Chapter Three
Michael had not reckoned with feeling scared, being hungry, or facing the acid realization that he had no idea what to do. He had nothing to fall back on, no reasonable guide; he had only Lamia’s words. Lamia herself, whatever she had to say, was hardly reassuring. Her brusqueness and her almost certain insanity made Michael all the more desperate to find a way home. He decided to try the gate again, to climb over it if need be; perhaps the river and the countryside beyond the gate were illusory. Perhaps he could just jump and find himself back in the alley...
Back with the figure in the flounced dress and broad hat.
That thought stopped him halfway across the field, behind the ruined mansion. Fists clenched, he turned and trudged back over the rocks and clods between the dead vines.
He was on the dirt road again, following Lamia’s directions, when he heard pounding hooves. A group of five horses and riders galloped along about half a mile behind him, raising a small plume of dust. He hid behind a boulder and watched.
The riders approached the narrow path leading to the house and slowed to confer with each other. Michael had never seen horses or men like them. Uniform mottled gray— all but one, a dazzling golden palomino—the horses were large and lean, hide clinging so closely to jutting muscles they appeared to have been flayed. The men were tall and thin, with a spectral quality most strikingly evident in their faces. All of them had reddish-blond hair, long narrow jaws without beards and square large eyes beneath formidable brows. Their clothing was pearly gray, differing from the horses’ coloration only in the way it diffracted the early morning sunlight.
Done conferring, the riders took the path to the house and dismounted near the steps. The horses kicked at clods of dirt as their masters entered the house without knocking.
Michael squinted from his awkward vantage. He decided it would be best for him to leave the area and get to the village as quickly as possible.
The walk took about forty-five minutes. All the way, he kept glancing over his shoulder to make sure the riders weren’t coming up behind him.
His wristwatch had stopped working, he noticed; the sweep second hand was motionless. The dial read one-oh-seven. But he could judge time by his growing hunger.
The village first appeared as an irregular line of brown blocks set against the horizon. The closer he approached, the less impressed he was. Small mud-brick houses leaned on each other, defining the outskirts of the village, their thick thatch roofs rising to conical peaks. Tiny twists of greasy smoke slid from the peaks of most of the houses. In the still air, the smoke gradually settled into a ground-hugging haze. Beyond the mud-brick houses, larger two-story buildings connected by stone walls presented a unified dreary green-brown exterior.
A low unguarded gate led through the walls into the village proper. He walked between the gateposts, kicking up wisps of smoke and ground fog. A sign neatly painted on the gate arch, facing toward the village and not outward, proclaimed:
EUTERPE
Glorious Capital of the Pact Lands
A few people were about in the mid-morning, women carrying baskets and men standing and talking. They all stared at Michael as he passed. He stuck his hands firmly into his pants pockets and returned their stares with furtive glances. The women wore pants or brown, sack-like dresses. The men wore dust-colored pants and dirty tan shirts. Some walked from house to house carrying bundles of dried reeds.
To Michael’s discomfort, he was attracting a lot of attention, though nobody advanced to speak to him. The place had a prison atmosphere, quiet and too orderly, with an undercurrent of tension.
He looked for a sign to show him where the hotel was. There were no signs. Finally he gathered up courage and approached a pale round-faced man with thinning black hair, who stood by a wicker crate to one side of the narrow stone-paved street.
“Excuse me,” Michael said. The man regarded him with listless curiosity. “Can you tell me where the hotel is?”
The man smiled and nodded, then began speaking swiftly in a language Michael couldn’t understand. Michael shook his head and the man made a few motions in the proper direction, lifting his eyebrows.
“Thanks,” Michael said. Luckily, the hotel was nearby and obvious; it was the only place that smelled good. There was no sign in front, but the building was slightly more elegant than its neighbors, with a pretense of mud bas-relief ornament over the door and windows. The odor of baking bread poured from the first floor windows in billows. Michael paused, salivating, then walked up the front steps and entered the small lobby
A short, bulky man wearing a gray kepi and coveralls sat behind the counter. All the furniture was made of woven wicker or—like the counter—of narrow, close-fitted bricks. The carpets in the lobby and hall were thin and worn, and the coarse cloth upholstery on a wicker couch placed near the door was tattered, barbed with feathers and fibers.
“Lamia told me to come here,” Michael said.
“Did she, now?” the man asked, his gaze fixed on Michael’s chest. He seemed unwilling to acknowledge that anyone could be taller than he.
“You speak English,” Michael said. The man agreed with a curt nod. “She said I should work for some food and be put up this evening. I should return to see her tomorrow.”
“Did she, now?” he repeated.
“She wants me to work.”
“Ah.” The man turned to look at the rack of keys mounted behind the counter—baked clay keys, bulky and silly-looking. “Lamia.” He didn’t sound pleased. He wrapped his fingers around a key but didn’t remove it from the hook. He stared again at Michael’s chest. Michael leaned over until the man could look into his face, and the man beamed a broad smile. “What kind of work?”
“I...anything, I guess.”
“Lamia.” He removed the key and looked at it longingly. “She never sent anyone here before. You a friend?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said.
“Then why’s she looking after you?” the man went on, as if Michael had answered in the negative.
“I don’t know much of anything,” Michael said.
“You’re new.” He stated it nonchalantly, then frowned and peered at Michael’s face more closely. “By God, you’re new! How’d you meet Lamia if you’re new? But—” His whole aspect changed abruptly. He came alive, lifting his hand and shaking his head vigorously. “No questions. You are under her charge, or you wouldn’t say so, believe me. Let it stand at that. Yes! Stand at that.” He considered something profoundly puzzling, solved it, and brightened. “Since you’re new, you’ll go in with the teacher.” He came around the counter with a jaunty swing of his long arms. “Double up. It’s a small room and my wife’ll work the skin off your fingers and the kink out of your arms. You’ll eat plain like the rest of us.” He chuckled ruefully, winking. “There isn’t anything fancy, believe me, but this place is quiet at night. You’ll sleep on cottongrass, and when the alarm rings—”
At that instant, a bell clanged loudly. The sound seemed to come from all directions. “My name,” the stout, long-armed man said, “is Brecker, and we’ll be going downstairs now. That’s the alarm. Risky!”
Michael assumed Brecker was assessing the situation, but the innkeeper called out, “Risky!” again and a thin worried-looking woman about the same age leaped down the stairs, bandy legs taking them three at a time.
“I heard,” she said in irritation. Michael looked through the lobby’s smoky windows and saw people hurrying about in the streets. “It’s Wickmaster Alyons and his coursers again. They must have been at the Isomage’s house, and now they’re here.”
Michael followed them down stone steps into a dirt-walled cellar. They squatted by the wall closest to the steps, among large bottles of brown liquid and straw baskets filled with potatoes. Brecker patted the floor beside him and Michael sat.
“Why the alarm?” he asked.
Risky tossed her lank hair and spat into a corner. “The riding of the noble Sidhe against the race of man,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm. She appraised Michael with a cool eye. “You’re new,” she said. “Where’s Savarin?”
“Probably watching them from upstairs,” Brecker said. “As usual.”
Even with the cellar door shut, Michael heard the sharp clatter of hooves. There came a high-pitched keening, and then a voice resonant and hypnotic.
“Hoy ac! Meat-eaters, followers of the Serpent! Praise Adonna or we unleash your babes and return the Pact Lands to dust and desert!”
Brecker shuddered, opening and closing his hands in spasms, and Risky’s lips became thin and white. The hooves clattered off. Moments later, bells rang again through the town.
“Welcome to Euterpe,” Risky said to Michael as she threw open the cellar door and scrambled up the steps. Brecker followed, motioning for Michael to return with them to the first floor.
“Tomorrow,” Brecker told Risky, “our new lodger goes back to the Isomage’s house, to Lamia. He’s new, you know.”
“He’s much too young to be anything else,” Risky said. “And he’s not like the rest of us. Not if she wants him.” That said, she seemed to make an effort to put everything from her mind. “Show him the double.”
“My thought, too. With Savarin.”
“Might as well. There’s a lot for him to learn.”
The double on the second floor waited at the end of an ill-lit corridor. The room was small, its dark walls paneled in thin strips of gray pasteboard. The floor was tiled with mica that flaked under his shoes. Two beds had been stacked bunk-style in the narrow space, and a washbasin on a flimsy stand made of sticks and wicker occupied a corner. At least there were no insects visible.
As he stood in the doorway, wondering who Savarin was, Risky came up behind him and argued with Brecker over what work Michael was to do. Brecker gave him a nervous glance and took Risky down the corridor, where they whispered.
Michael caught most of the conversation despite their precautions.
“If he’s under Lamia’s protection, should we work him at all?” Brecker asked.
“Did she forbid it? I say, work him. We can always use hands.”
“Yes, but he’s different from the rest of us—”
“Only because he came from the Isomage’s house.”
“And shouldn’t that mean something?”
“Lamia doesn’t scare me,” Risky said. “Now, if Alyons brought the boy in under his arm and said, ‘Show him a good time,’ maybe then we’d spare him some labor.”
That seemed to settle it. Risky showed him the washroom—”Modern, one upstairs and one down,” she said, but no running water and no plumbing. She gave him a crust of bread and a glass of thin milk, then set him to work wringing fresh-washed linens through a stone mangler in a laundry room behind the kitchen. As he turned the handle and fed in sheets and pillow casings, he munched on the bread.
“No crumbs on the sheets,” Risky warned. She peered at him critically. “You look hungry.”
“Starved,” Michael said.
“Well, don’t eat too much. We’ll just take it out in more work.”
Carrying dried sheets upstairs, Michael noticed that only two rooms were occupied out of the twelve in the building; the double he shared with the unknown Savarin, and the largest, a suite. “We don’t go in the suite but once a week,” Risky explained.
“Who’s in it?”
“Hungry and curious. Hungry and curious. Takes new ones a while to learn how the land lies, doesn’t it?” She shook her head. “You’ll meet him this evening. Brecker’s already planning a gathering.”
In the hotel’s service court, he was put to chopping sticks—or making the attempt. He raised blisters quickly on both hands and felt miserable. He had never enjoyed hard physical labor. As he swung and missed, swung and missed, swung and splintered, swung and finally split a bundle of sticks cleanly, he wanted more than anything to be home again, in bed with a book on his lap and a ginger ale on his nightstand.
By dusk—which came somewhat early, he thought—he had cut thirteen bundles of sticks into sizes that would fit in the hotel stove. Brecker inspected the small pile and shook his head. He stared at Michael’s chest as he said, “No doubt you’ll do better later. If you get to stay here. But never mind. There’s the meeting tonight.” His face took on a contented expression and he winked. “Word gets around. You’re good for business, tonight at least.”
They allowed Michael half an hour to clean up for dinner. Having eaten only the bread and drunk two glasses of the translucent bluish milk, he was ravenous again. He went to his assigned room and lay on the lower of the two bunks for a moment, eyes closed, too tired to really want to eat and too hungry to nap. He washed his blistered hands in the basin of water and picked at a splinter beneath his fingernail. A pungent herbal smell came from the basin. Michael sniffed the soap—a fatty, grainy bar with no odor at all—and wiped his hands on a rag. The odor departed rapidly.
He removed his shirt and wiped himself from the waist up with a damp cloth, then used the primitive facilities in the lavatory at the end of the hall. He suspected he would carry the slops bucket downstairs the next day, unless...
What? Unless his talk with Lamia went well? What would she do besides talk to him, and what was her connection with the riders, the Shee as Risky called them?
He was too exhausted to be terribly curious. Night had fallen swiftly. He descended the stairs to dinner with drooping eyelids and sat at the smooth-worn, stone-topped table next to Brecker.
Dozens of wax candles lit the table, inserted in clay holders before each seat. There were twelve seats, all filled. The table’s occupants—five women and seven men—regarded Michael with intense interest whenever his head was turned.
Michael sat as straight as he could, trying to be dignified and not fall asleep. As Risky carried out a bowl of vegetable soup, Brecker stood and raised a cup of watered brown ale. “Patrons and matrons,” he began. “We have among us this evening a newcomer. His name is Michael, and he’s young, as you see; the youngest I’ve ever met in the Realm. Let us welcome him.”
Men and women raised their cups and shouted in a bewildering array of tongues, “Cheers!” “Skaal!” “Slainte!” “Zum Wohl!” “Here’s to Michael!”, more than he could separate out. He lifted his cup to them. “Thank you,” he murmured.
“Now eat,” Risky said. After the soup had been noisily consumed, she removed the bowl to the kitchen and brought in a pot filled with cabbage and carrots and large brown beans, as well as plates of a sliced raw vegetable Michael had never seen before, resembling a brown-skinned cucumber with a triangular cross-section. There was no meat.
His eyelids drooped and he caught himself just in time to hear, “...so you see, lad, we’re not in the best situation here.” This from the tall, strong-looking fellow with the full salt-and-pepper beard sitting across and one chair to the left of him.
“Huh? I mean, sorry?” Michael said, blinking.
“I say, the town is not in the best of circumstances. Ever since the Isomage lost his war, we’ve been confined to the Pact Lands in the middle of the Blasted Plain. No children, of course—”
The plump auburn-haired woman beside the strong man shushed him and rolled her eyes. “Except,” he continued, giving her a harsh look. “And you’ll pardon the indiscretion, but the lad must know his circumstances—”
At this several people called out, “And where’s Savarin?”
“He should be the one tutoring the lad,” the auburn-haired woman said.
“The lad,” the man pushed on, “must know that there are children of a sort, to remind us of our peril. They reside in the Yard at the center of Euterpe.” The auburn-haired woman crossed herself and bowed her head, moving her lips. “And there’s not an instrument in the entire land to play.”
“Play?” Michael asked. The group looked at each other around the table.
“Music, you know,” Brecker said.
“Music,” Michael repeated, still puzzled.
“Lad,” the strong fellow said, standing. “you mean to say you don’t play an instrument?”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t know music?”
“I like to listen,” Michael said, feeling fresh alarm at their amazement. More glances were exchanged around the table. Brecker looked uncomfortable.
“Boy, are you telling us it wasn’t music brought you here?”
“I don’t think it was,” Michael said.
The auburn-haired woman gave a shuddering moan and backed her chair away from the table. Several others did the same. “Then how did you come here?” she asked, no longer looking at him directly.
“He’s not a Child, is he?” a stout woman at the end of the table wailed. Her male companion took hold of her arm and urged her back into the seat. “Obviously not,” he said. “We know the Children. His face is good.”
“How did you get here, then?”
Michael, haltingly and with some backtracking, gave an account of Waltiri, the note, Clarkham’s house and the crossing over. For some reason—perhaps his weariness—he didn’t mention the figure in the flounced dress. The gathering nodded in unison when he was done.
“That,” said the strong man, “is a most unusual path. I’ve never heard of it.”
“No doubt Lamia could tell us more,” someone said, Michael couldn’t see whom.
“I know,” said a deep, gruff voice. The crowd fell silent. Brecker nudged Michael and pointed out a man seated across from them and to the right. “The occupant of the suite,” he murmured.
Older than the others, none of whom seemed more than forty or forty-five, this man carried a thin curly cap of white hair, and his pale pink face, shadowed with tones of weary gray, wore an expression of bitter indifference. His pale blue eyes searched from face to astonished face. “He never says anything,” Brecker whispered to Michael, eyes wide.
“Boy,” the man said, standing, “my name is Frederick Wolfer. Do you know of me?”
Michael shook his head. The man was dressed in a yellowed and frayed tuxedo and a formal black suit shiny and ragged with age. The elbows of the jacket had been patched over with gray cloth, and in the patches, new holes had been worn. “Did Arno Waltiri mention me?”
“No,” Michael said.
“He sent me here,” Wolfer said, his jaw working. He raised an unsteady hand. “He sent a man already old into a land that doesn’t tolerate the old. Fortunately, I have fallen in with good people.” A murmur went around the table. “Fortunately, I have withstood the rigors of war, of Clarkham’s attempt to build an empire, and the internment of all of us here in the Pact Lands. All of that...” He paused and gazed at the ceiling, as if he might find the proper words floating up there. “Because on a summer night, who knows how many decades ago, I went to a concert and listened to a piece of music, music written by Arno Waltiri. I know the name, yes indeed. I am the only one left alive of those who were transported by his music. The only one. Boy, you must understand our circumstances. All of us here, with the exception of you, all the humans in the Realm, or Sidhedark, or Faerie Shadow, or whatever you wish to call this accursed place—we are here because music transported us.”
“Enchanted,” said the auburn-haired woman
“Crossed us over,” said a plump, black-haired man.
“Me, when I played trumpet,” said the strong fellow.
“And I, piano,” said another.
Wolfer held up his hand to stop the voices. “I was not a musician. I was a music critic. I believe that Waltiri took his vengeance on me...by setting me among musicians, forever and ever.”
“We loved music,” Brecker said. “We added something to human music which it does not ordinarily have—”
“Except for Waltiri’s concerto,” Wolfer interjected.
“We took from ourselves, and made music as the Sidhe have played it for thousands of years. Made it whole. And crossed over.” Brecker chewed on a stray bit of food, swallowed, and added, “All of us love music.”
“And here,” Risky said, “there is none.
“The Sidhe say their Realm is music,” the strong man said, “but not for us.”
“Ask Lamia why you’re here,” Risky suggested
“And be careful of that woman, boy,” Wolfer said, seating himself with painful slowness. “Be very careful indeed.”