Chapter Five
“Years ago, there was a war here,” Lamia said. “The entire plain was scourged. The river turned to steam, the trees became serpents and crawled away, the land cracked like open wounds, revealing all of Adonna’s past indiscretions, its abortions. And in the middle of it all...” She paused, swinging her thick arms to take in the ruined wing. “In the middle, this house stood alone. The Isomage lost everything, almost. But he escaped, and he still had enough power to threaten them with great harm if they didn’t make a pact with him. For their part, the Sidhe were to create a livable territory within the Blasted Plain, and gather all humans here, all those who had crossed over and were being persecuted. The Sidhe were not to harm them, but would tend them. For his part, the Isomage would go far away and work no more magic in this part of the Realm.” She turned her tiny eyes on him and Michael saw a gleam of defiance and strength that seemed out of place in the massive, paste-white face. She closed her half buried eyes and hardly seemed human. “I was young then.” She took a deep, quivering breath and let it out through her small, narrow nose with a low whistle.
They stopped by a long charred table with fragments of chairs scattered around it. In the rubble which covered the table, Michael could see glints of tarnished silver plates, bent and melted forks and knives, slumped metal cups and shattered glassware, all dusted with fine gray powder and chunks of wood and plaster. The smell of smoke still hung thick in the air.
“Years ago. Ages,” Lamia mused softly. Moving one columnar leg at a time, slow and ponderous as an elephant, she swung around to face him and pointed with her quivering left hand in his general vicinity. “You crossed over with something powerful. I know you did. Are you aware of it?”
Michael shook his head.
“You’ll know what it is, soon. This is a strange place; take nothing for granted. And above all, obey.” She growled the last word and advanced on him, stopping a yard away when he began to back up. “You still have a book. I told you to hide it. The Sidhe don’t like human words, any more than they like human song. Why didn’t you obey me?”
“I don’t have anyplace safe to hide it.”
“You doubt whether I can protect you, whether I will be obeyed?” Her voice sounded no more menacing than usual, but Michael felt a tremor ladder up his back nonetheless. He said nothing.
“I am the second guardian. Did you meet the first?”
“I don’t know.”
“You would know, my boy. Believe me, you would know.”
He thought of the figure in the flounced dress. “I think maybe I did.”
“Were you afraid of her?”
He nodded.
“You’re less afraid of me, that’s obvious. And yet...” She smiled, the curve of her lips barely shifting the great flaps of her cheeks and jowls. “I am the one who controls the other. Is that clear?”
“If nobody ever comes this way, why are you here?” Michael asked. Lamia tittered, holding one hand over her mouth and pretending coyness in a way that made his stomach uneasy.
“Now,” she said. “There are a number of things you must do. You’re new; you can’t know half what it takes to simply stay alive. And believe me, you don’t want to die here. To keep alive, you’ll have to be trained.”
“I don’t want to stay. I want to go back.” He clenched his hands. He still couldn’t believe the situation was irreversible.
“To go home, you must move ahead,” Lamia said. “There’s only one person with the power to send you back. He’s a great distance from here, and to reach him you’ll make an arduous journey. That’s why you must be trained. Do you understand me now?” She leaned over and peered at him. “Or are you stupid as well as young?”
“I’m not stupid,” Michael said.
“Parts of the Realm are quite beautiful, though few humans cross the Blasted Plain to see them. The Sidhe appreciate beauty. They leave the ruins for humans.”
“Are you human?” Michael asked.
Lamia’s white skin purpled slightly. “Not now.”
“Are you a Sidhe?”
“No.” Her laugh was a deep grumble in her massive torso. “Now you’ve had your questions. Any more and—”
“If I don’t ask questions, how will I learn?”
Her arm struck out like a scorpion’s tail and her hand slammed into the side of his face. He spun across the charred floor and fell into a mound of ashes, raising a choking cloud. She pushed through the cloud and grabbed him with both hands by the shoulders, lifting him clear and dangling him over the floor. Gentle, almost sweet, her voice reached him through the haze of ash and pain as if she were miles away.
“You’ll go to Halftown. You’ll take instruction from the Crane Women. Got that?”
“The hotel—”
She shook him once, making his bones pop. “You don’t deserve the luxury. The Crane Women are called Nare, Spart and Coom. Tell me their names.”
He couldn’t remember.
“Again, then. Nare, Spart, and Coom.”
“Nare, Spart...”
“Coom.”
“Coom.”
“They’re expecting you. They’ll teach you how to survive. Maybe they’ll teach you how to see and hear and judge situations better. Think that’s possible?” She held him with one hand and brushed him down with the other. Her touch was feverishly warm. She set him down near the table and looked up longingly at the burnt-out rafters.
“It was the middle of a banquet,” she said. “They took us by surprise. We used to have parties every night. It was beautiful.”
Terrified and furious, Michael tried to control his trembling but couldn’t. He wanted to kill her.
“Go,” she said. “Tell the innkeeper and his wife that Lamia no longer needs their services. Take yourself over to Halftown. The Crane Women. What are their names?”
“Nare, Spart, and Coom.”
She grunted. “Go, before the Sidhe return.”
He fled from the ruined wing, through the hall and across the entry to the front door. Book bouncing against his hip, he ran down the road to Euterpe until his lungs ached, ready to burst. Tears of rage streaked his face.
He stooped by a cracked, glazed boulder and pounded on it until his hand bled. “God damn you, god damn you!”
“Better be quiet,” the wind whispered. He jumped and whirled around. Nobody.
“Remember where you are.”
He screamed. Something luffed his hair and he looked up. There, translucent as a spider’s web, gaped a narrow and colorless face. It rotated and vanished.
Cupping his hands over his mouth, smearing blood on his chin, Michael stumbled and ran the rest of the way to Euterpe with little concern for his lungs or his legs.
Risky accepted his explanation with seeming indifference. Brecker nodded and accompanied him upstairs to the room. “You didn’t come here with anything, so there’s no luggage for you to pick up,” he said. “But you can help me clean it.” They swept the floor in silence. Michael was confused by the token labor.
“It’s not my dirt,” he said. “I’ve only been here one night.”
“We all do our bit,” Brecker said. “It’s what keeps us going.”
“Even when there’s nothing to do?”
Brecker leaned on his straw broom. “Where’d you get that bruise?”
“Lamia hit me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Michael lied.
“For asking dumb questions, likely.” Brecker resumed his sweeping. “It’s a hard land, boy. Wherever you came from, it seems you led an easy life among reasonable people. Not here. Mistakes cost.” He held a pan down for Michael to sweep dust and mica flakes into. “Mistakes cost dear.”
Savarin was climbing the stairs as they descended. Michael passed him with a shrug. “Moving already?” Savarin asked, staring after them.
“To Halftown,” Michael said.
“Might I accompany you?” Savarin asked.
Michael shrugged again.
“This could be most useful.”
The road to Halftown stretched to the east of Euterpe for two miles.
“We call it east, anyway,” Savarin explained, walking beside Michael. Michael kept his hands in his coat pockets, one wrapped around the book of poems. “Where the sun rises, you know.”
Michael said nothing, staring at the ground as they walked.
“Where did you get the bruise?”
“Lamia hit me for asking questions.”
Savarin pursed his lips. “Tough customer, Lamia, I hear. Never met her myself. What sort of questions?”
Michael looked suspiciously at Savarin. “What do you know?”
“You might have gathered by now that when new people show up, I am their tutor. I know as much as any human here, I suspect—with the exception of the Isomage; but he’s been gone for decades now.”
“Where the hell is this place?”
“Some people claim this place is hell, but it is not. I would venture a guess that it is the legendary land of Faerie, which some consider the place of the dead; but none of us trapped here died on Earth, so your guess is probably as good as mine. Ask Adonna. Adonna made it.”
“Who’s Adonna?”
“The genius loci, the god of the Realm. Most of the Sidhe pay obeisance to it. From what I gather, it’s not in the same league as whatever made our universe. Much cruder.” Savarin winked. “But be careful to whom you speak when you make such critiques.”
“So we’re in a different dimension?”
Savarin held up his hands and shook his head. “Not to be quoted. Scholar that I am, and as hard as I’ve researched, I’m still remarkably ignorant. Facts are hard to obtain. Frankly, I was hoping you could provide a few.”
“Who are the Sidhe?”
“The mortal enemies of humankind,” Savarin said, his face suddenly grim. “There are all kinds of Sidhe, not just the ones who bear a passing resemblance to us. There are the Sidhe of the air, called Meteorals by some—”
“What do they look like?”
“Translucent, drifting creatures, resembling spirits. There are the Sidhe of the forests, called Arborals; they are green as grass. Umbrals will always be found in shadow, and at night can be very powerful. Pelagals are reputed to be ocean-going, but we only have rumors of a distant ocean here. Riverines live in streams and rivers. Amorphals can be a different shape each time you see them. Most of the Sidhe, however, belong to the kind called Faer—like Alyons and his coursers. The Faer resemble you and me and we can even interbreed, but they’re a very different race, ages older than the current stock of humanity.”
“And what is Halftown?”
“Where the Breeds live. Born of female Sidhe, sired by human males, most often.”
“They won’t live with humans?”
“They’re a sad lot,” Savarin said. “They’re reputed to live forever, like the Sidhe, and like the Sidhe they have no souls. But like humans, they change—their peculiar way of aging. Humans don’t accept them. Sidhe isolate them, but find them useful now and then. Many know Sidhe magic.” They walked on in silence for a few minutes. “Who’s to watch over you in Halftown?”
“The Crane Women,” Michael said.
Savarin was impressed. “Very powerful. Ugly as sin, and they wouldn’t mind my saying so. They’re the oldest Breeds I’ve heard of. Was it Lamia who sent you to them?”
Michael nodded. “I don’t go anywhere on my own. I mean, I don’t have any choice.”
“Maybe that’s something to be thankful for. Less mistakes made that way.”
“Is Lamia a Breed?”
“I don’t think so. There are many stories about her, but nobody really knows what she is. I suspect she was a normal human once, but did something the Sidhe didn’t like. She was at the Isomage’s house when I came here.”
Beyond a rise, the road bisected the Breed settlement, which was laid out in an irregular circle. Halftown covered about ten acres, brown and dun and weathered gray buildings arranged along concentric half circle streets, the ends of each street letting out on the main road. The land around Halftown was hummocky, as if ploughed by a giant and careless farmer, and the ground was poorly drained. Standing pools of brackish water lay in the hollows and exuded a marshy green smell. A branch of the river flowed past the other side of the village, little more than a sluggish green creek.
“Observe the houses,” Savarin said, stopping to tie a string on his cloth shoes. “What would you say of them?”
Michael examined the flimsy structures and then, to make sure he had missed nothing, examined them again. “They’re shacks,” he said. “They look like the houses in Euterpe.” Savarin straightened. “You’re still not observing. See what you already know.” He pointed to the barren landscape: grassy shrub, hammocks and puddles, low bushes and scattered boulders.
“Jesus,” Michael said under his breath. “They’re shacks. Made of wood.”
“Wood,” Savarin emphasized. “Do you see any trees?”
“No.”
“That’s how you tell Halftown from Euterpe. Breeds have Sidhe relatives, and that means connections with Arborals. Arborals control all the wood in the Realm. Humans are only allowed sticks and wicker and grass.”
Michael felt dizzy. He still hadn’t accepted that the Realm was real—yet every moment it became more and more complex.
“There aren’t any trees at all?”
“Away from the Blasted Plain, there are forests everywhere. But no wood for you and me. Very few humans leave the Pact Lands. Sidhe traders bring in goods every fortnight, in accord with the Isomage’s pact, but even they face danger on the Blasted Plain.”
Michael saw his first Breed, a male, as they came within a hundred feet of the outer circle of huts. The Breed was slightly taller than Michael, with long, lank red-brown hair and a powerful build. He stood in the middle of the road, a staff in one hand and a bored expression on his face. He held out his staff to stop them.
“I recognize you, Teacher. I know this boy human, too. Lamia warned us about him—but she said nothing about you.”
“I come here often,” Savarin said defensively.
“The coursers came last night,” the Breed said. “No more humans allowed in Halftown. Except, of course...” He pointed his finger at Michael.
“I think you’d better go,” Michael told Savarin. “Thanks for helping me.”
Savarin frowned at the Breed. “Yes. I’m sure discretion is best. But I’ve never been barred from Halftown. I hope it’s not permanent. This is where I get most of my information.” He sighed, cast a sunny smile on Michael and turned around. “Learn quickly, friend. And come tell me what you’ve learned, if you can.”
Michael accepted his outstretched hand. Savarin returned the way they had come, leaving him alone with the Breed guard.
A cool breeze rippled their hair and clothes. “So where am I supposed to go?”
“To the Crane Women. Come.”
Michael followed him down the road. Through Halftown, the thoroughfare was paved with brown brick and cobbles. The huts seemed cleaner, though flimsier than those in Euterpe. Small plots around each house were filled with rows of healthy green plants; he couldn’t see any flowers.
Other Breeds stared at him through windows and open doors. The men were almost as tall as the Sidhe Michael had glimpsed at the Isomage’s house. The women were slender, handsome enough, even noble-looking, though few were what Michael would have called pretty. Their faces were hard and sculptured, too much like the men’s.
His escort led him out the other side of the village and away from the road, toward the creek. Across the water, perched atop a broad low mound, sat a larger hut shaped like a deflated soccer ball, covered with sticks, dirt and thatch. Except for two round glass-paned windows and a stone chimney poking through the top, it could have been a yurt—one of the portable dwellings used by central Asian nomads. The yard around the hut was strewn with small boulders and piles of debris, sorted and categorized—a pile of pebbles here, sticks to one side, bones and animal skulls there, other mounds he couldn’t identify. The smell was of ancient garbage, richer and more suggestive than dust, but not overtly offensive. Stakes marked the perimeter of the mound and scraps of fabric fluttered from them like sad, decrepit banners.
“How do I get across?” Michael asked as they stopped at the water’s edge. The Breed pointed out flat stones just beneath the slow-moving surface.
“They await you,” he said, and began his walk back to Halftown. Michael swallowed the tightness in his throat and stepped out onto the first stone. The water swirled around his shoes. He thought about falling into the water to force himself to wake up, stop dreaming, but if he hadn’t been shocked out of sleep by the things that had already happened, the murky creek was unlikely to do the trick. Besides, he had no idea what lurked in the depths.
He was sick of being afraid. He clutched his book tightly and stepped onto the second stone. He concentrated so hard on not falling that he failed to notice a figure standing on the opposite bank until he had crossed. He looked up with a start.
“Hello,” he said quickly. Beyond any doubt, this was one of the Crane Women.
The figure was female in a bizarre sort of way. She stood an inch or two shorter than Michael, slightly stooped. She still possessed a roundness in her elongated, leather-skinned limbs which demonstrated femininity, but her arms hung almost to her knees. Her face was oblate, wider than tall, with narrow long eyes beneath thin flat brows. Her legs, clothed in ragged pants, stretched very long in comparison with her torso. She lifted one hand and wriggled spider-like fingers in front of her flat chest. The fingers were long and dark and tapered to thin black nails.
“Hello,” he repeated.
She looked him over slowly, nodding with a steady rhythm as if feeble. Her short-cut hair had the color and texture of goose down.
“Jan Antros,” she said. “Just man-child.” Her voice was a gnarly squeak with undertones of heavy wind.
Michael shook his wet feet and reached with one hand to empty his left shoe, then his right. He never took his eyes off her. The shoes squelched when he put them on again. “I’m Michael,” he said, trying to be agreeable.
“You’re a delicate, incredibly fragile, very frail indeed, piece of tissue,” came a melodious voice from the hut. Another woman with similar features leaned from one window. Her face was a puzzle of wrinkles and red and purple tattoos. “You don’t look important.”
Behind Michael, where she couldn’t possibly have snuck up on him, a third woman stood on one spindly leg with the other tucked close to her chest. More than any of the others, this one scared Michael. She had long dusty-red hair tied in a single braid that reached to her knees. “The Flesh Egg sends us a weak man-child. She expects us to process, train?”
“Are you Nare, Spart and...Coom?” Michael asked, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.
“I’m Nare,” said the Crane woman standing on one leg.
“Spart,” said the one at the window, and
“Coom,” said the downy-haired figure who had first addressed him. “Want us teach?”
“I don’t know what I want,” Michael said, “except to go home.”
The Crane women chuckled together, sounding like leaves skittering over rock.
“Won’t hurt you,” Coom said, backing off a foot. “Much.” Her hair seemed alive in the breeze.
“We don’t mind man-childs,” said Nare at his side, circling.
“But there’s one thing you must want,” said Spart in her beautiful voice from the window. She spat into a nearby pile of debris.
“To survive,” Nare said.
“Live in Sidhedark.”
“Fight to live.”
“Fight to stay human.”
“Understood?”
Michael could do nothing but nod. In the moment he turned away from the hut, Spart left the window and stood between Nare and Coom. She was the tallest of the three and had the longest, most Sidhe-like face. Tattoos formed an intricate tangle of leaves and branches and whorls wherever her skin was bare.
“You’ll build a house on this mound, away from ours thirty paces,” she said. “Wood will be brought to you this evening. Until you’ve built your own house, you don’t exist.”
“What’ll I do now?” he asked. He had focused on Spart; he suddenly realized the other two were gone.
“Be patient.” Spart’s voice had much of the hypnotic quality he’d experienced while listening to Alyons and the coursers. “You can do that, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Go and sit where you want your house. Wood will come.”
The Crane Woman returned to their hut, leaving him on the stretch of hard-packed dirt by the creek bank. He shifted from one foot to the other, then looked over the water to Halftown. He shaded his eyes and stared at the sky.
Not a cloud was visible. Enameled sparkling blueness stretched overhead, blending with orange and green along the horizon. About thirty yards away from the hut, and an equal distance from the creek bank, two boulders nestled against each other, forming a natural seat about a yard wide and two and a half feet tall. Michael crossed to the boulders and sat on them, looking at the sky again. Sometimes it seemed to be made of cross-hatches of colors, hundreds of colors all adding up to blue. Yet it wasn’t like a painting. It was very alive, disturbing in the way it seemed to shift, to bulge down and retreat up.
He felt drugged. Until now, alone, with no instruction but to wait, it was as if he had not seen anything clearly. Now the clarity flooded down on him from the sky. The sky, by its very unreality, seemed to show how real everything was.
But this reality wasn’t the same brand he had experienced on Earth. This was more vivid, more apparent and simpler.
He knelt beside the boulders and plucked a blade of grass, peeling it along its fibers, rubbing the ragged edges, smearing the beads of juice on his fingertips. He felt a tickle on his arm. A tiny, translucent ant crawled among the light, silky hairs, rainbow-hued like an opal. Until now, Michael hadn’t thought to wonder if there were insects in Sidhedark. Not many, apparently.
What about birds, cats, dogs, cows? He’d seen horses, but...where did the milk come from?
He was tired. He leaned back on the rocks and closed his eyes. The darkness behind his lids soothed, still and restful. Wind sighed over him.
He had slept. He sat up and rubbed elbows stiff from pressing against the rock. The sun was setting. No clouds yet, but unmoving bands of color hung above the horizon, pale pinks and greens at the highest, and just above the sun’s limb a particularly vivid stripe of orange. Michael had never seen a sunset like it.
He looked to the east. The sky there was an electric blue-green.
Stars shined already in the east, as sharp and bright as white-hot needle points. Instead of twinkling, they made little circling motions, like distant tethered fireflies. Michael had sometimes used Whitney’s Star Finder on summer nights to pick out the few constellations visible through Los Angeles’ thick air. He couldn’t recognize any now.
The air had cooled considerably. Orange light flickered in the windows of the Crane Women’s hut. He had a notion to peer in and see what they were up to, but he rubbed the bruise on his cheek and thought better of it.
Only then did he notice that his wristwatch was gone. He grabbed for the key in his pants pocket, but it was missing as well. He still had the book.
He felt almost naked without the key. He resented the thievery; he resented everything about the way he was being treated, but there wasn’t a thing he could do.
The last of the sun slipped behind distant hills, burning muddy orange through the smoky haze which he surmised lay over the Blasted Plain, beyond the boundary of the Pact Lands. Where the sun had been, a sharply defined ribbon of darkness ascended from the horizon and blended with the zenith; and then another to one side, and yet another on the opposite side, resembling the shadows of cloth streamers in a celestial wind.
Michael listened. The land all around was silent, but from the sky came a low humming, like wind stroking telephone wires. When the darkness was complete, the humming went away.
Then, starting in the east and progressing westward across the sky, the stars steadied, as if precipitating out of solution and pasting themselves against the bowl of the heavens.
There were stars in the dirt, as well. He pulled his feet up on the boulders and looked down. Things sparkled and glinted between the few blades of grass. Soon these glows faded and the land settled into night with a breezy sigh, as if all the Realm were a woman lying back on a pillow.
No, indeed, Michael thought; this is not Earth.
He sat on the rocks for some time before he heard the voices. They came from the creek, but he couldn’t see who spoke; there was no light but the stars and the now-faint orange glow from the hut’s windows. Concentrating on the source, forcing his pupils to their maximum dilation, he discerned a low-slung boat-shadow gliding down the creek, and then a few figures standing on the prow. The boat nudged the bank and he heard footsteps coming toward him.
He stood up on the rocks like a housewife afraid of a mouse. “Who’s that?” he called.
The hut door swung open. Spart stood silhouetted against swirling, furnace-orange light. The approaching shadows passed through a shaft of light from the door and were outlined briefly. There were four, three male, one female, murky green in color, all naked. They were obviously Sidhe, with the same elongated features and spectral grace, and each carried a broad, stubby log.
They surrounded Michael. At a signal, the four simultaneously dropped the logs from their shoulders onto the dirt with resonant thumps.
“Dura,” said the female. The beauty of her voice made Michael shudder.
“Your wood, boy,” the Crane Woman called from the hut door.
He turned and croaked, “What do I do with it?”
But the hut door closed and the naked Sidhe walked away. The female glanced back at him with some sympathy, he thought, but she said nothing more. The night’s blackness absorbed them.
He remained standing on the boulder awhile, then sat. The four logs rested on their ends, each about a foot and a half wide and a yard tall. He was no carpenter like his father; he couldn’t calculate how many board-feet there were in the logs, or how much of a house he could build with them.
Not a very large one.
He leaned back and closed his eyes again.
“Whose boy are you?”
He thought he was dreaming. He wiped his nose reflexively.
“Hoy ac! Whose house?”
Michael spun around on the boulders and looked in the voice’s direction. There was only a log.
“Rup antros, jarl wiros,” said the voice, like that of the Sidhe woman but with a fuzzy quality. “Quos maza.”
“Where are you?” Michael asked softly. The night air was quite chilly now.
“All around, antros. It’s true. Your words are Anglo-Saxon and Norman and mixes from the misty north and the warm south. Ah, I knew those tongues once, at their very roots...affrighted many a Goth and Frank and Jute...”
“Who are you? Who?”
There was silence for a moment, then the voice, much weaker, said, “Maza sed more kay rup antros. It’s strange to be broken for a human’s house. Why so privileged? Still, all wood is passing; the imprint must fade...”
The voice did indeed fade. Though the night was still and quiet thereafter, Michael got no sleep.