“It would be all right if they didn’t call me that.”
CHAPTER 26
Scott and Mick turned to see a dark-skinned, black-haired teen, holding a bow and arrow at the ready. A company of four other beautiful youths were behind him, each with a stylish and richly appointed outfit, each with his own favored weapon. They were the boy band of assassins.
Mick stepped forward. “Well met, young blood. Your reputation precedes you—I believe yeh are Dhanu, most favored changeling of our High Queen—”
“And charged as captain of her Changeling Guard.”
(said Dhanu.)
“Alas, I asked you two for your own names,
Sirrah, Sir Runt. I’m freshly vers’d in mine.”
Mick looked snookered. “Right. Sorry. I go by Mick, an’ … um, I am a full an’ trusty member of the Seelie Court, leprechaun in good standing, Crest of Ór. As such, I request safe conduct for myself an’ my compatriot here, Scott, a changeling from parts distant.”
At this Dhanu took renewed interest in Scott.
“An’ Scott an’ I both crave audience with our High Queen, as is the right of all with Fay blood, at least once in our happy lives. I’ll be obliged, of course, to furnish my True Name whensoever—”
Dhanu, his bow relaxed, raised a hand and stepped uncomfortably close to Scott.
“You cannot be but human. What fairy
Nursery tended this, such fusty fruit?”
“Come now,” said Mick, “He—”
“Speaks, yes? If not to me, how to a queen?”
“I was born to humans,” said Scott. “I was raised by humans. But my dad and I have fairy blood.”
Dhanu looked Scott up and down at this and curled his lip.
“You have but drops of fairy blood in you,
And smell as like the inside of a crow.”
As insults go, this was so close to accurate that Scott thought it would be petty to tell him it had been a raven.
“I’m … pretty ordinary,” he agreed. He looked at these changelings, carrying themselves with red-carpet grace. He thought he was right in assuming they were all human, but a lifetime of fostering in the fairy court had given them a kind of ageless glamour. Still, they were human, and he was not—not entirely. “You need us in a way, don’t you,” he added, realizing something. “Us ordinary ones. Without us, someone else would have to be ordinary.”
Dhanu glowered at him a moment. Then his eyes changed. They didn’t soften, exactly, but they looked like a pair of eyes Scott might be able to work with. Like he and one of the popular kids had been grouped together on a science fair project and it would all be over soon. Dhanu turned without a word and motioned for Mick and Scott to follow.
“He’s kind of hard to talk to,” whispered Scott.
“Man, it’s this courtly speech,” said Mick. “I don’t think I can pull it off anymore. It’s been too long, an’ I was never very good at it anyway.” He pointed at Scott. “Don’t yeh even try it. Jes’ be polite, an’ don’t put on any airs.”
They walked along the castle wall. Scott liked the Tower of London. This was the castle a child would design: a white stone box, buttoned with arched windows, topped by a toothy parapet, braced at each corner by a tall tower. It lacked only a drawbridge and a moat. They passed an ogre diligently whitewashing one side with brush and bucket.
Then they turned a final corner, and Scott saw where the Fay had concentrated their improvements. The front facade of the Tower was whitewashed like the rest, but the gaps between every stone sprouted mushrooms, wild rose, clover and foxglove and bluebells and ivy. And here and there the fungi and flowers themselves had been trained to form signs and symbols: the now-familiar stars and moons and octagons that Scott could not help but see rendered in marshmallow and floating in milk. Cracks in the masonry had begun to form—nature was having its way. Eventually the elves would tear down their own castle for beauty.
There was still no drawbridge, no moat, but the main castle doors here were twenty feet off the ground. And emblazoned on these doors was another symbol, of two overlapping circles or spheres, split in two by a line.
“I’ve been seeing that a lot lately,” said Scott.
“It came to fair Titania in dreams,” answered Dhanu.
Towering giants stood to either side of these doors, stripped tree trunks in the grips of their long bare limbs, their belts hung with the tackle of their villainous, storybook lives—skulls, knives, the spine and rib cage of something or other, a lot of iron horseshoes that had been twisted together on chains. Scott thought the Fay weren’t supposed to like iron; but then he thought it might be like a tongue piercing—something unpleasant the big kids did to show what they were capable of.
He caught his breath. He supposed the only way up to that door was to have one of these bald-headed, snaggletoothed giants lift you up to it, and he suddenly felt a depth of sympathy for Fi that never would have occurred to him otherwise. But instead Dhanu whistled, and stout vines grew down from the castle door, weaving and intertwining so that when they’d reached the ground they’d formed a grand staircase. Roses bloomed as they climbed.
“’S that you, Cuhullin?” Mick asked the giant on the left when they were at the level of his waist. “How’s the wife?”
The giant didn’t answer.
“Ah, sometimes I think the Old Mother should have given giants a set o’ ears on their ankles,” Mick said. “I asked—”
“Not supposed to speak to you, Finchfather,” said Cuhullin.
Mick frowned. “Not supposed to speak on the job, or not supposed to speak to me person’ly?”
Still the giant didn’t answer.
The doors were open. Dhanu said,
“So now the stage is set, and it is seen
How churl and chaff assay to sway a queen.”
CHAPTER 27
Near the lake John and Merle parted company with Clara and Alfie and Mab.
“Fare thee well, Chickadee,” said Clara with a girlish smile.
John couldn’t help twitching a little. “We’re definitely calling me that, then?” he asked.
“Chickadee is another name for Titmouse,” said Merle. “We could call you Titmouse.”
“Chickadee’s fine,” said John.
They watched the little family disappear, then proceeded down to the water’s edge. When Merle saw movement, they paused and concealed themselves behind a copse of trees. Finchbriton hopped nervously back and forth on John’s shoulder.
Mermaids.
“Ah,” whispered Merle. “If only I were fifty years younger.”
“Seriously?” murmured John. He squinted to see better, but he didn’t think it helped.
Lough Leane was vast and electric blue, reflecting the dwindling light of the sky above. Down past the rushes the lake met the land, and there were a handful of low, wide stones lapped smooth by water. Lounging on these stones were the mermaids.
John supposed they might be pretty. But like so many things that are meant to be seen in the water, they looked stringy and colorless when out of it. Like seaweed drying on a beach. Their top halves were pasty and bare apart from whatever their lanky hair covered. Their bottom halves looked like low tide. There was a distinct pet-store sort of smell wafting up from the lake.
One thing that really surprised him: nearly all of them were wearing hats. Red silk pointed caps. Those that weren’t had red silk capes. A few had both.
“Merrows,” said Merle. “A sort of Irish mermaid. With so much of the seas disappeared here, I was hoping they might be hanging out in the lakes. The females are all honeys but the males are all hideously ugly, so they tend to be partial to human men. I’d been thinking we’d have to steal a couple of their caps, but the way that Clara was going goo-goo for you reminded me that I’m traveling with People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2010.”
“I’m embarrassed for you that you know that. And what about these caps?”
“Don’t ask me w
hy, but without one of those caps or capes they can’t dive beneath the water. But if we get a couple of them, we can go SHOOM! down to the bottom of the lake like rockets. Once we’re at the bottom I’m pretty sure we’ll find a door, a door that’ll take us to any lake we want. So how about sweet-talking those gals out of a coupla hats?”
John sighed and prepared. He couldn’t merely be a man who wanted some hats. He needed to be a man who loved fish women. He had to believe this. If he loved them, they would love him. They would want to give him their hats. He massaged his temples and searched his past for any and all fish affection he could think of. He’d had a goldfish as a boy, that was something, wasn’t it? He’d always enjoyed films about people helping whales be free. As a teenager he’d practically lived on fish and chips.
“What are you doing?” asked Merle.
“I’m getting into character!” John answered through gritted teeth. “Okay, fine. Fine. Okay. Here I go.”
He breathed and stepped down the mucky bank.
The merrow women flinched, and one moved as if to dive into the water. But John walked with his arms wide, hands open, his face a beatific Get Well Soon card to the universe.
“What treasures!” he said, and beamed them a smile that could be seen from space. “What treasures have washed ashore! And here I thought one had to dive to find pearls.”
The merrows exchanged glances. None of them said anything in return, but neither did they swim away, even as John drew slowly closer. One smiled, shyly. A second even giggled. All of them began to fuss in some way with their hair, pushing it back behind their webbed ears or combing it with their clamshell fingernails.
“Ladies.” John went down on one knee in the mud and bowed his head. Then he raised it slightly, looked up at each of them with lifted brow, did that thing where his jaw muscles clenched just a little like he had to bite down to keep from crying for joy to the heavens and so forth. All the stuff he’d perfected the year he’d done the Australian soap opera. Now the merrows were all grinning, and one of them made sort of a dolphin noise.
“What … what is your name, landsman?” asked one of the merrows.
“I am John. I travel with my elderly and mute and also unfortunately simpleminded father, who rests not far off. And you are of course right to call me a landsman, though I long to explore the beauty of the deep waters of the lakes of the world.”
“Aw,” said another merrow.
He wasn’t using contractions all of a sudden, thought John. Why wasn’t he using contractions? “Is it beautiful, beneath the waves? Tell me, please, so that I may describe it to my brainless and often gassy father.”
“Hey!” came a faint shout from the trees. The merrows craned their necks to look until John did sort of a puckery thing with his lips and got them to refocus. So they told him about the inky blue beauty of their home, the easy rhythms of the water weeds and grasses, the corals and sponges that had tumbled in centuries ago, afire with magic they’d absorbed from the Gloria Wall. They told him of the sea monster in Scotland that never left its cave because it didn’t believe in itself. They described the silver schools of fish that moved like one body and arranged themselves, just twice a year, into arcane symbols that none could decipher. They told him which fish they thought were stuck up and which ones could be really popular if they weren’t always camouflaging themselves all the time.
John listened patiently, nodding, hoping one of the merrows would get around to suggesting what he wanted, all on her own. And indeed, eventually one said, “You know, I have a spare cap in my grotto. I could make a gift of it to you—then you could see these splendors with your own eyes!” She gasped as if she’d surprised herself.
John pretended to really perk up at this. Could he really? One of the merrows with both cap and cape pointed out that she really only needed one or the other, so she could give John the hat right off her head. A small squabble erupted over who would give him what. In the midst of this, he sighed heavily and turned all their heads.
“What is it?” said a merrow. “What ails you?”
“Oh … just … any experience beneath the waves would be a hollow one if I could not share it with my halfwit father, who is not long for this world.”
So it was quickly decided that John would be given not one but two caps, and also an enchanted comb made from a conch shell. When pressed, the merrow who’d given the comb admitted that it wasn’t so much magic as it was merely the only thing she’d had on her person at the moment, but John thanked her extravagantly anyway. Then he brought Merle out (“Oh, he’s just as you described,” said one merrow), and they took up places by the water.
“Where’s Finchbriton?” whispered John.
“Zippered up inside my bag.”
“Are these bags waterproof?”
“’Bout to find out. But he’s in the ziplock with the flare gun.”
“We’d better hurry, then.”
John blew kisses to the merrows, which they made a great show of pretending to catch in their webbed hands and then devour, noisily. It was disturbing.
The men put on their caps. “So what do we do, exactly?” asked John.
“Okay, I think … I think this door, if there is a door, will be right in the middle of the lake,” said Merle. “So I think we have to, like, dive in, and if we think about the middle of the bottom of the lake, then I think the caps will take us there. And then we find the door, and I think we have to think about where we want it to take us, and then we open it and bam! We’re there.”
“Do you know what word I noticed a lot of in that plan?”
“Relax. What do people say in your movies? ‘It’ll work. It has to.’ Plans always work after the character says that.”
“Do we have to hold our breath with the caps on?”
“Better hold it just to be safe.”
“On three?”
One, two, three, and then they breathed, and dove.
CHAPTER 28
John’s head surfaced first, then Merle’s. Each gasped for air, then Merle scrambled up this new shore as quickly as his old joints would allow and unzipped his bag, then the ziplock. Finchbriton fluttered out, drowsily. He landed a few feet away and fluffed himself.
They looked at the marsh around them, the shroud of mist, the bandy-rooted and bare-limbed trees like the taut-skinned mummies of things that had tried to struggle free from the mire. Frogs chirped and croaked. The air smelled like rotten apples.
“Avalon,” said John. “Mick said this place was supposed to be nice.”
The plan with the caps had worked better than it had any right to. As soon as they’d hit water their bodies had been whisked downward, spiraling through a flurry of bubbles, to the bottom of the lake. The whole trip took all of two seconds, and that was fine—had it been slower, or had there been fewer bubbles, John and Merle might have been aware of all the colossal eels, or the one merrow who was as large as a submarine, or the fish with the pincushion teeth, or even the moment when their trajectory actually took them through the coils of a sea serpent and past its jagged jaws.
But they’d had no idea. They reached bottom, squinted about through the murk for an exit while entirely failing to notice the octoclops barreling down on them, swam over to a pearly door set into a tall stone amidst the weeds, and stepped through, thinking, Avalon.
“Well,” said Merle, looking at Avalon now. “I haven’t been here in a long time. Not properly.”
They scuttled up to a felled tree and crouched in among the roots. John couldn’t help looking at most trees a little suspiciously ever since one had tried to kill him, so a dead specimen like this was sort of a comfort.
He wondered if it was the gloom of this place or merely the fact that the two of them were dripping swamp water that made Merle shiver just then.
“First time I came to Avalon was also the first time I met Nimue, actually,” the old man said as he twisted around to survey the island, the sweep of the hill dotted here and there by
stones and caves. Dreary as it was, at least he could get his bearings. The place he’d visited in Somerset back on earth had barely looked anything like this. “It was one of Arthur’s early misadventures. He’d gotten himself wounded and his sword broken fighting this enormous knight named Pellinore.”
“This was before Arthur was king?”
“Nah, he was king already.”
“Why was he fighting Pellinore, then?” asked John.
“Oh, the usual. I don’t remember the specifics. A squire or a damsel rushes into the great hall of the king to tattle on some bad knight who’s knocking down other knights and taking their lunch money. So the king … does what? Tries him in court? ’Course not. One guy goes out to beat him up. Maybe kill him. No talking, no trying to reason with anyone. Just the juvenile belief that the guy who gets beaten somehow lost the argument. Whoever wins the fight is right, and whoever’s right wins the fight. I tried to point out that whoever wins the fight might just be lucky or do more push-ups than the other guy, but I never got a lot of traction with that.
“Anyway, the first guy Arthur sends to fight Pellinore doesn’t do so hot, so Arthur sneaks off to fight Pellinore himself. And does pretty well, but eventually he’s going to die if I don’t rush in and put Pellinore to sleep.”
“And no one ever thinks to send, like, a posse out?” asks John. “A proper police arrest?”
“Please. It was like high school with swords. All the cool kids, the rich kids, sitting at the big round cool kids’ table. Acting like the serfs don’t exist. Racing around, playing chicken with spears. Every one of them with some tragic, heroic opinion of himself. It was the adolescence of man.”