After a while Tommy whispered, “You awake?”
“I’m afraid to go to sleep,” Mike admitted.
“Me too.”
“How did he get here ahead of us? He had to be moving really fast. He never moves that fast when we play dodgeball.”
“I don’t move as fast as I did tonight.”
That made Mike laugh.
• • •
Despite his determination not to, Tommy fell asleep and dreamed.
The dream was in three parts. The first was of a castle full of knights. He was training to become one. Tommy was a varlet, a knight’s page, as was Mike. They practiced against the pell, a wooden stake as tall as a man, used to learn swordsmanship, and later the quintain—a rotating device with a target or dummy on one end and a sandbag on the other. The object with the quintain was to strike the target true with a weapon and then duck and dodge as the sandbag swung toward you from behind.
He and Mike were among the youngest pages there, and he had a sense of being far away from his family. He spent most of his time running from one place to another, carrying messages, doing errands, cleaning armor, and learning the many lessons that were designed to help him take up his duties when he became a man. There were lessons in manners and religion. He learned about archery, riding, hawking, and hunting. The lord he served taught him about combat—lessons that could be painful but excited him all the same. He learned games of strategy, such as chess.
• • •
In the second part of the dream, he was a little older. He was on the back of a galloping horse, with Anton up behind him. Anton, who didn’t smell funny in the dream, was dressed in rich clothing, and he was clinging to Tommy. Tommy held the reins as the panicked horse sped recklessly through dark woods on an autumn night, plunging across streams and through brittle brush. Its flanks were lathered and heaving, its ears laid back, and the whites of its rolling eyes glinting in the moonlight. Mike rode beside them, his horse equally alarmed.
They were pursued by something unearthly, a creature in an ebony cloak whose eyes glowed with an icy blue light beneath a hood that concealed its face. The creature effortlessly kept up with the terrified animals, not so much running alongside as floating. It appeared here and then there, on their heels and then suddenly beside them again. Tommy had no clear sense of how they had come to be in this situation, only that they were in danger, that he must protect Anton.
Now the creature leapt from the ground, hurtling itself upon Mike’s saddle and clutching at him. All the boys screamed, the horses reared, and Tommy reached to pull Mike to safety. They overbalanced and tumbled to the ground, landing hard, barely avoiding the hooves of the fleeing horses. Mike and Tommy quickly came to their feet and shielded Anton, who cried, “It’s me he wants; save yourselves and let him take me!”
Mike and Tommy paid no heed to this but quickly nocked arrows and drew their bows.
Their arrows flew, but the creature eluded them, grinning and making a game of their efforts. He rose onto a high branch, then swooped down upon them, and although the boys drew their daggers, he simply gathered the boys into his mighty hold. Tommy felt a pressure on the hand that held his weapon and was forced to drop it.
The creature did not claw or bite their flesh as Tommy had expected. It whispered into Tommy’s ear, its breath warm, murmuring words he could not make out in his dream. The creature’s cloak transformed into large black wings that bore them higher, higher . . . Tommy looked down and saw the horses speeding back to the castle, while his weapons lay useless and shining on the dark earth below.
Above him the waxing moon shone bright, only three days away from full, and they climbed so high it seemed for a time that they would be taken to it. He no sooner thought this than the creature dove, causing the wind to shriek in Tommy’s ears, and he began to fear that the thing would dash their brains out against the forest floor. But it slowed, and within the blink of an eye they were back down among the trees. Here they were surrounded by bright dancing lights, which seemed to have wings, and to whom the creature spoke in a strange tongue, after which he readily surrendered the boys. To fairies, Tommy thought with a mixture of fascination and dread. He saw the creature take away a bag of gold and disappear into the trees.
Anton seemed to grow as bright as the other lights, whose shapes and faces Tommy began to better discern. Anton moved freely among them, and although Tommy could not understand their language, he thought Anton was pleading on behalf of Mike and Tommy, but without success. Tommy, although warm now, and not in pain, was unable to speak or move, and could see that Mike was similarly afflicted. They were borne away through the forest, and Tommy was soon overcome with a desire to sleep.
• • •
He could not clearly remember the final part of the dream. He was in a place of idleness and pleasure, of sweetmeats, soft beds, and eternal springtime. Grass grew green and high. Flowers of unimaginable beauty surrounded them. Over the babble of a brook he heard the laughter of other children and knew this was a place of endless playfulness. Mike was there, and Anton, and he could almost be satisfied enough by that. He had a feeling he owed a duty to them that he must fulfill, and that for now, he was where he needed to be.
And yet he felt unhappy, felt himself fight a kind of drowsiness that seemed to deepen with every breath he took. He struggled as one who wishes to wake, to wake, to wake . . . but was held down by sleepiness. He felt himself to be a captive who could just make out a faraway shore where he would be free, but who had not the least hope of reaching it. Sometimes he heard faint sounds of sorrow in the distance and was troubled by the belief that these were made by his father, standing in the place in the forest from which they had been taken.
• • •
He woke feeling bereft. Mike’s room was cold and the day outside gray. He looked around him. It was 1962, and he was too old to be afraid of toy chimps or Howdy Doody. He got out of bed and went to his overnight bag and found his toothbrush, which seemed to him, that morning, to be on a long list of great inventions.
• • •
As they walked to school together Mike said, “What’s a sweetmeat?”
“You dreamed it, too. You know what it is.”
“Candy? Some kind of dessert?”
“Yes. Either one.”
“There was a blue-eyed creature with black wings.”
“Yes.” Wanting to think of a happier part of the dream, Tommy said, “You and I—training to be knights.”
“Fostered together,” Mike said.
The words felt right. Tommy knew what they meant, in this old sense.
“We trained on the quintain,” Mike went on. “And Anton was a prince or something. Do you think he made us dream something he wanted to be true?”
“No. I think he made us dream something that is true.”
“How can that be possible?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he put a spell on us.”
Mike brooded over this, then said, “I liked the part when we were in paradise, although I was a little restless there.”
“I wanted out of it,” Tommy admitted. “And I don’t know why. It was . . . it was as if I had something important to do somewhere else.”
“I don’t think we dreamed the same thing about that part. What should we do now?”
“Only one person I know of who might be able to explain it. Let’s try to talk to Anton.”
But when they found Anton, he only shook his head and said, “I can’t talk about it here. After school. Meet me in the cemetery.”
It rained that afternoon, so there was no dodgeball, just indoor games, like pairing off to play hangman and board games like checkers and chess. Tommy and Mike chose hangman. Tommy easily guessed Mike’s word was sweetmeat and Mike just as easily guessed his was quintain. They glanced over to see Bobby playing hangman with Anton, and then watched to make su
re there wasn’t a problem. Bobby was laughing and Anton smiling. Their friendliness seemed to shock the teacher as much as it did their classmates.
• • •
The rain let up by the time school was over, and Tommy, Mike, and Anton started to walk to the cemetery together. They hadn’t gone far before Tommy became aware that they were being followed. He let Anton and Mike get a little bit ahead of him, then suddenly turned around and shouted, “What do you want, Bobby? We aren’t going to let you hurt Anton!”
“I’m not going to hurt him!” Bobby said, affronted. “I promised already, remember?”
“Hello, Robert,” Anton said.
“Hi, Tony. Can I come with you guys?”
“No!” said Mike and Tommy, just as Anton said, “Yes.”
“Thanks!” said Bobby, hearing what he wanted to hear. He quickly caught up with them.
There wasn’t much Mike or Tommy could do, since they were dependent on Anton for explanations. But Tommy still felt irritated and said to Bobby, “You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Is it to my house? ’Cause we’re going the wrong way if that’s where you want to go.”
“Of all the—no, I don’t want to go to your house!”
“Neither do I,” he said.
After that, Tommy decided he would keep his big mouth shut.
He thought Bobby might balk when he realized they were walking into the cemetery, but he didn’t hesitate at all. Mike said, “You aren’t afraid of ghosts?”
“No,” Bobby said. “I come here a lot. No dead person has ever done a thing to me.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Anton said softly, but Bobby didn’t seem to hear him.
• • •
Anton stopped near a large monument shaped like a curved bench—an exedra, he called it, but the rain had made it too damp. He found a place that was drier—a monument consisting of four tall columns supporting a round roof over a stone block, and they settled in there.
“Robert, I promised Thomas and Michael that I would tell them about children stolen by magical folk,” he said. Bobby looked at Mike and Tommy as if this made them the weirdest people he knew, but apparently he had no objections to this program.
So Anton began to talk of two worlds—the mundane, the one they knew as normal. The human world. But there was also a hidden enchanted world—a world of fairies, trolls, goblins, and elves.
“Sometimes,” he said, “those in the enchanted world steal human children from the mundane.” He told tales of different ways in which each of these races and groups within the enchanted world dealt with the matter. “Some replace the stolen child, others do not. Among the people I—I mean, among the ones I know of—there is a seven-year cycle. A child may be taken for only seven years before being offered a choice. During that seven years, while the child lives among the fairies, he or she does not age.”
“What’s the choice at the end of seven years?” Mike asked.
“One is to remain among the fairies. To live in a children’s paradise, to laugh and play. To be safe and loved. That is the choice we hope he will make.”
“And the other choice?” Tommy asked.
“He may choose to return to the mundane world. If that is what he wants, he becomes a changeling. Seven years are taken from his age, and he is exchanged into a new family as a younger child. If, for example, he was taken from the mundane at the age of eleven years and five months, when he returns, he will be a child of four years and five months.”
“And that’s it?” Mike asked. “He’s a regular human from then on?”
“No,” Anton said with a smile. “The fae do not give up so easily. When another seven years have passed, the fairies come for him again, and offer him the choice again. Even in the mundane world, he never grows older than the age at which he was first taken, except in one circumstance.”
“So if he goes back with the fairies,” Mike asked, “he gets to be that age forever?” Tommy thought it was the wrong question.
Anton glanced at Tommy, but answered Mike. “If he chooses to return to the fairies, he never ages. The fairies always want the stolen children to return to them, to stay with them.”
“But the children have a choice every seven years?” Bobby asked.
“Yes.”
“This goes on forever?”
“No. It may only happen one hundred times.”
“Seven times one hundred,” Bobby said, doing the math. “So, it goes on again and again for seven hundred years?”
“Yes. Most children decide to remain among the fairies.”
“What happens at the end of the seven hundred years?”
“Then the stolen child must choose once and for all. If he returns to the fae, he lives untroubled among them.”
“You said he never ages, except in one circumstance,” Tommy said. “At the end of seven hundred years, if he chooses to stay with the mundane, does he age, or does he suddenly turn to dust?”
“No, he doesn’t turn to dust. If, at the end of all of those years of being parted from those who love him in the fae world—if the stolen child still wishes to remain with the mundane, he will grow older here, and live out whatever days are his. However, if he chooses to stay here, another child must be sent back to the fae in his stead.”
“Who wouldn’t want to go back?” Bobby asked.
“Exactly,” said Mike, staring hard at Tommy.
“No adults in the fae world?” Tommy asked. “No troubles?”
“There are adults, and some children who seem to actually be adults in children’s bodies.”
“Like you.”
Anton lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes you, as well. For all the playfulness of the fae, some have responsibilities. As for troubles, yes, we—they—have their own, but the stolen children are not drawn into them. The children in the hidden world do not worry that their rivers are poisoned, that bombs may drop from the sky while they play, that one day there will be no birds to sing to them. The children do not go hungry or unloved. No harm comes to children in the hidden world. It is very unlike this one.”
Bobby and Mike sat looking wistful. Tommy and Anton sat staring at each other, not with hostility, but as if each were trying to study and better understand the other.
After a while, Tommy said, “When?”
Anton said, “All Hallow’s Eve.”
“Halloween. Figures.”
“I need to get home,” Mike said. “Bobby, want to spend the night? I’ll ask my mom to call yours.”
“She’s right over there,” Bobby said, pointing to a grave.
“Sorry,” Mike said.
Bobby shrugged. “I’d like to stay over at your house. My dad might say yes. I don’t know.”
The four boys began to walk toward the housing tract where Mike and Tommy and Bobby lived. Tommy decided not to ask Anton where he lived. He didn’t believe Anton would lie to him, which was the problem, at least while they were within earshot of other people.
They paired off as they walked, and before long, Mike and Bobby were far ahead.
“Are you attached to your parents here?” Anton asked. “Is that why you seem uncertain?”
“They’re good people, and I wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt them. But there is a sort of distance—I have always believed I was adopted.”
“You were, as was Mike. Your parents are waiting until you are older to tell you.”
Tommy took a moment to absorb that news, but it wasn’t as upsetting as he might have expected it to be. “In the time of the dream—1262, right?”
Anton nodded.
“You were a prince.”
“Yes. It is a long story. The short version is that among the fae I am a prince, and in that time, I was stolen by another band of fairies, who exchanged me for a human pr
ince and cast a spell that left me without my powers. My parents are not the sort of beings one should trouble in this way, as the other band eventually discovered. My family is wealthy, and when they learned I had been taken, they offered rewards for my return. I was with my mundane parents on a visit to the noble family you were fostered with when—I don’t think there is an English word for this, so let’s say, a type of goblin found us that night in the woods. My parents were able, a little later, to return the human prince to his parents, much to their delight. A small enchantment allowed them and any other humans who had met me to believe that the prince they had known was that boy.”
“Did he tell them what had become of us? Michael and me?”
“He told them the truth, essentially, by way of an enchantment, one that allowed him to believe he had experienced it. A goblin spirited him away, and the two of you fought for him and allowed him to escape. Alas, the goblin took the two of you instead.” He paused, then added, “I know your father grieved for you. I asked my parents to return you to him. But they refused, saying he had given you away to a man who would put you in an army and see you killed. Which was, indeed, what became of most of the earl’s forces. Still, I eventually persuaded them to send a healer to your father, so that his grief abated as his other sons and daughters gave him grandchildren. Not a few of those grandsons were christened Thomas.”
Tommy found himself wondering about the power of the fairies’ spells and how they affected humans. He pondered this, thinking of the dream. “When we first met, you didn’t smell funny.”
Anton started laughing, and Tommy realized that he knew that laugh, but had not previously heard him laugh here, in this time. It was a wonderful sound, more pleasing than any song. He smiled.
“I have missed you, Thomas,” Anton said. “As for my . . . aroma. Over the years, when I have been sent to ask you to come home, I have learned to—put a bit of distance between myself and others. It makes things easier, later on, if no one else becomes attached to me, and vice versa. I find that even children who overlook appearance will judge another by what their noses tell them.”
Games Creatures Play Page 7