Tam Lin

by PAMELA DEAN

  "Yes. There's not much else I'm good for."

  She noticed with interest, in the part of her mind that went on operating despite all disaster, that they were sufficiently upset not to pursue this point, or even to mark the attitude as uncharacteristic.

  "If you attended some school close by," said her mother thoughtfully, "you could leave the baby with me. I wouldn't mind another."

  "Mom!" said Janet, horrified. "Andrew's just gotten to the age where you have some time to yourself. You don't want to be cluttered up with another kid."

  "Believe me," said her father, "your mother knows what she wants and always has."

  "So if you don't want to marry this boy—"

  "Who is he, for God's sake?" said her father.

  "—that might be a solution."

  "You don't think I should give it up for adoption?"

  "My first grandchild? It's up to you—but no, I don't think you should."

  "And you don't think I should have an abortion?"

  "I don't know. It seems the simplest solution—but I'm afraid you'd always wonder.

  Sometimes the road not taken really is different."

  The discussion wound around several more times and ended where it had begun.

  Showered with hugs and reassurances, Janet climbed into the car and was driven back to Blackstock—by her mother, who did not want her father to worm the name of the baby's father out of Janet on the way.

  Hallowe'en came; Tina, after a number of worried glances and falsely cheerful remarks, left for her dance. And Molly started in on Thomas again.

  "Will you stop it!" said Janet.

  Molly looked angry for a moment; then she turned red. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just things are so weird with Robin, I want to tie somebody's love life up neatly, even if it can't be mine."

  That impulse worked both ways, thought Janet. Because her affairs were in a complete tangle, she wanted to make things easier for Molly. She said, "If I knew something about Robin that he didn't choose to tell you, would you want me to?"

  "To what? Tell me? I don't know. It would depend on what it was. If he's sleeping with somebody else I don't want to hear about it."

  "No, not that." He probably was, or had been, thought Janet; but that was not the important thing.

  "Well, what? Robin doesn't choose to tell me anything, so—"

  "Is that the problem?"

  "Part of it."

  "Well, what I know will explain the problem but I don't know if it'll solve it."

  "Just say it," said Molly.

  Janet got out the Pelican Shakespeare and turned to the pr oper page. "Just read the names," she said.

  Molly read them. She went on staring at the page for some time, the heavy black-and-green book open over her crossed legs; she was sitting on the floor.

  "Far out," she said. "Three of them." Finally she looked up. "I can't say I believe this.

  But I'm willing to treat it as a hypothesis. You know—it's like looking up the answer to a physics problem in the back of the book. For one glorious moment you think everything fits together; and then you stop and think, and it doesn't, because you haven't done your homework and you don't know as much as you think you did. But I don't know what the homework would be in this case. It seems to explain Robin all right, I'll admit that. But how did they get here?"

  "They've been to Elfland," said Janet. "And they awoke, and found them here, on the cold hillside."

  Molly looked at her. Janet told her about Medeous. And then she told her about Thomas.

  Molly said, "How does Thomas know it's him? What if it's Robin?"

  "It had better not be, since I don't believe Robin's gotten anybody pregnant."

  "I never heard of anything so crazy."

  "I did, actually, and I've been trying to remember where. Wait a minute—" Janet got up, pulled Volume I of her battered Norton Anthology of English Literature off the shelf, and leafed through the section titled "Popular Ballads."

  "Here it is," she said. "No—damn it. This is about Thomas the Rhymer. The Queen of Faerie got him, too, but she took him home alter seven years—I wonder if that was to keep Hell from coming for him and now they're onto that sort of trick?"

  "I don't believe in Hell," said Molly, a little wildly.

  "Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it."

  "You're just depressed. Not that I blame you. Look," she said, sounding like Thomas.

  "It would be much better to be wrong about all this and look silly, than be right about all this and not do anything. Let's go out tonight—remembering the flashlights for once—and you can pull Thomas off his horse. If nothing happens, then people will talk for a while. If something happens, then it's worth it, isn't it?"

  "But then I can't have an abortion."

  "Say that again."

  Janet explained.

  "I don't guess you could think of it as a life for a life?"

  "No, it's not that. I don't know what I think about abortion; but I can't take advantage of being pregnant and then just go merrily off and not be pregnant anymore. Those that dance must pay the fiddler."

  "You read too much."

  "Such men are dangerous."

  "Huh."

  "So instead of having two months to decide if I'm going to have an abortion, I get about another two hours."

  "You know you don't want to have one," said Molly. "You just want a little longer to get used to the idea of being stuck with a baby."

  "I can't believe this is happening to me."

  "Think how Thomas feels."

  "Will you stop harping on Thomas?"

  "What happens if he doesn't show up?"

  "I'm not sure he can not show up." Janet frowned, remembering. "He's stayed away the last two times I saw them riding, though."

  "Has he thought of that?"

  "Probably. He said if he killed himself first they'd choose somebody else, so if he

  could stay away, I guess they'd choose somebody else."

  "Like Robin."

  "Maybe."

  "If I were Thomas and I thought you weren't coming, I think I might very well chicken out. I'm going out there; they aren't getting Robin without a fight."

  "Well, if you're going, I'm not staying here."

  "Fine. If Thomas isn't there, we can both pull Robin off his horse. A lover and a pregnant friend surely can't fail."

  "I don't think Thomas will chicken out, though."

  "If you think that highly of him, why don't you just make up your mind to marry him?"

  "Cut it out! "

  "Lord," said Molly, "what fools these mortals be."

  It was a chilly night, clear but tending to mist in the hollows. Eliot and Dunbar were bright with lit windows and noisy with music and laughter. The road up past the lilac maze seemed very steep, and once they had passed the tangle of bushes, there was a vast silence in which their every step made Janet's scalp twitch.

  "Damn!" said Molly, as they started down the long hill to the highway.

  "Shhh! What?"

  "We forgot the fucking flashlights."

  "We always do. It's okay. I don't want anybody to see me coming."

  The grass of the hill was soaking wet. The highway seemed impossibly wide. Janet broke into a run to cross it, and then skidded to a stop in the gravel. Molly, following, said not a word of protest. It was only eleven o'clock, they had come in plenty of time, in case the legions of Faerie kept a different time in this matter, as they certainly did in others.

  "Do we hide in the bushes, or block the bridge and yell at them to stand and deliver?"

  said Molly.

  It was clear which she preferred. Janet said, "We'd better hide in the bushes. The white horses come last, and I don't know what Medeous would do if she saw us."

  They crawled into the bushes and sat shivering under Janet's old green blanket. Janet's ears kept turning the distant sounds of revelry into bagpipe music; but when it finally came, there was no mistaking it. It was rather
labored, and definitely some sort of march, not the Ceol Mohr.

  "That's not Robin playing," whispered Molly.

  "I know. Maybe you'd better get ready after all."

  "I am."

  Tock, tock, tock came the first horses over the bridge: black as jet, darker than the night, with the beads and ribbons streaming in a tangled glow behind them. Medeous; Melinda Wolfe; the pale, stern people. Who will go with Fergus now, thought Janet.

  The black horses passed. The stocky brown ones came. Professor Ferris; Jack Nikopoulos; Anne and Odile and Kit; Johnny Lane, whose fault this all was; and Nicholas Tooley, sitting very straight, with a face like a mask. The brown horses joined the black ones in the road. Janet wished they were farther away. Her heart was so loud she could barely hear the piper, though he was now just the other side of the bridge.

  Tock, tock, tock. The white horses came. Robin was on the first one, looking so grim Janet did not recognize him for a moment. Behind him, with his hair all braided with shining beads and a painful smile on his face, rode Thomas.

  Janet scrambled out of the bushes, and ran at the horse, which not unnaturally sidled sideways. Janet made an enormous leap and caught Thomas around the leg. His hands caught and lifted her. The horse was still trying to go somewhere. Janet wound her arms around Thomas and simply leaned backwards until they both fell off the horse; sideways, because Thomas twisted so as not to land on her.

  "Hold on," he said in her ear.

  Janet did. There was a confused outcry from the other riders, and the sound of footsteps, and a complicated thud, underlaid with some gasping, that was probably Molly dragging Robin off his horse for safety's sake. She looked at Thomas's face, wondering how long she was to hold on, when there was a suffocating incursion of hot air and animal smell, and instead of having both arms trapped firmly around a tall, thin boy, she found her hands sliding off a huge rough-coated muscular shape that snarled in her face. Janet gripped it as hard as she could and stuck her head under its chin. Somewhere nearby Thomas's furious and neglectful voice said, "What fucking difference does it make to you?" The Romance of the Rose slapped to the library floor. The lion made a resonant growl in her ear that was as much struggle as sound. Good question, dimwit, thought Janet.

  But she hung on grimly, and there was nothing in her arms but air. A dry, cool thing slithered over her shoulder, and she grabbed it just in time, dragged it into her smock, and bundled it up. It flung its head free, opened its mouth impossibly wide, and hissed at her.

  Janet struck its head away from her face and, inspired vaguely by the men's adventure novels, held it hard with both hands just behind the head. Odile Beauvais, in the oil-smooth voice she had used for Gratiana, said right into Janet's ear, "I'll give you this, that one I never knew Plead better for and 'gainst the devil, than you." The snake closed its mouth and flicked its tongue thoughtfully at her wrist. Janet decided not to slacken her grip.

  The next moment she had a firm grip on nothing at all, and a madly flapping white shape was beating her about the head and delivering small sharp blows to her forehead.

  Janet batted it into the smock, too, where its terrified struggles were worse than the threats of the other shapes. She was afraid it would break its wings. "I'm not going anywhere," said Thomas's carrying voice, somewhere very distant.

  Janet tried to make more room in the smock without letting the dove out. The smock filled suddenly with a flailing thing, light but very strong. The cloth ripped, and a long white head with a yellow beak and an evil eye snapped at her nose. Janet wanted to laugh.

  The snake and the dove had joined forces. She caught the swan's neck as she had the snake's, and it twisted free and bit her finger. "Fine!" said Thomas, very close. " You say farewell, earth's bliss." Oh, no, not that, thought Janet. She was more angry than frightened now, and that was dangerous: if she hurt any of these abominable beasts, what would she have done to Thomas? Not that he didn't deserve something—but she could not tell what it would be.

  The swan got one wing free and beat her on the head with it. Janet sat down, not quite intentionally, and smothered its biting head in the smock again. There was a whoosh like the lighting of a Bunsen burner multiplied by a million, and she was holding not a living body but a burning brand.

  Somebody was screaming. It was herself. She could not hold this thing any longer; nobody would; her arms were going to fling it from her of their own volition, as one's hand jerks back from a hot stove before the message of pain even reaches the mind. Janet rolled over so the fire was underneath her; and with a sudden thought went on rolling, until the blessed icy water of the stream engulfed them like a bed. The fire went out. The thing she was holding was suddenly heavy. She opened her eyes, and hastily dragged Thomas's head out of the water.

  He was naked, which probably boded pneumonia if Medeous did not render the matter moot. Janet snagged the blanket she and Molly had brought from a bush that it had become involved with, and stood up. "If you'll get up," she said, giddily, "you can have this nice blanket."

  Thomas stood up, his teeth chattering. Bony, thought Janet, definitely bony. Well, he's yours now. You can feed him up. Thomas expelled a shivering breath, and she wrapped the blanket around him. They climbed out of the stream, stumbled over some branches, and stood dripping on the gravel.

  All the horses stood still on the highway, sparkling and gleaming with jewels. The glittering riders had dismounted, and made a silent clump, some holding the horses, and some just looking. Robin was standing a little to one side, looking disheveled. He had the only immediately recognizable expression: he was desperately trying not to laugh. Kit Lane's was similar; it might be that he was hiding a face of great and catlike smugness.

  Anne and Odile might have just watched their team win at some bloodless and polite sport—tennis, perhaps. Professor Ferris had put his hands over his face. Melinda Wolfe was so still and so devoid of expression that she looked like a statue. The pale, stern people were remote and indecipherable, as always. Johnny Lane might have been horrified; Nick might have been astonished. He avoided Janet's gaze, but seemed to be trying to catch Thomas's.

  But Thomas was not attending to any of them. Professor Medeous, her red and green rags hanging straight down and all their edges shaking as if with flame, stood two feet away and looked at them. No: looked at Janet.

  "Oh, had I known," she said in her own voice, but with a wild note and a wilder accent, Scottish flavored with Welsh or French or something nobody knew; she said this much straight to Janet, and then jerked her head to address Thomas. "Tam Lin," she said,

  "what this night I did see," and she looked back at Janet, "I had looked him in the eye, and turned him to a tree."

  She would have; and she could have. It was in her voice: w ood; a slow vegetable life

  rather than a bright swift animal one; a kind of blindness; a kind of deafness; and some death of the heart. Linear A: the alphabet no one knew. Janet clutched at Thomas, who was cold and wet and slippery, but still flesh and blood.

  "There will be two then," said Medeous, still with those wild-flavored vowels, but otherwise for all the world as if she were correcting somebody's sight-reading. "In seven years, we shall have two." She looked hard at Thomas. "And two dearer," she said, clearly.

  She turned, and without a word or another sign from her all the riders mounted. She climbed onto her horse as if she were one drop of water joining another on a windowpane; and silently, with no shout and no sound of hoofs, all that troupe rode up the long hill and vanished around the bend. They stood and looked at the empty black road. The stream lapped at the rocks. The wind picked up.

  "Listen," said Thomas in a shivering voice. "I couldn't say it before, it wasn't fair. I love you. Will you marry me?"

  "Don't be an idiot," said Janet, but she put her arms around him.

  "'Had you rather hear your dog bark at a crow?'"

  "Nobody else in the entire world," said Molly, coming up behind Janet, "would stand out here fr
eezing to death so they could quote Shakespeare at each other. Come in."

  "Where's Robin?" said Janet.

  "He's gone riding," said Molly lightly. "It's safe now, you know."

  They started walking.

  "If we'd known," said Molly, "we could have brought you some clothes."

  "I didn't think anybody was coming." Thomas said this with perfect composure, allowing for the chattering of his teeth. But Janet let her imagination, for the first time, consider what had been happening to him. She took his cold hand in her cold hand. Behind them, belatedly, the bagpipes made sounds as of an asthmatic giant, and lumbered into music.

  "Robin didn't play," said Molly.

  "He wouldn't," said Thomas. "Not for my funeral procession."

  "Was that all he could think of to do? Make you die to the sounds of inept piping?"

  "You don't know what it's like," said Thomas. "You don't know what it's like in that Court. It's like being wrapped up in cotton. And it's been going on for thousands of years.

  And they're all old, and you know, they don't get bored or tired; the older they are, the more they want to go on living. Robin remembers Shakespeare, at least a little. Why shouldn't he go on remembering him? Who do I remember? Besides—he tried to warn me about The Revenger's Tragedy, and after that he washed his hands of me. If he saved me, it might be him they'd take instead; it might be Nick. And they are all so remote there. Things take years to work their way through the cotton. They'd have wept for me, I calculate, around the year 3000. Getting a B.A. at one of the best small colleges in the country is like a vacation to them; it's like going to the beach for a week."

  "Has anybody ever told you that you talk too much?" said Molly.

  "I'm sorry," said Thomas. "I don't mean you should give up on Robin. He is human—and my God, Shakespeare wrote Feste for him. But you should know what you're up against."

  "What did she mean, about there being two next time?"

  "What she said," said Thomas.

  "So she might mean Robin and Nick?"