Dogfighters: Under the Hill

by Alex Beecroft

  Under the trees at the centre of the square, a dream-weaver, a bard and a courtesan played a game of illusion, creating glittering dragons the size of Ben’s hands, letting them spiral up, flying, fighting, giving tiny bursts of multicoloured flame as they fought to reach the arching ceiling. The air was full of them, glittery as toffee paper. They burst like bubbles when he tried to touch them, and the competitors crossed their hands on their breasts and cast down their eyes, standing statuelike and abased as he passed.

  Okay. So they think I’m someone important. So I think I’m someone important. I can use that.

  Ben considered saying, “Take me to your leader,” the prick of hysteria never too far away. God, what he wouldn’t give to wake up in the next half hour in hospital and find all of this had been just a dream.

  The other part of him, proud and certain of himself—the part that he felt he should have known was there all along—rolled imaginary eyes at his obtuseness. We will go to the palace, it said. The queen will have an explanation for what has happened. How you became embedded in my mind like a canker.

  No, it was official, he didn’t like his other self a bit. But he let it guide him up the curved street, commandeer a horse from a lesser noble, order anyone who didn’t look away fast enough to accompany him. A prince could not arrive alone—he must have a retinue.

  There were musicians in his train and jugglers, a couple of young women who strewed the street with flowers, fourteen ill-at-ease guardsmen and a cooper with his tools as he arrived at the palace doors and found them open. There his expectations were soothed as courtiers bowed to the ground before him, laying down their silken cloaks in a path before the feet of his horse. He was assisted from his stolen horse by nymphs, had it led away to be stabled, while beautiful young men pressed drinks upon him and brought him to a throne one step down from the great pearl chair in which Queen Oonagh sat.

  “My friend!” she said, leaping up and descending to his level, curling up by his feet on the step where his throne sat. “The servants will be whipped for not telling me you were recovered. I would not have had you arrive thus in meanness, had I known you willed to come here this day.”

  Ben put his foot down firmly on the part of his mind that was slightly mollified by this speech. “I don’t know you,” he said. “And you had no right to bring me here against my will.”

  She was a beautiful woman, all silver, with a look about the face that reminded him of Arran. He wondered if they were related, cousins perhaps. He seemed to remember reading somewhere that the old-fashioned royal dynasties were all horribly inbred.

  Now she bowed her head, looking sad and fragile. “I am sorry you don’t remember me, but I mean to help you remember. What looks to you at present as an abduction is a rescue, I assure you. Once you have recalled who you are, you will not wish to return to your exile.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, and there came like an echo from a deep cave, muffled by distance, his other self’s feeling of anguish and anger, betrayal and guilt.

  “I only hope that your father’s actions were not caused in part by our friendship. When you disappeared, we grieved, but we could not discover the truth. Your father”—she gave a small, sad laugh—“is not speaking to us at present, and he has closed the borders of his realm to us. We could not search for you against his will.”

  Uncurling, like a flower opening to the sun, she shook a head crowned with moonstones and offered him a hand. “But this is not a subject of which we should speak in public. Come, I have something I wish to show you. It may remind you, I hope, of who you are.”

  She led him to a stone door behind the dais. He crooked an elbow for her so she could lay her hand on his arm as they ascended, and she gave him a sideways glance full of pleasure and cunning that he recognised to the soles of his feet. No doubt about it, she was speaking at least some part of the truth—otherwise how could his other self be nodding along, going, Yes. Yes, I remember. The privy chambers are to the left and down. I remember that she has another city of her own beneath the common levels. Little passages of hewn rock and chambers empty of everything but darkness. Temples with statues of forgotten gods.

  You trust her? he asked himself, and got back something complex. He trusted Arran, but he knew that Arran reported to the queen, that his loyalties were absolute, far more to be relied on than any words he spoke. It seemed Ben’s other half admired this, and it grieved him that the same thing could not be said of himself.

  He paced beside the queen, and his hand on her flesh seemed too heavy, as though he might break her accidentally. “Whoever you remember,” he said, “that’s not me. I am Ben Chaudhry of Bakewell in Derbyshire. I am a human being and I have my own life that I would like to go back to.”

  He thought about Chris, and the expected resentment didn’t come. The man couldn’t—not really—have been expected to be on guard at all times, to have hovered over Ben every hour of every day for the rest of his life. They’d got off to a bad start and carried on via one disaster after another, but Chris was what he thought about when he thought of home. The chance to pick up with him and argue their way into some kind of new life. Something real—to build something whole and wholesome out of their own shared emptinesses.

  But Chris hated the fae with a passion. If Ben managed to find a way out, would he have to own up to being not entirely human himself? Would the passenger now riding in his head go away? Or was this all fucked up already, no way home?

  “Here,” said Oonagh, pushing open a huge round door into a room round as a bubble. In the centre of it was what looked like a beautiful sculpture of flowering vines, until Ben noticed that the thick, twisted metal rods of its construction were buried in the stone floor, the graceful curve of the wires disguised a brutal strength. Then he looked again and saw it was a cage.

  In the cage two people floated, their utter stillness like that of the dead, unbreathing. He recognised them both with a clench of the heart that felt like being pulled inside out through the lungs.

  “Your sister.”

  She was clad in the garments in which she would dance in the temple. He looked at her face and saw her dimly, the memories swimming up from somewhere deeper than his bones, tickling the back of his mind, bemusing him. “I don’t have a sister.”

  Yes, it is she.

  Looking at the man turned up the volume on his protests fiftyfold. God, yes, you didn’t forget the face of a man who’d tried to kill you. But he was so…so real, in his dirty RAF fatigues, blood and mud on his face, weight and flesh and presence, he was so human. And Ben choked on that future he’d just been imagining, found it tasted exactly like the snot running down the back of his throat from unshed tears.

  “And this man tried to kill me.” He sniffed, but the words still came out thick, full of unpacked anguish. “What the hell’s going on?”

  She looked sharply interested. “He did, did he?” and circled the cage, looking in. “I have suspected that one of my political rivals has been telling him lies about me. It seems they have been telling him lies about you too. You do know that he could not have touched your world without powerful magic?”

  “Well duh.” Ben tried to lay his hands on the bars of the cage. There was a resistance there—he pressed and pressed but his hand moved no farther.

  “Time is suspended inside the bubble,” Oonagh said, watching him. “They were stored down with the other sleepers, but I had them brought up here so that you could examine them in more comfort.” She picked up a rod of ivory that lay in a hollow beside the room’s single slab-like seat and handed it to him. “This activates and deactivates the time field. In case you wish to free your sister. It wasn’t my desire to keep her so strictly confined, but the two of them had begun to prove troublesome together. I could not allow that.”

  Ben took the wand and slumped into the chair, pinched the inside of his wrist and ow, that bloody hurt. “Imagine I don’t remember anything.” He looked again at t
he sleeping face of Geoff Baxendale and wondered how anyone’s life could possibly be so screwed. “Who are you, what do you want with me? Start at the beginning and tell me all of it. Make me understand.”

  She laughed and touched the prison, making the polished pendant leaves tremble. The ghostly, sourceless light of the room flickered and pulsed like the meniscus of a stream, flashing off the ornaments of the cage. The cage rustled like a wood in a breeze, but the sleepers within did not move.

  “I am Oonagh, queen of the Sidhe and of the Ylfe. And though you say ‘the beginning’, I think you will not wish me to tell you of the wars between those two. Suffice it to say, as the Saxons were to England, so the Ylfe were to Faerie. Long years since, and though we have become one people, that wound still aches betimes.

  “This is old grief, but old grief does not fade for a people who are doomed to live for millions of years. So my land still harbours those who resent me and my decisions. It is made worse by the fact that I—and my mothers before me—have espoused progress, industry, invention. The discoveries we’ve made!”

  Her smile was wry, her mouth all the more like Arran’s with the twist of sarcasm on it. “But our progress has come at a great cost. Our land is dying. I walk among my people in disguise that I may know their true thoughts, and I see them sickening in the reek of it. Year by year I watch more of them fall to despair, and I see no way to save us if we may not depart and leave the land to heal.

  “We have built ships, but they cannot be launched from this world—there is no longer the strength here to fuel them. You, Karshni, suggested that we launch them from your world. You were engaged on persuading your father. But then you disappeared and he would no longer speak to us, and the walls of your world were raised. Then we were desperate enough to capture your sister in order to force him to acknowledge us. But he has not done so, and time is running out.”

  “So what’s your next step?” Ben asked, getting up and walking around the cage. Eerie, how they didn’t move at all. They had a plastic look about them, like Lenin’s mummy, displayed for the faithful in Moscow.

  Oonagh laughed. “I found you again. My next step is to bring you here and ask for your help. We have been friends a long time, and this was always as much your plan as mine.”

  The other set of reactions, the other personality who rode along like a tattoo in the inner layers of his skin told him that she spoke the truth—that he had been here often, that he had chosen Arran centuries ago, over his father’s protests. Oh, now there was a familiar feeling—the baffled anger and grief that the people he loved could not see things as clearly as he could see them.

  “I’ve been Arran’s friend a long time,” he corrected her, watching with interest the hurt look in her eyes, the way she bent her head and curtained her reaction with jewels. “Not yours.” He levelled the rod, felt a bit like Harry Potter at the pose and was about to say “how do I work this thing” when he felt the intention to act travel down his arm, down the bone and leap across the empty air like a spark. The cage shuddered once more and the carven leaves tinkled against their frame. That was all, he thought at first, until he’d stared long enough to see Sumala breathe. My sister, and my rival. What the hell am I supposed to feel?

  “I want to hear from her why my father disowned me,” Ben said, allowing the shadow personality who knew what was going on to speak. “I have the feeling… I remember. A little. That it was your fault.”

  He almost wished he could turn over the whole conversation to this side of himself he’d never known before and didn’t trust. It would be easier than having to watch as Geoff rubbed his eyes, stretched. The man looked so stupid in his float vest and flying jacket. He looked like a cliché of an airman, except that in the films they had fewer stains, fewer rips in the leather sewn carefully back together by someone with a darning needle and lots of patience. Thinner, shabbier than what Hollywood would have provided.

  Geoff opened his eyes, looked to be having some problems focussing, that screen-idol face of his full of the same struggle with ghostly dreams and memories Ben felt in himself. For a moment his eyes seemed yellow as those of the dragon that had attacked Ben, then he pinched them shut, rubbed his forehead and focussed, and they were blue. “You?”

  “Who was it who told you to kill this man?” Oonagh asked while the two of them stared at each other and seemed equally lost for words.

  Geoff looked away with a bitter smile, licked his lips. “I’m not required to give you that information. Glad to know I was told the truth about him being an agent in your pay, though.”

  Ben moved away, took a turn around the room, trailing his hand over the rough stone walls. It looked like a crypt, with its stubby pillars and the branching vaults above his head which held up the city. There were tapestries, but they were so thick with dust and faded with age he could barely see the ghost shapes of pale hunters on a pale background, riding down a pale stag.

  Oh. Well, that explained things, just a little. Poor bastard. How long had Geoff been here anyway? How many lies had he been told already? Ben could, if he strained forgiveness to the limits, almost feel sorry for Geoff. He knew now, himself, what it was to feel completely at sea, lost for any firm ground to stand on, in doubt even of his own self.

  “I’m not in anyone’s pay,” he said, aware this wasn’t going to make things any easier for the man. “I’m some kind of reincarnation, if I understand it right, of someone who was an ally of hers in a previous life. In this life, I’d never heard of her or you until you tried to kill me.”

  Geoff frowned in confusion, then his face cleared. “How’s the skipper?”

  “Chris, you mean?” Not a subject Ben wanted to talk about, particularly not in front of an audience. “Fine. He’s a pain in the neck, and I fully expect him to do something stupid and get in here somehow to rescue me.”

  “I wouldn’t hold on to that thought too long.”

  Such a mix of feelings—it wasn’t up to him to comfort the bastard. But it wasn’t fair of Geoff to say such a thing. “He thought you were dead. They showed him a body, said it was you. He couldn’t bring himself to examine it any closer. He only found out otherwise at the pool. And there…there we thought you were some kind of apparition. A ghost maybe, or else the Good People messing with his head for their own purposes. He’s been planning to come ever since.”

  Geoff’s lips whitened as he pressed them together. He looked away. Cleared his throat. “And you’re not employed by the queen to do him harm?”

  “That’s what you were told?”

  “Yes. I’m starting to think I’ve been led right down the garden path. It seemed to make sense at the time, because if you were innocently human, how could you be Sumala’s brother?”

  Ben turned to the woman in the cage. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life. Part of him—the largest part—disapproved strongly of her costume. It was one thing for the Apsaras carved on temples to be filmily clad in gauzy skirts with their breasts, round as melons, revealed for all to see. Quite another for a real live person to wear such a getup. His mother would have been scandalised.

  But presumably, in a different life, his other mother would have entirely approved, brushed the girl’s long hair herself and tangled it with strings of gold. “You’re really my sister? This is, well. Bizarre.”

  “It is just as strange for me,” she said and reaching out, pulled at the cage door, making it rattle. There were tears in her eyes as she peered at him. “You are so human, it’s horrible. How can you stand it?”

  “I don’t remember anything else.”

  “Still, it’s cruel. I never thought our father was cruel, but then he did this to you, and he’s left me here in this land of barbarians to be treated like a slave, and I’m beginning to think that he…”

  “Why did he do it?” Ben asked, trying not to be overwhelmed by the jostle of someone else’s concern in his head. So what if it was an older version of himself? He was using this body n
ow, it could damn well remember it was a guest. But having said that, he was curious about this himself.

  Sumala ducked her head until she was talking to her feet. “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember anything—I already said.”

  “It was because of Arran.” Sumala was still mumbling, making Oonagh lean in to try to hear her, the queen’s gaze fixed on her lips as though she could read the words from the shape.

  “Because you two were…being perverted together…and you refused to give him up and get married as father commanded.”

  A flash of light burst inside Ben’s head, expanding into a sphere of hot gold, and he remembered a courtyard full of glitter and sandalwood, domes so bright against the deep blue sky the dazzle should have blinded him.

  “You owe me grandchildren. It is your duty.”

  “I owe you honesty.”

  “And obedience.”

  “Father, what is the reason why I cannot marry Arran? It would unite two kingdoms just as effectively, and now that we’re working together to find new worlds…”

  “You have no concept of dharma at all, do you, boy? Why will you have no pity for your own father? How can I pay my own debt to the gods—the debt I incur by my existence—if you will not put down this evil association and have children? Other worlds are nothing to me if you intend to damn your own father with your wickedness. Wretched child! I must punish you, if only to return you to your senses. Exile, I think. In the human world.”

  He remembered the absolute horror with disbelief. Remembered how the terror of such a fate had struck at his throat and his bowels, made him sick. How he had almost relented, almost given Arran up—almost given himself up and grovelled at the prospect. But both parts of him were proud that he had not, that in the end he had swallowed, straightened up and accepted it without flinching.

  Then he had forgotten the whole thing, been left living a life meant as a punishment with no conception of what he had done to deserve it. And, frankly, it hadn’t been that bad after all.