An eccentricity made a regular thing of ceases to provoke remark. Public opinion deplored the freckles on Fidès’ nose, but accepted them—together with her solitary rambles, her unpunctuality, and her growing inattention to what was going on around her—as a consequence of her widowed state. Her brother-in-law, her only relative at Court, sometimes urged her to wear gloves, but otherwise respected her sorrow, which did her, and his family, great credit.
As time went on, and the freckles reappeared every summer and the feathers accumulated to such an extent that she had to have an attic made over to hold them, he lapsed from respecting her sorrow to admiring her fidelity—which was just as creditable but less acutely so. When she made him an uncle he was slightly taken aback. But it was a nice peaceful baby, and not the first to be born to a bar sinister—which in some Courts, notably Elfhame in Scotland, is a positive advantage. With a little revision Fidès was still creditable: to have remembered with so much attachment the comfort of matrimony through so long and disconsolate a widowhood was undeniably to her credit, and his late brother would have taken it as a compliment.
But as a persuasion to Fidès to stay quietly indoors the baby was totally ineffective. She was no sooner out of childbed than she was out-of-doors, rambling over the countryside with the baby under her arm. “Look, baby. That’s a whinchat. Whinchat. Whinchat.” A little jerk to enforce the information. Or “Listen, baby. That’s a raven. ‘Noirâtre,’ he says. ‘Noirâtre.’ ” The child’s vague stare would wander in the direction of her hand. He was a gentle, solemn baby; she was sure he took it all in and that his first word would be a chirp. If her friends questioned her behaviour—Wouldn’t the child be overexcited? Wouldn’t it be happier with a rattle?—she vehemently asserted that she meant Grive to have his birthright. “I grew up without a bird in my life, as if there were nothing in the world but fairies and mortals. I wasn’t allowed to fly—flying was vulgar—and to this day I fly abominably. Birds were things to stitch, or things to eat. Larks were things in a pie. But birds are our nearest relatives. They are the nearest things to ourselves. And far more beautiful, and far more interesting. Don’t you see?”
They saw poor Fidès unhinged by the shock of having a baby that couldn’t be accounted for, and turned the subject.
The working fairies, chattering like swifts as they flew about their duties, were more downright. “Taking the child out in all weathers like any gipsy! Asking Rudel if he’ll give it flying lessons! Gentry ought to know their place.”
Only Gobelet spoke up for his mistress, saying that weather never did a child any harm. Gobelet spoke from experience. He was a changeling, and had lived in the mortal world till he was seven, when Fidès’ husband saw him sucking a cow, took a fancy to his roly-poly charm, and had him stolen, giving him to Fidès for St. Valentine’s Day. Gobelet grew up short-legged and stocky, and inexpugnably mortal. No one particularly liked him. To prove satisfactory a changeling must be stolen in infancy. Gobelet’s seven years as a labourer’s child encrusted him, like dirt in the crevices of an artichoke. He ate with his fingers. When he had finished a boiled egg he drove his spoon through the shell. If he saw a single magpie, he crossed himself; if anyone gave him a penny he spat on it for luck; he killed slow-worms. He was afraid of Fidès, because he knew he was repulsive to her. Yet once he made her a most exquisite present. She had gone off on one of her rambles, and he had been sent after her with a message. He found her on the heath, motionless, and staring at the ground with an expression of dismay. She was staring at the body of a dead crow, already maggoty. Forgetting the message, he picked it up and said it must be buried in an anthill. She had not expected him to show such feeling, and followed him while he searched for an anthill large enough for his purpose. When it was found he scrabbled a hole and sank the crow in it. What the maggots had begun, he said, the ants would finish. Ants were good workmen. Three months later he brought her the crow’s skeleton, wrapped in a burdock leaf. Every minutest bone was in place, and she had never seen a bird’s skeleton before. In her rapture she forgot to thank him, and he went away thinking she was displeased.
Grive’s first coherent memory was of a northeasterly squall; a clap of thunder, darkened air, and hailstones bouncing off the ground. He was in his mother’s arms. She was attending to something overhead. There was a rift of brilliant March-blue sky, and small cross-shaped birds were playing there, diving in and out of the cloud, circling round each other, gathering and dispersing and gathering again, and singing in shrill silken voices. The booming wind came between him and the music. But it persisted; whenever the wind hushed, he heard it again, the same dizzying net of sound. He struggled out of his mother’s arms, spread his wings, felt the air beneath them, and flew toward the larks. She watched him, breathless with triumph, till a gust of wind caught him and dashed him to the ground. She was so sure he was dead that she did not stir, till she heard him whimper. Hugging him, small and plump, to her breast, she waited for him to die. He stiffened, his face contorted, he drew a sharp breath, and burst into a bellow of fury. She had never heard him cry like that before.
He had come back to her a stranger. Though she still hugged him, the warmth of recognition had gone out of her breast. The angry red-faced stranger buffeting her with small soft fists was just another Elfin: he had never been, he could never become, a bird. She must put the idea out of her head, as when, deceived by candlelight, she stitched a wrong-coloured thread into her embroidery and in the morning had to unpick it.
It had slipped her memory who had fathered him, but she could be sure of the rest. An Elfin called Grive, he would grow up clever and sensible, scorning and indulging her, like her kind parents, her good kind husband, her brother-in-law. He would know she was crazy and make allowances for her; he might even feel a kind of love for her. She could never feel love for him. Love was what she felt for birds—a free gift, unrequired, unrequited, invulnerable.
The angry stranger wriggled out of her arms. She watched him making his way on hands and knees over the wet turf. Even when he paused to bite a daisy, there was nothing to remind her that she had half-believed he might become a bird. Presently she could say, quite calmly, quite sensibly, “Come, Grive! It’s time I took you back.”
She told no one of this. She wanted to forget it. She had her hair dressed differently and led an indoor life, playing bilboquet and distilling a perfume from gorse blossoms. By the time the cuckoo had changed its interval, she was walking on the heath. But she walked alone, leaving Grive in the care of Gobelet—an uncouth companion, but wingless.
Gobelet pitied the pretty child who had suddenly fallen out of favour. He cut him a shepherd’s pipe of elder wood, taught him to plait rushes; carved him a ship which floated in a footbath. By whisking up the water he raised a stormy ocean; the ship tossed and heeled, and its crew of silver buttons fell off and were drowned. On moonlight nights he threw fox and rabbit shadows on the wall. The fox moved stealthily toward the rabbit, snapping its jaws, winking horribly with its narrow gleaming eye; the rabbit ran this way and that, waving its long ears. As the right-hand fox pursued the left-hand rabbit, Grive screamed with the excitement of the chase, and Gobelet said to himself, “I’ll make a man of him yet.”
When these diversions were outgrown, they invented an interminable saga in which they were the two last people left alive in a world of giants, dragons, and talking animals. Day after day they ran new perils, escaped by stratagems only to face worse dangers, survived with just enough strength for the next day’s installment. Sorting and pairing feathers for Fidès for hours on end, they prompted each other to new adventures in their world of fantasy.
But the real world was gaining on them. Gobelet had grown stout. He walked with a limp, and the east wind gave him rheumatism.
The measure of our mortal days is more or less threescore and ten. The lover cries out for a moment to be eternal, the astronomer would like to see a comet over again,
but he knows this is foolish, as the lover knows his mistress will outlive her lustrous eyes and die round about the time he does. Our years, long or short, are told on the same plain-faced dial. But by the discrepancy between Elfin and mortal longevity, the portion of time which made Grive an adolescent made Gobelet an aging man. Of the two, Gobelet was the less concerned. He had kept some shreds of his mortal wits about him and felt that, taking one thing with another, when the time came he would be well rid of himself. Grive lived in a flutter of disbelief, compunction, and apprehension, and plucked out each of Gobelet’s white hairs as soon as it appeared. Elfins feel a particular reprobation of demonstrable old age. Many of them go into retirement rather than affront society with the spectacle of their decay. As for changelings, when they grow old they are got rid of. Grive, being measured for a new suit, thought that before he had worn it out Gobelet would be gone, discarded like a cracked pitcher, left to beg his way through the world and die in a ditch with the crows standing round like mourners, waiting to peck out his eyes.
Grive was being measured for a new suit because the time had come when he must attend the Queen as one of her pages. It was his first step up in the world, and having determined he would not enjoy it he found himself enjoying it a great deal. At the end of his first spell of duty he returned to the family apartment, full of what he would tell Gobelet. Gobelet was gone. As furious as a child, Grive accused Fidès of cruelty, treachery, ingratitude. “He was the only friend I had. I shall find him and bring him back. Which way did he go?”
Fidès put down the blue tit she was feathering. “Which way did he go? I really can’t say. He must have gone somewhere. Perhaps they know in the kitchen, for I said he must have a good meal before he started. As it is, I kept him long after he should have been got rid of, because I knew you had been fond of him. But one can’t keep changelings forever. Anyhow, they don’t expect to be kept. Be reasonable, dear. And don’t shout.” She took up the blue tit and added another feather.
“How it must distress you to think of getting rid of the Queen,” he said suavely. It was as if for the first time in his life he had shot with a loaded gun.
Queen Alionde had felt no call to go into retirement. She brandished her old age and insisted on having it acknowledged. No one knew how old she was. There had been confidential bowerwomen, Chancellors sworn to secrecy who knew, but they were long since dead. Her faculties remained in her like rats in a ruin. She never slept. She spoke the language of a forgotten epoch, mingling extreme salacity with lofty euphemisms and punctilios of grammar. She was long past being comical, and smelled like bad haddock. Some said she was phosphorescent in the dark. She found life highly entertaining.
When the pestilence broke out among the peasantry, she insisted on having the latest news of it: which villages it had reached, how many had died, how long it took them. She kept a tally of deaths, comparing it with the figures of other pestilences, calculating if this one would beat them, and how soon it would reach Bourrasque. Working fairies were sent out to look for any signs of murrain among cattle. They reported a great influx of kites. Her diamonds flashed as she clapped her hands at the news. And rats? she asked. Few rats, if any, they said. The reflection of her earrings flitted about the room like butterflies as she nodded in satisfaction. Rats are wise animals, they know when to move out; they are not immune to mortal diseases as fairies are. If the pestilence came to the very gates of Bourrasque, if the dying, frantic with pain, leaped over the palace wall, if the dead had to be raked into heaps under their noses, no fairy would be a penny the worse. Her court was glad to think this was so but wished there could be a change of subject.
Exact to the day she foretold it, the pestilence reached Bourrasque. Her office-holders had to wrench compliments on her accuracy out of their unenthusiastic bosoms, and a congratulatory banquet was organized, with loyal addresses and the young people dancing jigs and gavottes. Fires blazed on the hearths, there were candles everywhere, and more food than could be eaten. The elder ladies, sitting well away from their Queen’s eye, began to knit shawls for the peasantry. By the time the shawls were finished, they were thankful to wrap them round their own shoulders.
Bourrasque, complying with the course of history, had come to depend on its serfs for common necessities. The pestilence did not enter the castle; it laid siege to it. Fewer carcasses were brought to the larderer’s wicket, less dairy stuff, no eggs. The great meal chest was not replenished. Fuel dues were not paid. There was no dearth in the land; pigs and cattle, goats and poultry, could be seen scampering over the fields, breaking down fences, trampling the reaped harvest—all of them plump and in prime condition for Martinmas. But the men who herded and slaughtered, the women who milked the cows and thumped in the churns, were too few and too desperate to provide for any but themselves. Others providing for themselves were the working fairies, who made forays beyond the walls, brought back a goose, a brace of rabbits, with luck an eel from under the mud of a cow pond. They cooked and ate in secret, charitably sparing a little goose fat to flavour the cabbage shared among their betters.
On New Year’s morning the Queen was served with a stoup of claret and a boiled egg. The egg was bad. She ate it and called a Council. Hearing that they had hoped to spare her the worst, she questioned them with lively interest about their deprivations, and commanded that Bourrasque should be vacated on the morrow. She had not lived so long in order to die of starvation. The whole court must accompany her; she could not descend on her great-great-great-nephew in Berry without a rag of retinue. They would start an hour after sunrise.
Somehow or other, it was managed. There was no planning, no consultation, no bewailing. They worked like plunderers. The first intention had been to take what was precious, like jewellery, or indispensable, like blankets. This was followed by a passion to leave nothing behind. Tusks, antlers, a rhinoceros horn, some rusty swords, two voiceless bugles, a gong, and an effigy of Charlemagne were rescued from the butler’s pantry. The east pavilion was stripped of its decorations. They tore down velvet hangings to wrap round old saucepans. Cushions and dirty napkins were rammed into a deed chest, and lidded with astrological charts. By dawn, the wagons stood loaded in the forecourt.
A few flakes of snow were falling.
The courtiers had gathered at the foot of the main staircase. Many of them had put on nightcaps for the journey. Alionde was brought down, baled in furs, and carried to her litter. Behind its closed screens she could be heard talking and giving orders, like a parrot in its cage. A hubbub of last-minute voices broke out—assurances of what had been done, reassurances that nothing had been overlooked. Grive heard his mother’s voice among them: “I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything. Perhaps I’d better have one last look.” She brushed past him, stared up the wide staircase, heard herself being told to hurry, turned back, and was gone with the rest. He stood at the window, watching the cavalcade lumber up the hillside, with the piper going ahead and playing a jaunty farewell. A gust of wind swept the noise out of earshot. Nothing was left except the complaining of the weathercock.
He was too famished to know whether he had been left behind or had stayed. Like his throstle name-giver, Turdus philomelos, he was shy and a dainty feeder; rather than jostle for a bacon-rind or a bit of turnip, he let himself be elbowed away. Now, though he knew that every hole and corner had been ransacked for provision for the journey, he made a desultory tour of inspection. A smell of sour grease hung about the kitchen quarters. He sickened at it, and went into the cold pleasure-garden, where he ate a little snow. He returned to the saloon which had been so crowded with departures, listened to the weathercock, noticed the direction of the snowflakes and lay down to die.
Dying was a new experience. It was part of it that he should be sorting feathers, feathers from long-dead birds, and heavy because of that. A wind along the floor blew him away from the feathers. It was part of dying that a dragon came in and curled up on his fee
t. It seemed kindly intentioned, but being coldblooded it could not drive away the chill of death. It was also part of dying that Gobelet was rocking him in his arms. Once, he found Gobelet dribbling milk between his jaws. The milk was warm and sent him to sleep. When he woke he could stretch himself and open his eyes. There was Gobelet’s hand, tickling his nose with a raisin. So they were both dead.
Even when Grive was on the mend he remained lightheaded. Starvation had capsized his wits. If he were left to sleep too long he began to twitch and struggle; wakened, he would stare round him and utter the same cry: “I had that dreadful dream again. I dreamed we were alive.”
Gobelet was not distressed at being alive; on the contrary, it seemed to him that his survival did him credit. It had been against considerable odds. It was the lot of changelings to be dismissed on growing old. He had seen it happen to others and taken it for granted; he did so when it was his turn to be packed off to find a death in a world that had no place for him. But he had been a poor man’s child, and the remembrance of how to steal, cajole, and make himself useful came to his aid. He was too old for cajolery to apply, but he flattered, and by never staying long in one place he stole undetected. He had forgotten the name of his birthplace till he heard it spoken by a stranger at the inn. Then everything flashed back on him: the forked pear tree, the fern growing beside the wellhead, his mother breaking a pitcher, the faggot thrust into the bread oven. Knowing what name to ask for, he soon found his way there. Everyone he had known was dead or gone, but the breed of sheep was the same. Here he hired himself as a farmhand and for a couple of years lived honest, till the sudden childhood memory of a gentleman on a horse who drew rein and asked how old he was so unsettled him that he knew he must have another look at Bourrasque. By then the pestilence had reached the neighbourhood. He hoped to evade it, but it struck him down on the third day of his journey. Shivering and burning, he sweated it out in a dry ditch, listening to the death-owl screeching to the moon. In spite of the owl, he recovered, laid dock-leaf poultices on his sores, and trudged on through the shortening days. He knew he was nearing Bourrasque when he met an old acquaintance, Grimbaud, one of the working fairies, who was setting a snare. From him he heard how the peasants were dying and the palace starving. He inquired after Lady Fidès. Grimbaud tapped his forehead with two fingers. He could say nothing of Grive.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 50