by Fahy, James
Irene.
Robin thought this was quite an odd note. He checked his watch as he wolfed down his mysteriously cook-free breakfast. It was already almost ten. He had slept very late and his tutor was due in an hour. He supposed that meeting make-believe creatures, especially extremely annoying blue ones, took up a lot of energy.
After breakfast, he went outside, where the stone fountain was babbling merrily. It must be old, he thought. One of the satyrs horns was missing, broken off long ago. It looked rather sad and dejected.
With his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets to ward off the cold, he looked around for a while, but could see nothing out of the ordinary. He wasn’t really sure what he was expecting. Robin scanned the tree-line at the edge of the forest, but if Woad was hiding in the trees, he was hiding very well.
He circled Erlking Hall completely, discovering a large vegetable plot and a walled rose garden. There was an extremely large and old-fashioned looking conservatory, filled with lots of large leafy plants. There was a vast lone oak tree and a sundial in a shadowy nook. There was a well, covered with a large and, as Robin discovered, utterly immovable stone. But there was no blue faun.
Robin wished that Mr Drover and Henry would show up. He didn’t know whether to tell Henry about his encounter last night or not. He probably thought Robin was half-cracked anyway. But it would be better to have someone to talk to while he waited for his tutor.
His wish was granted in a way. He circled around the great hall to the front door and its tall, imposing columns. A person stood there.
Unfortunately, it was not Henry, or Woad, or anyone he knew. It was a woman, short and dumpy with a pinched, humourless face. Her black hair was scraped back off her face and she had her arms folded tightly across the front of her black dress.
She stared at Robin with such clear disapproval that he almost checked his shoes to see if he had stepped in something.
“Master Robin is it?” she snapped.
“Er … yes,” said Robin, not too sure about the ‘master’ part. “Hello.”
“Well, what are you doing out on the wet grass, you foolish little boy? Do you think you are going to come now and spread mud all through this hall?”
“No … I…”
“Well, you can think again!” she spat. “As if I don’t have enough to do in this place, without clearing up after another mucky, thoughtless little child! Perhaps you think I get bored, is that it? Cleaning windows and hoovering the stairs and washing the dishes?” Her beady little eyes glared at him in barely suppressed fury. “Maybe you think you are doing me a favour? Keeping me busy?”
“No … I don’t think…”
The woman threw her hands up dramatically. “You think this house cleans itself? Do you!? No. I do it! All of it, on my own. And what would happen if I didn’t? Eh? Does anyone ever stop to think about that? No, they do not!”
Robin gave up trying to join in the conversation. She seemed to be getting along fine without him.
“I’ll tell you what would happen!” She pointed a finger at him portentously. “This place would fall apart without me! Then there would be trouble! Yes there would!” There was a strange gleam of manic triumph in her eyes. “They don’t notice when it’s done, do they? No. But they’d notice quick enough if it wasn’t! Quick as a flash!” She snapped her fingers, presumably to show Robin how quick a flash was.
“Are you the housekeeper?” Robin asked, coming up the steps, as she paused to take a breath.
Her eyes flew wide. “I have JUST washed those steps!” she cried. “Look at them. Look what you have done, you horrible, horrible child!”
Robin had indeed traipsed a fair amount of mud up the steps. He looked at the horrified woman, his eyes widening with panic at her expression.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to … I’ll clean it up…”
“You’ll clean it up, will you?” she snapped. “Oh yes? And what do you think you know about cleaning steps? Have you cleaned steps in this house for the last hundred years? Think you know so much better than stupid old Hestia?”
Robin looked up horrified. The frantic woman looked halfway between bursting into tears and screaming with rage.
“I didn’t mean…” he began.
She flapped her arms at him like a furious chicken. “You never mean! None of you ever mean! But you still do!”
Robin backed down a step in the face of her outrage.
“You will take off your shoes! That is what you will do! Thoughtless child! Take them off right now and carry them to the kitchen and leave them on newspaper on the table! Then you will go straight to your room, and make no fingerprints in the polishing on the way! You will wash and clean and try to look more like a human child and less like a savage. Your tutor is due any minute! Think I want him coming here and seeing my steps all covered with mud? Are you trying to shame me?”
Robin dropped down and frantically unlaced his scruffy old trainers, while the woman ranted above him. He ran up the last two steps in his socks.
“Gone with you!” she cried after him as he slipped inside, mumbling sorrys. “And leave no footprints!”
Robin thought Henry was right. Hestia the housekeeper was a battleaxe, and she did have a face like a spade. He wondered briefly if anyone in this house apart from him was sane. Then he considered that he had spent the previous evening talking to a blue creature with a long tail, and shrugged it off.
He deposited the offending trainers in the large and austere kitchen, but didn’t bother going to his room to clean up. It was only his shoes that were dirty and he didn’t have a spare pair. By the time he had dawdled back to the lobby again, the front steps were gleaming and clear, Hestia gone. He was just wondering where he was supposed to be meeting his tutor when the large grandfather clock chimed eleven.
At the last melodic and genteel ‘bong’, there was a polite cough behind him.
“You must be the young master of the house,” a voice said.
Robin stopped in mid-step. He turned to face the owner of the sudden and unexpected voice, only to find that there was no one behind him. He blinked in confusion.
“You’ll have to do better than that, young Master Robin,” the voice came again genially. Robin spun in confusion.
The hallway was empty. There was no one on the stairs or the distant shadowy landing.
“Who’s there?” Robin called, searching the room. There was no one in sight.
“Your first lesson,” the voice said, so close to his ear it made him jump, “… is to learn to see.”
Robin found himself turning in a circle. “Where are you?” he asked, slipping slightly on the polished floor in just his socks.
“You have to learn to look at things and be prepared for what is actually there,” the dislocated voice said again. “If you think you know what you are going to see, then all you will see is what you will expect … and that would be terribly dull.”
The voice seemed to be coming from above him. Robin looked up, but there was nothing but the chandelier, glittering in the shadows above.
“Close your eyes, young Master Robin,” said the voice.
Robin was at a loss. If this was a trick, he didn’t know how it was managed.
With no other more sensible option at hand, he did as he was told and closed his eyes.
“Now,” the voice said. “What do you see?”
“Nothing,” Robin replied, thinking that this was a very stupid question.
Something moved right in front of him. “What do you expect to see? When you open your eyes?” the voice asked, very close to him.
“Erm … my tutor?” Robin guessed. He couldn’t think who else it could be.
“Correct,” the voice said, sounding very pleased by this answer. “Now of course, when you open your eyes, you will no doubt expect to see a tutor of general disposition. A man of middling age perhaps, with a sour expression and maybe a jacket with tweed involved and leather patches at
the elbows, yes?”
“Erm … I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Nonsense,” the voice replied. “It is impossible to hear of a thing without seeing it in your mind. Your Plato had the right of it there. And as I have said, once your mind has made its mind up, you will only see what it expects to see. And that will never do.”
“O-kay…” Robin said. He had to admit, he did have a vague impression of a dusty, bad-tempered old schoolteacher in mind. “So…?”
“So get rid of that image,” the voice said. “Allow it no quarter in your mind, or we will be off to a very poor start indeed.”
Robin nodded. “Okay … I think,” he said uncertainly.
He felt a fleeting pressure on his eyelids, as quick and light as the brush of a moth’s wing, then it was gone.
“Now you can open your eyes.”
Robin did so.
There was a man standing in front of him. Or at least, that was Robin’s first thought. He was concentrating on not having any image in his mind, and for a moment, his vision wavered, a trick of his confused brain, and then there was something else standing in front of him instead.
It looked fairly like a man, thinnish with wild tufty brown hair and a pointy beard. Robin noticed was that the man was not wearing tweed of any kind. He was in fact wearing nothing at all. His skin was very darkly tanned, nut coloured, and his arms and chest were decorated with swirling tattoos in berry-coloured ink.
Fascinating though this was, Robin’s attention couldn’t help but be drawn to the fact that the man’s legs were covered in sleek fur the same colour as his hair and, ending in ivory-coloured hooves which stood innocently and quite firmly on the well-polished floor.
The final thing Robin noticed, when he dragged his eyes away from the goat legs, was that sticking out of the man’s thatch of curly brown hair there were two small, stubby horns, like large acorns.
The man smiled at him. His eyes were very bright and alert. His teeth were alarmingly white.
Robin stared.
“Very good,” the man said, sounding genuinely pleased. “That is very impressive on a first try.” He held out his hand in greeting. “I, Master Robin, am Phorbas, and I am to be your tutor in the arts of the Arcania.”
Robin stared at the offered hand for a while, feeling a little stunned.
“It is customary,” Phorbas said politely after a moment, “to shake it.”
Robin shook the hand, suddenly feeling very impolite. His was numb with shock. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
The silence dragged out. Phorbas politely waited for Robin to get to grips with things. “You’re a … you’re a … faun,” he said eventually.
Phorbas raised his eyebrows. “A faun indeed! Do I look blue to you? Have I displayed an irritating urge to do acrobatics? No. I am a son of Pan. A satyr. The two are quite, quite distinct. It’s the humans who clump us all together.”
Robin said nothing. He stared at the satyr. This wasn’t really happening.
“Aunt Irene … hired you?” he asked, trying not to stare at the goat legs. Phorbas had released his hand and was walking in a slow circle around him, his ivory hooves clacking neatly on the floorboards.
“Oh yes,” Phorbas said. “I come with excellent credentials.”
“And she knows … she knows that you’re a … a…?”
“Satyr?” Phorbas supplied. “Yes, of course. She’s very bright you see. She would never have the temerity to confuse satyrs and fauns.”
“I think maybe I should sit down,” Robin said weakly. His feet suddenly felt a very long way away at the end of his legs.
Phorbas snapped his fingers under Robin’s nose. “No time for that, Master Robin. Your education has already begun. Your aunt informs me that due to a terrible series of mishaps and misunderstandings, you have no idea who you are, where you are from, or of what you are capable. You have been living in the human world far too long.” He shuddered slightly at this. “Which is most unfair on you. But all can be put right.”
“I thought you were coming to teach me schoolwork,” Robin asked weakly.
Phorbas made a distasteful face. “There’s time enough for frivolities like that when you are older,” he said. “A child like you needs to be tutored in the Arcania.”
“The what?”
“The arts of casting,” Phorbas said, with an extravagant gesture of his arms.
Robin looked at him blankly.
“Magic,” the satyr explained, grinning. “Fire, water, earth, wind, light, darkness and spirit! The seven towers of the Arcania! The seven fields of magical expertise. All of our kind learn these. Some specialise, some are hopeless. We will not know your limits, Master Robin, until we test them.” He smiled. “And test them we shall.”
The satyr walked towards the staircase. “Come, the Netherworlde awaits us!”
“The what?” Robin asked, following the quick stepping goat man.
“The Netherworlde,” Phorbas repeated. “I thought perhaps your aunt had exaggerated when she said you knew nothing, but I see she was, as ever, most carefully accurate with her descriptions. The Netherworlde, Master Robin, the flip side to what you know as the human world.”
Robin didn’t really know how to process this. He settled for the simplest question. “How will we get there?”
“Through Erlking of course,” Phorbas replied. “Erlking is a station.” He noticed the confused look on Robin’s face. Robin was remembering the small blue boy from the previous night. He had mentioned stations too. “There are permanent pathways between here, the human world, and the Netherworlde,” Phorbas explained, leading Robin on at a quick pace up to the third floor. “These passing places are called stations, and are governed mainly by Janus, which is our doorkeeper.”
He turned a corner and set off down a long corridor, trailing Robin behind him.
“There are a few…” he continued, “… a very select few, independent stations, ungoverned, unmonitored by the peacekeepers, Eris’ people. Erlking is one of these.”
“Why’s that?” Robin asked.
“Erlking is a law unto itself, and cannot be governed.” He glanced at Robin. “You would do well to bear that in mind, Master Robin. While your aunt holds mastery of Erlking, while she watches over, no harm can come to you within its walls. It is a fact most irksome to her enemies.”
They ascended a couple of steps and turned a corner. Robin was trying desperately to take all this on board.
“Why have I never heard of any of this before?” he wanted to know, still struggling with the fact he was following half a goat upstairs.
Phorbas laughed. “Very few humans know of the Netherworlde. We would never get any peace if they did.”
“So why me? Why tell me all this?” Robin asked.
Phorbas gave him a sidelong glance. “Because you, Master Robin, though I appreciate it may come as something of a shock, are not altogether human. You are the last of a long, long line.”
He stopped at the end of the corridor abruptly and turned to face the shocked boy. Robin’s eyes were very wide.
They had arrived at the locked red door. The same door which he and Henry had found the previous day. The door that according to the other boy, had never previously been there.
“You,” Phorbas said, leaning down and peering into Robin’s face intensely. “You, my young Master Robin, are the world’s last changeling.”
Before Robin could query him, the satyr slipped a slim silver key from the pocket of his waistcoat. It turned with a polite click and the door opened.
Robin peered within.
The room beyond was bizarrely out of place with the rest of the corridor and house. The walls and floor were rough stone, like an old castle. There was another door on the opposite wall, very old fashioned with huge black hinges and a ring of iron for a doorknocker.
What struck Robin was that the room looked so old and partly ruined. There were large green bushes here and there, growing through the cracks. Iv
y covered much of the dark walls. There were even a couple of wizened trees pushing up through the flagstones, their leafy canopies hiding much of the ceiling.
There was a large stone table at the centre of the room, covered in odd paraphernalia and scrolls, and a lantern casting a golden glow over the odd room.
The strangest thing, however, in an ever-growing list of exceedingly strange things, was that through the window in the room, the sky outside was dark and dotted with bright stars.
Considering that on this side of the door it was eleven o’clock in the morning and quite sunny, Robin found this quite hard to take in.
“Come on through,” Phorbas said. “Take your first steps in the Netherworlde.”
Robin followed the satyr into the room. The air shimmered a little in the doorway as he passed through, as though in a heat haze. He couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious that he took his first steps in the Netherworlde, apparently the world’s last changeling, in his socks.
Chapter Six –
Magics and Mana-stones
Phorbas followed Robin into the large, ruined room. A cool midnight breeze rolled in through the windows, carrying with it the sweet smell of night-time grass and odd flowers. Was this really happening, he wondered? He breathed deeply. There was a faint smell, like jasmine, autumn and burning wood, beneath the breeze. It smelled … familiar. Stepping through the locked door felt inexplicably like coming home.
“Ah,” said Phorbas, noticing Robin breathing the sweet dark air. “Nothing quite like it is there, Master Robin? The night blooming scents of the Netherworlde. No fresher air anywhere else you care to look, I would wager my beard upon it, and a beard is a very serious thing for a satyr to wager, I don’t mind telling you.”
Robin didn’t reply; he was still taking it all in. A small and slightly frantic voice kept jabbering in the back of his mind. He felt slightly dazed, drunk on the unremitting weirdness of it all.
Phorbas turned and looked at the door which led back to the side of Erlking Hall which reached into the human world. The corridor stretched away unassumingly. In the distance, very faintly, Robin could hear Hestia grumbling to herself as she hoovered. The normal, everyday sound seemed ridiculous in context. To be standing in a ruined castle in the middle of the night in one world and be able to hear someone vacuuming noisily in the sunshine in another. The satyr frowned, as though he wished to shut the door, cutting off anything mundane that might detract from the experience, but he gave a rueful look and thought better of it. “Your aunt has granted us use of Erlking’s doorway so that I might show you this. A small slice of our world,” he said. “She thought you might be more easily convinced by this than my merely telling you about it, but perhaps she is wise in forbidding us to close this door while we are on the Netherworlde side. It is not the … safest place at the moment, for you to linger.”