Widdershins

by Charles de de Lint

  Andy and Con just looked at her when she was done, waiting for the punch line.

  “These bogans,” Geordie asked. “Was there any indication as to what court they were from?”

  “Wait a second,” Con said as Lizzie shook her head. “This is all a joke, right? No one’s taking it seriously.”

  “I am,” I told him.

  Geordie smiled at the men. “I know exactly what you’re feeling,” he said. “Trust me. I spent years pretending that there’s no such thing as fairies and ghosts and monsters in the dark. Unfortunately, what we’d like to believe is true, and what actually is, can be two different things.”

  “No, come on.” Con looked to Andy for support. “Am I the only one here who’s not buying into this?”

  Andy fingered the rowan twig that he had sewn on his shirt pocket.

  “So that’s why you wanted us to wear these,” he said.

  “There was no one on the stairs with us,” Siobhan said. “Just me and Lizzie, a few steps down from me. But someone pushed me because I totally felt their hands on my back.”

  “But why?” Con said, shaking his head. “Even if this is possible—which I don’t buy for a minute—why would fairies suddenly attack you?”

  “Because,” Geordie said, “from what Lizzie told us, she was badmouthing them. Normally, you can say what you want and nothing happens—it’s not like the old days when people really did have to be careful about what an offhand remark might invoke. The fairy courts are peaceful now, coexisting with our world. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t rogue fairies, which is why it would really be helpful to know if they’re associated with a specific court.”

  “What difference would it make?” Andy asked.

  “We could petition their queen for a hearing—settle the problem before it gets any worse.”

  “Oh, please,” Con said. “Fairy queens? Courts? Who are you kidding?”

  Andy nodded. “And even if they were real, where would you start to look for them?”

  “Well,” I said, “Geordie’s girlfriend for the past couple of years has been the queen of a fairy court in the Woodforest Plaza Mall.”

  Con laughed. “Fairies live in shopping malls?”

  “Mother Crone’s not my girlfriend,” Geordie said to me, “and she’s not a queen, she’s a seer.” Then he turned to Con. “Fairies live everywhere. You just can’t see them because they exist in—”

  “The between,” Lizzie said. “That’s what Walker told me. Or maybe it was Grey.”

  “I was going to say the otherworld,” Geordie said. “But they certainly spend time in between the two.”

  Con shook his head yet again, but before he could speak, Lizzie cut him off.

  “Nobody mentioned anything about courts,” she said to Geordie and me. “But Walker talked about clans or something. He said he was a cerva, and Grey belonged to the corbae.”

  “Those aren’t clan names,” I said. “They’re like . . . species. Or tribes. I’ve never known any cerva—who are the deer people, I guess, from what you said about Walker. But we know a number of corbae.” At Geordie’s puzzled glance, I added, “Lucius and the crow girls, for starters.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “I always forget.”

  “So they’re different from fairies?” Andy asked.

  “Well, I didn’t think so,” I told him. “I thought they were all just spirit people. You know, kind of the embodiment of places and animals and things. I didn’t even know there was an enmity between them. . . .” I looked at Geordie. “Except weren’t you saying something about that earlier?”

  He nodded. “Hazel giving the finger to a bunch of cousins on the drive into the city.”

  “That’s the word Grey and Walker kept using,” Lizzie said. “ ‘Cousins.’ I guess it doesn’t mean they’re related, does it?”

  “Not in the same way we use the word,” I told her. “It’s what they call each other in general, like we’d say people.”

  “So these cousins you know . . . ,” Con began, then he just shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

  “It takes getting used to,” Geordie said. “What did you want to know about them?”

  “Well, where’d they come from? I get that fairies come from fairy tales, but I never heard stories about—what did you call them? Corb-heys?”

  “Corbae,” I said. “And I’m sure you have, but you didn’t realize it. Their stories just aren’t as easily accessible to the general populace because Disney hasn’t made a movie about them, or any of the cousins, really. I don’t think things like The Jungle Book or The Lion King really count because that’s just anthropomorphized animals. They’re not . . .” I had to think of the right word and settled for, “mythic. But you’ve heard of Coyote, and how Raven created the world—those kinds of things?”

  “Yeah. I just don’t think of them as real.” He gave me a curious look. “So, are you trying to tell me that they’re all real? Zeus and Krishna and Thor and everybody?”

  “I’ve never met any of the more famous ones,” I said. “Or I haven’t, knowingly. They mostly go about their business just the way we do, and it’s hard to get a take on their mythic status. You just forget. Like that fellow Lucius I mentioned earlier? He’s supposedly the Raven who made the world, except you’d never know it. He never talks about it, and I don’t think about it most of the time. Whenever I do, it hits me all over again how weird and amazing the world is.”

  “What I want to know,” Siobhan said, “is what can we do to make sure they don’t attack us again? Are these little charms enough? Do we just make sure we don’t badmouth them?”

  “That can’t hurt,” Geordie said.

  Lizzie sighed. “But it can happen again, right? They might do something else to another one of us?”

  “The charms will keep them at bay,” Geordie said, trying to sound confident.

  “Your problems seem to stem from having gotten on the wrong side of some pranksters,” I added, “and they’re not strong enough to overcome basic protections like rowan.”

  “I’d recommend we just do the gig,” Geordie went on, “this afternoon and tonight. Tomorrow we can take a drive to the mall and see if Mother Crone can help us sort this out.”

  “I’d recommend we get our heads examined,” Con said. “Or at least the lot of you.”

  “Want me to call Walker or Grey?” Lizzie asked. “Maybe that’ll convince you.”

  “Not a good idea,” Geordie said quickly. “When Walker gave you the gift of his name, it wasn’t to use it frivolously.”

  “And from what you said about Grey,” I added, “I don’t think he’d much appreciate it, either.”

  “I know,” Lizzie said. “It’s just that if they could see what I’ve seen . . .” Geordie nodded, returning his attention to Con and Andy.

  “Look,” he said. “I know exactly what’s going through your heads. Like I told you earlier, I’ve been there before, and that was after I’d had the real thing rubbed in my face, and on more than one occasion. That’s one of the main protections fairy have against us: we don’t want to believe in them. And if we do interact with them, we’ll find any kind of an explanation to convince ourselves that whatever we’ve just experienced doesn’t have a magical origin.

  “But that doesn’t mean that they’re not real, or that you’re not in danger. So all I ask of you today is, just wear the charms and carry on the way you would otherwise. It doesn’t hurt anybody, and well, better safe than sorry, right?”

  “You see why I didn’t want to tell them?” Lizzie asked me. “I knew they’d just think I was making it up.”

  “It’s not like that,” Andy said. “It’s just . . . well, come on. It’s a lot to take in, that’s all.”

  “Wait’ll some invisible little booger pushes you down the stairs,” Siobhan put in.

  “I think that was bogan,” Con said, smiling. He turned to Geordie. “We can do what you’re asking. I mean, this is a
bout as crazy a business as I’ve ever heard, but I know you’re a straight-shooter, and there’s no way Lizzie would make stuff up just to get some attention.” His gaze moved to her. “Whatever happened to you, I know that you believe it, and I’m going to leave it at that for now.”

  Lizzie seemed surprised, but she gave him a quick smile.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Ditto for me,” Andy added.

  Siobhan held up her watch. “You guys are going on in an hour.”

  We looked around and saw that while we’d been so deep in our conversation, the bar had started to fill up. Half the tables were full and, now that we were pulled out of the little world we’d fallen into, the buzz of chatting, the clink of glasses, and the general hubbub of the crowd was so loud that I didn’t know how we’d missed it.

  “Do you want to freshen up?” Geordie asked me.

  I nodded. “If you could get my chair, I’ll meet you in the foyer so we can go upstairs together.”

  “No problem.” He stood up, and looked around the table at others. “Just let me get ready and then maybe we can go over what you want me to do.”

  “I’ll write up a set sheet with all the tunes listed,” Lizzie said.

  I smiled as Geordie shook his head.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Just tell me the names of the tunes and how often you want to go through them before you start each set, and I’ll be okay.”

  He wasn’t bragging and probably didn’t even realize how that sounded. To him, he was just telling it like it was, because he really was that good and didn’t need more than that. But Lizzie and Andy appeared a little worried.

  “It’ll be cool,” Con told them.

  Siobhan grinned. “Maybe I don’t get to play today, but I am going to have so much fun watching this show.” She turned to me. “You want to sit with me behind the merch table?”

  “You’ve got a date,” I told her.

  I used my canes to get up and happily, nobody tried to help me. I mean, I like it when people help me if I ask them to, but I hate when it’s assumed that I’m useless. If I’d come in using the wheelchair, that’s exactly how it might have been.

  “Give me twenty minutes,” Geordie said to the band members.

  Then he left to get my chair while I made my way to the foyer. I actually beat him and was leaning against the wall by the old elevator, waiting for him when he wheeled in my chair. I sank gratefully into its cushion and let him push me into the elevator.

  “Oh god,” Geordie said, as the doors closed. “Was I sounding just like Christy out there?”

  “Yes, you were very take-chargy.”

  “I mean with all that lecturing I was doing about fairies and spirits.”

  “You handled it perfectly,” I assured him.

  “Because I know where Con and Andy are coming from.”

  I smiled. “I remember. I was there, Geordie, me lad.”

  He returned my smile.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You always were, weren’t you?”

  Later, when we were up in our room, I had to ask him.

  “So you and Mother Crone broke up?”

  I’d washed up and changed into another top in the bathroom, an awkward procedure since it was pretty much the size of a small closet. But now I was sitting in my wheelchair, watching as Geordie rosined his bow and checked to make sure his fiddle was in tune. I liked the way the light came in the window and made his hair glow. It looked as though he was giving off the luminescence and I wished I could capture it in a sketch, but I had neither the necessary materials nor the motor skills to do it justice. Not anymore. Instead, I had to hold it in my memory, the way other people who aren’t artists do. But did they see light the same way?

  Geordie looked over at me and shrugged in response to my question.

  “I don’t know if we were ever really a couple,” he said. “We were together, sure, but not like you and Daniel are.”

  “Um, we’re not so much a couple anymore, either.”

  He gave me a surprised look.

  “Oh, that sucks. Are you okay?”

  “Actually, I was the one who broke up with him.”

  “But—”

  “I know. He was perfect. But maybe that was the problem, or—not so much him being perfect, as everything between us deferred to what he thought I wanted out of the relationship, which for some people would be perfect.”

  Saying it aloud made me wince a little. It sounded so petty and ungrateful.

  Geordie shook his head. “When did you buy into the whole ‘bad boy’ routine?”

  “I didn’t. I haven’t. I know what it sounds like, but I wasn’t looking for a bad boy. I just wanted him to bring something of himself to the relationship.”

  “Okay, that I get,” Geordie said. “It’s sort of where things were with Mother Crone and me.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “But different, too. She’d never leave the mall. She wouldn’t, you know, just drop by the loft, or go rambling through Crowsea late at night, or hang out in a diner, or take in a movie or a concert. Everything we did together, we did at the mall, or at her place in the between.”

  It was funny. All those things he’d just mentioned were things we used to do together.

  But all I said was, “I guess most relationships are like that—one person always seems to be putting more into it than the other.”

  “Pretty much.” He gave me a flash of a smile. “You’d think we’d get it right after all the years human beings have been in the world.”

  “We’re slow learners or something, I guess.”

  The smile returned. “Or something.”

  He put his fiddle and bow back into their case and closed it up.

  “So, what do you think about all this fairy business?” he asked. “Bogans attacking Lizzie, Siobhan getting pushed down the stairs.”

  “I don’t know what to think. I just hope you’ll be careful up on stage this afternoon and tonight.”

  “Careful doesn’t make for great art.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him for quoting me back to myself. How many times had I given that advice? Too many to count.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “I do,” he told me. “And I will.”

  Edgan

  Saturday night, closing in on eight o’clock. The last of the cleaning staff had left by now and the warehouse-sized interior of Computer World was dark except for what light came in from the lampposts out in the parking lot and a few strategic fluorescent overheads that had been left on inside. But Edgan didn’t need light to go about his business.

  He was a curious little man, born a treekin—a kind of fairy about the height of a man’s knee, made of twigs and mulch and leaves and moss, all held together in the shape of a human body with a weaving of braided grasses and vines. Treekin needed to replenish their body parts from time to time—when a twig got old and chipped, or when a grass braid snapped and the press of leaves and moss that gave shape to limbs began to fall away. The materials they needed for repair were easy to find, even in a city, for there were always gardens and parks to plunder amongst the tall towers of concrete and steel.

  But in the past few decades, many of the treekin began to utilize bits and pieces of electronics and computer parts for their repairs, metamorphosing over time into creatures made as much of wiring and circuitry as they were of organic material. Eventually, some, like Edgan, became creatures entirely made of synthetic castoffs; each techno treekin—as they came to be called—as individual as the materials they were able to scrounge. In Edgan’s case, he had a torso built up around a computer motherboard; his limbs and head were a complicated tangle of wiring and less identifiable objects, though his nose was certainly a spark plug and his eyes a pair of camera lenses.

  He was in Computer World tonight because he’d recently seen another of the techno treekin sporting an iPod in the twisting snarl of wires that held her torso together, and he
simply had to have one himself. He already had a PDA wired into his motherboard body—as well as a digital camera and a pair of cell phones—but its memory capacity couldn’t match the sixty gigabytes of the iPod. The iPod would be perfect for storing the data he pilfered from the Internet, but he also liked the shiny whiteness of its case for how it matched his spark plug nose.

  So he wandered up and down the aisles, searching for the appropriate display, until he finally found the iPods racked with the other MP3 players in the music section of the store. He pulled one down and after opening its package, happily busied himself attaching the player to his torso, weaving the lovely white power and earphone cords into the other wiring on his arms. He stood and admired his reflection in a display case, strutting back and forth in front of the glass, swinging his arms.

  Lovely. The patterns he’d knotted with the white wires looked like tattoos amongst the darker wiring of his arms. Into the knots, he’d shaped symbols taken from traditional treekin tribal markings—the ancient glyphs that calendared the trees in the long ago—and had done a fine job of it, if he did say so himself.

  After awhile he went looking for an electric outlet and plugged himself in to charge the batteries of his new iPod and his other peripherals. The outlet he’d chosen was near the big windows at the front of the store, giving him a view of the big parking lot. Across the lot he could see the dark bulk of the Woodforest Plaza Mall where the rest of his court were going about their business. He would rejoin them soon enough, but for now he was happy to sit beside the cash register, kicking his heels against the counter, which made a cheerful thumping sound—

  Until he saw a halfdozen of the Bogan Boys go ambling across the parking lot.

  He stopped kicking the counter and hid behind the register, hoping he hadn’t been seen. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of them, as that the Bogan Boys were always up to no good, and the trouble that followed them had a tendency to spill over onto anyone unfortunate enough to be in their vicinity.

  Over the past few years, they had become more and more like those old Irish wolves, the hard men. The hard men had been a pack of shapechanging spirits who’d once held the city under their sway until, rumour had it, the green land itself arose and swallowed them whole. But where the hard men were tall, with old dark hurts burning in their eyes, the Bogan Boys were half the size of a fullgrown human and carried only spite in their small dark eyes. What they lacked in height, they made up for in muscle, stocky as dwarves, but quick and cunning. Their heads were large, their hair raggedy, their teeth sharp. And they were not at all pleasant company.