“What do you see?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Something flew into the pot, right?”
“Yes, but…”
“Did it fly out?”
“No. What the hell was that?”
“That is what we’re here to catch.”
I led her back to the saucepan, and crouched down to say hello to my new friend. Stuck in the molasses about knee deep was a tiny naked woman with mosquito wings.
“Hello,” I said to her.
“Iza stuck,” she said back.
“Yes, you are,” I said, picking up the saucepan.
Brenda stared at our prize with naked astonishment. “What is it?”
“This,” I said proudly, “is a pixie.”
* * *
Back in the room, I placed the ensnared pixie on the bed while Brenda lit a few candles. The pixie just pouted, which is something they’re very good at. They are, unfortunately for this particular pixie, very bad at resisting the smell of mushrooms, garlic, and fennel. (The part they eat is the mushrooms. It is possible to tame a wild pixie with just raw mushrooms, but very difficult to catch one that way, and we were under the clock.)
The average pixie is somewhere between three and four inches tall, with gossamer wings and, scale-wise, simply fantastic bodies. Most every one I’ve ever met was a blonde, and I mean that both literally and in the intellectual sense, although calling them stupid isn’t really fair. They’re simply innocent. If Jerry the iffrit is the devil on your shoulder, a pixie is the angel on your other shoulder. Not that either species is particularly good at advice, but you get my point.
You may have encountered a pixie once or twice in your life and not known it. And since they move faster than anything else I’ve ever seen with wings, if you did see one it was for the merest of seconds, just enough time for you to convince yourself your eyes were playing tricks on you.
“Hello,” I said to my new friend.
“H’lo,” she said back, then repeated, “Iza stuck.” She wasn’t afraid, just annoyed at being stuck. It’s not that I’m naturally non-threatening; it’s that it would never occur to her to be afraid. Think Adam and Eve before The Fall, if that helps.
“It’s a little tiny girl!” Brenda observed. She was still dealing with this.
“Yes, as far as I know, they’re all girls,” I said.
“Then how do they… you know.”
“I never figured out how to ask one. They don’t seem to understand the concept.”
“Iza stuck!” the pixie repeated.
“Right, sorry,” I said. “What’s your name?”
She looked at me blankly. “Iza. Iza stuck.”
“Oh.” Silly me. “Iza? Would you like me to help you get unstuck?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, I’ll do that for you, but I need you to do me a favor.”
She looked unsure. “Big favor?”
“No, a small favor.”
“Iza small.”
“Yes. That’s why I’m asking you. Can you read, Iza?”
Iza brightened. “Iza read!”
I held up the newspaper and pointed to a word. “Can you read that line for me?”
She squinted at it for a few seconds. “’Nay-than-eel,’” she read.
“Good! And that one?”
“’Gah-ree.’”
“Very good!” Ooh boy, this was going to take a while.
“Favor done?” she asked.
“No, that wasn’t the favor, Iza.”
She pouted again. “Feet are mushy,” she complained.
“I’m sorry about that. Iza, do you know what a police station is?”
Chapter 8
More mushrooms in today’s meal and I only just realized I’m an idiot. They aren’t for me and never were.
Evidently a certain somebody has been making herself useful in the kitchen. The only problem is, I’m pretty sure I can’t trust her. Not after all that’s happened. I guess it’s possible she’s also a captive of some kind but if she is, I’d wager she’s got much better digs than I do.
After lunch today, I took the fresh mushroom garnish and spread it around the vents. You know how in movies there always seems to be human-sized air vents just begging to be used by an escapee? No such luck here. These vents are along the wall on the floor and the ceiling, about a half inch wide and not fashioned for a decent escape attempt. Doesn’t mean something can’t get in through them, just that I can’t get out.
We’ll see if it works. Then maybe I can figure out what she’s really up to. Besides, I have nothing better to do.
* * *
It took the entire evening to explain to Iza exactly what I needed from her, a maddening procedure not unlike trying to deliver shoe-tying instructions to a retarded child who’s never seen a shoelace. Twice, Brenda threatened to eat Iza, just for the heck of it. Finally, when I was sure Iza had it down, I freed her with some hot water in the sink down the hall. (And permanently clogged the sink with molasses. Oh well.) Iza could have flown off after that, but this is where the artless nature of pixies is a good thing. It was beyond her grasp to consider not doing something she’d promised to do.
So, the next morning I stood across the street from the downtown police station, with a pixie on my shoulder and a fresh bottle of peppermint schnapps to keep me warm.
“Do you have the camera?” I asked under my breath.
“Uh-huh. Heavy.”
She had the smallest commercially available camera I could find strapped to her bosom. It was barely an inch long and a centimeter thick. Took digital images. Cost a bundle. When I’d bought it, I flashed back briefly on a Renaissance painter I knew who had to hire three men and a sturdy donkey to carry his painting gear around, and who took six months to complete a single portrait. Bet he would have hated the twenty-first century.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Iza okay.”
The camera was a necessity. I couldn’t rely on her to comprehend what she was being sent to examine, much less convey it to me. Ideally I would have asked Jerry to do it—he’s smarter, and would do it much more quickly in exchange for the bottle in my pocket—but it would have taken too long to find him. There are just too many bars to choose from. This way was imperfect, but ultimately faster.
“There’s an open window on the second floor. Do you see it?” I asked.
“Iza see.”
“Okay. Good luck.”
She buzzed off. One might think that even if the three-and-a-half inch pixie was difficult to see, the slate gray micro-camera flitting across the street would be obvious, but as I said, pixies are very fast. Not even owls bother with them. I lost sight of her myself and I knew to look. I still stood there for a few minutes, looking for some definite indication she’d made it to the window, but getting none, I moved on.
* * *
A pixie saved my life once, back in the first century AD. Of course, we didn’t call it that back then. We didn’t call it anything back then, because the Roman calendar was still in vogue. (Every time I come across a new calendar, I have this bizarre need to go back and figure out when everything happened in my life according to that calendar. It’s a bit anal, but I have a whole lot of free time. And between the Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Egyptian, early Christian, Islamic, Julian, and Gregorian calendars—among others—I had to do this quite a bit. My personal favorite calendar was one used by a small equatorial African tribe, which held that every day was Tuesday. Inaccurate, but very convenient.)
I was living in a small harbor town called Herculaneum, on the Bay of Naples. The whole area was a vacation spot for wealthy Romans, sort of an ancient equivalent of the Hamptons.
I liked it there. It was warm and breezy and pleasant, and I didn’t have to do any fishing, something I’d grown tired of. I worked as a gardener, of sorts. Farmer, really, which I’m pretty good at. (Most jobs I’ve had have been variations on hunter-gatherer and farmer. I was one of the first to say
“Hey, if we grow our own food, we won’t have to hunt it down all the time.” Mostly, I was just tired of moving around constantly, but you have to admit it was a pretty good idea.) I was working for a fat old Roman named Adolphus. He was a retired prelate and acted like one, but he gave me room and board, appreciated the yield from the modest garden I tended, and otherwise left me alone, which was about all one could ask for.
I had been having a problem with my olive tree. I’d spent a couple of years nursing the thing to health after the last caretaker had nearly killed it by not watering it enough (olive trees need a ton of water) and this particular summer was supposed to bear the fruits of my success. But while it did produce healthier olives than before, the yield was still low. It was frustrating as all Hades. I was beginning to think maybe the tree was suffering from some sort of root disease, but that sort of thing usually manifests itself in the bark somewhere and I saw no evidence of that. It was baffling.
It took half the summer before I considered perhaps the problem wasn’t with the tree at all. Perhaps I had a vermin problem. Despite the difficulty of imagining a rat climbing the tree and dangling off a branch to prey on my olives, it was the only thing that made any sense.
Intent on solving the puzzle, at the next full moon I camped out at the edge of the garden—motionless, hidden beneath a sackcloth—and I waited.
Shortly after the moon reached its zenith, I caught some movement in the tree. Mind you, I didn’t see anything there, but the leaves on one of the branches twitched and an olive fell. A few seconds later, another branch jerked and another olive fell. Still, I didn’t see anyone or anything. I’d have thought a ghost was responsible, except there’s no such thing.
Unwilling to sit around and watch the whole tree being denuded before me, I sprang to my feet wielding a broom I’d brought for just this occasion, and went at the tree swinging.
It is a known fact that most creatures will run in the face of a well-swung broom. Even some larger creatures, like tigers. Honest. But instead of frightening whatever-it-was away, I just annoyed it.
“Hey!”
I stopped swinging, as evidently the tree had suddenly gained the power of speech.
“Almost hit!” The pixie hovered in front of my face and pointed at me accusingly.
“Oh. Uh, sorry,” I said. This was the first time I’d seen a pixie, but I had heard of them before, so I wasn’t completely stunned at the sight of one.
“Okay,” she said, then flitted to the ground and picked up one of the olives, which she proceeded to eat. This is what I mean by naive. Any other creature, when facing a human swinging a broom might think, “The human is trying to hit me with the broom. Perhaps I should flee.” A pixie thinks, “He was trying to brush the dust out of the air and didn’t see me.”
“Hey, stop that,” I protested.
“You want?” She offered me the olive. “Is good.”
“No, I mean stop eating the olives from this tree.”
“Is good,” she repeated, taking another bite.
“Yes, I know it’s good. It’s my tree. That’s why I want you to stop taking all the olives from it.”
“Silly.” She continued eating.
“No, not silly. Please don’t.” I repeated, “It’s my tree.”
“Not your tree. Ground’s tree. Tree’s tree. Tree’s fruit.” Munch, munch, munch. It was exasperating.
“I grew tree,” I tried to explain. You ever notice how your syntax changes when you’re talking to an idiot? “Tree is for me.”
She frowned. “Tree is for you?”
“Yes, tree is for me.”
“Silly.”
“No, not silly.” I was ready to take another shot at her with the broom.
“Silly. Moon for you?”
“No, the moon is for everyone,” I said.
“Tree is for everyone.”
Pixies, the first communists. I decided to change tactics. “Do you like the fruit?”
“Good fruit.”
“Is there anything else you like to eat?”
She thought about it. “Mushrooms.”
“You like mushrooms?”
“I like.”
“Better than olives?”
“Okay.” That might have been a yes. Hard to tell.
“If I got you some mushrooms,” I asked, “would you stop eating the olives?”
She ran through her options carefully. “You have mushrooms?”
“I can get mushrooms.”
“Okay.”
“We have a deal?” I asked.
“Deal.”
“What is your name?”
“Win.”
“My name is Antony.”
And that’s how I made friends with a wild pixie. Every night I’d leave out a plate of mushrooms I’d either bought in the market or picked myself, and she left the olive tree alone. Every now and then I’d hang out in the garden and strike up a conversation with her. Once I got used to the interesting syntax and the Edenesque world view, it became a fairly easy matter, and by the end of the summer I even felt like I’d made a friend.
You can never have too many friends. They especially come in handy in bad times, like on days you discover that you’re living at the base of an active volcano.
* * *
I’ve seen my share of volcanoes, mostly from a distance, which is how you want to see one in case you’re wondering. The closest I’d ever gotten to one—up until that day in Herculaneum—was during the Minoan empire. I was working on the island of Crete as a fish merchant when a massive volcano on a nearby island—it’s called Santorini now; we called it Thera back in the day—basically wrecked the whole region. I mean wrecked. Earthquakes, showers of ash, and this nasty junk called pumice. It killed thousands of fish—which put me out of a job—and took down the Minoans almost completely. Plato even wrote about it, although he called the island Atlantis. (Between you and me, Plato was a hack. All that crap about higher forms and caves? He was drunk when he wrote it. I know. I was there. And Aristotle? Seriously obsessive-compulsive.) After that experience, I swore I’d never set up shop anywhere near an active volcano ever again. Nonetheless, sixteen hundred years later there I was at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which nobody even knew was a volcano. My own fault, I guess, for trusting mortals to check that sort of thing.
The morning began as most did on the Bay of Naples: sunny, breezy, and generally pleasant. If anything, it was too calm. I did notice as I tended to the garden that there were no birds. Unusual, but not terribly so. It was just past noon when Win showed up.
“Ant! Ant!” She called me Ant because Antony was too difficult. Pixies prefer one-syllable words.
“What are you doing here?” She always slept during the day. Pixies are not strictly nocturnal, but do prefer coming out at night.
“Must go!” she insisted, landing on my shoulder and shouting in my ear.
“But you just got here.”
“Ant must go!”
“Where?”
“Away! Away now!” She was almost hysterical.
“Win, calm down. What is this about?”
“Bad sky come.”
“What, a storm? A hurricane?” I’ve lived through a few hurricanes, too.
“No, hot!” she exclaimed. “Hot fire sky!” Like that helped.
“Honey, you need to take a breath and add some words to your sentences, or this is going to take a while,” I said.
“Just go!”
“Where do you want me to go?”
She looked around anxiously. “Boat?”
“I don’t own a boat. And you know I can’t fly. Now seriously, what’s this about?”
Just then, the ground rumbled. It felt like Naples had indigestion. I knew that sound.
“Oh,” I said. “Hot fire sky. A volcano.”
“Mountain goes up,” Win confirmed. See, now if she’d said that right away I would have gotten it.
I looked at the peak and saw a faint curl of smok
e work its way out of the center.
“How long do you think I have?” I asked her.
“Ears hurt.” She felt the same thing that had sent the birds away. Not the best forecasting method around but it would have to do.
Just then the mountain ejected a larger mass of smoke and running seemed like a very good idea.
“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s run, shall we?” The proper thing to do would have been to warn Adolphus and his wife first, but they were in Rome on business at the time, so I was obligation free. I ran.
I headed down the hill, taking the most direct path I knew of to the shore. Any boat close to the mountain would be rendered useless by a big enough pumice rock or flaming ember—wood boats and all—and I was betting that any boat owner with half a brain would know this and act accordingly. Getting on one of those boats before they left would be a good thing.
And then, as I was halfway to the dock, Mount Vesuvius erupted. It began with an earthquake tremor, which knocked me off my feet, leaving me prone and looking up at the top of the mountain, which put me into position to see something amazing. The entire top cone of the mountain rocketed skyward in a million pieces propelled by an enormous column of ejecta that spread outward in all directions. It looked a bit like those mushrooms I’d been picking for Win, only writ large and much deadlier. As horrifying as it was, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything quite so magnificent.
My immediate and very human reaction was to sit there and watch, as one rarely gets a chance to see something this extraordinary. (I’d been sleeping when the volcano off Crete blew.) Fortunately I had Win to watch my back.
“Move now!” she urged, tugging at my earlobe.
Snapped from my reverie, I got to my feet and stumbled down the hill as the ashes began to rain down from the initial blast. I’d gotten about twenty paces, still turning from time to time to admire the view, when a massive chunk of pumice landed right where I’d been admiring the volcano. That sealed it. It was time to get the hell out of Herculaneum, and fast.
As I sprinted through town, I came across dozens of neighbors who didn’t seem at all inclined to motivate themselves toward the shore. They just stood there and watched. Either they simply didn’t comprehend the peril they were in or they knew there was no place to run and figured they might as well catch the show. I wasn’t quite at that point. I’d swim to Capri if I had to.
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