The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “You have no shadow.”

  It was, he realised, the first time that word had crossed his lips.

  “I am an Elf,” said the lady. Her voice was like fragments of fine ice in the wind, like the silver bells in the horse’s mane. “I am the Queen of Elfland, and we cast no shadows. You are True Thomas, a human, and you should cast a shadow, and do not.”

  “It seemed a small thing,” he said, “at first. A curiosity. But now it is not so amusing.”

  “You were not born without a shadow,” said the Elf Queen. “It was taken from you, in your cradle, by a great rat, who cut it away with his sharp teeth, and carried it carefully down a rathole. There are ratholes everywhere, even in palaces, and they lead underground, underground, into the world of shadows, where the queen of the Dark Elves weaves them into webs, to trap mortals and other beings. Your shadow is folded away in a chest in her dark house, where the rat took it, running through tunnels and corridors, clutching it softly in his sharp teeth. He is her friend and servant. They can use a human shadow to trap the man or woman to whom it belongs, to snare them in darkness and use them to work their will. All this kingdom, when you are king, can be ruled by them, through the manipulation of your shadow in the shadows. Bit by bit they can draw the whole land into the shadows and take it from under the sun.”

  “This appears to be my fault, but I have done nothing,” cried Thomas.

  “Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.”

  “What must I do?” asked Thomas, for he saw clearly that the Elf Queen had come to tell him to do something.

  “They cannot use your shadow until you, and he, are men, and not boys. So you must go underground, now, whilst you are still a boy, and the shadow is harmless, and find it, and bring it back to the upper air.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “I will take you some of the way. You must mount behind me.”

  “I am not ready,” said Thomas, thinking of his life in the palace, the things in his room, his books, his games, his anxious mother and father, his old nurse.

  “You are as ready as you will ever be,” said the Elf, and bent low, and held out her hand, with the whip in it.

  He had the thought—he was a canny boy, even if honourable and straightforward—that she might herself be a malign force, come to do him harm.

  “If you do not trust me, this will be the worst day of your life,” she said, and he seemed to know, inside himself, that this was so. So he stretched up, and took her hand, which was cool and dry, and swung easily into the saddle behind her, and put his arms around her fine waist, and bent his face towards the velvet gown.

  “Now,” she said, “we ride, with the wind, into the waste lands.”

  And the horse leaped out of the mound, and went like a wind (there are creatures that do move like the wind) towards the high wall that surrounded the palace. There it collected itself, and stood back on its haunches, and rose, and leaped, and cleared the wall with space to spare, and the green cloak flying, and the wind in Thomas’s hair.

  And they rode away fast, across that kingdom, and into strange lands, and stopped for a while by the gate of an orchard. The Elf Queen told Thomas he must not pluck the fruits, which hung invitingly on the boughs, because they looked fair, and were foul, and would poison him. But she gave him a milky cake from a bag at the saddle-bow, and a flask of clear water to drink. And the sky began to darken, not as it did at home, but as though a curtain was being pulled over it, or they were entering an invisible cave.

  “This is the border of Elfland,” said the Queen. “This is a shadowland where the shadowless travel.” The rocks, and the grass, were grey, and a little river that ran beside the track was grey, and thickets they passed were grey, rat-grey, shadow-grey, and there was a sound of rushing and roaring, like breakers on the beach. And the grey stream went faster over the grey pebbles, breaking with little crests of grey foam. The skirt of the lady still shone green, and the coat of the horse still gleamed ghostly-white, and Thomas’s own hands were still pink with the human blood that circled under his skin.

  The river opened out onto a pebbly strand, where a tide of water lapped, and rose and fell, quietly enough, a pink and grey frill. Thomas could not see the other side of the tide, whose surface shimmered endlessly before him, but he did see that it was not grey, but red, like blood, or perhaps was blood. There were neither sun nor moon in that evenly slate-grey overarching roof. The horse stepped forward without hesitation into the bloody tide and walked on, lifting its proud feet delicately. And soon it was in knee-deep, and occasionally breast-deep. And Thomas saw that the blood appeared to stain the white coat, and then dripped off fetlock and silver hoof, leaving no permanent mark. And they went on in this way for what seemed to Thomas not hours, nor days, but weeks, with a sullen water-roaring in his ears, and flat grey and crimson ripples before his eyes.

  They came to another strand, in the end (or I should have no further tale to tell) and the horse stepped out on the fine sand. It shone golden, and before Thomas’s eyes was a long beach, and cliffs of white chalk, covered with fine green turf, and white gulls swooping and crying, and a few woolly sheep balanced on the cliff-edge, munching the low bushes that grew there. The cliff-walls were riddled with caverns, out of some of which little rivulets ran, cutting edged tracks in the sand, meandering round pebbles. Thomas looked back, and there, a space out at sea, was a red line which was the edge of the blood, and a great wall, like a looming sea-fret, which was the edge of the grey world, through and beyond which nothing could be seen at all.

  “This is my own country,” said the Elf, dismounting and helping down Thomas. “And here we must part, for although I live under the hill, I cannot go with you underground, where you must now go. I will give you my satchel of food, and the water bottle which was filled at the spring in my orchard, where I hope in time you will come. The right way in—one of the ways in, for there are many—is through the central one of those three slits you see in the cliff-face. You must wind your way in and down, in and down to where the Dark Elf and the rat are waiting. The way is long—walking, scrambling, climbing, crawling. The mine-tunnels down there are populated with all sorts of creatures, human and inhuman, ancient and very young and lost. You will find help and companions—so much I can see—and you will meet dangerous things, and wild things, some of which She will have sent, and some of which have their own concerns, nothing to do with Elves, or rats, or shadows. You will do well to travel with others, but you must choose your companions wisely for there are wicked things down there that seem reasonable and friendly at first sight.

  “I have three gifts for you. The first is a light which will shine in the darkness—it is made of elvish fireflies, enclosed in a glass, which will spin into flaring brightness, briefly, if you shake them and whisper to them the words ‘Alfer Light.’ I advise you most earnestly to let no one know that you have this glass—or any of these things. The second is an imperfect map of the tunnels that lead to the dark court. It has been made by Light Elves, many of whom perished in the passages, and we do not know—for no one has survived who knows—how accurate it is, or how many major branches are not recorded. If you could mark on it where it goes wrong, and where it is of help, other later travellers will be grateful.

  “The third thing is another thing even I do not perfectly understand. It is a little brass case in which is suspended—we do not know how, or by what physics, or magic—a needle of crystal, that spins around and shows the way to the centre. It is said, also, that it gives out a strange light, blue like a gentian, when it comes near enough to Herself, but this I cannot vouch for.

  “Do you have a question?”

  “One question? I have a thousand.”

  “One. You must go quickly, not looking behind you, before the tide comes in and cuts off the mouth of the cave.”

  “What is the worst thing I can meet down there?”

  “The worst? The Dark Elf, and the
great rat, are bad things. But the worst may be your own shadow, when you see him, if you recognise him.”

  “That is bad, since I must seek him out.”

  “It is bad. Go quickly now, and watch your steps.”

  17

  In September 1896 Tom put on his spanking new uniform, and got into the train, at King’s Cross, with crowds of other Marlowe boys. The family—Olive, Violet, Dorothy, Phyllis and Hedda—Violet carrying baby Harry—had come to see him off, and already he saw that they were an embarrassment. They were too many, too loud, too female, too agitated. His mother’s beauty made her remarkable in the wrong way. Dorothy’s scruffiness made her remarkable in another wrong way. They had had long discussions about how much of his hair must be cut off. It had been trimmed, once, and cousin Charles had said it wouldn’t do, it would be thought girly, and now it was trimmed close to his head, so that he felt exposed, and saw himself as a condemned felon. He wore a cap, sewed in segments of wine and gold felt, with a tassel and foolish little brim, that made his lovely face egg-shaped. He wore a blazer, in the same rich wine-red, with a unicorn embroidered in dull gold on the breast pocket. He was not allowed, as a new boy, either to do up the buttons of this garment, or to put his hands in his pockets. He had a wine-red tie with small unicorns on it, which he would be allowed to exchange for a knitted tie in two years, and a bow tie when he was eighteen. He had a stiff white rounded shirt-collar, which had to be buttoned—later again, it would be allowed to be unbuttoned, and later still he could wear a shirt with a pointed collar, like a man. His mother said she thought the presence of the imaginary unicorns might be a sign of imagination. Tom did not think so. When he got into the train, Hedda started to howl, and had to be taken away.

  And so he went North. Marlowe was in the Yorkshire dales, just outside a market town called Fosters. It was hideous, built in grey stone slabs, imposing and imprisoning, with all sorts of anachronistic turrets and portcullis gates. Tom saw Julian Cain, and called out to him, across a quadrangle. Julian sauntered over—the boys cultivated a kind of vulpine lope—and said sotto voce that Tom must never use his first name, and must never speak to older boys unless he was spoken to. Tom said how could he know all these things? And Julian said he would learn them pretty quickly, or the archets would take it out of him. Boys who at Eton would have been prefects and fags, were at Marlowe archets and butts. Julian asked what house Tom was in, and was told Jonson House—the Houses were named for seventeenth-century dramatists, the heirs of Marlowe, Dekker and Jonson, Middleton and Ford, Webster and Turner (anglicised from Tourneur). Tom said he was to be Hunter’s butt. Hunter was the head archet of Jonson, blond and muscular, with a face like a knife. He was captain of the Second Eleven, and rowed stroke in the Jonson boat. Tom had formed an unfavourable impression of him, but dared not ask Julian what he was like, in case he was breaking some complex tabu. Julian knew what he was like, but dared not tell Tom. Tom would find out soon enough. Julian was in Ford House, whose head archet was a mild boy called Jebb, who was the best slow bowler in the whole school, and therefore did not have to keep proving himself. Julian looked at what had been done to Tom’s loveliness, to cram him into cap and blazer, and saw that it still shone out. The shaved nape of his neck was elegant and vulnerable. For Hunter’s butt, this presaged horrors. Keep out of Hunter’s way, Julian wanted to say, keep out of his way, my dear. Tom’s innocent mouth was perfection. It said “There is so much to learn, and no one tells you what it is.”

  “They knock it into you,” said Julian. “As it was knocked into them.”

  Julian, at sixteen, shared a study with two other boys. Tom, as a new bug, had no private place. Not even the jakes, where the boys stood and sat at a long open stool with regular holes in, and considered each other’s privates, furtively or openly. Not in the dorm, where he lay two feet away from a boy called Hodges and a boy called Merkel, both of whom had that smell both cheesy and acrid which permeated the whole school. Hodges asked him if he liked touching or being touched best, and Tom went fiery-faced and said, neither. He was, of course, being touched, by Hunter, who had his own gang of bloods, solid members of the rugger scrimmage, who played a kind of game of forfeits with the newbutts, which consisted of tearing off their garments, one by one, as they tested them on arcane school lore. “What do we call a creep who smarms at the archets.” “A sucky-bum,” said poor Tom, who knew that one. But they went on and on until they found things he didn’t know—that you must never say bacon and eggs, but always pigs and shelly, you must not say prep, but bogroll. What must you do when we beat you? Say thank you, because it’s good for you, or we’ll beat you a lot more. His underpants were taken before his socks and shoes, and they all handled him, one after another. The whole code of such places insists that it is foul and dishonourable to tell anyone of such happenings. Tom didn’t.

  He bumped into Julian on a cross-country run in the Dales, for a short distance, and thought of speaking to him. But he looked at Julian and saw both that Julian knew what was happening, and that Julian, like everyone else, expected him to grin and bear it.

  His letters home said that he was settling in, and had various duties like making the archets’ beds, and bringing them things from the tuckshop. He imagined a stolid, unimaginative small boy writing, and wrote what he imagined such a boy would write. Humphry remarked to Olive that his letters were dull for a boy with two writers for parents, and Olive said that it was just protective camouflage, she was sure, boys at school were not encouraged to show their feelings. He always wrote at the end “Thank you, Mama, for sending the story. It makes all the difference.”

  Considering that there were six other children in the house, and Humphry of course, Olive missed Tom appallingly. He had something to do with her power to write good stories—real stories as opposed to pot-boilers—and she needed him. He was neither audience nor muse, exactly, but he was the life of the story. She went on writing Tom Underground for him, compulsively. She hoped he didn’t mind her having changed her hero’s name from Lancelin to Tom. Names are things over which writers sometimes have little control. Tom underground would neither act nor think, without his true name. The plot sprouted all sorts of delectable, frightening complications as Tom underground made his way inwards and downwards, along rushing underground rivers, along ledges beside plunging black funnels whose end could not be seen—or heard; if you dislodged a pebble, no sound of landing came back. Sometimes there were caverns lit by encrusted glittering jewels, which someone unknown had cut free of the rock and polished. Sometimes at a distance there were sounds of activities—whisking things that might be rats, or larger animals, trundling wheels of trucks in adjacent galleries, passing trains and troupes of gnomes and salamanders, from whom Tom concealed himself in a crevice, fearing their alien dark faces and spiked, filthy fingernails.

  Time went on, and Tom’s stolid little letters continued to come. Thanks, Mater, for the delish fruitcake, which was much appreciated by the archets. Can you send more treacle cake, the Head Archet likes it. (So do I, when I get any.) Yesterday we went on a cross-country run in the Dales, by a trout-stream. It was soggy weather, we got soaked and covered in mud, but it was nice to be out in the open, and I put up a respectable time, coming third. I am trying to improve at rugby and have a mass of bruises to show for my efforts. Fawcett Major said my running was creditable but my tactical sense nil. I shall work on the latter. Thank you for sending the story. It makes all the difference. Your loving son, Tom.

  The story was an embarrassment. How does a suddenly little boy, deliberately deprived of privacy, read dozens of pages of typed paper, without drawing attention to himself? How and where could he hide? The story was a necessity. Tom reading Tom Underground was real: Tom avoiding Hunter’s eye, Tom chanting declensions, Tom cleaning washbasins and listening to smutty jokes was a simulacrum, a wind-up doll in schoolboy shape.

  He went underground. The school was heated by a bellowing and shuddering system of coke-fired radiators
. There were coalholes and boiler-rooms down there, accessible from the basement locker rooms. Tom furnished himself in the village on a school outing, with a little oil lamp on a rocking base called a Kelly lamp. He remembered, in the days when he had been Tom, pursuing the hiding boy through the underground pillars and vaulted arches of the South Kensington Museum. Tom was one of those lonely boys who imagines rapidly and easily that he is the only one of his kind in the whole community, that he is in a sense the unique butt of all mockery, bullying and ordinary spite. So it did not occur to him that other desperadoes might have been driven to take refuge here, amongst the shovels and brooms. But he did find traces of previous fugitives—a chalk drawing of a row of hanged boys on gibbets on a wall, a carefully folded travelling rug, and pillow, with a neatly buckled satchel, under a heap of sacking. There must be, or have been, at least one more like him. So he made his hidey-hole in a very cramped, unpleasant corner behind a roaring furnace, which belched out unpleasant fumes. Even other fugitives might not think first of this as a refuge. There he spread a blanket, put on a sweater, lit his Kelly lamp, and read Tom Underground, smearing the typescript with sooty fingers.

  The travelling prince had acquired various companions, some human, some inhuman, some of whom had stalked him for days before revealing themselves, some of whom he had himself tracked through burrows and into crannies. One was a mine-spirit, who was of a kind known as gathorns, and whose name seemed to be, like all his kind, Gathorn. He was slender and pale, and could make cobalt-blue light shine from his hair and the tips of his fingers. He described himself as timorous, but in moments of danger showed a tremulous, but real, courage. There was a scurrying salamander-like creature, as long as Tom was tall, like a small dragon on bow legs, with ivory-coloured scales, and crimson eyes like red coals. He had hissed and reared his crest when he saw Tom, but the gathorn had soothed him, and co-opted him to the company. He could always find fresh water, where it trickled down slate or sprang through fissures in the shale. There was a thing that was sometimes there and sometimes not there, which took the form of a huge, transparent tube, rounded at both ends, with eyes and a mouth that appeared and vanished from time to time in random places on its body. It was known as Loblolly and had dropped like a bead of amber into the prince’s hair, and then had swelled and expanded to line a whole cavern. It could flow along the ground, or diminish to a heavy square of jelly that the young prince could carry in his pocket. It warned of the three lethal damps—Fire Damp, Choke Damp, and White Damp—and would spread its own body as an impermeable tissue to prevent these horrors creeping in through cracks and pinholes.