by Alan K Baker
‘Of course I can, you fool!’ she cried. ‘Look what’s after us!’ Her face was caked in dirt, and her hair had come untied and was falling upon her heaving shoulders like a great dark waterfall; as her eyes blazed at him with fear and anger, like those of an Amazon prepared for battle, Blackwood felt something stirring in his chest which was not remotely as uncomfortable as the amulet had been, but which was profoundly unsettling nevertheless.
‘Excellent, my dear. Excellent.’
‘Mr Blackwood! Lady Sophia!’ cried Shanahan from somewhere up ahead. ‘Hurry yourselves – there’s not a moment to lose!’
‘Where are we going, Shanahan?’ Blackwood shouted.
‘Anywhere but here,’ said Sophia.
‘Yes, but with a hundred-foot-high fighting machine and an entity from another dimension after us, “here” is a very big place.’
Sophia sprinted off once again. ‘Come along, Thomas,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘No time to dawdle.’
Dawdle indeed! he thought as he set off after her.
As they made their way deeper into the woodland, Blackwood glanced up repeatedly through the treetops, dreading the sight of the fighting machine’s armoured hull rearing above them. But for the moment, Indrid Cold had lost them, for he seemed to be firing the Heat Ray indiscriminately, blasting trees to oblivion to the left and right of them. The greater danger lay with the djinn’s tendrils, which were whipping amongst the trees directly behind them, as if possessed of some infernal perception. The creature knew where they were, and the tendrils were gaining rapidly upon them. Blackwood spurred himself on, with the whip-like snapping of the tendrils in his ears and the horrific screaming and roaring of the djinn seeming to tear the very sky apart. We’re not going to get out of this alive, he thought and immediately had a vision of Sophia being dropped into the djinn’s gibbering maw. No. No no no!
‘Shanahan, where are you?’ he called.
‘Here, sir. Quickly!’
Blackwood followed the sound of the faerie’s voice and burst through the trees into a wide clearing whose long grass shone like emerald in the darkness. ‘What’s here?’ he demanded. ‘Why did you bring us here?’
‘It’s plain enough that there’s no escaping our pursuers, sir.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Nevertheless, I’ve arranged for a means of escape.’
The whip-crack of the djinn’s tendrils was now joined by the WHUMP, WHUMP of the fighting machine’s tripod legs striking the ground nearby.
‘You’re talking in riddles, Shanahan,’ said Blackwood. ‘Whatever cards you have up your sleeve, now’s the time to play them.’
‘My thoughts exactly, sir,’ said Shanahan, with a heavy hint of satisfaction in his voice.
Blackwood heard Sophia gasp. She was pointing at the centre of the clearing, which had begun to rise into the air, as if an upturned bowl was pushing the grass and earth upwards. The ground continued to rise, until it had formed a hemispherical dome.
‘What the devil is this?’ whispered Blackwood.
‘This, sir,’ replied Shanahan, ‘is the means of escape I mentioned.’
‘It’s… it’s a faerie mound,’ said Sophia in wonderment.
The grass which covered the mound began to glitter and glow as if it really were made of emeralds, until presently the glow filled the entire clearing. So shocked was he that Blackwood only dimly registered the fact that the djinn had fallen silent. Now, the only sound was that of the approaching fighting machine.
Shanahan hovered above the mound, his delicate dragonfly wings glittering like the emerald grass. He beckoned to them. ‘Come, my friends,’ he said, and suddenly his voice seemed deeper and more powerful than before.
Blackwood took Sophia’s hand in his. She gripped it tightly. ‘Where are you taking us, Mr Shanahan?’ she asked, her voice trembling.
‘To the only place where you will be safe, beautiful Sophia,’ he replied in that deep, powerful, resonant voice. ‘I am taking you to the Realm of Faerie.’
CHAPTER THREE:
In the Faerie Realm
As Blackwood and Sophia watched, captivated, scarcely believing their eyes, the mound opened – or rather, it seemed to open: for while their physical vision told them that the surface of the green hemisphere remained intact, some other sense, of whose existence they had always been dimly aware and yet had never truly acknowledged, told them that a door had opened, from which a light emerged, pale, crystalline, pure and indescribably beautiful.
They began to discern movement within the light, which gradually resolved itself and became three human-like figures, which were as small as butterflies and as tall as men. They possessed the same delicate wings as Shanahan and were completely naked, their bodies strong and supple and exquisite to behold. As the figures walked out of the mound, Blackwood and Sophia saw that they were carrying long, slender objects which looked like the branches of trees, and at the ends of the objects were many-petalled blooms which rippled with a myriad unknown colours.
The figures bowed to Shanahan, just as Petrox Voronezh had done, Blackwood noted, and they raised the branch-like objects towards the writhing tentacles of the djinn, which towered above the surrounding trees. From each of the many-coloured blooms, a silent beam emerged, but the beam was not composed of light – rather, it was a clarity, as if the material, human world were a pane of glass caked with dust and grime, and the beams were wiping it clean, and within each beam, scintillating motes danced like raindrops in moonlight.
The beams cut through the cold night air and struck the djinn, and wherever they touched, the flesh of the Outer Being vanished without a sound; nor did the monstrosity utter the smallest murmur as it was pushed out of the world and the Universe, back to the terrible place from which it had come.
As the djinn was expelled, Blackwood felt a curious sensation in his chest. For a moment, he feared the resurgence of the dreadful burning pain, but in fact the very opposite was the case: the sensation he felt was one of unalloyed sweetness and wellbeing. Mystified, he felt for the amulet beneath his sweater, and was astonished to discover that it was no longer there.
Their task completed, the three faerie men lowered their weapons and returned to the mound. Shanahan beckoned to Blackwood and Sophia. ‘Come, my friends, quickly. We cannot linger here.’
The sound of the Martian fighting machine’s footfalls came closer, and once again the Heat Ray flashed out, incinerating great swathes of woodland, from which dark columns of smoke and flame erupted. Blackwood took Sophia’s hand again, and together they followed Shanahan through the door that was not a door, into the faerie mound.
*
Blackwood was unsure what he was expecting to see – perhaps a stairway leading down to a hidden world of caves and subterranean cities, perhaps a misty realm of ethereal cloudscapes with weightless faerie castles floating in a rarefied atmosphere… But he saw neither of those things: instead, he and Sophia found themselves in a twilit glade not entirely dissimilar to the woodland clearing they had just vacated. Glancing behind him, he saw the mound and sensed the invisible door through which they had come. Looking up, he saw the sky as he would have expected it to appear from Earth; the only difference was that he no longer felt the chill of an English October: the air was sweet-smelling and pleasantly warm. Somewhat guiltily, he realised that he was rather disappointed with the place.
‘Not very different from your own world, is it?’ said Shanahan’s voice in his ear.
‘Not really, no,’ he replied.
‘Wait.’
‘For what?’
‘For your mind to re-orientate itself. Just as the human body acclimatises itself automatically to a new environment, so the mind must undergo a similar process, here in Faerie.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘In a few moments, you will.’
As Blackwood and Sophia waited, they felt something stirring in their minds: a feeling, a memory, lying buried beneath all the th
ousands of years of human history, until it had all but vanished, lost in the bright glare of conscious thought. It was the same intuition which had allowed them to perceive a door in the faerie mound where no door existed; it was the same faculty which was once so vibrant and powerful in the human mind, when the mind was brand new, and shone with delicate light and the innocence of animals. It was the primal beauty and purity of perception, the loss of which was the price humanity had paid for civilisation.
The feeling, the memory, grew stronger in the minds of the humans as they stood in the faerie glade, and as they looked about them, the stars became bright jewels set within an obsidian sky; the glade opened upon a landscape that was infinite in extent, rolling away and away towards a horizon which was a naïve assumption rather than a reality, and within this landscape, which was home to snow-capped mountains of impossible height, to floating forests bright with a million shades of green and many-towered cities glowing in pastel hues, they became aware of people – millions upon millions of people, in the cities, in dwellings nestling within the floating forests, in villages resting upon the foothills of the mountains. They sensed each mind… and each mind sensed them and welcomed them.
And then they turned to Shanahan and saw that he was no longer a tiny, flitting creature dressed in clothes that might have been fashionable a century ago, but tall and powerful and naked, and beautiful beyond words, and his dragonfly wings were vast in the light of the jewelled stars.
‘Shanahan?’ Blackwood said.
‘That is not my real name, and I beg your forgiveness for deceiving you, but it was necessary.’
‘What is your real name?’ asked Sophia.
He smiled at them and answered, ‘Oberon.’
Sophia gasped and whispered, ‘The King of the Faeries!’
His eyes blazed in the starlight, and the humans felt their knees buckle, and they sank to the grass that was softer than cotton wool and averted their eyes, for it was painful to look upon him, at the power and purity of him.
Oberon stepped forward and laid a hand upon their heads, saying, ‘Do not kneel before me, my friends. Come. Stand. Look at me.’
Rising unsteadily to their feet, Blackwood and Sophia looked again into those blazing eyes, but now the pain was gone, leaving in its wake only the dull sadness of their crude physicality – sadness, and in Blackwood’s case a burning shame at the condescension with which he had frequently treated Shanahan. I treated him like a lackey, he thought. And all the while, he could have destroyed me with a single thought or turned my life into a nightmare of pain and misfortune.
‘Time was when I walked often with humans,’ Oberon said. ‘Time was when the Earth was another home to us.’
‘But not anymore,’ said Sophia.
‘No. That time is long past, for the human mind has chosen a path which has taken it far from us, from the friendship we once shared, the commonality of perception and feeling.’
‘We have lost much,’ said Blackwood.
Sophia shook her head. ‘We have lost everything.’
Oberon smiled again. ‘You are of the material world, children of matter. It was always to be, from the moment when the first life-chemicals bound themselves together in the primordial waters of Earth. Yes, it was always to be… and yet we still help you when we can.’
‘You have helped us a great deal,’ said Blackwood, ‘for which I offer you my humblest thanks. But why did you disguise yourself? Why did you, Oberon, King of the Faeries, pretend to be a Helper from a human cogitator?’
‘I will answer that question and the others you doubtlessly have. But first you will be guests in my home.’
‘Where is that?’ asked Sophia.
‘In the Fortress of Apples.’
*
Oberon led Blackwood and Sophia out of the glade and across the fantastic landscape of Faerie, and as they walked, it seemed that they were not walking at all, but gliding above the soft grass, propelled by a sweet-scented breeze. And the people of the land bowed to Oberon as he passed, upon the plains and in the floating forests and on the sides of the mountains, and it seemed to the humans that even the jewelled stars watched his passing, and that they loved him as much as his people did.
At the centre of a vast field of swaying green, a great tree stood taller than any mountain on Earth, its colossal branches stroking the obsidian sky, so that the stars above nestled like fruit in its uppermost leaves. Its trunk rose like a wall before them and curved off on either side into the far distance. Blackwood guessed that it was as wide as the city of London. Entire buildings stood within the deep furrows of its trunk, and in the high branches, the lights of a million torches shone in perfect counterpoint to the light from the jewelled stars.
‘This,’ said Oberon, ‘is the Fortress of Apples, where I live with my Queen Titania.’
Both Blackwood and Sophia wanted to say something, but they had no idea what to say: no human words could do justice to this magnificence, this exquisite immensity that was at once both unreal and infinitely more than real.
Oberon took in the expressions on their faces and gently touched the tears that had begun to fall from Sophia’s eyes, and then he gathered the humans in his arms and ascended into the air on his vast, glittering wings, taking them higher than the tallest of Earth’s buildings, the tallest of its trees, the highest of its mountains or clouds, into the branches of the Fortress of Apples. Within the tree’s canopy, they passed villages of beautifully fashioned wooden buildings, standing upon the twisting lanes formed by the branches, until they came to a vast castle of wood at the living heart of the tree. Whether the castle had been fashioned by the faeries or by the tree itself, they didn’t know. That it was alive, they had no doubt, for as they approached, the gigantic leaves which formed its gates opened, spreading wide to reveal a great hall within.
Oberon alighted upon the floor and released Blackwood and Sophia. Perhaps they would have commented on the singular nature of the chamber – the elegant and complex curves of its living walls, the intricate intaglios of wood grain which at once confused and delighted the eye, the graceful arches of the doorways which led deeper into the castle, and which were located at various heights above the floor – had not their attention immediately been seized and held fast by the vision standing before them.
Of such staggering beauty was she that both Blackwood and Sophia wondered whether they were hallucinating, for it seemed to them that no creature, whether in the material world or the Realm of Faerie, could be so exquisite, so perfect in every way. The humans stared at her openly, unable to draw their gaze from her face, from the long, dark-auburn hair which framed it, from the flawlessness of her pale skin, from the delicate lace wings which spread out behind her, from the gentle magnificence of her slender, naked body.
‘Titania, my Queen,’ said Oberon, stepping forward.
‘Oberon, my husband,’ she replied, and her voice was like the wind and rain, like the whisper of distant thunder and the opening of a flower in the swift sunlight of dawn.
They embraced each other and kissed, and Blackwood and Sophia felt the kiss upon their own lips, and their hearts pounded with the delight of it.
Taking his wife by the hand, Oberon said, ‘These are my friends, Thomas Blackwood and Lady Sophia Harrington. Thomas, Sophia, I present to you my Queen, Titania of Faerie.’
‘You are very welcome here,’ Titania said, as she stepped forward towards them.
‘Thank you,’ whispered Blackwood. Unsure of what else to say or do, he gave an awkward bow. Sophia glanced at him and did the same.
Titania broke into a smile, and her eyes shone like the jewels drifting through the sky above. Blackwood’s mouth was dry, and he felt himself stirring in a way which caused him the utmost consternation. The image of Titania filled his mind and brought the blood rushing to his cheeks, and he fervently hoped that neither she nor Oberon was aware of the waves of passionate adoration that were flowing through him at this moment.
Although he didn’t know it (and it would not have surprised him in the least if he had), Sophia found herself in the tender clutches of a similarly overwhelming sweetness as she regarded Oberon. Her breath came in quick gasps of delight, which she struggled vainly to control, and she wished to be away from here without delay, while simultaneously wishing to stay here forever.
Titania’s smile grew broader as she said, ‘Your friends are embarrassed, Oberon. Could it be because we are unclothed?’
‘I suspect so,’ replied the Faerie King.
‘Why is that, I wonder?’
‘They believe that the human body is tainted by a sin committed at the beginning of Time, and for which all subsequent generations of their race must pay with shame and despair at their own physical nature. They do not appreciate the beauty of the forms in which their souls are embedded.’
‘Ah,’ said Titania, her voice bright with amusement. ‘You are speaking of modesty – the modesty which is born of that mythical infraction which casts a shadow even upon their newborns.’
‘I am.’
She shook her head and addressed their guests. ‘What a pity it is, for you are both beautiful and should rejoice in your physical existence. Your bodies glow with the beauty of Being, a beauty which is undeservedly dimmed by the obscurity of clothing, born of a shame as false as it is puerile.’
‘I… that is to say, we,’ stammered Blackwood. ‘We are products of our culture and history, I’m afraid. It’s… just the way we are.’
‘Thomas wishes to make love to me,’ said Titania, her amusement growing in her voice. ‘And Sophia wishes to make love to you, Oberon.’
Sophia gave a little gasp at this, and Blackwood said, ‘Your Majesty! I assure you the thought never crossed my mind!’
Oberon and Titania laughed at Blackwood’s discomfiture, and the Faerie Queen said, ‘Your denial is as charming as it is ridiculous.’
‘Come, my friends,’ said Oberon. ‘Do not allow yourselves to be put out of sorts by my wife’s sense of humour. She is merely teasing you, for she is often amused by the antics of humans, by their strange beliefs and attitudes.’