Among Others

by Jo Walton

  We spent our childhood playing in the ruins, sometimes alone and sometimes with other children or with the fairies. We didn’t realise what the ruins were, not for a long time. There was an old ironworks near Auntie Florrie’s house where we used to play all the time. There were other children there, and we’d play with them sometimes, wonderful games of hide and seek, chasing through. I didn’t know what an ironworks was. If pressed, I’d have worked out the etymology that someone must have once worked iron there, but nobody ever pressed me. It was a place, a thing. It was all over rosebay willow-herb in the autumn. It was unusual that we knew what it was.

  Most of the ruins where we played, in the woods, didn’t have names and could have been anything. We called them witch’s cottage, giant’s castle, fairy palace, and we played that they were Hitler’s last redoubt or the walls of Angband, but they were really old crumbling relics of industry. The fairies hadn’t built them. They’d moved in with the green things after people had abandoned them. The fairies couldn’t make anything, not anything real. They couldn’t do anything. That’s why they needed us. We didn’t know that. There were a lot of things we didn’t know, that we didn’t think to ask. Before the people came I suppose the fairies would have lived in the trees and not had houses. The farmers would have put out milk for them, perhaps. There wouldn’t have been so many of them either.

  The people had come to the Valleys, or rather their ancestors had, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Under the hills there were iron and coal, and the Valleys were the boom towns of their day, filling up with people. If you’ve ever wondered why there wasn’t a Welsh immigration to the New World on the scale of the Irish or Scottish ones, it isn’t because the people didn’t need to leave their farms in the same way. It’s because they had somewhere of their own to go. Or at least, they thought it was their own. English people came too. The Welsh language lost out. Welsh was my grandmother’s first language, my mother’s second language and I can only fumble along in it. My grandmother’s family had come from west Wales, from Carmarthenshire. We still had relatives there, Mary-from-the-country and her people.

  My ancestors came like everyone else, after iron was discovered, and coal. People started building smelters on the spot, railroads to take it out, houses for workers, more smelters, more mines, more houses, until the valleys were solid strips of habitation up and down. The hills were always there between, and the fairies must have huddled in the hills. Then the iron ran out, or was cheaper to produce somewhere else, and while there was still coal mining it was a pitiful remnant of the boom of a hundred years before. Iron works were abandoned. Pits closed down. Some of the people left, but most stayed. It was home by then. By the time we were born, chronic unemployment was a fact of life and the fairies had crept back down into the valleys and taken over the ruins that nobody wanted.

  We grew up playing freely in the ruins and had no real sense of this history. It was a wonderful place for children. It was abandoned and grown over and ignored, and once you slipped away from the houses it was wild. You could always go up the mountain into real countryside, which had rocks and trees and sheep, grey-coated from coal dust and unappealing. (I can’t understand how people are sentimental about sheep. We used to shout “Mint sauce!” at them to get them to run away. Auntie Teg always winced at that and told us not to, but we kept on doing it. They’d come down into the valley and knock over dustbins and destroy gardens. They were the reason you had to keep gates shut.) But even down in the valley, running through everything were the seams of trees and ruins. They were everywhere, through and under and parallel to the town. It wasn’t the only landscape we knew. We went to Pembrokeshire on holiday, and up to the real mountains, the Brecon Beacons, and to Cardiff, which is a city, with city shops. The Valleys were home, they were the landscape of normality, and we never questioned it.

  The fairies never said they built the ruins. I doubt we asked, but if we had they’d just have laughed, as they did at most of our questions. They were just inexplicably there or, some days, inexplicably not there. Sometimes they would talk to us, and other times flee from us. Like the other children we knew, we could play with them or without them. All we really needed was each other and our imagination.

  The places of my childhood were linked by magical pathways, ones almost no adults used. They had roads, we had these. They were for walking, they were different and extra, wider than a path but not big enough for cars, sometimes parallel to the real roads and sometimes cutting from nowhere to nowhere, from an elven ruin to the labyrinth of Minos. We gave them names but we knew unquestioningly that the real name for them was “dramroads.” I never turned that word over in my mouth and saw it for what it was: Tram road. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open. Tram to dram, of course. Once there had been trams running on rails up those dramroads, trams full of iron ore or coal. So empty and leaf-strewn, used by nobody but children and fairies, they’d once been little railroads.

  It wasn’t that we didn’t know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We’d been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn’t connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies’ possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognised that they were from The Chrysalids.

  It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.

  TUESDAY 18TH SEPTEMBER 1979

  School is awful, as expected. For one thing, as I’d known from all the school stories, one of the most important things about boarding schools is the games. I’m not in any shape to be doing games. Also, all the other girls are from the same background. They are almost all English, from not too far away, products of the same landscape as the school. They vary a little in size and shape, but most of them have the same voice. My voice, which was posh for the Valleys and immediately marked my class origins to everyone there, here brands me an outlander barbarian. As if being a crippled barbarian isn’t bad enough, there’s also the fact that I was coming late for the year into a class that has known each other for two years already, with enmities and alliances drawn up across lines I know nothing about.

  Fortunately, I figured this out quickly. I’m not stupid. I’ve never gone to a school before where everyone didn’t already know me, or know my family, and I’ve never gone into a new school as a singleton, but I’ve just been through three months of the Children’s Home, and this can’t possibly be any worse. Using the clue of voice, I identified the other barbarians, one Irish (Deirdre, called Dreary) and one Jewish (Sharon, called Shagger). I do what I can to befriend them.

  I glare at the other girls when they try to tease me or patronise me or pick on me, and I’m glad to see that my glare works as well as ever. I get called names a lot, “Taffy” and “Thief” and “Commie,” as well as slightly more justified things like “Crip” and “Suck-up.” Commie is because they think my name is Russian. I was wrong in thinking it would mean nothing to them. They pinch me and thump me when they think they can get away with it, but there’s no real violence. It’s nothing, absolutely nothing, after the Home. I have my stick and my glare, and soon I started to tell ghost stories after Lights Out. Let them fear me as long as they leave me alone. Let them hate me as long as they fear me. It’s a pretty good strategy for boarding school, however it worked out for Tiberius. I said this to Sharon, and she looked at me as if I was an alien. What? What? I’ll never get used to this place.

  I quickly rose to th
e top of the class in everything but maths. Very quickly. More quickly than I’d expected. Perhaps these girls are not as clever as the ones at the grammar school? One or two there gave us some competition, but here there doesn’t seem to be any of that. I soar above the others. My popularity, bizarrely, goes both up and down slightly because of the marks. They don’t care about lessons, and they hate me for beating them, but you get house points for exceptional marks, and they care a lot about house points. It’s depressing how much boarding school is just like Enid Blyton showed it, and all the ways it’s different are ways it’s worse.

  The chemistry class, with a different set of girls, is a lot better. It’s taught by the science master, the only male teacher in the school, and the girls seem a lot more engaged by the subject. It’s the best thing on the curriculum, I’m really glad I fought for it. I don’t care that I miss art—though Auntie Teg would care. I haven’t written to her. I’ve thought about it, but I don’t dare. She wouldn’t tell my mother where I am—she’d be the last person to do that—but I can’t risk it.

  Then yesterday I found the library. I’ve got permission to spend time here when I’m supposed to be on the playing field. Suddenly, being crippled starts to feel like a benefit. It’s not a wonderful library, but it’s so much better than nothing that I’m not complaining. I’ve finished all the books my father lent me. (He was right about the other half of Empire Star, but Empire Star itself is one of the best things I’ve ever read.) On the shelves here there’s The Bull From the Sea and another Mary Renault I’ve never heard of called The Charioteer, and three adult SF novels by C. S. Lewis. It’s wood-panelled and the chairs are old cracked leather. So far it seems to be deserted by everyone except me and the librarian, Miss Carroll, to whom I am unfailingly polite.

  I’ll have a chance to keep up my diary now. One of the worst things here is how impossible it is to be alone and how people ask you all the time what you are doing. “Writing a poem” or “Writing in my diary” would be the kiss of death. After the first couple of days I stopped trying, even though I really wanted to. They already think I’m weird. I sleep in a dorm with eleven other girls. I’m not alone even in the bathroom—there are no doors on the toilet or shower cubicles, and of course they think lavatory humour is the height of wit.

  Out of the library window I can see the branches of a dying elm. Elms are dying all over the place, it’s Dutch elm disease. It isn’t my fault. I can’t do anything about it. But I keep thinking maybe I could, if the fairies told me what to do. It’s the kind of thing where there might be something that would make a difference. The dying trees are very sad. I asked the librarian and she gave me an old copy of New Scientist, and I read more detail about it. It came from America on a load of logs, and it’s a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that’s why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you’d never think it was part of all the others. You’d see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins.

  WEDNESDAY 19TH SEPTEMBER 1979

  After prep and before supper, we have a free half-hour. Yesterday it wasn’t raining, so I went out in the dusk. I walked down to the bottom of bounds, the edge of the school grounds. There’s a field there with black-and-white cows in it. They stared at me apathetically. There’s also a ditch and a straggle of trees. If there are any fairies here, this looked like where they’ll be. It was chilly and damp. The sky was losing colour without any noticeable sunset.

  It’s hard enough to find fairies on purpose even when you know where they are. I’ve always thought fairies are like mushrooms, you trip over them when you’re not thinking about them, but they’re hard to spot when you’re searching for them. I hadn’t brought my key ring, and everything I was wearing was new and had no connections, so I couldn’t use that. But my cane was old, and wooden, and might work. I tried to think about the elm trees and whether I could help. I tried to calm my mind.

  I closed my eyes and leaned on my cane. I tried to ignore the pain, and ignore the huge hole where Mor ought to be. The pain is hard to put aside, but I knew it would scare them off like nothing else. I remembered them scattering and bounding away like startled sheep when I cut my hand up behind Camelot that time. The normal pain in my leg is in two parts, a sharp tug and a slow grind. If I stand still and balanced the grind goes down to an ache, and the tug doesn’t come unless I shift my weight, so I tried that and got it down. I tried to think of what would we do if we wanted to call them. I opened my mind. Nothing happened. “Good afternoon?” I said, tentatively, in Welsh. But maybe fairies in England would speak English? Or maybe there aren’t any fairies here. It’s not a landscape with much room for them. I opened my eyes again. The cows had wandered away. It must have been milking time. There was a bush and a little stunted mountain ash and a hazel tree on the school side of the ditch. I put my left hand on the smooth bark of the hazel, not really hoping for anything now.

  There was a fairy up in the branches. It was wary. I’ve always noticed how much more fairies are like plants than anything else. With people and animals you have one standard pattern: Two arms, two legs, one head, a person. Or four legs and wool, a sheep. Plants and fairies, though, there are signs that say what they are, but a tree might have any number of branches, growing out anywhere. There’s a kind of pattern to it, but one elm tree won’t look exactly like the next, and might look completely different, because they’ll have grown differently. Fairies tend to be either very beautiful or absolutely hideous. They all have eyes, and lots of them have some recognisable sort of head. Some of them have limbs in a roughly human way, some are more like animals, and others bear no resemblance to anything at all. This was one of that kind. It was long and spindly, its skin like rough bark. If you didn’t see its eyes, which are kind of underneath, you’d take it for some kind of creeper draped with spider’s web. In the same way that oak trees have acorns and hand-shaped leaves and hazels have hazelnuts and little curved leaves, most fairies are gnarly and grey or green or brown and there’s generally something hairy about them somewhere. This one was grey, very gnarly indeed, and well over towards the hideous part of the spectrum.

  Fairies don’t go much for names. The ones we knew at home we gave names, and they answered to them or not. They seemed to think they were funny. They don’t name places either. They don’t even call themselves fairies, that was us. They’re not big on nouns at all, come to think, and the way they talk . . . Anyway, this fairy was completely strange to me, and I to it, and I didn’t have any names or passwords to give it. It was just looking at me, as if it might go bounding away at any moment, or fade back into the tree. Gender’s another iffy thing with fairies, except when it isn’t because they have long trailing hair full of flowers or a penis as big as the rest of their body or something like that. This one didn’t have any indication in that direction, so I think of it as it.

  “Friend,” I said, which should be safe.

  And then from total stillness it exploded into motion and speech. “Go! Danger! Find!” Fairies don’t exactly talk like other people. It doesn’t matter how much you want them to be Galadriel, they’re never going to make that kind of speech. This one said that and then vanished, all at once, before I could tell it who I was or ask it anything about the elms and if there was anything I could do. It felt as if I’d blinked, but I hadn’t. It’s always like that when they go quickly—gone between one heartbeat and the next, gone as if they’ve never been there.

  Danger? Find? I have no idea what it meant. I didn’t see any danger, but I headed back to the school, where the bell was ringing for supper. I was one of the last in the line, but the food isn’t worth eating even when it’s hot. Danger didn’t find me and I didn’t find danger, at least not tonight. I drank my watery cocoa and hoped the fairy was all right. I’m pleased it
’s here, even if it isn’t very communicative. It’s like a little piece of home.

  THURSDAY 20TH SEPTEMBER 1979

  This morning, I discovered what the fairy meant by “find” and “danger.” The post brought a letter from my mother.

  I don’t know how finding the fairy let her know where I was. The world doesn’t work in a nice logical way. The fairies wouldn’t have told her, and while there were people who might have, they might have done it at any time. What I think is that she was looking for me. Being in a strange landscape and with all new stuff I’d have been hard to catch hold of—I have nothing but the cane and a handful of things of my own here, and the things of mine that she has will mostly be fading by now. But by opening my mind to call the fairy, I drew her attention. Maybe that made someone give her my address, or maybe she came to know of it directly. That doesn’t matter. You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.