Among Others

by Jo Walton

  “I think he saw them,” I said. “I think he saw them and dreamed them into the elves he wanted. I think they are his dwindled remnant.”

  “Maybe he saw them when he was a child, and remembered them,” Wim said. “I wish I knew what they are really. You’re right, they’re not ghosts, or not only ghosts. They’re definitely not aliens either. They’re not substantial. When she touched me . . .”

  “They can be more substantial sometimes,” I said, remembering the warmth of Glorfindel beside me on Halloween.

  “What did she mean? Go, need, in, belong, go, join.”

  I was impressed that he’d remembered so precisely. “I think she meant I should go to the Valleys because I’m needed there for something. Maybe you’re right about my mother, or maybe it’s something else. I’m going tomorrow anyway.”

  “Half the time I can’t believe it. What you told me about your mother and magic and all of that. And then something like her.” He turned to me and put his arms very tightly around me. “If you’re going to go and save the world, I want to come.”

  “I’ll phone you every day,” I said.

  “You need me.”

  I didn’t ask what earthly good he’d be, because that would have been cruel. “I did it on my own before.”

  “You got mashed up and nearly killed before,” he said. “Your sister did get killed.”

  “There’s nothing she can do like that now,” I said. “I don’t even think she wanted to kill us then. And this—this isn’t unusual. Or it’s only unusual in that it’s in English, and here, where they don’t usually bother with me. Maybe it’s because we’re closer.”

  “Not unusual!” Wim looked at me as if that was the oddest thing he’d ever heard. “And closer to what?”

  “Wales?”

  “Closer for values of closer that mean further away. The Welsh border is only a couple of miles from Oswestry.”

  “Okay. But they want me to do something, and I’ll do it, or I won’t do it, and it’ll work or not, and I’ll survive or not,” I said.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “I’m not going to Elfland to have adventures,” I said. “I’m going to South Wales, where, in between seeing my slightly peculiar relatives, they probably want me to do something that seems pointless, like dropping a flower in a pond or a comb in a bog, which will have repercussions down the way.”

  “A comb in a bog?” he echoed. “What did that do?”

  “It made somebody go away and die,” I said, looking away guiltily, sorry I’d mentioned it.

  “Are you always going to be doing this stuff?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I always have. But I’m less use now. And I think—I think children might be better at it because there are fewer shades of grey.”

  “I could help,” he said.

  “I’ll see. If I think you could help, I’ll let you know and you can rush down then.”

  He settled for that, thank goodness.

  We walked back across the fields to the Old Hall. There’s a footpath, which Daniel had shown me on the map, and which was easy to find, all except for one bit where a sign had been taken down. It’s all boring fields and crops around here.

  The aunts were very nice to Wim, in a revoltingly patronizing way. They asked him what his father does. I was rather surprised to discover that he’s a farmer. Wim isn’t the way I imagine a farmer’s son at all. His mother works part time cooking at the hospital. He has two younger sisters, eight and six, called Katrina and Daisy. I hadn’t heard any of this, while he knows everything about my peculiar family. I knew I talked too much!

  The food was awful, heavy fruitcake, dry scones, watery tea and, because it was High Tea, dry slices of ham. The bread was good, Daniel brought it back from Shrewsbury.

  They did not attempt any magic on Wim, I’m sure I would have noticed. They approved of him, and of me being with him. It was normal, which was what they wanted from me. Nice Niece would have had a boyfriend, and if he wouldn’t be exactly like Wim, Wim would do. As long as I was going to grow up and go away and not rock their world, they could put up with me. They weren’t evil, after all, they were just odd in a very English way.

  I went to the station with Daniel to drive Wim back. “Remember, phone every day, and if you need me, I’ll come straight down. I can be there in three and a half hours,” he said. It’s so sweet of him, really it is. I’ll see him again in just over a week.

  SUNDAY 17TH FEBRUARY 1980

  On the train.

  Inverted World is weird. I’m not sure it’s even science fiction. It doesn’t make sense in the end. To begin with, I thought I really liked it, but now I’m not sure at all.

  Auntie Teg is meeting me in Cardiff station. But if she doesn’t, I’m fine. I’ve got six pounds seventy-two. There’s a way that money is freedom, but it isn’t money, it’s that money stands for having a choice. I think that’s what Heinlein meant.

  This train line skims along the Welsh border all the way. One day I must go to North Wales, or even over the Welsh border Wim says is only a couple of miles from Oswestry. It’s marked on my map, now I know. I wish they taught us maps in geography instead of stupid Glaciation all the time. Though I suppose Glaciation helps me see the landscape, or at least where the glaciers have been down it. In some parts of the world the glaciers came so often the mountains were worn down to stubs and everything is like a flat lake bottom except with plugs sticking up where volcanic cores of mountains were left. That would be cool to see, but I’m glad it didn’t happen here. I love the mountains the way they are.

  Sweeping past Abergavenny (and over the border into Wales) there’s a sudden rush of primroses along the embankment. I must remember to tell Grampar. The daffodils will be out in Cardiff, well in advance of St. David’s Day.

  I’m adding this in Auntie Teg’s flat, just before bed.

  We went up to see Grampar for visiting time. To my horror, when we got there, Auntie Flossie was there, which would have been all right, but with her was Auntie Gwennie, one of my least favourite people in the world. There’s not much that’s worse than a ward full of senile and dying old men, but there she was. Auntie Gwennie knows nothing about tact, and nothing about kindness. She’s rude and annoying and prides herself on speaking her mind. She’s eighty-two, but it isn’t because she’s old and impatient that she does it. Gramma used to say she was the same when she was six years old.

  “So, why have you walked out on Liz?” was Auntie Gwennie’s greeting to me.

  “Because she’s insane and impossible to live with,” I said. You have to stand up to her, or she walks all over you. “What were the family doing thinking it was a reasonable place for me to live?”

  “Humph. And how are you enjoying living with your good-for-nothing father?”

  “I don’t see much of him, I’m away at school,” I said, which I admit was a bit of a cop-out.

  We had, of course, managed to sort of keep it from Grampar that Daniel was involved at all, but of course now it all came out. Trying to get onto a calmer topic, Auntie Teg mentioned the plans she’s working on to get Grampar out of Fedw Hir in the summer holidays, when she’ll be able to fill in if the arrangements don’t work out. Auntie Gwennie immediately suggested that Auntie Teg should give up teaching and sell her flat and move back to Aberdare to look after Grampar full time. I don’t think so! If nothing else, imagine when he dies! I can’t believe people, selfish people too, like Auntie Gwennie, think other people ought to sacrifice themselves entirely like that. She says things, and you just stand there because you can’t believe that what she’s said really came out of her mouth. Grampar did tell her not to be so daft, that’s the only satisfaction.

  However, Auntie Gwennie did tell one very funny story about how she lost her driving license, which I want to record. She’s eighty-two, remember. She was driving from Manchester, where her awful daughter lives, to Swansea, where she lives. She was on the Heads of the Valleys road, wh
ich is an A road, with two lanes in each direction, but not a motorway, and the speed limit is therefore sixty. She was doing ninety. A policeman stopped her—a young whippersnapper of a policeman, she said. “Do you know how fast you were going, madam?” he asked.

  “Ninety,” she responded, accurately but unrepentently.

  “Are you aware that the speed limit on this road is sixty?” he asked.

  “Young man,” Auntie Gwennie said, “I have been doing ninety along this road since before you were born.”

  “Then it’s high time you had your license taken away from you,” he said, fast as lightning, and he did it too, so she has to go on the train!

  Unlike me, she hates trains. “I can’t abide trains. I hate Crewe station. I can’t bear changing platforms there. You have to go all the way to Platform 12 for the Cardiff train, up the stairs and then down them again! I’m never doing it again! No, Luke, this is the last time you’ll see me. I won’t come down to South Wales again until I die, and then it’ll be my coffin changing at Crewe!”

  I burst out laughing at that, which, I’ll say this for her, she didn’t mind at all.

  I rang Wim, and told him I’d made no progress yet. I’d better go and see if I can find Glorfindel tomorrow. I told Auntie Teg about Wim and she wanted to know everything—not what his father did and what A Levels he’s doing, but what he’s like. I told her he’s gorgeous and he sort of likes me. She wants to meet him. I said he wanted to come down, and she immediately started fussing about where he could have slept. Her funky brown sofas are much too short for visitors.

  MONDAY 18TH FEBRUARY 1980

  I went up to the cwm. I didn’t tell Auntie Teg any lies, though I didn’t tell her all the truth either. I said I wanted to go up to the cwm and have a wander about on my own. I went up past the library. There’s never anybody about up there. I don’t know why not. The river runs along beside the dramroad, and it’s as pretty as anything, especially right now with the beech trees starting to come into leaf. There’s no colour like that very early green. There were big clouds in the sky, scudding along up the valley as if they had an urgent appointment in Brecon. In between the sun made everything almost glow with green.

  When I came to Ithilien, Glorfindel was there, and Mor, and the fairy who gave me the stick, and loads of other fairies, many of whom I know quite well. I’m not going to get into this impossible thing where I try to record conversations again. What Glorfindel said was that I needed to open a gate so that Mor could live with them and be one of them, and also to give them a way to use the magic that they know. “Then are you ghosts?” I asked. I knew Wim would want to know the answer, and I wanted to know myself for that matter.

  “Some,” he said.

  Some of them are? “Then what are the rest?”

  “Being,” he said.

  Yes, well, I knew that. They are beings. They exist. They’re there and they know about magic and they live their lives that are not like our lives. But where did they come from? Are the ones who speak the ones who were human, once?

  The gate he wants me to open has to be opened with blood, of course. And there’s something more, something I didn’t understand. I asked about my mother and he said she can’t hurt us, or she won’t be able to hurt us ever after I’ve done this. That definitely means I’m doing it to prevent harm. It’s not the place in the Labyrinth, thank goodness, because that’s a long trudge. It’s just down in the old Phurnacite. I can get the bus almost all the way there. Using blood for magic is always risky, but Glorfindel knows what he’s doing. He always has. The weird thing is that he knows it and yet needs me to do it, because he can’t really move things.

  It was odd seeing Mor among the fairies like that, as if she was half a fairy already. I felt really strange. She seemed so remote. She wasn’t growing leaves or anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was.

  This evening, I phoned Wim and told him everything as best I could. “What are the risks?” he asked.

  “Well, getting too caught up in the magic, or making the magic wider than it should be.”

  “What do you mean getting too caught up in it? You mean dying?” His voice sounded exasperated, at the other end of the line.

  “I suppose I do.”

  “You suppose! Look, I’m coming down.”

  “There’s no need,” I said. “It’ll be fine. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “You’re much more confident than I am.”

  Telephone conversations are so inadequate, so lacking in expression and gesture and everything. I’m not sure I managed to reassure him properly.

  The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there’s a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn’t. I know, and Wim doesn’t. That’s all there is to it. I wouldn’t wish on anyone that awful instant when I realised that the headlights coming towards us were real. But without that understanding people think there are dangerous things that can kill you, and everything else is safe. That’s just not the way it works. We were past the dangerous bit that we knew could kill us and just crossing the road. I don’t even think she wanted to kill us. We were more use to her alive.

  I need to do it at sunset, which according to the Western Mail is half past five.

  TUESDAY 19TH FEBRUARY 1980

  I went up the valley on the bus after lunch. Auntie Teg had to go in to school for a meeting and then was coming up to meet me at Fedw Hir for seven o’clock visiting time. I got off the bus at Abercwmboi, by the ruins of the Phurnacite. I was early. I was wishing I’d arranged to do something else in the afternoon, like meet Moira and Leah and Nasreen. I thought about ringing them, but then I thought about Leah’s party, which is the last time I saw them, and how they weren’t really friends any more, just people I knew. They’d want to hear about Wim, and trying to talk about him in their terms would cheapen what I really feel about him.

  There was a sign on the rusty iron railings at the top of the Phurnacite road. “Land Reclamation Project. Mid-Glamorgan County Council.” It lifted my heart, because it reminded me of the march of the Lords of Gondor. We had called this place Mordor, and it had fallen. There were no hell-flames now. Some of the trees were showing a little spring green. No fairies were about. My leg was hurting a bit, probably enough to keep them away.

  The chimneys were cold and all the windows were broken. It was pathetic, a five-year ruin, not yet crumbled enough to seem like a fairy fortress. The sign about dogs was hanging at an angle. The dogs, if there ever had been dogs, were gone with the workers. The dark pool still looked evil, though there was grass around the edge now. I walked around to the other side of the factory where I could lift up my eyes to the hills and sat in one of the alcoves. I wanted to rest so that my leg would get down to a normal quiet background pain the fairies could put up with. I read A Touch of Strange, which is brilliant, and beautifully written, though a bit weird. It’s short stories. I’m glad at least one of the things Wim gave me is good.

  After I’d finished it, instead of starting Gate of Ivrel, I tried to see if I could get the pain to go out of my leg the way acupuncture does. It isn’t really magic, except that it is. It’s not magic that reaches into the world and changes things. It’s all inside my body. I thought, sitting there, that everything is magic. Using things connects them to you, being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic. Fairies are more in the magic than in the world, and people are more in the world than in the magic. Maybe fairies, the ones that aren’t lost dead people, are concentrations, personifications, of the magic? And God? God is in everything, moving through everything, is the pattern that everything makes, moving. That’s why messing with magic so often becomes evil, because it’s going against that pattern. I could almost see the pattern as the sun and clouds succeeded each other over the hills and I held the pain a little bit away, wher
e it didn’t hurt me.

  Glorfindel came first, and then all the others behind him. I’d never seen such a parade of fairies, not even last year when we had to stop Liz. Looking at Glorfindel with my insight about magic and everything, I decided I should stop calling him that, stop trying to fit him into a pattern I’d found in a story. The name wasn’t his, not really, though names are such useful labels. The fairies were all around me, surrounding me, very close. Nobody had told me to bring anything special, and I hadn’t, but I was ready.

  The sun was starting to sink behind the hills. Glorfindel, without speaking, led us all back to the pool. I should have known it would be there. I stopped beside it. Mor came up to me. She looked so young, and also so remote. I could hardly bear to look at her. Her expressions were like a fairy’s expressions. She was like herself, but she’d moved away from who she was, into magic. She was more fairy than person already. I took my penknife out, ready to cut my thumb for the magic, but Glorfindel—I can’t think of him any other way—shook his head.

  “Join,” he said. “Heal.”

  “What?”

  “Broken.” He gestured at Mor and me. “Be together.”

  The fairy who had given me my stick came forward.

  “Make, stay together,” Glorfindel said. “Stay.”

  “No!” I said. “That’s not what I want. That’s not what you want either. Half-way, you said, at Halloween. I could have done that then if I’d wanted to.”

  “Stay. Heal. Join,” Glorfindel said.

  The old man fairy touched my stick, and it became a knife, a sharp wooden knife. He mimed plunging it into my heart.

  “No!” I said, and dropped it.

  “Life,” Glorfindel said. “Among. Together.”

  “No!” I started moving away from the knife, slowly, because of course, it was also my stick, and without it slowly was the only way I could move. Mor picked it up and held it out to me.

  “Beyond dying,” the old man said. “Living among, becoming, joining. Together. Healed. Strength, reaching, affecting, safe always, strong always, together.”