The Green Children of Woolpit

by J. Anderson Coats

  I wait till Em throws herself back onto her bed, then I ask, “Can I move the bigger bones into the corridor? There are so many. It’ll go faster if I can find the small ones easier.”

  Em makes an impatient shooing gesture, and I set aside the bone dress and start shifting the pile. The curtain moves easily now. I move bones by the armload. Soon enough Em is bored again and braiding her hair, so I uncover the opening in the side of the pile and move the pig like it’s any other load. I set it on its trotters in the corridor where it staggers like someone fed it barley mash from a brewing.

  Most of the big bones are in the corridor. Hundreds of tiny ones spread over the floor like a carpet of fallen stars. I make one last trip into the hallway. The pig is where I left it, nose pointed at the floor, ears limp and listless. I pet its head, even though it’s not real. Poor hapless thing.

  Then I pinch its tail hard and dart back into the chamber. I’m kneeling in the bones when the pig bleats weakly, not even close to a squeal, and Em looks up.

  “What was that?” she asks.

  The walls listen to whispers and secrets especially, so I look up from my work as if I’m bewildered at her interruption.

  Em rocks to her feet and looks under her bed, then behind the chair. My heart is racing, but I keep glamouring bones into the gown one after another. Once she finds that pig, I want her heading to the revel as soon as possible. I can’t give her too much time to look it over and work out it’s not what she thinks it is.

  The curtain twitches. Em steps past me and pulls it back, then lets out a wordless screech of joy. She is buzzing again, high and triumphant, and shoves me hard out of her way so she can push the pig into the chamber. She doesn’t know to look for the tail that curls over and not under, or the chipped front hoof. Everything that makes Mother who she is. I fight down a smile and force the last few tiny bones onto the hem of the long, clickety skirt.

  Em holds the curtain aside and peers up and down the hallway. “Hey. Rats! You were promised a reward for finding this pig and you shall have one. Rats? Hmm. They must not like the bones.” She lets the curtain fall and mutters, “It’s about time something went right.”

  “Your gown is ready,” I say, and when I hold up the dress of bones, Em’s eyes go big with the closest thing to excitement I’ve seen from any of Those Good People. I rattle it so the whole thing goes tickety-tick and tempts her vanity because she absolutely cannot try to turn my pig-thing into my ma right now because in no way will it work. It can barely stand of its own power. She must put the gown on and leave so I can flee this place.

  Only that means I’m leaving Acatica. I’m leaving my da.

  If I don’t leave, I may never see them again anyway.

  I help Em dress as quick as I can, chattering all the while how no one else at the revel will have anything like it, and she spins to admire herself. The tiny bones chitter along her shoulders and shush around her feet.

  “They will surely look at me when I enter,” Em says, smug and haughty. “Even in the ninety-and-ninth row.”

  “You should go right now,” I tell her. “Mayhap if you show the king you have the pig, he’ll let you walk in earlier. He wouldn’t want to keep the others from the spectacle he promised.”

  Em scoops up the pig in her arms. The poor thing looks instants from shattering into moss and knuckles and stones. I would struggle with a beast that size, but it lies in her arms like a sack of wet barley. Then she’s gone without a backward glance, without so much as a word of thanks, and the curtain dances behind her.

  I have made Em think she has everything she wants, but it won’t be long before she realizes she’s been tricked. It’ll happen in front of the whole of the fairy court, too. She’ll try to pull the glamour off the pig-thing, but instead of my ma, it’ll be —

  Laughing. Pointing. Like Glory last May Eve.

  I can be nowhere near here when it happens.

  Once Em is well and truly gone, I stand in front of the wall. There is no one who doesn’t like a story, whether it’s bedtime or not.

  I lean close and start whispering.

  Today I slipped out to fetch water. I’m shivering my way down the path in a rush because if Ma spots me, she’ll whisk the bucket away and insist I go play. Find Glory and Kate and Tabby. Spend the day cozied up by the fire with my spinning.

  The old Agnes was never allowed such leisure.

  There is no rest under the mountain. The fair folk revel every night, wining and dancing, and time in that place ebbs and flows according to their whims or requirements. Nights can last a night, or they can last a month or a year or a thousand-thousand timeless ages. There is no end to their needs. No patience for resistance or tears or moping. Idle feet are turned into benches. Idle hands become tables. Those who simply will not obey are drawn into the walls where they can look upon freedom while going slowly mad. There is no warning. There is no pleading. Anyone who does not work is made useful in some other way.

  So every night my hands carried. They got burned by hot plates and cut to bits by sharp leaves. Every night my feet scurried, usually away from a smack aimed at my head or under an armload of golden dishes streaked with gravy and heaped with bones that would turn back to leaves in an eyeblink.

  I would not bow to them, though. They did not like it. They did not like how I found ways to stand next to others — not just Trinovantes, but Iceni and Cantiaci and even Catuvellauni — so we could keep ourselves alive in whispers.

  My ma made the best roast.

  My sweetheart’s brother is wed to your cousin. That makes us kin.

  My grandda inked these marks on my back.

  Our feet began to slow. Our eyes strayed up from our work. We were forgetting how we swore to serve, how we agreed to become nothing but our hands and feet. We were forgetting how we had agreed to an eternity that was both a bargain and a sacrifice while also being neither, and we’d done it to save ourselves.

  I thought we were beneath notice. I was wrong.

  Her name in whatever tongue the fair folk speak was a muttery buzz in my ear, and all I could be sure of was the sound it began with. Emmmmmmsomethingbuzzymutterevilevilevil. The first time she summoned me, I thought I was done for. But instead she took my hand and the wall rushed at me — dirt — rocks — bones — just as it did when I first came under the mountain. She’d taken me to the crossing place, and day after day I followed her into the harsh yellow light of the world beyond.

  The first thing you’d see was the bodies. Where the soldiers came from, rebels were nailed alive to crossed pieces of wood and left there to die slowly, but there were too many rebels here for them to bother making crosses. Instead the bodies were impaled. A single sharpened post was driven into the ground with a man skewered on it, the bottom part through his nether regions and the top stabbing through his shoulder, or his chest, or his gaping, silent mouth. Sometimes a boy my age. One time, a girl with a tangle of hacked-off scarecrow hair, stripped to her shift and cut to pieces, and I was sick all over myself.

  After the bodies, you’d see the houses. What was left of them, anyway. People were still living in them the first few times, but these were not the proud, cheerful men and women I remembered. They were thin and hooded, scurrying, their eyes always to the horizon. There was no one I remembered. There were soldiers, though. The men of Rome who did not think it enough to burn it down, but decided to make a home in the boneyard of it, as if no one had lived there before.

  After a while, there were only stray dogs in the settlement, then heaps of earth began drifting over the houses and byres and sheds, like the ground itself thought to bury the dead that no one else would or could.

  “No amount of whispering or memories will bring them back,” the fairy girl would say. “The men of Rome have made this place a burying ground, and now they have gone. Like none of you were ever here.”

  It hurt too much to think about. So I fetched and carried. I stopped whispering to the others.
Her work done, the fairy girl left me in peace and went back to her feasting and plotting. She could have just turned me into a stepstool, but there was no amusement for the fairy court in that. No reward from the king, either.

  But I never forgot how my ma would run her fingers through my hair while she told me stories. I never forgot how my da taught me to carve an apple and weave a fishing basket. I never forgot what it was to go to sleep at night knowing they were near, that they would keep me safe.

  If there were no more mas out there, no more das, no more girls to weave flower crowns and suppers to eat and long starlit nights to tell stories in, I’d gotten the better end of the bargain. Since under the mountain I would never age or wither or die, those things would live forever deep within me.

  But something was amiss. On their high holy days, the fair folk would ride. Every May Eve, every All Hallow’s Eve, they put on their finest garments and left us with a mighty mess to clean, so many soiled plates and spills and rubbish everywhere that we’d barely have it done by the time they clattered back, all high spirits and boasting.

  If there were no mortals to sport with, to trick and torment and reward, the fair folk had no reason at all to leave their realm.

  I poured strong red wine on the walls, and they got drunk and let me go where I liked. I went straight to the crossing place. Somehow it had become a pit, and there, crouched among the white bones of wolves and children, I hoped and I hoped hard. A hut. A shack. A tent, even. Just one living person who might meet my eye and nod.

  I steeled myself, then climbed up halfway. Snuck a quick peek over the top in case there were worse things than ever the soldiers did to us.

  Houses stood where none had been for ages. People everywhere — mas and das, grannies and granddas, housewives and husbandmen, kids of all sizes. They looked nothing like me. They spoke a tongue I did not know. They were not Trinovantes and they were not Roman. They were something else entirely, but they cooked and plowed and bickered and hugged and herded and sang, the kids throwing dirt clods and giggling, tending lambs, pulling hair.

  Making flower crowns.

  It was foolhardy, going back, but I couldn’t stay away. I drank in das carrying kids on their shoulders. Mas making cheese and butter. Kids splashing in the stream ford and girls picking apart the exact way Aelfred looked at Eahlswith at the revel last month. I learned their tongue, my ears still full of glamour. I hung on the edge of the crossing place till my arms went numb. And after the fairy girl realized what I was doing and made it so I could never go back — not when the people above the mountain whispered and grew hostile, and especially not when the walls knew to look for me — instead of putting my head down and fetching and carrying and forgetting, I made a plan.

  “Goodness, Agnes, what are you doing out here? It’s freezing, and you should be indoors.” Ma steps out of the pig byre as I’m trying to sneak up the path. “You haven’t been fetching water, have you? Here, give that over and go play.”

  “But Ma, I don’t mind. Really.”

  “Nonsense!” Ma takes the bucket and wails when she sees my cold-reddened hands. “We must wrap those right now. You’ll get frostbite!”

  “Yes, Ma.” It’s easier than arguing. I shove my hands into my apron and run my fingers over the scrap of fairy cloth. Something’s not right. Ma should be treating me like Agnes. Instead she’s treating me like a baby.

  Or mayhap it’s working just as I mean it to. Ma is loving me hard and consuming, like a fire. She’s loving me like something that must be protected at all costs. Not like she’d love a child who must make a mistake or two and learn from them, who is strong and smart enough to do it.

  No. It’s working like the boy-thing intended. Tempting me to use something beyond my control with the hopes of gaining things I’m not meant to have.

  I pull the cloth from my apron. I must be done with it. Agnes did not have to glamour her ma and da for them to love her. I am Agnes and I must do the same.

  Instead of going inside, I slip around the house and into the garden where I dig a hole and shove in the scrap of fairy cloth. Then I stand up, trembling, my foot primed near the pile of dirt, hesitating, hesitating, willing myself to fill in the hole.

  She might stop loving me at all. She might turn away from me. I will have nowhere to go. I will lose another ma.

  The cloth is back in my hand. Back in my apron. I’m shaking all over. I fill in the empty hole with one swift sweep of my foot.

  This wall insists I’m telling the story wrong. It keeps interrupting and calling me bad names and threatening to pull me in, but soon enough it goes fuzzy with sleep and there’s a dizzying clamor of voices and a shush of gritty brown wind as I pass through.

  I blink, and I’m in a grand corridor, one of the kind that all look alike, lit faintly green and arching high and cold above my head. The walls on either side are faded, deep in dreams, so I move quick.

  A single gust of silver turns along the floor. In Woolpit, I tried not to look for the wind. It was hard to stop watching once I started, and it would be pretty and fold on itself and glitter, and then I’d get a cuff to the ear and a grown-up shouting at me to step lively. But now I squint into the dim. I start thinking about Mother, and curls of wind drift like dust in a sunbeam, and corners appear in the hallways where none were before. Then more corridors and corners, more winks and glimmers, and I stop thinking much at all and just follow.

  They lead me toward music.

  It’s muffled by distance, but there’s a lute and a lyre spinning a brisk circle dance, and flutes and the clattering of spoons and laughter and the tromp of dancing feet. Gleeful shrieking and rumbling and the sound of small things breaking.

  The revel. It has to be.

  If I wasn’t following the wind, I’d think I was being lured. I can’t turn back, though. Not given what’ll happen with Em and the pig-thing, especially considering how much the king may already know thanks to those dratted walls. I must escape or face eternity as a rat — or worse.

  The noise gets louder as I slink near, and soon enough, I turn into a corridor where open doorways spill blocks of firelight every twenty paces into the green-glow dim. At the end of the hallway is a staircase, and whispering all the way up are silvery glints of wind. I’ll have to move past these three doorways without any of Those Good People seeing me.

  I lift my hands. They’re mostly skin again, but there’s a pattern pressed deep into them. Wall-twigs if I hold them up, floor stones if I move them down. Whatever that glamour-dust was that Em blew on me — when? — must be wearing off. Music fills the chamber and the hallway, too, and the laughter and talk all but drown it out, so I don’t have to try for tiptoe-quiet. At the first doorway I cautiously peek inside.

  I mean only to be sure no one’s looking at the door, but I stare outright at the sprawling room lit by thousands of tiny blazes of firelight. It’s as big as the feasting hall where Acatica and I laid the table not long ago, and Those Good People are drifting here and there, gathering in twos and threes to smoke and chatter, pressed against the wall and kissing in a way that makes my face go hot. The rotty glamour smell is thick and my pig bite hurts in a steady hum; a lot of seeming must be going on here. No one’s paying this doorway any mind and I’m about to dart past it, when someone catches my eye.

  It’s Acatica. She’s across the hall between two of those sculptures that look like people made of sand, and she’s holding a dish of sliced honey. Don’t leave me. Take me with you. I’m begging.

  Her plea glides into my head clear and direct, and I pull back into the hallway out of sight. I can save her. No more rats and vicious walls. No more bloody stumps for fingers. I’ll move slow. Those Good People won’t notice me. They’re too busy reveling to pay heed to one mortal thing.

  The pig bite on my leg throbs.

  I peek again. Please. You have to. Acatica’s whole face is frantic. Her hands like claws around the dish she’s holding. I can’t leave her here.
Not like this. Or my da. They may have made a bargain, but it was a bad bargain. No one makes good decisions when they’re scared.

  My foot moves forward on its own. Toward the doorway. It’s not every day I have a chance to help someone. To save someone. I’ll take her hand and we’ll slip down this hallway and up those stairs and —

  I stumble. My pig-bit leg goes stiff and won’t bend.

  I blink awake.

  Not awake, not exactly. I cough against the rotty glamour smell, and when I dart another look into the hall, Acatica is still there — only she’s one of those statues made of sand. She’s not quite smiling. Rather, it looks like she’s just realizing something’s not going her way. The bowl is positioned on her outstretched, sculpted hands.

  We don’t care for your trickery, whisper the walls. We’ll shut you up good.

  “Forgive me,” I whisper to Acatica, because there’s nothing I can do and I’m trying not to cry as I hurry down the corridor, past each doorway and its span of orange light. The ache in my leg subsides into stinging. My belly hurts, and not just from going hungry for a while. I get to the stairs and take them two at a time.

  When I reach the top, my heart lurches. A hallway stretches out so long I can’t see the end. Every ten paces there’s a door. They line both sides of the corridor, each one smooth and green and twice as tall as me. I’ll have to try every one. Into eternity.

  The walls giggle.

  I close my eyes. I think of Woolpit, its sprawling fields and rolling heath. My little house at the end of the path, its fence that won’t stay up and the shed that’s perfect for playing pretend in. Glory when we were both small, how she and I would spend hours in the greenwood with berry baskets, discussing whether it’s possible to break a dirt clod into such tiny pieces that it would stop being a dirt clod, only it’s not Glory’s face I see but Acatica’s, only that makes no sense because Acatica hasn’t been above the mountain in so many whens I can’t even count them.