Jo Walton - Among Others

Then in the evening we went up the valley to see Grampar. He’s out of hospital and in a nursing home called Fedw Hir. Everyone else there is a loony, practically. There’s a man who sits going “Blubba, blubba, blubba,” with his lips, and another one who cries out at intervals. It’s the most horrible depressing place I’ve ever seen in my life, all those old men with their jaws sunken and their eyes dull, sitting on their beds in pajamas and looking as if they’re in death’s anteroom. Grampar is one of the best there. He’s paralysed all down one side, but his other side is as strong as ever, and he can talk. His mind is all there, though his skin isn’t the right colour. His hair has always been grey, ever since I can remember, but now it’s white and there’s a patch in it that looks the colour of curdled milk.

He can talk, though he didn’t have much to say. He’s hoping to come home soon, but Auntie Teg doesn’t think so, though she hopes to have him out for the day at Christmas. She wants me to come, and I said I only would if I don’t have to see my mother at all. I don’t know if we can manage that. Grampar was absolutely thrilled to see me, and wanted to know all about me and what I was doing, and that was awkward, of course. He won’t have Daniel’s name mentioned, not at all ever, he hasn’t let anyone mention it since Daniel abandoned my mother. So of course I can’t say anything about him. But I told him about school, leaving out quite how awful it is and how everyone hates me. I told him about my marks and about the library. He wanted to know if my leg was getting better, and I said it was.

It isn’t. But I realise now it’s nothing. All right, it hurts, but I can walk about. I’m mobile. He’s just stuck there, though he gets some physical therapy, Auntie Teg says.

When we were walking out, Auntie Teg, who goes there often, was saying goodnight to some of the other men, who she knows, and who either didn’t respond or responded inappropriately with howling and stammering. I couldn’t help thinking about Sam, who must be around the same age as these men, and his nice warm room and the piles of books and the electric samovar. He was a person, and these men were just refuse, really, the remains of people. “We have got to get Grampar out of there,” I said.

“Yes, but it’s not that easy. He can’t manage on his own. I could come up at weekends, but he’d need a nurse. It’s very expensive. They’re hoping maybe in the spring.”

“I could live with him and help,” I said, and for a moment it hung there like a little star of hope.

“You need to be in school. And anyway, you couldn’t help him walk. He leans all his weight on the person supporting him.”

She’s right. I’d fold up under that, my leg would give way and we’d both be on the floor.

I should write to him. I can do that, nice cheery letters. Auntie Teg can read them out, it’ll give them something to talk about at visiting time. We have got to get him out of there. It’s incredibly grim. And I thought school was bad.

I went up the valley on the red-and-white bus today. It’s interesting. It goes on the old road all the way, up through the narrow streets of terraced houses, through Pontypridd, and all the way I could see horrible coal tips and slag heaps and ugly houses crammed together, and above them, the hills. When I got to Aberdare, I got off and walked up the cwm to the ruins we call Osgiliath. I don’t know what they really were. The trees were practically leafless, and there were a lot of wet leaves on the ground. It wasn’t actually raining, which was good, as I urgently needed to sit down by the time I got there. I hadn’t remembered how far it was. Or rather, I’d remembered it was about half a mile, the nearest of any of them to a bus stop, but still a long way for me to walk now.

I wasn’t looking for fairies, especially. I just wanted to go there. But the fairies were there. Glorfindel was. They were waiting for me.

I’d like to report our conversation as if it were like talking to Tolkien’s elves. “Long we have missed you and awaited your coming, Mori, long we have sought you in vain among the trees and palaces. Word came to us from a far country that you still walked the world, riven from your twin, so we waited yet in hope until today the breeze brought us news of your coming. Be welcome among us, for we have great need of you.”

But it wasn’t like that. Sometimes Mor and I would play over a conversation with the fairies with me saying what they should have said in language like that. That speech is essentially what Glorfindel said, what he meant to say, only most of it wasn’t in words at all, and what was, was in Welsh and not that kind of words.

Glorfindel’s beautiful. He looks like a young man, nineteen or twenty, dark-haired and grey-eyed. He wears a cloak of leaves that swirls around him, except that it isn’t really a cloak. It isn’t as if he could take it off.

The fairies are very wise. Or rather, they know a lot. They’ve had a lot of experience. They understand better than anyone else how magical things work. That’s why it would have been such a disaster if my mother had got control of them. She would have used that knowledge to make herself powerful. They wouldn’t have been able to help doing it for her. I don’t know how it would have played out in the real world. I don’t suppose she’d really have become a dark queen, not exactly. But while she can’t ever try that again, she’s trying something else. I should have known.

What Glorfindel wants is for me to go, tomorrow, up through Ithilien to Minos’s labyrinth, where he says the dead will walk. Tomorrow is Halloween. He said I need to take oak leaves and make a door for them to pass through. That will stop her getting hold of them. Fairies know a lot, but they can’t do a lot, they can’t really interact all that much with the world, they can’t affect things. They have to get other people to do it for them, and that means me. According to Glorfindel, he’d done as much as he could in making me get here this week. He hadn’t known where I was until I spoke to the fairy, and he couldn’t reach out until I’d burned the letters. But then he arranged things to bring me to him. (He rearranged the school timetable? All the school timetables? He arranged for Daniel to agree to let me come? He made me want to come to the cwm today? Sometimes I hate magic.)

He said it would be easy, not like last time. No risk. The difficult thing is that I’ll have to be there at dusk. I thought that would be really hard, but when I lied to Auntie Teg and said I wanted to have tea with Moira from the Grammar School, she said she’d pick me up at seven and take me to Fedw Hir to see poor old Grampar again.

Reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Spell Sword , which is fun so far.

Near thing, but not the way I expected at all.

So the first thing was, it was a long loooong walk. No fairies were anywhere near me as I walked it. They hate pain, I don’t know why, but I’ve known it as long as I’ve known anything about them. Even a skinned knee or a turned ankle will send them scattering. The pain screaming out every step from my leg must have been enough to scare them off for miles around. It’s a good thing I set off early, to give it time to subside after I got there.

King Minos’s labyrinth is right up the mountain, the Graig. It’s one of the highest ruins. It was a very old iron works, one of the first, and an iron ore mine, not a deep one, just a scratching and mostly filled in. What’s left of it really does look like a labyrinth, or a maze anyway. You have to thread your way through the walls, and though none of them are more than shoulder-height it does feel like following a maze pattern. The bit where the entrance to the diggings used to be is in the centre, and it’s a bit sunken, and there’s a kind of lane that leads down to it. I sat on the wall there and rested, leaning my cane up against the wall. It was spotting with rain, so I couldn’t read, though I’d brought my book, of course. It was Delany’s Babel 17 , I’d been reading it on the bus. I’d brought oak leaves too, I picked them up on the way up through heavily wooded Ithilien. Glorfindel hadn’t said how many, but I’d kept stuffing them into my bag as I went. Oaks hang onto their leaves all winter, like mallorns, so it’s easy to find them.