Jo Walton - Among Others

I was wearing my school coat, because I don’t have another any more. I hadn’t brought my coat when I’d run away. My school coat has the Arlinghurst badge on it, a rose, with the motto Dum spiro spero , which actually I rather like—while I breathe I shall hope. I heard a joke about a school deciding to have “I hear, I see, I learn” which translates as “Audio video disco.” I spent a little while thinking about that. At this distance, I could kind of like the motto. When I’m there, I feel I have to hate everything about it or I’m giving in. School seemed very far away as I sat there, coat notwithstanding. There’s something real and essential about the landscape in the valleys that makes everything else seem like a distant distraction.

After a while the sun came out, feebly. The clouds were scudding across the sky at a tremendous pace, and I was looking across the valley from almost as high as they were. There aren’t many trees up there, just two spindly rowans clinging by the entrance to the old diggings. There were flocks of birds circling about, probably deciding which direction to migrate, marking patterns across the sky. After the sun came the fairies, peeping out at me behind walls, and at last Glorfindel.

It’s very unsatisfactory writing down conversation with a fairy. Either I put it into proper words, which really is making it up, or I try to represent something that’s only partly in words with just those few words. And if I write it down like I did yesterday, it’s a lie. I’m saying what I want him to have said, when in fact what he said was a few words and a whole lot of feeling going along with that. How do you write that down? Maybe Delany could.

We didn’t talk all that much, anyway. He sat beside me, and I could almost feel him. Then I could feel him next to me, which is beyond unusual, and then I started to have sexual feelings. I know, unthinkable, with a fairy. All the fairies came closer, then, which worried me and once I’d started worrying about it Glorfindel was as insubstantial as ever, though still right next to me.

I remembered then that I do know stories about women who had sex with fairies, and every single one of those stories is about pregnancy. I looked at Glorfindel, and yes, he’s beautiful and ... ineluctably masculine ... and he was looking at me soulfully, and yes I would like to, but not if it means that. No way! Even if all the normal men I meet look at me as if I am dogmeat. And in a way, that would be incest too, with Glorfindel. More so.

“Untouched?” he said, or something like that, I’m never absolutely sure what that word means. But I knew what he was talking about.

“So far, I’ve fought off everyone who’s tried,” I said, sounding much fiercer than I intended, though it’s nothing but the truth, not that Daniel needed fighting exactly. “You know about Carl.”

“Dead,” he said, with gloating finality. Carl is dead. He was a policeman, and he went to Northern Ireland, because the pay was better, and he got blown up. Or, to put it another way, I had asked Glorfindel how to get rid of him, and I stole his comb and sank it in Croggin Bog. That was when he was staying with my mother and he came into my room and sat too close and kept trying to touch me. I bit him, hard, and he hit me, but he backed off. I knew that wasn’t the end of it. I was still fourteen then. Dropping someone’s comb in a bog isn’t murder. I thought it had worked when he went away.

Glorfindel just looked at me, and I knew he was my friend, as much as any of the fairies are, as much as they can be, being what they are. Lots of them don’t care about people or the world at all, and even the ones that do aren’t like people. I don’t know what it meant to him for desire to be in the air between us. His name isn’t really Glorfindel, he doesn’t even really have a name. He isn’t human. I felt very aware of that.

The sun was sinking behind the hill we were sitting on, but it wasn’t really set yet; in the next valley it was still full daylight. But I suppose there’s always a next valley, all the way around the world until you get to tomorrow. Our shadows were very long. Glorfindel got up and told me to scatter the leaves in a spiral through the maze, ending at the two rowan trees. I did, and then I sat and waited as the light faded. I wasn’t sure if I was going to see anything, or whether it would be one of those times when I do what I’ve been told and it makes no sense and I never know whether it worked or what it did. The sky faded until it got to that point where there’s no colour left in anything but it isn’t dark. I started to think about how awful going back was going to be.

Then they came walking up the dramroad out of the valley through the twilight. They were ghosts, I suppose, the procession of the dead. They weren’t pale kings and pale maidens, they were work-worn men and women—perfectly ordinary people, except for being dead. You’d never mistake them for living people. You couldn’t quite see through them, but they were even more drained of colour than everything else, and they weren’t quite as solid as they ought to be. One of the men I recognised. He had been sitting in Fedw Hir near Grampar making blubbing sounds with his mouth. Now he strode along easily with a spring in his step. His face was grave and composed, he was a man with dignity and purpose. He bent and picked up one of my oak leaves from the path and offered it like a ticket at the cinema as he passed between the two trees. I didn’t see anyone take it. I couldn’t see into the darkness at all.

Some of the others were milling about at the entrance, they had come this far and were unable to get in, because of whatever my mother had done. When they saw the old man give the leaf, they started picking up the leaves. Then each passed through, one at a time. They were all very earnest and dignified, not speaking at all, taking their turns to go between the trees and vanish into the darkness. I don’t know whether they were going into the ground or under the hill or to another world or down to Acheron or what. There was a fat woman and a young man with a motorcycle helmet, who seemed to be together. All the dead saw each other, but they didn’t seem to see me or the fairies, who crowded to each side of the path, watching. The young man gestured for the woman to go ahead, and she did, solemnly, as if they were in church.

Then I saw Mor. I hadn’t been expecting it at all. She was walking along quite unconcerned, a leaf in her hand as if she was playing some serious part in a game. I shouted her name, and she turned and saw me and smiled, with such gladness that it broke my heart. I reached out for her, and she for me, but she wasn’t really there, like a fairy, worse than a fairy. She looked afraid, and she looked from side to side, seeing the fairies, of course, lining the path.

“Let go,” Glorfindel said, almost in my ear, a whisper so warm it moved my hair.

I wasn’t holding her, except that I was. Our hands reached out and did not touch, but the connection between us was tangible. It glowed violet. It was the only thing with colour. It wasn’t visible normally, but if it had been for the last year it would have been trailing around me like a broken bridge. Now it was whole again, I was whole again, we were together. “Holding or dying,” he said in my ear, and I understood, he meant that I could hold her here and that would be bad, and I trusted him about that although I didn’t understand it, or I could go with her through that door to death. That would be suicide. But I couldn’t let her go. It had been so very hard without her all that time, such a rotten year. I’d always meant to die too, if dying was necessary.

“Half way,” Glorfindel said, and he didn’t mean I was half dead without her or that she was halfway through or any of that, he meant that I was halfway through Babel 17 , and if I went on I would never find out how it came out.