Silver moved to take the old man"s arm.
Go through the Gate swiftly-Fyraire"s contact came to all three, Holly, Chris and Fletcher-for I must make it take me to my own place; and from there to Faerie is a short step She did not move when Chris and Fletcher went to the Gate; she was talking urgently to Fyraire.
"You said there was an overlap, didn"t you? Between here and there. So if being spell-breakers and humans means we can"t come with you, surely we could at least see it?"
"Who wants to?" Chris interrupted. "I seen enough. Let"s get home."
Fletcher said, "I"ve made my choice. I don"t want to see what I can"t have."
The boy is closest to the truth. It is not good to see that which cannot be had for all the gold or love in the world, and know that it cannot be had.
"You two carry on-I"ll be with you in a bit." She watched them go. They think I"m crazy. Maybe I am. But I"ll see it through to the end. All of it.
Do not say no warning was given-the range widened to include the rest-now, follow me.
He pa.s.sed through the Gate, and after him Oberon, Elathan and Eilunieth in a group; then Holly and the Harper and Tanaquil; then the other elukoi and morkani. At the Gate Holly put her hand over her eyes and carried on walking, holding Mathurin"s arm.
It was worse than before, much worse. Before it had made her dizzy and sick, but this was like a blow in the stomach.
She stumbled, breathless and sweating, the glow of the wine shaken out of her; stone cold sober.
"My own place" the Unicorn had said. Holly recognised it. Silver birches were leafless still, buds not broken, the dips andhollows filled with red bracken; leaves underfoot, yellow and brown; the sky an incredibly wide expanse of blue; the sun too high for winter.
I saw this at Highrock-Holly let go of the Harper"s arm-at midsummer. Clear as I see it now.
A rutted track twisted among the trees, easy going for the wagons. Holly pushed ahead and found herself by Fyraire and the King.
Oberon said, "How long is it that we have been gone from our own land?"
A year and a day. All the thousands of years that have pa.s.sed over you have only sufficed there to turn summer to winter, and winter again to summer.
"And where shall we return, Lord?"
To the place where you left it, you and all your people.
They topped a rise and the trees ended. Holly, still walking forward, found her way barred by the Unicorn.
You may look only. It was a warning. Stand here by me. Oberon"s people! There is your home. Go to it while the way is open.
"This wood borders on Faerie?"
The Silver Wood borders on most places.
The line of wagons rumbled ahead and out of the wood, and with them went the elukoi, the morkani, and the beasts.
Holly watched them go. For a few yards there was gra.s.s, then it petered out and sandy soil showed through, and that in turn gave way to hard flat sand. She saw that, then she was distracted by Oberon.
He had gone forward first, now he stood alone on the sand. She saw him take a deep breath and straighten up, and it was more than that-his whole body grew and straightened skyward. It took him as a fire takes paper, the colour flooded back into his skin and the wrinkles went out of his face; his golden eyes cleared, and his hair flamed and reddened like a sunrise.
Tall he was, and strong and fair and wise; Oberon, Lord of Faerie.
Others followed: Eilunieth, Elathan, Mathurin, Tanaquil, Seahawk, Brionis and Silver-the age and the cares of Earth went from them like a bad dream. It was not that they became young. They became ageless.
And Holly was alone. Those who glanced carelessly back and saw her had no recognition in their eyes, not even Elathan; not even Mathurin. She knew then why Elathan would not have taken Fletcher with him even if he could. They had pa.s.sed from a nightmare into the waking world.
Fyraire stirred. Look well. If you must look, then look well.
Holly looked away and beyond the people of Faerie.
It was summer and early morning, she felt the heat of it on her face. She stood on the verge of a wide sandy beach, with the waves beating far ahead as the tide went out.
A long rocky spit of land reached out into the sea and ended at a craggy mount. On this was a city, white and gold in the sunrise, hazed in flying spray.
Holly forgot the elukoi and morkani then. She knew that city. It was impossible, but she knew it. And she wanted it desperately.
Plain white stone houses with their roofs of enamelled blue tiles, bright as kingfishers; glinting here and there with gold-she knew them. The terraced streets that criss-crossed up the hill, the arches and bridges and gardens with their fountains, the courtyards with shivering lime trees; she knew them all. She could have named the shops and warehouses and the docks, and the cobbled streets that led down to the harbour. It was all white light and gold, and blue shadows rich in sea-haze.
She thought it must be somewhere she had dreamed of, or seen as a child; not knowing how familiar that perilous Kingdom can seem.
A strong wind out of the east whipped the sea to foam, and brought her the clean smell of salt; and fish-smells too from the market at the mount"s base, where fishing boats were drawn up on the shingle. In the waterside docks were high-prowed sailing ships with canvas bellying deep in the wind as they strained to set sail.
I know that place, she thought or said or sang. Every street, every cliff above town. I know the ships in port and their captains, I know what fabled lands they set sail for. Oberon, I know it as well as you do. This is home- Unknowingly she stepped forward, and the Unicorn lowered his head and a horn barred her way.
You have seen. Go back. That would kill you.
"I don"t care. I"m going there."
Get back!
She made a dive past him, but he was there before her. The horn stabbed at her throat and she dodged, leaped back again to avoid the flailing hooves, and slipped.
"No!"
He was a white fury. She scrambled up and ran, pushing through the bracken. Hooves crashed behind her, she felt his hot breath, and she ran; headed away from that white city.
He"s going to kill me! She slipped again, cannoned off a birch tree and ran on, scarcely breaking stride. The ground dipped; opened into a trickle of a stream. She hurdled it, heard him scatter stones close on her heels.
"I won"t go there-I won"t!"
Her foot caught in a pothole. She fell and twisted sideways. The white horn struck within an inch of her and split a birch trunk as thick as her leg. Holly was up and away, one shoe left behind in the mud, as the Unicorn wrenched free from the pale wood. She ran, limping.
Ahead, the trees were clearing-it would give her room to run-she sprinted out of the wood and over the snowy gra.s.s, skidded across a slushy road and fetched up hard against a low brick wall.
No noise except her own sobbing, heaving breath.
Holly opened her eyes, clinging to the wall as if it were a lifebelt, feeling as if her chest had been scoured out from the inside. She was looking down at railway lines. Not a wall -the parapet of the bridge; Hallows Hill.
She looked over her shoulder-an ordinary road and a hill and, in the distance, Birchdale Junction. Dazed, she bent down to feel her wet shoeless foot and test the ankle. He was right , she thought. The Silver Wood borders on most places. I"ve seenthe last of that shoe anyway.
In the white expanse of the marshes were two dots of colour. She waved both arms over her head and waited until Fletcher and Chris waved back, then took the path across the mud.
It was for a.s.surance she looked for the Downs. They were unforested. She could see everything between her and those ancient hills clearly; the contours of the land under the snow, the houses of Combe Marish and of Deepdean under Chalk Head, and every dip and fold and snow-filled hollow of the Downs themselves. Frosty air struck her newly cold. A gull curved high on the wind and cried. Her shadow went tall into the west. It was good; but not good enough. She squeezed her eyes shut but the hot tears ran down her cheeks.
I had to look. She wiped her face. I had to look, didn"t I. What was the name of that city? I knew it-I knew all about it-but it"s gone now. What did he say? That which cannot be had for all the gold or love in the world. And still to want it.
"We thought we"d lost you for good," Chris grunted, short of breath from the slope up to the bridge. "Well-what did you see?"
"You didn"t miss anything." She smiled and lied. "I didn"t get there-I don"t think we can. And I lost a shoe somewhere!"
"Oh, Jesus, girl!" Chris saw her one wet sock and shouted with laughter. "Trust you. It could only happen to you!"
"Oh ha ha. Very funny. How am I supposed to get home-hop?"
Fletcher pointed down the road. "You"ve got the devil"s luck. There"s the early bus."
"Good. I"m starved, just plain starved. Me for bacon and eggs. And beans and toast and fried spud-"
Holly realised it had been fourteen hours since she"d eaten. "Oh, don"t!"
Fletcher took one last look back at the Hills. "We seem to have come out of this pretty well, wouldn"t you say? They are OK, and so are we."
"I should think so! Since we managed most of it between us three-right Holly?"
"Hmm?" Us all right? she thought. Two weeks and we"re back in that b.u.g.g.e.rly school with b.i.t.c.h-Gabriel, and she"s going to try and beat h.e.l.l out of me. And there"s exams. And my G.o.ddamm parents. It"s too much. And never to see the city again...
But already her fingers itched for paints to trace its shape on paper, and Chris was waiting; so she sc.r.a.ped up a grin and said, "Right on!"
Fletcher held up a hand. "Listen."
Someone in one of the nearby houses had a radio on, and the old carol came out thinly over the snow. The three of them listened; and laughed; and flagged down the bus. The carol played on in the deserted morning: "The holly and the ivy, When they are both full grown; Of all the trees that are in the wood The holly bears the crown.
O the rising of the sun And the running of the deer, The playing of the merry organ: Sweet singing in the choir..."
About the Author
One of the most important and idiosyncratic contemporary British speculative fiction writers, Mary Gentle was born in 1956, and published her first novel, A Hawk in Silver, a Young Adult Fantasy, in 1977. She first gained major critical attention with her Orthe sequence, an SF planetary romance made up of Golden Witchbreed (1983) and Ancient Light (1987); here, her mastery of historical and exotic coloration combined well with reflections on the relationship of the First and Third Worlds, producing a generous mixture of entertainment and argument, of fantastic atmosphere and rigorous extrapolation.
The next phase of Mary Gentle"s career involved the application to fiction of the copious knowledge she had gained in her studies of the history of the Renaissance. That period"s Hermetic philosophies and pungent realities gave shape to the masterful White Crow cycle, made up of two initial novellas in her first collection Scholars and Soldiers (1989), the major novels Rats and Gargoyles (1990) and The Architecture of Desire (1991), the t.i.tle novel of her second collection, Left To His Own Devices (1994), and "Black Motley", another story in the last-named volume. Moving freely through time and s.p.a.ce and with equal ease between the genres, these tales relate the strange and metaphysically significant adventures of the scholar-soldier Valentine and her sometime lover, the gross and earthy Baltazar Casaubon. Grunts! (1992) is a lighter and decidedly parodic examination of Tolkienian Fantasy from an orcish perspective.
After completing an MA in War Studies (she is an avid collector of university degrees), Mary Gentle worked for several years on a ma.s.sive and seminal Fantasy (or SF) epic, Ash: A Secret History, which was published in a single 1100 page volume by Gollancz in the UK in June 2000. Dealing with an earth-shaking confrontation between the powers of a very familiar 15th Century Europe and their bizarrely extrahistorical nemesis, Visigothic Carthage, Ash is a work of vast imagination, profound understanding of the forces and perceptions governing history, and comprehensively sympathetic insight into war and its effects on human psychology. It may well emerge as one of the cla.s.sics of modern Fantasy. (In the USA, it was published as four paperback volumes from Avon Eos: A Secret History, Carthage Ascendant, The Wild Machines, and Lost Burgundy.) Nick Gevers - "Introduction" to The Joy of Knowledge, the Clash of Arms, an interview with Mary Gentle, available at the Infinity Plus website: