Aphrodite's Hat (8 page)

‘But what, beyond the world, does she want with a human child?' the visitor enquired.

‘His mother was a votaress of her order,' Rowan explained.

The explanation struck her, as she voiced it, as lame. The connection hardly seemed strong enough to justify the scenes which had raged over the little Indian boy whose mother, a friend of the queen's, had died in childbirth.

‘One of your idle fancies, acting the saviour,' the king had chided. A pretty poppet, at least by mortal standards, Rowan thought, but no match for the queen's terrible beauty or the king's awe-inspiring features. The plainest of us, she considered as she eyed the visitor, is more remarkable than the round-eyed dust-coloured man child. And yet the queen doted on him, still took him into her bed at night wrapped in costly Indian shawls – the only surviving relics of his mother – and played with him each morning, quite as if she were a mortal and he her own offspring.

‘I wonder what the child makes of it all?' The visitor was of the king's party but had long ago given up taking sides except to convey the appropriate official demonstrations of loyalty. From time immemorial, the two households had been an unstable liaison, sometimes at it hammer and tongs and then, as suddenly, falling into recapitulations of old affections, only to set off again before long on some new quarrel. It made him weary to think of it. Truly, immortality was a doubtful blessing. ‘Mind if I take a look at the boy?' he asked.

Rowan frowned. ‘What for?'

‘Interest only,' the visitor said nonchalantly. ‘In all this time I've not set eyes on him and naturally one becomes curious.'

Since the child was in the next room, it was an easy matter to grant the request. Rowan had rather warmed to the visitor. Her own order of males were a dull lot – pansies and dragonflies – and she was, without knowing why, attracted by the sense of simmering danger the visitor had about him.

She moved towards the door behind them and opened it warily, for in exposing the boy to potential predators she was disobeying orders.

A flight of stairs ran down to a high-vaulted room. At its centre a young boy squatted, his glossy head bent. He was drawing something on the sandy floor and seemed wholly absorbed.

‘Manu,' Rowan called. ‘We have a guest. Come and say hello.'

The boy got up and padded towards them. He had, the visitor thought, for a mortal an expression of considerable calm. He extended a long silvery hand to the child.

Manu held out his own plump brown one in return and bowed his head slightly. ‘I am delighted to meet you,' he said gravely.

The visitor also bowed. ‘Likewise. You are well?'

‘I am well,' said the little boy, ‘if a little bored.' He spoke with a pure diction as if, which was not exactly the case, this was not his own tongue.

The visitor turned to Rowan and raised his eyebrows. ‘Bored, is it?'

‘Are you, Manu?' she asked, a little flustered. The child had shown no previous signs of discontent.

‘Oh, always to be safe and happy is dull,' the child announced. As if to demonstrate the truth of these words, he took off, sprinting away round the large room with his arms held wide and beating the air. ‘I can't fly,' he announced, coming to rest before the visitor.

‘No one flies here,' Rowan said, embarrassed.

The visitor looked sideways at her with narrow sloe-blue eyes. ‘But we can if we choose,' he murmured.

‘But,' said Rowan flustered still more, ‘it is thought …'

‘Vulgar?' the visitor suggested and laughed, showing two double rows of pointed yellow teeth.

There was something disturbing in this which made Rowan move protectively towards the boy who was gazing up at the visitor entranced. ‘Can you fly?' he asked.

‘Oh, we all can,' the visitor, whose name was Monkshood, replied. ‘But it's not done.'

‘Why not?' The upturned face, which still showed traces of childish pudginess, had the look of a being far older – a Buddha maybe.

‘Lord knows,' said Monkshood. ‘Etiquette is always obscure in observance and hard to explain. The lower orders fly, of course. But among our kind …' he waved a mauve-veined hand at the end of which the nails curved dangerously.

‘I would like to fly,' Manu stated.

‘Ah,' said the visitor, now a little bored himself. ‘I dare say.'

It was in fact about the boy that Monkshood had come. He had been sent as an ambassador from the king to reopen the negotiations for the child to be sent across to his kingdom. Monkshood was a practised diplomat but he was obliged to admit that so far they had got nowhere. Quite why it was that both these powerful beings had such a passion to have this child under their sway was beyond his understanding. Seeing the boy in the flesh had made Monkshood none the wiser. The brat was attractive enough, to be sure, for a human; but there was nothing obviously special about him. As the boy himself had remarked, he couldn't even fly, as the meanest of their kind could.

However, Monkshood was there to further the king's business, not to question its merits. He adjusted his usually unforthcoming expression to one of sincere but mild appeal. He knew he had been chosen as the emissary least likely to irritate the queen.

‘Your majesty,' he said, bowing low on entering her presence. ‘It is most gracious of you to agree to see me amid so many more pressing demands.'

The queen slightly inclined her neck. They both knew that she had nothing to do since all the usual activity within her province was on hold while the dispute over the child seethed. ‘Gracious is as gracious does. What is it you have come to ask?' As if I didn't know, her manner as good as added.

‘Your majesty, it is the usual request. You have heard it many times. Too many times, I sometimes fear.' Monkshood judged that a slight disloyalty towards the king was worth the risk of his displeasure should he hear of it.

The queen smiled. It was a cold smile and might have brought goose flesh to a human skin. To Monkshood, however, it was moonshine on water.

‘Quite so. Your king is well acquainted with my views. His mother was a votaress of my order; and, in the spiced Indian air, by night, full often has she gossiped by my side; and sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands.'

The queen looked dead at Monkshood with long eyes that had darkened to a forbidding black. ‘But she, being mortal, of that boy did die. And for her sake do I rear up her boy and for her sake I will not part with him.'

Monkshood sighed. It was as he had predicted. But it was his duty to have one more try. ‘Is there nothing you can give me to tell the king that will give him hope?'

‘Nothing,' said the queen. ‘I am afraid you must return to your king empty of words of comfort.'

Manu had been taken from the human world before he was a day old, but he was perfectly aware that he was a mortal boy. He was not a changeling – that is a child who has been swapped at birth for a fairy child. He was an orphan who had been abducted by the queen perhaps out of her much-vaunted love for his mother or perhaps, as the queen's consort had snidely suggested, as a mere fancy. That she was prone to fancies Manu, who was a quick child, was well aware.

Since he could remember, she had taken him into her bed to cuddle and caress him but these days he preferred to be put to his own bed by Rowan, the queen's lady-in-waiting. Rowan was relatively young. Not that anyone could ever determine a fairy's exact age, since fairies evolved, rather than being born, in a process somewhat like the life-cycle of plants – moving from seed to husk immensely slowly over aeons of time yet never dying. The queen, he knew, was very old, even for a fairy. Her consort was slightly younger by a couple of thousand years. This information could not have been gleaned from their appearance, which never altered; or, if it did, so gradually that no mortal reckoning could register the change.

Manu had no absolute measure of his own age but over the years, when he could escape the vigilance of his carers, he had been in the way of finding a route from the thick of the wood to its verge, where human children sometimes came to play. Most often, it was the wilder boys who ventured there. They came in excited trepidation since there were still wild animals which, at times of dearth, would come foraging and were capable of savaging a child or even eating one alive. Manu crouched in trees above the playful children's heads, concealed by his dark skin and the capacity learned of his adopted kind for camouflage, watching fascinated the mortal children. From these forays, he had worked out that he must now be about the age of the older boys, which was ten or eleven years old.

It was hardly possible for him not to be aware that he was the subject of a struggle between the queen and king. The king having at first indulged the queen over the adoption had conceived a fancy for her mortal prize himself and had demanded Manu be handed over to become his henchman. But the queen had consistently refused to surrender up her charge. In consequence, all the seasonal workings of nature, in correspondence with their rulers, had been at loggerheads: roses bloomed in snow, birds built their nests in fog and ice, and the whole natural world was topsy-turvy and in stasis.

Manu, suspecting that the arrival of the visitor had something to do with this dispute, had followed the ambassador to the queen's quarters and had seen him emerge with an expression that suggested that his mission had failed.

‘Excuse me,' the boy said, approaching. ‘May I talk to you?'

That same evening Monkshood spoke to the king.

‘That there was no joy from her majesty will hardly surprise you, sir, but I did meet the boy and we conversed.' The king's expression brightened, but he waited for his ambassador to continue. ‘He has conceived a desire to fly. I explained this is hardly possible.'

‘But he wishes to learn?'

‘So it seems.'

‘Ah,' said the king, ‘then perhaps we are in business.'

As a frail moon lifted itself above the darkening trees the king set out, unattended. He made these solitary excursions from time to time. Unlike the queen, his nature craved occasional solitude. Moving soundlessly over the dense undergrowth, he arrived at his destination, a circle of birches enclosing a patch of grass silvered by the wasted moon. But the glade was not, as the king had been expecting, unpeopled, for leaning against the peeling white trunk of one of the trees sat a shape.

The king moved swiftly back into the night shadows but the shape stirred and resolved into the figure of a person who spoke to him.

‘Well met, your majesty.' So he was one of those that could see. He must then be a halfling, that is a mortal with a degree of fairy genes. ‘Forgive me if I am trespassing on your territory,' the mortal continued. For all his respectful address, he appeared quite at ease at the encounter.

‘Not my territory,' the king said, moving into the moonlight.

‘Perhaps, then, your wife's?'

‘She is not my wife.' The king, who felt caught out, spoke with a certain chilly stiffness.

‘I beg your pardon. Your –' the mortal broke off, conveying that he lacked the proper term.

‘My queen,' the king offered, more amicably.

‘Indeed, your queen,' the mortal agreed.

‘I came here,' the king began and halted. He was visited by an odd inclination to confide in this halfling but his customary hauteur held him back.

‘You came to intercept her,' the mortal suggested. It was a statement rather than an enquiry.

‘That is so,' the king admitted.

‘To try to reach agreement over the Indian boy?'

The mortal appeared to have surprising insight, but then maybe he was one of the very rare halflings with a stronger strain of fairy than mortal in their makeup. There were a few, the king had heard, though to this date he had never met one.

‘You know of the boy?'

‘Oh yes,' the mortal said. ‘I know all about him. In a manner of speaking, you could say he is mine.'

‘Your child?' This would put an altogether different complexion on the matter. ‘I had thought, have been advised, that he was the son of an Indian prince.'

‘Not mine in that sense,' the mortal said. ‘But I invented him. So you might say he is more mine than if he were spawned by my own seed. He is rather the seed of – what shall we say? – my imagination. And now he threatens to disrupt my play. Not that that in itself matters – I am in fact rather in favour of disruptions – but with the consequent problems between your royal selves it leaves things stuck. And the groundlings simply won't stand for that.'

‘I see,' said the king, who did not see at all. But at that moment the moonlight intensified and then guttered like a mighty candle.

‘The queen, I suppose,' said the halfling. He moved behind his tree.

The king, left alone and caught off guard, drew himself up to his greatest height. Quite what that was would be hard to quantify but it had the effect of his seeming to tower above the queen when she swept into the glade followed by her extensive retinue. The king had wanted this advantage since he was not sanguine that his speech would carry weight. But to his surprise he found that words came to him easily.

‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,' he declaimed.

The queen with her teeming train of followers halted and looked up at him with long darkening eyes.

‘What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence; I have forsworn his bed and company.'

The row was predictably intense and prolonged but on both sides unusually articulate. If, in the end, unproductive. The king tried one final time. To assert his claim – ‘Give me that boy' – and the queen refused him yet again, ‘Not for thy fairy kingdom' before commanding her followers to retire.

The king stood watching their departure until the quiet accent of the halfling in his ear made him jump. ‘One of my better scenes.'