Guardian of the Green Hill (16 page)

Silly felt ashamed but justified it by telling herself that if she didn't stare, they wouldn't get paid, and they wouldn't like that much, would they? It never occurred to her to pay and not stare, and it certainly never occurred to her that Carl kept all but a modicum of the money his freaks earned for him, giving them just enough for food but not enough to leave. Carl gave them clothes, too, but only their outlandish show costumes, so that they'd have nothing normal to wear if they tried to escape. They were virtual prisoners, of their bodies, their circumstances, and their ringmaster.

“They should be in hospitals,” Dickie said. “Some of them anyway. That woman must have some kind of lymph disease, and she's not getting proper treatment. And look at the fat lady. She'll be dead in a few years if she keeps that up.” The Fabulous Blubberous Maybelle, as her sign identified her, lolled in a cart drawn by four hairy-legged drafthorses, a cart she no longer had the strength to leave. She was the only member of Carl Cottager's show who was well fed, though by
well
he meant sticks of butter and bowls of sugar, which she swilled down for a cheering audience. Once, when she told Carl her bones ached and she wanted to try a diet, he threatened to roll her off her cart in Piccadilly Circus and let the news crews find her. After that, she obediently ate her sticks of butter. To be carted around to provincial venues and treated like a massive sort of fertility goddess was one thing, but such public humiliation would kill her faster than her clogged arteries. And so she thought she was trapped, just like the others.

There were two tents with special exhibits at which spectators could gawk for an additional fifty pence each. One was labeled “For Adults Only,” and from the comments of people leaving the tent, Silly and Dickie gathered it had something to do with Siamese twins. The other promised “A Creature So Strange It Will Haunt Your Dreams! Only 50 Pence for a Peek at the Goblin Brat!” They handed over their coins and filed in with a few other people when the last group came out.

“From the dank, dark underground fairy warrens comes this wee monster,” Carl said in high melodrama. “Just a baby, yet strong as a rhino.” He guided them to a dark corner where a small shrouded box sat on a table.

“Is that it?” Silly asked. “There can't be much under that.” It was bigger than a bread box, but smaller than a television. Whatever it was, she thought, at least it wasn't another poor deformed human. Or was it?

“This beastie is endowed with the magic of the ages,” Carl continued, toying with the moth-eaten green velvet curtain draped over the box. “They call them the Good Folk. They call them the Neighbors. But never let your guard down around a fairy, my friends. He would kill us all, slaughter us where we stand with his thoughts alone, if not for the powerful charms we've placed on him. Observe! The cage is thrice barred with iron, deadly poison to the fairies and pixies. Around the cage we have tied the finest gossamer spiderwebs, and onto their deadly stickiness we've blown dandelion seeds, and those things together no fairy can penetrate. We've wrapped the whole in strands of ivy and bound up the wee man's powers.”

He could see the crowd was getting restive, but he wanted to give them their money's worth, and he had a tale to tell. He told them something about a wedding and a funeral held at the same time, and a man in a high silk top hat who might have been the groom, might have been the chief mourner, might have been both, and how a train of little green men came through, and the last one was scooped up in that high hat and imprisoned. But Silly hardly listened. From near her ear came a hissing voice. The Wyrm, coiled around Dickie's shoulder and still invisible, woke to point something out.

“Do you remember what I told you about how to trap a fairy? All around us is flummery, but this, methinks, is real.” There was a sound of shifting scales as he, invisibly, raised his head to see what was inside the covered box.

The man made a few more boastful claims about the rarity and danger of whatever hid in the box, then, pressing a lever with his foot that made a multicolored strobe light start to flash, he grasped the green curtain in the center and pulled it up with a dramatic flourish.

Silly and Dickie couldn't see anything at first. The adults in the room pressed forward and crowded the children out as they pushed their faces against the box. A moment later, though, like the tide turning, they began to drift away with little disappointed murmurs. Dickie heard someone tell his wife they should demand their money back. Silly pulled him through a gap, and he finally managed to look into the box.

Crouched in the back, as far from the invasive eyes and leering faces as it could get, was a creature no bigger than a newborn baby, naked and scrawny. Its skin, baby soft, was a very pale mottled jade, and its eyes were unnaturally big. Its twiglike arms were curled against its chest, and it trembled uncontrollably. It caught Silly's eye, and for a moment the hopeless look vanished and it started forward, but then a fat, sweaty matron, who had bargained a cheaper price for her brood of ten children, shoved Silly and Dickie aside, determined that her chicks should have their sport and she would get her money's worth.

“What is it, Mum?” a towheaded boy asked.

“It's a dirty fairy,” the mum said.

“Why's he dirty, Mum?” asked a freckled girl in chestnut pigtails.

“'Cause he sucks eggs,” she replied irrelevantly.

“Is this what'll get us, then, if we go in the scummy pond?” a redhead inquired.

“Or if we climb the roof?” asked a black-haired girl.

“'Cause you allus tell us the fairies'll get us if we do anything,” said a tiny tot with golden wispy curls.

“If this is fairies,” said the eldest boy, “then I ain't afeard of them. Mum, I'm a-gonna swim in that scummy pond when we get home, first thing. If I'da known this is all there is to fairies, I'd a-done it long ago!”

Seeing her lifelong hold over her unruly offspring quickly evaporating, Mum ushered her brood out the door and hauled Carl after her by his sleeve, giving the poor man a shrill piece of her mind for corrupting good, wholesome family life with this shocking display. Silly, Dickie, and the Wyrm were left alone with the little green fairy.

Silly, impulsive as ever, attacked the box bodily, but the iron bars wrapped all the way around and were joined by a padlock as big as her fist. She tore off the spiderwebs and dandelions and vines, and the little fairy seemed to relax a bit, as if relieved of some constant pain, but it still wasn't able to get past the iron bars.

“What do we do?” she asked Dickie helplessly. Her main resources, strength and recklessness, had failed.

I don't know
, he almost answered, but he'd learned in the last few weeks that looking confident was almost as good as being confident, and certainly makes everyone around you feel better. So he said, “Go to the door and keep watch. If anyone comes, cough and do what you can to distract them.”

She stood just inside the tent flap and peeked out to see Mum still haranguing Carl. As if they were another sideshow spectacle, a group was gathering round them. Silly felt a tickle in her throat, an almost unbearable desire to cough.

“What do we do?” Dickie asked the Wyrm when they were alone. “How can I get through the metal?”

“Alas, there are great gaps in my metallurgical knowledge. Once I lived a score of years with the dwarves of the Rhineland, learning all the skills of forge and bellows, but now … oh, look, a set of keys.” The Wyrm pointed his wedge head behind the cage, but seeing Dickie look wildly around, he remembered he was still invisible and considerately changed to a ghostly, half-visible shape. Dickie took the bunch of keys from the large iron ring hanging from a hook at the back of the cage. It was a lesson he'd yet to learn: When in doubt, try the obvious.

“Silly,” he called softly, “we found the keys!”

Silly snatched them out of his hand with a jangle and started trying them in the lock. In her rush she wasted a lot of time, trying keys that were obviously too big or too small and dropping them twice and losing complete track of which ones she'd already tried. If she had just let Dickie do this, a lot of what came next could have been avoided. Dickie could see almost at once which key must fit the lock, and they could have been off with the little green fairy quick as billy-o, and when Carl returned to find the fairy missing, he naturally would have suspected Mum and her multitudinous offspring, obviously using a distraction technique. No one had noticed Silly and Dickie in the crowd, and they would have gotten off scot-free. But no, thanks to Silly, who had to do everything herself, it was not to be.

Finally, when she had exhausted every other possibility (some twice or more) she lit on the right key and the lock fell open with a rusty protest. The door swung outward and Silly found herself with an armful of little green fairy—who wasn't a little green fairy for long. In a fit of shapeshifting, it changed from a giant mushroom to a tiger cub to a Psammead to an unwieldy bird that might have been a dodo. It made little mewling sounds as it changed back into a little green fairy and wrapped its skinny arms chokingly tight around Silly's neck. She hugged it back with a fierce love she'd never expected, that protective love we sometimes feel instantly and automatically for things that depend on us.

They heard a cough from the tent flap, the sign for an approaching intruder, but it wasn't one of them as sentry—it was Carl, and his face was red and fuming.

“Hand him over, you lousy little brats,” he said. He actually said something much, much worse, but since neither of them quite knew what the words meant, “lousy little brats” will give you the general idea. He held a wrench in one hand and slapped it against the palm of the other.

Silly clutched her small fairy to her and felt it bury itself in her hair. “I'll never let him go! Never!” And then she did a very foolish thing—she charged straight at an angry man five times her size who was holding a bludgeon. Maybe she didn't really think he'd use it. Maybe she simply couldn't conceive of failure. Maybe she panicked. Who knows. She charged directly at his belly, tucked like a linebacker ready to tackle, and at the last instant dodged to the right. Carl raised his wrench, and even he didn't know if he would actually hit her. He had children of his own, but these brats were stealing his livelihood.

Before he could decide to strike, the tiny, helpless fairy shapeshifted again, this time into a cinnabar and gold dragon, on a small scale but with a yawning toothy mouth that roared into Carl's face. He stumbled back against the flimsy tent wall and brought the whole thing down on them all.

“Stop that girl!” he shouted, but he couldn't see if anyone heard him. By the time he flailed himself free, Silly was a distant speck, her legs flying as she ran away toward the center of town. Carl stood, brushed himself off, and spied a lump writhing under the collapsed tent.

“I caught you, you blasted accomplice!” Though again,
blasted
wasn't the word he chose. He grabbed Dickie by a handful of shirt and hauled him up so he dangled in the air. “Now take me to … oh, another fairy, I see. Well, I won't be fooled twice.” He eyed the Wyrm, who flapped his stubby wings and hissed menacingly, his head swaying like a cobra's. “You can change shape, but you can't hurt me in that form.”

He was wrong, of course, on both counts, and the Wyrm bit him on the shoulder.

“Aayyyeeee!” Carl squealed, knocking the Wyrm heavily to the ground. But he didn't let go of Dickie. He only tightened his hold and stalked through his freak show, to the amazement and amusement of his employees, dripping blood from a number of puncture wounds.

The Wyrm was a scholar, not an athlete. Though hardly hurt by the blow, he was momentarily stunned, and when he shook his head and cleared his senses, Carl and Dickie were long gone.

“Oh, for my library,” the Wyrm said miserably to himself as he tried to wipe the nasty taste of Man out of his mouth. “This is the consequence of fieldwork. Theory, theory only, from now on.”

“Pardon me, mate,” said a voice behind him. “D'you know a sheila name of Meg Morgan?”

A Deus ex Machina Is a Shabby Device

I
F YOU LIVE IN THE COUNTRY
and have any idea what it is to mow vast acres of hay, you probably envision a great tractor towing whirling blades that cut through the grass and pile it neatly. Later another machine will compress the hay into small, rectangular bales or cylinders the size of a hippo's belly. Though there is a certain amount of human labor involved, the bulk of it relies on gasoline and internal combustion and mechanics.

In Gladysmere, the harvesting of hay is another animal entirely. Through long tradition, and despite the pressures of speed and profit, all harvesting is done by hand, or, more properly, by arm and back and muscle and sinew. How they were convinced to eschew modernity to such a great extent no one can say, except perhaps Phyllida Ash.

Hard labor was balanced by fun, and every harvest was an excuse for a village-wide party. Muscular swains strutted about with their scythes over their shoulders, and for once Meg was glad she hadn't reached her full height. Even so, she felt anxious with all those blades overhead—what must the tall adults feel? But no one seemed nervous. They laughed and slapped one another on the back and held tankards and mugs in hands that weren't holding scythes. The men—all of whom would be competing in the various mowing competitions—struck poses to show off their physiques, much to the pleasure of giggling girls with flowers in their hair, as well as of their grandmothers and maiden aunts.

Meg hadn't been able to persuade Finn to abandon his money and skeleton key and help her keep Fenoderee from being tricked. He said someone would steal it even if he left it hidden in the cart, but if you really must know, he didn't want to see Fenoderee again. So she helped Finn and his burden into the safety of Fenoderee's wagon and went looking for the pig-nosed fairy.