Among Others Read online

  “No,” I said, more quietly. “Look, that’s not what I want. Last winter, maybe, right after it happened, but not now. Mor knows. Glorfindel knows. I’ve gone on. Things have happened. I’ve changed. You might see me as half a broken pair, and you might see my death as a way of tidying up loose ends and getting more power to touch the real world, but that’s not how I see it. Not now. I’m in the middle of doing things.”

  “Doing is doing,” he said, which I found much less reassuring than before. “Help. Join. Act.”

  Mor held out the knife, blade towards me. There were fairies all around me, tangible substantial fairies pushing me towards the knife. The knife I knew was substantial. I had been leaning on it for weeks. I had been making a magical connection with it, as it had with me.

  “No. I don’t want to,” I insisted. “A little blood and magic to help Mor, to help you, if it would help you, yes, I agreed to that, but not to death.”

  What would Wim think? Worse, what would Auntie Teg think, who had no idea about the fairies, who would think I’d come up here without saying a word and killed myself? And how about Daniel? “I can’t,” I said.

  I tried to move backwards, away, but they were pressing against me, pressing me forwards towards the knife.

  “No,” I said, again, firmly. They were all around me, and the knife was closer than ever, and the knife wanted my blood, my life, tempting me to become a fairy. If I was a fairy I could see the pattern of the magic all the time. There would be no more pain, no more tears. I would understand magic. I’d be with Mor, I’d be Mor, we’d be one person, joined. But we had never really been that, and that would be all. I took a step backwards and started speaking as calmly as I could. “No. I don’t want to be a fairy. I don’t want to join. I want to live and be a person. I want to grow up in the world.” The calmness helped, for the same reason the Litany Against Fear helps, because fear is something the magic uses. And rejecting it in my heart helped even more, because the other thing it was using was whatever of me did want to become a fairy, had always wanted that.

  In front of me was Mor, the knife, and behind her the pool. All around me were fairies. I reached out to the knife with my hand. Whatever else it was, it was wood, and wood loves to burn, burning is in the pattern of wood, the potential fire that is the sun’s fire. The sun was setting, but the wood leapt to flame, and I was flame, I was a flame contained in my own shape for a moment, and then I was a huge flame. The land here knew flame. Here the hell-flames had burned, here coal from the mines had been processed to lose its smoke and poisons. Coal wanted to burn, knew burning even more than wood. The fairies fled from me, all but Mor, who was holding the burning knife and connected through it to me. We were two huge mirrored shapes of flame.

  I didn’t have an oak leaf, and we weren’t near the door to death, but I was fire and she was fire and I had the pattern and I loved her. She was not me, but she was in my heart, she always would be. “Hold tight, Mor,” I said, and, though she was flame she smiled her real smile, the smile she used to smile on Christmas morning when Gramma was alive and we would wake up to see the balloons hanging in the hall that meant Father Christmas had been and there were stockings waiting to be to opened. I opened a space between the flame and where death fell in the pattern, and I hurled her through it, knife and all, and then I closed it up again and sank down, dampened the flame until I was in my own shape again.

  I was still burning, still flame, but I knew how to stop, how to return to the flesh which is what I am. It would be easy to forget, to be consumed in the transformation. I reached for flesh, and with flesh came pain. I was not even singed, but my leg was protesting having my weight on it.

  The fairies had backed off, but they were still all around me. Glorfindel looked rueful and the old man looked angry. “Goodbye,” I said, and took several slow steps backwards, up hill. The sun had set while I was talking and everything was dusky shadows. The fairies were melting away. I turned around slowly.

  And there she was, of course, on the road in the twilight. Auntie Gwennie must have told her I was around, and she’d probably followed the commotion among the fairies to find exactly where.

  She hadn’t changed at all. She looks like a witch. She has long greasy black hair, darkish skin, a hooked nose and a mole on her cheek. You couldn’t typecast someone more like a witch—though of course the Sisters are witches too, and they’re impeccably blond and County. She was wearing typical clothes for her—that is, whatever things had come up when she’d counted through her wardrobe by threes. It found things that were the most magically charged, or that was the idea. It also found things that were incredibly mismatched and unsuitable for the season, in this case a huge knitted patchwork jumper and a long thin black skirt.

  “Mama,” I said, hardly above a whisper. I was terrified, far more so than I had been of the fairies and the knife. I have always been afraid of her.

  “You’ve always been the one like me,” she said, conversationally.

  “No,” I said, but my voice cracked and it came out as a whisper.

  “Together we could do so much. I could teach you so much.”

  I remembered how we had tormented her once, when she was at her maddest. We must have been ten or eleven. She had pushed me down the front steps because she had sent me to the shop for cigarettes and I had come back empty-handed because they wouldn’t sell them to me. I was bleeding, and Mor was picking me up and we saw a big black bird flap slowly across from the cemetery gates—it was probably a crow, but at that age we called them all ravens. It’s the same word in Welsh, anyway. “Once, upon a midnight dreary,” Mor began, and I joined in, and she, Liz, my mother, had retreated into the house, and then into her room, as we’d gone on reciting Poe’s Raven louder and louder.

  I had seen the pattern of the world. I had sent Mor through to where people are supposed to go when they die. I had been flame. My mother was a pathetic patchwork witch who had used magic so much to meddle in her own life that she had no integrity left and was nothing but a coil of hatreds consuming themselves in futility. We had already hedged her power, with the help of the fairies.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” I said, loudly, and took a step forward.

  I took another step, which was making my leg hurt quite a bit, but I ignored that, ignored her. I could tell that she was doing something magical, something aimed at me, but my protections, the ones I had made at school, held, and it drained harmlessly away into the ground, the way the pain does in acupuncture.

  I took another step and passed her. She reached out and physically grabbed me. Her hands were like claws.

  I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were terrifying, just like always. I took a deep breath. “Leave me alone,” I said, and shrugged her off.

  She reached up to hit me, and I realised she really was reaching upwards. I was taller than she was. I pushed her, using the momentum of her own movement and the turning of the world. She fell. I took another step on beyond her, up the hill. I couldn’t run, I could barely limp, but I kept on limping upwards.

  “How dare you,” she said, from where she had fallen. She sounded really surprised. Then she was drawing on magic again and like the time when Mor died, she sent illusory monstrous shapes swirling around me as I walked. Then, we’d ignored them as best we could. Now I took hold of them and drew them around me. They were sad hollow things without fear to feed them.

  I heard a ripping sound, and turned, and gasped with horror. She had taken out the one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, which was hers, but the first one I had ever read, and torn out a page. She threw it at me, and it became a burning spear in the air between us. It was dark enough now that it lit everything up with strange extra shadows. I dodged it. She tore another page. I could hardly bear it. I know books are only the words, and I have two copies of it of my own, but I wanted to go back and grab the book from her. The spears weren’t as bad as the violation, they wouldn’t have been even if they’d hit me. How coul
d she use books against me? But I could see how it would seem the obvious thing.

  I could do the same. I drew the illusion monsters towards me and gave them a push towards her. They changed and became dragons and huge alien turtles and people in spacesuits and a boy and girl in armour with drawn swords, making a barrier between us, protecting me, rushing down through the dusk towards her. I took another step uphill and away.

  She could ignore an illusion as well as I could, of course.

  The spears kept coming. They weren’t on fire now, and they were harder to see. She must have torn out handfuls at once and been flinging them wildly. I stopped and reached out to the pattern of the world. They were paper. Paper was wood, so easy to make into a spear, but what did wood really want to be? One came so close I could feel the wind of it passing, and I knew, and laughed. It was what Mor had said here, so long before. It wasn’t even difficult. The spear that was a page became a tree. So did the others, the ones she had already thrown and which were stuck in the ground. For a moment they stood there, roots in the earth, branches reaching, oak and ash and thorn, beech and rowan and fir, huge beautiful mature trees in full leaf. Then they began to move downhill, Burnham Wood coming to Dunsinane. “Huorns will help,” I said, and there were tears in my eyes.

  If you love books enough, books will love you back.

  They weren’t illusion. They were trees. Trees are what paper was, and wants to be. I could just about see her through them. She was raving and screaming something at me. The pages were turning to trees as soon as she tore them, and sooner. The book, which was in her hands, became a huge mass of ivy and bramble, spreading everywhere. The whole desolation where the Phurnacite had been was a forest, with the ruins of the factory at the heart of it. There were fairies in among the trees. Of course there were. An owl swooped down over the dark pool.

  “Sometimes it takes a little longer than you think,” I said.

  I kept walking on, up and away from the Phurnacite. She was still raving, down there in the trees. I just kept walking away, as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast. I was out of her reach now. I took two more steps and I was out on the road.

  Once there, I could hold on to the bars of the railings to help myself walk. This was useful, and almost as good as a stick. I only had to get to the bus stop. My old stick was in Grampar’s house. Then I saw that I was just like stupid Fanny Robin in Hardy’s stupid story, dragging myself along the railing, and I started to giggle.

  As I came to the end of the railings, by the bus stop, still giggling a little, there they were in front of me.

  I was more than a little surprised to see Wim, astonished to see Daniel (how had he got away?), and completely amazed to see Sam. The three of them had appeared seemingly out of nowhere like the Trinity, though of course it was all simple enough. Wim had decided to come and had telephoned Daniel who had telephoned Sam. They hadn’t seen me turn to flame and make the pages into trees, at least Daniel didn’t. I think Wim may have seen something out of the corner of his eye. I don’t know what Sam saw. He just smiled.

  I didn’t need them in the least, but it was lovely to see them.

  WEDNESDAY 20TH FEBRUARY 1980

  We went in the car to collect my stick and all went to Fedw Hir and saw Grampar. He isn’t going to forgive Daniel any time soon, but that’s the way things are. Auntie Teg made dinner for everyone, with me helping, and then we decided to all spend the night in Grampar’s house, because there really isn’t room in the flat. It was like one of those dreams where everyone is in the wrong place. Grampar liked Wim. He always wanted a son. And Wim really likes Sam. It’s so strange them all being here.

  And here I am, still alive, still in the world. It’s my intention to carry on being alive in the world, well, until I die. At Easter I’ll go to Glasgow and see what science fiction fandom is like. Next June I’ll take my exams and pass them, and have qualifications. Then I’ll do A Levels, as it best works out. I’ll go to university. I’ll live, and read, and have friends, a karass, people to talk to. I’ll grow and change and be myself. I’ll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I’ll belong to libraries on other planets. I’ll speak to fairies as I see them and do magic as it comes my way and prevents harm—I’m not going to forget anything. But I won’t use it to cheat or to make my life unreal or go against the pattern. Things will happen that I can’t imagine. I’ll change and grow into a future that will be unimaginably different from the past. I’ll be alive. I’ll be me. I’ll be reading my book. I’ll never drown my books or break my staff. I’ll learn while I live. Eventually I’ll come to death, and die, and I’ll go on through death to new life, or heaven, or whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when they die. I’ll die and rot and return my cells to life, in the pattern, whatever planet I happen to be on at the time.

  That’s what life is, and how I intend to live it.

  Gate of Ivrel turns out to be really brill.