Among Others

I’ve noticed before that there are two kinds of people for going round castles. There are the ones who say “And here’s where we’d put the boiling oil and here’s where we’d put the longbowmen,” and the ones who say “And here’s where we’d put the settee, and here’s where we’d hang the pictures.” Wim turned out very satisfactorily to be of the first camp. He’d been to Conwy and Beaumaris with his school, so he knew about castles. We fought a very successful siege (and had a few cuddles in corners out of the wind) before he even asked about fairies.

“Tons of them,” I said, sitting down in a windowseat so that he could have my stick and see them. I looked out through the cross-shaped arrow slit, but the view so attractively framed was of pylons stretching out wires over neat Shropshire fields, and the red telephone box down below.

Wim sat beside me, with my stick across his lap and watched them for a while. They didn’t take much notice of us sitting there. When we were children the fairies would play games with us, hide and seek, mostly, and other chasing games. The ones in the castle seemed to be playing games like that with each other, moving in and around the rooms, keeping out of each other’s sight, dashing through doorways ahead of entrances through broken walls. Not having the stick didn’t stop me seeing them, of course, so Wim and I sat there and wondered aloud what they were doing. Then one of them, a tall, impossibly tall, fairy woman, with long hair mixed with swan feathers, swept through the fallen wall, saw us and stopped. I nodded to her. She frowned and came over and stood before us. “Hello,” I said, and then in Welsh “Good afternoon.”

“Go,” she said to me, in English. “Need. In—” She gestured.

“In the Valleys?” I asked. I was used to guessing games when it came to fairies and nouns. “In Aberdare? In the vales of coal and iron?”

I could feel Wim looking at me.

“Belong,” she said, and pointed at me.

“Where I come from?” I asked. “I’m going tomorrow.”

“Go,” she said. “Join.” Then she looked at Wim, and smiled, and drew her hand down the side of his face. “Beautiful.” Well, he was. She swept on, out of the doorway, and a parade of warty grey gnomes came in through the hole in the wall and followed her out without a glance in our direction.

Wim stared after her, awestruck. “Wow,” he said, after a while.

“Do you see what I mean now about hard to have a conversation?” I asked.

“Impossible, yes,” he said. “Fragments like that, you wouldn’t know if you were making up the right half or not.” He was talking quite distractedly and still looking after her. “She really was beautiful.”

“She meant that you were,” I said.

He laughed. “You’re not serious? No, you are serious? Jesus!” He peered after her, but she was out of sight.

“You are beautiful,” I said.

“I get zits,” he said. “I cut myself shaving. I’m wearing a stupid tie. She—”

“Have you read ‘Firiel’? In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil? The end of that? That’s what you’re feeling.”

“Tolkien really knew what he was talking about,” Wim said.

“I think he saw them,” I said. “I think he saw them and dreamed them into the elves he wanted. I think they are his dwindled remnant.”

“Maybe he saw them when he was a child, and remembered them,” Wim said. “I wish I knew what they are really. You’re right, they’re not ghosts, or not only ghosts. They’re definitely not aliens either. They’re not substantial. When she touched me…”

“They can be more substantial sometimes,” I said, remembering the warmth of Glorfindel beside me on Halloween.

“What did she mean? Go, need, in, belong, go, join.”

I was impressed that he’d remembered so precisely. “I think she meant I should go to the Valleys because I’m needed there for something. Maybe you’re right about my mother, or maybe it’s something else. I’m going tomorrow anyway.”

“Half the time I can’t believe it. What you told me about your mother and magic and all of that. And then something like her.” He turned to me and put his arms very tightly around me. “If you’re going to go and save the world, I want to come.”

“I’ll phone you every day,” I said.

“You need me.”

I didn’t ask what earthly good he’d be, because that would have been cruel. “I did it on my own before.”

“You got mashed up and nearly killed before,” he said. “Your sister did get killed.”

“There’s nothing she can do like that now,” I said. “I don’t even think she wanted to kill us then. And this—this isn’t unusual. Or it’s only unusual in that it’s in English, and here, where they don’t usually bother with me. Maybe it’s because we’re closer.”

“Not unusual!” Wim looked at me as if that was the oddest thing he’d ever heard. “And closer to what?”

“Wales?”

“Closer for values of closer that mean further away. The Welsh border is only a couple of miles from Oswestry.”

“Okay. But they want me to do something, and I’ll do it, or I won’t do it, and it’ll work or not, and I’ll survive or not,” I said.

“I’m coming with you.”