Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (14 page)

“I asked for your master,” Hogg said.

The rider laughed. “Are we yours, then, to order about as you please?” it said. Its voice sounded unpleasant, like water coiling past old roots and rocks. It spoke with difficulty through its many sharp teeth. “Are you to tell us when to come and when to go? We made a bargain, nothing more.”

“Aye, a bargain. I was promised gold. Where is your master?”

The horse wheeled again. “Gold!” the rider said. “When will you ask us for something real?”

Hogg said something in a language George didn't recognize. The rider made no move that George could see, but a large purse fell at Hogg's feet. Hogg leapt for it. “It turns to coal unless your part of the bargain is kept,” the rider said. Then the shabby room came up around them again.

George looked at the other men in the room, at the alembic, at the table littered with tools. He felt he was in a dream and that at any moment he might wake, that the room around him would vanish a second time and he would find himself safe and in his bed. “What—” he said.

“They are not demons, or anything sent from hell,” Hogg said. George had not heard him come up next to him.

George shook his head. How could he be certain of anything Hogg told him?

“It's easy enough to make the distinction,” Hogg said, almost as if he had read George's thoughts. “They live in light. Their enemies live in darkness. Their enemies are the children of Cain.”

“The children—”

“The woman Alice knows them well. She has had dealings with them, if I'm not mistaken.”

George nodded. He could see now how everything fit together, how right he had been to chastise Alice.

“We must stop her. Her and the children of darkness. The folks I called up here will help us. You understand now that it is lawful to trade with them.”

“What—what was the bargain you made?”

“I asked for the secrets of alchemy. They will, of course, give nothing away. I promised them a fair exchange.”

But even before the man finished speaking George knew what he promised to trade. “Alice's son,” he said.

“Aye.”

“What do they want with him?”

“I don't know. But I can tell you that her son is a sort of child of Cain himself, that he comes from the darkness. If we give him to them we are doing nothing wrong.” Hogg untied the purse he had been given and poured out a handful of shining coins. Gold. “Here,” he said. “For your help in this matter.”

George took the coins. They were sovereigns, he saw, and felt cool and weighty in his hand. He could expand his business, buy more books and copyrights. He didn't need Alice and her stall at all. And with this gold and the money he would soon be earning he could have any woman he wanted. He would not be balked by her stubbornness again.

“They will turn to coal if the bargain is not fulfilled,” Hogg said. “And all that you've bought with them will vanish as well. We must have the boy to trade.”

George's heart began to beat faster. He ran his thumb over the coins in his hand. “But Alice herself has not seen her son in years,” he said, and then wondered if he should have given away so much. Would Hogg want his gold back if he thought George could not help him?

“Then what you must do,” Hogg said, his voice low and soothing, “is have her lose her membership in the Stationers' Company. Without her livelihood she will be forced to go to her son for help. We know that with her husband dead she has no one she can turn to in the churchyard.”

He marveled that Hogg's commands should come so near to his own heart's desire. With Alice out of the company he would never be reminded of his failure with her, of her immoral ways, of how she had laughed when he had confronted her.

“There is a reason man has been put above woman,” Hogg said. He was whispering now, drawing them into a conspiracy of two and excluding Anthony and the other man. “A woman on her own does not have the logic or the will to resist evil.”

“How am I to have her lose her membership?” George asked.

“Ah. I'm sure you'll think of something.”

Margery's note had said only, “Come visit me on Sunday.” Alice felt her usual exasperation when dealing with her friend; since Margery didn't go to church she assumed that no one else did. When Sunday came Alice went to services at St. Faith's beneath the choir of Paul's, the stationers' church. Then she made her way toward Ludgate and out of London.

Margery surprised her by having a visitor. They both sat under her windows, the sun coming in weakly through the unwashed glass and making them look as if lit by dark stained glass.

The other woman's face was nut-brown and completely round, with a wide, thick, smiling mouth to draw attention away from the fact that she had almost no chin. She seemed to grow fatter as Alice looked downward, her shoulders slightly plump but her stomach and hips padded to the shape of a ball. She looked very much at home in Margery's strange cottage.

“Agnes was telling me a story,” Margery said. “I think you'll be interested too. She comes from near your village, Alice.”

“Aye,” Agnes said. She took one of Margery's apples and she bit into it, and then said nothing more for several seconds. Perhaps she was going over the story in her mind. “I'm a midwife,” she said finally. “One night a man came to the door and summoned me to a birth. He was a strange one, I remember. Very short, less than four feet tall, and his hair was long and black and wild. Under it I thought I saw that his ears were pointed, like an animal's. I'd never seen him before.

“I told my husband I'd be out for the night. ‘Will you be taking the horse?' he asked me, but the little man said, ‘Nay, there's no need.' We went outside and I saw his horse tied to a tree.

“I mounted up behind him. I was younger and lighter in those days—this was near twenty years ago, did I say? Aye, twenty, or a little more. We rode quickly, making good time. I'd tell you where we went, but I couldn't see the way. It was dark, and fog lay like a hand over us. Many times since then I've tried to find the road we took, but I never could. We stopped at a hill, and I'd swear I'd never seen that hill before in my life.

“When we got off the horse the little man came close to me and said, ‘Don't be frightened,' and he breathed on my eye. And for some reason I wasn't afraid. Then the hill opened, and we went inside.

“It was— Oh, it was fine. I can't describe it. Walls of gold and silver. Men and women dressed in mail as light as cobwebs, with swords as sharp as diamonds. Music like nothing I'd ever heard. No candles, and you couldn't see the moon or stars overhead, but light came from all around. And from the people's faces, too—but they weren't people, were they? They were of Faerie.

“They were in a long hall, feasting, at a table laid with silk and linen, with crystal goblets and silver plate. Everyone stopped when we came in, and one of the men stood and came over to us. ‘Is this the best you could do?' he said to the little man. He had horns, but somehow it was his eyes I looked at. Silver-gray they were, and sharp as sword-points.

“The little man shrugged. I thought he liked me, that he might feel badly about the other man's rudeness, but now I wonder if that was true. They don't have feelings the way we do. He smiled, and when he did his mouth stretched nearly to his ears, but he said nothing.

“This second man motioned to me to follow him out of the hall. Tiny creatures flew past us, and I saw more little men, and women carrying fire on their heads. Tapestries of fine silk hung on the wall, and when I looked at them they seemed to move. I couldn't see much as we hurried past, but I thought I saw small creatures mounted on the backs of birds, fighting with lances the size of needles. And men in silver armor, their faces upturned as dragons spewed fire. But it was hard to think of battles in such a place as that.

“There was a woman in labor in the room I was led to, and when I saw her nothing seemed strange or unusual. I knew what to do, why I had come. The man had left, and I was in a room full of women. I went straight to the birthing stool and helped her. She didn't cry out the way other mothers do, and the birth was an easy one. The child was a boy, and healthy. When it was over I got mugwort from my bag to ease her belly.

“All the time I attended her I knew who she was. She wore no crown, of course, just a light gown made of gossamer. But she was the queen. I could tell by the way the other ladies deferred to her, but even if she'd been alone I'd have known it.

“When it was over the little man came into the room again, and the horned man with him. The little man carried a bundle in his arms. ‘Quickly,' he said. The mortal woman has just given birth, and she'll sleep for a while now.' The women had moved the queen to the bed, and she lay nursing her son. ‘You must give him up, Oriana,' the horned man said. ‘For his safety, and for ours.'

“The queen looked at her son one last time, and then gave him to the little man. And the man passed over his bundle, which I saw was a baby, a human boy. When the little man got the queen's baby he took it and ran out of the room. The other one looked at me with his hard eyes and said, ‘This should not have been done in front of her.'

“‘She'll forget,' the queen said.

“‘I'll see that she will,' the man said, and he took a step toward me. I knew he was going to breathe on my eye, and I closed them both as tightly as I could. But even so I remembered nothing after that, only waking up in front of my house the next morning, with my husband coming out to look for me.”

Agnes seemed to have finished her tale. “The queen,” Alice said, remembering. “I saw her too. She's beautiful, isn't she?”

“I didn't bring you both here to compare stories,” Margery said sharply. “The queen is not our concern. Think, Alice. The boy. The son.”

A new thought, horrible and troubling, struggled to come to light. “Nay,” Alice said. “It can't be true—”

“It is,” Margery said. “The son, the human baby. That was Arthur.”

“Nay!” Alice said again.

“Aye, it was. And the child you raised as yours was of Faerie. A prince of Faerie, the queen's own child.”

“He's not—” Alice said. But she could argue no more. All of Arthur's strangeness, his moods, his beautiful singing voice, his lack of concern for anything human, all of this forced itself upon her at once, and she knew that what Margery said was the truth. “And my son? Arthur?” she said.

“They raised him as best they could,” Margery said. “They know very little of humans, you see, though they need us. He has been well cared for, at least.”

“But why?” She remembered the queen in her circle of lights, the strange kinship she had felt between them, and she wondered how such a fair-seeming creature could have done something so ugly.

“They're fighting a battle,” Margery said. “They live long, and they have children seldom, so the queen's son had to be protected above all else. If the child was captured the war would be lost. They gave him to you, to keep him safe.”

Alice realized, to her own great surprise, that she cared nothing for kings and queens and battles. She wanted only to see her son; it was a feeling as sudden and as strong as being struck by lightning. She wanted to comfort him, to show him his true, human birthright.

Oriana was not there to feel her anger, but Margery was. “Did you know all this?” she asked. “Did you watch Arthur as he grew, laughing to think that he would soon be taken from me?”

“Nay. I did not guess about Arthur until very recently. I saw that the Fair Folk were moving toward London, leaving their true home in the fields and woods, but I thought they came here for another reason. People in the country are being thrown off their land, you know—the landlords are turning all their cropland to pasture. And so the homeless folk are coming here to find work. I thought that the faeries followed them—they need to be with people in some way we can't understand. And maybe that's why they did come, I don't know. Some of them had left the country years ago, before you and your husband thought of moving to London. No one can guess their true reasons.”

“Nay, they came for Arthur. You know that.”

“Do I? The world is changing, moving in a direction I cannot predict. The Fair Folk have a part to play in all this, but whether it is large or small I cannot say.”

Margery's talk of cropland and changes only made Alice impatient; all her concern was with Arthur. “Didn't Oriana—”

“Oriana tells me very little. When I saw the faerie-light on your child I knew what he was, of course. But it was only when I found Agnes that I realized he was the queen's son.”

Agnes looked on avidly, not bothering to hide her interest in the story. The apple lay forgotten in her hand, and one of the cats watched intently, in case she dropped it. Of course, Alice thought sourly. She's waited twenty years for the end of this drama.

“And now that he's grown? What are their plans for him now? Will they give him back?”

Margery seemed to be answering a different question. “They didn't expect Arthur to leave home. They've lost him, you see. And they have to get him back, to win the war.”

“The man in black, asking about Arthur! But he was human, I'd swear to it.”

“Aye. Both sides recruit humans, when they need them.”

“Both … Then the others are looking for him too?”

“Aye,” Margery said. “And they must not get him. We must find the queen's son first, and trade him for yours.”

“How?” Alice said, despairing. “A friend saw him once, but he lost him again. The Saracen's Head, that's all he said. I went there to look for him but no one had heard of him.”

“You're not alone in this. I'm with you, and I know more about the faeries than a dozen men in black. We'll find him.”