The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (47 page)

"Better and better," Darlington responded. "On such a night, a little blasphemy might serve as well as a hot posset or a mug of mulled ale. I hold you to your word, sir."

Elias Patterson considered. "I suppose this would be as fitting a night as any for the tale, it being Imbolc, Bride's Festival—or perhaps you guise her as St. Bridget in Skipton?" Darlington stared back at him uncomprehendingly. "Come, I know they honor Bride in the Dales, no matter what we priests and preachers admonish them. I have seen the
Brideog
corn dollies made, and caught my own parishioners setting out the strips of cloth for Bride to bless when she walks the land on Imbolc Eve. You? Never?"

Darlington shook his head, forcing an embarrassed laugh. "Not in Skipton, believe me. Never in Skipton."

"A loss," said Elias Patterson. "Christianity was ever the better for a good brawl with the old gods. Now in the village where I lived—actually not too far from here, a bit west—every last sheep in my flock believed in every one of them. Come Beltane night, not a deacon, not an elder, not a First Soprano but was bound to be out till dawn, hunting till they dropped for faery gold. I was younger then, and I scolded them endlessly, shouting that it was an unholy pagan thing, and that those who trifled with such matters were placing their immortal souls in the gravest danger. Those were my very words, and every one of that lot sat mortified, when I called their names in church, and mumbled penitence, and went right on doing it, as I knew they would." He sighed. "It all shames me dreadfully to recall, Mr. Darlington. You won't understand, I expect."

"Well, I was never exactly a churchgoing man," Darlington answered him. "Be a better person if I had been, I've no doubt of it. But the world outside was so much more interesting. Always was."

"I knew nothing of the world in those days," Elias Patterson said. "I had my God, my work, my books and my cat, nor did it occur to me that these might not necessarily be sufficient for a man pledged to follow the Cross all his days. And for all my scorn of the old festivals as wicked folly, still I never left my house on Beltane, Samhain, Lughnasadh. My cat did, mind you, but not I."

"Never hurts to be on the safe side."

Elias Patterson looked directly into Darlington's face, and his gray eyes were very bright in the firelight. He said, "We give them different names, those nights lit only by fire and the moon, depending on the county and the calendar, but we know what they are. They call up the world that was before the Lord came down among us; the world where good and evil were not so certain, so
fixed
as they are today, where the known and the unheard-of could mingle as they chose . . . where truth had its doubts, do you see?" He laughed harshly. "Well, all that was a bit alarming for me to deal with then, so I stayed by my own neat little fire on those nights, and neither stepped out nor let anything in. Who knows what your door may open to—or upon—on Beltane eve?"

"I've usually taken Beltane off from work," Darlington reflected. "Girls are always so
cheery
at Beltane."

Elias Patterson was staring far into the fire. "But on one such eve, long ago, I opened my door three times. The first occasion was to let my cat out, for there's no Christianizing a cat, as I'm sure you know. They belong to gods older even than Bride and Angus, and our Lord grants them a special dispensation. Or so it was believed in my village, and I chose to believe it myself." This time the laugh was warm and genuine. "The second time I opened the door was to let Hannah Dawkins in. She was a widow, Mrs. Dawkins, but still youthful and pleasing enough to capture any man's eye, I must say. She brought me some of her own currant wine, I remember."

Darlington winked boldly at him. "Must have been a good deal of that coming to visit, hey? You being young and not bad-looking, and of course highly respectable. And unattached."

"She was as respectable herself as any in the village," Elias Patterson responded severely. "A handsome woman, as I say, well set up, with money of her own, and a lively conversationalist in the bargain. And if she did come calling with a purpose, guessing that most of the other women were likely to be out jumping over the Beltane fires, or dancing in a circle widdershins . . . why, no blame to her, or to me either, for setting down my book and inviting her to my fireside."

"Man was not meant to be alone," Darlington quoted piously. "Isn't that what our Lord himself said? Something like that."

Elias Patterson looked mildly shocked. "No, certainly not, nothing of what I can see you thinking happened between us that night—nothing but a bit of excellent currant wine and a bit of conversation. And if—and I say
if
—she left in some slight disappointment . . . well, I may have led her on, though I never meant to. I may have done."

Darlington said, "I've always found these things a matter of the moment, myself. Another time—another hour, even—another place . . . " But the white-haired man shook his head.

"It would have taken another man," he replied softly. "Not owing to any flaw in the good Widow Dawkins, but because of a restlessness that I never could put words to, and never dared name, for fear that would give the thing more power over me than it already had. From my birth, it had always slept quietly in me for months, years at a time, that
thing
 . . . and then it would rouse up to rack my sleep and trouble my reading in the Book, and turn my sermons on their heads. It was such a restlessness came on me after the Widow Dawkins left, and made me bank my hearthfire and open my door for the third time that night, and walk out into the wilderness of Beltane eve. As I had never before done—as I had always known better than to do. Because of that
thing
."

"Yes," Darlington murmured as though to himself. "Not the gold. It's never the gold."

Both men were silent for some time. Elias Patterson had his arms folded on his knees, and was bent almost double, staring into the flames. Darlington, his lethargy vanished, listened constantly for any sounds of pursuit, but he heard nothing except the hiss and crackle of the fire, and the occasional cold bark of a fox, signaling to his mate.
The snow clouds were blowing away, and stars were appearing for the first time in several nights.
Be a nice clear day tomorrow,
he thought.
See for bloody miles, they will
.
Bloody wonderful
.

Elias Patterson finally stirred. "Mr. Darlington, do you believe there is a real place called Faery? We have spoken of Beltane and Imbolc, of Bride and Angus, of corn dollies and old gods. Do you believe that there is an actual realm where such as these still dwell? Your answer is important to me."

Darlington did not laugh, but he slapped both his thighs and grinned with teeth that should not have been as healthy-white as they were, given the life he led. "You mean Under the Hill? The door in the mountain where you wander in and spend a night dancing and reveling with the fairy folk, and then you come out in the morning and it's a hundred years later? That place?"

"That place," Elias Patterson agreed quietly. "
Tír na nÓg,
the Irish call it. The kingdom of Oberon and Titania."

Something in his voice made Darlington's smile fade. After a moment, he said, "Well. I've nothing
against
believing in it, when I think of what I've seen in my time, and what I've had to believe. But I've never yet met anyone who could tell me he'd been there."

"Until now," Elias Patterson said.

Darlington said nothing, but simply held out his hand for the leather flask. He took a swig, handed it back, and remained silent for a long enough time that it became necessary to arrange more wood on the fire. He said at last, "You're a hundred years old."

"I don't know how old I am," Elias Patterson answered. "Do I count the years, or do I count the time?"

The silence was longer this time. Darlington got up again and relieved himself into the darkness. He did up his buttons, turned back to face Elias Patterson, and said, "So, then. Instead of doing the sensible with that nice, willing widow, you walked out alone after she left, and you walked straight Under the Hill. Straight into Faery."

"Nothing about Faery is straight, not as we understand the word." Elias Patterson's eyes seemed to be growing brighter as Darlington stared into them. "The doorway is not always in the side of a hill, or a mountain. Faery lights where it pleases, shows itself where it lists; and though that village of mine lay in country as flat as Norfolk or the Fens, yet even so, when I walked out that night there lay Faery just across the road . . . or was it across Roger Munro's upper pasture . . . or perhaps glimmering beyond old Hugh Hobden's rich, muddy bottomland. It danced on before me like a rainbow, Faery did, and I followed as best I might, always explaining to myself that I was looking for my cat. And when at last I was too weary to follow further, I simply laid myself down on a little low hillside, in a pile of fallen leaves, and fell asleep as trusting as a child. And while I slept, Faery came to me."

Darlington raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

"It must have been an enchantment," Elias Patterson continued, "for I dreamed all that happened, but I could not waken. First there came the loveliest woman I had ever seen, tall and splendid and queenly, riding on a milk-white steed—as is told, you remember, in the rhyme of True Thomas. And after her came another, and then another—all on white horses, each woman so beautiful as to make the one who rode before look like a kitchen wench, a scullery maid—until there were a full dozen of them ranged in a circle around me, looking down on me as though from a far greater height than the back of a horse." His eyes were closed as he spoke, and his voice seemed far away, as though only a part of him still sat by the fire. Darlington knew the man believed every daft word; and in his own despite he felt himself starting to catch that belief, like a head cold.

Elias Patterson looked at him thoughtfully. "Had I actually awakened to that sight at that moment, I think I might well have gone mad. Humankind can only bear so much wonder and glory all at once, which is why I often worry about Heaven."

Darlington shrugged. "Not one of
my
problems. Go on."

"Ah," said Elias Patterson. "Last came Titania, stepping barefoot and alone. In my dream she knelt beside me, like no queen but a young girl, and she gazed long and closely into my blind face before she spoke. She said, "'This is he. I will have no other. Bear him to my bower.' And so it was done."

"
And so it was done
," the highwayman mocked him. "And you mean to tell me that you went on sleeping in the arms of a dozen beautiful women bearing you away? And still knew what was going on, all along?" He shook his head. "Rot and moonshine, man."

"I am telling you what happened. I was lifted and borne directly into a farmer's hayrick, of all things—but through it I know I saw the lights of Faery rippling and flowing, on the far side of my closed eyelids. And I heard the music, for even a faery enchantment cannot altogether silence faery music. Titania told me later that I smiled in my sleep to hear it, and that my smile touched her heart. The women of Faery, glorious as they are, have no hearts, but Titania does. This is why she is often lonely."

Darlington thought he heard a horse somewhere nearby, but Elias Patterson's eyes held him fast, and he could not move. He asked, "How long did you sleep? When did you wake?"

"I was never sure," Elias Patterson replied. "What matters just now is that I woke in a twilight secrecy the like of which I had never seen. There were green and purple vines arching over, and strange birds singing their evening songs in great misty trees for which I had no names, and the thickest, gentlest grass beneath all. I smelled something like honeysuckle, and heard water somewhere, and Titania singing. It was hard to tell her voice from the voice of the stream, for it murmured and laughed by turns, and sighed too, soft as the grass on which I lay, warm as the breeze that ruffled my hair . . . or it might have been Titania's fingers, for my head was in her lap, and her own starlit hair was brushing my face. And I did not want to move, ever again."

"All most unchristian, to be sure," Darlington twitted him. "Why, I'd go so far as to name it pagan."

"You would be right, without question. And for that, in that moment, I could not have cared a fiddler's fart." Elias Patterson snapped his fingers at the end of that vulgar phrase, and the outlaw was hard put to it to determine whether it was the snap that startled him most, or the sudden startling bite of the words.

"When I sat up," Elias Patterson went on, "which seemed to take forever—and that was perfectly agreeable too—I found myself face to face with a face I could have drowned in, and welcome. I knew this could only be Titania, and this place Faery, and that I was bound under lifelong orders from my God and my bishop to cry out
Retro me, Sathanas!
and turn my mind from temptation and toward Heaven . . . if this were truly not it." He ran his hands through his white hair, and smiled helplessly. "But all I could say to that face, to those mischievous tender, fiercely wise eyes was, 'I pray you, madam, give me leave to go from here. For I in no way belong in your realm, as you well know.' Granted, I said this in a small and most tremorous voice, but I did say it."

"I said something similar to a lady in Wapping one time," Darlington offered. "Almost cost me a tooth."

Elias Patterson smiled briefly before continuing. "Then Titania laughed fully, and the sound of that laughter turned all my bones so weightless, and so . . . so full of sunlight that I could have flown up and out of that bower like a mayfly, if I could have moved at all. She caressed my face with her hands, that were like wings themselves, light and strong enough to bear us both to world's end and beyond, as just then I wished they would. But I was a Christian, even in Faery, Mr. Darlington, even with the Queen of Faery's hands on me, and to her laughter I repeated my request, saying honestly, 'Great lady, you know what I am. You know that I serve another God than yours, and you know further that my Lord's victory is foreordained in the firmament. With every respect, what word have we for one another?'