The Onion Girl (23 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“They should know the stories.”
I know what he's talking about, all those old folk tales about faerie fading away because we stopped believing in them.
“But they don't necessarily know the stories are real, do they?”
“And there's the irony,” he says. “For we're dependent on their belief all the same. And most of us are ephemeral—fading soon after we're made. It's very sad.”
“Well, I guess,” I say. “But I still don't understand why the—what should I call it?—the hyper-reality of the animal people diminishes you. How would something like that even work?”
“I think it's like believing in Faerie.”
“I thought this was Faerie.”
He nods. “Except the truth is, this place is whatever you call it. Faerie. The spiritworld.
Manidò-akì.
People find. what they expect to find here. In many places it
becomes
what you expect it to be.”
I give him a slow nod. “Joe's told me about some of that.”
“But the other Faerie,” he goes on, “is the one in which people like me live. The one that exists because people believe in it. When they lose their belief, we just fade away.”
“Like the stories about the old gods,” I say, thinking aloud. We're back to those old folk tales again. “Or how every time a child says she doesn't believe in faerie, a faerie dies.”
He nods.
I realize that for all my penchant in believing that there's more to the world than what we can see, that folk tales and fairy tales are based on real, if forgotten events, I never accepted that part of it as being real.
“But that's horrible,” I tell him.
“Yet it's the life we've been given,” he says. “And since it's the only one we can have, we've learned to take what we can get.”
I study him for a long moment, then lift a hand and trail my fingers from the curly hair at his brow, down the length of his cheek.
“I don't believe it,” I tell him.
“It's not a matter of believing or not. It simply is.”
But I shake my head, firm on this.
“One's origins don't matter,” I say. “Once you exist, you are. If a tree, a stone, a house, can have a spirit, then so do you.”
Now he shakes his head.
“Maybe it'd help if
you
tried to believe,” I say.
That wakes a laugh. “Maybe you're right.”
“I know I am. It would be so unfair otherwise.”
“That's not the best of arguments. We don't live in a fair world.”
“Maybe not,” I say. “But isn't that all the more reason for us to work at making it one?”
“You argue well.”
“It's not something I'm debating,” I tell him, and repeat, “it's what I believe.”
We fall quiet then. Toby seems more relaxed since we started this conversation, as though this was something he had to get out of the way before our friendship could continue. Or maybe it's simply his mercurial nature. He doesn't seem able to focus on any one thing for too long a period of time. I've been accused of that myself, but it's never bothered me. You could have a lot worse said about you.
As for me, I'm mulling what I've just learned. It explains a lot, about
a great many things, but it also sends my brain off on a hundred other tangents, each of them filled with an ever-expanding tangle of questions. I settle on the simplest one to ask first.
“So what are you called?” I ask him. “You and these other so-called ephemeral people?”
“We are the Eadar. Creatures of Meadhon, the middleworld.”
“I don't understand.”
“You know that
geasan
wakes in between places?”
“
Geasan?
”
“Magic.”
I nod. Both Sophie and Joe have explained this to me. Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.
“Meadhon is the grandmother of between,” he explains. “The half-world or middleworld one needs to pass through from your world to reach this one. Thin as gauze in some places, wide as the Great Plains of Nydian in others. Some think that all the
geasan
called up in either this world or yours is drawn from Meadhon. Without passing through the middleworld, you could never be sitting here talking to me.”
“You mean dreams? But I thought all of this”—I lift a hand—“was the dream.”
He smiles. “No. The dream is what carries you here. The spiritworld is as real as your own world, only someplace else. It's the middleworld that provides all the doors between, but it's a chancy place with no real boundaries and not a great deal to commend it, except for its service as a passageway. The difference between the middleworld and the worlds it joins is like the difference between the People and the Eadar. Except it has a purpose, as do the People, while we are merely whims, long-lived only if we capture the fancy of enough believers.”
His voice has been changing throughout this conversation, having transformed from the somewhat innocent and happy little fellow I first met to someone with the same merry face, but the sound of an old man, full of a knowledge that has brought him only a resigned sadness, rather than any understanding or even intellectual pleasure. The whisper of wisdom I've noticed in his eyes from time to time has come to the fore.
“Who are you really?” I find myself asking.
“The face under the bark,” he says. “The child that the Green Woman abandoned to follow the ghost of Grian Eun, the sun bird.” He lifts the hand with the tattoo of the thunderbolt on its back. “This is the sign of her luck medicine,” he adds. “Borrowed from the Grandfather Thunders. And this”—he lifts the other with the thunderbolt encircled—“is that luck swallowed by the earth—the way it looked before Raven pulled the rounded turtle shell that is the world out of the darkness. Though some say it's the moon that is Nokomis's heart, and that luck is a twisting snake, not a thunderbolt.”
His dark brown eyes study me for a long moment before he asks, “And who are you, really?”
“Just who I said I am. A painter. A visitor here. A stranger, really, nothing more.”
“And the light burns so bright in you because … ?”
I shake my head. “I don't know anything about that.”
He nods gravely. Then it's as though someone has passed a hand over his features, transforming them once more. He grins and points upward.
“Do you want to climb a tree?” he asks. “The twigs at the very top are fat with magic. We could gather up a handful each and become wizards.”
I start to comment on this abrupt change, but then decide it's not my place to say who he should be, how he should act. It's not like who he sees in me is the whole story either. He knows nothing of the Broken Girl I really am. If I'm going to wear a mask, I have to let others wear their own, and not comment when they decide to trade one for another, and then back again.
But it serves as a healthy reminder that nothing is necessarily what it seems, not here, not in the world where the Broken Girl is sleeping, dreaming she's able to walk and paint and live a normal life.
“Come on, come on,” he's saying.
He's on his feet now patting the tree bark.
I give that enormous tree trunk a dubious look. The bark's rough and there are plenty of hand- and toeholds, but the first branches seem to be miles away, and I don't think I have the courage to clamber up into its heights.
“I don't think so,” I tell him.
“Oh, it's easy. It's fun.”
He goes scurrying like a squirrel, two or three yards up the side of the tree, then peers back down at me, expectant.
“Not today, anyway,” I say. “I have to go now.”
Before he can argue me out of it, I wake myself up.
But we keep talking about it on other visits and finally I put my sketchbook in its plastic shopping bag, put the loops of its handle through my belt so that it's hanging behind me, and I follow him up one of the trees. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, although I'm climbing straight up, fingers and toes finding easy purchase in the bumps and crevices of the rough bark, I don't feel perpendicular to the ground at all. It's more as if I'm going up a gentle slope. And I've already decided that if I fall, I'll just wake myself up before I hit the ground, so what's the worry?
I don't fall. Don't even come close. I just follow Toby, up and up. We're like a pair of Jacks climbing a beanstalk, because when we finally reach the immense first branches, there's another world up there. The dreamworld's an amazing place, no question, but this might be the most amazing part of it I've found to date. I don't know how many times I looked up into the heights of these giant trees, never guessing there was all of this up here.
The branches are as broad as a two-lane highway and slightly flat on top, so that we can walk along them, side by side, going higher and higher, pulling ourselves up onto the next levels of branches by way of tangled nests of vines that hang here and there like clusters of ropes. As we rise from branch to higher branch, the twilight gives way to a deep yellow light and then we find actual patches of grass growing on those broad branches, swaths of wildflowers, little pools of clear water from which we can take a drink, other pools where the water's sat too long and is thick with algae. Frogs peer up at us out of the slimy green, invisible except for their eyes and the triangular tops of their heads.
It really is a whole other world up here, and much livelier than the quiet, stately cathedral feel that I get below on the forest floor. I see more wildlife than I saw below. Here there are songbirds in plenty—finches, sparrows, wrens, bluebirds, cardinals—flitting among the smaller branches, and all sorts of little lizards and butterflies and bugs. We pass
sleeping moths that are bigger than my two hands put together, with creamy wings that look like they'd be soft as velvet to the touch. Noisy red and black squirrels arguing with each other and scolding anybody who comes by. Fat rabbits, chewing on clover. I see that one of them has a small set of antlers, like the supposedly mythical jackalope in Texas and the Southwest, before they slip away.
“Why are you smiling?” Toby asks.
Smiling? I think. Surely, I'm grinning like a loon.
“I can't help it,” I tell him. “All my life I've read about people who manage to find themselves in some magical otherworld full of marvels and wonder, and now here I am.” I wave a hand at the branch/road we're walking along. “Now I'm in the impossible place, and I just love it. I wish I never—”
But I break off before I finish the sentence.
“You never what?” Toby asks.
Have to go back to my broken body, I think.
“Have to wake up,” is all I say.
“Why do you have to?”
“The same reason you're an Eadar, I guess. That's where my real life is and until I finish dealing with everything back there, I can't go on to whatever might be waiting for me here.”
“I hate rules, don't you?” Toby says.
“Rules?”
“You know, whatever makes our lives have to be one way and not another.”
I think about getting run down by a car and having my body left lying there on the side of the street like so much broken china. And I think about older hurts, the ones that twist like scars across my memory and no one but me knows I'm carrying them.
“I suppose I do,” I say.
He gives me a considering look, then shrugs. “Come on,” he says. “We have to get higher up.”
I love this world of trees. The broad boughs overlap one another so that it's possible to continue walking to the top as though following a switchback trail on a steep mountainside. But closer to the trunk there's a veritable nest of vines and tangled branches that Toby leads me up and I feel less like a Jack and more like a monkey as we climb and climb.
Eventually, we don't reach the top, but we do clamber up onto what turns out to be several branches growing snug together, one against the other, forming a huge natural platform. Standing on it feels like being on a raft, the slight sway of the giant tree taking the place of a slow river current. The branches open up here and an incredible vista is revealed. It's soon apparent that large as the trees of the Greatwood are, this one we're climbing dwarfs them, for we're looking out across the tops of the forest, westward, I think. In the far distance I can see where the forest ends and a range of foothills climb up the skirts of a mountain range. On the closest hill is what appears to be a structure of some sort. A castle, or a chateau. I can't tell. It's too small to make out from this distance.

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