Glorfindel just looked at me, and I knew he was my friend, as much as any of the fairies are, as much as they can be, being what they are. Lots of them don’t care about people or the world at all, and even the ones that do aren’t like people. I don’t know what it meant to him for desire to be in the air between us. His name isn’t really Glorfindel, he doesn’t even really have a name. He isn’t human. I felt very aware of that.
The sun was sinking behind the hill we were sitting on, but it wasn’t really set yet; in the next valley it was still full daylight. But I suppose there’s always a next valley, all the way around the world until you get to tomorrow. Our shadows were very long. Glorfindel got up and told me to scatter the leaves in a spiral through the maze, ending at the two rowan trees. I did, and then I sat and waited as the light faded. I wasn’t sure if I was going to see anything, or whether it would be one of those times when I do what I’ve been told and it makes no sense and I never know whether it worked or what it did. The sky faded until it got to that point where there’s no colour left in anything but it isn’t dark. I started to think about how awful going back was going to be.
Then they came walking up the dramroad out of the valley through the twilight. They were ghosts, I suppose, the procession of the dead. They weren’t pale kings and pale maidens, they were work-worn men and women—perfectly ordinary people, except for being dead. You’d never mistake them for living people. You couldn’t quite see through them, but they were even more drained of colour than everything else, and they weren’t quite as solid as they ought to be. One of the men I recognised. He had been sitting in Fedw Hir near Grampar making blubbing sounds with his mouth. Now he strode along easily with a spring in his step. His face was grave and composed, he was a man with dignity and purpose. He bent and picked up one of my oak leaves from the path and offered it like a ticket at the cinema as he passed between the two trees. I didn’t see anyone take it. I couldn’t see into the darkness at all.
Some of the others were milling about at the entrance, they had come this far and were unable to get in, because of whatever my mother had done. When they saw the old man give the leaf, they started picking up the leaves. Then each passed through, one at a time. They were all very earnest and dignified, not speaking at all, taking their turns to go between the trees and vanish into the darkness. I don’t know whether they were going into the ground or under the hill or to another world or down to Acheron or what. There was a fat woman and a young man with a motorcycle helmet, who seemed to be together. All the dead saw each other, but they didn’t seem to see me or the fairies, who crowded to each side of the path, watching. The young man gestured for the woman to go ahead, and she did, solemnly, as if they were in church.
Then I saw Mor. I hadn’t been expecting it at all. She was walking along quite unconcerned, a leaf in her hand as if she was playing some serious part in a game. I shouted her name, and she turned and saw me and smiled, with such gladness that it broke my heart. I reached out for her, and she for me, but she wasn’t really there, like a fairy, worse than a fairy. She looked afraid, and she looked from side to side, seeing the fairies, of course, lining the path.
“Let go,” Glorfindel said, almost in my ear, a whisper so warm it moved my hair.
I wasn’t holding her, except that I was. Our hands reached out and did not touch, but the connection between us was tangible. It glowed violet. It was the only thing with colour. It wasn’t visible normally, but if it had been for the last year it would have been trailing around me like a broken bridge. Now it was whole again, I was whole again, we were together. “Holding or dying,” he said in my ear, and I understood, he meant that I could hold her here and that would be bad, and I trusted him about that although I didn’t understand it, or I could go with her through that door to death. That would be suicide. But I couldn’t let her go. It had been so very hard without her all that time, such a rotten year. I’d always meant to die too, if dying was necessary.
“Half way,” Glorfindel said, and he didn’t mean I was half dead without her or that she was halfway through or any of that, he meant that I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out.
There may be stranger reasons for being alive.
There are books. There’s Auntie Teg and Grampar. There’s Sam, and Gill. There’s interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head. There’s the distant hope of a karass sometime in the future. There’s Glorfindel who really cares about me as much as a fairy can care about anything.
I let go. Reluctantly, but I let go. She clung. She held on, so that letting go wasn’t enough. If I wanted to live, I had to push her away, through the connection that bound us, though she was crying and calling to me and holding on as hard as she could. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, worse than when she died. Worse than when they dragged me off her and the ambulance took her away and let my mother go with her, smiling, but not me. Worse than when Auntie Teg told me she was dead.
Mor was always braver than I was, more practical, nicer, just generally a better person. She was the better half of us.
But she was afraid now, and lonely and bereft, and dead, and I had to push her away. She changed as she clung, so she was like ivy, all over me, and seaweed, tendrils clutching, and slime, impossible to shake off. Now I wanted to get her off I couldn’t, and even though she was changing I knew she was still Mor all the time. I could feel that she was. I was afraid. I didn’t want to hurt her. In the end, I put my weight down on my leg. The pain broke the bond, the same way it frightens the fairies. The pain was something my living body could do, the same as picking up oak leaves and bringing them up a mountain.
She went on, then, or tried to but the twilight had became darkness, and couldn’t go through the door, it wasn’t there any more. She stood by the trees looking like herself again, and very young and lost, and I almost reached out for her again. Then she was gone, in an eyeblink, the way fairies go.
It was a long walk back in the dark, alone. Every step I was afraid of meeting my mother, come to see what had gone wrong with her plan to get them all. It was because of Mor she could try it, I see that now, because Mor was her daughter, her blood. I kept thinking that I couldn’t run, and she could. Mor felt further away than ever. The fairies had all fled the pain, naturally. Even Babel 17, which was right there in my bag, felt a long way away. But Auntie Teg was waiting with the car, and Grampar at Fedw Hir, so pleased to see me, he’d have been heartbroken if I’d gone on. The bed was empty where the man had been making the blubba blubba noises, they’d already taken his empty body away. He was lucky to be able to go tonight. People who die in November have to wait a whole year. Like Mor. What happened to her? Will she have to wait until next year?
Thursday 1st November 1979
The more I think about it, the less I understand about what happened. Does every valley have an opening like that? How about people who die in flat places? Is it actually old, older than the ironworks, or did the ironworks open it up where before it was smooth hillside? And where did they go? And was that really them, all of them? And what about Mor? Where is she now? Did my mother get her after all? Will the fairies help her? What about the rowan trees? I never heard that the rowan is the tree of death—that’s supposed to be the yew, the graveyard yew. But it was oak leaves, dry gold oak leaves. There’s one left in my bag. It doesn’t mean someone got left out, Mor had one, and there were still leaves crunching on the ground when I left, I brought more than enough. I thought I shook them all out, but there was one inside the back cover of Babel 17. What an odd book! Does language really shape the way it’s possible to think? I mean, like that?