Some Kind of Fairy Tale (29 page)

Things came to a head the next day when Silkie approached me and said that he wanted to tell me his real name. I didn’t know what this meant, but later I learned that this offer had shocked the entire community to its core. When I told Hiero that Silkie had said this, he turned quite pale. He asked me if it was something I wanted. I asked what difference could it make if Silkie wanted to tell me his real name.

You see, their real names are not names at all. They are sounds, secret sounds that when spoken set up an eternal vibration between two people. Disclosing your secret name is like giving someone a gold ring. To speak your name is to offer a binding promise.

“The difference,” Hiero said, “is that I now have to fight him.”

I was shocked but I had no say in the matter. Nothing I said made any difference at this point. Hiero went off and issued a formal challenge to Silkie and the challenge was formally accepted.
Naturally, I was appalled, but Hiero didn’t seem unduly anxious. In fact, he seemed to look forward to the whole thing. I pleaded with him not to let this go ahead, but to no avail. I went to Silkie and told him that it should be stopped, but he just smiled sadly at me. Even Ekko was of no help. She told me I’d started it just by being there, and the men would finish it. I told her to tell the pair of them that they were acting like fools, and that I wanted neither of them and that as soon as I could get out of that place I would be gone.

She laughed in my face. “Tell them yourself,” she said.

There was great excitement in the community. People I’d never seen before poured out of their dwellings around the lake and came down to the sandy beach, bringing food and drink and blankets on which to sit, all as if it were a gala day. They chattered and made bets on the outcome as a fighting ring of hemp ropes was constructed near the water’s edge. I was told that the fight would take place at dusk.

I refused to watch. I went back up to the house. But I could hear the laughter and the excited chatter. I looked out the window and they had brought flaming brands to stick in the sand at the water’s edge. I closed my eyes and covered my ears, but it was too much. I went back down, determined to stop it somehow. But the sky had changed. It had gone the color of burgundy, and the lake was the dark blue of a damson. The flames danced off the still surface of the water, and as I walked down I passed a couple who were openly fucking against a tree. The woman was hugging the tree while the man had her from behind. Another couple were shagging in the long grass. There was no shame. These perverts were fucking openly, obviously wound up by what was going to happen.

The place reeked of sex and blood scent.

When I got down to the sand I could barely break through to see what was going on. Hiero and Silkie were standing naked, hands on hips, staring at each other. Silkie, baring his teeth, was the taller of the two, but Hiero had a much stronger build and smiled confidently. I thought they were going to fistfight, but another man entered the ring with two cruel blades, like machetes, and he stuck them both in the sand in the middle of the circle.
Before I knew what was happening I heard a blast on a horn and a great cheer went up from the crowd, and the two men ran full pelt toward the blades, arriving at the blades almost at the same time.

Hiero, being a split second behind, went in sliding, kicking up earth, and sweeping Silkie to the sand. Hiero was on his feet first, and he swept his heel up into the air before bringing it down like an ax on Silkie’s face. I heard a sickening crunch and already Silkie’s nose was mashed and bloody. A huge cheer went up from the crowd.

Hiero reached for a blade and brought it down where Silkie was lying, but the younger man rolled clear, backflipping with miraculous skill, like a lithe animal, so that he landed crouched and set, waiting for the attack. Hiero now stood between him and the second blade. Silkie lunged, but it was a feint and Hiero made the mistake of trying to finish his opponent with a sweeping blow from the machete. All he sliced was air and it left him off balance. A backfist punch to the ear sent him staggering, and another cheer went up, this time in Silkie’s favor, and in that moment Silkie picked up the second blade.

I saw Ekko in the crowd. Her eyes were gleaming, yellow, like a cat’s. She was sweating with excitement and the light from the flames ran across her skin like amber beads. I begged her to stop it.

“Stop it?” she called, baring her teeth at me in a terrifying smile. “You can’t stop it. One of them has to die.”

“Die?”

She waved me away, eager to watch the combat in the ring. Again, the firelight shone in her yellow eyes as she shouted encouragement to the fighting men. She was avid for it, a beautiful woman made ugly with bloodlust.

Silkie kicked high and caught Hiero on the side of the head, but Hiero countered with a swipe of his blade. Silkie folded his body expertly and the blade missed opening his guts by a quarter of an inch; but it gave him the advantage and he grabbed Hiero by the wrist, twisting him round. Hiero fought back by spinning hard into Silkie’s embrace and striking a stunning blow from his elbow into the other man’s bloodied jaw, but miraculously the younger man maintained his wristlock. They were bonded in a
lethal embrace now, each with a free knife hand but no room to make it count. Without warning, Silkie dropped to the floor, and in that moment I saw Hiero’s undoing.

Silkie collapsed all his weight into a squat, and, suddenly released, was able to spring back upright, dragging his blade upward in a single gutting action. Hiero felt his belly spring open, and he swayed, already knowing it was over. Their eyes met as they stood off each other for a moment. Then Silkie hacked his knife at Hiero’s throat, and Hiero crumpled.

There was no cheer. The crowd watched in silence. I was screaming at them to let me through but I had to beat against a wall of backs. By the time I fought through to Hiero, two men were already dragging him away by the legs. His blood soaked the sand. I could see the wide-open wound in his belly. I cried at them to let me go to him, tears scalding my cheeks, but I was bundled away. They wouldn’t let me go to him. No one else seemed to give a damn. It was vile, vile and evil, and no one seemed to care.

But then Ekko pulled me away. “Let them do what they have to do,” she shouted at me, pulling me away. “You don’t understand our ways. It’s over.”

“No, I don’t understand,” I wailed at her. “How could you let this happen? It’s like it’s all sport to you. You’re all twisted. Twisted and perverted.”

“And you’re very young,” she said. “And you’re now under Silkie’s care.”

I ran back up to the house. I would have left immediately but I knew there was nowhere to go. At the house I flung myself on the bed, weeping and trembling with the shock of everything I’d witnessed. After a while I recovered enough to look out the window. Down by the lake they had lit a huge funeral pyre and I could see they were hoisting a body onto the pyre. I let out a wail so loud I saw people turning and looking back toward the house. After a while someone came in. But through my tears I couldn’t even tell who it was. It didn’t even seem like a complete shape, more like fragments of a wispy garment coming toward me, and then I realized it was Ekko and she was speaking to me, chanting words I didn’t understand, and she reached out with two bony fingers and closed my eyes and all I know is I fell into a swoon.

I woke up in the morning to birdsong, with the sunshine streaming through the dusty windows, illuminating cobwebs in tender beams of light spilled across the room. I knew I had to get out of that place. I knew I had to try again.

I wanted an end to the madness. I wanted home. I wanted you, Richie. I wanted Mum and Dad.

I went out. There were snoring, naked bodies lying on the sand near the house. It looked like the aftermath of a carnival or an orgy instead of a ritual killing. I went to the stable and I took the white mare again and threw a blanket across her back. I didn’t care how long it took me. There had to be a way home and this time I wouldn’t give up.

But the landscape had changed. The paths I remembered were no longer there. The hills and valleys almost seemed to have been reordered. And even though my heart was sick and I was unable to shake off the ugly images of the slaying of Hiero, the light was unbearable and beautiful.

The sun was up and I want to say that it was golden, but it wasn’t golden, it was the color of treacle. I want to say the grass was green, but it wasn’t, it was turquoise, the color of a quarry pool. The rocks were lion-colored and glimmered with quartz, and the sky I wanted to call blue was in reality lilac. And the colors were moist. It was as much as I could do to prevent myself from getting off the horse and putting my hands into these colors, to see if they would come off on my fingers.

It was like the world had been remade and though it was a thought I resisted, it felt as if the killing of Hiero had something to do with its renewal. I wandered on my horse through hollows in the land and across hills. I had no idea where to look to find my way back home. I just knew that I would wander until I found it, even if it would take me twenty years.

I stopped only to let the white mare drink or graze. And then on I went. One night I slept under a bush, and another night I spent sleeping in a crevice between granite boulders. When I woke in the morning I had a fat tear on my cheek. A little lizard crawled from the crevice and hopped onto my chest. I gasped but I wasn’t at all repelled by it. It climbed up onto my face and it drank the teardrop on my cheek and I knew it was trying to comfort me.
I don’t know why I knew. Then it finished drinking my tear and pattered across my eyebrow and pushed its tiny damp snout against my forehead in a spot right between my eyes. It tickled, but in a nice way, and I felt the tickling go right to the seat of my brain and I heard the lizard say
Don’t worry
. Then it hopped off my face and disappeared into the crack it had come from.

The world started opening up for me. I knew exactly where to go for food. I found pools to drink from, mushrooms as big as my fist, and apple-sized berries. I had only to look.

One afternoon I’d stopped to let the horse drink and I sat with my back to a rock and a bumblebee came by, buzzing round my head. I reached out and carefully took its wing between my thumb and forefinger. The bee didn’t mind. It grew in size until I was able to climb on its back. We went flying, quite low to the land. I let the bee know what I was looking for, the crossing, the path home. But we couldn’t find it and after several hours on the bee’s back I dismounted and the bee became small again and flew off.

You’ll say I dreamed it; of course you will. I’m not so sure.

Then on the third evening I saw the moon coming up and I made my camp on a hilltop, on a flat slate table of rock that was like a mysterious altar covered in a bed of sparkling green moss, and there in the sky, slightly east and west of me, the sun and the moon met, just briefly, and I sensed everything would be well.

I covered myself in the blanket from the mare and I slept, and in my sleep the lizard led me to a clear pool and there were stones in the pool. The lizard told me each stone was a dream and if I picked up a stone I would have that dream, so I picked up a stone and the dream was you, Richie, you! But you were older, as you are now. And in the dream I taught you some new chords for your guitar, imagine that. Then I picked up more stones and had more dreams and when I woke up, someone was sitting beside my mossy bed.

“Are you ready to come back now?”

I blinked. The figure was in shadow with the rising sun at his back.

“Hiero! It’s you!”

I leapt from my bed and embraced him.

“Of course it’s me! Who’d’ye think it was.”

“But you were dead! ”

“Dead? No, no, it would take more than that to kill one of us. But I’ve got a nice souvenir to show for it.” He lifted his shirt and showed me a wicked scar across his midriff. But it was healed. “That’s the first time I’ve let young Silkie best me in a fight, I’ll tell you. I must be getting old.”

“But I saw them burning your body on a pyre!” I hugged him again.

“No, gracious, that wasn’t me, that was a
form
. Did you know you smell like that old mare?”

I didn’t understand, but I didn’t care. Hiero was alive. I was so pleased to see him that I wept.

“So you do care about me, then?” he said.

“Of course I do!”

“So why did you run away?”

“I thought you were dead! I just want to go home.”

He looked at me sadly. “I know that. It’s taken me a long time to find you, Tara.”

“But I’ve only been gone three days!”

He shook his head. “No, no. You’ve been gone a few months. Your time to go back to your people is near.”

He told me that I had only seven days in total before the crossing opened again and I could go home. I became excited and he looked more than a little sad. He warned me that things wouldn’t be easy when I returned home, that things would not be the same. Of course, I didn’t heed his warnings; I had no idea what he meant. How could I? And then he told me flat out that he loved me and that he wanted to know if there was any hope for him. I let him down gently, and he asked me if there would be any hope if he were to come back home with me. I told him I couldn’t see that happening. He turned and squinted into the sun and he seemed to accept it.

I let him lead me back to the lake and to his house, where I passed the next seven days in anticipation of coming home. In order to make the time pass more quickly I learned as many things as I could while I was there. Oddly, there seemed to be no more animosity between Silkie and him, and Silkie left me well alone, seeming to blush and walk away whenever I came near.

On the day before I was due to leave, Hiero begged me on his knees to stay with him. He cried and hung on to my legs. Then when he realized that I wasn’t going to change my mind he seemed to become angry. He demanded to know what I had that was so important to go back to. I told him I had you, Richie.

“Blast him,” he said to me. “I will blast him.”