Among Others

Reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Spell Sword, which is fun so far.

Wednesday 31st October 1979

Near thing, but not the way I expected at all.

So the first thing was, it was a long loooong walk. No fairies were anywhere near me as I walked it. They hate pain, I don’t know why, but I’ve known it as long as I’ve known anything about them. Even a skinned knee or a turned ankle will send them scattering. The pain screaming out every step from my leg must have been enough to scare them off for miles around. It’s a good thing I set off early, to give it time to subside after I got there.

King Minos’s labyrinth is right up the mountain, the Graig. It’s one of the highest ruins. It was a very old iron works, one of the first, and an iron ore mine, not a deep one, just a scratching and mostly filled in. What’s left of it really does look like a labyrinth, or a maze anyway. You have to thread your way through the walls, and though none of them are more than shoulder-height it does feel like following a maze pattern. The bit where the entrance to the diggings used to be is in the centre, and it’s a bit sunken, and there’s a kind of lane that leads down to it. I sat on the wall there and rested, leaning my cane up against the wall. It was spotting with rain, so I couldn’t read, though I’d brought my book, of course. It was Delany’s Babel 17, I’d been reading it on the bus. I’d brought oak leaves too, I picked them up on the way up through heavily wooded Ithilien. Glorfindel hadn’t said how many, but I’d kept stuffing them into my bag as I went. Oaks hang onto their leaves all winter, like mallorns, so it’s easy to find them.

I was wearing my school coat, because I don’t have another any more. I hadn’t brought my coat when I’d run away. My school coat has the Arlinghurst badge on it, a rose, with the motto Dum spiro spero, which actually I rather like—while I breathe I shall hope. I heard a joke about a school deciding to have “I hear, I see, I learn” which translates as “Audio video disco.” I spent a little while thinking about that. At this distance, I could kind of like the motto. When I’m there, I feel I have to hate everything about it or I’m giving in. School seemed very far away as I sat there, coat notwithstanding. There’s something real and essential about the landscape in the valleys that makes everything else seem like a distant distraction.

After a while the sun came out, feebly. The clouds were scudding across the sky at a tremendous pace, and I was looking across the valley from almost as high as they were. There aren’t many trees up there, just two spindly rowans clinging by the entrance to the old diggings. There were flocks of birds circling about, probably deciding which direction to migrate, marking patterns across the sky. After the sun came the fairies, peeping out at me behind walls, and at last Glorfindel.

It’s very unsatisfactory writing down conversation with a fairy. Either I put it into proper words, which really is making it up, or I try to represent something that’s only partly in words with just those few words. And if I write it down like I did yesterday, it’s a lie. I’m saying what I want him to have said, when in fact what he said was a few words and a whole lot of feeling going along with that. How do you write that down? Maybe Delany could.

We didn’t talk all that much, anyway. He sat beside me, and I could almost feel him. Then I could feel him next to me, which is beyond unusual, and then I started to have sexual feelings. I know, unthinkable, with a fairy. All the fairies came closer, then, which worried me and once I’d started worrying about it Glorfindel was as insubstantial as ever, though still right next to me.

I remembered then that I do know stories about women who had sex with fairies, and every single one of those stories is about pregnancy. I looked at Glorfindel, and yes, he’s beautiful and ... ineluctably masculine ... and he was looking at me soulfully, and yes I would like to, but not if it means that. No way! Even if all the normal men I meet look at me as if I am dogmeat. And in a way, that would be incest too, with Glorfindel. More so.

“Untouched?” he said, or something like that, I’m never absolutely sure what that word means. But I knew what he was talking about.

“So far, I’ve fought off everyone who’s tried,” I said, sounding much fiercer than I intended, though it’s nothing but the truth, not that Daniel needed fighting exactly. “You know about Carl.”