Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (24 page)

THE FEY OF CLOUDMOOR
by Terry Brooks

Terry Brooks
published his famous fantasy novel
The Sword of Shannara
in 1977, when it became the first work of fiction ever to appear on the
New York Times
Trade Paperback Bestseller List, where it remained for five months. He has published thirteen consecutive bestselling novels since. Brooks has subsequently explored the complex history of the
Shannara
universe, spanning hundreds of years, in more than a dozen novels—including
The Elfstones of Shannara, The Wishstones of Shannara, The First King of Shannara, The Druid of Shannara, The Elf Queen of Shannara, Isle Witch,
and
Jarka Rules—
as well as the three-volume
Genesis of Shannara
series, prequels to the original novel, and the tangentially related three-volume
Word and the Void
series. In addition, he’s the author of the light-hearted six-volume
Magic Kingdom of Landover
series. His most recent books are the start of a new
Shannara
series
, Bearer of the Black Staff
and
The Measure of the Magic,
and a
Shannara s
tory published as a novella chapbook,
Indomitable.
Brooks lives with his wife in the Pacific Northwest and in Hawaii
.

Here he gives us another take, a most compelling one, on what happens
after
the end of one of Poul Anderson’s most famous stories, “The Queen of Air and Darkness.”

He came out
of the world of Men and their cities of steel and concrete in tatters, all scratched up and dirtied on the surface and broken and ripped apart inside. He carried what was left of his life in a blanket clutched to his breast, carefully shielding its contents from the sights and sounds and smells of the civilization that had ruined him and destroyed her. He thought of her all the time, but he couldn’t make himself remember what she looked like anymore. He only knew how hard they had tried to find a way through the morass of their lives, choosing to share their misery but always searching to break free of their bonds.

Hard to do when nothing in your life is real and every day is a slog through dark and painful places that strip the skin from your soul.

When she died, they had been huddled in an alleyway in the darkest part of Christmas Landing, sheltered poorly in cardboard from a steady downpour that formed a small river only four feet away. They had scored early and resold what they had to get money for food and milk for Barraboo. They made a good choice for once, but came to regret it with night’s hard descent and no means to soften the blow. She had been coughing badly for days and her breathing had worsened and all he knew to do was to stay with her. There were medical centers you could go to, but once they entered one of those places they might as well say goodbye to their baby. She might have gone alone, of course, but she was afraid to do that, as if making that choice would cost her the baby anyway.

As if in his desperation, he might choose to sell it.

As if in hers she might approve.

He stole some medicine off the shelves of a pharmacy, but it didn’t seem to help her. Nothing did. She just kept coughing and wheezing, everything getting worse. He found her an old blanket in a garbage bin and wrapped her in that and then held her close against him to share his body heat. She was so cold, and she didn’t look right. But she still held Barraboo and wouldn’t let her go, and so he ended up holding them both.

But finally he fell asleep, even though he had told himself he wouldn’t do so, and when he woke she was dead.

He never knew her real name. She never gave it to him. He called her Pearl because she was precious to him, and she seemed content enough with that. He told her his own name, though. “I’m Jimmy,” he said. “Once upon a time, I was kidnapped by the Old Folk.”

He told that to only a very few before her and then quit doing so because no one believed him. She probably didn’t believe him either, but she came closer to looking as if she did than anyone else. She was like that. Even at her worst, when she was so strung out she could barely put a sentence together and started seeing things that weren’t there, she could find a way to listen to him. She was tough, but she was vulnerable, too. She trusted people when she shouldn’t have. She had faith in people who didn’t deserve it. He was one of those people, he supposed. Mostly, he was good to her and took care of her and the baby and did little things to make her life more bearable when really it was Hell-on-Earth.

He thought all this and more as he rode the hovercraft out of Christmas Landing to Portolondon and his future. His and Barraboo’s. For he was determined his daughter would have a future, even if Pearl didn’t. He had fought against himself and his habit and his wasteful, reckless existence for too long. He had denied what he had known was true for too many years, persuaded by his mother and the rescuer she had hired to find him, made to believe when in his heart he knew he shouldn’t.

Memories surfaced like half-remembered dreams of his time among the Old Folk, the Outlings. He had been only a boy, little more than a baby and so young he barely realized what was happening to him. Taken from his mother’s camp by a pooka, carried to the realm of the Old Folk beyond Troll Scarp, seduced and made happy beyond anything he could have imagined possible, his mother all but forgotten, his world made over—there he had remained until his mother had come for him, finding him with a mother’s persistence in the face of formidable odds, taking him back to his old life, telling him he would forget all this one day, it would seem a dream to him, he would become the man he was meant to be and not a pawn in the hands of creatures who could not know and would never care what it was he needed.

“The choices you make in this world should be your own and never another’s,” she had told him. “You should never be another’s pawn.”

He disembarked with his precious cargo still asleep and stood looking from the loading platform at the dingy buildings of the town. There was nothing here for him and never would be—not in this hardscrabble collection of housings and shelters, not in this scooped up mélange of humanity and waste. He wrinkled his nose at it, a measure of its ugliness given his own sad state. All of Roland was a backwater, light years away from the civilized universe—the back of beyond. It allowed for habitation—breathable air, drinkable water, sustainable crops—but not for much in the way of sunlight. He shivered in the cold, empty light of the season’s perpetual night. Winterbirth, the pooka had called it. It gave him pause that he should remember this, but memory chose to keep what it wanted and discarded the rest. What mattered was how much attention you paid to memory and what you did with it as a consequence. For example, if you knew it was dangerous to go somewhere, you tried hard to remember not to go there again.

Conversely, if you remembered a place where you were happy—even if you were told you weren’t and tried very hard to forget it and pretend that what you believed then to be happiness was in fact nothing of the sort—maybe you needed to make sure.

Especially when all other options had been exhausted and nothing of your life was good. Especially when you had more than yourself to worry about, and even in your drug-addicted rootless life you knew babies were pure and innocent and deserved better than what you could give them.

Especially when hope was all you had left to give.

He looked out across the buildings to the far north of Arctica, to the shimmer of the aurora and the green of mountains and valleys and mysteries that everyone knew were waiting there and no one wanted to discover.

No one except him.

“Hoah,” a voice greeted. He looked down. A dwarf was standing right beside him, looking up from waist-high, bearded and twinkly-eyed, browned by weather and sun, wrinkled by age. “Need transport?”

He shook his head. “Got no money.”

“You don’t say? But there’s other means to get to where you want to go, youngling. Have you a destination?”

He shrugged. “Out there, somewhere. A place I lived once a long time ago, when I was a boy. Beyond Troll Scarp.”

“Scallywags! Flywinds! Danceabouts!” The old one shook his head. “Don’t no one wants to go there. They who is not to be named in places like this one live in places like that one, and they keep to themselves. Everyone knows. No one says.”

“Old Folk. Outlings. The Fey. The Faerie Kind. There, I’ve said it for all those who won’t. I don’t fear them. I lived with them.”

The old man cocked his head. “Yet came back to live among the humans who birthed you? That right? But from the look of you it didn’t work out so well.”

“Not so well.”

“A baby and no mother?”

He looked at the old man sharply. The baby hadn’t moved or cried out. He might have been carrying old clothes for all anyone could tell. But this old man knew better.

“The mother died. Pearl. She was like me, an addict. But not strong enough to survive it. The baby is all I have left.”

“Ayah. Would you take her with you, then?” Jimmy didn’t miss that he hadn’t told the old man it was a girl. “Would you give her over to them for a drug that only they could give you?” the old man persisted. “Would you make a trade if it were offered.”

He shook his head. “Not for anything. Not though I were the most desperate of men, and I am very much that. I am the lowest and saddest of all humans, and I would sell anything I could get my hands on to satisfy my need for even five minutes. But not Barraboo. Not my Pearl’s child. I have not yet come to that.”

The old man studied him as if to ascertain the truth of such a statement. Then he shrugged. “What then?”

Jimmy Cullen, he that was taken by a pooka once upon a time, smiled crookedly. “I have come to take her home.”

The old man regarded him quizzically, all knitted brow and scrunched up mouth, before saying, “Well, then perhaps I can help you.”

The old man led him through the city, down its teeming streets and byways, along its alleys and footpaths, past shops and offices, homes and apartments, flowers and filth way out to the ends of the northside and there to a stable. Inside the stable was a wagon and what appeared to be a reindeer and soon enough, on closer inspection, proved to be. The old man hauled the wagon out of the stable by himself, grunting with the effort but refusing Jimmy’s help, harnessed the reindeer and got them aboard and settled.

“Bit of a ride ahead. If you need to sleep, put the small one in the necessaries box behind you—there, you see it, don’t you? There’s blankets to make her snug. What’s your name again?”

“Jimmy Cullen,” he said.

“I don’t think so. But it will do until we reach Cloudmoor.”

“What’s yours?” Jimmy asked.

The old man shrugged. “Oh, I have all sorts of names. Widdershanks and Skitterfoot and Trundlestump, among others. But you can call me Ben.”

They set out, the reindeer pulling the wagon and its load, leaving Portolondon and humankind, making for the Outway and Troll Scarp, solitary and far distant against the always-darkening horizon. No sun this time of year; no daylight, no day. It was night all the time or maybe twilight for a little while each day, and the people who lived in Arctica soon got used to the idea. Behind them, the Gulf of Polaris glimmered green-gray under skies brightened marginally by two small moons brought close together in their present orbits, both dwarfed by the dazzle of Charlemagne. Lights from the city lent their smudged and diffuse glow, but it did not penetrate the darkness far beyond the city. The Outway was its own space and kept its own presence and did not suffer intrusions from men or the consequences of their inventions.

“Better wrap up in this, Jimmy Cullen,” the little man said after a time. He held a long switch in one hand for urging on their wagon’s furry engine and he held the reins in the other, but he laid down the switch long enough to hand Jimmy a blanket. “It gets cold out here for those not born of the Outway, especially those come to us as you have, desperate and soul-bereft. Go on, now. Take it.”

He did so, pulling it about him, altering it to give further warmth to Barraboo. She was beginning to stir and soon would cry. But he had nothing with which to feed her, neither food nor milk. He had love, but he knew you could not live on that alone or even survive on it. Ask Pearl. Tears flooded his eyes as he thought the name and the memories surfaced.

“How do you know the way?” he asked Ben, anxious to deflect the consequences of his awakened feelings.

“I just do,” the other answered, and said nothing more.

“Are you one of them?” Jimmy asked, glancing over for a close look.

Ben shook his head. “Not I. But I know of them, and I do what I can for them. I am a link in what has become a very long chain.”

“Were you looking for me back at the station? You seemed quick enough to find me. I don’t look the sort that many would want to help. Only avoid. Yet you asked me right out. Do you know me? Have we met before and I’ve forgotten?”

The old man laughed softly, not in a mean-spirited way, but gentle and kind. “I know you well. Not by name, but by look.”