Metro Winds (28 page)

I put the pouch of stones into my basket and set off. Outside the grounds of the King's Palace it was summer and gloriously bright. The walk in the sunshine with Yssa lifted my spirits immeasurably, and as we approached the nearest bridge that would lead me to my old world, I had to suppress a wild desire to burst into song. It was not the thought of going back to my own world that lifted me, but the fact that I had found a way to act.

I begged Yssa to come with me, but she baulked at the bridge where we were to cross, hanging back and saying that she would come next time. It was ironic that, although there were many ways from this world to my old world, and few in the other direction, faerie folk seldom crossed. Perhaps, like Yssa, they feared it, or feared what might be done to them, or feared mortality might be contagious. Impatient to be gone, I hugged her and promised that I would not be long.

I noticed immediately how few of the people about me seemed to see me, let alone notice the oddness of my clothes. I wondered uneasily if my time in the other world had thinned my essence in my own world, with its solid truths and heavy certainties. Then it came to me that perhaps I had always been less substantial than others of my kind. Might it not be that all the dreams and longings with which I had filled myself had rendered me less solid than other mortals, and so more able to cross between the worlds?

By the time I reached the open market area that was my destination, I was beginning to understand that it was travellers and tourists in particular who were blind to me. The local people saw me, but turned their eyes away. This puzzled me mightily. I did not know then that the denizens of that city, which is a gateway to this world, had been affected by certain residual magic so that they were able to see what outsiders could not. This was not a power they acknowledged or enjoyed. In the deepest part of their minds where all minds join and become mystery, they knew the secret their city hid. Such knowledge is naturally unbearable for most mortals, and so amnesia has become a subtle art in that city straddling the gateway to Faerie. Thus, many who saw turned aside and at once erased that seeing from their mind.

What fascinated me most in the end were the few tourists who showed by their startled looks that they did see me. I was eager to speak to them, but without exception, anyone I tried to approach fled at once with half-shamed faces. I began to wonder uneasily how my time in Faerie had marked me and was glad to reach the open market and give my attention to my list. But when I tried to shop, I soon discovered that although most of the traders could see me, few would acknowledge or serve me. Those who would were invariably the eldest of the traders, and even they would avoid looking directly into my eyes after that first startled glance. They took the jewels I offered without comment and bagged my purchases. They were grimly courteous and the transaction would be so swiftly concluded that it was as if a door had been slammed in my face. I did not know if I was being cheated, but later, when I returned to Faerie, Yssa laughed at my suspicions, saying no mortal would dare to cheat a faerie.

‘But I am not a faerie,' I protested.

‘You bear the mark of one who has been loved by a faerie,' Yssa said, and for a moment the old grim grief showed in her eyes.

I wondered, as I often had before, what had been done to her in the past, but I did not ask for I knew she would not answer. Concern for her robbed me of the innocent pleasure I had taken in my purchases and reminded me of the look of pity I had seen in one rheumy mortal eye. No doubt the old man thought I had been stolen, rather than choosing to enter Faerie. It is true that mortal children are sometimes stolen, but my husband told me that usually they are unloved starvelings who have strayed close to Faerie. They are none the worse for their crossing, and probably far better loved and coddled than in their own world, since faerie folk breed so seldom that all children are precious.

But perhaps it is not always so that those stolen children were unloved. As I left the market, an old woman sitting on a stool outside her door had reached out to catch at my hem, asking with tears in her eyes about her little granddaughter, before her husband hushed her.

The old woman's words changed my mind about going straight back to Faerie upon completion of my shopping. Instead, I made my way to the pension in the small lane where I had lived before my first crossing to Faerie. Scarlet geraniums still dangled in an untidy, vivid cluster from the third-floor balcony of my old apartment, but I saw the nose and the paw of a sleeping dog and a white shirt flapped on the line to tell me my room was now occupied.

What would happen if I knocked and made the concierge acknowledge me? Would she have my case stored in her attic or had it been sent home to my parents along with the report of my disappearance? The police had surely guessed what had become of me, for there must be many disappearances in that city, yet I knew they would never speak of it to the mainland police.

I turned away from the pension without knocking and found myself on the wooden bridge I had crossed on the first day I came to Faerie. Then, I had been wearing flat loafers of the sort my mother had favoured because they were comfortable and quiet. Such footwear does not exist in Faerie, but there, fortunately the highest heels are deliciously comfortable. Indeed I wore high heels to market, and it was hearing them tap tap upon the wooden boards that called to mind the loafers I had worn the last time I crossed that bridge, and made me suddenly decide to follow the same route I had taken on the day I had first travelled there.

I would go as far as the Wolfsgate, I decided, though this time I would not pass into Faerie by that route. I knew of a less contrary crossing close by that I would use.

My intended destination when last I crossed that little bridge had been a small private library. I had been granted special permission to enter it for an entire afternoon. I wanted to examine a certain ancient tome, which referred to an obscure incident in history that I hoped would form the centre of a thesis. I had stopped on the other side of the bridge to examine the letter of invitation from the curator, wanting to make sure I had correctly memorised the name of the street in which the private library was situated. I did not have a map because I had always taken pride in eschewing maps in new cities, and I had passed over the bridge several times already and knew it would bring me to the main thoroughfare from which ran the street I sought.

I had folded the letter and tucked it into my pocket, reassured to have remembered the name correctly, but realising I would arrive early if I went directly to the library. The curator had sounded particularly fussy, an old man unlikely to let me in the door until the specified time, so I decided to explore a little before making my way there.

As Cloud-Marie begins to comb my hair, gently teasing out the snags between her fingers, those two journeys over the same ground seem to fuse. I see myself simultaneously at twenty-two and at thirty-two, moving away from the bridge and turning to go along a canal. Two women slow to admire the opaque aqua flow of water lit with sequins of sunlight, the fringe of green moss waving in the currents along the edge of submerged steps in the canal. The older thinks how the water flowing through the canals in Faerie is darker because it is not water but pure forgetfulness.

Both women come to the piazza and the younger hesitates, trying to decide which way to go. The older remembers what the younger chose, plunges immediately into the narrow lane between two yellow buildings and is surprised to discover a small café had been built further along the lane where there was once none. She was surprised because change is rare in Faerie, and almost as rare close to its borders.

That younger self is left behind as I follow my older self along the lane and see how she was forced to stop when a group of noisy tourists suddenly comes pouring from an intersecting lane, chattering and gesticulating wildly. Unable to continue, she turns to watch how they surge past without seeing the café or her. Their attention is fixed on the formidably buxom woman leading them, her standard an upraised umbrella. She listens as their guide marches them back towards the piazza, explaining in a ringing voice that gondola are made crooked so as to be stable in the water.

‘Imagine that,' murmurs a woman at the end of the group holding the hand of a small child.

Instead of responding to her mother, the child turns to look at me. That jolted me, I remember, even though I knew some mortal children were capable of seeing faerie until they learned to filter out uncomfortable and inconvenient truths. That thirty-two-year-old self stands staring after the child and its mother until they vanish from sight, then she turns and continues on her way along the lane until it spills into an open area before a cathedral. It is a breathtakingly beautiful building. Her younger self had almost gone inside, but her older self has a wariness of churches and cathedrals, for there is magic of a kind in them inimical to faerie.

I watch my older self turn reluctantly away from the cathedral, then gaze at the building opposite, which had so struck my younger self when she turned from the church.

I had been astonished, I remember, because it seemed so utterly familiar to me. I had never passed that way before. I knew the red-painted sill on the lower front window, the lion-shaped knocker on the front door, the broken shutter on the third floor, and wondered in bewilderment if I might have seen the building in a photograph.

That was when I noticed a lane between it and the next building. I shrugged off the queer feeling that it had not been there a moment past, for how could a lane suddenly appear? I had smiled, then, realising the red sill and lion-shaped knocker and the other things that I had seemed to recognise were only visual clichés I had encountered a dozen times in films and novels featuring that city.

I had gone to peer along the lane, wondering if it would bring me through to the main streets where I would find the library, but it was too shadowy to see properly when I was standing in the sunlight, so I stepped into it.

Thus did my younger self step unwittingly and perilously into the shadowy space where the realms of faerie and mortal reality overlap.

A man sat smoking on a stoop a little way down the shadowy lane. He had a dark, sculpted beard and a mass of coal-black curls flowing over his shoulders. His long legs were stretched out in front of him and the end of the black cigarillo in his fingers was a burning eye in the shadows as he drew on it. He expelled the smoke from his lungs in a long sighing breath and then turned his head to look at me.

I caught my own breath then, having never seen a man so profoundly handsome and so singularly wild looking. He had a long, beautiful, angular face, a straight nose and bright, almond-shaped turquoise eyes flecked with gold that reminded me of the canal water. Dark hairs curled above his collar and showed at his wrists, which were muscular and strong, but instead of his skin being swarthy to match, he was pale as milk. Unabashed by my stare, he held my gaze as he took another long pull at the cigarillo. I had drawn closer without intending it and heard the sound of dry tobacco crackling. Then he took the cigarillo from his lips and sent it spinning away into the shadows further along the lane.

I felt a fool as I realised how I must appear, standing there gawping at him as if he were a statue in a gallery. I said in a brisk voice, ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but I wonder if this lane will bring me to the main streets along the Grand Canal.'

He uncoiled and rose in a single movement, but instead of stepping towards me, he merely leaned back against the wall and slid his hands into his pockets, asking languidly, ‘I am not sorry that you disturb me, lovely lady. Are you lost?' His voice was low and soft and seemed to insinuate itself against my skin like an affectionate cat.

‘I don't mind being a little lost,' I said.