Authors: Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner
Despairing I looked up just once more, for it seemed to me that the lid too would be shocked into closing down on me. As it was beginning to do. As it was now changing, funnelling down
onto me in crushing solid greyness. It was as near as my own choking breath. Their funnel.
And in the funnel there was a hand. It was a large, rather rough hand, with thick nails. It was open and reaching, and I put my own right hand into it. It closed on my hand and I laid my other above, onto its wrist, which I could feel, but not see because of the greyness. And then it lifted me.
Almost immediately everything was swallowed up: the forest, the blinking menacing fairy lights, the wriggling clefts and the mound between them. I could see nothing, hear nothing, expect nothing. I had no measure of minutes or days. I could still feel the hand with both of my own, but there was no ache or drag in the lifting. I was passing through some layer in which such things were altered.
And in the end I found myself standing on a concrete road and grasping in my two hands the crook of a staff, which was warm from my long and firm grip, and made plainly and roughly out of hazel wood.
I had been walking hard for some time and was now resting on my staff and looking back over one shoulder. But there was nothing to be seen so far. I remembered places I had passed. These seemed to be mostly dumping grounds for cast-off things, discarded tins, frying pans, religions, newspapers, dolls, dreams, engines, pulleys, tyres, theories, and so on. It was black night over the road; there were no stars showing, but whether this was owing to their absence from the heaven above the Debateable Land, or because they were hidden by clouds, or, as I then assumed, because they were occluded by the large and powerful arc-lamps at either side of the road, I do not know. This road lay
perfectly straight, but dipping and rising a little, for an indefinite mileage behind and ahead of me. Every thirty yards or so there was a lamp standard from whose observation nothing on the road could escape; they were, however, neither friendly nor unfriendly; I was used to them. It was by their light that I had noticed the waste lands on both sides, whose derelict ugliness stretched back from the edges into profound darkness and the beginnings of man's impatience with his destiny.
Here in the Debateable Land there was much that was reminiscent, that brought back to me clear memories, where in Fairy Land I had only perceived faint intimations of something coming increasingly between me and joy. Thus I remembered dumping grounds and back-yards, not so spacious as these, but still devastating enough for the indigenous humans. It seemed to me that I had seen such places very commonly on Middle Earth and that out of that life and place I could remember many more objects which were flawed or broken or chipped or in some way mishandled, than such as were new or tolerably unspoiled. It hurt me now to remember those after the perfections of Fairy Land. It hurt me to think, as I did, of a teapot stencilled crudely with pink and blue, discoloured inside, as I knew well from having washed it so often, and with a crack across the lid. For a time I was overwhelmed with the poverty and inadequacy of that teapot, and of the check table-cloth, hastily darned, as I was now aware, by my mother, upon which I was used to set it every evening. But I pulled myself together, swung my hazel stick, and walked on resolutely.
All things discarded and shed on Middle Earth find their way here sooner or later. As I walked by I could watch the heaps
swelling slowly, the hopes and loves effacing one another as the incoming tide effaces a baby's rampart of sand. For a little while the older hopes would be still visible beneath the new ones, then they would be smoothed away and done with. And now I could remember many of the hopes and dreams I had myself cherished in that earlier time, and I could have lain down by the roadside and wept for them, but that I had to hurry on without pause. Only, the memory of what I had wanted for myself and my world as I saw it, made a kind of rough ache in my mind, corresponding to the ache which was now beginning in my feet and ankles, and which I had never known in all the days of my fleet-foot hunting and hour-long dancing in Fairy Land. Thus I remembered kindred pains on Middle Earth, cheap shoes that bit my toes and instep, chilblains, cracked lips, back-ache coming home from the office dog-tired on Spring evenings, my head still full of figures and always at the back the anxiety as to whether one would keep the job, whether the boss had been just snappy or whether he'd meant it, whether perhaps next Saturdayâand what would Mother say when I came back, or rather what would we both
do
?
Cogitating upon this it came to me that the thing which I at least had done was, clearly, to go to Fairy Landâor to have been taken there. Yet I could not at present determine any backward limit to my seven years in that country, for right at the beginning it had still appeared as though I had always been there. Or so I thought now.
I looked round constantly over my shoulder, listening intently at the same time, but I could only hear the tinkling and rustling and sighing of the dump-heaps. The road had mounted a slight
brow and was now dropping, and I could see that, some distance ahead of me, the lights were reflected in a peculiar way. I was wondering about this when the arc-lamp immediately ahead of me gave a ping and dropped through the centre of its light-cone a flaming question mark which turned to black on the road and shrivelled out, but was enough to sharpen my walk into something near running. Down and down I went as the road dipped and dropped and the lamps dimmed in a rising fog or steam. Then behind me I heard the fairy horns, the long rising scream of the siren, the wild tooting, the speed unchecked on that cornerless road. Looking back from my now breathless running on the bruising concrete, I could see their headlights beginning to lap over the rise in the road, rapidly rising suns. Now I could see ahead of me patches of steam and patches of reflection apparently across the road. Now a plain flood limit lay unescapable but a chance. I could not tell what it was, only it looked dark. Half in, on the edge, lay a piece of machinery with little wheels and a blunt muzzle and a ribbon of cartridges dripping out of its guts. I was in over my shoes as the headlights tipped the crest, but already wreaths of steam were hiding me, rising from the warm blood into the cold night air.
I recognised this for what it was, but where it had been knee-deep in the time of Thomas the Rhymer, it was now almost shoulder-high in the middle, with a slow current that dragged at one's knees and feet. I did not care to swim; I could not face all that blood against my neck and chin. There was no sound now from the horns, no glare from the headlights, the pursuit was checked. Gradually we climbed out of it again, waist-deep, thigh-deep, ankle-deep. In mid-stream I had found a companion. She
said: “I was shot while attempting to escape. So I had to wait till someone else came by. Hold me until we are out.”
Our clasped hands dripped blood together, strangely from no wounds of our own. I said: “Was it they who shot you?”
“I think so,” she said, “but now it is over.” I said: “Where can we wash this off us?”
She said: “There is a deep spring near here, of eye-water, tears for the blood. I think that will wash us.”
We went down from the road over rocks that were strewn with torn treaties and crumpled telegrams, and washed in the spring. When we came out I found that we were covered with a kind of flexible armour and that it was near dawn. When I asked my companion why, she asked me in turn what else I thought could happen when opposite meets opposite on the same body. And as to the dawn, night had been piling up and piling up in the further side of the Debateable Land which I had just left, and after a time something was bound to alter. I admitted that this was so and asked her for her name. She shook her head and said she didn't know any longer and added that we were now in that part of the Debateable Land where come all that have lived in vain, and this was why we were armoured. We went on together; it was still too dark to see her face at all clearly, and she kept it turned away, partly perhaps because there was a bullet hole in her forehead.
For a time we were walking along the road in silence, very white in our armour of opposites, and then far off I heard the roaring of the sea. As we came nearer I saw a little below the road a bay between black cliffs, and heard the grinding and shrieking of pulled gravel as the great waves pounded and swept forward
and back and sideways. And there, fighting the waves with sword and axe and shield were three heroes, each desperate, wearing himself out, each unaware of the others. I asked: “Who are they?” but even as I did so I could see in the dawn light reflecting up from the slithering foam how their faces changed, so that sometimes there was one man and sometimes another. And after a little I observed that one of them was a man whom I had seen more than once on Middle Earth speaking about those things which had seemed to me then to matter more than anything, from a platform in the hall where I was used to go on a Sunday evening when my mother shook her head at me regretfully and went to church; and this man's face now was like his face had been then, and now too his lips were tight and his eyes hard and agonised as he slashed and tore at the leaping water.
And now we were walking through a lovely forest, murmuring in the dawn, where great tree trunks held up uncounted fingers of twig and living leaf. But all at once there was terror in the forest. I saw coming towards us a monstrous flapping thing, white and crumpled, and as it passed it was eating the forest with its formless jaws. “Keep well to the middle of the road,” said my companion, and we watched the destruction of the trees by the newspaper and saw the headlines that striped its hideous body dissolve and melt into one another. When it was near us it paused and flapped itself and grinned at us, momently shooting out and withdrawing notebooks, press cameras, fountain pens, cheques and paper laurel wreaths. But we in our armour shook our heads at its antics and walked on quickly. I remembered my boy-cousin who was a reporter on our local paper at eighteen, and how later on his face had changed and gone bright and bitter.
Beyond the forest there was a great concourse of ghosts, old and young, and a great many babies and very young children. They were all round us in the early morning under the now unlighted lamp standards, and I felt a vile misery creeping through me between my skin and the armour, although I did not believe that the ghosts themselves were unhappy, for they seemed to be talking and playing and doing ordinary things. But I was afraid of seeing my mother among them, or anyone else I had known and loved on Middle Earth, and I stopped on the road with my right hand over my eyes. I still held the hazel stick in my left. It seemed to me now that I could remember the whole of my life on Middle Earth from my shrilly-complaining obscure childhood on to the fright and uncertainty of my adolescence, and the growing dull pressure of working days. And it was all a ghost life. And it was to get back to this that I had left Fairy Land. And as I thought of that I knew also that the pursuit was again near, coming swiftly on me. But I did not care. I was gone soft with misery. I only hoped they might take me back with them so that if only once again I might see and feel the delight I had cast away.
But my companion was crying at me: “Go on! Go on! Very soon I shall be remembering my name!” And she looked up with the oozing bullet hole in her forehead and I thought if I stayed I must recognise her and hear her name, and I was afraid of what it might be, and suddenly I turned away and plunged through the hosts down the road, which narrowed ahead of me to a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was light, and an immediate chasm. At the far side of the chasm the road began again, apparently the same. At the bottom of the chasm, but not so far down that one could not see clearly, there was an outcrop of extremely jagged
rocks and I thought I could also perceive across one of them some pieces of torn cloth and the occasional white of bones. Over the chasm was a rope and plank bridge, just wide enough to walk along, dipping in a curve and without hand-rails. Behind me in the tunnel I could hear the first laughter of the fairies, unpleasantly prolonged by echo, and after all it was impossible for me to surrender to it. My knees were beginning to tremble, but I ran across that bridge, looking steadily at the far side, my head almost bursting with the effort of control, and using my hazel stick for balance. It was very difficult where it sloped up at the far side; I was almost hopeless of being able to make it; when I did reach the road again I lay down flat, shaking, and only just in time unlooped the ropes from the staples and set the chasm between myself and pursuit.
It was now full daylight, although cloudy, and with a rippling wind. The road was very much pleasanter, grass edges and a gravel surface instead of concrete; the lamp standards were gone, and here it wound about through low hills with pasture and woodland and sometimes orchards. There would be farm-houses and barns and byres, and occasionally I saw people working in the fields. Looking through the gate of one barnyard that opened onto the road, I noticed that a chained dragon, elderly, its scales moulting, was being used to blow leisured fire under the boiler of a steam threshing machine, and I saw by the notice attached to the animal's spikes that this was a farmers' co-operative effort.
I was beginning to be hungry and thirsty, so, after crossing a brook, I went down to the edge, knelt on a mossy stone and drank. As I lifted my wet face, the brook said in a grumbling, gabbling voice: “What right have you to drink my water?”
“Please, brook,” I said, “I was thirsty.”
“All right,” said the brook. “But don't make me turn any of your mills.”
“Please, brook, I haven't got any mills,” I said, and put back the piece of moss which my foot had scraped off the stone. But as I was doing this, suddenly again I heard the sounds of pursuit, the fairies whooping merrily to one another as I had heard it often enough when I was hunter not quarry. I fell on my knees, whispering, my lips against the water: