The Hounds of Avalon (Gollancz S.F.) (23 page)

‘Oxford?’

‘No, silly! I live beyond the furthest star, on the other side of the mirror, in the misty vale where the golden apples grow. If you want to be poetic.’

Hal considered this comment for a moment, sieving through the little he had gleaned of mythology. ‘The Otherworld?’ he asked eventually.

‘That is another name for it, as is T’ir n’a n’Og. There are names and names and names, and when you are as old as I am you’ll
realise that names are meaningless, for they never really capture what a thing is.’

‘But this isn’t Otherworld,’ Hal protested. ‘This is … the world.’

Petronus laughed. ‘How ridiculous! I am here, so it must be the Land of Always Summer.’

Hal looked around. ‘But it’s winter.’

‘Then that proves the matter, for the Otherworld is a land of contradictions.’ Petronus spotted the tiny woman’s glimmer of golden light high over the rooftops. ‘My friend! I must go!’

‘Wait! How do you know I’m a Brother of Dragons?’ Hal asked.

‘So many questions! How does anyone know? It’s as plain as the nose on your face. You’re a blazing Blue Fire, like a little star come down to earth.’ Petronus pulled up his mask to reveal slanted eyes filled with the wildness of nature, and pointed pixie ears. He gave Hal a wink, pulled down the mask and then soared high into the sky and was gone.

Though he felt as if he was walking through a dream, Hal’s mind was racing. What Petronus had said about being in Otherworld gelled with what he had been told by the little people he had heard singing the other night. What could it possibly mean?

It wasn’t the only matter preying on his mind. Every time he heard someone or something call him a Brother of Dragons, it filled him with an unaccountable panic. Those words hinted at a future where he would have to give up the quiet, thoughtful life he had made for himself. It was a future where chaos ruled and anything could happen, where there were no certainties, no breakfast at seven-thirty, no lunch at one, no dinner at seven, no Sundays off, or sitting back with a good book as twilight fell. The name spoke of sacrifice and bloodshed and death and upheaval and all manner of unpleasantness, of the kind of life in which Hunter would probably revel, and which consequently was anathema to Hal. If it was true that he had somehow been selected by a Higher Power to be a defender of humanity, then that Higher Power had certainly got it wrong, for he had nothing whatsoever to offer.

Lost to his thoughts, Hal wandered down a side street off St Aldate’s to cut through to one of his regular haunts. It was a familiar route, but this time he was confronted by a pub he had never seen before. It looked oddly quaint and historical in a slightly unrealistic way, as though it had been prepared for a film set.
Through bottle-glass windows filtered the ruddy glow of a fire and the gleam of lanterns, with a great many deep shadows in the areas between them. The warped glass did not allow a clear view inside, though there were clearly many drinkers within. Their hubbub leaked out through the ancient, scarred oak door. The second storey overhung the first in a Tudor style, complete with the requisite black beams and white paint, and from it hung a sign that said ‘The Hunter’s Moon’, with a picture of a full moon partially obscured by cloud and what appeared to be a man with a wolf’s head.

It looked surprisingly inviting, and so Hal ventured in without a second thought. It was only when the door had banged to behind him that he realised his mistake. The occupants of the pub were a strange, otherworldly group. There was a man as thin as a needle, nearly seven feet tall, wearing a stovepipe hat that made him even taller, his fingers so long and thin that they looked as if they were made of stretched toffee; a woman with long blonde hair that moved with a life of its own – she had a seductive look about her, but mad, dangerous eyes; a giant of a man wearing furs and a battered wide-brimmed hat, a string of conies around his neck and a blunderbuss hanging from his belt; another woman as bent, twisted and wrinkled as a crone from a fairy story, black shawl and white cap, a black cat perched on her shoulder, her cackle like the rattle of stones on a coffin; and more, all odd and out of place. Further towards the back, the revellers were even more bizarre; Hal glimpsed horns and scales and forked tails.

‘Bless my soul, it’s a Brother of Dragons!’ the tall, thin man said.

Before Hal could back out, he was grabbed by numerous hands and dragged to the bar where the landlord loomed, overweight and black-bearded, his arms as thick as telegraph poles, both of them covered with tattoos of disturbing symbols.

‘Pour the lad a drink, Drogoff!’ someone called. Another agreed raucously, and the landlord reluctantly served up a tankard of foaming ale that was almost as big as Hal’s head.

‘Ooo, it ain’t often we get someone like a Brother of Dragons in here,’ the crone cackled. ‘We’s honoured.’

‘What is this place?’ Despite the dreamlike sensation that gripped him, Hal was beginning to feel the first pangs of incipient panic.

The big bear of a man with the blunderbuss levered himself out
of his chair and loomed over Hal. ‘Why, it’s The Hunter’s Moon, good brother. Best inn in all of the Far Lands.’

‘I don’t know what’s real or not any more,’ Hal said. His route to the door was blocked by more strange characters crowding around to see the new arrival. They were curious, but there was also unmistakable good will towards him, which made Hal feel a little more at ease.

‘The only real stuff’s in ’ere,’ the crone said, tapping the side of her head. ‘We make the rest of it ’ow we want it to be. Everybody knows that.’ With shaking hands, she grabbed a tiny goblet from the bar and knocked the contents back with gusto.

‘Steady on, Mother,’ the man in the stovepipe said. ‘The poor lad’s a bit disoriented. You know how it is when they first venture into the Far Lands. Give him room to breathe.’

The woman with the snaking hair glided forward, her hypnotic eyes burning into Hal. ‘Even Jack, Giant Killer, was adrift in his first days in Faerie,’ she said sibilantly. She moved a rotating finger slowly towards Hal’s temple, until the blunderbuss man gripped her wrist tightly. The woman hissed at him like a serpent, then pushed her way to the back of the bar.

‘Have to watch yourself round here, good brother. You’re not at home any more. There are many dangers, if you don’t know what you’re doing.’ The blunderbuss man clapped Hal heartily on the back. ‘Come on, drink up!’ he roared. ‘Join in the fun! I’m Bearskin. The fellow in the hat is Shadow John and this is Mother Mary.’

‘I don’t understand what’s going on,’ Hal said. ‘I was walking through my home town, and then somehow I ended up here.’

‘That happens sometimes,’ Shadow John said, resting his long-fingered hands on a silver-topped cane. ‘There are thin places between the Fixed Lands and Faerie. Sometimes Fragile Creatures can just fall through, without even making the transition—’

‘Not just Fragile Creatures.’ A new person had appeared on the fringes of the group who resembled nothing so much as a medieval woodcut of the devil, complete with red-tinted skin, horns, a goatee beard, furry animal legs and cloven hooves. ‘One day I dropped right out of the Far Lands. I had to walk halfway across the Fixed Lands before I found my way back. It was a close call, I tell you. They can be a savage lot when their ire is raised. Followed my
footprints up hill and down dale, they did, before I managed to slip back.’

Bearskin thrust the tankard into Hal’s hand and encouraged him to drink with the exhortation, ‘All given freely and without obligation.’ Everyone laughed raucously, though Hal didn’t get the joke.

The beer was the best he had ever tasted, with a vast complexity of subtle flavours and delicate aromas, but after less than a quarter of the tankard he was already feeling heady. Yet while his conscious mind flirted with drunkenness, it unleashed his subconscious to work overtime making connections that began to unveil a hidden picture. Hal decided that here was an opportunity he should seize to glean as much information as he could. So much time and energy had been expended by several ministries in the search for the nature of the Otherworld and what had happened in the days before and after the Fall, and they had found next to nothing. All the knowledge Hal gathered would be vital in the war effort; and perhaps, Hal thought, it would move him a few rungs further up the ladder; he had languished at his current level for far too long.

‘So,’ he began, ‘your world exists alongside my own – the Fixed Lands, is that right? Side by side?’

‘Beside it, behind it and right in amongst it,’ Mother Mary said. ‘Didn’t you listen to any of the old stories when yer were a kid? We was always there, amongst you, sometimes seen, more often than not, not.’

‘You’ve always exerted an influence?’ Hal said.

‘There were some who felt the need to shape and guide,’ Shadow John said.

‘And some who just liked mischief and menace,’ Bearskin added. ‘But make no mistake, we’ve always been around. Played a bigger part in your affairs than you could guess.’

‘Invisible,’ Hal mused, ‘but always there.’ That thought set an alarm bell ringing in Hal’s mind, but the reason why remained irritatingly elusive.

For the next hour, Hal asked many questions, about Otherworld, the Caretaker, the invasion, and while he received some answers of note, many were couched in riddles that left his head aching. Then, as he sipped on his beer, a twinkle of light passed quickly behind
the bar. Hal glimpsed Drogoff the barman stooping low, his face puzzled, but after a moment he gave a resounding cheer.

‘What is it now?’ the Devil said with irritation.

‘A hero!’ Drogoff said with arms raised. ‘Our young friend is a hero!’

‘We know that,’ Shadow John said superciliously.

While Hal buried his face in his tankard, Drogoff proceeded to tell the entire bar how Hal had saved the tiny flying woman. Suddenly the attention Hal received was even more glowing.

‘I always knew them Brothers and Sisters of Dragons wos a good lot,’ Mother Mary said drunkenly. She dabbed at one eye. ‘To save one of us … and a miserable lot we are … that’s just …’ She couldn’t find the words and so downed another drink.

‘I didn’t really do anything,’ Hal protested.

‘The mark of a true hero!’ Bearskin proclaimed. ‘More beer, Drogoff! And don’t put any water in this one!’

The rest of the evening passed in a haze of beer, fragrant pipe smoke and stories that made Hal’s head spin. Some were so unbelievable that Hal wondered if the pub’s strange inhabitants were playing games with him. The feeling of being in the middle of a dream grew more potent the longer he was there, and Hal felt uneasily that the longer he stayed the more dreamlike it would become, until he didn’t want to leave. It was compounded when he attempted to check the lateness of the hour, for however much he screwed up his eyes, he could not make out the time on his watch. He put it down to the drink, but the matter niggled away at him.

‘I think it’s time to go,’ he said as he drained the last of his fourth tankard of beer.

A disappointed outcry rose up from the increasingly large group that had gathered around him during the course of the discussions.

‘But you haven’t yet told us any tales of the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons,’ Bearskin protested. ‘We never tire of those.’

‘About how the Giant Killer set up your Brotherhood in the days of the tribes,’ someone called out.

‘The one about the tomb in the Forest of the Night. “
A kiss shall awaken him
.” I remember that part,’ said another.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hal replied, ‘but I don’t know any of those.’

‘You don’t know?’ said Shadow John incredulously. ‘But it’s who you are!’

The feeling that he was betraying some great heritage made Hal even keener to go. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps another time. It’s getting late.’

‘The hour is always late,’ Mother Mary said with a cackle.

Drogoff leaned across the bar. ‘Stay the night, young lad. We’ve got rooms free. A quiet one, if you like, or one where we can send all the pleasures you would ever need.’ He nodded towards three incredibly beautiful women leaning against a post in the middle of the pub, sipping drinks the colour of absinthe from long glasses. They looked quite normal until one raised a hand to wave to Drogoff and Hal saw a third eye embedded in the palm. It winked at him.

‘Some other time,’ he said with a shudder.

Shadow John slipped a friendly arm around Hal’s shoulders. ‘We’ve enjoyed your company, young lad. And for your act of great compassion you may call on us any time.’

‘True, too true,’ Bearskin said. ‘Call on any of us who drink here in The Hunter’s Moon. Right, lads and lassies?’ Loud agreement echoed around the pub. Bearskin grinned, showing two rows of pointed teeth stained with blood. ‘Call on us if you need any help, any time. We’re always ready to help out a friend.’

‘And friends like us you cain’t do without!’ Mother Mary’s shrieking laugh ended in a series of hacking, phlegmy coughs.

‘How do I call on you?’ Hal asked.

Bearskin and Shadow John shared a secret smile, before Bearskin dipped into one of his voluminous pockets and pulled out a shiny red gem that glowed with an inner light. ‘This is a Bloodeye,’ he said. ‘Stick it in your pocket. You’ll forget it’s there until you need it. Then hold it and say “Far and away and here” and whichever of us you need will be just around the corner.’