Pamela Dean (57 page)

"If you want one. It's up to you; I won't go away."

"I don't think I could do that."

"Do what? You thought yarrow would
produce
abortion, I thought."

"I mean I don't think I could use your baby to save you and then kill it."

"I don't know if it is a baby yet and I don't know if it is killing, but I do see your point.

It's the kind of nasty problem that comes back to haunt you."

"So it's both or neither."

There was a long silence. Janet shifted the receiver to her other ear. Her hand was sweaty.

"Look," said Thomas in a stifled voice. "I understand that I have put you in an impossible position. But I don't think anybody's interests are served by your trying to put me in an equally impossible one. I can't say anything to you that you won't interpret as self-serving. Maybe I can't say anything to you that
isn't
self-serving."

"That understood," said Janet, whose own voice was also clogging up, "say something."

"Do you want to get married?"

"Don't be an idiot."

"As a response to the only proposal of marriage I'm ever likely to make," said Thomas, "that lacks something." And he hung up.

Janet went back to the room and said to the watchdog of the moment, "I have to go home and talk to my family. If I'm not back in an hour, you may institute whatever procedures seem good to you."

"Shouldn't I come with you?"

"No, stay and study your genetics." I'll get my dad to drive me back, thus thwarting suicidal impulses on the way home."

"I'll walk over with you and walk back again by myself, then," said Molly, and did so.

Having herded both parents into her father's study and wept all over her mother, Janet managed to tell them that she was pregnant. Her father, shedding all modern and enlightened attitudes in about twenty seconds, was disposed to blame the young man, and intermittently during the ensuing discussion demanded to be told who he was.

They both told her that money and support would be forthcoming for whatever she might decide to do, and, like Thomas, infuriatingly left this entirely up to her. Her mother, pressed for advice, finally said, "Do you want to go to graduate school?"

"Yes. There's not much else I'm good for."

She noticed with interest, in the part of her mind that went on operating despite all disaster, that they were sufficiently upset not to pursue this point, or even to mark the attitude as uncharacteristic.

"If you attended some school close by," said her mother thoughtfully, "you could leave the baby with me. I wouldn't mind another."

"Mom!" said Janet, horrified. "Andrew's just gotten to the age where you have some time to yourself. You don't want to be cluttered up with another kid."

"Believe me," said her father, "your mother knows what she wants and always has."

"So if you don't want to marry this boy—"

"Who is he, for God's sake?" said her father.

"—that might be a solution."

"You don't think I should give it up for adoption?"

"My first grandchild? It's up to you—but no, I don't think you should."

"And you don't think I should have an abortion?"

"I don't know. It seems the simplest solution—but I'm afraid you'd always wonder.

Sometimes the road not taken really is different."

The discussion wound around several more times and ended where it had begun.

Showered with hugs and reassurances, Janet climbed into the car and was driven back to Blackstock—by her mother, who did not want her father to worm the name of the baby's father out of Janet on the way.

Hallowe'en came; Tina, after a number of worried glances and falsely cheerful remarks, left for her dance. And Molly started in on Thomas again.

"Will you stop it!" said Janet.

Molly looked angry for a moment; then she turned red. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just things are so weird with Robin, I want to tie somebody's love life up neatly, even if it can't be mine."

That impulse worked both ways, thought Janet. Because her affairs were in a complete tangle, she wanted to make things easier for Molly. She said, "If I knew something about Robin that he didn't choose to tell you, would you want me to?"

"To what? Tell me? I don't know. It would depend on what it was. If he's sleeping with somebody else I don't want to hear about it."

"No, not that." He probably was, or had been, thought Janet; but that was not the important thing.

"Well, what? Robin doesn't choose to tell me anything, so—"

"Is that the problem?"

"Part of it."

"Well, what I know will explain the problem but I don't know if it'll solve it."

"Just say it," said Molly.

Janet got out the Pelican Shakespeare and turned to the pr oper page. "Just read the names," she said.

Molly read them. She went on staring at the page for some time, the heavy black-and-green book open over her crossed legs; she was sitting on the floor.

"Far out," she said. "Three of them." Finally she looked up. "I can't say I believe this.

But I'm willing to treat it as a hypothesis. You know—it's like looking up the answer to a physics problem in the back of the book. For one glorious moment you think everything fits together; and then you stop and think, and it doesn't, because you haven't done your homework and you don't know as much as you think you did. But I don't know what the homework would be in this case. It seems to explain Robin all right, I'll admit that. But how did they
get
here?"

"They've been to Elfland," said Janet. "And they awoke, and found them here, on the cold hillside."

Molly looked at her. Janet told her about Medeous. And then she told her about Thomas.

Molly said, "How does Thomas know it's him? What if it's Robin?"

"It had better not be, since I don't believe Robin's gotten anybody pregnant."

"I never heard of anything so crazy."

"I did, actually, and I've been trying to remember where. Wait a minute—" Janet got up, pulled Volume I of her battered
Norton Anthology of English Literature
off the shelf, and leafed through the section titled "Popular Ballads."

"Here it is," she said. "No—damn it. This is about Thomas the Rhymer. The Queen of Faerie got him, too, but she took him home alter seven years—I wonder if that was to keep Hell from coming for him and now they're onto that sort of trick?"

"I don't believe in Hell," said Molly, a little wildly.

"Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it."

"You're just depressed. Not that I blame you. Look," she said, sounding like Thomas.

"It would be much better to be wrong about all this and look silly, than be right about all this and not do anything. Let's go out tonight—remembering the flashlights for once—and you can pull Thomas off his horse. If nothing happens, then people will talk for a while. If something happens, then it's worth it, isn't it?"

"But then I can't have an abortion."

"Say that again."

Janet explained.

"I don't guess you could think of it as a life for a life?"

"No, it's not that. I don't know what I think about abortion; but I can't take advantage of being pregnant and then just go merrily off and not be pregnant anymore. Those that dance must pay the fiddler."

"You read too much."

"Such men are dangerous."

"Huh."

"So instead of having two months to decide if I'm going to have an abortion, I get about another two hours."

"You know you don't want to have one," said Molly. "You just want a little longer to get used to the idea of being stuck with a baby."

"I can't believe this is happening to me."

"Think how Thomas feels."

"Will you stop harping on Thomas?"

"What happens if he doesn't show up?"

"I'm not sure he can not show up." Janet frowned, remembering. "He's stayed away the last two times I saw them riding, though."

"Has he thought of that?"

"Probably. He said if he killed himself first they'd choose somebody else, so if he

could
stay away, I guess they'd choose somebody else."

"Like Robin."

"Maybe."

"If I were Thomas and I thought you weren't coming, I think I might very well chicken out. I'm going out there; they aren't getting Robin without a fight."

"Well, if you're going, I'm not staying here."

"Fine. If Thomas isn't there, we can both pull Robin off his horse. A lover and a pregnant friend surely can't fail."

"I don't think Thomas will chicken out, though."

"If you think that highly of him, why don't you just make up your mind to marry him?"

"Cut it
out!
"

"Lord," said Molly, "what fools these mortals be."

It was a chilly night, clear but tending to mist in the hollows. Eliot and Dunbar were bright with lit windows and noisy with music and laughter. The road up past the lilac maze seemed very steep, and once they had passed the tangle of bushes, there was a vast silence in which their every step made Janet's scalp twitch.

"Damn!" said Molly, as they started down the long hill to the highway.

"Shhh! What?"

"We forgot the fucking flashlights."

"We always do. It's okay. I don't want anybody to see me coming."

The grass of the hill was soaking wet. The highway seemed impossibly wide. Janet broke into a run to cross it, and then skidded to a stop in the gravel. Molly, following, said not a word of protest. It was only eleven o'clock, they had come in plenty of time, in case the legions of Faerie kept a different time in this matter, as they certainly did in others.

"Do we hide in the bushes, or block the bridge and yell at them to stand and deliver?"

said Molly.

It was clear which she preferred. Janet said, "We'd better hide in the bushes. The white horses come last, and I don't know what Medeous would do if she saw us."

They crawled into the bushes and sat shivering under Janet's old green blanket. Janet's ears kept turning the distant sounds of revelry into bagpipe music; but when it finally came, there was no mistaking it. It was rather labored, and definitely some sort of march, not the Ceol Mohr.

"That's not Robin playing," whispered Molly.

"I know. Maybe you'd better get ready after all."

"I am."

Tock, tock, tock
came the first horses over the bridge: black as jet, darker than the night, with the beads and ribbons streaming in a tangled glow behind them. Medeous; Melinda Wolfe; the pale, stern people. Who will go with Fergus now, thought Janet.

The black horses passed. The stocky brown ones came. Professor Ferris; Jack Nikopoulos; Anne and Odile and Kit; Johnny Lane, whose fault this all was; and Nicholas Tooley, sitting very straight, with a face like a mask. The brown horses joined the black ones in the road. Janet wished they were farther away. Her heart was so loud she could barely hear the piper, though he was now just the other side of the bridge.

Tock, tock, tock.
The white horses came. Robin was on the first one, looking so grim Janet did not recognize him for a moment. Behind him, with his hair all braided with shining beads and a painful smile on his face, rode Thomas.

Janet scrambled out of the bushes, and ran at the horse, which not unnaturally sidled sideways. Janet made an enormous leap and caught Thomas around the leg. His hands caught and lifted her. The horse was still trying to go somewhere. Janet wound her arms around Thomas and simply leaned backwards until they both fell off the horse; sideways, because Thomas twisted so as not to land on her.

"Hold on," he said in her ear.

Janet did. There was a confused outcry from the other riders, and the sound of footsteps, and a complicated thud, underlaid with some gasping, that was probably Molly dragging Robin off his horse for safety's sake. She looked at Thomas's face, wondering how long she was to hold on, when there was a suffocating incursion of hot air and animal smell, and instead of having both arms trapped firmly around a tall, thin boy, she found her hands sliding off a huge rough-coated muscular shape that snarled in her face. Janet gripped it as hard as she could and stuck her head under its chin. Somewhere nearby Thomas's furious and neglectful voice said, "What fucking difference does it make to you?"
The Romance of the Rose
slapped to the library floor. The lion made a resonant growl in her ear that was as much struggle as sound. Good question, dimwit, thought Janet.

But she hung on grimly, and there was nothing in her arms but air. A dry, cool thing slithered over her shoulder, and she grabbed it just in time, dragged it into her smock, and bundled it up. It flung its head free, opened its mouth impossibly wide, and hissed at her.

Janet struck its head away from her face and, inspired vaguely by the men's adventure novels, held it hard with both hands just behind the head. Odile Beauvais, in the oil-smooth voice she had used for Gratiana, said right into Janet's ear, "I'll give you this, that one I never knew Plead better for and 'gainst the devil, than you." The snake closed its mouth and flicked its tongue thoughtfully at her wrist. Janet decided not to slacken her grip.

The next moment she had a firm grip on nothing at all, and a madly flapping white shape was beating her about the head and delivering small sharp blows to her forehead.

Janet batted it into the smock, too, where its terrified struggles were worse than the threats of the other shapes. She was afraid it would break its wings. "I'm not going anywhere," said Thomas's carrying voice, somewhere very distant.

Janet tried to make more room in the smock without letting the dove out. The smock filled suddenly with a flailing thing, light but very strong. The cloth ripped, and a long white head with a yellow beak and an evil eye snapped at her nose. Janet wanted to laugh.

The snake and the dove had joined forces. She caught the swan's neck as she had the snake's, and it twisted free and bit her finger. "Fine!" said Thomas, very close. "
You
say farewell, earth's bliss." Oh, no, not that, thought Janet. She was more angry than frightened now, and that was dangerous: if she hurt any of these abominable beasts, what would she have done to Thomas? Not that he didn't deserve something—but she could not tell what it would be.