The Book Man, Chapters 50-51 (Revised)

50 THE FIRST COMPANION

He was long out of sight of the pool, the sirens, and Narodnaya when his adrenaline faded and he had to stop running and catch his breath. He leaned up against a willow tree, panting, his heart still pounding but his feet soothed by the thick moss beneath them. A rustling in the leaves behind him made him turn around fearfully, but it was Narodnaya coming through the trees with his clothes clutched in her bony hands. She thrust them at him.

Put your clothes on. You humans shiver so without them. It’s pathetic.

She drifted out over the river as he pulled his clothes on. They were warm and dry from sitting in the sun on the shore so long. Then he realized what was missing.

“You’ve forgotten my shoes,” he said.

She eyed him coldly. I am sorry. I was too much preoccupied with saving your skin to remember your shoes.

“No,” Christian stammered. “No, I’m sorry. That isn’t what I meant at all—”

He had a feeling she was about to leave him again, so he broke off his apologies and said hastily, “Don’t go.”

She peered out at him from behind a tree. Why shouldn’t I?

“Well,” Christian said, “I’d be quite glad of the company. You’ve been very kind to me.”

She drifted out from behind the tree and lowered to his level, studying him. He blushed under the intensity of her gaze but stood firm. She did look frightening, there was no changing that. But, after all, she had given him a walking stick, and water when he was too dehydrated even to ask for it, and she had saved him from the sirens and brought him his clothes (even if she had forgotten his shoes, he thought before he could stop himself).

“Really,” he said. “I’d be glad of your company.”

You would? I do not frighten you?

“Well—” He blushed again, but he knew she could hear his thoughts; he decided to tell the truth. “I would be lying if I said you didn’t—didn’t frighten me a little, you know, before at least, but you’ve done so much for me already. And I’m all alone in this world, and I haven’t any idea what to expect, and I think—I think it would be lovely to have a friend.”

He was so red he could feel the heat rising from his face and neck and ears. He didn’t really know how to make friends; he was sure one did not just come out and say one would like to be friends, but he knew no other way to do it. He could not remember how he and Conrad had become friends, though he remembered in perfect detail the circumstances of their first meeting.

Narodnaya’s voice came astonishingly low and sad when she spoke again.

I am the marsh-witch, the friendless. The people fear me, and those foolish fairies thought I was allied with Goblin and tried to destroy me.

The fairies? She must have meant Aurelia and her sisters, though he could hardly imagine them trying to destroy anyone other than Goblin himself. He put the thought aside, however, as she spoke again.

You would really like me to travel with you?

“Yes,” Christian said more definitely. “I really would.”

Narodnaya ducked her head in a way that made it seem, he thought in amazement, as if she was blushing herself, though no color appeared in the thin, greyish cheeks.

Then I would be happy to, she said.

51 CONCERN

The addition of a companion, even one as fearsome as Narodnaya, made Christian feel better about his journey. He could not forget that Liza was lost somewhere—unless, somehow, she had already reached the Sunforest—nor that her husband’s leg might yet be opened up and oozing pus, nor that Minerva, back in the park, was short an arm. But with the marsh-witch drifting along beside him, the optimism of that morning returned. He felt sure of finding Liza and Conrad soon and returning to Earth.

Presently he said, “Can I ask you something?”

You may.

“Why did you agree to come with me? Not that I’m not glad you did—”as she looked sideways at him. He thought of Liza again, and, though he was more hopeful about his prospects of finding her, his lungs compressed in anxiety at her absence. “But, well, my friend and I were supposed to come here together, only we got separated in the portal—or something separated us—and I was terribly glad at the thought of having someone to walk with, but I really wasn’t sure you’d accept. You don’t seem the social type—”

He stopped talking as he realized that she had fallen behind. She sank down onto the branch of a live oak and sat with her bony fingers digging into the bark. If he hadn’t known she was there, he thought, he’d never have been able to tell; with her mossy gown and grey-green complexion, she blended right in.

“Narodnaya?”

Her voice in his mind sounded melancholy.

Once, she said, hundreds of my kind lived on the marshes, caring for the trees and sphagnum and pitcher plants. No one intruded except the sirens, now and then, when they were hungry; but we did not care, for we spent our days singing together as we looked after our subjects.

“Singing?” Christian asked apprehensively. He could not imagine that anything resembling a song could ever burst forth from Narodnaya’s lips.

In answer to his question, she opened her mouth and let out an unmelodious wail that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He shivered.

“That was—was lovely,” he stammered.

Liar, she replied, but she continued with her story. My mother was the most fearsome of all the marsh-witches. She could have been the matriarch of our clan, had she wished it, but she declined and instead taught my siblings and me to be just as fierce.

Her wild hair gathered about her of its own accord, swirling and bunching together until her face was hidden.

But that was long ago. The marsh-witches were eradicated—my mother, for all her fierceness, with the others, and I have been alone now these four hundred years.

Her hair unbunched enough to reveal one glimmering green eye. That is why I agreed.

Christian didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t imagine hundreds of Narodnayas floating about on the bog, making the horrible wailing noise she called singing; but he knew what it was like to be lonely. It seemed that everyone he’d ever cared for had left him one way or another, and every leaving still hurt so badly, when he let himself think of it, that it might have happened yesterday. He had trouble letting things go, he’d once heard his mother say to his father. It had been that, more than anything else, that so worried her about her son’s well-being after her impending death.

They rose to the surface, all the people who had died or left, and he could feel Narodnaya prodding at his memories of them. He was not sure he wanted her to see them.

She felt his hesitation. I will not look, if you do not want me to.

But even as he wavered, he thought how nice it would be to tell someone about them—and with her, he would not even have to use words. Would not have to think horribly concrete thoughts like my father is dead, which he had never liked to think because they made the facts of the situation truer than he wanted them to be.

“It’s alright,” he said.

He thought of his mother humming as she painted the kitchen eggshell blue, trying to brighten their dreary flat even as her black hair grew shorter and shorter with each round of ineffective chemotherapy; thought of the tall, bearded husband she’d left behind, who seemed to shrink with each passing year after her death. He thought of Joel Kinneman, all mischievous blue eyes and golden hair as he stole a kiss on Christian’s seventeenth birthday, a mess of mangled skin and blood and clothing when he died nearly a year later. Vittoria, who never officially broke things off but hadn’t needed to; Christian saw her kissing someone else in the university library and understood he wasn’t wanted anymore. Jude, an attractive older androgyne who ended their relationship through bruised and swollen lips, the least souvenir of a stranger who’d seen them walking together through London one night, and the coworker who stopped inviting Christian for drinks the moment he realized his fellow accountant’s interest in romance was not limited to women.

It wasn’t four hundred years, he thought, but it was abandonment and death and heartbreak and loneliness.

“I understand, you see,” he said quietly.

Her hair unbunched further, revealing her other eye

Yes, she said. I think you do.

They continued on their way.

After a while her voice penetrated his mind again. Why did you come here?

“Goblin is growing stronger,” Christian said. “I have to go to the Sunforest and find Morrow. The fairies—”

He broke off; he didn’t want to mention the fairies to her, in light of their history together, but he needn’t have worried. At Morrow’s name she made a strange wheezing noise he realized was her version of laughter.

Morrow? And why should he be able to help you? From what I hear he can barely find his bed each morning.

“Why?” Christian asked uneasily. “What’s wrong with Morrow?”

She continued laughing, so hard she could not answer. Instead Christian only heard, over the sound of her wheezing laughter, her voice in his head saying over and over again, Morrow! I never heard anything so ridiculous. Morrow!

After that they fell silent. Narodnaya occasionally chuckled to herself, but Christian was worried. He did not know how much Narodnaya knew about Morrow or the Fair-folk. She had told him she did not usually leave the bog. So it was possible there was nothing wrong with Morrow, that she had been misinformed of whatever it was she thought was wrong with him, but he was afraid. What if Morrow couldn’t come back to Earth and help? What would they do then?