One time after the meal comes, he says suddenly, “Chrimbil—that’s how they maintain their population.”
“Chrimbil?” he asks.
“Changelings. They do steal babies to replenish the line when one of them dies. They are, most of them, infertile.”
“So I was told.”
“There’s a golden green pool somewhere in the city where the babes are dipped and their—oh, how to call it?—their composition altered. Dunk, dunk, dunk, hey, presto, a new elf.”
“They snatched my sister’s child . . .”
“Oh, was it that pursuit by which ti came here? Avenging a gone-astray babe?”
“In part, I suppose.”
“Well, ti are hardly the first. But all time and life ye’ve wasted. The child will already be reapportioned. They’ll mature till they have known some fifteen of these summers. Is it fifteen? I think that’s the number, but you know best,” he says to his invisible companion. “Yes, fifteen of their summers. Hundreds of ours. Already your babe will be white-haired, sharp-faced, and spiny as a lobster. Ti nor I would know them for anything but Yvag, and e’en then we could not tell its sex. Three states they have, indistinguishable to us.”
“So Nicnevin told me.”
“She did not lie, but told ti true, True Thomas.” He cackles himself into a coughing fit then. “Mind you, even after being dipped in the pool, perhaps one in a hundred fails to embrace the indoctrination. Something does not take properly.”
“What happens to them?”
“Oh, various things. Some try to escape. Others have been known to attack their fellows, their preceptors.”
“And?”
“They end up here for a while. I’ve had a few mad companions in my time.”
“Where are they, then?”
“Oh, they’re kept only until a new teind is due, or they kill themselves in their madness.” He opens his hands as if to say there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Another day, Taliesin forgets who Thomas is, and tries to teach him the history of the elves. He explains how they have come here from another universe entirely, whatever that can mean, and that this is a temporary world to them. “It used to be home to trolls.”
“That I know.”
“You do. Well, I am impressed at that. There are still some of them alive in caves, holes in the ground, mostly far from the city. So many names for everything. What they really want, the elves, is our world.”
“Why?”
“Have ti seen the machinery? Did she lead ti beneath the surface?”
“Surface of what? I don’t understand.”
“Ah, she didn’t, then.” He begins arguing with himself. “No, no use describing it when he hasn’t seen it. It’s enough that he know of it.” Then to Thomas again: “I personally had expected something more bucolic. All the stories of Elfland are of such pastoral beauty, so perhaps it was the purples and the blues that amazed. Still and all, nothing like this had I ever heard mentioned. The gleaming city, sometimes called Ailfion, is only a tiny portion of their world. Most is hidden. Underground. They draw all their power from the world’s heart, and are slowly draining it whilst they prepare to take a new one, one that they will make over to their liking.”
Thomas works out to what he’s referring. “Our world, you mean.”
“A slow process. We haven’t the machinery yet, but in time we will. They’ll guide us to build it. And they don’t care if it takes time, being immortal.”
“But why take ours when they have their own?”
“Why?” His expression is one Thomas has seen a hundred times on faces confronting him—that of a person who’s discovered he’s simple. “To escape the Unseelie, naturally. They need to jump so quickly that the Unseelie cannot follow them.”
“Who are the Unseelie?”
Taliesin shakes his fists in the air in frustration. “Have I taught you nothing?” After that, he doesn’t speak again for hours. When finally he does, it’s to calmly announce that the meal is coming again.
Coming how? How can he know?
Thomas listens, hears nothing. Once more he gets up and goes to stand in his doorway, ready to spring upon whoever comes; once more the lights dim and return, and he is tilting off-balance, falling this time. Hands out, he catches himself against the floor. New food, steaming, sits in the center. Whatever magic they’re using, he’s unable even to glimpse it. He knows he heard a kind of music, but what tune eludes him.
Wearily, he gets up, carries the board and cup to Taliesin, but then retreats to his own cell to eat alone. This is going to break him, sooner than later. He can’t keep up with the volatile shifts in the old poet. Embedded in what Taliesin says, there are hard facts, no doubt important things he should know. But it’s all maddeningly unpredictable. He needs a way out.
He needs to go home before everyone he knows has died.
XXVI. Beeswax
His discovery occurs because of an accident.
Meals arrive while Taliesin is so busy declaiming a poem of his in which trees march to battle—“I have beheld Caer Vevenir, where made haste the very grass and trees . . .”—that when the lights blink off and the food appears they both remain seated in his cell. The poet stumbles in his recitation then and comes to a stop, confused. Thomas stands clumsily. He retrieves the patens at which point Taliesin begins his poem over again. As Thomas approaches, Taliesin cries, “I have been an eagle!” and abruptly flaps his arms, striking one of the patens. It flips out of Thomas’s grasp and lands upside down on the floor, skidding along on gravy and honey. The cup sprays water all around the center. Thomas scurries to scrape it all up, getting most of it back on the board, but a smear of gravy and honey remain across the floor of the entrance into Taliesin’s cell. He gives Taliesin some of his water. They settle down, and Taliesin, never to be dissuaded, starts his “Battle of the Trees” all over yet again.
By the time he finishes reciting this epic verse, the smear of gravy has dried; the honey remains a sticky spot that Thomas avoids as he carries the two empty boards into the middle. He returns to his cell and lies down on his pallet.
The empty patens often disappear while he sleeps, but a few times he has been awake when the darkness descended. One time he crawled out afterward and indeed the patens were gone, as mysteriously as they had appeared.
