The Wonder Tales

Chapter Five-2

It went sorely against the grain with him to sit idly by and do nothing, and soon he would be forced to some course of action. But the likelihood of failure, of falling an easy prey to manipulations that may prove catastrophic, stayed his hand whenever he almost made up his mind, and so he sat atop the bar and did not stir and another five minutes slipped away.

‘They are not so bad, Dwerryhouse,’ said Theo into the heavy silence.

Tobias looked sharply at him, and found his friend’s hazy green eyes bright and alert at last. ‘Of what do you speak?’

‘The apples,’ said Theo.

Tobias’s mouth twisted in a grimace, and he folded his arms in an old gesture of stubborn recalcitrance. ‘I beg to differ.’

‘Until you have tried, you cannot know.’

It was impossible for Tobias to contradict a statement so perfectly, unassailably true, and so he was left to glare at Theodosius in helpless silence.

This display of unmoved indignation passed Theo by, however, for he turned dreamy once more and did not speak again.

Tobias wandered into his memories, visions of past deeds and long-completed journeys he had hoped to leave forever in the past. He sought a clue, some hint, a secret — anything with which he could counter the machinations of Pippin Greensleeves.

In the midst of this unfruitful reverie there came a light step upon the threshold, and a wild figure blew into the inn upon a gust of summer wind. Tobias looked up.

Clarimond stood framed in the doorway, her hair an abundant tangle about her face. She had lost her shoes and shawl somewhere upon the way, her skirts were stained in every imaginable colour, and smears of juice glistened upon her face and hands. Gone was the neat, composed, well-ordered and self-controlled woman he had always known. This was a new Clarimond: disordered, chaotic and in no way respectable.

She had never looked more beautiful to Tobias.

Her eyes met his with an intensity he had never seen in her before, though he knew not how to read their expression. She crossed the common room with hurried steps, brimming with a restless energy strikingly different from her former sedate composure.

When she reached him, she kissed him, swift and fierce, and that was new, too.

‘Tobias,’ she said, and taking his hands she pulled him away from the bar. ‘Come with me.’

He went, bemused, and followed her into the gardens behind the inn. The trees had crowded up to the walls and bent their hoary heads to the windows; sitting inside had come to feel like withstanding an eerily silent siege. But Clarimond had no trouble finding a way through the close-knotted trunks, and he followed close upon her heels.

She halted before the silver pear tree, and Tobias recalled the night not long past, when Barnaby Longstaff had stood there drunk and fetched down the first impossible fruit. Now a hundred such pears hung within easy reach; with ease, he could stretch forth his hands and gather up a dozen.

Clarimond did just that, plucking each pear with deft fingers and transferring them one by one into Tobias’s possession. She reserved one for herself and bit into it with feral delight, sucking the dripping juice from the tender flesh. ‘Eat,’ she told him.

Tobias let the pears fall, unheeded. ‘But I—’

‘We are losing Southtown, Tobias. It is being taken into Faerie and if we do not act, the whole of Berrie will follow. Eat, for you must.’ Clarimond turned to him and offered the remains of her own prize, holding it up for him to sample.

Such a vision he could not resist: his own love, undeniably changed but by no means lessened by her taste of faerie fruit, and entreating him to join her with such irresistible sweetness. Her delight in the pear operated powerfully upon him, and he was no longer able to withstand the allure of the fruit itself. Her words echoed but dimly in his ears as he touched his tongue to the sweet pear, a tentative taste which flooded his mouth with sweetness and demolished his remaining reserve.

He took it from her, and for a little while he knew nothing more, so lost was he in a delirium of sweet indulgence. When he had finished his first pear she gave him another, and another, and he ate without pause until the beat of his own heart sang loud in his ears, the unparalleled vigour of vibrant youth sweeping away every ache, every pain, every lingering sensation of weariness.

A sound like the tolling of a vast bell rung over Berrie Wynweald, and the world cracked and splintered and became something… else. Tobias exchanged one swift, intense look with his beloved, and in her eyes he saw a resolve to match his own.

Together they turned, and made their way back through the rampant orchard to the Moss and Mist. The trees seemed different, now, to Tobias; no longer a darkening threat or an obstruction, but a natural part of the landscape, as right and as inevitable as the sun and the moon and the swift summer wind. It was the buildings that were out of place — even the familiar contours of the Moss and Mist, though it loomed no less beloved in his eyes.

His common room, however, was not exactly as he recalled. The differences were subtle, so much so he would have been hard pressed to name precisely what they were. The tables were in a slightly different configuration, perhaps, and the furniture was a little newer. Theo Penderglass still sat dreaming in his former spot, though he, too, was altered: paler than usual, his brown hair somehow losing its richness of colour as Tobias watched.

Theo did not appear to see Tobias and Clarimond return, or perhaps he was merely too lost in thought. He faded further and grew hazy around the edges, until only a ghost of Theodosius Penderglass remained, still and silent in his chair.

Clarimond crossed the room with quick steps and stood directly before him, but none of her efforts could attract Theo’s notice, nor reverse his odd fading.

Tobias went to the door and looked out into the street. The scene outside was familiar enough, save that he recognised none of the people he saw passing by. Their clothes were antiquated, of a fashion popular some hundred years before. The signs hanging before his neighbouring establishments displayed some names he knew, others he did not.

And everywhere he saw flickers of movement, ephemeral and faint, like sunlight upon rippling waters. They were shades, like Theo Penderglass; the hazy figures of the people he knew, faded almost beyond sight.

A woman approached the doorway of the Moss and Mist, her quick steps reminiscent of Clarimond’s. She had vivid blue eyes, her dark hair coiled in an unfamiliar style. She wore a yellow dress of outdated mode and a loose shawl over her shoulders, a wide-brimmed hat perched atop her hair. On her arm she carried a basket full of yellowish apples.

She was hastening to meet somebody, for she stepped straight into the Moss and Mist — directly through Tobias, to his consternation, and only then did he realise that he and Clarimond had become as wraith-like as the rest — and into the common room.

Tobias turned. In his usual spot behind the bar stood somebody else, a man older and taller than Tobias, his dark hair and beard threaded with grey. He greeted his visitor with the kind of delight Tobias felt only for Clarimond, and he felt little doubt that they were wedded or betrothed.

The lady emptied her basket of apples onto the bar. ‘Look!’ she cried. ‘This is the best that we have been able to gather, and they are not fit even for preserves. They will not thrive, and I cannot understand why!’

She sank her face into her hands, oblivious to her lover’s attempts to soothe her. The apples toppled off the bar and rolled across the floor, unheeded.

‘Do not despair, heart, for I have found a source of better specimens,’ said the man, and these were the words to penetrate her misery, for she at last looked up.

‘Where?’ she breathed.

‘It is not far,’ said he. ‘And yet, far indeed. We must go soon, if we go at all, for I fear that it is destined for the same decline as our own orchards.’

The lady stood taller, her chin lifting. ‘Take me there?’

He took her hands and kissed them. ‘My Rosamund, we go at once.’

With which words the couple left the Moss and Mist, moving with the purposeful haste of those intent upon a task of some importance. Clarimond came up next to Tobias and took his hand, though he barely felt her touch.

‘We follow,’ she said.

And follow they did, weaving through the narrow streets of Berrie in pursuit of the strange pair.

‘Where is the river?’ said Clarimond after a time, and Tobias saw at once what she meant. Where the rushing waters of the Wynspan usually flowed he saw an unfamiliar street crowded with whitewashed timber buildings, thickly clustered about with apple trees in full fruit.

‘What can it mean?’ he said, troubled and nonplussed.

Clarimond had neither answer to give nor theory to advance. They hurried on, burdened now with a sense of foreboding as to what they were fated to witness. The words of Pippin Greensleeves echoed in Tobias’s mind: It sometimes happens that history comes a-calling. It is well to pay attention when it does.

They came upon the site of the Wynspan, and Tobias was surprised to see that a bridge stood there in spite of the absence of the water. The bridge arched over a shallow ravine which once, perhaps, had contained a river, though it had long since dried up. The bridge was a simple wooden construct, smaller and narrower and meaner in all its ways than the Wynspan.

Instead of crossing the bridge, the bearded man led the way into the ravine below and directly underneath. Tobias saw him withdraw some manner of key from a pocket in his coat and insert it into the wood.

Thick, choking fog gathered in the space beneath the bridge, and in its midst opened a door limned in white light. The man and his lady stepped through.

‘Quickly,’ Tobias said, securing Clarimond’s hand. They ran into the ravine and darted through the incorporeal door just as it began to close.

They came out upon another bridge, this one greater and grander by far than the simple wooden structure of Berrie. Wrought from something pale and cool like marble, it arched gracefully over a river of rushing golden waters, and a scent as of the richest, sweetest nectar reached Tobias’s nose.

On either side of that glittering river stretched orchards in full fruit. These were the trees of dreams and nightmares: vast and mighty and ancient beyond counting, boughs laden down with a harvest fit for a queen.

On the left bank of the river night was falling, and the full moon shone with a pallid, languid radiance. The trees beneath bore silver-skinned pears, each gleaming with the reflected radiance of pale moonlight.

On the right bank of the river daylight reigned, the sun setting in an amber-lit sky. The sunlight glinted off the golden skins of the apples ripening below; each burgeoning fruit took that light into itself and shone, answering the pears’ ethereal glimmer with a warm, rich lambency.

Tobias and Clarimond beheld the exquisite beauty of the orchard in breathless silence, neither stirring from their station atop the bridge.

Clarimond was the first to recover her words. ‘Tobias,’ she breathed. ‘Have you ever beheld anything so lovely?’

‘I have come here before.’ Such words he would prefer never to have uttered, for secrets were safest never told. But his mouth betrayed him, his lips forming the sentence before he could remember why it was that he had ever cared for concealment.