“Maybe he longs for home,” I suggested.
“What has home to compare with this,” Mama said.
“Why do they call him Tom-lin?” I asked.
“Because he has ceased to be Tom,” she said. “Though when he speaks of himself, he calls himself Thomas the Rhymer, still, and writes verses down on bits of paper.”
Mama greeted Queen Mab, evidently a higher ranking queen than herself, though Mab was kindness itself when she spoke to me, welcoming me to Faery.
“You’ve been long away,” she said to Mama.
“A hundred mortal years, evidently,” Mama said gaily. “Else my daughter would not be with me.”
So Mama hadn’t known the difference between me and Beloved. So what. I’d been asleep. Or rather Beloved had. And Mama hadn’t seen me since I was a baby. How would she have known? Inside me, something said, “Somehow, she should have known.”
Queen Mab turned to ride with us to the palace and Tom-lin turned to follow. I caught the full strength of his stare, hungry and demanding. I was careful not to stare back, having the feeling Queen Mab would not much like it, but something in me responded to that stare. Something human and sympathetic.
There was a feast prepared at the castle. We ate and drank. The wine was wonderfully flavored and scented, but it did not make one drunk. The food was wonderfully prepared, but it did not make one full. One could eat and drink forever if one wished, pandering, as Aunt Basil had used to say, to one’s palate with no thought for tomorrow’s indigestion.
When everyone was weary of eating, we trooped outside. I thought, perhaps, we would walk in the gardens or have music or even dance, but no. In the glades behind the castle streams ran into silver pools, steaming beneath the stars. The water was warm, and my astonishment at this had not faded when I looked up to see the inhabitants of Faery slipping into the pools, naked as eggs, Mama among them.
She called to me in a bell-like voice. I sat on a stone and fumbled with one shoe, trying not to stare. I could see them, males and females both, slender, the woman almost breastless, their vulvas naked of hair, their bodies like little manikins carved from ivory. The males had a kind of sheath, like a dog, or goat, coming from between their legs and a little way up their bellies, and these sheaths seemed covered with golden fur. Nothing dangled. Nothing protruded. Nothing seemed awkward or erotic. Their smooth buttocks folded gently together on either side of a simple, unperforated crease. Mama had told me the truth. They did not piss or shit in Faery.
But I was not built as they were. I had breasts. I had hair on me. If I bent over, as some of them were doing, my parts would show. I was overcome with shame. I blushed.
And every eye was on me, fierce and prurient. Out of the doggy sheathes, little penises protruded, like darting red tongues. On every female face a luxurious interest gleamed, and I saw their hands reach out to stroke one another familiarly.
I stood up and walked away.
Mama was beside me. “When our fairy children are reared here, they do not find our habits strange,” she said with a little tinkle of laughter which did not cover her distress. Her tone was as it had been sometimes in Chinanga, when she turned remote and still. “Grown-up children have too much of the world in them. Perhaps, in time …” She patted me on the arm and went away, leaving me to walk among the flowers.
Thomas walked there, too, evidently as discomfited as I at the naked licentiousness of Faery. He glanced at me, but did not offer conversation. After a time the fairy folk came to get us, and we went into the palace, to our own rooms, to sleep on beds where soft moss grew instead of mattresses, and coverlets sewn of rose petals kept off the drafts. If there had been any drafts, which there were not. Fountains played in that place, and their music was an unending melody. I was glad to be left alone.
The blue of the sky seemed to deepen, only a little, as though in awareness that most of us slept. The stars crinkled and winked, as though talking. I lay awake, lost in wonder. After a time there came a scratching at my door. I went on silent feet and opened it, and it was Thomas the Rhymer there. He touched me on the arm.
“I did not dare speak to you in the gardens,” he said, softly as a whisper, with great longing in his voice. He stared at me closely. “It’s true, you’re human!”
I let him in and shut the door behind him. I was dressed in a full, silky robe. I needed only imagine what I wore, and it was there, around me. It had sleeves that fell away from my arms, floor long panels that wafted like spider silk. “I’m half human,” I told him. “Elladine is my mama, but my father is human.”
He nodded. “I saw those of Faery at the pool, lusting after you. You have a fine smell about you, one that arouses them. You smell of fecundity. They are almost sterile, you know. They seldom have children of their own anymore. They must steal children from cradles, or consort with mortals to bear them.”
“Why is that?”
“I do not know. It has something to do with the way they were made, at the beginning of time.”
“My mama is disappointed in me.” It hurt to say that, but I was sure of it.
He nodded at me soberly.
