Chapter 17
A Girl on the Road
My mother taught me well and good
T’fear the faeries of the wood.
‘They’ll eat your hearts,’ so we were told,
‘And take ye so ye’ll ne’er grow old.’
Parwysh Child’s Rhyme
Jareth had endured enough.
He was never built for the life of a travelling trouper, meandering from place to place, hoping the next inn on the road would accept entertainment in lieu of coin.
Nor for hard beds and harder crowds, with little taste for true drama and an overenthusiasm for slapstick and bawdy jests.
No, he had been born for silk and sensitivity, and at last fate, or the Old Stones—or whatever powers shaped the stage and direction of his life—had seen fit to match his resources to his nature.
The heavy purse jangled and thumped in his saddlebag, louder than the clop of Bess’s hooves on the road.
Louder, even, than the lingering screams of the terrified and dying.
He had been willing to endure a difficult life, so long as it provided the opportunity to spend some nights on stage disappearing into truth and beauty, performing the soliloquies and monologues of the great poets.
Tensirr of Alberon’s The Descent of Caius, with its famous speech plumbing the depths of despair, pondering the questions that plagued every mortal life.
The oft-quoted final conversation between Polon and Bithia in Martinette Martin’s How Soft Blows the Eastern Wind?
full of heartfelt longing masked by stinging wit.
A true encapsulation of tortured love long denied, if ever he could find a proper partner to perform it.
That one night, when he was ten years old, summoned from the brothel’s vulgar scents into the elevated perfumes of The Rose—Afondir’s great theatre—Jareth had seen his mother infuse Bithia with a sublime reluctance, glimpses of honesty showing through a mask of barbs and innuendos.
Nothing he had seen since—nothing he had performed in his entire life—had ever matched that golden memory.
If only she had raised him instead of abandoning him upon her ascent to the stage.
A child had been a burden better left behind in a nest of frayed silks and cheap perfume with the other pleasure women of the Daisy and Drake.
He might have matched her. He had the potential—had always had it, he felt in the marrow of his bones—but never a chance in twenty-seven years to truly unlock it.
A seed of talent unwatered, a sprout untended, forced to grow tough and stunted merely to survive among the weeds of the wild world.
No longer. With the gold in his saddlebag, he could start anew.
Rent decent lodgings—Stones, perhaps buy lodgings—in Afondir, in the entertainment district.
Attend performances every night. Learn at the feet of the greatest thespians in the world.
Refine his craft, work his way up from the satellite stages until he, at last, strode the ancient boards of The Rose and threw his voice to be caught and conveyed by its wondrous, swooping rafters.
There had been a twinge of shame when the thought had first occurred, in the moment that woman had opened her hand and he had felt the weight settle in the bottom of his hat.
The nightmare that had followed, however, had settled his mind and soothed his heart.
The girl Siwan, no matter how lovely her voice and deliciously tragic her past, was a danger.
Afanan knew it. Even Llewyn knew it. Travelling with her was like living with a knife to your neck.
In the four years since the last time one of her fits had called ghosts down from the sky and soaked a field in blood, Jareth had often woken from nightmares.
He had spent more than a few days watching the girl from the corner of his eye, wondering when next she might tumble over the edge of sanity and control.
In all likelihood, the girl had killed the rest of the troupe that very night.
Or she would, eventually. It was inevitable.
Better—not just pragmatically but morally better in some sense that Jareth felt but could not put words to—that he take the gold and start afresh for himself.
Some good deserved to sprout from that midden heap.
He rode into the depth of the night, passing Bryngodre, the branches of its ancient oak like a dark hand reaching to grasp at the night sky.
It would have been safer and faster, he knew, to ride south towards Halway into Forgard, and thence east to Afondir, but he and his horse had panicked in the chaos.
To traverse the Windmarsh by night was to gamble with Bess’s ankles, to say nothing of the risk of bandits emerging from the hills, or the unburied dead rising from ancient battlefields.
A possibility he hoped he had left behind, but he had never expected to find himself in the company of a young girl whose weeping could rouse wraiths to begin with.
The memory of hands reaching down, of silhouettes standing at odd angles in the sky, of bodies coming apart like paper, made it difficult to discount any possibility.
At the place where the old First Folk road vanished beneath the marsh, he dismounted and sought a campsite.
An old, time-worn wall of mortared stone stood atop a nearby hill.
Not true shelter, but enough to shield him from the wind for a few hours until dawn.
He dismounted, tied Bess’s reins to a jutting bit of the wall and gave her a hurried rub-down.
Sudden, unplanned flight left little time to gather such things as a firebox or a bundle of kindling, and so with no material for a fire he merely wrapped himself tight in his cloak and sat with his back to the crumbling ruin.
Drowsy memories carried him to sleep and became hazy dreams: of The Rose; of golden curls bouncing; of old Alma pointing up from the commoners’ pit below the stage and whispering, ‘There she is, little one. There’s your mother. ’
He would join her, finally, soon enough.
Whickering and stamping hooves drew him out of sleep.
Bess tossed her head, her eyes as wide as coins, the reins taut between her and the wall.
Jareth scrambled to his feet, blinking sleep from his eyes, searching the sky and the scant vegetation clinging to the hills for sign of unnatural wind, or dark silhouettes against the stars.
Surely Siwan’s terror would not have followed him this far.
Unless she had somehow learned of his thievery and treachery, and sent her wraiths to hunt him down.
A silly thought. The girl could no more control them than control her seizures. Still, he regretted having shown Llewyn the hat of coins. The troupe might well come after him, if any of them survived.
His gaze lit on a silhouette crossing from the First Folk Road towards him. Panic, fear and drowsiness made it seem a wraith at first glance, and he reached for Bess’s reins and began untying them with quaking fingers.
‘Ho there!’ a young woman’s voice called up. The silhouette raised one arm in nervous greeting. The other gripped a walking stick. ‘I’d no notion the spot was occupied. I’ll move along, then.’
Some of the tension faded from Jareth’s shoulders.
No ghost, then, but a girl. Alone, crossing the Windmarsh in the dark.
He knew, from stories bandied about by the ladies of the Daisy and Drake, of the kinds of lives that forced young women to flee home by moonlight and seek their own fortunes.
The night wind caught her pale dress and pressed it against a willowy, malnourished frame.
She was some villager, surely, of peat-cutting or mining stock, fleeing a husband who beat her, or a father with malformed desires, or simply the poverty of a peasant’s life in these hard, haunted times.
There was danger in meeting strangers on the road, of course, but he had never seen a less dangerous-seeming stranger. A slip of a girl, desperate, without any weapon. In need of protection, surely, more than a threat to his own safety.
‘It’s only a single wall, but you’re welcome to share!’ Jareth called down. ‘At least until dawn!’
She hesitated a moment, then resumed her trek towards him, picking her way with her walking stick through the brambles and weeds over treacherous ground. She carried no bundle, nor any bags that he could see. Truly a desperate flight, then, to match his own.
Hazy visions, dreamlike, drifted through his mind as she drew near and the moonlight caught the sharp outline of her handsome, comely face.
A spray of freckles over pale, striking cheeks beneath flaxen hair that glinted in the moonlight, even in the shadow of her hood.
This was a second turn of good fortune. Fate had brought her to him, her rescuer from whatever torment she had escaped.
He recalled the unlikely, destined meeting of Polon and Bithia upon the moors of Llysbryn that begat their whirling storm of romance and passion.
Might his life not mirror art? The destitute youth raised up from poverty, first to wealth, then to love, then to fame? Granted, only a generous interpretation of his age might class him a youth, but the fates worked in their own time.
The girl smiled shyly as she reached the top of the hill.
Jareth matched her smile, then dipped a half-bow and gestured to the wall.
‘Make yourself comfortable, my dear,’ he said.
‘I regret that I have no fire, nor any victuals to offer you. I, too, was called to sudden nocturnal flight. I am called Jareth, of the Silver Lake Troupe. You might have heard tell of us.’