But they were not kids, and it was no Hallowe'en prank. They were much crueller than our tales had remembered them, harder and leaner and ungodly faster. The nobles were as beautiful as the stories had said, wearing shining armor that made no sound, that showed no seam, and they wore swords in scabbards that sparkled with thousands of diamonds. But it was the small ones who did for the police, with their arrows and bolts and elf-shot. The bobbies never knew what hit them, and it was just as well. Some of them were quirky, eerie or merely strange, but others were foul, grotesque, hard to look on without queasiness even when they kept to the shadows.
There was no long night, like in American movies, where the authorities refuse to believe what some teenager screams into the telephone. The Army was called right away. Chipping Norton was empty of tourists by then, its fields brown from harvest; but even the lorry drivers had mobile phones. The reserves were on maneuvers nearby, as luck would have it, and our boys rolled out the armored cars and tanks as quickly as anyone could have hoped.
But the others were hard to see in the fog, in the twilight, and had no need of roads. They spread out wide from some central point, like water welling up from a spring. It was only in the morning that we noticed that the twilight was not brightening and the fog was not lifting. Then the tanks began to stop, one by one. All communications were lost. It wasn't like jamming. If you turned on your radio you could go from one end of the dial to the other without a whistle or a pop. Instead, the ether was perfectly clear, as it might have been if you had turned on a radio a hundred years ago. Beyond that, every electronic device within a few miles of town went solidly dead, as if a veil had dropped between us and the rest of the world.
Mechanical devices still worked, and for a while, our soldiers shot their assault rifles at swordsmen. It was not one-sided, not yet. By the village, an entire battalion of their fiercest warriors went down in a swarming assault on three privates armed with M-16's. It was horrible slaughter, the hills covered with red and green flags, the brook running blue with their blood. It is said that one of the soldiers wept at the sight of the serried ranks going down before his bullets. But then the privates somehow mistook one another for their enemies, and gunned each other down. That must have happened more than once, all across Chipping Norton, soldiers failing to see the enemies right in front of them, or failed to hear them walking behind them, or ran off ledges, or shot each other.
Then the guns, too, all seemed to malfunction. Of course in that turmoil of glamour, who could say what was failing and what merely appearing to fail? But I do not believe it was a deep glamour that gummed up the works of every mechanical device more complex than a horse cart. The effect was too uniform, and it spread as their rainbow-colored banners spread, as they poured forth from some distant yet immanent place to fill our fields and roads.
In the last War, whenever a piece of miraculously complicated machinery failed to stand up and salute, we fliers blamed "gremlins." It had been a joke, then.
They marched fifty miles a day, by foot, tirelessly, and the shroud of electronic silence spread with them. After the first skirmish, each new battalion we sent against them was brushed aside like an unpleasant thought. They lost no battles, and kept no prisoners. Our broken survivors staggered back alive, but without their wits. They muttered along the roads, their minds reeling with who knows what evil visions, to join the refugees; and still the invaders spread out all along the roads and fields, swarming outwards like army ants.
Oh, yes, the refugees. The invaders had come to reclaim their land. Ages ago, before ever history was set down on parchment, men took their land from them. Mundane men, with dour, literal minds that could not be swerved by glamour, had crossed the cold sea in open boats to take possession of this green and pleasant land. By cold iron, the wild gentry had been forced to the heather and the forests, and then from the light of the sun altogether. They had been in exile under hill for a millenium, perhaps, if not three. How, then, could we be surprised when they showed us no more courtesy or mercy? They evicted the shepherd from his cot, the cottager from his garden. They had even less sympathy for those who dwelt in apartments. These they set afire with a species of green flame that burned concrete and seemed to laugh as the inhabitants screamed.
Soon the roads were as swollen as brooks full of April snowmelt. People abandoned their Mercedes in the middle of the road, even before the encroaching veil took the engine's spark from them. With shocking speed, the thousands became tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. Britain was home to sixty million human beings. The invaders were reclaiming all of it.
In the face of an enemy so ruthless and uncanny, the Prime Minister did the only possible thing. He asked the Americans for nuclear strikes on the center of the phenomenon. The missiles would rise from far away, start falling miles above the green earth, and explode long before they reached the ground. They would be safe from the dampening field; and no glamour could resist the fires of the sun.
The missiles blew up in their silos. It was surely no mercy on the invaders' part, but just luck of the draw that the silos were all hidden in the vastnesses of the Great Plains.
The witches of Britain summoned themselves together in the biggest convocation since, they said, they had gathered in 1940 to bind Hitler from crossing the Channel. There was a huge mob scene at a stone circle in northern Scotland. Every man or woman who had ever idly scratched a pentagram was there, hoping that if magic had returned to the land, then magic could be used to fight it. They whooped and chanted and danced. They prayed and wept. They broke into small circles and then made a gigantic Great Circle. They danced a spiral dance. They started at dusk, and at dawn, they finished.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all. I am told that magic does not come naturally to human beings. It must be delicately coaxed, and even among the greatest practitioners, it is a feeble thing. The fair bright legions cutting their way across the motorways, the tall nobles and the minuscule buzzing gnatlike creatures, the blundering huge ones whose arms could wrench steel cables out of a suspension bridge, or push over one of those atrocious apartment blocks; the exquisite small females in flowing robes that seemed to hang in midair; the dark, bark-skinned, twisted ones with ten foot arms no thicker than your wrist, who none the less could pile those ugly little delivery trucks onto a bonfire without assistance: well, they were magic.
Fortunately, some cherished the old stories, and from them we fashioned our defenses. The two things the fair folk could not bear were cold iron and the name of God. It is said that here and there a truly pious parson did stop the tide for a while, and gave his townsfolk time to pile their most precious belongings in their garden carts. But you had to have true, deep, abiding faith, without doubts, and there had been precious little of that in England for a long time. Once our faith in God had been a weapon. But we had discarded it to make room for faith in our mechanisms - devices so complex that we could no more understand them than our forefathers understood the Holy Trinity. And who is not assailed by doubts after his waking mind has wandered off into dreams?
Cold iron was another matter. There were housewives who battled with iron skillets, of course, but while the invaders were enormously respectful of the skillet itself, one woman could not protect her own back. But there was a club of historical re-creation enthusiasts who forged new weapons in what they had determined was the way of the ancient Celtic smiths. They had some professor with them who had built an entire ancient Celtic settlement, with thatch huts and dirt floors and an extremely smelly hole out back. They managed to forge a surprising number of wrought iron weapons.
The effect was miraculous in those dark times. Against a man holding one of these, the glamour had no effect. The invaders were bewildered and confounded; and the smallest cut from even the crudest iron blade would send the blackest giant howling for the woods. Our heros of the hour made as many of them as they could, and armed every man they could coax out of the swarms of refugees, especially those who had taken a little fencing in school, or actors who had learned stage combat. They eventually realized that they did not even need to make swords; batons would do, and you could make those faster. They say there was a steel factory near Sheffield that the workers almost converted in time. It could have poured out cold iron by the tonne.
But there was no time. Of properly armed defenders we had few, and the foreigners had thousands of years of practice with swords. A battalion of nobles came, wielding swords of the lightest bronze. They fell, horribly burned by the iron. But they came on. They knew how to die well, and they were not afraid of it.
Their vengeance on those who had wielded iron against that was unspeakable, and when I think of it now, I must pause and take a drink to steady my nerves.
They always said there was a King who sleeps under hill. He is Arthur, the Once and Future King; or he is Charlemagne, or he is Bran the Blessed, or he is Owein Glyndwr. The legends always said that he would return to save the land when it was in its greatest danger. When I was a child, and the Blitz was pounding London to rubble, there was always something perversely reassuring to know that the land must obviously not be in its greatest danger, since the King Who Sleeps had not yet awakened. I often since consoled myself that, no matter how dismal the world seemed, no matter how small a handbasket our civilization seemed to have gone to hell in, we could not have been facing our deepest peril yet.
The King wouldn't come without assistance. He lay asleep under a hill, in an underground chamber, with his men about him. A golden horn hung on the wall. From time to time a shepherd of one town or another would fall in a hole and discover the chamber. But they never blew the horn. They would try to steal some of his gold. Or their shuffling would half-wake the King, and he would mumble out "Is it time?" and in their fright they would tell him it was not yet time, and he would return to sleep.
It is a mark of how desperate those strange days were, that there were quite a few who, abandoning all hope in technology, and remembering the old legends, went searching for the King Who Sleeps.
But none of them found him.
Now magic has returned to the land, with a vengeance. But that is no comfort to the millions sheltering in typhoid-ridden refugee camps all across the Continent. There have surely never been so many people displaced, not even when the Khan's hordes swarmed across Europe. Not even Hitler's legions ever defeated a nation so thoroughly.
And who is to say there is the end of it? Every nation had its fair folk, in legend at least. Germany has its trolls and nixies and goblins, elves and dark-elves. The Greeks had their giants and their dryads, their sylphs and their chimaerae. Africa's bushes have always been full of ghosts, at least in stories. The Great Plains of the United States shimmer with animal spirits, Coyote and Raven and a thousand names only the shamans knew. Why should they not also not return to reclaim what has always been theirs? The Irish, fatalistic or prescient, are fleeing the Emerald Isle as fast as boats can take them, in a panicked echo of the Great Famine.
They will not tell me their plans. Oh, they treat me well enough. I am their honored guest, they say, and they are pleased to let me inhabit my humble cottage so long as I am alive. That may indeed be a long time, for I find that when I cut myself, I heal as fast as I did when I was a boy. My bones do not seem to ache so much, even in wet weather, and the rain only seems to come in the evening now, soft and gentle, with a scent of honey. Sometimes I catch myself about to dive, roll and tumble down a hill filled with wildflowers, and then I catch myself catching myself, and I realize that I will not likely break my ankle, although I would have last year, and that if I do break it, it will heal in a night. Time passes slowly in Faerie, and the soul ages faster than the flesh; it is only on returning to the mundane world that one crumbles into dust.
There are others of us who live under Faerie's crown, the scattered hundreds who kept true to the old ways out of superstition, or habit, or sheer poetry. The fair folk are cruel by nature. But they like being appreciated, and they have a perverse sense of gratitude. We all longed for a return to a more magical time. We left out milk by the front door, we kept corn dollies over the hearth. Sometimes we talked to them, not believing anyone was listening. There are young women, self-appointed witches, who earnestly invoked the old gods and prayed to be given the keys to the heart of the land. There are writers of novels who, after a few brandies too many, came to believe the soft old phrases that resonated in their hearts. There are a few old men and women like me who did things a certain way because they seemed right, and lived in little country cottages with butterfly gardens, and watched the world hurtle by, and wondered out loud how long it would be before it crashed.
We gather, from time to time, in the long, warm days of summer, when the crops have nothing to do but grow. Travel is difficult, of course, for the others have taken all the horses for themselves. Animals like them and, having grown used to their soft voices, frighten easily at ours. But we walk the necessary miles to gather.
They are strange gatherings. Rather than telling ghost stories around the campfire as we might have in earlier days, had we known each other, we enact rituals of a different kind. We play at "supermarket," putting as many brands as we can into our imaginary basket, and the "clerk" quotes us prices, which we then all argue about. We play at "emergency ward," remembering when our doctors performed lightning miracles with fleets of machines, at great expense. My favorite is when we count down the launch of Apollo 11. One of the gentry tells me she has been to the Moon, riding a sea shell and pulled by sparrows, and I believe her. But it was somehow grander to have to ride there in a tiny bucket of steel balanced atop a pillar of fire. Or so I tell myself.
It is hard to say the before days were happier. I remember long, leaden stretches, and I remember days of fear, and shrouds of despair. But there is a gentle melancholy to the evenings that never goes away. It is the same for the others. No matter how much we longed for this in some secret part of our hearts, none of us is truly content. We are strangers in a land that used to be home. The hills are no longer alive with a faint suggestion of magic; they are frantic with their revelry. They are no respecters of boundaries; my garden is as much a dance floor as my bed. They think nothing of the future and little of the past. So how can they understand what we have lost, we who kept them in our hearts during the long winter of their diaspora?
But for me it is worse. For I have a secret I can never tell the others. I do not think they could forgive me. They all have relatives on the other side of the Veil; a few lost brothers or sons to the first few battles. All of them have lives they have lost forever.
Ah, my secret. There was a time I would have cherished having a secret, but now we live among revealed mysteries.
They used to say a King slept under the hill. I always loved those stories, for as a child, I hoped that one day it would be I who fell in the hole, for I would be brave enough to blow the horn, and summon the rightful ruler of the land back to his throne. When I became a man, and a writer, I tried in my books to summon forth what little I could of that golden age of Arthur, of Owein Glyndwr, to bring the land back to itself. It was like blowing the King's horn, though the sound was only a faint echo of the true horn's voice, and so only roused a faint echo of the King. But then the darkness would fall again, at first with Hitler's war, and then only in the unsorrowing mundanity that seemed to strip my holy island of all that made it home.
It was a strip mall, American-style, laid in across the street from the little parish church that had been there since Domesday. For a thousand years that church had faced nothing but a stone wall and a field across it. I started to walk past the tractors and cranes, but I found I could not. I was paralyzed with horror, tormented by loss. Choking back shameful sobs, I stumbled back out along the footpath, and then into my fields, and then into fields whose owner I could not recall, up by the ancient Rollright Stones.
I fell in a hole, just like in the stories. I fell in a hole, and when I came to my senses, I was in a chamber wrought of silk and dark wood. An uncanny light came from everywhere and nowhere. A king slept on his throne, face in his hands as if in sorrow. His men lay sleeping in their cloaks here and there, as if he had kept vigil over them while they slept, until he could no longer keep awake himself.
I saw the horn. I had no hesitation at all. I picked it up and blew.
As he lifted his face from his hands, I realized that his ears were inhumanly long and pointed, his eyes dark as night. There was an eerie beauty about his pale face, and his armor was so seamlessly worked that you could not see the joins. He was regal, but in all his long, thin face there was not a hint of mercy, no compassion, no pity. He could have been an arachnid, except that he was of the most compelling beauty.
There was a King who slept Under Hill, waiting to save the land from its greatest peril. But he was not Arthur, or Owein Glyndwr, or Charlemagne, or any human king. How could he be? They are all dead, long dead, for a mortal span is feeble indeed compared with the elder races. He was Oberon, the King of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, ruler of selkie and kelpie, goblin and troll and pixie, banshee and brownie and all the Fair Folk; and I am he who woke him.
Copyright © 2001 by Alex Epstein