TUESDAY 30TH OCTOBER 1979
I went up the valley on the red-and-white bus today. It’s interesting. It goes on the old road all the way, up through the narrow streets of terraced houses, through Pontypridd, and all the way I could see horrible coal tips and slag heaps and ugly houses crammed together, and above them, the hills. When I got to Aberdare, I got off and walked up the cwm to the ruins we call Osgiliath. I don’t know what they really were. The trees were practically leafless, and there were a lot of wet leaves on the ground. It wasn’t actually raining, which was good, as I urgently needed to sit down by the time I got there. I hadn’t remembered how far it was. Or rather, I’d remembered it was about half a mile, the nearest of any of them to a bus stop, but still a long way for me to walk now.
I wasn’t looking for fairies, especially. I just wanted to go there. But the fairies were there. Glorfindel was. They were waiting for me.
I’d like to report our conversation as if it were like talking to Tolkien’s elves. “Long we have missed you and awaited your coming, Mori, long we have sought you in vain among the trees and palaces. Word came to us from a far country that you still walked the world, riven from your twin, so we waited yet in hope until today the breeze brought us news of your coming. Be welcome among us, for we have great need of you.”
But it wasn’t like that. Sometimes Mor and I would play over a conversation with the fairies with me saying what they should have said in language like that. That speech is essentially what Glorfindel said, what he meant to say, only most of it wasn’t in words at all, and what was, was in Welsh and not that kind of words.
Glorfindel’s beautiful. He looks like a young man, nineteen or twenty, dark-haired and grey-eyed. He wears a cloak of leaves that swirls around him, except that it isn’t really a cloak. It isn’t as if he could take it off.
The fairies are very wise. Or rather, they know a lot. They’ve had a lot of experience. They understand better than anyone else how magical things work. That’s why it would have been such a disaster if my mother had got control of them. She would have used that knowledge to make herself powerful. They wouldn’t have been able to help doing it for her. I don’t know how it would have played out in the real world. I don’t suppose she’d really have become a dark queen, not exactly. But while she can’t ever try that again, she’s trying something else. I should have known.
What Glorfindel wants is for me to go, tomorrow, up through Ithilien to Minos’s labyrinth, where he says the dead will walk. Tomorrow is Halloween. He said I need to take oak leaves and make a door for them to pass through. That will stop her getting hold of them. Fairies know a lot, but they can’t do a lot, they can’t really interact all that much with the world, they can’t affect things. They have to get other people to do it for them, and that means me. According to Glorfindel, he’d done as much as he could in making me get here this week. He hadn’t known where I was until I spoke to the fairy, and he couldn’t reach out until I’d burned the letters. But then he arranged things to bring me to him. (He rearranged the school timetable? All the school timetables? He arranged for Daniel to agree to let me come? He made me want to come to the cwm today? Sometimes I hate magic.) He said it would be easy, not like last time. No risk. The difficult thing is that I’ll have to be there at dusk. I thought that would be really hard, but when I lied to Auntie Teg and said I wanted to have tea with Moira from the Grammar School, she said she’d pick me up at seven and take me to Fedw Hir to see poor old Grampar again.
Reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Spell Sword, which is fun so far.
WEDNESDAY 31ST OCTOBER 1979
Near thing, but not the way I expected at all.