The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [115]
She looked down on him, and smiled, neither kindly nor unkindly. He stood up, and gave a little formal bow, which seemed the right thing, and stood shadowless next to the shadowless pair. He meant to say something like “Greetings,” or “My lady,” but he said
“You have no shadow.”
It was, he realised, the first time that word had crossed his lips.
“I am an Elf,” said the lady. Her voice was like fragments of fine ice in the wind, like the silver bells in the horse’s mane. “I am the Queen of Elfland, and we cast no shadows. You are True Thomas, a human, and you should cast a shadow, and do not.”
“It seemed a small thing,” he said, “at first. A curiosity. But now it is not so amusing.”
“You were not born without a shadow,” said the Elf Queen. “It was taken from you, in your cradle, by a great rat, who cut it away with his sharp teeth, and carried it carefully down a rathole. There are ratholes everywhere, even in palaces, and they lead underground, underground, into the world of shadows, where the queen of the Dark Elves weaves them into webs, to trap mortals and other beings. Your shadow is folded away in a chest in her dark house, where the rat took it, running through tunnels and corridors, clutching it softly in his sharp teeth. He is her friend and servant. They can use a human shadow to trap the man or woman to whom it belongs, to snare them in darkness and use them to work their will. All this kingdom, when you are king, can be ruled by them, through the manipulation of your shadow in the shadows. Bit by bit they can draw the whole land into the shadows and take it from under the sun.”
“This appears to be my fault, but I have done nothing,” cried Thomas.
“Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.”
“What must I do?” asked Thomas, for he saw clearly that the Elf Queen had come to tell him to do something.
“They cannot use your shadow until you, and he, are men, and not boys. So you must go underground, now, whilst you are still a boy, and the shadow is harmless, and find it, and bring it back to the upper air.”
“How can I do that?”
“I will take you some of the way. You must mount behind me.”
“I am not ready,” said Thomas, thinking of his life in the palace, the things in his room, his books, his games, his anxious mother and father, his old nurse.
“You are as ready as you will ever be,” said the Elf, and bent low, and held out her hand, with the whip in it.
He had the thought—he was a canny boy, even if honourable and straightforward—that she might herself be a malign force, come to do him harm.
“If you do not trust me, this will be the worst day of your life,” she said, and he seemed to know, inside himself, that this was so. So he stretched up, and took her hand, which was cool and dry, and swung easily into the saddle behind her, and put his arms around her fine waist, and bent his face towards the velvet gown.
“Now,” she said, “we ride, with the wind, into the waste lands.”
And the horse leaped out of the mound, and went like a wind (there are creatures that do move like the wind) towards the high wall that surrounded the palace. There it collected itself, and stood back on its haunches, and rose, and leaped, and cleared the wall with space to spare, and the green cloak flying, and the wind in Thomas’s hair.
And they rode away fast, across that kingdom, and into strange lands, and stopped for a while by the gate of an orchard. The Elf Queen told Thomas he must not pluck the fruits, which hung invitingly on the boughs, because they looked fair, and were foul, and would poison him. But she gave him a milky cake from a bag at the saddle-bow, and a flask of clear water to drink. And the sky began to darken, not as it did at home, but as though a curtain was being pulled over it, or they were entering an invisible cave.
“This is the border of Elfland,” said the Queen. “This is a shadowland where the shadowless travel.” The rocks, and the grass, were grey, and a little river that ran beside