Chapter 4: The Hidden People
Author’s note: This is Chapter 4 of my second novel, The Hidden People, a fantasy story with a romance element. The previous chapters can be found here:
I know I’ve mixed together Goidelic Celtic, Brythonic Celtic and Norse languages and names in what follows, but that’s all part of the fun. Thanks to David Gregg for his invaluable assistance with Gaelic. Any errors are mine.
This Substack will remain free, but if you ever feel like giving a tip, here’s a link by which you can do so (but only if you want, absolutely no obligation!)
When Jo woke, she was lying on her side, her cheek tickled by rough silvery grass. She rolled over and stared at the dark purple sky above: wherever she was, it was not at the bottom of a well. A warm breeze blew, carrying a fruity, flowery perfume. She sat up and looked around her. Shadowy trees with long thin leaves waved in the wind. There was no apparent way to get back to the well and Henny was nowhere to be seen.
“My dream is getting stranger and stranger.” Jo decided that this was the only explanation. She’d had dreams where she’d opened the door to the caravan they’d lived in once and found that it opened into the coffee shop, or a library, or one of the squats. It must be one of those kinds of dreams, just a little more exotic than most. She’d dreamed she’d gone down the well and emerged … here. Wherever here was.
She pushed herself up—most inconveniently, she was still wearing Simon’s old pyjamas. Miss Pickles’ slippers were totally ruined and soggy. On the one hand, now that they were wet, they were very uncomfortable, but on the other, she didn’t know what was in this dream grass: there might be thorns or biting insects.
She pushed forward, squinting her eyes, hoping to see a tunnel or a cave leading back to the well, and wished dream Jo could magically summon her phone, to use as a torch. Squitch squitch squitch, went her slippers under her feet.
This dream place was strange. The edges of it seemed somehow blurry—and if you tried to focus on them—you could no longer see what was there, but out of the corner of her eyes she saw strange, ruined towers, stone circles and gnarled trees. Things were lurking.
She inspected the closest tree; the sweet, almost sickly, smell came from a profusion of purple and red flowers. The pale silver-green leaves of the trees had a central stem, with projecting stems like feathers, holding tiny silvery leaflet. As she touched them, the leaflets pulled in to the projecting stem as if protecting themselves. She let go of the tree, feeling immense guilt, and said, “Sorry!”
Then she wandered aimlessly, hoping that the dream might provide an exit to another place, when someone pulled her hair. This was no mean feat: she didn’t have much hair to pull. She turned around. “Ow!”
Something flittered behind her and made a chittering buzzing noise.
She turned to catch it, but it disappeared. Then something poked her simultaneously in the left leg and the right shoulder.
“Eek!” She threw up her hands; this dream was not fun. “Stop it, stop it, whoever you are.”
The air was still, as if no one had ever poked her or pulled her hair. She waited some time and when she was sure that everything was calm, she began to walk.
Almost immediately, someone—or something—threw a handful of tiny pebbles at her.
Jo gritted her teeth. “Argh! Stop!” Behind her, several people—or animals—made the laughing, chittering, buzzing noise again. She turned to find them, but they’d disappeared.
She put her hands on her hips. “I am ignoring you.” Then she had a thought. “Hey! Maybe you can help me? If this is not a dream, and I’m somewhere else—I’m trying to find my brother, Henny. Same colouring as me: tall, brown eyes, pale skin. Doesn’t speak much. If you aren’t going to help me, can you at least not hinder me?”
Silence greeted this.
So she started again, following a strange winding path through the silvery trees. It’s as if this dream place doesn’t like straight lines.
The watchers did not bother her again, but she sensed they were still following her. She wondered if they ate people. She presumed not: they’d probably have trapped her already and gotten her ready for roasting. She began to giggle to herself at the image this provoked.
Abruptly, a strange gruff roaring noise sounded in the trees and alarmed chittering broke out all around Jo. From the silvery trees, five creatures flew.
Jo blinked and wondered how she was going to explain this to Simon when she woke up. The creatures were winged—like fairies—but they were a far cry from the fairies in books Jo had read as a child. Their multiple wings were huge and transparent, but more like beetle or bee wings than butterfly or bird wings. Their gremlin faces, Jo realised, were like the grotesque carvings on the inside wall of the well. They held out two sets of little arms and chittered at her: they had six limbs, and stood on the bottom set. When she tried to step forward, they pushed her back and one poked her in the arm—it looked almost like the creature had a stinger, like a wasp—but her skin wasn’t pierced. Another did a strange agitated dance in the air.
“Ow!” she cried, but this made the creatures even more agitated. They hissed and then abruptly stopped. Jo smelled a musky stench, like the lion enclosure at the zoo, but with a strange metallic overlay. She closed her mouth and stopped walking. Another roar sounded, closer still. Jo froze behind the dark trunk of a tree. The little creatures seemed content at this, and two of them sat on Jo’s shoulder.
They sat silently and watched as something crawled or slithered by. Whatever this latest beast was, it was enormous and sinuous, like a huge midnight-scaled snake panther, with legs. Simon had once told her that predators had their eyes at the front of their heads and prey had their eyes at the side of their heads. This animal’s yellow eyes were at the front of its head and they radiated deadly malice. Jo hardly dared breathe and her strange companions were silent. The creature stared at the place where Jo hid and sniffed deeply. Jo was terribly afraid that it could sense the hammer of her heart. Finally, it kept going.
Jo was quiet for a long time after the creature had disappeared: she was shaking a little.
“Thank you, strange bee gremlins.”
The five little creatures buzzed around her, tweaking her hair and tickling her face with their wings, making pleased chittering sounds. Then they darted off and hovered, as if waiting.
“You want me to follow you? Okay.” Jo was ready to trust the creatures after they’d warned her about the panther-snake.
She was a good deal more wary, now that she knew there were deadly animals in this dream world. The little bee gremlins played with her, sometimes hiding and bursting out, sometimes tweaking her hair, sometimes sitting on her shoulder. She felt something tickle inside her ear.
“What was that?”
The little bee gremlin flew and hovered out in front of her. Then he—or she? Jo didn’t know—extended a long, coiled tongue.
Jo started to laugh. “What? You licked my ear?” The bee gremlins buzzed and chittered—in the noise she had decided to call ‘laughter’.
“I guess it must be useful, having a tongue like that.” Jo thought about the nature books her mother had brought home from the library. Mama been simply obsessed by the variety of animals found on Earth, and sad that some were becoming extinct. Jo wondered what her mother would have made of this dream world. “Do you drink from flowers? Because—your tongues are like a butterfly’s, a honey eater’s—”
The bee gremlins made a noise that sounded agreeable. Now that she looked more closely at them, she saw that what she had thought was their ‘clothing’ was actually stripes of blue and black fur, like a smart little uniform. They showed her how they fed from the flowers hanging down from the silvery trees. One creature became covered in pale white pollen and Jo dusted the creature down, sneezing as she did so. The bee gremlins chittered with what sounded like amusement and thanks.
Jo was starting to enjoy this dream, now that she had worked out that it was a dream, and the snake-panther had gone. She hoped that when she woke up, she’d remember all the details to tell Simon. He’d love the coiled tongues. Was there any way to ensure you remembered dreams? For a while Simon had been obsessed with ‘lucid dreaming’ and watched multiple YouTube videos about it, but Jo had thought it was silly. She wished she’d asked him more.
Suddenly, the bee gremlins rose in alarmed panic and buzzed in a circle around Jo’s head.
“What? What? Another snake-panther?” Jo didn’t hear any guttural roars.
A male voice called from the trees, with a command. Jo looked around—it was no language she knew—and she could not see anyone. She continued walking, a little more tentatively, peering at the trees, while the bee gremlins circled frantically. No one emerged, so she decided to make a run for it. This was a mistake.
Something whizzed out of the trees and hit her in the shoulder with a thud. Jo stopped and stared down at it, uncomprehendingly. It looked like an arrow: a wooden shaft fletched with glossy black feathers with a purple sheen. It had pierced her shoulder and she was bleeding. Jo did not like this dream after all.
The bee gremlins made panicked noises. Then they swarmed up into the air in a group and fled. Jo pulled at the arrow and winced—it was lodged in her shoulder firmly, and felt disturbingly painful and real—and shouted, “Oi! Bloody hell, who do you think you are, shooting like that?”
Her head started to spin—she didn’t like blood. What happened if you dreamed you fainted—did you faint in real life too? She supposed she might be about to find out and sank to the ground.
Warily, five people emerged from the trees from all directions, holding old-fashioned black wooden bows, arrows aimed at her. They were wearing silver and black patterned clothing, to blend in with the strange silvery, trees. Their faces were covered by cloth masks and hoods.
The tallest person approached and said something. She saw dark eyes in the gap in the material, but that was all.
“I can’t understand you.” Jo rolled her eyes at the dream person, and wondered how her brain had made up an apparently coherent foreign language. “Why the fuck did you shoot me?”
The person made a huffing noise and spoke more loudly and slowly.
Jo was entertained by this: she was reminded of Mr Pickles with Ranjit from the curry house. He simply thought that if he spoke more loudly and slowly, Ranjit would suddenly gain an understanding of English. She supposed her dream was riffing off several awkward curry house incidents.
“I. Still. Can’t. Understand. You. Saying it louder and slower doesn’t help, see?”
The person tried several other phrases, slowly. Finally, the person said, “Dost thou English speakest perchance?” His accent was very strange and difficult to understand.
“English!” Jo had heard a word she recognised. “I speak English!”
The man’s eyes narrowed above the face-covering. “Who art thou? Whence dost thou hail?”
Jo wrinkled her nose at him. “Huh?”
The people surrounding her had a rapid heated conversation. The man who’d spoken to her sounded like he was the leader. He turned back to her.
“Stand, churl,” he commanded. “Tell me again, whence dost thou hail? Art thou from the Realm of Blood? Or a poacher?”
“What if I don’t want to answer your stupid questions?” Jo wondered what the dream would do now. “I mean—you’re the one who bloody well shot me, for no reason? I think you owe me an apology.”
The leader said something, made a gesture, and to Jo’s horror, another dark-eyed person came forward and leaned down to grab Jo by the front of her pyjama top.
One of Mama’s ex-boyfriends had taught Jo methods of getting away from kidnappers. She kicked up towards her would-be captor and tried to put her thumbs into his eyes, but her reactions were slower than usual, and her shoulder hurt where the arrow still protruded. As the would-be captor recoiled from her thumbs, she tried to twist away. Her captor got his arm around her from the back—he smelled like he’d been wearing the same clothes for some days—and she bit his arm as hard as she could, then tried to worm away. The shaft of the arrow broke in the struggle and some part of her was aware that it hurt like hell, and that she was now bleeding like a stuck pig, but she was so angry that she barely felt it. A second and a third person grabbed her and dragged her upright and she struggled and screamed, “Let me go, let me go!” as her wrists were bound.
Then the leader approached, and she tried to break free and kick him in the balls.
He slapped her across the face. “Enough! Stop fighting!”
“You bastard!” Jo spat at him.
“Thou whoreson,” said the leader, his dark eyes gleaming with fury.
Jo had never heard this insult before, but she sensed it wasn’t complimentary, and she was sick of being mistaken for a boy.
“That’s whoredaughter to you, bastard.” She made an exploratory kick at his balls again, and one of Miss Pickles’ pink slippers went flying from her foot. It would have been hilarious if it had hit the man in the head, but unfortunately he dodged.
The leader froze halfway through picking up the slipper. “Thou’rt a woman?”
“Last time I checked, yes.” Jo was proud of the scorn she’d packed into the retort.
The leader said something to the others, provoking murmurs of general disbelief.
Jo put her head up to the purplish sky and announced, to no one in particular, “The bee gremlins were fun, but the rest of this dream sucks. Make me wake up! Simon, come wake me up!”
The leader approached her again, more carefully, while the others held her restrained, and put the slipper near her foot. “Stop fighting. I would help thee. Thou’rt bleeding badly now.”
Jo looked down at her shoulder. It was true: blood was spreading across her top, black in the strange twilight. She suspected that, back in real life, she was lying in a way that caused pain to her shoulder, and it had come through to the dream. It was starting to hurt badly.
The leader unsheathed up a bronze knife. Jo flinched back. The man’s dark eyes flicked to her face. “Thy collar. I must … cut it. To remove the arrow. ‘Twill suppurate if I do not remove it. I am sorry—hast nicked the bone—I can sense it—”
“You can buy me new pyjamas then!” Jo had given up on taking this dream seriously. “Actually, no, you can buy Simon new pyjamas—”
The leader hesitated, while the others called out what sounded like encouraging comments.
“Grow up, boys!” Jo was almost sure they were all men. As the leader drew closer, she considered biting him, but she was curious to see what happened next.
The leader pulled down the cloth over his face, pushed back his hood, and she drew in a breath. He looked wild, with large dark eyes, slightly angular, just like her own, and long pale hair braided with leather thongs, beads, animal teeth and black feathers. Silver earrings dangled from his ears—Jo thought even Sean might be impressed by how many there were. He was older than she was, and his face was stern and unforgiving.
The leader took the collar of Simon’s pyjamas in one hand and slashed the pyjama top with the knife. It was difficult to see in the twilight gloom, but Jo was surprised to notice that he blushed slightly. His posture indicated that he was awkward about being close to her for some reason, and his men knew it, from the way they were laughing behind their masks.
Jo peered down, but she couldn’t see where the arrow had gone in; she could only see the shaft sticking out. It was too hard to make out, looking down at her own shoulder. The angles were all wrong.
“I must see if I can remove it. I beg thy pardon, this may hurt.” The leader pulled gently at the broken shaft from several different angles with long pale fingers—Jo yelped—and then the leader sucked a breath through his teeth. “I must needs cut thy flesh to get the arrowhead out. Thou wilt scar.”
“I don’t care, because this is a dream anyway.”
After a thoughtful pause, while the leader washed his hands down with a herbal smelling liquid, one of the men got out a bottle and put it to Jo’s lips and tried to tip it into her mouth. Jo closed her lips and spat the sickly sweet liquid out. “What the fuck is that? I’m not drinking some random shit?”
The leader sighed and looked up, his face grim. “‘Tis mead. This will hurt.”
“You’re not getting me to drink. For all I know, it’s got rohypnol in it? You might be a group of perverts who shoot women and rape them—?”
The leader scowled. “We are not. We will not ill-use thee, by my name and our clan.”
He explained something to the surrounding men. A serious discussion ensued, the bottle was withdrawn, and another man proffered a small leather wrapped item, the size of a credit card.
Jo stared at the thing in the man’s hand. “Huh?”
“Eochaid will put it between thy teeth,” said the leader, tersely, with some frustration. “I tell thee again—art thou witless?—this will hurt sorely. We are accustomed to hunting injuries—”
Jo allowed the man holding her left arm to put the leather-wrapped wood between her teeth, and tensed.
The leader whispered something in a strange singing tone—it made Jo’s shoulder bones tingle, and reminded her of something Mama had said a long time ago—then he drew a breath and made a swift cut to her shoulder with the knife. Jo screamed “Fuck!”—it really hurt—and the leather wad fell out of her mouth. At that moment, the leader drew out the arrowhead and the stub of the shaft. Then he drenched her shoulder with an astringent, faintly herbal-smelling liquid. It had hurt before, but now burned like the fires of hell.
Jo screamed and bucked against the two men holding her, and they tightened their grips around her upper arms. She shouted, “You fucking arsehole, I’m going to grow wings in this dream, then cut off your balls and shove them up your nostrils for that! I hope you all wake up tomorrow and your dicks have fallen off!”
The leader ignored her. One of the other men handed him a needle with thread through it. “I must stitch the wound. Curse if thou must—I care not—but stay still—I do not want to prick thee with the needle, and a well-stitched wound heals with less of a scar.”
Another man picked up the leather wad, and dusted the mud off it, and Jo accepted it back between her teeth. She clamped her teeth down and tried not to moan too loudly through clenched teeth as the leader sewed her flesh. He was clearly practiced, as he did it swiftly, and then he drenched the wound with the stinging liquid again. Jo couldn’t help it—she screamed as the wound burned—and the leather wad fell from her mouth again.
One of the other men pressed a pad of material to the wound, and with the leader, helped bandage the pad of material to her shoulder, around her pyjamas, under her arm and over her shoulder. The pressure of the bandage helped reduce the pain a little.
The leader exhibited the bloody arrow to her, his face momentarily softening. “Thou’rt brave. ‘Twas barbed—”
Jo thought she could see her own flesh on the arrowhead. It was certainly covered in her blood. She sagged against the hold of the other men. “Wake up, Joanna!” she moaned. “Wake up!”
The leader’s face became hard again, and he pulled his hood and the wrapping around his face back up. “Walk!”
Jo tried to resist, but the men tied a rope around her, and dragged her along the winding paths, until she was stumbling with exhaustion. Her wounded shoulder throbbed and stung with every step. The men did not tell her where they were taking her or what they were going to do. She presumed that they would not kill her, having gone to the effort of sewing up her wound, but her mind went to other horrific possibilities: death might be better.
They reached a glade. Strange white horses were tied to the trees, glimmering faintly, and as they got closer, Jo was surprised to notice that the horses’ eyes were orange. Men boosted Jo up onto a horse and the leader swung up behind her. She hated being this close to a person she didn’t know, particularly given that he’d hurt her, and he was larger than her. His arms trapped her on the horse once he took the reins, and her plans for escape were ruined. She cringed forward, away from him, and over the neck of the horse, even though that meant burying her face in a horsey smell, and it made the stitches in her shoulder pull and sting. The horse didn’t seem to care at all.
Jo felt tears trickle down her face. She was starting to realise—this wasn’t a dream after all. And maybe … just maybe … the things Mama had told them weren’t nearly as scary as the reality.