King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

find it.
    One positive thing out of today: after all my badgering and beavering (like the drop of water that wears away the mighty stone, as Daddy keeps reminding me), and, I don’t doubt, a little help from Mummy (I’m sure I heard voices raised in the breakfast room when I got up this morning), Daddy has relented and let me have the use of one of his cameras—a leather-bound brown folding portable.

July 9
    O N APPEARANCES ONLY, TODAY is no better than yesterday, but I could feel a change in the air, in that same way you know by feel when it is going to clear up and when it is going to rain all day. By three o’clock there were patches of blue coming in from the Atlantic, and, miracle of miracles, the odd stray beam of watery sunlight. These were still far from perfect conditions, but I had no intention of losing another moment to the weather. Armed with camera and notebook, I went up into Bridestone Wood to hunt faeries. Nothing. They must be even more sensitive to the elements than we are. It was not a totally fruitless day. At teatime I noticed, as if for the first time, the carved Dutch wooden globes Daddy keeps on the dining room mantelpiece. They are hollow wooden balls painted with old maps of the world which open like Russian dolls so that the smaller globes nestle within the larger. Noticing them made something go click! in my head and all those thoughts and ideas that had been flying around loose in there began to fall together.

July 10
    N O FAERIES TODAY, EITHER . But I could feel them as I have never felt them before at Craigdarragh—that spooky, electrical sense of presence.
    I am developing a theory about the faery: it is that our world and Otherworld lie one inside the other, like the concentric spheres of the carved Dutch globes, along different planes of being. In many ways they are alike, though I think that to us, Otherworld seems a little smaller than our world. Perhaps to Otherworld it is our world that seems the smaller. Both follow the same path around the Sun, and (here lies the significant difference) both turn, but at very different rates. In our world a day is twenty-four hours long; in Otherworld, a day can be a year from dawn to sunset. Daddy would be pleased with my next piece of reasoning: I consulted the atlas in the library and thought it all out very scientifically. Because the periods of rotation are different, there may be times when our world’s axis is inclined at a different angle from that of Otherworld, with the result that the surface of Otherworld touches, then passes through, the surface of our world. This area of intersection starts as a point, increases to a circle. Then, as the orbits progress and the axial tilts come back into line again, the zone of interpenetration diminishes again to a point. This, I think, is why Otherworld has always been associated with things of the earth—with hollow hills and the underworld. Mummy’s book makes the point that the legendary entrances to Otherworld have always been through caves and lakes. It would also explain why supernatural events are associated with the equinoxes and solstices—because it is at those dates that the shift of the axes occurs! I think that the geography of Otherworld must be very different from our World. I think there is much less sea, much more land—the Otherworldly Tir Nan Og is always placed in the far west, where we have only the empty Atlantic.
    The more I think about my theory, the more it opens up before me, just like one of the magic gates to Otherworld, the moon-shadowed path that leads to the Land of Ever-Youth. I am so excited, it is as if after a long, hard climb, I have come to a high vista from which I can look out over a whole new landscape.

July 11
    T HE WEATHER IS BETTER , brighter; there is a strong breeze off the Atlantic carrying fast white clouds upon it. I went up to the wood with a sense of expectation and was not disappointed. I saw a pookah—one of the little horse-headed men. It