Chapter 4 - Zibby
4
Zibby
Robert truly was, under all the dirt, a beautiful child. His pale green eyes had a certain attractive tilt at the edges, and the look in them always suggested deep affection, no matter what he was looking at or with what intention. His strawberry hair was thick and soft, though it couldn’t be made to lay in one direction, much less to flatten out. His skin was tan and glimmered with a sort of sheen that only ever existed in the Fae people, and was without marks or flaws except for delicate freckles that rested on his shoulders and nose. And, of course, the healing cuts on his palms. His wings were clear as crystal, and were webbed with delicate veining like a dragonfly’s wings. He wasn’t quite old enough to fly, but he would be soon.
Like all the local boys of his age, he was tough. Hard times couldn’t properly describe the lives of those on the outskirts, because no one had ever known times that were not hard. Such a lifestyle made all the children strong - well, the ones that survived, that is - but it also made them look hard and much older in the face.
Such was not the case with Robert. He kept a kind of grace in his movements, in the corners of his mouth, and the light but deliberate steps that carried him from home to home. He looked like royalty, and was swimming in charm. All the little girls (and quite a few of the older girls) smiled at him whenever they saw him. He was roguish, yet polite. He was also quite smart.
So, when he had cried out all the tears he had to cry, Robert had given his sister a bath and washed the cuts on his hands. Then, he had bundled the baby girl tightly in the piece of pink tartan that was to lay in her crib (the same piece that the soldier had used to clean his blade, but Robert washed that as well) and pulled the makeshift blanket around her shoulders and back so that her wings couldn’t be seen. (They had popped back up after the soldiers had left, and then started to turn different colors.) Then he picked her up and left the hut in the forest, leaving his mother’s decapitated corpse inside. He never went back again.
He had walked with his sister until he reached another cluster of shabby homes (they called it a Town) and knocked on a door. Perhaps it was fortunate for Robert (and the baby) that the owner of the home was a mother of five children. She fell in love with him at once, and he lived there with her for around a month. The woman cared for the both of them, and Robert helped as much as he could, until the two boys of the house hated him (because he was stealing their mother’s affections) and all three girls were fighting over which was to marry him. Then, Robert took his sister and stole away in the dead of night. And he moved to another town, and did the same thing all over again.
Soon the baby was strong and growing, and Robert himself was strong and growing too. The tiny girl was a strange little thing. She watched everyone and everything with big, wide green eyes. When she was big enough to sit upright on her own, she would sit on the bank of a stream while her brother practiced flight. She would stare at her brother, and then stare at little swarms of gnats. Robert would get his wings going and lift off the ground, and the little girl would watch him with her mouth wide open. Then she would point at a bunch of gnats and make a buzzing sound, as if to say, “No, you’re doing it all wrong. They’ve got it right.”
“Zzzzib,” she would say. “Zzzib, zib zib.”
And then Robert would wrinkle his pretty little nose at her and try again. Soon, the baby girl would start saying her word whenever Robert took her with him to practice flying. Sometimes, if he was shaking his wings enough, she would start zib-ing away as if she thought he ought to try.
In one home the siblings invaded, a teen-aged Faerie asked Robert what the baby’s name was.
“I don’t know, miss,” the boy said, honestly. “Mum never told me what her name was. Before she left, I mean.”
“It’s a horrible thing for a mother to leave her children,” said the girl scornfully. “Well, in that case, you should name her. She’s your charge, isn’t she?”
And so Robert thought about this. He thought very hard. He thought so hard that his wings started buzzing all their own, and the baby girl said, “Zzzzzib!” with such enthusiasm he thought she would stand up and jump right there.
And so, from that day forth, the little girl’s name was Zibby. It was not a conventional name. A group of children in the next town said that it wasn’t a real name, and Robert got into a tussle with them. Three against one isn’t fair. Fortunately, a young wife with no children yet to care for stepped in and rescued him, and Robert and Zibby had another home for a little while.
Robert would have loved to stay with some of the people that took them in. Many of them were good, honest folks, and Robert did miss having someone to take care of him. He missed being held and kissed most of all, so he held and kissed Zibby to make up for it. He had never known a father, and now that his mother was gone, he was more than living without her - he was taking her place.
Zibby didn’t know anything about mothers or fathers. She had her brother, and that was the first thing she ever cared about. She started learning to speak, and the first thing she tried to say was “Robert.” Unfortunately, it came out more like “Bobbit,” and was not remedied by constant practice. From then on, people who met the two called them Zibby and Bobby.
As they traveled, Zibby and Bobby did not really know where they were going. They followed lights that they saw in the night until they found dwellings, and they ventured further away from the bright city that formed the center of their world. Some of the towns they went to had people without wings, and soon, they started to find new, bustling cities with noisy marketplaces and stranger people than they’d ever seen before. Zibby was now old enough to walk and talk, and with all the different kinds of people around, she didn’t have to cover up her wings in the old pink plaid blanket.
Zibby was four now. Bobby was eleven. He still had his charm, that was for sure. But he was getting a little too old to appeal to the motherly kind. It was mostly young girls that brought him into their homes, and their parents shot strange looks at the Fae boy. They couldn’t stay in these homes longer than a week, but they would often remain in a town for several months, skipping from home to home. Even still, Bobby only had eyes for his little sister. He did not kiss girls and preferred to be in Zibby’s company than that of children his own age. It was getting harder to earn his keep, though. He had grown from a small, beautiful boy into a slender, girlish thing with delicate ways and sensitive intuition. Men did not want his help because no part of him looked work-roughened. His skin was soft and tender, and his muscles were a bit too small for the farm work that was needed in these towns. He was a hard worker, yes, but he could no longer keep up with the boys who had been doing this work for years. He had strong legs and he could fly, which got him odd jobs, but the siblings were stealing more food and sleeping in alleyways more often than not.
Zibby was becoming a beautiful child, much different from the odd, ugly baby she had been. She had her brother’s build and coloring, though she was a bit less elegant and more boyish than he had ever been. Her red hair was shiny and straight, and reached her shoulders. The white bit in the front had formed a pretty streak that usually framed the right side of her heart-shaped face. Her eyes were green and much bigger than her brother’s. She had become very fond of the pink tartan blanket, the only souvenir from her original home, and wore it like a sort of belted toga. However, the wings were the most striking bit of her appearance.
Most of the time, they were white and feathery, but the feathers were shiny and their fibers were sometimes fused with an iridescent film. They could be pink-tinged, or green or blue, whenever the light hit them right. They were almost crystalline sometimes. And then, without notice, they could fade into her back as though they hadn’t existed, leaving only the pinkish birthmarks on her back. Within the past year, they had started doing some funny things. Sometimes, when they popped up behind her shoulders, they weren’t feathered at all. They mimicked bugs - butterflies, dragonflies, and beetles - and sometimes formed themselves out of scales or skin. And, they would change color at the drop of the hat, especially if the little girl was excited or scared. But, Zibby and Bobby were in strange places where they knew no one, and no one seemed to really question them, or think that the strange wings were strange at all.
One time, Bobby got work from a cloth maker. The big man saw Zibby’s tartan toga and informed the brother and sister that it was a Scottish pattern, and that it meant McRae. Bobby did not know what Scottish was, but he recognized McRae as a word he used to hear when he was very young, before his mother’s death. So, this is how he learned (or re-learned) that their last name was McRae. When he told Zibby this, she was so happy that she put her skinny arms around herself and hugged the makeshift dress. She did not know much about last names, or mothers, or families, but if the name McRae was something that forever connected her with her brother, she was extremely proud of it.
Zibby was smart and a bit of a troublemaker. Of course, she always did what her brother told her to, but she spent too much time alone when he was off working to really keep herself under control. One day, she had been hungry all day, and so she stole two muffins from a baker’s stall. She was chased from the village crying, and Bobby found her the next day, sleeping in a tree. And so he coaxed her down and they kept moving. With his mere one day’s work at the last town, and the stolen muffin incident, Bobby decided that it would be wise to stay away from towns for a while. Problematically, he did not know what to do for food and shelter. Of course, he did not tell Zibby this. He was all-powerful and all-knowing in his baby sister’s eyes, and he couldn’t tell her that things were going to keep getting harder. So, he carried her on his back, and she slept with her head on his shoulder, and Bobby McRae thought very hard about how they were going to survive this time.