Labyrinth: All That Glitters
It was when someone, he forgot who, wished away a well-born toddler that Jareth first saw sequins. Their usefulness in making a good first impression was obvious to him immediately. Coins had long added a bit of glitter to one’s clothes-a century or so ago a Venetian courtesan had wished away her babe in exchange for dresses decked with quantities of them, gold bezants with holes in the middle for sewing-but Jareth hadn’t cared to wear another’s face. Especially given the poor reproductive qualities of human mints.
The little girl clutched a cloth poppet to her chest, and its eyes winked at Jareth in silver. He studied it curiously, then bent down to pick up the girl from the goblins that gamboled around her. The Goblin Court was raucous with the creatures. None of his kingdom’s fae had made an appearance today, avoiding the goblins with the usual distaste, and the goblins were celebrating what they viewed as a victory over their king's barely-tolerated subjects. "What have you here, little one?" he asked, detaching the poppet from her clutches.
"S’mine," she mumbled, ducking her chin, her voice hitching in a way that let him know what was in store for him if he didn’t make her cheerful quite swiftly.
"Ah, hmm." Jareth bounced her in his arm a bit, studying the poppet. "Its kirtle has a tear. My dear, how very distressing. Now," he announced, having redirected her concern to the toy, "why don’t you let me fix it-and you-" he spared a quick glance around the throne room and located a likely activity in a corner. There, a goblin with an extraordinarily long tongue was occupied in using it to stir a damp brown substance in a pot. "You play with Wet Wally over there." He nodded in the goblin’s direction, and she twisted in his arms to look. "He’s making mud pies for the party. Wouldn’t you like to make mud pies, too?" he asked cunningly.
Curiosity smoothed the crumpled look from her face. "If I make pies of mud, will goblins eat them?" she asked. Her voice high and piping as a marsh-bell fairy’s, and it carried easily through the raucous din in the room. She spoke with that strange pronunciation he had heard more frequently of late from those coming to the Underground from the lands of Albion.
She had probably never been allowed outside her family’s manor walls to mess about in the dirt, he reflected. It was hard to imagine what might have led the child’s nurse to wish her away, though Jareth certainly didn’t mind the opportunity to add another denizen to the Underground, whether she went goblin or not. The nurse’s dreams had been base and cheap. "Of course they will," he assured the child promptly. "Goblins think mud is the tastiest food there is. Have you ever eaten a bit of mud?"
She shook her head vigorously, brown curls tangling. "Nurse says mud is nasty nasty and good girls shall not touch it!" she parroted, but patently couldn’t decide whether to make a face or not. She stole another glance at Wet Wally in his corner, and wriggled experimentally.
Jareth set her down and said, "Then I think you ought to ask Wally to let you have a taste, too. In the Underground, good girls may play in mud whenever they desire. I have it on very good authority that mud is the best sweet of them all."
"Truly?" she asked, eyes widening in disbelief.
"Quite truly," he assured her, giving her a gentle nudge in Wally’s direction. "You go help Wet Wally with his pies, and I’ll fix your poppet’s dress."
Solemnly, she nodded. "Yes." She took a step towards the goblin, then turned back to look up at him in belated anxiety. "Her name is Mathilde. Will you be good to her?"
"Indeed, I promise you," he said with a quick caress to her head. She was a cute little human now. Her face was round and flushed with health. Her laced kirtle was neat and clean, though it would be surprising if it didn’t stand up on its own weight of dirt by the moon’s rise that night. Her humanity might not last much longer.
She beamed at him. "You be nurse, then!" she declared, and scampered off in Wally’s direction.
A nod to Follimol detailed that goblin to ensure the child came to no harm, though it guaranteed her hair would be irretrievably tangled in elflocks the next time he saw her. Jareth swept out of the crowded throne room, poppet in hand.
"Really, Jareth, a human toy?" said Elswythe disapprovingly as he handed the poppet over to her a few minutes later. At his cool glance, she amended, "Sire," but her distaste was clear nevertheless.
"Not the toy," he said, and gave its eyes an impatient flick. "These."
Aelynnia peered over her sister’s shoulder, not incidentally giving him a lovely view of her cleavage, but, as he’d made clear on several previous occasions, her sister’s charms were the greater. And, really, Aelynnia did no-one a favor in that dress; had she not been showing it his court for the better part of a century already? He sighed to himself as the two ladies scrutinized the poppet.
Aelynnia, too, failed to see the obvious appeal of the sequins. "The little bits of metal?" She drew back, hand rising to toy with a curl of hair that slipped forward over one shoulder, her brows puckering. "Sire, what would be the purpose?"
Jareth’s equanimity began to ebb away; could no-one see the brilliance of his plan? His subjects sorely disappointed him at times. "To amaze. To awe. To delight the eyes of fae and daze the eyes of men."
"But does not human silver tarnish?" Elswythe asked, completely missing the point, however much she had established herself as the court’s arbiter of beauty. She turned to her sister, amusement brightening her eyes. "Have I spoken to you yet of Aelfwyne? My dear, she fairy-led a mortal but then got lost herself!"
Jareth snatched the poppet back from Elswythe’s careless grasp. "She lost herself right out of this kingdom," he snapped and strode out of the room, taking satisfaction in the two ladies’ gasps of dismay.
The walk through the castle to the city that surrounded its outer walls eased Jareth’s mood as he took satisfaction in seeing all was well, goblins and dwarves and other creatures all going about their business without explosions or other time-consuming messes he would have to clean up after.
Falbur’s smithy was blackened with soot, inside and out but for the clear pool of the spring that burbled at its south corner in the late-afternoon sunlight. The spring fed one Above, long held sacred to Weland, and even Underground there was a nod to the legendary smith, for a goblin’s skull crafted into a goblet hung upside-down over the doorway. Fashioned from ivory bone banded in a delicate setting of gold, it announced the presence of a master metalworker and goldsmith.
"Falbur," Jareth called, ducking to step into the smithy’s empty front room, redolent with wood smoke and the tang of hot steel. It was divided by a short, narrow counter, and the shelves behind held scales and weights of assorted sizes, trays of the cheap brass rings goblins loved so, enchanted flasks and pewter plates, gold goblets that stayed full always of the first liquid poured into them, and a convex, silver-backed mirror in a gilt frame. A pen-case dangled from a nail at the end of one shelf, and a red string of clear crystal beads hung from the other.
Taking in his mirrored reflection, Jareth couldn’t resist a moment of preening: he looked especially fine in the rich indigo of his houppelande, its pleats cinched in at his waist by a belt of gold links embossed with a myriad of screaming goblin faces, and its long, flaring sleeves lavishly dagged. Falbur had made the belt, come to think of it, and a masterwork of craft it was. Its horrified goblins held the same expressions they had shown the night he had killed the mistress of the Labyrinth. "Falbur!"
The door from the front room to the back of the smithy banged open and a dwarf, his heavy leather apron scorched. "Sneck up, Your Majesty, good though it is to see you. Too loud and you’ll be having the bird screeching," he said with a nod past Jareth to a cage beside the door that held a magnificent golden clockwork bird. Its wings were bejeweled with emeralds and lapis, its breast flushed with rubies and jasper. It cocked a topaz eye at Jareth, but its onyx beak remained shut.
Jareth frowned at the impudence, but let it pass without comment-Falbur was too skilled a smith to send off to the Bog for a lesson in etiquette. He held out the poppet instead. "I want you to make me some of these."
The dwarf took the poppet and turned it around in his hands, focusing immediately on the sequins, the only bits of metalwork to the toy. His thick russet brows knotted. "Phaugh, these spangles? A child’s work-they’re naught but a coil of silver, snipped into rings and beaten flat. I’ve better to do if you’re wishful I keep supplying your goblins with arms and armor."
"Of course not exact duplicates," Jareth said impatiently. "What use would I have for such? They should wax and wane like moons; they should twinkle like stars. They should shine like tears of the dead and dazzle the eyes of men."
"Hm." Falbur flicked the poppet’s spangles with a thick fingernail. "I s’pose something like that could be arranged. Hm." He darted a glance up at Jareth before returning his attention to the poppet. "You’ll need to give me the materials for it, howsoever. Regular silver won’t have the effect you’re wanting."
Jareth looked down at the dwarf, lips tight with displeasure. "I? Supply you, smith?"
The dwarf shrugged, handing the poppet back to Jareth. "I ain’t no Maker-of-nails to have things for such a project, Your Majesty, nor yet the spells. You would. But that’s what I need for spangles like you want."
"So," Jareth said, tucking the poppet under his belt. The horror-struck goblin faces holding the poppet in place opened their mouths wider with shrill shrieks of dismay. The noise caused the clockwork bird to squawk unhappily and shuffle on its perch, sending its cage swinging. It emitted another noisy cry, a screech of metal.
Falbur scowled but before he could say anything, Jareth showed his teeth in a pointed smile. "Brobb Nalr broke the pulley to the castle’s inner gate this morning. You’d best see that it’s working again and soon, or I know what I’ll supply you with, and I doubt you will enjoy it."
Satisfied at the dwarf’s disgruntled expression, Jareth turned owl and flew from the smithy. Owls were not designed for sustained flying, and he gained altitude only with effort as he circled the castle, slowly spiraling upward in the cool autumnal air toward his private rooms in the central tower. The sound of a goblin squabble burst from a window as he passed by, and his eyes were caught by any movement beneath him: gate guards shoving each other in the courtyard, the lamplighter cutting down an alley, the Wiseman shuffling home for the evening.
He resisted the owl-urge to prey on its hat, and instead tried to think about where he might get material for the spangles. One possibility was flames from the candles lit in the eye-sockets of skulls, of which there were plenty about since the goblins never could resist ransacking their burial crypt beneath the castle; marsh-lights were another. These would have some of the effect Jareth wanted, but neither was substantial enough for being worked into another form.
He heard her singing first: "He that gose upon earthe, glittering as gold, Like as earthe never more go to earthe sholde," a song he recognized as recently come from Above. Cliona began the next verse as he passed by her room’s window. In the brief glance he had, the fae woman was draping a long, sparkling string of diamonds around her pale neck. Their glitter gave him an idea, and by the time he blew through the unglazed window of his bedroom, its shutter left always open, he was refining a plan.
In the solitude of the room, dominated by the massive, curtain-hung bed and several dark wooden chests, he changed into hose, a wool jacket belted with black leather, and tall boots suitable for a trip into the Forbidden Forest. Leaving the poppet on a small table and the houppelande in a dark puddle on the floor, he headed down the curving tower stairs to stop by the throne room on his way out.
Goblins were hanging off the ceiling already, and chicken feathers floated through the air: the party was in full swing, then. A pig darted by, squealing unhappily, decked in what looked to be a fae lady’s underwear. Running into him full-tilt, a muddy-faced little girl, hair a mass of knots and straw, attached herself to his leg. She gave him a gap-toothed grin. "Mudth wunnerful," she blurted, lisping. Wet Willy babbled his agreement, hopping teasingly around her. She turned and stuck her tongue in his ear-and Jareth, with no surprise, saw that it was inhumanly long, a glistening gray. Wet Willy screeched and darted off, the girl giggling and scrambling after.
Whistling cheerfully, Jareth vanished himself to the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
There was a protocol to passing through the Labyrinth that even he was enjoined to obey unless he wanted to pay a price, and it restricted the ways in which he could approach the Forest. In this case, he appeared outside its doors, the dark patina of its knockers dull in the ruddy light of the setting sun.
The eyes of both knockers widened to see him approach, and one called out a greeting. "Your Majesty! Am I glad you came by. We can barely open. We need to be fixed before our hinges rust shut." It rolled hopeful brass eyes at him.
"Mmph thgthy . . . lscl . . . wlfr!" the second one mumbled pleadingly.
"You will be seen to," Jareth said drily. "But for now," and he kicked the second door, "you’ll open if you know what’s good for you, and open immediately."
"What? I can’t hear Your Majesty. You’ll have to speak more loudly," the first knocker said.
"Hlpeth bkld gmft!" the second knocker exclaimed, dismay painted broad on its lean features. It squinched its eyes shut and its cheeks puffed in a deep breath. With a shriek of reluctant hinge, a groan of wood, and a shower of rust flakes, the door shuddered open.
"Pwnzg," groaned the knocker.
The first knocker shouted tetchily, "What’s that? Rusty? I know we’re rusty! That’s why we need help!"
Jareth ignored it. "My thanks," he said to the second knocker, and entered the forest. The door slowly, creakily closed behind him in another cloud of dirt and rust. He could feel the Labyrinth stirring around him, an eddy of magic and power that tracked him with a slow, slumberous awareness.
By the time he reached his intended destination, the sun had set and moonlight limned the landscape. Even after nearly a thousand years, he was still not certain about how places Above became part of Underground. Perhaps the Labyrinth annexed them in some manner--it had certainly seemed satisfied, a century or so ago, when this grove first appeared in the Forbidden Forest.
Leaves shone silver and gold and a fierce, cold white against the black sky as Jareth approached, as if stars had been cast down into trees. But entering the grove discovered the pale trunks to be gray as rotting bones, and the branches they raised were twisted, gnarled, tortured claws. They trembled as if agonized by the breeze that stirred them, and the earth beneath was black and barren.
The thready, shrill wail of crickets hushed as he stepped into the shadows of the outermost trees, and the thin voice that had been leading them fell silent. All of the trees were similar in size and age, but of those bearing silver leaves, one had the largest. Jareth went to it first, pulling down a branch to study the leaves more closely.
They did have more substance than candleflame or marsh-light. He started to bend one to test its pliability when the tree rustled above him and something moist dripped onto his cheek.
He tensed, defenses springing ready, though he held himself still and simply tipped his head back to look up into the branches.
A pallid face dominated by green eyes in which no white showed stared down at him. Long hair wreathed her face in a tangle, wet and dark as water-weeds. Another drop ran down a lock and fell onto his shoulder. He was careful to keep his expression bland. "A pleasant evening to you, lady," he said.
The planes of her face were sharp, taut with anger, obscuring the youth and beauty she had once possessed. "What is it you do here?" she demanded hoarsely.
Jareth took a step back, assessing the situation. Carefully, he bowed, keeping his senses alert for any change in the woman--though not a woman, precisely: she was most emphatically dead, and when living had been little more than a girl. "I have need for what I find here: I come to take some leaves of this and a few of the other trees."
"No!" She was out of the tree and before him without a twig having been stirred. "No. You may not. Take nothing. Leave!"
Jareth narrowed his eyes, his hands resting at his waist. "Lady, what is it to you? You are clearly of the lake. Have you some claim to them?"
Fury seemed to boil within her, spitting forth in a furious cry. "Some claim? Some claim?" She trembled, foot shifting, fingers tensing as if she wanted to leap on him. She flung a hand at the tree. "This was my father!"
Jareth dropped his hands as if taken aback. "Lady?"
"My father," she rasped. Another sharp movement indicated the other trees. "My mother. My sisters. My brother. Aunts. Uncle." A breeze brushed through the leaves above, and branches flinched and shivered in response. Her voice rose to a howl, "And yet you ask what claim?"
She had only started her leap when he flung a crystal, encasing her completely. She slammed into its curve and shrieked at him-and he wordlessly tweaked the crystal’s properties to the muffle sounds escaping it.
The crystal was impervious to the blows from her fisted hands, but several minutes of effort resulted in nothing but damp smears upon it. She subsided into a crumpled heap of wet hair and sodden white bliaut and blazing eyes.
He began walking around the globe, scrutinizing her at his leisure, even as he touched the nearest tree with a tendril of power. "Pardon me if I take issue with your assertion, lady," he said at last. He ignored her snarl as she twitched to follow his path. "But these trees are clearly not ensouled."
Reaching up, he touched a branch while continuing to gaze at her. "They feel as other trees feel, nothing more, nothing less." He smiled. "Why, if I were to-snap a branch," and he did just that, breaking off a leafy twig a span long, "it’s all the same to the tree as if a storm took it."
She lunged up to claw at the crystal and scream at him.
Jareth twirled the twig between his fingertips. "You overstep your bounds, lady," he said coolly. "The lake is your domain; the earth is not." He tossed the twig to the ground and trod on it.
She moaned, eyes on the branch as water welled in her eyes and spilt onto her cheeks.
Jareth stepped to the crystal, palm-to-palm with her as he leaned forward until only a skin of magic separated the two of them. "Now," he said, and the menace and sheer authority in his voice had her turning, all unwilling, to look at him. "I rule this Labyrinth. I rule all within it. These trees are mine to do with as I like, even should I desire to rend them into splinters and burn them into ash." She flinched. He added quietly, intimately, "And so could I rend you, lady, dead or no . . . until even the shreds of your spirit cried in pain."
He stepped back and vanished the crystal. She swayed on her feet but watched him quietly, hands limp at her sides. He smiled, pleased: she recognized who the power was. Now he would be generous. "These trees are trees, but not natural for all that. And so I ask you lady, you who name them kin: how comes this?"
She crouched slowly, obviously trying not to upset him, and picked up the broken twig. "Outlaws killed us." Her eyes cast down, she cradled the branch, its leaves crumpled and torn, and stood. "We were in progress to the northernmost of my father’s manors, and they set upon us." A pale finger stroked one tarnished leaf. "They--killed my father and uncle, and struck off my brother’s head. Then they-they--we wept, but they took what they would, and after concealed the bodies so that we could not even have proper burial."
Jareth studied the trees again. Slaughter, robbery, tears spilt on green earth, an unquiet spirit; so many deaths near a place of magic and moving water could certainly turn out in this fashion. He slid a glance back to her. "And you?"
Her hands fisted, the branch crackling a protest. She jerked her head towards the lake behind her, wet hair dripping on the ground. "I was wounded unto death. But I ran and hid and so they did not find me."
"Hm." It was easier to propitiate spirits and the revenant dead than argue with them. He turned back to face her, and she jerked a startled glance up to his face before looking away and down again. He crossed to her and, finger under her chin, forced her to meet his eyes. "I’ll have what I need from these trees, and you shall not stop me." She swallowed. "But I am minded to do what I can for you, lady. I rule here, and so I ask you this and offer it should it be within my power: what would give you solace?"
Her fathomless green eyes widen as she stared at him, first disbelievingly. Then slow hope rose in their depths. "My lord," she said, and trembled once with a terrible eagerness. "I want to die."
Jareth dropped her chin, shock a cold breath down his back, and took a step away. She followed, twig tossed aside, fierce with her desire, "I want to die. I was a good girl, once! It is Heaven I should be in, not-not here." Seeing the look on his face, she held out her hands in supplication. "You offered. This is what I want. You said the souls of my family are gone from this place. I want to die, to be dust in the earth, tied here no longer, and free to join my family in Jesu’s city. Please, my lord!"
Jareth took a deep breath, trying to smooth his expression. The one mystery mortals knew that he did not, their greatest fear and greatest joy, from which he and his kind were forever barred and kept ignorant. "Very well." He was pleased that his voice was even, dispassionate. "Show me your part of the lake."
She led him to the shore with quick footsteps. "There," she said, and pointed partway between the small island in the middle of the lake and the shoreline where they stood. A mass of plants floated upon the lake’s surface where she gestured.
They were water lilies, but though the moonlight shone upon them and spangled the dark water in silver, the flowers were not white, but seemed black. He knew why when, on impulse, he summoned one. The lily bloomed scarlet with heart’s blood. "Ah," he said in recognition, and quickly gathered all those he could see to him. Their stems dripped on the ground between him and the girl. "Where do you feel drawn now, to these or the lake still?"
She closed her eyes only for a moment before she nodded to him and said, "Here."
"These will be sufficient, then," he said, and strode back to the grove. He laid the lilies in its heart and turned to her. "You must understand that there is no guarantee where you will go," he said brusquely. "I can sever you from this place, but where you proceed hence is not in my hands. Are you still so minded to pursue this course?"
"Yes," she breathed, face avid as she stared at the lilies. "Oh, yes!"
"I ask a third and final time. You will be sent from here, never to return. Is that your wish?"
She gave him a direct look, straightening. "So I wish." She hesitated, arresting his incipient gesture. "My lord. Once you have . . . taken what you need from here, please destroy the trees. I would there be no memorial to my--my family’s destruction."
He inclined his head in acknowledgement. Then, bending will to power, he set fire to the lilies binding the girl to this place. A silent concussion rolled over him and they flashed into ash, and the girl was gone without even a flicker; no trace of her remained to any of his senses.
The Labyrinth stirred questioningly but subsided, after a moment, into its quiet nighttime thrum.
Jareth scattered the remnants of the lilies with a toe, a breeze assisting with his efforts. Perhaps in a decade or so the ground might be green once more.
A cricket chirped. Another. They begin a thin duet. He looked up; no moon nor sun ever hung in the sky Underground, though it felt their light, but the sky had begun its barely-perceptible brightening as the moon Above descended into dawn. After assessing the surrounding trees, he gathered several branches apiece of silver and diamond leaves. A damp floral scent lingered in the air.
"The island would offer a fine spot for a pavilion," he mused, looking past the trees toward the lake. "There could even be dancing. And these trees would border a pathway to the lake quite perfectly." He considered the idea. "It liketh me," he said merrily. He turned and began to walk back towards the Forest gate, vanishing the branches to the castle ahead of him.
Really, all this had been quite troublesome, he thought. But the impression he would create on hapless mortals and fashion-conscious fae alike-well worth such minor annoyances as these. Hmm. He wondered what it would take to appear and disappear in a puff of glitter.