It was the middle of the night when the mirrors came out of the elves. With a sound like the cushioned patter of an ice storm, the tiny mirrors fell to the ground, leaving a crust of glitter behind the marching elf-army. They bled, of course, but the elven blood restored the dry land, undoing the effects of the drought, and moss emerged green from the ground in the troops’ wake.
The sight of the moss brought forth the drought-starved humans and their pathetic get to the mouths of their caves.
“Stay here!” the new father commanded. Not one of the children was his. But all the real fathers were dead, so they had no choice but to obey him or be beaten.
“Don’t go,” Agnes wanted to say. “Don’t trust them.” But Richard gently touched her lips to silence her. Richard was the oldest of the children, indeed almost an adult himself, and he did what he could to protect the others.
The adults fell on the damp moss, tearing it up by the double-handful like so much bread dough. They sucked the moisture from it and crammed its substance down their throats. Briefly, all seemed well. One of the new father’s wives was raising an arm to beckon the children down when the minute mirrors they had ingested suddenly expanded to ten, a hundred, a thousand times their original size. Jagged shards of mirror erupted from their flesh as horns, tusks, and spines. Blood fountained into the air and pooled on the ground, glimmering in the moonlight. The adults splashed through it, lurching grotesquely, writhing and howling in pain.
The children hid their eyes and turned away. The littlest ones cried.
Then, suddenly, there was silence. That was the hardest to bear of all.
But though the adults had ceased screaming, they did not fall. Brutally sharp glass fragments jutted from every inch of their bodies, holding them upright and rigid.
Nothing that was human remained of the adults. They had turned to crystal.
“We’ve got to bury them,” Agnes said firmly. “We can’t just leave them standing like that.”
“How?” Richard asked. “We can’t even touch them.”
The children had no shovels, but even with shovels they would have had a tough time trying to dig graves on the dry, barren beach. Where they stood had once been the shore of a small arm of the Pacific Ocean. But then the ocean had dried up and become a low, mountainous land of cliffs and sudden rifts, blanketed with dead fish and rotting seaweed. The sun had baked the wasteland that the elves had first created and then crossed as black and hard as obsidian. There would be no burials there.
“We can throw stones,” Frederic said. He was the youngest of the children. He hadn’t spoken until he was three, which was over five years ago. When he did start to speak, however, his first words were, “Things are not as they once were.” Followed, after two days of intense thought, by, “In any case, they could be arranged better.” He came up with ideas nobody else could have.
So they did as he suggested, smashing the starlight-glittery figures from a distance until they were nothing but mounds of broken glass. Richard, who had read a lot back when there were books, said, “In ancient times when men were warriors and carried spears, they buried their dead in mounds of rocks called cairns. This was an honorable form of burial. Even kings and queens were buried that way.” Then he turned to Agnes. “You’re good with words,” he said. “Please. Say a few words over the dead.”
Agnes took a deep breath. At last she said, “The adults were stupid.” Everybody nodded in agreement. “But the elves are cruel, and that’s worse.” Everybody nodded again. “I’m sick of them, and I’m sick of their war.” She raised her voice. “I want to have enough food to eat! All the food I want, every day of my life. I’m going to get it, too. I don’t know how. But I do know that I’m never going to be fooled by the elves or their mirrors or their green moss ever again!”
She spat on the ground, and everyone else followed suit.
“Amen,” she said.
She had no idea how futile her vow would prove.
During the Alien Invasions, as they were called before the world learned that the armies of Elfland came not from someplace unimaginably far away but from somewhere impossibly nearby, the children and their parents had been vacationing on a resort near Puget Sound. So shocked were the parents that at first they didn’t think to shield the children from their television sets. So the children saw the slaughter—what happened to the people who resisted the elves, and then what happened to the people who didn’t. When the elves came to Seattle, they left the television stations untouched, and courteously escorted the cameramen to Volunteer Park to broadcast their victory celebration to whoever might still be watching.
Under the guidance of their ghastly, beautiful queen, the invaders flayed their prisoners. This they did with exquisite skill, so that all were still alive when the work was done. Then they roasted them over coals. Troubadours wandered up and down the rows of scorched and screaming flesh, playing their harps in accompaniment. Elf-lords and elf-ladies formed quadrilles on the greensward in front of the band shell and danced entrancingly. Afterwards, they threw themselves down on the grass and ate heaping platters of roasted human flesh, while goblin servants poured foaming wine into sapphire goblets.
Then they torched the city.
The children understood cruelty far more intimately than did the adults, who had the army and the police and a hundred other social institutions to shield them from schoolyard beatings, casual theft, and having bugs and other vermin dropped into one’s food or mouth or clothing simply because somebody larger was bored. But they had never before seen such cruelty as this. What shocked them was not the deeds in themselves—they had imagined much worse—but that nobody took pleasure from them. These cruelties were not done with fiendish playground glee. There was no malice behind them, no glorying in the cruelty of what was done. Just a string of horrifying and senseless images running night and day on the television, until one day the transmitters stopped and there were no more.
That was when Frederick told the children that they had to go into the caves, and Richard led them all there. When the adults came to bring them back to the rental bungalows, Richard led the children deeper into the darkness and the adults followed. Thus it was that they few survived when every building on the island simultaneously burst into flames. It was cold in the caves, but at night the adults went out and foraged for food and blankets and fuel. Every now and then some of them didn’t return.
Months passed.
When the elves changed the weather and shrank the seas, the grasses and crops dried up. There was little to eat, and the adults weren’t anything like they used to be. Hunger made them unpredictable, violent, and impulsive.
It was no wonder, then, that the elves were able to catch them by surprise.
