Blooming Women

7. Flower People

'It's how I stop people,' said Hazel, breaking into the memory.

'How you kill them, you mean! You took down the warning signs and swept the salt off the road, didn't you? I found it under the barrier. And you'd loosened that, too! How do you even manage that if you're a... a... a carry...'

Karya, Dear. Kar-ya. A nymph of the hazel grove.
'Karya. Thank you. Where did you get spanners from anyway?'
'Am I? I don't think so. Baz the man called me a lot of things and that wasn't one of them, but I don't think he was being nice at the time... Spanners?'
'Spanners. Yes.'
There was a polite, uncomprehending pause.
'Spanners? To undo the nuts?'
'What nuts? Nuts fall by themselves after my dress is brown and I've danced to remind my trees to sleep. If the squirrels don't eat them.'
'And that works, does it? Don't the trees do it by themselves?'
Do try not to be so antagonistic Dear.
The shape in front of her shrugged. 'I've danced for them since before the time the Hairy People left their fort.'
She could be speaking of millennia. This is fascinating; I knew it would be, when we first encountered the creature.
'Pardon me for being underwhelmed.'
Samantha began to reply, but Amber spoke over her. 'So. How many years ago was that?'
She'd been wanting to ask when Hazel had first mentioned the Hairy People, but the idea of avoiding hypothermia had got in the way.
'Oh. I can barely remember... two, three, four...'
It must be centuries at least, perhaps longer; Drydon Castle is very close! Think how we could enrich the knowledge of our Priory colleagues.
'Thirty-three, thirty-four. Thirty-four summers. They built a fort to sing in, then ohhh... Many-many people came, thick as summer ants, and held a ball beyond the pine trees; they sang and danced for three days at midsummer. And then they went away. They sang of love and peace and... and the wizard of the ball. Yes. I remember. A pine ball wizard. We danced to their drums and hoped they would return to see the year turn again, but they never have; we still speak of it. Are you dying now?'
Amber had stopped stamping her feet, had doubled up as far as her gripped arm would let her and was wheezing weakly through shivers as Samantha spoke defensively inside her head.
When she said 'Hairy People' I believed she meant, at the very least, pre-Norman conquest Anglo-Saxon, Dear. Dear? DEAR! This laughter does NOT become you. I can allow that circumstances may have lessened your good sense, but levity of this type is tactless in the extreme —
'Hippies? They were a bunch of hippies singing 'Pinball Wizard' at a summer pop concert?' wheezed Amber.
'Oh no. They were Flower People. We heard them shouting it. "We are the flower people!" Over and over.'
A distinction without a difference.
'That's all very well, but how did you get the barrier loose?'
'So you aren't dying? Yet? Well the metal is held together with things that turn; I watched carefully when the men built it; they used metal sticks and other things to put everything together, but I can undo it all with my fingers; it's easier to take those with death in them without the fence or the red-brown salt there – it's such horrible stuff. Why do they spread it?'

Amber began trotting again to try and keep some warmth in her; her "legendary aptitude", as Samantha had called it, for last minute life-saver plans had cut in while she'd been distracted; now she just had to work the conversation back to where she needed it.
'The salt? It helps keep the ice off the road so the cars don't slide off it so easily and hurt people.' The sarcasm got lost somewhere in the shivers; she took the opportunity to change her basic on-the-spot jog into something with a back step on every fourth beat.  'And the metal sticks are called spanners. The fastenings are called nuts and bolts.'

'Nuts? Metal nuts? That's silly; they never grow, they just go brown.'
'It's just what we call them. They're small and hard, nuts are small and hard – and go brown too, for that matter. I suppose it's just the way things are.'
'Ohh.'
Amber saw the faint outline of Hazel nod as if she'd considered the logic that sometimes life is just the way it is and approved of the notion.
The silence that followed was broken by the sound of Amber's trainers padding on the cold earth and frozen leaf mould. She was beginning to dance.