A Green and Ancient Light (14 page)

I woke up in my bed, my mother wiping my forehead and cheeks with a cold, wet cloth. My head ached; my stomach roiled. I had influenza and was in bed for two endless days and nights, unable to keep even water down. Whenever I tried to sip the water I wanted so desperately, I would have relief for a few minutes, then vomit into a pan while my mother rubbed my back, my nose searing, my body racked with sobs. She read me fairy tales, as many as I wanted to hear. I wept, so grateful that she was beside me. When he was home from work, my papa sat with me too.

I dreamed of the bear only once or twice after that. The last time, there was fire, a blaze like the heart of a furnace that was destroying everything around me. The bear stood in the midst of the fire, its fur smoking and reeking, its flesh burning. It snarled at me, its face oozing blood from many slashes, as if someone had attacked it with a knife. Maybe one of my father
'
s policemen had tried to protect me.

*  *  *  *

In the sacred woods, my heart raced at the memory. With an effort, I shook it away and moved on, aware that the sun was lowering. I
had not dreamed of the bear or felt its presence for a long time, and I did not want to think about it now. I did not want it ever to come back.

Past the angel, in a narrow gap among the trees on the steep north wall, a stairway appeared to climb up and out of the garden. I saw a hill high above, toward which the stairs ascended—a grassy rise in full sunlight.

Leaving the stairs for another day, I pushed on eastward.

Slowly, in the deepening shadows of late afternoon, a dark cliff took shape ahead. After a few cautious steps, I halted and stared.

An enormous face glowered from the rock wall. Beneath a wrinkled, furious brow, its eyes were empty pits. Nostrils flared in a broad nose, and its screaming mouth was a cave, a portal into blackness—the top lined with teeth.

The face seemed more monstrous than human, with protrusions atop that might have been ears or horns and a twisting fringe that suggested a beard or a lion's mane. A young birch had grown up beside the jaw, passing close to one eye like a wayward strand of hair. The whole terrifying visage was mottled black and gray from centuries of weather.

I crept nearer, fascinated. Never had I seen anything at once so horrible and so delightful. Hardly daring to breathe, I tiptoed up the weed-choked steps to the yawning mouth—and nearly yelled when a bird emerged from one of the eyes in a burst of wing beats.

The mouth was indeed the doorway into a single room. Rough-hewn, dank, and littered with leaves, the chamber held a stone table and benches—a picnic table, it seemed, housed inside a shrieking head. I glimpsed on the back wall a carving of angels, but I didn't look closely. It was time to head homeward.

I retreated from the cave, all the way to the bottom of the steps, and checked my surroundings to be sure I was alone. The great central thicket filled the entire view southwestward. For a moment, I thought I saw another stone object there among the giant trees—a soaring pillar wrapped in vines. But it was only a dead tree trunk, the bleached wood resembling stone.

Past the cave, the glade continued to curve, leading around the end of the central thicket and down a slope toward another arch like the one I'd come through. Far beyond it I saw Heracles tower­ing over the bushes, so I knew the path would take me down to the lower garden once more.

As I went, a wall of rounded stones ran beside me on the left, reaching up to about the height of my elbows. Looking over its top, to where another gradual rise left the ravine, I saw her at last: the mermaid. Years ago, Grandmother had come upon her from behind, wandering down the slope I now faced, its branch-strewn ground dappled with golden patches of sun. But I was face to face with her. She wore a tranquil expression beneath plaits of curly hair. Down to the waist she was a woman, but from there, two scaly fish's tails stretched off along the ground in opposite directions, almost like impossibly long legs ending in graceful crescents.

Hurrying now, I passed beneath the arch into the lower garden, found myself back at the tortoise and the elephant, and turned west again to the leaning house.

On the way there, I discovered one more pedestal in the gloom of the thicket's edge. It was just a base; the statue that had stood there was gone, broken in some former time. Only feet remained—exquisitely carved feet in sandals. I wondered if the fallen statue might lie among the trees and bushes behind the pedestal; a
cursory glance showed me nothing, but there wasn't time for a proper search. The pedestal's engraving said,
Behold in me
.

I sighed in frustration, thinking that without the statue that had stood here, some vital piece of the garden's puzzle might be lost.

I'd intended to call up to Mr. Girandole that I was going, but he was already looking out from the upper window. I had so many questions for him and Grandmother, but they would have to wait.

“You've seen it all now?” asked Mr. Girandole.

“Not all,” I said, standing below the terrace. “I didn't go up the stairway to the hilltop.”

“Ah. Then you have something more yet to see.”

“I have to go now,” I said. “Are you sure you don't need anything?”

He grinned, resting his arms on the sill. “Only the things M —— is bound to think of.”

On the walk back to Grandmother's cottage, I decided that I would keep a notebook about the sacred woods. As Grandmother advised, I would include nothing about Mr. Girandole or R ——, but I'd write down every inscription from every statue, getting Grandmother and Mr. Girandole to help me read all the words. Maybe I would try sketching more of the statues. If there was sense to be made of it all, I wanted to try.

I also remembered the urgency in Mr. Girandole's face, and the fact that he had something to tell us.

*  *  *  *

I burst into the back garden, eager to tell Grandmother my news, but fortunately I looked before I blurted anything: Mrs. F ——,
Grandmother's stern next-door neighbor, had dropped by. She and Grandmother sat on the bench under the trellis, framed by myrtle and fuchsia, like ladies in a painting. The teapot, cups, and crackers were arranged on a little folding table.

Mrs. F ——, whose hair was straight, white, and cropped like a helmet, looked me up and down and asked if I'd been playing in the woods. I was sure Grandmother had already told her so, but apparently Mrs. F —— wanted to hear it from my own lips.

“Yes, ma'am,” I answered.

Mrs. F —— twisted her mouth and looked reproachfully from me to Grandmother, as if I'd confessed to a crime.

“He knows not to go far,” Grandmother offered.

“It's not a question of
far
,” said Mrs. F ——. “You don't have to go far into the ocean to drown.”

Apparently, Mrs. F —— didn't like either the forest
or
the sea.

“It's no good being afraid of everything,” said Grandmother mildly, with a smile in her voice.

“Fish get into nets whether they're afraid of swimming or not,” said Mrs. F ——. I wondered if it was a proverb, like one of Mrs. D ——'s. In the village, people didn't need much more than proverbs to talk.

Grandmother said nothing but poured Mrs. F —— another cup of tea.

Mrs. F —— abandoned the subject; she'd lived next to Grand­mother for a long time and evidently knew she was wasting her breath. “Well, we have different ideas about raising them, but yours is safely grown and out of the nest, and so are mine. We've been blessed.”

Grandmother smiled and agreed.

*  *  *  *

When Mrs. F —— had finally gone, I asked Grandmother why she'd come over.

“Being neighborly,” she said. “You have to pay a visit when someone's garden is in full bloom. She was impressed with the window-boxes especially.”

“Will we have to pay her a visit?”

“Not immediately, because she was just here. But we'll have others dropping by soon, and I'll have to do a bit of visiting myself. Which reminds me—we should go to the bakery.” I knew she meant that we'd need ample cookies and crackers to accompany the tea we served.

She looked expectantly at me, and I made my report. Grandmother was relieved that our patient was alive, and that Mr. Girandole was managing so admirably. As I helped her get supper ready, I asked her if she knew about the words carved into the pedestals.

“Yes,” she said, stirring the soup. “I told you the grove was a riddle in stone. I've read all those words, at one time or another—or most of them, anyway.”

“Do they make any sense?”

She shook her head, curling her lower lip. “The more you puzzle over them, the more frustrating they seem. It's quite ­possible they don't have meanings at all.”

“No meanings?” I stopped rinsing lettuce to cock my head. “Then why put them there?”

Grandmother carried the steaming pot to the table. “The old duke was quite a trickster. Why build a house that leans like that? Why put a picnic table inside a screaming mouth? I think he may
have simply laughed himself sore over people wandering through that garden, scratching their heads.”

I considered the idea. The words inside the leaning house said,
Reason departs.
I had to allow that everything might be nonsense, but that didn't ring true to me. I suppose I wanted to believe there were meanings . . . or rather, one meaning to the garden as a whole—a puzzle with a solution. If I'd built such a grove of monsters, I'd have put a meaning there and given a reward to anyone who could discover it.

“It's full of mischief,” Grandmother went on. “Take the mermaid—did you notice that she's a perfect mirror of herself? If you imagine a line dividing her in half, you'll see that everything on the left is also on the right, exactly reversed—every ringlet of hair, the positions of her arms, every scale on her tails.”

I told Grandmother that I wanted to make a notebook on the garden. She nodded. “I have a blank one you can use. Just don't put in anything incriminating. Protect the guilty, you know.” Then, in a matter-of-fact tone, she added something that nearly made me drop a handful of silverware: “It's too bad we don't have the one your father kept when he was a boy. I wonder if he still has it . . .”

“He wrote down things about the garden too?”

“Oh, yes. I remember how excited he'd be to show me new things he'd found and copied. Sometimes, he'd need me to help him read them. He had some grand theories for what it all meant—buried treasures, magic swords . . .” She laughed softly, turned to the window, and looked out of it for a very long time.

I frowned, watching her stiff back.

When she spoke again, her voice seemed on the edge of tears—a sound I'd never heard from her before, and it surprised me.

“He so much wanted me to come with him so that he could show me the monsters. I told him I'd seen them, that it was his time to be seeing them now, and that the garden was his special place—a place only for children. Quite the opposite of what Mrs. F —— says about the woods, isn't it?”

I nodded, though Grandmother couldn't see me nodding. When Papa was a boy, she couldn't go with him to the garden; the sacred woods were Mr. Girandole's home, and Grandmother had left it and gotten married. For Mr. Girandole's sake and for her own, she could never set foot there.

There was something else I'd wondered about, and the truth surprised me. “So, Papa never met Mr. Girandole—not even in the garden?”

“No. And that's how I learned just how strong and noble Giran­dole is. If Girandole had befriended my son, he could have kept a part of me. He could have had constant news—could have even sent me messages. But that wouldn't have been the proper thing. It would have brought more hurt than comfort, and undone all that he wanted for me. He chose only to watch.”

A small part of me was excited and proud that I knew Mr. Girandole when my father did not—when my father did not even have proof that fauns existed. But mostly, it made me sorry. All the more, I wanted Papa to come here; I wanted to introduce the two.

Grandmother crossed her arms, and I thought I saw her wipe her eyes. “I never worried about your father when he played in the woods. With Girandole watching, I knew he was safer there than anywhere else in the world.”

In another instant she turned, her strong self again, and declared that the soup was getting cold.

“I wish we could live all our lives in the garden,” I said, wandering over to my chair. I was thinking that there was no school in the woods, no Mondays, no alarm clocks, and certainly no war—only the green, ancient light and stories in wood and stone.

“Well, we can't,” said Grandmother. “But remember this”—she pointed a spoon at me and shook it for emphasis—“there's pain, and there's misery. We can't avoid pain, but misery is always a choice.”

After we'd eaten supper and washed the dishes, Grandmother found me the blank notebook she'd had tucked away in her desk. It had a beautiful cover of dusky blue cloth and a long ribbon for a place-marker, attached to the binding. The cream-colored pages were of the perfect size: big enough that I could fit a lot onto them but small enough that the book was easy to carry.

“My name and address are written inside the cover,” Grand­mother said. “I hope you don't mind.”

“I don't mind. It's wonderful—are you sure I can have it?”

She nodded. “It's begging to be yours. I heard it begging at night and wondered what the noise was. That will be a happy notebook now; they're meant to be used, you know. I think I bought it once when I got it in my head to start a diary, but—” She waved a hand in dismissal. “I'd rather do the living than write about it.”

“Thank you,” I said.