A Green and Ancient Light (16 page)

I told him my name, and he introduced himself, apparently not remembering that he'd done so before.

“You old how many?”

I told him I was nine, and he nodded.

“You no goat people?”

Grandmother glanced at Mr. Girandole, who had been R ——'s only nursemaid since he woke up. “No,” she said. “We're
people
people.”

“Good you here. Mr. Satyr no like me.”

“I'd like you better if you'd stop calling me a satyr,” said Mr. Girandole. “I've told you I'm a faun. Satyrs are a vulgar folk. You won't see me guzzling wine by the skinful.”

Grandmother cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Not by the skinful,” he said.

“And woman?” R —— grinned waggishly. “You run catch woman?”

“Mind your own business,” said Mr. Girandole. “And mind the company.”

“What about you, R ——?” Grandmother asked, dampening a rag to clean the wounds. “Do you run and catch women? Do you have a family?”

“Father have. Mother die. Two sister. Brother die. Wife go other man. Take child.”

“I'm sorry about that,” Grandmother said.

I didn't quite follow who was alive and who was dead, but it sounded as if R —— didn't have much of a family left.

Grandmother had brought along a clean, raggedy sheet. She cut strips from it to make new bandages.

“I already die?” asked R ——, looking at the ceiling.

“Well, you're clearly not in Heaven,” said Grandmother, “or you wouldn't be in pain. And if you were in Hell, we wouldn't be helping you. So, I'm afraid you're stuck in the same old world.”

R —— blinked a few times. “But this house . . . funny.”

“Yes, it most certainly is funny. That's not part of your fever. You're in the forest near the village of ——, which means you're well behind enemy lines.”

R ——'s gaze focused on her. “But . . . you help me.”

“I'm not sure if what we're doing is helping you at all. I'll say again: you should have a doctor and medicine if you want to live.”

“Madam Grandma.” R ——'s hand found Grandmother's wrist. “No doctor. Live, die—no distance.”

“No
difference
?” Grandmother asked.

“Yes.” R —— seemed to be looking beyond the stone walls. “The flute. They dance and sing. Better there, not back. Not go back.” His hand dropped to his side, as if he'd exhausted himself.

“This is the way he talks,” said Mr. Girandole. “He's been to the edge of Faery, and he'd rather be there than back in his own country, or fighting a war.”

“H'm,” said Grandmother.

I helped hold the sheet so she could cut it more easily.

“You wrote this,” said Mr. Girandole, showing R —— the poem he'd written in the notebook.

R ——'s eyes widened, and he brushed his fingers over the page.

Mr. Girandole held the book steady for him. “What does it mean to you?”

“Many man with goat foots . . . like you. Many man, woman, faces like sun, stars.”

Mr. Girandole exchanged a look with Grandmother. “Why did you write the lines backward?” he asked R ——.

“I write? Not remember.”

It was difficult to imagine what a doctor could have provided that Grandmother did not. She made R —— swallow pills and tonics. She bathed his wounds in disinfectant, re-bandaged them, and had us help her pull the dirty canvas out from under him and replace it with what was left of the clean sheet. When all the boughs and leaves were stuffed into the pallet again, she announced that she had to get out of this leaning place. Before we helped her down the stairs, she told me to unpack the food we'd brought.

“We're out of milk,” she said. “We'll have to buy more.”

R —— asked for his notebook, and Mr. Girandole returned it with apparent reluctance. He also helped R —— relocate the stubby pencil. Grandmother said that was a good idea, that maybe the fairies would send another message.

“You have gun?”

Grandmother shook her head. “No one has it. It's at the bottom of the sea.”

Someday it will be inside a giant pearl,
I added silently, remembering the mer-folk.

The pilot blinked and squinted. “How get there?!”

“I put it there,” she said.

R —— looked regretful. “Good gun, was.”

*  *  *  *

I spent the rest of the morning in the grove, running from statue to statue, hunting for the inscriptions and copying them into my notebook. When moss covered parts of the words, I scraped it carefully away.

Grandmother took a nap on one of the benches outside the stone house, using the carpet bag as a pillow. While we were there to keep an eye on the patient, Mr. Girandole made a trip to his own home high on the mountain. He brought back some herbs and roots and cooking ware, and he delivered to R —— a drab green shirt and a brown pair of trousers. Going a ways off into the woods, he built a campfire and made a pot of stew with a rabbit he'd caught. He also burned up the dirty bandages and R ——'s original shirt, pants, and gun holster.

We regrouped for a late lunch on the terrace. Mr. Girandole took stew and tea up to R —— and helped him eat. Then he and Grandmother explained difficult words for me, and we all read through the lines I'd found. In two cases, Grandmother and Mr. Girandole remembered a phrase differently from the way I'd written it, and I went back to the statue to check; once they were right, and once I was. It perplexed me that some of the inscriptions were not even complete thoughts. One gave me the impression that the engraver had grown bored and walked away, leaving the job unfinished; in other instances, he seemed to have begun carving in the middle of an idea. Grandmother wondered if they might be phrases copied or paraphrased from literature.

“It would be like the duke to paraphrase the classics for his own purposes,” Mr. Girandole said, “which would make it harder to identify the originals.”

I barely knew what “the classics” were; Papa used the word to refer collectively to some dusty books with dark brown covers on our shelves. I admired their stately row and their scent, like a solid old wall back in the dimness, holding up a part of our house. I'd never tried to read them, but it didn't surprise me that Mr. Girandole seemed familiar with the great stories of our world.

I'd found ten different inscriptions:

My steps fall softly like the rain
(from the sleeping woman)

Or a thousand cheeses times a thousand if you give me days enough
(I found this concealed by bushes on the bear's pedestal; it had taken some courage to approach the bear again, but in the brightness of midday, I managed it. An inscription about cheeses certainly seemed to be nonsense.)

Hurry now to find me draw near but not inside
(from the centaur)

I am it is very true
(the comforting words from the announcing angel)

Round and round the dancers go and my answer is in three and seven
(from the chamber inside the screaming mouth, where the letters stood above embossed angels on a dull metal plating)

The Mermaid
(engraved on a slab before the mermaid)

There was no writing I could see anywhere around the tortoise.

Or walls or ivied garden porch or doorstep have we none
(written along the elephant's base)

Behold in me
(from the pedestal of the missing statue, of which only the sandaled feet were left) I searched in the bushes behind but found no fallen statue.

The wild boar had no letters. Perhaps non-mythical animals received no inscriptions, I thought at first—but no, the bear had his . . . as did the elephant.

Y
ou have we have all have though perhaps home
(from the pool of the four women)

Narrow
(This single word was carved on the high-arching back of Neptune's throne.) Intriguingly, this “Narrow” arced along the top edge of an accompanying illustration: in an elliptical frame on the chair's tall back, above Neptune's head, a weathered relief sculpture depicted a ship sailing between two cliffs. Atop one cliff was a monster with several dog-like heads and one head that seemed to be that of a human woman, but it was hard to see—the carving had lost much detail to the passing years. Grandmother, who'd joined me when she finished her nap, pointed out a whirlpool on the ship's other side. She explained that it was a picture of Odysseus and his crew sailing the narrow strait between the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis.

“That's a good morning's work,” said Mr. Girandole, running a dusky finger down my page one final time.

“But I don't think they're all here,” said Grandmother. “I seem to remember more.”

I suddenly recalled the
Reason departs
from the leaning house and wrote it down.

“Yes,” Mr. Girandole agreed, “there are probably a few more. For one thing, you haven't climbed that last stairway.”

So I did that.

Grandmother returned to the cottage ahead of me; there was garden work that needed doing. I promised to come and help her as soon as I'd seen what was on the hilltop.

I followed the mossy steps upward at the north end of the ravine. Over the centuries, the elements had rounded their edges. Tendrils from the bushes crawled across the path, and I pushed through branches. I wondered if the stairway would make it all the way to the top, or if a wall of foliage would block my way. Insects whirred in the brush. A spray of blue wildflowers had blanketed the stairs in one place; I threaded cautiously through the patch so as not to damage them.

First, the stair climbed far to the right, and at its bend, I looked down the steep bank to the screaming mouth. Then the track switched back left. At the next turn, I was high above the announcing angel. Wandering back to the center, the steps emerged from the bushes and brought me to a grassy meadow on the brow of the hill in brilliant, warm sunlight.

The trees held their distance all around, their crowns still higher than the hill's summit. Bright butterflies floated over the green carpet, the grasses tasseled in gold and sprinkled with more
wild blossoms, an artist's palette of colors. Straight before me, grand and gray, rose a many-pillared stone temple.

It reminded me of pictures of the Parthenon I'd seen in my mythology book, although this building was smaller and in better repair, with its walls and roof intact. People in airplanes would be able to see it if they looked carefully, I supposed, but the stone was so rimed by lichen and age, it would probably appear to them as no more than some decrepit and long-forgotten shed.

On the pediment above the columns, I found the words
I am a gate
. More accustomed to the antique mode of writing now, I was sure of the meaning. With excitement I copied the sentence and noted where in the garden it was from.

Was the doorway to the other world here, just beyond the columns? Surely, it couldn't be so simple. I waded through the grass, which reached to my knees, and climbed carefully up onto the slab. Deep coolness radiated from the interior. I tipped back my head, studying the relief carvings on the triangular pediment: men and women in flowing garments . . . and fauns! I counted at least a dozen fauns, some dancing, some playing harps or pipes.

I turned, wondering if any part of the garden was visible from this high place, but I saw only the rolling tops of the trees. Even giant Heracles was lost beneath them. Trees screened the entire village from my view, though I could see the ocean in the distance, dotted by tiny boats.

The temple had only a single chamber. Two more stone tables stood among the shadows, flanked by their benches. The cross of Christ was molded onto the back wall: a plain cross of cylindrical poles, though only the forward halves of these emerged from the
wall. No figure of the Lord hung there. On the floor at its base were a prayer rail and a shelf for kneeling.

I crossed myself, as I'd been taught to do when entering a church, and then padded slowly from wall to wall, from front to back, examining every pillar and corner. I pushed on the walls, tapped on the floor, and searched for anything that might indicate a hidden doorway. The cross was perfectly solid, a three-­dimensional extension of the wall. I found no other inscriptions, no images.

I shook my head.
I am a gate.
How? What gate? Where?

I walked out into the sunlight and sat on the edge of the porch. In the steamy weeds, two bees hummed around the tops of my shoes. This place felt good to me, with all its brightness and air, its cross, and its lack of anything fanciful or grotesque. Much as I loved the gardens below, it was fitting that the path through the grove ended here.

The hilltop temple was the only part of the garden that was not on a circular course. Everything below could be approached from a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction; but to get here, one had to depart from the circles and move along a line. The stairway, though it meandered, led only here; nor could I discover any other path descending into the forest.

I hurried down the steps, my mind racing ahead. I wanted to ask Mr. Girandole if he thought that the temple might conceal the magic doorway. I dashed out from between the bushes, jumped off the bottom step into the upper garden—and found myself face to face with two soldiers. I felt the blood drain from my face.

“Hold it, there!” one ordered me.

I froze in panic, realizing that I'd left the carpet bag, hatchet, and
firewood bundle on the terrace of the leaning house, to pick up on my way home. None of these things were in the soldiers' hands, so perhaps they hadn't been there yet. The men held their rifles—not aimed at me but ready. They must have heard me trotting down the steps, stirring the bushes.

I tried not to look terrified. I held my pencil in my hand, the notebook under my arm.