A Green and Ancient Light (22 page)

Grandmother had said that “deception” had once carried the additional meaning of “magic.” But what if the duke had intended no more than “deception”? Art is deception, after all (though I'm not sure how fully this thought formed in my nine-year-old mind): art makes us feel and imagine things that have no substance; paint and chisel-marks, ink and vibrations evoke in us what is beautiful and stirring, but all is illusion.

I floundered through the bushes around the sea serpent's base and came out soaked and scratched, but I found no inscription there. What I'd thought was a horn on the serpent's head proved to be a castle or tower with a crenellated parapet. When I looked in on Grandmother and mentioned this oddity, she said it was proba­bly intended to be the duke's castle; putting it atop the monster's head showed the power of the duke's family.

“Truth be told,” Grandmother ventured, “there may be some meaning to this tilted house, too. I've been thinking it over.”

“What do you suppose?” I asked eagerly.

“Noblemen of the duke's day often used towers in their gardens or on their family seals to represent their wives, who stood faithful, especially when the men were away at war. Our duke loved his wife G —— very much.”

“But why is the house leaning?”

“It could be to show that G —— endured hardships, but she kept standing steadfast. Or . . .” She dabbed at R ——'s injured neck, and he winced. “Or it may be his acknowledgment that nature, in the end, overturns all the works of human hands.” She grinned up at me. “Or both meanings—or neither.”

Studying my notebook as Grandmother used a wet rag to rub R ——'s hair, I jumped up suddenly, a thrill of inspiration shooting through me. “Fourteen!” I said. “Twice seven.
W
ords among the trees in stone
. Fourteen is the number of inscriptions there are!”

R —— cocked his head, probably wondering what I was carrying on about.

Grandmother looked puzzled, too, though she didn't stop working.

“
Find twice the number
T
aurus follows with his eye
!” I quoted. “Taurus keeps his eye on the Pleiades, right? Seven sisters. Twice that number—fourteen! We just needed the number. Not fourteen women, but fourteen
inscriptions
!”

She smiled. “I knew your father's handiness with numbers must be in you somewhere.”

I was thinking that I could have spared myself that last hunt through the brambles. “I've found them all: twelve from the garden,
the one from the entrance arch, and
Reason departs
from this room.”

“Good,” said Grandmother. “Now fill the bucket again.”

We stayed until past noon, hoping Mr. Girandole would return. R —— ate and talked on and on about his home city and places he'd been and movies and movie stars he thought we should know. It was rather painful without Mr. Girandole to translate. Mostly, R —— spoke to Grandmother, because I kept going outside to watch and listen. Once when I returned to the chamber, he beckoned me closer and showed me a magic trick: reaching up with his good hand, he stuck his finger in my ear and mysteriously produced a coin. He claimed he'd pulled it out of my ear, though I thought I'd have felt it if it had been there. He wanted to give me the coin, which was from his country, but Grandmother said I'd better leave it here.

R —— told us he played the piano and the flute, and he was forever moving his fingers on an imaginary keyboard or in the air beside his face, his lips blowing across a pretend mouthpiece. He talked of meeting a certain famous composer of our country before the war, and that subject interested Grandmother more than anything else he'd said. I left them chattering about conductors and concerts (they had some differences of opinion, it seemed), and I went out to stand guard and think about
My answer is in three and seven
, the words from inside the screaming mouth. The complete line was
Round and round the dancers go and my answer is in three and seven
.

These dancers, I reasoned, could be the same as the Pleiades in the poem: “Sisters dancing in the water and the sky”—not stars or sisters, but the fourteen inscriptions. They danced “round and round” the garden—the inscriptions were scattered all around the grove. I was sure I was on the right track.

Turning to the map I'd made, I counted the statues. If you left out the leaning house and considered the four women at the pool as one sculpture, there were ten in the lower garden: the dragon, Neptune, the sea serpent, Heracles, the boar, the pool, the elephant, the tortoise, the statue of which only feet remained, and the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. Ten: three plus seven. Did that mean the riddle's answer was contained in the lower garden?

In the upper garden, I counted seven structures: the sleeping woman, the centaur, the Announcing Angel, the bear, the screaming mouth, the mermaid, and the temple. Seven . . .
My answer is in three and seven.
On the one hand, it could mean that the upper grove was false and insufficient, lacking “three”—whereas the lower grove, with seven and three—ten—was complete and held the answer. But on the other hand, it could mean that I needed the upper garden for the seven, and then three of something else. Could I isolate three of something in the lower half?

Seven urns on the terrace railing—that couldn't be an accident, could it? My head was spinning. Seven women: four at the pool, one asleep, one a mermaid, and one vanished but for her sandaled feet.

It was overwhelming. For the moment, I'd have to stop thinking about numbers. I paced around the leaning house, listening, clearing my head. I passed the beautiful feet (
Behold in me
) and along the border of the central, impenetrable grove. As I neared Apollyon, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, I looked away with a shiver—and stopped. Slowly, I turned back to face that terrible angel with the keys and the chain.

Why had I not seen it before? My fear of the statue, perhaps, had made me skip over a close investigation without intending
to—but now that I looked, it was quite obvious: Apollyon's base had an inscription, too.

So much for the neat number of fourteen I'd found. This made a fifteenth:

The path beyond the dusk

I copied it down and jotted the location with a hand that trembled. The angel glared at me from beneath his frozen, wind-streaming hair.

*  *  *  *

Grandmother and I had to go home; we'd eaten no breakfast, and it was past lunchtime. But R —— refused to be shut again in the secret compartment.

“If someone comes,” Grandmother told him, “you'll never be able to scramble back inside by yourself and close the lid—not without tearing loose all your stitches and making enough noise to raise the dead. And all this work will be for nothing.”

All this deception will be purely for art,
I thought, my mind still numb from too much puzzling.

R —— shook his head.

“Stay hidden until Girandole gets back,” Grandmother said. “When he's here to watch, you can stay out all you want.”

But R —— would have nothing of it. The cramped, black space with its tilted floor was driving him mad. “And want hear fairies,” he added. “Hear no good there.” He pointed at the sunken compartment. “Fairies sing in night.”

So, he was still hearing fairy music, either in dreams or when he was awake.

“I can't imagine it's good for you to be hearing them,” Grand­mother told him. But she eventually saw that persuading him was a lost cause. “You're not our prisoner, R ——. Stay out, then. But if the fairies steal you away, or the soldiers return, or someone from the village comes to see what all the fuss was about, or if wolves eat you, don't come crying to me.”

R —— said he wouldn't; and that, I supposed, was true enough.

Step by step, I helped Grandmother down from the upper room. On the way home, I asked her if there were really wolves in the forest.

“I've never seen one,” she said. But not liking the look of relief I gave her, she went on: “You know Mrs. O ——, with the thick eyeglasses? She claims in all her years of gardening, she's never seen a single snake. I can't believe snakes go out of their way to avoid her garden. The truth is, she's just not seeing them.”

After a remark about how she'd missed nap time, she left me to my thoughts.

A little farther along, I asked her, “Do you know if there's an inscription on Heracles's base?”

“I'm fairly sure there's not,” she said. “The bushes around him weren't so thick when I was young, and I remember thinking that doing all those labors of his must have left him no time for words.”

We took a roundabout way getting home, crossing from the woods behind V ——'s ice house. Mrs. F ——, if she saw us arriving at our front door, would think we were coming back from town.

*  *  *  *

After lunch, we both needed a long nap. The sky clouded over again as I was helping Grandmother in the garden before supper. Near
dusk, another shower hissed into the leaves, making puddles along the fence row. “Well,” said Grandmother, gazing out from the back doorway, “every raindrop washes a little more of that stench away.”

“Do you think Mr. Girandole will come here first or go to the grove?” I asked, mostly because I wanted to say his name and wished he were back.

“The grove, I'd imagine.” Grandmother shut and locked the door. “That's where he knows what to do.”

“He always knows what to do, doesn't he?”

Grandmother shuffled into the kitchen, her stick clicking on the wooden floor. “Well, you saw him at a loss on the night R —— arrived.”

When we'd washed the supper dishes, Grandmother asked to see my notebook and settled in her chair by the lamp to study it. My mind was still worn out from all the thinking I'd done about the statues, counting and recounting . . .

Numbers.
I still hadn't copied down the numbers from the stairway in the leaning house. I would have to do that first thing.

“I'm going to hold down the fort tomorrow,” Grandmother announced, rubbing her eyes. “For one thing, I can't run up and down mountains every day. For another, we can't be gone all the time. The garden needs tending before the germander runs it over, and people come to the door sometimes. And for a third, I have to pay some visits to people myself if I don't want to be rude. You go on up there if the sun comes out, and see if Girandole is back.”

We were just getting ready for bed when I suddenly thought of the mailbox outside the front door. While I was here, Grandmother had turned over to me the task of bringing in the daily handful of flyers, notices, and the occasional bill. I usually did this in the
hour before supper. Today, I'd completely forgotten about it. I unlocked the heavy door, stepped out into the fragrant, drippy darkness under the porch roof, and opened the lid of the cast-iron box. Inside was a single letter in a small envelope.

In the patch of light angling from the back room where we sat at night, I recognized my father's handwriting. The letter was addressed to both of us. I re-locked the door as fast as I could and raced back to Grandmother.

“Open it!” she said, handing me her letter-knife. She sat on the edge of her chair with her hands in her lap and told me to read it aloud.

Like all my papa's letters, it had been opened once and taped shut again. The Army did that to make sure the letter didn't say anything that shouldn't fall into enemy hands. My own hands trembled with excitement as I knelt in the warm light beside Grandmother's chair and unfolded the cream-colored paper. It was dated months before, on the precise day I'd arrived in the village. We'd gotten four letters from Papa that he'd written later. I wondered what this one had gone through before it finally found its way here. It said:

Dear Mama and G ——,

I hope you are well and are enjoying the chance to get to know each other at last. I hope you will both forgive E —— and me for not making it happen sooner. It seems we go through our lives thinking that such-and-such will be easier when thus-and-so happens. But in all this moving and listening, fighting and mostly waiting, it's come home to me
that we shouldn't put off anything good. Anyway, I don't have to ask how you're getting along. I know you both quite well, and I'd guess it will be a real struggle for E —— and me to separate you two at the end of the summer.

G ——, the village is a wonderful place, isn't it? What did I tell you? I love the way time passes there, and what the people talk about, and the way the arbors whisper, and how the sun makes the tomatoes ripen, and how the woods glow with their green light. I'd bet it has changed hardly at all since I was a boy. I find that very comforting!

Here, it's more of the same. I know you want some news, but we're not supposed to say anything about operations, and there's really not much to tell—nothing real, in the way that the village is real and families are real—what we're doing in the war is the bad business of another world. I'll be glad when I can come home to the real one. But I'm well, and I think of you every day and every night. Sometimes the light falls just right here, too—like now, in fact, as I'm sitting in the corner of a little garden behind a farm house, and the sun is shining down through the leaves of a brave old oak tree; and the tree is telling me that it knows the bad business will be done someday, maybe before very long. When I'm under a tree like this, I feel—no, I know—that we are just in different corners of the same sacred woods.

Well, speaking of woods, do you go up there,
G ——, to the forest above Mama's cottage? If she hasn't shown you the Grove of Monsters yet, that's what you have to do. Don't you dare leave there without seeing it.