A Green and Ancient Light (26 page)

In just a few days, unquestionably R —— became our friend. Grandmother laughed at his antics and seemed to enjoy impressing him by saying things in his language. Even Mr. Girandole forgot to be disgruntled at him when R —— spoke of the fairies' songs, which he heard every night—and of his recurring dreams of “satyr-men,” which Mr. Girandole determined from his descriptions were in fact fauns. R —— spoke again and again of how he wanted to go to Faery, not back to his homeland.

One afternoon, when Mr. Girandole and I were doing our best to explore the central thicket, I asked, “Why does R —— hear and dream these things, and not the rest of us?”

Mr. Girandole looked back at me through thorny branches, his
hat dusted with seeds. “He was there. Once a mortal has been on the borders of Faery, its voices can always reach his ears.”

We couldn't penetrate into those unyielding bushes at the grove's heart. The tangle might harbor nothing more than thorns and roots and trunks from one side to the other, or it might conceal wonders; either way, it was closed to us. As we picked leaves from our clothing out on the open ground again, Mr. Girandole said he supposed it was fitting that the garden's very middle should be beyond our reach. “Like Eden,” he said. “The Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not to be touched.”

Standing there, we were only a few steps from the pedestal of the missing statue—the image of the duke's wife, G ——. I couldn't help moving closer to gaze in wonder at the small, sandaled feet, exquisitely crafted in stone.

Mr. Girandole watched me curiously, but his gaze, too, was drawn to the pedestal.

Without thinking carefully, I said, “The day I met you, you talked about Cinderella. The prince went to search far and wide through the land for the girl with the beautiful feet. He knew he'd find her.”

I closed my mouth, realizing I'd probably said too much. I felt him staring at me. I finished lamely, “These are beautiful feet, I've always thought.”

*  *  *  *

Taking my notebook, I climbed to the roof of the leaning house while Mr. Girandole patrolled the garden. Grandmother was snoring softly down on the terrace, and R —— was looking through a book of piano music we'd brought to amuse him.

I leaned back against the parapet and held the notebook in my lap. On a clean page, past all my notes and diagrams and scribbles that were swiftly filling it up, I copied out every inscription again so I could study them free of explanations:

You who enter this place, observe it piece by piece and tell me afterward whether so many marvels were created for deception or purely for art.

My steps fall softly like the rain

Or a thousand cheeses times a thousand if you give me days enough

Hurry now to find me draw near but not inside

I am it is very true

Round and round the dancers go and my answer is in three and seven

The Mermaid

Or walls or ivied garden porch or doorstep have we none

Behold in me

Y
ou have we have all have though perhaps home

Narrow

Reason departs

I am a gate

All is folly and you search both high and low in vain

The path beyond the dusk

Fifteen inscriptions. Some made an odd sort of sense; some made none at all. They had no punctuation, except for the one Grandmother had given me. I'd never seen it for myself; I wondered if she had added the punctuation, though I didn't guess it mattered much. Idly, I began to play with the punctuation of another:

I am. It is very true.

I am, it is: very true.

This was pointless.
Y
ou search both high and low in vain.
My father had spent years looking for a keyhole. I could spend years pushing words around on paper, counting trees, and reading books.

For deception, or purely for art.

A thousand cheeses times a thousand.

If you give me days enough.

There
'
s no meaning here at all, is there?
I asked the duke. Rising to my knees against the balustrade, I put my chin on my arms and watched Mr. Girandole pacing near Neptune, his hands clasped behind him. No meaning at all. The purpose is the search—to make
discoveries, each one whetting your appetite for more. It's the perfect puzzle, because it never ends, from year to year, generation to generation. There is no disappointment, because the solution is always just ahead, growing more wonderful with each theory that fails.

I stood up and took a good look around. The filtered sunlight shifted with the breeze—shafts of light, as from the high windows of a cathedral. Green vaults receded among the trees, each an entrance to the secret avenues of the world. A plane was passing somewhere; I rarely heard planes anymore, here in our garden.

As my gaze slid over the mass of bushes between the square pool and the sleeping woman, I did a double-take. Once again, I saw something I'd never seen because I'd never been looking for it. In the middle of that thicket, against the ravine's west wall, there was a distinct gap in the foliage, a place where no bushes grew. Only my high vantage allowed me to see it. Perhaps it marked an outcropping of stone . . . maybe a pit or well . . . maybe a natural, muddy hollow where rainwater pooled. Whatever it was, I would have to go and find out. Again, my heart was fluttering—that was the effect the garden had.

As I climbed down the ladder, R —— sang, “Da dum dum daaa, da dum dee deedle-dee dum!”—his nose buried in the piano score, his hands playing a keyboard that wasn't there.

Grandmother went right on with her nap. Mr. Girandole noticed me hurrying down the terrace steps. I waved him over, pointing toward the thicket where I was headed.

“There's something in there,” I said, facing the green wall that stood three times my height, thorny and dark. A white butterfly wove among the bushes' pale blossoms.

“What do you mean?” Mr. Girandole asked, his nose testing the air. “Something moving?”

“No. Something big and oblong that keeps the bushes from growing.”

Eyeing the dense brake, he adjusted his hat. “Well, then, here we go again.”

Once more, we pushed and twisted, fighting for places to plant our feet and squeeze through. Vines tried to choke us; dead limbs cracked and rolled beneath my shoes. Invisible strands of web stuck to my face, and spiders jiggled indignantly. Parting the leaves, I squinted ahead.

“I think it's just a big rock,” I said, glimpsing a gray shape too formless to be a statue.

“If it's a rock,” said Mr. Girandole, “then it's a rock with teeth!”

We struggled through the last vines, and I stared into a mouth wider than my outstretched arms, the thicket's creepers flowing between rounded teeth like an expelled mouthful of seawater. Far back in shadows rose a huge, fluked tail.

“A whale!” I cried out. It was another statue on a rectangular base, lost here in the bushes. And sure enough, we found letters carved into the pedestal's side.

“Didn't you know about this one?” I asked as we worked our way along the leviathan, admiring the intelligent-looking eye, the flipper, the power in its massive shape.

“I'm no longer sure,” he said. “If I knew once, it was years upon years ago. It's certainly been covered over since before I met your grandmother, and I didn't pay as much attention to the statues back then—they were just man-things.”

It thrilled me to have made a discovery the others had missed—
to be seeing for the first time something that not even Grandmother in her long years had ever seen. This whale had lain here behind the leaves and branches, his eyes unblinking through rains and winds, summers and winters, mere paces away from the open glade but always hidden. Garlands of vine draped the sea-beast so thickly that I doubt he would have been recognizable from a short distance; the tail seemed almost to be a leaning tree. Step by step, leaf by leaf, we uncovered the inscription:

Y
et one by one a herd may pass

We circumnavigated the base, hunting for other markings, tapping for hollow sounds, and especially looking for keyholes, since my father had likely never found the whale. Mr. Girandole boosted me up, and I sat on the creature's broad back. There was a shallow depression for the blowhole, from which a real whale would send up plumes of breath—but it was only a blowhole, not a keyhole.

“So,” said Mr. Girandole, helping me down. “Another enlightening revelation.”

“Now there are
sixteen
inscriptions,” I said. “When does it end?”

Grandmother awoke as we sat on the terrace, pulling brambles from ourselves and tossing them over the railing. “What did I miss?” she asked, sitting up.

“A whale,” I said.

That afternoon, we scouted from the house's roof and from the hilltop for any other suspicious openings in the thickets. Mr. Girandole climbed a few strategic trees and did some hunting in the brake southwest of the dragon, down by the old entrance arch. Near as we could figure, there were no other places where statues
might hide—except, of course, for that central tangle. Even so, the leaning house overlooked much of that, and no break in the rolling bush-tops was apparent. It was always possible, though, that branches might be joined in a ceiling, hiding something beneath. We could never truly know.

Before we left for the cottage, R —— asked if there were reeds growing by the stream; he wanted to try making a flute. Mr. Girandole said he would bring a few back when he went to refill the water bucket.

*  *  *  *

Despite the fun we were having, as that glorious week drew to its close, a feeling of gloom and frustration settled over me. We were finding no more clues—no numbers, no inscriptions, and certainly no keyholes—and what we had gleaned seemed to lead in hopeless circles. Again and again I pondered my theory that perhaps the duke had intended the garden to be no more than an endless path, that no ultimate attainment could be better than the journey itself.

And yet three factors persuaded me otherwise. One was the key: surely something as specific and purposeful as a key would not have been made without a door that it could open. The second was the strange poem R —— had written in his delirium. And finally, there were the fairy voices that he continued to hear at night, and his dreams of fauns, who seemed to be waiting for him beside a road that stretched away in the starlight. R —— had no memory of writing the poem, though it was there in his notebook, scrawled in his own hand. He claimed he was not a poet and had composed no poetry since his school days—when, he said, love compels every youth to attempt it.

He was, however, a musician, and he succeeded admirably at carving a flute out of a hollow reed. It couldn't play as many notes as a real flute could, but R —— was most interested in playing the fairy melodies he heard. Sometimes, Mr. Girandole listened keenly to these and asked R —— to play on and on without a rest; sometimes, the melodies plunged Mr. Girandole into melancholia, and he would leave the chamber without a word and disappear into the forest. As the days passed, we all walked around with the fairy melodies in our heads. We'd catch ourselves humming or whistling them without realizing it. R —— sent the piano book home with Grandmother and me. In his own notebook, he drew a musical staff and wrote down some of the melodies the fairies sang. Intrigued, I copied these into my record. They were not like ones I'd heard anywhere else, and in the years since, I've never encountered their like in any songbooks or the works of mortal composers. It's difficult to explain
how
they are different, but if you heard them, you would agree.

I wandered about the garden with increasing aimlessness, gazing at the stone faces, running my fingers along the pedestals, climbing and descending stairs. I lay on the benches; I sat with Grand­mother and Mr. Girandole as they watched the slow play of light through the leaves. I learned a song in R ——'s language. Grand­mother encouraged this as a diversion from the fairy music, which she said we oughtn't to become too familiar with; it was like the germander, she said: beautiful and fragrant, but it would take over everything if not kept in check. She did her best to get R —— to think carefully about his determination to leave the human world behind, but it was a lost cause. In the middle of a conversation, he would hear the trilling of a bird, or his gaze would fix upon a
dapple of sunlight on the mossy stone, and his mind would journey far away.

During the times he was most awake and present in our world, we would get him to talk about planes or the shenanigans he'd pulled with his fellow pilots or growing up on a dairy farm near the city of ——. He improved the tangerine-peel game when he discovered how well cockleburs stuck to a particular cloth we'd brought. With Grandmother's permission, he drew a target of concentric circles on it, and we weighted its top edge so that it hung down against the wall of the sunken compartment. We tossed the burrs, aiming for the bull's-eye, which I said was Aldebaran, the Red Star, the Eye of Taurus.

And always, always, I studied my notebook, looking for meanings—for some way that the cryptic words and numbers might relate to the garden as it lay there, in deep shade, in spears of sunlight, in the bottomless night when we were gone and the fairies sang R —— to sleep.

*  *  *  *

One morning, R —— greeted us from his window and announced that he wanted to come down the stairs and all the way to the floor of the glade itself, outside the leaning house. He'd been able to gaze across at some of the statues, but he longed to see them up close. Mr. Girandole scowled at the idea, but Grandmother thought it would be good for R —— to walk a little—a body, she said, had to be
encouraged
to heal.