A Green and Ancient Light (30 page)

“Heavens, no,” said Grandmother. “There are far more pleasant places for that.”

I warned her about the grimy film on the metal plate.

She prodded it with the tip of her walking-stick. Then she rapped harder, as if knocking on a gate. The sounds echoed in the confined space. “It doesn't sound hollow,” she said. “But I suppose it might be a very thick door.” Opening the carpet bag that I still carried, she pulled out a rag and used it to grip the angel on the left. The figure stood out in low relief from the surrounding surface, like the keys at Apollyon's side.

Remembering the key-shaped compartment my father had found, I hurried over. “Does it open?” I asked. “Can you slide it right or left?”

Grandmother applied pressure in every direction, including pushing straight against the figure as if it were a button. Finally, she shook her head. “It's solid.” The rag came away soiled, like my fingers. Where she'd gripped the embossing, cleaner patches of the metal showed through—a dark bronze, barely lighter than the patina of grime. She tried the right-hand angel with the same results.

I climbed onto the table, took the cloth, and experimented with the top angel. I felt no give or play.

Grandmother sat on the left bench and looked around from that vantage. I helped her feel along the edges of the table and seats—and I checked the table's supporting block—for any hidden catches. Finding nothing, we faced each other across the tabletop, and she pronounced the situation “curious.”

Mr. Girandole had been studying the place from the outside; now and then, I'd see him stalk past the doorway with his head cocked to the side, or with a twig in his hand, or focused intently on the ground. Suddenly, he appeared at the threshold and said, “R —— is coming.”

I looked out to see R —— waving cheerily, far away by the arch to our south. He limped toward us. The motion seemed to pain him, but he was able to move pretty well.

“Good morning!” R —— called. “This wonder place! Wonder!” He paused to lean on the stone wall, staring at the mermaid.

“Stop shouting,” Mr. Girandole advised. “And you shouldn't walk too far all at once. You'll wear yourself out.”

R —— shook his fists beside his ears as if to demonstrate how strong he'd gotten.

Grandmother looked out from the mouth.

“This door?” R —— moved toward us again, gazing in delight at the monstrous face with Grandmother framed in its maw. “You find?”

“No,” said Mr. Girandole. “We haven't found anything.”

R —— mounted the steps with care, leading with his good leg. Partway up, he seemed unsteady, so I offered him a hand. He bowed to Grandmother and had a good look around the chamber himself. Easing down onto a bench, he asked about the inscription, and I explained it to him.

Grandmother eyed him curiously. “How did you find us, R ——?”

“Hear tap, tap, tapping. You look for fairy door.” So, he'd heard Grandmother pounding on the wall. “But I think, ‘Maybe soldiers,' so I go like dog and look first.” He indicated his hands and knees and squinted his eyes. He meant that he'd been creeping in the bushes.

“I'm glad to see you're getting around so well,” Grandmother said.

Nudging my arm, R —— put his fingers and thumbs together to make an oblong shape. “Hole for key. I dream of key and hole for key. You got key?”

We had said nothing to him about the key from Papa. Grand­mother sat opposite him and fixed him with her gaze. “Yes, R ——, there's a key. You really want to go to that other world forever?”

He smiled at her, and I thought his eyes were misty. “Here, nothing. There . . . beautiful. I see it.”

“You were on the border once,” said Grandmother. “You think they'll let you stay this time?”

R ——'s smile broadened, and he clutched Grandmother's wrist. Glancing at Mr. Girandole, who watched from the doorstep, R —— spoke in his own language.

When he'd finished, Mr. Girandole watched him for a long time and finally said, “Thank you, R ——.”

Grandmother asked what R —— had said.

Mr. Girandole looked confused for a moment, forgetting that we hadn't understood the other language. “He said that he might have stayed in Faery the first time. But they sent him back to help me get there, too.”

Grandmother patted R ——'s hand and added her thanks.

R ——'s dreams and poem had convinced us to try and solve the garden's puzzle, and his hearing fairy music had inspired us along the way. We believed we'd been helping him, but he had come to help us.

So, now we all worked together to scour the chamber inside and out, searching, tapping, vigilant always for a keyhole. The table and benches were anchored in mortar and could not be moved. I crawled on hands and knees, hunting for any stone in the cobbled floor that might be loose. Mr. Girandole climbed over the exterior, prying and probing. Once, his face appeared at one of the eye-holes, looking in.

I joined him outside for a while. Grandmother came out, too, to sit on the steps and rest. I investigated the stone walls on both sides; scrambling up the bank, I examined the urn. Centuries ago, it had held flowers, I supposed; now it housed a tuft of weeds.

Mr. Girandole seemed most interested in the mossy open ground in front of the face. He positioned himself here and there, on the steps, near the steps, and back by the thicket, always peering toward the sculpted entrance.
“Draw near but not inside,”
he muttered.
“Behold in me the path beyond the dusk.”

“Do you see anything?” Grandmother called to him.

He shook his head.

I wandered back inside.

In his broken speech, R —— pointed out something intriguing about the metal plate. It seemed indeed to be set in the wall, like a jewel in a ring, but it stood at a curious angle: the left edge emerged farther from the wall than the right edge—not a great difference, but measurable—
as if the plate were a door that had not closed all the way
. Moreover, to a lesser degree, the top edge protruded just slightly more than the bottom edge. But there was no discernible crack around the plate, as one would expect around any door; not so much as a knife blade could be inserted beside it.

“Maybe someone slammed it closed and it jammed,” I suggested. “Or maybe the hillside has settled over the years, and the building isn't straight anymore.”

“Or maybe,” said Grandmother from the threshold, “the duke wasn't satisfied with just
one
skewed building.”

R —— clawed and shoved at the angel carvings. At last, he sank back onto a bench in exasperation, wiping his hands on his clothes. More of the original color peeked through the grime.

“What is this sticky stuff, anyway?” Grandmother scratched at one of the handprints on the flat metal surface. “It can't be tree sap, under a roof.”

I saw what interested her: the color of the “clean” patch on the plate was different from the angels' bronze. She dug in the carpet bag, which I'd put on the table. “Run and bring that water bucket,” she told me, “and any rags you can find. There's enough dirt on this thing to plant a garden. Let's see what's under it.”

I didn't mind being given the order. I was ready to stretch my legs. Cautiously, I trotted around to the leaning house. The bucket was full of water; I guessed Mr. Girandole had filled it before dawn. Gathering up an armful of rags, I gazed fondly about the awful, tilted room. Even the last lingering reek had fond associations now.

When I returned through the arch, Mr. Girandole was fairly jumping in place, pointing at the ground and waving at me to hurry. Grandmother and R —— hobbled down the steps, and I'm not sure who was helping whom.

I rushed forward, sloshing out some of the water.

“However did we miss them?” Mr. Girandole. “All these years . . .”

So, yet another feature had been hiding under our noses. As I drew up beside him, I saw that he'd scraped away an earthy mat of leaves, twigs, and moss. Beneath, on the landing of stone just at the bottom of the eight steps, were two large human footprints—a left foot and a right, as if someone had stood there barefooted when the masonry was soft. Ornamental spirals were etched in the toe-marks, the heels, and the balls of the feet; the footprints were centered just before the middle of the lowest step, as if whoever had left them was ready to begin climbing.

“Ah, haaa,” said Grandmother thoughtfully. R —— squatted
with effort and ran his fingers through the shallow impressions.

“Near but not inside,”
said Mr. Girandole. “This is where we're supposed to stand.”

“Brilliant!” said Grandmother. “You've done it, Girandole! But what can you see from there?”

Mr. Girandole shook his head, looking perplexed. “Nothing.”

R —— elbowed him aside and stood with his worn flight boots on top of the footprints. He squinted hard at the stone face, but apparently there was nothing to see. “Maybe you have to be my height,” I said. I stepped up next. Unfortunately, no miraculous visions unfurled. Not to be left out, Grandmother tried looking too but fared no better.

R —— said a word that Mr. Girandole translated as “pickaxe.” R —— wanted to use one on the metal plate.

Grandmother rolled her eyes and muttered, “Thank goodness you didn't come with grenades, R ——.” She told me to bring the bucket and rags, and to try not to spill any more of the water.

Inside the chamber, she supervised as Mr. Girandole and I washed the metal plate. “Don't put the rags in the bucket, clean or dirty,” she said. “R —— drinks out of it.” We got the rags wet by pouring water over them. Wiping and folding, we used the cloths one by one until they were all black.

“I can't tell if this is just dust,” said Mr. Girandole, “or if it's been deliberately applied.”

“Nothing else in the garden is covered with it,” I pointed out, working from atop a bench.

“True. But nothing else is made of this same material, whatever it is. Things don't all get dirty in the same way or at the same speed. Have you noticed how black the ceiling is in here?”

I hadn't, but looking up, I saw what he meant.

“I think someone must have built a smoky fire in here once—maybe many times—before the fauns came; it wasn't us.” He looked at his rag. “This could be smoke residue.”

I had a mental picture of the screaming face viewed from outside at night, a fire in its gaping mouth, its eyes and nostrils ablaze with red light.

The angels were tooled in far greater detail than had been visible through the coating of grime. With the proper polish, Grandmother conjectured, they would gleam. The plate itself was smooth as a sheet of ice, very hard, black, and shiny.

“Stone?” asked R ——, gazing over our shoulders.

Mr. Girandole nodded, rapping it with his knuckles. “Yes. It's some kind of stone.”

I jumped down from the table for another rag. “Now that we're cleaning it up, I can see my reflection in it.”

Mr. Girandole stopped washing. He waved his arm back and forth in front of the plate, and slowly he turned to look at me, then at Grandmother.

Grandmother's eyes widened.

A
mirror
.

All the grove's suggestions of mirrors whirled through my mind.

“Not ‘come inside,'” Mr. Girandole breathed, “but ‘
behold
in me.' We're not looking for a doorway in this room. We're supposed to see something reflected in the mirror—something out there.” His rapt face turned outward, peering through the distorted stone jaws.

I bounded from the doorway, my pulse pounding. There was nothing to see but the central thicket, filling the entire view—the tangle of giant trees and interwoven bushes, locked with thorns and
chained with vines, the haunt of lizards, snakes, and spiders. The door into Faery must lie somewhere in there. Perhaps once it had been plainly visible, though disguised. My spirits sank. Clearing even a narrow path would be a task of many days.

“Wild place,” said R ——, behind me. “Fairies like wild.”

“Finish the job,” Grandmother said. “Get the mirror clean, and we'll see what's to see.”

My feet dragging, I went back to work. “The mirror will just show us the thicket,” I said.

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Girandole, dumping the last of the water over the cleanest of the rags and squeezing it out. We'd gone through all the cloths and had resorted to searching them for tiny clean patches to use. Dirty water puddled around us. “Now we know,” he said, “why the mirror isn't set straight in the wall. It's tilted to line up perfectly on something when you stand down there in the footprints.”

Grandmother gave R —— a withering I-told-you-so look and muttered, “Pickaxe, indeed!”

Although we left a few smudges and streaks—especially down near the floor, when our rags were too dirty to do much good—we got the mirror clean. We all hurried to the bottom of the steps.

R —— made for the footprints, but Mr. Girandole barred his way. “As keeper of the notebook and breaker of the code,” Mr. Girandole said to me, “the honor should be yours.”

I grinned at him. His gravity seemed a bit much for the moment—it wasn't as if I were stepping
through
the door into Faery. I was only looking into the mirror, and unless it was itself magical, I knew what I would see.

“Do you think I should take my shoes off?” I asked, looking at the footprints.

“Perhaps it would be best,” said Mr. Girandole.

R —— sighed impatiently.

I untied my shoes, pulled off my socks, and stepped into the cool impressions, still moist from their long blanketing. The carved spirals felt pleasant beneath my soles.

I peered up the stairs, through the gaping mouth, and into the stone's black surface. As I'd expected, the leafy light and sun-­dapples showed me a reflection of the trees and bushes. It was as Mr. Girandole had said: the mirror was angled to reflect the thicket, not us.