A Green and Ancient Light (29 page)

“Now”—she handed me back the notebook and the pencil—“I need a cup of tea. While I put the kettle on, you take those lines that are left over—the ones with numbers right-side up—and write them out in the order from the stairway.”

Unfortunately, the result of my modified recopying was no lightning-strike of revelation. In the stairway order, the lines read:

The path beyond the dusk

Behold in me

Hurry now to find me draw near but not inside

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

Yet one by one a herd may pass

I am it is very true

Narrow

Or walls or ivied garden porch or doorstep have we none

You have we have all have though perhaps home

I am a gate

“Curious,” said Grandmother. “It almost seems to make sense, but not quite. We're still missing something. Are you sure you copied these numbers properly, and that no more of them were upside down? I'd like to be able to throw away a few more of these lines.”

I knew I'd copied the numbers with the utmost care. More than anything right now, I wanted to show our findings to Mr. Girandole.
I hoped he could see something that we were over­looking. We seemed to be so close . . . But it was too late to climb the mountain. Already the trees were casting long shadows, and the light on their crowns was deep golden.

“Girandole will be here after dark,” Grandmother said as if reading my mind. “Give me a hand with supper.”

We had plump noodles covered in cheesy sauce, eggplant from our garden, and a wonderful tomato soup garnished with herbs. Before washing the dishes, we carried our teacups outdoors and watched the fireflies winking in the hedge. Slowly the meadow flooded with dusk, and the leaves whispered of coolness and rest. Night birds called from the arbors and were answered from the forest. Vine-covered fence posts faded to silhouettes, and the arbors might have been the ruins of old fantastic castles. One by one the stars came out. It was a glorious ending to the day of our great breakthrough.

We put the kitchen to order and were waiting for Mr. Girandole on a garden bench when he opened the back gate.

“You're both smiling,” he said, and I wondered how he could see our faces in the dark.

“Because you're here,” said Grandmother.

When we were inside in the lamplight, we sat him down in front of the notebook and overwhelmed him with the day's findings. He gazed at us in awe, shaking his head. “It's not the time you have,” he said at last. “It's what you do with it. I've spent three or four mortal lifetimes in and around that garden, and I've never made this connection. But it's so simple, any child might figure it out.”

“The best puzzles are,” said Grandmother. “That's what makes them elegant.”

“This poem—or whatever it is—still doesn't make sense, though,” I reminded them. I looked hopefully at Mr. Girandole. “Can you see what's wrong with it?”

Fingering his short beard, he bent over the page, leafed back to my list of numbers, and smiled. “You've gotten it backward, is all. I could say those stairway numbers from memory. You wrote them from the top down. Try going from the bottom up.”

It was easy enough to read the lines from the bottom to the top. But I wrote them out the right way, and this is what I got (after Grandmother added punctuation):

I am a gate

You have, we have, all have, though perhaps home

Or walls or ivied garden, porch or doorstep have we none.

Narrow

I am, it is very true;

Yet one by one a herd may pass,

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

Hurry now to find me; draw near but not inside.

Behold in me

The path beyond the dusk.

“Ten lines,” I said. I had developed the habit of counting everything. “So, maybe
my answer is in three and seven
isn't a
complete
lie.
If
the answer is here.”

But Grandmother and Mr. Girandole were lost in thought. The lines did indeed seem to make up a poem, though it didn't rhyme.

“A gate without a garden,” Grandmother murmured. “Without walls, without a house.”

“A narrow gate,” said Mr. Girandole, “that an entire herd can pass through, one by one. And all those cheeses!”

“A gate we ‘all have,'” said Grandmother.

Suddenly, they both burst out laughing. Grandmother looked expectantly at me.

I blinked, trying to think of all the farm enclosures I'd seen in my life, the different kinds of fences with swinging or sliding gates. But what did farms and herds and cheeses have to do with the garden?

Mr. Girandole snorted. “Well, it's one gate or the other—we know it's one of two!”

“Don't be crass,” Grandmother said, dabbing at her eyes. “You're a faun, not a satyr.” For my benefit, she asked, “Why do we keep herds? Why do we make cheese?”

“For food,” I answered.

“And what ‘gate' do we send food through?”

At last I got it. “Our mouths!”

“Exactly! And where in the garden can we find—”

“The screaming mouth!”
My mind filled with a vision of the stone face that was also an entrance—the yawning mouth that led into a chamber with a table and benches.

“Or the pictures of the screaming mouths inside the stone house,” said Mr. Girandole. “We shouldn't discount those just yet.”

“There are a lot of mouths in the garden,” said Grandmother, “but that big one seems the most likely to me. I always wondered why the duke was satisfied to build nothing more than a single room behind such an impressive opening.”

“Do you think there's a tunnel?” I asked, dancing around the table. “It must be behind that plate on the wall, with the angels!”

“Possibly,” said Mr. Girandole. “But what do you make of ‘draw near but not inside'? How can one pass
through
without going
inside
?”

Grandmother picked up her teacup. “That's a question we can only answer on the premises.”

If I'd had trouble waiting for sundown, the wait for early morning was many times worse. I tossed in my bed as the crickets and tree frogs shrilled on and on. Perhaps I dozed now and then, but I know I was already wide awake when Grandmother stirred in the darkness before dawn, leaned into my room, and said, “Shall we go?”

*  *  *  *

When I asked Grandmother if I should bring the key along this time, she said yes. We threaded a sturdy twine through its head, tied the loop around a handle of the carpet bag, and nestled the key inside the bag, beneath our supplies to take to R ——. I put my notebook in, too. “You can run ahead of me if you want,” Grandmother said, “but it's still as dark up there as it is down here.” I stayed beside her, moving at her pace. We'd long since gotten the lantern back, and our many trips to the grove had begun to wear a trail, even in the lush meadow. That wasn't good, I thought: it would lead curious wanderers to the garden. No one would need dogs to see where we'd been. I mentioned this to Grandmother, and she said it didn't matter much, that the summer was almost over, and nature would soon wipe the slate clean.

I asked her, as we passed beneath the trees, if she thought she'd come up to the woods much after I'd gone back to the city. She
said she didn't think so—that she even planned to start paying Mr. H —— to bring her firewood.

“The grove is really no place for an old woman,” she said. “Espe­cially not once all the menfolk are gone.”

The idea of Grandmother alone made me sad. “But if we find the door, Mr. Girandole doesn't have to go through it now. He could wait until—” I faltered.

“Until I die? I suppose that's what he'll choose, the old dear. As if there's any good in watching me totter along and turn into a prune.”

“Besides,” I said, “I want you both to be here when I come back. I'm sure I can come again next summer!”

“You should never say you're sure about the future.”

“Well, if I have anything at all to say about it, I'll be back. Maybe even at Christmas.”

I saw her half-smiling in a ray of moonlight. “We've had a good time these several months, haven't we?”

“The best,” I said. After a while, I added, “I'll bet the garden is quite a sight in the winter, too. You've seen it then, haven't you?”

“Yes. It's quite a sight in the winter, too. But winter is a rainy time, good for resting.”

*  *  *  *

The garden was coming to life as we approached it in the hour of translucent mist and bird songs, the lingering pools of night lightening to purple between the trunks, and soft pink and yellow in the sky. A woodpecker knocked on a tree somewhere as if reporting the breaking news by telegraph.

Grandmother had blown out the lantern, but it was still too hot to stow in the bag.

Mr. Girandole met us while we were some distance from the dragon. I could see ruffles in the weeds where he'd been pacing about, leaving swaths through the silvery dew. He was bare-hoofed and had his patched trousers rolled up to his goat's-knees to keep the cuffs dry; he seemed tense, and I thought I understood. For me, the day was a culmination of one summer, but for Mr. Girandole, solving the puzzle would bring change to a life that never changed. This was a momentous hour of a momentous day.

Once we'd said our good-mornings, I asked if he'd been to the screaming mouth.

“Not yet,” he said. “I thought we should go together.” Hands joined behind his back, he fell into step beside Grandmother. Carrying the carpet bag and the lantern, I led the way, barely able to restrain myself from breaking into a run.

“How is R ——?” asked Grandmother.

“Sleeping. He was making music with the fairies all night and hardly slept a wink. I took some extra things back to my cave and had a nap there.”

“You've never heard these voices he hears?” asked Grandmother.

“Not since leaving Faery.”

At Grandmother's suggestion, we turned right before we reached the garden and circled around to its east side, “to let R —— get his sleep,” she said—though I suspected she didn't want to deal with his ebullience as we explored the chamber of the open mouth. We came up behind the mermaid with her twin tails, passed through her sequestered yard, and entered the upper clearing by the gap in the low wall. To the southwest I could just see part of the leaning house, steeped in early-morning shadows. But as we followed the stone wall northward, the central thicket quickly blocked the building from view.

So, we arrived in that wonderful young light before the face, its round window-eyes, nostrils, and mouth looming black. Neither human nor animal, it howled silently from the bank of earth and mossy stonework. Still the slender birch grew up alongside the left eye; still dead leaves drifted on the furrowed brow, around the ears-or-horns, and clung to its beard-or-mane. I counted eight steps leading up to the mouth. Behind the face on the slope, an age-pitted urn stood atop a short pillar.

Grandmother and Mr. Girandole hung back, looking things over. I preceded them, moving cautiously up the steps. A small animal scurried in the brush to my left. I paused halfway up, listening and watching. Above me, the round eyes were hypnotic in their emptiness. It was easy to believe this bizarre cave was an exit from the world.

I peered inside, then stepped across the threshold. The stone table and benches waited within the narrow room, illuminated by the grove's filtered daylight through the eyes, nose, and mouth. Above the frieze on the rear wall were the chiseled words of what we now knew to be a false clue. Except for the sentence on the entrance arch, this one, at fourteen words, was the longest in the garden:

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

Such was the duke's sense of humor: a picnic table inside an ogre's mouth, and an elaborate deception inscribed in the ­chamber to which the other clues led. Yet even the duke's falsities had an impish ring of truth. The “dancers,” I thought, might be ­visitors to the garden, all those who had admired the wonders and pondered the mysteries. And after all, if the answer truly lay here, it had been
reached through “three and seven”—the ten true inscriptions, properly arranged, that directed us to seek a mouth. A garden where lies contained the truth: it boggled the mind and made reason depart.

I had thought of the metal plate as a frieze when I first saw it, but now it looked all the more to me like a door of some sort. It seemed much too simple to be an ornament, its only decorations the three angels—one on its right edge, one on its left, and one near its top—leaving its center featureless. Moreover, each angel had an arm and a finger slightly extended. Before, I'd supposed them to be pointing at one another, but now it occurred to me that they were all pointing at the smooth, empty expanse of metal in their midst. Their gestures formed a triangulation—a set of imaginary lines that intersected in the middle of the plate. It
must
be a door.

I touched its surface lightly, wondering if my fingers would pass through into another world. No: it was as unyielding as it looked—cold and sticky with a dusty residue. I examined my finger­tips and rubbed them together. Whatever the dirty coating was, it made them black. I wished I had a pair of gloves.

Grandmother entered behind me, her stick tocking on the ­cobbled floor. Mr. Girandole peered across the threshold but said he thought one of us should stay outside at all times, in case the room contained some kind of trap. Grandmother seemed unfazed by the notion, but I glanced nervously at the domed ceiling and into the dim corners.

“Did you ever sit here and have a picnic?” I asked, kneeling to study the undersides of the table and benches.