A Green and Ancient Light (4 page)

Smiling awkwardly, he offered a hand. From his manner, I couldn't help thinking of a child who has been ordered to shake the hand of a dubious stranger. His fingers were surprisingly long, and the back of his hand was hairy. I wondered if he were a foreigner, perhaps from behind the mountains—though he had no noticeable accent.

I was none too eager to shake his hand either, but as he was a friend of Grandmother's, I did so.

“Well, it's a fine mess,” he said, trudging past me and returning his hands to his coat pockets. His gaze took in the dangling pilot and all the entangled folds of parachute, the skeins of cord.

Grandmother stood studying the problem too, her palms on her waist. “He'll die if he keeps hanging there,” she said. “May die anyway.”

Mr. Girandole nodded. “Which is why I thought it best to . . . As you can see . . .”

Grandmother paced slowly, examining the trees and limbs.

I was a passionate climber of trees now that I had a whole garden full of them to choose from. Grandmother had learned early that I was easily entertained by sitting in a fork among the boughs, reading one of the books I'd brought. Now I guessed what she'd had in mind when she'd said she might need my help.

But there was no way to climb these gigantic trees. The first limbs began high in the air, and no branch came anywhere near the ground. It would be impossible to get above the pilot in order to cut him loose.

“Let's gather leaves and dirt,” Grandmother said at last. “Pile them right here.” She pointed with her stick at the bloodstained forest carpet straight below the hanging man. “Should have brought the rake and spade.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Girandole, as if he grasped her plan. She handed him the bucket I'd carried, and he hurried off in one direction; Grandmother untied the canvas bundle and led me in another. Finding a patch of soil where few plants grew, she sliced into the earth with the brush knife. Onto the square of canvas we piled handfuls of crumbly dead leaves and dirt. Beetles and gray rollup bugs scurried between our fingers. Grandmother hummed to herself, exactly as she did when working in the garden.

When we had a load, we dragged it back to the pilot. A drop of his blood spattered the canvas as we shook the soil loose. He groaned but did not raise his head.

Mr. Girandole worked quickly, bringing his third or fourth bucketful. He glanced up at the man and pursed his lips. “I fear this may be in vain.”

“H'mm,” Grandmother agreed. We headed back for another load. I looked with interest at a deep bed of plush moss, but Grand­mother shook her head. “We're not tearing up the grove for him,” she said, and I remembered the monsters. This was their home.

At first, we labored within the circle of the lantern's glow, placing it on the ground near the growing earth pile, but when the forest lightened, Grandmother had me blow the flame out. Birds warbled, flitting from branch to branch. From the direction of the village, far away, a late rooster crowed.

Even by daylight, this section of the wood reminded me of parlors I'd seen—dusky rooms with high ceilings and forbidding furniture, reserved for times of greater importance than the present. And yet in other ways, this place was like nothing in any human dwelling. There were age and stillness here. The furnishings were alive.

Twice as we worked, the man over our heads woke up and grumbled. I supposed he was feverish.

“Perhaps we look sinister to him,” said Mr. Girandole, meeting us as we emptied our loads of earth together. “Perhaps he thinks we're digging his grave.”

“Perhaps we are,” said Grandmother.

Here, where none but the rarest sunbeam reached the wood's floor, it was still a summer day. My shirt was sticking to my back, wringing wet, and Grandmother had long since shed her scarf. Mr. Girandole, in his unseasonable coat, looked about to expire.

He dabbed with his sleeve cuff at his forehead beneath the hat's brim and glanced furtively at me, not for the first time.

Grandmother announced that it was time for us all to rest. She perched on a rock, and I gratefully flopped down on the ground nearby. “Really, Girandole,” she said. “How long are you going to keep this up? Whose eyes are you afraid of here?”

Mr. Girandole's mouth twitched. His gaze flicked toward me, then up at the man in the tree, who hung limp again. Two crows hopped along the limbs, clearly talking to each other as they assessed the pilot—speculating.

Mr. Girandole sighed. “I suppose you're right, M ——.” He scrunched his brows, took a breath, and played with the cuff of one sleeve. Several times, he seemed about to speak but didn't—and always his eyes darted back to me.

Grandmother propped her arms on her walking-stick, laid her head on her wrists, and closed her eyes, lazily tapping one foot.

“Well,” said Mr. Girandole. “You see . . . That is, er . . .” Seeming to find his focus then, he crouched beside me and held up a spindly
finger. I couldn't help looking him up and down, trying to decide what was so unsettling about the
way
he crouched.

Yet it was also hard to look away from his luminous brown eyes. “Young sir,” he began with determination, “you have heard, I take it, the tale of Cinderella?”

Grandmother snorted with amusement—why, I wasn't precisely sure—and continued her impression of nap-taking.

I nodded.

Mr. Girandole examined his never-still fingers, as if finding his words there. His nails had soil caked beneath them now, as mine did; his hands were smudged with drying muck.

“A lost slipper,” he said. “A slipper of glass—or of fur, as the tale used to be told. The details change. The truth . . . the truth behind the story . . . is that no foot would fit the shoe but hers—the foot of that one girl. Why do you suppose that was?”

I blinked, thinking of the story. “She . . . had small, dainty feet.”

“Do you really think so?” Mr. Girandole leaned forward earnestly, and I flinched, unsettled.

“The prince searched the length and breadth of the land!” he said. “Maidens from far and wide tried to force their feet into that slipper. Are we truly to believe that Cinderella had the smallest feet in the kingdom? The tale always assures us, no matter who tells it, that she was beautiful . . . that the prince had to find her again, at any cost.” Mr. Girandole spread his hands decisively, as if I could not fail now to see his point. “Tall people and small people can be very beautiful, of course. But could she have towered over him, or stood no taller than a child? Surely she must have been of a fairly ordinary size. If the prince had been looking for someone of extreme stature, why let all the typical maidens try on the slipper? Do you see?”

I had no answer. He did make an excellent point.

Above us, the pilot moaned and murmured something under his breath.

Mr. Girandole looked down at his own worn boots. “Cinderella's foot wasn't larger or smaller than that of most women.
It was of a different shape altogether.
”

Grandmother raised her head and said matter-of-factly, “That's true. As I first heard it, the stepsisters mutilated their own feet trying to make them the right shape. One cut off her toes. The other cut off her heel.”

“And both attempts failed!” said Mr. Girandole. “If the shoe fit Cinderella's foot, what does that tell us about her?”

I tried to imagine her foot, and the picture in my head wasn't pretty.

“Why, she must have had neither,” said Grandmother brightly. “Neither toes nor a heel.”

“And what does that leave?” Mr. Girandole finished. “And who gave her the slipper? Who changed her fate?”

“F-fairy,” I managed. “Fairy godmother.” The sweat on my face and in my shirt had grown chill.

“And you don't just
get
one of those.” Leaning still closer, he lowered his voice. “For reasons beneficent or nefarious, the tale handed down to us has been altered to obscure Cinderella's origins. The fact is that she was ill-treated by her step-family because she was
different
.” He glanced sideways, conspiratorially, then straight back at me. “Cinderella was not a daughter of the Second Folk or humans. Her people were
older
.”

Before his words had quite sunk in, Mr. Girandole plucked loose the laces of his right boot, grasped it in both hands, and pulled it
off. There, in the somnolent light of morning, I saw protruding from his trouser cuff a bony ankle covered in coarse brown hair—and instead of a foot, the sharp, split hoof of a goat.

I sprang to my feet, barely containing a yelp.
“Old Mr. Clubfoot,”
Mrs. D —— had said.
“Witch-weasels and sickle-winds.”
I backed away, heart pounding.

“Sit down,” Grandmother told me gently but firmly. “Don't be rude.”

“I suspect it was a fur slipper,” Mr. Girandole said. “A hoof would shatter a shoe of glass.” He looked up at me with a sad, lop-sided smile.

My mind was so numbed that my body was left to make the decisions, and it decided on flight. I turned and bolted into the forest, too deeply shaken to obey Grandmother's order that I stop. The ground descended in a slope, and the undergrowth became denser. Bushes clutched at my knees; branches lashed at my face. I skidded, landed on my arms, and got up again, dodging right and left between the trunks. As I careened down into a wide ravine, my pulse pounded in my ears.

It wasn't long before I came back to my senses. Clearly, Mr. Girandole meant me no harm. I didn't run far. But I ran just far enough, crashing through briars and low branches, to carry me headlong into the grove of monsters.

Looming above the bushes straight before me was the huge, dark head of a beast.

I stopped so abruptly, my feet shot out from beneath me, and I landed sitting, paralyzed with fear. The creature, too, seemed frozen in rapt attention, its round eyes fixed on me, its jaws gaping wide. Neither horse nor lion, it had round ears high on its head and
tufts of streaming hair between them and its mouth. Overlapping plates of leathery hide armored its muzzle and neck. From its back, in the grove's half-light, rose two shadowy wings.

I was certain this was my last moment of life—that the beast would spring upon me, snapping tree limbs with its lunge, and devour my upper half at one bite. I flung up my arms to cover my head.

But after a long space, when I opened my eyes again, I saw that the beast had not moved. Still its bulging eyes watched me, and still its jaws gaped; yet I heard no rumbling breath, no ponderous movements. Birds twittered, and a breeze stirred the branches.

Eventually, it occurred to me that the monster's grayish hue was not elephantine skin but the gray of weathered stone, that the darker patches on its sides were fans of lichen, and that fallen leaves clung to its back. The beast was a statue—a craftsman's sculpture.

I sat there breathing, clutching my shirt-front, the sweat drying on my neck. As I rose to a crouch and looked around, I saw that fantastic shapes loomed everywhere, half-buried in the undergrowth. Bearded stone faces peered between vines; a muscular giant towered among the trees; a sea serpent reared above green waves of bushes; a stately king or god occupied his throne. In the distance, a tall tower was just visible past three interposing trees. As I studied it, tilting my head to one side and the other, I saw that this building leaned at an odd angle, as if stuck in the act of toppling over.

So, these were the monsters, and this was the haunted woods, the sacred woods, a garden long overgrown and abandoned, hidden in blue shadows, in shafts of early sun. How truly strange it was!
It sang to my heart in a silent voice. Every vine-obscured shape intrigued me—every secret space drew me forward. I wanted to discover every figure the garden would reveal. Yet I remembered how I'd left Grandmother and Mr. Girandole. With a last, longing glance, I hurried back toward them.

Mr. Girandole seemed to have been more worried about me than Grandmother was. He breathed a sigh when I reappeared, and he kept glancing at me as if seeking some kind of reassurance. His boots were both in place again, and I felt bad for reacting with such shock to his hoofed feet. He was Grandmother's friend.

Grandmother watched me with a serious expression, waiting.

Mr. Girandole had taken off his coat and held it folded over an arm. Beneath, he wore a gray shirt with old-fashioned, pointed collars. When he laid the coat neatly on a rock, I saw the reason for his odd gait. His legs, clothed in trousers the color of dust, bent differently from those of other people. His knees were apparently backward, sticking out behind him. Despite myself, I felt another rush of fear, but I resolved not to stare. I showed him a sheepish grin, which seemed to relieve him further.

Grandmother said, “Have you been to the grove?”

I nodded and fell in beside her as she took up the brush knife and started back to work.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” she asked.

Again, I could only nod. The grove seemed too significant for me to wrap words around.

Grandmother scooped decaying leaves. “I first found my way there when I was younger than you. That was a long time ago. Obviously.”

I noticed that Mr. Girandole's hands paused in his own labor
across the clearing. Just for a moment, he was motionless, gazing at the ground—listening or remembering something.

I asked Grandmother, “Which monster did you see first?”

“The mermaid. I came upon her from behind, and I knew at once she was a mermaid, though she has two tails instead of one. I wondered why she wouldn't turn and look at me. I supposed she was angry at me, like my mother. That's how I found the place, you see: I was running away from a scolding at home.”

I laughed. This was the most Grandmother had ever told me about herself at one time, and I was enjoying it.

“What had you done to get in trouble?”