A Green and Ancient Light (8 page)

We had a light, early lunch. Then Grandmother said, “After I stretch out for a bit, I think we'd better have a look for ourselves up in the forest.”

I sprang up straight in my chair. “Can we do that?”

“There's no curfew in the afternoon, and I've heard of no restrictions on where one can go—well,” she added after a moment's thought, “there's some foolish new law about trespassing among ruins, I think. But ruins are as much a part of our land as the trees and the rocks. May as well order us not to walk around on our feet!”

“What if the soldiers see us?”

“We'll be gathering wood for the stove. We'll take along the hatchet.”

So, we did precisely that: Grandmother took a nap, and I dozed again on the garden bench—the one beneath the camphor tree, protected from Mrs. F ——'s windows. It was still early in the afternoon when I lifted down the hand-axe from its pegs and Grandmother picked up the binding cords from the wood bin. She poured some milk into a jug with a stopper and packed it, along with a tin of crackers, some fruit, and a wedge of cheese into her carpet bag.

I glanced at the bag. “Did you take out his gun?”

Grandmother nodded. “It's hidden in my room. Getting rid of it may be our mission tomorrow, if the weather's good.”

We paused at the edge of the sloping meadow to look around.
The grasses waved in a slight, wandering breeze. Like a green cliff, the forest eaves rolled away in both directions, the hollows between limbs full of purple shadows, windows of twilight at midday. I loved this boundary, where the bright world met one full of secrets.

“You live in the best place on Earth,” I told Grandmother.

She laughed, not in a scornful way, and leaned on her stick, slowly studying the distance. A woodpecker knocked somewhere. Off to our right, a vine-tender whistled a tune.

“If there are soldiers here,” said Grandmother quietly, “they're under one of the arbors, watching with binoculars.” She rested on a bench, examining the grapes on the lattice over our heads. The crop was still tiny, hard, and green, but Grandmother said they would ripen well this year.

“I can carry the bag,” I said.

Grandmother peered at me with one of her appraising looks that ended in the hint of a smile. “You're a good boy,” she said, and handed the bag over.

I smiled then, knowing that praise from Grandmother didn't come lightly. “Was Papa like me when he was my age?”

“Eerily so.”

We left the arbors and crossed the meadow then. If any soldiers saw us, they issued no challenge. To give credibility to our wood-gathering ruse, we picked up a few sticks where the trees began. When the forest's emerald shadows had closed over us, I asked Grandmother about something else I'd heard earlier in the summer, from two elderly men inside the smoky open window of the pipe lounge while I waited for Grandmother outside the ­apothecary's—about dancing fires on the mountainside at night, music among the trees, and something called a “procession of souls.”

“There's an old belief,” she said, “that the souls of those who die throughout the year don't go to Heaven one by one; on Mid­summer's Eve, they all go together, in a procession.”

“Is Heaven that way—on the mountain, or beyond it?”

“That's the direction I'd head if I were looking.”

I didn't ask any further questions, because we both wanted to watch and listen. Birds sang, insects hummed, and we met no patrolling soldiers. Wildflowers shone like droplets of cream and butter and honey in patches of sunlight; some clustered in deep places where the shade was blue and cool. The village sounds grew distant: a carpenter's hammer, a few motors, the wallop of someone beating a rug. Then once more, we passed into the heart of silence, where the trees stood huge and dark. Shadowed by the thick canopy, the glens became caverns of leaf, trunk, stone, and mossy earth.

Grandmother pointed with her stave at places where boots had trampled the moss and smashed some of the white toadstools. She shook her head gravely.

We came at last to the parachute. R —— was gone, and we were alone in the glade. The soldiers had not bothered to drag the chute down; it still hung in tangles, the soft earth beneath it crisscrossed with boot tracks. The mound we'd made for R —— to fall into had been flattened out; I supposed Mr. Girandole had scattered it to make our assistance less obvious. I saw no traces of blood. But if one looked, our excavations among the leaf-beds were plain to see.

I picked up the mashed remains of two cigarettes, and Grandmother snickered. “You want to take them to Mrs. D ——?” I didn't, choosing to bury them instead under a handful of soil.

We found nothing of interest. After a few moments, Grandmother
led the way toward the grove of monsters. Without asking, I knew we would go there. We descended the long slope where sunlight fell in occasional golden shafts.

As my gaze settled on one such circle of light, I halted and stared. The sun illuminated the base of a tree with a riot of twisting, overlapping roots. For a moment, I thought I saw a village there, all in miniature among the ferns in the blaze of light: houses of stacked pebbles with mossy roofs; bridges of bark; towers and tiers and petal banners; and galleries stretching into the dim caves beneath the roots. But when I looked closer, I saw that all was merely the forest floor. Its myriad colors and textures had fooled my eyes. A dragonfly like a long green needle whirred lazily across the sun-patch.

Blinking, I hurried to catch up with Grandmother.

“I found the grove from its other side when I was a girl,” she said quietly, “so this has always seemed like the back door to me. But the real front gate is in those bushes down there”—she pointed south, toward the village—“at the bottom of the hollow that holds it all.”

As we threaded through the bushes, I stretched to my full height, trying to catch sight again of the gray dragon. Soon enough, I saw it, still rearing and snarling, its mouth open wide. My heart raced with the same thrill as when my parents would take me to the carni­val or a picture show.

I could see the top of a broad arch to the south, which must be the main entrance Grandmother had meant. Trees stood here and there like colossal pillars, roofing the garden over with their impenetrable crowns. Grandmother stopped and put both hands on the head of her stick, listening. I kept still, giving her the
chance to hear anything the grove might tell her. But I couldn't help easing closer to see the dragon.

Dense bushes had grown around him as high as his ­shoulders. This green tangle extended to both sides, a mass of thorny branches that choked much of the ravine. Peering through thorns and a spider web, I examined the dragon's clawed feet and the pedestal they gripped. Then I noticed why the beast was roaring and unfurling his wings: buried in the undergrowth around him, at least three dogs were attacking him. Carved with the same skill, they bared their fangs, surrounding the monster, one preparing to lunge. It was hard to contain my excitement and curiosity for what might lie hidden just beyond sight in the bushes.

To our left stood a second, smaller arch, about the size through which a tall man could walk without stooping. Vines had cloaked it, but faces were visible all up and down its span, some bearded, some beautiful, some monstrous. They peered out from among leaves and blossoms like spirits of the forest.

This arch had escaped the encroaching bushes. Grandmother led me beneath it, and we passed into a clearing like a vast cavern of viridian light. Randomly columned by trees, the clearing spread from one steep wall of the ravine to the other. To the right I saw again the sea serpent, its long neck rising from the same brake of bushes that engulfed the dragon. On the left, near at hand, sat a crowned, bearded man on a throne. He held a gigantic fork, both weapon and scepter. “That's Neptune,” said Grandmother. “God of the sea. And I think that's Heracles.” She pointed at the figure towering over the bushes beyond the sea serpent, near the ­hollow's eastern wall—a muscular man with short, curling hair and a mighty club. “I know I'm mixing my Greek and Roman mythology,” she
added. “But this looks more like a Neptune than a Poseidon, doesn't it? And ‘Hercules' just doesn't seem to fit that one.”

“Was Heracles that big?” I asked, trying to remember what I'd heard of Heracles—some hero or warrior of long ago.

“Probably not,” Grandmother said. “Maybe it's just some giant. But he looks like Heracles to me. If he were holding up the
sky
, I'd say Atlas . . .”

In the half-light of the hidden garden, moss lay thick, and more strange figures loomed near and far. The lack of breeze combined with the age of the statues to give me the sense that time did not pass here.

Before us and a little to the right, across a mostly unobstructed expanse of forest floor, rose the tower that leaned at a disturbing angle. Nearer to us was the sculpture of a wild boar with real vines growing over his back. A large, square basin had once contained a pool or fountain but now held only a brackish accumulation of rain-water, leaves, and fallen branches. Four identical stone women stood delicately poised, one on each corner of the basin's rim. Each woman bore a water-jar on her hip, a slender arm curled around it. None wore a stitch of clothing, and I looked quickly away. When Grandmother moved ahead of me, I took a second, longer glance.

“That's really awful,” she said, and I jumped, feeling my face begin to burn.

But Grandmother was talking about the tower. “For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would build it that way. It makes me dizzy just to look at it, and if I go inside, I feel ill.”

“A mystery,” said a voice, and I barely held back a yelp.

It was Mr. Girandole, his face in a narrow window on the tower's upper story. Grinning, he leaned out with his elbows on the sill.
He still wore the floppy brown hat, but now his shirt was a dusky blue. “Whatever mischief the old duke was up to when he built it,” Mr. Girandole said, “it's come in handy.”

“So, there you are.” Grandmother looked up with her typical restrained smile—a smile that seemed to look beyond the reason for smiling to the next ache or nuisance or grief, and still farther beyond that—a long telescope of foresight. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Very well, thank you, though there have been some anxieties.”

“And that one?” Grandmother lowered her voice further.

“Alive.” Mr. Girandole looked over his shoulder once, into the tower's interior. “But not awake yet. He's had water and tea, and a sip or two of broth, but he's burning with fever. I think he dreams dreams.”

Grandmother laughed. “Of course he does, in that catastrophe of a house. It would drive anyone mad. If he lives, he's likely to come out of there crawling on all fours and eating straw.”

For all her brusqueness, I thought Grandmother sounded happy. I studied the building and decided it wasn't a tower at all, though its height gave that impression. It seemed to have only two stories, if the windows were any indication, though its flat roof had a crenellated parapet, like a castle. The rooms—of which there could conceivably be only two—must be about the size of my own bedroom in Grandmother's cottage, but they must have very high ceilings.

“He's in here,” said Mr. Girandole, though we'd gathered that. “Do you want to come up and see him?”

“No, you come out here,” Grandmother answered. “I know what a delirious man looks like.”

Mr. Girandole disappeared from the window, and Grandmother started up a flight of weathered stone steps that led to a terrace at the foot of the leaning house. The terrace itself was level, not leaning. There was a matching stairway at its other end, and in the spirit of adventure, I took that one. I paused before climbing to peer across the glade at the statue of a mighty elephant who held an armored warrior in his trunk, frozen in the act of dashing the man to the ground—the violence of the scene gave me a chill. Beyond the elephant a stone tortoise, broad as a table, appeared to creep from the bushes.

I hurried up to the terrace, where weeds grew in the cracks between flagstones. Grandmother mounted from the other side, grunting as she labored up the stairs. Stone benches lined the platform along every side. She chose one against the building, where she could lean back against its wall and face outward. The terrace had a mossy railing with ornamental pilasters and seven planting urns, spaced at regular intervals. Each urn now held a thicket of natural growth, leaves and vines spilling from its rim and along the railing—like pots of forest that had boiled over.

Mr. Girandole emerged from a doorway in the tower's side and joined us. He wore no shoes, and his hoofs clicked on the stones. When he settled himself on the western bench, above the stairway Grandmother had ascended, I saw beyond his shoulder the desolate fountain of the four unclothed women.

I perched beside Grandmother. Between our feet and Mr. Girandole's, a tiny brown lizard skittered for cover. I sprang up and followed it to see where it would go. Reaching the platform's back edge, past the corner of the house where the open doorway yawned, the lizard raced over the brink and straight down the
block wall to the ground, not caring that the stone beneath its twiggy feet was vertical. I lost sight of it then.

Raising my eyes, I found myself facing another great stand of matted bushes and close-set trees, which blocked another large swath of the garden behind the leaning house. But another archway led onward in a gap, as strangely clear of undergrowth as the one through which we'd come.

Then I saw, in a patch of such deep shade that I'd missed it at first, a statue stained black with moisture or mold. It was the image of an angel, but not the sort I'd ever seen in a church. This angel's long hair and robes blew back in what seemed a fierce wind. The face made me draw a frightened breath, for its mouth was a line of unyielding purpose, and its eyes seemed colder and darker than the stone of which they were carved. In one hand the angel held a ring of keys, and in the other a chain, which looped down to cross and re-cross the square base on which the angel stood—as if the chains held that base bound against the earth.