Greenmantle (44 page)

Ali sighed and took another bite of her sandwich. What a weird move this had turned out to be. We have to put down some roots, her mother had said. Find a place we can really call our own. But the peace and quiet they’d both been hoping for hadn’t appeared. Ali thought about how their lives had turned topsy-turvy in the past few weeks. She didn’t regret it—not exactly. Not when you weighed Tony and Mally and the stag—especially the way the mystery made her feel—not when you weighed not ever having known them against the trouble that had come with them.

“Did you have enough?” Mally asked.

Ali looked down and realized that she’d devoured her sandwich. “I guess so,” she said with a rueful smile. “I’m not being very good company, am I?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been moody—brooding all day.”

Mally shrugged. “Talking’s not everything, Ali. Sometimes just being together’s enough. Didn’t the mystery teach you that yet?”

“I’m not very good at lessons, I guess.” Ali licked a crumb off her finger. “Are you sure my mom understood why I couldn’t come home?”

“No. But I think she trusts you to know your own heart.”

“That’d be the day,” Ali said, but she knew she wasn’t being fair. Her mother was pretty good when it came to disciplining her, but she gave Ali a lot of slack. Ali found that she didn’t get into a lot of the messes that other kids did simply because she knew her mother trusted her not to and Ali didn’t want to blow that trust. “I hope they’ll be okay,” she added.

“You can’t worry about them,” Mally said. “You’ve got to think about Old Hornie now.”

Ali shot a glance at the unlit bonfire. “When do we start—you know, lighting the fire and everything?”

“When we hear Tommy’s pipes—that’d be best.”

Ali nodded. She looked away to the west. The sun was lowering steadily, turning into a deep orange ball as it neared the horizon. She hadn’t brought her watch, but by the way the shadows were lengthening down below them in the forest, she didn’t think it’d be too long until nightfall. Then they’d hear Tommy’s pipes and light the fire and she’d call the mystery to her….

Thinking about the piping reminded her of last night and where Mally and the stag had taken her. That place was almost like the music itself—very real, very here and now, but at the same time, unearthly, otherworldly, fey. She loved the sound of that old word. Fey. That’s what people would say if she’d lived back then and they saw her riding the stag with a horned wild girl for a companion. “That Ali,” they’d say to each other. “She’s so fey.” Either that or they’d burn her as a witch.

Ali looked at the heap of wood and bones in front of them and shivered. She turned to Mally.

“What about the Hunt?” she asked. She’d already told the wild girl about having seen them outside her window last night.

“Don’t think of them,” Mally said, “or you might call them to us. But if they do come—don’t listen to them. Everything they tell you will be a lie. Logical, oh, yes, and persuasive, but a lie nevertheless.”

“I’m nervous.”

Mally smiled. “Don’t be. You rode on his back last night, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes. But this is different.”

“Yes,” Mally said softly. “It
will
be different.” She studied Ali for a moment. “Try to be a little merry,” she added.

“I’m having enough trouble keeping my knees from knocking together, let alone trying to wear a smile.”

“But merry can mean ‘looking for’ as well as ‘happy,’ you know. Try to be a little of both—keep a balance and you won’t do so badly. The merry poet searches for her muse, but she does so happily. Why don’t you do the same?”

“I’m not searching for a muse,” Ali said. “I’m calling the stag to me.”

“Some people might say that’s the same thing.”

Ali frowned and looked away, first to the antler on top of the unlit bonfire, bedecked with its feathers and beads, then westward, to where the sun was just peeking above the horizon now.

“I just want to talk to him,” she said. “I want to ask him if he wants to be free—that’s all, Mally. I’m not looking for anything for myself.”

Mally nodded. “I know. But you have to do something for yourself at the same time, or it’s all in vain.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know,” Mally replied. “But it doesn’t matter. It’ll happen just the same.”

“You know more than you’re telling me, don’t you? What’s in this for you, Mally?”

The wild girl shrugged. “I don’t really know more,” she said. “I don’t know what’s in it for me, or you, or even Old Hornie. I just know that some things must be done—the knowing just comes to me. I think it’s because I’m a secret, that’s why I know things, but I couldn’t explain why I know them.”

“You’re the reason Lewis’s son left, aren’t you?” Ali guessed. “And Lily’s son, and the others, too. You talked to them and showed them what lay beyond the village and these woods, and once they saw it, they just had to go. Isn’t that so?”

“I talked to them. But I always said the village needed more people in it, not less. I didn’t make them go.”

“You wouldn’t have to.” Ali felt she was close to something now, but she wasn’t sure what. It wasn’t simply a matter of figuring Mally out—who she was and why she did what she did—but something more.

“You gave Lewis the books,” she went on. “Did you talk to Ackerly Perkin as well?”

Mally didn’t answer.

“Are we freeing the mystery,” Ali asked, “or binding me to it?”

Mally lifted her gaze until her cat’s eyes studied Ali. “It’s getting near the time,” she said. “Best light the bone-fire now.”

Ali didn’t say anything for a long moment. Answer me! she wanted to shout. She wanted to grab Mally and shake the truth out of her, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. There was only one way to find out, and that was to see this thing through to its end. God, she thought as she pulled a pack of matches out of her jeans. I hope I don’t regret this.

* * *

Lewis smiled when he saw that the bag of sandwiches and the water sack were gone. He’d seen the two girls heading for Wold Hill and knew something was up. He also knew that they’d be hungry, and while Mally would never ask for something, she wouldn’t find it at all hard to just ‘find’ the provisions and take them along.

I wish I knew what you were up to, he thought as he looked toward the hill now. The twilight was deepening. He stood, listening to the quiet, enjoying it. For a few minutes all the questions and riddles were held at bay by the simple beauty of the moment, then he heard a scuffle of feet on the path running by his house.

He looked over to see Gaffa bound by, Tommy following the dog at a slower pace, his pipes in hand. This wouldn’t be a gather-up night, Lewis thought, but all the same he left his cabin behind and followed Tommy Duffin up the path to the old stone. He had a feeling that something was in the air tonight. He just didn’t know what, and he certainly didn’t intend to miss out on it.

* * *

The kindling caught quickly and soon the flames were licking the bark of the larger fuel. One match, Ali thought. Not bad. And I’ve never even been a Girl Guide. The sun dropped below the horizon as she watched the fire take hold. Soon it gave off more light than the graying sky. She glanced at Mally. The flickering light made shadows play across the wild girl’s features. Then Ali’s heart gave a little thumping lift as the sound of Tommy’s pipes drifted up the hill.

“Call him to you now,” Mally said softly.

Ali nodded slowly. “How?” she asked.

“Use the fire that burns inside you.”

I don’t have a fire inside, Ali wanted to say. All I’ve got is butterflies. But the sound of the music against the crackle of the bonfire woke something inside her and she thought that must be it. She concentrated on that feeling. Looking into the bonfire, mesmerized by the dancing flames, she tried to call the mystery to her.

“Use his name,” Mally said.

“I don’t know his name.”

“Give him one then, one that you will know him by.”

Old Hornie, Ali thought, then shook her head. No, that was Mally’s name for him. Just like Lewis called him the Green Man. What did she think of him as? Just a mystery. A small smile tugged at her lips. Maybe as Bambi’s father?

“Can you feel the night?” Mally asked. “It’s listening. Call him.”

Ali nodded. But I don’t have a name, she thought. She had to back away from the fire a little as the flames continued to rise. People are going to see this for miles, she thought. What if they send in forest fire fighters? It was a beacon. To call the mystery, yes, but if he were real, then mightn’t there be a whole realm of otherworldly denizens that it could call? Victorian elves and gnomes came to mind. Illustrations from dozens of children’s books. Faeries and trolls and everything in between. She thought of the Hunt that had been watching her window last night, the pack of hounds that chased the stag. She shivered and put the image of them away.

Instead she tried to think of a name for the mystery. What came to mind was a chapter from an old friend of a book,
The Wind in the Willows
. Grahame’s Rat and Mole and especially Badger all walked through her thoughts. She’d never been as big on Toad as most people. It was the quiet creatures she’d loved the best, the descriptions of quiet times. Picnics and Yule nights and rowboats on the river….

She remembered the chapter where Otter’s son Portly was lost and all the animals went out looking for him. Rat and Mole in their rowboat… They found him, but they found something else as well. The mystery watching over the little otter. Grahame called him the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Ali never thought of Pink Floyd when she heard that phrase—just of Grahame’s book, of Rat and Mole’s awe, and of the chill that ran up her spine whenever she thought of those few pages, or read them again.

That’s who you are to me, she told the mystery. I just wish I knew your name.

She could see him if she closed her eyes. Not as a stag or a Green Man like Lewis did, nor as he’d appeared in the otherworld, but as the goatman he’d been for a moment last night. The long curling horns and the pinched features that reminded her a little of Mally. His reed pipes were like Tommy’s, but different, too. Because his music was different. What Tommy played made her want to move; it made her emotions dance until she just had to step her body to its rhythm. But the other music,
his
music—it would fill her with peace. She’d never heard it, but she knew what it would be like. She knew
just
what it would be like.

She tried not to hear Tommy’s music, searched instead for the melody that she knew the mystery would play if he had the pipes instead of Tommy. Closing her eyes, she drew up the image of him in her mind. It flickered just at the limits of her grasp. His music was almost there, but then Tommy’s piping stole it away and her memories went back to last night again. The goatman was a stag when it came to the old stone. There was dancing. She was moving to the music with Lily. Then Mally caught her up and tossed her onto the stag’s back and they were off and away—away into some elsewhere.

She went with the memory, followed it on that wild ride through a forest that didn’t exist in this world, to the summit of that otherworldly mountain with its circular stone formations. The moon hung low and full, the stars were so bright. Her breath frosted in the air. The mystery was a stag, then a man in his mantle of green leaves, and she was standing in front of him, asking him what he wanted, asking him for a name. Again she was caught by his gaze—as powerful in memory as it had been last night. Something in their gazes connected and went on and on and on.

There’s no name for something like you, she thought. No one can name you. All they can do is take an aspect that they can see and call you by that. Pan. Old Hornie. A Green man. Greenmantle.

Greenmantle.

That’s what I’d call you, if I only knew you from last night. But I’ve known you all my life, haven’t I? You’re what makes the seasons change, the blood to flow. You taught me how to breathe when I left my mother’s womb. You taught my body to grow and my heart to recognize you when I finally saw you. In the pages of a book. In the melody of a tune. In the spread of a branch against the sky. In the hop of a robin, the eyes of a cat, the scent of a blossom….

She watched herself turn away from him in the memory—because Mally was calling her. They had to leave that place in elsewhere. It was time to go before…before what? Then she heard the sound of their baying, and the warm feeling that the memory had left in her chilled in her veins. The Hunt. The pack. They had to hurry because if the hounds caught their scent in that place, they’d chase her and Mally, just like they chased the stag. In her memory, she saw that they’d gotten away from the pack. But then she remembered later that night, the hounds at the edge of the forest, watching her as she stood by the window….

Her eyes opened with a snap. The fire blinded her for a moment, and she blinked, looking away from it.

“Mally?” she started to say, but the wild girl was gone.

She stood up, shivering for all the heat that the fire threw off. Something was wrong. She couldn’t hear the piping anymore. How long had she been away in her memories? It couldn’t have been too long because the fire was still burning high. But where was Mally? Why did she feel so strange?