The Greenstone Grail (13 page)

What are you talking about? Annie mouthed.

Later, Nathan whispered back, wondering what on earth he was going to tell her. On the other end of the line, the immigrant from an alternative universe was saying: ‘Yes. That is what happened. You came out of air, like angel in old
legend. Then you bring me to this place. Why? Cleaner here, some people kind, but society – not modern. Backward.’

‘I know it must seem strange,’ Nathan said. ‘I couldn’t help it. We had to come here. This is my place.’ There was a pause, then he went on: ‘I have so many things to ask you. Can we meet?’

‘Is important … yes. You find me, or I find you?’

Uncertain if his mother would allow him to go to Hastings on his own, Nathan suggested a train to Crowford and then a bus, offering to pay for the trip once his new friend arrived. They settled on the following Saturday, and Nathan hung up trembling slightly. This was a man from another world, someone he had saved, though he didn’t know how, and pulled into an involuntary exile, and now, at last, they were going to meet. He would learn about that other world and its masked inhabitants, about the ruler who spied on him, and the winged xaurians, and the talk of contamination, and –

‘What was that all about?’ Annie demanded.

Nathan was silent for a long minute. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sorry. There’s something I don’t understand yet, and … I have to work it out.’

‘There’s more to this immigrant business than a school project, isn’t there?’

‘Yes. Please don’t ask me, Mum. I don’t want to lie to you, and I can’t tell you the truth.’

Annie studied his serious face, and saw the pleading in his eyes. She said on a sudden rush of panic: ‘You’re not doing anything
illegal
, are you? I know these people need help, but you wouldn’t – you wouldn’t get involved in breaking the law – would you?’

‘Of course not. I’m not stupid, Mum. I’ll swear it, if you like.’

Annie gave a tiny shake of her head, only half relieved.
‘This man’s a stranger to you,’ she said, ‘yet you have secrets with him.’

‘I’ll explain when I can,’ Nathan said. ‘If I can.’

‘I ought to stop this right now …’

‘No! Please … I’m not doing anything wrong,’ he protested, hoping it was true. His activities might not be illegal, but he knew they were questionable. ‘Please trust me, Mum.’

‘I trust
you
,’ Annie said wryly, ‘but you’re too young for me to trust your judgement.’

But she made no attempt to prevent his rendezvous with the asylum-seeker, and that night she collected him and Hazel from the party at eleven, ‘because you shouldn’t walk home on your own at that hour, even though the village is quite safe,’ and after they had left Hazel at her home a silence fell between them that neither could break. Nathan was unhappy because he had never been alienated from his mother, and he knew he was hurting her, and Annie saw him turning into a teenager, secretive and hostile, and her heart ached. In bed she couldn’t sleep, and she heard him climb up to the Den, but she lacked the will to call him, and send him back to his room. A little while later, footsteps on the landing told her he had gone to bed, and she lay wakeful long after, isolated in her separateness, not knowing that Nathan, too, did not sleep.

The next day they went over to Thornyhill for tea. Nathan left his mother with Bartlemy, hoping she would talk to him, since he knew Bartlemy had a way of making things right. Meanwhile, he took a packet of Smarties and went looking for Woody. As always, it was quiet under the trees, the familiar woodland quiet of birdsong and leaf-murmur and the hum of a passing insect. Sunlight speckled the ground, filtering through branches unruffled by any wind. When he had gone some way, he sat down on a convenient log, calling softly: ‘Woody! Woody!’, and waited. The woodwose appeared very quickly; perhaps his long nose had picked up the scent of the Smarties. Nathan offered them to him.

‘I like green ones best,’ Woody volunteered, making a careful selection.

‘All the colours taste the same,’ Nathan pointed out prosaically. ‘Still, most people have a preference. I like the yellow ones myself.’

They sat for a while in Smartie-munching companionship, talking little. Presently, Nathan began to tell his friend about the cup of the Thorns, though he still could not speak of the chapel or his vision, and how they had to find the injunction so Rowena could reclaim her family heirloom. Woody
understood little of this, having had nothing to do with the law in this world or any other, and Nathan’s explanation didn’t enlighten him, but he was able to assimilate the final point of the story. ‘The injunction is probably just a piece of paper,’ Nathan concluded. ‘If we can find it, Mrs Thorn can prove that the cup belongs to her, and get it back. We’ve had a good look through the house and it doesn’t seem to be there, but Uncle Barty thought it might be concealed in these woods, maybe on the site of the ancient home of the Thorns. That was destroyed a long time ago, before Thornyhill was built – my uncle told me there were other houses, dwellings he called them, and in the time of Henry VII, or perhaps it was VIII, they built the house the way it is now, sort of on top. You can still see bits of the old,
old
walls, in some of the rooms. Anyway, there should be the ruins of the original place around somewhere, under the trees and the leaf-mould. I thought you might know where.’

‘You mean,’ Woody said, concentrating, ‘the
first
house was not – where the house is now?’

‘That’s right,’ said Nathan. ‘Sorry if I sounded muddling. It would only be a few bits of wall, perhaps not even that. Just lumps in the ground where the foundations were. I went to see a Roman villa once and there were no walls, just floors, buried under the soil, and when they scraped it off they found wonderful pictures in mosaic. This place might be a bit like that, though I don’t know if it’s Roman, and I don’t suppose there are any mosaics. The Thorns can trace their ancestors back to the Saxons or even further, according to my uncle. He says there are records of someone called Turnus, which is also spelt T-H-Y-R-N-U-S, in – I think – 400 AD, and that’s meant to be Thorn Latinized, because people often Latinized their names in those days, if they
were grand enough. Of course, Thorn could be Thymus anglicized, I suppose.’

‘I don’t do spelling,’ Woody admitted cautiously. ‘What is AD?’

‘It’s Anno Domini, the year of Christ’s birth. It’s how we count time. AD was over two thousand years ago.’

‘I don’t count very well either,’ Woody murmured. ‘I can do up to twenty-three, but –’

‘Why twenty-three?’

The woodwose wriggled an assortment of fingers and toes.

‘
I
see,’ Nathan said. He realized Woody was distressed, and added hastily: ‘It doesn’t matter. If we have to count anything, I’ll do it. The thing is, you know the woods. I thought you might know of a place where there were odd ridges in the ground, or something like that.’

‘I know,’ Woody said. ‘But I don’t go there much. It’s in the Darkwood. I don’t like it there. The trees grow twisted, as if they are afraid of the sun, and the river changes its course, and at night there are strange creakings and whisperings, and I have seen shadows move where there was no movement to cast a shadow.’

‘Whisperings?’ Nathan said, remembering the snake-murmurs in the chapel, which reached even to his dreams. ‘You mean – voices? What do they say?’

‘Nothing,’ Woody replied. ‘Nothing I can hear. They just whisper. Swss – swss – ss. A hissy sort of sound. No proper words. And once I heard thumping noises, coming from underground.’

‘Maybe there’s a badger’s sett,’ Nathan suggested.

‘Not badgers. Smell’s wrong. Badgers smell animal, rank, very strong. No animal smells in the Darkwood. More like a tingle than a smell. A tingle in my nose.’

‘Like a sneeze?’

Woody shook his head decisively. ‘A different kind of tingle. A tingle that means something bad, or maybe not bad, something peculiar – like what you said.’

‘Something weird,’ Nathan said, recollecting their former conversation.

‘I think so.’ Woody still wasn’t sure about the meaning of
weird
.

‘Can you take me to this place? There could be secrets buried there – the injunction, or something else. Something that thumps. Anyway, we have to see. And it’s not dark now; it won’t be dark for ages. We’ll be quite safe.’ He concluded, optimistically: ‘I’ll look after you.’

Woody seemed to accept this, with reservations. ‘We go there quickly, and leave quickly,’ he insisted. ‘The Darkwood is unfriendly, even to me. Old memories linger there, bad memories.’

‘The trees remember?’ Nathan asked, thinking vaguely of Ents.

‘Memories remember,’ said Woody. ‘Leaves dying turn to leaf-mould, trees to wood-rot. Always something left. Memories lie thick in the Darkwood, like the leaves of many seasons. Things can grow from the memories, as seeds grow from the woodland floor. Bad memories breed bad spirits.’

‘I’ve been to the Darkwood often,’ Nathan said. ‘I’ve never sensed any danger, not
real
danger.’ Except in the buried chapel …

‘You haven’t been to this place,’ Woody said with confidence. ‘I would know.’

‘Let’s go quickly then.’

Woody took him at his word, flickering ahead between the trees like something with little more substance than a leaf-shadow. When Nathan was very young, Woody had always
led him carefully away from the garden, holding his hand, helping him if his clothes snagged on twig or briar; but now he kept well in front of his companion, pausing only rarely to let him catch up. Several times Nathan had to call to him to wait. They were far from any path and as they penetrated the Darkwood low branches reached out to trip him, netted stems snarled his ankles. On his previous explorations he had always chosen the most open route, but Woody was undeterred by the undergrowth: his thin body slid through every tangle. As they plunged deeper down the valley the sun went in, or was cut off by a shoulder of hill, and the trees closed over them. In the dimness it grew harder for Nathan to see his guide, unless Woody turned and motioned to him with a quick, nervous gesture. Normally sure-footed, the boy stumbled over tree-roots and slithered down sudden steeps in a flurry of dead leaves. Then the woodwose stopped abruptly in the lee of a tree-trunk begreened with moss. ‘We must be careful now,’ he said, ‘and quiet.’

‘Who is there to hear us?’ Nathan asked; but Woody did not answer.

They moved forward very cautiously now. The boy made out a ridge in the woodland floor, running too straight for nature into a jungle of briar. He tried to follow it but Woody caught his wrist and pulled him on. They came to another ridge beyond where the ground fell away for a few feet. Peering down, Nathan saw the short drop was almost sheer, as if it had been shaped by a wall. Or maybe the wall was there still, under leaf and moss and root-tendril. ‘That tree was uprooted in a storm last winter,’ Woody indicated an upturned bole some way below. ‘The earth slipped. Lots of earth. Then it was like this.’

‘I’m going to climb down,’ Nathan said. ‘I want to look closer.’

‘No!’ Woody hissed. ‘You will disturb things. Memories – or worse. We come quickly, go quickly. You promised.’

‘I must look,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s what we came for.’

He swung his legs over the edge, and jumped down. It looked an unlikely spot to find a missing injunction, but he had forgotten about that in the excitement of discovering the place where the first Thorns had lived; an eager curiosity drove him on. He explored the slope with his hands, pushing aside nettle and briar-twig, getting scratched and stung. He could feel a network of fine tubers stiffening the soil. Remembering how the chapel had been concealed, he probed in between with his fingers, sensing a loosening in the earth. There was a sound from Woody – a kind of stifled whimper – and he glanced up; but his friend had gone. Something like a zephyr moved across the wood floor towards him, eddying the leaves, shuddering a low-slung branch. The treetops did not even quiver; whatever it was travelled only on the ground, invisible, rippling the undergrowth like a serpent. There was a faint rustling which might have been grass-stems rubbing together, but wasn’t. Then it swelled to a whisper of many voices, wordless yet filled with unknown words – a whisper that drew swiftly nearer, coiling across the ground, like yet unlike the whisper in the chapel, softer, colder, more deadly … Nathan backed away from the earth-wall and began to run, down the slope at first and then pausing, knowing that was foolish, veering right and uphill again. He didn’t look round but the pursuing whisper always seemed to be just behind him, close as his own shadow. He didn’t know what had happened to Woody. Cricket and rugby had made him fit but he fell once, setting his foot on a rolling piece of log, shortening his breath, and even when the whisper failed fear still followed him, urging him to panic, blocking
out thought and sense. When at last he came to a halt, panting and exhausted, he was back in Thornyhill woods but far from the house, and a distant bend in a road showed through the trees. He looked all round, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, and the birds were singing again, and the sun had returned. He called: ‘Woody! Woody!’ but the woodwose did not reappear. He said: ‘You were right. I’m sorry,’ hoping the apology would reach the ears for which it was intended, and set off walking slowly back to the house, keeping parallel with the road, thinking and thinking.