The Radiant Road (25 page)

She stretched her hands out to touch both walls as she walked, tracing carvings as she went, feeling the faint heat on her damp face, following sighing breath and the animal scent of sweat not her own. The passage turned and twisted. Clare followed in the dark. She didn't peek. She didn't count the time. She didn't look back.

Over the next few minutes, the passage widened until she could no longer touch the walls on either side. The breathing sound grew louder, rasping and huffing spasmodically, and she could sense the great size of what huffed and rasped and sweated.

Her own eyes stayed closed. She put her hands, cold and trembling, out into the empty air before her. She could almost hear the beast's eye rolling in its head. She walked a few feet farther, stopped.

In the silence, Clare felt the heat from the beast's skin on her own; she was that close.

The creature took a sudden, wheezing breath, then gave a series of short, terrible cries of rage or anguish, so quick and furious they were like the barks of a mad dog.

Clare's eyes flew open.

A few yards away stood an enormous black shape, the size of a small elephant on its hind legs. Its head was the head of a great black bull, wide forehead narrowing down the muzzle to wet black nostrils. Beneath the two yellow, curving, sharp-pointed horns, his small eyes rolled in panic or fury, the whites wet and twitching.

The monster's head and shoulders were a bull's: but below the shoulders, the monster was made like an enormous man, arms twisted with ropy muscles, broad chest bulging. Above the waist his skin was shiny and black as a sea creature, slick as a whale or seal.
Below the waist he was covered in coarse dark hair. From head to toe he was a deeper black than the night sky, and instead of feet, he stood upon the hooves of a great bull.

Stumbling backward, Clare found her back pressed against a wall almost immediately. She turned, but the passage that had led her here had vanished. She and the monster were at the bottom of a high, circular stone enclosure, like a narrow, topless tower, or a dry well, nothing above them but the cloudless, pale blue-violet fairy sky. This was the center of the labyrinth.

All brave and strengthening thoughts of saving the tree and the fairy roads, of making it up somehow to Finn, all of those vanished. If she could have run, she would have, for she had no chance against this beast and was certainly about to die. But there was nowhere to run, and her legs felt too weak to run.

“Help,” she whispered to the air. “Help, help, help.”

As if in answer, a soft voice floated high above the heads of Clare and her monster—a soft, disappointed voice.

“But you're cheating,” it said sadly.

Pressed against the wall, Clare laughed a single wild laugh.
Mad Clare.
Was she supposed to close her eyes again?

The beast gave a long, ominous bellow or groan.

She will fail.

She will die. Humans who try, die.

She is too young.

Oh well
, thought Clare, straightening up.
Closing my eyes worked before. And I don't think I'm so young.

She faced the beast, closed her eyes, and took a step forward.

His sweat. Her own sweat.

Another step.

His snuffling, chuffing breath, faster now; then a series of low barks. But now, with her eyes closed, Clare was no longer sure the barks were angry.

Another step.

Were the barks perhaps . . . fearful? But what could a beast be afraid of?

A last, smaller, frightened step. Her hand struck something: slick skin over hot flesh, muscle shifting under a huge, heaving side.

“Oh!” said Clare, aloud.

And now Clare did one of the most surprising things she had ever done: eyes closed, hands out, she put her arms around the beast.

Why? Because her eyes were closed, so her nose could smell sorrow's salt. Her ears could hear that the heaving breath was crying. Her hands felt the trembling beneath the smooth flesh.

She remembered the fairies saying:
It is angry with you.

But blinded, Clare knew they were wrong, they were all wrong.
My monster isn't angry. It's sad
.

“There you are,” said Clare gently, eyes still closed. “I see you now. I'm so sorry. It's all right. It's all right now. I'm here.”

The beast wept and wept.

Face pressed against the beast's hot, smooth side, Clare felt the heaves of the sobs, then felt them slow, and become the rhythms of rising and falling breath. She smelled the zoo smell of animal sweat and animal body.

She knew, with sudden certainty, that the fairies were wrong: Balor wasn't conquered by his beast. He stopped listening to it, he stopped seeing with it, and his beast went mad from loneliness and grief. She took a few steps backward, and opened her eyes again.

The beast gave a low, rough snort and shook its great bull head, back and forth, back and forth. Clare fought down the fear that came with opening her eyes.

“Beast,” she said, hesitant. “Can you talk?”

Clare's beast rolled its frightened or angry eye, and huffed its breath out again. It held its huge arms out from its side; it rocked back and forth on its hooves.

Those who try, die.

No. You choose the story you make.

“Beast,” she said. “I don't know what's right to do.”

The beast gave several desperate, wheezing grunts, then lifted one enormous arm in the air.
It's going to hit me
, thought Clare . . .
and then, with a shocked pang, she remembered that gesture. “It was you at Finn's Cap,” she said. “It was you.”

The beast huffed again and rolled its huge head, the horns slicing a double yellow semicircle in the half-light. A speck of white froth appeared on one black lip.

“I don't understand, and I'm afraid,” she cried. The beast turned angrily, clawing at himself, and Clare saw something glinting on his broad, midnight chest, something silver and spiky.

Something familiar.

From around his huge neck, the beast lifted a heavy, thick-linked silver chain. Dangling from the center was a silver star: her mother's star, the star she had lost at Finn's Cap. Only somehow—the
only somehow
of dreams—the star was much bigger now, with a bright diamond at its center, like a drop of rain in the center of a flower. Bigger, transfigured, but unmistakably her mother's star, and her own.

And somehow to see the beast wearing her star transformed the creature, for a moment, from a monster into a friend. Now, seeing the beast's raised arm, she remembered Finn's raised arm in the dreadlock and dancing dream. She saw the beast's gesture for what it was: not a threat, but an invitation. The beast was inviting her to dance. He was inviting her now, just as he had invited her as she woke from her dream at Finn's Cap.

“I do love to dance,” Finn had said. “They say I get it from my father.”

“Oh,
that
was the key!” said Clare, almost laughing. “
Dancing
was the key, and you were trying to show me!”

The beast made a long and slow sound, like someone blowing into a glass bottle. He took a step toward her, his hooves raising dust in the empty circle. He held out the silver chain. But when Clare stretched out her hand for it, he did not give it to her, but instead wrapped it carefully around her right wrist. The other end he wrapped around his own left wrist.

And somehow (somehow), the chain around her wrist was delicate again, the chain she had known all her life, while the chain around the beast was thick and heavy-linked still.

Between them, the diamond-hearted star twisted and dangled like a child between its parents.

Again, now, the beast stretched a long arm out to Clare, and she put her palm against his. The moment stretched long between them, and anxiety rose up in Clare like the clouds of dust raised by their feet:
Midsummer comes so soon.

Then, from far above them, came singing: a high, girlish voice, pure and sweet as spring.

For the rest of her life, Clare often tried to remember the words the yew-girl sang. She could recall certain phrases, and
sometimes almost remembered more, but never quite. They slipped away as a dream does. The one line that stayed with her, like a fragment of poetry, was this:
Know what roots know: there is only one tree.

Palm in palm, eyes closed, great bull head hung to one side, small red head hung to the other side, the beast and the girl bound together danced a circular dance, a fairy dance, in the violet light at the center of the labyrinth. They danced first facing each other, until their breath become one breath, and they knew they were one dancing creature. Then they turned and danced with their backs to each other, their eyes closed, their hands lifted to the clear sky. And Clare surrendered herself to the dance in a way she never had before, even with Finn, or even alone.

Because Clare's eyes were closed, she did not see that their dancing made a circular track, which became a circular dent in the dusty ground. She did not see that the dent became deeper, and the dirt inside the circle fell away.

But when the song stopped, and the beast and girl bound together opened their eyes, their dance had opened a door in the earth, into which a spiraling path descended out of sight.

“Clare, Clare,” called the high, sweet voice from above. “It's almost your birthday!”

Clare's stomach contracted. Her birthday, her first birthday, was
the day she must return with the flag. “We have to go,” she said to the beast, and took his hand more firmly in hers.

Together they descended the twisting, stony path, into a darkness as dense as black bread. Clare's eyes were open, though they might as well have been closed. But it seemed as though the beast could see, or found its way some other way than seeing.

As the spiraling slope descended, the floor became less rocky, became hard and smooth, and the walls around them had that same hard, warm smoothness: the walls were wood. She was just thinking,
What does that remind me of? Oh, my tree, my in-between, mine and Finn's,
when the path leveled off. It was as simple as that: Clare put out her foot to step down, and found level ground.

Now she and her beast moved together down a pitch-black passage, and she had the sense that the smooth wood passageway was contracting around them, growing lower and narrower the farther they walked. It was the darkest of all the tunnels she had known.
Oh please let us not be back in the labyrinth
, she thought.
Oh please let us be going the right way. Oh please let us get there soon.

Wherever
there
was, and however she would know it, when they reached it.

But if the passageway was contracting, then Clare and her beast must be getting smaller, too, for the passage never closed on them entirely. At its narrowest point, when there was barely room for
her and her beast to stand together, the passage turned sharply and stopped.

There was light here—not a lot, but enough to see her horned and bull-headed beast, the dull gleam of its skin. Enough to see that their way was blocked by an iron gate. No lock, nor lever, nor any way at all to open it, as far as Clare could see. Her hand in the beast's tightened in despair. Had they been going the wrong way this whole time? Was there time to trace their way back?

Clare put her hand to the gate and tried to shake it. The gate—its iron elaborately wrought into dozens of little crowned figures, vine-wreathed kings and queens bowing, offering one another flowers, in ornate repeating patterns—did not move even a quarter inch. “It's iron,” she said, “so we must not be in Timeless.” Though where they were, she couldn't guess.

Now the beast, too, put his great, hairy hand to the gate, but lightly, not gripping. He caressed the iron delicately and gave a low, almost musical moan.

The gate began to move. No: the gate began to liquefy. The little iron kings and queens elongated, bent, bowed, straightened. They began to move backward, pulling the scrollwork back with them, like stagehands pulling back curtains.

Clare felt a familiar chill: a Strange chill. She paused at this threshold, looking at her beast.

“That was a fairy-making,” she said. It was not a question. Then, with slow understanding: “Oh, but . . . oh. It was you. You made that totem out of fireflies. You were warning me.”

Although she was never sure he understood her words, the beast turned to her gravely and inclined his huge horned head.

My beast can make the way the fairies do.
Someone had said that a beast can only speak through pain or pleasure or making. The question, she saw, is whether it will make alone in fear and confusion, or together, in a sort of dance with you.

“You probably don't understand this,” Clare said to her beast, “and I don't have time to say it the way I ought to. But I'm so sorry we've been apart so long.” Then she took up his hand again, and together they walked through the gate,

They found themselves in a dimly lit forest clearing, surrounded by ancient, bent trees with dark green leaves. Clare looked to the sky for a clue, but above them the dimness simply disappeared into darkness. She could not even tell if they were inside or out.

The beast pulled at her hand, and they took a few steps farther in. At the center of the clearing stood a low stone well, choked with dead leaves.

Above the well, hanging upside down from the branch of a tree, was a little girl with long green hair.

The Yew and the Beast

The upside-down girl was brown as a tree, dark brown, except for the dark green hair that dangled into the well. Her rough pants and shirt were the color of olive leaves. Skin the color of wood, hair flowing evergreen—but her eyes: her eyes were white as clouds, pure white. She was blind.

Clare and her beast, still bound at the wrist, walked through the clearing to the well. The closer they came, the more familiar everything seemed to Clare, till by the time she was standing near the girl she almost laughed, or maybe cried. She knew this girl, of course she did. But her heart was so full and so tender, all she could say was, “You're my yew.”

The yew-girl smiled radiantly through swollen eyes and dried tears. She had been crying for a long time. “You came,” she said. “You came, I knew you'd come, but then I thought you wouldn't, but then you did.”

“Are you all right?” asked Clare. Her heart felt wet and gold as a sunrise. “Can I help you down? Did Balor hang you up here?”

The yew-girl laughed a hoarse, crying-too-long laugh. “No, of course not. I like to hang upside down. I'm good at it.” She reached
past Clare and put a small hand to the beast's arm. “Hello, Asterion,” the yew-girl said. “I missed you a lot.”

The beast bent low, and pushed his head against the yew-girl's hand. She pulled gently on one of his horns.

Asterion
. He had a name. Clare looked up at the beast and squeezed his hand. Then she sat at the edge of the well, lightly stroking a lock of the girl's green hair with her free hand. “I'm so glad I found you. Because, listen, I'm going to help you, and help—just everybody. That's why I'm here. I need to unlock this gate—do you know what I mean by that? I think you do—and get to the in-between. In the tree. And I have to really hurry.”

During this speech, the upside-down girl's face fell. At the end, she shook her head vigorously, so that the long green hair flew around her face. “No,” she said. “No. You just got here. You can't leave already. Don't you want to play first?”

Clare hesitated. “I do want to play,” she said, “only I don't have time right now. I'm sorry.”

The yew-girl's lip trembled. “But you haven't been here in so long. You used to come all the time, but you haven't come in so long. And since that bad thing happened . . .” She stopped, and her arms wrapped around herself, her small shoulders drew together as if to protect her heart. “Since that bad thing happened, I've been all alone. I can't find anyone. Everywhere my roots try to go is a wall. I can't find all my other trees, I can't even find my ocean grandma. I
was all alone!” And now she was crying, big round tears spattering down to moisten dead leaves. “And no one was here but Asterion, and we missed you! And then he was gone, too!”

“I'm sorry,” said Clare miserably. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know. I'm trying to fix it. That's why I have to get into the—”

“Well, anyway you
can't
go to the in-between,” said the yew-girl, her wet face darkening, “because the well is dry.” Without warning, she grabbed the branch she hung from, flipped over to land on her feet, and walked blindly and surely around Clare to take the beast's—Asterion's—free hand. “So I guess you might as well stay and play. Or at least tell stories. I know a good place for that.”

Clare sensed she had met someone as stubborn as she was. Defeated for now, she followed the beast and the child to one of the ancient trees surrounding the clearing.

“If I had the key to this gate,” said Clare as they walked, “then I could get to the in-between. Do you know the key? Could you maybe just, tell me?”

The girl dropped to the ground and made herself comfortable against a broad trunk. The beast lowered himself beside her, and Clare sank to her knees on his other side.

“If I could tell you,” said the girl primly, “I would not, because that would be cheating. But how could I? Keys cannot be said. Do you not know
keys
?”

“I know a little about keys,” said mortified Clare. To herself:
Then remember: Hurrying doesn't help.

So Clare made an effort to slow her racing mind. She listened to the girl croon, “Asterion, Asterion,” as she stroked the beast's arm. And when the beast bent his great head to lay it gently on the girl's lap, Clare slid closer, her hand still in his, their wrists still bound, and curled against his obsidian-black side.

The girl stroked the beast's horns. “He is tired,” she said, “and so are you.”

“I didn't know he had a name,” said Clare. She repressed a yawn. She was tired, and this slowing down to listen, the only way to find a key, had made her so much more aware of how tired she was.

“His name means ‘star,'” said the girl. She turned a wide smile and pearly eyes to Clare. “And so now, stories. I love this tree for telling stories. First I will, because mine will be a bedtime story, and you will fall asleep.”

“Oh no,” said Clare, sitting up. “I don't have time to sleep. I really can't.”

The yew-girl's mouth turned down and her blind eyes shifted down. “Yes,” she said. “You have to sleep.”

“But why?”

“Because you're
tired
.”

“But if I don't get through this gate in time, the gate could be
closed forever. Then you'll be lonely forever,” added Clare, feeling that this was mean to say, but that she had no choice.

The stubborn yew-girl simply turned her back. “I'm going to tell my
bedtime
story,” she said. “So you have to go to
bed
.”

Clare tried to persuade the girl, who would neither turn to Clare, nor answer, nor give any sign of having heard. After several minutes, in a frustration near despair, Clare said, “All right, all right, I can try to sleep, but only for a little bit, okay? A very short nap. Is that okay?”

The yew lifted her head and smiled. “You will sleep as long as you must,” she said, “because it's a very good story.”

So Clare curled up again, her head against the side of her great beast, smelling the salt and pleasant sweat of him. His side moved slowly up and down, because he was already asleep, Asterion was. And almost as soon as she lay down, Clare's body too felt heavy as sand, and she listened to the girl's story in a kind of drowse.

“Once upon a time,” the yew-girl began, “a tree stood in a forest. It was an old, rich forest, rich with death: with fruits dropped and decayed on the ground, and bird messes, and dying grass—all the deaths large and small that make a forest rich, and make the roots beneath it strong and supple.”

Weird beginning to a bedtime story
, Clare thought sleepily.

“One day, a hunting party came through the forest. As they passed beneath the oldest and wisest tree, a child trailing behind the others picked up a stick from the ground and threw it at a squirrel sitting underneath the tree, guarding a cache of nuts. The stick was aimed too well, and put out the squirrel's eye.”

Something inside Clare twisted, and her eyes opened.

“The child did not even notice that the stick had hit so true, and ran to catch up with the hunting party. But the tree heard the squirrel weeping and said, ‘Why don't you borrow the moon for your eye?'

“The squirrel replied, ‘There is no moon tonight, only a black hole against the sky, like the hole where my eye should be.'

“‘That's right,' said the tree. ‘But when the moon turns again, as it must, then you will have a new eye.'

“The squirrel said, ‘I am not tall enough to reach the moon.'

“The tree said, ‘I am tall enough. Climb to my highest branches and see if you can reach it.'

“In those days, squirrels lived on the ground and didn't climb trees. So this was hard for a squirrel, especially one so recently injured. But the tree urged him on the whole way, saying, ‘Don't delay—once your eye has healed over the wound, it will be too late.'

“So the squirrel climbed the highest branches, and plucked the tiny sliver of moon from the sky, and placed it in the wound where
his eye had been. And it worked! The squirrel had two eyes again. Afterward he and the tree became best friends, and the squirrel learned to scramble among its branches as easily as squirrels do now. And ever since, trees and squirrels . . .” The yew-girl trailed off. “Clare?” she said. “Are you crying? It isn't a sad story.”

“No,” said Clare damply, her face hidden.

“
Was
the story sad?”

“Only I wish it were true,” said Clare, her words muffled into the warm side of her beast, her hand still clinging to his open, soft, sleeping hand, “oh, I wish it were true, and not just a story.”

“Oh well, it is true,” said the yew-girl confidently. “All my stories are true.”

Clare choked out a small laugh. “I don't think so,” she said. “A tree tall enough to reach the moon is definitely just a story, I'm sorry. But if it did exist,” she added with passion, “I would find it, I would.”

“It
does
exist,” said the yew-girl, with exaggerated patience. “It's in my
story
. And anyway you wouldn't need a tree like that, to reach the moon. You have Asterion.” She yawned prodigiously. “So that was a bedtime story; so now let's go to sleep.”

Clare, with her own painful wound no moon could heal, and with her terror of the clock ticking away somewhere, the clock she couldn't see, knew with certainty that she would never sleep.

But the long, soft sighs of the girl and the beast nestled around
her slowed her own breathing, and called back the drowsiness. Little stabs of anxiety jolted her from time to time, but soon even those faded away, and she was dreaming.

And, as had been true all her life—only she had never known it before—Clare and the beast dreamed together, hand in hand.

Clare and the beast dreamed that they were an old woman and a golden lion who walked together along a river at dusk.

The old woman wore a long green coat with wooden buttons. Her white hair moved lightly around her face, and her breath came in puffs of white. She felt taller and bigger than she had as almost-fifteen Clare, also softer in some places, harder in others. Her hands felt knobby and stiff. Her right shoulder ached sharply, and her legs felt thick and slow beneath her. But she also felt great calm.

Old-woman Clare stopped beside the dark, swirling river. The golden lion stood on its hind paws, its huge warm face above her face like a great sun. They stood that way for long moments, a kind of embrace, the lion's forepaws crossed behind her neck as if he were placing something there. Clare felt the sweat and heat of the lion's flesh under the rough hide.

When the lion dropped back to its haunches, Clare found around her throat a soft collar of golden fur, surely part of the lion's
own mane. She stroked his head in gratitude. They looked out at the evening sky, translucent green and indigo, scudded with shadow-clouds. Old-woman Clare thought to herself:
I am old, and I have almost learned to ride the wind, like the birds, instead of plowing against it.
Old-woman Clare laughed.
But not quite.

An old man walked toward them, once-black hair now mixed with slushy gray. His hand rested on the neck of a tall white stag beside him. The old man wore dark glasses and a wry half smile. His half smile matched the half smile of the old woman.

“You found the inside,” said the old man.

“I did,” said the old woman, in her voice that was Clare's, yet rougher and lower than Clare's.

“There is deeper still to go,” said the old man.

“I know,” she said. “There always is.”

“There always will be,” he agreed.

Then he took her hand, and she put her other hand on his shoulder, and they danced. The lion and the stag sat side by side, watching them. His black coat was rough under her fingers, and the bones of his shoulder hard beneath it. His face was softened by time, but still and forever, from the day she was born, no face more familiar than his.