The Changeling (8 page)

Mrs. Smith had painted a great deal more tree into the picture than was really there. Limbs and branches came from everywhere filling most of the canvas with mysterious green and leafy swirls. Out of the sea of green only faces and hands stood out plainly, glowing with a strange light that was also faintly tinged with a bright soft green.

When Martha and Ivy were finally allowed to look at the finished picture, they were amazed and de lighted.

“We
do
look beautiful, don’t we?” Martha whispered to Ivy, and Ivy nodded.

“We look like we were part of the tree,” she said. “I mean, as if we lived up there and never came down to earth.”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Smith said.

The game of the Tree People started soon after that, and probably the painting had something to do with it. But if the inspiration for the game came from the painting, the real beginning didn’t come until one afternoon sometime later, halfway up one of the oak trees in Bent Oaks Grove.

Martha and Ivy had always played in the oak trees. They were perfect trees for climbing, with their wide heavy branches and the easy slope of many of their bent limbs. And, of course, Ivy was already a very practiced tree climber. Aunt Evaline’s house in Harley’s Crossing was right at the edge of a forest, and Ivy said that she had started climbing trees almost before she had learned to walk. Now, at Bent Oaks, she could walk up sloping branches standing erect, with her arms held out for balance and her bare feet sure and steady on the rough bark. Sometimes she even did a kind of dance on the wide lower branches, bending and swaying easily and smoothly with a control and balance that seemed almost magic to Martha.

Of course, Martha couldn’t begin to do everything that Ivy did, but she kept trying, and little by little she improved. It became easier as she worked at it, and the fact that she had begun to lose weight helped some, too. Finally she could follow Ivy to most of the special places in the Bent Oaks. All the special places had names by then—The Lookout, Falcon’s Roost, Far Tower, and the Doorway to Space.

The afternoon that the Tree People began, Martha was swinging in one of the rope swings when she looked up and saw Ivy walking down a limb towards her. She was barefooted and her skirt was tucked into the legs of her underpants as usual, but she had her sweater tied around her shoulders like a cape and her hair was full of leaves twisted into a green crown. But even without the costume, Martha would have known by her face that she was somebody else.

“Who are you?” Martha called.

“I am a princess from the Land of the Green Sky,” Ivy said. “I have discovered the Doorway to Space, and any moment now I will be on the Treeway that leads to the planet Earth.”

“At any moment” was a phrase that Ivy used a lot. She was always saying that “at any moment” this or that might be going to happen. But what Martha and Ivy didn’t realize as they began to develop their knowledge of the marvelous Land of the Green Sky and the people who lived there, was that “at any moment” their time together was going to be over—for two long years.

One day Ivy didn’t come to play at Bent Oaks when Martha expected her, and the next day at school Martha heard that the Carsons had gone away. And that was all—for two long years.

The two years when you are eight and nine are two of the longest years in anybody’s life, and they were particularly long for Martha. She still rode, and Mrs. Smith went on being a very special friend; but at home, Martha went back to dead center. At least that’s the way it seemed in comparison to the hurricane existence of the other Abbotts. All around Martha’s quiet dead center of books and daydreams, went promotions to vice president, golf tournaments, projects, campaigns, and social events—along with daily flocks of older boys and girls, friends of Tom and Cath, trailing behind them noisy slip-streams of talk about dances, games, parties and the opposite sex.

Sometimes Martha made a new friend, but never one who was just right, or who lasted very long. She cried less, those two years, and the dark wasn’t so frightening; but a lot of things that seemed as simple as breathing to other people, still seemed as far away as the stars for Martha.

The Abbott household was full of stars. Martha’s mother and father had won things and led things and been the best at things, all their lives. Cath, of course, had always shone at everything—and in junior high she was more of a star than ever. She was chosen class president, won first prize in the science fair, and was even the first girl in her gang to get a figure. Tom, besides being absolutely everybody’s friend and favorite person, was a star in little league, and then he was quarterback of the touch football team.

But even though Tom was just as much a star as the other Abbotts, he always seemed a little more reachable to Martha. There was one day, for instance, when Martha stumbled into Tom lying in the grass behind the garage, with his arms across his face. He looked strange, flushed and puffy. Martha asked him if he was all right.

“Sure,” he said, turning his face away. “I feel great. Just great.”

“You don’t look very good,” Martha said.

“Look Marty. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Martha sat down in the grass beside Tom and waited. After a moment Tom looked at her and grinned a sour kind of grin and said, “That is, there’s nothing wrong with me except I’m probably the world’s worst quarterback. I threw a really stupid pass at the game today, and the coach yanked me out and yelled at me in front of everybody. And he kept me out all the rest of the game, too. And then on the way home Dad read me out all over again.” Tom made a stern face and said, “If you’d just listened to what I’ve been telling you about that play, Son, that would never have happened.”

Martha giggled at Tom’s imitation, and Tom grinned back. He asked Martha what she was doing, and when she said she was just on her way to sit in the grass and read
Wind in the Willows
for the third time, Tom asked her if she’d like to play a game of
Monopoly.
Martha didn’t think she liked
Monopoly
much, but she said okay. Tom and his friends had a
Monopoly
fad going and, considering the amount of time they’d been spending on it, Martha thought it must be better than it looked.

That day she had a run of beginner’s luck and lit on all the right things. She could have absolutely wiped Tom out if she’d tried, but she didn’t much want to. Taking someone’s money and houses away seemed like an awful way to win. When Tom finally lit on her most expensive property she said, “Look, Tom. Let’s pretend that I was out of town and I just asked you to stay there and take care of the hotel, and you didn’t have to pay the rent.”

But Tom laughed and said, “You are really crazy, Marty Mouse. This game is
Monopoly,
not Make-Believe. You have to stick to the rules or it spoils everything. Someday you’re going to have to learn how to play some real games.”

When Martha asked why, he laughed harder; but she really meant it. She really couldn’t understand why it was more fun to always stick to somebody else’s rules.

After Ivy had been gone almost a year, the Carsons came back to Rosewood Hills; but Ivy didn’t come with them. Instead, Martha got a letter from Harley’s Crossing. Aunt Evaline was better and back at home, and Ivy had gone to live with her again. Ivy never wrote to Martha while she was with her family. She never said why, but Martha suspected that her father wouldn’t let her. When the Carsons left Rosewood Hills, they never left a forwarding address, and there were usually good reasons why they didn’t want to be found for a while. But once Ivy was with Aunt Evaline, she wrote every now and then. Her letters were as strange as she was, with no beginnings and no ends, at least not the kind most people write. Usually they said things like:

Dear Martha. There is a nest under our table. We think that at least one of the eggs is going to be something very unusual. I will let you know if it does. LOVE—LOVE—LOVE ivy.

Martha thought about that one for a long time. She tried to picture a nest under the various tables in the Abbott house and finally decided it must be an outdoor table—Ivy had said that she and Aunt Evaline did a lot of things outdoors. But that still left a lot of questions unanswered; and they didn’t get answered, because the next letter was about something else.

Hello. I am studying to be a dancer, again. At Last. I know I didn’t finish being a dancer last time because I know I am still one inside. My teacher is very old and once she danced before a king. I will too, someday. LOVE—LOVE—LOVE ivy.

Then, at last, after Martha had already started the fifth grade, the phone rang and it was Ivy; she was back in Rosewood Hills.

I
VY WAS BACK BECAUSE
Aunt Evaline had been very sick again and had been sent away to a rest home. Ivy wanted to know if Martha could meet her in Bent Oaks Grove. It was a Saturday, so Martha said she was going for a walk and then she ran all the way to the grove. She reached the stone gate towers completely out of breath, but Ivy was there before her.

Ivy seemed hardly changed at all. Perhaps she was a little taller, and her hair was longer. Instead of flying loose, it was braided in one wide braid that hung down her back so far that she could sit on the end of it. But all around her face little wisps escaped, as wild as ever, making curly black petals for her dark flower face. She was still very thin.

She noticed that Martha was thinner, too, right away. “You’re much thinner,” she said, “and you have bands on your teeth, and your hair is longer and yellower. When your mouth is shut, you look like a Viking Princess.” Martha thought about that every time she looked in the mirror for a long time. No one had ever said anything so interesting about Martha’s looks before.

“What was it like at Aunt Evaline’s?” Martha asked.

“Just like always,” Ivy said. “Except Aunt Evaline isn’t very strong anymore. The woods are the same, and the river, and some of our friends. The best new thing was the dancing lessons.” Ivy’s face always seemed to be lit from inside when she talked about dancing. “There’s this old lady in Harley’s Crossing. Aunt Evaline has known her for years and years. Her name is Mrs. W., because nobody has time to say her whole name. Anyway, she was a very great ballet dancer when she was young. She’s too old to even do much teaching, but because of being Aunt Evaline’s friend, she started giving me lessons last year. So now I’m a dancer again.”

“Again?” Martha asked.

“In this reincarnation,” Ivy said. “Remember, I told you about how I knew I was one before.”

“Oh, yes.” Martha said. Then, after a while, she asked “Now that you’re a dancer, are you a changeling anymore?” She was pretty sure what the answer would be, but it seemed important to hear Ivy say it.

Ivy said, “Don’t be silly. You’re either a changeling or you’re not.” And Martha felt strangely relieved. She didn’t know exactly why, but she knew that that was one thing she didn’t want to change.

“What have you been doing?” Ivy asked.

“Not much,” Martha said. “I still go to the stables quite a bit. Fifth grade is pretty good. I read a lot of books.”

“Did you come here very much while I was gone?”

“No. I stopped and looked around sometimes on the way to the stables, but I didn’t stay long. It’s not so good alone.”

“Alone?” Ivy said. “Did you forget about the Tree People?”

Martha almost had. After all, they had only begun to learn about the Tree People when Ivy went away. But now that Ivy was back, the whole thing started up again right where it left off.

The Tree People lived on another planet that they called the Land of the Green Sky. On their planet all of the land was covered by enormous trees that grew hundreds and hundreds of feet into the air; and the thick roots of the trees were woven together in a great solid floor that completely, or almost completely, covered the ground. The Tree People were very beautiful and good. Their skin was pale green, and their hair was darker green and blossomed with flowers. They lived in softly rocking tree houses and traveled from place to place on highways that were the broad lower branches of their forest world. They lived on fruits and nuts that grew everywhere, and their pets were tiny bright-colored monkeys and singing birds. Although the Tree People couldn’t fly, the gravity was not very strong on their planet, and they could glide like blowing leaves from the higher levels to the lower ones.

However, the good and beautiful Tree People had very terrible enemies, who lived underground beneath the interwoven roots of the great trees. They were called the Lower Ones, and they were very cruel and ugly. Then, because of the death of one of the tree roots, a hole was formed in the wall between the two worlds, and the invasion of the Lower Ones began. Down in the great caves in which they lived, the Lower Ones had discovered the secrets of a powerful dark magic; and by using this magic they were able to turn some of their people into other forms. By doing this, they were sometimes able to kill or capture the leaders of the Tree People. In time the beautiful Land of the Green Sky could be conquered and ruled by the Lords of the Lower Level.

Martha and Ivy invented and played the Tree People game in many places, but most often up among the wide branches of the trees of Bent Oaks Grove. Sometimes they played themselves, Martha and Ivy, Earthlings who had discovered the Doorway to Space, and were able to travel to the Planet of the Green Sky to help the Tree People in their fight against the Lower Ones. At other times they played the roles of such Tree People as Prince Willow, the handsome but weak prince, whose careless killing of a singing bird had caused all the trouble in the first place. Nothing was ever killed under the green sky, and there was a curse on bloodshedding, so that the blood of the dying bird, falling down onto the root of a tree had made it die, leaving an opening for the Lower Ones to enter the land.

There was also Princess Wisteria, the good green princess, and Lord Lilac, the kind but rather foolish advisor to the royal children. And then there were the Pretenders—Lord Hemlock and Queen Oleander and their daughter Princess Mistletoe—who were all, in reality, transformed Lower Ones. In fact, in the evil days after the death of the bird, the Land of the Green Sky was full of Pretenders—lovely green people who were hiding their true squat and scaly shapes behind the dark magic of the wizards of the Lower Lands. These Pretenders could only be detected by the fact that their beautiful emerald eyes were blank and color blind because they did not really use them for seeing, as true Tree People did. The Lower Ones saw only by means of an internal radar that perceived shapes and surfaces even in the dark, but could not see colors even in brightest daylight.