Under the Green Hill (18 page)

That's why they picked Rowan, Meg thought. If the queen had picked me, I'd have had sense enough to say no.

“When a person has been imprisoned by the fairies, there's always a way to get him back. The trick is finding it. Sometimes there's just one day each year when the captive's freedom can be won. Or you have to play a certain melody on a fiddle at midnight, or beat the fairies in a game of skittles, or trick the prisoner into wearing some piece of clothing inside out. The method is never the same. Mother did everything she could, racking her brain for lost memories from her ancestors, scouring our library for some text that might hold a clue. She followed the fairy rade when it trooped at Beltane, and though she saw my father riding among them, he didn't know her. Many times over the next seventy years, I saw him with the Seelie Court, dressed like them, proud and laughing, in jewels, amid the fairy ladies. But he did not hear me when I called out to him, and if I tried to touch him the whole court vanished.

“While my mother lived, she did all she could. She climbed to the top of the Green Hill and set it on fire. She threatened to renounce her Guardianship, sell the Rookery and the land on which the Green Hill stood, and let developers tear the whole forest down. It was only bluff, and the fairies knew that. However much she loved my father, however she yearned to have him near her again, she couldn't betray the obligation she'd inherited. She was the Guardian, mother of the next Guardian, and that was her first duty. It could not be set aside even for the sake of love.

“Chlorinda ran away when it seemed certain our father would never be saved. Mother hardly seemed to care…. Chlorinda had her own destiny. We heard from her a time or two, but she never returned to England. My mother—she died when I was twenty, made old before her time by loss and grief. I became the Guardian, with Lysander to aid me. And never, as seasons waxed and waned, as fields grew ripe and quick and barren winter followed harvest, never did I cease searching for a way to bring my father back.”

Phyllida looked at her hands where they lay in her lap. She was thrust back so far in the past, her own old body was a shock to her. Why, a moment ago, she'd been a girl, then a new bride. Now she stared at hands that could not possibly be hers, dry skin and gnarled knuckles, marked with spots and scars. How had they grown so old, when she could slip so easily back into the mind of her youth?

“How did the fairies capture him, in the end?” Meg asked, mercifully shattering Phyllida's reverie.

“Ah, that I never knew until five years ago, when he was returned to us. He said it was a trick, though I'm not so sure he could be tricked against his will. When he visited them that final night, the Seelie lady asked him once again to feast with her, and again he refused—for a man may pursue his pleasure without wishing to give up his freedom, his life. This time she did not draw him into the wild dance. She led him to a cave, a moldering, wet place with a carpet of moss and mushrooms growing out of the walls. ‘If you will not eat,' she said to him, ‘at least you can help prepare the feast.' She set him before a huge, deep cauldron that bubbled over a fire. ‘You must stir this, never ceasing, until I return,' she said, handing him a wooden spoon. ‘Then we will dance and make sport?' he asked. ‘When I return,' she replied, and left him.

“So he crouched before the cauldron and stirred the brew. He was sorely tempted to taste it, for it smelled at times like rich lamb stew, then like May wine with sweet woodruff and honey. But he didn't dare put the spoon to his lips. Yet, for the lady's sake, he stirred for what felt like forever, and the cauldron bubbled on. The pot was deep, the spoon short, and as he stirred he scalded his fingers in the boiling brew. Without thinking, he sucked on his fingers to cool them…and he was caught. It might have been an accident, though who can tell if a moment of carelessness is not in fact surrender to one's deepest desire? My father was gone, my mother's love was gone, and he lived with the fairies for seventy years. The rest of us grew old, but he existed in unchanging limbo in a land where the sun never rises, the moon never sets. The Green Hill was his home, the fairies were his companions, and we no longer mattered to him.”

“But you got him back,” Silly said cheerfully. To her it was just an exciting story. She couldn't fathom any pain that had happened decades before she was born.

“Aye, we got him back in the end, Lysander and I, thinking it wise. Seventy years to ferret out the secret, to discover the night and time when he would be vulnerable, when we could bring him back to his home. I learned the way from a creature who lives in a pond in these parts, a horrid, foul thing called Jenny Greenteeth. She lives alone in her murk, waiting for prey to come too near her shore. But though she is a lonely, wretched, bitter thing, she knows all the secrets of the wood. The water whispers them to her. She wanted me to bring her a child—she dearly loves to eat a child, but they all know by now not to go too near her pool. That I wouldn't do, even for my father's sake. In the end, she agreed to tell me if I brought her a lamb, a kid, and a calf, no more than a day old.”

Phyllida closed her eyes, remembering their screams as they were pulled into the water and devoured. “But she was true to her word—the fairies have to be.

“On the appointed night, Lysander and I waited at the crossroads for the fairy rade to pass. There were three fairy knights on horseback, each looking exactly alike, each with the face of my father. But Jenny Greenteeth had warned us about that. ‘First let pass the black,' she said, ‘and then let pass the brown. The man you seek will ride the milk-white steed.'

“We had only an instant as his horse went through the crossroads. We pulled him from his mount, and the two of us, old as we were, hardly had the strength to hold him down. He fought like a madman, calling out to the queen and her court to aid him, as though we were strangers to him. Perhaps we were strangers—how could he see the children he had known, through the cloak of years that had fallen on us? He wept and pleaded with us to let him go, then cursed and threatened us. He changed shape—for as the fairies' companion he had their powers. He changed into a serpent, and still we held strong, for we knew he couldn't harm us. Then into a bear he turned, grim and savage, and next to a snarling lion. He became a red-hot iron poker that seemed to burn us, but still we held, until, with sorrow in their faces, the fairies rode away, looking over their shoulders at the one they had loved.

“My father changed one last time. Gone were his fine clothes and jewels, and in their place moss and dried, crumbling leaves. For the fairy glamour had evaporated, and the illusion would not hold. That is the secret of the fairies, children—nothing that you see is as it appears. Nothing is real. For seventy years he had supped on toadstools and acorns, and thought them ambrosia. His silk and brocade garments were no more than tatters, his jewels bits of coal. And yet he had been happier there than as a mortal man. My father had been happy in that twilight world.

“With the glamour gone, he was a malnourished, ravaged carcass of a man, his hair tangled and his beard to his waist. I'd half expected him to crumble into dust, or have his years catch up with him all in a moment, like Oisin when he touched the ground after leaving Tir Na n-Og. But, no, my father stayed young, to all appearances the same man who had left his wife and children so many years ago.”

“His wife was gone,” Meg said, feeling Bran's pain with a pang that caught at her heart. “His little girl had grown old. How did he bear it?”

“When the fairy glamour had left him,” Phyllida said, “he fell into a stupor, and we carried him home to nurse him. It was ages before he spoke. At first he would take no food, and even the taste of our purest springwater made him retch. But he had been a strong man once, and even if he had no wish to live, his body took over and saved him although his mind preferred to drift away into nothingness. For weeks he lived as if this reality was no more than a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, and one day he would find himself again in the world of the fairies. Then there came a day when he was lucid, and knew me for his own child. And then he wept, and tore at his hair, and called out for his wife, who was so long dead. ‘Seventy years!' he lamented to the deaf heavens. ‘It cannot be. Just a few hours…I was only there a few hours….' Such is it always to the captives, that their bliss, however long, seems no more than an instant.

“When he was able to walk, and take a little nourishment, he went to my mother's grave and knelt there for an hour. Chlorinda was dead by then, too, though buried in America, and he had a horde of great-great-grandchildren—you four. He recovered fast enough, it seemed, and threw himself into work around the Rookery. Soon he looked just like he did when I was a child, handsome and robust. But he was a man out of his time. Though the Rookery was largely unchanged, all around him the world was a different place, with fast cars and computers and space flight. He's done his best to shut it out, but sometimes young Jack plays modern music on his radio, or a jet plane passes, and Bran will actually cringe, as though he was just waking from his seventy-year trance.

“He was so full of remorse for what he did to me and to my mother. For a time I tried to get him to talk about his years under the Green Hill. He's told me a little bit, though it pains him too much to talk about it. At first I believed this was because it was so terrible to him, that he should have been enjoying himself, all oblivious, while those who loved him suffered through his absence. I suppose that was part of it. But those few times he did speak of his captivity…his eyes glazed over, and his entire body would tremble with the memory of it. You cannot imagine the pleasures the fairies can bestow on those they favor! To go from that blissful world to this real one must be almost more shock than the mind can bear. Though to my face he curses the day he was carried away from his family, there are times when he will fall into a reverie, and I see that he would do almost anything to return to the fairies.”

Meg understood a little better that tearing bitterness of loss she'd seen in Bran in the cow barn. What's more, she realized what a dangerous opponent he truly was. He was fighting for something dearer to him than anything on this earth.

“Did he try to go back?” Meg asked.

“I thought he would, and I almost regretted bringing him home in the first place. After so many years, is it not more a punishment than a reward to fetch him back to a strange world—home, and yet not home; family, and yet not the family he remembers? Would it not be better, at this late stage, to let him languish in his sunless world, where, however false is his happiness, at least he is happy? Maybe I was selfish. All my life I longed to have my father restored to me. When I finally got the chance, I did not think I would be doing him a grave harm.

“He never returned to the fairies, and I think now that he couldn't. At least, not to the Seelie Court, where he made his home. Perhaps they viewed his return to me as a kind of betrayal, and this is his punishment, to be trapped in this world against his will, as I thought he was in the fairy world. Over the five years, the desire to go back under the Green Hill has become stronger. Oh, he won't confess it, yet I've seen him go to the woods, searching, no doubt, for a fragment of what he's lost. Since Lemman came, it's been even harder. When I asked him, he always swore he'd not go back even if he could. But now that the opportunity has been granted him, now that the bliss, or something like it, is again within his reach, it seems the temptation was too much. It is within the Black Prince's power to take Bran into his court. Whether he will or no, I cannot say. His offer must have been sweet enough to Bran's ears that he'd shed his kinsman's blood to win it.”

She sighed deeply and took Rowan's hand in her own. “That, Rowan, is why you must be on your guard with him. He fights for a treasure no man has ever tasted, to regain that which must be dearer to him than life—his own or another's. You fight for honor, and to live, but in your heart you have no wish to kill him. He will not be fighting under such a handicap. The lure of the fairies made him forget his loved ones once before, and now it has happened again. Be wary, Rowan, and be strong. If you would live, you must show him no mercy. He will have none for you.”

No one can know how Rowan spent the next three weeks as he prepared for battle. Oh, as far as his superficial actions, you can guess them fairly well—he trained and swung his sword and stretched his tendons, perfecting the skills that had come so easily over the preceding weeks. Every day Gul Ghillie met with him, only now, to help Rowan grow accustomed to fighting a grown man, he appeared as the Seelie prince. At first this threw Rowan completely off, for not only did his opponent strike from two feet higher than he was accustomed to, but he had a bearing such that Rowan felt constantly tempted to lay his sword down at his feet and swear his allegiance to the prince instead of fighting him. This, too, was a vital part of his training—to come at full force against someone whom he really didn't have any grudge against, whom he would befriend and admire if only circumstances were otherwise. It was indeed diabolically clever of the Black Prince to choose Bran as his champion.

This is all certain. What no one will ever know is what thoughts bounced around in Rowan's head those three weeks. Just what does a man feel when he knows that he will go marching forth against a formidable foe, that there's a very good chance he'll be killed, and, if not, that the only other outcome is that he'll have to kill someone? It is a situation many soldiers have found themselves in, and they get through it as best they can by a mixture of bluff confidence, joking bravado, and working their bodies so hard that their minds never manage to think too clearly or too long about what is to come.

These soldiers prepare for battles that are at once more uncertain—they don't know what will unfold, or whom, precisely, they will have to fight—and safer, for they are not the only combatants. Gul Ghillie had explained the Midsummer War in a bit more detail, and though it was true that all of the fairies would participate, Seelie Court against Host, the fairies would fight one another, leaving the field clear for the two humans to battle without interruption or interference. Whatever the fairy courts might accomplish among themselves, the ultimate victory would not be determined until one human lay dead.

One soldier among many usually expects to live. One man, fighting alone, is not afforded that luxury. Still, Rowan did not expect to fail. He was young, and youth can never brook defeat. Whether through wisdom or the callousness and confidence of youth, he thought only of the battle to come, and not its final moment.

Meg, on the other hand, waffled constantly between pride in her brother's obvious prowess and a terrible fear that always stalked her, and pounced, gripping her in its claws, when she least expected it. Ever since she'd first held the Hunter's Bow and felt the calmness of the glamour descend on her, she'd almost entirely given up trying to talk her brother out of the war. All the same, she could not quite shake the conviction that she should do something to stop it. Yet if she breathed so much as a word of opposition, Rowan only looked at her with a lofty sort of condescension, and Silly called her an old-lady worry-wart and told her to stop being such a girl. And so Meg, cowed by her siblings and swayed by the charm of her bow, held her tongue. But that did not stop her mind from silently reaching out for some opportunity to keep her brother from harm.

Occasionally she practiced with Rowan and Silly, though her archery had progressed so rapidly that hitting targets was tame. Gul Ghillie offered to take her hunting for waterfowl some morning, but this she steadfastly refused. Gul Ghillie had started to let the Morgans keep their weapons. Frequently, after a few minutes of shooting, she'd wander away from the training grounds, the Hunter's Bow unstrung and hung over her shoulder, where it bumped against her quiver, and find some sanctuary to pursue her fruitless musings. Most often she sought the Rookery roof, taking the secret path through fur coats and stoles, up the narrow blind staircase into the brilliantly illuminated crow's nest—or, rather, rook's nest.

The others never bothered with the roof anymore, and she was guaranteed to have it to herself. The morning before Midsummer, she was sitting there, safe above the world, lofty in the dread concerns none seemed to share. As she grew browner and more freckled in the noonday sun, she went once more over the possible solutions, dismissing each one in its turn, as she had before. She felt as frustrated as she sometimes did during math tests. She knew no new trick to solve the equation, and in desperation she revisited all those tired old failures just to see if she'd missed anything the first (and second and third and hundredth) time around. But she always arrived at the same unpleasant conclusion—unless Rowan changed his mind, she was powerless. Then she would fondle her bow, and forget for a time that she was worried at all.

She watched indifferently as, below her, Finn traveled (with many backward glances) toward the woods. She'd almost forgotten that he was a Rookery resident. He made himself scarce during the day, and when in the house he was often to be found in inexplicable confabulation with Dickie. When she bothered to think about either of them, it was with some wonder and vague satisfaction that they seemed to be friends. But she had so much else on her mind that neither Finn nor Dickie was a high priority.

She might have been dragged from her reverie if she'd known that Finn had been regularly spying on fairy life for the past few weeks. The seeing ointment worked like a charm, and Finn used it daily.

Now, if you or I had such a thing as a seeing ointment, we might be tempted to introduce ourselves pleasantly to all the fairies we met. But for all his faults, Finn was occasionally a very clever boy, and from what Dickie told him, and what he had gleaned himself from his bruising encounters with elf-shot, he had the notion that the fairies wouldn't be too pleased to find him spying.

Finn was an expert eavesdropper, and back in Arcadia he was as up as any local gossip on who was spending evenings away from home, or had just received a Mercedes from the parent of a failing student. And he knew without a doubt that the key to successful spying is remaining unobserved. He learned to be stealthy, to lurk behind doors and quietly lift telephone receivers and, yes, even crouch below windows.

In the fairies he was presented a unique and amusing opportunity. With the help of the ointment, he could see them, and even hear them, when they imagined themselves concealed. If they suspected he could see them, they'd pelt him with elf-shot or worse. But if he traipsed his merry way through the woods, seemingly oblivious of the assortment of fairies around him, they'd act as though he weren't there.

It was difficult, especially at first, to see green-skinned bogies and winged sprites and not react. It was even worse because they constantly mocked him, calling him unpleasant names and making rude faces. (They thought they were invisible, of course, but I think they would have behaved just as uncouthly if they'd known he could hear and see them. Some fairies have no manners.) He kept his countenance blank through the worst insults, and fixed his right eye, in which he'd daubed the ointment, on the heedless creatures, sucking down all he could learn.

Thus, he came to know more about fairies than the Morgans did. Though they were favored by the Seelie Court, they saw none of its inhabitants other than Gul Ghillie in his two guises, and occasionally the Rookery brownie or a passing diminutive garden-variety fairy. Finn, on the other hand, saw schools of Water-Leapers (rather like bat-winged tadpoles with scorpion tails and sharp teeth) splashing in the pond, with little blue women on their backs. He saw a line of red-capped Knockers marching off to some distant mine, and spied a trio of Kobolds tramping down a barley field. The hideous but harmless pig-faced Jimmy Squarefoot picked his nose unself-consciously under Finn's stare, and an itinerant hag gave him the evil eye as she passed. He saw tiny golden fairies fly like bees through blankets of St. John's wort, and watched a willow with a woman's face in its rough bark wade across the stream, its weeping branches held delicately up above the ripples. Through it all Finn kept silent, and never showed by any sign that he could see the fairies with one eye.

He heard marvelous things, too. One morning, as he sat on the rocky stream-bank, a fairy lady and gentleman passed him. Except for their rather archaic clothes, he'd have thought them as human as he was. But when he closed his right eye and looked only with his left, they were gone. The fellow wore snug breeches and hose, the woman a high-waisted dress of dotted muslin and a quaint little bonnet. They walked arm in arm, and as they drew nearer, Finn heard what they said.

“The brewer's wife has been delivered of a strapping wee laddie,” the fairy man said. “Bonnie gray eyes, I'm told, and golden curls.”

“Ah, it will be good to have a young one about the hill again. How long has it been since a fairy child was born here?”

“Nigh on three hundred years,” the man replied, then took the lady's hand and kissed it lightly. “You shall have your bairn, sweetheart. Tomorrow's new moon…I'll take him then. Have you fashioned the stock?”

“Aye,” she said, and pulled from the folds of her garment a wooden figure carved in the likeness of a newborn with a pained expression on its scrunched face. “Like the bonnie boy it will look, but seem to wither with illness in three days, then seem to die. The parents will bury no more than a lump of wood, while the babe thrives under the Green Hill.” The pair wandered on, and so Finn learned how fairies sometimes steal human babies, leaving the parents none the wiser.

On June 20, when Meg Morgan from her high perch spied him going off into the woods, Finn saw only two fairies, very small and unassuming, and to his mind not very interesting. At least at first. They were not beautiful, as were many of the flowery fairy maidens he saw, nor were they hideous enough to be fascinating. No, these were three feet tall and plainly dressed, except for a row of white feathers they'd attached in a line all along their sleeves.

Finn almost let them pass. This game, though enjoyable enough, was beginning to wear thin. He'd just about had enough of hobarts and hob goblins, of pixies and sprites, and was considering whether he ought to tell the Morgans gloatingly about the fairy ointment, and maybe, after letting them beg for a week, consent to share a bit—only a bit, mind you—with them. A great secret unshared can only hold its appeal for so long.

As far as he knew, they hadn't seen any fairies since that fabulous first night. He wasn't sure exactly what they got up to all day, but it seemed that they never even left the grounds. Apparently, that one night of disobedience had been enough for them, and they tamely heeded the Ashes' injunction against leaving the Rookery.

Finn's only grounds for complaint—and, indeed, the thing that had kept him from telling the Morgans about the seeing ointment weeks ago—was that in all his spying he had never laid eyes on that fabulous creature, the Fairy Queen. Several of the lesser lords and ladies of her court had on occasion passed through the woods, but he wished more than anything to behold that vision he'd glimpsed dimly in Jenny Greenteeth's pool. Each day, he searched for the Green Hill he'd seen in the vision, but the sacred tumulus remained steadfastly hidden even from his magically seeing right eye. Though he was still hoping for a sight of her that day, in the end he decided that two drab fairies were better than none at all, and he followed the feathered pair along a deer path through the forest.

When the fairies go about their business, it is almost as if we humans are the invisible ones. Perhaps they really can't see us unless they put their minds to it. In any case, they often don't pay attention to humans at all. Which is fortunate for us, because most fairy attentions are hazardous one way or another. These two didn't seem to notice that Finn was following them, and if they did, they were too secure in their invisibility to worry about him. Finn wandered down the deer trail at a leisurely pace, as though he were out taking a casual stroll, all the while keeping the fairies just in sight ahead of him. As he traveled, he fingered the jawbreaker candies he carried in his pocket as provender. The fairies walked for a few minutes, then stopped at the base of a papery-barked white birch.

One of them looked up into the tree's upper branches and called, “Stay yer hand, old lady. I'm a-coming up!” The tree seemed to shimmy in answer, and the other boosted his friend up to the first low branch. With some difficulty—for birches are not the best climbing trees—the fellow pulled himself into the canopy, where Finn, pretending not to look, could see the branches rustle. A while later, the feathered fairy slid back down the trunk, sending out a spray of silvery shreds of bark.

“Still up there, all right,” he said to his friend.

“Both of 'em?”

“Ye think I'd be so calm if they weren't? Two millennia, and I've never lost a life-egg yet.”

“Two little eggs in the woods…What if a polecat et 'em, eh? What if a storm blew 'em out o' the nest? What would happen in the Midsummer War then?”

“Micawber, ye daft fool! D'ye think the White-Handed Birch Lady would let man nor beast near the eggs? Why, I'd like to see the polecat that's man enough to climb 'er, that I would. She's only safe with the likes of us. Didn't I tell her I was a-coming up? She'll be quiet for a few minutes now, but woe to the soul who tries to climb her if she's a-riled. Don't you fret, Micawber. Them eggs is safe enough. Least, until tomorrow night. Then one of 'em's doomed, Birch Lady or no.”

“Have you caught sight of the Black Prince's champion? 'E's that fox-eyed feller as used to ride with the court. Never thought I'd see the day. His egg's the blue un.”

“Haven't seen him. Don't see much of the court these days, what with…” Here he lapsed into a long and not very interesting account of his journeys to the Fens, the rheumatism he got there, his cousins who dwelled there, and his very tedious trip home. Finn almost left, but he guessed that the fox-eyed feller must be Bran, and stayed to hear more.