Under the Green Hill (24 page)

“And the other fairies?”

“The oath of one is the oath of all. He will die easily enough of his own accord, without my help.”

A moment later, she burst into Rowan's room to find him awake and very cross-looking. “You mean I didn't even…” he was saying, then spied Meg. “You! Of all the nerve—”

“Later!” she said. “Bran's alive again, but he's dying. Lysander's going to split the ash tree. We need your help!” Phyllida and Silly hurried out, with Rowan following, looking confused and angry. There hadn't been time to answer all his questions, and he was still trying to sort out what was real and what was only a dream given to him by Lemman. In his mind, he'd fought heroically on the Green Hill. But Phyllida told him he'd shamefully (to his way of thinking) slept the night away while Meg took all the glory. He had never thought he needed saving, and now that Midsummer was past and the fairies no longer held his life in an egg, the noble warrior's heart he'd borrowed was replaced by the somewhat petty, childish, though fundamentally good one he'd started out with. He was annoyed with Meg, as if she'd kept him from playing some game, or broken a favorite toy.

Some of his testiness was knocked out of him when he saw Bran, stretched almost lifeless on the banquet table. Now that his heart was beating, blood once more seeped from the gash in his chest. “He's alive?”

“Barely,” Meg said.

“But…but I thought one of you had to die.”

“He did die. But he's alive again.” In April, such a conversation would have seemed absurd. “Come on—we have to get him to the ash grove.”

Bran was well over six feet tall and powerfully built—not the sort of burden young people or old can easily carry. It took Rowan, Meg, Silly, Dickie, and Phyllida to get him outside, and even then they half dragged him. By some miracle, he was still breathing when they laid him at the foot of his ash, a thick, sturdy tree with a somewhat sloping trunk. The ash bent its spearpoint leaves low, but could not quite touch Bran's body where it lay among the thrusting roots.

Lysander propped a ladder against the trunk and climbed to the place where the ash naturally split into two main branches. It would take skillful ax-work to cleave the tree properly, for it must be hewn deeply enough for Bran to pass through the gash, yet cleanly enough so the tree had a chance of mending itself. Fifteen feet off the ground, Lysander examined the tree. The trunk was stout, true, but the branches were so well grown and heavy that their weight might be enough to split the tree to the ground, killing it. This is why splitting the ash hardly ever saves the very young or the very old. Saplings are too tender to recover from harsh treatment, and old trees are too ponderous, too set in their ways to take injuries without falling. Only trees—and humans—of middling age will spring back easily from grievous hurts. He checked the tree for any sign of weakness or rot that might thwart their efforts, chose a likely spot, and, balancing carefully on the ladder, raised his arms to deal the first blow.

Meg knelt at Bran's side, laying her hands upon him as if there was some healing virtue to her touch. She felt powerless, but at least her cool hands could soothe his brow, her fingers could tell him, through his insensibility, that someone was near, caring for him. He had seemed to her somehow more alive when he lay on the banquet table, for then he had been serene, and though he was cold he seemed strong, like a marble pillar. Now, alive, he looked nearer death than he'd been before. His body was no longer firm but flaccid, his head lolling to one side and his muscles without any will. He was flushed with fever, and burned under her cool touch. Above them, the ax fell.

A violent convulsion passed through Bran's body as the ax blade bit into his ash tree. Again the ax struck, and his body arched in response. His eyes opened, wide and staring, but he seemed to see nothing, not even Meg's anxious face a bare few inches above his own. With each chop at his tree, his body shuddered, but between strokes he lay immobile and ever weaker. He was hardly breathing—air seeped in and out of his parted lips, but this seemed to be more a special favor of the air than the result of any effort on Bran's part. The elements were conspiring to keep him alive a bit longer; would it be enough?

A terrible creaking came from above, and with it that dreaded sound of wood splintering on its own. All eyes turned upward and watched the great ash, now cloven several feet at its crook, hover on the edge of splitting. Lysander held his breath. He could risk no more chops—another might kill Bran's last chance. The tree, overweighed by heavy branches, groaned, and the split widened before their eyes…one inch…two…three…. The jagged crack snaked lower…. Then the tree seemed to find new strength. The fissure stopped, and the split tree held its ground, firm in its trunk and in its roots. The first stage was successful.

Lysander threw the ax away from him as though its mere presence might move the tree to break its equilibrium, and climbed down the ladder. Now came the tricky task of getting the limp and unresponsive deadweight that was Bran up the ladder, to pass his body through the split. Lysander took off his belt and looped it under Bran's armpits, hauling him up awkwardly, while Rowan and Meg grabbed whatever parts of Bran they could and followed him up the ladder, clinging to the side like monkeys, pushing and pulling as best they could. One careless moment and Bran (or all of them) would plummet to the ground, and that would surely be the end.

Once, Meg's foot slipped, and all was almost lost, but Lysander had one arm hooked securely through a rung, and his prodigious strength saved them. Each step on the ladder was an impossible obstacle, each inch gained a hard-won victory. Bran's head hung, with his chin tucked against his chest, unconscious and absolutely incapable of offering any help.

On they struggled, until, at last, as they neared their goal, their burden grew suddenly lighter. They looked up and saw leafy hands reaching down, strong forked branches catching at Bran's arms, snagging in his clothes, pulling him toward the cleft. They had done their part—Bran's ash tree was taking over.

“He'll pass through the split,” Lysander said. “Then we'll take him down and put him to bed while I bind up the ash with rope. We won't know for many days if Bran will live. Trees never do anything quickly.”

The three clung to the ladder and helped the tree guide Bran into the deep cleft. But as he lay propped against the gentle incline of the split trunk, high above the ground, the tree began to move of its own volition. The raw inner wood, bleeding pale sap, began to close around Bran's body. Before his kin could think to pull him free, the split bark seemed to seal itself, pulling the edges of its wound together, with Bran trapped in the center. Wood fibers were reconnecting, sap and pulp joining together to close the cleft. And in the middle, still insensible, was Bran, entombed in the healing flesh of his ash tree. In a matter of seconds, his body was hidden, encased in the ash, and only his head was visible, cradled at the top of the split, held gently in a woody embrace. Man and tree were locked together. There he was sealed, to live or die as the strength of his tree decreed.

Huddled together at the base of the tree, the Morgans, the Ashes, and Dickie looked wonderingly up at the encapsulated Bran.

“What do we do now?” Meg asked.

“The hardest thing of all,” Phyllida said. “We wait.”

There is no pain, there is no sorrow, that can match the torture of waiting in uncertainty. Waiting is timeless, it has no beginning and no end. The mind becomes uncannily fertile, imagining every variation, every conceivable outcome. Hope burns painfully bright in the breast of the one who waits, but so does the certainty of tragedy.

For those who kept vigil at the base of Bran's ash tree, there was no hope of tranquillity. Every moment that he yet lived filled them with joy even as it destroyed them with the fear that each breath could be his last. While they sat among the roots or paced slowly, winding their way through the other ashes in the grove, they were not merely biding their time for an outcome. No, they were constantly conjuring in their heads all the wonderful and terrible ways the world could turn out. One moment, Bran was fully recovered; the next, irrevocably doomed. There was no peaceful middle ground in their thoughts, only that seesawing between extremes. They waited. And waited. And waited.

Eight days passed with Bran trapped in the cleft of his ash tree, and never was the pair left untended. His heart kept up a steady, slow beat, but he did not seem to improve. Likewise, though the tree had in part mended itself, it still wept sap from its jagged split, and seemed to heal itself no further than it had in those first few minutes when it encased Bran. The high branches of its canopy drooped, and the narrow leaves were beginning to brown and curl at the tips.

On the morning of the ninth day, Rowan and Meg were sitting together in a patch of clover at the edge of the ash grove. Meg was absently making a chain, and fat, dusty bees buzzed around their heads, sometimes resting on the children's knees when weary of gathering nectar.

“I still don't understand why you did it,” Rowan said. Time had done much to cool his irritation, and now he was reluctantly grateful to her. He still felt he hadn't needed any saving and had been thwarted in his calling, but overwhelming this was relief that he hadn't been the one to injure Bran. He thought he could handle the hardships of warfare, but it had never occurred to him that the real trial comes after the fighting is over. He didn't think he'd much like to be in Meg's shoes, watching a man hover between death and life, knowing that she had been the one to put him there. Then again, if he lived, she'd be the one who saved him, for without his life-egg he'd have had no chance. Come to think of it, she'd as good as saved
his
life, too, Rowan mused. Imagine, their two lives rolled up in Finn's sock and shoved into a mousehole! However did Finn get hold of those eggs? Meg wouldn't tell her brother how she'd gotten the eggs away from him, but he knew from a certain uneasiness in her eyes when he asked her about it that she wasn't exactly happy about her methods.

Finn had come home late on the night after the Midsummer War, and expressed some faint sympathy for Bran's plight. He'd wished the man ill, but that's a far cry from wishing him dead. Though no one much cared to talk to him, he got the gist of the story from Dickie. Once, it might have impressed him, or scorched him with jealousy. But he had seen the Green Hill, he had seen the Seelie queen, and no other sight, no other thought had the power to charm him now.

As soon as Meg had led him to the Green Hill and run along home to the Rookery, Finn, concealed in the brambles surrounding the hill, had placed a daub of the seeing ointment in his right eye. At once the character of the hill changed. What had been merely a pleasant knoll was now charged with a vitality that seemed to hum through the air. Some people will feel this in all wild places—in fields that are alive with insects, in clumps of earth thrilling with crawling worms and bacteria. Such people experience an almost ecstatic awareness of the glory of life in even the smallest patch of nature. But for Finn, it took a magic ointment to open his eyes, and the rest of his senses, to what was already there.

The hill was a living thing. Even as a house takes on something of the personality of the people who live in it, the Green Hill was unmistakably a fairy home. Each herb that grew on the slope sang a faint paean to the people who lived beneath its roots, each insect droned its homage to the fairies. Above the Green Hill, the sky seemed more blue than any sky has a right to be, and the very trees that ringed it bowed to the sacred fairy mound.

Only Finn Fachan was out of place, the interloper. He was not invited, nor did he fortuitously stumble on the hill, but had won his prize by treachery, to which even the fairies are vulnerable. Through the centuries, there have always been men, too clever for their own good, who have sought to gain the secrets of the fairy world. And it is true that fairies, though masters at deception, can themselves be befuddled. But fairies are like the sea—time and again, you might sail through storms and laugh at the fierce salt spray, and think that you have beaten her, but the sea does not like arrogance, and will wait until your back is turned to drag you under or toss your ship on the rocks. Never turn your back on the sea, they say, and never cross a fairy.

Fearlessly—because he did not know enough to be afraid—Finn climbed the Green Hill and settled himself at the summit. For several hours he didn't see any fairies, and it occurred to him he might have been duped. The sun climbed higher, and the day grew uncomfortably hot and bright. Sweat started to bead on his forehead and drip down the back of his neck, and little sweat bees (which don't sting) hovered to sip the salts his body was shedding. Then, when the sun was directly overhead and he could hardly see for the glare, shapes finally emerged from the place where the brilliant, sunny green of the hill met the forest's deep shade.

Finn saw the Seelie Court that day, marching in their fairy rade. It is a rite that reconnects them with the real world, the world of humans and sunshine, to which they are bound. For the fairies, like captured humans, are sometimes wont to retreat to the twilight lands beneath the Green Hill, and if they stay too long, they may sink irrevocably back into the earth from which they were born. And so they emerge to salute the day, greet the trees, touch the flowers, and sometimes give a lucky mortal a glimpse of their grandeur.

Perhaps two dozen fairies rode past Finn that day, but in his eyes there was only one. There below him on her dappled palfrey rode the Seelie queen, bewitching, enticing, untouchable. It was all he could do to keep from jumping to his feet and running after her. But he knew that would give away his secret, and he didn't want to take any chances. The queen passed out of sight, and Finn was left in solitude.

No more fairies came that day, nor did the trooping court return by any path visible to him. As the sun set, he crept down the hill. Though dejected, he was not without hope…and not without a plan. He was wise enough to know he might have trouble finding the Green Hill again on his own, and so he'd brought with him a skein of red wool swiped from Phyllida's knitting basket. Every few paces as he made his way home, he tied a snip of wool to a bush or a low-hanging tree branch, leaving a foolproof trail to follow the next day. And, sure enough, the following morning, while the others were anxiously watching the tree-entombed Bran for any signs of recovery, Finn traipsed off into the woods and followed his well-marked trail straight to the Green Hill.

Every morning, he spied on the queen and made grand resolutions to greet her. But his dread of being banished from the Green Hill overwhelmed his desire to be near her. Better to do no more than see her each day, than to bask for a moment under her eyes only to be forever after exiled. He would not sacrifice the chance of future gain on an impulsive, premature act, for his sights were set high—he hoped to discover the entrance to the Green Hill itself, and introduce himself in the queen's own realm.

One day, he saw a courtier pause a moment to nudge a little stone with the toe of his boot. It piqued his interest, and when the troop melted into the forest, Finn investigated and found an innocuous piece of worn red shale lying in the grass. Tentatively, he shifted it to the left, and at once, grandly and silently, the earth heaved as it has not since glaciers shouldered up mountains and left gorges in their wakes. The hill lifted, and the vacuum it created as it rose sucked the air from Finn's lungs. He took a step back, and beheld the inside of the Green Hill.

The hill perched on alabaster columns, a many-legged turtle. A soft glow came from within, and, hesitantly, Finn advanced until he just peeked his head between two columns. He saw no fairies, or life of any kind, but the air was thick in a swirling silver mist, and he could not see well beyond a few yards. He took another step, and he was under the Green Hill. It seemed as if the hill was hollow, for above him arched a dome of dark slate blue, speckled with what might be stars—if stars could come to earth and then move of their own volition, for the lights shifted slowly against their false sky.

The movement of the mist around him made him dizzy, and for all that he stared hungrily about him, he could never, as long as he lived, remember quite what he saw that day. Sometimes it seemed that he stood in a vast hall illuminated with cold fire and pale jewels, and there was a rock-ringed well in the center. Other times he thought he was in a garden tended by fireflies, where the bloodless leaves knew no sun and the fruits never ripened. Once, when he looked at the floor, he saw no more than rough dirt strewn with hay, as in a stable; yet another time it seemed that an endless black chasm lay at his feet, with a narrow staircase spiraling down to the heart of the earth. Did the air beneath the Green Hill smell like sweet grass and new lambs? Or did it reek of brimstone and the dank, rich rot of decaying things? He could not tell, then or after, but only knew that something strange and old and unknowable was washing over him. Did he dare to take another step? Would the garden await his footfall, or would he plummet into the abyss?

His trial did not come that day. From behind him came the wild, joyous baying of hounds on a trail. The fairy dogs, with milky coats, and ears and eyes that burned red fire, had picked up the scent of Finn's trickery, and now the pack surrounded him, snarling and wagging their tails at the same time, as dogs will do when work and sport are one. The noon light shone through their carnelian ears, and a dozen pairs of ruby eyes stared him down. Before he knew what was happening, he was on the turf outside the Green Hill, and the pillars were gone, the ambiguous inside was sealed—the hill was closed and solid once again. He was found out, and the way was now barred to him.

The fairy hounds drove him away from the hill, but they showed him mercy, and did not hunt him till he dropped. They chased him only as far as the road, baying and nipping at his heels but never harming him. It was not the ending he'd anticipated—an inglorious retreat, without acknowledgment or reward. But what did it matter? He had been inside the Green Hill! He had seen the fairy home, looked into its heart. Could the Morgans say that? Finn had been chased away that day, but tomorrow was still before him. He could return to the Green Hill whenever he cared to. He believed he had discovered the key, that the fairy world now lay open to him. He did not know that no man may enter the Green Hill twice by the same path.

On the next day, the ninth day of Bran's entombment, Finn rose full of enthusiasm and confidence and set out as usual to the Green Hill. Just out of sight of the Rookery, he came to the first piece of yarn that marked the red trail he'd set.

He looked ahead for the next piece, and his mouth gaped in horror. There before him, on every tree, every bush, every creeping bramble and lowly herb, was tied a piece of red yarn. The entire forest was decked as though for a holiday in brilliant scarlet bows. Each was exactly like the ones he'd tied. His carefully marked trail was obliterated.

“No!” he cried to the heavens. He stumbled this way and that, trying to find a path in all the sameness, looking for any clue that might set him on the right trail. But the bedizened trees mocked him, and even the tiny flowers, prideful in their new finery, tittered at the fool who crashed and staggered through the woods, screaming protestations and pounding his fists against the rough bark. At length, deep in the woods and completely surrounded by red yarn bows, he sank to his knees.

It's over, he thought grimly. Dickie was right, Meg was right. The fairies don't want me there. I'll never find the Green Hill again.

But Finn did not have the constitution for lingering despair. He was young, his mind was lively, and he was supremely egotistic—it was not possible for him to fail. The Morgans weren't barred from the Green Hill. They could lead him back. He fell to plotting. Scowling at each and every one of the red bows around him, he headed back to the Rookery, working out the lies and half-truths he'd use to convince the Morgans to help him. Meg, he thought, would be his best bet.

“I've just seen the most remarkable thing,” Finn began as he approached Rowan and Meg in the ash grove, intending to spin a convoluted tale, the exact details of which he'd not yet worked out. But, to his irritation, neither so much as looked at him. They were both gazing up into the tree, rapt and intensely still, like bird dogs at their quarry. Finn glanced up, but Bran was still in the same place. Finn grimaced. Country fools! He had to be dead by now. Why didn't someone take him down and bury him before he began to smell?

“You'll never guess what I've seen,” he tried again, but Rowan hissed at him to be quiet. In the silence, while Finn tried to think of something particularly cutting to say, a faint sound rose above the bee buzzing and leaf rustle. It was like the low groan of ice breaking at the thaw. It was quiet, barely a sound at all, but, like the ice, it was the sound of a beginning. High in the tree, Bran made the first noise of consciousness.

The Morgans exchanged a glance. Hopelessness and hope had stood hand in hand for so long—did they dare give preference to one yet? Bran's head shifted on his wooden pillow, and then—oh, wonders!—he opened his eyes!