by Jane Yolen
She had not finished with the namings, when she landed, softly, upon a mound of dry leaves and found herself in a lovely garden full of flowers: both a cultivated rose bed and arbor, and an herb garden in the shape of a Celtic knot. It reminded her of her own lovely garden at Cuffnells, the small one that was hers, not the larger-than-life arboretum that Reggie had planted, with its Orientals, redwoods, and Douglas pine. Poor lost Cuffnells. Poor dead Reggie. Poor gone everybody. She shook her head vigorously. She would not let herself get lost in the past, making it somehow better and lovelier than it was. She’d never liked that in old people when she was young, and she wasn’t about to countenance it in herself now. The past was a lot like Wonderland: treacherous and marvelous and dull in equal measure. Survival was all that mattered—and she was a survivor. Of course, in the end, she thought, there is no such thing as survival. And just as well. What a clutter the world would be if none of us ever died.
She took a deep breath and looked around the garden. Once, the flowers had spoken to her, but they were silent now. She stood up slowly, the hip giving her trouble again, and waved her cane at them, expecting no answer and receiving none. Then she walked through the garden gate and into Wonderland proper.
“Proper!” she said aloud and gave a small laugh. Proper was one thing Wonderland had never been. Nor was she, though from the outside it must have looked it. But she could still play all those games in her head. Griffins and mock turtles and caterpillars. And rabbits. Men all seemed to fall so easily into those categories. She brushed off her skirt, which was suddenly short and green, like her old school uniform.
“Curioser and curioser,” she remarked to no one in particular. She liked the feel of the words in her mouth. They were comfortable, easy.
There was a path that almost seemed to unroll before her. A bit, she thought, like the new path to the Isis from Tom Quad, which Father had had dug. She was not at all surprised when she spied a young man coming toward her in white flannel trousers, striped jacket, a straw hat, and a pair of ghastly black shoes, the kind men had worn before tennis shoes had been invented. She thought tennis shoes were aces. The young man glanced at his pocket watch, then up at her, looking terribly familiar.
“No time,” he said. “No time.” He stuttered slightly on the n.
“Why, Mr. Dodgson,” she said, looking up at him through a fringe of dark hair and holding out a ringless hand. “Why, of course there’s plenty of time.”
And there was.
Our Lady of the Greenwood
In Locksly town, in Nottinghamshire, In merry sweet Locksly town, There bold Robin Hood he was born and was bred, Bold Robin of famous renown.
—from Robin Hood’s Birth, Breeding, Valor and Marriage
“My Lord of Locksley, it is a boy.”
“And has his mother named him?”
Lady Margaret lay in the great bed, her stomach humped up like leviathan before her. Her face was in a dancing shadow, for the candles on her bedside tables shuddered with each passing breeze.
She called the midwife to her. “I feel the child moving.”
“The child has been moving inside thee lo these many months, dearie,” the midwife said. She was never one to stand on ceremony with her patrons, not even so fine a lady as Lady Margaret of Locksley. What is she but a brood mare? the midwife thought to herself. Wed only for the sons she can bear. She had little patience with the fine folk in the castle, though they were her living. It was the babies who were her chiefest concern.
“This feels quite different,” Lady Margaret said. And then she added, “Oh!”
The midwife flipped back the ornately embroidered coverlet and stared at Lady Margaret’s legs, nodding. “Oh, indeed. Thy water has broken, dearie. The child will be here before long. Let me call thy women.”
“No, Mag, I want only you here,” Lady Margaret said. “It will not be a hard birth. He will be born by midnight, christened by noon.”
“First children take longer than that, my sweetling,” said the midwife.
Lady Margaret sat up and took the midwife’s hand, though it was an effort because she was suddenly shaken by a great convulsion. When it was over, she spoke hastily. “Listen, Old Mag, and listen well. This child was promised to the Good Folk ere I came to Locksley’s land, that he be a man of the forest, a green man, and their good shepherd.”
The midwife sketched a hasty sign of the cross between them. The Good Folk! The Fey! Whatever was a good Christian woman like Lady Margaret doing mixing with the likes of them? “What did thee promise them, lady?” she asked, her voice sharp, all pretense of coziness gone. “What did they promise in return?”
“I promised only that they could name the child,” Lady Margaret said. “They promised that I might have him,” she added.
“And what did thee give up?” asked the midwife Mag, dreading the answer.
“Only my life,” said Lady Margaret. She smiled. “Do not look so black, Mag. I have never been hale, girl or woman. Not likely to make old bones, my nurse always said. I have not given up much. And Lord Locksley will have a son. My son.”
She was shaken by another contraction, much more severe than the first. Squeezing the midwife’s hand, she made not a sound till the pain was over. “There,” she said, “I feel him creeping from my womb.”
“Sliding, more like, dearie,” Mag said sweetly, back entire into her old way of speaking. “Just thee work with me and we will have this child born between us as soon as soon.”
“By midnight,” insisted Lady Margaret, squeezing the midwife’s hand again as a third contraction passed through her body, making her belly ripple like an ocean wave. “The Good Folk foresaw it.” Mag had never seen the ocean, but she had heard the minstrels sing of it. If it was anything like a woman in labor, she knew she never wanted to be a-sea.
The child—a sturdy boy—was indeed born at midnight. All the candles went out at once from a wind that blew in suddenly through an open window.
Mag held the child, still red with birth blood, overhead. She blessed him silently and consecrated him to the Queen of Heaven, thinking the old words but not saying them aloud:
Mary who is o’er us,
Mary who is below us,
Mary who is above us here,
Mary who is above us yonder,
Watch o’er us like a shepherd with sheep
O’er the hills, and valleys,
O’er the steep mountainsides.
“Promise me, Mag,” Lady Margaret whispered. “You will take him at once to the greenwood, foot solid and unstraying upon the path. Go all the way to the great oak at the forest’s heart. There you will find a circle. Step in boldly. Do not step out again. You will take the care I bid you and no harm will befall you.”
“I promise, my lady,” said Mag, not at all sure she would do what Locksley’s wife had asked. She had never been into the greenwood. It was not a place for Christian folk.
“Or the hounds will be on your trail. That I can promise you.”
Mag startled. She knew that Lady Margaret did not mean Lord Locksley’s hounds, though that would be bad enough. He had brachets and ratters, several deerhound, and a pair of fierce-looking, stiff-legged mastiffs. But Mag was sure Lady Margaret meant the Gabriel hounds, the hunters belonging to the Fey. She knew of them, of course. Everyone did. There was the old verse:
The Devil’s dandy dogs course
Hell’s skyways hunting.
All wise people seek their beds,
The hours of night counting.
“I promise,” she said again, this time meaning it. The fear of the hounds decided her. Though how she was going to get to the Old Forest with the newborn child and find the very place Lady Margaret spoke of, and all in the black of night, she did not know.
Getting out of the castle with the child was perilously easy. The guards had all turned aside in their watch just as she went past.
Ensorcelled, she thought to herself as she escaped across the moat bridge.
Swaddled tight against the midsummer night, the child was still, the dark feathering of his lashes like a bird’s wing against the downy cheek. “I will keep thee safe,” she whispered to him. “From boggles and nuggles and things that fly in the night.” She said it fiercely, but she was sore afraid. For herself as well as the babe.
She slipped down the path that led toward the greenwood. Overhead the moon outlined the Old Forest with a ghostly white light the color of whey. As she went, she kept looking around, right and left, north and south. She did not know what she was looking for, but thought it best to be alert. Once she thought she heard the sound of hounds, but knew it at the last for the soughing of the wind through the trees. All the while the child slept in her arms, that easy, untroubled sleep of the newborn. She hugged him close and moved on.
When she reached the forest edge, where shadows black as raven wings seemed to reach out toward her, she stopped. Hesitated. Changed her mind. Turned to go back home.
This time she heard hounds and it was not the wind through trees, for the trees were still.
“Mary who is o’er us,” she said aloud to still her galloping heart. Then she turned toward the forest again.
At her voice, the babe opened his eyes. In the moonlight they were not the unfocused milky blue of infant’s eyes, but sea green and strangely knowing.
Mag took a step into the shadows, and the dark fully claimed her. She felt herself pulled deep, deeper still into the heart of the woods; the child—his eyes staring up at her—lay heavy in her arms.
She stayed on the path—Lady Margaret had been most specific about that—going past mushrooms that gleamed oddly in the dark; past streams that ran silently, silver against their black banks; past trees that leaned in the night like old men after too many mugs of ale; and over a wide and grassy glade. Little fingers of mist reached out, as if trying to tempt her or pull her off the path, but she kept solidly on.
“Mary who is below us,” she whispered.
There was a crying sound, but it was not the child she carried. A white owl, the round circle of its face glowing, flew past her. She felt the wind from its silent wings.
And then—was it a moment? was it an hour?—she was at the great oak that Lady Margaret had spoken of, its branches spread wide and down, making a kind of woody bower within the glade.
“Oh, my lady,” Mag said, then caught her breath. The moon was somehow shining through the green interlacings of the oak branches. And there in the very center of the greenwood, under the spreading oak, the moonlight illuminated a circle drawn in the grass.
Lady Margaret had told her to step boldly into the circle with the child and not to stir from there till night was done. “Not a foot out of it,” she had warned. “Not a finger. Else you will be lost.” Or somwat as like that, Mag thought wildly.
So Mag, shivering with more than the cold night air, and feeling every one of her sixty-three years, strode into the circle and, gathering her skirts about her, sat down on the ground within the circle to wait.
She did not have to wait long. Between one blink of the eye and the next, the empty glade was suddenly full of dancing bodies, though one could not rightly call them human. An unseen band piped song after song, and not a one of them was a song she knew.
Among the dancers were creatures scarce a hand’s breadth high, the color of fungus. And little mannikins dressed in green with red caps upon their heads. An elf skipped by, holding a lantern made of a campanula out of which streamed a blue-green light. There were fairies no bigger than a singing bird, with darning-needle wings, translucent and veined by moonlight, who flitted about in a complicated reel. But there were larger folk as well, near human size, with long yellow-white hair bound with strips of cloth that glittered like the overhead stars. They were beautiful and terrifying at the same time, and these larger Fey danced in a slow, swaying rhythm that was hypnotic to watch.
And then Mag saw, at the edges of the fairy dancers, ragged human folk, their skirts and trews dirty and torn, their hair tangled in elflocks. They danced, too. And far from seeming sad at their terrible estate, or frightened as Mag was, they kicked up their heels and danced as if they were having a marvelous time. Mag stared at them the longest, for they reminded her of something. And when a couple went capering by, holding hands and spinning wildly, Mag gasped aloud, for the man of the pair was Tom the Swineherd, lost these seven years.
At the sound of her voice, the Good Folk all turned and stared into the circle. One of them, a tall and fiercely handsome Fey, came over and stood at the very edge of the circle. He held out his hand to Mag.
“Come and join us, Mag, and ye shall be young again and beautiful. I shall be thy consort and ye shall live in my hall.”
His words were fair and seemingly open, and for a moment she was sorely tempted. Who would not be, to be young again. And lovely. But she looked over at Tom and he was neither young nor comely. Nor were any of the human folk there. And besides, there was something dark and hidden in the fairy prince’s eyes. Something she did not like or trust.
“Oh, my Lady of the Greenwood,” Mag prayed aloud, meaning the Queen of Heaven, “save me and the child.” But meaning and magic are held to different tasks under the oak tree. What she meant was, somehow, not what she said.
Suddenly there was before her, shimmering in the moonlight, the most beautiful woman Mag had ever seen. She was as tall as Lord Locksley and slim as a girl, with snow-white hair tied up in a hundred braids. There were bells hanging at her belt and sewn to the bottom of her green skirt, so whenever she moved she made music. “Thee called me, Old Mag, and I am come.”
“I called the Queen of Heaven,” Mag whispered, clutching the silent child to her breast.
“I am all the queen there is here,” said the woman. “But as thee cried out my name, the Lady of the Greenwood, I must give thee what thee wishes.”
“You will let me go?” Mag asked.
“Come outside the circle and then thee will surely be free,” the dark-eyed prince of the Fey said. But when the queen turned and glared at him, he shook quite visibly and took two steps back.
Then Mag remembered what Lady Margaret had told her and shook her head. “I dare not,” she said. “The circle is my protection.”
“Thee will not,” agreed the queen. “Till the night is done. But let me see the child’s face.”
As if a geas, a fate, had been laid upon her, Mag obeyed, lifting the blanket away from the baby’s head.
The queen clapped her hands. “That is Lady Margaret’s child.”
Mag was astonished. “How do you know?”
The queen gave her such a look then that Mag was forced to drop her eyes. The fairy woman might not be the Queen of Heaven, but she was the Queen of the Greenwood. Of course she would know!
“We have promised to give the child something,” the queen said.
“A name,” Mag said.
The queen nodded and then, one by one, the trooping fairies came to the circle’s edge and gave the boy names.
“Fleet-foot,” said one.
“Green kin,” said another.
“Straight as an arrow,” said a third.
“King’s own.”
“Child of the wood.”
“Giver of riches.”
“Merry maker.”
“Bow bender.”
“Staff breaker.”
And on and on and on they went. Such odd things, not a good Christian name among them. Mag kept shaking her head as if rejecting everyone, till they were all done with their naming.
“A name,” the queen said when they were through, “is what one is. It is power and honor and all.”
A name, Mag thought, is but a tag. A man may be born with one name, achieve another. Honor and power come from the heart. But she did not say that aloud. For just then the first thin red line of dawn shone between the trees.
“Away!” the dark-eyed prince cried. And the rest echoed him, disappearing as suddenly as stars in the morning,
one small flicker and they were gone.
Mag waited long into the morning, when sunlight completely lit the little glade, and the Good Folk were gone to their rest. She was just about to stand and step out of the circle, when a little bird flew down out of the tree. It was an undistinguished brown bird with an orange breast. It lit on the outside of the circle, but then hopped in, totally unafraid. Standing still for a moment, it cocked its head to one side and looked at Mag.
“Why, thou art a robin,” she said aloud. Suddenly she remembered the story one of the good sisters of Kirklees Abbey had told her: “When Our Lord Jesus was dying, the robin tried to pluck away the thorns on his crown but only managed to tear its own little breast. As its reward, the robin’s breast was ever stained to this day in memory of its brave deed.”
Why, what better name than this? she thought. For a child who would be brave and true. “The Lady of the Greenwood has sent thee thy name, child.”
The baby in her arms looked up at her and, though it is said that newborns cannot smile, he smiled.
“My Lord of Locksley, it is a boy.”
“And has his mother named him?”
“She did, my lord, before she died, poor sweet lady.”
“And what name did she give him?”
“Robin, my lord.”
The Confession of Brother Blaise
“Many of those who shall read this book or shall hear it read will be the better for it, and will be on their guard against sin.”
—The Infant Merlin to his confessor, Father Blaise, in Vita Merlini by Geoffrey of Monnouth