A Green and Ancient Light

by Frederic S. Durbin

  I held my notebook, wondering if I wanted to risk taking it along, tucked beneath the fake one. Yes—there was nothing in my notebook that couldn’t be replaced. Grandmother and I knew the poem by heart, and everything else was written in stone, as it had been for close to four hundred years.

  As I picked up the bag, Grandmother gave me an appraising look, and I guessed she was considering something with care. “I don’t think R —— is dangerous,” she said finally. “But he’s ­getting his strength back. Remember that, for one thing, he is an enemy soldier, and for another thing, he’s a man we know nothing about. The less he knows about us, the better. Don’t feel you have to entertain him. Be wary around him, and if he does or says anything you don’t like, you just run away. He can’t run after you yet.”

  I nodded soberly.

  “Be back in time for supper.”

  * * * *

  Again, I had the joy of watching daylight arrive, tremulous and misty, in the sacred woods. Again, I trekked silently all around the garden to check for strangers or anything amiss. The foul scent was fading from the glade itself, but it was still almost palpable on the stairs. I hoped we hadn’t ruined the leaning house forever. Long before I entered it, I knew Mr. Girandole wasn’t back yet. He would have heard me coming and met me somewhere outdoors.

  R —— was dozing under a blanket, but he opened his eyes at my appearance and struggled to sit up. It occurred to me that we’d forgotten to move the padding from his old pallet up to the ­chamber floor where he now lay.

  “Oof! Ah!” he complained, contorting his face as he slowly propped himself up against the wall beneath the window. “Hard bed. Bad smell hard bed.”

  “Good morning,” I said, unpacking the food. Grandmother had sent along two old, chipped cups from the back of the cupboard, and I poured us each some of the milk. I was hungry now, after my hike. Still, the reeking chamber made swallowing anything unpleasant.

  R —— thanked me and ate whatever I pushed his way. He seemed to be faring all right. At least, he hadn’t been caught by anyone or eaten by wolves.

  “Did the fairies sing last night?” I asked him, suddenly thinking that he’d done something remarkable, something wild and perilous: he’d spent a night in the garden outside the shelter of the compartment. What might have transpired in the moonlight just below his window?

  He nodded. “Sing like angels. I want go fairy country. Later, I strong again, I go with them. Yeah? Fairy country.”

  His expression held such longing that I felt a pang in my chest. “If you go to their country,” I said, “I don’t think you can ever come back.” At least, I thought it worked that way in the old stories.

  “No want come back,” he said. “No worry for me. Good there!”

  I picked up a cracker but felt my stomach lurch. To eat in this malodorous place . . .

  Seeing my plight, R —— showed me a trick: he tore two little pieces from a sheet of waxed paper that wrapped the crackers in the tin. Having wadded these into balls, he stuck them into his nostrils.

  I thought it might be worth a try. It was uncomfortable to have wads of paper in my nose, but it made eating possible. The plugs I’d rolled jutted from my nostrils like tusks. R —— laughed at me, said “Elephant,” and trumpeted, curling his arm in the air like a trunk. I couldn’t help laughing and trying to imitate the sound myself.

  We ate in silence for a minute or two.

  When he was slowing down, R —— studied me. “She . . . grandma?”

  “Yes,” I said, pulling the papers from my nose. “She’s my grandma. My grandmother.”

  “Good. Good lady. Kind.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Mother? Father?”

  I hesitated, remembering that I wasn’t supposed to tell him much. But I didn’t see any harm in the question, so I explained as clearly as I could that my father was away fighting the war, and my mother was working hard and taking care of my baby sister.

  R —— declared that this, too, was “good.”

  He said, “Maybe you father shoot me. Shoot plane.” He made an explosion gesture with his fingers and an accompanying sound, then grinned.

  “No.” I smiled back, guardedly. “He’s not a pilot.”

  “Oh. Good. You, me, we friend, then. Yeah?”

  I only smiled and left the food where he could reach it. Then I noticed that I’d better bring him a fresh bucket of water and empty his toilet again.

  Pointing at me, R —— pretended to swing something—some imaginary tool, perhaps?—and smacked his fist into his other palm and pretended to catch something. It was a question. I had no idea what he meant—some sort of work?

  “I don’t have a job,” I said. “I’m a kid.”

  “No, no! Baseball!”

  So, that was it. I’d heard of it and seen pictures—a game played in other countries, involving funny hats and baggy pants.

  R —— waved rapidly at me, as if telling me to back up. I looked around in confusion. Then he curled a hand in such a way that I realized he was supposed to be holding up a ball. He tossed the “ball” up, made a show of swinging with his invisible club, and made a cracking impact sound.

  “Go! Go! Go!” he cried, waving me backward. Next, he said “Catch! Catch!” so fervently that at last I put up a hand half-­heartedly, feeling like an idiot.

  “Ff-tumpf!” R —— cupped hands over his mouth and made a catching sound. “Here! Here!” He held up his hands again. “Home! Home!”

  Smiling awkwardly, I made a limp throwing motion.

  “Out!” he finished in triumph, pulling off his “hat,” throwing it into the air, and giving me a thumbs-up.

  I wondered which of us had “won.” It seemed a bizarre game, but I couldn’t help chuckling at him as I picked up the bucket and the pan and carried them carefully down the stairs.

  When I returned, I established from him that he hadn’t seen Mr. Girandole recently, and R —— looked worried about him, too. As I was getting out my notebook and pencil, he had another question for me: he said “grandma” again and made a cigarette-smoking gesture with two fingers.

  “No,” I said. “She doesn’t smoke.” He wanted cigarettes.

  “Beer?” he asked. “Wine? Whiskey?” Those words he knew just fine in our language.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask her.”

  He seemed to understand—or else he took it as a promise that I’d bring him some—and again he gave me a happy thumbs-up.

  I turned my attention then to copying the numbers from the staircase. As I went along, I prodded and thumped on each riser to see if it might conceal a hollow space, and I was always on the lookout for a keyhole. R —— asked what I was doing, but I didn’t know how to explain it to him. The numbers, in order, were:

  5, 12, 3, 10, 7, 13, 8, 6, 1, 14, 11, 2, 9, and 4.

  They were all of the same size and carved in the same style, but the 12, 7, 14, and 2 were upside down. I copied them that way.

  Taking my notebook out onto the terrace, I pondered the numbers. When I counted them, I wasn’t surprised to find that there were fourteen of them. That number again: fourteen. Twice seven.

  On a blank page, I added up all the numbers and got a total of one hundred and five. The total of only the right-side up numbers was seventy. The total of the upside down numbers was thirty-­five. I noticed at once that thirty-five was exactly half of seventy. I tapped the pencil on the notebook. Did any of it mean anything?

  My answer is in three and seven. Among these numbers, the 3 was right-side up, and the 7 was upside down. That reminded me of a mirror again. This garden always came back to mirror images.

  But if “three and seven” meant ten . . . Ten of the numbers were right-side up. That could mean that the answer was contained in them somehow, and I could forget about the upside-down num
bers. But numbers were only numbers, cold and uncommunicative. Perhaps they were only here for decoration. Reason departs.

  It seemed pointless for me to hunt all over the garden for a keyhole. My father said he’d done that for years and found nothing. I wished he were here now. I imagined him taking one quick look through my notebook, laughing, and pointing out how simple the answer was.

  Or . . . maybe he wouldn’t. A puzzle shouldn’t be unsolvable, but it shouldn’t be too easy, either.

  With a sigh, I looked back at the page. Absently, I let my fingertips walk across the four upside-down numbers.

  Four.

  The four in the garden that came readily to mind was the number of women with water-pitchers around the square pool. Could each upside-down number represent one of those women? Following that assumption, could each of the fourteen numbers represent a different statue? No, there were more than fourteen statues in the garden.

  I shut the notebook and stood up, not sure what to do next.

  At that moment, a voice spoke close beside me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Well, I’m back,” said the voice.

  It was Mr. Girandole.

  * * * *

  I felt such relief that my eyes watered. Without thinking, I flung my arms around him, pressing my face against his lapel. He stood woodenly at first, but then he hugged me and patted my back. The long, bedraggled coat smelled of swamp water, and his shoeless hoofs were plastered with drying mud. He still wore his hat, but the rucksack was gone from his shoulder, and I saw no sign of the flak vest.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yes. Just in need of a long sleep. How is everyone here?”

  I assured him that Grandmother and R —— were fine. “But R —— refuses to stay in the compartment any more. He sleeps out on the open floor up there.”

  Mr. Girandole scowled.

  “What happened with the dogs?” I said.

  “They’re making dogs more persistent these days.” He sat wearily on a bench. “I went first to my cave, put that sack of gear there, and sealed up the entrance so you’d never know it was a cave. I had more dog-bane on my shelf—”

  “The stuff in the gourd?”

  “Yes. I doused the approach, then doubled back and laid my own scent trail in another direction, still dragging that jacket of R ——’s. I led them over the mountains to get them far away from here. As I drew near to the villages on the other side, I left the vest in a barn and stowed away on a freight train. That took me through another arm of the mountains; I got off at a place where I knew I could use a river to come a long way back toward home without leaving a scent.”

  At the mention of a train, I wondered if it might have had the engine that my father had designed. I liked the idea of my father helping to save Mr. Girandole. “You swam?” I asked.

  “Mostly floated, hanging on to a little raft.”

  I shook my head in amazement at his ingenuity. “How do you know the country so well?”

  “I’ve explored a lot. And I’ve studied maps.”

  “I’m so glad you’re back! We were worried.”

  “I was worried about you, too. I guess you’ve done well.”

  I told Mr. Girandole I had something to show him. “Not far away at all,” I added when he looked worried. (He seemed to be on his last legs, about to collapse from exhaustion.) I led him down the terrace steps and then directly behind them, to the Angel of the Bottomless Pit.

  “Did you know about this?” Summoning my courage, I eased through the weeds at the statue’s base, reached out, and took hold of one of the stone keys hanging against the angel’s side.

  It wouldn’t budge. Mr. Girandole stood quietly, looking over my shoulder.

  I tried the second key, and it grudgingly slid back to reveal the key-shaped space behind it—which, of course, was now empty.

  Mr. Girandole’s bleary eyes widened, and he leaned close. “No, I didn’t know!” he said. Cautiously, he touched the depression with his long fingers, felt around the edges, and tried pushing it like a button. Then he stood back, resting his chin on a palm. “It looks like it was made to contain a real key.”

  I grinned, relishing the moment. “It did. We have the key at Grandmother’s.”

  “Extraordinary!” He beamed at me. “How did you find it? Clues from the inscriptions?”

  Now I felt a bit sheepish—he was so proud of me. I told him about my father’s letter.

  He nodded, and a faraway look came to his eyes. “I remember those years when your father used to come here. I . . .” The subject seemed to embarrass him suddenly, and he fell silent.

  “I know you kept hidden when he was here,” I said. “Grandmother explained it to me.”

  “Oh.” Now he looked even more embarrassed. “Well, I sort of kept watch over him; not that there was much danger here in those days. If you don’t mind my saying, you are so much like him—the same walk, the same eyes, almost the same hair. It’s as if time has turned backward . . . though it never does.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “But I must not have been watching when he found this.”

  “Can you guess what it might open?”

  He smiled faintly, studying Apollyon. “The door we’re looking for? I hope it’s not just for locking that compartment in the house, or the spare key to the duke’s castle.” Stooping, he examined the statue’s base, where the mighty carven chains bound the door to the bottomless pit.

  “I rather hope, too, that there’s not a keyhole in this platform,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be reluctant to go sticking a key into the lock on the Bottomless Pit? No, I don’t much care for the duke’s sense of humor in making us use Apollyon’s key. It’s too much like asking us to open Pandora’s box. That did not go well at all.”

  He shivered then as if with firsthand memory.

  As we returned to the leaning house, I gave him a quick summary of my recent progress and thoughts about the garden. It came out mostly like gibberish, and I thought later how good it was of Mr. Girandole to listen so politely in his present state. But I did ask him clearly what he made of the number seventy.

  “‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten,’” he answered. Seeing my blank look, he said, “That’s what Moses said. Seventy years is a human life.”

  “Moses?” I asked in surprise, crawling after him up the steep steps. “Do you read the Bible?”

  He stopped, gazing down past his elbow at me with a serious face. “Do you suppose that the Elder Folk don’t know who makes the trees grow? We’ve known Him since the beginning.” Climbing again, he added: “I would never disregard a book simply because it was so new and so concise.”

  Mr. Girandole’s mood turned cranky when R —— greeted him with an exuberant “Mr. Satyr!” But after taking stock of the patient’s condition—and commending me for keeping things clean and in order—Mr. Girandole climbed up to the roof to take a nap. I told him I’d stay around in the garden and keep my eyes and ears open, for which he was grateful.

  I did more pondering and puzzling as the sun climbed to its zenith. Returning again to the great stone tortoise and then to the wild boar, I searched their slabs once more for inscriptions that I’d missed, but neither harbored any words at all. One foray through the sea serpent’s brambles had been enough for me, but I did shore up my resolve and thread my way into the thicket where Heracles stood. I traversed the roots of a giant old tree and yelped as a black-and-yellow snake shot away from my feet. I wondered if Mrs. O —— would see a snake if one came that close.

  When the icy tingles of the encounter had passed, I edged forward again, avoiding webs where fat spiders hung and shook their forelegs at me. The spiders, too, were patterned in bright yellow and black, as if all the thicket’s denizens were in uniform. Heracles stood partly in a patch of sunli
ght; the dense brake beyond the tree-shade’s edge was steamy and stifling. Dark purple berries shone like jewels. A prickly herbal odor hung thick, and mosquitoes buzzed. Something scrabbled through the bushes, some animal alarmed at my bumbling.

  I hoisted myself onto the pedestal between Heracles’s enormous feet and sat cross-legged to rest on a bare expanse of stone, shaded by the statue. Some creepers looped across the pedestal like oily ropes sprouting leaves. As I’d noted from a distance, vines coiled around the legs of the colossus, giving him a pair of leafy trousers. Even so, I could see that his sandals, toes, and bulging muscles were all carved in minute detail.

  Moving all around the base, I hung down over its edge to push back the foliage. But Grandmother’s memory served well. Nowhere did I find any engraved letters.

  When I’d made my way back to the open glade, I observed the arches: the northern pair, bare of any carvings, and the southern pair, adorned with faces.

  I peered up at these carvings one by one, bearded men crowned with leaves . . . angelic faces of great beauty . . . weathered faces that might have been animals . . . frightening faces with horned brows. There were—as I’d come to expect—fourteen faces in all: seven on the left arch, seven on the right.

  Hungry, I returned to R ——’s chamber for lunch. He had his eyes closed but opened them when he heard me rummaging, and was obviously glad I was still around. I peeled a tangerine and used some of its skin to block my nostrils this time. R —— taught me the words for “tangerine,” “cracker,” “cheese,” “bread,” and “water” in his language. Then he pointed upward, whispered “Mr. Satyr,” and taught me another word, smiling and nodding as I repeated it.

  Mr. Girandole’s hearing was sharp indeed. His voice drifted down to us through the open hatch: “That doesn’t mean ‘faun’ or ‘satyr.’ Forget that one!”

  R —— slumped against the wall, laughing.

  I pointed at R —— and said the word again, whatever it meant. He laughed harder, holding his side. Then I took the pieces of tangerine peel from my nostrils and threw them at him one after the other.