Guardian of the Green Hill

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “Almost,” he said, and proceeded to tell her about his vandalism and his encounter with Gwidion’s goat.

  “Another time I might worry about what he’s up to, but not now. Not with James down there.” She thumped the hill with the flat of her hand. “I don’t even care about Phyllida. I don’t ever want to see her again.”

  “What’s going to happen to all this if you don’t take her place?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Meg said as meanly as she could, though it mostly sounded sulky. “I’m going home as soon as I get James. The others can do what they want. Let her teach Silly … in the time she has left. Or Lysander can teach her. Or Bran. She’ll love it. Not me.”

  That reminded Finn about his other piece of news, but he softened it to the point where he was almost telling an untruth. “Lysander isn’t well. They called the doctor in, and they’re making him rest.”

  “I don’t care!” she said so defiantly it was obvious she did. “What happened?”

  “As soon as you stormed out, he fell down, and we got him on the sofa and then the doctor came. I don’t know what the doctor said. I was in Gwidion’s house then.”

  Right when I left, Meg thought. That’s my fault too. And Bran pushing himself to exhaustion because of me, and now in a drugged sleep. Even James is my fault. I should have known better than to leave him alone, though the others said they’d watch him. I knew they wouldn’t, not really. Everything is my fault. All the more reason to leave now. I didn’t know the Ashes a few months ago, except from a card once a year or so. Now Phyllida will die, and I’ll be home, and I’ll forget all this.

  Turn tail, the brownie had said.

  “But first I have to get James,” she said, continuing her thoughts aloud. “Before the Midsummer War, I tried to get in, tried to get the Green Hill to open, but nothing worked. I’ve called and pounded and threatened, and no one answers. I don’t know what to do. Phyllida said there’s always some way to get a fairy prisoner back, and it’s different every time. If I could just get them to open up, just see James, I know I could get him back. I’d do anything.”

  “I opened the Green Hill once,” Finn said.

  “What? How!”

  He pointed. “Right over there was a rock, looked like any other rock, but it was a little lever, and when I moved it the whole hill opened.”

  “Did you go inside?”

  “Yes, but just a few feet. There were columns, like marble, but they looked like they were made out of giant bones. It was dark, almost completely dark, but there was a swirling mist hiding something I could almost see. Then the dogs came.”

  “Dogs?”

  “White with red ears. They chased me away.”

  “Nothing will chase me away if I get in!” Meg insisted. “Now, show me the rock.”

  He found it easily enough, but no amount of manipulation produced any result. Finally Meg scooped it up and threw it into the brambles. It hit Fenoderee on the head, but whether because his skull was tough or because she threw like the proverbial girl, he took it as a friendly way to get his attention.

  “Fenoderee, can you get inside the Green Hill?”

  “Sure,” he replied.

  “Will you let me in? Please?”

  “I have to wait another hundred years or so. And a day. I can never forget the day. Then I’d be happy to.” His entire face was smeared with blackberry juice.

  “Oh,” she said. “Never mind. I have to get in now.”

  “If you had a key, you could let yourself in,” Fenoderee said, doing his best to be helpful.

  Gee, thanks, Meg thought, but Finn said, “Wait a minute.… Why didn’t I think of it before? It’s not a lock, exactly, but it wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The skeleton key,” he said proudly, pulling the bag open. It was a pain to lug around, but he’d known it would be useful. “Excuse me, but would you mind opening this hill for us?” He tipped the bag over, and the hand crawled out.

  It glanced over its shoulder at Finn (that is, if a hand could glance, or had a shoulder) as if to ask him, Are you he sure?

  “Please. Meg has to get in. It’s very important.”

  The hand loved a challenge, and though the stakes were high, it figured nothing much worse could happen to it. It had already been severed from its body (which was long dead). The fairies might be angry, but there wasn’t much more they could do to it. It didn’t even have any fingernails left to pull out, or jab bamboo slivers under. It cracked its knuckles, crept around the base of the hill looking for a likely spot, and set to work. It fiddled with some stones, bent a few leaves, then plunged itself into the soft earth and quivered. When at last it pried itself free, there was a low rumble and the dirt where it had been collapsed in on itself in a circle, exposing a low tunnel.

  “But where’s the arch?” Finn asked. “The columns?” He bent low and peered in, but saw only darkness and dirt. “We can’t go in there. We’d hardly fit, and the thing would cave in on us. It’s a trap.”

  But Meg’s feet were already disappearing inside.

  Why Are You Showing Me This?

  “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA where we are?” Dickie asked.

  Silly set her jaw stubbornly and said, “We’re almost there.” They had been wandering the woods for three hours.

  They’d set out confidently enough. “Meg can find the Green Hill whenever she likes, and I’m sure I can too,” Silly assured him, and she’d blustered like a bear through the forest, not looking for trails, not paying any attention to her direction, just knocking aside vines and stepping on late violets, relying on instinct to guide her. Every animal that could move faster than a slug fled from the great crashing monster who invaded their home, and Dickie (and the Wyrm) followed sheepishly in that young juggernaut’s wake.

  “We certainly won’t catch them by surprise,” Dickie said early on, when he still had some hope and fight left in him.

  Now, his legs aching and scratched by thorns, he moped silently on behind her. He’d have headed home if he’d had any idea where home was. He even asked the Wyrm, who replied that, alas, he could only navigate by the stars in the southern hemisphere.

  “If it pleases you, I’ll brush up on my celestial navigation when we get home. Much though I loathe adding to the store of knowledge I am so earnestly endeavoring to forget.”

  “Fat lot of good that’ll do us. We won’t ever get home,” Dickie grumbled. “You might as well get used to living in the woods.”

  The Wyrm, alarmed, longed aloud for his comfortable library and promptly went to sleep, on the theory that when he woke up, things might be better, and if not, at least he would have missed a few hours’ unpleasantness.

  Silly stopped abruptly and glared at the encircling trees as if they were her mortal enemies. “Don’t you have any idea where to go, you silly little thing?” she asked her baby fairy fondly.

  The fairy turned into a fat pink dahlia, then a spider monkey, then a blue-tongued skink before nuzzling Silly’s ear, cooing, and following the Wyrm’s example. “That’s all right, darling,” she told it, kissing its green forehead. “I don’t really want to give you back anyway.” She pressed onward, hoping for the best, and Dickie followed.

  In the end it was Silly who called the halt. “I’m not giving up,” she said adamantly. “But it’s almost midnight, and I admit I’m a little lost. Just a little. I know the Green Hill’s over there somewhere.” She made a vague gesture into the blackness. “Still, at this point we might as well wait till morning. I’m going to sleep here. Once the sun’s up, I’ll be able to find our way.”

  Since he didn’t have much choice, Dickie lay down near her in a hollow of moss and fern. It was more comfortable than that bed of pine boughs survivalists are always encouraging you to make, but just barely. Bugs, sensing their warmth, came eagerly from the moss and sought out their crevices. Dickie eventually stopped scratching long enough to fall asleep, but not bef
ore he heartily wished himself back in Arcadia.

  * * *

  I’m not going in there, Finn told himself as Meg’s heels disappeared into the crumbling hole. No way. Nothing doing.

  And so he was as surprised as anyone to find his own head plunged into the earthy den as he crawled after Meg. While his mind urged him to worm his way backward before it was too late, his arms and legs kept pulling him deeper.

  There was no light past the first few feet. “Meg, wait for me!” He grabbed her by the foot and shouldn’t have been surprised that she kicked like a mule—who wouldn’t after being unexpectedly grabbed belowground?

  “You should go back,” she said.

  “I know I should, but I’m not.”

  “This isn’t your problem. James is my brother. I’ll take care of it.”

  If he’d been gallant, he would have said, And I’ll take care of you. But his thoughts hadn’t gotten nearly that far, and he only knew he was going with her whether she or, more to the point, he liked it or not. All he said was, “If you’re gonna go, then go,” and gave her sneakered foot a shove.

  At the mouth the tunnel was big enough that if they wanted to have very sore backs, they could have walked in a deep stoop. But as they progressed, it narrowed by almost imperceptible degrees until Finn could feel the dirt scraping his back even though he was crawling. It was warm, too, even warmer than the summer night air outside. The earth around them was just about body temperature, and humid, so they felt like they were inside a living thing.

  “It’s getting too narrow,” Finn said, but he wasn’t sure if Meg could hear him. Meg, slightly smaller than Finn, was having an easier time, and she pushed on. Finn had to drop to his elbows in a military crawl.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said as he wormed blindly forward. “I’m going back.” But he only said it in hopes that she’d go back herself. It suddenly occurred to Finn that he might not be able to reverse course if he tried. He made an experimental wiggle and all of his bones seemed to bite like backward-curving viper teeth into the earth, holding him snugly in place.

  Meg crawled on as if she were deranged. Her love and anxiety for James combined with her rage over Phyllida’s lies and her own guilt about not doing something herself sooner spurred her on to bravery. Perhaps she had been brave before in the Midsummer War and when facing down Smythe, but confronting a known danger in the open air is a very different thing from plunging yourself into what is practically a tomb. Though she wasn’t positively phobic, she didn’t like tight spaces. And indeed, the air itself was getting tighter. Eventually she too had to drop to her elbows and squirm her way forward, and it felt like the weight of all the dirt above her was crushing down on her back, choking the life out of her. The air was dank and rotten; the hole got tighter and tighter. She heard Finn say something behind her, and though his words were muffled, she knew he was saying exactly what any half-sensible person would say at that moment: “Let’s get out of here before it’s too late!”

  At last she could go no farther. Her questing hands and then her forehead bumped solid dirt. They’d reached the end of the tunnel.

  Panic filled her. She was held so tightly in the earth’s embrace that she could barely move, otherwise she would have flailed and kicked her feet. She felt she couldn’t even scream. Her face was pressed against a wall of dirt, and every exhalation echoed back to her. There wasn’t any air! She was breathing her own air over and over again, and the tunnel would collapse behind them, and they would die suffocated and crushed and alone so far beneath the hill that no one would find them, and worms would eat them!

  Then a hand wrapped itself around her ankle. If he said anything, she couldn’t hear it, but that simple human touch reassured her just enough that she discovered she could breathe after all.

  Who must do the hard things? She who can. Meg made mole-paw scoops with her hands and started to claw at the wall of earth. Madness, she told herself. You’ll pull the whole thing down on our heads. But still she dug. This was the Green Hill, her Green Hill, her heritage and birthright. It might make the way hard, but it would let her inside in the end.

  She scratched and scraped until a piece of the wall crumbled. Behind, the earth was softer and she squirmed her way through. There wasn’t a tunnel anymore, just the hole made by Meg’s body. Dirt forced its way into her mouth and even into her eyes, which against all reason she couldn’t help but open periodically to check for light. And then there was light, tiny pinpricks like Finn had seen when she kicked him in the head. Winking diamonds whirled around her as she forced her way forward one last foot. Then she was free—or her head was—and she pulled the rest of her body out and shook herself like a dog. She gulped several deep, relieved breaths before she remembered Finn. She threw herself back on her belly and thrust her hands into the dirt. Fingers twined around hers, and between her strength and Finn’s frantic kicks, he was hauled out of the ground.

  He lay stunned, weakly wiping the dirt from his good eye and from behind his eyepatch. When he could see, he said, “This isn’t the Green Hill I saw.”

  “Me neither,” said Meg, who had only glimpsed it from the outside.

  They were in a cave of sorts, lit by twinkling rocks in the walls and the soft reflection of glowing grubs that clung to the stalactites. Nothing in it looked man- or fairy-made … and yet it wasn’t quite natural either. It was like a movie set: not a real cave but an almost-too-perfect representation of a cave created just for them. The rock walls were molded to look perfectly natural, the glowworms placed with careful randomness. Even the steady drip-drip of mineral-rich water from stalactite to stalagmite sounded with artificial precision.

  “Hello!” Meg called, and her voice came back in ever fainter echoes, hello-hello-hello.… Where was Gul Ghillie? Where was the Seelie queen? The fairy kingdom was supposed to lie beneath the Green Hill. Bran had told her about the feasts, the dancing, the lovely fairy woman who had held him seventy years away from his family. Where were they all? More important, where was James?

  “Let’s go,” Meg said.

  “Go where?”

  They were in a large cavern that branched out into various passageways. They couldn’t see very far down any of them.

  Meg shrugged. “I don’t think it matters. We found this place. We’re bound to find something.”

  Again, the impossibility of going back propelled Finn forward, and he followed Meg as she chose a corridor.

  “There are bats, so there must be another entrance,” Meg said, pointing to dim flying shapes above their heads. That was a momentary relief … until one of the bats swooped closer and they saw it was dark bloody purple and slimy, with a frog’s face and a long, trailing tadpole tail. Like many cave dwellers, it had no eyes, so it flapped along with its mouth gaping open, tasting the air to find its direction. It bumped against Meg then swooped back to lick her on the arm, its tongue leaving a slime trail. It flew up to its cavemates, and they all touched tongues to talk about the new creature in their lair.

  Meg and Finn were walking downhill, and before long they heard the trickle of water. Meg fell on her backside and was sliding down the chute before she’d quite placed the sound. Finn, finally deciding that he absolutely, positively wouldn’t follow her this time, lost his footing as he scrambled back and tumbled down the chute. He landed on top of her in a pool of frigid water, and they both went under.

  On the downside, the water was just a little above freezing. On the plus side, the pool was lit from within by a strong glow that illuminated the whole cavern, and when they sputtered to the surface, they could clearly see each other’s teeth chattering and their skin turning blue and goosefleshy. The pool was waist deep, shimmering silver. They couldn’t see their own legs, but there were other things swirling in the water that Meg desperately hoped weren’t alive.

  They weren’t, at least not yet.

  Looking down, Meg saw people dressed in styles she had never seen. They walked in tight packs through a cityscape,
and though it wasn’t a place Meg recognized, it didn’t immediately strike her as odd or ominous. Skyscrapers reflected each other grayly in polished windows, and cars—again, just a little different from any she’d ever seen—flew by. First she thought she was looking through the water to some realm beneath it, but when she moved and the ripples distorted the image, she realized it was a picture in the water itself. More people and different cities appeared, and it was a long while before she realized what disturbed her about the scenes: there was nothing green in them, nothing living besides the people. Every metropolis she’d ever seen had a tree or shrub planted in a preserved square of soil, clinging to life amid the smog. There should be rooftop gardens, flowerpots on windowsills. And pigeons—is there a city in the world without pigeons? In these places there was nothing but teeming humanity. She touched the icy surface with her hand, and the scene changed.

  Now she saw men in military dress, soldiers with straps around their waists and thighs and chests, all holding weapons. They were running in loose formation toward … “Oh! Look!” She pointed, and the second her fingertip touched the water, the scene changed again, but she knew what she’d seen. The soldiers were about to engage an army of half-man, half-horse warriors wielding bows and lances. Men were fighting centaurs.

  Another image rose from the silvery depths, a hairy, child-sized creature on two legs running for the safety of a forest while teenage boys chased it with rocks and chains. His legs were too short, they were gaining on him … a rock struck his head—

  “No!” she cried, and touched the water again.

  It was a seashore under moonlight, calm at high tide, and Meg let out the breath she’d been holding. She let the peace of the scene soothe her … then the tide started to ebb, revealing the mangled corpses of mermaids and mermen on the shore, their long hair flowing back and forth in the bloody waves.

  Meg slammed the pool with both her fists. “Why are you showing me this?” she yelled. In answer, the water started to drain. With a whine and then a great sucking sound, it turned into a whirlpool, and Meg and Finn searched the cavern for any means of escape. But the chute that had brought them there was too steep and slippery with mud for them to climb, and the walls had no handholds. They watched, helpless, as the whirlpool widened, felt the sucking against their legs. At the end, they clung to each other as they were pulled under in a swirling mass of pressure and bubbles.