by Susan Cooper
Inland, though, you could see slope after slope of new houses, covering every foot of land, and in the distance, chunky machines standing on the next sandy brown hill, waiting to chop down its few scrubby trees and replace them with buildings and roads. The horizon beyond disappeared into a rim of brown fog, under the hazy Pangaian sky where the sun always looked furry, even on a fine day.
I heard music from below, jolly music, with bright trumpets and jingly tunes, and I realized that the square down there was filled with people. Lou was already scrambling over the rocks toward a path that led downward, and I went after him. I no longer cared much whether Bryn was following, but I knew he was; I could hear his sliding feet.
The first streets we came to were empty, but as we went farther down we began to catch up with people walking: a couple here or there, then a family, then more, all hurrying down toward the square. Bryn was walking with us now, and a chunky, youngish woman with two little girls skipping beside her glanced at him and smiled. I suppose he was a striking sight, with his tall broad-shouldered figure and his golden beard. She had a friendly face and she included us in the smile; she was one of those people who just like to talk.
“With any luck, the speeches will be over,” she said.
Bryn said amiably, “I hope so.”
She laughed. “They do so like to make themselves sound grand, don’t they? Incorporation of Greater Harbiton—as if it was anything more than making the town bigger and bigger.”
“And bigger and bigger,” said Bryn.
One of the small girls was skipping with a rope, murmuring some rhyme to herself as she skipped, keeping pace with us. The other, smaller, was hopping along on one foot, kicking a round stone. She nudged it over to Lou, and Lou kicked it gently back, and they hopped happily along together, grinning, kicking.
“It’s nice to have the space, though,” the woman said. “The girls with their own room. Did you move out of the city too?”
“Oh yes,” said Bryn. “Indeed we did.”
“Nice to have the space,” she said again, contentedly. “And this was all desert, after all.” She looked fondly at the little girl and Lou, hopping along kicking their stone. “Are yours looking forward to the games?”
She was asking Bryn, but she was smiling at me, so I smiled back. “Sure,” I said.
We turned a corner, and suddenly we were part of a crowd of cheerful people in the square, which looked much bigger now that we were in it. Big grey stone buildings ran along its edge, with alleyways leading off into a mixture of brick-walled houses and glass-walled office blocks. At one end of the square, people were applauding, as a bunch of official-looking men and women climbed down from a platform. A band was playing. I glanced nervously at two or three groups of security police, in the dark red uniforms, but they all seemed very relaxed and cheerful and paid us no attention.
The music stopped, and people began drifting to the edge of the square, leaving a growing space in the center.
“Just in time!” the woman with us said happily, and her two little girls ran out into the space. The smaller one looked back at Lou. She was a cute little girl, with two bows in her hair.
“Come on!” she called.
Lou waved to her, but stayed beside me, near Bryn and their mother.
And out into the center of the square, dozens of children came running. Maybe hundreds. I don’t know where they came from; they just appeared from all over, slipping out of the crowd, out from alleyways and round corners. They were very young; they looked to be about Lou’s age, boys and girls together, and suddenly they were playing a game. It was an odd game, a kind of chain-tag. I hadn’t played anything like it for years; I’d almost forgotten how it went.
I think now that this is what Gaia meant when she said children were the weavers of story. We all have these rhymes and games that we learn from other kids when we’re small, and the younger ones learn them from us, and so on. But when we grow up, we forget them. Only the little ones keep carrying them on, only the little ones know them.
It started with one skinny girl in a black jumpsuit, waving her arms and screeching out to them all. She was holding a raggedy blue cap in one hand, like a baseball cap. When enough of them were watching her, waiting, she yelled, “Blue Man, rise up!” and she dropped the blue cap on the head of a little chubby boy nearby.
The kids all scattered then, and the little boy in the cap chased them. Round and round the space they went, with the adults cheering. When the boy caught someone, he kept hold of his hand and they chased the rest together, until there were three chasing, and then four, and in the end a whole chain. Only the ones at either end could tag someone, so there was a lot of ducking and dodging and laughter.
As they ran, they sang an odd little song, and skipped in time to it so that their running was almost like a dance.
“Run catch the year
Run catch the sun
Year turn round for everyone,
Up in the sky
Down in the ground
Catch him up till the year turn round!”
The twisting line of children wove its way in and out of the edge of the crowd, around the square, right past us, and the boy in the blue cap reached out and tagged Lou, so that he had to join the line at the very end. It made me nervous, but Lou flashed me a grin and skipped off after the rest.
To and fro they went, until there wasn’t a little one left who wasn’t in the long, singing, skipping chain. Then the tall skinny girl popped out of nowhere again holding a bright yellow cap, and put it on the head of the last one in line, a small girl with long fair braids.
“Yellow Man, rise up!” she shouted, even though the chosen one was a girl, and at once all the children dropped hands and scattered, and the little girl chased after them and the chain began to grow again. They danced round and round, in and out. I saw Lou dodging, laughing, till he was the very last child tagged to join the long snaking line.
And the skinny girl was there again, this time with a green cap. She held it high for a moment. Then she dropped it on Lou’s head and shouted, “Green Man, rise up!”
For an instant I remembered Gaia’s voice: From child to child the right words go . . .
And what happened then was so impossible to believe that I have trouble writing it down.
The children stood still, wherever they happened to be, and all together they shouted,
“Up in the sky
Down in the ground
Catch him up till the year turn round!
Green Man, rise up!”
The shout faded away into nothing and there was dead silence, with everyone in that great grey square still as statues, and into the silence a wind came, first murmuring like the breath of casuarinas and then growing, whining. It lifted the edges of people’s clothes, it blew litter round the streets, and as it blew, everybody near my little brother Lou backed away from him until he was alone, in a space. I couldn’t see his face, it was shadowed by the brim of the green hat, but I saw him begin to change.
He began to grow.
He grew, and he grew, the little cap falling away as his head grew, until he was a creature ten feet tall, fifteen feet tall, twenty feet tall, all green. He was the Green Man they had called up, with a huge green face that was not Lou’s face but a grown man’s, with its mouth wide, laughing. Green leaves and curling tendrils were growing out of his head; he had branches for hair, twigs for eyebrows; branches were growing out of all his body as if he were a great bush, and when he held out his hands, leaves grew from his massive fingers, long shoots, twirling as they grew.
I watched. I can’t tell you what I felt. It was like being frozen, paralyzed. Behind me, I heard Bryn give a little sigh.
The Green Man opened his mouth wider yet, as his enormous body stretched further and further up, high as the buildings all around, and out of this mouth poured a great torrent of branches and vines and leaves, like a green waterfall. It flowed over the pavement and the streets, and as it came I heard a rumbli
ng and a crackling begin, as everywhere in the big open square, and in the streets around it, sharp green sprouts came breaking up out of stone and concrete and brick, bursting up, cracking the paved ways. Inside the buildings of the town there was a deeper rumbling, and people came running out of doorways as branches sprouted from windows, and cracked walls, and sent tiles tumbling down from roofs.
I saw nobody hurt; it was as if the green flood were trying to avoid people, though I don’t know if that was possible in the end. In a moment or two the stunned city began to defend itself, and several of those little black helicopters came swooping low out of the hazy sky, over the square. Two of them hovered near the great Green Man, and dropped some sort of explosives, bombs I suppose. They burst near enough to make the enormous figure lurch, but in the same instant, huge snaking green vines shot up from the ground and snatched the helicopters out of the sky. They crashed into the square and burst into flames, and I saw the other helicopters drop and explode too.
I heard a different rumbling then, over the noise of the green things breaking the city apart, and down the streets that led into the square came armored grey vehicles like big lumbering steel boxes, huge and menacing. There were slits in their sides, and out of the slits came jets of blazing white light, that leaped out at the springing branches and fried them, where they touched, into blackened stumps. But they were no match for the flood of leaves and vines and branches pouring out of the earth all around them. In spite of the rays of fire, that advancing green mass wrapped itself round every single vehicle, rocking it, turning it over, putting out its light and fire. There was no stopping the force of the Green Man.
He towered into the sky, a huge square figure like a dense wood of interweaving green trees, and out of his great open laughing mouth now came flowers, a flood of flowers, roses, anemones, hibiscus, hundreds of others, and all of them red. In a scarlet river they poured down the streets, and were caught up by little streams, where water ran fast through the gutters of the street from broken water mains. Red they ran, these flower-filled streams, through the square and down the main street to the harbor steps. Looking down the slope to the harbor I could see them spreading out over the sea in streaks of red.
The sky was growing darker out there over the sea, and waves were springing up, rocking the lines of bobbing red blossoms. Lightning flickered from the horizon. I heard a low growl of thunder, far off. Something made me turn inland, to look at the horizon there, and everywhere on the rolling hills, with their endless grey buildings, there was a new haze of green. Over all the land; over all Pangaia, perhaps.
Bryn was at my side suddenly, exultant, eyes blazing, as the Green Man towered above us and the flood of green branches and red flowers poured down and around. The air was full of shouts and screams, and the crackling and rumbling of stone burst apart by the growing green things. Bryn yelled in my ear, clutching my shoulder hard.
“Any moment from now, any moment, the worlds will touch!” he shouted. “Watch and go, Trey! Watch for Lou!”
But how could I watch for my little brother Lou? Lou was the Green Man!
“Watch!” Bryn yelled. “Save him, one last time, as he has saved Pangaia!” His fingers dug into my shoulder so hard that it hurt. I felt his beard against my neck as he yelled in my ear, “Thank you, Trey! Gaia go with you!”
I looked up, to try to see any trace of Lou left in that huge figure, but in the same moment I was knocked off my feet by another wave of branches and leaves and flowers, pouring down, filling the street. I couldn’t see Bryn, I couldn’t see anything but a blur of green, as I was carried along, struggling, away from the square and toward the harbor. Twigs scratched my legs, vines wrapped themselves lovingly round my hands; it was like being caught in dense scrubland at home on the island, except that everything was moving. The leaves parted for a moment above my head, and I thought I caught a glimpse of the Green Man, but there was no longer a recognizable figure up there, only a dense mass of trees like a towering wood.
Then the leafy green tide dropped me, and I found myself on hands and knees on the stony shore, with the sound of a rising wind in my ears. Leaves and branches whipped past me, with wet seaweed twined in them, and there was a strong smell of the sea. I could see the sky, the hazy grey-brown sky of Pangaia, with clouds riding across it—
—and then that shimmering came again, the shaking of the air that was always the sign of our crossing between the other world and our own. For a moment I could see nothing but a blur, and the sound in my ears changed, grew louder, became the sound of wind in casuarina branches higher than I’d ever heard it, like the shriek of an animal.
And I was on the beach of Long Pond Cay, with sand under my fingers instead of stones, and small choppy waves were splashing at me as the tide began to rise. Out on the water just offshore, our little dinghy was tossing at anchor.
In the moment I saw the boat I reacted out of instinct, knowing I had to let out the line to match the rising tide. I splashed out toward it, and saw that the sea all round me was scattered with leaves and broken twigs, and red blossoms, hibiscus and poinciana and bougainvillea, even though there was nowhere on that wild little island they could have come from. Sunshine flickered between mounds of grey-white cloud running across the sky. I reached the boat, with water up to my neck, and tugged the anchor-line loose so that the boat swung free. Then I hauled it in toward shallower water so that I could climb in.
I looked up. Out past the boat, among the waves tossing the twigs and the scattered blossoms, I saw Lou.
He was swimming toward me; all I could see was his curly black head. It was as if my whole mind suddenly came to life again. I gave a yell and let go of the boat, and half-splashed, half-swam toward him, until we were both in water shallow enough to stand, clutching each other. “Lou—oh Lou—”
He was coughing and spluttering as if he were half-drowned, and he was exhausted. I had to hold him up in the water. There was no way of telling whether he had any memory whatsoever of the Green Man. He was my little brother again, a frightened small boy now. And he was as naked as on the day he was born.
THIRTEEN
I got us into the boat, somehow, and that good little motor started up as easily as if it were a calm dry day. It took us a long while to get home, through the choppy sea and the rising wind. I gave Lou my shorts, because I was in a floppy T-shirt long enough to cover my butt. We were both cold, though, and the light was beginning to fade by the time we got back to our jetty. The waves were slopping up over it, and banging the moored boats against the edge; I’d never seen the water come that far up, and it wasn’t near high tide yet.
I didn’t know how Lou had lost his clothes, I didn’t know how he had come back to his own self out of the Green Man, and he couldn’t tell me, of course. I don’t think I was even thinking about it. There was nothing in my head but getting back home.
“Thank God!” Grand said as we came in the door, and Grammie ran to hug us. She was crying. Grand was holding life preservers and a bag of gear, and Will was with him; they’d been on their way to come out looking for us. The weather forecast that day had promised rain, but suddenly it had turned much worse. A freak storm from the Atlantic had changed its course without any warning or reason, and was heading straight for our islands, and as it picked up moisture from the ocean it was turning into a hurricane.
Grammie wrapped Lou and me in big dry towels and made us drink hot lemon and water with a little rum in it. Will gave us a hug because he was so relieved to see us, and then he and Grand went out to bring the boats up on land. The wind was picking up, rattling the windows.
“I reckon we’ll all be up at the church before midnight,” Will said to Grammie.
“Sooner,” Grand said.
He opened the door, and the wind whirled in and hit us all in the face. “Gettin’ bad!” Will yelled, and he strode out after Grand and pushed the door shut behind him. I wanted to go too, to rescue our dinghy, but Grammie wouldn’t hear of it.
/> “They’ll put your little boat in the shed,” she said. “You got things to do here.”
I’d never been in a hurricane, but I knew how they worked. The storm is a great whirling circle of clouds and rain, many miles across, with winds inside it more than eighty-five miles an hour, and the circle travels across the ocean getting bigger and fiercer all the time. It can sink ships at sea, and do terrible damage when it hits land. Sometimes little tornadoes develop at its edges, vicious funnels of whirling wind and cloud that can break up a house in an instant, and kill anyone inside.
And when a hurricane hits the coast, it brings a big sea-surge with it, pushing the water up twenty feet or more higher than the highest tide. That was why Will talked about the church. Our settlement is so flat that in a big hurricane the sea would cover nearly all of it, all but the one hill on which St. Peter’s Anglican Church stood. When things started getting bad, everyone was supposed to gather there, to be safe from the storm.
Grammie made us fill big plastic jugs with water, and she heated some soup and put it in two thermos flasks. We collected all the candles and flashlights we could find, and rain jackets, and stuffed four blankets and pillows into garbage bags, along with Lou’s yellow boom box and an ancient little primus stove. Then she had us pick up every loose object in the house—magazines, cushions, vases, pictures from the wall—and shut them inside cupboards.
“Last hurricane was when I was a little girl,” she said, “and I remember. It took our roof off, and everything that wasn’t tied down blew right away.”
We heard thumping sounds from outside; Grand had come back and was closing the big wooden storm shutters over the windows. The wind was beginning to whine and moan in the roof. He came indoors, wet from the rain and the sea, and within a few minutes all the lights went out.
Lou started to make his nervous gasping sounds, Lou who had been so silent and brave in the dark in the Otherworld, and I felt hastily for a little flashlight I’d shoved into my pocket, and turned it on.
