Into the Green

by Charles de Lint

  "I have others interested in such items," he said. "I came to you first because your principal has provided me with a good business over the past year, but if the price is too steep..."

  "Five thousand," Kellin said.

  Spenn merely laughed.

  Kellin would buy. Spenn had no doubt of that. All that remained now was to enjoy the bargaining.

  8

  Mostly, when Angharad played the small harp she'd named Garrow, she pulled dance tunes from its strings, lilting jigs or reels that set feet tapping until the floorboards shook and the rafters rang. But some nights the memory of old sorrows returned. Lying in wait like marsh mists, they clouded her eyes with their arrival. On those nights, the music she pulled from Garrow's metal-wound strings was more bitter than sweet, slow airs that made the heart regret and brought unbidden memories to haunt the minds of those who listened.

  "Enough of that," the innkeeper said.

  The tune faltered and Angharad looked up into his angry face. She lay her hands across the strings, stilling the harp's plaintive singing.

  "I said you could make music," the innkeeper told her, "not drive my customers away."

  It took Angharad a few moments to return from that place in her memory where the music had brought her to this inn where her body sat, drawing the music from the strings of her harp. The common room was half-empty and oddly subdued, whereas earlier every table had been filled and men stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the bar, joking and telling each other ever more embroidered tales. The few who spoke now did so in hushed voices; fewer still would meet her gaze.

  "You'll have to go," the innkeeper said, his voice not so harsh now. She saw in his eyes that he too was remembering a forgotten sorrow.

  "I..."

  How to tell him that on nights such as these, the sorrow came, whether she willed it or not? That if she had her choice she would rather forget as well?

  Sometimes the memories the music woke were not so gay and charming. They hurt. Yet such memories served a purpose, too, as the music knew well. They helped to break the circles of history so that mistakes weren't repeated. But how was she to explain such things to this tall, grim-faced innkeeper who'd been looking only for an evening's entertainment for his customers? How to put into words what only music could tell?

  "I... I'm sorry," she said.

  He nodded, almost sympathetically. Then his eyes grew hard. "Just go."

  She made no protest. She knew what she was— tinker, witch and harper. This far south of Kellmidden, only the latter allowed her much acceptance with those who traveled a road just to get from here to there, rather than for the sake of the traveling itself. For the sake of the road that led into the green, where poetry and harping met to sing of the Middle Kingdom.

  Standing, she swung the harp up on one shoulder, her small journeypack on the other. At the door she collected her staff of white rowan wood. Witches' wood. Not until the door swung closed behind her did the usual level of conversation and laughter return to the common room.

  But they would remember. Her. The music. There was one man who watched her from a corner, face dark with brooding. She meant to leave before they remembered other things. Before one or another wondered aloud if it was true that witch's skin burned at the touch of cold iron— as did that of the kowrie folk.

  As she stepped away from the door, a huge shadowed shape arose from where it had been crouching by a window. The quick beat of her pulse only sharpened when she saw that it was a man— a misshapen man. His chest was massive, his arms and legs like small trees. But a hump rose from his back, and his head jutted almost from his chest at an awkward angle. His legs were bowed as though his weight was almost too much for them. He shuffled, rather than walked, as he closed the short space between them.

  Light from the window spilled across his features. One eye was set higher in that broad face than the other. The nose had been broken— more than once. His hair was a knotted thicket, his beard a bird's nest of matted tangles.

  Angharad began to bring her staff between them. The white rowan wood could call up a witch-fire that was good for little more than calling up a flame in a damp campfire, but it could startle. That might be enough for her to make her escape.

  The monstrous man reached a hand towards her. "Puh-pretty," he said.

  Before Angharad could react, there came a quick movement from around the side of the inn.

  "Go on!" the newcomer cried. It was the barmaid from the inn, a slender blue-eyed girl whose blonde hair hung in one thick braid across her breast. The innkeeper had called her Jessa. "Get away from her, you big oaf." She made a shooing motion with her hand.

  Angharad saw something flicker briefly in the man's eyes as he turned. A moment of shining light. A flash of regret. She realized then that he'd been speaking of her music, not her. He'd been reaching to touch the harp, not her. She wanted to call him back, but the barmaid was thrusting a package wrapped in unbleaclhed cotton at her. The man had shambled away, vanishing into the darkness in the time it took Angharad to look from the package to where he'd been standing.

  "Something for the road," Jessa said. "It's not much— some cheese and bread."

  "Thank you," Angharad replied. "That man... ?"

  "Oh, don't mind him. That's only Pog— the village half-wit. Fael lets him sleep in the barn in return for what work he can do around the inn." She smiled suddenly. "He's seen the kowrie folk, he has. To hear him tell it— and you'd need the patience of one of Dath's priests to let him get the tale out— they dance all round the stones on a night such as this."

  "What sort of a night is this?"

  "Full moon."

  Jessa pointed eastward. Rising above the trees there, Angharad saw the moon rising, swollen and round above the trees. She remembered a circle of old longstones that she'd passed on the road that took her to the inn. They stood far off from the road on a hill overlooking the Grey Sea, a league or so west of the village. Old stones, like silent sentinels, watching the distant waves. A place where kowrie would dance, she thought, if they were so inclined.

  "You should go," Jessa said.

  Angharad gave her a questioning look.

  The barmaid nodded towards the inn. "They're talking about witches in there, and spells laid with music. They're not bad men, but any man who drinks..."

  Angharad nodded. A hard day's work, then drinking all night. To some it was enough to excuse any deed. They were honest folk, after all. Not tinkers. Not witches.

  She touched Jessa's arm. "Thank you."

  "We're both women," the barmaid said with a smile. "We have to stick together, now don't we?" Her features, half-hidden in the gloom, grew more serious as she added, "Stay off the road if you can. Depending on how things go... well, there's some as have horses."

  Angharad thought of a misshapen man and a place of standing stones, of moonlight and dancing kowrie.

  "I will," she said.

  Jessa gave her another quick smile, then slipped once more around the corner of the inn. Angharad listened to her quiet footfalls as she ran back to the kitchen. Giving the inn a considering look, she stuffed the barmaid's gift of food into her joureypack and set off down the road, staff in hand.

  9

  There were many tales told of the menhirs and stone circles that dotted the kingdoms of the Green Isles. Wizardfolk named them holy places, sacred to the Summerlord; reservoirs where the old powers of hill and moon could be gathered by the rites of dhruides and the like. The priests of Dath named them evil and warned all to shun their influence. The common folk were merely wary of them— viewing them as neither good nor evil, but rather places where mysteries lay too deep for ordinary folk.

  And there was mystery in them, Angharad thought.

  From where she stood, she could see their tall fingers silhouetted against the sky. Mists lay thick about their hill— drawn up from the sea that murmured a stone's throw or two beyond. The moon was higher now; the night as still as an inheld breath. Expectant. A
ngharad left the road to approach the stone circle where Pog claimed the kowrie danced on nights of the full moon. Nights when her harp played older musics than she knew, drawing the airs more from the wind, it seemed, than the flesh and bone that held the instrument and plucked its strings.

  The bracken was damp underfoot. In no time at all, her bare legs were wet. She circled around two stone outcrops, her route eventually bringing her up the hill from the side facing the sea. The murmur of its waves was very clear now. The sharp tang of its salt was in the mist. Angharad couldn't see below her waist for that mist, but the hilltop was clear. And the stones.

  They rose high above her, four times her height, grey and weathered. Before she entered their circle, she dropped her journeypack and staff to the ground. From its sheath on the inside of her jerkin, she took out a small knife and left that as well. If this was a place to which the kowrie came, she knew they would have no welcome for one bearing cold iron. Lastly, she unbuttoned her shoes and removed her jerkin, setting them beside her pack. Only then did she enter the circle, in pleated skirt and blouse, barefoot, with only her harp in hand.

  She wasn't surprised to find the hunchback from the village inside the circle. He was perched on the kingstone, short legs dangling.

  "Hello, Pog," she said.

  She had no fear of him as she crossed the circle to where he sat. There was more kinship between them than either might claim outside this circle. Their Summerblood bound them.

  "Huh-huh-huh..." Frustration tightened every line of his body as he struggled to shape the word. "Huhlow... "

  Angharad stepped close and laid her hand against his cheek. She wondered, what songs were held prisoner by that stumbling tongue? For she could see a poetry in his eyes, denied its voice. A longing, given no release.

  "Will you sing for me, Pog?" she asked. "Will you help me call the stones to dance?"

  The eagerness in his nod almost made her weep. But it was not for pity that she was here tonight. It was to commune with a kindred spirit. He caught her hand with his and she gave it a squeeze before gently freeing her fingers. She sat at the foot of the stone and brought her harp around to her lap. Pog was awkward as he scrambled down from his perch to sit where he could watch her.

  Fingers to strings. Once, softly, one after the other, to test the tuning. And then she began to play.

  It was the same music that the instrument had offered at the inn, but in this place it soared so freely that there could be no true comparison. There was nothing to deaden the ringing of the strings here. No stone walls and wooden roof. No metal furnishings and trappings. No hearts that had to be tricked into listening.

  The moon was directly overhead now and the music resounded between it and the sacred hill of the stone circle. It woke echoes like the skirling of pipes, like the thunder of hooves on sod. It woke lights in the old grey stones— flickering glimmers that sparked from one tall menhir to the other. It woke a song so bright in Angharad's heart that her chest hurt. It woke a dance in her companion so that he rose to his feet and shuffled between the stones.

  Pog sang as he moved, a tuneless singing that made strange harmonies with Angharad's harping. Against the moonlight of her harp notes, it was the sound of earth shifting, stones grinding. When it took on the bass timbre of a stag's belling call, Angharad thought she saw antlers rising from his brow, the tines pointing skyward to the moon like the menhir. His back was straighter as he danced, the hump gone.

  It's Hafarl, Angharad thought, awestruck. The Summerlord's possessed him.

  Their music grew more fierce, a wild exultant sound that rang between the stones. The sparking flickers of light moved so quickly they were like streaming ribbons, bright as moonlight. The mist scurried in between the stones, swirling in its own dance, so that more often than not Angharad could only catch glimpses of the antlered dancing figure. His movements were liquid, echoing each rise and fall of the music. Angharad's heart reached out to him. He was—

  Something struck her across the head. The music faltered, stumbled, then died as her harp was knocked from her grip. A hand grabbed one of her braids and hauled her to her feet.

  "Do you see? Did you hear?" a harsh voice demanded.

  Angharad could see them now— men from the inn. Their voices were loud in the sudden silence. Their shapes exaggerated, large and threatening in the mist.

  "We see, Macal."

  It was the one named Macal who had struck her. Who had watched her so intently in the common room of the inn. Who held her by her braid. Who hit her again. He stank of sweat and strong drink. And fear.

  "Calling down a curse on us, she was," Macal cried.

  "And what better place than these damned stones?"

  Other men gripped her now. They shackled her wrists with cold iron and pulled her from the circle by a chain attached to those shackles. She fell to her knees and looked back. There was no sign of Pog, no sign of anything but her harp, lying on its side near the kingstone. The men dragged her to her feet.

  "Leave me alo—"she began, finally finding her voice.

  Macal hit her a third time. "You'll not speak again, witch. Not till the priest questions you. Understand?"

  They tore cloth strips from her skirt then to gag her. They tore open her blouse and fondled and pinched her as they dragged her back to town. They threw her into the small storage room of the village's mill. Four stone walls. A door barred on the outside by a wooden beam, slotted in place. Two drunk men for guards outside, laughing and singing.

  It took a long time for Angharad to lift her bruised body up from the stone floor and work free the gag. She closed her blouse somewhat by tying together the shirt tails. She hammered at the door with her shackled fists. There was no answer. Finally she sank to her knees and laid her head against the wall. She closed her eyes, trying to recapture the moment before this horror began, but all she could recall was the journey from the stone circle to this prison. The cruel men and the joy they took from her pain.

  Then she thought of Pog.... Had they captured him as well? When she tried to bring his features to mind, all that came was an image of a stag on a hilltop, bellowing at the moon. She could see...

  —

  The stag. Pog. Changed into an image of Hafarl by the music. Left as a stag in the stone circle by the intrusion of the men from the inn who'd come, cursing and drunk, to find themselves a witch. The men hadn't seen him. But as Angharad's assailants dragged her from the stone circle, grey-clad shapes stepped from the stones, where time held them bound except for nights such as this when the moon was full.

  They were kowrie, thin and wiry, with narrow dark-skinned faces and feral eyes. Their dark hair was braided with shells and feathers; their jerkins, trousers, boots and cloaks were the grey of the stones. One by one, they stepped out into the circle until there were as many of them as there were stones. Thirteen kowrie. The stag bellowed at the moon, a trumpeting sound. The kowrie touched Angharad's harp with fingers thin as rowan twigs.

  "Gone now," one said, her voice a husky whisper.

  Another drew a plaintive note from Angharad's harp. "Music stolen, moonlight spoiled," he said.

  A third laid her narrow hands on the stag's trembling flanks. "Lead us to her, Summerborn," she said.

  Other kowrie approached the beast.

  "The cold iron bars us from their dwellings," one said.

  Another nodded. "But not you."

  "Lead us to her."

  "Open their dwellings to us."

  "We were but waking."

  "We missed our dance."

  "A hundred moons without music."

  "We would hear her harp."

  "We would follow our kin."

  "Into the green."

  The green, where poetry and harping met and opened a door to the Middle Kingdom. The stag pawed at the ground, hearing the need in their voices. It lifted its antlered head, snorting at the sky. The men. Where had they taken her? The stag remembered a place where men dwelt in houses set cl
ose to each other. There was pain in that place...

  —

  Angharad opened her eyes. What had she seen? A dream? Pog, with that poetry in his eyes, become a stag, surrounded by feral-eyed kowrie.... She pushed herself away from the wall and sat on her haunches, shackled wrists held on her lap before her. The stone walls of her prison bound her. The cold chains weighed her down. Still, her heart beat, her thoughts were her own. Her voice had not been taken from her.

  She began to sing.

  It was the music of hill and moon, a calling-down music, keening and wild. There was a stag's lowing in it, the murmur of sea against shore. There was moonlight in it and the slow grind of earth against stone. There was harping in it, and the sound of the wind as it sped across the gorse-backed hills.

  On a night such as this, she thought, there was no stilling such music. It was not bound by walls or shackles. It ran free, out from her prison, out of the village; into the night, into the hills. It was heard there, by kowrie and stag. It was heard closer as well.

  From the faraway place that the music took her, Angharad heard the alarm raised outside her prison. The wooden beam scraping as it was drawn from the door. The door was pushed open and the small chamber where her body sat singing grew bright from the glare of torches. But she was hardly even there anymore. She was out on the hills, running with the stag and the kowrie, leading them to her with her song, one more ghostly shape in the mist that was rolling down into the village.

  "St-stop that, you," one of the guards said. His unease was plain in voice and stance. Like his companion, he was suddenly sober.

  Angharad heard him, but only from a great distance. Her music never faltered.

  The two guards kept to the doorway, staring at her, unsure of what to do. Then Macal was there, with his hatred of witches, and they followed his lead. He struck her until she fell silent, but the music carried on, from her heart into the night, inaudible to these men, but growing louder when they dragged her out. The earth underfoot resounded like a drumskin with her silent song. The moonlit sky above trembled.