A Green and Ancient Light

by Frederic S. Durbin

  I couldn’t watch the next part, either. Grandmother took the rag in one hand and the knife in the other. With my arms crossed over my stomach, I got up and moved away. Behind me, I heard the trickle of water and a sound like when my mother ironed clothes. The pilot mumbled something, and twice he emitted a scream. When a terrible, hot odor reached me, I dropped to my knees and retched. Mr. Girandole sat on the rock and watched me with a look of sympathy.

  By the time Grandmother had finished her awful surgery, she had scorched R —— in some places and sewn him up in others. He was horribly pale, but his blood was no longer trickling into the earth. For the moment, at least, he was still breathing. Grandmother cut clean, dry rags into bandages with the shears and used the string to bind them around R ——’s leg, shoulder, side, and neck. We cleaned our hands again. Mr. Girandole went to extinguish his fire and to wash the other rags and canvas in the stream.

  As we collected our gear and waited for him to get back, I repeated my question about Mr. Girandole.

  “He’s a faun,” Grandmother said. “And he’s very old—much older than me.”

  I stared at her. “But he looks—”

  “He’s looked the same since I met him, when I was seven.”

  “You met him here, didn’t you—in the sacred woods?”

  She nodded. “He’s the last of his kind. Or at least, the last around here.”

  “If they don’t get old, how can that be?”

  “The other fauns went away, as I understand it. Girandole fell in love with a human woman. He left the forest to live with her. But she grew old and died. When he came back to the grove, his people had gone.”

  I watched the pilot breathing, his chest rising and falling. More planes droned past—a patrol of ours, I thought, though they were far away. “So, Mr. Girandole lives alone here in the woods?”

  “Yes. His home is high on the mountain, in the steep places where no one ever goes, in a cave. He’s always stayed around here, because he has no place to go in the world of humankind. I think he’s always hoping his people will come back, or that he can find a way to rejoin them. He’s from Faery, the other world. He misses it.”

  The story was very sad. I got the impression Grandmother was telling me these things partly to take my mind off all the stitching and cauterizing. But now I was thinking of the statues in the grove—of dragons and giants, of the mer-people under the sea. I’d always wanted these things to exist outside of fairy tales. A part of me had always believed that they must, somewhere, even if it were in a world humans couldn’t reach. But if fauns could live—here in our own country . . . “Are the others real?” I asked, so full of hope that it hurt my chest. “All the creatures from stories?”

  Grandmother gazed at me, looking tired, resting her chin on the head of her walking-stick. “You’ve seen all the ones I’ve seen. Maybe they all were here once. The stories had to come from somewhere. I think Girandole is the last.”

  Sadness settled on me like a weight. “They’ve gone back to Faery? Why?”

  She shrugged. “Too many of us, I expect. The world is too noisy for them now.”

  I hoped she was wrong. I wanted desperately for there to be others.

  “Don’t be so gloomy,” Grandmother said. “Think of it: yesterday, you never thought you’d meet a faun.”

  “Where there’s one,” I said, “there might be more!”

  “That’s an expression about snakes,” she said.

  Mr. Girandole returned. I watched him come, swinging along with what seemed a cheerful aspect, the boots now back on his feet. I supposed the boots must be padded with wads of cloth in the toes and heels—for if ordinary feet would not fit Cinderella’s slipper, the reverse situation must also be true.

  “I spread the wet things out in the sun to dry,” he reported. “I’ll bring them and these tools back to you after dark tonight.”

  I saw his reasoning: it would be best if no one saw Grandmother and me coming out of the woods with an armload of strange gear. I knew how the villagers loved to gossip. Only a narrow meadow and the belt of arbors separated Grandmother’s back garden from the forest’s edge.

  Grandmother took his hand. “Thank you for all your help, Girandole. You are always so kind.”

  He bowed his head in a courtly way. There was worry in his lean face. “You should go now. Tread very carefully, M ——. If anyone finds this man, alive or otherwise, it will be clear he didn’t stitch himself up.”

  “We’ll be careful,” Grandmother said. She frowned into the treetops. “Can nothing be done about that parachute?”

  Mr. Girandole took off his hat for the first time and ran his long, dark fingers through his hair. I felt my eyes widen at the sight of two small nubs of horn on his forehead, nearly hidden by his matted locks. “A rock tied to a rope, I suppose,” he said. “If I could snag some of the cords, I could pull one way and another until it all came down.”

  Grandmother nodded. “I have some clothesline rope that ought to be long enough. I’ll give it to you tonight. There’s nothing more we can do for . . . R —— here . . . until he decides whether he’s going to live another day.”

  Mr. Girandole agreed. “I’ll bring a blanket and cover him. I don’t smell any rain coming.”

  Leaning on her stick, Grandmother turned to go, but Mr. Girandole cleared his throat. “There’s . . . also the matter of his weapon.”

  I looked toward the gun, hidden in the pile of rocks.

  “Out of sight, out of mind!” said Grandmother, laughing at herself for forgetting it. She narrowed her eyes, thinking. “It doesn’t belong here. We’ll take it out of the forest.”

  “I could take it to my cave,” Mr. Girandole offered. “Or bury it somewhere high on the mountain.”

  “No. If R —— dies, he won’t be needing it. If he lives, he’ll want it back, and you’ll never hear the end of it. We’ll carry it beyond any retrieving. I know a good way.” So, Grandmother put the heavy black gun into her carpet bag, and we took our leave.

  Glancing back, I saw Mr. Girandole, his coat folded over his arm, pacing slowly around our patient.

  * * * *

  We arrived home just as the noon whistle sounded from the fish cannery. If you listened carefully as it ended, you could hear its echo from the cliffs. First, we pumped up water from the well in the summer kitchen and washed our hands and faces thoroughly. Then Grandmother fixed us a lunch of bread and honey, sardines, cheese, fruit, and tea. I watched her strong hands peeling a pear, and I remembered with a shudder the sight of those hands sewing skin. When we’d washed the dishes, she went to her room for a nap.

  I saw that the pan under the ice box was nearly full from the melting ice block, so I carried it out and dumped it according to the rotation pattern. Today, it was the third pear tree’s turn for a drink. Flowers and vegetables shouldn’t be watered in the heat of the day. When I’d replaced the pan, I sat on a bench in the sun and watched butterflies flit in the germander. I felt wrung out, like one of the rags.

  Until three months before, Grandmother had been only a name, a photo in a round frame on the mantel. She was my father’s mother, and I don’t think she and my mother liked each other much; at least, we never visited her as a family. In my childhood, I knew Grandmother wrote letters to my papa sometimes, and he wrote back. He’d asked me now and then for some of my drawings to send her. Papa used to tell me stories of growing up in the village, where time hardly seemed to pass at all, and every arbor, every garden gate, might be the doorway to a magical world. Seeing the place for myself, I thought so too. Grandfather had been alive then, when my father lived here.

  I yearned for a better look at the sacred woods. For now, my eyes were heavy, too; exhaustion swept over me. Curling up on the bench, I was soon fast asleep.

  * * * *

  I awoke to the growl of a plane.

 
Springing upright, I blinked into the thick, hot light of late afternoon. Golden sun slanted through the garden, and the ­shadows under trees and bushes were dark. My head had the sluggish feeling that comes when consciousness has been far away for a long time. My face was sore from the bench on one side and sunburned on the other.

  There was not one plane but two. They were sleek, angular fighters of our side, from the airfield to the north. Very low, they roared over the village in repeated loops and buzzed up the mountain, making pass after pass.

  Grandmother came out of the cottage, her hair in disarray. “They’ve seen the parachute,” she said.

  A chill passed through me. “I can run fast,” I said. “I’ll go and warn Mr. Girandole.”

  “No.” She watched the planes, the sun gleaming on their wings and canopies. “They’ve warned him themselves, with their noise. If you go up there, you’ll run into a lot of soldiers. It’s the hardest thing, but what we have to do is wait and see what happens.”

  I couldn’t stand it. “But they’ll catch R ——! Mr. Girandole will be too scared. He won’t know what to do.”

  Grandmother gave a short laugh. “Don’t go counting on that. He’s only timid when there’s someone nearby to be brave for him. Left to his own devices, he does just fine.”

  My heart was pounding. “We’ve got to do something.”

  “Let’s see if there are any ripe tomatoes,” Grandmother said.

  * * * *

  That was the longest evening I had spent in my life. I could focus on nothing but the sounds of planes, of cars and trucks in the street, and the snatches of voices that passed. We heard two large trucks roll by, but they were gone before either of us reached a window.

  About an hour before sundown, an Army truck drove slowly through the streets. Soldiers with rifles on their shoulders sat in the open bed, and their commanding officer clung to the rear of the cab, using a megaphone to repeat an announcement over and over:

  “AN ENEMY SOLDIER IS SUSPECTED IN THE AREA, THE PILOT OF THE CRASHED PLANE. REPORT ANY STRANGERS TO THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY. A GENE­RAL CURFEW WILL BE IN EFFECT BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 P.M. AND 6 A.M. UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. REMAIN INDOORS AT NIGHT WITH WIN­DOWS AND DOORS SECURED.”

  I looked bleakly at Grandmother, but the announcement seemed to have cheered her up. “You see?” she said. “They’ve been to the forest already and found the parachute but not the man. They’re up against a faun in his own woods.”

  Still, it worried me when supper was over, sunset came and went, and the moon rose, but still Mr. Girandole made no appearance. I pictured him wringing his hands in the dark. R —— was probably dead, and Mr. Girandole didn’t know how to break the news to us. Or might the soldiers have caught Mr. Girandole? Might they have shot him? But we’d heard no gunshots; I supposed a gunshot could be heard a long way off in the quiet woods.

  After nightfall, there were no more planes, and the only traffic was a truck passing every hour or so. Grandmother worked on stitching a quilt. “He may not come tonight,” she said. “The soldiers are likely watching the open field, and the moon is bright.”

  So, I pulled my feet up onto a high-backed chair near the same lamp and tried to read Arabian Nights, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept reading and re-reading the same line.

  “When your mind’s too restless to think,” Grandmother said, “move your hands.”

  Getting out my sketchbook, pencil, and eraser, I drew a picture of the grove of the monsters as I remembered it, with the winged beast snarling over the bushes, and faces peering through the vines near and far.

  “You’d better not draw or write anything about Girandole or R ——,” Grandmother said. “Not in your book there, and not in your letters.”

  I nodded. “I’m only drawing the monsters.”

  But I found myself unable to remember the details. My lines on paper did no better than words at framing the secrets of the ­shadowy wood. A silence passed in which I drew and erased, brushing away the eraser’s gray crumbs, my fingers smudged with pencil lead.

  Suddenly, as if we were still in the midst of our morning’s conver­sation, Grandmother began to speak. The things she told me were personal, and I marveled that she was trusting me with so much and talking to me in the same tone she used with adults. As I look back on it, I think she’d been testing me that day—or perhaps for many days—and I’d finally passed.

  “Girandole’s my best friend.” She put down her quilting and sighed. “You ought to know this, because someday you’ll wonder about it, and I won’t be around to tell you. First, he was like an uncle or a father to me. As I got older, he was like a brother, but even more than that . . . When I grew up, he insisted I find a man to marry—one of my own kind, who could grow old with me. He didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past, you see. So, all the while I was with your grandfather, I didn’t go to the woods, and Girandole didn’t come out. I didn’t see him for more than thirty years, but I knew he was watching me sometimes, hidden among the hedges near the garden. He wanted me to have a normal life, but at the same time it broke his heart—he loved me, you know, even though he tried not to. The heart is uncontrollable.”

  I had no idea what to say. At last I managed, “Did you love him, too?”

  She smiled faintly and seemed to fix her gaze far beyond the cottage walls. “Yes. I did, and I do.” Her eyes found me again. “But I’m an old woman, and he’s a faun. What that means for us is friendship. And the knowledge that there’s more to the larger story of things . . . much more, beyond the borders of this world—beyond the walls of time.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant. But since she seemed to be in an answer-giving mood, I asked, “Did the fauns carve the statues?”

  “No. The monsters in the grove were commissioned by a nobleman—a duke—nearly four hundred years ago. It took many years as the garden grew, piece by piece—his life-long project. He employed the finest sculptors in the land, the ones whose work is still to be seen in the cathedrals.”

  “Why did he make them?”

  The kettle boiled, and Grandmother laid aside her quilting to brew a pot of tea. “No one knows for sure, though there is more than one version of the story. Some say the garden was a tribute to the duke’s beloved wife, a woman named G ——. But some say she took one look at it and fell down dead with fright. Not very long after she died, the duke simply vanished. No one knows what became of him. The garden was left abandoned, and in time, it was overgrown by the woods. Even the duke’s castle up on the mountain is gone now; not so much as a foundation remains. I read what I could about it all years ago in the national library, on a trip to the capital. You won’t hear many facts around here.”

  I wasn’t happy with my drawing: the winged creature’s mouth wasn’t right. Erasing it, I tried yet again.

  “People talk as if the monsters were real,” I said. “Do they know they’re only statues?”

  “A few of the brave ones have been up there to see them—enough to keep people reminded that there are monsters. There’s always been superstition about the place—the duke wasn’t around to defend himself after he vanished, and there were all the ugly rumors of what might have gone on in the garden.” Grandmother sighed and listened as a truck motored past.

  “And now this—” She tipped her head vaguely toward the truck sound. “These times, and the world all upside down. The current regime forbids any celebration of our glorious past in art or music or books. We’re not supposed to have spirits; we’re supposed to be good children and obey. For most people, it’s easier to be afraid of monsters that are safely off in the woods.” She smirked. “The haunted woods.”

  “They call it haunted; you call it sacred.”

  Grandmother chuckled, placing a cup of tea on a saucer beside me. “When your father took you to the Great Cathedral, how did you feel? Frightened, or full of holy awe?”


  I thought of the gargoyles, the soaring stained glass and colored light . . . the vast space and dim heights . . . the joyous and fiendish and suffering faces, carved in high places and in low, in brightness and shadow. “Both,” I answered.

  “There you are, then. Haunted and sacred. Maybe they want to mean the same thing, but neither word is big enough.”

  I darkened my monster’s eyes and began adding the teeth. “Did Papa go to the grove?”

  “Of course he did, though he learned not to speak of it in front of your grandfather. The forest was forbidden, even then. Funny . . . I always felt as if the place were calling me.”

  I nodded, tapping my pencil against my lips, planning how I would ask my father about his time in the garden—what he thought of it, and what he did there. Setting aside my sketchbook, I got out letter paper, but Grandmother frowned.

  “You should wait a few days, until things settle down,” she said. “Unless you want your letter opened and read by the Army right there in the post office.”

  I didn’t want that, so I put the paper back in its box.

  When the hour grew late, Grandmother announced that she intended to sleep on the couch, in case Mr. Girandole rapped on the door too lightly to be heard from the bedroom. I joined her in the vigil, dragging my mattress and bedding out of my room and arranging them on the floor before the wood stove.

  “Don’t worry,” Grandmother told me when she blew out the oil lamp. “We’ve done what we can for now.” She seemed to take her own advice; in minutes, she was softly snoring.

  I lay awake for a long time in the glow of the embers behind the stove’s grill, listening to the frogs and crickets, and to the rustle of leaves when the wind picked up.

  At last I slept, but my dreams were a repeat of the day: rags soaked in blood, planes flying low, trucks full of soldiers . . . and the grove of monsters. In my dream, the monsters blinked and shifted when I wasn’t looking directly at them, and I could hear them whispering together in the far parts of the garden, the parts I couldn’t see behind the leaves.