Under the Green Hill

by Laura L. Sullivan

  One soldier among many usually expects to live. One man, fighting alone, is not afforded that luxury. Still, Rowan did not expect to fail. He was young, and youth can never brook defeat. Whether through wisdom or the callousness and confidence of youth, he thought only of the battle to come, and not its final moment.

  Meg, on the other hand, waffled constantly between pride in her brother’s obvious prowess and a terrible fear that always stalked her, and pounced, gripping her in its claws, when she least expected it. Ever since she’d first held the Hunter’s Bow and felt the calmness of the glamour descend on her, she’d almost entirely given up trying to talk her brother out of the war. All the same, she could not quite shake the conviction that she should do something to stop it. Yet if she breathed so much as a word of opposition, Rowan only looked at her with a lofty sort of condescension, and Silly called her an old-lady worry-wart and told her to stop being such a girl. And so Meg, cowed by her siblings and swayed by the charm of her bow, held her tongue. But that did not stop her mind from silently reaching out for some opportunity to keep her brother from harm.

  Occasionally she practiced with Rowan and Silly, though her archery had progressed so rapidly that hitting targets was tame. Gul Ghillie offered to take her hunting for waterfowl some morning, but this she steadfastly refused. Gul Ghillie had started to let the Morgans keep their weapons. Frequently, after a few minutes of shooting, she’d wander away from the training grounds, the Hunter’s Bow unstrung and hung over her shoulder, where it bumped against her quiver, and find some sanctuary to pursue her fruitless musings. Most often she sought the Rookery roof, taking the secret path through fur coats and stoles, up the narrow blind staircase into the brilliantly illuminated crow’s nest—or, rather, rook’s nest.

  The others never bothered with the roof anymore, and she was guaranteed to have it to herself. The morning before Midsummer, she was sitting there, safe above the world, lofty in the dread concerns none seemed to share. As she grew browner and more freckled in the noonday sun, she went once more over the possible solutions, dismissing each one in its turn, as she had before. She felt as frustrated as she sometimes did during math tests. She knew no new trick to solve the equation, and in desperation she revisited all those tired old failures just to see if she’d missed anything the first (and second and third and hundredth) time around. But she always arrived at the same unpleasant conclusion—unless Rowan changed his mind, she was powerless. Then she would fondle her bow, and forget for a time that she was worried at all.

  She watched indifferently as, below her, Finn traveled (with many backward glances) toward the woods. She’d almost forgotten that he was a Rookery resident. He made himself scarce during the day, and when in the house he was often to be found in inexplicable confabulation with Dickie. When she bothered to think about either of them, it was with some wonder and vague satisfaction that they seemed to be friends. But she had so much else on her mind that neither Finn nor Dickie was a high priority.

  She might have been dragged from her reverie if she’d known that Finn had been regularly spying on fairy life for the past few weeks. The seeing ointment worked like a charm, and Finn used it daily.

  Now, if you or I had such a thing as a seeing ointment, we might be tempted to introduce ourselves pleasantly to all the fairies we met. But for all his faults, Finn was occasionally a very clever boy, and from what Dickie told him, and what he had gleaned himself from his bruising encounters with elf-shot, he had the notion that the fairies wouldn’t be too pleased to find him spying.

  Finn was an expert eavesdropper, and back in Arcadia he was as up as any local gossip on who was spending evenings away from home, or had just received a Mercedes from the parent of a failing student. And he knew without a doubt that the key to successful spying is remaining unobserved. He learned to be stealthy, to lurk behind doors and quietly lift telephone receivers and, yes, even crouch below windows.

  In the fairies he was presented a unique and amusing opportunity. With the help of the ointment, he could see them, and even hear them, when they imagined themselves concealed. If they suspected he could see them, they’d pelt him with elf-shot or worse. But if he traipsed his merry way through the woods, seemingly oblivious of the assortment of fairies around him, they’d act as though he weren’t there.

  It was difficult, especially at first, to see green-skinned bogies and winged sprites and not react. It was even worse because they constantly mocked him, calling him unpleasant names and making rude faces. (They thought they were invisible, of course, but I think they would have behaved just as uncouthly if they’d known he could hear and see them. Some fairies have no manners.) He kept his countenance blank through the worst insults, and fixed his right eye, in which he’d daubed the ointment, on the heedless creatures, sucking down all he could learn.

  Thus, he came to know more about fairies than the Morgans did. Though they were favored by the Seelie Court, they saw none of its inhabitants other than Gul Ghillie in his two guises, and occasionally the Rookery brownie or a passing diminutive garden-variety fairy. Finn, on the other hand, saw schools of Water-Leapers (rather like bat-winged tadpoles with scorpion tails and sharp teeth) splashing in the pond, with little blue women on their backs. He saw a line of red-capped Knockers marching off to some distant mine, and spied a trio of Kobolds tramping down a barley field. The hideous but harmless pig-faced Jimmy Squarefoot picked his nose unself-consciously under Finn’s stare, and an itinerant hag gave him the evil eye as she passed. He saw tiny golden fairies fly like bees through blankets of St. John’s wort, and watched a willow with a woman’s face in its rough bark wade across the stream, its weeping branches held delicately up above the ripples. Through it all Finn kept silent, and never showed by any sign that he could see the fairies with one eye.

  He heard marvelous things, too. One morning, as he sat on the rocky stream-bank, a fairy lady and gentleman passed him. Except for their rather archaic clothes, he’d have thought them as human as he was. But when he closed his right eye and looked only with his left, they were gone. The fellow wore snug breeches and hose, the woman a high-waisted dress of dotted muslin and a quaint little bonnet. They walked arm in arm, and as they drew nearer, Finn heard what they said.

  “The brewer’s wife has been delivered of a strapping wee laddie,” the fairy man said. “Bonnie gray eyes, I’m told, and golden curls.”

  “Ah, it will be good to have a young one about the hill again. How long has it been since a fairy child was born here?”

  “Nigh on three hundred years,” the man replied, then took the lady’s hand and kissed it lightly. “You shall have your bairn, sweetheart. Tomorrow’s new moon…I’ll take him then. Have you fashioned the stock?”

  “Aye,” she said, and pulled from the folds of her garment a wooden figure carved in the likeness of a newborn with a pained expression on its scrunched face. “Like the bonnie boy it will look, but seem to wither with illness in three days, then seem to die. The parents will bury no more than a lump of wood, while the babe thrives under the Green Hill.” The pair wandered on, and so Finn learned how fairies sometimes steal human babies, leaving the parents none the wiser.

  On June 20, when Meg Morgan from her high perch spied him going off into the woods, Finn saw only two fairies, very small and unassuming, and to his mind not very interesting. At least at first. They were not beautiful, as were many of the flowery fairy maidens he saw, nor were they hideous enough to be fascinating. No, these were three feet tall and plainly dressed, except for a row of white feathers they’d attached in a line all along their sleeves.

  Finn almost let them pass. This game, though enjoyable enough, was beginning to wear thin. He’d just about had enough of hobarts and hob goblins, of pixies and sprites, and was considering whether he ought to tell the Morgans gloatingly about the fairy ointment, and maybe, after letting them beg for a week, consent to share a bit—only a bit, mind you—with them. A great secret unshared can only hold its appeal for s
o long.

  As far as he knew, they hadn’t seen any fairies since that fabulous first night. He wasn’t sure exactly what they got up to all day, but it seemed that they never even left the grounds. Apparently, that one night of disobedience had been enough for them, and they tamely heeded the Ashes’ injunction against leaving the Rookery.

  Finn’s only grounds for complaint—and, indeed, the thing that had kept him from telling the Morgans about the seeing ointment weeks ago—was that in all his spying he had never laid eyes on that fabulous creature, the Fairy Queen. Several of the lesser lords and ladies of her court had on occasion passed through the woods, but he wished more than anything to behold that vision he’d glimpsed dimly in Jenny Greenteeth’s pool. Each day, he searched for the Green Hill he’d seen in the vision, but the sacred tumulus remained steadfastly hidden even from his magically seeing right eye. Though he was still hoping for a sight of her that day, in the end he decided that two drab fairies were better than none at all, and he followed the feathered pair along a deer path through the forest.

  When the fairies go about their business, it is almost as if we humans are the invisible ones. Perhaps they really can’t see us unless they put their minds to it. In any case, they often don’t pay attention to humans at all. Which is fortunate for us, because most fairy attentions are hazardous one way or another. These two didn’t seem to notice that Finn was following them, and if they did, they were too secure in their invisibility to worry about him. Finn wandered down the deer trail at a leisurely pace, as though he were out taking a casual stroll, all the while keeping the fairies just in sight ahead of him. As he traveled, he fingered the jawbreaker candies he carried in his pocket as provender. The fairies walked for a few minutes, then stopped at the base of a papery-barked white birch.

  One of them looked up into the tree’s upper branches and called, “Stay yer hand, old lady. I’m a-coming up!” The tree seemed to shimmy in answer, and the other boosted his friend up to the first low branch. With some difficulty—for birches are not the best climbing trees—the fellow pulled himself into the canopy, where Finn, pretending not to look, could see the branches rustle. A while later, the feathered fairy slid back down the trunk, sending out a spray of silvery shreds of bark.

  “Still up there, all right,” he said to his friend.

  “Both of ’em?”

  “Ye think I’d be so calm if they weren’t? Two millennia, and I’ve never lost a life-egg yet.”

  “Two little eggs in the woods…What if a polecat et ’em, eh? What if a storm blew ’em out o’ the nest? What would happen in the Midsummer War then?”

  “Micawber, ye daft fool! D’ye think the White-Handed Birch Lady would let man nor beast near the eggs? Why, I’d like to see the polecat that’s man enough to climb ’er, that I would. She’s only safe with the likes of us. Didn’t I tell her I was a-coming up? She’ll be quiet for a few minutes now, but woe to the soul who tries to climb her if she’s a-riled. Don’t you fret, Micawber. Them eggs is safe enough. Least, until tomorrow night. Then one of ’em’s doomed, Birch Lady or no.”

  “Have you caught sight of the Black Prince’s champion? ’E’s that fox-eyed feller as used to ride with the court. Never thought I’d see the day. His egg’s the blue un.”

  “Haven’t seen him. Don’t see much of the court these days, what with…” Here he lapsed into a long and not very interesting account of his journeys to the Fens, the rheumatism he got there, his cousins who dwelled there, and his very tedious trip home. Finn almost left, but he guessed that the fox-eyed feller must be Bran, and stayed to hear more.

  “Tomorrow night I’ll be in for a treat to be sure,” the Fenland traveler went on.

  “That other one he’s fighting—’e’s no more’n half his size, but to hear them tell it, he’s twice as fierce. Should be a Midsummer War to remember.”

  His friend agreed, and patted the birch’s trunk in farewell. “S’long, old girl,” he said fondly.

  “Are ye sure we shouldn’t bide a bit, wait till she’s her old fierce self again?”

  The other fairy didn’t think so. “Folks in these parts know to be on guard around her. They won’t know she’ll be harmless for a few more minutes. Them two eggs, and the lives they hold, are safe enough without us. Step smart, now, Micawber. I’ve got a barrel of last year’s cider ready to be tapped.” They marched away to their drink, and Finn took their place beneath the birch.

  Now, Finn knew nothing whatsoever about the Midsummer War, and it never occurred to him that a person’s life force could be held in an egg. But he did know from the fairy conversation that the eggs were supposed to be closely guarded, and so must be precious. And he knew that one of them, the blue one, belonged to his instinctive nemesis, Bran. Though he really didn’t see how a birch tree could do him any harm even on her best days, he knew that, whatever her dangers, she was no threat for the moment. So, as soon as the fairies were gone, he hoisted himself into her slippery branches and took the two eggs, the blue and the speckled, and put two jawbreakers in their place.

  It was a precarious trip down the boughs, and thrice he almost dropped the eggs (and you know what would have happened to Rowan and Bran then), but in the end he touched ground safely, and headed home just as the Birch Lady came awake and shot a twiggy fist after him. He never realized how lucky he was to escape the birch’s white hand. If it touches your skin, it sears a white mark and frequently brings madness. If it touches your heart, it brings death. Not to worry—most birches are kind, and dream their lives away. Very few of them are the deadly White-Handed Ladies.

  Finn wrapped the eggs in a sock and tucked them in a mousehole he found in a fourth-floor garret, where he was almost certain no one would venture, and went to sleep satisfied. He did not know exactly what he had gained by stealing the eggs, but if he could in any way get even with Bran for his imagined slights and insults, it was a day well spent. Perhaps the eggs would have their uses, and at the very least, they might hatch into something interesting.

  The Ashes made everyone go to bed early on the night before Midsummer Day—and of course most of them didn’t sleep at all. James, sulky at being sent to bed, picked his scabs, his nose, and all of the embroidered ivy out of his pillowcase. Rowan stayed up late alone in his room, practicing sword strokes and blocks with his shield. Silly grumbled and read fitfully alone in her room for a while, then tried knocking on everyone’s door. Rowan ignored her, Meg whispered shakily for her to go away, Dickie really was asleep, and Finn, rehearsing exactly how and when he’d reveal his intimate knowledge of fairies, told her testily to take a hike.

  Meg finally fell asleep near dawn, but was awakened first by a dream of Rowan being killed by Bran, which was terrible, and later by a dream of Rowan killing Bran, which was nearly as bad. The world seemed to be out of its proper and logical alignment, and Meg felt younger than she had in a very long time.

  The Longest Day of the Year

  There are so many ways in which we can divide up our world. We set people apart by their ages or faces, so that a man of fifty sees all boys of ten in a certain light, and all women of ninety in another. We cut the world into halves, and the northerners laugh at the southerners, and vice versa, while those in the east often cannot fathom those in the west. We call some animals elite—ourselves—and dismiss the personal lives of squirrels and fruit flies as inconsequential. We use time to divide the vastness into more manageable chunks, so that when one day ends we can let ourselves sigh with relief and prepare for a fresh one; each year is over and done with the moment it passes, and the past and the future have nothing to do with each other. For as long as there have been humans, the world has been temporally divided into discrete blocks by which we reckon our existence. For much of our history, the sun’s cycle has been one of the most pronounced of such divisions.

  As summer draws nearer, the sun rises earlier and sets later, so lengthening each day before Midsummer. After the Midsummer turning point, the sun wakes a b
it later and goes to sleep a bit earlier, and so the days grow shorter, the nights longer. Midwinter, which is just before Christmas, is the shortest day of the year and the longest night.

  Now, the people who figured all this out thought about the world a bit differently from you and me. We might celebrate the long days before Midsummer and the long (though declining) days after it with equal fervor. After all, the amount of sunlight at the beginning of September is roughly the same as that at the beginning of April.

  But the ancients, and their descendants who still have fragments of the old ways in their lives, whether they know it or not, saw that boundary, that marvelous longest day of the year, Midsummer, as the beginning of a decline, the first sneeze as the year sickens and falls toward winter’s death and darkness. You’d think Midsummer would be a time of unalloyed celebration, but, no, it is always tinged with the poignant realization that the best is over, the bloom has reached its fullness, and the rest is all downhill. A depressing lot, those ancients, though pragmatic. No matter that the rich bounty of harvest time still lay before them, or that harsh winter was still many months away. The longest day was passing, and the days would shrivel and shrink for the next six months. Contrariwise, though Midwinter has the longest night, the briefest day, it heralds the year’s rebirth, and so that holiday is often a more hopeful celebration.

  The Ashes were very businesslike about it all. They had some role in the village’s Midsummer rituals during the day, which they accomplished without betraying to anyone that their relatives would fight to the death that very night. You might think that this was a strangely cold indifference, but for those who are accustomed to fulfilling obligations and steadfast in doing their duty, such mechanical obeisance to what is required is often the only way of fighting back emotion.