The Green Lady and the King of Shadows

by Moyra Caldecott

  He rubbed the grimy surface with his sleeve, trying to see more clearly what the mark was, but as he put pressure on the block of stone it moved. Alarmed, he jumped back and turned to run, but his curiosity was now stronger than his fear and he paused. He held the light close to the wall again and pushed the marked stone, poised ready to retreat if necessary. But this time, although again it moved slightly under his hand, it did not give so easily.

  He tapped the wall and found that it gave back a hollow sound. He knew that he could not leave until he had found out what was beyond it. He put his rushlight on the ground, propping it up against the bundle he had been carrying, so that its light was aimed directly at the wall. He slid his knife blade into the fine cracks around the marked block and began to scratch and dig.

  Gradually the rock loosened. He pushed and pulled and scraped until his knife was blunt and his fingers were bleeding, but at last it had sufficiently swivelled on its base for him to get a proper grip on it. He tugged at the stone and suddenly the huge block came loose and began to fall. He tried to hold it but he was not strong enough and leapt back only just in time as it hit the stone floor, the sound it made reverberating like thunder down the black and dismal tunnel.

  Was it he who screamed with fear or something else in the shadowy darkness behind the stone? He would have run then if he could have but fear seemed to have turned his legs to dust and he could not move. The jolt of the fall had knocked the rushlight over and its flame now set the whole bundle alight. Suddenly flames flared upwards and illuminated the tunnel like daylight.

  Lukas stared with horror as the shadow of a giant towered over him. Shuddering, he turned to run and then realized that it was his own shadow, magnified by the leaping flames, the same flames which now brought light to the dim cavity behind the stone that had fallen. He gripped the grimy sides of the hole and peered fearfully in. Briefly and brilliantly what was beyond was illumined.

  He stared into a dark cavern, its walls dripping with slime. In a far corner a ghastly grey figure lay, chained by a metal that gleamed like gold, to the black wall. A figure that lifted its skeletal head to look at him as he stood framed in the hole he had made.

  He ran, stumbling and cursing with terror and pain as he knocked himself against the walls, back the way he had come, each step taking him further and further from the flaring light of the bundle of rushes, and the dreadful thing that lay in the dark hole beyond the marked stone.

  * * * *

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Brother Peter asked, startled as Lukas almost fell through the great door of the kitchen, his eyes staring and his face and clothes smudged and dirty.

  Lukas looked at Brother Peter blankly, for the moment not knowing what to answer, only half realizing where he was.

  ‘I . . . I fell,’ he stammered out at last.

  Brother Peter looked at him long and hard. Had he been brawling again? Only last week in defence of the young boy Matthew, Lukas had been involved in a fight that could have turned really dangerous if the Brothers had not stopped it in time. Would he ever be controlled and disciplined enough to please the Abbot and be finally accepted into the Order? Sternly he pointed to the ash bucket and the pile of greasy pans to be scoured and then left the room. Normally this was one of the most unpopular tasks in the kitchen but today Lukas set to it with a good will, relieved to have some ordinary, practical thing to do to make him forget the extraordinary experience he had just been through. Never would he go down that tunnel again; never lift that lid of branches. The only thing he would do was return to the hole the next day when the sun was full and bright and pull great boulders over the entrance to block it up so that no one would ever find it again, and no one or no ‘thing’ could ever climb out of it.

  He thought about Brother Peter. He was a gentle man. He kept his helpers busy and allowed no slackness, but he did not shout and punish as some of the other monks did. Everyone obeyed him out of respect, not out of fear. Should he confide in Brother Peter? Perhaps that ‘thing’ needed exorcism. But when Brother Peter returned to the kitchen he was in a hurry and told Lukas to be off.

  Walking away slowly the troubled young man remembered the words that had been read aloud in the chapel that morning.

  Out of my distress I called upon the Lord;

  the Lord answered me and set me free.

  He whispered them over and over to himself, wishing he had the certainty of faith Brother Peter seemed to have, wanting to believe the monks’ teaching, but not finding that the way the Abbot taught it rang true to his own experience.

  * * * *

  That night Lukas lay a long time before he could sleep, although his body was more weary than it had ever been before.

  The dormitory in which he slept was a long low room, the roughly trimmed tree trunks which held up the beams of the thatched roof covered with clothes at night, hanging from innumerable pegs driven into the wood. The beds were rough trestles and very hard, the blankets hand-woven in the monastery from wool spun from their own sheep. In winter they had sheepskin rugs they had cleaned and cured themselves — all except the abbot who had a bear-skin brought with him from the mountains of Wales.

  Although in the east and the north of the country enemies had overrun their land and every day the danger of an invasion by the Saxons grew greater and greater, the monks kept their community in the old Celtic way as it had been for centuries. They prided themselves that there had been a monastery at Glastonbury before the Romans came to Britain, and it was still there long after they had left. They believed the same would happen should the Saxons come. They would absorb the invader, tame him, and watch him go. Had not God himself led Joseph of Arimathea to this very place after Our Lord’s death and given His promise that their tiny island would be an inspiration to the world for millennia to come? The original wattle huts which Joseph and his twelve companions had built had long since rotted, as a man’s body must rot with the passing of time, but the spirit of the work they had done still lived. In the Scriptorium, by the light of smoky mutton-fat candles when the sun was gone, the monks copied the gospels on vellum and sent them by river and sea, over mountain and plain, to far away places where others could read them. In the little chapel, half built of stone, half of wood, by night and day, a perpetual choir sang the praises of Our Lord and asked, as He had said we must ask, for help and guidance and protection.

  The four seasons turned and turned again like a great wheel; battles were fought in distant places; kings rose and fell; but the work of the monastery went on at the centre as though it were a still point in Time.

  Lukas lay on his hard bed and listened to the steady rhythmic breathing of those around him. The monks worked hard and were grateful for sleep when it came. Usually it was only Matthew who had restless nights. Lukas could hear him now, wheezing in his sleep. As though he could feel Lukas’ attention on him, the lad turned over in bed and started to cough. Lukas lay in the dark and listened to him. When would that cough end? Matthew had been brought to them the autumn before so ill with fever that no one had thought that he would live. But he had recovered with the monk’s care, prayers and herb lore, to take his place among them. But sometimes his small frame seemed to be about to burst with the violence of his coughing. Lukas shut his eyes and whispered a prayer for Matthew as he had many, many times before.

  Gradually weariness got the better of Lukas and he drifted off to sleep.

  In his dream he fell again the long fall to the darkness beneath the earth, and walked unwillingly the passage he had walked before. No matter how hard he tried, he could not turn back.

  As he approached the hole in the wall where the marked stone had been he noticed that light glowed from within the cavern, and in spite of his fears he found himself peering through the hole. He could see the grey figure more clearly now and found to his surprise that it was not such a fearsome sight as he had at first thought. It was nothing but the frail form of an old, old woman chained to the wall, and as he stared
at her she stirred.

  He looked at her steadily, strangely no more afraid, and met her eyes. She seemed alive, but tired and sad beyond belief. She spoke no words to him, but her eyes asked for help with such a burden of pain in them he would have tried to help her had it meant facing the hounds of hell.

  ‘I will help you!’ he cried, pulling at the rocks around the one already dislodged, trying to make the hole large enough for him to climb through into the cavern. The relief in her eyes was so beautiful that for a moment he was convinced that he saw not an old woman upon the floor, but a young woman of great beauty and delicacy, with gold hair falling almost to her feet . . . a woman he seemed to know.

  He stopped what he was doing in amazement, but even as he did so the vision faded, and he awoke with a start in the long dormitory, Matthew and the others still sleeping on either side of him.

  He stared around him, puzzled. The dream had been so strong and vivid he could not believe that it was only a dream. Unlike other dreams, the memories of which slithered away as soon as wakefulness came, this one was so vivid he remembered every detail of it, as though it were something that had really happened to him.

  He realized that he was no longer afraid of the cavern and what it held. The girl reminded him of moonlight, fine and silver, shining on water on a summer’s night.

  He lay for a long time thinking about her, feeling a kind of ache, a stirring, a restlessness — a longing to touch her — to know her as woman — to experience what it would be like . . .

  He tossed and turned trying to get away from the seductive images that came to mind . . . trying to find some explanation for her presence in that place.

  He must go back and set her free.

  And he must go back alone.

  5

  It was not until the late afternoon of the following day that Lukas found the opportunity to escape to the orchard. He had managed to arrange it so that everyone who would have expected him to be in one place now expected him to be in another, and so no one knew precisely where he was at any given moment. He had a sudden qualm that if anything horrible happened to him in the tunnel no one would know where he was and he would probably be buried alive, lying there, undiscovered for centuries. He shuddered. Was this what had happened to the woman he had seen? He thought of Matthew. He could swear him to secrecy, but then if he were just a few moments late for Vespers Matthew would panic and tell everyone. No, it was better that he told no one. On the other hand . . . Lukas wasted precious moments wavering. In the end he decided on a compromise.

  In the Scriptorium there were various pieces of smooth slate stone the abbot had brought from Wales. On them those who had been chosen to be scribes practised their letters before being allowed to work directly on the vellum. Lukas had several small broken pieces in his possession. He slipped to the place behind the kitchen where he had hidden them and scratched a message for Matthew on one of them. ‘Look for me where you could not find me. But this time under the earth.’ He thought that that was sufficiently enigmatic to hide his whereabouts from the others and yet clear enough for Matthew to find him if necessary. He returned to the dormitory and slipped the piece of slate into Matthew’s bed. Hopefully he would be safely back to remove it before it was found.

  Finally Lukas turned his attention to the orchard and his secret tunnel.

  He had, as he had planned, bread and water with him, but a suitable cloak had been too difficult to find. The loosely woven blanket from his bed was folded and fastened over his shoulder, the hammer and chisel from the workshop, with his stock of rush lights and his knife, were in his belt.

  It was good how confident he felt as he walked the way he had walked so warily before. The dream was still with him and he felt no fear. He even whistled softly to himself as he moved deeper under the hill.

  A great deal of time seemed to pass and he could not help thinking that it was taking longer than before to reach the place where he had seen the woman chained; but he had noticed before how one’s impressions of time altered with mood and circumstance. Perhaps he was imagining it. He paid even closer attention to the wall at his side. Eventually he retraced some of his steps, afraid that he might have missed the hole he sought. But there was no sign of any break in the hard wall and he continued forward again. Surely he should have stumbled over the great stone on the passage floor even if he had missed the hole itself? His light slithered over the rough stones ahead of him, revealing nothing.

  He began to feel more and more uneasy. He must have passed the place! He stopped short. Was he mad that he had believed so absolutely in a dream? What had made him do it? Never before had he trusted those fragments of insubstantial mist that clung about him as he slept. Never again would he. And then he started as he heard a faint sound ahead of him. He strained his ears to catch it, but the darkness pressed silently upon him again and he could hear nothing.

  He turned on his heel, thinking to return the way he had come. It was as though he could feel a cold breath on the back of his neck.

  He heard the faint sound again and he paused trying to decide where it was coming from and of what it reminded him. It was a kind of faint rumble, becoming stronger and then fading at regular intervals. He held the rushlight high with sweating hands, peering into the darkness almost as though he expected to see the noise itself rather than what was causing it. This time he thought that there was something familiar about it. He strained a few paces nearer, listening.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ he suddenly gasped. He did recognize it! It was the distant muffled sound of a man chanting one of the monastery prayers. Relief flooded his heart. The tunnel must have come full circle and he was back at the monastery! He thanked God that he did not have to retrace his steps through that fearful gloomy tunnel and hurried forward, rejoicing as the sound of the prayer grew louder. He did not know the voice, but that did not worry him for it would be distorted by the hollow tunnel. He even smiled to himself at the shock he would give the Brother as he suddenly emerged. He no longer cared if the tunnel was a secret or not. He never wanted to come down there again.

  Without his being aware of it the ground must have been rising all the time, for now it seemed he was at wall level, and not below the floor as he would have expected. Where the sound of the man’s voice was loudest he noticed a small fissure of light. It did not take him long to find loose rocks to push and pull beside it. He noticed that the voice ceased when he started to scrabble at the rock and he knew that the man must be shocked and frightened by the sound of someone trying to break through the walls.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t attack me before he sees who I am,’ Lukas thought, and gave one last push.

  For one second the small, bearded, ginger-haired man standing in front of him stared, and then before Lukas could properly recover his balance from his precipitate appearance, he lifted a pewter bottle that stood on a low table and flung the icy contents full in his face, shouting something in Latin angrily at the same time.

  Lukas staggered back, gasping and spluttering, trying to wipe the water out of his eyes. The hermit stared at him for a moment, his eyebrows like untidy straw above his startled eyes, and then he seized a bowl from the same table and flung the contents of that as well. This time it was warm gruel.

  ‘What in God’s name do you think you are doing?’ cried Lukas.

  The man paused with a book in his hand, presumably intending it to follow the water and the gruel.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘I found a tunnel. I thought I was back in the monastery.’ Lukas gazed around him, puzzled. The room he was in did not look like a room at all. It looked like a hut of wattle boughs built against the side of the hill, the one wall half bedrock and half built of blocks of stone very similar to those in the tunnel. It was in fact an entrance to the tunnel which had been long since walled over, the hut built against it centuries later, and inhabited by a hermit.

  ‘Nothing is as it seems,’ the man said gruffly.
‘You ought to be more careful.’

  Having recovered from the shock of Lukas’ arrival the stranger’s eyes now went to the hole in the wall and he uttered a very irreverent exclamation of anger.

  His presence took some explaining and Lukas did his best to make amends for the fright he had given him by telling him some, but not all, of his experiences. The man listened intently, grunted and then demanded that he leave forthwith and never enter the tunnel or his hut again.

  Lukas was not sorry to go.

  The forest was close about the hut. Behind it the slope of the Tor rose steeply. A tingle of excitement ran down his spine. That he should be so close to the mysterious mound!

  The path the hermit indicated he should take almost instantly disappeared beneath an arch of green foliage and he was once again walking in a tunnel, but this time it was a green and living one. Trees joined branches above his head, while their trunks wove together with bushes and flowers to make an almost solid wall on either side. The sun was low and the light fairly dim on the path, but when he emerged at last on Chalice Hill he saw the sprawling buildings of the monastery not far beneath him brilliantly lit by that strange, bright, dying light of evening, the huge old oaks that stood like sentinels around it casting long, long shadows. ‘Different light makes all things different,’ Lukas thought. ‘I am seeing something new though I have seen it a hundred times before.’ The sound of the Vesper chant rose to meet him, and he began to hurry, suddenly realizing that he had been away a long time, much longer than he had intended. He wondered how many people had missed him; how many people he would have to explain his absence to. He dropped his blanket and his tools in an out-of-the-way shed to be collected later, and slipped into the chapel hoping to take his place at the back without being noticed. But the door creaked and there could not have been a person in the chapel who did not swing round and see him creeping in, shame-faced and dishevelled.