The Green Children of Woolpit

by J. Anderson Coats

  I’ll never see her again. I’ll never see her as she really is — both my Mother and my ma.

  My feet are made of rocks, same as the ground. Em smacked me with enough glamour that I’m not even myself anymore.

  I stand up. However I seem, I am still Agnes Walter. If my first ma could get free of the Otherworld and stay with me, there must be a way I can get back to her. There must be a way I never have to return here.

  The mouse hole grows larger as I approach it. Or mayhap I shrink. I’m able to move through it, though, and Acatica is waiting for me in yet another greenish corridor. Her arms are full of woven platters and she nods me into motion, chattering anxiously about how much there is to do.

  I keep pace at her elbow, hurrying. “I know you said there was no escape, but my ma got out. She was turned into a pig and — ”

  “There is no escape,” Acatica cuts in, and she sounds less angry than weary. She plows a pace ahead of me and into a workroom much like the one we were in not long ago. It’s filled with kids with busy hands, weaving plates and mugs and cutlery.

  “What happened to all the platters and things we made before?” I wiggle my fingers that were stumps and hide them in my skirt.

  Acatica pulls a handful of dead leaves out of her apron and scatters them at my feet.

  I take that in. The enormity of it. The eternity of it. Every night these things will have to be made. Thousands upon thousands. They will fall apart by day, and we will have to remake them or be ourselves remade as washing stands or chairs or privy seats.

  “But my ma’s not here! The king all but said as much. She must — ”

  “No more of that,” Acatica whispers, piling my arms with leaf-woven dishes and mugs. “It’s trickery, whatever you think you heard. Our masters might not lie, but you still cannot believe anything they say. If your ma’s not here, you don’t want to know what’s become of her. And say nothing more of escape where the walls can hear!”

  Acatica hurries in front of me and I make myself follow. That business with the pig didn’t sound like trickery, but she’s been here long enough to see things I might not.

  There’s no one I can ask. No way to know for sure.

  We step into a massive chamber that’s squint-bright and bigger than I thought any room could be. It’s half the size of Woolpit at least, and gloriously lit like midday in July. Lining the walls are dozens of statues. Each one is made of fine sand and tinted with different shades of earth so they look like real, living people. They’re wearing strange garments I’ve never seen, and each fold is sculpted so perfectly that I have to look and look again just to be sure they’re not really alive.

  “Here.” Acatica is moving toward a table so long I can’t see the end of it, covered in a single white cloth, with hundreds and hundreds of chairs pushed tidily beneath. All those people. What they must have done, to be made to kneel forever on all fours and have hot food put on their backs.

  Acatica begins laying leaf-woven dishes on the table, and the moment each one touches the cloth, it becomes the purest shining silver. I follow her lead, placing one platter before every chair. There are still mugs and cutlery to do and I try to keep up, but my hands are shaking.

  There is someone I can ask. Someone without much more to lose. The man who’s a washing stand. She’ll come if you call to her. Mayhap he knows how she escaped. How she’s managed to stay in Woolpit all these years without being snatched back. There must be a story. Only I wouldn’t know how to get back to the crystal room if I tried, and I dare not try. Already the walls are watching me. I’ve said too much they don’t like, and now they’re waiting for a chance to drag me in and stuff my mouth with dirt and pin me down with the weight of stone.

  When we get to the end of the table, the bottoms of my feet are worn blistery and the platters we place become gold instead of silver. This must be where the king sits, and the Crown Prince, and other noble lords and ladies. The walls are the palest green and the twigs that make the pictures are the thinnest wisps of wood. Acatica sighs, then starts the long walk back to the other end and the rest of the tableware.

  I’m trying to stay angry at Senna. I’m trying not to admire Senna for being clever enough to get free of all this. Make the platters. Weave the glowworm dress. Serve the food. Stay very still and keep your head down, because there are worse things than fetching and carrying. Night after night after endless, timeless night.

  The pig bite on my leg begins to ache, which makes me think of Mother and how she’d lay next to me when I was sitting alone splitting daisy stems with my thumbnail and feeling left out. How she’d listen, breathing steadily, when I told her my secrets and worries and fears. How hard it must have been to hand baby me over to a stranger and hope to whatever saints she knew that I’d be looked after.

  My knees go out and I fold down near the wall. Close my eyes. I can’t cry. My feet are throbbing. If I was the girl in the story, I’d know what to do. It would come easy, like things do for girls like Glory who are never at the edges of anything.

  So mayhap I’m not the girl in this story after all. I don’t know anything.

  “I want to be,” I whisper. “I want to be the girl in the story.”

  Will you tell us the story? the wall asks in a shy, hushed voice.

  I leap back. It’s a trick. It has to be.

  Please don’t go. The voice is small and hesitant. Like a timid child hoping to join the group. We cried too much. We all got put here. Away from our mas. They’re in other walls. We can’t cry if we’re near the king. He doesn’t like it.

  “You all?” I repeat. “You’re . . . children?”

  At the far end of the hall, Acatica is making her slow way up the table, placing sticks bound with hedgeweed near every plate. Each bundle turns into a dainty silver goblet as it touches the cloth. I can’t make her do all the work alone, but I can’t force myself to move.

  In front of me is something that’s both a wall and children. It’s neither one of these things nor the other.

  If you don’t tell us a story, we’ll pull you in here with us, the wall says, and there’s an edge of threat in its baby voice, eerie and sweet. Then you can tell us stories forever.

  This is the kind of sticky trap that Those Good People love most, when you don’t know whether doing a thing will end in a reward or a punishment. But the wall wants a story, and I have more stories than I know what to do with. Besides, doing a kind thing is still a kind thing, whether you’re rewarded or punished.

  I lean close to the pale, delicate twigs. I close my eyes, and I whisper the first story that comes to mind—my own. How I got here. The last story I might ever have to tell. Martin’s sudden, terrible illness. Waking up in the pit. Senna’s treachery. It’s not whispering into flowers and shouting into rocks, but someone is hearing it. Someone will know what’s become of me, even if it’s a wall of half-mad children trapped in a prison of dirt and bones.

  My hands sting. They’re clasped tight in front of me like I’m hugging everyone I’ll never see again. My parents. Glory. Mother the pig, who I would give anything to kneel beside and whisper thank you one hundred times into her silky ear.

  When I open my eyes, I’m not in the feasting hall anymore. I’m alone in the corridor outside the crystal room where Em confronted the king. The wall behind me is wavering and fuzzy, shifting the smallest bit like baby Hugh curling up for sleep after I’d told him a bedtime story.

  This wall is entirely children, and no kid can resist a bedtime story.

  The crystal room stands empty, perfectly clean. Just as I pictured it in the moments before the wall spoke to me and I lulled it to sleep. I doubt I’ll get another chance, so I tiptoe to the washing stand, kneel, and whisper, “Hello? Are you in there?”

  “Is it you? Forgive me if I scared you. I just wanted a look.” The voice is urgent and scratchy, like it’s coming from deep in a pit. It’s a man’s voice, but the washing stand stays a glimmering pedestal balancing a basin on
its slender neck. “I didn’t want to hope. Nothing’s worse than hope. But it’s you. You look just like her.”

  I can see my likeness reflected in the smooth panes of crystal, and it’s unsettling enough that I shift a little so I’m all in pieces.

  “I’m called Agnes. I was here . . . earlier.” Keeping track of time under the mountain is like swimming in fast water. At least I can use the revels to count the days.

  “When your ma told me she was expecting you, I wept. You’d be born here. You’d never see a sky.” The washing stand’s voice cracks. “But I’ve lost so much. Gaining a little baby meant everything.”

  I had a first da, and even though the Woolpit mas had their own stories about him, in mine he was always a handsome lord somewhere, or a busy merchant who thought a baby would be happier living in a village than on some dusty road. Now I squint, trying to remember those few moments I saw him cleaning. The color of his hair. The wonder on his face. Slowly I say, “You’re my da?”

  “I am,” the washing stand replies quietly. “Not that I’m much of one. I couldn’t protect your ma. Or you.”

  “Is it true?” I glance at the walls, then lower my voice and speak right into the pedestal. “Did one of Those Good People turn my ma into a pig?”

  “She was humiliated. She kept saying how no one could love her like that. I didn’t care. Nothing could make me love her any less. I told her again and again. That she was beautiful. That us being together made this place bearable. But she started saying how she knew a way she could leave and stay gone. How she couldn’t bear the thought of you being born a piglet here.”

  “Only birth and death can stop the seeming,” I whisper, and for once the Woolpit mas were right. There was something unusual about the tattery woman who’d staggered into the village and given me up. Leaving the kingdom under the mountain meant she’d have no chance to be human again. Those Good People would never take the seeming off her. After having me, the seeming would come back and she’d stay a pig for good. And she did it for me. Giving up something for someone else is the purest form of love.

  Little wonder sacrifice is one of the few things that forces the Otherworld to stop and take heed.

  The washing stand sighs. “I begged her not to. She was all I had left, and she had you in her belly. A baby or a piglet, I didn’t care. Either way you’d be mine. But she . . . well. Soon enough, no one could find her. Our masters demanded I tell them what I knew. They didn’t believe me when I said I knew nothing. They did believe when I told them that even if I knew, they wouldn’t get it out of me. Mostly they couldn’t have me spreading it around that one of us things got out. So here I am.”

  “Here you are,” I echo sadly.

  “I don’t know which would be worse,” the washing stand whispers. “For her to be down here still, keeping away from me because she’s ashamed, or for her to have made it out of the Otherworld only to have you snatched back and trapped here like the rest of us.”

  “She’s well. But she’s still a pig.”

  “I don’t care.” The washing stand’s voice is low and raw. “She’s alive. That’s all that matters. I love her no matter what.”

  “Me too,” I whisper.

  We sit there together in the glittering quiet of the crystal room. I lean my head against the pedestal and it makes a small sound, like a muffled sob.

  “Da?” I bite my lip. “You said my ma knew a way to get out. She was a pig while I was in her belly, so mayhap I can use that same way. Did she tell you what it was?”

  “You’re going to leave?” the washing stand asks plaintively. “But I just met you.”

  “If you’re really my da, wouldn’t you want me to be free of this terrible place?”

  “I should. I do. Just . . . you’re all that’s left of her. Of anyone I’ve ever loved. How can I want anything but for us to be together?”

  My throat is closing. There’s no leaf-rot smell. Nothing of glamour. I watched him weep outright. This isn’t a trick, and my whole insides hurt.

  “The others have forgotten me,” the washing stand says. “I have no kin. No one I knew from before, when the soldiers came. I’m all alone here now.”

  “I could bring you with me. Somehow. I won’t leave you alone.”

  The washing stand is quiet for a long, long moment. At last it whispers, “Yes, you will. But I’ll tell you anyway.”

  “I won’t! I — ”

  “She said the wind drifted in sparkling whispers along the hallways,” the washing stand cuts in. “There’s but one way wind could get under the mountain, and that’s through a door that leads outside of it. Pigs can see the wind, you know. They’re the only animals that can.”

  It’s so pretty, too. Little silvery currents that whirl and glide like weeds in a stream. It was never a story. There’s some piglet part of me that can see the wind.

  “The walls must have overlooked her. They listen especially for whispering and secrets, and she likely marched right past them as if she had nothing to hide. With glamour still on her, she must have found her way to the crossing place and made it through.”

  The washing stand is crying now, softly, like it can’t go on. This is a place where things only seem, so I slide closer and put both arms around the slender crystal pedestal. Its edges dig into my shoulder and hip, but I cling tight and hug hard. “It’s all right. Don’t cry. You won’t be alone.”

  “Well, well. This is unusual.”

  I whip around, and there in the doorway is the king under the mountain. Every bit of me wants to scrabble away, but I’m frozen and it’s not because of glamour.

  “Ah . . .” I cast around for the first thing that makes sense. “She sent me. The one who had an audience. It wasn’t my idea. She told me to come here. To . . . ah . . .”

  The king waits till the words slip and dart and wing away from me. Then he says, “The walls heard you whispering in this place all alone. So I heard you as well.”

  “She lost a hair pin,” I finally manage, “and she told me to look for it. But it’s not here.”

  “Not under the washing stand,” the king replies, almost a taunt, almost a question.

  “No. Sire.” I climb to my feet. It gives me time to put words together. He found me where I shouldn’t be, and words are all I have now. “Sire, why am I here? I’ve done you no wrong.”

  “We care nothing for right and wrong. We take what we’re owed, and what we’re owed is blood. This is a question of sacrifice.”

  A life for a life, traded by whatever means.

  “I—I thought it was a bargain.”

  The king hitches a shoulder. “In this case, it’s both.”

  “I mean no insult,” I say, careful, careful, “but how do you know my blood belongs to you?”

  “The mortal girl called out from the crossing place in her own tongue,” the king replies. “No one could hear her unless they shared the blood.”

  Senna said the same thing, and nobody else in Woolpit so much as lifted their heads from their work. At least one thing she told me was in truth.

  “But her people are Trinovantes,” I say, “and there are none in Woolpit.”

  “She is from where you are from,” the king replies, “but she is not from when you are from.”

  I frown. Woolpit has always simply been. Then again, Granny was once my age, and she had her own granny, who also had a granny. One of them must have been listening to the rocks and flowers and heard Acatica and the others calling and whispering, hoping someone would hear.

  “It’s not right.” I lift my chin. So far boldness cut with courtesy has served me well, and the king has yet to realize I’m a piglet he has overlooked. “My grandmother always said your people were fair. She said you might not always be as kind as you could be, but you never lied and you never promised something and then didn’t give it.”

  The king narrows his eyes. “I gave them exactly what I promised. And as for kind? I did them a kindness they didn’t deserve. All th
ose pathetic farmers and their hoes and shovels, facing down the legions of Rome. The Trinovantes. The Iceni. The rest. They begged me to save them. Me and their gods. Their gods did not save them. I did.”

  “A kindness? Then why did Senna want so badly to leave?”

  The king’s dark look falters and he almost smiles. “You are more clever than you look.”

  I don’t reply. Being clever under the mountain seems like a good way to get yourself turned into a rat. Those Good People cannot be stopped, challenged, or defeated, but they can be outwitted and tricked by anyone with wit enough to carry it off.

  Those Good People reward clever even as they despise it.

  “Perhaps this is what you’re looking for?” The king holds out a finger, and on it perches a butterfly that’s slowly closing its delicate orange wings.

  He knows I gave a false reason for being here. I know it too. Still I croak, “Yes. Thank you. Sire.”

  “You should take it to her right away.” The king snaps his fingers and a rat appears in the doorway of the crystal room. I offer one shaking hand and the butterfly obediently drifts onto it. It could be a leaf. It could be a girl like me who misses home.

  It could be a girl like me who was careless with her whispering.

  My first da has kept my ma a secret for this long, but after tonight, when Em will have to produce the pig or admit she let it escape, there will be no more secret. One way or another, I cannot be here when that happens. It won’t be long before they work out how Mother got free, and I’ll be trapped here for good.

  I cannot rest easy till All Hallow’s Eve has come and gone. I tack the iron needles to our door crosswise and stay up all night stiff on my pallet, listening to the fairy wretches clatter past on this, one of their high holy days when they ride and riot. Ma and Da sleep soundly but I hear every hoof-fall. I feel every cold whisper through the thatch.