Enchanted Forests (9 page)

lay ourselves down and in our exhaustion we slept.

"And when we awoke, our Christopher was naught but

bones.

"We shouted, we fought among ourselves, we attempted flight,

but it did no good. We saw the sunlight wane, then reappear,

over and over, for time had become strange to us.

"And at last we slept again, and when we awoke old Stephen

was as Christopher, nothing but bone.

"And so it went, and we perished, each in our turn, until only

i survived, and I knew what my fate was to be when next I slept,

and in my despair I fell down upon my knees and cried out to

whatever had trapped us, whatever had spoken that first day, and

I begged for my life, I bargained, I offered whatever I could if

only it would free me, spare my life and let me go."

"And it did?" Jenny asked.

Tinker nodded. "Aye," he said, "but erst it spoke to me again,

and told me that it would trade my life for seven others—if I

swore, by God and the Virgin, to bring it seven other lives, then

I could go free. May God forgive me, lady, I did so swear—and

but moments later I was on the high road, where you found

me."

"And you sent it seven people?"

"I know not how many I sent it!" he wailed.

Jenny stared at him.

OUT OF THE WOODS          59

"Look you, lady," he said, "I bethought me that if I spoke of

Queen Mab in the village, and said fairy treasure was to be had

in the wood, then a few hardy souls would venture forth, and I'd

be quit, and at little cost to my conscience, for they'd take the

risk upon themselves, would they not? And I'd put that village

behind me and ne'er set foot there again, and 'twould be an end

on it." He gestured helplessly. "How was I to know of television,

or motorcars, or tour buses? To send hundreds thither, at risk of

their lives, was ne'er my intent, and now all England is cursed

of me—my face blazoned on paper at every comer, and on the

telly glass in every home! Take me to America, I beg you. Let

me put this behind me!"

She stared at his pleading eyes for a moment.

"We have television in America, too," she said at last. "You'd

be news there, too."

His expression collapsed into despair.

"And you have to do something to stop them," she said, struck

with sudden horrific realization. "All those people going into

that forest... I bet they're still sneaking in, even though it's of-

ficially closed. My God, / was tempted to take a look!"

"What can I do?" He spread his hands hopelessly. "A tale

once spun has a life of its own."

"That's true," she said thoughtfully.

"And if I speak the truth now, they'll stretch my neck ere

mom, for betraying all those fools to their doom."

England wasn't known for lynchings, but this was a special

case. "That might be true, too," she said. She considered care-

fully.

She wondered, for a moment, why she didn't just throw Tinker

to the wolves. After all, he had betrayed all those innocents. By

his own admission, he had meant to send seven strangers to their

deaths—but then, he had seen his own companions killed horri-

bly one by one and known he was next....

He'd done wrong, but he knew it, he wanted to make what

amends he could. What good would it do to destroy him?

But they couldn't let more people feed the thing in the

forest—whatever it was. Jenny didn't believe in demons or fair-

ies, but there must be something in there.

And then she saw the way out. If one lie had lured people in.

maybe another could turn them back.

"Listen," she said, "you're going to go on TV again—on

television—and tell everyone that Queen Mab's angry about all

these intrusions on her privacy. Remind everyone that fairies are

60 Lawrence ^ffait. Evane

dangerous. That's something we tend to forget nowadays. Re-

mind them that fairies steal human souls. That should discourage

most people—and anyone who goes in anyway, it's his prob-

lem."

"Aye," Tinker agreed reluctantly, after a moment's thought.

"That should serve, I warrant. But am I to spend my life in tele-

vision?"

"Oh, no," Jenny said confidently. "Don't worry. You're just a

fad. It'll all be over in a few weeks, and you can settle down

somewhere—I bet there are colleges that would hire you for their

history departments. You must know the sixteenth century better

than anyone else alive."

"Aye, perhaps," he said. "You'll accompany me, then, to the

television?"

She hesitated, but then said, "Sure." She gestured. "Go

ahead and open the door, and we'll tell your camera crew the

news."

Jenny insisted they do their interview right there. The first few

questions were harmless, asking about how she happened to pick

Tinker up.

But then the newscaster asked, "Do you believe there are fair-

ies in the wood?"

She glanced at Tinker, there beside her.

"Oh, yes," she said, "and in fact, I believe I've heard their

voices."

Startled, the newsman asked, "Oh?"

"When I picked Bill up on that road. Maybe he didn't hear

them, but I did—they were saying they wanted to be left alone,

that he'd abused their hospitality long enough and that any other

humans who bothered them would regret it."

She glanced at Tinker, who smiled gratefully at her.

"Indeed, I heard something," he said. "I'd not caught the

words, though...."

And together, they blithely made up a whole network of lies.

The broadcast went well—and for the rest of her stay in En-

gland, Jenny Gifford found herself something of a celebrity. She

spent a good bit of time in Tinker's company, helping him adjust

to modem life—an adjustment he made with amazing speed.

And she was only slightly jealous when he bedded that young

witch, rather than herself—but really, she told herself, he was a

bit old for her, wasn't he?

She giggled at the thought.

By the time she returned to the States, Tinker's moment of

OUT OF THE WOODS          61

fame was already passing, and her own with it. Within a week of

her arrival home, the whole thing seemed like a dream.

But for the rest of her life, she still shuddered whenever she

passed thick woods.

SPEAKING WODS

The view from the branches

Viridescence

by Connie Hirsck

Connie Hirsch got the idea/or "Viridescence" when she

visited Muir Woods and discovered the extraordinary way

in which the Sequoias altered their environment to promote

their own well-being. When not writing, Connie makes da-

tabases sit up and do tricks, reads a lot, plots expeditions

to interesting places, and frets about not writing.

"Colorless green thoughts sleep furiously."

—Noam Chomsky

We must have had a beginning; our seed must have sprouted in

the manner of unremarkable seed, our shoots yearning up to-

wards the bright, our rootlets drinking moisture, burrowing

deeper in the good soil of our slopes and rills, growing in the

manner of the Green.

Yet, when did we become aware of our apartness? That while

we were of the Green, we were yet apart from it, too awake in

the bright day, dreaming too strongly in the dark night. Most of

all, knowing that we were different, remembering that we re-

membered. In some forgotten age of time, we knew that we were

ourselves.

Our knowledge made us wonder, and speculate upon our own

nature, proposing theory after theory. Perhaps our ancestor seed

fell from the sky, carried by some great wind from a distant land

so far the Green only whispers dreams of it. Perhaps the light-

ning struck our ancestral soil with some magical cousin of the

hated Fire. Perhaps the fungus that feeds our roots went through

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Connie Hirach

a shift of its nature, linking plant body and root body and wood

body together as never before. Perhaps all of these, or perhaps

none: the result the same. We live, remember, dream together

here on our slopes, beneath the sun and the rains.

Once we would have added, "as we always have." Yet that is

not true. Changes have come to us, changes we fought or wel-

comed, changes we have even initiated. It is this lesson we pass

to those who will come after us, as the individual members of

our self germinate, mature and die in their stages. For it is the re-

membering that we pass on.

When still the Green whispered of the great glaciers retreating,

we were young, and unpracticed in our togethemess. We were

still new, learning to use the senses we had been bom with: the

feel of the sun's heat upon our green body, the patterns of light

and dark as sunbright filtered onto our ground, the fee! of limb

and branch and root, separating out body from member body, yel

conscious of the whole. We grew in our capacity to feel, to co-

ordinate, to sense.

But what we sensed did not please us. For the first time, we

noticed the depredations of the fleshbeasts that infested us, that

were not of the Green. Before, when green body was destroyed

or root body disturbed or wood come crashing to the ground, we

had no more apprehension of its wrongness than when the Sun

disappeared into the darkness of night every day.

Now we knew differently, that these happenstances were not

random acts or laws of nature. And perhaps for the first time, at

least in our long remembering, we felt emotion. We learned ha-

tred.

Oh, how we resented those robbers, meditated long on their

evil, inventing new concepts as we thought on them and their

depredations. And in our long resentment, we came to under-

stand that we could no longer be passive with these interlopers,

not as we were passive beneath the sun that gave us life, and the

sky that gave us the rain. We must take action against the

fleshbeasts, a campaign to save our very being.

For long seasons we trained ourselves, forcing our Mind to

evolve and strengthen. An infestation of Tinybiters, winging

from branch to branch, consuming leaf and tender bark? We

learned to poison our sap, to make our green body taste unpleas-

ant. Did we feel too many Gnawers clambering over our

branches, eating our fruit before it could germinate? We learned

to weaken connective tissue in our wood body, to drop branches,

limbs, that the Gnawers clung to. We learned to set springy traps

VIRIDESCENCE              67

with our roots, to suddenly ensnare the fleshy ones and drag

them under, entomb them where they could feed our fungus.

We were fierce warriors against the beasts; they did not pass

our boundaries without punishment. Our space became filled

with peace, filled with healthy growing, till we could support no

new members throughout our boundaries. Vines grew on our

tronks, airplants sprouted from our branches, and we ruled su-

preme in our demesne, but for one thing.

Yes, for all our learning, our many accomplishments, we could

not protect ourselves from the Fire. Decades would pass in

growth and peaceful dreaming, and then a dry season would

come. We could conserve our sap down in our roots, increase the

wax that coated our leaves, spread our upper branches wide to

protect our lower, younger selves from a sun turned savage. But

the dryness, bad enough of itself, could bring the Fire.

Always, we could feel it coming, as the Green cried out

around us, as the heat leaped from valley to mountain, from

grass to leaves to bark, the wind pulling at our leaves, sucking

the very air toward the Fire's hunger, the sun turning cold, gone

out as it did in the night

Then would come the pain, as the fire consumed our wood

bodies, scorched our plant bodies, worse than any Tinybiter or

Gnawer, so fast, so sudden! The strategies we used against

fleshbeasts were useless: the Fire did not crave our sap or our

seeds, and we could not pull it under the ground to smother it.

Our only hope was to conserve our sap and essence in the roots

that would not bum.

Time and again, in the long seasons, we were burned down to

those roots. We despaired for the continued existence of our self,

but our roots lived, and sent up new shoots, or our half-burned

trunks recovered. We grew back each time, adopting new lives

into ourselves, until our strength was full—and full of wrath.

We were angered by the unfaimess. The Green about us did

not seem to suffer nearly so much as we from the Fire, for all

they were dumb and silent, and infested with fleshly life.

Eventually our anger gave way to observation. While the

fleshbeasts thieved the Green, they gave back in several ways;

clearing away deadwood, spreading seed. On a tentative basis we

allowed back in a few Tinybiters and Gnawers, watching, weigh-

ing their swift activities. We studied them, took their fleshly bod-

ies apart, meditated on their structure.

Then we turned our Thoughts on them. It seemed impossible,

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Connie Hirscn

and yet we had patience on our side, and time. First we had to