The Green Man Read online

  Her Web site address is www.tanithlee.com [URL inactive].

  Author’s Note:

  The inspiration came from a long-standing interest in Dionysus who, in ancient Greece, was most decidedly one of the gods of the Wild Wood. Often misunderstood, Dionysus is far more than a wine deity. He is the Breaker of Chains, who rescues not only the flesh but the heart and spirit from too much of worldly regulations and duties. He is a god of joy and freedom. Any uncultivated, tangled, and primal woodland is very much his domain.

  As for the sisters and their background, they arrived at once and took over. One of the reasons I like writing such a lot: it’s always fascinating to see new places and meet new people!

  Song of the Cailleach Bheur

  Jane Yolen

  Do you see her there, her staff in hand,

  Calling the deer behind her?

  They come like sheep to the shepherd’s pipe,

  Running on their toes to find her.

  Come down frae the hills you wolves, you swine,

  Come down frae the highlands and hollows,

  Come down frae the snow-capped mountain fasts,

  The Cailleach Bheur to follow.

  She is the winter, the wind, the snow,

  Her breath both warm and chilling.

  A single word from her icy lips,

  A single kiss is killing.

  I kenned her once in the winter tide,

  When snow lay on the heather

  I saw her dance with the lithesome goats

  And the snoutish boar together.

  I kenned her wrapped in a winter storm

  Like a white shawl on her shoulders,

  With icicle drops for earring bobs,

  Her hair as grey as boulders.

  She is the winter, the wind, the snow,

  Her breath both warm and chilling.

  A single word from her icy lips,

  A single kiss is killing.

  I have heard that upon the May Day Eve,

  Her staff will lie under the holly.

  Then she will turn to a standing stane,

  Like a tall, indomitable folly.

  But I dare ye to gae—as I will not

  For fear of hurt and dying—

  To gambol beside that great grey stane

  The winds aboot ye sighing.

  She is the winter, the wind, the snow,

  Her breath both warm and chilling.

  A single word from her icy lips,

  A single kiss is killing.

  Jane Yolen lives part time in Scotland, which only half explains why she wrote this poem.

  The author of over two hundred books for young readers, and adults as well, she has won most of the major literary awards, including the Caldecott Medal, the Christopher Medal, two Nebulas, three Mythopoeic Society Awards, a World Fantasy Award, the Golden Kite Award (and two honor books), state awards, ALA Notable Book awards, and ABA Pick of the Lists. Called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America” by Newsweek and “the Aesop of the twentieth century” by the New York Times, Ms. Yolen is married, a mother of three, grandmother of three, and a dab hand at oral storytelling.

  Visit her Web site at www.janeyolen.com.

  Author’s Note:

  Actually, I wrote a short story for this volume which was turned down by the editors. (Or at least turned over to another book they were working on.) So there I was with no more stories in me on the subject, when Terri Windling sent me e-mail about a strange Scottish wood fairy, a kind of winter Highlands mythic creature, the Cailleach Bheur, which she found in Katherine Briggs’s Encyclopedia of Fairies. Said she, “I thought I’d pass it on in case it sparked any ideas…”

  P. S. Dear Reader—it did.

  Hunter’s Moon

  Patricia A. Mckillip

  They were lost. There was no other word for it. Dawn, trudging glumly through the interminable trees, tried to think of a word that wasn’t so definite, that might have an out. Ewan had been quiet for some time. He had stopped kicking over rocks to find creepy-crawlies and shaking hard little apples out of gnarly branches onto his head and yelling at her to comelookathis! Now he just walked, his head ducked between his shoulders, both hands stuffed into his pockets. He was trying not to reach for her hand, Dawn knew, trying not to admit he was afraid.

  Lost. Misplaced. Missing. Gone astray. They were in that peculiar place where lost things went, the one people meant when they said, “Where in the world did I put that?” She was stuck with her baby brother in that world. It was grey with twilight, hilly and full of trees, and they seemed to be the only people in it. The leaves had begun to fall. Ewan had stopped doing that, too: shuffling through piles of them, throwing up crackling clouds of red and gold and brown. Dawn huffed a sigh, knowing that he expected her to rescue them. She hadn’t wanted to take him with her in the first place. She had followed him aimlessly through the afternoon while he ran from one excitement to the next, splashing across streams and chasing squirrels. Now he was tired and dirty and hungry, and it was up to her to find their way home.

  Trouble was, home wasn’t even home. Here in these strange mountains, which weren’t green, but high, rounded mounds of orange and yellow and silver, where rutted dirt roads ran everywhere and never seemed to get anywhere, and nobody seemed to use them anyway, she didn’t know how to explain where Uncle Ridley’s cabin was even if they did stumble across anyone to ask. It wasn’t like this in the city. In the city there were street signs and phones and people everywhere. And lights everywhere, too: in the city not even night was dark.

  A bramble came out of nowhere, hooked her jeans. She pulled free irritably. Something fell on her head, a sharp little thump, as though a tree had thrown a pebble at her.

  “Ow!” She rubbed her head violently. Ewan looked at her and then at the ground. He took one hand out of his pocket and picked a small round thing out of the leaves.

  “It’s a nut.” He looked up at her hopefully. “I’m starving.” She took it hastily. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Why not? Eating nuts never hurt me.”

  “That’s because you never ate the poisoned ones.”

  She threw it as hard as she could into some bushes. The bushes shook suddenly, flurried and thrumming with some kind of bizarre inner life. Dawn froze. A bird shot up out of the leaves, battering at the air with stubby wings. It was large and gray, with long, ungainly legs. It fell back to the ground and stalked nervously away, the weirdest bird that Dawn had ever seen.

  “What is that?” Ewan whispered. He was tugging at her sweater, trying to crawl under it to hide.

  “I don’t know.” Then she knew: she had seen that same bird on one of Uncle Ridley’s bottles. “It’s a turkey,” she said, wonderingly. “Wild turkey.”

  “Where’s its tail?” Ewan asked suspiciously; he was still young enough to color paper turkeys at school for window decorations at Thanksgiving.

  “I guess the Pilgrims ate all the ones with tails.” She twitched away from him. “Stop pulling at me. You’re such a baby.”

  He let go of her, shoved his hands back into his pockets, walking beside her again in dignified silence. She sighed again, noiselessly. She was older by six years. She had held him on her lap and fed him, and helped him learn to read, and reamed into bullies with her backpack when they had him cornered in the schoolyard. But now that she had grown up, he still kept following her, wanting to be with her, though even he could see that she was too old, she didn’t want her baby brother hanging around her reminding her that once she too had been small, noisy, helpless, and boring. She kicked idly at a fallen log; bark crumbled and fell. She had wanted a walk in the woods to get out of the cabin, away from Uncle Ridley’s endless fish stories and her father trying to tie those little feathery things with hooks that looked like anything but flies. But she couldn’t just be by herself, walking down a road to see where it went. Ewan had to come with her, filling the afternoon with his chattering, and leading them both astray.

  �
��I’m so hungry,” Ewan muttered, the first words he had spoken in some time. “I could eat Bambi.”

  “Bambi” was what their mother said their father had come to the mountains to hunt with his brother, who had run away from civilization to grow a bush on his chin and live like a wild man. Uncle Ridley had racks of guns on his cabin walls, and a stuffed moose head he had shot “up north.” Painted wooden ducks swam across the stone mantelpiece above his fireplace. The room Ewan and their father shared was cluttered with tackle boxes, fishing poles, feathered hooks, reels, knives, handmade bows and arrows. Dawn slept on the couch in the front room underneath the weary, distant stare of the moose. Once, when she had watched the fire burn down late at night, an exploding ember had sparked a reflection of flame in the deep eyes, as though the animal had suddenly remembered life before Uncle Ridley had crossed his path.

  A root tripped her; she came down hard on a step, caught her balance.

  She stopped a moment, looking desperately around for something familiar. There was a farmhouse on the slope of the next hill, a tiny white cube at the edge of a stamp-sized green field. Bright trees at the edges of the field were blurring together, their colors fading in the dusk. The world was beginning to disappear. Dawn’s nose was cold; so were her hands. She wore only jeans and her pale blue beaded sweater. The jeans were too tight to slide her fingers into her pockets, and her mother had been right about the sweater. Ridiculous, she had said, in the country, where there was no one to see her in it, and useless against the autumn chill.

  “I think we’re close,” she told Ewan, who was old enough to know when she was lying, but sometimes young enough to believe her anyway.

  “It’s getting dark.”

  “Your point being?”

  “Things come out in the dark, don’t they? In the forests? Things with teeth? They get hungry, too.”

  “Only in movies,” she answered recklessly. “If you see it in a movie, it isn’t real.”

  He wasn’t young enough to buy that. “What about elephants?” he demanded. “Elephants are real.”

  “How do you know?”

  “And orcas—I saw one in the aquarium. And bats—”

  “Oh, stop arguing,” she snapped crossly. “Nothing in these woods is going to come out in the dark and eat you, so—”

  He grabbed for her at the same time she grabbed for him at the sudden, high-pitched scream of terror that came from the depth of the wood. They clung together a moment, babbling. “What was that?”

  “What was that?”

  “Somebody’s getting eaten. I told you they come out now, I told you—”

  “Who comes out?”

  “Werewolves and vampires and witches—” Ewan dived against her with a gasp as something big crunched across the leaves toward them. Dawn, her hands icy, hugged him close and searched wildly around her for witches.

  Someone said, “Owl.”

  She couldn’t see him. She spun, dragging Ewan with her. A tree must have spoken. Or that bush with all the little berries on it. She turned again frantically. Maybe he was up a tree—

  No. He was just there, standing at the edge of shadow under an immense tree with a tangle of branches and one leaf left to fall. He seemed to hover under the safety of the tree like the deer they had seen earlier: curious but wary, motionless, tensed to run, their alien eyes wide, liquid dark. So were his, under a lank flop of hair like the blazing end of a match. He didn’t say anything else. He just looked at them until Dawn, staring back, remembered that he was the only human they had seen all afternoon and he might vanish like the deer if she startled him.

  “Who,” she said, her breath still ragged. “I thought owls said who.”

  “Screech owl,” he answered and seemed to think that explained matters. His voice was gentle, unexpectedly deep, though he didn’t look too much older than she.

  Ewan was peeking out from under Dawn’s elbow, sizing up the stranger. He pulled back from her a little, recovering dignity.

  “We’re lost,” he admitted, now that they had been found. “We walked up a road after lunch, and then we saw some deer in the trees, and we tried to get closer to them but they ran, and we followed, and then we saw a stream with some rocks that you could walk across, and then after we crossed it, there were giant mushrooms everywhere, pink and gray and yellow, and that’s where we saw the black and white squirrel.”

  The stranger’s face changed in a way that fascinated Dawn. Its stillness remained, but something shifted beneath the surface to smile. His thoughts, maybe. Or his bones.

  He let fall another word. “Skunk.”

  “I told you so,” Dawn breathed.

  “And then we followed—”

  “My name is Dawn Chase,” she interrupted Ewan, who was working his way through the entire afternoon. “This is my brother Ewan. We’re staying with our uncle Ridley.”

  The young man’s face went through another mysterious transformation. This time it seemed as though he had flowed away from himself, disappeared, leaving only a mask of himself behind. “Ridley Chase.”

  “You know him?”

  He nodded. He took a step or two out of the trees and pointed. Dawn saw nothing but more trees, and a great gathering of shadows spilling down from the sky, riding across the world. She clasped her hands tightly.

  “Please. I don’t know where I am, or where I’m going. I never knew how dark a night could get until I came here. Can you take us back?”

  He didn’t answer, just turned and started walking. Dawn gazed after him uncertainly. Then she felt Ewan’s damp, dirty hand grip hers, tug her forward, and she followed.

  The moon rose just when it got so dark that the bright hair always just ahead of them seemed about to disappear. Dawn stopped, stunned. It was a storybook moon, immense, orange as a pumpkin, the face on it as clear as if it had been carved out of crystal. Surely it couldn’t be the same little white thumbnail moon that she noticed now and then floating above the city, along with three stars and a dozen flashing airplane lights. This moon loomed over the planet like it had just been born, and she, Dawn Chase, was the first human to stand on two legs to look at it.

  She felt Ewan pulling at her. “Come on. We’re home.”

  Home under that moon? she thought confusedly. Home in what universe? He dragged her forward a step, and she saw the light beneath the moon, the lantern that Uncle Ridley had hung on the deer horns nailed above the cabin door.

  She looked around, dazed like an animal with too much light. “Where’s—where did he go?”

  Ewan was running across the little clearing, halfway to the cabin. “Come on!” he shouted, and the door swung open. Uncle Ridley stuck his round, hairy face out, grinning at them. The old retriever at his knee barked wildly with excitement.

  “There you are!” he shouted. “I knew you’d find your way back!”

  “But we didn’t,” Dawn said, her eyes flickering through the moonlit trees. They cast moon shadows across the pale ground; the air had turned smoky with light. “There was someone—”

  “I’m starving!” Ewan cried, trying to wriggle past the dog, who was trying to lick his face. “What’s for supper?”

  “Bambi!” Uncle Ridley answered exuberantly. That was enough to make the deer Dawn saw at the edge of the clearing sprint off with a flash of white tail. She stepped onto the porch, puzzled, still trying to find him. “Someone brought us home,” she told Uncle Ridley, who was holding the door open for her.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. He never said. He hardly talked at all. He looked—he was only a couple of years older than me, I think. He had really bright red hair.”

  “Sounds like a Hunter,” Uncle Ridley said. “There are Hunters scattered all through these mountains, most of them redheads. Ryan, maybe. Or Oakley, more likely. He never uses one word when none will do.”

  “He didn’t even let me thank him.” She stopped at the threshold, her stomach sagging inside her like a leaky soccer ball at the sme
ll of food. “Where’s Dad?”

  “He took the truck out to go searching for you. He was pretty worried. There’s always some idiot in the woods who’ll take a shot at anything that moves. He’s probably lost himself now on all those back roads. I told him there’s nothing out there to hurt you in the dark. Even the bears would run.”

  “Bears?”

  “But it’s best if you don’t roam far from the cabin during hunting season. Come in before the bats do, and have some stew.”

  “It smells great.”

  He shut the door behind her. “Nothing like fresh venison. Shot it last week, four-pronged buck, near Hardscrabble Hollow.”

  “Venison?” she asked uncertainly, her throat closing the way it had when he talked about bears.

  “Deer.”

  When she woke the next morning, she was alone. They had all gone hunting, she remembered, even the dog. Earlier, their whispers had half-wakened her. Coffee burbled; the wood stove door squeaked open and shut; bacon spattered in a pan, though it had to be the middle of the night.

  “Shh,” her father kept saying to Ewan, who was so excited that his whispers sounded like strangled shouts.

  “Can I really shoot it?”

  “Shh!”

  Finally, they had all cleared out, and she had gone back to sleep. Now, the quiet cabin was filled with a shifting underwater light as leaves fell in a constant shower like colored rain past the windows. She lay on the couch watching them for a while, random thoughts blowing through her head. She could eat deer, she had found, especially if it was called venison. She hoped Ewan wouldn’t kill anybody. He had never shot a rifle in his life. Uncle Ridley had invited her to come with them, but she didn’t really want to be faced with the truth of the link between those wary, liquid eyes and what had smelled so irresistible in her bowl last night. The eyes in her memory changed subtly, became human. She shifted, suddenly finding possibilities in the coming day. She hadn’t seen his face clearly in the dusk, just enough to make her curious. The stillness in it, the way it revealed expression without moving.… She sat up abruptly, combing her short, dark hair with her fingers. If she stayed in the clearing in front of the cabin, no one would mistake her for a deer, and maybe he would see her there.