The Green Man Page 4

I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Like, how dumb does she think I am? Pretty dumb, I guess, from the look on her face.

  “Guess,” she says, making a quick recovery.

  “Wrong fairy tale,” I say, pushing it. “Come on. Tell me, or you lose.”

  “Do you know what you’re asking?”

  “Yes.”

  There’s a long silence—a long silence, like no bird is ever going to sing again, or squirrel chatter or wind blow. The green girl puts her fingers in her mouth and starts to bite her nails. I’m feeling pretty good. I know and she knows that I’ve won no matter what she says. If she tells me her name, I have total power over her, and if she doesn’t, she loses the game. I know what I’d choose if I was in her place, but I guess she must really, really hate losing.

  Watching her sweat, I think of several things to say, most of them kind of mean. She’d say them, if she was me. I don’t. It’s not like I’m Mother Teresa or anything—I’ve been mean plenty of times, and sometimes I wasn’t even sorry later. But she might lose her temper and turn me into a pigeon after all. Besides, she looks so human all of a sudden, chewing her nails and all stressed out like she’s the one facing seven months of picking up fairy laundry. Before, when she was winning, she looked maybe twenty, right? Gorgeous, tough, scary, in total control. Now she looks a lot younger and not tough at all.

  So maybe if she loses, she’s threatened with seven months of doing what I tell her. Maybe I don’t realize what I’m asking. Maybe there’s more at stake here than I know. A tiny whimpering behind my right ear tells me that Bugle is pretty upset. Suddenly, I don’t feel so great. I don’t care any more about beating the Queen of the Fairies at some stupid game. I just want this to be over.

  “Listen,” I say, and the green girl looks up at me. Her wide, mossy eyes are all blurred with tears. I take a deep breath. “Let’s stop playing,” I say.

  “We can’t stop,” she says miserably. “It has begun, it must be finished. Those are the rules.”

  “Okay. We’ll finish it. It’s a draw. You don’t have to answer my question. Nobody wins. Nobody loses. We just go back to the beginning.”

  “What beginning? When Gnaw-bone was chasing you? If I help you, you have to pay.”

  I think about this for a little while. She lets me. “Okay,” I say. “How about this. You’re in a tough spot, right? I take back my question, you’re off the hook, like you got me off the hook with Gnaw-bone. We’re even.”

  She takes her fingers out of her mouth. She gnaws on her lip. She looks up into the sky, and around at the trees. She tugs on her dreads. She smiles. She starts to laugh. It’s not a teasing laugh or a mean laugh, but pure happiness, like a little kid in the snow.

  “Wow,” she says, and her voice is warm and soft as fleece. “You’re right. Awesome.”

  “Cool,”I say. Can I go home now?”

  “In a minute.” She puts her head to one side, and grins at me. I’m grinning back—I can’t help it. Suddenly, I feel all mellow and safe and comfortable, like I’m lying on a rock in the sun and telling stories to Elf.

  “Yeah,” she says, like she’s reading my mind. “I’ve heard you. You tell good stories. You should write them down. Now, about those wishes. They’re human stuff—not really my business. As you pointed out. Besides, you’ve already got all those things. You remember what you need to know; you see clearly; you’re majorly kind-hearted. But you deserve a present.” She tapped her browny-green cheek with one slender finger. “I know. Ready?”

  “Okay,” I say. “Um. What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise,” she says. “But you’ll like it. You’ll see.”

  She stands up and I stand up. Bugle takes off from my shoulder and goes and sits in the greeny-brown dreads like a butterfly clip. Then the Queen of the New York Fairies leans forward and kisses me on the forehead. It doesn’t feel like a kiss—more like a very light breeze has just hit me between the eyes. Then she lays her finger across my lips, and then she’s gone.

  “So there you are!” It was Elf, red in the face, out of breath, with her hair coming out of the clip, and a tear in her jacket. “I’ve been looking all over. I was scared out of my mind! It was like you just disappeared into thin air!”

  “I got lost,” I said. “Anyway, it’s okay now. Sit down. You look like hell.”

  “Thanks, friend.” She sat on the bench. “So, what happened?”

  I wanted to tell her, I really did. I mean, she’s my best friend and everything, and I always tell her everything. But the Queen of the Fairies. I ask you. And I could feel the kiss nestling below my bangs like a little, warm sun and the Queen’s finger cool across my lips. So all I did was look at my hands. They were all dirty and scratched from climbing up the cliff. I’d broken a fingernail.

  “Are you okay?” Elf asked anxiously. “That guy didn’t catch you or anything, did he? Jeez, I wish we’d never gone down there.”

  She was getting really upset. I said, “I’m fine, Elf. He didn’t catch me, and everything’s okay.”

  “You sure?”

  I looked right at her, you know how you do when you want to be sure someone hears you? And I said, “I’m sure.” And I was.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “Good. I was worried.” She looked at her watch. “It’s not like it was that long, but it seemed like forever.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, with feeling. “I’m really thirsty.”

  So that’s about it, really. We went to a coffeeshop on Columbus Ave. and had blueberry pie and coffee and talked. For the first time, I told her about being adopted, and wanting to look for my birth mother, and she was really great about it after being mad because I hadn’t told her before. I said she was a good friend and she got teary. And then I went home.

  So what’s the moral of this story? My life didn’t get better overnight, if that’s what you’re wondering. I still need to lose a few pounds, I still need glasses, and the cool kids still hate me. But Elf sits with me at lunch now, and a couple other kids turned out to be into fantasy and like that, so I’m not a total outcast any more. And I’m writing down my stories. Elf thinks they’re good, but she’s my best friend. Maybe someday I’ll get up the nerve to show them to my English teacher. Oh, and I’ve talked to my mom about finding my birth mother, and she says maybe I should wait until I’m out of high school. Which is okay with me, because, to tell you the truth, I don’t need to find her right now—I just want to know I can.

  And the Green Queen’s gift? It’s really weird. Suddenly, I see fairies everywhere.

  There was this girl the other day—blonde, skinny, wearing a white leotard and her jeans unzipped and folded back, so she looked kind of like a flower in a calyx of blue leaves. Freak, right? Nope. Fairy. So was an old black guy all dressed in royal blue, with butterflies sewn on his blue beret and painted on his blue suede shoes. And this Asian guy with black hair down to his butt and a big fur coat. And this Upper East Side lady with big blonde hair and green bug-eyes. She had a fuzzy little dog on a rhinestone leash, and you won’t believe this, but the dog was a fairy, too.

  And remember the trees—the sidewalk ones? I know all about them now. No, I won’t tell you, stupid. It’s a secret. If you really want to know, you’ll have to go find the Queen of Grand Central Park and make her an offer. Or play a game with her.

  Don’t forget to say hi to Gnaw-bone for me.

  Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan, raised in New York City, and now lives in Boston. She is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (winner of the Mythopoeic Award), and The Freedom Maze. With fellow fantasist Ellen Kushner, she is co-author of a short story and a novel, both called “The Fall of the Kings.” With Terri Windling, she co-edited The Essential Bordertown. She is a consulting editor for Tor Books and president of the Interstitial Arts Foundation (www.artistswithoutborders.org [URL inactive]).

  Author’s Note:

  I grew up in Manhattan just two blocks from Central Park. The tamer playgr
ounds were my back yard. The wilds of the Ramble were my Forest Perilous. The Boating Pond was my Boundless Ocean. Not long ago, I heard someone say that he didn’t believe that fairies would live so close to all that concrete and noise. From my own experience, I knew that he was wrong, and I wrote “Grand Central Park” to prove it. No, I never met the Green Queen personally, but I certainly was conscious of her, and of her court, the dangerous ones as well as the merely mischievous. I still am.

  Daphne

  Michael Cadnum

  You know how the sun is, how he won’t shut up on one of those dry, drought-golden days, the vineyards blue-black with fruit, the ox carts groaning by, every human being wishing for a portion of shade.

  Apollo the sun god was what you would expect—all smiles, all mouth, too beautiful to look at, and knowing it. Oh, he was good company, dropping by the fields where honest women were herding geese or cranking buckets out of the well, and he’d speak in that voice that was like the sky itself favoring you with its attention.

  I had a simple life. My own father was the river god Peneus, and my mother was a former village maiden who, taking her ease by river bathing one hot late summer afternoon, felt the lap and sinew of my father around, beneath, within. Rivers are promiscuous, ardent, and deep. My mother spent years pensive, alone, but sustained by the knowledge that she had once been loved. She raised me to make straw dolls and wax horses, all the petty, pretty toys of girlhood, but never let me forget that I was the daughter of the river—that distant father who never addresses his children but is, at the same time, always faithful to them.

  The sun god would amble by and flirt, but I paid him no attention. Young mortal men would come around, too, all blushes and stammers, and I would shake my head and tell them that the wedding candle and the bridal bed held no magic for me. The daughter of the deep current has no great fondness for the merely human breath of any lover, and the prospect of becoming a wife filled me with no happiness.

  One day I waded into the river.

  I let the current surround and know me. The coursing, seaward longing of my father for the deeper ocean was always his great failing, and his lasting strength. My father pulsed all around my body, both on his way to the salt ocean and steadily in one place at the same time.

  Hear me, I whispered.

  I heard no answer.

  “Oh father, listen to me,” I prayed.

  The ripples of river water glittered.

  I said, “Make me a virgin all my years—make me one who does not tarry with mankind.”

  And my father spoke at last, in that water-lunged, rotund whisper. You’ve heard my father speak, soft syllables among the willow branches, muttering whispers in the shadow of the bridge. “Will I not have grandchildren?” he complained. “No wee ones, splashing along my banks?”

  I begged him again to bless my maidenhead, and told him that just as Diana the Huntress Immortal was no lover of men, so I, too, would seek a chaste existence. I would enjoy a noble life worthy, after all, of the river’s daughter.

  This last argument teased the concession from him. The river god is powerful, with his long, grappling arms full-muscled each spring, when the mountains are dark with rain. But the river god is not so mighty he does not feel the weight of the even greater gods, the powerful sea in his abyss, the sun with his yodeling, arrogant look-at-me each day. So with a reluctant but not unkind sigh, he blessed my virginity, and with a loving, guarded murmur added, “Be kind to your mother, Daphne—I still hold her in my heart.”

  My father—constant, stubborn, fickle, undying. And you ask why I wanted nothing to do with mortal men.

  It was not very long before the god Apollo came around as usual, parting the wheat field with his athletic stride, laughing. Tossing back his head and laughing—that god was one great, life-consuming laugh.

  But on this day he did not pass me by. Something about me had changed. Perhaps my private vow had altered me, and increased my beauty. The sky was not enough for him, he swore—he desired me.

  “Daphne,” he said, “let’s go see the berries ripen on the bush.”

  I did not meet his gaze.

  “Let’s go watch the olive branches get heavy with their bounty,” he added, and other such things, all god-chat meaning: let me play in-and-out with you over on the hillside, my dear, and I’ll leave you alone and forsaken ever after.

  I told him I had taken a vow of chastity.

  He frowned as he smiled. “As a divinity, I can dismiss this vow,” he said, all teeth and sparkle.

  I made no further reply.

  “Oh, Daphne, have you not dreamed of being the mother of the sun god’s brood?” he asked.

  I had nothing to say.

  The god would not shut up. He came to see me for days. Each morning he would split the hillsides with his beaming countenance, and each noon he would lay his hot, huge hands all over my body as I carried the bucket from the well, reaching down and feeling me wherever he could, shoulders, brow. But I would not allow him the private favors he sought.

  I heard him on his way toward me that hot day. He was more merry than ever. He talked as he came along the winding road from the village, as I was out collecting thyme for my mother’s stew. “Wouldn’t that head look fine bedecked with a crown?” he sang. “Wouldn’t that pair of hips look just right, graced with the girdle of a queen and the silks of a monarch, my comely bride? Wouldn’t those lips come alive under the…”

  But I had heard enough, and casting the sweet-scented herbs to the ground, I walked away. I walked fast.

  I hurried.

  He followed, never ceasing to talk, his unending spiel enough to wither crops. He described how passionate he had always proved as a lover, how the hills stirred and brought forth forests at his caress, how poppies broke into blossom at his breath.

  And who was I? he asked.

  Who was I? he said, beginning to grow surly. Who was I, a mere river-godkin’s daughter, to turn aside the love of the lord of so much life, and a well-favored, rich-voiced Father of All at that.

  Right then I made my terrible error.

  I made my mortal blunder.

  I began to run.

  As I ran, Apollo strode along with me, faster than any greyhound panting after his hare. He circled me as I fled, bounded along, crossed my path, back and forth, mocking, seeking, all but capturing me against my will, as though pursuit made his lust all the keener. In my ignorant virginity I began to weep, my next mistake. My wet tears merely made him laugh.

  I ran as no woman has ever run, fled as few mortals have ever flown, down the slope of the river valley, the sun god matching me stride for stride, his sky-warm breath at my shoulder. I reached the side of the river, and called out just as he seized me.

  He was very strong.

  My voice swept linnets from the willows. It startled harvest mice in their slumber. Help me, Father. I heard the god of the sun chuckle at my ear. He said, “What can a mere water godlet do to keep my lust at bay?”

  My father did not forget me.

  My fingers split. My arms throbbed, and broke wide open. Working fibers snaked down the veins of my lungs. My feet seized and held the bank of the river, a root from my spine to the soil, and down, into the cold stone. Wide into the sky I held my beseeching arms. They branched, and my full-leafed embrace filled the blue from where I panted, a green-pithed tree, rooted to the earth.

  Well Apollo loved me then, weeping, feeling the trilling of my human heart within my wooden girth. Because the gods love mortals. They seek our beauty, our courage, our joy. They envy us our hope. We are in our hearts what they can never master, and all the night long the lord of light keened beside me, weeping for the love he would never win.

  To this day when a daphne blossoms, or when any tree breaks into leaf, you can feel how the sun is chastened, faithful to the living he can worship but never possess. And as for me—feel no sorrow. When you see the wind stir the greenwood, or when you turn the pages of a book made from a t
ree’s still-blameless flesh, lean close and listen.

  You hear my voice.

  Michael cadnum is the author of more than two dozen books, including In a Dark Wood, Forbidden Forest, and The Book of the Lion, which was a National Book Award Finalist. His most recent novel is Ship of Fire. Cadnum’s short fiction has been published in various volumes of the Datlow/Windling adult fairy tale anthology series and in their children’s fairy tale anthology A Wolf at the Door. Several of his stories have also been chosen for reprint in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is currently at work on a series of novels based on Greek and Roman myths.

  Author’s Note:

  I’ve always loved stories of transformation. I wrote about a werewolf in Saint Peter’s Wolf, and a vampire in The Judas Glass—I love writing about people on the verge of becoming something else (including young people in the process of growing up). My favorite classical work is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where we find his wonderful version of the Daphne story. This rendition is decidedly my own, and results from my deep regard for the tale. I studied Latin in high school and was not very good at the language, but I love the Metamorphoses so much I have translated a little of it just for the pleasure. The lines in this story which describe the chase, just before Daphne turns into a tree, are very much my homage to the original Latin.

  Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box

  Charles de Lint

  Such a thing to find, so deep in the forest: A painter’s box nested in ferns and a tangle of sprucey-pine roots, almost buried by the leaves and pine needles drifted up against the trunk of the tree. Later, Lily would learn that it was called a pochade box, but for now she sat bouncing lightly on her ankles admiring her find.

  It was impossible to say how long the box had been hidden here. The wood panels weren’t rotting, but the hasps were rusted shut and it took her a while to get them open. She lifted the lid and then, and then…

  Treasure.