The Green Man Page 9

  Near dawn, they reach an edge of the forest which opens on a wide valley where a river runs. There’s a great house down there, a timbered manor, set in walled gardens that have flowers.

  The three witches blow out their rush candles, (which have sorcerously lasted all this while) as the first pink tarnish of dawn begins in the east over the valley.

  Then the witches draw off their veils and some threadbare mittens and their other dark clothes, and under them Ghilane’s astonished to see three fine dresses trimmed with embroidery, and necklaces of gold and silver. But most astonished of all to find that, of the three old women, only one’s at all old, with braided silver hair under a white hood. The other two are younger, one about the age of Ghilane’s mother and the other only a few years older than Ghilane.

  “There’s our house,” says the youngest witch. “Do you like it? You do? Then come live with us.”

  It seems that, like many Witcheries, the members range across all areas of society, from the highest to the most everyday. They don’t have any sense of class, however, as they mingle in the forest of the god, the rich women with the women who must pretend to sell eggs for their bread in case they’re thought too clever.

  And these three seem very much to want Ghilane to be part of their household—not, they explain, as servant or skivvy—but as another daughter.

  They ask Ghilane nothing except would she like this?

  She hesitates, of course, thinking this is too good to be true. Perhaps it’s another dream. Perhaps they’re lying and they will ill-treat her.

  Then the sun comes up in the east, and Ghilane sees a man riding up the hill to meet the three ladies. He’s the manor’s lord, got up in his best and very polite to the witches, who are his mother, his wife, and his daughter. It’s now fairly obvious, too, that Ghilane is also his daughter. His hair and skin are brown like hers. But none of the three witches appear dismayed. And he seems pleased to see her too.

  Among the Witcheries, things are different.

  So Ghilane accepts her wish come true, and goes down the hill with the ladies, and the lord who isn’t a woodcutter, only made out he was long ago, when he was less just than now, and Mother less ugly and harsh.

  And what is Ghilane going to, then? To worse unkindness from a jealous stepmother and even more furious half-sister? Judge from this:

  Five years on, when Ghilane has been made the lord’s legal daughter and is gladsome, healthy, and very well-dressed, she is one day walking in the wood, having also become a full member of the Witchery by then. And she looks up and sees what she thinks is the god again, strolling through the wood. But it’ll turn out this time it’s only a man, though he is the son of that kingdom’s king. So, being now a lady herself, there’s nothing to stop Ghilane marrying him. Which she does. After all, it’s what young women like Ghilane are meant to do.

  Bergette, though.

  Oh, Bergette.

  Bergette the cruel, claws and fists and kicks and tricks. Bergette with the serpent-poison eyes. Who steals the coins, and steals too the offerings from the altar of a god, in a forest she knows—and she did—in her deepest heart, is the place of that god, or one of them. Stupidity added to viciousness, as so often happens.

  Poor stupid, foul, disgusting Bergette, who ought, in the best tradition, to be punished for her endless crimes, just as Ghilane, who’s really all right, has been rewarded for her kindness and clear vision.

  Well, we’ve hurried here, you and I, haven’t we, almost skipping over Ghilane’s much-deserved and nice rest of her life. Sorry for that. But, you see—Bergette, awful Bergette—she’s the special one.

  Yes, didn’t look like it, did it? All that underhand rottenness and that inability to see the forest glowing like a rising sun with the presence of the god—

  Nevertheless…

  When Bergette yelled what she really wanted, which was precisely the same (of course) as what Ghilane (and a great many people) really wanted, the most appalling thing in the world happened to her.

  Up from the ground sprang vines and creepers and the very roots of the trees, and they caught her fast into themselves, they bound her tight and tighter than the tightest rope.

  At first she screamed and fought. But it was no use at all. She couldn’t move anymore, and then leaves had wound over her mouth and shut her up, too.

  So then she hangs there, trapped in a spiderweb of forest. And the god’s also still there, looking at her, the indescribable, beautiful god, but not like that, like a pillar of darkness having only eyes—yet eyes she can’t see. The voice, though, that Bergette hears.

  “Any are welcome,” says the voice of the god, “to what lies on my altars, if they have need. The starving fox, the bird, the man, the woman. Any are welcome also to forget me and go instead to another Master, providing that lord is good. There is One. Most are staring in his face and missing him altogether. But you, Bergette, never know to do any of that. Therefore, since you are mine, I shall teach you.”

  That’s what the god says to Bergette, and unlike her sister, she’s going to remember it always.

  It’s the last thing she hears for a while, anyway.

  Because next, the snaky creepers and other things are growing again, whirling around and around her, completely covering her, binding her over. Bergette shuts her eyes, thinking now she’ll die, so she thinks she has.

  And that way, she doesn’t see, then, how a great tree is pushing up now out of all the other growth that wraps her, shutting her in like an upright wooden coffin of the finest oak.

  Well, after all, that’s quite a punishment, wouldn’t you say?

  In the forest, (across which Ghilane is busy becoming a lord’s daughter) early summer ripens to fall. There are green beeches and red chestnuts among the pines and firs. Even the pines and firs are fringed with new green. Birds sing and then grow lazy. Hunting horns sound. Deer rush through and vanish like brown ghosts. Honey drips.

  Imprisoned in her tree, Bergette isn’t dead.

  She’s dreaming.

  Oh, so many dreams.

  First she sees her mother, as she once was, and here’s another surprise—Mother is dancing with the witches. She was, then, one of the local Witchery! Mother was also good-looking then, with long, washed hair. Bergette in her dream watches sadly as Mother falls in love with the lord from the manor house, who’s come to dance in the witch rituals, but in disguise. And then Bergette’s dream takes her back three more years, and Mother is even younger, and falling in love for the first time—with this other one who is a lord, but said he was a woodcutter.

  When Bergette in the dream sees this first woodcutter/ lord, she sees who her father really is.

  Then she realizes he’s telling her the story of her beginnings.

  For Bergette’s father, with his dark, long and curling hair, his eyes now vine-green and now grape-black, is the god-in-green, the Lord of the Wood, the Power of the forests.

  Oh, he’s much older than how he looks, older even than the oldest forest. Yet, though so old, always young. Yet, too… ancient, ancient and young both at once.

  As soon as she grasps this, in her enchanted sleep, Bergette begins to trust him.

  The stories go on as the dreams go on.

  Bergette loves them. She loves being asleep and dreaming them. For the first time in a long while, she’s happy.

  Outside her strong fortress of bark, fall-of-leaf strips the woodland. The treacherous traveler-gobbling bogs groan with mud. Winter comes and colors everything dead white, but for the blackbirds feeding on the scarlet berries.

  Bergette dreams on, seeing other times, other lands and worlds. Bergette is learning such a lot. It’s like food and drink to her.

  Outside, deer rub their horns on the trunk of the tree. Purple flowers open round its feet, and tawny colonies of mushrooms.

  Then summer’s back—though it’s not the summer we expect, but another summer far off in the future, where now Bergette has come to be.

&n
bsp; She opens her eyes.

  It’s a summer night and the forest smells of pine balsam and wild roses.

  Bergette finds she’s come out of the tree, she’s passed right through its trunk.

  For a time, she dances with her shadow—she still casts one, or thinks she does—on the moonlit grass between the trees.

  Then a fox arrives, and later two wolves out courting. And an owl sits down in the tree.

  Because they’re not alarmed by Bergette, she sings them the song her mother had sung over her cradle. The old witch song about a knight from the East, and a lady, and the starry armor in the green leaves. She knows now who the knight is meant to be. It’s Father, that’s who the knight is.

  After some hours, Bergette understands that she isn’t as she was. She can, after all, walk into and out of trees—she’s already tested this, walked back into her own and out again a couple of times. She looks into a forest pool and sees her long, grape-dark hair, and how her eyes are no longer the green of a snake’s poison but of its gliding skin among the vine.

  She dances with a wild cat, now.

  She chases a marten up a spruce, and plays with it along the whippy boughs—fearless, of course, because even if she falls, it won’t matter now; she can’t be hurt anymore.

  If she thinks about it, she supposes that yes, her life is changed, wonderful and new and different—and she’s far away from them all.

  But now, coming and going as she pleases in the forest, she notices the people who come there. Of these, few cut down trees. Most of the villages get their wood from the self-renewing coppices. But the villagers do gather a lot in the forest, fruits and berries, herbs and mushrooms, and reeds from the bogs. Sometimes, Bergette plays little tricks on these gatherers. Nothing terrible. She may move a basket, conceal a fallen glove, then put it back somewhere else, or tie the edge of a cloak to a bush. The people in the forest never see her, but they sense her, some of them anyway. Word gets round. “Those imps are mucking about again in the forest.”

  “Stole my knife then stuck it in a clump of violets.”

  Sometimes too they accuse her of doing things she hasn’t, but which someone has done… That is, someone of her kind.

  Bergette knows there are others like herself among all the trees. Other brothers and sisters, the sons and daughters of Father. As yet, she only glimpses them—glimmering shadows, breezes blowing by. And for them, she thinks, so far she’s the same—just a glimpse. Meetings will take time, but that’s one thing she—they—have.

  Meanwhile, Bergette begins to see, despite the games she plays, the people of the villages don’t seem as wary of the forest as they did, despite what they may say. She becomes curious about this. One afternoon, when the heat runs over everything like slow water, Bergette wanders down to her own village, the place where she was born.

  She’s stunned.

  It’s not much like it was.

  For one thing, it’s ten times the size. The houses are better built too, and there are a lot of gardens. A few pigs wander up and down the streets, but they’re fairly neat pigs.

  In Mother’s revolting house, there now lives a scholar. He has a housekeeper, and everything’s immaculate (except the scholar, actually, who’s an untidy old soul).

  When Bergette gets up to the church (walking all unseen, but sometimes sensed, among the market crowd) she stops, amazed. Because the church has turned into a plant, or vegetable. She can see this at once.

  In the summer, the old stone sweats and has a color like the Eastern mineral called jade. But more than this, the whole building has been carved. What carvings they are. Stone trees stride up the walls, inside and out, and in among the stone leaves are people of stone and little stone animals. And on the altar, where nothing much stood before, stands a beautiful calm Christ statue, crowned with thorns.

  Bergette stays some while in the vegetable church, liking it. When the priest comes through, he’s not the drunk one she remembers. He’s fat and thoughtful, brown from the sun.

  Bergette decides this religion too is, at its true heart, perfectly beautiful. It had only been spoilt a little by fools. The force of an ultimate God pours through the stones, as through the forest. And from this Ultimate spring all and everything, all trees, all carvings, all beasts and men. All gods.

  Then Bergette sees, over by the wall, a young man is bending to work on the stone with a mallet and chisel. She knows he’s the mason and the sculptor, one of many, maybe, who’s carved the church into a sacred wood and shown true God on the altar. Bergette recalls what Father once said to her. She thinks that, though this aspect of God is perhaps the Other One he spoke of, Father too has a place inside the forest of stone.

  She whispers in the mason’s ear, and he hears her.

  And under his cunning hands, the wall carving changes. It becomes a face masked in leaves and which is speaking leaves, smiling so they spill, the leaf-words, from its lips—the face of her father.

  Then Bergette goes back into the forest, to live forever unlonely, among her brother and sister trees.

  Time goes on turning its pages of seasons and history.

  One day, a princess comes riding into the May-green wood, which in her language they say is blue with leaves, because simply to say green doesn’t describe such lushness.

  The princess and her ladies discard the horses with their grooms and walk off into the depths of the forest.

  After they find a place they think suits them, they begin to play like little girls with a gold-stitched ball, throwing it back and forth.

  Bergette, sitting up in a cedar, looks over and sees—her sister, brown Ghilane, dancing there in a silk gown and rings of gold. A princess! When did this happen?

  She isn’t jealous, you understand; she doesn’t hate Ghilane anymore. Why should she? Bergette’s almost insanely happy, so there’s no room in her anywhere for hate. Besides, she long ago forgave herself, and so forgave everyone else.

  But Bergette is, well, fascinated. So she leans down and snatches the ball out of the Princess Ghilane’s brown hands in the instant she throws it.

  “It’s gone into thin air!” cry the ladies, between thrill and unease. Everyone’s always told them these woods are weird, which is why they like to go Maying here.

  But the princess looks straight up into Bergette’s face and seems to see her.

  “Good morning,” says the princess. “You must be the spirit of the tree. The Green Lady.”

  Bergette understands this; she can speak any language of the world now, just as she understands what the leaves themselves are saying. She smiles, but before she can reply, the princess offers her own name. “I am Princess Ghisella,” says the princess.

  Bergette remembers. Time isn’t as it was, for her. She says, softly, “Not Ghilane.”

  “Ghilane? Let me think, that was my great-great-great-grandmother’s name.”

  “Who’s she talking to? She’s gone off her head,” mutter the ladies to each other, worried because, if she has, they’ll almost definitely get the blame.

  But the princess peers on into the tree at Bergette—whom she can apparently see because they’re still dimly related.

  “Can I have a wish?” asks the princess. Greedily.

  Can I grant wishes?

  Bergette wonders where her father is. She sometimes senses him passing in the forest, just as ordinary human things sense her. But she hasn’t seen him for quite some time (centuries in fact). Somehow, that’s never mattered. She has instead begun to meet—often by now—with her own kind. Introductions come slowly here, because, once made, they’ll last for millennia. She’d like to ask their advice, her kindred, but for once, all she hears is the whispering of the leaves.

  So, “What do you want?” inquires Bergette uncertainly of the human princess.

  Ghisella squares her jaw—something Ghilane never did.

  “To be a queen, and the mother of a king.”

  Bergette thinks (and this really is Bergette, thinking th
is), What a shame.

  And she hears herself say, “You won’t get that. Why don’t you ask for something important?”

  But exactly then she sees Ghilane’s great-great-great-granddaughter shaking her head angrily, frowning, glaring.

  “It’s disappeared! All a trick—how dare it?—doesn’t it know who I am?!”

  The ball thuds down on the ground.

  But Bergette, who vanished to the princess when the princess became totally stupid, is now leaping laughing over the tops of the trees, and by her, taking her hands, are three or four just like her, their long hair full of leaves. And the whole forest seems to be laughing. And maybe even Ghilane, wherever she is by then, is laughing too.

  Though obviously, years after, when poor silly Ghisella is the queen of a very large country, and her son the king-to-be, she thinks back smugly and says, “I asked this from a wood spirit, whom I charmed with my manner and grace.” And everyone nods politely, though by now she’s grown graceless and frowsty, like poor old Mother long ago.

  Tanith Lee was born in 1947 in London, England. She began to write at the age of nine.

  After school she worked variously as a library assistant, a shop assistant, a filing clerk, and a waitress. At age twenty-five she spent one year at art college.

  In 1970-71 three of Lee’s children’s books were published. In 1975 DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave, and thereafter twenty-six of her books, enabling her to become a full-time writer.

  To date she has written sixty-two novels and nine collections of novellas and short stories (she has published over two hundred short stories and novellas). Four of her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC in the UK and she has written two episodes of the BBC cult TV series Blake’s Seven.

  Lee has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction, and was awarded the August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master.

  In 1992 Lee married the writer John Kaiine, her partner since 1987. They live in Southeast England with one black and white and one Siamese cat.