Guardian of the Green Hill (8 page)

A hopeful little whimper rose from the wagon's unseen owner. “I love my wagon, I do,” he said earnestly.

“I bet you do,” Finn said pleasantly as he scoured the ground for an appropriate stick. “It's a pretty cool wagon. Here, this ought to do.” He took out his pocketknife and set about shaping the stick into a makeshift axle. The blade snapped off (luckily flying clear of his remaining eye), but he managed to scrape the stick into an appropriate shape. Lost in his work, he came very close to forgetting his own troubles and resentments for almost a full minute. He fit the replacement into the wheel and gave it a trial roll. “How's that, then?” he asked. “Good as new, if not so pretty. Do you want to try it out?”

There was no answer.

“Don't be afraid. You won't come out to see it? Okay, I'll just leave it here for you.” He chuckled to himself. Poor tyke. Probably so well trained by his mommy, he didn't dare meet a stranger. Or maybe she told him the strangers might be fairies in disguise. Well, it was certainly likely here. He smoothed out one last rough spot on the stick and left the wagon for its owner. Finn whistled as he walked down the lane, wanting to look back but respecting the little guy's shyness. He just smiled to himself. He felt unaccountably good, which as a rule happened only when he did something self-serving.

He had just gotten out of sight when he stumbled over a hemp bag. “Hey, kid, is this yours?” Finn shouted back over his shoulder, but there was no answer. He called out several times before he looked more closely and saw roughly scratched into the dirt the words
FER YE
.

“For me?” he asked. Had the little boy left him some personal treasure of marbles or chewing gum to thank him for his help? “Gee, you didn't have to do that,” said Finn, warming.

He pulled the frayed and twisted cord open and felt inside the unusually heavy bag. On top was crinkling paper, and as he pulled that out, he felt something hard and knobbly beneath it. The paper turned out to be money of some sort. On one side was a pleasant-looking maternal woman in a short, spiky crown, who could be no other than Queen Elizabeth, and on the back was a bushy-bearded man who might have been the writer Anthony Trollope but you could guess from the ship, flowers, bird, and magnifying glass was more likely Charles Darwin. From the large
10
in the corners, Finn determined it must be a ten-pound note. Unless the poor dollar had fallen farther since he arrived in England, his bill was worth about twenty dollars.

There was no bank in Gladysmere, and he had no way of getting to a bigger town, so Finn had been unable to make use of the bank account and checkbook his parents had set up for him. It is even more remarkable, then, that he didn't instantly count himself lucky and pocket the money.

“Little boy!” he called out, heading back to where he'd left the wagon. “Come out! Where are you? You can't give this to me, it's too much.” He waved the bill around to the empty woods. Imagine, some little child giving him twenty dollars. Even if he was well off, it had to be all his pocket money for weeks.

“I'm staying at the Rookery,” he said loudly to no one. “If you change your mind, you can have it back.” As soon as he said that he was sorry. He was already thinking how to spend it.

He slipped the bill in his pocket and immediately felt his hip sink. It felt like someone had strapped a bowling ball to his side. His whole body tilted, and he could hardly stand upright. He thought at first he might have dislocated his hip, but how? Then he thought maybe his foot had caught on something and was pulling him back. But no, it wasn't any pull but that of gravity—it was a weight. It had happened as soon as he put the bill in his pocket. He took it out again, and the weight vanished. The bill was as light as a hummingbird feather in his hand. He looked at it quizzically and put it back in his pocket. At once he was weighted down as if with a dangling ball and chain. He tried the experiment again and finally was forced to conclude that the flimsy piece of paper in his hand suddenly weighed a great deal more when in his pocket. It must have weighed … he burst out laughing even as horripilations danced on his forearms. Ten pounds. The ten-pound note weighed ten pounds!

His first instinct was to throw the unnatural thing to the ground, but a healthy respect for money (some might call it greed) made him keep it. It must be a magic bill of some kind. He looked around warily. Surely it had been a little boy he heard, not a fairy. Well, perhaps the boy had gotten the bill from a fairy. He chuckled. What had seemed incredible generosity was instead probably just getting rid of a cumbersome burden. Tiny as that chap sounded, it must have been well nigh impossible to carry around a ten-pound weight. He'd rather ditch it than carry it miles to town to spend. Finn slipped it back in his pocket and felt the same way himself. He'd carry it in his hand until he got back to the Rookery, then leave it in his bureau until he could find a way to spend it.

He took it out, expecting it to be feather-light again, but though it perched ephemerally on his hand, he could hardly lift it. Even out of his pocket, it now weighed ten pounds.

He tossed it away, and it drifted and twirled to the ground like a winged maple seed.

“Do you mean,” he asked aloud, indignantly, “that if I want to spend this thing, I have to carry ten pounds around?” No one answered, but he fancied he heard a giggle in the breeze. “I mean, not that it's heavy or anything.” He didn't want the kid to think he was a weakling, but ten pounds would be an annoying burden for a grown man; it was all the more difficult for Finn. He picked up the bill. He put it down again. He looked at the bill. The bill looked at him.

“Fine!” he said, almost angry at his gift. He shoved it into the hemp bag, and when his fingers hit the knobbly thing again, he remembered that he had two presents.

Something grabbed his hand, and he squealed and pulled it out. Clutched in his hand—clutching his hand … in fact, shaking his hand in a cordial way—were five skeletal digits. If they'd been clean and white (or not following an enchanted ten-pound note), he might have thought they were no more than a prank, a prop left over from Halloween. But it was evident that these bones once had flesh and skin and muscle on them and that the softer tissues had mostly (but not completely) rotted away. There was even a slight stickiness to them and a stale odor somewhere between a dog bone and an unused attic.

He tried to drop the thing, but it held on, pumping his hand in so friendly a manner he could almost see the rest of the body attached to it—a man of medium build in neat but mended clothes, dark hair, a hat, a wry smile, a cunning look.… Finn shut his eye and shook his head, dispelling the vision, and was left only with the hand, which now skittered back into the bag and held fast. No matter how hard Finn tried to pull it out, it gripped tight, clutching the bottom of the bag in its decomposing fingers. He shut the bag and looked around him one last time. What could he do? He was afraid, but how could he not keep his presents? How could he be invited into a world of mystery and oddity and decline the invitation?

“I won't take it,” he said.

He stared at the bag for a long moment.

“Yes, I will.”

*   *   *

“There you are, child,” Phyllida said when Meg found her, still in her little sitting room. There were crumpled tissues on the vanity table, which Phyllida hastily brushed into a polished wooden wastebasket before Meg noticed them. “How did the painting go?”

“Oh, fine, I guess. I'm not very good. The others liked it, though, especially Rowan and Dickie. But not Finn. He left—I don't know why.”

“Oh, good, good,” Phyllida said absently. “Meg, sit down if you please. Just move those things onto the floor. I need to talk with you about something, something very serious.”

Meg perched on the seat, two lines deepening between her eyebrows. “Is it Moll? Have you found her?”

“No, not that. Not yet.”

“I'm going out this afternoon to look for her. I was going to before Gwidion came.”

“Yes, do. There's no harm in that. But what I must talk with you about, Meg … Meg…” She sighed deeply. “I am going to die.”

Meg's eyes blurred and welled, and fat tears like late-summer-afternoon raindrops rolled down her cheeks. She threw her arms around Phyllida so hard she hurt the old woman.

“No, no, no! Not now, child! Not now!” She heaved a sobbing little laugh herself and pushed Meg away. “You don't understand me. I'm not dying just now, nor yet for some time, if I have anything to say about it … which I just might. But someday. Someday I will die, as of course we all will, but if all goes according to the plans of nature, I'll die much sooner than you. It cannot be too many years hence, perhaps a dozen if I am lucky, who can say? I have no child, Meg, no daughter. In the weeks you have been here—has it only been a matter of weeks?—you have come to seem more like my child than I would have thought possible.

“We tried, you know, Lysander and I. Seven times I was quick with life, and seven times that life melted away before it came close to seeing the sun. I couldn't carry a child. That has never happened to a Lady of the Green Hill. What will become of the Green Hill and its denizens if they have no Guardian? The people will forget. The fairies will grow bold. Wives and babies will be stolen, cattle will go dry … and the people will have just enough of the old lore left to remember how to retaliate. They will burn the Green Hill. They will mow the thornbushes. They will cut down the ancient trees. They will plow up the hill itself, and someday, when the truths my ancestors have held for generations are no more than fairy stories told to babes in the nursery, they will build apartments where the Seelie Court once danced. The fairies will be gone, and mankind will be diminished. I would not see that happen.”

To be faced with the prospect, even theoretical, of her beloved great-great-aunt's demise was bad enough; to see practically before her very eyes the Green Hill plowed and leveled and commercialized froze Meg in an openmouthed stare. Then her jaw gaped wider. She knew what was coming next. The weight of responsibility settled on her, itchy and oppressive like a woolly winter overcoat on a summer noon, and she wanted to shrug it off immediately and run away to some cool, shady place.

Phyllida was speaking again, but Meg didn't listen. She didn't have to. Meg looked at some vague place over Phyllida's shoulder and saw her lips move. She was telling her it would all come to an end, all of it, if Phyllida didn't have an heir. And who could that heir be? Meg's mother? No, she had her life as a professor, and she'd shown no interest, no calling. Silly? Preposterous. Silly was good enough in her own way, but unless she underwent a dramatic personality shift, she would never have the serene strength and wise determination to mediate between the world of man and the world of fairies. She might study them, might, as one of Phyllida's blood, come to know practically everything there was to know about them, and she might violently and passionately defend fairy from man, man from fairy. But the position required someone steady, a diplomat, a negotiator. Silly was not the girl for the job. And yes, it must be a girl, so Rowan and James were out. It was Meg, or no one. Meg, or a strip mall on the Green Hill.

“I'm just a kid!” Meg said suddenly, interrupting Phyllida's narrative. “I can't make this kind of decision now. I don't know what I want to do with my life.” It seemed like all other possibilities were flying away from her. She had wanted to be a great many things when she grew up—a paleontologist, a writer, a lawyer, a marine—her choices shifted with each book she read, each movie she saw, each field trip that inspired her. Now it felt like all of those were closed to her, and though she had to admit she probably didn't really want to be a marine, she liked the idea that it was an option, that she still had plenty of years to decide, to play with possibilities. Phyllida was trying to strip that away.

She thought Phyllida was going to say something about her destiny, tell her that she was fated to be the Guardian of the Green Hill. She thought Phyllida would try to convince her, bully her, even, and she braced herself for a struggle. She might want to be Guardian … but she might not, and no one was going to force her to decide her entire future on the spur of the moment. She felt in her heart that if Phyllida did pressure her, she would be compelled to say yes (and was fairly sure she wanted to say yes) but feared any decision made in haste would be repented at leisure, and she understood herself well enough to know that she would keep even a deeply regretted promise. No, she would make no promise now, and she dug her heels in and prepared to be stubborn.

But Phyllida knew her, and the world, too well for that. “It is a big decision, and one you should not make without a great deal of thought. The worst thing in the world is to bind yourself to something you hate. I think you have the ability to be Guardian … and I think you have the interest. But it needs unswerving dedication. It is in many ways a life of sacrifice. I have had to do unpleasant things in my day, things that, if they were not done for necessity, would mark me as a madwoman, or criminal, or worse. I ask you only one thing today, my little Meg. Will you agree to learn more? Will you let me teach you about the fairies, about the Green Hill, about what it truly means to be the Guardian? For what time we have together, let me teach you as though you were indeed to be my successor, and someday, you can decide. It needn't even be in my lifetime.”

Meg felt an almost magnetic force drawing her to say yes, and for one minute more she fought it. I want to learn, she thought, all she has to teach me. She heard the Green Hill call out to her, felt it pulling her out of the life she knew, her Arcadian childhood, calling her to a wild dance in a mushroom circle. And, oh, how she wanted to join in that dance! To be as serene and wise and powerful as Phyllida, to live forever in this lovely place, to have the knowledge, the lore, of creatures who have existed for millennia, creatures so lovely and frightening she felt her breath catch to think of them.