Into the Green Read online

  "I could call him back," Angharad said in a small voice. "In this place... I could call him back."

  "Only if I let you."

  Anger flickered in Angharad's witchy eyes. "You have no right to come between us."

  "Angharad," Woodfrost said softly. "Do you truly believe that I would stand between you and my grandson if he were alive? When you joined your futures together, none was happier than I. But we no longer speak of you and Garrow; we speak now of the living and the dead, and yes, I will come between you then."

  "Why is it so evil to call him back? We loved each other."

  "It is not so much evil as..." He sighed. "Let us leave the talk of evil and sins to the priests of Dath. Say rather that it is wrong, Angharad. You have a duty and responsibility while you live that does not include calling forth the shades of the dead. Death will come for you soon enough, for even the lives of witches are not so long as men would believe, and then you will be with Garrow in the Land of Shadows. Will you make a Land of Shadows in the world of the living?"

  "Without him there is nothing."

  "There is everything still."

  "If you weren't already dead," Angharad said dully, "I would kill you."

  "Why? Because I speak the truth? You are a woman of the traveling people— not some village-bound goodwife who looks to her husband for every approval."

  "It's not that. It's..."

  Her voice trailed off. She stared past him to where the will-o'-the-wisps stood pale and tall, silent harps held in glowing hands, witchy lanterns gleaming eerily.

  "I could live ten years without him," she said softly, her gaze returning to the old man's. "I could live forever without him— so long as I knew that he was still in the world. That all he was was not gone from it. That somewhere his voice was still heard, his face seen, his kindness known. Not dead. Not lying in a grave with the cold earth on him and the worms feeding on his body.

  "If I could know that he was still... happy..."

  "Angharad, he can be content— which is as close as the dead can come to what the living call 'happiness.' When he knows that you will go on with your life, that you will take up the reins of your witch's duties once more— then he will be at peace."

  "Broom and Heather!" Angharad cried. "What duty? I have no duty. Only loss."

  Woodfrost stepped towards her and lifted her to her feet. His touch was cold and eerie on her skin and she shrank back from him, but he did not let her go.

  "While you live," he said, "you have a duty to life. And Hafarl's gift— the gift of the Summerblood that gives you your sight— you have a duty to it as well. The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them, Angharad. Otherwise they fade away."

  "I see only a world made grey with grief."

  "I have known grief as well," Woodfrost said. "I lost my wife. My daughter. Her husband. I, too, have lost loved ones, but that did not keep me from my duties to life and the gift. I traveled the roads and sought blind folk such as you were and did my best to make them see once more. Not for myself. But that the world might not lose its wonder. Its magic."

  "But..."

  The old man stepped back from her. In his gaze she saw once more that weighing look that had come into his eyes on that first night she had met him.

  "If not for yourself," he said, "then do it for the others who are still blind to their gift. Is your grief so great that they must suffer for it as well?"

  Angharad shrank back, more frightened by the quiet sympathy in his eyes, than if he'd been angry with her.

  "I... I'm just one person..."

  "So are all who live... and so are all who have the gift. The music of the Middle Kingdom is only a whisper now, Angharad. When it is forgotten, not even an echo of that music will remain. If you would leave such a world for those who are yet to be born, then call your husband back from the Land of Shadows and live together in some half-life— neither living nor dead, the both of you.

  "The choice is yours, Angharad."

  She bowed her head, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  I'm not as strong as you, she wanted to tell him, but when she lifted her anguished gaze, he was no longer there. She saw only the wraith-shapes of Jacky Lantern's kin, watching her. In their faces there were no answers, no judgments. Their blue-gold eyes returned her gaze without reply.

  "Garrow," she said softly, all her love caught up in that one word, that one name.

  There was a motion in the air where Woodfrost had stood, a sense of some gate opening between this world and the next. Through her teary gaze she saw a familiar face taking shape, the hazy outline of a body underneath it.

  "Garrow," she said again.

  The image grew firmer, more substantial. For a long moment she watched him forming there, drawing substance from the marsh, breaching the gulf between the Land of Shadows and the hillock where she stood. Then she bowed her head once more.

  "Go gentle," she said.

  She could feel his presence vanish without the need to watch. Her throat was thick with emotion, her eyes blinded by tears. Then there was a touch on her cheek, like lips of wind brushing against her skin, here one moment like a feather, then gone. He was lost now, lost forever, while she must go on. In the midst of her grief, a strange warmth rose up in her, and she thought she heard a voice, distant, distant, whispering.

  I will wait for you, my love...

  And then she was alone in the marsh, with only the ghostly will-o'-the-wisps for company.

  Through a sheen of tears, she watched one of the harpers approach her, the woman's pale shape more gossamer than ever. She laid her harp on Angharad's knee. Like Woodfrost's hands, it had substance and weight, surprising her— but there was no eerie chill in its wood. It was a small plain instrument— more like a child's harp than those that the itinerant barden carried and played. She touched the smooth wood of its curving neck.

  "I... I'm a witch," she said in a low soft voice, the bitterness in it directed only at herself. "I can't make music— I never could."

  But her fingers were drawn to the strings and she found that they knew a melody, if she did not. It was a slow sad air that drew the sorrow from her and made of it a haunting music that eased the pain inside her.

  A kowrie gift, she thought. Was it supposed to make her grief more bearable?

  "It must have a name," the wraith said, her voice uncanny and echoing like the breath of a wind on a far hill.

  A name? Angharad thought.

  She watched her fingers draw the music from the instrument's strings and wondered that wood and metal could make such a sound.

  A name?

  Her sadness was in the harp's music, loosened from the tight knots inside her and set free on the air where the night healed it.

  "I will call it Garrow," she said, looking up.

  The ghostly company was gone, but she no longer felt so alone.

  4

  Autumn turned cold. The frosts came and then the snows, and Angharad wintered with a shepherd and his wife in their croft, nestled in the highlands of Kellmidden near Crinan. Through the short days and long nights of that winter, she made herself useful with the carding of wool and weaving, but still found time to explore the music she discovered gathering in her thoughts, a music that was so easily pulled from the strings of the small harp with which the kowrie had gifted her.

  It was that music and her ability to call it forth— she who, before that night in the fens, could scarcely hold a tune— that gave her a purpose when she set out again on the roads come spring. The ghosts and kowrie might all have been a dream, and sometimes it was easy to think of them as such, but she had but to pick up the harp to know the truth.

  There was witchery and magic afoot in the world still; it wasn't merely the stuff of legends, but it was fading. What she had learned was that it need not disappear entirely, not when those with Hafarl's witchy blood still lived in the Green Isles. So as Woodfrost had done before her, she took to the tin
ker roads to find those with the Summerblood sleeping in their veins, and finding them, she woke Hafarl's gift in them so that they could add to the wonder of the world, rather than hide from it, or add to its decline.

  Spring was still fresh on the land when she walked out of Kellmidden's highlands and met with a tinker company camped by a stream with good pasture nearby. She was still a young, red-haired tinker woman when she came to their wagons, but her eyes were old now, and she carried a small harp slung from her shoulder as well as a witch's rowan staff.

  The tinkers welcomed her readily with a guest-cup and a place by the fire when she called out to them in their own secret tongue. Sitting in the flickering light cast by their fires, Angharad looked from face to face as she was introduced to the various families that made up the company, smiling as her gaze finally rested on a lanky girl named Zia who by Angharad's reckoning was thirteen summers old, give or take a season.

  Zia blushed and looked away, but Angharad knew that inside her breast the young tinker girl felt something stir that had been buried when she learned the ways of a woman and set aside her favorite doll with its cloth face and broom and heather body.

  Smiling again, Angharad began to play her harp.

  —

  But while spring came to the Green Isles, there was a place across the Grey Sea to which such seasonal changes were unknown. The Great Kharanan Desert knew only two seasons: hot and hotter. It lay far to the east on the mainland, a vast wasteland that encompassed thousands of square miles of unrelieved sand and stone. There were waterholes and oases, but they lay few and far between and were known only to the nomadic Kharanan tribes that inhabited the wasteland. Those who dared its reaches were either tribesmen or fools.

  Behan g'n Khohr was not a fool. He stood at the crest of a wave of sand in that part of the Kharanan that his people called the Unforgiving Sea of Sands and shaded his eyes. What he saw in the trough below the dune on which he stood made his normally stern features slacken in surprise.

  Beyond the boundaries of the Kharanan, legend had it that once the whole of the desert was a kingdom of graceful cities, gentle pastures and woodlands. But the inhabitants of that land had raised the ire of their god and in his wrath he had brought the sands to cover their kingdom and erase all memory of their presence.

  The tribesmen had no such legends; the ancient kingdom with its cities and richly watered lands was a part of their history. They remembered, the tale passed on from one generation to another by their singers and shamanic caliyeh. They remembered, and lived their lives by the strict tenets of their faith so that one day, as promised, Jaromund, holy be His name, would take back His sands and return Kharanan to its former glory.

  So when Behan saw the temple spire growing from the sand below, he fell to his knees and bowed in thanks, touching his brow to the sand. The trailing edges of his headcloth, held in place by a decorative fillet of thick woolen cords wound round with gold, silver and silk thread and ornamented with tufts of goat hair, fell to either side of his face.

  "My unworthy life be His," he murmured.

  Still bowing, he lifted the end of the tassled cord that lay against the breast of his robes and kissed the knot there.

  "Jaromund, holy be His name, I thank you for this gift."

  His heart sang with the news he would bring back to the camp. The sands were receding. Jaromund, holy be His name, had finally forgiven His unworthy followers. Once again the Kharanan would blossom so that where now was sand would all be oasis.

  He remained in a position of obeisance for a long time. The sun rose first one finger, then three, in the sky above him as he prayed, his right hand clenched tightly around his prayer knot. He murmured the ten-and-thirty blessings, followed by the twelve chants of repentance. Then finally he sat back on his haunches to study the spire below him.

  It rose some seven feet from the encroaching sand, revealing, from his vantage point, the intricately detailed stone work that rose to its fluted tip and one paned window. It was a miracle, he thought, that the sands had not crushed that window.

  An hour passed, then another, as he sat in contemplation of the marvelous sight. But slowly a change came over him. The joy faded in his heart as he watched the sands, not recede, but rise against the stonework.

  We are still unworthy, he realized. Jaromund, holy be His name, was still displeased with His people.

  With that realization, the holiness of the moment fled. He rose to his feet and stretched his cramped leg muscles. Hefting his pack, he began his descent to the spire. The sands rose to mid-calf as he went down the side of the dune, threatening to fill his red goatskin boots, and the footing was unsteady, but he reached the window without mishap. He tapped a knuckle against the glass, hand lifting to his prayer knot as a hollow echo returned.

  Taking the curved knife from his belt, he wedged it between the window and its frame, working along the edge until he caught the inside clasp against the tip of his blade. A quick flip of his wrist popped the clasp. The window pried easily open and a wave of cool stale air came from inside, brushing against his face like the passage of a ghost.

  Behan frowned, considering. His eyes, the startling blue of a southern tribesman, appeared paler than ever against the dark cast of his skin.

  If this were a holy site, he thought, might not Jaromund, holy be His name, be displeased with its breaching?

  Ah yes, his curiosity argued back. But would Jaromund, holy be His name, have allowed the sand to uncover the spire, did He not wish Behan to explore its interior?

  Curiosity won. He took a torch from his pack and unwrapped the leather that covered the oil-soaked cloths wrapped about one end. Coaxing a flame from the clay ember-jar that hung from his pack, he lit the torch and thrust it in ahead of his head and shoulders as he leaned over the ledge to look inside. The torch's flickering light showed an empty chamber, heavy with dust. The window was at chest height from the stone floor. At the far side of the room was the head of a staircase.

  Behan dropped his pack in first, then followed it inside. He stood for a moment on the dusty floor, looking outside at the sand dunes, judging the wind. There was time. It would be many hours before the sands rose high enough to block his retreat. So assured, he left his pack by the window and went exploring.

  The staircase wound down to the next floor in a circular fashion, revealing another empty chamber. Behan continued to follow the winding stairs until he had counted seven stories. He marveled at the height this structure had once commanded, then marveled still more when he considered how the sands had covered it all.

  It was on what would have been the ground floor that he came across the first piece of furnishing. Set in the middle of the chamber was what appeared to be a stone altar that, on closer inspection, proved to have a movable lid. Wedging his torch in a wall sconce near the base of the stairs, he strained at the stone lid of the altar, finally shifting it enough that he could peer within.

  A small square shape lay inside, wrapped in silk and bound with a filigreed rope of braided goat's hair. When Behan had unwrapped the silk covering, he found himself holding an ebony puzzle-box, inlaid with silver designs that made him feel slightly queasy as he followed their pattern. He turned it over and over in his hands, then finally wrapped it once more and set it on the lid of the altar.

  He turned his attention to the two doors on either side of the chamber, but neither would open. The desert lay behind them, he realized— the millions of tons of sand of the Unforgiving Sea of Sands that had swallowed the structure.

  The thought of the weight of all that sand pressing against the walls of the tower made him suddenly uneasy.

  He returned to the altar and picked up the puzzle-box. Retrieving his torch from the sconce he hurried back up all the winding twists of the stairway, breathing a sigh of relief when he found the square of window still uncovered on the top floor. He thrust the box into his pack and tossed it out the window, quickly following it himself.

  He paused the
re a moment after he had put out his torch. He wrapped the oil-soaked cloth with leather once more and returned the torch to his pack, all the while studying that window. Finally he closed it once more and retreated up the steep incline of the dune. The sands, he noted, had risen a good foot and a half in the short while he'd been inside. By this time tomorrow, the window would be covered again. Another day, and the spire itself would be swallowed by the sands once more. It was likely that he was the first man in a thousand years to see that structure. And he might be the last for another thousand years. But the next to come would find it even emptier than he had, for now not even the puzzle-box lay hidden away in its secret depths.

  An odd find, he thought, remembering the queasy feeling that had stolen over him as he had followed the silver patterning inlaid in the wood. Perhaps Yeuhanin would know what to make of it.

  Swinging his pack onto his back, he set off once more, continuing his interrupted journey back to camp.

  —

  The tent of Yeuhanin g'n Khohr stood slightly apart from those of the rest of the camp, the natural color of its goatskins a stark contrast to the brightly painted tents of the other tribesmen. Yeuhanin was the tribesmen's caliyeh— part priest, part shaman; their link to Jaromund, holy be His name. Unlike the other men of the tribe, he wore loose baggy trousers and a short caftan against which hung his prayer knots— thirteen in all. His feet were bare, a white turban hid his long grey hair, and his pale eyes were surrounded with a webwork of ochre tattoos that also covered his right brow and his left cheek.

  Behan went directly to Yeuhanin's tent when he reached the camp, not even stopping to see his wives and children. The puzzle-box played on his mind, making him increasingly uneasy; its patterns wouldn't leave his thoughts. Outside the door flap of the caliyeh's tent, he coughed once, then waited.