Richard looked up from his son, focused on the far window where sunlight illuminated the fitted shards of colour, predominantly green. The stained glass showed a classic duel between chivalrous knight and man-eating monster, a human form, a wild man, green-cloaked and massive, barring the way to a summer-wood, just glimpsed through the door in a mound that rose higher than the trees. Yet instead of the knight spearing the wild man, this window showed the wild man exacting the life of the knight. It could have been a portrayal of martyrdom. But Richard now saw that it depicted the triumph of nature over the despoiler.
Alexander Lytton had listened with fascination as Alex recounted this dreamlike memory of his “rescue” by the knight. Now, he looked up, looked around, murmured, “His dreams came back to him by all the doors and windows of the sanctuary…”
Alex, exhausted, had begun to drift into sleep in his father’s arms. Richard cradled him, rocked him, but watched the gaunt features of the Scot.
“Where are we, Alexander? Where the hell are we? We’re in a wood, I know that. We’re in a reflection of a ruin that Alex once visited, a cathedral, a sanctuary, a holy place. A haven. I know that too. It’s the Green Chapel, in its way, and Green Knights come and go, and dreams enter and pass through—”
“Exactly,” Lytton murmured. “This is the passing place. Exactly that. Old dreams pass out, new dreams enter. The Green Chapel in the old poem was a place of testing. To the medieval world, the tests were of honour, of chivalry, of courage. The Cross against the witches of the pagan world, the world of forgotten gods, forgotten lore. The Green Chapel itself was described as a burial mound, an access to the Otherworld of ‘faerie.’ Your boy recognised a long time ago that the Christian story was a convenience to suit its times. I remember you telling me how he subverted the story in his school play to make it not a test of honour by benevolent trickery, but a double-cross by Gawain himself, to get access to an older land and older treasures. And what treasures!
“The chapel is the frontier between instinct and conscience, the place which tests dreams, and by testing dreams, by testing the faith a mind puts in its dream-state, tests the mind itself. There is a magic in dreams that these days we can’t value. They can express combinations of experience. They can create vision. If the vision is clear, is lucid, if it can be controlled, if its symbols can be comprehended, it gives power through something we take for granted. Intuition! But that ability has to be won against more basic instincts.”
Lytton glanced at Richard and smiled. “Think of this place as your son’s version of the ‘passage’ between primal and higher minds, between unconscious and conscious. That’s certainly what the Green Chapel itself represents. This is a natural place to come when you are stripped of dreams, and need to heal. How I would love to know the dreamtime story of the Green Chapel. What an understanding that might give us into insight. Your boy was given the briefest of glimpses. So have we been. But because of the appetite of Alex’s imagination, which means he absorbs a lot of junk imagery, we only get to see Jack the Giant-Killers, and Gawains, and sturdy knights etcetera, Tennyson-esque queens in barges (an interesting aspect of the mind’s notion of self-healing, incidentally). The hollyjack is primitive, though. That was close to something very old…”
From the window through which they had entered the cathedral, Lacan called down, “There’s something coming through the woods! Can’t make it out, but whatever it is, there’s a lot of it. Not creatures … not as such…”
Alarmed, Richard said, “Christ! Helen! We’ve got to help Helen.”
Lytton grabbed his arm. “Helen stayed behind in the glade for a reason. She’s a capable woman. If she sensed Coyote, you should let her be…”
“She’s in danger. I can’t lose her! Not now.”
“She’ll have to face Coyote on her own. You can’t help her.”
“She’s not facing Coyote. She’s facing Gawain … If what Alex says—”
“The greenjacks,” Alex whispered. “Only it’s winter. The Green Knight in winter can’t be trusted. The hollyjack told me so. Until the spring comes, he’ll try to kill us, just like Gawain…”
Increasing his grip on Richard’s arm, Lytton said grimly, “Gawain and the Green Knight are part of the same creature. But they’re Alex’s—Coyote is not. Helen wouldn’t have stayed behind unless she was sure her own time of testing was coming.”
* * *
Winter developed into a storm. Snow blew hard against the cathedral, swirling icily into the wood inside the walls. Richard joined Lacan on the falcon sill, staring into the gloom, and saw the spread of movement across the black forest. Like the lights and shapes that had emerged from the Mask Tree, elemental forces were flowing towards the sanctuary, streaks and swirls of colour in the blizzard, faces and forms that existed at the periphery of vision.
Richard returned to the shelter in the Lady Chapel. When he told Lytton of the impending attack, the man swore loudly, raised wide eyes to the broken walls.
Moments later the elementals seeped into the cathedral. Lacan yelled suddenly from the window-ledge and almost plummeted to the snow-covered floor below, just keeping his grip on the thick, slippery creeper. Above him, faces stretched from the stone, statues shifted, and the cracked figures in the wooden pews emerged and ran through the shivering wood.
Through it all, light pierced the stained glass, making the figures of Gawain and the Green Knight appear to writhe within the crystal. Yet they remained in place, while the stone figures all around them, birds, gryphons, and grinning monks, became animated, their voices emerging as a meaningless chatter, muffled by the stifling snow.
Alex laughed at the antics. His eyes glowed, despite the cold. “It’s like the first dream. They danced for me! They danced!”
Richard hugged his son, not understanding the enthusiasm, the excitement. The cathedral flowed with movement. Every thorn and hazel, all the gnarled oaks and slender birches that formed the chapel-wood seemed to move, to shift a little, to join the dancing figures.
“They’re coming back to Alex,” Lytton said from his hunched position in a niche where a statue had once stood.
But even as he spoke, so the effect seemed to vanish. The figures froze, the sense of a massive elemental intrusion into the sanctuary withdrew. Lytton’s eyes widened. He glanced at the boy, then murmured, “Not Alex’s at all! Someone watching us, someone outside.”
He stood and waded through snow to the ivy-covered wall, pulled himself up the thick strands to the icy ledge. Richard followed him. Lacan and Sarin huddled for warmth; Alex was swathed in the big man’s cloak.
From the falcon window, as the snowstorm eased, a figure could be seen at the woodland edge. Richard was certain that it was not Helen, nor a knight in any shape or form. It was a man in a long, black overcoat, his white head bare, his face full-bearded. He carried a staff; a backpack was slung over his left shoulder. He was staring up at the cathedral.
The air cleared, a sudden lull. The man stepped forward, shaking snow from his hair to reveal darker locks, a younger face.
“My God,” Alexander Lytton breathed. “It’s Huxley. It’s George Huxley!”
The man by the wood turned away. Lytton called his name. The man hesitated, frowning as he glanced back, but then turned again to pursue his path through the trees.
“Huxley!” Lytton cried desperately to the winter wood. “George Huxley! Wait!” He scrambled down to the floor of the chapel, grabbed his rucksack and found his oak staff. He tied his cloak around his chest and tugged the hood over his head. “I can’t lose him now … I’ve spent too long looking.”
“You’re mad!” Richard said. “You’ll never find him in this storm. And how can you be sure it was him, and not a mythago?”
Lytton laughed dryly, as if recognising the irony of the situation. “How? Because I’ve seen more photographs of the man than he ever knew existed. I gained access to them. I’ve stared into his eyes, into his soul, using a lens, using my imagination
… I’ve stared at that face for more hours than I’ve stared at my own, Richard. You could show me the shaved whiskers of his cheeks and I’d know they were his. Don’t doubt me, lad. I’d know him anywhere. For Huxley, it’s the 1930s. This is the middle of his deepest journey, his longest absence. I didn’t expect to find him. He found me … our meeting is recorded in his journal—he doesn’t name me, so I can’t be sure, but everything fits with what he wrote when he returned to Oak Lodge in September 1937.
“I will find him, Richard; he can’t get far in this snow. I hardly had the courage to believe it would happen. But it has. And it’s time for me to leave you.”
He hugged Lacan powerfully, then bowed to Sarin. He ruffled Alex’s hair and finally extended a hand to Richard. “I’m glad we both got our wish. I learned a frightening lesson about myself, that day with the Jack…”
“Gone and forgotten,” Richard said quickly. “As will Huxley be, if you don’t get a move on.”
Lytton glanced down at Alex. “Don’t let your father do anything foolish. His friend, Helen, knows how to handle herself. She’s a match for any trickster. To help her,” this for Richard again, “might be to frustrate her wish.”
“There are wolves in the wood,” Alex said anxiously. Lytton frowned.
“Scarag. I know. The greenjacks in winter.”
“Try not to hurt them. When spring comes, they’ll be our friends.”
Lytton smiled thinly to reassure the boy. “Laddie, I have no intention whatsoever of challenging a scarag. I saw what they did to a friend of mine.”
He scaled the wall again, crossing the sill by the falcon gargoyle, and skidding heavily to the ground outside. Richard followed him to the window, leaned out of the stone and watched him go, a fleeing figure, cloak swirling, entering the snowstorm again, soon lost in the wood, his final cry for Huxley sucked hollow by the winter world.
* * *
During the night the sounds and vibrations from the crypt were a constant, muffled reminder that the cathedral was not a complete sanctuary. The snow had ceased to fall. At dawn Lacan took his spear and climbed to the window to watch for danger. Sarin and Richard investigated the entrance to the crypt, but found only a sealed wall, riddled with roots and faint inscriptions. Alex wouldn’t go down the stone stairs. “They’re coming back to me. My friend told me. But they frighten me—”
“Who?”
“The winter-wolves. They’re finding a way to get to me…”
Richard strung his bow, fingered the tip of one of his arrows. “We’ll fight with everything we’ve got. Which isn’t much, admittedly, but we’ll use it!”
“They’re our friends in the spring. Don’t hurt them—”
“You seem to know a lot about them, Alex. But none of the rest of us do. You seem afraid of them, but afraid for them. What do I do if they attack?”
“Don’t hurt them,” Alex whispered, but he shivered as he said it, looking nervously across the snow-laden trees, feeling the sudden vibration of a large creature below the altar.
“What is it?” Sarin whispered apprehensively. “Something’s happening.”
“I don’t know.”
Richard took a step away from the altar. The whole wood was quivering, snow being shed from winter branches. “Arnauld!” he began to shout, but he managed no more.
The floor in front of him buckled below the spreading roots and silver trunk of a birch, forcing the tree to lean sharply. It heaved again and the birch fell. A black marble slab thrust vertically from below it, scattering snow and exposing the darkness of the crypt.
The head that pushed up from the hole was bone-white, huge, with four tusks curling from its gaping mouth. Below folds of bone and gnarled ridges, black eyes glittered as the creature looked quickly around before heaving its lithe and sinewy frame from the pit. It had a wolf’s features, despite the protuberances from its mouth. Its ribcage was vast, gruesomely defined above a stomach that was hollow and taut, although it rippled as the muscles were tensed. The creature was twice the height of a man. Its arms hung heavily by its sides, fingers spread and ready as it watched Lacan on the high window, then howled at him.
Lacan hurled his spear. The scarag didn’t flinch. At the last moment it snatched at the weapon, allowing the blade to make a shallow nick in its breast. It howled again and its tusks clattered. It tossed the spear across the cathedral, toward the altar where Richard watched in horror. As the haft clattered on the stone, Richard reached for it.
The scarag moved away from the vault. At once a second head appeared in the hole, this one broader, flatter, one tusk broken. The lame thing that hauled itself from the crypt was grey and bony also, taller than the first, but stooped. It watched Lacan curiously, then growled and turned to forage in the chapel wood.
A third and fourth winter-wolf emerged from the hole in the floor, each looking around as it rose, hesitating, watching first Lacan, then Richard, before stalking through the trees. The fifth scarag, a smaller version but no less menacing, remained at a crouch by the gap in the marble floor, emitting a sound like a low growl. Without moving its head, its eyes shifted restlessly, sharing its scrutiny between the huge Frenchman and the crouching trio by the golden cross on the altar. It seemed to be guarding the hole to the underworld.
The first scarag soon found the body of the hollyjack. It gathered the dry, dead evergreen into its arms and lifted it to its chest. One of the others picked up the straw bird and placed it in the open body. The wood filled with the sounds of mourning and the winter beasts moved stealthily toward the cathedral’s main doors and entered the decaying nest.
Last to go was the Guardian, the shaman of the group. It pointed three times with its carved staff to the passage through to the crypt, its feral eyes fixed on Richard. Then it rose and backed steadily through the snow to the maw of the nest. Here, with a series of cries that were almost human, it turned and crawled inside.
* * *
Three days later, at the height of the day, as Richard returned from a fruitless search for Helen, the nest by the tall doors began to exude bird-cries and chattering. At once, Alex ran to the ramshackle structure and stood in the wash of green light that began to flood from the circular mouth. There was a great deal of movement inside the nest and the same sun that had transformed the winter world into one of spring flashed blindingly through the crystal window above the doors.
Alex started to move towards that light but Sarin put restraining hands upon his shoulders and looked around for Arnauld, signalling to Richard as she saw the man drop over the access sill.
“Something’s happening,” she called urgently.
Alex shrugged her off, then turned, eyes wide, lank hair flowing about his grinning face. “They’re back. They’ve come!”
Before Richard could do anything to stop his son, Alex had jumped at the hole in the mass of wood and grass and bundled himself inside. The eerie light flickered. There was movement and a sudden breeze, like a breath.
The entrance to the nest closed! It seemed to snap shut, and Richard flung himself across the cathedral to stand by Sarin. She backed away, horrified and appalled, her hands to her mouth.
“It’s eaten him,” she whispered. Richard held her, shaking and afraid.
“No. No, I don’t think so. I think this is the end of it.”
Dear God, please let it be so.
The nest shrank. The wood and bramble melted down, became hair, became eyes, became a nose and a grinning mouth that opened and emitted a low chuckle. The eyes watched stonily, the hair waved like rushes in a high wind. Richard panicked.
“Arnauld! Quickly!”
The Frenchman came running. Richard tried to thrust his spear into one of the Jack’s eyes, but was blown back by the stench from its mouth, and the hollow laugh. Don’t hurt it … his son seemed to say. A moment later the face seemed to calm down. It dissolved into a kinder head, a sad-featured visage that Richard remembered from the Argo.
Vast, grotesque in its way,
Orpheus fleetingly watched the trembling man below him, and sang words in a whisper.
“One bloody nick … side of his head … all for the lady … the love of the lady…”
Then Orpheus too dissolved, the wood and bracken crumbling into dust, the whole nest collapsing down, dissolving, dispersing into the feeding green shoots of new growth that reached from the tall doors, and from between the cold stone flooring. Soon there was just a curled human shape covered with ivy and ground elder, which writhed over the boy’s naked form, then drew back, taking the black rot, the orange fungal growth, the shards and fragments of decay, taking it all back down to the root-web.
Curled on the floor, Alex opened his eyes. He unfurled like a leaf at dawn, his arms stretching, his legs flexing, his back arching. He greeted the high sun, the grey-green shadows, and smiled. He passed water and sat up, watching the steam from between his legs, slightly embarrassed. Then he looked at Richard, who was standing shocked and in tears. He stood up, brushing self-consciously at his wet thighs, trying to hide himself from his father’s gaze. There was a strange fire in his eyes. Green light seemed to touch his skin.
“I need clothes.”
At once, as if kicked into action, Richard ran to the boy and placed his cloak around Alex’s shoulders. He could hardly speak, managing a tear-choked, “Dear God, you give me some frights!”
The nest had sucked all dead things away, including the ends of hair and strips of his nails. But there was something whole about the boy, now: trickster and conscience had come back. The two faces of the Green Knight had returned.