“Stop!” she cried. She tried to make her voice as loud as she could so that it would ring above the sound of the stag’s hooves and the noise Mally was making, but all that came out was a soft whisper. “Please stop.”
The stag turned its head slightly and Ali stared into one large liquid eye before her mount looked ahead once more.
“I’m scared,” she said.
She knew this wasn’t Lanark County. She didn’t know where it was, but it wasn’t any place she knew of. They didn’t have trees this big anywhere in the Ottawa Valley. They didn’t have this kind of a forest. It was too…primal. This wasn’t a place for mankind—or for girls, either, she thought. It was a wild place.
The ground inclined sharply now and suddenly they burst out of the forest. The stag’s hooves clattered on rock, but it never slowed its pace. The huge moon was very close now, like the stars. This wasn’t the night sky she knew, Ali thought. Oh, jeez. What was happening to her?
As they continued to climb at a breakneck pace, she could see the countryside for miles around. There were no lights, no sign of houses or people anywhere. Just that big moon shining down, the stars hanging so low she felt she could reach out and catch them, and the dark forests stretching out as far as she could see, off into invisible horizons that were swallowed by the night.
She couldn’t look anymore. Instead, she burrowed her face against the neck of the stag. The clattering of its hooves and Mally’s wild singing combined with the pounding of her heart until she got so dizzy she knew that any moment now she was going to fall off the stag’s back. She was going to fall and smash her head open on those rocks. She’d roll and bump and spin all the way back down the steep incline that the stag had so effortlessly climbed. But then the stag slowed and Mally suddenly broke off her singing.
Ali opened her eyes to see that they were approaching a summit. Her teeth chattered from the cold and the stag’s breath billowed around her like clouds. She was thankful now for the warmth of it on one side, Mally behind her. The stag slowed to a walk. There were shapes outlined against the sky before them. Ali thought of pictures she’d seen in travelogues of Ireland and Britain, and then they were in among the stone formations and the stag came to a halt. Mally slid down from its back and landed sure-footed on the ground.
“Come on, then!” she called to Ali.
Ali just stared around herself. The formations of the stones were like some primal Stonehenge—not raised by men, but by some freak of nature. Or by the gods. Is that what the gods are? she wondered. Are they what’s responsible for all the oddities and impossibilities to be found in nature? Maybe those things were their signatures. The stones towered three times Ali’s height—and she was still sitting on the stag. The big moon appeared to be impaled on their peaks.
“Ali, Ali, in free!” Mally sang.
Ali turned to look down at the wild girl. Mally had lost her hat and her hair was a bewildering thicket that stuck up every-which-way all around her head. She was hopping about from foot to foot, dancing to her own inner music, and for a moment the chorus from Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” ran through Ali’s head.
Mally held up her arms to Ali. Praying to whatever god who would listen that she wouldn’t fall and crack her head on the stones, Ali slid down from the stag’s back. Mally caught her.
The stag immediately paced away from them. It stood between two tall rock formations and stared eastward, its antlers like the bare limbs of a tree thrusting up into the night sky. Ali moved carefully to see what it was looking at, her legs feeling a little rubbery. Before she reached the stones, Mally bounded ahead of her. The wild girl scrambled carelessly right up to what Ali discovered was a sheer drop of hundreds of feet when she finally stood beside her.
“What a night,” Mally murmured. “What a magic night!”
Ali shivered. Her breath was wreathing around her face, and while she was wearing jeans and a windbreaker, they weren’t enough for the chill that the night air held.
“Here,” Mally said, offering her own jacket.
“But you—”
“Can run naked in a snowstorm and not be cold. Don’t you know me yet?”
Ali shook her head. “A secret,” she muttered under her breath. But she took the proffered jacket and did feel warmer with it on. “What are we doing here, Mally? Where is here?”
The wild girl shrugged. “Don’t really know.”
“But we must be somewhere.”
“Maybe we’re inside the old stone,” Mally said with a grin. “I really don’t know, Ali. This is a place that Old Hornie comes to when he wants to be close to what he used to be a part of.”
“I want to go back,” Ali said.
Mally turned slowly and studied her face. “Truly?” she asked.
“Well…” Her mother’s face reared in Ali’s mind. Frankie would be worried sick when she found out. And Tony, too. And she was scared anyway, though not so much, maybe, now that the wild ride was over. Did she really want to go back? Because this was it. This was her big chance—her big adventure. This was what she’d always wished would happen to her. Going through the wardrobe into Narnia. Down a rabbit hole. Doing something, like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. She’d devoured tales of adventures and the fantastic, from Joy Chant to Caitlin Midhir, and had always longed to be the kid that that kind of thing happened to. To hold the Weirdstone of Brisingamen like Alan Garner’s Susan…
“Can…can we go back?”
“Go back?” Mally laughed. “It’s easy to go back. The getting here’s the hard thing. I can only come when I ride the stag and then I always mean to stay forever, or at least a week, but I’m always drawn back. To my own forests, I suppose, thin as they are. Or maybe it’s Tommy’s piping…”
“Why are we here?” Ali asked.
“For fun!”
Girls just want to, Ali thought. “No,” she said. “I mean, I understand that. It’s just…”
“Not reason enough? Then look around you, Ali. Breathe the air. This is beauty. This is a place that still has its heart.”
Ali turned to look out over the darkened forest again. The air was cold, but it was invigorating. It went down into her lungs and woke every cell in her body as the chill pure oxygen rushed through her bloodstream. And she wasn’t all that cold anymore. Maybe she was adjusting to the temperature drop.
“It is beautiful,” she agreed.
Mally grinned back at her. “It’s beauty. Wonder. Magic. Enchantment. Mystery.” Her voice hung on to the last word, instilling it with something that sent a thrill running up Ali’s spine. “Lewis talks about Old Hornie as though he was the whole of mystery,” Mally added. “As though whatever wonderful beings, from his Green Man to ancient Pan, were all wrapped up in this one being, but it’s not so. This—” she swung her arm in a wide circle “—is the mystery.
“We catch peeks of it, little whiffs of its scent, a breath of its air, a whisper of its sound, and it sets our hearts a-tremble. That’s why Old Hornie’s magical. He’s a part of all this. But only a small part. He’s a bit that came loose, and while he can return here, he’s no longer a part of it. So he roams our world, looking for the other bits that’ve come loose over the years. They’re the mysteries of our world.”
“That’s it?” Ali asked.
“No. It’s not so simple. People have wonderful minds—they can imagine. They can do something wonderful that no beastie can. When some of this magic comes loose and drifts into our world, people’s minds give it its shape. They make a Pan, an Odin, a Jesus. Did Lewis tell you how the mystery reflects—becomes—what you yourself project?”
Ali nodded.
“This is why.”
“But…” Ali shook her head slowly. “Religions are based on these things, people live by them, believe them….”
“Religions are based on mysteries,” Mally replied. “They always have been.”
“But if they aren’t real, then—”
“No!” Mally cu
t her off. “They are real. Faerie lies in our minds, but it’s made real by this place. From this place. Gods and demons and the magics that witches and enchanters use—it’s all real. And all from here. Don’t you see? This place is the lifestuff of beauty. Of Magic.”
“But when you talk about God and Heaven and everything…”
“You talk about it. You and Lewis, and the dark man did, but I don’t.” She frowned, looking for the most precise way to tell Ali what she meant. “All those gods and prophets,” she said finally, “they were given their lifestuff from this place, but they were their own being. People might have imagined them, but once they existed, they became what they had to be, not always what people wanted them to be. It’s like the dark man’s hounds.”
Ali looked nervously around. She’d forgotten about them.
“You’d do well to beware of them,” Mally said, “but there’s no need to worry right now. It always takes them longer to reach this place than it does the stag.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Yes. The dark man made them, Ali. He made them just to see if he could—out of his disbelief. He didn’t want something like Old Hornie to be in the world. People made him up, the dark man said, so he’d make up something to hunt Old Hornie down, but he never really believed that he could. And when he did, he never really believed they were real. And when he finally realized they were real, he discovered that he couldn’t control them because such beings are always true to themselves.”
“That’s awful,” Ali said.
Mally nodded. “But it’s always been that way. The leaders that people follow must always do away with the leaders that went before. ‘Great Pan is dead!’ they cried—not because he was dead, but because they wanted him to be dead. Him and all his kind. Yet you’ve seen his cousin here tonight, you’ve ridden on his back, and I don’t doubt that in some old glade in Arcadia the old goat’s still piping, still making the nights merry with his magic—or his panic—depending on how you approach him. It was only the Christians that wanted him gone.”
“Lewis doesn’t like Christians much either,” Ali said.
“Oh, but they’re not the worst, you know. Neither the first, nor probably the last. Only the most successful—so far. What’s most amusing is that they made Pan into their devil, but it’s their own god’s son who’s more the old goat’s cousin.”
Ali shook her head. “I’m not too clear on whether gods are real or not, but I can’t see that. Pan used to, you know, drink a lot and chase the ladies.”
“He’d catch them, too!” Mally said with a laugh. “But he wasn’t evil. It’s just that the Christians made him so.”
“But Jesus—”
“Preached love, not hate. Spoke of a heavenly kingdom on earth. People changed what he said to suit themselves, Ali. And even Christianity’s not the same now as it was back then. When it was growing, it took a bit of this, a bit of that, and made one thing out of it all until it began to split apart again, only from the inside out. Those gospels of theirs—if you look hard enough, you can find a passage to forbid anything you want, and another to condone the same thing.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“Neither did I. But I talked to the dark man a lot. To Lewis and others. I learned how to read the truth between the lines they spoke. I think I would have liked Jesus. The man—and the mystery.”
“What about you?” Ali asked. “Are you a mystery, too?”
Mally smiled. “Oh, no. I’m a secret—it’s not the same.”
“I wish you’d stop saying that. Why can’t you just tell me who you are?” Or what, she added to herself. “Lewis said you were young when he was young, but you never changed. You never got any older.”
“Is it so important to know everything?” Mally asked.
“The more you know, the better you can understand. How can I make decisions if I don’t have all the facts?”
“What decision is there for you to make?”
Ali didn’t have an answer for that.
“I think the world needs its mysteries and its secrets,” Mally said. “Without us, it wouldn’t be such a merry place.”
“The world’s not all that happy,” Ali said.
“I meant merry as in ‘fey.’ Without the mystery of what men call Faerie, the world loses its depth. The resonating of our secret music. The glamor that we lay upon the wild places. There are mysteries and secrets living in the places that men have built, too, but they aren’t so merry.”
“So magic?” Ali asked.
Mally shook her head. A smile that was more bitter than sweet touched her lips. “No, this time I meant happy. They’re not so happy. Sometimes I’m not so happy.”
“Why did you bring me here?” Ali asked. She was no longer so scared—well, at least not very scared—but she was puzzled.
“Because of the fire in you—like the one in Tony.” She pronounced his name “Too-nee.”
Ali frowned. “Fire?”
“A brightness—like a fire of bones.” At Ali’s confused look, Mally tried to explain. “On midsummer’s night, when the bone-fires are lit by the people of the hills to give their greeting to their mother moon.”
“A bonfire?” Ali asked.
“That’s what I said. A bone-fire.”
“You mean they burn bones?”
“Some—to return a bit of the world’s marrow to its mother.” She took Ali’s hand and led her back into the middle of the rock formation’s circle. “This is where they light their fires on that night,” she said, indicating a dark ring burned into the stone. In the moonlight, it stood out dark against the lighter stone.
“Who are these people?” Ali asked.
“Faerie. Secrets.”
Ali smiled. And was it so important to know everything? Maybe not, but that wouldn’t stop her from trying. She glanced at where the stag had been, but he wasn’t there now. The stone circle seemed empty except for the two of them.
“The stag…?” she began.
Mally pointed to where they’d entered the circle. A tall figure stood there overlooking the forest that they had travelled through earlier. The Green Man, Ali thought, in his cloak of twigs and leaves. His antlers gleamed in the moonlight.
“Lewis wants to keep him in New Wolding,” Mally said, “but there’s not enough people there for him now. Tommy calls him up, and he ranges too far, picking up the reflections of minds that don’t celebrate him—minds that don’t know him, minds that can’t conceive of him. What they reflect back hurts him. It changes him—makes him wilder than he would be if he were free.”
“Where do I come into it—and Tony?”
“You both have the fire in you, only in you it burns brighter and you are…purer. More innocent to the darkness that men add to their souls when they leave their childhood behind.”
“But what is it that you expect me to do?”
“You could free him.”
Ali looked from the Green Man to Mally. “Me?”
“You could do it. It’s not that you’re the only one who could, but you’re the one that’s here. You’re near him, so you could do it. It needs doing. Signal to him with a fire of bones—call him with the light inside you, rather than with music, and you can free him.”
“On Midsummer’s Eve?”
“That would be the best time,” Mally said, “but it can be done any time. I’d do it as soon as you could. Tomorrow night. He’ll hear Tommy playing, but he’ll hear you, too. If you call to him strongly enough, he’ll choose you and then you can set him free.”
“How?”
Mally shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. You’ll know. With the moon and the twin fires, inside and out, you’ll know.”
“Lewis said that if the mystery were to be freed into the world that it’d be a disaster. He would take all the bad things in the world and project them back. Everybody’d go crazy and destroy everything.”
“That could happen,” Mally said. “If all th
e world were like New Wolding. But there are mysteries everywhere, and the world, while it totters one way and another between wars and disasters, it still survives. No, Ali. It’s very simple. If the stag stays in New Wolding with only a few to celebrate him, he’ll no longer be a positive force. He’ll break free and do great damage. If there are enough people in the village to celebrate him, then all will be as it had been.”
“But you think he should be freed.”
“I think you could free him,” Mally said—which wasn’t really a reply to what she’d asked, Ali thought. The wild girl studied her for a moment. “You’ve ridden him,” she said finally. “You’ve had your legs wrapped around his belly and felt the thunder of his hooves in the forest. What do you think?”
“You said earlier that you expected me to free him, but now you’re hedging your bet.”
Mally shook her head. “I only said that you could do it. It’s not for me to say what you should do.”
“I think I want to go home. I’m getting confused and people will be worrying about me.”
“Needlessly.”
“But they don’t know that.”
“That’s true. Anyway, the hounds are coming—listen.”
Ali could hear them as soon as Mally pointed the sound out. She’d been hearing it for a while, actually, but it had seemed more like the wind, and she’d been concentrating on what Mally had been saying. The baying of the Hunt was like the pipes in that way, she thought. It just kind of crept up on you until it was too late.
“Does he ever get to rest?” she asked, looking at the Green Man.
“Oh, yes,” Mally said. “Some nights the hounds don’t chase him at all. They’re not clever creatures, just persistent.”
The sound of the pack was bringing back Ali’s fear. Her throat went dry and it was hard to breathe. She cleared her throat nervously.