The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [58]
Pig didn’t usually go far into the shrubbery. He got his worms and his pebbles from the flowerbeds in front of the house. But he thought he would just show Mother Goose, so he marched in, and went on marching in.
As he got further into the trees and bushes, and further away from the house, he had the feeling that the bushes, and the undergrowth, were getting bigger, and that he was getting smaller. He went a little more slowly—he didn’t really know exactly where he was, by now, for the shrubbery was laid out like a maze, and Pig was far too small to see over the top of anything. He might be going in a circle that would lead to the mouth of the first path he had entered, or he might be pressing further and further to a hidden centre. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the leaves were long on the other leaves and the gravel path, shadow on shadow, like a grey web over the green. At the same time all the things in the shrubbery appeared to be more solid, and more full of the deep greens and tawny browns of the things that grew there. He stopped to look at a holly. A holly is a living creature in any case but this holly seemed to him to be full of almost too much life, of a different kind. The shiny leaves almost seemed to be giving out a green light, and the few berries seemed to be redder and rounder and glossier than any berry he had ever seen before. And yet at the same time, they were caught in the thick net of almost solid shadows. Pig said to himself, I am not afraid, which meant, of course, that he was. He clutched his white stone tighter, as though it was a talisman. He saw a little clump of toadstools with silky fawn surfaces and the most lovely pleated frill of very pale flesh-colour whorled round above the pearly damp stems. He had the odd idea that he wanted to be the holly-berry, or the toadstool, not only to see. He went slower still—he had all the time in the world, he had been told never to come back—and felt time had stopped all around where he was.
He came to a place where there was a little wooden bench in a diminutive clearing. The bench was covered with a very bright green slime that was growing on it. Pig sat down on it without even thinking of how the slime was going to stain his legs and his socks and trousers. It was suddenly quiet. There had been sounds of things in the undergrowth—a bird chirping like two pebbles rubbed together, and once a rustle of unseen feet in the leaf-mould. Now there was nothing. Pig put his stone to his eye, and looked through it at a tangle of brambles and ferns. Sitting on the ferns was a very small woman, a nut-brown woman with a brown skin, and long brown hair under a brown hat, and sharp brown eyes under bushy eyebrows. She was neither old nor young, and she was wrapped in a brown cloak, veined like a leaf. She had a neat litle basket, and was gathering something—Pig could not see what, it was too small. He sat very still, said nothing, and went on looking through his stone. After a moment or two, the woman closed the basket, climbed down off the fern fronds she had been sitting on, and walked away down the path. He watched her go, until she came to a gnarled root of a thornbush; she ducked under it, and seemed to disappear into the earth.
Pig stood up and trotted after her. He knelt down on the path, on his green-stained,