The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [17]
Small-g gods might be considered a sort of concentrated essence: Loki the impulsive, Shiva the destroyer, Wayland the craftsman. The local gods were why Brothers had come to Britain, a country littered with Norse and Roman deities. The Holmes brothers were a bit god-like: generous and well meaning towards lesser mankind, but capricious and sometimes frightening in their omniscience. What, I wondered sleepily, would Brothers have embodied, had he succeeded in becoming a god? For that matter, what god would carry the attributes of flying machines? Which deity would be represented by the rifle?
As I sat in the deafening, cramped and frigid compartment, behind a dying pilot, holding a child for whom I could do nothing, incredibly, imperceptibly, I drifted into sleep.
The grey scraps of cloud outside, tossed like leaves in a fitful breeze, shifted, becoming wind-tossed foliage. I was sitting not in a fragile device of metal and wood, but on a hillside, warm and secure in an ancient land. The foliage remained, a hedgerow bordering a field of summer wheat. The grain rippled with the breeze, the green wall danced, until in the midst of the leaves—or the scraps of cloud—I became aware of a Presence among the moving scraps of green or grey: a pair of eyes that were there and then gone, that met mine and were hidden again. Green, grey; there, gone; comfort, threat.
I must have made a noise, because the child in my arms stirred, pushing away the heavy coat to rub her eyes and look around her.
“What did you say?” she asked me.
“I didn’t say anything, honey.”
“Yes, you did,” she insisted.
“I fell asleep, and was dreaming. It must have been something about that.”
“I’m cold,” she complained.
“It won’t be much longer,” I said. She gave me a look that declared her lack of reassurance at the statement. “Here, snuggle back under the coat,” I suggested.
This must be what it felt like to be an Elizabethan noblewoman before a roaring fire, I thought: toasty warm in front, frigid in back.
“What was your dream about?” Estelle asked.
“Only a silly dream. A face peeping out from leaves.”
“My Papa made a painting like that.”
“Did he? Oh yes, I remember.” I’d seen it in a London gallery—heavens, only two weeks before? The Green Man, Damian had called it, a Surrealist rendering of the ancient pagan spirit of the British Isles, the surge of life in this green land. The figure was carved into church ceilings and pews, painted on the signs of public houses, leading processions. He was often shown as a face with branches bursting from his mouth and nostrils and twining about his head in the exuberance of life: a divine creature, speaking in leaves.
Jack-in-the-Green, Will of the Wisp, Wild Woodsman: The figure represents not just life, but the cycle of birth and death and birth anew. His authority and mystery stand behind such diverse characters as Robin Hood and Puck. Damian’s painting began as a study in green, a canvas entirely covered with leaves so precise, they might have been the colour photograph of a hedge. Only after examining the wall of greenery for some time, searching for meaning in the shades and shadows, did the viewer become aware that two off-centre points of light were not drops of water on leaves, but reflections from a pair of green eyes. Unlike the foliate heads carved into the stones of churches, nothing could be seen of the features—or rather, the skin seemed made of leaves instead of flesh—but the sense of watching was powerful. Not threatening, necessarily, just … eerie. Disturbing.
At the time, my thought had been, Next time I walk in the woods, the back of my neck will crawl.
Now I pulled my arms more snugly around the artist’s child, and raised my eyes to what I could see of Javitz. He had stayed reassuringly upright; there was no indication that he was about to faint away and send us spinning to earth. Still, I wanted to get down as soon as we could. The hour I had