Read Online Very Best of Charles de Lint, The by Charles de Lint - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Charles de Lint
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What if at night he stepped out of his tree—really and truly, flesh and blood and bone real?
There was only one way to find out.
* * *
Sara felt restless after Julie went home. She put away her guitar and then distractedly set about straightening up her room. But for every minute she spent on the task, she spent three just looking out the window at the garden.
I never dream, she thought.
Which couldn’t be true. Everything she’d read about sleep research and dreaming said that she had to dream. People just needed to. Dreams were supposed to be the way your subconscious cleared up the day’s clutter. So, ipso facto , everybody dreamed. She just didn’t remember hers.
But I did when I was a kid, she thought. Why did I stop? How could I have forgotten the red-haired boy in the tree?
Merlin.
Dusk fell outside her window to find her sitting on the floor, arms folded on the windowsill, chin resting on her arms as she looked out over the garden. As the twilight deepened, she finally stirred. She gave up the pretense of cleaning up her room. Putting on a jacket, she went downstairs and out into the garden.
Into the Mondream Wood.
Eschewing the paths that patterned the garden, she walked across the dew-wet grass, fingering the damp leaves of the bushes and the low-hanging branches of the trees. The dew made her remember Gregor Penev—an old Bulgarian artist who’d been staying in the house when she was a lot younger. He’d been full of odd little stories and explanations for natural occurrences much like Jamie was, which was probably why Gregor and her uncle had gotten along so well.
“ Zaplakala e gorata ,” he’d replied when she’d asked him where dew came from and what it was for. “The forest is crying. It remembers the old heroes who lived under its branches—the heroes and the magicians, all lost and gone now. Robin Hood. Indje Voivode. Myrddin.”
Myrddin. That was another name for Merlin. She remembered reading somewhere that Robin Hood was actually a Christianized Merlin, the Anglo version of his name being a variant of his Saxon name of Rof Breocht Woden—the Bright Strength of Wodan. But if you went back far enough, all the names and stories got tangled up in one story. The tales of the historical Robin Hood, like those of the historical Merlin of the Borders, had acquired older mythic elements common to the world as a whole by the time they were written down. The story that their legends were really telling was that of the seasonal hero-king, the May Bride’s consort, who, with his cloak of leaves and his horns, and all his varying forms, was the secret truth that lay in the heart of every forest.
“But those are European heroes,” she remembered telling Gregor. “Why would the trees in our forest be crying for them?”
“All forests are one,” Gregor had told her, his features serious for a change. “They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”
She hadn’t really understood him then, but she was starting to understand him now as she made her way to the fountain at the center of the garden where the old oak tree stood guarding its secrets in the heart of the Mondream Wood. There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.
The forest primeval. Remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth—through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees, remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.
Which was why the druids’ Ogham was also a calendar of trees.
Why Merlin was often considered to be a druid.
Why Robin was the name taken by the leaders of witch covens.
Why the Green Man
There was only one way to find out.
* * *
Sara felt restless after Julie went home. She put away her guitar and then distractedly set about straightening up her room. But for every minute she spent on the task, she spent three just looking out the window at the garden.
I never dream, she thought.
Which couldn’t be true. Everything she’d read about sleep research and dreaming said that she had to dream. People just needed to. Dreams were supposed to be the way your subconscious cleared up the day’s clutter. So, ipso facto , everybody dreamed. She just didn’t remember hers.
But I did when I was a kid, she thought. Why did I stop? How could I have forgotten the red-haired boy in the tree?
Merlin.
Dusk fell outside her window to find her sitting on the floor, arms folded on the windowsill, chin resting on her arms as she looked out over the garden. As the twilight deepened, she finally stirred. She gave up the pretense of cleaning up her room. Putting on a jacket, she went downstairs and out into the garden.
Into the Mondream Wood.
Eschewing the paths that patterned the garden, she walked across the dew-wet grass, fingering the damp leaves of the bushes and the low-hanging branches of the trees. The dew made her remember Gregor Penev—an old Bulgarian artist who’d been staying in the house when she was a lot younger. He’d been full of odd little stories and explanations for natural occurrences much like Jamie was, which was probably why Gregor and her uncle had gotten along so well.
“ Zaplakala e gorata ,” he’d replied when she’d asked him where dew came from and what it was for. “The forest is crying. It remembers the old heroes who lived under its branches—the heroes and the magicians, all lost and gone now. Robin Hood. Indje Voivode. Myrddin.”
Myrddin. That was another name for Merlin. She remembered reading somewhere that Robin Hood was actually a Christianized Merlin, the Anglo version of his name being a variant of his Saxon name of Rof Breocht Woden—the Bright Strength of Wodan. But if you went back far enough, all the names and stories got tangled up in one story. The tales of the historical Robin Hood, like those of the historical Merlin of the Borders, had acquired older mythic elements common to the world as a whole by the time they were written down. The story that their legends were really telling was that of the seasonal hero-king, the May Bride’s consort, who, with his cloak of leaves and his horns, and all his varying forms, was the secret truth that lay in the heart of every forest.
“But those are European heroes,” she remembered telling Gregor. “Why would the trees in our forest be crying for them?”
“All forests are one,” Gregor had told her, his features serious for a change. “They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”
She hadn’t really understood him then, but she was starting to understand him now as she made her way to the fountain at the center of the garden where the old oak tree stood guarding its secrets in the heart of the Mondream Wood. There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.
The forest primeval. Remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth—through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees, remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.
Which was why the druids’ Ogham was also a calendar of trees.
Why Merlin was often considered to be a druid.
Why Robin was the name taken by the leaders of witch covens.
Why the Green Man
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