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“In there” was a copse of trees, trees that looked as old as Mother Nature herself, old as Father Time. They were hoary with emerald moss, and ivy dangled like crepe paper at a party from every branch. She saw the face of the old Green Man beaming at her from between the branches before he disappeared again with a reedy laugh. And from within the circle of those trees came a sound she’d never before heard but recognized at once. The sound of panpipes played softly and so well that Lia knew she heard them played by the creature who created them and who had given them his name.
“It’s not real,” she said.
“It’s not?” August said, bemused. “Then why are you crying?”
She didn’t answer. August took her in his arms and kissed her forehead. Lia heard the music, closer and clearer, and she stepped forward, unable to resist the song any longer. August walked at her side, near her but not touching. Lia knew she must choose this moment—it could not be chosen for her. August could offer it to her, but it would not happen until she accepted the gift.
The sun had risen to high dawn—the full yellow disc of it stood tiptoe on the edge of the horizon. The shadows in this primordial glade were long and gray. The breeze smelled sweet as strawberry blossoms. Lia’s heart beat outside her body. She had never felt so much in her life. So much so much so much, she felt everything at once. She couldn’t have stopped walking forward if someone tied iron chains around her ankles.
They came to a creek, no wider than a puddle. August skipped over it first, then helped her across.
She wobbled her landing and ended in his arms. Lia clutched his shoulders to steady herself and, once steady, his shoulders remained clutched.
She kissed him.
It was a sweet and tender kiss and over in three breaths, but Lia knew that kiss changed something inside her. Not changed something really, but healed something. And that something was her heart, and the kiss healed it because the kiss meant she had a heart again. And she knew she had one because she hadn’t kissed August out of passion but passionately kissed him out of love.
She pulled back from the kiss and met his eyes.
“Don’t look now.” August whispered the whisper of a devout child in a church hiding his prayers inside his hands. “But he’s behind you.”
Lia looked behind her.
She gasped softly, almost silently, when she saw the shoulder of the god. He sat with his brown back against a green tree, and all she could see at first was the tree and the shoulder and the naked human back that turned to animal fur at his waist.
“Oh,” Lia said, fingertips on her lips. Just “oh.” She looked at August, smiling through tears or crying through her smiles, she didn’t know.
“Go on,” August whispered. “He won’t hurt you, I promise.”
She shook her head, not in disagreement but disbelief. But she went on. How could she not? What English girl who ate and drankThe Wind in the Willowswith her tea and buttered toast wouldn’t? Such a thing would be as silly as Alice refusing to follow the White Rabbit or Lucy Pevensies walking past the wardrobe without giving it a second glance.
August let her go and he let her go alone. She walked past peonies, past green willow warblers, past doubt and fear and heartache so healed now she’d forgotten she’d ever been hurt.
She walked into the glade and there he was, still sitting with his back to that tree and so enormous, even seated, she had to crane her neck to see his face. Had he become bigger or she smaller? He was the god, not she. Maybe August had made them the size of Ratty and Mole and that’s why the god loomed so large. Or perhaps she felt so small because she had become a child again. Not in body but in wonder and in joy.
The old god Pan played on and on, ringing lazy lullabies from his pipes and sweet melodies made for sleeping not dancing. His horns were curved like the spirals of a seashell and shimmered as if made from the same stuff as the insides of oysters. They glinted like dancing water as he swayed gently in and out of the sunlight in time with his music.
Lia stood in front of him, directly in front, and he nodded his head, once and nobly. She saw the baby otter at Pan’s feet, curled up so tight it was as if he’d fallen asleep in the bottom of a teacup.
August had remembered everything...the boat on the river, the strange magic island come out of nowhere, the pipes, Pan and the baby otter she’d come to rescue and return to his worried father.
Pan’s Island...she had finally found Pan’s Island.
She knelt on the ground and gently, oh-so-gently, slipped her hands under the otter and lifted him to her, holding him like a human infant against her shoulder. Small as he was, no bigger than a newborn puppy, she could hold him in one hand. With her other hand, she reached out toward Pan’s cloven hoof. Trembling, Lia touched it, hard as a goat’s hoof but ten times its size. He must have felt her touch, and she froze when his eyes met hers.
Pan’s face was handsome behind his shaggy beard, with lines upon lines around his earth-brown eyes, which crinkled when he smiled. She loved every last one of those tender wrinkles. Lia had never known either of her grandfathers, gone before she was born, but she knew a grandfather’s love for the first time when she gazed on that kindly and timeworn countenance. Those old eyes of his had seen everything and forgiven everyone. And Lia knew that as long as she lived, he would love her, and as long as she loved him, he would live.
And oh, she did love him.
The great god Pan had played his pipes all this time, played sweetly and softly and well. When she stood humbly at his feet with the baby otter in her arms, he took the pipes from his lips. Why? August had stepped into the sacred grove, and it was when Pan saw August that he’d stopped playing for a full measure. When the music played again, it was no less lovely, but Lia found it mournful, less a lullaby and more an elegy.
Pan shook his great shaggy head as if trying not to laugh.
“You can laugh,” August said to him. “I deserve it.”
Pan held his pipes in one hand and with his other he ruffled August’s hair like a fond uncle, then patted his cheek, then chucked him once just under the chin before he turned all his attention to his playing again.
Lia looked at August and saw he had twin tears on his cheeks.
