Green Boy by Susan Cooper Read Free Book Online

among the few remaining trees, and spread before us was a grey world of concrete and steel and stone, an unbroken city, stretching as far as we could see in all directions. Buildings and streets filled an enormous plain, flat, flat, until in the distance it rose into slopes like the one on which we stood. Beyond them, folds of hills rose higher and higher, each of them grey with the buildings of the city, until they vanished into a brown haze.
    Gwen was standing beside me now, looking out. “There is what we’ve done to Pangaia,” she said bleakly. “There’s our world.”
    Lou had paused only for a second. He was standing there now on the mossy slope, turning his head from sideto side, like a dog casting about for a scent. Then he began to move again, sideways, toward a rocky outcropping surrounded with the same tall ferns that had crammed the floor of the forest. And I saw that beyond the rocks, between the forest and the endless sprawl of the city, a tremendous steel-mesh fence stood as a barrier, topped with whorls of barbed wire. Beyond it was a second fence, just as big, just as sturdy, and beyond that a third. If Lou’s strange convinced sense of direction was leading us all toward the city, we’d have a hard time getting there.
    We followed Lou, walking now over stony ground patched with moss and clumps of an odd yellow grass. I was staring out at the fences, which looked taller and more forbidding the closer we got to them. I said to Gwen, “How can we possibly get out of here, with those in the way?”
    She said, “If the tree is inside the fence, just be grateful we’re here. It would have been even harder to get in than to get out.”
    There was that word again. “What tree?” I said.
    Then gradually I began to hear, somewhere, a sound that seemed to come straight from Long Pond Cay: a weird husky whistling sound like the wind in the casuarina trees. It was soft but unmistakable, and though it didn’t grow louder, it didn’t go away. It seemed to fill the air all around us; I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
    Lou walked round the group of tall irregular rocks ahead of us on the slope, and as we followed him I could see an inner cluster of rocks with a tree growing out of them. Its roots were spread over one flat rock like long dark fingers. It wasn’t very big, maybe twenty feet high, but it looked very, very old; its trunk was broad and twisted, with grey bark smooth as stone, and its thick, gnarled branches drooped, as if they had carried a heavy weight for a long time. They were covered all over with new side-shoots and twigs bearing long thin leaves almost like pine needles. And all these were moving in a breeze that I couldn’t feel; a breeze that came from nowhere, and blew only on this one tree, producing that soft moaning casuarina sound that was filling the air. It was like singing, though it had no words.
    Perhaps it had words for Lou. He paused, and clambered up onto a ledge of rock on the way to the tree. Bryn and Math climbed up after him—and then they both gave a kind of strangled gasp, and grabbed fast for their knives, staring downward. Gwen and Annie and I scrambled up to look over the edge of the rock.
    It was like a snake pit, all round the tree. Between the outer group of great lichen-patched boulders where we were standing, and the rocks in the middle where the tree grew, there was a gap like a big ditch, filled with shiny black bodies, moving, slowly rippling, like a sluggish sea. They were hideous: thick armor-plated cylinders about three feet long, with tiny snout-like heads. Atfirst they looked like stubby hard-shelled snakes, but after a moment you could see the legs, hundreds of legs, moving ceaselessly under each body. There was a very faint smell that reminded me of something, though I couldn’t remember what.
    Bryn was looking down in fascinated disgust. He took a breath, and I saw his fingers