Today my sly heart and I spied a beautiful woman; as beautiful among women as a prancing, slendershin filly, gloss-haunched and high-necked in nervous curvet, might be among horses.

Really! I shock myself with such crude animal comparisons. But she did have a kind of untamed intensity of vital autonomy, and long straight fair hair, which I love. She was natural and strong. Actually she is a rider; she wrestled intently, commandingly, with the controls of her chunky, lungepower Volkswagen van; had some slight difficulty but quelled it and having won ^___and our eyes meeting^___ she smiled. Eyes triumphant, modest, daring. Smiling blue eyes in a face freckled and sunchafed ^___grinning now. There is something complicit in her look; something easy. Does she suspect that I don't drive? Who is she?

Her name, I later learn, is Amelia.

II

All the long summerday long, the painted Lion watched the comings and goings of village life. He would see the wives, yoked like oxen, carting their buckets to the well to winch up the day's water. Slowly they walked, grumbling, with dour but sturdy step. Sometimes a shepherd, in grass-stained smock with a crook over his shoulder, would stop at the inn for a lunch of ale and cheese while his sheep milled stockily round with long blank faces and woolburdened backs before eventually ambling onto the green to nibble its patchy graze, all cropping in the same direction. Very occasionally a stranger would stop at the inn; usually a peddler, dust of the road in his beard and clothes, wearily lowering his heavy pack from which hung and peeped ribbons and yarns of bright happy colours like carnival catkins. The innkeeper's wife invariably came out to rummage, diving and probing with surreptitious greed. The Lion would be able to see past her fat round shoulders and frilled cap into the dark recesses of the Peddler's pack which flowed with lawn and cambrics and precious silks, or flashed with needles and small bonehandled knives.

In the evening the men would go home from their work in field or wood, smithy or mill and then, having eaten whatever meal awaited them, according to their prudence or lack of it, would gather outside the inn to drink ale and mull over the day's small events. The Lion would strain for every word, aching with curiosity about the vague troubled shadows their sparse talk conjured, about the nature of some comparison which had set them all to a salivary chuckle. The voices would murmur on till the light was no more than an insubstantial soot dislodged by the dart and twist of bats, by which time the Lion would be fuming with frustration. Although he could see and hear everything that went on outside the inn he couldn't ^___of course^___ join in. He was only a painted lion, after all: a picture on a board; some-one's idea of what a lion is.

The lights of the Institute spill into the surrounding darkness with a severe, laboratory fluorescence; Learning's Bastille, much armoury but only a scattering of inmates. I am stupidly, anxiously early so I circle and re-circle the car-park's dark beach of gravel on the bike, trying to fight down a rising flood of embarrassment while rehearsing alternative speeches of casual surprise. Then ^___too soon^___ the hollowed echo of footsteps on shallow stairs, the huddle of dark anonymous coats, the reluctant swing of doors. Those people who always leave gatherings quickly are diving individually into the damp liverish gloom. By nature, by inclination, I too should be hurrying into a safe private obscurity, but tonight I seem to have an excess of recklessness, as if the nearby trees were full of my trusty merrymen, all with arrows notched.

Amelia's emergence is sudden, animated, complicated by her being with another woman, and alarming. I decide at once against the whole thing. I will be someone else, waiting for someone else. She won't remember me. When she has bid her friend goodnight, however, she turns and walks straight towards me.

^___Hello, she says, simply, as though the meeting was prearranged. Are you waiting for me?

Even in the greenish, disfeaturing streetlight her eyes appear lively and warm.

^___I hope you don't mind, I excuse myself, meaning it with unexpected intensity.

Her van is in the car-park but she says she would enjoy a walk; she has had a lesson in Indian dancing and feels charged with spacious energies. We walk downhill towards a wide avenue which is almost obscured by heavy autumn mist. We can see how the mist glides and gathers in the college grounds before rolling through the trees, shredding wetly on dark dripping branches. Amelia talks about her dancing, describing the class, their teacher, the absorbing meditative qualities of the movements. Her words invest everything with overtones of significance and awe, and her whole demeanor has a seriousness, a generous dedication, which seems to fill and overflow my resentful interior vacancies like a tide. Unselfconcious and enthused, Amelia decides to demonstrate the steps she has just learned and gives me her coat to hold. It smells exotically warm and mammalian, as though she had removed her own skin. There is not a single other person in the whole straight length of that road, only the double phalanx of silent spanning trees, the mists thickening, mothjealous and ghostly round the staring streetlights, and she...treading and weaving these strange idolatrous shapes. The road becomes transformed into a huge cavernous gateway to the Underworld; deserted, forsaken, with she its halfhuman denizen rising out to be my guide. I am entranced by something unearthly, lovely, inevitable, sad.

Before we take leave of each other in the Institute's deserted car-park, Amelia informally invites me to her cottage a little way out along the Huntingdon Road. Then she is just two fierce, fiercening red lights that narrow and dwindle, and I have five misted black miles to pedal home, thinking of nothing but her.

III

Many unmeasured miles from where the Lion swung on his lonely board there grew a deep dark forest. It covered the heights of several hills and lay in the valleys like a permanent shadow. Wild beasts lived there: shambling bears and hungry wolves, ancient nightnosed badgers and hunched-up boars with curving tusks. There were birds, too: mordant ravens and staring owls ^___but no people. There weren't any roads through the forest, only a few narrow paths near the edges and these quickly lost themselves in the dense, ruthless reach of inhuman growth. It was a frightening place, even in summer. A slow tranced malevolence seemed to rise through the massive unreachable branches of the primaeval trees. Millions and millions of leaves sucked at the dilute sun; millions and millions of tiny membranous wings denatured the soundless air. Most frightening of all was that silence; scheming and watchful, as quick as a slip. A fledgling, falling from its crowded nest near the open sky, would gradually sink and dangle, subside and snag, till it was released from the lowest twigs no more than a rag of tufted, unresembling bones, its cumbersome little beak gaping and usurped. As soon as any remains touched the dank wadding of mouldering leaves, these would hatch open and, fraction by fraction, even the largest of awkward morsels would be dragged out of sight. And all in silence! It was a place with neither need nor thought of Man, as inimical as thorn and death.

Only one person lived there, and she was a Witch. You would have thought the Witch's house had grown where it was, just like part of the forest, so closely tangled and tinecrossed was it with thickets and vines. It was almost invisible but its one door opened onto a clearing, so it might have seemed to a visitor ^___if anyone had ever visited the Witch^___ that she lived at the bottom of a deep dry well. In fact no-one ever did visit the Witch because there were no paths to the clearing, no way either in or out except the Witch's own ways, which were her own closely-kept secret. The house and its furnishings were very simple: a flat stone for the fire; a cauldron hanging over the stone used for brewing mixtures; a loom; a pair of silver scissors, and a bed. There was also a shelf for all the books of magic.

The scissors and the loom were for the Witch's hair. She had thick golden hair which grew and grew during the night, sometimes as much as twenty yards. By morning the hair was so heavy the witch could hardly move. She had to take the silver scissors and cut and snip till she was free, then she would stand the loom in the mossy clearing and weave the strands of hair into beautiful strong cloth; weaving and singing, singing and weaving, back and forth all morning long. Sometimes, on nights with a full moon, the Witch would wake in the morning to find that her own ghost had risen in the night and woven her hair without cutting it first. Woven it madly: on the loom, under the bed, in and out of the rafters ^___everywhere; the sleepstained gold of her hair and cold, opaline moonstreaks, all tangled and knotted.

It was after just such a night, when the Witch, grumbling and cross, had managed to free herself and leave the house, which looked like a strangely sentient cocoon, that something remarkable happened; something that was to have tremendous effect on the Red Lion all those miles away. It was a wide windy day, the wind herding and harrying highfronted clouds across the airstrewn sky. Though the atmosphere at the feet of the great forest trees seemed as still and dank as ever, their tops swayed in slow complaint, and an occasional gust would dip down into the Witch's clearing. One effect of the previous night's activity was that all the magic books had been nudged and blundered off the shelf, and one of them was lying right in the open doorway. With each gust of wind the pages of this book riffled and turned, as though some unseen intelligence browsed idly through them, and one of these pages happened to be loose. It was the page where the Witch's most powerful spell was written: the spell for Bringing Things to Life. Being loose, it flicked and flapped more than the others and, because of the Spell, the air around it became charged and noisy. This made the page snap back and forth even more violently, which made the air in the whole clearing start to crackle. Soon every leaf in the high surrounding wall of foliage was shivering and twisting, and the noise was as though thousands of flying creatures ^___bats, birds, and buzzing flies^___ were trapped inside a glass dome, swirling and screeching with the urge to escape. Finally, a tremor ran the entire length of the forest in the shape of an extra-strong squall of wind. The page was torn completely out of the book and half-drawn, half-compelled up, out of the clearing in a crazy, angular, looped, lurching spiral.

The page, with its powerful spell, flew through the air, now surfing over blustery billows of wind, now swooping beneath them, the squat dense script and strange symbols outraging the normal sky. Sometimes it would hover and circle teasingly, once almost landing on top of a coach-and-four that toiled up a steep hill, (the horses quickened their pace and the glum passengers all began to talk at once). It didn't land, however, but continued to curl skittishly along until some invisible interchange between earth and sky caused it to plummet suddenly, whereupon ^___just as though predestined^___ it wrapped itself surely and tightly round the wrought-iron bracket of the Lion's sign.