by Paul Kearney
'I'll shoot you something,' he said. 'We can roast it on the spit.'
'You will not. There will be no bangs and blasts in this place. The forest will not like it. Did you learn nothing from last night?'
He remembered the hulking shadow, the flashlit face. Human and yet inhuman, like a giant Neanderthal. 'What was it?'
'Troll, most likely. Hard to tell if it was a good one or a bad one. You didn't give it a chance.'
'Good and bad trolls,' Michael mused. 'They didn't have those in the stories.'
'This is more than a story.' She stopped. 'Have you flint and steel?'
His fell fell. 'No, I'm sorry. Only matches.'
She giggled. 'They will have to do, I suppose. What about a knife?'
'I've a penknife.'
'How splendid. Give it to me.'
He handed it over doubtfully. 'What's it for?'
'Breakfast. Light us a fire. I will be away a while.'
Then she stripped off her shift and rolled naked in the earth and leaves of the forest floor whilst Michael gaped. When she rose again she was a matt-haired brown-skinned savage, the knife blade glinting in one fist. She winked at him and scampered off, as silently as a—as a cat.
'Bloody hell,' Michael said. He set about building the fire.
A LONG, HUNGRY morning inched along. There was a stream nearby, a transparent rivulet hardly a foot wide. There Michael drank and scrubbed himself, stripping to the waist and gasping at the coldness of the water. He dried sitting by his little fire. There was dead wood littering the ground among the trees and he had a respectable pile. He had even fashioned a crude spit, breaking branches between his fingers. The fire was smokeless, the air above it shimmering with heat.
He wondered what she was trying to catch for them to eat. Not bacon and eggs, that's for sure.
He whipped round, staring. Something in the trees, darting behind a trunk.
'Damn you, Cat.' His hand crept to the shotgun.
There was a flickering movement. He could hardly catch it, and he thought he saw spider-like limbs scrabbling in the beech leaves.
A face, there, in the crook of a branch, black, triangular and leering, with slits for eyes and pointed ears sticking up through a thatch of moss-coloured hair.
Gone again. A hoot of high-pitched laughter, like that of a demented child. The wood was still, but for a distant patter like rain on a canopy of leaves. Feet? Impossible to tell. That laughter again, distant this time, merry and disquietening. It faded, and was gone.
He reloaded the shotgun.
—And spun round at the noise, but it was only Cat dumping a dead animal on to the leaves and glaring at the levelled shotgun with eyes narrow in her mired face.
'There was something in the trees,' he told her lamely.
'There are many things in the trees. You can't shoot them all.' She bent and without further ado began cutting into her catch. It was a large piglet, Michael saw, dun-coloured except for black stripes running along its body from nose to tail, He watched in horrified fascination as she slit the throat and held the body up by the hind legs while a thick stream of dark blood gushed out. It had hardly finished steaming on the ground before she sliced into the skin and gralloched the animal, pushing the steaming entrails to one side.
At last she jointed it, licked her fingers, and began to sharpen sticks of firewood.
Breakfast. Somehow the edge of Michael's appetite. had disappeared.
'How did you catch it?'
'Easy.' The fire hissed as she placed thes kewered joints over the flames. 'Their trails are simple to follow, the young as simple to snatch if you are fleet of foot. It is the mother you must beware. They are good mothers, the wild sows.'
'You're a mess.'
'I'm a huntress. Mind the meat, and I will make myself presentable.' She snatched up her shift and made for the stream. His gaze followed her as she went, the tangled hair flowing down to her buttocks, the smooth movement of muscle in her calves, the tight curve of her hip as she knelt by the water.
Behind him the stink of blood and fresh entrails was being drowned by the appetizing odour of roasting pork. He felt hungry again.
Cat was humming as she splashed, a dark sound, sweet as honey. The tune he had once heard being sung in the wood at home. He grimaced. She was rubbing a handful of green leaves over her arms, breasts, belly and thighs, crushing them to the skin. He looked away, swallowed, and twitched his trousers into a more comfortable position.
When she rejoined him, dressed and wet-haired, he had to sniff at her to confirm the smell he had caught over the roasting meat. 'Chewing gum!'
She shook her head. 'Mint leaves. I found a few along the boar track, faded by the season but still with some goodness in them. See?' She thrust a forearm under his nose and he breathed in the tang of spearmint along with the slight woman smell that underlay it. He kissed the forearm and she laughed, then began retrieving pork from the flames.
It was black and seared on the outside, white underneath and pink at its heart. They chewed in silence, their faces smeared with grease, juggling the hotter pieces in singed fingers.
'Tell me about the things in the wood,' Michael said when they had finished gorging themselves.
She sucked grease off her fingers and wiped them on her filthy shift. Once white, it was now the colour of beech bark.
'People fear the wood. Your kind of people. They build barricades to keep it out and burn the trees so the branches will not touch their houses. They stick up crosses everywhere to keep off the beasts, and never venture out after dark. They grow crops and herd animals, build things and haggle over money. But there are others. The tribes, the wanderers who roam the forest at will, setting up a village here and there for a few days, a week, a year, and then moving on. They build huts, fish the streams, hunt the boar and wolf. Live free.'
'Like you.'
She frowned. 'Not like me. They are people, you see.'
'So what are you?'
'A fairy.' She struck a pose.
'You're no fairy. Fairies are tiny, with wings and such.'
'Ach, what do you know? And there are the other folk, the tree folk who keep to themselves, helping or hindering as they please. And the trolls, of course. Wood trolls, stone trolls, good and bad. Odd things, half beast. The forest is alive with them at night. That is when they hunt. In the day they are stones or tree stumps.'
'Who is the Horseman?'
She fired a black-browed stare at him. 'The Devil. He seeks souls. The black wolves follow him sometimes, and the manwolves.'
'Manwolves? Werewolves, you mean?'
'Whatever. They are the worst of the beasts. They carry disease with them and increase their numbers with infection when they've a mind to. Terrible things.'
'One came after us.'
She nodded. 'Terrible things. Servants of Satan, the village folk call them, They steal babies and drink blood. And then there is the forest itself. It knows things. It lives just as we do, and remembers all that it sees.' She paused, looking up at the kaleidoscope of branches above. 'I love the forest.'
'I love you,' he said on impulse. Simple words, fearful and grand.
She cupped his face in her long hands, unsmiling for once. 'I know.'
She would not speak further, but began stuffing what was left of the piglet into Michael's game bag.
'Put out the fire. Piss on it, if you can. Cover it up. The blood, also. Time to go'
He beat out the low flames and buried them with damp earth.
When he had finished Cat sprinkled the Scar with leaves and twigs until it looked as undisturbed as the rest of the wood floor. In the air the smell of burning remained, and under it was the tang of blood. Cat's nostrils quivered.like a deer's.
'Best to make some haste. The blood will bring things here, even in the daylight.'
'Are you taking me home now?'
'Indeed.'
'So where is this hole, then? This way back?'
'A fair tramp. A
day's amble, no more. Pick up your knife.'
The morning had worn on. It was noonish, he guessed. His grandmother would be cooking the lunch.
They set off again, Cat free and unencumbered, swinging her arms, himself weighed down with weapon and bag, boots and coat. Michael Fay, intrepid explorer.
THE AFTERNOON CAME round and the sun slanted through the trees to dapple their way, a shifting leopard-skin carpet. It was warm when they walked, autumn a mere guess of wind and colder air above the canopy overhead. They glimpsed scurryings and movement in the thicker undergrowth, the startled flight of deer, and were eyed once by a massive homed owl from the limb of an oak. They stumbled across other things also: a tree wound round with garlands of dog rose and honeysuckle, the blossoms dead and fallen. And at its foot a pile of bones and broken spears. Michael retrieved a beautifully flaked spearhead from the pile, leaf-shaped and keen as a razor. He looked at Cat but she frowned and gestured that he throw it back. It was a place sacred to one of the tribes, she told him, best left alone.
Later they walked into a small clearing in the wood that was slowly being reclaimed by saplings and thick briars. There, mouldering amid the riotous vegetation, were the remains of wattle and daub walls, thatched roofs, crude stone hearths, discarded skins and a midden high with bones and bluebottles. And here, with its back to a tree, was the leathery skeleton of a man, all smell gone from it now. The seasons had washed him clean and for some reason the beasts had left him alone. Empty sockets looked out on the lost village from a black face, the scraps of hide drawn tight as a drum over his skull.
The clearing was silent and still, and the sun had gone in.
Michael felt there had been something unpleasant here, some disaster. He and Cat hurried on without a word, leaving the corpse to its vigil.
The forest grew thicker, darker, and overhead the clouds gathered. They began to fight their way through thickets, Michael cursing the game bag which snagged on everything, and beating branches aside with the barrel of the shotgun.
Rain. It started as a drift of moisture where the leaves were thin but soon strengthened into a pouring drizzle, flattening Cat's hair to her back and making her shift transparent. She began to shiver and Michael gave her his coat to wear. Then they slogged onwards, Cat correcting their path every so often from the rear.
Evening. It was beginning to gather in the shadows. Michael doubted if they had come a mile in the past hour.
'How much farther?'
'I don't know it in yards,' Cat snapped. She wiped the dripping rain from her eyes. 'Too far to make today.'
Another night in the forest. And Michael was already wet through. He swore, and as he did his voice cracked into a deeper tone, startling them both. Then Cat began to laugh.
'I hope your wonderful matches are dry, my love, or it will be a miserable night.' She hugged him to her, teased his lips like a bee brushing a foxglove. Her face was cold, rain gathering in the hollows of her collarbones and trickling between her breasts. He kissed it away, tongued a pebble-hard nipple through her shift. Then she lifted his head gently.
'Time enough for that later. For now we need shelter, and a fire.'
'We're not sleeping in a tree tonight, then?'
'We'll risk the ground. We need the fire, and it'll help keep the beasts at bay.'
A long, hard time, cold as flint, the woods dark and loud with pouring water. He had his coat laid over the little pyramid of twigs and his shivers would barely allow him to strike the matches. Match after bloody match, damp and dead, until one caught and he nurtured it in the palm-rubbed moss that was their tinder. Smoke stung his eyes and reeked his hair. But it had caught.
Cat had rigged up a shelter, a framework of branches covered with drifts of leaves and caulked with fistfuls of squelching mud. It looked like a great hairy molehill and was so close to the flames that the smoke sailed in, but they huddled inside to eat the cold pork, grey with congealed grease, and soaked up the warmth, building the fire until the flames were a yard high.
They made love there in the damp smokiness of the firelight, and this time Cat's fingers were as tight as ivy on his shoulders and she screamed into the rain and the rushing trees, so that he paused, afraid he had hurt her. But she urged him to go on, not to stop, and his climax was like a burst of brightly lit blood in his head, a sea wave washing over them. Her tautness relaxed under him and she kissed his eyes, murmuring words in some language he could not understand. In his nostrils was the smell of mint and mud, woodsmoke and sex. Ever after he would associate the act with those smells, and the sound of branches tossing in wind and rain.
There had been, or would be, another time,however, when those smells would be part of his life, and the deep trees would be the only world he knew.
IN THE MORNING of that other time there was snow on the hills and the hide of their shared bag was stiff with frost. It seemed that even with the dawn the life of the forest was in abeyance, sleepy and torpid with cold.
They were close to the edge here, nearing the end of the trees and the open land beyond where there was a hole in the mesh, a way back through a cave mouth they had emerged from—so long ago, it seemed. Despite his heavy weariness, Michael's senses kicked into a higher gear. They were close. It would not do to get caught so near to the finish.
In the late afternoon a dark shape rose out of the side of a tree and Ringbone was before them as he had promised he would be, his rank smell making the mounts sniff and blow down their noses. The long ears of Cat's mule twitched.
'Ca spel, ycempa?' Michael asked him. Spel was the word for news, an Anglo-Saxon word, but Michael had long ago given up any attempt to classify the languages that the forest peoples spoke. Old Gaelic mixed with Saxon and Norse, and a smattering of bastardized Latin. It pulled at the mind, flickering just out of comprehension. Old words, buried like gems in the subconscious. It was a huge effort to drag them out of his mind, though once they had been the very tongue of his dreams. It was because he was so close to the finish, so far from the heart of the wood. Mirkady had warned him of that: that the wood sent roots and feelers into the mind as surely as the trees put out their branches. They were receding, pulling back, but he thought some of them would always be there, no matter what road he might walk in the years to come.
Ringbone told them that the land was deserted, the weather change sending the—forest creatures to their burrows. Even the trolls were lying low until the cold snap passed. But scent would persist for a long time in weather such as this. Good weather for hunters.
The snow crunched and Cat had kicked the mule forward.
She threw back her hood.
'Best to make hay while we can. We should keep going, Michael, find the wood's edge before setting camp for the night. This is the last chance they will have to come at us out of the trees.'
He nodded sombrely. She spoke to Ringbone in his own language, Michael glowering and frowning at his own inability, and the fox man seemed to agree. He jogged off through the trees, beckoning. Ringbone was alone. The rest of his kin—those who had survived—had departed, for this part of the world was outside their ken.
The trees thinned after a while, the open spaces between them thick with snow. It was a relief to ride without having to be wary of snatching branches, to look up and see the first of the icy stars a deepening gulf of night away.
And then the trees ended—Michael and Cat dismounted and stood gazing out from the last vestiges of the forest towards what seemed to be an expanse of infinite space, a rising land of low, snow-covered hills that glistened in the starlight and rolled endlessly to the edge of sight. Open country, at long last.
'Utwyda,' Ringbone said in a plume of breath. The Place Beyond the Wood.
The cold ate into them after a few minutes and they began to busy themselves with the well-worn routine of setting up camp. Fire, sentry, horses—each had their set task. It was a brief half hour before they were sitting around the hissing fire and the yellow light was carving sh
adows out of their faces. They ate—a hare Ringbone had snared the day before— and then reclined like emperors with the trees a brooding blackness around them, the slightly lighter patch to one side where they had ended and the hills began. They would put forty miles behind them tomorrow but for now they unrolled their bedding amongst the leaf mould one last time. This was Cat's place they were leaving behind, the land she knew best and loved most. It was Ringbone's also. In the morning the fox man would go his own way. Michael wondered if Cat would rather be going back with him, back into the forests and the hazy fairy-tale existence she had known before.
She pushed into Michael's arms and lay there like a child whilst he nuzzled her glorious hair, tangled and greasy now, and her buttocks nestled against his groin.
There, in the travel-weary quiet of the firelight, Ringbone told them a story. It was one Michael had heard before, though from other points of view. It seemed to be the seminal myth of all the forest peoples, the story of their beginnings. He could even pick out the meaning in the words because he knew them so well. He thought Ringbone might be telling it to comfort them, and himself, out here on the edge of his world.
It was a tale of his people, of all the peoples of the wood and the hills. His tribe were once warriors, he said, and they had been in service to those folk who lived in the villages and fortresses. But they had tired of their task, the patrolling of the stockades and the escort of caravans, and they had set out into the wood to make lives of their own, taking some of the village womenfolk with them. They had split up, splintered and sundered like a tree struck by lightning, and had become the tribes: the Badger-People, the FoxPeople, the Boar-People. They had dwindled, worn down by the beasts of the forest, and whilst they were away more men came from the north, where the trees ended. These men were lost and confused, and they had a speech of their own. They were fleeing the raiders from the sea, they said, leaving a land in flames behind them, and the village folk had nodded at this, remembering their oldest legends. Some of these new men wore robes and carried crosses. The crosses kept the unholy amongst the beasts at bay and the people of the villages welcomed them. And so the churches were built, and the Brothers of the Wood set up their retreats. But Ringbone's people they denounced as pagans, little better than animals, and they were denied the villages except when there was a mart or fair when their trading goods of skins and amber, hunting dogs and river gold, were welcomed. But the tribes remembered that they, not the Brothers, were the true guardians of the land, from the time when the Old Man, the lame one, had brought them across the terrible heights of the southern mountains, through the dank terror of the WoIfweald and through the southern woods. They had come from a place of fear and persecution, and the Old Man had vanished once the passage of the mountains had been forced, returning to the snow-clad peaks which the village folk said marked the world's end. They had forgotten, because of the words and worship of the Brothers, who said that all men came from the north, from beyond the Utwyda. But the tribes remembered the truth of it, that these Brothers were from a different place, another world, perhaps, whereas the true home of all Men in the Wood was south, beyond the terrible mountains, a land of burning and horror where lost cities rose on great hills and monsters worse than the trolls of the forest roamed the deserted streets. The tribes had been god-like there, wielding strange weapons of wood and the black metal—iron, the metal that slew the Wyrim with a scratch, if they had no yarrow to bind to it.
