by Paul Kearney
Dawn seeped into the air like a cold liquid, filtering down through the trees and distinguishing shadow from object, imagination from reality. Unseen birds sang in the treetops and the rain ceased, water continuing to stream and drip and trickle everywhere, runnelling round their feet. Michael was stiff and tired. He had to lean against the horse or he would have swayed where he stood.
Cat and Mirkady seemed to be in conference. She was stooped over him with her ear close to his mouth and her hood thrown back, looking for all the world like Maid Marian taking advice from a leprechaun. Michael chuckled aloud at the thought, intensely glad that the night was over. What next? he was wondering.
'A mount,' Mirkady told him when they were sitting chewing fairy bread (more wholesome than it sounded) and slugging deep red wine from the mouth of a skin, relishing the alcoholic buzz and warmth. Behind them Fancy was discovering fairy barley, and from the sound of things finding it as filling as the bread.
'We've got a mount,' Michael said with his mouth full.
Mirkady sighed. 'We are more than one person, however.'
Stubbornly Michael said, 'The forests too thick to ride in. Your head would be at the pommel the whole day. I thought one horse would be good for baggage and stuff.'
'The forest is not all as thick as this,' Cat put in. The wine had coloured her lips; they were dark as bruises.
'It is open in places, and there are glades and clearings. And then there are the tracks that men make. We can follow them.'
Michael shrugged. 'Fair enough. Where are we going to get one? And what are we going to buy it with?'
'Iron,' Mirkady said.
'What? You can't buy a horse for a piece of metal. And we haven't got any iron anyway.'
'You can and we have,' Mirkady said smugly. 'Iron is rare here, a precious metal. And that metal club you have tied to the saddle with the wooden head—'
'No,' Michael said, realizing at once. 'That was my great-grandfather's. I'm not giving it to some woodland savage to use as a club. It's a modern firearm. You need a licence and everything.'
'The barrel is worth its weight in gold here, Michael,' Cat said impatiently. 'We need it.'
'You're not getting it.'
She glared at him. Mirkady merely laughed. 'You will remain penniless then, and become footsore before long.'
'We'll steal one,' Cat said.
'We can't...' Michael trailed into silence at her stare. He had an odd desire to seize her face in his hands and crush those lips with his own, but could not with Mirkady there. Cat smiled at him, eyes dancing as though she had read the thought.
'We'll steal one from the next village we come to; a priest's horse. They always have the best.'
Catching some of her mischief, Michael grinned. 'So we're going to be horse thieves? All right. How do we find the horse?'
'Not a problem,' Mirkady said. 'We are close to a village here, scant miles from the South Road that runs almost the length of the Wildwood. We can be there before the middle of the day.'
'Darkness is the best time for thieving,' Cat said, and the little goblin nodded. The best time for our kind to be abroad, but we must be wary now we are out of the bounds of the Howe. All sorts of things roam the woods at night, the hunters and the hunted. Myself, being what I am, most of them will ignore, but you pair have the reek of human blood about you. A sweet drink for many of the night prowlers.'
Michael had the feeling Mirkady was trying to goad him, so he said nothing. The bronze dagger hung heavy and cold at his hip, but he could not envisage himself using it. He vowed to unpack and load the shotgun when he had a chance, to stick to a civilized weapon.
'And we had better find ourselves some wolfsbane to crush on your blades, just in case,' Mirkady added.
TWELVE
WOLFSBANE.
The pub was crowded at this time of day, the tables full and the spaces between covered with people. Their noise and warmth clouded the air and the smoke of their cigarettes was a blue haze in the fading sunlight from the windows.
He was sweating, deciphering three demands at once and tugging down the pump to bring brown beer frothing into a pint glass. In his mind he added up figures, remembered orders and calculated the time left until he would finish. He could smell the yeasty reek of the beer and his own sweat, the smoke in the air. His feet felt flat as slates from long standing. Two feet away from his nose a line of customers pressed against the wood of the bar with money clutched in their fists, clamouring for attention. Just another Saturday.
But he was glad of the crowd. He hated silence as much as he hated darkness, and the press of bodies was comforting. Nothing could touch him here; nothing that was not a part of pavements and tarmac, offices and exhaust fumes. He was safe.
He was tired, too, and the flesh of his stomach was a bulge over his belt. Too much beer, he thought as he set the foaming glass on the bar and reached for another. Too little exercise. Always it had seemed to him that his body operated best on nothing but the essentials. It made use of every scrap of nourishment and rest it was given, wasting nothing. And now there was a surplus: there was too much. He had become soft—a big, soft man with full red cheeks and too much flesh under his chin. A paunch ahead of its time, and a heart gone to seed along with his smoke-stained lungs.
No piglets on a spit here, he thought, listening with a blank face to the shouted order of another customer. None of the diamond clearness that had been a part of his senses as he had travelled through the Other Place. He had been an animal then, had been chipped down like a flint spearhead, and while the process had been an agonizing one it had left him sharp and hard, clear-minded as the bleb of an icicle—and afraid almost every moment.
His lungs ached for a cigarette and he damped his mouth into a thin line and hauled his attention back to the work in hand. He pressed tall glasses up to the optics, dug into the ice bucket, pulled more pints and poked unendingly at the cash register's noisy buttons, the cash drawer hitting his stomach every time it opened as though to remind him it was still there.
Still there. He felt that there was a skeleton inside him—not locked in some closet, but in his very flesh—a different man, another adulthood. He had seen himself grow up twice. The first time he had grown into a woodsman, a warrior, an acquaintance of savages and fairies.
Fairies. Such a childish name. The Wyrim. Odd how it had taken a mental effort to remember it. Some things he had forgotten much as he had forgotten the forest language the farther from the wood's heart he had gone.
But this was his other adulthood, his real life, he reminded himself harshly. This was the reality of the world he would remain and die in: these faces with their slurred urgency across the bar, and the stink of the beer, the rumble of the traffic outside. This was his own world, without wonders, grey and tired with striving; a potbellied, short-of-breath world. That leaner, deadlier man that he might once have been was as dead as a half-forgotten dream. And in any case, he did not want to go back. The nights were bad enough as it was, here in this urban labyrinth, this tamed place.
He was given a break after four hours and walked out of the back of the pub for a breath of fresher air, fumbling for his cigarettes as he went. Out here there were red-bricked walls and overflowing dustbins; a cat cleaning its paws. The sky was bricked off, a mere square far above him lined with jet trails and deepening now into a street-lit night. Other buildings soared up on all sides, metal fire escapes hung with washing. There were children's voices up there somewhere, a baby crying, the sound of a young woman's laughter.
He smoked the cigarette down to the butt and lit another, setting his backside on a dustbin. It would be a long night. He was there till the end, the last shift, and one of the night's final tasks would be throwing out the reluctant drunks. The manager had given him the job because of his size. They never argued. Perhaps even now there was Something in his eyes which told the quarrelsome to walk away. The thought pleased him. Still a trace of that hardness there, the man who had been
Cat's lover, Ringbone's friend and a killer of men.
The evening was quiet for the city. Something—a cat—crashed off a dustbin, clattering the lid and yowling loudly. The alley backed away into thickening shadow filled with rubbish, peppered with vertical and horizontal bins and the wreck of a discarded and stripped van. It was empty.
His cigarette glowed like a hellish eye as he sucked on it. Winos slept in this alley sometimes, huddled in old news-papers. They rooted in the bins, competing with the rats, and were as furred and foul-smelling as animals themselves. Per-haps there was one out there tonight, curled like a foetus in its womb of trash, watching him.
Hard to believe that a brick wall away there was a crowd of people drinking and talking and doing the things people enjoyed doing in the city. It was so still out here, still as a wood on a windless night. From the surrounding buildings a few faint lights glimmered, and on one ceiling he could see the blue flicker of a television. But it seemed almost as if there was a thickness of silence, a depth of it as thick as smoke, down here where he sat amid the rubbish, the papers and the dogends, the scraps of littered food and wrappers of chips and sweets. The flotsam of the streets.
He blew out smoke that was becoming invisible in the gloom.
Something moved down the length of the alley, furtive, lurching. As his hand came up to his lips again ash fell on his shirt. His fingers were trembling.
One of the winos rummaging for a bed or the leftovers from someone's snack.
Because something was watching him. He could feel its stare crawl up and down his plump body. He knew he was not alone in the alley.
Behind him he heard a burst of ragged laughter from the windows of the pub. They were pools of yellow light now, and made the alley seem all the darker. Had he been out here so long? Best to be getting in before he got told off for skiving.
Something there, in the shadows.
He backed away with the cigarette hanging from one moist lip. His heel clanged against the bin and he cursed ever so softly.
Not here. Not now. That was done with.
There was a snarl in the shadows, a low, liquid growl coming from deep in some massive chest. The cigarette dropped from his mouth. He turned and ran for the safe throng of the pub.
THEY HIT UPON the village near midday and at once climbed one of the surrounding trees, the shotgun bumping at Michael's back, to take a look at the lie of things and see what they were up against. Fancy they had left tethered half a mile behind them, much to Michael's misgiving, but Mirkady told him that no Wyrim would touch an iron-shod horse with more iron in its stirrups and a bunch of holly—they had found some in the thickets—tied to the pommel. The animal was safe from any non-human forest dwellers who happened to chance by, and few people ventured so far from the villages or the Great South Road. Cat had reinforced his argument and Michael had given in, though was uneasy about the idea of the ordinary fauna of this place. Lions and tigers and bears, no less. Nothing would have surprised him. And he 'placed little faith in the pungent plant Mirkady had crushed on the blade of his dagger.
The village huddled without rhyme or reason in the bow curve of a fast, clear stream. The trees had been cleared to a hundred yards from the outlying huts and the ground there was thick with stumps, reclaimed by fern and briar and nettle. Around the corner of the stream Michael could glimpse other clearings green with pasture and dotted with animals. A haze of woodsmoke hung over the place, blue and grey, and from a midden there rose the steaming scent of dung and carrion.
The buildings were wattle and daub or wood logs chinked with mud from the stream bank. They were roofed with turf and tree bark, their doors animal skins weighted with stones.
One building was different, however. Built of squared planks and roofed with shingles, the church stood on a small rise to the north of the rest of the village, and beside it was a finer, larger hut that must belong to the priest. There were crosses on the church's gables, coloured glass in the tiny windows, and the brass glint of a bell in the stubby tower that was not even as high as the surrounding trees.
The village seemed quiet, the menfolk out in the tiny fields, perhaps, or hunting in the forest. Children played by the stream dressed in undyed linen and wool, barefoot and grubby, and a small group of women was drawing water and talking some tongue that carried strangely in the stillness. Others worked on tall looms that sat under leantos close to their huts, or scraped at small vegetable gardens with crude hoes. An old man was smoking a clay pipe in the beaten dirt before one house, spitting contentedly now and then and kicking out when a foraging pig came too near.
Pigs, chickens and dogs roamed freely, mingling with the children. They were scrawny creatures on the whole, the pigs half wild, the chickens thin and fierce and the dogs lean creatures that looked scant generations away from wolves.
The village was surrounded by a rough palisade of sharpened stakes, sometimes with a gap of as much as a foot between them. It straggled along the eaves of the outlying huts and crossed the river, ending in a crude gate which was hanging open on leather hinges. It was unguarded. The place was peaceful, sleepy.
'Nice as pie,' Mirkady whispered with relish.
'But where are the men?' Cat wondered.
A burst of distant shouting gave them their answer. Its source was hidden from them by the curve of the woods, Michael saw the women at the stream pause and straighten. One shook her head.
'Something's going on,' he said, the curiosity kindling in him.
'Nothing to do with us,' Mirkady told him. 'See the grey gelding in the pen behind the church? That's ours, the one we're after. A noble beast indeed, but inside hallowed ground, alas. I cannot enter. It is your own wits you must rely on from here on.'
'Listen,' Cat said, ignoring him.
Hoofbeats, and a surf of voices. Mirkady's eyes brightened.
'Trouble. Now is the time—'
A crowd of people both horsed and afoot came into viewat.the far end of the village. A pair at the front seemed to be tripping and stumbling as they came... no, they were being shoved from behind. One tall, bald figure in a brown habit was waving his arms. He shouted something about devil worshippers, savages.
'I can understand what they're saying,' Michael breathed. Neither Cat nor Mirkady seemed to have heard him.
'One of the Brothers,' Mirkady spat, making the word into a curse. His twig-like fingers jabbed out hornwise at the approaching throng.
There were shouted words, which this time Michael did not understand. His comprehension ebbed and flowed. He was aware that the language being spoken was strange. He could feel the unknown quality of the words in his head, but here and there they burst clearlit into his mind like cloud-broken sunlight.
The villagers plashed across the stream in a mass. There were at least three or four dozen of them, and the tall priest stayed at the forefront all the while. The objects of their invective were two ragged and barbarous looking figures who were tripped up in the stream and fell with an explosion of spray.They were tied, Michael realized, arms bound tightly to their sides.
They were fox men.
'So the priest has taken offence at some tribes people,' Mirkady murmured. His eyes glittered like wet jade. 'What will it be? Drowning, burning, or a mere beating?'
The horsemen thrashed through the stream and bent in their saddles to drag the two fox men out of the water and on to the other bank. The pair lay there struggling feebly. There was blood on their faces, and one had lost his headdress.
They were not frightening any more, but seemed oddly vulnerable, like mistreated scarecrows. They were a long way from the terrifying shadows of Michael's past.
'Why are they doing this?' he asked. Instinctively he sided with the underdogs.
'They have no love for the tribes, do the baldheaded Brothers of the Wood,' Mirkady said. 'And the tribes fear them for their cross-magic that keeps the Wyrim at bay. Sometimes there is a slight, real or imagined: an insult, or a theft maybe. They have different
ideas about the rights and wrongs of things, the tribes and the villagers. Then this happens. The fox men will be lucky to see another dawn.'
Outrage flared in Michael. 'They're going to kill them? We can't let them do that. We have to do something.'
Cat and Mirkady looked at him.
'We're here to steal you a steed, or had you forgotten?' Mirkady asked archly. 'And, besides, see the men on horses?'
There were perhaps half a dozen of them, their mounts hardly larger than ponies but thick-limbed and shaggy. The riders wore leather armour that flashed with odd pieces of bronze and were decorated with strips of fur. On their heads were rough helmets of hide and horn, guards coming down from the brims to encircle the eyes and make beaks out of noses. They appeared predatory, capable. They bore lances of bronze-tipped wood and long daggers. One had a sword slapping at his thigh in a wolfskin scabbard and all of them had the scarlet shape of a cross dyed into their jerkins, rusty as ageing blood.
'Who are they?' There was something elemental about the horsemen, something unrestrained. They were laughing as they rode in circles round the two prostrate tribesmen, and when one of the fox men levered himself to his knees the butt of a lance sent him sprawling again. The priest stood preaching with his arms in the air and the villagers quietened. Even from here Michael could see the glee in some of their faces, the uneasiness in others.
'They are Knights Militant, the military branch of the Brothers,' Mirkady told him. 'The Protectors of the Villages and Saviours of the Church. They are animals.'
