A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  She nodded. Behind her a shape loomed, hulking and tusked.

  'This part of the wood is no fit place for human man,' Dwarmo said. 'And their hurts are many.'

  'They will be more numerous still ere they win their way back to the Forests of Men again.' Mirkady twinkled. Michael felt an urge to strike him. He sat up instead. The pain in his thigh was a hot red thing that impaled him to the ground, and allied to it were three or four other little agonies that gashed his limbs. The Ulfberht lay to one side.

  Looking round he could see the funeral pyre ready to be fired, the other, blacker mound nearby that comprised the enemy dead. Hundreds, there must have been. The pitiful remnants of Ringbone's folk were packing up. their meagre belongings, many women bleeding from grief cuts and red-eyed, the men like walking corpses, some with wounds oozing. No more than two score had survived. Michael could count less than a dozen men able to stand. In the midst of their camp were the two horses, gashes and bites marking their flanks. They had survived, at least.

  Ringbone squatted before him. There were bark dressings about forearm and bicep. No one in camp seemed to have escaped hurt, Cat included.

  'Cadyei?' the fox man asked him. He said he was well.

  Ringbone bent his head to the ground for a moment, and then asked him if he and Cat still intended to go on south.

  Michael glanced at her and she winked at him, though Mirkady's eyes had darkened. Ringbone ignored the two Wyrim as if they did not exist.

  The people were going north, he said. They would not survive if they stayed here. He stopped and Michael saw an obvious struggle on the normally impassive face.

  Let the Utwychtan and the Teowynn come back north with the people, he said as though the thought had just occurred to him.

  Michael shook his head.

  Ringbone nodded to himself, and broke into one of his unaccustomed smiles. If—when—they came north again, they would find the tribe four days' walk west from the burnt village. It had been decided that it was better to face the Knights than the ForestFolk—and here his gaze did slide sideways for a second at the silent Mirkady.

  'Dhanweyr moih,' he said finally. And Michael wished him good travelling in his turn. Then the fox man stood up in one swift movement and was gone, off to organize what was left of his people.

  And so they melted away, not so much disappearing into the trees as dissolving. Forty souls in search of sanctuary. Michael got the feeling that he was watching an ancient ritual, oft repeated. It was as natural as the turning seasons that men should shift and move, seeking a better place. Even if it destroyed them.

  It was quiet when the last of the Fox-People had gone. Michael, Cat, Mirkady and hulking Dwarmo moved up the slope of the valley, away from the stink of the dead and the smoke of the funeral pyre, and lit a fire of their own to boil water and tend their wounds.

  Night swooped in on them. At the edge of the firelight Dwarmo stood tireless guard like some broad megalith whilst Mirkady sat listening to the wood noises, his long ears moving back and forth.

  Michael and Cat drank infusions of wood poppy to deaden the pain and cleaned out each other's hurts with a heated knife. There would be scars, Michael knew as he treated the gashes on Cat's legs, and he mourned the marring of her perfection. She was as thin and hard as a greyhound and her breasts seemed meagre—dark nipple and very little else. He kissed her navel as she lay under the knife, and covered her over again.

  'You need feeding, Cat.'

  'What about you? With that beard you look like a half-starved prophet, though your shoulders are nearly as broad as Dwarmo's. Where did you get that size from?'

  'It's in the bones.'

  They ate reheated venison and forest onions along with some barley spirit that Ringbone had given Cat. Powerful stuff, it was precious to the tribe for it could only be obtained through trade with the villagers. It was clear, but smelled strongly of alcohol, like methylated spirits that had somehow been infused with a hint of corn and summer dust. They trickled some on their wounds, stiffening and grimacing at the pain, which made Mirkady chortle. He declined a drink, recalling for them the sweetness of the mead in his own howe.

  They fed the fire as the night deepened, heavy cloud being blown in from the west to hide the stars and promise rain before morning. The trees tossed and turned uneasily in the wind, their tops undulating and swaying like the waves on a vast, dark sea. Their campfire was a tiny jewel, a bright pinhead in the midst of the forest murk, for the pyre had burned to ash now, and Ringbone's dead were being scattered through the air like a cloud of dark moths winging towards some distant light.

  'So it is south you are headed,' Mirkady said at last, the humour gone from his voice. Michael nodded. His arms were full of Cat and he was resting his chin on the crown of her head. Her cold fingers were clasped over his.

  'You have an idea, maybe, of the country you will be entering,' the Wyran went on. 'It is not named the Wolfweald for nothing. And wolves are the least of the things you will encounter in there. '

  'We know,' Michael said firmly. He thought Cat shuddered in his embrace, and hugged her tighter.

  'Do you now? ... Sister Catherine, you know. You have heard the stories. Can you not talk this man out of madness? Cat leaned forward from Michael's arms and poked at the fire with a stick.

  'There is no talking to him. He has a quest in mind and means to follow it.' There was a sort of weary bitterness in her tone.

  'The kinswoman taken by the Horseman. I see. So you hope to find her, Utwychtan.'

  Michael did not speak.

  'Let me tell you a story, Farsider, an old one your lady might not know. Like all the best tales it is a true one, and it may yet give you an idea of what you are clamouring to get into.

  'Some years ago—nine times fifty or less, which is a raindrop in a storm to the Wildwood—the Brothers took it upon themselves to convert the men in the wood to their way of thinking, and they sent out missions to the outlying villages. The villagers were easy to win over, for the crosses and holy words of the Brothers kept the beasts at bay. And so the men who are now of the tribes, though they were called Myrcans in the beginning, these men who had been the guardians of the villagers were left purposeless. They were and are a proud people, and when they saw they were no longer wanted or needed, they drew apart from those who had once been their wards. The people began to mistrust them, for they were warriors without compare in those days, consummate soldiers whom even the Wyrim respected. They were ostracized and degenerated into the wandering folk we know now.

  'But that is getting away from the story. These Brothers sought to convert the whole world in their arrogance. Their numbers grew and grew, and men began to flock to their service. Soon it was that villages which hesitated to convert, or who desired to cling to their Myrcan warders, were overcome by force, and the soldiers of the Brothers of the Wood were named the Knights Militant.

  'Even the Forest-Folk, who loathe and despise the Brothers for their holy poisoning of the wood, even we have known good men amongst them, men who preached harmony and who wished to live in peace with everyone, the Forest-Folk included. There were more of these in the beginning. But as time has gone on tolerance has declined on both sides. First it was the Wyrim who were decried from the pulpits, and now it is the tribes. There is a war of sorts in the Wildwood.

  'Again, I draw away from my story. Forgive me. The Wyrim are ever a prolix folk when they get going. A tale to them is as good as drink, worthy of savouring. It is a thing to be embroidered and delved into. It is a thing to be mined and smelted and reforged with every telling.

  'Well such, as I have said, was the arrogance of these Brothers and their armoured henchmen that they decided they would spread their good news to every glade in the forest, and this, they thought, should include the forbidden places to the south where the beasts roamed undisturbed. This part of the wood was less perilous in those days, and humans hunted and farmed within it in communities so small as to be hardly worth
noticing. Some even ventured as far south as the Wolfweald itself—and never returned. It was not known what manner of place the wood was in those days. There were only the tales to go by, the myths of the Wyrim and the stories of those men who had become of the tribes. And yet the people preserved stories of their passage through it on their way north from the mountains. It was a terrible place, they said. No man survived there. Why, they could not say.

  'The Brothers did not come across the mountains, Farsider.

  They came from your world, or one like it; they came from a door in the north and so never knew the terror and the hardship of the passage of the southern woods. Their crosses would keep any beast at bay, they said, and they would rid the villagers of this superstition of theirs concerning the Wolfweald. They would bring it under the wing of their church.

  'And so an expedition was arranged and a Brother called Bishop, who was very high in their authority, led a company south into the forbidden forests there.

  'Five and twenty Brothers went, and with them half a hundred of the Knights and more than twice as many followers. They had mules and horses to carry their baggage and they drove flocks of sheep and a herd of cattle with them, for they had a mind to build a holy settlement of sorts, part church, part fortress. It is rumoured they also carried with them a piece of their God's flesh as a talisman, but I doubt if even the Brothers could be so barbarous.

  'So off they started one morning in the spring, singing as they went, and into the woods they disappeared, two hundred souls. They were never seen again.

  'Over the years the rumours came to the people in the villages. They had built themselves a fortress and were beleaguered there. They had turned back to savagery the same as the tribes had. They had died at the hands of the Wyrim, or the goblins. The Brothers' magic had failed them in the deep woods. They had gone on south and had crossed the mountains to the land beyond. The Horseman had taken them to his castle.

  'Another expedition was rigged out two years after the first. Only three Brothers went with it, three young men, one of whom had once been a Myrcan: Phelim, Finn and Dermott. Forty Knights accompanied the trio. The forest swallowed them also.'

  The fire cracked and spat before them, a bright blaze against the encroaching dark. Dwarmo stood immobile, but his head was cocked as he, too, listened to Mirkady's tale.

  'That was the end of the expeditions to the south. From then on it was a land for no man to venture into. Gradually men left the woods bordering on the Wolfweald—these woods around us. There were tales of black shapes in the trees, vampires that stole children and drained cattle of blood. Ghouls that preyed on human flesh.'

  'Goblins,' Michael said.

  'Grymyrch. Yes. They were more furtive in those days. They have grown in confidence since, and in numbers. It is the Horseman has seen to that. It is said that the ghosts of the lost expeditions still wander the trees, their souls kept in the Horseman's castle.'

  'What happened to them?' Michel asked, sure that the Wyran knew.

  Mirkady smiled unpleasantly. 'Why do you think I have that knowledge about me?'

  'You people seem to know everything:

  'Oh, we do,' the other replied airily. 'It is just that we do not choose to disclose it to everyone.'

  'What happened?' Michael repeated.

  The little creature stared into the flames of the fire.

  'Our people trailed them for a while, kept at a distance by the crosses and the masses and such. They came upon isolated farmsteads, hamlets, tiny villages whose folk were known to us and whom we had let be. Some of us had even got to know the people within them. They were hardy souls. They had to be, living in what was then the very eaves of the Wolfweald. They lived with the forest, not in spite of it, and there was a truce between them and the Wyrim. These people were converted to the Brothers' cause, either by persuasion or by force. In the larger of the settlements a Brother and a pair of Knights would stay behind to make sure this faith of theirs grafted, and the column rode on.

  'By the time they were well into the Wolfwood itself they had left over a score of their number behind them. They erected wooden crosses on cairns at the close of every day's march, and their thinking was to build a road between them some day. These things they magicked with their incense smoke and their water and they may stand yet in places, for the Brothers used oak and built to last.

  'They had few problems for the first days. They saw the balefires and ignored them, set up a fortified camp every night, which was no small labour in the thicknesses of that part of the forest. But things began to happen. The livestock became difficult to manage and some were lost. Men disappeared in the nights, having ventured beyond the camp's perimeter. A pair of Knights vanished when sent out to look for them.

  'After that they were more careful. They had to slaughter their herd for food, for game was nonexistent and they could not range out to hunt for it. The wolves followed them in great packs, and the brothers had to stand watch in the nights to ward them off. They began to tire, and the constant watchfulness took its toll of tempers and spirit.

  'They were deep in the Wolfweald now, glimpsing strange animals they had never encountered before. The trolls shadowed them, and goblins peered from the branches of the trees. The camp followers began to murmur against the Brothers, saying they were on a fruitless errand, that there was nothing in the trees but death. Some were for turningg back, but Bishop and the head Knight quelled their opposition. In the night a large number did leave, having suborned a pair of Brothers and a few Knights. They forged into the trees intending to retrace their path and find the Woods of Men again. None returned.

  'Weeks passed, and every day there were fewer at the morning mass. When scarcely a hundred were left Bishop decided that they had best turn back, and his decision was greeted with rejoicing. But that night a fog came down, thick as cream. Some men panicked and rushed into the trees. Some the Knights slew as they tried to loot the supplies. The Brothers themselves became mortally afraid, and with their fear their powers waned. Beasts penetrated the perimeter, and in the fogbound night men blundered around leaderless and were taken one by one. Only a few young Brothers kept their faith, and around them gathered the hardiest of the Knights and followers. By morning barely twenty of them were left alive and Bishop himself had been taken. The camp was a wasteland of gore and wrecked supplies and dead animals, but not a single man corpse was to be seen.

  'It is not clear what happened after that. The faith of those that remained was strong, and they did not fight among themselves. The Wyrim left them to the grymyrch, but I have heard tales and rumours that this tiny band kept together and went on south, seeking an end to the trees, a glimpse of open sky again. Some among my own folk maintain that they got away, that the goblins lost them in the darker parts of the weald and that they found their way at last to the Mountains of the World's Rim. But that is mere conjecture. One thing is known: never a one ever came again to the Woods of Men. Likely enough they left their bones in some glade where even the goblins do not go, that or the Horseman took them. And this is what happened to the second expedition also, that led by the three Brothers. The Wolfweald swallowed them all.'

  'You speak as though you had been there,' Michael said, staring at Mirkady closely.

  The Wyran laughed: a brittle, dangerous laugh.

  'Wyrim did help the goblins, the wolves, the manwolves. We are children of the same father, after all.'

  There was a silence, during which Dwarmo came over to the fire and helped himself to the bulging wineskin Ringbone's people had left them, gulping deeply and smacking thick lips over his fangs. There was a look of bliss on his face.

  'You know now what it is you are walking into, Farsider. What you are taking our sister into,' Mirkady said softly.

  'They are watching us,' Dwarmo added. 'They fear the Wyr-flames, or they would have been upon us hours ago.'

  Michael started up, gasping at the pain in his thigh. He drew his sword, but when he looked out from
the fire all he could see was a screen of tangled trees, impenetrable as a wall. An owl hooted, and somewhere there was the harsh choke of a pheasant. He might have been in the wood back home, were it not for the height of the trees. They were massive here, towering giants with trunks wider than he was tall. He sheathed the sword and rubbed Fancy's nose absently. The horses were picketed well within the limits of the firelight and they seemed calm enough considering the madness of the night before.

  'I'm still going, even if I have to go alone.'

  'You will not go alone,' Cat said heavily, and she frowned out into the forest.

  'So be it,' Mirkady said, and he spat into the fire.

  There was a hiss out of proportion to his spittle, and the fire cracked sharply. Michael spun round.

  'What are you doing?'

  'Keeping both your skins whole for as long as I can. Wyr-fire, Michael Fay. I am granting you a boon.'

  The fire rose higher, waist height, shoulder height, and then it was above Michael's head, a thin spiral of flame that was rapidly deepening in colour. It darkened to blue, then green, and their faces were suddenly bathed in a flickering, undersea light. It was the same hue as the flames which had consumed the goblins.

  'Wyr-fire,' Mirkady said. 'A gift of the forest to the Wyrim. The sap of the earth refined in light.'

  He leant forward so that the very flames were caressing his wedge-shaped face, running up through the thatch of hair and licking at his eyes. Their emerald light was almost identical to the firelight. For a few seconds it looked as though the flames were pouring in and out of his eyes like twisting tears. Then Mirkady breathed in. sharply, his birdlike chest expanding enormously, and the green flicker of the fire was sucked in through his open mouth, running down his throat like water. The yellow of ordinary firelight returned, but Mirkady was standing there swollen to bursting. He stepped over to Cat first, and abruptly placed his black, leathery lips against hers, making Michael start. Then he seemed to blow. Cat jerked away, but the little creature's fingers fastened on her shoulders and held her close. A huger, heavier hand on Michael's nape prevented him from getting up, and behind him Dwarmo's rumble said: 'You have nothing to fear. It is a privilege Mirkady is according you, a boon indeed. Be still.'