A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  Mirkady released Cat and she tumbled backwards with the whites of her eyes flickering under the lids. Michael jerked convulsively, but Dwarmo's massive strength held him.

  Mirkady's lips were leaf-dry and light on his own. He felt as though a gale had somehow been funnelled into his mouth; a hot wind that raced down his throat and warmed his gullet like wine. It wheeled through every nerve and vein within him and he thought he might be becoming lit up and luminous, a neon decoration, a Christmas tree overhung with lights. It exploded in his brain and fireworked through every passageway, every neurone, every cell—and the wood was in the light, in his mind. He raced from hot darkness through rock and clay and sediment, strata clicking past madly, through the slow reach and tangle of root systems, up the trunks of trees, the seasons mere blurs to be felt like a quiver of wind through the thick bark. And then out to the whirling leaves, feeling the sun warm and stir him, the air move in his veins like blood. And he was cast loose, floating down, back to the soil and the clay and the deep gut rock again, to begin from another beginning.

  And the firelight was warm and yellow on his face and the weight on his shoulder was Dwarmo's hand stopping him from falling. He glanced round, dazed, saw Mirkady reclined by the fire, smirking and serious at the same time. Cat looking as bemused as he felt, shaking her head as though a fly buzzed at it.

  'What did you do?' he asked Mirkady, and staggered as Dwarmo's grip finally released him.

  'I gave you a gift that the forest things will smell for miles around. Wyr-fire. You can call it up yourself now, you and Catherine—but once only between you. The wood creatures will think of you as Wyrim until, or if, you finally let slip the fire. When it leaves you, you will both be human again, mere cattle in this part of the world. Remember that.'

  'How do we release it?'

  'You will know how, Farsider, when the necessity is great enough. But remember it can be used once only.'

  Dwarmo spoke, a deep bass from the edge of the firelight.

  'It is... an honour you are being done. It is not a thing given lightly by our people.'

  'Why?' Michael asked Mirkady.

  'Because I love your lady.' He and Cat stared at each other whilst Michael looked on, baffled.

  'And because I think you are doing something important. Something that is meant to happen. I do not think it is mere whim that has brought you here; nor do I think that you yourself truly know the reason. There is more to it than that.'

  The Wyr-fire was a distant singing in Michael's bones, a tingling.

  'Do you know the way to the Horseman's castle?'

  Mirkady nodded. We all do. And so does Cat. It is like a shadow at the edge of sight, always in the comer there.'

  Michael looked at her. 'You know then? You know it exists, that it is real?'

  She said nothing. Her mouth was a tight, angry line.

  'How far?' Michael asked Mirkady.

  'A bad dream away. Distances are deceptive in this land, and straight lines are fatuous things. You will walk until you find it—and all who come here find it sooner or later, if the Horseman wants them to. It could be a league away, or ten thousand. You will find it when he wishes you to. When he deems you ready.'

  'Ready for what?'

  'Ready to give up your soul.'

  MORNING CAME AND Mirkady and Dwarmo were gone, though a smiling face had been scratched into the earth by the fire. Michael listened for a while. The valley was full of thick mist that rolled like an ocean below him, the trees towering out of it, shaggy giants wading ashore. The wood was quiet and a pale sun was just flinging the first of its beams over the eastern horizon, cutting rainbows from the vapour in the air.

  Cat lay on the other side of the dead fire, watching him. It had been cold without her warmth in his arms, but she had been distant since the Wyr-fire had been kissed into her. Was it Michael's imagination, or was there something different about her— something that had more to do with Mirkady's fold than with humanity? Could it be that her eyes were more narrow, her ears longer, more pointed?

  But when she got up, throwing her furs aside, he castigated himself for being absurd. She was the same lithe, lovely girl he had always known, and he ached for her.

  'Cat?'

  'What?' she asked, not looking up from her packing.

  He touched her arm and paused without meeting his eyes.

  'No, Michael.'

  'Why not? It's been an age.'

  'I'll not love you while you're selling your soul for some other woman.'

  She was crying, the tears coursing down one cheek, though her face was unmoved, set hard.

  'She's kin to me. Damn it, Cat, I thought this had been settled. I thought you had stopped worrying about it. You're the one I love.'

  'Then find me my soul, Michael.'

  'What?'

  'If I am a changeling, then my soul is also in the Horseman's castle. Would you go on a quest for it?'

  He could not answer her. He felt winded, wholly at sea. She was as unpredictable as the rain. Damned if he knew what to say to placate her.

  He turned away. 'I'll get breakfast,' he growled, bewildered with hurt. Nothing was as it appeared in this place. He began to wish he had taken up Ringbone's invitation and gone north.

  If Ringbone was still alive. He and his people might well be a jumble of corpses by now.

  Cat's hand was on his nape, and he turned at once to kiss her. They pressed into each other hungrily, and he made short work of tucking her tunic aside.

  'I'm sorry,' he said as he slid inside of her, and she repeated it, so that they were apologizing to each other as they made sudden love, transforming it into a litany until it seemed they were sorry for all that was to come as well as all that had been. They were sorry that things were going to turn out the way they would.

  SIXTEEN

  IT WAS A quiet night. He was at his station, pulling pints behind the bar; or he would be pulling them if anyone wanted one. The pub was almost deserted, a few diehards staring into their glasses, a game of darts in the corner with old men taking their time to shuffle to and from the board.

  Outside the long day was winding into a clear blue night, and the traffic had eased from the five o'clock mayhem that he hated. There was the roar of a red bus now and again, ploughing along the road outside.

  He leant on the bar and lit a cigarette, though the landlady forbade it.

  Clare. There was a thing.

  Not a good idea to get involved with a girl ten years your junior, one who believed in true love and honour and suchlike.

  Nice, though.

  He liked her elegance, the city cut of her. There was not an ounce of hayseed in her make-up. The city was her everything.

  A face appeared briefly at the window of the bar. It grinned hugely, the eyes becoming two slits filled with green light, the ears pointed as leaves.

  Mirkady?

  He hobbled from behind the bar and crashed open the door, glaring out into the calm night, the lamplit street.

  Nothing.

  His heart was labouring, fighting to expand out of his chest. He pressed a fist to his breastbone, panting, whilst the world leapt and jumped in his sight, the street lights spangling into stars.

  He staggered back to the bar. Stares followed him.

  There was an iron band around his chest, tightening unbearably, squeezing shut his lungs. He lurched to the row of optics and clinked a glass below the brandy, clicked it up. Then the stuff was searing his throat and heating up his gullet.

  A pair of customers at the bar were asking if he needed help. He waved them away. Christ, he thought, I'm getting old. I'm dying here.

  Had it been Mirkady out there, in the street? He was no longer sure. After so much time one fiendish face looked very much like another. And his lips stretched in a ghastly, mirthless grin. His chest loosened, lungs opening. The world steadied again and he was able to laugh at the concern of the old blokes, make a joke of it. The rest of the brandy finished his recov
ery, and one of the pensioners bought him another. No mean gesture. He raised it in salute.

  What was happening to him? He was seeing monsters in every shadow. There was something about the city after dark that reminded him of the Wildwood. That watchfulness. It was not his imagination. Walking with Clare around nightfall he had been sure they were being followed, soft feet padding the pavement behind them. Nothing to see, of course.

  And there had been that one night he had woken to the sound of hoofbeats in the road below his flat. There had been no clash of iron. The hoofs had not been shod, as no horses were shod in the Other Place.

  He cried off work early, his excuse of illness backed up by the customers in the bar. The landlady took one look at his face and let him go without comment, surprising him. It was only when he was on his way out that he noticed his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, a sight he hated, these days. His face was as lumpish and heavy as always, the fair hair sliding ever further up his scalp, but it was as white as snow, the eyes popping in their sockets. His mouth was twisted with self-disgust and fear as he stepped outside.

  Into the lamp lit darkness, the traffic, the long streets dotted with people, some hurrying, some dawdling.

  Too damn quiet, even if Mirkady were here somewhere, watching over him.

  Would Mirkady watch over him, though? He and his kind had withdrawn, had abandoned Cat and himself after what had happened in the Wolfweald. Perhaps he was allied to the manwolves and the Horseman now. They were in it together.

  A few years ago these thoughts would not have come to him. The memories had not been there then, at the top of the heap. They had been buried somewhere deep down, and the thought of fairies or goblins had been absurd. Not now. It was no mere fairy tale.

  He eyed shadowed corners fearfully as he walked, but nothing disturbed him. It was only whilst negotiating a wholly deserted square that he thought he caught the flicker of a deeper darkness off to one side, and he halted, watching. But there was nothing there.

  And Clare was at the door for him, and tugged him inside to the light and the cooking smells.

  She was vegetarian, and as he sat down to his candlelit pasta he found himself smiling to think what Cat would have made of this—or himself, for that matter—once upon a time. Clare was talking about work, about bosses, about weather, for God's sake. Clearly his silence was making the meal heavy going for her. But he smiled, toasted her in red wine—finer, thinner stuff this, than the vintage he had drunk in the Wildwood—and it seemed to make her happy. Though she kept stealing worried glances at him when she thought he could not see.

  Afterwards they lay on the sofa, the television flickering like a blue-flamed campfire in their eyes. She seemed oddly heavy lying on top of him, and he thought that her flesh was strangely soft, with no hard muscle underneath.

  He blinked, and slid far down the road before sleep. His mind retrod old ground on the edge of dream and nightmare. He thought he was staring open-eyed across the room to a dark corner, and in that corner Cat sat watching him. He tried to get up, but Clare's weight pinned him to the sofa. She seemed to be asleep.

  Cat's eyes gleamed green in the dimness and her ears lanced up through her hair, as long as a deer's.

  He heaved Clare off him and she fell to the floor with a thump. He scrabbled over to the corner. Nothing. A dream. A memory from a long-ago time when he had consorted with wood spirits. Wood spirits! Christ, he was going mad, that was it. He was hallucinating, reliving some childhood fantasy.

  'What the hell was that about?'

  Clare. He turned. She was rubbing her hip and glaring at him in anger and puzzlement.

  'Sorry. Had a—a bad dream. It shook me up a bit—'

  'Another one?' Now she was concerned. Her hand stroked his face. 'I thought something was wrong as soon as you came in. You were so pale, Michael. You looked as though you'd seen a ghost.'

  He almost laughed aloud at that, but settled for a smile and kissed her on the mouth. She pulled him closer, all big dark eyes and tumbled hair, skin smooth as china. Peaches and cream, he thought. English roses. He doubted if she'd spent a night outdoors in her entire life.

  The television burbled along to itself as they shed their clothes .and for a moment its light washed her skin in green so that it might have been the light of the Wyr-fire in the forest. But it lasted only a second. She was moving on him now, eyes shut and lower lip caught between her teeth as though she were caught up in mental arithmetic. Her breasts, dark-aureoled and full, swayed with her thrusts. He balanced his hands on her hips and closed his own eyes as the familiar sensations took hold. But as his body responded to hers, as they moved together to some desirable culmination, he was with one clear part of his mind seeing Cat's face in the firelight, He was watching sunshine in trees as tall as office buildings, feeling the cold breeze of spring on his face.

  He could remember everything, as clear as day. Everything that had happened in the Wolfweald.

  SOUTH THEY HAD gone, with the sun rising on their left every morning and the first light taking its time to filter down through the immense trees. It pushed through the branches overhead in great spars and shafts, splintering into spears and arrows as it struck the sprays and twigs, the budding leaves and finally spangling into a swaying dapple that carpeted the forest floor.

  The canopy grew thicker as they travelled, however, the branches entwining together ever more closely and the tops of the trees fighting for space and sun, and they began to move in what seemed like perpetual twilight. The horses' hooves made little sound on the soft humus of the ground, clumping steadily, and the nights were black as pitch, the stars invisible overhead, blocked out by the interwoven ceiling of the trees.

  It was dank and chill in this underworld, as if the trees had sealed in the end of winter, the cold air and the dampness. Their lower branches were dead and rotten through want of light, and the dead wood itself was like wet paper, stinking. It became almost impossible to find dry wood for the fire and often Michael and Cat huddled together in the endless darkness of the nights with the horses crowded round them, unsettled and restless.

  Navigation became a problem. Though Cat, if pressed, would indicate the rough direction they were to take, Michael felt it necessary to glean information from every glimpse of the sun or stars, for he had a fear they would otherwise go in circles till they left their bones in the leaf mould. He marked trees with the Ulfberht in a desperate attempt to keep them going in a straight line; but he had a feeling that it was unnecessary, that they were travelling a course which had been plotted for them a long time ago.

  He climbed a tree once, to try and see the sun, and scaled a hundred feet of an old forest giant, his fingers digging into the rotten bark and the black, evil-smelling stuff grinding in under his nails. He caught a hint, a wisp of sunlight, and knew that up there somewhere the world rolled on. Dawn came every morning and the moon rose. But the highest branches were too flimsy to bear his weight and he had to descend, grubs and mites from the tree infesting his clothing and biting his scalp.

  They had enough dried meat and forest roots in the saddlebags to keep them chewing for a few weeks, which was as well since the forest seemed empty of animal life. Not a bird sang in the gloomy mornings, and never a game trail did they find. It was as if the massive bulk of the trees sucked the vitality out of the land, leaving room for no other life. Michael voiced this thought to Cat as they sat shivering one evening with their pitiful campfire guttering at their toes. She nodded.

  'Can't you feel it?'

  'Feel what?'

  'The power here. It is in the very air. The trees are part of it, and thrive with it, but nothing else can unless it is a beast of the Horseman. This place is rotten with magic, Michael. It is sick with it, like a stagnant pond.'

  Water became a worry. There were streams in the forest, narrow and choked with roots and mud, and the water in them was dark as porter. They drank nonetheless, but after two weeks of it Michael fell sick. He reme
mbered little but the ground swooping up to meet him as he slid off Fancy's back, and Cat's face bent over him for what seemed an interminable time of vomiting and sweating. Then things became blank, and his mind lost all links with his body. He had convulsed, Cat told him later, which was why there was a chunk bitten out of his tongue, and the healing wound in his thigh had sprung open again like the rind of a rotten fruit.

  Two days he was like this, waking on the night of the second to the smell of his own stink and the taste of blood and vomit in his mouth, Cat a red-eyed manikin beside him. Around them the trees loomed as huge and silent as ever, and the reek of the forest seemed somehow worse than that of his own wastes.

  They boiled their water after that, though Cat had seemed unaffected by the stuff, and drank it in sparing sips. Michael's bowels remained loose, the constant riding an agony to his reopened thigh and chafing buttocks. He ate some of the horses' barley, which helped, but the horses themselves were growing gaunt through lack of food. The undergrowth, sparse as it was, did not tempt them, and they gnawed at sapling bark and fleeting clumps of wiry heather that clawed for life in the murk of the forest floor. Great ticks fastened on them, white and heavy-jawed. If left to feed they would become as big as Michael's little finger, bloated on blood, before dropping off.

  Cat caught frogs in some of the unwholesome streams, and they skinned and ate them warily. Though they tasted to Michael like rotten pork they were not poisonous, and soon they halted to try their luck every time they heard the trickle of water, eking out the smoked venison they had left.

  One day, however, they heard the clear tinkle and bubble of free-flowing water, quite unlike the slow seep of the streams they had so far encountered, and steering towards it they came upon a brook running crystal clear between banks of green grass and overhanging briars. They halted, amazed, and drank their fill of the delicious, clean water, better than wine after the filth they had been imbibing. And, even more astonishing, there was a hole in the impenetrable canopy overhead so that for a few minutes a ray of sunlight actually lanced down to set the water alight and gleam off the polished stones in the stream bed. Michael laughed aloud, but Cat was silent and presently she threw up, her whole body arching in agony.