by Paul Kearney
'Come on. We're getting out of this place.'
NINETEEN
THE MUD HAD stiffened on them, making Cat's hair into a helmet of spikes and clogging the raw, ragged edges of their wounds. They sat beside a high fire that it had taken the better part of two hours to light and carefully cauterized every break in each other's flesh with the pink glow of the Ulfberht's point. Even that brief flaring agony brought no more than a moan from them. Pain had become an everyday thing, as unremarkable as the need for sleep.
They had no food, nothing to drink. The pot they had boiled their water in was lashed to the back of the grey gelding, lost in the forest. The fact barely registered. There was only this present, the night that darkened around, them, the trees leaning close.
It had gone. The brooding presence that had been dogging them for days had disappeared with the unleashing of the Wyr-fire, and now there was no longer any sense of being watched. It was as if the consciousness of the forest had retreated. To lick its wounds, perhaps—or to consider a new mode of attack. They could not say which.
Why did they call it the Wolfweald when it had no wolves? Those things were the beasts the forest had been named for; the beasts that had sprung out of the ground. Wooden wolves. They were the guardians of the Wolfweald, extensions of the trees' enmity.
The scene of the fight was a scant hundred yards away—all the distance they could stumble in their beaten state. Here the ground was less sodden, for the waters had retreated. They lay on a thin layer of twigs and moss and around them the faces of lost souls strained out of the tree trunks, mouths open in silent screams. Nennian was there. A loud crack in the gathering dusk, and a layer of bark had fallen off a nearby bole to reveal his broad features caught in the wood, cords standing out on his neck as though he were striving to free himself from the clutch of the tree. Cat had screamed on seeing his face, but now they ignored it. The sturdy priest had shared the fate of his brothers. Perhaps he was exchanging stories with them in some tree-bound hell.
Tiredness bound down their limbs like some mindthickening drug, and yet they could not sleep. There was no going on, Michael knew. He had had enough. They had not the strength to continue. He was not sure if they had the strength to go back, either.
He would leave Rose here; abandon her. He could do nothing else. That knowledge was a bitter taste in his mouth, the tang of failure. Cat knew it also, but he did not think she knew that he was going home. Somehow he was going home, and if he had to leave her behind then so be it. At present all he wanted was to be a boy again, unscarred and unafraid of the dark. He wondered if it were possible.
Cat shifted painfully beside him and even in the uncertain light and the shadow of the fire he saw the dressing at her collarbone darken further as the blood seeped through it. He could have wept to see her like this, bone thin and ravaged with hurt, but all that came was a hot stinging in his eyes. He would betray them both, leave her and Rose behind. His quest had failed utterly.
IN THE MORNING they lurched upright like stiff marionettes, unspeaking. There was light in the forest. Somehow the canopy seemed to have thinned and the weak sun was filtering through overhead. Cat broke Michael a rude crutch from one of the trees and they set off northwards at a snail's pace, leaving Nennian's face howling in the tree behind them.
Luck of some sort was with them, though. They found a trampled trail in the leaf litter that only the horses could have made, and pieces of equipment and scraps of harness were scattered here and there. And in the afternoon they came upon their three recalcitrant mounts standing trembling with their saddles askew and their manes matted with mud and twigs. They rode them for part of every day after that, striving to husband both the animals' strength and their own, and made better time. After a week the more shallow of their wounds were healing well and they were becoming healthy enough to sicken of the forest spawn they consumed to keep the life in them alive.
Ten days from the site of the battle they came to a decision and butchered the priest's donkey, ladening down the two other animals with its bleeding flesh and eating their fill of the stringy meat in the evening. Fancy and the grey were too exhausted to balk at the stench of blood and from then on they picked their way through the wood with the dismembered limbs of their comrade swaying from their flanks.
The meat put new strength into Michael and Cat. Tough though it was, it represented the most filling meal they had eaten since the days of Nennian's goat stew and honey. They stuffed themselves morning and evening and soon Cat was able to walk at the side of the grey all day, though Michael's mangled thigh kept him on a horse's back for most of their travelling.
Time passed. The forest left them alone, and the huge trees of the Wolfweald paraded endlessly by. Two weeks from the scene of Nennian's death they came upon his clearing in the trees, cutting almost in half their outbound journey—as though the wood were eager to be quit of them.
It was a chill afternoon when they stumbled across it, the light growing steadily stronger as the trees thinned until they startled a goat grazing at the edge of the glade and made out the humped shapes of the priest's outbuildings. Chickens pecked the ground contentedly there, but the forest had made inroads in the Brother's absence.
The bare central yard around which the buildings clustered was already thick with grass and green briar. Tufts of vegetation were sprouting over the sleeping hut, and young ferns were springing in the very doorway. The rough enclosure that had held the goats was fallen and overgrown, and saplings of hazel and lime, birch and beech, had broken out of the ground with amazing speed. They were almost waist high, trembling in a slight breeze. There was a thick, growing smell in the air, like freshly turned loam. The place looked as though it had been deserted for a year.
They unsaddled the horses, fed them from Nennian's store and let them loose in what was left of his goat enclosure. Then they both drank their fill of the clear water that still ran in his stream. It was delicious, paining their teeth with its coldness. Michael met Cat's eyes across the stream and knew she was human now, or as human as she could ever be. He wondered if there was a chance for the pair of them, a place for them both in his own world. He felt as guilty as a murderer with his secret resolution to go home. Could he make her come with him?
They ransacked the place for what food remained: smoked meat, mainly: the vegetables in the garden that the weeds had not yet buried, and a pot of honey. It was not enough for Cat's sweet tooth, and she attacked the bee skep determinedly, scooping out handfuls of honey and wax with the outraged and cold-sleepy bees blackening the air about her head. When she and Michael settled down for the night her hair was matted with honey and her face had swollen with stings. But her sticky face grinned at him across the fire. He felt a kind of disgust.
In the night something walked in the trees surrounding the glade, and the horses were restless. Michael hobbled from the fire with drawn sword, listening to the bending vegetation, the muffled footfalls. Something big circled the outermost reaches of the firelight; he could sense the breathing, the wary eyes, and a hint of the rank smell. But" perhaps there was some of Nennian's faith clinging about the sanctuary, for the thing left them in the early hours, and swished off into the forest.
'What is it?' he had asked Cat.
'Troll, maybe. Who knows? There are reputed to be beasts in the Wolfweald no one has ever seen. Like the tree wolves we encountered. I think our time of being ignored is over, Michael. It starts again now.'
They left Nennian's home with regret, their saddles weighed down with all the supplies they could claw together. Braces of chickens were dangling trussed and indignant from their saddles, and a pair of freshly slaughtered goats.
As they departed from the glade Michael looked back once and saw that Nennian's cross had sprouted green shoots which blurred its outline. It had become a tree, alive and growing.
THE JOURNEY CONTINUED without ceasing, like a fortyyear stint in the wilderness with no Canaan at its end. Michael's thigh wound slow
ly healed, and he cast aside his crutch. The horses gathered strength from Nennian's barley grain and began to fill out. They made better time, which was just as well for there were shapes in the trees at the corner of sight, darker shadows lurking in the dim light of the wood. They took to keeping watches in the blackest hours of the night, and all the time were aware of the movement at the limit of firelight, the odd noises. But the Weald was being left behind steadily.
Twice they were attacked by goblins, the squat shapes boiling out of the night to be met with Michael's blade and Cat's arrows. Both times they threw back their attackers with grim slaughter, piling their corpses around their campsite. The assaults were disorganized, febrile, the grymyrch launching themselves in knots rather than in waves. Michael and Cat received hardly a scratch in return.
At last the wood opened out and the land dipped. The trees grew smaller and there was light enough for undergrowth between them. There were birds and game and clean water. Cat laughed aloud, throwing back her black mane of hair. It was like a paradise after the gloomy fastness of the Wolfweald. They felt as though they had been freed from prison and given a glimpse of the real, brilliant, vibrant world once more.
They dawdled, taking time to hunt and gorging themselves on fresh meat. The horses cropped good grass and drank from the streams. When they were unsaddled in the evenings they rolled in the wetness of the grass, rubbing the fresh scent into their coats and wiping off the mud and mould of the weald.
They, all of them, almost died.
A wolf pack came upon them unawares as they were warming meat at a morning fire: eight rangy beasts with eyes as yellow as pus and black muzzles. Whilst Michael struggled with the horses Cat shot two down with the last of her arrows and disembowelled a third using a knife they had salvaged from Nennian's hut. Another fastened itself on the grey gelding's near hind leg but was kicked away. Michael gutted one that tried to attack Fancy, but as it collapsed it took the Ulfberht with it, ripping the hilt from his fingers. Another sprang at him, but Cat pounced on it in mid-air and bore it to the ground. They rolled, snarling in unison, and when the thrashing tumble had stopped she got to her feet with one arm blood to the elbow. The rest of the pack fled.
They were more wary after that, remembering belatedly that the Wildwood proper had its share of horrors too. But they were hungry for the sight of human faces, the sound of voices other than their own.
They had not long to wait. Three days after returning to what Michael thought of as the normal wood, they came upon a wide track going south to north. Following it (a relief to ride without ducking under branches and leaping fallen trees), they saw lopped stumps in the wood, abandoned brush huts and finally they came across a village set back from the road in a tiny clearing. They snuffed woodsmoke and heard children squealing.
'Civilization,' Cat said.
The children burst into view from the trees—a trio of tiny ragamuffins. They stopped as one and stood stock-still on seeing the pair of mounted strangers, then they gave a collective wail and ran off, crying out in the forest language, 'Fiesyran, fiesyran!'
The word could mean either strangers or enemies. In the Wildwood the two were seen as virtually interchangeable.
'Do we seem so fearsome?'
'Have you seen your face lately, love? You look like a grey-bearded killer.'
He thought Cat was making fun, but her own face when he looked at it was sober. Grey, he thought. I'm a grey man now.
He supposed they did look fearsome—mounted, for one thing. Few but the Knights went mounted in the wood. And armed as well. And they were scarred, their eyes wild, their faces filthy. Their clothes were bloodstained and ragged, black with mud, resewn a hundred times. They had taken to wearing short capes of deerhide with the hair turned outwards to ward off the rain, and dangling from their pommels were lumps of smoked venison, inadequately wrapped in one of Nennian's spare habits. Cat's beauty was hidden behind a mask of dirt and a tangle of matted hair. It was hard to tell if she were a woman at all, for she was as slim as a tall boy and the long blade of Nennian's bronze knife hung wicked and glinting from her waist.
Men came hurrying out of the trees with their tools grasped in their fists. Half a dozen, then ten, then fifteen—they gathered in a silent crowd with the children and a few women behind them. Michael felt very weary.
'Pax vobiscum,' he said.
They started at that, muttering amongst themselves. The Ulfberht drew many stares. Finally one man stepped forward. He was as barbarous looking as the rest, clad in deerskins and rough wool, but his head was shaven.
'Et cum spirito tuo.'
THE BROTHER'S NAME was Dyrnius, and he made them welcome despite the reservations of the other villagers. They stayed for three days, resting the horses and themselves. Cat caused a minor sensation when she cleaned herself up and the men saw her face properly. She was as lovely as ever, but it was a fine-edged loveliness now, as sharp as frost. She was as slender as a sapling, her eyes huge in her pinched face. Purplepink lesions, healed and half-healed, old and new, striped her body, and in the nights Michael kissed each one, mourning. He made love to her as though he were afraid his weight would snap her in two.
The village was the last settlement of men before the Wolfweald, a forgotten place that Brother Nennian had come to twelve summers before and that the Knights rarely visited. The people were hungry for news once they had overcome their initial fear, and they were consumed with curiosity about the fact that the two travellers had come from the south, from the terrible depths of the weald. Michael and Cat had little to say to them.
On the third night, lying entwined in the hut that had been set aside for them, they heard hoofbeats off in the wood, galloping faint and far away, and the wolves baying at the new moon. They knew they were still pursued, and left on the fourth morning with the priest's blessing upon them.
Endless days, ceaseless travelling. They would stop for a while, and then move on as the beasts got close. The settlements grew in size and frequency; they passed other roads in the wood, saw the spikes of churches through the trees and bypassed troops of Knights who patrolled the forest tracks. They made slow time, always headed north, sometimes running across the signs of the tribes in the woods, glimpsing figures in the trees which were as wary as animals. Three times they came upon the remains of men burnt at stakes, and once they found an entire encampment destroyed, stinking with the unburied dead, alive with gore crows and foxes. The Knights were exacting revenge for the attack of the FoxPeople. It seemed like years ago.
'Where are we going?' Cat had asked him, and he had answered: 'To find Ringbone's people.' But that was only a half-truth. As spring edged into summer and they discarded the heaviest of their furs he told her at last that he wanted to go home. He wanted to return to the morning he had left and be given his boyhood back again. They were heading for the cave mouth they had entered this place from, the one unchanging door that would lead him out at the bridge in his own world. And he asked her to come through it with him.
He thought for a moment that she would fly at him. Her eyes blazed. But it was her sudden tears catching fire from the sunlight. She said nothing and they travelled the next two days in a stiff silence, nor could he draw her on the subject. It became absurdly maddeningly taboo.
They became aware of being watched again, but it was not the wood this time. There was hooted laughter in the trees that degenerated into snarling, and they thought they saw faces in the branches looking down on them as they rode. Little things began to go wrong. The biggest waterskin somehow developed a leak. The horses went intermittently lame. Michael's girth split in two and he discovered that teeth had gnawed it thin. Cat shouted Mirkady's name into the trees, sure that the Wyrim were behind it, but there was no reply.
'They've left me,' she whispered. 'I'm not one of them any more.' Nothing Michael could say would cheer her. The guilt of it twisted like a cold blade in his stomach. Whatever life she had led here before his coming, he had destroyed it
—and now he planned to desert her. She must come with him. She had to. There was nothing here for her.
Midsummer came and went. Michael's hair turned almost white, though his beard was salt and pepper, grizzled as an old sea dog's. Cat looked like his daughter ... no, his granddaughter. They travelled north like a pair of exiles seeking rest, and all the while the pursuit never left them. It was a distant noise in the night, a rank beast smell in the dark hour before dawn. Though they had recovered from the worst ravages of the weald, they grew worn and irritable with the constant watching. The day they finally chanced upon one of the fox men out on a solitary hunt, Michael almost killed him, riding him down in a mindless reflex. It was only when the bruised tribesman shouted 'Utwychtanl' desperately that he lowered his sword, the red haze leaving his eyes. Recognition took him, and he heard his own joyful, relieved laughter creaking out of his mouth.
Celebrations. Feasting. A glad day that seemed free of shadow. Ringbone greeted them both with a grin splitting his usual reserve, and he and Michael embraced like brothers. Cat and Michael were feted as heroes, and Michael felt that this, at least, was a homecoming of sorts, a return to familiar things.
They were greater in number, the Fox-People. They had taken in refugees from the Bear-People whose camp the Knights had gutted. There were almost four score of them, a healthy number, and a far change from the defeated, fearful people that Michael had last seen on the borders of the Wolfweald. They had fought their way back north, losing people in ones and twos all the way, but now they were in their traditional hunting grounds again and neither the beasts nor the Knights with their iron swords would shift them.
