A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  The battle at the village had been made into a song, a savage plainchant, and Michael realized that he and Cat had been elevated into something of a legend with these people. They were greeted with awe by the newer members of the tribe. Utwychtan, the man who slew Knights with fire and thunder and who dared the Wolfweald. Teowynn, the Treemaiden who knew the forest better than any of the hunters. They had become the beginning of a myth.

  But they had to move on. The beasts were closing, and Michael did not want to bring the Horseman down on these people's heads.

  Ringbone and some of his men escorted them through the wood—an aboriginal honour guard— and as the summer wound down into autumn they found themselves far to the north, the cold weather creeping up on them again and the nights becoming longer. But they became separated as the pursuit quickened and drew close. Wolves attacked Cat and Michael, taking the grey gelding that had carried Cat so far. They finally met up with Ringbone's folk once more with Michael feverish and wounded yet again.

  And something else had happened. Little by little the forest language that had leaked into Michael's head and made a place for itself there was disappearing. Words at first, then the construction of sentences. It was easier to understand it spoken than to speak it, but as the autumn drew on into an early winter he had to use Cat as an interpreter between himself and the fox men. As though this land were washing its hands of him, shutting him out now that he had decided to leave it. The thought made him bitter and sad.

  They had to seek sanctuary in a Brothers' retreat which the fox men refused to enter. Strangely enough, Michael could understand the Brothers' speech as he always had. It was something to do, perhaps, with their shared Christianity.

  There most of the tribesmen left, only Ringbone staying with them to the end, to the Utwyda. It was cold by then, and the woods had seen the first snows. With the fox man at their side, Cat mounted on a borrowed mule, they had stared out at the land beyond the forest, weirdly open and empty after the months and years spent under trees. And there they had said goodbye to the savage who had started off as a child's nightmare and who had become a friend, one of the precious few Michael had known. Ringbone seemed not to recognize the finality of this parting. He had never thought to see them again after they had disappeared into the southern woods, but they had survived and no doubt they would one day come back from this new journey.

  'Ai neweht yewenian,' he said, and that much Michael understood. Until the time you return.

  And then Ringbone melted away into the thick dimness of the trees, the wood that was his world. Cat refused to watch him go, and her face was white and closed, admitting nothing. The pair struck out across the bare hills for the last stage, to where a river issued from a cave mouth and formed Michael's road home.

  Looking back once, they saw the Horseman seated silently, watching them from the shadowy eaves of the Wildwood whilst the dawn broke open the sky above his head.

  THEY MADE GOOD time, for Cat's mule was a willing brute. By the evening of that day they were up in the hills, and the sylvan world they had sojourned m for so long was a vast dark carpet on the land below, its higher contours dusted with snow. It was eerie and exhilarating to be able to see in all directions, to have no dark hollows or overhanging branches to worry about. If the wolves continued their pursuit they would be obvious for miles away. Of the Horseman they could no longer see any sign.

  The cave and its river had not changed. For some reason Michael had expected it to be different, perhaps because the boy who had come through it that morning was gone. Now there was only a hulking, grey-bearded man with scarred limbs and the eyes of a killer.

  They made camp, lighting their fire by the riverbank and heating the meat of a two-day-old kill. Then they drank barley spirit that Ringbone had given them on parting, toasting him and his people.

  Still Cat said no word about Michael's impending departure. They sat on opposite sides of the firelight, leaning on their saddles whilst Fancy and the mule grazed peaceably nearby and the night swooped in overhead in a spatter of glinting stars. It was cold these nights. This far up in the hills there were banks of snow everywhere in the lee of stones and knolls, and the welkin was clear and sharp with oncoming frost. If it snowed again it would become warmer.

  These things he told Cat in a desultory fashion, knowing that if it snowed he would not be here to set his footprints in it. It was his last night in this world. In the moments before dawn he would take Fancy and swim up the chill river into the cave mouth, and he would never come back. Cat must know that, but she refused to speak and the twisting grief and guilt within him began to glow into anger against her stubbornness.

  'I'm going home in the morning, Cat,' he stated bluntly at last. She poked at the fire with a stick. The yellow light threw into relief the hollows under her cheekbones, the seamed scar at her neck where a wooden wolf had almost ended her life.

  'Will you come with me?'

  'No.' She looked up, and her pale face was shut against him.

  She seemed middle-aged, gaunt, like a saturnine spinster.

  'Why not?'

  'It's not my world there. I don't belong. You will be returning as a child, a boy, and I will remain the same. My place—my home—is here. Once I thought yours was also.'

  'I never said that.'

  A dry smile bent her mouth.

  'I told you before: I didn't think it would be like this. I didn't know what it would do to me. Christ, Cat, I thought it would be some sort of fairy tale complete with knights and castles.'

  'But it is.'

  'Not the way I imagined them. How could I stay here? You saw the Horseman at the edge of the wood. He'll never leave me alone and you neither, maybe.'

  'I'll take my chances.'

  'There are no Wyrim to look after you, Cat. Mirkady and his folk were on the Horseman's side all along. That's why they gave us the Wyr-fire. So it would transform us into something like them— something the Horseman could control.'

  'It saved our lives,' she said, her face becoming animated.

  'It wasn't meant to. We turned the wood's power against itself.'

  'Michael'—and her voice was full of scorn—'you don't know a thing about what you're speaking.'

  'Don't I? I've had a long time to think it out. You nearly became one of the Forest-Folk yourself, and even I felt the change that was possible. If it hadn't been for Brother Nennian—'

  'The priest who was going to confront the Horseman in his castle, the one who would have challenged the whole Wildwood if he could.' She was contemptuous.

  'Yes. That was what he wanted, and he saw us as a means to his end. But he kept me sane, Cat, or I would have been drinking that black water and having green fire fill my eyes just like you. I felt it too.'

  'But truth and justice and the God you follow won out?'

  The hostility in her voice shook him, but he ploughed on regardless.

  'If you like. Those wooden wolves attacked us because we were almost at the castle, and 1 was not going to change. The Horseman had failed, so he was going to destroy us. He didn't think the Wyr-fire was a two-edged sword.'

  She was silent, her face a mask of baffled anger and grief.

  'We can't stay here anymore, Cat,' he said softly, willing the words across the fire as though they were missiles. 'I love you, lass. Please come back with me.'

  There was a brightness in her eyes, as though the firelight had caught there and writhed behind their windows.

  'We've come a long road together, you and I,' she said. 'And yet we're back where we began. As though we came no distance at all. Like a dream.'

  Perhaps it was like a dream, he thought. A dream of trees and dark beasts, of other wonders. He could not speak. It was as though the width of the flames were a yawning gulf, Cat an unbridgeable distance away, lost for ever.

  'Oh, Michael—' she said, and her voice broke.

  They both moved in the same moment, crossing the distance, and were in each other's arms. H
e could feel her bones under his hands, the lean warmth of her, and he kissed the satin skin below her ear.

  'I can't,' she whispered. 'I don't belong. This place is where my bones must lie.'

  You will be the death of me, she had once said. The phrase came back to him and he felt as helpless as the boy he had so recently been. There was to be no happy ending, for either of them. This world did not work that way.

  They made love for the last time at the side of the fire, whilst around them the cold wind picked up and moaned round the treeless hills. When they slept at last the sky was crowded with dark cloud, the stars invisible, and in the darkness the snow began to fall, kissing their upturned faces and shrouding the hard earth.

  IN THE LAST dark moments before the dawn he left, the water iced around the banks of the river. Its chill grip made him cry out, and he clung to Fancy's mane as the mare struggled through the slow-moving current towards the dark cave mouth and the world that waited on the other side. He was going balk to his home, his boyhood, the land he had been born into, but half of him was still with the dark girl who watched from the snowy bank behind. He felt bruised and bleeding, tom in two, and as the black entrance closed over his head he was weeping like a child into the icy river.

  CAT REMAINED STANDING and watching long after he had gone, the cold spreading numbness into her limbs. When at last she turned back to the dead ashes of the fire she saw without surprise that the Horseman was there behind her, his steed breathing quiet clouds of breath into the frigid air. He reached out a hand towards her, and she had no longer the will to flee.

  PART THREE

  The Horseman

  TWENTY

  MICHAEL CAME THROUGH on the other side with a high wind tearing at his hair and the black branches of the overhanging trees roaring. Fancy powered through the freezing water and scrabbled to the bank, shaking herself. Michael hauled himself slowly in her wake. His clothes were hanging on him, hampering his limbs. He was weak and chilled. He lay on the bank in a grey pool of river water with his feet clutched by the swift current. His tears were a rawness in his throat. She had not come with him. He had lost her.

  Dawn was coming. Though the river hollow was full of the noise of the rushing water the sky was vast and empty beyond the trees, light glowing in the east and making its sure way upwards. He struggled to think, to remember how things had been when he had left all that time ago, but his mind was as numb as his soaked body. He threw off his stinking furs—much too big for him—and found the sword scabbard empty. The Ulfberht had been lost in the river. Remembering his family history, he knew it would not stay lost for long.

  His shudders of cold and the sobs that racked him merged into one and for a moment he stayed kneeling on the sodden riverbank, his face buried in his hands. He could feel the lithe freshness of his body, the lessening of his muscles' bulk. He was a stripling again, a thirteen-year-old with middle-aged eyes. His chin felt weirdly smooth as his palms touched it—as smooth as Cat's had been. And he had no scars.

  I'm a blank slate, he thought.

  No, not quite. He had those memories. He knew he would never lose them, even if he wanted to.

  Those first days in the Other Place, riding across a vast empty landscape with the air as clear as spring water.

  Firelight in a whispering wood, Cat's face an inch from his own, her body pressing against him.

  Hunting in the Wildwood with Ringbone watching the mist rise through the trees and the antlers of a stock-still stag become black branches against it.

  And the other side, the dark side.

  The eyes of the werewolf burning into him like malevolent coals.

  The Horseman waiting in the dark trees while gore crows flapped around his head.

  Brother Nennian's face before he died.

  Dream or nightmare, he would never forget. It was burnt into his brain.

  'Cat,' he whispered. And the cold had him shuddering again.

  Fancy nuzzled him, and he lurched to his feet. Things to do.

  He led her out of the hollow, and the rush of the water faded. There was dew-wet grass under his naked toes. He stopped to stare at the quiet meadows, the dark woods. Cattle moved in the field, staring at him and chewing cud. The birds were in the middle of their dawn chorus.

  The wind had a tang to it, a faint aftertaste of smoke and metal. He had forgotten how different it was here.

  He clinked open the gate and led the docile mare into the yard, unsaddling her once he had reached the straw-deep stables. She seemed none the worse for wear, as well-fed and sleekly groomed as the morning he had galloped off in Cat's wake. But her saddle was scraped and scored, hung with rawhide bags that gave off a sour, wet stink. The shotgun was still there also, rust along the barrel. He cleaned the tack as best he could, dumped the saddlebags behind sacks of grain in the tack room and patted Felix's huge flank as the heavy horse sniffed at him. Then he padded out across the yard, the wind cold on his skin. But the gale was dying. It would be a fine day once the sun cleared the eastern hills.

  He eased into the house, clicking the latch of the back door. The kitchen was silent, the range glowing red and a clock ticking endlessly to itself. The house seemed tiny, enclosing, and for a second claustrophobia rose like a cloud in Michael's throat. There was movement upstairs. His family, waking.

  He made not a sound as he ascended the stairs, wary as an animal. He closed the door of his room behind him, hearing the clump of feet on the landing. His grandparents, his Uncle Sean, his Aunt Rachel. All here.

  How long had he been away? One, two years? Or the fragment of a morning?

  He crept into his bed and found Cat's smell there on the sheets. He buried his face in them and wept bitterly.

  'MICHAEL, MICHAEL, TIME to get up! You'll be late for school.'

  And faintly, from down in the kitchen:

  'Where are my clothes? Who's taken my trousers?' Uncle Sean, discovering Cat's long-ago theft.

  'Someone's been in the larder. Mother of God, we've been burgled!'

  Who's been eating my porridge? he thought, and smiled faintly. Cat would have laughed.

  They forgot him, in the hubbub. When he came downstairs there was an early sun flooding the kitchen and the entire family, Mullan included, were toing and froing as more missing articles were noticed.

  'My best pan.'

  'That apple pie I'd just made.'

  'We never heard a thing.'

  'Must have been a tramp or something. All he took were food and clothes.'

  'And my best pan!'

  'No one heard anything. You're sure?' One by one they shook their heads.

  'The dogs didn't even bark,' Pat added uncomfortably.

  'I thought I heard the horses moving about, but it might have been the wind unsettling them,' said Sean, his dark widow's peak of hair tumbled down over his forehead.

  'The horses!' Pat and Mullan cried at the same second, and they both shot out of the back door.

  Michael's grandmother shook her head. 'Never seen the like of it,' she said, and she sank into a chair.

  None of them was different, Michael realized, none of them had changed. It was not a shock to see them again. He had a feeling that in a few days his memories would be like so many dreams.

  His grandmother put on a huge pot of tea to brew and Sean went out to start work, muttering that the cows would not milk themselves. Michael was lost in thought, and when Aunt Rachel asked him sharply if he had washed his face this morning he barely heard her. She shook his shoulder, and he raised his eyes to stare at her.

  'What?'

  She backed away, pale as paper. 'Nothing, nothing.'

  'Almost time for you to be off, Michael,' his grandmother said over her shoulder. She was frying bacon and eggs and the exquisite smell was drifting about the room, bringing the water into Michael's mouth. Presently she set a steaming plate on the table for him and smiled. Her smile drained away.

  'Are you all right, Michael?'

  Irritably
he told her he was, and began wolfing down the food. In the heavy silence that followed he looked up to see Rachel and his grandmother staring at him, and realized he had been stuffing the greasy food into his mouth with his fingers. He wiped his hands on his shirt, a shamefaced grin on his face.

  'Better be off,' he mumbled.

  'Don't forget your bag,' his grandmother said faintly.

  He grabbed it and ran, feeling the cool outdoor air on his face with relief. He had been sweating in the kitchen, and the walls had seemed too close, the ceiling too near his head. It was like being buried alive. This was better, though there was still that tang in the air that made him screw up his nose. He could smell the horses in their stables, the fragrance of Mullan's pipe, cow dung from the pastures and a hint of fox from the back field where most of the chickens had their nests.

  That diesel smell—the tractor. And he spat to get it out of his mouth.

  Mullan came out of the stables leading a pennant of smoke and striking sparks off the cobbles with his boots. 'Mike!' he called.

  'What?' Michael was uneasy.

  'Have you been mucking around with the tack? It's all ahoo in there, and there's a saddle looks like the light riding one but is scratched to shit. And then these—' He produced a rawhide bag shiny with grease and usage that Michael knew contained the remnants of a winter hare, caught in another world. The miasma of just-rotting meat wafted from it.

  'Maybe the tramp that was in the house left it there,' Michael conjectured.

  'A tramp or a bloody cave man.' But Mullan stopped and took the fragrant Peterson from his mouth. 'Christ Almighty, Mike. What happened to you?'

  'What's wrong with me?'