by Paul Kearney
That is what I tell myself as I make my way deeper into the woods.
FOR A WHILE, I think it is my own heartbeat I hear thumping in my throat, a soft rhythm. But after a while I realise that the sound is beyond me, in the trees up ahead where the land rises. The path is narrower here, the brambles and dead bracken starting to choke it, and when I look up I can see the sky darkening beyond the treetops, and here and there the glimpse of a star.
The cloud is clearing, and it seems with that the cold deepens, and the snow begins to crunch under my feet like barley sugar between the teeth. A light grows in the forest, soft and silver. The moon must have risen, and though it is nothing like full it seems incredibly bright. The snow seems to take on a glow of its own, glittering like crushed glass. And still, I hear that strange thumping beat off in the wood ahead. A drum, tapped lightly, now slow, now fast.
And I hear a woman laugh.
The sound is shocking in the moonlit wood, a noise that does not belong there. It brings me up short, breathing hard, my heart beating as fast as the drum.
And there is light, a yellow flicker of it in the deep part of the trees.
Another fire, another night of moon.
Now I am all at a stand. I want to go back. I do not want another adventure in the night, with a knife at the heart of it. But I am angry at myself for the fear I feel now. I am angry in general, at father, and Miss Hawcross, and the bloody Turks, and the memory of running across Port Meadow and wetting myself like a baby. The anger is stronger than the fear.
I start walking again, but now I leave the path, and pull father’s old cap around my head like a hood, and move at a crouch, zigzagging through the trees towards the far flickering light. The knife is cold in my pocket. It feels ugly to the touch, and there is no reassurance there.
Closer. And now I see that the fire is bright and tall, much bigger than the one that was on the Meadow. And the drum is being tapped light and fast. And the woman’s voice starts up again, but now she is singing, a rippling, soaring song in a language I do not understand, and yet it is familiar too. Her voice is beautiful, and the song is old and foreign and like nothing I have ever heard in England before, sometimes almost tuneless, sometimes as piercing and beautiful as a sunlit shard of ice.
Closer, the trees hiding me, the moonlight fading as the firelight grows, until at last I hunker down behind a mound of snapping ochre bracken, and I can take it all in.
There are perhaps a dozen people around the fire, some sat upon bedrolls, as comfortable looking as though they were lying down on sofas in a warm room. I see the shine of the flames on metal pots, on earrings – the men as well as the women – on jewellery, and there is a lovely savoury smell. A big blackened pot is hung over the edge of the fire by a single bent branch and a stout woman with a blue headscarf is stirring it.
An old man taps a little drum he holds between his knees, his big brown hands almost hiding it, and another woman with long skirts and a fringed shawl is singing the beautiful song. She is very pretty, with eyes as large and dark as a horse’s, and heavy eyebrows. She looks something like the people who come to the Committee meetings – foreign, eastern – but there is none of their defeat in her face, and her teeth are white and perfect. I feel a sudden rush of memory, as though I had seen her before somewhere, but it passes as quick as a bursting bubble.
They look so similar, all of them. Dark, lean men with sharp faces, dressed shabbily, with kerchiefs tied round their necks, their trousers out at the knee. Some of them are barefoot, despite the icy cold. The women are better clad, the older ones with bright headscarves and dangling necklaces that glitter and gleam in the firelight. They have long rings in their ears, and the one tending the pot has a jewelled chain sparking low on her forehead, hung with little coins that jingle as she moves.
Somehow, these people remind me of the long-lost city where I was born. They are exotic, out of place here in the cold northern wood. I can tell just by looking at them that they are from so far away.
As I am.
Something else, moving in the firelight. I thought it was low-hanging branches but now I see that dangling from the trees surrounding the campsite are lots of little shapes made of twigs, and as I frown and study them I see that they are all the same. They are stars, five-pointed, bound with roots – crude, but rather lovely too. And somehow disquieting here in this place. These people have ornamented the trees, hanging these symbols up like somebody decorating their drawing room. How odd.
I hear something close by in the briars, a rustle, and I turn.
And right beside me the thin dark boy with the wedge-shaped face is crouched, the firelight playing on his long nose and lighting up his eyes.
I start to leap away with a sharp cry that I cannot hold in, and once more, I feel the hard grip of his hand as he seizes my arm, harder even than before.
‘No, no no!’ I hear myself scream, though I am barely aware of anything except his face, and the eyes.
The singing stops. There is a spatter of exclamation around the fire, words I do not understand. With my free hand I reach into my pocket for my knife, but it takes two hands to open it, and he is holding my other arm fast.
‘Leave me alone!’ And I punch him with my free fist, my knuckles lighting with pain as I strike his cheek. He growls, and grabs my other arm, pinioning me, throwing me on my back in the bracken and the snow. I try to kick him, but he sets his weight atop me and crushes me down. I struggle harder than I ever have in life before, but he is far too strong. Our faces are mere inches apart and I raise my head to try and bite him, but he butts me back with his hard skull, and lights go off in my head and I taste blood at the back of my throat.
‘Luca,’ a voice says, ‘Let her up.’
It is the young woman who was singing. I blink away the tears and see that they are all standing around us now, silent. The dark boy looks at me, and all of a sudden he gives a grin and lets go my wrists and springs up, and I am lying there in a circle of strangers on the edge of the firelight, and overhead the moon is bright and fat and the trees are black as veined coal beneath it.
6
THEY LOOK AT me as though I am some insect which is set upon a pin, like those I have seen in the glass cases of the Pitt Rivers in Oxford.
A quick gabble between them in a language I don’t understand, and then the older woman, with the coins on her forehead, says;
‘What you doing spying on us, girl?’ Quick and sharp. There is more authority in her tone than I have ever heard in Miss Hawcross’s, and I answer at once.
‘I wasn’t spying.’
‘I calls it spying,’ she snaps, and to the dark boy she says, ‘Bring her to the fire Luca. Gentle, mind.’
Luca holds out his hand to me with his head cocked on one side. I slap it away. ‘I can get up by myself.’
No knives at least. They stand around studying me again.
‘Just a child,’ a young woman says in English. ‘No harm here, Queenie.’
And to me she says, ‘Come to the fire me dear. No-one will hurt you.’
I rub my throbbing head where Luca’s skull clipped it, and decide that I have nothing to lose. It would be just too absurd to turn around and run away now. It would be childish. And I am not a child, whatever they say.
‘All right.’
The warmth of the fire is very welcome, as I have begun to shiver; and the smell of the food in the pot is something to relish, whatever it is.
‘Sit by me,’ the young woman says with her bright, white-toothed smile. She is really rather beautiful, and her black hair falls in long curls down her back. I sit beside her on a lumpy bedroll of canvas and old carpet, and about the fire the others resume their seats, except for Luca and one of the older men, who talk quietly in their unknown language. Luca looks at me, then nods to his elder, and without another word he sidles off into the dark woods as quietly as a fox, to disappear in a twinkling.
What a sneak, I think, and I rub the bump on my head a
gain.
‘Is you alone?’ the older woman, Queenie asks me, hands on hips. Her eyes are dark as sloes and she has a strong face, as broad as any man’s. The coins glint on her forehead. She looks like a figure from some strange faraway past.
‘Yes.’
She studies me a second, and then grunts, and leans down by the fire. She ladles some of the stuff out of the cooking pot into a battered pewter bowl and it is passed around the fire to me. The young woman retrieves a beautifully worked wooden spoon out of her skirts and places it in the bowl. ‘Eat, me dear. You look half starved.’
I am hungry, and though I cannot see what it is I am eating, I begin scooping it out of the hot bowl with a will. Some kind of beef stew, and there is wild garlic in it, and thyme, and the taste transports me for a moment to another, warmer world. I wolf it down while they all watch, silent as the trees.
‘Where be you from?’ Queenie asks me in a softer tone.
‘From Jericho, in the city,’ I answer between steaming mouthfuls.
Queenie frowns. ‘That ain’t right. You ain’t no more English than me, my girl. I sees it in your face. You is from somewheres far south o’ here.’
‘I am Greek,’ I tell her. I look around the fire as I say it, and I realise with something of a pleased shock that I must look just like these people here. I am dark and olive-skinned with brown eyes and black brows, just like them.
‘Are you Jews?’ I ask them.
Queenie laughs, a rasp of humour, and it travels round the fire.
‘We’m of an old and wandering folk girl, a tribe as ancient as you Greeks – or the Jew-folk too, comes to that. The ignorant calls us Romani, but we ain’t the same as the travellin’ people, though we has dealings with ’em. Egypt is where our kind hails from, in the old, old part o’ the world.’
‘Then what are you doing in England?’ I am quite unafraid now, with the good food in me and the warmth of the fire and the beautiful smiling girl leaning against me.
‘What is you doing here?’ Queenie darts back.
I set down the empty bowl, and decide that the truth cannot hurt. ‘The Turks drove us out, and killed my family and took our home.’
There is a buzz of talk at this, the men speaking among themselves. Queenie gives me a long hard look. I can’t keep her eyes. There is something in them that is as sharp and shrewd as a black crow.
She gives a snort, and then turns back to the fire. Kneeling down, she sets some more sticks upon it, placing each one as carefully as though it were made of glass. Then she blows softly into the heart of them, and the flames lick up and dance yellow and blue, and the heart of the fire glows bright and hungry. She waves her hand through the flames as though she is caressing them, and it seems for a second that the light jumps up brighter to meet her fingers.
‘I was askin’ what you are a doing in this here wood, creeping up on us like a little stoat,’ Queenie says. ‘Care to tell us that, Greek girl?’
‘I… don’t know,’ I say, keeping carefully to the truth. ‘The moon and the snow… I had to get out in it. And there was something about the woods that just drew me in.’
Queenie looks up at that, and I see her glance at the moon. One of the older men, the one who had exchanged words with the boy Luca, rattles on harshly in their language, shooting suspicious glances at me as he does. I don’t like him. He has grey whiskers, and looks like a bright-eyed rat in a flat cap.
Queenie frowns. ‘There’s more you ain’t told us, child.’
The girl beside me tightens her arm about my shoulders. Now it feels less like affection, and more like a restraint. ‘Speak up dearie,’ she hisses to me.
My heart is thumping fast again. They all stare at me. Who are these people, so strange and foreign, and why are they out in the woods on a night like this? The fear comes back, cold enough to make the food I have just eaten turn to a cold lump in my tummy.
‘I saw that boy before,’ I say, reluctantly. ‘Luca. I saw him on Port Meadow weeks back. He was with some other men, and they had a fight.’
I wish I had Pie to hold. Their eyes are all so sharp and cold now, and the firelight almost makes them seem to shine yellow, blank as glass.
‘You saw what happened then,’ Queenie says.
‘I didn’t tell anyone, I swear,’ I say, gulping. ‘Fat Bert started it. He had the knife. The boy was just fighting back. I won’t tell anyone.’ I feel the tears hot at the back of my eyes. There is no warmth in the fire now, and I am crushed by the darkness of the great wood around me, and the dark night, and the loneliness of it, here in the middle of these people. They could bury me here under the trees in a corner where I would never be found.
‘She’s shaking like a shitting dog,’ one of the men says, and laughs horribly.
‘Shut your mouth, Job,’ Queenie snarls. She has long brown teeth from which the gums have pulled back, and they look almost like fangs.
‘I believe her,’ the girl with her arm about me says. ‘There’s no harm in this one, Queenie. A proper little flat she is.’
‘T’ain’t for you to say, Jaelle. Job, call the boy back in, and we’ll get his word on it.’
The old rat faced man raises his head, and gives a yipping series of barks which make me jump, so high and sharp they sound. Then he shrugs, and begins filling a clay pipe, all the while shooting looks at me, at Queenie, and at the others around the fire, who sit as silent as a jury in a trial. Some of the men nod at me, but the women are all slab-faced and hard.
After a few minutes, Luca is there again, breathing fast. Steam rises from the open neck of his shirt, and his hands are covered in dirt, as though he has been scratching in the ground with them.
‘What’s the matter?’ he demands, quick and sharp.
‘This one saw you on the Meadow that night not a moon past when you had your trouble,’ Queenie tells him.
‘I know. I told you.’
‘So? What thinks you? Did she blab, or leave it be, like she says?’
Luca stares at me. ‘She’s just a little ’un, Ma. Ain’t no harm in her. She even had a doll with her.’
‘That makes no matter boy.’
The girl, Jaelle speaks up beside me. ‘Why would she be here if she had run to the peelers?’
‘She might be leading them on us,’ Rat-faced Job says, puffing on his clay pipe, eyes narrow as coin slots.
Luca laughs. ‘She ain’t leading no-one nowhere. The wood is empty but for us. I been coursing it like a hare. She’s on her own, Ma, I’d take an oath on it.’
Queenie holds my eyes with her own black stare. ‘Luca is my boy, and I taught him never to lie, ’cept to flats and peelers. What about you, girlie. Do you lie?’
‘Sometimes,’ I can’t help but say.
Queenie cackles. ‘Well, there’s truth at any rate. My boy didn’t mean to kill no-one, Greek girl, and was like to have been cut himself if he hadn’t done what he did. Even by law, what he did wasn’t wrong, though no judge would ever let it go at that.’
‘I saw it,’ I say. ‘He didn’t start it. It wasn’t his knife.’
‘No, it weren’t.’ Queenie looks at me with her head cocked to one side. ‘Our folk has enemies you know nothing of, girl.’ Then she raises her head, and it is almost as though she is sniffing the air. When she meets my eyes again I can’t keep her gaze, but drop my own.
Finally she throws up a hand.
‘She ain’t lying. Whatever she saw or didn’t see, the girl is straight, just a babe in the woods. And unless I miss my guess, there’s old blood in her. I can smell it plain as paint. Let her be, Jaelle.’
The girl at my side looses her grip on my shoulders, and I half-see something disappear into the folds of her skirts, a shine of metal barely glimpsed before it is gone.
‘I knew you was all right,’ she whispers to me, her white teeth close to my face.
‘She can’t be staying here all night though,’ Queenie goes on thoughtfully. And she turns back to tending the pot above th
e fire
‘You no home to go to?’ she asks without turning round. ‘People to miss you this time o’ night?’
‘We have a house in Oxford, Pa and me. We’re all that’s left,’ I say, and as I do, I feel a moment’s panic as I think of father looking at his pocket-watch, and I wonder how long I have been gone, and how I am ever going to get back through the dark woods on my own, for I have been quite turned around by events, and I cannot even tell if I am facing back towards Oxford, or into the heart of Wytham Great Wood.
‘Time a girlie like you was warm in bed,’ Queenie goes on. ‘The deep wood is no place for your like. Not tonight.’ More sharply, she says; ‘Luca, see her home. All the way, mind’
‘Aw, Ma!’
‘Do as you’re bid. She don’t know which way she’s turned. I seen rabbits in a trap with more sense.’
‘I can find my own way home,’ I say, stung by her words.
‘Not this night, you won’t, girl. The moon is up, and the snow is deep, and will be deeper yet before morn.’ Queenie turns to Luca.
‘This is no place for such as her. And if she’s missed, then there’ll be questions asked, and things kicked up that are better left buried. You see her to her doorstep, and no mischief on the way neither. You hear me boy?’
Luca nods sullenly.
‘Then be off, the pair of you, and keep the moon at your backs, and move quick and quiet.’
‘I know what to do,’ Luca says, and he jerks his hand at me.
‘Come on then, you. Time’s a passing.’
I stand up, and the girl Jaelle rises with me. ‘You be careful now dearie,’ she murmurs, and her dark eyes take the light of the fire and seem to shine with it, and her grin is very white and not altogether pleasant.
I turn to go, and the rest of them around the fire all watch, and say nothing.
‘What are you doing out here?’ I ask Queenie on an impulse. ‘Out in the cold and the dark?’
‘We’m living life as we see fit to do it, dearie,’ she replies. ‘We’ve been this way since your folk was young, and the Christ-man was unborn, and the world was wide and full o’ marvels. This is what we is, and like as not this is how we’ll die.’
