by Dan Vyleta
Through all this I am standing half in, half out the coach. I want to ask Price why he stopped, and who’s attacking us; whether he has a second gun on him; what sort of trick it is he thinks he is playing. I am so filled with questions at that moment, all of them there, present to me all at once, that my head feels light with them, as though thoughts are air, no, lighter than air, are buoyed by the magic of balloon gas, and all the same I cannot get my legs to move, am frozen, rooted, grown into the doorway of the coach at foot and hand.
Then Price is hit. The swing of a bat, an axe, a sledgehammer: invisible, trailing a bang like an afterthought. What sort of gun is this that slams a man into the side of a coach and leaves his chest a hole open for perusal?
Then it’s my turn. I feel a punch, then heat, a branding iron plunged into my temple. My last thought is another question of sorts, mute wonder at the fact that neither Price nor I found time to shroud our fall in Smoke.
Then hard hands grab me from behind.
As metaphors of death go, this is one I can believe.
When one remembers under what conditions the working-people live, when one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and corner swarms with human beings, how sick and well sleep in the same room, in the same bed, the only wonder is that a contagious disease like this fever does not spread yet farther.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS, THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND (1845)
IN THE WOODS
Thomas goes down hard. It’s Charlie who is pulling him. The force of it surprises Livia: he grabs him at throat and shoulder, kicks his feet out from under him. Anything to get Thomas away from the door. Out of the line of fire. On the way down, Thomas’s shoulder collides with the edge of the seat. It twists the body and makes him land facedown, his arms trapped beneath him at odd angles. He may well have broken bones. Then again, what does it matter? He is already dead. Livia saw him being hit. Something dislodged itself, some clump of him, of his face, his head. It flew through the air. She will see it to her dying day. Livia’s face is speckled with his blood.
And still it isn’t over. Another shot sounds—the fifth, the sixth?—rips a hole in the door the size of a fist. Then the whole coach buckles and leaps. It is as though even the wood and wheels are trying to get away from the shooters. For a breath it stops, gathering strength. Then it leaps again, tilts, topples. The next moment the very ground has given way and they are falling, rolling, her scream drowned out by those of the horses. The impact throws them into a tangle of limbs and breaks open the coach like a conker: sunshine above, the play of sun and cloud.
It is only when she sees the trees that she understands what has happened. She should have thought of it before: she knows this road, has ridden it a hundred times. Across from the old windmill, running parallel to the road, is a sharp dip—almost a ravine—that drops some seven or eight yards, down to the edge of a forest below. In mortal terror, the horses must have dragged them off the path. Three hang dead within the harness now, two bleeding from gunshot wounds, the third with its head twisted backwards atop its broken neck. It’s the fourth horse that keeps on screaming. Two of its legs are broken, spill out of their knee joints like limp flippers. When she starts moving, it is to get away from these screams. Next to her, Charlie is already pulling Thomas’s body out of the wreckage. It takes courage to turn and help him lift it up over his shoulder. She is glad she finds this courage and gladder yet she isn’t asked for more. They run for the trees, away from the attack, Thomas’s head, chest, and arms dangling limp down Charlie’s back.
The forest is dense. There is no obvious path and, near the edge, shrubs cut their clothing to shreds. Fifty steps in, their progress improves. There’s older growth here, tall trees that throw mighty shadows. They eat too much light for shrubs to grow along the forest floor. Dead leaves swallow their boots up to the ankles; their crackle follows them, the forest’s whisper, showing their pursuers the way. Neither she nor Charlie suggests slowing down.
They have to stop eventually. The weight of a second body becomes too much for Charlie. It is astonishing he has borne it for this long. He staggers and drops his burden; falls down next to it. When Livia slides to her knees beside him, she finds Thomas’s blood has soaked Charlie’s jacket, at the small of his back. It is impossible to think of him now as Mr. Cooper.
“Is he alive?” Charlie asks. He has to speak through his panting breath, sneaking the words out in between inhalations. It gives an odd, dispassionate quality to his voice, like he is too exhausted for emotion.
“We must feel his pulse,” she answers. “It’s easiest here. At the throat.”
Without hesitation, Charlie sticks his fingers into the blood that covers Thomas’s neck. The wound above is still bleeding. It’s the left side that’s been hit, near the ear. There is no way of telling how deep the wound is. Leaves have become stuck to it, and clumps of dirt, as though the earth is already claiming him as hers.
“I cannot feel it, Livia. My hands aren’t working.”
When she bends to slip her own fingers onto the side of Thomas’s throat, she sees what he means. Each of her fingers is drumming, her own pulse shoving blood all the way down to its tips. It is impossible to feel anything. She lets go, bends lower, presses one ear right to Thomas’s mouth. Tell me your secret, she thinks. Are you alive? Charlie bends down with her, lying almost flat on the forest floor, his eyes level with hers, his mouth three inches away. There is something to his face. She studied it all through the coach ride, as they sat there, too awkward to talk. The cast of the mouth, the wide-open eyes. The kind of face saints sometimes have, painted on the glass of church windows. A face so little guarded, so unmarked by Discipline, it taunts her, terrifies her. What sort of creature is he that he can afford to live so naked and not sin?
Something reaches her. Her ear. Not a sound: a sliver of air, like the lick of a tiny tongue.
“He’s breathing.” She lets go of Thomas, turns around, lifts her skirt and starts ripping off strips of petticoat. “He mustn’t bleed to death.”
Behind her, Charlie starts praying, his voice light and firm.
ф
The woman appears like a ghost. One moment she isn’t there, then she steps out of the shadow of a tree, four yards away. Charlie does not notice her. He is desperately trying to fashion a bandage out of the strips of cloth Livia has supplied. They have no water, cannot clean the wound.
“Quick,” he keeps berating himself. “We must keep moving.”
When Livia puts a hand on his shoulder, he does not react.
The woman has no colour. She wears a sort of shift made from patches of leather and cloth. Everything about her—her clothes, her skin, her hair—is uniformly grey, the shade of spent embers. Ashen. She stands motionless, her knees bent, back humped, ready to run. It reminds Livia of nothing so much as a cat watching the goings-on of the kitchen. Curious, shy, twitchy; its ears pressed back against its skull. And all the while the woman is smoking, smoking just as steadily as she is breathing, rhythmically, ceaselessly, adding dye to her ashen skin.
Charlie notices her at last. He starts. His movement is answered by the woman’s twitch. But she does not run, not even when he rises and shows her his blood-smeared palms.
“Our friend is wounded,” he says, calmly, soothingly, the way Charlie can. Evidently he has decided the woman is not their enemy. Livia agrees with his assessment. Whoever she is, she does not belong to those who shot at them. She is part of the forest. There may be a sharp stone hidden in her fist, even a knife. But not a gun.
“We need help. Water. A doctor. Are there people around?”
The woman does not answer but moves two steps to the side, to gain a better view of Thomas. Livia follows the look. The bandage sits loosely around his head and face. Already it is spotted with red. It will soak through before they have carried him a quarter mile.
Charlie risks taking a step. The woman stares at him from her grey face.
“H
elp, you understand. Someone who can tend his wounds.” Charlie points to Thomas’s head. “Stop the bleeding.”
She does not react but allows him to approach to within two yards. Charlie folds his hands together, an altar boy’s gesture, fingers closed, thumbs resting against the bridge of his nose.
“Please!”
The word does something to her. It is familiar; frightens her, recalls her to a moment in her past. Her head jerks down, her shoulders up, much like a cat’s when startled by a noise. Then she tries it, her lips shaping themselves around the sound. Biting it off. Tasting it. Ready to spit.
“Plea-sseh.”
Her expression does not change with the word. It is as though she has unlearned her face’s gestures. It convinces Livia once and for all that she is living here, alone in the forest, without human contact. All at once the old servants’ stories come back to Livia, about the ghost in the woods. Her father’s soul. His reason: gone missing, roaming amongst trees at dawn. But this woman is as blank as he, and smokes with equal abandon.
There is something odd about her Smoke, however, something that sets her apart. It takes Livia several moments to put her finger on it. She smokes with equanimity. Steadily, near-constantly, always the same light-grey Smoke, subtle like a mist. It clothes her more thoroughly than her rags. In summer, Livia catches herself thinking, she will walk the woods naked, dressed only in her Smoke. The thought brings a flush to her cheeks. Anger, embarrassment. Envy? A moan from Thomas cuts short the thought.
The stranger reacts to this moan. She looks over at Thomas, digs in a sort of satchel that seems sewn onto her very garment, draws forth a fistful of something green. Moss. Dry as it is, it retains an eerie emerald sparkle in the grey of her hand. But she won’t step closer, not until Charlie withdraws and pulls Livia with him, taking her hand as naturally as though he’s held it all his life.
“Please,” he repeats and with a sudden burst of movement the woman sprints over to Thomas’s side, falls on her knees, takes off the bandages and scatters them carelessly by his side. She presses the moss into the wound, starts digging between a tree root, finds a fistful of clammy mud, and smears it on top. Livia starts forward but Charlie’s hand stops her. They can see the mud caking in the cold of the air. The woman, meanwhile, is digging in her satchel, dismissing a dozen herbs, until she pulls out a dried flower and forces it into Thomas’s mouth, slipping it under the tongue. All this takes her barely a minute. As a last step, she knots the strips of soiled petticoat together and quickly slips them into her bag.
When Livia and Charlie walk over to Thomas, the woman withdraws again, crouches in the dead leaves of the forest floor. The poultice looks barbaric and like it will crumble away at the slightest touch. But the bleeding has stopped. Charlie makes to pick Thomas up, then stops.
“We need to get him to safety,” he says to Livia. “Do you have any idea where we are?”
She closes her eyes, tries to picture the forest and the surrounding land. It is hard to transfer distances from horseback to this stumbling through the woods.
“There is a village somewhere. At the far side of the woods. Near the river. But it’s several miles.”
Charlie nods, turns back to the woman, takes a slow step towards her. She does not move. His voice is very gentle when he speaks. Gentle, but not condescending. How long, Livia finds herself thinking, since this woman has been spoken to as a human being not a beast?
“We need help,” Charlie explains. “People. A village. But we don’t know the way.”
When the woman does not respond, Charlie falls to his knees, clears a patch of forest floor. He uses a stick to draw into the dirt. A house, the way a child would draw it: a box with a roof. A stickman, then another, clothed with the triangle of a skirt. When the woman still does not react he adds a clumsy river, writhing like a worm. This means something to her. She copies the picture with her fingers in the air.
“The river? Do you know where it is?” Livia’s words sound hard to her ears, after Charlie’s gentle whisper.
“Riv-ver.”
“Yes, the river. There are people there. Will you lead us?”
The woman seems to consider the request. She crouches motionless for a moment, cocking her head. In profile, she becomes strange all over again, her features foreign: the jawline strong, the small dark eye almost hidden in its thick fold. When she jerks her head to them and beckons, Charlie gives a sudden start.
“I have seen her before!”
“Where?”
“On a picture of your father’s, taken fifteen years ago. But there she had two heads.”
But he does not explain what he means by this, bends down and shoulders Thomas instead, out of whose face mud grows like a dirty tumour.
“Do you think we are being followed?” she asks him as he makes to set off.
“Don’t let’s wait and find out.”
ф
They walk for more than an hour. Very quickly Charlie tires of his burden and at Livia’s insistence they take Thomas’s slumping body between themselves, his arms slung over their shoulders, feet dragging in the leaves. Progress is slow and there is no way of telling how much distance they are putting between themselves and their attackers. The woman walks a good ten paces ahead, melting into the trees seemingly at will, then stepping out a few yards farther on and beckoning with her head. At long last they reach the river. They see it first as a wall of brightness cut into the dark mass of the trees: the sun is out and is hitting the water, reflecting up. It’s so tranquil it makes no sound. On the other bank the trees cluster thickly. Wherever they are, there are no people here.
But their guide has a reason for choosing this spot. She beckons them on, walking quickly along to the riverbank. Livia knows she cannot carry on much longer. Charlie too is staggering under Thomas’s weight, his breathing ragged, the head beetroot-red. There isn’t far to go: thirty steps on the woman stops and disappears in the shrubs to the side. When they reach the spot, she is gone, somewhere in the shadowy darkness of the woods. The riverbank is steep here. Swollen as the river is by the recent rains, they are walking no more than a yard above the waterline.
“Can you see her?” Charlie pants.
“No. But there is something behind this shrub. Something she wants us to find.”
It’s a rowing boat, not six feet long. The forest has very nearly claimed it. Its sides are overgrown with moss and the piece of canvas covering its top is weighed down with leaves and dirt from which grow the grey tendrils of dead weeds. When they slip off this cover, they discover two sculls lying in its bottom, along with a film of rotting water. The smell makes them gag. A bracket of rusted iron is let into each of the boat’s sides, to anchor the sculls. As she helps Charlie push the boat out into the open, Livia’s fingers unearth a carved crest within the moss at its prow. A boar, basking in the circle of a rising moon. She knows it at once. It’s her own crest, her family’s, the ancient emblem of the Naylors.
“My father used to disappear for days at a time. Going fishing. It was his one indulgence.” Livia shivers, is transported back to a distant time. Early childhood. Her father’s hand stroking her hair. “But that was many years ago.”
“Do you think it’ll float? The wood’s half rotten. But it’s tarred from underneath and the canvas kept the rain out.”
“Let’s hope it does. It’s the best chance we have.”
ф
Getting the boat into water proves to be hard work. The bank is too high to just drop it in, and they are forced to drag it back a whole ten yards to find a better point of access. Charlie tests it before they heave Thomas in, moving gingerly from prow to stern as though expecting to fall straight through. But the boat holds; turns gently with the slow, even current, ready to run.
There is no way of lifting the wounded boy in without both of them getting soaking wet. Livia’s heavy dress clings to her most indecently. Then, too, the boat is too small for three, and sinks low into the water as they c
lamber in. At last, shivering, they find an arrangement that distributes their weight, with Thomas stretched out along the bottom, prow to stern, and Livia curled next to him, in uncomfortable proximity to his mud-smeared face. Charlie sits above, manning the oars. The smell of rot is strong in the bottom of the boat and it is difficult not to associate it with the wound. Before they set off, she peeks over the side one last time and catches a glimpse of the woman crouching amongst roots two steps from the riverbank. Something connects her to Livia’s father, and Livia is afraid she will never learn what. Then she is gone, out of sight, and all there is, is the sound of the river below her, and the heat of Thomas’s body far too close. Charlie is nothing but a dark shadow above her: the sun is out overhead and burns her eyes whenever she looks up. It must be right around noon.
Time passes. The boat drifts with the current, then jerks forward with every push of the oars. At some point Livia becomes aware that they are taking on water, that the wet on her legs and back is not just the result of their earlier soaking. There is nothing to be done. She cannot bail the boat, there is nothing to bail it with. Then the sound of the river changes underneath the rotten planks. She looks up, alarmed. The sun has moved enough now that she can watch Charlie’s back rocking with the rhythm of his sculling. He is facing upstream, keeping to the centre of the river, too tired perhaps to turn and see what lies ahead. Livia raises herself to her elbow, risks a peek. The river is no longer flat and glassy. There are shallows ahead, rocks peeking through the surface, and the water is speeding up. Just as she thinks this, a scraping sounds from underneath her and fresh water seeps into the boat.
