Quarter Square

by David Bridger

  A new noise came from above, like slow wing beats that went from quiet and distant to loud and close in the space of a few seconds, until they hovered overhead.

  What now?

  I couldn’t see the creature, but from the flurries each wing beat caused in the highest tree leaves, it had to be something big.

  The uglies had disappeared. Whatever was above us, they didn’t want to tangle with it.

  Min sang a few notes. Her voice wasn’t strong, but it was as pure and clear as ever.

  The wing beats departed in the same direction from which they had arrived. Silence fell around us.

  I peered down at Min. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I definitely don’t know what those things—” she pointed at the bushes, “—were. Never seen anything like them before.” She stared up into the treetops. “And I don’t know what that was either, but I’m glad it came.”

  “What did you sing?”

  “I said thank you.”

  I hugged her. “I know you don’t know what it was, but what do you think it might have been?”

  “It isn’t a thought really. More a feeling.” Her voice was muffled against me. “It felt like an angel. Not that I’ve ever met an angel knowingly, but if I did, I think that’s what it would feel like.”

  I shook my head in wonder. “That’s what it felt like to me too. Not at the time. When it was here, I was terrified. But now that it’s gone, remembering it…”

  She squeezed me tight. “Yes.”

  Chapter Ten

  Stiff and groggy, we left before dawn. I was going to destroy the shelter, but Min stopped me.

  “Leave it for him to find. Anything that delays him is to our advantage.”

  This wasn’t the first time I’d frowned at one of her decisions. Sometimes I wondered if being immortal meant she didn’t have to worry about acting too stupid to live, but the thought was ignoble, and she did have all the memories I lacked. I had to keep trusting she knew what she was doing.

  Twenty minutes after leaving our overnight camp, we retraced our steps for ten minutes, then climbed a tree and set off in a different direction. Although walking backwards with heel-to-toe foot placements made my tendons ache, I was getting better at it.

  Min was more sprightly moving through the treetops than she had been, but we still went cautiously and indirectly towards wherever it was that she was taking us.

  We talked as we travelled, and she helped me remember more about my magical talent.

  “There’s this trick you’ve used before to help us escape from Tyac. You call it growing. You sort of blend us into a tree or a wooden panel.” She sighed. “I hate it.”

  I glanced at her in surprise. “Why?”

  “It’s like the worst kind of claustrophobia imaginable. It terrifies me. But it’s saved us many times.”

  “Saved me, you mean, don’t you? He never kills you, does he?”

  “He doesn’t kill me, but he breaks my heart by killing you. That’s what this is all about.”

  When we stopped for an hour at midday to let me catch up on the rest I’d lost during my attempt at a night watch, I tried to blend myself into a tree.

  “You normally stand with your back to it. Apparently you connect with its rush of life.”

  The potential to connect was there. It was like being filled with a thrumming flow, yet also being alert and aware of everything the tree felt. Through this tree I sensed what other trees in the vicinity felt, but I couldn’t do anything that came close to what Min described as blending into it.

  I practised growing during the night while she slept, improving as the hours passed and using it to listen out for wildlife moving, close by and far away.

  In the middle of the night I felt a party of humans and dogs jogging a long way off. The sensations were so strong, I could almost see and feel boots thudding on the earth, leather armour rubbing and squeaking, clunks of wooden shields and clinks of iron weaponry and dogs panting hard. I could even count them: twenty-six men and twelve dogs. I woke Min to tell her about the war party.

  She sat up stiffly and rubbed her eyes. “Tribes have always fought each other in the Wild. People are pretty much the same wherever they live. We’d better take care we don’t walk into a battle.” She peered through the canopy of trees overhead. “And we’d better get going.”

  “It isn’t dawn yet.”

  “Even so—” she stood and stretched, “—Tyac may have recovered by now. He’ll be coming soon.”

  We stopped again at noon to allow me a quick nap. As I dropped off, I hoped I would soon be able to sleep on the forest floor at night as easily as Min could. She was eager to be off again as soon as I woke up, but I insisted on trying to grow into a tree one more time. If this was such an effective trick against Tyac, I wanted to master it.

  I rested my spine against the bark of a tree, closed my eyes, stilled my thoughts and became part of the tree in my mind. This, my tenth or twelfth attempt in twenty-four hours, didn’t feel any different to all the others. But after a few minutes Min gasped, and I opened my eyes to see what had made her anxious.

  She stared at me. I tried to ask her what was wrong and discovered my lips could only move slowly. I didn’t have the breath to utter a single word, and I felt the tree around me. It touched me everywhere, outside and inside, hollow and solid at the same time. I tasted the living wood. It had become part of me. I’d become part of it.

  We stretched our roots to drink from the deep earth and welcomed the clean sunlight warming our leaves and the breeze tickling our uppermost branches. Vibrations from the movements of other creatures in the forest came to me through the wood, and I translated those vibrations automatically into sounds.

  With a focused effort I raised my right hand until it broke free of the bark. Nothing splintered, and no sound came. I swiveled my eyes down without moving my face to find my hand and arm covered in bark, appearing as a limb growing from the tree.

  Min shuddered. “I can’t bear this.”

  I crooked my finger to beckon her, but she shook her head and hugged herself.

  It took considerably more effort to extract myself from the tree than it had taken to blend with it. When I finally made it back into fresh air, I stretched and shook myself, blinking rapidly and working my jaw. My mouth was dry, and it took time for me to work up some saliva.

  “Come on, then. You said this has saved us from him many times.”

  She shook her head again, her eyes wide with fear.

  “I managed to do it alone, but that’s no good. If he finds you, he’ll find both of us. We have to do it together.”

  “You can’t imagine how awful this is for me. It comes naturally to you, but I’m terrified. Imprisoned inside a living tree, unable to breathe or move or speak. It’s a nightmare.”

  “Are you saying you won’t do it?”

  She didn’t respond for several moments. Then she closed her eyes, took deep breaths and gripped my hand. “Keep hold of my hand. Don’t you let go in there.”

  We chose the biggest tree around and stood side by side with our backs against the bark.

  “Ready?”

  “Just do it. And don’t bloody let go of me.”

  This time it was easy. I simply closed my eyes, relaxed my breathing, stilled my mind and blended with the tree. Min held my hand with a dry, loose grip. I squeezed her fingers, and her answering squeeze came back in slow motion. She was inside the tree with me.

  A new vibration came to my attention: a man running steadily many miles away. My tree sense translated the vibrations so that I saw him as a camouflaged shape moving among other camouflaged shapes.

  Breathing heavily, the man crouched to study the ground.

  I eased us free from the wood.

  Min fell to her hands and knees and gasped for breath. “I hate that.”

  “Tyac’s coming.”

  “Where is he?” She was instantly alert.

  “Near the
cave we passed yesterday, searching for our trail where we climbed over the nettles.”

  “Let’s go.”

  We found a stream shortly afterwards, jumped into the water and followed its current for an hour.

  “We might make the Axe village tonight,” Min panted, “if we keep going.”

  “Do you know exactly where it is?”

  “No. I’ll find them okay when we get into the area, though.”

  “Can’t risk it, love. He’s too close and moving fast.”

  “He’ll move a lot faster in a few hours, when he’s a wolf.”

  “Run.”

  Half an hour later we climbed high and travelled through the trees for a hundred yards before shinning down an oak tree into a clearing and setting off in a different direction to the one we’d been going before our climb. Then we doubled back to the clearing as dusk fell.

  I didn’t need to grow into a tree to sense the monster now. By resting my hand lightly on the bark, I could hear him coming. He’d found our midday resting place and was in the stream we’d followed earlier. He was hot on our trail, and the way he made the tree vibrate terrified me. After ensuring we’d left no sign of our presence, I pressed my spine against the oak.

  “You ready?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.” She shot me a brave smile. “We’re going to be in this tree all night, you know. Don’t move until well after dawn. Even if you think he’s gone and it’s safe, keep us in here.” She patted the tree trunk and tried to hide her shudder. “He’s a clever bastard, and he’s a lot better at this kind of thing than we are. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  We climbed up to balance on two thick exposed roots, with our backs to the trunk. Min gave me a tender kiss on the cheek, and I grew us into the oak.

  It was difficult to measure time accurately inside the tree, but maybe half an hour went by before Tyac made his appearance. I heard him coming all the way, and as he closed in, I noticed something new: creatures of the forest fell still and silent as he approached, and stayed that way until he’d gone. Min and I weren’t the only beings who were utterly terrified of him.

  He trotted along the trail we’d followed, and passed the point at which we’d climbed a tree, a hundred yards to the east. But he hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he skidded to a halt, dropped to all fours and snuffled around to our tree of ascent. He seemed to fly up the tree, ripping out leaves and branches and throwing them down. His trip through the treetops was equally frenzied and rapid and destructive. The hundred yards that had taken us twenty minutes to cross, he spanned in three or four.

  Again, he charged a few feet past our departure point, then swung around a supple treetop and landed squarely in the top branches of our oak tree.

  I felt his heavy presence through the wood. I heard his powerful heartbeat and felt the pressure of his paw pads, the sharp dents of his claws and his breath on my leaves. If I could have shivered in my voluntary prison, I would have done so when hot saliva flicked from his fangs onto my innocent bark.

  He plummeted in a controlled fall and landed in the clearing on all fours: alert, his massive muscles bunched under the coarse hair of his back and shoulders.

  Min squeezed my fingers, and I returned the pressure, knowing she needed the reassurance as much as I did.

  Tyac sniffed the ground, then reared to his hind legs and trotted off in the direction we’d taken earlier. I followed his progress with all my senses as the forest fell silent around him. He reached the point where we’d turned back, and didn’t waste any time investigating that area before returning to us.

  I squeezed Min’s fingers again to warn her of his imminent appearance.

  He entered the clearing, his ears cocked and his huge head swinging from side to side as he walked directly to our tree. He inhaled deeply, smelling us. He must have known our scents intimately.

  He circled the tree, then circled the clearing on all fours, sniffing the ground closely and investigating every tree and shrub.

  Finally he stood in front of us and looked directly into my face, if only he knew it. I was grateful that I couldn’t tremble, trapped as we were inside the wood. I felt a tiny pressure from Min’s fingers and stared back into the werewolf’s mad eyes, only inches from my face.

  Tyac prowled the clearing again and tested several places for our tracks before returning to our tree. He peered at the bark, the thin crust of wood that was the only thing between him and us. He leaned forward to sniff it, and the stink of his breath assaulted me with its stench of carrion and death. Then he licked the bark, as if it were a delicacy to be savoured.

  If my bowels had been free to move, they would have done so there and then.

  Eventually Tyac left. Min and I stayed exactly where we were, sealed inside our living hiding place, while I followed the monster’s movements, which wasn’t difficult, because in his rage he ripped every bush and scarred every tree along his path. He roamed a long way, zigzagging randomly, before he stopped moving, although the creatures of the forest maintained their silence.

  When he shifted, he moved stealthily. There was another heartbeat in his vicinity, and at the same moment as I realised he was stalking something, he hit it hard. I knew terror on behalf of the deer he had hunted, even as its heartbeat stopped.

  As he stalked back to us, I warned Min with my fingertips before he dragged the deer into the clearing, tore it to shreds and ate it. He threw the remnants aside as he stood, belched and wiped a front paw across his muzzle.

  Wolves howled in the distance. For some moments, Tyac cocked his head to listen, then trotted from the clearing.

  I followed his progress. He travelled in a line and jogged at a steady speed.

  I pressed Min’s fingers for the hundredth time, but this time she didn’t apply any pressure in return, and I imagined her reining in her terror. I didn’t know if this would work, but I did my best to soothe her mind by transmitting calm thoughts and feelings to her through the wood.

  Tyac didn’t return. He kept moving away from us for a time, then went to ground. I detected no further movement from him and eventually lost any sense of his location.

  We stayed in the tree until well after sunrise. When finally we broke free of the wood, Min fell into my arms and sobbed.

  “I felt your thoughts. They were soothing, like your voice. Thank you, love. I’ll never get used to that experience, but thank you for your thoughts. They helped.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We were jogging through broken patches of knee-high grass beneath a dense tree cover when my skin tingled and I pulled up to a sharp halt.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Min called over her shoulder. “It’s the ward. It’s strong and fresh. We’re nearly there.”

  Two miles farther on we stood on a rise of ground and watched the leisurely activity inside the enclosure below. The Axe settlement covered an area about half the size of a football pitch and consisted of wooden huts inside a high circular fence of split logs.

  “I thought you said this was a temporary camp. It looks pretty permanent to me.”

  “It is temporary. Kind of. They’re nomadic herders, and they follow traditional routes. That’s how I knew roughly where to search for them in summer. Every time they return to one of their settlements along the way, they tidy it up.” She frowned. “It does look well established, though, doesn’t it?”

  I counted twenty-seven huts laid out in a horseshoe shape, with the open end aligned to the palisade gateway. At the far end stood a substantial oval-shaped building with an apex roof of timber shingles, but all the other huts were circular constructions with low-hanging conical grass roofs. Tethered goats grazed at the edges of three of them.

  Eighteen people were visible in the open ground between the huts, and a bunch of shrieking kids chased one another round two of the huts. Like the adults, they were naked.

  “Will said there are cannibals in the Wild.”

  Min chuckled. “I’m sure he did. Don�
��t worry, love. The Axe won’t eat you. Look, they have cattle penned over there. And you’re my consort, remember.”

  “Let’s hope they remember.”

  “Come on, wimp. Let’s go and meet some old friends.”

  I needn’t have worried. People noticed us the moment we walked through the gateway into the enclosure, and curiosity spread through the community. Within minutes the entire tribe seemed to be crowding around us, and they weren’t as naked as I’d thought. The women were bare-breasted, but all the adults wore loincloths. Everyone smelled warm and earthy and fresh. They belonged to the forest.

  They were happy to see us. Some of them clapped, and several women sang together in a drawn-out single note. There was no doubt they knew exactly who Min was and accepted me as her companion.

  The crowd fell quiet as a tall, well-built man worked his way through the jostling bodies. He must be the leader of the tribe, and I couldn’t help admiring his impressive silver mane, which merged with his beard and chest hair.

  “Welcome, Min.” He spread his powerful arms wide. “Your presence honours us.” He bowed deeply to her, then grinned at me. “Welcome, Cayal.”

  Min acknowledged his courtesy with a small inclination of her head. It was a rather regal gesture. “Thank you for welcoming us, Chief. What is your name?”

  “I am Shad.”

  “Shad, in this life Cayal is known as Joe.”

  “Welcome, Joe,” he repeated, and in murmurs my name rippled through the assembled people.

  “Prepare a dwelling for Min and Joe,” Shad commanded.

  Three women peeled away from the back of the group and disappeared inside one of the nearest huts, then reappeared with their arms full of blankets and stone jars. A boy trotted into the hut with a broom, and clouds of dust billowed from the doorway into the air. It appeared Min and I would be accommodated in the tribe’s storeroom.

  “They speak English,” I whispered.

  “What did you expect? This is the Wild of Britain. There are other languages in the Wild. Original languages, with the kind of developments you would expect after hundreds or thousands of years. You’ll hear Welsh in Wales and Gaelic in Scotland, of course, but the common language everywhere is English.”