A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  He was in the wood, inside the wood, spliced into the fabric of the trees. And it was within him also, its roots the network of his arteries. For a brief moment he thought he knew what the Other Place was, where it lay.

  But it was trickling away. His elbows were deep in mud, his face buried in the hollow of Cat's collarbone. He slipped out of her, flaccid and spent. It was wet down there, slick as melted butter.

  'Mine,' Cat murmured.

  'What?'

  The sudden grin was an inch from his own. She kissed his nose and her legs scissored his waist. 'All mine.'

  Fornication, he thought. That's what it was. The biblical word made him shiver. He stood, ashamed of the wet sheen that plastered him. He pulled his trousers up hurriedly. Cat twitched down her shift.

  I've fucked a fairy, he realized, the awful, forbidden word twisting like a snake in his mind. Was that a mortal sin? He ruminated momentarily on confession, what the priest would say about this in the little dark box. What had he said to Rose when she told him?

  'Will you have a baby?' he asked Cat. She was poking the fire composedly.

  'Do you want one?' She seemed amused.

  'What we did. That makes babies. I know.'

  She began to laugh. 'You worry too much, Michael. Sit.'

  He did as he was told. Her back was filthy from the wood floor. He brushed leaves from it and found himself leaving his hand there, savouring the taut muscle under the shift. The dark hair was a midnight cascade down one side of her neck, thick with the detritus of the trees.

  'What do you mean when you said "mine"? That I'm yours?'

  'And I'm yours too,' she said, her eyes fixed in the fire. 'We belong.'

  Baffled, he took his hand away. He needed to pee, but could not while she was here.

  'Listen, Michael.' She became animated, twisting round to face him. She took his hands in hers .'How would you like to go somewhere? Somewhere strange that you've never seen before, somewhere far away?'

  'The wolves...' he began doubtfully.

  'It's not just wolves. There are other things, too. Castles and cathedrals, cities and sailing ships. It's a whole world, Michael.' He remembered the glimpse he had been given, the empty land of the Bann valley with the single light off in its darkness.

  Werewolves and wilderness.

  Dream or nightmare? He didn't know. But this was real, here: this girl and what they had done. She was as real as earth and wood and stone, as solid as himself. Though only he could see her.

  '1 don't know.' It was late. His grandmother would be worrying. How long had he been out here?

  'You think it's a fairy tale, Michael, but it's not. It's out there, all of it. I could show you things.' Her hand caressed his stomach.

  'I—I don't know. It's late. I've got to go.'

  'They'll worry. You've said it before.'

  He felt strangely guilty. 'Are you still cold?'

  'You warmed me.'

  His face burned in the firelight.

  'Come with me' she said. 'Stay with me.'

  He stood up, retrieved the shotgun and his bag. The desire to urinate was a hot pressure.

  'I can't. I can't, Cat.' He had a moment's vision of the pair of them riding along a bright road in sunshine with the pennants of a castle flickering on the next horizon. The knight and his lady, like in the stories.

  The wood was silent and dark, water dripping from the leaves. His clothes were thick with mud. He felt stupid, heavy-headed. Cat's eyes were like two dark holes in her face. He wanted to do it again, and was ashamed of himself.

  'I love you, Michael.'

  His heart leapt for a second and he had to smile. Seeing that she grinned that wide grin of hers and stood up also. The shift was a disrupted pattern of light and dark, white cotton and black earth. Blood there too, he noticed, a patch like a strawberry at the top of her legs. Had he hurt her?

  She hugged him as though he were a child, as Rose had hugged him in the thundery nights. Their eyes were level. I'm tall he thought. Not a baby any more. A man, then?

  'I'm not going,' he said as she manoeuvred him into the hut and her deft fingers unbuttoned him.

  'Oh, I know.'

  He no longer had to go to the toilet. He saw her stand and let the shift fall to the ground around her feet like pale water. Then she was with him, on him, under him, her smell all through him, and he was marvelling at how fine it felt to touch those forbidden places.

  'Mine,' she breathed as he coupled with her. 'All mine.' They let the fire die, and were blind to the rising of the moon.

  IT ROSE OVER a vast forest.

  Leagues upon leagues carpeted the world in a dark sea which lapped at the shoulders of the mountains. They reared their hoary branches to the stars and at their feet moon-silver rivers wound patiently towards an unknown ocean. Hills and valleys alike were covered by the thick growth, and in the dips of the land mist gathered like lambs' wool.

  Here and there the turrets of a fortress jutted above the grasping oak and elm, lime and sycamore, horse chestnut and yew. In the river bottoms were willow and alder, brakes of thorn, and where the land rose there were birch, Scots pine and spruce. At their feet briars and bracken nestled, awaiting spring.

  Roads ran through the forest, and there were clearings hacked and burnt along their length, clusters of buildings usurping the hegemony of the trees and woodsmoke rising in the moonlight. They huddled together as if fearful of the dank woods, fenced off by palisades, guarded by crucifixes. In the midst of every hamlet the steeple of a church sprang up like a spike. But no men were abroad in this wide land, this moonlit kingdom. They locked their doors against the night, and in the darkness the beasts roamed unafraid, peering at the light behind windows, ruling the depths of the forests.

  Michael lay naked with the girl in his arms. The fire was dead, one solitary glede mocking him like a red unwinking eye. She was asleep, but he lay listening to the night sounds. Pheasant, with its harsh whirr, and the keewick of a hunting owl. Other, distant sounds he could not name. And once the deep, full-throated growl of some huge beast. The wood was alive with sound, a plethora of rustlings and shufflings. He thought if he lay still enough he would hear the very beat of this land's heart; enormous, bestial. Some night creature snuffled at the base of a tree yards away, invisible, and then padded off into the depths of the forest.

  'Cat.' Soft as a summer zephyr. 'Cat, wake up.'

  She stirred. He saw the dark eyes open.

  'You made it happen, didn't you? You did it. We're there again.'

  She sat up, pushing him aside. He thought her nose was sniffing the air. How far was he from home? How many miles or years or worlds away. He shook her roughly. 'Cat!'

  'Ssh!' Her fingers bit into his arm. Their lower bodies were entangled. His penis lolled like a severed umbilical across his thigh and he could feel the cold air bite into the sweat that still marked him.

  'Jesus, Cat, what have you done?'

  'Be quiet!' As sharp as a slap, but low, afraid of being heard.

  He could see nothing beyond their livid limbs. Their clothes were beneath them but the shotgun was invisible, off among the leaves somewhere. Fear shrunk his belly. He felt like a cave man at the world's dawning. Cro-Magnon man shivering in the prehistoric dark.

  'Get dressed.' Her voice was a hiss.

  They sorted out their clothes, fumbling and stumbling. He had even taken off his boots. There were dead twigs in them and leaves and old bark stuck to his coat like burrs. In silence, by touch, they dressed. He explored the leaf litter until his fingers struck the chill iron of the gun barrel. At once, he felt safer.

  'Davy bloody Crockett,' he muttered.

  They stood for a moment, listening. It seemed reckless to speak aloud, to make any noise. Cat bruised his lips with a kiss and then pulled him along by the hand. 'Come.'

  She can see in the dark, he thought. Those eyes. A cat, indeed. He stumbled in her wake as they left the hut behind.

  A few yards in the
impenetrable gloom, and he had forgotten where the hut had even been. His hand tightened on Cat's fingers. If he got lost here, that would be him lost for ever. Disappeared. His family would never know where he had gone.

  How did it happen? How was it done? One moment he was a quarter of a mile from the walls of his home, the next he was in some primeval wilderness. A dark fairyland, complete with wolves. The magnitude of the puzzle kept him silent as he shuffled along after Cat.

  There was something behind him.

  He knew it as surely as a blind man knows the direction of the sun. It was big—he thought he heard it expelling quiet breaths far above his head—and almost entirely noiseless. Like a horror film, the ones in the pictures where the hero is grabbed from behind.

  He let the weight of the shotgun ooze through his grip until his fingers were curled around the trigger guard.

  Crackling footsteps in time with his own. He tried to say something to Cat but she seemed intent on the way ahead, wherever that was. And his throat had seized up and puckered.

  He would turn around and give it both barrels like Audie Murphy, as Mullan had done with the werewolf in the back yard. Except that the werewolf had escaped unscathed.

  Magic or no magic, two shotgun rounds at pointblank range would settle anything's hash.

  He tore his hand loose from Cat's, pointed the gun and fired. The recoil threw him back into her and they both fell. He was deafened, blinded, bruised. Got you, you sneaking hairy bastard, he thought gleefully, but all that came out was a strangled wail.

  For a second he saw a massive torso lit up by the flash, man-like but not human, and what might have been a face above it, brutish, hulking. Then utter dark took him. He lay not replying to Cat's cries, her searching hands. Something crashed away through the trees in a chaos of breaking branches, but there was no other sound—unless it might be a cavernous muttering, bad-tempered thunder.

  'What did you do? What did you do?' Cat's fingers pried into his painful shoulder.

  'Ow, let go. It was a monster. I shot it.'

  'A monster? What kind of monster? Did you see?'

  A giant, memory told him. A troll. But he shook his head in her invisible face. 'I'm not sure, but I got it. It ran away.'

  Her ringing slap sent lights flaring across his vision again. For a moment he was too shocked to do anything, then he reached out to where he thought her throat might be, but encountered only empty air. 'What was that for?' Tears of fury stung his eyes.

  'You're not at home now; Michael. You can't slaughter things with your brave guns. There are different rules here. Listen.'

  He did, still smouldering. The woods were silent— deathly silence, the hush like that of a desecrated church.

  'It doesn't mean you have to slap me. A bloody girl, too.'

  'Oh, be quiet, you stupid boy.'

  That word again. He gritted his teeth. He'd get her back for it.

  'We have to put some distance behind us, and quickly. We must leave this place. They'll be flocking like bees.'

  'Who?'

  But she ignored him. He was tugged to his feet and yanked along like a recalcitrant child, and he felt like one, sulking and chastised. Brambles raked his face and the lower branches strove to gouge holes in his skull.

  'How do you see in this?'

  Again he was ignored. They ploughed through the midnight forest in silence.

  By the time they halted he was staggering with tiredness. He no longer cared where they were or where they were going. The shotgun was a dull ache of weight. Cat grasped his free hand and set it against the rough bark of a tree.

  'Climb.'

  'You must be joking.'

  'Climb, if you want to see the morning.'

  'I can't, holding this.' He brandished the shotgun in the darkness.

  'Blast you. Give it to me, then.' He could have sworn she shuddered as she took the weapon from him.

  'I can't see a thing-—'

  Noises off in the trees, distant growls. A long, high-pitched howl.

  'Climb!'

  He did as he was told. The rough bark tore his palms; He straddled it and hauled himself up with quivering limbs, encountered a stout branch and clung to it, grunting. There were others here. He hauled himself on, feeling his way, running his hand up the trunk of the tree until he met something his fingers could grip. Once something small and clawed scampered over the back of his hand and he almost fell. He gave in to cursing, low and venomous. He was too tired. His arms would not support him and there was nowhere for his right foot to go.

  A hand, guiding his ankle. 'Put it there.' And his foot was safe, taking weight.

  'That's enough,' she said after a while. 'Ease out along the branch.' He inched out fearfully, the drop an unknown height in the blackness, His branch was a yard thick, and others arced close by. He was able to sit back and relax. He heard Cat rustle beside him and then the cold weight of the shotgun was plumped into his lap. 'There. Now we can sleep.'

  'Sleep!'

  A palm caressed his cheek, and then she was kissing his ear, the corner of his mouth, and her hair tickled his nose. 'I'm sorry, Michael.'

  'Aye.' Mollified, despite himself.

  She slipped a slim arm about his shoulders and he felt safe as houses. He dipped his head under her chin. Bloody hell, he was tired, sleepy as a child.

  He did not hear the pack coursing below them later in the night, the hoofbeats that battered the empty air above the tops of the trees, the trolls calling out to one another.

  THE LIGHT IN his eyes woke him. He prised open his gummy lids, stiff as wood all over and beginning to shake with cold. For a second he was utterly bewildered by the swaying branches, the birdsong and the brilliant early-morning light sifting through the leaves. Then it flooded back. He shifted in Cat's arms and the shotgun slipped out of his lap and fell to the ground with a far, muffled thump.

  'Bugger.'

  Cat stirred but did not waken. His leaning weight had made her arm blue and cold and he rubbed it gently, coaxing the blood to move. She was severely beautiful in the dawn, though dirt smeared her cheekbones and thorn scratches lined her skin. He brushed a sun-brilliant beetle out of her hair. His stomach rumbled and complained and he thought wistfully of bacon and eggs, hot tea, soda bread. And a bath.

  But there was something fine about being here on talking terms with the birds, seeing the sun come up. And having this girl beside him. In a strange way, his hunger made it more immediate. Once he had ground the sleep out of his eye sockets he felt as sharp as a knife, and licked dew off a coppery leaf to moisten his tongue.

  When he looked back she was awake, her eyes enormous and filled with sunshine, like the shallows of a summer sea. She was flexing and stretching, pointing her dirty toes.

  'Is it safe now?'

  She yawned and smiled. 'Safer maybe. We can get down. You slept well.'

  'Where are we going?'

  'I'll take you home. You're not ready for this yet.'

  He surprised himself by feeling let down. Perhaps it was the crystal clearness of the morning air, the jewel light of the sun, the bird-loud trees. Adventure. Wonderland.

  'Can you explain any of it?'

  She shook her head, vastly amused. 'Not in your terms. Why seek reasons?'

  'I don't know. There's a reason for everything.'

  She began lowering herself to the ground. They were a surprising way up, he saw, at least thirty feet. A red squirrel regarded them curiously from a nearby branch, unafraid.

  He retrieved the shotgun, cleaning dirt from the muzzle anxiously whilst Cat sniffed the air and peered through the trees like some lithe animal. He wanted her again, but could not bring himself to say anything.

  The forest floor was a lot less congested than it had seemed the night before. There were bare spaces under the trees, the brambles dying back with the turning of the year, and the sun flooded the ground through the thinning leaves. Wood pigeons somewhere, and a thrush. Other songs he could not identify. Apar
t from that there was near silence, broken only by the clamour of his empty gut. He was filthy, and so was Cat. She seemed not to mind, wood creature that she was.

  Michael broke open the shotgun and pocketed the spent shells. Cat shot him a disapproving look, and he snapped the weapon shut without reloading. There was a glass rattle in his game bag and he knew that the flask was broken.

  'I'm for it,' he said with a groan. Out all night without a word. His grandmother 'Would flay him alive.

  Cat beckoned impatiently and they started off into follow-my-leader again, a steady lope through the trees.

  'How do we go from one place to another?' he asked when his breathing had-settled a little. The shotgun jigged painfully on his shoulder.

  'We walk, being poor,' she replied shortly.

  'No. You know what I mean. From my home to here, this place. How do you do it, how do you get us through?'

  'It's not my doing.'

  'Whose then?'

  'Yours maybe?'

  'Don't be daft. Tell me, Cat. Or do you not know yourself?'

  She slowed to a walk and allowed him to catch up. 'There are holes here, leading to where you have your home. There always have been. They move and shift, disappear and reappear, but some are permanent. And we can go through them.'

  'How do you know where they are?'

  'I just know, likeI1 know which way is north, or where open ground lies.'

  'Is it all forest like this over here?'

  'Mostly. The forest stretches for uncounted leagues in all directions. Beyond it are hills and a great river, and mountains to the south. Huge mountains no one has ever climbed.'

  What about towns, villages, people?' Fox-People.

  'We have those also.' What are they like?'

  'You will wear me out with questions, Michael. These things you will find out soon enough. For now I am keeping a lookout for breakfast.'

  'Breakfast!'

  'Hush! Not so loud. Breakfasts are caught on the hoof in this country.' Her eyes danced at him and his throat tightened with ... love? Lust? The feeling was powerful enough to dizzy him. He felt like shouting aloud.