A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  'Fay.' Mirkady looked strangely thoughtful. 'Now there's a name to conjure with. Is it apt, I wonder?' And his hellish eyes studied Michael with something like seriousness.

  'You know how he is called now, Mirkady,' Cat grated. 'He gave the name in blind trust. If you abuse him I swear I'll have it out of your hide.'

  Mirkady held up a long hand. 'Fear not, Cat. It may be l know more of this whole drama than you.' He smiled a smile that seemed almost human in its warmth. 'Let the door be opened.'

  A hush fell, and beyond the glimmer of the fireflies Michael saw that they were at the foot of a mound. It was dark and bare, the grass free of the leaves that carpeted the wood floor, and at its summit a stark old tree squatted, its trunk as thick and round as a hay rick. The branches splayed out overhead, and from them dark bundles swayed and swung, some small, some large—and from these the sweet decaying smell drifted.

  Corpses.

  Some were men, some small enough to be children; but there were dogs and cats, sheep, even a horse, all hanging cadaverous and rotting from the huge limbs of the tree. Strips of long moss and ivy hung there also, like tom funeral shrouds, and here and there in. the grass Michael could make out bumps and hummocks that were the remnants of other offerings, fallen like overripe fruit from the boughs.

  But there was a new thing. A blade of light appeared like a misplaced sunbeam, stabbing from the mound itself. There was a snatch of music, exquisite as a ripple of silver bells, and the light broadened, rays lancing out to throw Michael and the others in relief and send shadows streaming behind them into the trees. A door rose out of the mound, flooded with light, and all the while that maddening, beautiful music tinkled, tugging and evocative. Michael walked forward into the light without a thought in his head save the music, and was conscious only that there was a great crowd, a host, a throng, pressed around him and laughing, saying welcome.

  HE REMEMBERED TALL walls rearing up in sunshine, white as chalk. There were battlements and flapping flags, and men in bright armour mounted on huge horses. There was a bridge spanning a wide, glittering river with girls plashing and diving, sleek as salmon. And there was a vast hall hung with golden tapestries and gleaming weapons, its long table set with silver goblets and sparkling crystal. The bread he ate there melted in his mouth, and the mead filled his belly with fire. The people were beautiful: stately and royal. Mirkady was a wise king, grey-haired and venerable, his fingers sparkling with rings and a crown of bronze oak leaves on his head. Dwarmo was a broad-shouldered knight whose dark curls cascaded around a shining cuirass, and who clinked glasses with him and laughed like a gale. Other lords and ladies sat in robes trimmed with ermine and beaver, circlets of thin gold around their brows. The men were athletic, dark, the women coy and graceful, like half-tame deer, and they shot veiled glances down the table at Mirkady's guests.

  Only Cat remained the same, dressed in her stolen clothes and smelling of sweat and earth. Midnight hair hung round her face like a hood, and her eyes were two emeralds in a face still smudged with smoke.

  Wonderland. He had found it.

  Things became blurred. He remembered leaning on Dwarmo, the pair of them drunk as coots, a dizzy gliding drunkenness that made Michael's tongue free and easy. They stood on a battlement that looked out on' to a sea, an ocean of trees extending away out of sight, hung over with a golden haze to infinity. Michael had the feeling that he had gone deeper, had travelled down some tunnel into a more faraway place, and he knew with sudden certainty that there was an infinity of such places, one for every dreamer in the world, perhaps. But the moment was smothered with laughter and the feel of Cat, warm but unyielding beside him. That was somehow sobering.

  'Where is this place?'

  It was the king, Mirkady, who answered.

  'The Wildwood, where else?' Then he smiled at Michael's puzzled face. His eyes were green, like Cat's, but a darker, murkier green, like the weed that floats on a stagnant pond.

  'Think of the world as a glove,' he said. 'One garment, many fingers, each leading away to its own place, and the glove itself is meant but to fit something larger.'

  That made no sense, and Michael's bubbling happiness was marred by bafflement.

  'The world is the ground beneath your feet. As long as it stays there you can walk on it. It is a road the same as any other.' It was Dwarmo. He looked like a statue hewn out of silver and the goblet was as small as an eggcup in one knotted fist. When he smiled Michael saw that his canines were longer than they should have been. Muzzily, he wished he had not drunk so much mead at the feast.

  Feast?

  'Who is to say where you are?' Mirkady asked lightly. 'Some say there is a different world for every story ever told or untold, that there is no such thing as the here and now, only the unfolding of infinite possibilities, all of them real in some place or other.'

  'In which case,' Dwarmo said, vastly amused, 'there is no such thing as a mistake.'

  Michael was lost. The battlements, the forest, these companions, they blurred in his eyes as though they were on the verge of metamorphosis. He dragged his gaze away.

  'Cat.' She at least was real, unchanging. She appeared as stern as a nun in the golden sunlight—like the nuns who had taken Rose away in the black car. The black car driven by the tall priest into the night...

  Rose.

  He could no longer remember his aunt's face. When he tried to summon it up all he could see was Cat. They were almost twins in his mind. But Rose was dead—wasn't she?

  She had died having that baby she had told him about. She had never come home.

  A voice singing a coronach off in the trees... Dead love, a lost lover.

  I'm in mortal sin, Michael. I'm a fallen woman.

  The mead (had it been mead?) was fogging his mind. He felt he was on the edge of something. It was on the tip of his consciousness, hovering like a swimmer about to dive.

  There had never been a funeral. Why?

  Unless she was not dead. Unless she had simply disappeared somewhere...

  Michael's eyes widened. The other three regarded him unsmilingly. Was it imagination, or were King Mirkady's ears pointed, his mouth too wide to be human?

  Rose.

  'She's here,' he said, the knowledge bursting in on him. 'This is where they took her. They brought her to this place:

  'Who?' Dwarmo asked. His armour was somehow dimmed, ragged at the edges.

  'You knew about Rose, Cat. That's why you brought me here. You knew!'

  Again, that resemblance, the almost-recognition.

  There were no battlements, no white walls. They were standing in an earth-ceilinged cavern with tree roots lacing the black soil like old bones. In their hands were wooden cups, and up and down the cavern old hides and furs covered the bare earth. They were spattered with clay plates and jugs, gnawed bones, discarded scraps. A host of nightmarish creatures of every shade and form sat busily around a flaming fire pit, the light of their eyes as green as jade and their hubbub an indecipherable din of noise.

  'Bravo,' Mirkady said, and he winked one brilliant eye at Michael.

  'My God,' said Michael weakly, and the din at the fire lessened. 'Your God,' Mirkady agreed. 'Not ours.'

  Michael ignored him. He grasped Cat by the upper arm. 'Who are you, Cat? Where did you come from?'

  'I was not baptized,' Cat said. 'That is all I know. It is how the Wyrim were able to take me in.'

  'Infants left out by the villagers to die, unwanted and cursed, we claim as our own,' Mirkady said. 'It was the Horseman left Sister Cat here, at the Howe, shouted the name "Catherine" into the trees and then rode away. But he always comes back to claim his own—Michael Fay.' Mirkady's voice was almost a sneer. 'You make our sister mortal, so that she feels cold and hunger. You make her human, and so the Horseman hunts her.'

  'Is it true, Cat? Did you know?'

  But she would not meet his eyes. She looked disturbing in his uncle's clothing, at once seductive and child-like.

  'Th
e Horseman sired her, as he sired us all in the beginning,' Mirkady went on implacably. 'We are kin to the wolves of the forest. Everything in the Wildwood belongs here, but you and your kind.'

  'The Brothers,' a low murmur from the fire pit said, and there was a general growl of agreement.

  'The tribes, the villagers. They were all one once, the remnants of a proud people driven over the mountains from the lands beyond and led by a crippled man into the Wildwood so long ago that they do not remember themselves. So they clear the trees and bum the ground and rape their crops from it—call it theirs ¬while we, the dark folk, who have been here always, are pushed into the deepest parts of the Wood, to lurk in the impenetrable fastnesses there. Some worship us as the spirits of the woods and the earth and hang their offerings in the trees, but more often we are hated, feared as children of the Devil.'

  'So call me a changeling, then,' Cat said bitterly and pulled her arm out of Michael's grasp. But he was hardly aware of her, of any of them.

  Rose was in this place somewhere, still alive. He was sure of it.

  He could find her and bring her home.

  'That's why I'm here,' he said, dazed. Cat broke away from them and squatted at the fire pit to swill from a discarded cup. She stared into the flames as though she were contemplating some private hell.

  'We have to go,' Michael told Mirkady. 'I have to find her if she's here. She's ... ' He glanced at Cat. 'She's family.'

  'Blood is thicker than water,' Mirkady said, his mouth a lipless gash across the triangle of his face. 'Do members of your family make a habit of wandering between worlds?'

  'She was brought here. My aunt. Years ago. She was going to have a child and was taken away.'

  Mirkady's interest seemed to sharpen. 'The father?'

  Michael's face burned. 'A labourer who worked for us.'

  Thomas McCandless. That much he had guessed at as he grew older. The young Protestant man his grandfather had thrown out of the house.

  The man who had been atop Rose in the wood, pushing her into the leaves with his thrusts.

  'So it seems you have a quest to follow in this world, young Michael. A maiden to rescue, perhaps. But what of our sister?'

  Michael swallowed, met the green stare squarely. 'I love her.'

  'Indeed! How noble of you. Do you know what the Wildwood can be like to a wandering mortal, my fine friend? I think not. Even the tribes have scant idea of what lurks in the thickest parts, the shapes that wander there. Nightmares prowl the trees in this land, and the Horseman will be hunting you. He has followed you from your world to this. I'm thinking he has plans for you both. And his steed can walk on the wind.'

  'We'll survive,' Michael said, more firmly than he felt. He thought he might be in a dream and would wake up in bed at home to hear the wind whistling round the gables. It was too strange, even after all he had seen. It was the stuff of sleep. And yet he could smell the earth around him, sniff the woodsmoke from the fire pit and the roasted flesh there. This land was solid under his feet, as Dwarmo had said.

  'Can you help us?' he asked Mirkady and the little goblin laughed.

  '1 was wondering when that would come! So you would ask a boon of us, or several if you dared. And you love our sister.'

  He paused, and Michael realized that the others in the cavern were silent and Cat was watching him with almost painful intensity. Her look made him feel somehow ashamed.

  'We are not sages, nor seers either, despite what some of the villagers think of us. We will give you no magic to aid your journey, nor charms to ward you on your way. But some things we can bestow, for our sister's sake.'

  Mirkady was sober now, the laughter gone from his voice. 'Food, some gear, even a weapon or two, so you will not have to let off that iron monstrosity you left tied to your horse. Clothing, also. It becomes cold, and so long as our sister's path lies with yours she is as human as you are.'

  'She's human anyway,' Michael said.

  Mirkady shook his head. 'You have a lot to learn despite the promise of your name, Michael Fay. Catherine is as a princess amongst us, and we value her. I would not willingly let harm come to her.' His tone made the words into a warning. 'When the folk you meet realize the blood that is in her you will be shunned. You may be attacked. Our kind are not popular amongst the Christians of this world.'

  Michael shook his head. 'Who are you people? The castle I saw. The hall and the knights. You were a king.'

  Dwarmo chuckled nearby and wiped his wide lips. 'Sup with the Wyr-Folk in one of their Howes, and what does a mortal expect to see?'

  'Indeed,' said Mirkady. 'We can be anything you want us to be, or anything your mind expects. Cat cannot, because of the human in her. She and her like are caught between the worst of both worlds. And it is worse yet if they fall in with a mortal whom they come to ... love. Then they forfeit any protection their forest blood gives to them, and the Horseman pursues them.' He stopped and looked at Michael closely. 'And they begin to age.'

  Abruptly he turned his sharp face upwards, glancing to the root-held ceiling overhead.

  'Evening lingers in the world above. It will be night soon.

  Since you are eager to take this thing upon yourself, we will leave when the sun sets.'

  'We?'

  'Indeed. Talk to our Catherine—your Catherine, I should say. I have things to do.' And he skipped off into the shadows to disappear.

  Your Catherine.

  When he joined her at the fire pit her eyes were full of the yellow flames so they were as amber as a wolf's. He knew now that there was a link, a kinship between her and the werewolf, between her and every monstrous creature he had so far seen, but the thought no longer disturbed him. He set a hand on her nape and stroked the soft hair there. To his relief, she leaned into his arm.

  'Tell me of this aunt of yours,' she said. 'I thought you knew about her.'

  'Only a little. Only what the woods themselves remember. That she was dark, and tall, and loved the land. That she came here seeking something, but lost her way and the Horseman took her.'

  'Where, Cat? Where did he take her?'

  She shrugged. 'They say there is a place in the Wolfweald where the Horseman has a castle, and there he keeps souls. But that is in the deep part of the Wildwood, the worst part, where even the Wyr Folk are afraid to go.'

  'I'm not afraid,' Michael said.

  'I did not bring you here for this, Michael. '

  'For what, then?'

  'What do you think? You wanted to come, and I wanted to have you—to show you this country, the marvels and the wonders. I cannot live in your world, so I brought you to mine to share it with you. And now you announce you have a quest, no less, this lady to rescue.' There was a leap of the old flame in her voice and her eyes flashed. Michael grinned.

  'You're jealous, Cat.'

  'Jealous! She is kin to you, this woman, and older.'

  'So she is.' But unbidden in his mind came a picture of Rose in the river, with the sunlit water cascading from her naked shoulders.

  THERE WAS NO music when they left the Howe, no glory of yellow light or ring of voices. The earth opened in a widening circle before them to let in a night breeze full of the smell of rain and clay. The trees were thrashing and rushing in a high wind and the milling air seemed full of spray. Michael screwed up his eyes against it. Fancy was standing patiently at the foot of the Howe, ears back to the rain and her bundles strapped to the saddle. He felt a surge of guilt, and ran out to her with the wind and water beating about his head, but found she was hardly damp. She nosed his new clothing with interest.

  'How long have we been in there?' Michael yelled at Mirkady.

  The creature was closing the door to the Howe. Even as he watched, the opening with its light narrowed and drew shut like a curtain. There was a brief twinkle of the silver music, a final blade of light that struck out through the trees, and then they were alone with the trees and the gale-bitten night.

  'A moment or two, no more. In my kin
gdom we can give you all the time you want!' His grin was diabolical, black skin as slick as wet ebony in the rain.

  'Yeah, sure,' Michael muttered.

  He and Cat were dressed in close-fitting hide tunics that came down to mid-thigh. They seemed to be a coarse kind of suede, but the raindrops rolled off them like marbles. Deep hoods hung from the shoulders— Cat had hers drawn up over her head—and strings drew them shut at the neck. The fit was perfect. Part of Mirkady's boon. Cat bore a long, wicked-looking knife of black stone in a scabbard at her hip and a skin bag of unknown weight was slung on her back. She looked medieval. The picture was completed by an unstrung shortbow and a leather quiver that bristled with black-fletched arrows, each over two feet long. Michael had handled them and had been shocked by the cruel barbed flint of their heads, the runes and symbols that were incised upon the shafts. At his own waist was a broad-bladed bronze dagger, the hilt cast all of a piece with the blade, and a leather thong wrapped around the grip. It was a heavy, ungainly thing, the nicks in the greening blade testimony to much usage. He had asked Mirkady about it and the little goblin had been amused. A corpse's shaving knife, he had called it, which made Michael handle it more gingerly than ever.

  He felt suddenly lost, adrift, and a pang of homesickness smote him as he stood there in the dripping dark of the forest with his not-quite-human companions. He thought of his bed at home, the range in the kitchen with the tea brewing on its top plate, his grandparents. Mullan. There was a tightness in his throat which he fought away by drawing his hood up over his head and knuckling the rain out of his eyes. The path had forked; he had chosen one way, and could never go back and re-find the other.

  He was thirteen years old.

  THEY WALKED THROUGHOUT the night. When Michael asked, quite reasonably he thought, where they were going, he was ignored. So he plodded along leading the mare by the bridle whilst his legs became soaked by the wet vegetation of the forest floor. It was almost impossible to see or hear anything. The wind abated after a while, but there was still the rush of the rain on the canopy overhead. Soon Michael was cursing to himself, tripping over invisible obstacles, plucking at the back of Cat's tunic to avoid being separated. She and Mirkady seemed to be able to see in the dark. When the goblin looked back at him Michael could see the glow of his eyes green and feral in the darkness. And Cat's seemed to shine also. Their light transformed her face into that of an animal, something unguessed and wild.