by Paul Kearney
Spring was in full force. Snowdrops beneath the trees were giving way to daffodils, bluebells as thick as carpet, bright primroses. The wood was brightening, coming to life before their eyes, and the nights were getting shorter. After the initial shock of their encounter had worn off, the tribe seemed to become cheerful. When two weeks had passed they traversed a wide game trail and some of the men left to try their luck at the hunt, for smoked meat was beginning to stick in their throats. Michael stayed behind. An inchoate dread had begun to steal up on him with every mile southwards they walked. He and Cat left the tribe's camp and wandered on to a wooded rise that overlooked a long, westwardwinding valley. A sea of trees stretched out like a vast, long bowl to every horizon, stark under the sun but with the greenness just beginning to be picked out in the unfolding buds, and the darker patches where the tall evergreens stood unchanging.
'No people, no houses, no roads—nothing.'
'This is the Wilderness, Michael. What were you expecting?' He looked at her. Cat got on well enough with the Fox—People, but had made no friends. They were a little afraid of her yet, he thought; they could see the Wyrim part of her perhaps more clearly than he could. To him she seemed as lovely as ever, slim as a willow wand, seasoned as a steel blade. It made his heart skip to see her lips quirk into a smile, those green eyes flash. She was wearing a doeskin shift, supple as silk, her skin pale as cream where the garment fell forward below the collarbone. The stone knife was tucked into her belt.
'None of the villagers come this far south,' she went on. 'The wood is too wild here, with too many beasts and the Horseman riding the glades in the nights. Even the tribes seldom follow the hunt so far. We are scant leagues from the first eaves of the Wolfweald.'
'What about your people? Do they live here, or are they too frightened as well?'
She grinned at him without humour. 'They are all my people, the wolves along with the fairies. We are all the same.'
'That's not true, Cat.'
'Isn't it? Ask any of the Brothers, or the merchants who wander the great roads with their escorts. Ask the Knights. We are all the same.' She rubbed her eyes as if tired. 'Trolls there are here, the dark kind that cannot abide the sun. And ... goblins, I think you would call them. They have strongholds in some of the valleys. They are a strange folk. Mirkady tells me they eat anything that lives and smelt their weapons from bone and marrow, but he may have been jesting. Sometimes they and the wolves hunt together.'
'Does Ringbone know this?' Suddenly the wood seemed secretive, furtive. He watched a kestrel circle and circle over the sunlit tops of the trees whilst his imagination ran momentarily riot conjuring up shadows beneath them.
'Of course. He lives here.'
'And I don't.' Ever the alien. There was a part of him that would always be the boy from the farm. He knew that. It was why he was not out hunting with the men. His heart was not entirely in it.
She kissed the side of his neck as he watched the kestrel stoop for the kill.
'These Brothers. They don't fit in here either,' he said.
'I think they are from your world. Not spawned by the same time, perhaps, but breathers of your air. Ringbone could probably tell you more than I.'
'Ringbone and his people are full of myths and tales. To hear him you would think they were descended from princes or warrior kings. They're savages, Cat.'
She teased his beard. 'And what does that make us, then?'
'Strangers. Foreigners. You have no more of a home here than I do.'
'This is my home—here at your side. If I am content with that, why cannot you be?'
He stared at her helplessly, watched her flush.
'This damned woman you think is here,' she said. 'Is that still in your head?'
'Mirkady thought she was here.'
'Mirkady would try to tell a fox how to fly. Not everything he says has truth in it. He has not your welfare at heart all the time, or anyone's. That is the way of his folk.'
'Your folk,' he said with a smile, but she did not return it.
'If this kinswoman of yours is truly here, Michael, then she is lost, gone for ever. This land does not go out of its way to provide happy endings. Death is all you will find if you take this quest of yours seriously.'
'I love you, Cat.'
She was silent, startled. On her face pleasure and annoyance fought for mastery until she laughed, a loud, ringing sound. 'You fool.' And she kissed him until his lips felt bruised.
'I want you to take me to the Castle of the Horseman.'
She was instantly sober again, and angry.
'Are you deaf? Do you not listen to anything I say? It is impossible, Michael.'
'Nevertheless,' he said doggedly.
'You're afraid. I can smell the fear off you.'
It was his turn to be silent.
'What demon is at your shoulder making you do this? Is it the only reason you came here with me?'
'No, Cat, of course not.' He did not tell her that one of the reasons he had come was because she had made it sound like some kind of medieval wonderland, not the harsh, brutal world it was.
Restless, they both began walking in the same moment, scuffing through the remnants of last year's leaves as though they were strolling through a park. They climbed upwards from their hill, up the slope that was the southern side of the valley, and by unspoken consent did not stop until they were at the top looking out from the encroaching trees on to the heavily vegetated coomb below with the odd glitter here and there of the river at its heart, and the almost vertical ribbons of woodsmoke from the camp rising out of the depths of the trees.
Michael tripped over something, kicking it out of a burial of leaves and earth. He bent and tore it free in curiosity. It was a human femur, shreds of cartilage and flesh clinging to it. He threw it down in disgust. Death and decay everywhere. Violent death—the bone was snapped off at one end. He footed it away. Cat stared, then switched into her wood mode and began sniffing and prowling round the thickets at the lip of the slope.
'Cat, come on. We should be getting back.'
'Wait a moment.'
He joined her as she scrabbled and snapped her way through a riot of dead branches and the crusts of lifeless ivy.
'What is it?'
'I smell something.'
And then he did too: a faint miasma on the spring air. The stink of corruption, old but perceptible.
They broke through to a small open space where the ground was almost bare and the branches arced so thick overhead that they were at once enveloped in a half-light and had to blink and squint to let their eyes adjust.
An old, old oak, so old it was only a stump, a shell black with rot but tough as an ancient molar. It was shaggy with sap-sucking ivy and wrapped about with dog rose. Around its roots the broad, hanging leaves of nightshade swayed at the intrusion. The smell of rot and decay became overpowering and Michael buried his nose in his sleeve, though Cat remained unaffected.
There were bones on the ground. Some gleamed white, others were green and grey with clinging tissue. A skull grinned at them from under a mat of black hair, and a skeletal hand lay like some great petrified spider. Long thigh bones had been split for the marrow and vertebrae were scattered like jagged stones. The place looked like a cross between a desecrated burial ground and the site of a cannibalistic feast.
'Michael. Here.'
He followed Cat deeper into the surrounding brake. Here was a taller tree, a beech, bearing a few coppery leaves that had outlasted winter. It was even darker here, the trees a wall around them, a dark roof above. They might have been in a church for the silence and the dimness.
A man had been crucified on the wide beech bole.
Dark spikes of some black hardwood had been hammered through his wrists and ankles. His belly gaped, a gash with something dark as blackberries inside. He stank, but not so badly, for the weather had remained cool and he had, Michael estimated, been dead less than a week. His face was still human, though the crow
s had made off with his eyes. Slashes and bums at his elbows, knees and groin spoke of torture.
'They didn't eat this one,' Michael murmured.
The embers of a fire lay on the ground. They had worked on him a long time, judging by the depth of ash.
Blackthorn sprays had been twisted into a ring and pushed down on to his head until they tore the flesh.
Michael's spine prickled. He moved closer. What he had taken to be the tongue was in fact a piece of wood jutting from the mouth. He tugged gingerly at it. A cross.
'He was one of the Brothers,' Cat said tonelessly. 'That is why they did not feast on him. They were afraid, so they killed him the same way his god was killed, to destroy his magic.'
'Magic!' Michael snorted. A deep rage smouldered into life within him. 'Was this your bloody forest people? Mirkady and his like?'
She shook her head. 'This is not a good place, Michael. We should go. The tribe will need warning.'
'Warning of what?'
'Grymyrch. Goblins. They may be watching us now.'
He whipped the Ulfberht out of its scabbard, the iron a black bar in the dim light.
'Let them, the bastards.'
'Don't be stupid. If they wanted you they would take you in the night, or when you were alone. They are not strong in themselves, but are deadly in numbers. And they would swamp you. We must go.'
'Just a moment.'
He hauled out the spikes and let the corpse fall to the ground.
It was hard bending the arms down to its sides, and when he felt the skin slide under his hand he had to pause and reswallow burning bile. He covered the body with leaves and branches, then lashed up a cross of sorts with ivy and burnt sticks, jamming it into the ground. Strange how it outraged him that a priest should die this way, when he had thought little on seeing that other one die in the village with an arrow in his throat. Perhaps it was the isolation of it, the knowledge that he had almost certainly died alone—for the bones that carpeted the ground nearby were much older. Perhaps it was the barbaric nature of his death.
Still a farm boy, he thought with a bitter smile. Still capable of being shocked. The violence in the air was as palpable as the smell of putrefaction. It sickened him, and fed the anger. Who had the corpse been? A hermit seeking enlightenment, or a missionary out hunting souls?
They left the thicket and breathed in the clear, cold air of the valley with relief. The day was wearing round and they hurried on their way back down to the camp, Cat pausing once to listen, head cocked. But it was only a breeze wheezing through the trees. And the pattering on the leaves was not feet, only the first heavy drops of rain, the beginning of a shower that was to fall steadily until dark.
The rain gathered in puddles and streamed from the canopy overhead. The women set about erecting their hide shelters, suspending them from the nearby boughs and placidly tending the fires against their men's return. Those warriors who remained stood guard, leaning on their spears with the rain dripping from their noses and streaking their face paint. A child cried until it was given its mother's thin breast. Michael and Cat sat in silence before their fire while the world beyond became blue with evening and the heavy cloud gathered, lowering over the valley. They had told old Irae, who was in camp, that there might be grymyrch nearby and he was walking the rough perimeter, doing the rounds.
The wood was ominous this evening, the shadows full of malice. Michael felt that the tribe was stepping where no men were supposed to go. He hoped the hunters were safe.
Grymyrch. They were of the Wyrim, Cat told him, and yet were not. They belonged to some branch of the Forest-Folk who had long ago broken away from their cousins and followed a different path, a darker way. Mirkady's people were capable of savagery, but were just as ready to tolerate, even to welcome, an outsider, a human, depending on how he tickled their fancy or challenged their wits. They were a capricious, finicky people, as unpredictable as the weather; whereas the grymyrch were black and wholly evil, scarcely above animals. The Wyrim and the grymyrch had become enemies, and loathed each other, the hatred fuelled by what they recognized of themselves in the other race.
For the Fox-People goblins were a story, a legend to go with the store of other legends they held in their heads. The Forest-Folk they knew of; they were a part of the Wildwood that was familiar. But these new, unseen monsters which Michael had told them of and Cat had afterwards described had Irae looking grey and worried. On the whole, he told Michael, he preferred the dangers of the Knights to the perils of this new land, this unknown region of the wood. The tribes had not been this far south since the Great Journey, when they had trekked steadily, a great multitude of them, from the far mountains in the south north to where the woods were friendlier. That was before the villagers split off to found their settlements, before the Knights or the Brothers, before the Four Roads had been laid down.
For a moment, as he spoke, he reminded Michael irresistibly of Mullan, and he might have been talking wistfully of the horses moving up to Ypres in 1915. The resemblance was striking, but it lasted only a second, and Irae was a grey-haired savage again, his skin stained with madder and his teeth rotten in a weather-lined face.
The hunters returned in the late part of the evening, grins breaking out across their faces as the women welcomed them, laughing at the burdens they bore on poles. Three does, thin but full-sized. The tribe would eat well for a few days.
Ringbone came over to where Cat and Michael hunkered near one of the rekindled fires. He was chewing on raw meat and the dark blood drooled down his chin. The fox man offered Michael a chunk and he took it politely, biting into the juicy flesh and feeling the blood slip down the back of his throat. At the other fires the people were butchering the deer. The animals had already been gralloched, the organs replaced in the chest cavity. Now they spilled out glistening in the light of the flames. Knives flashed wet as the women expertly skinned the beasts, cramming odd bits of meat into their mouths as they did so. By the fires the older children were readying what earthenware the tribe possessed while two of the men were stoking up the embers in the smoke tent. There was almost an air of festivity about the place, and Semuin was looking relieved. The hunting was his main concern and if it failed he would be held at least partially responsible.
Ringbone sat opposite Michael at the fire, taking off his headdress and scraping his short-haired pate. He caught a louse and threw it to pop in the flames. His face had grown serious. He wiped the blood from his chin and told Michael that he had been speaking to Irae. The old man was perturbed. This was not a good country they were in, he had said; it was too full of beasts and strange things. They should go back north and take their chances with the Knights. What had the Utwychtan and Teowynn to say to that?
Michael hesitated. It was true, he told Ringbone, that there were strange beasts and strange peoples in this part of the world, and the tribe had best be on its guard for there were grymyrch nearby in all likelihood. He told Ringbone what he and Cat had found at the lip of the valley.
The fox man's face went blank, as it always did when he was thinking something over. He asked Cat if she knew of these grymyrch. Were they dangerous to a band of warriors such as this? What were their customs, and how close did she think they were?
Cat answered perfunctorily. She did not know much more than she had told Michael or Irae. Ringbone's face grew blank again. He would have to think on this for a while, he said—until tomorrow at least.
Then Michael said in a rush that he was leaving the tribe, pushing on south alone with Cat. He was going into the Wolfweald. He could feel Cat's glare on his face as he said it.
The fire cracked and spat, branches slumping with a noise like rattled tinsel. It was a very quiet night now that the rain had stopped.
What the Utwychtan sought to do was his own affair. No man could tell another one where to go, Ringbone told them, but his eyes were as black as jet pebbles in his face, fixed on Michael's. For a second Michael thought his habitual reserve was goi
ng to break and a flood of questions spill out, but the fox man remained silent, only shaking his head a fraction and staring momentarily into the glowing logs. When he looked up again there was grief in his eyes. He thrust an arm out over the fire and Michael clasped it, the flames scorching hair from their skin.
Things would be readied to aid them on their way—food, clothing, shelter. And their horses would be rubbed down for them and given the last of the barley grain. Then Ringbone rose fluidly and padded off to the butchery and feasting at the other fires.
'So you will do this thing, no matter what I say?' Cat asked Michael in a low, stilted voice.
I1 have to. I don't think I have any choice. It's what I came here for, I think.'
A memory of Rose with the lightning flickering in her eyes. You'll look for me no matter what they tell you? Promise? She was here all right. Somehow she had known what was going to happen to her.
'I'm sorry, Cat.'
'You'll be the death of me, Michael.'
'Don't say things like that.'
True night fell, the silent pitch of night in a windless forest.
Michael had come to love and fear it. There truly were bogey men in the world. They were not just a fairy tale, and they roamed the darkness at the edge of firelight. But there was a beauty in the trees and the snuff of woodsmoke that eddied about their trunks, a peace he had not known even in the placid Antrim countryside. He wondered sometimes if he would ever again be able to live content without it.
The camp was still, the fires burning down and most of the tribe asleep, their bellies full. Even the horses stood with their eyes closed, resting one hindquarter.
Michael had slipped into the light doze that had been his equivalent of sleep for the past months when Cat's gentle shake woke him. He was sitting up in a second and fumbling for his sword, blinking. About the camp silent figures moved out to the perimeter in the dying flush of the fires. The warriors.