A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  'What is it?' he whispered to Cat. Then he realized.

  Lights. Flickering blue witch lights in the trees. They guttered and leapt like candle flames but burned as blue as deep ice.

  'Bale-fire,' Cat muttered. They had seen them before, of course, but never in such numbers. Michael's grandmother would have called them 'will-o'—thewisp' and told him that they led travellers to their deaths. Here in the Wildwood they were the toys of the Forest-Folk, harmless if they were ignored. But there were hundreds of them out there and, standing up, Michael saw that they ringed the camp entirely, like the watchfires of a besieging army.

  He sought out Ringbone whilst Cat settled her bow and quiver on her back, crushing dried kingcup on the flint arrowheads. It was not an especially potent herb, but the best they could do. The most effective weapon in the camp was Michael's iron sword.

  Owls called in the trees, and once they heard the howl of a wolf a long way off; but otherwise there was no sound. The Fox-People built up their fires until the campsite was as bright as sunlit amber in the night. Women gathered their children in close whilst the men patrolled the perimeter.

  An hour passed, and nothing happened. Michael staggered where he stood, eyelids fighting to drop. Cat was on the alert, however, and the fox men were leaning on their spears talking quietly or squatting with their backs to trees. The fires burned low for want of fuel, for Ringbone would let none leave the camp to gather more and the ground within was bare. A few women had put green boughs on a fire, only for it to smoulder and smoke uneasily. Most of the children were asleep, an amorphous huddle cloaked with hides and furs. The tension had left the air.

  Someone screamed, a high yell of pain cut off in mid-flow. At once half a dozen warriors congregated on the area of the sound, flashing noiselessly over the ground and casting about for its source. They found a spear lying on the earth and a spatter of shining blood. Further away a trio of fingers lay pale as grubs amid the decaying leaves.

  'Jesus,' Michael said.

  The flickering bale-fires suddenly went out. In the moments it took for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness, Michael could feel the beating of his own heart, a fast pulse at his throat.

  Then madness erupted.

  A boiling tide of squat, dark shapes seemed to rise out of the very soil around the confines of the camp and swarmed forward. They were pitch-black, broad as tree trunks, and they loped along on tiny legs and overlong arms, agile as apes. They glinted with bone weapons and ornaments, and made no sound.

  One warrior was caught by the bristling horde and immediately swamped. They engulfed him like a mass of black maggots so that he went down and disappeared with one arm still swinging his club. They came on into the dim fire glow at terrifying speed, and here Ringbone's people made their stand: whilst the women helped or carried children into the branches of the trees the men stood in an evershrinking circle and began to fight for their lives.

  For Michael it was an unreal nightmare of halfguessed shapes and clawing limbs. The goblins thronged before him waist-high and so dark-skinned that even with the aid of the low fires he could make out little in the way of features. He felt the rake of claws, the agonizing bite of fangs, and he kicked back bodies that were compact and heavy, furred as finely as rabbits. He saw the shine of eyes that were without pupil and as blank as stones, and all the time he swung the heavy sword down again, again and again so he heard the crunch of bone, the pulp of broken flesh and his breeches became soaked with blood. Only when they were hurt did they make any sound, a thin, high squealing like a hare caught in a trap, and after three had fallen before him in quick succession they started to avoid the deadly iron of his blade— one nick was poison to them—and concentrated their attacks elsewhere. His leaden arm came down and for an instant he chanced a look around whilst the fox men battled on at his shoulders.

  They were being overrun. He saw Cat flailing about her with her stone knife, her hair a raven billow about her head. He watched, aghast with fear for her, as she slashed the throat of an adversary, booted another aside and stabbed a third through the heart, all the while avoiding the deadly flicker of the bone skewers many of the goblins bore.

  Nearby Ringbone fought with a grim economy of effort, his face bitten with a frown of concentration. He had lost his headdress and blood slicked his torso. His or his enemies' Michael could not tell.

  Semuin went down, tripped up and stabbed in the eye with a bone sliver. Michael leapt into his place and split a long-eared skull, smashed back a snarling face with the sword pommel, ground the point into the mouth of another. They drew back, snarling. Even their fangs were as black as ebony.

  The circle was shrinking fast. At their backs were the trees at the centre of the campsite, their branches full of children and women, though some of the women had taken up weapons and were fighting alongside the men. Michael saw one woman dragged into the black throng of the enemy and then carried off screaming by a dozen of them. Her mate lurched after her, but his mad thrust only put him in the middle of his foes and they slashed at him until he collapsed.

  We'll die here, Michael remembered thinking with perfect clarity. He was fighting at Cat's side now, and his body was looking after itself. He was filled with a sense of exaltation as he spun and swung and stabbed and kicked out. Perhaps it was the unreal, nightmarish quality of it, but he felt that were he to die here he would wake up in bed at home to an autumn morning.

  Tired, though. He was tiring quickly, blocking more attacks than he launched, lunging less violently so the creatures before him were able to evade his thrusts. One set of claws fastened on his arm and tugged him forward to where the ravening maws waited. He stumbled, punched, cutting his knuckles on a set of teeth, and fell on his knees in the scrum, unable to swing the sword properly. A bone knife was pushed with incredible force into the top of his thigh and he shrieked with pain and anger, toppled helplessly and felt the black bodies close over him.

  But then Cat and Ringbone were there battering the enemy aside, clearing a way to him. He was dragged backwards, one fist closed about the bone that protruded obscenely from his thigh, the other hanging grimly on to his sword hilt.

  Clear. He screamed again as he yanked out the bone sliver and a jet of blood followed. For a moment he felt faint, and the night swam in his eyes. Ringbone and Cat had already returned to the fray.

  Children were wailing above his head and looking up he saw that the goblins were in the lower branches of the trees. The circle had broken. The horses were neighing in terror and Fancy reared madly with a black form clinging to her neck. The defenders were no longer a line, but straggling knots of people surrounded by a swarming sea of bestial monsters. A child was thrown from its perch and swallowed up by the teeming crowd. A warrior beat at the jaws which had fastened about his wrist. A man dragged his unconscious friend away with a goblin clinging to his shoulders.

  That's it, Michael thought. It's over.

  A massive roar rose over the noise of battle above the screaming and the striving, and a hulking shape loomed to the rear of the goblins with two lights blazing in its head and two long arms sweeping terrible destruction on every side. It plucked two goblins from their feet and swung them like clubs, breaking the attacking mass to pieces and picking up two more when the first pair fell apart. The enemy recoiled in confusion, and Michael heard some of them cry out in fear.

  Above, along the branches and trunks of the trees, a green light shimmered like arcane electricity, and the goblins that were grappling with the children there shrieked as they felt its touch. They smoked and burnt, fell to the ground in flames and bounded off trailing fire towards their fellows. When the flame, still burning and filling the air with the stench of charred flesh, hit the rest of the goblins it leapt from one to the other as though alive. The wood was lit up by the hellish light of the creatures cavorting and screeching in molten agony, though the fire did not seem to harm the trees.

  The attack was melting away. Scores of the monsters w
ere afire and many were streaming away like demented fireflies into the forest. The huge, hirsute shape that had wreaked such havoc upon them was clearly visible now. The face was brutal but merry, the eyes green glints under an overhanging crag of a brow and the lower jaw outthrust to accommodate the laughing tusks.

  'Dwarmo!' Cat shouted joyously. A twig smote Michael on the head and he looked up to find Mirkady peering down at him from the branches of the tree.

  'Told you I'd keep an eye on you,' he cackled. The bark around him flickered harmlessly with green flames.

  'Yeah, right,' Michael muttered. The world was a swimming dance in his eyes, shot through with the retreating light of the flaming goblins. Their screams were dwindling, fading into the forest. Dark shapes moved about, and he was conscious of Cat talking at a great rate, reassuring what was left of the warriors. 'Cymbr,' she was repeating: 'Friend.' And Dwarmo was still grinning all over his great troll's face. But the women were weeping and the air stank of blood and burning. It swooped in on Michael like a cloud, and he sailed away into the core of its darkness.

  FIFTEEN

  HOT, CLOUDLESS, THE sky lowered smog-grey on the topmost floors of the highest buildings, buoyed up by the traffic roar and battened down by the crushing sunlight. He swallowed carbon with every breath, was bumped and jostled like a pinball in his progress up the street. Big steps, little steps, never one long, uninterrupted stride. Big steps, little steps, the pavement awash with litter and blaring reflected heat up into his face.

  Time flies, he thought. No: it does not fly; it is flushed away and carries so much with it. Memories stay, though, even when they are unwanted. They are a stain no bleach will fade. An aftertaste.

  He was slipping back and forth, his mind awash with images from the past. The beating sun was forgotten as he stood, one hand on the bottle within his pocket, and remained unyielding and unaware of the glares from obstructed passers-by. He was in the cool woods again, and their dark smells were choking his brain.

  He looked behind him, at the crowd and scurry of the street with its towering two-deckers and beetling cars. Impossible to tell if it were following.

  The Wildwood was here, in the city. Wolves in the alleyways. A fairy catching a train. He laughed harshly, and lurched into motion again.

  She was waiting for him when he dragged himself to his door that night, there on the landing.

  He caught his breath at the sight of the raven hair, the pale cheek semi-lit by the dim bulb overhead, and in that moment he sobered entirely, an entire evening's alcohol obliterated in an instant.

  Then she turned, and the fearful wonder, the budding joy, twisted and burned to ash. It was that bloody girl again. Maybe she'd left her lipstick behind. The alcohol began to trickle back into place, fuzzing the edges of his mind.

  'Mike! There you are.' The use of his Christian name was forced, an unfamiliar word in her mouth.

  'Here I am.'

  He reached the top of the stairs, breathing hard, and painted on a grin which might well have been a leer. His grinning muscles were not exactly overused these days.

  'Good timing. I just got here. I was trying to remember if it was this floor.' She was diffident, nervous, and looked away from him as she spoke.

  'It's late,' he said with gruff gentleness; a last-ditch effort to be decent.

  'I know.' She gestured to the shut door. 'Can I come in?' He shrugged. So be it.

  He winced at the mess inside, threw on a low light and kicked a cushion out of the way as he went to the window and opened it wide. For a second or two he stared down and out at the teeming city, the orange street lights and the eyes of cars. He wondered where the wolves were tonight, where that Wyran was, if it was here at all and his mind was not just playing games with itself.

  A cough. He turned, smiling apologetically. 'Sorry, I was wool-gathering. Sit down. Have a drink'

  She sat on the edge of the big sofa. He meandered his way to where the bottles stood on the dresser, thought better of it, sighed and took a seat. Here we go, he thought.

  Young. She looked painfully young sitting there in her city clothes, her shiny shoes and sheer tights, a smart jacket. And a briefcase, for God's sake, resting on her thighs like a secret weapon. Had she been working to this time?

  Black hair, thick, just touching her shoulders. Big eyes, dark, under brows that would be heavier if she didn't pluck them. A round face with a snub nose and well-painted lips. Not a businesswoman. More like a business child. He tried to remember what she had been like under the power dressing. He had a vague impression of white curves, softness. Breasts bordering on the large. He had laid his head between them, almost content for a while.

  She was talking to him.

  '...don't make a habit of that sort of thing, and then when you didn't call or anything, I thought that—'

  'Why did you leave in the middle of the night?'

  She hesitated. In the low light, he thought she flushed. 'You were drunk. You were talking nonsense, about trees and fairies and cats. And then you began talking gibberish, like a foreign language. I was scared. I thought maybe it was Gaelic or something. I thought I'd hopped into bed with some kind of lunatic.'

  Unwillingly he smiled again, and this time she returned it. 'Did we actually...?'

  'No. You were too drunk. It was sort of sweet. You apologized over and over.'

  'I see.'

  Silence, but for the city noises. He suddenly wanted this girl to stay with him, to see out the night. But there was another indignity.

  'I've forgotten your name.'

  The eyes flared briefly, a flash of temper. He expected her to get up and go, but instead she said quietly: 'Clare.' He nodded.

  'I wrote it down, and my number. I left it beside the bed.'

  'Why did you come back?' he asked, too tired to beat around bushes.

  'I don't know. To see if you really were a lunatic, I suppose.'

  They looked at each other, strangers ashamed of past intimacy. And yet that, oddly enough, lent an air of companionship to the room.

  'How about that drink?' Michael asked, as if he were requesting a truce. She shook her head. 'I'll have some coffee, though.' For the first time, the briefcase descended from her lap.

  She was twenty years old. Her accent spoke of expensive schooling and her smell of expensive perfume. He let her talk, conscious of his own bedraggled appearance, hoping she would not notice the bulge of the empty bottle in his coat pocket or the bulge of the stomach over his belt. Vanity, he thought wryly, is an irrational thing.

  It grew late, and the city began its brief sleep. The tiredness tugged at his eyelids and he realized that he had ceased to listen to what she was saying. He was aware only of that nicely cultured voice and the silence it held at bay. He was willing to sit and fight off sleep all night, just to have it continue. As long as she talked and sat there smelling elegantly the wood was kept out of the room, and his ghosts stayed in the memories where they belonged.

  But she stopped talking at long last, and sat balancing her empty coffee cup on her knee as though she were in a monarch's drawing room. One hand slipped down to touch the briefcase as though it were a talisman.

  'I have to work in the morning.'

  'So do I.' There was a pause, long in mute communication. 'I have to get up early.'

  'I've an alarm. Works most of the time.'

  Another pause. Those dark eyes bored into him. He knew with a sudden flash of insight that in her way she was as frightened of the lonely night as he was. But he kept his face neutral, sure that he had overstepped the mark, transgressed some mutual contract of flippancy.

  Finally she smiled; a wide, generous smile. 'Promise me you won't speak Gaelic in your sleep?'

  'I promise.'

  And this time he was not too drunk, or too tired.

  They made love carefully, courteously, anxious not to offend. The earth hardly shifted, but afterwards he laid his head between her breasts and gloried in the feel of her arms around him
. No wilderness had worn her lean, no wounds had scarred her skin, and he nuzzled the ripe bloom of her body as though he could bury himself in it, whilst outside the dawn broke open the black sky and in shadowed corners of the streets below the woodland creatures kept their vigil.

  A LONG WHILE, it seemed, he floated in some indeterminate place, a Never-Never Land that swirled with known and unknown faces. Cat was there, but she had changed somehow, had grown plump and wide-eyed. His grandfather was present, also—old Pat. And Rose was there. She was crying.

  'Come and get me, Michael. Take me home.'

  Home.

  The Horseman rose up like a black wall, blotting her out. He was immense, black as a starless night. Up and up he towered, tall as a hill—and he became a castle, high-walled and ruinous upon a granite crag, so high that the clouds played about its battlements and .grey moisture beaded it like sweat. Around its knees the trees rose, huge and old, tangled as wire, their roots grinding deep into the loam and rock of the earth. So thick was their canopy that it seemed like a textured carpet for giants to walk upon, and from its dim depths came the sound of wolves howling, as they bred and slaughtered in their thousands.

  He opened his eyes with a cry and Cat shushed him, held him close.

  'It's all right, my dear. You are all right.'

  It was day. He could smell the acrid fire reek in the air, and there was a woman keening softly somewhere, people moving around, muttered talk.

  'Mirkady,' he croaked from a dry throat.

  'Here, my man.' And the diabolical face grinned a foot from his own.

  Michael dosed his eyes again and let himself be held by Cat's warmth. Ringbone's voice dose by. There was a sound of bustle. He opened his eyes and looked into Cat's face.

  'They're leaving, aren't they? Going back north.'