by Paul Kearney
'You would set yourself against him, would you? Now there's hubris... Cat would never let you come.'
'Tell her I am to be your guide, no more.'
Michael hesitated. He thought of the changes in Cat, the way she seemed to be metamorphosing into something else. He wanted it to stop. He did not want her against him if he ever made it to the damned castle in the end. The thought was more than he could bear.
And yet he was sure he did not trust Brother Nennian. He had not come this far to be a mere means to someone else's end.
'I'll see what Cat thinks,' he said at last.
Brother Nennian bowed slightly, then with one swift movement drew the Ulfberht out of its bed of clay. He thumbed the edge.
'It would draw blood from the wind now. A weapon fit for a Crusader.'
MICHAEL FOUND CAT with the horses. The brief rest was already filling them out, though Fancy had a tendency to gorge herself. Nennian's hay had been dampened by the winter's rain and had little goodness in it. Cat doled out the Brother's barley grain as though it were water, and Michael had to restrain her; too much of the stuff would give their mounts colic. It was rich after the short commons of the previous weeks.
They stood leaning on a rail very like a hitching post before the horses' lean-to whilst the mist vapour thickened and beaded Cat's hair with grey drops. It made spiders' webs into tangible, jewel-like things and hid the tops of the tallest trees so that they might have been beans talks racing up through cloud to some giant's castle above.
Cat was goosepimpled, and Michael embraced her from behind, burying his nose in her hair.
'So you are not so shy now in this holy place? Has the priest given his permission, then?' But she relaxed in his arms, tilting her head back so he was able to kiss the side of her neck.
'We'll leave soon,' he said, his voice muffled by her flesh.
'Mmm.'
'Brother Nennian is coming with us.'
'What?' She pulled out of his arms and faced him. 'What did you say?'
Tiredly, he told her that the Brother knew the way. He would be their guide, no more. Otherwise they would be wandering until the Horseman was ready to receive them.
'Why is he so charitable to us, knowing what I am? He wants something, Michael. It is in his eyes. He is not offering to do this for nothing.'
'Maybe. But we need him, Cat. We can use his help.' Seeing this did not convince her, he said: 'We'll leave him behind once we sight the castle. We'll lose him in the forest. He won't come the whole way.'
She seemed slightly mollified. 'What's happening to you, Cat?'
'What do you mean?'
'Nothing, nothing.' Again that weariness, the sense of years piled on his shoulders before they had any right to be there.
Cat touched his beard gently. Her eyes had softened. 'You're grey, my lovely boy, all grey and grown. The wood has made you into a man, a warrior. You belong to it now, Michael.'
It's killing me, he snarled silently, but he bent his head to receive her kiss and she pressed her body against him. Hard and soft, bone and breast. He wanted to bury himself inside her and forget about castles and quests, horsemen and goblins.
And the wood. He wanted to forget about that most. of all, and scrape the gathering moss from his memory.
EIGHTEEN
ANOTHER NIGHT IN the smoky hut, a meal composed of the last of the goat stew. Michael woke the next morning with the bright rectangle of the window a lambent blur in his sleep-gummed eyes. Cat was in his arms, their bodies a tangle of limbs and raven hair. He blew dust from her eyelashes gently, saw it dance and glow in the sunshine that poured through the door, and smiled with simple, momentary happiness.
It was cold, sharp and frosty. He got up and looked outside, stretching. The mud of the clearing had frozen hard, the puddles iced over, though where the sun hit them there was only a shimmer of ice thin enough to be broken by a spider's foot. Mist again, but it was a hazy, gossamer thing this morning lit by the sun. It hung in a broad band halfway up the trees and their tops were crystal clear against the pale blue sky, their trunks the washed-out colour of a pastel painting. As he watched he saw a heron take flight from the stream at the far end of the glade, the great wings wide. Brother Nennian was talking to his goats in a low voice, the sound carrying like a bell in the stillness. After a while he came trudging back to the living hut leading what looked like a large donkey and carrying a rough basket.
'Eggs for breakfast,' he said, grinning.
They started off in the middle of the morning, the food warm in their bellies, and set the sun in their left eye. Within an hour the character of the forest had changed again, and the sun was cut off. Michael's heart sank as the early light was lost, hidden by the encroaching treetops, and the forest floor became bare and dark once more. He felt he was riding into some endless cavern that went deeper and deeper into the heart of the world, a tunnel without end.
Their saddles were piled and hung with supplies. Bannock, honey, cheese, smoked meat and dried vegetables as well as skins of the blessed water which Cat could not drink and a pouch of the Brother's fragrant tobacco. Nennian's donkey, a patient, fleabitten creature, clanged and clanged as they ambled along, irritating Michael. There was a copper pot and various bronze implements hanging from its pommel. Brother Nennian looked like a tinker on his travels.
'What about the animals?' Cat had asked him coldly as they left the sunlight of the hollow behind. Nennian had opened the goat pen before they left.
'They will wander, but there is good grass in the dell and most of them know well enough not to stray into the deep part of the forest. The billy will keep them together, and I have left caches of barley grain here and there. The chickens are good at fending for themselves.'
'You'll have a lean time of it for a while when you return,' she told him.
'Everyone must make sacrifices.'
TRAVELLING AGAIN. THE rhythm of movement claimed them once more as though they had never paused in Nennian's sanctuary. They had strayed off the direct route south to find his clearing, and now the rotund Brother led the way, taking them back on the southward path, but as far as Michael could make out veering off it after a while to the southeast. Within a day Michael's navigation was based on glimpses of the stars and surmise, though the priest led them clanking onwards without faltering, as though the lair of the Horseman were a beacon standing high and bright in the distance,
Little things irked Michael. He was constrained with Cat in Nennian's presence, and to her frustration could not make love to her in the nights beside the fire. In the mornings they were delayed by the Brother as he said mass for himself off to one side, and Michael felt oddly distanced from the ceremony, as though it were a fossil he had left buried behind him. He had enough belated piety in him to quiet Cat's protests and let the priest pray undisturbed, though it cost them travelling time.
He and Nennian ate well, though for some reason—bloody-mindedness, perhaps—Cat insisted on foraging for food, and they looked somewhat askance at her forest roots and skinned frogs. Only the honey could tempt her, and she would wolf down a sticky bannock with relish, refusing everything else and drinking the forest water without fear. It was as if the trees had claimed her once more, and she was slipping into the ways of the wood now that the transient civilization of the sanctuary had been left behind. It worried Michael. When be lay beside her in the nights he could almost believe she was changing in her sleep, shifting in his very arms. She would twitch and shake, and sometimes he thought he heard her snarl.
Mirkady's gift, he thought. It had not been as generous as it seemed. Occasionally he thought he could feel it working in his own flesh, making him loathe the stocky priest on his donkey and causing the clean water to bubble in his throat.
The signs of life they had noticed on approaching Nennian's glade disappeared, and the forest became an empty, stark place, a hall with a thick-raftered roof upheld by the pillars of the trees. Spring was beaten back here, and they travelled
in a never changing dark of winter, the cold air moving in trapped eddies and currents under the canopy, the leaf mould on the ground, millennia of autumns, degenerating into thick mud that sucked at the horses' hoofs and exhausted them so the travellers had to dismount and pull the weary beasts along by their bridles ankle deep, calf deep, sometimes knee deep in black glutinous ooze. It did not take very many days for the neat and plump Brother Nennian to begin to take on what Michael had come to think of as the wanderer look. His cheeks seemed to fall in on themselves and the mud-thick habit became looser around the stomach. He stuffed his sandals with rags against the cold and his eyes seemed to sink in his head. Cat took a grim satisfaction out of this transformation, as if it were evidence that the holy man's magic was not proof against the power of the forest.
Their camps at night became at once hugely desirable and achingly uncomfortable. They were tired enough to sleep where they fell at the end of the short daylight, but had the horses to see to, a fire to coax out of sodden wood, the worst of the sludge to sluice off. The trunks of the trees ran with moisture, bringing out the mites that infested the bark—blind, white, burrowing things with painful bites. The travellers lay with the wet soaking through the furs— furs which were themselves hard with caked dirt and reeking of mould—and focused their eyes on their guttering campfire before dropping off. Watches were kept, each of them waking and watching for several hours every night. Michael had a suspicion that Nennian slept through most of his, though he was so in need of sleep himself that he was never able to remain awake and test the theory.
They spoke little, eating their food silently in the evenings, Cat dining on toadstools which clustered at the foot of the trees in scarlet profusion. They looked deadly, but she consumed them with something near relish and drank the reeking water of the stagnant ponds without coming to any harm. It was as if she were made to exist in such a place, or it was made for her.
'Damned if I know why they call it the Wolfweald,' Michael said. 'The place has fewer wolves, fewer of anything, than anywhere else I've ever been in this place. There's nothing here. Nothing.'
'There are the trees,' Cat told him, her eyes ashine in the gloom.
They were sitting in the dark, the tinder having defeated their attempts at lighting it. The horses were shifting and blowing through their noses a few yards away and further still they could hear Brother Nennian murmuring his devotions. There was a faint rush and hiss of wind in the treetops, but no other sound in the forest.
Michael wondered if the first expedition had come so far. He doubted it. There was hardly any forage for horses here, let alone cattle. There was nothing a sane man could do in such a place, except cut down the trees to let some light in. Michael was beginning to hate the trees, but he kept that to himself because he could see the awe and reverence with which Cat regarded them.
The Wyr-fire was there, inside them both. Michael had a feeling he could live on toadstools and stagnant water as easily as Cat, if he only surrendered to the wood; but he preferred to eke out the last of Nennian's supplies and keep his mind his own.
The priest finished his prayers and rejoined them. He was shivering as he sat, though his face was impassive, calm. Not once had he seemed at a loss for the right path in their travelling, even in the thickest of the swamp or the blackest part of the wood. It was as if he had some kind of internal compass, its needle pointing infallibly at their goal. Michael was getting to the point where he did not care whether they reached it or not, as long as they returned to clean beds and decent food again.
'How much farther?' he asked Nennian, as he had been asking often these past few days. The sanctuary was almost two weeks behind them and there was no sign of the wood changing.
The Brother's expression was hard to read in the dim light, but Michael could hear the uncertainty in his voice.
'Farther than I had thought. It took me a week of travelling to come within sight of it the last time I tried. We are on the right path. I cannot be mistaken about that. I can feel the power of the place like some black sun beating on my face. But it seems to be retreating, or the forest is growing larger even as we traverse it ... I don't know.'
He sounded weary and baffled, his ready smile in ashes. Cat snorted in disgust.
'Is this some will-o'-the-wisp in a brown habit we are following, or is he just leading us on a grand tour of the Wolfweald?'
'Cat,' Michael said warningly, but he was too cast down by Nennian's uncertainty to argue. All this time he had been telling himself that it was not far, that they were nearly there. Now they could be a thousand miles away. He could have howled with frustration and despair.
'We were better on our own. We made better time, and the forest hardly minded us. Now that he is here it is watching us, our every step. Can you not feel it?'
Michael thought he could. It was a silent regard, an eyeless stare that made him hunch his shoulder blades as though expecting a blow between them. There was something in the air of the Wolfweald that made it heavy to draw into the lungs, like the opposite of high altitudes. Thick air, leaden with dislike, dripping with power.
'I feel nothing, 'Nennian said. 'I have lived in this place for a dozen years and I have never felt such a thing. The Wolfweald knows me, and I know it.'
'You are a fool,' Cat said contemptuously, and Michael thought he saw the priest's face tighten with anger.
'Stop it,' he said, angry himself at their bickering. 'How much longer will your supplies last?' This to Nennian, who was a tense crouched shape, the habit making him look like a moss-covered boulder.
'Water for two, maybe three days. Food for another four.'
'Toadstools and pondwater.' Cat laughed. 'You'll be sinking them soon, unless you'd like to try chewing your sandals!'
'Shut up,' Michael hissed, and surprised them with the venom in his voice. 'No more arguing. We boil the forest water as soon as we can get a fire lit, and we eat anything we can find. Beetles if need be. But we keep going, even if it means riding south to those high mountains that are supposed to be on the other end of this damned place. All forests finish, and we'll get to where we're going even if we end up eating the horses and walking our feet down to the bones.'
His outburst seemed to subdue his companions and Cat's back was turned resolutely towards him that night, but he did not care. He could sense the tendrils and shoots of the wood worming their way into him, infiltrating his will, and the effort of shutting them out was exhausting him as much as the endless travelling. The wood was telling him to abandon the Brother, to leave him here where the trees could take him. It urged him to wander without a path, to let the weald resculpt him in a more fitting form for the meeting that was coming. Sometimes he thought its voice was an actual sound, an audible whisper that carried above the creak of tree trunks. He had to abandon himself to the Other Place and forget all that he had learned in his former life. He must forget about Ireland, about home, about mass on Sunday and the bustle of a surrounding family. He was merely an orphan in between parents, and he needed the wood in his veins to be accepted within it. Give up; give in, it said. Drowning is easier if you do not struggle. You will find your goal the quicker, and be a happy man at journey's end. The message was as persistent and annoying as tinnitus.
The ground under the trees rose and fell as they continued, becoming a range of wooded hills and giving them drier campsites. Here and there patches of moss-covered stone thrust out of the humus and dead leaves like the bones of the land pushing through decaying skin. Nennian was convinced that these heights were the foothills of the terrible southern mountains, and that they were near to the edge of the forest. It could not be far, he told them, with something of the old confidence back in his voice. Cat ignored him, and even Michael paid him little heed.
The trees grew strange. They diminished in height, though their roof was as thick as ever. They looked as though they had contracted some leprous disease. Instead of soaring straight up they twisted and curved like arthritic finger
s, and the bark had dropped off them in places, scab-like, revealing black wood underneath. Their roots crept and crawled over the thinning earth, coiling around stones. They had become contorted, tortured things clawing for life, and Michael's imagination conjured the misshapen trunks into mottled faces and bodies, distorted limbs.
'Can you feel it?' Cat asked in a whisper. Her face was full of awe.
'Feel what?' Nennian demanded irritably.
'The power here, thrumming in the air. Even the trees cannot stand it. It's like a hot air. Michael, can you feel it?'
He could. It was like the light tapping of a drum in his temples, a far whisper. The wood was alive and watching them. He felt that they had wandered into the maw of some gargantuan beast, a whole land become sentient and cunning. And hostile. It leached the strength from his limbs and sucked out what courage he possessed, so that he might have been seven again, seeing the dark shapes crossing the river at twilight, the fear rising to block his throat.
'Mother of God,' he murmured. Brother Nennian was reciting Latin in a low voice.
Their camp was at the base of a rocky bluff, the fire reflecting off wet stone and lighting up a tiny semicircle of the world. Around them was the darkness, the wood, and in the night they could. feel the presence of the trees as though they were a vast silent crowd of onlookers, baleful and disapproving. They were alive. Michael could think of no other word to explain it.
'We are close, here. Very close,' Nennian said, staring at his unlit pipe. Cat was calming their mounts at the edge of light, whispering in their ears and wiping the rank terror sweat from their flanks.
'Did you not pass through this region when you approached the castle?' Michael asked him.
'No. It is ... It is new to me, this place, but I have followed the path I took then, I swear. It is as if the forest could move and shift, the land itself change.'