A Different Kingdom

by Paul Kearney

  On to an endless canopy of trees, bare with winter, the stars glittering bright and cold in the sky above.

  He retreated from the window. Tricks. They were playing tricks on him.

  A smothered giggle, like the laughter of a child, from the bedroom.

  He ran in with the spear thrust in front of him, saw the disordered shape of Clare's nude form—and a black, spider-thin creature chuckling over it.

  He shouted with outrage and stabbed at the thing, but it leapt away and scurried across the room, still chortling. In one claw-like hand was a black ribbon of hair.

  It was hard to see. He prodded the corners, the loose clothes on the floor. The voice laughed again. Its owner invisible. Michael was shaking with rage aand fear. He bent over Clare and saw that some of her dark locks had been cropped. Acorns nested on her eyes and a scarlet cluster of rowan berries had been placed in the dark pelt of her crotch. The bed was covered in shards of rotting leaves and broken twigs, the hard spheres of unripe winter berries. He brushed them away and shook her again, but she continued to breathe in even sleep.

  Another smashing blow to the front door. There was a long, eager howl just outside, the sound of animals snapping and yelping. They were waiting for something, growing impatient.

  The bedroom seemed empty, the creature that had been there gone. He kissed Clare with an odd feeling of fraud, and shuffled out of the hall.

  There were leaves on the floor, pieces of twigs that jabbed his bare soles. Mushrooms and toadstools had begun to sprout in corners. The flat smelled dank, and the temperature had dropped until Michael was beginning to see the plume of his warm breath misting the mephitic air. There was that unwholesome breeze coming out of nowhere, carrying along with the smell of decay a hint of snow, the breath of the dark season. He might have been in the deep woods on a winter night.

  Shivering, he went back to the window.

  The forest was still there with a mist rising in it and the moon climbing over the tops of the tallest trees. There was a frost starting to sparkle on the bare branches, and the thin mist was set alight by the moon.

  Michael sank to his knees in the gathering much that was the floor of the flat. The Other Place had reclaimed him. He groaned, and thought he could hear answering laughter, silvery as bells, outside. But he would not look.

  Why? Why had they come back for him? Had he done them and their forest so much harm that they must needs hunt him like this, following him over the years and the long miles, the separating sea? Why?

  There was a rending crash, a splintering and tearing of wood, and then a dull boom as the front door was punched off its hinges and fell to the floor. A cacophony of howling and screeching broke out in the hall, and Michael leapt up.

  In the living room doorway was a long-eared shape with shining teeth and two glowing eyes. He stabbed the spear into it with all his strength and felt the knife slide sideways from the wooden shaft. But the iron in the blade did its work, and the beast tumbled sprawling to the floor.

  More shapes behind it, the rank smell choking his throat. He drew the other knife from his belt and it-flashed in the moonlight that was splintering in wands and bars through the window blind.

  Another great head thrust over the corpse of the first wolf and warm slobber spattered his chest. He stabbed again, but this time went wide as the animal swung to one side. Something hit him with tremendous force, flinging him across the room. The knife spun from his fingers. Bright lights stabbed into his head and the breath was crushed out of his lungs. Something raked his upper arm, tearing his sleeve to shreds and ripping long tears in his flesh. There was harsh fur against his face, pricking his cheek. A tremendous animal heat, hot breath, was clouding about him. The twigs that littered the floor pierced the muscles of his back.

  And two eyes were a foot from his face. Vast, amber circles, they were slitted with pupils black as jet, red lines veining the yellow cornea. They blinked once, slowly, and Michael could see the massive muzzle; striped by moonlight, the faint shine of the teeth that lined it.

  Terror galvanized him. He screamed aloud as his entire body convulsed with effort, the cords in his thick neck riding out of the flesh and neat to snapping. His arms pushed up with enormous force, a strength dredged from the bowels of his fear, and the heels of his hands impacted with the wolf's throat. He felt something give way in there, a wet snap, and then the heavy beast was punched into the air. Air flooded his lungs, and he flowed to his feet with something of the old hunter's grace.

  The others were lunging for him.

  Without thought, he launched himself towards the window, adrenaline powering the neglected muscles of his legs. He hit the Venetian blind and felt the sharp edges slice at his arms and shoulders, and then the glass doing the same, but with a bright flare of pain, deep and cold. He was weightless, his stomach turning and his ears full of the demented howls of his attackers, anger in them, disappointment—and fear?

  And so it ends, he thought, and he was smiling as he fell, a moment of free fall crammed with reflection. He wondered what the shattering impact of the concrete pavement would be like.

  Branches whipped at his face, along his torso, cutting and whipping his flesh.

  The wood. Still there.

  He hit something hard and unyielding, a thicker branch. It crushed the breath out of him, popping his ribs like sticks, and then he was careering past it.

  Again. This time a spray of twigs and lesser branches that lashed his face. And now he was being buffeted from branch to branch in a kind of arboreal pinball, yelling with the pain of his broken ribs.

  And a final, enormous impact that left him lying on his back with his lungs flat and airless: the surrounding trees a wheeling kaleidoscope of shadow and moonlight.

  He struggled, and finally sucked in a huge draught of air that fuelled his scream of agony. Then he was breathing quickly, carefully, his ribs an orchestra of white-hot daggers jabbing his sides.

  But I'm alive.

  He hauled himself to his feet, grimacing. Around him the trees reared up, a diffuse silvery radiance that was the moonlight illuminating the topmost branches high above. Down here he was enveloped in Stygian gloom. The ground gave moistly under his feet, mud and moss, the mulch of millennia's leaves. The tree trunks glowed faintly, phosphorescent mould plastering the bark. There was a reek of dampness, of rot and decay. It stirred memories. He squeezed his eyes shut until the darkness had seeped into them and he was no longer totally blind.

  He was in the Wolfweald.

  Something stirred in the wet earth at his feet. He jumped backwards, the lurch sending the jagged needles of his broken bones grating.

  The leaves shifted there, mud rose up. He blinked furiously, trying to make it out. His injured arm dripped blood upon the earth but he hardly noticed.

  Something coming out of the ground.

  He remembered, and white terror flooded his brain. He saw Nennian's face as they tore him to pieces.

  Two black horns or ears surmounting a broad skull. A long muzzle thrusting its way free of the ground. Powerful shoulders below the heavy head, all utterly black, mud-covered, stinking of decayed leaves and deep day.

  He ran.

  He had time to think: This is the end. It finishes here. I am the last loose end. And then he heard the awful howl of the beast behind him and the patter of its feet on the dead leaves.

  He blundered along like a drunk, careering into trees, tripping over roots and having his forehead slashed by low branches. His lungs worked and wheezed like a leaking set of bellows, and the pain of his injuries mingled with the chill race of his adrenaline to make a cocktail of energy, high-octane panic. He sounded like a mad ghost, all laboured breathing and the jingle of the keys in his pocket.

  It was not enough. He was losing blood steadily and his air supply was constricted by the racked agony of his broken rib cage. And he was not fit. He was an overweight man who smoked and drank too much, who spent his days on one side of a bar or the othe
r. The city living was heavy in his limbs, a millstone settling with fatal weight across his chest.

  I'm going to die here, he thought. The fairytale finishes.

  Michael! This way!

  What? A voice? Had he heard it or imagined it?

  Michael!

  There she was. Cat, plain as day, beckoning urgently to him, Just as she had once many years before in the wood. beside his home. A laugh got past the strangled constriction of his throat. She was going to save him again. It would be all right.

  Something struck him from behind and knocked him on to his face. His mouth was full of the stinking leaf litter and there was a dry snarling, like the rip of a chainsaw, in his very ear. He rolled in the filth of the forest floor. The beast was on top of him and there was a green light spilling out of its eyes. The black maw descended and he reached up to fend it off. It was like grappling with slimy mahogany, solid wood that nonetheless bulged with muscle. His fingers slid along its smooth throat. Stone-hard paws scrabbled at his chest, ripping his clothes away, popping buttons, tearing into his flesh. He shrieked with pain and fury. The teeth lunged for his face and he punched the wolf's head aside, skinning knuckles. The jaws fastened on his forearm and it was as though a razor-edged vice was crushing the bones. There was a metallic rattle as his keys slipped from his pocket.

  His keys.

  His free hand scrabbled for them, digging through the wet dirt and rotten twigs. Then they were hard and cold in his palm. With absurd familiarity, the key to his front door was in his fingers. An old key, for an ageing Victorian red-brick. The locks had never been changed.

  An iron key.

  He stabbed it into one of the green-glowing eyes and saw the light sputter out.

  The grip on his arm slackened, the teeth pulling free from his flesh. The wolf fell to one side with a sound like the splintering of sap-heavy wood. The weight was off his chest and he was breathing more easily.

  When he looked again there was no trace of the beast, but only a framework, hard to see in the neardark, like a skeleton of twigs, the flesh mere shards of rotting bark and something like dark fungus within the woody rib cage. Then it sank into the forest soil and was gone.

  He lay back. His body was a massive labouring wound, and the blood was pulsing out of him to clot in ropy strings on the leaves. There was no feeling in the arm the wolf had bitten. Peering fearfully at it, he saw his flesh hanging in streamers and tendrils from the bare bone. His hand flopped like a dead spider at the end of his wrist. No movement. The bone was not bitten through, but the sinews and nerves had gone. He recorded the fact with an odd detachment. It did not matter. He was going to die here—that much was plain.

  But there was something else to do first, He had seen Cat. (Or had it been Rose?) That was a reason to get up, to knot together the remains of his shirt and tuck his mangled arm within them.

  It was hard even to stagger. Moonlight ahead, a brighter shade beyond the trees.

  And behind him the howls of other beasts. A pack of them now, on his trail.

  If only he had the Ulfberht. And the strength to wield it, he added to himself.

  Sense and consciousness were coming and going like a blossoming red balloon in his mind. He was wandering, the pain tearing his mind free of panic and fear.

  I'm dying.

  But that did not matter either. If nothing else, he wanted to sate his curiosity before the end. And to see Cat again. Maybe he would have a fairy-tale ending after all and die in her arms.

  He fell, cursing feebly, and then he was on his feet again. Had someone helped him? Was there an arm supporting him?

  Never mind. It was easier to walk now. He came through the trees and then there was a brightness, a flood of silver light. The wood ended as though it were a carpet with clear-cut edges. And there was open country before him, rising into hills. Looming directly to his front, one hill reared up above its brothers and became a steep-sided crag, the rock faces on it black in the moonlight. There was a building at its summit, built 80 cleverly that it was impossible to say where rock ended and man-made wall began. A castle.

  He smiled. Of course. It all fits.

  He stepped out of the wood, leaving it behind just as the murderous shadows lunged at his back. They stopped at the eaves of the trees, snapping and snarling their frustration, but came no further. Michael grinned at them.

  Fuck you.

  Then he began stumbling and staggering south across the moon-bright hills, towards the Castle of the Horseman.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT WAS COLD up in the hills. The moon sparkled off frost-coated grass that thickened as he limped onwards until it had become a covering of brittle snow. Soon the powdery stuff was above his ankles, soaking and numbing his feet. He stuffed handfuls of it into his mouth, trying to assuage a raging thirst. Its chill made his teeth ache and his head throb. His eyes were like two hot globes of glass set in a freezing skull, but he felt little pain from his injuries. Dimly he thought he might be in shock.

  He accepted without question the burning need in him to approach the castle ahead, and battled uphill grimly, slipping and sliding on the snowy ground— and once falling on his face with an impact that tore a shriek out of him. Back in the wood the wolves were still howling as though mocking his pain.

  But I beat them, he thought. I got past them, somehow. Made it so far.

  His breath plumed; a moonlit feather. As the rises became ever steeper he began scrabbling upwards on hand and knees. His passage left the snow scuffed and tom, speckled with blood. He was carving a brutal path southwards through the white, pristine covering, leaving a trail that would be visible for miles. The woodsman part of him was bothered by that, but the rest knew it did not matter. He had survived the Wolfweald, had seen the end of it after so many years. There would be no more pursuit.

  The castle loomed slowly closer, bulking as black as pitch against a star-filled sky. There were no lights within, no sign of life. It might have been a ruin set at the edge of the world, a grim monument.

  He worked his way higher. The hills began to level off after a while. He was walking across their crests now, with the occasional loss of altitude as they dipped. He was higher up than he had ever been in this world before, and looking round he could see the whole vast panorama of the earth filling every horizon. To the north the forest rolled for league after uncounted league under the moon, the treetops glistening with frost. To east and west there were the hills he was stumbling across. They were higher around him, and he realized that he was walking up a drumlin-filled valley with the real, stony heights of the others extending in higher tors and ridges to west and east. It seemed to be a pass extending through them to the far south, and dominating it all was the castle.

  To the south, beyond the black crag the Horseman's Castle occupied, there was a white country of windscoured buttes and escarpments rising ever higher until at the end of sight the moon set alight the far shapes of mountains, snow-covered, sharp as horns. Even at this distance he could feel their height and coldness. Thousands of feet of barren, ice-bitten stone extending like some savage barrier along the south of the world. He knew now why some of the forest people believed them to be the rim of the earth with nothing but a star-filled gulf beyond them.

  The castle overtopped him, towering and dark. He was nearly there, and his strength was almost finished. Pausing, he saw that there was a rime-white road leading around the circumference of the crag, winding like a helter-skelter until it disappeared far above.

  He groaned. His injured arm had lost all feeling up to the biceps, but his broken ribs were protesting incessantly and the raking clawmarks of the wolf were oozing blood. Blood that was crystallizing even as he stood. The cold had deepened. It was a raw, numbing thing that ate towards his marrow. He could no longer feel his feet and he could sense tiny ice particles crackling in his nose.

  'Jesus,' he stuttered, shuddering. He had not expected this.

  Had he really seen Cat in the wood or had
it been his own fancy? He looked up at the winding road ahead.

  Can't—can't do it.

  He was shoved forward roughly—he distinctly felt a pair of hands in the small of his back—but when he spun round there was nothing there. He cursed rabidly.

  'All right! If that's what you want then I'll do it!'

  And he started stumbling forward up the last, spiralling road.

  He was swearing and mumbling as he went, trying to talk himself up it. But the steep incline and the bitter cold stole the breath from his lungs after a while so that he was wheezing and panting for breath, and he was clenched into silence. Stopping once to spit out the phlegm that was crowding the back of his throat, he saw it land dark and clotted on the snow and knew that his wayward ribs had punctured a lung. But still he battled upwards. There was nowhere else to go.

  He slipped on slick stone and fell, his head cracking on the ground. The darkness whirled in on him and for a while he had the strangest sensation: that he was warm and beside the kitchen range at home. The heat was glowing over him and warming his toes. His shudderings eased. But the woodsman part of him would not let him rest. Hypothermia, it said. Get up. But it was not his own voice telling him that.

  He opened his frost-whitened eyelashes to see Cat leaning over him. She was dressed only in the white shift he had first seen her in, but she did not seem to feel the cold.

  He smiled. That white shift. She had worn it for so long. It looked like a hospital shift, the type they gave out to expectant mothers. He wondered why he had never noticed that before.

  She was looking at him mutely and he sighed.

  'All right.'

  He wriggled to his hand and knees, then to his feet. There were white blotches on his fingers and the back of his free hand. God, he was tired.

  'Damn you, Cat.' But he lurched onwards nonetheless.

  It seemed as though he had been travelling for many hours, but there was no lightening of the sky to the east, no sign of the dawn, and as far as he could see the moon had scarcely moved. There was no Great Bear in this sky to tell the time by. He wondered if the Horseman was keeping the land in shadow to impede his climb. Or maybe his sense of time was awry. Everything else was.