by Paul Kearney
And he was there.
Just like that. He wheezed a chuckle that turned into a bloody, agonized cough.
The castle walls reared up black and shining before him ¬fifty, seventy feet maybe, with not a joint or crack or squeeze of mortar to be seen. There were cobbles underfoot—the snow was a white skim here, no more—and a cold wind winnowed the crag around him, He was too far gone even to shiver.
A gateway yawned, black and high.
There was a dry moat, cut like a dark chasm in the very rock of the hill. Spanning it was a crumbling stone bridge that led to the gaping portal. Like the bridge at home, he thought. A doorway. He knew he must go through it, and knew also that he had to be swift, for life and consciousness were ebbing away. His body was hardy and stubborn yet, despite the years of abuse; but he was human, after all. Mortal.
He staggered through the gateway.
'Cat! Are you here?'
Vast buildings reared up around a huge courtyard. There was a barbican behind him with pointed towers, then a broad walk into the square. A well was in the middle, broken in on itself.
The buildings were in ruins, walls fallen in, roofs gaping, slates and rubble littering the cobbles along with the rotted ends of once-mighty oak beams. Michael scuffled through the detritus of centuries as he walked. Broken swords, fragments of chain mail, bones and skulls. Earthenware and copper pots, glinting trinkets that caught the moonlight and sparkled icily. All strewn across the cobbles like rice after a wedding. Derelict. The place was empty.
He groaned. 'Oh, Christ!'
And then, from somewhere close by, music. A tabor beating, someone accompanying on a mandolin, and the golden notes of a harp. Beautiful, tugging music that wrenched at his heart, and then faded away like an echo of silver bells, at once merry and elegiac. He had heard it before somewhere.
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 glittering river with girls splashing and diving, sleek as salmon.
A picture barely viewed before it was gone. Why did he feel he had been here before?
His voice fell into a trough of silence when he called Cat's name again, the echo soaked up by the surrounding stone. Why had he expected to meet her here anyway?
Because he had sensed her. She had accompanied him all the way from the trees.
She was here.
His sight flickered. He was at the end of his strength. He sank to his knees on the hard ground.
The Horseman rode out of the shadows his steed's hoofs clumping softly on cobbles. He seemed huge beyond belief, towering up amongst the stars with the moon haloing his head and his hood full of impenetrable shadow.
Michael's heart lurched Sickly for a moment. He had been mistaken. Cat had not called him here. It had been some trick of the Horseman's. And now his soul was forfeit.
But he felt no fear. In the extremity of his pain and exhaustion there was a certain clearness, an icy logic to his brain. The worst had already been done to him. He no longer cared.
Grimacing with pain, he hauled himself to his feet.
'What the hell are you?' he muttered.
As if in answer the Horseman reached up and threw back his hood. Michael gaped.
There was nothing human there. The head looked like an overgrown stump of dark wood wound around with shoots of honeysuckle as though they were a necklace. Gleaming holly dung like hair mixed with mistletoe and dog rose. What might have been eyes were formed by red rowan berries, and a circlet of blackthorn coiled above them like a crown.
'I am the Wildwood' the Horseman said softly, and his voice was like the rush of the great trees in a breeze. It had no depth, as though his chest were not airtight, but was some wide, leafy space.
'Cat,' Michael whispered. 'Where is she?'
Here, Michael. The words flitted past him like a wind-driven leaf.
We're all here, Michael.
He realized that the voice was coming from the Horseman. 'What have you done with her—with Rose? What the hell do you want?'
'You.'
Michael backed away, trembling. 'No.'
Without any sense of transition, it was Cat who was seated on the horse before him. Her scars were gone and her hair was shining in the flood of moonlight.
'It's me, Michael. I'm part of the wood, as I always was. I'm not any different—but I'm not afraid any more.'
'He. got you, Cat. He got you at last. It was my fault. I'm sorry.'
She seemed irritated.
'You don't understand, do you?' But her face faded away, and he was looking at the mossy features of the Horseman again. The Green Knight.
'I am the Wildwood,' the figure said again. 'And I am anything you want me to be. What you see is what you wish to see. Root and branch, my sap is the same as that of every tree nourished by this earth.'
And then it was Nennian who was astride the motionless horse, his broad face smiling slightly.
'You have changed, Woodsman. The world you live in now is not fit for you. You belong to the wood even as I do.'
'He took your soul,' Michael croaked.
The priest continued to smile, shaking his head gently. 'Still you understand nothing.' And he was gone.
'What about Rose? What happened to her? Is she here too?'
'She died in your world, but yes, she is here. She had a daughter who belonged to the wood.'
Cat. Michael had guessed as much over the years. She was his cousin.
'Let me see Rose.'
'She is dead.'
'So was Nennian.'
'The priest was a part of the wood, part of this world. Hence he will never truly die.'
'So the quest was futile from the start. There was no way I could free Rose.' He was bitter, bitter and humiliated. All that suffering had been for nothing. He had thrown away his time in this world, maybe Cat's too.
The Horseman did not answer.
The cold was eating into Michael like a canker and the blood in his wounds had frozen into crystals, black as coal in the moonlight. He did not think he had much time left.
'Why am I here? You brought me, didn't you?'
The leafy head inclined slightly. His horse nosed at the white ground. Rime was forming around its muzzle but it seemed oblivious to the cold. Michael's face was becoming a mask of ice where his breath condensed around his mouth and nose. It cracked every time he spoke. He was very tired.
'When you die here, you will be mine,' the depthless voice said. 'You will belong wholly to the wood.'
It was the Wildwood speaking to him, Michael realized. The castle was a mere ruin, a peg to hang a legend upon. And the Horseman was merely a cipher. The wood was the key, the centre of everything, the heart of this world. Its god. Poor Nennian had wanted to confront the Horseman, not realizing that he was only the embodiment of the wood's will. He did not steal souls ~ they were lost to the Wildwood. Nennian's had been lost also.
I love the great trees.
The Horseman was the wood.
I am anything you want me to be.
Rose had wanted a mysterious romance. Michael wanted Cat. Or Rose. It did not matter. He had wanted that dark girl, and the wood had given her to him.
But now it wanted something in return.
'You're not getting me,' he said steadily. The cold had tightened the muscles of his jaw and his words were bitten out of the frigid air. 'I won't become part of you unless you let Rose go.'
'She is dead.'
'You have her essence here. Her ... soul. And you have my life. Give my life to her and let her go back. Let her go free and I'll be part of your wood. I'll do whatever you want.'
'Are you so strong you will bargain with me?' The words were a soft, threatening zephyr.
'I'm not Nennian. You can't blind me. My life for hers.'
The face stared at him. It seemed to be weighing things, considering. In that moment Michael knew that it was not evil, no m
ore than the spring gale or winter blizzard were evil. It was as elemental as the sun.
'She will return to the moment she left, to a stillborn daughter and a life of disgrace.'
'But life, nonetheless.'
'When she returns you will be there also, a boy. The man you grew into will never exist. There will be another Michael Fay in your world. That land's history will have changed.'
Michael smiled. So his other self would have another chance, a life not ruined by his time in the Other Place. And Rose would be there with him. Who knows? he thought. Maybe he will even go to England one day and meet a well-spoken girl who dreams of a man speaking Gaelic in his sleep.
'That's the bargain.'
The leafy growth around the face rustled with what Michael thought was silent laughter.
A happy ending for a fairy tale.
And Michael knew that he had won. His quest was fulfilled at long last.
Cat was there, and Nennian, his face open and grinning. And Michael was no longer cold.
I'll do whatever you want.
He left aside the battered remnant of what he had been, found Cat lithe and alive in his arms. The pair of them were standing in sunlight looking out over the vastness of the Wildwood that was the breath and life and heart of this wide world. And it was summer.
My life for hers.
EPILOGUE
THE SUMMER EVENING was finally darkening. She placed the last plate by the sink and listened to the birds at their evensong. Outside the air was becoming blue with dusk and the sun had long sunk behind the mountains to the west. Only a red glow, like the coals of some old fire, burned at the brim of the world's horizon.
The house was quiet. Most of the family were in bed, and old Demon was twitching and snuffling in his sleep under the kitchen table. A piece of harness lay gleaming with soap across one chair where Mullan had left it, and the clock ticked quietly in the empty stillness.
She padded upstairs, avoiding the steps that creaked through long practice, and paused on the landing. Slow breathing; more clocks ticking endlessly to themselves. She entered the smallest room and stood there for a moment gazing down on the head that occupied the pillow there. His mouth was open in sleep, one hand trailing on the floor. She replaced it under the blanket and kissed the boy's forehead, easing away his frown. Then she tiptoed back downstairs and let herself out into the yard soundlessly.
The sky was huge and cloudless. It had been a hot day, and the evening star was rising into a flawless vault above the trees. She could hear the river in its hollow, an early owl. Her bare feet made no noise in the grass.
The river was louder here, on the brink of the hollow, and night came more quickly in the shadow of the trees. She put her back to one and wrapped her bare arms about her knees, waiting as she had waited so often at dusk and dawn, not even sure what she was waiting for. All these years.
She thought sometimes she was watched, as she crouched there, by small shapes in the shadows; and once she was sure she had heard the soft thud of a horse's hoof. But the wood had been empty, the river coursing along within its banks to pour into the darkness below the bridge at the other end of the trees.
Nothing, yet again. Stiff with tiredness, she stood and began to walk back across the fields to where the kitchen light glimmered in the dark. She paused at the gate, looking back—and it was then she saw the movement and thought she heard her name called softly in the warm air.
She ran back, sure now, her heart bursting with inexplicable gladness and the joy hiccuping a laugh out of her as she went. Two shapes, standing in the eaves of the trees, the wood strangely thick about them, as though it were a copse transplanted from some other, older forest.
And she stopped. The man was tall, broadshouldered and bearded. He was dressed in leather and cured skins and he leaned on a spear. The woman beside him was slender and dark. She carried a bow, and a full quiver hung at her back. They stood so still that they might have been part of the trees, their faces slightly lighter ovals in the gloom.
Then the man raised a hand, pale in the dim light, and said something in a language she did not understand. But it was a happy thing, the words an alien music that were as deep and as old as the hills. And the woman laughed, her voice a silver bell in the growing night. Rose's eyes filled with tears and the world became a blur. When it cleared again they were gone, and the wood was empty. But she ran back through the quiet fields to her home with the wild flowers skimming her knees and the earth clinging to her feet. The stars were filling the night sky with brilliance, and she was singing.
About the Author
Paul Kearney was born in Northern Ireland. He studied Old Norse, Middle English and Anglo Saxon at Oxford University, and subsequently lived for several years in both Denmark and the United States. He lives in County Down, in a croft with a boat by the door.
Table of Contents
A Different Kingdom
PROLOGUE
PART ONE Antrim
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
PART TWO The Other Place
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
PART THREE The Horseman
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
About the Author