She turned her back on the exchange, the snap of blood in her ears drowning out the men’s conversation. With hot cheeks and unsteady breath she fumbled with the stirrup-straps, rubbing the old cracked leather hard between her thumbs and forefingers before, with an effort, she could force herself to tip the world right-side up again and go mechanically through the motions of preparing the saddle and mounting for the ride.
“Shee hee!” Skander whistled, his mood restored, ignorant of the blush of fear on Margaret’s face. “Come by, Twiti! Come by, Latimer!”
They went out by the curtain-wall gate north along the wooded fellside, dropping single-file by way of a narrow walking-path into the thick pine-woods. The land below was swimming in silvered mist: every now and then the stark bare black of orchards swaths of snowy pasture showed through, looking, at that distance, like the swells of the sea. It was beautiful, clean, and clear with a light dusting of snow everywhere, and Margaret’s spirits could not help being lifted on a tenuous upward draught of pleasure. They were a merry, handsome group in a fiercely bright, handsome land: a flicker-flame of a party, trimmed in gold and ermine, riding among the snow-laden pine-boughs, dressed in scarlets and greens, and blues as clear as Lord Gro’s aquamarine ring.
Margaret’s dark-dappled mare was frisky this morning and took the sloping path downward at a hard, jogging trot, vying for space with Witching Hour on her left and, she found, Periot Survance’s horse on her right. The horses’ breath steamed in the shadowy air. She took the reins firmly in hand, giving her mare little head to fight with. White breath streamed backward over her, pearling on her cheek and once, as her mare shook loose from a low pine-branch, she got a dusting of snow on her lashes.
The second time Hanging Tree bumped into Survance’s horse he said, “We seem to have lost the hunting line, haven’t we?” and pulled his horse back alongside her mare’s flank.
“We do seem to have bunched up a bit,” Margaret admitted. She swung sideways in the saddle and bent to avoid another branch—and to see what look was brooding on Rupert’s face to gauge his attitude. His mount had pulled ahead and she could see only his shoulder and the back of his head. “I am sorry: Hanging Tree is fidgety this morning.”
“No need to apologize. We all have fidgety mounts some mornings…Have we met before? I don’t believe we have.”
Margaret had been dreading the question, knowing when he had spoken out that it was only seconds away. She had wanted to like him, and had wanted him to like her—that was about to be over, now. “You haven’t.” She twisted and reached out, putting her hand in his. “I’m Margaret Coventry, from the Mares.”
“Ah!” said Periot. A smile, almost hard with sincerity, flashed across his face. “Is this your first time to Ryland—I mean, to Lookinglass? I don’t suppose you would come up this way just to see Ryland.”
“Yes, it is my first time to Lookinglass. Where is Ryland?”
“Just there.” Periot pointed to their left and downward. Through the ragged pine-tops Margaret could see the homely red roofs of buildings emerge from the mist. “I am Periot Survance. I am one of the shepherds there.”
“I can see that it is in the shadow of Lookinglass,” Margaret admitted, “but it looks pleasant from here.” She almost added that it must be good to have a home, no matter what grander shadow it was in, but she bit it back just in time. “I did hear your name when you spoke to Skander in the yard. You have a friend, I understand, who could not make it?”
The man—he must have been fifteen years her senior—put down his heels and leaned back to dodge another low-hanging branch. “Oh yes, Ely—I just finished my rotation in the pulpit and Ely begins tomorrow, so he stayed home to study. He will be sorry he was not able to meet you. He is fond of new people.”
“Well, perhaps another time,” Margaret heard herself saying. At that, Rupert turned his head and she could see his brow uplifted, the faintest, softest feather of a smile touching the corner of his mouth.
They passed over Ryland and left the track altogether, following Skander Rime and his huntsman Gabriel into the thick, scrubby ground of the wood itself, riding fetlock-deep in snow and leaf-muck, crashing over fallen logs after the leashed hounds, following the pock-marks that Gabriel had made going and coming back from locating the boar. They fell back into single-file. The wood afforded bare space for one horse to walk comfortably, and the ground was rough, more so than when she and Rupert and Skander had gone on their flurry of a fox-hunt. They went through clear wood for awhile, passing between empty maples and birch, but soon left those to fight with holly and heavy, ancient pine where the new morning light, which had been mounting in the air, was nearly strangled by the thick evergreen growth. Though the difficult ground made her uneasy, Margaret found herself enjoying it more than she had the fox-hunt, for though they went largely in silence, they were gaily-spirited and pleasant, even Gro—who rode in the unenviable position before Rupert, with Rupert’s eyes on the back of his neck.
Were it not for the bulk of fell which ran roughly north and south, Margaret would have lost sense of direction. They wandered at a walk and breaking trot after the hounds for the better part of an hour, worming and weaving through the harsh winter wood, keeping much together though, after awhile, the string broke up into a staggered pattern around her that worked into a crescent-shape. They pushed on northward and a little westerly, always going down a bit of slope so that the constant motion of leaning back and swaying from side to side began to make Margaret ache. The sun had got clear of Glassfell and was shining beautifully down between cloud-streamers and the crazy, pin-wheeling pine-branches, stabbing down into the snow and scrub and scouting hounds so that the images of them all showed up brightly and clearly on Margaret’s vision and seemed painfully, wildly dear—
The foremost hound raised his head and gave a strange exultant wail, like a howl and a scream at once, and quick as thought the others took it up, clustering, bunching in around the leader, straining their leashes almost to the breaking point. Imperiously Gabriel’s horn blared, shattering the crystalline beauty of the quiet wood—sending up a pair of partridges out of a thicket in a flurry of tawny wings—and the dog-boys stooped as one to let loose their charges. The motley crew of dogs, all big-boned, fierce beasts like Curoi, heavily-limbed and swift in motion, broke from the clustering group of horses. Yanking in their leashes the dog-boys ran after them, dodging Gabriel on his horse, trying not to be crushed underfoot as the huntsman kept flying pace with his hounds. His encouraging shouts and staccato horn-notes beat back on Margaret’s ears as she, too, lurched into the chase. It was just as before, only more dangerous with the uneven, half-hidden ground underfoot and a sudden rocky bed of a stream opening up before them, steep and cold as horror on her skin; one horse, a new-looking, lanky bay, gave a scream of shock as it went in and grumbled and squealed as its rider urged it up the opposite bank after the disappearing tail of one of the biggest of the dogs. Margaret clung on only because she had to; her mare did most of the footwork for her, following after Rupert and answering, as if it knew the language, to the call of the horn.
They turned uphill once and came into a roughly shallow piece of fellside that might have once been a cirque, but was now as wooded as the rest of the ride, and came flying up a damp, empty bit of streambed to what must have once, after the cirque, been a kind of pool at the foot of a low waterfall. There was a big, swift movement of black on the background which, in the confusion, Margaret understood intuitively to be the boar. In the flurrying motion she did not get a clear view of it.
The horn screamed again. The dogs all gave tongue, closing into a tight ring at the mouth of the dead stream to keep the boar from escaping. Most of the men, and even Woodbird, had flung themselves off their horses and were forming the tight, hesitant ring around the beast. Feeling somehow unsafe on the back of her hunter, though it stood patiently beneath her, Margaret unhooked her leg and foot from the saddle and slid to the ground, hanging back with a cl
ear view of the fight. Against all better reason she did not want Rupert to think she was a coward.
The saddle had afforded her the best view of the boar, but even from the lower sloping ground of the old damp streambed she could see it clearly enough between the bunched ring of the hounds and the group of men. It was backed up against a low rocky fall which, in spring, would be gushing with snow-water, but now was littered with dead leaves and rattling pebbles. Plant-growth and dirt shunted upward in a brown spray around the boar as it dug its forehooves in, sheeny back bristled, its gargoyle face leering at them as it swung about slowly, this way and that, to take them all in. It was a wily beast. Even at that distance, and with no foreknowledge of the animal, Margaret knew it was awful and cunning, far more horrible than that thoughtless half-moment with the fox in the wood; this was a thing of brute and bloody strength, and her own blood ran chill in her veins to look at it. She tore her eyes from its gaze: there was something bewitching about its flickering red eyes that would be her death, she thought, if she met it and let it hold her.
“Hy! hy my!” someone cried, and as if the cry were an archer letting loose his fingers, three alaunts sprang forward at once, hurling their heavy bodies at the boar. Three of them was significant weight and fang to throw against anything, but the boar was waiting for them. Transfixed, Margaret watched the boar swivel its thick, craggy body like a corkscrew—it seemed not to be on the ground at all. A dog screamed, another snapped and howled; one got a good mouthful of bristling boar-hide before it was shaken off, with a hind leg torn wide open, to stumble across the bodies of its fellows. Margaret had come to know from watching Curoi that alaunts have little sense save blood-lust, and this one, like Curoi, clung to the fight as long as it could. It tried to regain purchase on the ground, slipping and sliding on the muck and its game leg, but the boar was too much for it. Like a wall falling on a crippled beggar it ran the dog down, crushed it, broke open its skull with its tusks, and trampled clean over it, racing for the break in the ring of dogs and hunters.
It was all over in a moment. Margaret saw it happen clearly, everything etched with sharp edges in red: the brief struggle between the dogs and the boar, the boar’s triumph, and the boar’s enraged burst for freedom through the ranks. Then everything went odd to Margaret, as if things were longer than they ought to have been, and shorter by half at once. She was aware of the two lymers, Latimer and Twiti, jumping up beside her, eager to join in the fight, and she, possibly out of her mind, letting go of her horse in a panic to grab a collar in each hand.
“No!” she cried above the clamour of boar and dogs and huntsmen. “No, you idiots—you fools! Let it to the bigger dogs!”
She dug the heels of her riding boots into the muck and clung on; she was hauled forward a step, but thankfully Skander’s hounds seemed better trained than Rupert’s Curoi. They stopped obediently, but nothing else did. When she could look up again Margaret saw the boar coming through the last line of hounds, hurling a hunting-boy aside with something spitting and nasty where his knee should have been, and come charging. The distance between her and it seemed impossibly long. It was more like looking down time than looking down several yards of old streambed. But at the same time it seemed the boar was only a moment from her. It did not occur to her that it was bearing straight for her—for boars, Rupert had said, have no use for dodging and foxy play as harts do—she only knew it instinctively, as if she had always known it, as if it were a dream, as if this were the perfectly natural way of things.
Her hands sprang open. What happened to the dogs after that, she did not know. There was a horse beside her which belonged to she knew not whom, and she reached for the first thing among its tack which looked serviceable. It was the fourchée, as long as any spear, and hooked like the devil’s fork. There was a scream which she thought was her own as she turned and braced her feet into the gravel and mud—it was only the scared horse—and almost at the same instant the boar was on her. The world became brute force, the sense of being knocked off the edge of Plenilune into the empty black, the rot-reek of boar breath, a squeal of rage and a savage cry. The jar nearly wrenched the fourchée out of her hands but somehow she clung on, which was stupid, she realized later. But what saved her by a hair’s breath was Aikin Ironside, who had sprung in with his own boar-spear. His was the savage, wordless cry of brute force to match the boar’s. His was the weight which threw the boar’s off just a fraction—just enough to save Margaret’s chest from being gouged open by the beast’s fangs.
The whole scene dived off the end of Plenilune into the black, turned on end over Margaret’s head, and seemed to fall on without her. The world stopped whirling and she found herself on her side with her face raw and the raw places filled with gravel. Her hands were blistered and torn, and stung as she pressed them into the leaves to heft herself up. She had bit her lip again, just where it had been broken before: through the confusion and swimming feeling in her head, that was what she noticed chiefly, and it annoyed her.
People rushed to her side. Aikin, who was closest, was there first, with an experienced but bloodied hand under her elbow to hold her until she found her balance. The world swam a moment with brown and tawny and pale light until it became a November wood again, and she looked down and over to see the huge body of the boar scrabbling and heaving, still alive, but only barely, with her make-shift weapon and Aikin Ironside’s spear in its chest.
“Someone kill it, please,” a man called, half-laughing in an uncertain, shaky way. “She’s all right, only tumbled a bit.”
Through the ringing in her ears Margaret realized it was Aikin Ironside himself who was speaking, his dark auburn hair a mess with leaves and his face rather pale so that, looking up, she realized he had two stark brown freckles on his left cheekbone. But the tawny of his eyes was laughing, and his smile flashed white with a companionable triumph which made Margaret warm where the boar’s tusk would have hit her.
Rupert was there on her other side, then, slipping an arm around her hourglass to support her—her legs did not feel certain just then—and Skander was looking from her to the boar’s killing and back again, seeming bemused. “I take it back, Rupert,” he said slowly. “You were right.”
“Someone see to Charlock’s cub!” someone yelled. “It took a chunk out of his knee!”
Margaret was momentarily forgotten as several people scrambled to help the silent, pale-faced boy sitting in a crevice on the ground, holding onto his own leg and trying gamely—and doing well—not to cry. Rupert took her out of the way and quietly put her on a log with his own cloak about her shoulders and a flask of brandy to sip from clasped whitely in her hands.
“Sit there quietly,” he told her. His fingers brushed her cheek. In a still more gentle voice he added, “You have done better than all, brave heart.”
His words came to her through an odd, muffling blanket of emotion and it was not until he had gone away himself to help with the task of unmaking the boar that she really heard him. She shuddered at the memory of his touch. It was uncanny and wretched how that was the clearest feeling of all: not the cuts on her hands or the roughness of her cheek, or even the sickening backwash of fear, but the warm, gentle, rough touch of his hand on her face. Impulsively she shoved the back of her hand across her cheek and took a sip of the brandy to drown the shock.
The unmaking was a smelly, disgusting business. The boar was killed thoroughly and turned over to be systematically, almost ceremoniously, taken apart. No one said much to her, but the odd thing was that their faces were rather different now: they were much more open and accepting whenever they happened to drop their gaze on her sitting alone with Twiti, who had slunk fawningly up, lounging on her feet. As the shock began to wear off, she could not quite think why. It was Aikin Ironside who had really done it. If it had not been for his thrust she would have been maimed, if not killed, and she had a cold, sober appreciation for the young man’s skill and quick thinking.
“Put your head between
your knees,” a voice said above and behind her. “It will get the blood back into your brain.”
She looked round to find Lord Gro had joined her, quietly though the ground was strewn with sticks and pebbles. His appearance had not changed since she had last spoken with him, but after the first awkward moment of finding him looming over her, Margaret thought she caught the merest glimmer of respect in his frank, cold eyes. She remembered what he had said to the others behind the closed lattice—and remembered also that he did not know she had overheard. Unavoidably she coloured and looked hurriedly away.
“I am all right, thank you,” she said, trying not to sound too blunt, and failing, for her voice was not quite certain in her throat. It seemed to her less lady-like to stick one’s head between one’s knees than it was to have met a boar head-on with an oversized fork.
The wind gusted and tugged at their cloaks. Margaret huddled deeper into hers while Lord Gro’s danced wildly about his shoulders. Ears blowing in the wind, Twiti scrambled to his feet and wedged himself in the folds of Margaret’s skirt between her knees. Risking one hand to venture out into the cold, she fondled the dog’s ears, drawing the purling softness through her fingers. The fleshy underside of the ear was warm and pulsed faintly beneath her pressure: she held onto it as onto a life-line, for the stark reality of her close shave was as cold as the wind to her belly, and as biting sharp. She watched, blindly, from a distance as Periot Survance squatted at the dog-boy’s feet and began poking gently at the wound. The boy lay with his head in Woodbird’s lap and did not say a word, but stared in a fixed, horrified way at the wood canopy, face as white as fainting. Margaret took a deep, shaking breath and pulled herself together.
“To think,” she remarked in her old familiar, steady voice, “I was concerned that there might be wolf-hunts in these parts.”
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