Crow Of Thorns

by Richard Mosses

  Although it is probably nothing other than what she says I still feel like I really missed a cue last night. It was too early, but I may also be too late. She needs to be more patient. I told her that already. It's going to be much better to leave this alone.

  The cold water is good on my face, and it stings as it runs down my chest. I feel awake and clean – ready for the rest of the day. Janice is coming out of the Ladies as I head back to my tent. I nod.

  “Sorry I lost my cool with you,” Janice says.

  “Don't worry about it. You didn't ask me for help. I should keep my nose to myself.”

  “You weren't interfering. You were just looking out for me.”

  Should I ask some plants in the Lower World for some advice for her cough after all? “Well we're a community. We should stick up for each other. No one else will.”

  “Aye. You're right there. I need to visit my sister and she's allergic to the dog. Would you look after Brutus for me?”

  Me and my big mouth. I can't back out now. But maybe it will help bring the Tent City together, properly. Rachael was right. We are all isolated from each other. “When do you want me to get him?”

  “He'll be okay in the tent. Just make sure he gets his walks, and some food. I'm leaving later today.”

  “I'll drop by before you go then.”

  I play it safe and use the fox drum, wade through mother's milk and emerge in the Lower World once more. I've not been here since my first proper trip. It feels weird. A bit like going home and a bit of an adventure at the same time.

  The kaleidoscope of animals still whizzes, buzzes, zings and crashes past me and I'm always ready to duck out of the way. A large green wasp, the size of my hand, seems determined to fly into my head no matter how many times I try to gently bat it away until suddenly it's taken by something that passes with a whip of wings. There's an horrendous cat-howl that sounds like something in pain until it sounds like an answering call from the opposite direction.

  The forest appears to be larger than before. I can't see any further into the chaos, but I sense a greater mass around me. Most likely I simply have the time to notice. It all seems so different too. Everything has changed. Foliage has fallen and been replaced. The light falls differently on the jungle floor. Almost nothing can have survived the constant cycle of predation, except some top of the heap cats or lizards. Finding Midori could be a challenge. Perhaps the river will lead me to the pool where we met. If I can find the river.

  I climb over fallen trees, avoid the spores bursting out of fungi I fall on, crawl under giant leaves, swat away blood seeking flyers the size of humming birds and generally do a great job of getting myself lost. A swarm of millipedes, each the size of my arm, passes in front of me. In their wake I see what looks like a worn path through the writhing undergrowth.

  This is highly unusual. Is it an elaborate trap? Some creature that lures in the lost with the hope of a passage to safety like an anglerfish in the depths of the ocean. In fairy tales the advice is usually to not step off the path rather than avoid it. Against my instincts I follow it.

  The path tracks a random course, curving round trees and large rocks, obliging me to still duck under fallen branches or clamber over other obstacles, but never quite going back on itself. After some time I worry less about a crazed animal waiting in its lair and more that this is just a waste of time. I'm on the path to nowhere.

  Sticking it out for just a little bit longer, it starts to feel like an hour or more has passed, when I hear rushing water and the path takes me to a huge tree that has fallen across a deep chasm through which a river crashes in a cascade of falls. I cross the tree, able to comfortably stand up on such a wide trunk. When I look downstream I think I recognise the pool where I met Midori. On the other bank the path heads off in the other direction and I have no idea if it will loop back down.

  I wait for two bees the size of sparrows to pass before clambering down the steep slope alongside the river. Then the slope turns to a cliff. I remember hanging onto the roots on the edge of the Abyss and have no desire to try clambering down this. To my left the cliff face extends as far into the jungle. To my right the river cuts down into the rock. Perhaps I can follow the river, risk using the wet rocks and even jump from pool to pool.

  I'd better be right about this pool.

  Derr, there's always my in built GPS. “Computer trace a path to Midori.” A familiar window opens and assures me this is the right place.

  Slipping down the rocks, I splash into the river and am immediately pushed over by the current. I bob like an apple on Halloween, before finding my feet again and bracing myself against the flow. I'm soaked to the skin, but the water is refreshing in the heavy air of the forest. With care I edge my way to the nearest fall and balance on wet, sharp rocks until I reach the small turbid pool below. Two more later and it might have been better to climb down the cliff. One more to go and I'm finding it hard to concentrate. My foot slips and my shin is scraped raw by a sliver of rock which insinuates itself under the hem of my motorcycle leathers. Hot and cold at the same time, my leg is bleeding profusely, the red churns with the foam of the falls. I don't feel like I can put any weight on it and there's nowhere I can pull myself out of the rapids.

  There's only one way out. I let myself go. I'm picked up and tossed over the edge of the fall before my stomach rises while the rest of me plummets down. Then I hit the water and the breath is taken from me. Fluid seeks to replace it and I surface choking for air and coughing up water. Behind me I hear a frenzied splashing and realise that this pool must be home to something carnivorous. My leather coat and the surfeit of spanners pulls me down and I struggle to swim.

  I hear strange words and I'm sprawling on mud and wet rock as the river rapidly recedes from beneath me.

  Midori strides out of long reeds on the banks beside the pool. She ducks down gracefully and supports me as we stand. I hesitate to give her my full weight, afraid I would crush her. She ends up dragging me out of the pool and laying me down in grass before the water floods back into the worn rock bowl. Without a word she pulls up the trouser leg and traces the gash with her finger. The flesh knits back together and the bleeding stops.

  “Thank you.” I try to sit up, but Midori pushes me back down.

  She bends over me, her face close to mine. “Lie still, for a while.” Her breath is sweet and heady like nectar.

  My tongue aches slightly where she jabbed me when we kissed. “Thank you.” I relax and drift off for a moment. When I come back I sit up. My head feels heavy and swollen.

  Midori is kneeling just watching me. “It is good to see you again, Nikolai Munro. I wondered if you would be back. Where is your flying friend?”

  “He had some other business to look after.” I need to get my act together. Working with Midori might be good, but if every conversation is a duel it will get tiring.

  “Have you come to accept my offer?”

  “An alliance sounds very formal.” Midori's scent is all around me, floral and yet musky too. Something stirs inside me.

  “A partnership sounds very intimate, to me,” Midori says, smiling.

  It's like time stops. I have never seen anyone so beautiful. “As would a union, no doubt.”

  “You don't wish to be united with me?” She runs a hand up her leg, over her hip, round her waist and lifts her breast, mocking me.

  The spell breaks. My lust subsides. “How about a coalition?”

  “With just two of us?”

  “We could invite more. All of us working together.”

  Midori strokes her chin. “Very well. Who would you like to invite?”

  “Anyone can join. No one is anyone's owner. No vassals, no lords. Cooperation for mutual benefit.”

  “You want me to give up my obligations? Free the spirits indentured to me?”

  “Your servants will also get the chance to be your allies. But through choice not obligation.”

  She laughs. Hard, brittle, like dry sticks
. “Look around you, naïve fool. Do you see the lion lying down with the lamb? Cats and dogs living together? This is the jungle. Things get eaten.”

  “Of course they do. We all must do what we can to survive. But look beyond that. Not everything fights all the time. You protect your servants. You still will. But instead of some tired feudal struggle a new system will begin.”

  “It has sustained us well this long.”

  “If this world reflects the Living World then the change will happen anyway. Sooner or later the lords will ask too much of the servants. They will feel they do all the work and are taxed too much. Unearned taxes which are squandered on squabbles with other powers or plain indulgent excess, which is the rubbed in their face. The little people will rise up and cast the lords down alongside them. It won't be bloodless.

  “You must have enforcers, knights, barons, who keep them in line. The workers will throw them down, or the barons will take your power from you. If you survive, instead of fighting with armies or trading witty jokes, you will have to work the land yourself.”

  “Your prophecy is empty,” Midori says. “Nothing changes here. The spirits are too weak to revolt, that is why they serve. If they could protect themselves and thrive they wouldn't need me. But let me indulge you, how will this new system of yours work? Will it not lead to the same situation? Servants will be workers, lords become…I don't know bankers, senators. People will always get fat on the efforts of others. You should leave. Before I get fat eating your carcass.”

  I see people falling past my window. I know that along one path she is right. But there are other paths. Socialism, communism. Dismissed as either failed or utopian ideals. I have no real answer for her, no response as I'm just against the way things work, and my alternative is just some woolly idea of a community working together. A vague New Lanark. I stand up and stride into the jungle while Midori stays kneeling beside the grass I flattened.

  Perhaps the only way to know how it will work is to try and explore it. Find spirits who do want to work alongside me rather than for me. It doesn't have to be a world-wide movement.

  I wish I knew what spirits ate. Something must sustain them, unless they actually eat one another. But the spirits at the bottom would need to feed on something, get energy from somewhere. The economics of the spirit world – bound to be a gripping bestseller.

  I understand economics – I worked in a bank after all. I did the math on probabilities of making money from models. But I've come up against a more fundamental philosophy – how things should run. I'm so far out of my depth I wish I'd never started swimming.

  Lost in thought I walk until I find that the jungle has started to become more familiar. The massive canopy trees are now heavy wide oaks and beeches. I can see sky. The business of insects, birds and beasts has calmed, to the point where the lack of movement made me realise the environment had changed. The soil is rich and reddish, where it has been disturbed, otherwise a thick carpet of grass, moss and clover covers the ground. Cattle with shaggy coats and wide horns, graze in lazy herds. Swallows dart through clouds of midges and I hear the cooing of doves. It's like I've walked back in time to some British idyll.

  I walk down a hard dirt avenue. Brambles and hawthorn bushes form a hedge at the top of the steep slopes on either side. Deciduous trees arch over the top. Ahead I see a strange figure in silhouette. The broad shoulders and legs of a man, but the antlered head of a stag. The cave-painting in the Underworld given life. I saw this figure in a TV show from my child hood; a silver arrow and Herne's son. Could this be Herne himself? The idea is exciting and I feel awed. The figure waits. For me? For the hunt to begin?

  As I get closer I see that this is a giant of a man, wearing a Great Elk's head and draped in its skin. An array of bones and small animal skulls hang from threads sewn into the hide. His feet are bare, but he's wearing rough leather trousers beneath the skin. I'm almost knocked back by the stench of piss, sour sweat and excrement.

  “Hello traveller.” Herne's voice is deep, and touched with humour. “I saw you coming and thought it would be nice to have company, if you would have me.”

  “It's unusual for someone to be happy to see me. So I would be glad to join you.”

  “Then you should keep better friends,” Herne says.

  I finally reach him. This man is twice my height and twice as broad. “I can't fault your logic there. I'm Nik. Nik Munro.”

  Seeing my hand in his is like when I first held Lucas after he was born. “I am The Hunt.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “You carry the world on your shoulders, shaman.”

  There is a subtle pressure in the presence of The Hunt. Not just the urge to stand upwind. A force of will. It's not being exerted, it's just there. “I'm no shaman,” I say. “I don't know what I'm doing.”

  “You look like a shaman to me,” The Hunt says. “At least you have the courage to admit your shortcomings to strangers.” The Hunt walks slowly along the path and I, walking normally, just about keep up.

  “Just one more example of my extreme stupidity.”

  “What is really at the heart of your trouble?”

  “I'm lost here, in the spirit world. I can't see how the system works. What do spirits live off? How do they organise? Where does the money go to?”

  “Money?”

  “Energy, food, power. If I even knew that it would be a start.”

  “Why concern yourself with such things?” The Hunt says. “You are new. All this you will understand with time. What did Abel negotiate with you?”

  “Why is that so important to everyone?”

  “It is the first lesson.” I look at him. “One of them anyway.”

  “I gave him nothing,” I say. “I took back what was mine.”

  “And what did this tell you?”

  “You sound like Corbie.”

  “Your teacher?”

  “Yeah. It told me not to take any shit from you people. I should have paid more attention.”

  “Normally he extracts a gift, a promise, a prohibition, some tribute.”

  A light bulb flickers to life. “The tribute is the currency. It moves energy from the Living World to Otherworld. No one needs it, but it does raise power, to carry out the shaman's request, maybe with something left over after.”

  “Yes. It is like nectar or cream. And don't forget it binds you closer to that spirit. It remains a two way street as long as the agreement lasts.”

  “I've been looking at this all wrong.” I feel embarrassment bloom. “Corbie hasn't helped. Socialist revolution. There are already contracts, binding oaths. Taboos, tattoos, offerings.”

  “Thank you for the fox.”

  “That went to you?”

  “You hunted it, didn't you? You took some of me and it helped you. I took some of your kill for myself. Not everything is a conscious contract. Of course if you needed more concrete help we could come to some arrangement.”

  “I don't expect I'll be doing any more hunting in the near future. Thanks for the offer.”

  We walk along in silence for a while.

  I was so easily caught up in the romance of creating a change in a system I didn't like, that I hadn't taken the time to understand it properly. I've also handled the situation with Midori very badly. There's still no excuse for how Djuha and his sidekick treated me. “Where does this road go?”

  The Hunt shrugs his massive shoulders.

  “There's someone I should apologise to. I've enjoyed walking with you, but I want to say sorry sooner rather than later. Maybe we can do this again sometime?”

  “I would welcome the company from time to time. Don't be so hard on yourself. You are a shaman.” I turn to go, but The Hunt's massive hand stops me. “Here. This will help you find me more easily.” He passes me a flint arrowhead the size of my hand.

  “Thank you.”

  I activate my GPS and sprint back through the Greenwood to the jungle, and eventually to Midori's pool. I could have tri
ed thinking myself back home and seeing if I could interrupt it, but I didn't want to find I couldn't and be too knackered to get back in again today.

  Kneeling beside the pool, I disturb the water, hoping this will encourage her to appear. I wait. And wait. It's risky I'll piss her off even more, but I splash the water, kicking it about. Mud clouds the pool, but still no sign of Midori.

  It's hard to tell time here, but I reckon it's close to midnight. Round about lunchtime in the living world. I've been here about an hour. The longest I've been away from my body if I don't count my illness.

  I hear a heavy sigh behind me. “You just don't know when you are not welcome.” I turn and Midori is standing there, thorns catching the moonlight.

  “I've come to apologise. I didn't take the time to understand things. I still don't. But I didn't listen to you properly. I rushed ahead with a crazy idea, assumed you and I were talking about the same thing.”

  “That is noble of you,” Midori says. “It may take me a while to understand you too.” The thorns retract.

  Her perfume wafts towards me on the breeze. It is different to how it was before. It reminds me a bit of Kathryn, but also of expensive scents I have found enticing. My tongue tingles slightly.

  “Perhaps we can go back to that alliance I offered before,” I say.

  I try not to stare at Midori as she moves. She is lithe like an athlete. I can feel heat from her body, she is that close.

  She touches my arm and it feels right, like it completes a desire I've had for a long time. “Come, let us sit and discuss it.” She sits down gracefully.

  I feel a little dizzy and very hot. My heavy leather coat clanks when I drop it on the ground. I sit next to Midori. She touches my arm again and hesitantly I reach out to caress hers. The leaves of her arms are firm like flesh, with slightly raised veins. It's strange but heightens my sense of touch to feel them under my fingertips.

  She reaches up and touches my face, rose thorns just scratching my stubble. I'm about to reflect her move when she shakes her head, her grass hair rustling. Midori takes the wooden face and begins to peel it off. I'm shocked and afraid, this is almost too weird and god knows what's beneath. She plays with the mask, like a burlesque dancer flashes glimpses under her fans. The skin is white and almost luminous in the moonlight. I see her eyes smiling when the mask holes let me. I think I see cherry lips. I know I want to kiss them. Then she snatches the mask away and her face is soft and oval, with the blind-looking almond eyes a creamy tint against the apple white of her face. A sharp nose is so cute I want to bite it. Her mahogany mask is a mask of war compared to the face beneath.