Hooded

by H. J. Mountain

  My mother has eyes the colour of the clear night sky. They shine darkly.

  “Remember. You are not alone. When you are lost, look up to the sky. I am with you there. Always.”

  Her touch leaves me. I cannot stop shaking. “Mother.”

  “You are strong. It is –”

  There is a loud rapping on the door of our home. She says one more thing to me. Words I do not understand. And the last thing I see is her neck, the curving specks that disappear under her gown, before she climbs to her feet.

  “Go now! Do not stop, sweet child. Do not look back.”

  There is only darkness as the cloth falls. My mother places the board back in place. I slide into the tunnel. Wormy mud presses in. Tears shudder through me. I try to stay quiet. I try to hold my breath.

  There is a furious crash. The raw crack of wood breaking like bones. And I cannot stop myself. I disobey her. My fingers sink in the wet earth, pulling me back. At the end I reach out. My free hand lifts the corner of the cloth. A smell stronger than mud rushes over me. Once I put my fingers too close to the cauldron flame. This is a smell like that but much thicker. It is the smell of bitter flesh. Of sulphur.

  In the sliver of space between the board and the mud, I see the shape. Our visitor.

  It – He – must be very tall. He has to stoop to enter our home. His shadow, cast from the fire, seems endless. Bent up the wall like the mouth of a cave.

  Another vicious sound: the shattering of glass. It makes me jump. The firelight fills with plumes of dust. Twisting snakes. The shadow begins to speak, a voice like nothing I could imagine:

  “Dearest…”

  Then the voice changes. It becomes monstrous. Enraged.

  Suddenly the light changes. The dust crackles. The crooked shadow leaps across the room. Thrusts a blade down into her. My mother’s body is thrown against the wall. Her last is a cry of desperate pain.

  I see a hand. Flesh that seems burnt. Fingers long and red, curling out…

  In my terror and shame I turn. Crawl through the tunnel and the mud and the roots. Into the woods I flee.

  **

  I imagined this day. This moment. Reunion. How I will avenge her. Somehow. But the reality is entirely different. It is overwhelming. A sick wave turns my stomach, renders me mute with terror. I cannot move a muscle. I am petrified.

  In a hard guttural the shape beyond, the Burnt Man, speaks. His tone is that of a master unto a servant. At the command, Vesilly crosses to the slab. I am certain now he will hear the hammer beating under my ribs. Then a grinding sound drowns out everything. Stone slides on stone. The slab: it is moving. Being slid away. With a great thud it tilts and falls to the floor.

  The whimpering is louder. A cry of muffled terror.

  With a great long arm Vesilly lifts a sack from the open slab. He raises it as if it were empty – weightless. But the sack is writhing. Through a hole ripped in the canvas fall strands of hair. They are the dark brown of oakwood.

  A flash of fury bursts through my suffocating fear. They are only men, I tell myself. Only men.

  “Sara!” I call out, push myself to standing, my flint-blade grasped in white knuckles. “Let her go!”

  Vesilly’s head jerks round. Behind him, in the gloom of the doorway, the one I think of as the Burnt Man issues a single word. Order. With hardly any strain Vesilly throws the sack – the girl – across the chamber to his master, and turns back to me. He begins a grim succession of harsh sounds like a rutting beast.

  I cannot see beyond him; only the shape of the master, catching and clutching the sack like it were nothing. He seems to rake his hand through it. There is a girl’s scream, and for a moment a furnace-like glow from the shadows.

  I get no further than a step towards them. Then Vesilly lifts his cloaked sleeves and the dust above him swirls into a thick cluster. He thrusts his arms out with such violence that the stones underneath me groan. A rush of heat strikes my face. The air is solid. Like a great hand swiping at me, flinging me from my feet into the wall. Rock smacks the back of my head. Blackness fills my vision, deeper than all the shadows.

  ***

  I should never awake from such a collision. Yet my eyes sear open. The floor tilts around me. My head throbs like a bruise. But I am breathing. I am alive.

  For now: Vesilly is crossing toward my slumped body. Beyond him, the Burnt Man is gone. Sara is gone too. Dread, at this, beats me down. I have to fight it. I have to fight.

  A flat beast rushes out from Vesilly’s gaping sleeve. Serpent-like in its scaly body and face but it has arms and legs: short limbs that propel it along the frame of the slab. The creature curls into an arc and springs at my face. I run from it, nearly evading its stubby blackened claw, which scratches at my jaw. I stumble to the corner of the room, Vesilly blocking my way back toward the door. He is swaying. He speaks in those strange, grunting words. I know not their meaning but they make me think of rage. Death.

  His hairless white hand clutches the curved blade with a quivering energy.

  I groan. How can I ever escape from him? My shoulder brushes something hot. One of the cauldrons spitting out fumes and dust. I have no time to think, to make of this a plan. I come behind it. Place my palms on the bowl. Its heat singes my hands, but I press myself against it. The cauldron tilts. Vesilly’s chant breaks into a wordless bark. It is too late.

  The bowl tips forward. A torrent of bubbling blue-black liquid gushes out. The snake-thing is almost at the spot where it falls. The creature is charred at once. Its squeal dies under a river.

  Vesilly is quicker. Howling in fury, he flies up into the air, away from the gushing liquid. He lands on the slab: a leap that not even Farragut could make. As he does he turns and launches his weapon at me.

  Perhaps it is the sting of the cauldron’s heat, or the dust that I taste on my tongue and lips, raw like the bitterest herb. But it pricks my blood. Brings a sharp clarity to everything. Even in the gloom I see his blade true. I throw myself to the side. Its kiss of sordid metal passes by my cheek.

  Vesilly lifts his cloaked arms. Chanting. His blade curves back, landing perfectly in his grip. But his focus is on the ground between us. The floor of the chamber seems to shiver. It is the blue-black liquid. It puckers. Rises. The sight makes my eyes stream in disbelief. Like a different substance altogether it sheers up into a sheet.

  “Beware,” Vesilly roars – a word I understand. “Beware the Order!”

  And like that liquid sheet bursts. Liquid knives fly at me. I throw myself behind the cauldron, but I am still struck. Wet heat lashes down my back. Spots sizzle through my dress to my skin. The pain is exquisite.

  I twist on the stone. Faint. Out of the corner of one eye a worm is crawling towards me. It is blackened. But its reptilian eyes are open. Hungry.

  My mother’s words echo inside: Use it only when you must. But do so with courage and faith in your heart.

  Courage. Faith. These seem worlds away. But I must. I must try.

  I swing down my arm. The flint-knife buries in the serpent’s flat head. Ochre oozes from its mouth. Vesilly issues an anguished cry.

  I have hurt him. Good.

  I pull the blade free. It is covered in yellow-black gore. Kneeling on the stone beside the dead reptile, I find my voice. “Tell me where have you taken her!”

  Vesilly makes a sound like a hiss. “She…is…His…”

  I take in the dusty air. Deep, bitter breaths. I burn with it. I see it all: the chamber in my mind’s eye. I see where he stands. With my remaining strength I rise and launch the flint-blade through the air. Vesilly is unafraid. He jumps higher, cloak spreading like a cape. Higher than any man should be able. Well clear of the blade’s flight.

  My knife flies on through the air, turning end-over-end, disappearing with my hope. But as I watch it go, something alights inside of me: a turning in my blood. It sparks in the heat in my neck and fires through my chest and limbs. Around me, outside of me, it is as though the air stills. The mome
nt stills. My eyes locked on the knife. My neck pulses hot. Coursing through my veins. Down into a sudden furious thrust at the tips of my fingers. I pull them in. My whole body locks, a delicious pain crackling through me.

  Dust like a whip casts away from me.

  And then the knife is flying back.

  Vesilly is descending to the floor. His blade is ready. But he is not. He spasms and jerks as the flint-blade finds his back. For a moment his mouth is visible in his hood. A silent scream: a tongue of pure white licks at the dust.

  He scrambles away. With a long arm he pulls the blade out. It clatters on the stone. The act seems to shrink his height. I glimpse the back of his cowl. There is a spreading patch. So he bleeds. And it spreads over a sewn face in the fabric: a black lion with a halo surrounding it.

  He disappears into the corridor, a scuttling shadow. I am left with a single haunting image. Those strands of dark hair falling from the sack like rain, before the master stole her away.

  And this: I could not save her.

  7.

  Looking beyond where I am is beyond me. It is a challenge enough to simply breathe. Try to calm the frantic intakes and expulsions of my chest. Knees bent up, arms forming a protective ring around me, a deep weariness soaking my body and mind. For some time – how long is a mystery – I crouch in the corridor. Shiver though my skin feels hot. Feverish. But I cannot rest. Whenever I lean back needles press into my spine, trapping me in myself.

  My mind struggles against the fever. I try to reckon with what to do next. Where should I go? Who should I go to? Guy is my first thought. But he will be desperate when he sees me like this: a scratch down my throat, scored holes through my dress. He will scold me for coming down here alone. Yet I trust Guy like no other. He will help me, no matter what.

  To find Guy I must return to the banquet. That disturbs me. I am in Sherwood Castle, the home of the Lord Sheriff, he who enforces the law of the land. Yet there is a chamber in the belly of his castle. Mutch’s sister was being kept there: chained to a slab. Did the Sheriff know? I cannot believe that. But the way he spoke to me in his room, the way he forced his kiss upon me. I do not trust him. And something else knots my stomach.

  Is the master up there? Does he walk the corridors above?

  That thought makes me tremble.

  Wherever he went, he took Sara. I stumble to my feet. Unsteady. My head sways. I manage a few steps toward the stairwell when I hear footsteps. Someone is coming down the stairs!

  Turning down the corridor, I move as fast as my ailing self allows. I pass the entrance to the chamber, where the liquid pools glimmer in the murk. I dare not go back in that hellish place. So I hurry on, reaching a stoned tunnel in the other side of the wall. It is low. I bend to enter its mouth and look back.

  A man is at the foot of the stairwell. He holds up a lantern. The spark of light reveals the guard who fell asleep in the room at the top of the stairs. He begins a way down the corridor, stopping at the cavern room. There is an unmistakable tensing in his shoulders. The lantern flickers in his twitching hand. He does not seem curious. He seems afraid. He hurries back the way he came.

  I wonder that he knows what takes place in that room.

  I do not linger. Crouching, I make my way down the tunnel. It is long and filthy and almost fully dark. Between the paved stones the earth presses in moist. It mixes with the faint reek of sulphur – fading but still there. My eyes search for any sign of Vesilly ahead. But something tells me he is not here. He is gone. For all he did to me, I hurt him too. Somehow.

  The memory seizes me for a moment: the flint-knife twisting through the air, the whip of dust, the blade turning on its path. How can that be? It belongs to the blood-fever that took me over in the dust of the chamber.

  The tunnel ends without warning. An earthen wall fills the darkness. I put my hand out, fearing a dead-end, frantic that Vesilly could be lurking here, after all. There is a dark ring of light above. A diagonal line of stones juts out from the wall. I take them slow, using both hands and feet like a small child. But as I climb, my body feels old. Bruised all over.

  At the top stone, I stop for breaths. Taste the night’s air. Good air. It gives me succour to push my shoulder against the wooden board. With a reluctant creak it lifts. I slide through a gap into long grasses as the board drops shut beside me.

  I am in a cluster of trees. A copse. A cloudy night sky peers through the branches. Chill breeze and damp grass shroud me. I lie awhile, awaiting any sound of discovery. Any clue that someone is close. I hear only the wind and the whispers inside my own head.

  Beyond the copse. One way leads toward the woods: the grand shadows of Sherwood Forest. I have not the energy to face them. To the other are the outer walls and buildings of the castle. I have no desire to return there either. Finally, I spy a fenced space with a long stable. Shelter.

  I take a wide route. Away from the shed at the front of the enclosure, where a guard may be stationed. My back throbs as I keep low. When I reach the back of the stable, I pull myself over the wooden wall, landing in a muddy space that reeks with the stench of horses’ droppings. I do not care. I have dealt with far worse tonight.

  On either side of me are the horses’ stalls. The steads are sleeping. But for one: Farragut’s chestnut face with the white stripe down his nose stares out from over his stall. He neighs. I rush over. Whisper for him to be quiet. The relief is thick, as if I have found Guy himself rather than his ride.

  I slip inside the stall. Farragut bows his head, trots his front legs. He is not the only one to greet me. Waking, springing up, is Wolf. His grey muzzle licks my face, my neck. I wonder if the animals sense how damaged I feel. I am. I hope they cannot.

  My body sinks into the piling hay in a corner of the stall. Wolf curls beside me. Farragut places himself between us and the stable door. My protectors for the night. It is my last thought before I collapse into the broken sleep of the fevered.

  *

  There is above mother’s bed a tapestry. Sometimes I stand before and beneath it, staring up for hours, taking in its strange beautiful shapes. There is one with three lines of blue. There is a circle of shadow that somehow looks deep, like it disappears into the space behind the wall. There are the branches: brown of soil, reaching downward, like the markings on the inside of a hand. And there is a flower of golden petals, fiercely bright. That is my favourite.

  But there is a fifth. The one that is a collection of them all, layered upon one another. This one I stare at and another feeling comes upon me. It is like I am standing near the edge of a drop. A cliff.

  I am afraid. And yet I am drawn to it.

  I keep seeing myself falling beyond the edge.

  My mother comes behind me. Her hands warm my shoulders. Then gently: the sides of my neck. I look up at her. I ask: what is it?

  Her dark eyes sparkle. She comes to my cheek. I am less afraid now. I am with her.

  Soon, she whispers. Soon.

  **

  Light is casting thin spears of gold into the stalls. Wolf is dozing. Farragut sighs within a dream. I feel like I, too, ought rest for longer. Dawn has other ideas. This is no place to linger. The banquet is long done. Men will be coming for their rides.

  My body groans. My arms and legs are sore but my back is worse: prickly as though it were covered with the fiercest nettle-sting. The strangest sensation is in my neck. It feels swollen: the flesh stretched and full. Every swallow hurts.

  God knows how I must look. I wish for a warm bath. Fresh clothes. Time to heal.

  It is all there, of course: inside the walls of Sherwood Castle. But what if it is like when Guy and I returned to Gisbourne House after the clearing? How I felt trapped, unable to do anything but wait. The Sheriff will have questions. They will demand to know what happened. How can I begin to tell them? About the master, or Vesilly, or how my knife turned in the air, as if I willed and it obeyed? Such things are not possible, are they?

  My mind races to Vesilly as he fled:
the lion’s face sewn into his cloak. It was the same as the torn cloth in the clearing. I think of Sara in the village market. Her nervousness, but the steeliness, too, behind her gaze. When they took her, she fought them. Long enough that Mutch got away. Did Sara rip the lion’s cloth too? Was that why Vesilly was there when I arrived?

  I do not know. But perhaps there is one who does. One who knows something about the meaning of the lion’s head. If I leave now, perhaps I have a chance to find out.

  The stable gate opens. I move to the front of the stall, stepping around Farragut’s bent legs. A board creaks under my foot.

  “Who is there?”

  A girl’s voice. This lessens my nerves only slightly. I feel for my flint-blade. Comforted to find it tucked against my leg. Awoken, Wolf steps to my side. There is a long pause before the visitor says, “You ought show yourself or I will call the guard. He may be less forgiving than I.”

  The voice is familiar and anyway I do not have much choice. The guard will no doubt take me to the Sheriff and my chance will be gone. I lift the bolt and push open the stall door. Wolf emits a low growl.

  “Be still, Wolf,” I tell him.

  The girl is stood in the forming light of the stable. Her hands poised at her side where a short blade is sheathed at her belt. She wears a tan leather waistcoat over a pale grey blouse and dark green skirt. Her golden-brown hair is clipped around her face. This softens as her eyes take in mine. An odd mixture of relief and unease passes through me at the sight of the girl from the dance.

  “It is you,” she says. Her brow dips. She seems to appraise me anew. Take in, perhaps, the cut on my throat or the strands of hay laced in my dark hair, the pressed and tattered state of my fine dress – of Beatrice’s fine dress. “Are you…alright?”

  I do not know how to begin to answer that. “It has been a rough night.”

  She comes closer. She must glimpse the side of my dress. Spots where the fabric is scored through. She gasps and puts her right hand on my upper arm, turning me gently. My body is rigid, but I allow her. I can sense her gaze moving up and down my back.