Hooded

by H. J. Mountain

  That is when the Burnt Man senses me. In the grip of transformation, he turns to where I am knelt and his eyes, blackened, bulge into tunnels. His hand upon Sara’s wrist momentarily rips free and his arms jerk forward. Before I can move a muscle, a whip of fire-like thread lashes out. Hooks at my wrist – a grip far tighter than the manacle – and pulls at me violently. My feet drag across the floor and then whatever holds me to the earth is overcome.

  I cannot fight it. He is too strong. The muscles of my arm go limp. Drained. I hear a distant clunk. My bow and arrow hit the floor. My only effort is to tweak my neck. Look back to see my mother watching after me. The flatness in her eyes, her head bowed slightly, the mottled white flesh of her scalp. She looks so ancient that I almost do not recognise her – another stranger in this world of them.

  Then, Adam standing at the threshold: lent forward, as if he wishes to enter but is unwilling or unable. My brother, I think, and the absurdity of this almost makes me smile.

  I realise – but it is a dream-like reckoning – that I am being carried towards Him. He grips me with the fire-whip as he grips Sara with long liquid fingers. Taken inside the chamber, and when they see me, drifting and yet locked in this position, the men in the lion’s masks push up from their seats. Like spectators at one of the tournaments held at Sherwood Castle. Entertained. No, much more than this: they are captivated.

  The Burnt Man has them, much as he has me.

  I hover before his face. The sight is ghastly. Small pockets of flame lick over his cheeks. But the skin beneath is pure white. His eyes are full with a great glory, like he is seeing far beyond me. And then he extends his arm and the fire-whip unfurls and I am lifted higher and higher. A sickening wave of dizziness hits from the height, combined with an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Of being an object manipulated. Controlled.

  The orbs and their whitish strings blur and dance around me. I have no bearing. No sense of where I am – only of being thrust upwards by a profound force, of which the fire-whip is but the fingertip: the limit that I can see. For a moment, I glimpse distant shapes beyond a white-hot blur. The black shadow of Vesilly dragging my mother by her chains across the floor, the orange cats following after. Pawing at her body, in the playful murderous way that cats do with mice.

  The pain becomes unbearable: the fire-whip tightening upon my wrist, darkening the flesh and twisting the small bones beneath. I try to break free but it is like I am struggling against a thousand knotted ropes. The pain burrows deeper. I grow faint. Mortain, whose face far below is now a rippling, scalded mask, opens his mouth. He issues a deep throaty chant. He is drawing upon me. I feel it tearing at me like a sickness. A ravaging that does its decaying work with a speed beyond any mortal pestilence.

  “From death life renewed…” shrieks a voice, Vesilly, slipping between languages strange and familiar. He is met by humming awe from the masked. The words repeat dully in my mind.

  I grow aware of a kind of rushing near my neck. It is a fast-flowing river. For a moment, in my faintness, I wonder that I am beside the stream with Marian again. Her feet dangle in the clear liquid. Then the pain ratchets through me once more, ripping at some part deep inside, and I scream, and the memory erodes like a reflection. Was I ever there? Was that this life? It does not seem real.

  One moment lingers. Marian beside the water, telling me:

  They hold secrets, if we may learn them…

  I twist my swollen neck, or it twists me. The near rushing is the sound – though it is also more than a sound – emanating from the strands of light that are pulsing down from the orb and into the Burnt Man’s stretched body. His ritual is nearing an end. I sense it in the charged, sulphur-ridden air. Sara’s hair is burnt away. Her small body is in spasms on the slab. She is weakening, just as He is growing immense.

  The Burnt Man’s arms come together in a fiery clutch before him. Like he is being bound and stretched on the rack by the white-silver strings and they are remaking Him. Turning him into a master of fire and earth, of air and water, and thus of the anima mundi, the soul of God. A reign of a thousand years, echoes in my mind – the thought becoming a vast emptiness, a cave opening inside of me, swallowing me whole.

  Unless.

  Unless: the bonds are broken.

  It is then, upon the edge of that eternal shadow, I close my eyes and screaming I rip at the ropes that are binding me. And then into the threads of light from the orb, I thrust my broken wrist.

  *

  She rests her hand on my shoulder. We are outside the cottage. It is dawn: the greenwood grasses and the leaves still wear their dew. I look up at her. She tells me to wait, just to watch. I will know it when I see it.

  A small black bird swoops down from a branch. Sunlight sparkles the thousand beads of rain on the ground and overhead. The earth is squelchy underfoot. The wind is chilled, lilting the white flowers that turn and nod, daisies and whispers and meadow-ghosts by the hundreds.

  “What is it, mother?”

  “The sky is changing, Brya. But it is the same sky as ever has been, my love. The same as ever will be.” She waits. “Close your eyes.”

  I do.

  Her hand upon my shoulder moves ever so slightly so that her fingers brush my neck. It tickles me at first. I almost laugh. I almost open my eyes. But I do not. Because she asked me; and I want to know why. And because, though sightless, I begin to discover there are things I can see nearly as I did a moment ago: the black bird, at first, and then the sunlit dew and the muddied soil, and even the flowers lent, the daisies and the whispers and the meadow-ghosts…

  Then I see something else besides.

  For a moment it is there – like a secret I have overheard in a language I do not speak. Or, as though the world has pulled back its hood and looked me square in the eye. And I am left blinded by its gaze.

  When I finally open mine, my mother is looking down at me. I cannot quite read her expression. But her eyes are glowing. They have tiny golden sparks. They make me think of fires deep within a cave.

  “Did you see?”

  “What was it?” My voice is shaking.

  “The world, my child,” she says, “the world beneath its hood.”

  She holds my hand tighter, and together we look out unto the greenwood.

  **

  The destruction is before my eyes. My hand turns blackened. Buried in the threading light. Though I do not yet feel the agony of it, a wave of cold heat enveloping me like I am being submerged in twisting, mixing waters. The fire-whip round my arm disintegrates, curling back on itself like a snake. The metalled locks round my wrists, the chain-belt that binds them – they melt and break apart. Dropping to the floor, where the clang of their contact on stone is joined by the sharp sounds of popping metal and a half-human cry of rage that seems to echo in the farthest depths of my ears.

  Then I am falling. Spinning downwards. I manage to turn my body so that I land on my feet. The impact sends a juddering vibration into my bent wrist. But from the height I dropped the pain ought to be tenfold worse.

  Still, all of these discoveries are overshadowed.

  For a heartbeat of time that seems to stretch indefinitely, I see the anima all around me as if with naked eyes. It is not light, not exactly. There is substance to it. Many threads. Unlike anything I have known: a shifting, knotting presence that forms and breaks and forms again. Changing constantly as they cast from the orbs cross the chamber, which is fallen into starker shadow.

  Beneath and beyond this shadow, I see with clarity. Dust, a red-purplish hue nearest me, eddies and tunnels around the threads, which sends out emissaries. Waves of dust spread in the way of ripples on the surface of a disturbed lake. Passing through the masked men who grow black as silhouettes. Not men so much as forms of men, compelled under the alchemical power of the Master.

  But something has happened to Him. The Burnt Man is upon the stone again. Bent forward. The thread I touched: it undulates like a biting serpent, still locked to his ar
m. I cannot see his face but steam emits from the folds of his robe. The red heat of his cowl faded. And I witness in amazement: there is a hole ripped in his cloak. Mangled white flesh, a shard of chain penetrating.

  His fingers grasp thirstily at the threads from the four orbs. Flesh brightening, now and then, like a wood-fire stoked by fresh gusts of wind. But something is not right. The taut nature of his hands, like the bent digits of a very old man, the jerky movements of his body: something is not right at all.

  The Burnt Man’s long crimson-tinged hand reaches for Sara on the slab. But she is not there.

  Whatever disruption I wrought has passed through the anima and into Him and thence shattered the chains that bound her. Bits of hook and metal scatter the chamber. Sara has rolled off the slab. The flames wrought terrible damage. Her hair is nearly gone; her scalp is puckered raw. But she breathes. In a dazed way she begins to crawl toward the corridor.

  I look there. At first, Adam is gone. But then he is in the corridor again. He has reined a stout grey horse.

  “Brya, come!”

  “I must get her!”

  I have no choice but to trust him. But I cannot follow. I turn back to the chamber, to where my mother is laid upon the stone. I seize up my bow and arrow – the act awakening a sheer, unholy pain down my wrist – and run to her. She does not move. She does not open her eyes.

  I am aware of something new and awful happening ahead of us. A hissing that reminds me of a covered cauldron nearing full heat. I look up in horror.

  He has ordered Vesilly to him. The misted one – after a slight hesitation in which I sense a tingling of fear – kneels. Pulls back his cowl to reveal a hairless head. The Burnt Man lowers one stretched hand to grasp the back of Vesilly’s bowed skull. At first the mist around Vesilly’s penitent shape thickens. His body begins to shake. At the same time, the Burnt Man’s is becoming more still. As if calming – reaching some inner resolve – as Vesilly’s groans of agony are drowned out by a deep chant emanating from the Master’s lips:

  iggray...eeyol…

  fugrat…rhymm…

  iggray…eeyol…

  fugrat…rhymm…

  I pull my mother up. She clings to me: that dreadful lightness like she is nought but rags. But I do not yet turn for the doorway. The ritual holds me rapt. The Burnt Man is rising again. Under His transformation, the light and the shadows of the chamber harden. Become stone-like. The lion-masked men come around the banquet table. Crouched forward, their heads bowed.

  Vesilly is now in a state of utter submission. Fissures of ember fester cross his lily-white skull, like it is an egg that is cracking from a fire within. For a moment the mist of his face clears. What is beneath is cratered skin paler than white. The outlines and contours of a man’s face – a high nose, thin lips, narrow, sepia eyes – but these are glazed over. Like a structure that was a home once, long since abandoned. Over the days and months and years, the slow, irrevocable work of nature and decay growing over the walls and doors. Moss and lichen, worms and spiders, until the building that was, is no more – a burial of a man.

  Suddenly Vesilly crumples to the ground, a ghost of steam fleeing his broken body, and the Burnt Man elevates above us – the height of a man, at least, from the stone. The threads from the orbs tightly held by him. And that is different, I realise, with awe: if they held him a moment ago, he holds them now. His face, un-hooded, is shimmering. A blinding passion that makes my eyes tear and run like prey down my cheeks.

  A cry at my back: Adam, perhaps. But his young, reedy voice is distant. Heard through a tunnel.

  The Master’s hands manipulate the dust. Gathering it in. The orbs – of air and earth, of water and fire – fill into fierce lanterns, four moons in the sky of the chamber. The dusts swirl into a shape. A form.

  It is a lion. Twisted and engorged. Its face pared with rage. Pawing forward in the dark air between the Burnt Man and Sara.

  She has stopped moving.

  I lift the bow and set an arrow at Him. But I cannot maintain its aim. It sways, this way and that, as though a hand pushes it surely left or right. I keep trying to bring it back to Him. But the effort is immense, draining me, before the subtle hand swats it away again. A kind of mist settles upon me, slowing my blood. All the while, the black lion, this creature of dust and firelight, moves toward the girl who is prone upon the ground. The lion’s mouth an open maw that mirrors exactly that of the Burnt Man, as he delivers words that are older than all of us.

  I see it all, yet the mist gathers around. Then He is looking upon me.

  “Bend your knee.” His voice is calmer. A throaty promise, almost a tenderness to it. “Bend your knee, and serve under me, child.”

  It strikes a chord deep in my chest. My father. Does he see me now? Does he know? A life unlived in that chord: a childhood with my mother and with my father. Never taken away. Would that have saved me from this fate? Would it have saved Him?

  I am so tired. Broken.

  My knee begins to loosen. The tendons give way. The bow drops with me. In this moment of submission I am contained. Safe within myself and these mists. A child under my father’s watch.

  Then I am aware of a movement just below. Her eyes peel open. The trance-like gaze she had moments ago is gone. She is here. And close to mine, her night eyes hold tiny twists of gold that seem to move. It is like looking upon water running in the light. The way it catches and changes, a pool that contains stillness and motion all at once. A distant memory is in that pool: the two of us stood in the greenwood at dawn. A moment so different from this dark dungeon in time and yet connected in some fundamental way…

  Her lips move and those golden twists of her eyes glow like the fire that warmed our home in the greenwood. Then my mother reaches to my neck. Her four fingers with care meet the marks that scar my flesh. The purpled bruises that never fade, that I hide always beneath my scarf, and for a moment the world is dark and the day is young and the air winter clear.

  As her hand drops, the turning pulses in my bloodstream. Thicker, more pure than ever it was. It flows like melted metal to my fingertips, bursting through the pain in my wrist, shattering the mists. I grip the bow tighter, raising it with the dust-coated arrow. A sharp clarity touches everything about me. I can see each particle of dust. I can see the threads of the anima. I suck in the sulphuric air and my chest swells against the cage of my ribs. And I know suddenly that this ritual is not the first and it will not be the last. Other children, other girls, have perished in this place, so that the Burnt Man may revive and grow stronger and live on, perhaps for always: drawing on them, drawing on the anima…

  My eyes leap to high on the wall. When my arms follow, the Burnt Man roars. The black lion hurls itself away from Sara toward me. I whisper one word, a word my mother gifted to me that day He came to our home in the greenwood to take her away: Torayam. The devil’s light.

  My hand opens like a wing. The arrow flies.

  17.

  Were Guy here, he would never believe it: how the arrow departs. Or perhaps he would, and he would be proud of me, of his student. But then if he were here, everything else would be altered. He would have insisted on protecting me. On keeping me out of harm’s way, as if such a thing were possible in this life. I would not have entered the dark castle alone, or at all. I would not have found my mother. I would not have thrown a desperate, broken hand into a whitish thread alive under the Burnt Man’s mastery. And I know this much: I would never have fired the shaft that leaves a whistle in its trail as it slices through the dust-shrouds, for once true to where I dream it to go. Before it strikes the orb and shatters the clouded glass in a burst of tainted purple flame and changes for always the world as I know it.

  The violence is beyond imagination. It ripples down the thread like an adder. It pulls the Master’s body taut. His black robes catching alight, his mouth opening in a great snarl that is drowned out by a thudding sound like thunder has filled the chamber. The dust-lion collapses into a shap
eless cloud. A cat – a real, flesh-and-blood cat – is lifted in a gust, thrown against the ceiling, like it is falling upside down. The violence races on through the strings of anima that bind the Burnt Man to the orbs. Each of them explodes. From one, there is a rain of black dust; from another, a silvery liquid; from the third, a sudden, furious gust of sulphuric wind. These emanations drench the dust in the air. They dive in every direction. They fall upon one and all.

  White heat blisters my face. It slaps my mother and I backwards. But I see all of it.

  Vesilly – what is left of him – is covered in black dust, the flesh of his face sinking into bone. The front-line of the masked men are hit as if by a battering ram. Knocked back into each other, sliding across the floor. But it is their faces that haunt. Their masks are melting. Such that it is impossible to tell what is mask and what is skin, as they tear at their own faces like they are being eaten alive.

  But the Burnt Man is at the heart of the violence.

  “Adam!” I cry – too late.

  He has run forward to his father, who is set upon by a blue-tinted flame, deeper and brighter than any earthly fire. The Burnt Man becomes a shadow surrounded by a blue aura. Threads stretch his limbs beyond any rightful degree. There is a dreadful sound. Like the ratchet of a drawbridge, of worn ropes being pulled over tired wood. For a moment, beneath the blue aura, I see a man’s face. Mortain. Younger. His cheeks are scarred; they always were that way. His dark eyes are spellbound. I know not what they see, what awe and horror he glimpses beyond the door of the anima, but it is the last thing they do.

  In a burst of hideous light that knocks me to my knees, Walter of Mortain’s body is broken apart. Ripped into pieces. There is a lash of great heat. But it is as though a layer of glass – of something – encases us, mother and I. I still breathe. I still witness. Where he was, above us all, there is only a burning mass, not human anymore.