Hooded

by H. J. Mountain

  Threads of the anima spin and dance like headless snakes. One twists as a serpent, striking Adam in the neck. It is a moment’s work. Pockets of silvery liquid fester on his skin. Then the hideous light leaps and swallows him whole, and I turn and with my mother, we bear Sara to the threshold.

  The horse stamps its hooves upon the stone, its battle-worn eyes wide with terror, yet somehow it has not bolted. Not yet. We carry Sara to the saddle. She is sunk forward upon its neck. Could he carry us all three? Mother wants me to mount him. I shake my head. You first. She allows me this insolence. I make a pedestal with my hands, and with frail care she climbs onto the horse, behind Sara, whose motionlessness scares me to the bone.

  A sound of frantic movement at my back: I turn, hopeful somehow that Adam will be following, but it is not he. Several of the masked men are still alive. One, at the front of the group, has a charred jaw. His lips are gone. He comes stumbling into the corridor in blind rage. Another is close behind, and another. They seize up weapons from the stack. Swords. Bows.

  There is no time. Dust is eating at the walls. They are crumbling. I smack the horse on its hind. It does not wait for a second asking. It launches into a charge through the open gates.

  I run there, turning at the threshold to set off an arrow that catches one of the men in the shoulder, bringing him down. Others carry on relentless. The lipless man at the front wields a sword with wild sweeps. I flee outside.

  Rain pummels my face and hair. The night-wind is high. A sheer pain breaks open in my wrist, making me gasp as I stumble cross the short drawbridge over the steaming moat. A crash at my back: a wall coming down, and then the drawbridge is disintegrating underneath me, ravaged by the dust. I leap for the mossy sunken grasses of the isle, landing just as the rotted wooden bridge collapses into the moat.

  Masked men leap after me.

  The grey stead is far across the lake now. Near to the other side. But, there, through rain- and dust-soaked eyes, I glimpse new shapes. Riders. My heart sinks. It is more of them. The masked. Followers of Him: servants of the Black Lion. Mother and Sara: they are riding into the jaws.

  But I look again. The horse at the front: a giant chestnut with a white stripe on his face, bearing down the slope, as though from a moment I have lived before. Farragut! And that is Guy upon him. The shock of hope gives me a second wind. I reach the edge of the isle. Run onto the shallow bridge across the dark waters that are shifting with submerged creatures. Aware that the lipless man is upon it too: his sword hissing at the air at my back.

  What is Guy doing? He is turning Farragut. Racing him away along the edge of the lake. And then, with a gasp, I realise it is not Guy at all. The rider, his hood fallen back, has a thicket of dark red-tinted hair. He is a thief and a bandit. And he is riding away.

  As this hits me, I sense the desperate closeness of the man at my back. I cannot outrun him, or the others behind him. I drop suddenly. The blade rushes over me. The force of his attack spins the lipless man half around and I kick out with my foot. He stumbles but does not fall from the bridge. He laughs: a mad cackle. Comes again. From the ground I cannot set my bow. He is too close. When he thrusts the sword downward, I do the only thing I can. Roll to my side. Roll off the bridge and plummet into cold depths.

  Fronds of algae pull at my legs. I kick for the surface. A hideous side-eyed creature, like a bloated leech, appears at my side. It twists up after me, a puckered mouth of jagged white. I swat at it. But there are more. They are all on sides. I feel one bite – or suck at – my ankle. Another is at my elbow. My neck.

  It is too much. I scream under the water. And whatever is left of the turning in my blood, it issues a sharp pulse that radiates out through my arms and legs, every part of my flesh, churning the water, and the leeches are thrust away, if only for a moment. I tear with all my limbs. I know what waits for me above, but I cannot think of anything but to escape this watery hell.

  I break the surface. Gasp down air. Reach for the slippery stone of the bridge. Look up to see the lipless man, his mask-burnt visage, glaring down. He lifts the sword high over his head: an executioner’s rite. Then an arrow bursts his neck and ends him.

  I clamber onto the bridge. Dimly aware of the far shore, where Farragut is stood, and upon him: Will, who has not fled as I thought. He raises another arrow to his bow, as more of the masked men come. Then of the stone bridge quivering beneath my feet, breaking apart from the island, and a shadow, and I am being lifted. Pulled up from under my shoulder, until I am resting against the back of a giant. He spins the horse and returns the way he came. He stinks of sweat and ale. They are the sweetest scents I could imagine.

  Equine muscle carries us forward. Men – or the shadows of men – shrieking after us, falling from the splintered bridge into the waters of the lake, which are thrashing with the leeches. I do not look back again.

  *

  For a time we ride. My mind clouded. I sense the night’s rain on my soaked hair and back, and a cold wind that drapes itself over me, even as I huddle against the largeness of Little John. I sense the strange, skinned trees of the weeping wood, and the other horses and riders. Murphy, alone and in the lead; Will next, with a lifeless Sara in his clutches; my mother with the one named Tucker. The grey stead from the castle, rider-less, stays with us, as though grateful for the company. I sense a longing inside that Marian and Adam were among our party also.

  I sense all these things through gauze. Threads of dust and smoke.

  Through it all, a single thought keeps returning. Haunting me.

  Am I a shadow? Did I not perish like Adam, in the chamber of the Burnt Man, when the anima ripped through all of us? How would I know? If I feel the wind, does that mean I am here? Or do the dead dream, too?

  I force myself to keep opening my eyes. Force myself to look into the wind and to look for my companions: to prove to myself that I am like them, I am flesh and I am blood.

  But the gauze is always there.

  “Do you hear me?” I call out.

  Little John nods, without looking back. He does not speak, but that is enough. For now, as the weeping wood and the gauze of dust shrouds my world, it is enough.

  **

  The next I know we are stopped in a dip in the wooded slope. Will is laying Sara upon a blanket on the ground beside a tree. She is a blue-ish pale. What is left of her dark hair mats across her face, which is mottled with cuts and bruises. She does not shiver under the relentless rain.

  Will catches my eye. He looks ashen. I do not understand why he is here, why he came back, but this is not the time. Little John dismounts and helps me down. I cannot quite manage it alone. Away from the chamber and its sulphur dust, my wrist is a bent sapling of hot-then cold- stabs. It is swollen blue. With each footstep, other hurts ripple down my back and inside my neck.

  With Tucker’s help I aid my mother to the wet earth. Grateful to see her eyes casting around, even if they betray a deep weariness. I hug her. Feel her ribs against mine.

  “We need warmth,” she says, urgent. “For the girl.”

  Will overhears. He looks doubtful. “There’s no way we get a fire started in this.”

  My mother stares at me. She wears a look I cannot fathom – a kind of calmness. “In your pocket.”

  I look down, unsure, until I reach into one of my dress pockets. The lion’s cloth. Its dust tingles under my fingertips.

  I offer it my mother. She shakes her head.

  “Here,” she gestures to a spot between Sara and the tree. There is a pathetic smattering of twigs. She moves us to it, holding my elbow. “Branches,” she says, digging at the soil, “more branches, Robyne!”

  I look at the boys. Murphy and Little John and Tucker, who have been regarding with curiosity and no little confusion this tiny old woman who is scratching at the earth with her fingers, move into life. They scout for fallen branches, adding to the pile. From the soil, my mother unearths a bulb with small tapered ears.

  So some things, I think, wit
h wonder, do grow in the weeping wood.

  “She needs wildroot.”

  Will comes closer. “Wildroot?”

  “It gathers at the foot of the trees.” Talking makes her breathing hoarse. “Please hurry!”

  For once, Will does not argue or question. He sprints off.

  Her hands fast at work peeling the bulb, my mother instructs me to place the lion’s cloth above the cluster of sticks. Work it between my hands. Song-like words pass between her lips. By repetition I learn them. Soon my voice melds with hers.

  Torayam…leeve…arayu…zhay…torayam…leeve…arayu…zhay…

  It is hopeless, though. The rain drenches the sticks and the cloth. Sara, too: her face pale and waxen. I keep looking over at her. Feel myself shrinking. Returning to the gauze.

  My mother turns to me.

  “Do not give up, my child.”

  “It is no good.”

  “The anima comes from the earth,” she whispers, “and it draws on the air, and on the fires, and on the waters too. But it is in you also. In all of us.”

  I look at her. Lost. She places her hands upon mine. Together we chant. The boys return, now and then. More branches added to the wet heap. Will brings over wildroot. They give us strange looks. I ignore them. Something sneaks upon me. A sense of focus in my act and in my blood: a collecting of faith that I feel, at first, tracing down a path from my neck through my chest, then along my arms and into the fingers that hold the lion’s cloth. It happens with slowness and yet before I know it this focus is deep. The glossy dust becoming more defined, brighter halos: a red like the last of sundown, a gold of bursting flower. Mother’s hands on mine are warm. For a moment, I am witness to a shard of light between us. Then suddenly, like a rain all of its own, the dust sheds downward upon the branches: a cascade of amber that catches into fire and, despite the downpour, burns with stubborn heat.

  My mother moves our hands perilously close to this rare flame. I gasp, expecting to be scalded. I should know better by now: there is only subtle warmth. She tells me to place my palms upon Sara’s neck. This frightens me. Her neck is so thin. Her flesh is chilled. She does not react to my touch. But I hold my hands there, my gaze flicking back and forth between Sara and my mother.

  She places the hearts of the wildroot to the fire. They burn with eagerness. Become blackened pits, crumbling in her hands. Then, with a quickness belonging more of youth, my mother rubs the black powder upon Sara’s lips. It stains and seems to sink into her closed mouth.

  I feel a weight in my blood, chinks of iron spreading out and passing inside of me. My mother is changing, too: the lines of her face deepen with her work. Her eyes are catching. She is hunched over Sara; we both are, as the flame burns, as if hooded from the cold rain. Starker in colours green and then sulphur-gold, its heat radiating over the three of us. There is something terrifying and yet undeniable about the ritual, and this is a ritual we are undertaking, I know it in my bones. It is like the giving in of a prayer. Like an offering to some great and grave power that is beyond our reach.

  Our voices slow. An ancient chant: of fire and earth, of air and water. They take on a life of their own. Echoing inside me. With the iron-blood in my neck that makes the night darker and the firelight fierce.

  Suddenly, with a splutter, Sara opens her mouth. Her eyes. She cries out. Relief cascades through my bones, and below it, a sprinkling of awe: at the power I have witnessed, the transformation we have drawn. My mother falls back against me. I hold her. Sara stares at us both. Then, with a pared-back vision, she sees the four boys who have formed a ring behind us.

  “‘Tis alright, Sara,” I say, reaching to her. “They will not harm you.”

  “I know you,” she whispers, as if seeing me for the first time.

  I nod.

  “Where am I?”

  “In the weeping wood.”

  She closes her eyes. But she does not return to that stillness. There is heat and colour in her cheeks. Life.

  I glance up at Will. He is frowning. Troubled by what he has seen. Because, I wonder, he cannot explain it. But neither can I.

  ***

  My mother is speaking. Her voice is soft. I miss her words. She is laid across me. Almost like a young child. I lean in closer.

  As I do, I hear her: “You are not alone.”

  “I know that. You are with me.”

  She tries to lick her lips. “I passed onto you what I learnt. That day…”

  She reaches up to brush my neck: the mottled marks that are like the prints of fingers. I feel their chill.

  “But I did not have time to teach you. Do not let it destroy you, my child.”

  “How?” Her words unnerve me. Everything about this unnerves me.

  “Your father…he was different once. Before it overcame him.”

  She looks up at me. The whites of her eyes are pinkish. Close to red.

  “I will not.”

  With great effort she places her blackened fingers upon my broken wrist. The charred wildroot melts on my skin, its effect a cold balm, which makes me gasp.

  Then, for reasons I do not understand, she says, “I was born in Locksley, Robyne.”

  “Locksley is a place?”

  “A village. Once. Perhaps it is still there.”

  “What is, mother? The village?”

  Her eyes are closing more heavily. But her face, reflecting the last of the fire, is momentarily flush with light. I am reminded vividly of watching her at work from my bed in our home, when everything seemed possible and nothing beyond us.

  “What is left, my child…the words of the wood…” She breathes out. “What you seek.”

  I want to tell her that she is what I seek. What I have always sought. I need nothing more. Only time with her: time that was stolen from us.

  But she is disappearing. Vanishing before my eyes. I hold her tight against me. As though I could trap her in this moment. But I feel it suddenly. It is like a cut inside of me. No: ten thousand of them. They become one vast bleeding from within. Its slow loss turns me cold. Until all I can feel is emptiness, and within that a dark wish to follow her.

  For, I am still here. Breathing on the sodden grass. Still here.

  But she is not.

  18.

  I do not remember much of the night after. It is patchy. Like the scattered remnants of a dream, more image than memory, and even then drained of my own self, my presence, as though I saw it all through someone else’s eyes. Perhaps that is for the best.

  They buried her there.

  How Tucker, stocky and busy, could never look at me, though I watched him using a large trowel they must have traded with the blacksmith. Will and Little John and Murphy with whatever they had, carving bigger the gash into the ground. How the mud turned was full of worms and woodlice. The rain stopped feeling cold after a time. Just became what I knew. A cloak.

  How they waited, the boys and Sara, who was sat with her thin arms tight round her knees. They did not speak. They waited for me to. But what are words in that darkness. Just sounds I would make.

  How in the end I could not watch. I knew that I would regret this later. But I wanted not my last sight to be her laid low in that black soil. So in the end I closed myself off.

  How when it was all over, I wanted only to ride alone. Not upon Farragut, for he belonged to another world I was not ready to inhabit, if ever I was, but the grey stead that had carried my mother from the castle that had kept her prisoner for so long. My legs buckled when I tried to mount him. I pushed and fought at Will when he caught me.

  How the trees blurred into a forest never-ending. Farragut flowed beneath us. I did not sleep, but was not awake either. My wrist: a solitary reminder that I was still made of flesh and bone and these were tortured. My forehead on Will’s shoulder, the pulse of the ride beating through him into me. The rain must have stopped at some hour. It left a kind of mist around and above us.

  How we came upon the edge of a road and I glimpsed a reddish c
reature, a fox scrambling from a ditch at the sound of the horses. It moved liked they always do. Ever on the run: never safe. I wondered where they sleep. If they ever rest.

  How the night, which I thought never would, ended. Birdsong: strange and cheerful. Dawn like a pale blue seeping out of the earth.

  How I shut my eyes because the light became too much to bear.

  *

  The day is aged when we stop in a clearing in the greenwood. I lift my head. My eyes are puffy. Sore, like the rest of me. The sky is grey but rainless. Around us the trees are thick and cluster together: the strange separateness of the weeping wood is long behind us. This is Sherwood Forest. It makes me think of Marian.

  Will’s words over his shoulder confirm my thought. “You can stop with us for now.”

  The others are dismounted not far ahead. Sat around log stumps and breaking out pieces of bread and apples and meat. My stomach feels like a pit, but where there ought to be growling hunger there is only dullness: a hollowed-out space that will not fill.

  “I will go with you to Marian. Then I must take Sara home to her brother.”

  “Tough kid, that one.”

  I look over at the short girl who is sat with Little John and Murphy and Tucker. The remnants of her brown hair fall in wild strands across her shoulders. Burn-scars pepper her cheeks and scalp. Yet her appetite seems undamaged. She is ripping into a brown loaf.

  “She is.”

  Will is quiet. “Your mother saved her, you know.”

  My throat feels clogged. I am not ready to think about her, let alone talk about her, so I ask him what happened after the tavern. “What happened to Guy?”

  “Your boy is fine, don’t worry.”

  “Well?”

  “We lost him and the other soldiers.”

  I nod at this sliver of relief. But I am confused. “Why did you come back then?”