Coldfall Wood

by Steven Savile

  “Ripe for the plucking,” his chalk giant brother, lumbering menacingly toward her, mocked.

  She didn’t move: not toward them, not away from them. She let the stem of the denuded flower fall from her fingers, and the bees gathered close enough so that they became a living glove.

  “Did he send you?”

  “You know he did,” Gogmagot said.

  “True, I just wondered if you’d try and lie.”

  “Why would I do that? I don’t have anything against you in this form.”

  “And yet here you are, intending to kill me.”

  “It’s not personal,” Corenius said.

  She saw the crown of leaves the giant wore, and even from this distance could identify bean, broom, burdock, chestnut, hawthorn, meadowsweet, nettle, oak, and primrose.

  “You brought me an offering? How kind of you,” Macha said, holding out her bee-gloved hand.

  “Oh, it’s not for you, only to help us find you.”

  “And here you are, and I’m telling you it is mine,” she said sweetly. “Give it to me, or I shall have my little friends take it. I don’t think you want that to happen.”

  The chalk giants didn’t move, and she had no interest in drawing things out, so with a whisper sent the bees swarming. They filled the air between them, swelling to fill every inch of the tunnel. Ten thousand must surely have been closer to thirty thousand and more by the time the first settled on Gogmagot’s bare arm. The chalk giant crushed it beneath his hand.

  “That was a mistake,” she said, as the smell of death drove the other bees wild.

  “I don’t care what you think,” Gogmagot sneered.

  “And that’s your final mistake, my old friend. They will willingly die for me, like all creatures great and small. They understand that there needs to be sacrifice. And there are a lot more of them than there are of you.” The giant in a boy’s skin laughed, his voice booming out to drown out the humming of the bees.

  “Do your worst, woman,” his brother said. “See if you can do your magic tricks after I’ve snapped your neck.”

  “Sometimes strength has nothing to do with muscles,” she said, opening her mouth and letting a single bee settle on her tongue. She swallowed it whole. “Sometimes it comes from being able to ask for help, and now I am asking,” and with that whatever had been holding the bees back lost its hold on them, and as they swarmed around the chalk giant they began to sting. At first it was only one at a time, but in the few seconds it took her to walk to where the brothers lay on the piss-stained paving slabs, writhing around in agony, hundreds upon hundreds of her hive had descended to sink their stingers into the two Hunters.

  They slapped at their arms and faces, turning and turning on the spot, losing their balance even as more stingers sank into their skin. They fell up against the tunnel wall and slumped down against it, clawing at their faces, their eyes, mouths open to scream, but instead of desperate cries going out, bees swarmed over their lips and teeth, filling them.

  Their deaths weren’t pretty, but then death shouldn’t be.

  She watched impassively, as their skin reddened and as more and more venom poured into their bodies; anaphylactic shock took them one after the other. It was an agonizing death that she wouldn’t have wished upon her worst enemies, but some good could come of it, she thought, as she recovered her crown from the fallen giant. As soon as it settled on her brow, the leaves and buds blossomed into glorious life.

  He would feel it, she knew, just as she felt his growing strength; such was the bond between them. She and he might not be lovers in this lifetime, but they were joined in ways that went beyond mortal comprehension. They were part of the endless knot of life, indivisible, inseparable, unending. It was only a matter of time before her ancient betrayal demanded a reckoning in his mind and the dance would begin all over again, the knot consuming itself like a serpent eating its own tail.

  Would it be her turn this time, or his again? It was difficult, sometimes, to remember that though their methods and means differed so vastly, they both essentially wanted to bring the magic back into the world so that it might survive the coming days.

  Crouching down beside the fallen brothers, she ran her fingers across the damp corners where the ground and tunnel wall met, digging out a few inches of mossy fungus, that she then sprinkled into the open mouths of the dead Hunters. Her touch brought new life to the moss, causing it to flourish in the dampness of their throats, and in moments all manner of mushrooms and toadstools had begun to sprout out of every orifice as the brothers became a breeding ground for the slugs and snails, worms and flies.

  She stood and turned her back on the Hunters. She had taken two of his pieces out of the great game, even as her most potent player had returned. In this moment, she was winning. She could feel the magic bristling in the ground beneath her feet with an urgency that had been missing for centuries. It was flooding back into the realm, and that was his doing. At dawn, all of the birds in the sky had cried out as one, their song announcing the return of Manannan’s blade, the Godslayer. With Freagarthach in his hand, she had a hero to stand against her lover in the endless conflict between the Aos Shee and the Bain Shee.

  They were the same, and yet so different. It was more than just light and dark, they were counterparts; together they made up the whole. They were chaos and order. The Aos Shee were the ancestors of the forest, of nature and the land, who had retreated into the Otherworld. They were staggeringly beautiful, godlike in their perfection. They still lingered in our understanding with the faces more commonly thought of as angels. While the Bain Shee had taken refuge in the lands of the dead, they were the rot that riddled the landscape and the decay that ate away at Mother’s natural beauty. They were the foul stench that came with putrescence, and unlike their kin theirs was a terrible beauty—hideous and deep rooted—bearing the masks of demons in our more basic mythologies. But one could not exist without the other. And no matter what aspect of their kind they represented, they had abandoned our world. They did not belong here.

  She could sense their presence, pushing at the veil. It was only a matter of time; the one thing the Bain Shee had an abundance of. Their exile could not and would not last. And when they finally broke through, the world—her world—would need every shred of magic spilling back into it now to resist its ancient enemy.

  She had never been afraid of loss. That was for her aspect as a mother. In this skin, she was full of that same youth and beauty Arawn so cherished, and because he was so predictable, she had always been able to manipulate her love.

  She dismissed her bees, sending them out into the world to cross-pollinate the miraculous seeds she had conjured into existence, knowing that each bud and blossom they brought forth would enrich Mother.

  She took the stairs, emerging from the underpass. The fresh air was heady in her lungs. She felt like her body must surely rupture, spilling out all of its richness, so intense was the fragrance of the newly grown forest all around her. Everywhere she looked she saw fresh signs of beauty returning, replacing the sickness of man.

  She would prevail. She had no alternative. She must. For all of their sakes. She was willing to give everything—even the deity she had loved body and soul for her entire existence—for this place. That was the fundamental difference between her and Arawn. He always thought there was another way to go about things, and clung stubbornly to that need, even when it was as guileless as drawing a sword and bellowing “Charge!” Even so, she knew that her time here was growing shorter by the hour; the maiden aspect could not live forever. In all things there is a season, and summer must come. It would not be held back. Not now. All she could do was take some small comfort in the fact that so much had already been accomplished. She just had to look around her to see the burned-out shell of all of those temples of avarice, gutted by the cleansing fires of Arawn’s army of children. Across the avenue newly blessed with fresh woodland, she saw the endless row of chapels dedicated to greed with their g
audy displays of wealth overturned. This place wasn’t what it had been, but they were moving in the right direction at least, back toward a simpler time when the land was all anyone needed and they were content to dedicate their lives to serving Mother.

  There was still so much left to be done; but this was a beginning.

  In the distance she heard dogs barking. Above, the sky was filled with starlings.

  Arawn had called out to the creatures.

  51

  As one, all of the birds in the sky—thousands upon thousands of starlings, rooks, crows, and more—loosed a chorus of tortured song that was deafening. It was answered by packs of wild dogs across the city and by the feral youth who took up the ululating howl as a war cry. The cacophony was utterly bone-chilling. The creatures of the city answered the call.

  Robin savored the sheer beauty of it all.

  Cockroaches crawled out of the woodwork, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of black-carapaced insects scurried and skittered and chittered between the new forestland, climbing the limbs of the trees to give them a second constantly shifting bark. Then there were the tomcats that prowled along fences and the mice that ran along beside them like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But the worst of it by far was the rats. They spilled out of the sewers and nests in compost heaps and discarded trash: slick-bellied, bloated, and skinny critters that swarmed over each other in a race to find the light. At first, they came like creatures from the ark, two by two; but quickly two became four and four became eight as they poured up the steps of the abandoned Tube stations at Down Street, Brompton Road, and Wood Lane; at Swiss Cottage, Charing Cross, and Aldwych; until the sheer weight of their numbers was so much that it forced through barricades that had stood in place for decades. By the time they reached street level, they were a flood; a writhing mass of black and brown fur that surged out of the dark places beneath the city, and still they kept coming. There is a myth that there’s a rat for every Londoner, meaning more than eleven million of them living beneath the city, some as long as two feet, these giant, mutant rodents like something out of a James Herbert novel. The reality was far fewer, but still in the millions, and seeing them all rise up like this in a sea of black, the difference was negligible.

  Robin couldn’t see the cracks in the pavement for the rats. He couldn’t see the double yellow lines in the gutter for the rats. He could barely see patches of the white line down the middle of the road, turned into a Morse code message—the long dashes broken up into staccato dots. Save Our Souls painted on the tarmac.

  With the rise of the rats, people started running; panic filled the streets. They were all trying to find higher ground, shelter, somewhere the vermin wouldn’t crawl over them if they stood still, even for a moment. He saw them surging up around their ankles, their claws tearing at the seams of tights and hooking into the denim of jeans as the rats scrabbled upward.

  And still more of them came out of the darkness, their chittering chorus like the tinnitus of madness in his ears. He had no intention of silencing it.

  This was the world he loved and so much closer to how he remembered it.

  Robin walked on. Estate agents, banks, charity shops—all of the windows were gone, all of their differences erased over the nights of violence. Now they were just empty units.

  The natural order had changed beyond recognition.

  Another chorus of rabid barks rose angrily in the near distance, no more than two streets over. The savagery of it changed, and he knew without doubt that the animals had found fresh prey and were tearing into it.

  More people ran through the undergrowth that had been the High Street, forcing a path between the trees and the concrete bollards that once upon a time had served to stop the traffic from driving down the pedestrianized stretch of the street.

  The rats danced to his silent tune, as though he was some weird Pied Piper in his torn, bloody, muddy clothes. He knew that he must have looked like he’d been dragged through hell backward, kicking and screaming, and out the other side. Though this place was no better than the inferno now. His legs were splashed with dark stains that could have been blood or mud or other bodily fluids that had dried in. Robin looked back over his shoulder, whipping up his arms and cackling as he watched the rats swarm around his feet. He called out for the rat chorus, in the clutches of a religious experience. He ignored the rats that he crushed beneath his feet, throwing his arms around as though conducting some invisible choir that only he could hear.

  More and more of the vermin emerged from the city below in front of him, and in streets off to the left and to the right, converging on him as he walked. The city was vast, and the sewer system beneath it every bit as vast. Now that the rats had answered Arawn’s call there was no stopping them. It was the stuff of nightmares. It was impossible to plant a foot down without treading on the back of a rat or a roach or tripping over a cat or facing the bared incisors of a rabid dog.

  And more of the hidden dwellers of the city were emerging by the minute.

  There was no road to follow now, only a churning writhing tidal mass of tiny furred bodies that broke and swarmed around the trunks of the trees and over the ripped-up tarmac where the roots had torn through from below. The constant chittering was everywhere, echoing off the high buildings, and amplified by the ancient acoustics until the entire city sounded like it was alive with rats.

  They tore open garbage sacks and gnawed through the plastic bins to get at the rotten food they contained. They spilled out of the drains along the side of the road, bringing up the filth of the sewers clotted in their fur. The stench was overpowering.

  A couple of times he caught a flicker of movement, a shadow across the periphery where the canopy of leaves thinned. He heard more dogs baying. They were moving in packs. They sounded closer now than they had a few minutes ago. All of the animals were coming together, converging on a single point: the lightning-struck tree in the heart of the Rothery. He saw them a moment later: the Gatekeeper with the wooden warrior, the Knucker, prowling at his side, heckles of bark raised as they, too, walked toward the old tree, drawn to it.

  The rats were the only creatures not eager to crawl all over the ancient tree, giving it a wide berth even as more birds settled in its high branches.

  Everywhere he looked, there was life—brilliant, vibrant, animal life. Root and branch; claw and tooth: life.

  This was Arawn’s kingdom.

  52

  Josh walked the ancient wood.

  Julie walked beside him; lost in his own world of silence.

  Alex and Ellie brought up the rear, Ellie on her radio. She looked distraught, arguing with the voice on the other end without being able to explain where they’d been or what had happened to them. She kept dancing around the subject as her superior officer chewed her out. Every third or fourth lie out of her mouth was broken by the same “I know, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” But that wasn’t appeasing him. Josh felt like taking the radio off her and demanding of the man, “Have you looked out of the window today?”

  Eventually she killed the radio.

  Of all of them, Josh was the only one who really grasped what was happening here with the incursion of the forest into the streets of the city. It wasn’t the miracle the others thought it was. It was a different sort of miracle altogether. It was a rebirth. A return.

  The trees might have sprung up overnight, but the forest wasn’t new.

  It was as old as the land itself, and far, far older than the paved streets its roots encroached upon. Albion had awoken. Her ancient forests, the primordial lifeblood of the eternal giant, were once more vibrant and filled with life as dawn by dusk by dawn Mother awoke and found her strength returning.

  The land was finding a new balance. The ecology of London reverting to what it had been before Mother’s youngest children had come swarming over her body like parasites. He could feel it in the air; taste it on his tongue as he breathed it in. The first strains of magic were there again, subtle, emanating from the
old trees. It would only grow stronger if it were nourished. And Arawn’s version of nourishment was blood and sacrifice. The blood of this London would seep into the ground, deep into the dirt only to be absorbed by the endless root system of the ancient wood that was spread out beneath the concrete and steel, to be released into the air through the green shoots and leaves.

  Blood magic.

  The Coldfall Wood that Arawn and his disciples had walked in those long-forgotten days had been so much more vast than the Coldfall Wood Julie Gennaro looked out over through his new lounge window and Josh and Alex played in as kids. The woodland had died back naturally in places, but in so many others it had been harvested to make way for the cemetery and the houses of the Rothery, the primary school across the way, and the endless commercial developments of greed, shrinking and shrinking until almost nothing remained. Even a hundred years ago it had covered hundreds of acres more ground than it did even last week. Today was different, and try as he might, Josh couldn’t think of that as a bad thing.

  He reached out to touch one of the tree trunks, then another.

  The wooded streets were infested with rats, but they kept their distance, swarming over each other to make room for Josh to pass, watching him. Recognizing him for what he was, dogs bayed as they neared, their endless barking giving the impression of an honor guard.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Julie said, finally breaking his silence.

  “I don’t,” Josh admitted. “And I can’t think about it. Not when I face him.”

  “We face him.”

  “No. I’ve got to do this alone.”

  “Then what was the point of getting this fucking great big sword? We’re in this together. One for all and all for one,” he brandished Manannan’s blade.

  “The world’s saddest musketeers,” Josh said. “Don’t argue with me, Julie. You know what you need to do.”

  “You’ve changed,” Julie said, and the way he said it made it obvious he didn’t mean it as a compliment.