The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘You’re not taking him anywhere,’ said Roland.

  She began to walk away from them. They were going to try to stop her, of course, but she knew she was faster and smarter than them.

  ‘Come back here right now,’ growled Roland.

  All she had to do was get over the enclosure’s fence, and then she could flee into the woods. She almost smiled at her own capability. Yasuo yawned and snuggled up against her collarbone and she held him there tight. She would run into the forest and live with her fox there, and Seb could come and visit and the others could find her when they were done in this place.

  ‘Stop her,’ said Roland, and his footsteps became heavier.

  She broke into an instant run, glancing back over her shoulder to see Roland and two strangers doing the same. Yet no sooner was Roland in motion than Seb had stuck out a leg and tripped him. He fell with a shout into the mud, and his lackeys hesitated before continuing their pursuit. Hiroko cackled with relief, for that had been all the extra time she would need to get away and over the fence. She was already too far ahead for them to catch her, racing across the field towards the valley’s slope. She would scramble over the fence in seconds and be rid of them. Then she would be free.

  Leonard was leaning on the fence when she reached it. His pose was a bored one, as if she were late for an appointment. His Alsatian stood behind him, the discs of its eyes reflecting her pursuers’ torchlight.

  Hiroko slowed down as best she could, but the mud skidded out beneath her and she fell to her hands and knees. Yasuo tumbled from her arms with a yelp, but she snatched him back up even as she regained her footing. Leonard straightened, and the approaching light glittered off the frames of his glasses. Then Hiroko spun around and found herself hemmed in by Roland and the others, although among them were Adrien and Hannah and Michelle.

  ‘Stop!’ yelled Seb, dashing between Roland and Hiroko. ‘Cool off, everyone.’

  ‘Whyever should we be cool?’ asked Roland, wiping grime off his lips. ‘You kids are a law unto yourselves.’

  ‘This isn’t Yasuo’s fault,’ objected Hannah, barging forward. ‘It’s in his nature.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Michelle, and Hiroko looked to her with sudden gratitude. ‘Hannah warned us that the cows were weakening the fence.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about what’s in his nature,’ snorted Roland, and pointed at Yasuo. ‘Give him to me, girl.’

  Hiroko held Yasuo all the tighter, looking from left to right for another way out. She could hear a faint growl in the Alsatian’s throat.

  Then, without any warning, Seb threw himself at the person holding the torch. He grabbed hold of it, wrenched it free and buried its fire in the mud. At once everything turned black.

  Hiroko ran. Sprinting away to her right, absolutely blind and hoping she didn’t collide with the fence in that direction, once she reached it. She raced as fast as she’d ever done, with Yasuo whimpering in her ear.

  She collided with something and it floored her. She gasped for the air it had knocked out of her lungs, then regained her urgency and scrabbled back to her feet. When she picked Yasuo up once more he was trembling, perhaps sensing his predicament through the panic of his mistress.

  Hiroko did all she could to steady both herself and the fox. But what she had collided with was not the fence.

  ‘Hand it over,’ said Leonard, his voice disembodied by the dark. He sounded casual, formal even, but of course he knew that Hiroko would do no such thing.

  She turned to run again, but the blow came so fast to her back that it felt as if her shoulder blades had imploded. She fell and her mouth filled deep with mud. When she clambered back to her feet, retching cold soil, someone was bringing another torch.

  ‘Can you see this?’ asked Leonard, holding Yasuo up by the tail. The approaching light was still weak, but Yasuo writhed in such distress that it was impossible to miss.

  Hiroko lunged for him but, before she could even raise her fists, Leonard dropped Yasuo.

  The Alsatian’s jaws clamped around the little fox before he hit the ground. The dog shook its head as it savaged him, its throat rumbling with a happy bloodlust. By the time it cast Yasuo aside, his body was like a thing unzipped, and the teeth of the zip were the pieces of his vertebrae. His neck was twisted so far round that his chest was like his back, and he stared at the night sky with dull eyes.

  Hiroko dropped to her knees, but it felt like she fell much further. She clawed her way over to where Yasuo lay and lifted him up without blinking. The blood trickled warmly over her fingers and into the cuffs of her hoodie. The light was growing brighter, and there were voices raised behind her in accusation and argument, but she had no ears for them. She ran her forefinger down the length of Yasuo’s face, and the end of his nose was still moist, as was the tongue in his mouth. She held her finger between his teeth and willed him to bite them, to leave another set of pinprick scars in her skin. He did not.

  She laid his sorry remains gently on her lap, and his blood seeped into her jeans. Then her anger began to rise up, pulled from the depths of her as a tree pulls up water. She broke, and grabbed handfuls of her hair and pulled it as hard as she could until it made her scream. At some point Seb knelt at her side to restrain her, but everything felt far away. ‘What have you done to me?’ she choked at him, but he didn’t seem to hear.

  The Alsatian might just as well have bitten her heart in two. She missed her sobo and her sofu and she missed Carter. She even missed Saori. She missed the Tokyo apartment, the puppy wrestling its rubber toys on the carpet, and she screamed, ‘Yasuo!’ at the top of her voice. She missed her poor young mother, dead as many days as she herself had been alive. And most of all she missed her father.

  She pushed Seb away from her and rose to her feet, pulling out her skinning knife and grasping its hilt in her fist.

  Leonard waited, without his guard up. Maybe he wanted what was coming.

  Hiroko launched at him, quick as a spark, but before she knew it she had been yanked back hard. Her knife flew to the ground with a slap. Seb, Hannah and Adrien were struggling to contain her.

  ‘Hiroko!’ shouted Seb. ‘You can’t just stab him!’

  She punched one of them, she didn’t know who, then elbowed another in the gut. Still they kept her back, while Leonard only watched without stirring. Even though he had not moved a muscle, he had his own blade out now, his knife as long as a machete. Perhaps he’d had it drawn all along.

  With a sneer, he turned away and disappeared into the night. The Alsatian vanished after him.

  Hiroko stopped fighting. She cried through clenched teeth, and she was just a little girl, and her daddy Inoue Naoki was holding her just so, after a wasp sting or a deep gash from a briar or even just a day of being picked on at school. ‘Gomenasai!’ she sobbed, which meant I’m sorry in Nihongo. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I was angry with you. Of course we couldn’t have the forest house! Of course!’

  ‘Hiroko,’ Seb was saying worriedly. ‘Hiroko . . .’

  ‘Gomenasai! Gomenasai!’ She looked up with a gasp and the night was underwater with tears. Seb and the others were huddling close around her and their arms were the only things keeping her upright. Leonard was gone, but what did that matter? Yasuo was gone too.

  8

  The Grave

  After the events of the night, Hannah felt sicker than ever at the sight of Leonard. Come breakfast he lazed outside the settlement’s makeshift kitchen, taking his time over a bowl of the gruel they served there. She couldn’t eat that stuff (it was full of dead birds and rabbits, boiled until the meat floated off the bones), and had finished every supply that Seb had brought her, so she wasted no time in hiking up to the woods. So long as Leonard remained in the valley, foraging again felt like a wholesome pursuit. Before she entered the forest, she took one last look down the slope. The wind crashed about as it pleased, and even as she watched there came a groan from the hotel as another piece of roof caved in. A chimney d
ropped some twenty metres and exploded off a branch, showering the ruin in bricks and a weathervane.

  She left it all behind her. Once she was beyond the forest’s dead borders, the day seemed suddenly more alive. Granted there was no sun, few flowers and not much greenery, but the woods were full of autumn’s boggy riches. Everything was tan or umber or meltingly dark, and she found enough edible mushrooms to fill an old carrier bag. Toads watched her from damp ditches, playing their throat music.

  She was just breaking off another chanterelle at the stalk when a bray like a cow’s stopped her hand. She looked up and saw it chewing on leaves: a calf kirin the size of a roe deer. Its pelt was far blacker than those of the adults she had seen, perhaps to better camouflage it from its predators. Its horn, yet to fully develop, was a fistful of stone still covered in a membrane of skin.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered. ‘It isn’t safe. He’s already shot one far bigger than you.’

  It brayed again, then began to wander away, deeper into the forest.

  ‘Go on,’ she urged it, ‘keep going. Best to get away from here.’

  It stomped its foot and gazed back at her along the length of its body.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘of course. I understand.’

  She followed it. They headed north-west, through undulating land. Each orange leaf was a paper-cut fire, burning on the forest floor or adding its flame to the cold inferno in the canopy.

  After some fifteen minutes of walking, the kirin came to a sudden halt. Hannah looked around for the reason and at first saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then she realised that a mass of ivy up ahead was not growing on a fallen tree but on a cracked stone wall. Stepping closer, she discovered it was part of a ruined chapel, a place that had been derelict since well before the trees came and was now not much more than three crumbling walls heaped with grass and the creepers. Despite that, someone had made camp between them, not too long ago, and the chewed ribs of some toasted animal lay in the ashes of a fire. More disconcerting, the place smelled of dog. Its excrement lay dried out and untidied in the shadow of the tallest wall.

  She spotted the grave just beyond the chapel, and the calf kirin whinnied as she did so. A filthy brown anorak drew her eye to it, its hem flapping up from the soil. The grave it had been unearthed from was too new to have been made for any of the chapel’s congregation. It was shallow and raked open by beasts, and Hannah looked away from it at once, even though she had already seen too much. Its ditch had not been dug deep enough to keep its incumbent safe from scavengers, and the animals that had opened it had devoured almost all of the soft matter from inside. The coat was a man’s, Hannah would guess, but there was not much else to identify the corpse by. It was probably only a few weeks old, but that was a long time in the forest.

  For a while, Hannah stood very still, unsure of what to do. Part of her wanted to dash away as quickly as possible, but another part of her felt like she owed this dead stranger some last token of respect. The kirin snorted, and turned its head to itch its shoulder with its horn. Then, with a nervous shuffle, Hannah dared to look again.

  Bangled around the body’s wrist bones was a watch. Its leather strap was cut and frayed by tooth marks, but the timepiece itself was unscratched, and it said that it had just turned ten forty-seven in the morning. It was an expensive watch, Hannah reckoned, perhaps the kind given as a gift, and upon seeing it a suspicion began to nag her, based on something Michelle had said. She held her breath as she approached the arm, choosing a stick to be her tool. The kirin began to chomp on the chapel’s ivy.

  She jiggled the watch loose with the stick. The bones were not well attached, so the task was largely one of stomach. When she had freed it she lifted it up at arm’s length.

  Engraved on the underside were the words For David. Happy 50th Birthday.

  9

  Forest Law

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Roland, when he found Adrien sitting on a tree stump, halfway up the valley’s north slope.

  Adrien didn’t answer, only buttoned up his jacket against a blustering wind that rolled downhill and made something fall with a crash from the roof of the ruined hotel.

  Roland put his hands on his hips. ‘You know this isn’t the deal, don’t you? You don’t get to stay here if you don’t pull your weight. Even the children do something useful with their days.’

  ‘I did some chores in the kitchen tent,’ said Adrien, ‘but I couldn’t concentrate, so I came up here.’

  ‘Wow. You’re really working your fingers to the bone. There aren’t career breaks any more, Adrien. It’s hard graft here, and that’s only fair. While we’re on the subject, what was your excuse for this yesterday?’

  Adrien looked up at him. Roland’s shirt was a fresh primrose, and he was wearing gumboots to protect his trousers from the mud.

  ‘Yesterday you did exactly what you’re doing now,’ continued Roland. ‘You sat on this stump, all day long. I hope you’ve got a good enough reason.’

  Adrien’s reason was this: someone had put a crow in the gruel pot. He had just about been coping with the steady slew of rabbits and other birds (and rats, there’d been a brace of rats that morning), all tossed in for the boil, but the crow had been too much. He had closed his eyes and felt the tickle at the back of his throat, that one that came from too much cawing, in the roost or on serrated wing. Merely remembering it had made his lips feel pinched and stretched, hard enough to peck meat off the bone.

  That was the reason why he had run up here with his stomach heaving. Thankfully, he had been too hungry to vomit. Roland could withhold his place at the settlement’s tables all he wanted, since Adrien had not eaten anything in a day. His guts were aching now with hunger, but for that he was actually grateful. At least it was a human hunger, not a carrion one. Nor was it the hunger of worms, nor of leaves pining for the sunlight, nor the insatiable thirst of roots in the ground.

  ‘I’ve got a good enough reason,’ mumbled Adrien.

  ‘Care to explain it?’

  ‘You might not believe me.’

  To his surprise, Roland took a seat on the stump ahead of him. They faced each other for a moment without speaking, then Roland smiled. ‘I have a proposition for you.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’

  ‘You have to understand that it doesn’t look good. You, just sitting up here. Nobody should get special treatment.’

  ‘I can’t go back to the kitchen, Roland. And I definitely can’t chop down trees.’

  Roland raised his hands in conciliatory fashion. ‘Are you going to let me finish?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  He stood up. ‘Walk with me. This is a thing it’s best if I show you.’

  Adrien shrugged to himself and stood up, too. How much of a trap could a walk be? They set off alongside each other but at a distance. People looked up with respect at Roland, then with intrigue at Adrien, no doubt wondering what a hopeless case like him was doing in the company of their glorious leader.

  Roland led him back down the slope, but not towards the scrapheap or the shelters. They headed, instead, towards the ruined hotel that stood apart from the settlement.

  ‘I thought this place was out of bounds,’ said Adrien, as they drew closer. ‘Bits of it keep falling down.’

  ‘We have to say it’s a no-go zone,’ soothed Roland, making his way towards a stone entry, an arch atop a run of steps, ‘because we don’t want the kids to try to play in here. But some parts are more stable than others. Stick close to me and you’ll be fine.’

  When they reached the archway, the hotel gave a long and ruminative groan, as if a giant foot had just pressed down on all its floorboards. Above the arch the split wood of the door had been lifted like a portcullis, and chained up there by brambles. Through this they entered, and found themselves in a cavernous lobby which might once have been impressive in its own right. Now the trees had risen through the flagstones and superimposed their own idea of grandeur. They w
ere among the biggest Adrien had ever seen, their branches thick as trunks, their twigs thick as branches. They draped themselves with curtain upon curtain of autumn leaves, and among them there was no ceiling to speak of. There was just a nest of winding boughs, interspersed with brick and glass, rising as high as could be seen. When the breeze parted the foliage, it revealed sections of hotel room and corridor tipped on their sides or prised open for a craggy bough to pass through.

  Roland led Adrien across the lobby floor, their footsteps ringing briefly off the flagstones. They passed through another doorway gripped by creepers and entered another hall, arched over by an ever-rising vault of orange vegetation. Here and there were the splintered remains of chairs and tables, and gilded ornaments dangled upside down or on their sides among briars. The branches groaned, and a sprinkling of brick dust sifted down between the leaves.

  ‘You told me this place was safe,’ said Adrien, craning his neck. The trees groaned again, and he wondered if it was due only to the weight of the architecture.

  ‘It is,’ said Roland. ‘This part of it, at any rate. This was the hotel’s restaurant.’ He crouched to find a silver fork beneath the leaf litter. ‘See? Before that, it was the banqueting hall for the lord of the manor. Here, you can take that. It can be the first thing you find for us.’

  Adrien took the fork and twirled it in his fingers. ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You want me to try to salvage things.’

  Roland nodded. ‘But stay in this hall and the lobby. I’d hate it if a chunk of bricks fell down on you.’

  ‘You’re a bad liar.’

  ‘Oh please, Adrien, let’s be grown up about this. Just because you and I see the world differently, doesn’t mean I want you to die.’

  All of the banqueting hall’s decoration had been either faux medieval or genuine antique, although not much of it had survived the forest’s attention intact. Plate mail busts with plumed and antlered helmets had been seized from their plinths and flung aloft, their visors gaping open for sprigs to shoot through. The sunlight fell almost at random through the levels above, waiting for openings blown between the leaves. Sometimes it found blue and ruby shards, remnants of stained glass that had once made the windows colourful.