King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t go then. I tried.’

  ‘Well, you must wait.’ Sister Ermengarde rather enjoyed this kind of thing. They had to learn, these children. A few years of her training and the wildest of them became decent, devout girls who knew how to subdue the flesh.

  ‘Sister, I can’t!’ Sybil’s brilliant blue eyes brimmed with frightened tears. There’ll be an accident. Oooh!’ She gripped her stomach hard and half-crouched, knees pressed together.

  ‘If I let you go, there’ll be a penance.’

  ‘Yes, Sister Ermengarde. Oooh!’

  There won’t be a penance, you silly old cow, because I shan’t be here.

  ‘Very well. Be quick and be very quiet when you come into the church. See me afterwards.’

  ‘Yes, Sister Ermengarde. Thank you, Sister Ermengarde,’ said Sybil and ran for the dorter. She went straight through, ignoring the privy stair on her left. Passing her bed, she snatched up the mantle she had left there in readiness. There was another way out, the one they used at playtime. She darted through, arriving in the open safely out of sight of the church and made for the place in the outer wall where the stonework was broken. She had been industriously working bits of stone loose over a period of months, seizing opportunities whenever she could, usually during recreation. She had made sufficient footholds now.

  In the church, the singing of the Office had begun. Everyone must be inside. She clambered up the wall, hoisted herself astride the top of it and sat there, panting. Then, suddenly sick with terror that Sister Ermengarde would come in search of her, even so soon, and catch her, she dropped down on the other side, to land in a crackling drift of leaves. She lay, massaging a scraped ankle. She was committed now. The drop was further on this side and there was no broken stonework. She couldn’t get back even if she wanted to.

  Moving as quietly as possible, she stood up and began working her way round the wall to find the track that led towards home. She must use it as a guide, she thought, keeping it in sight while she walked through the trees to one side of it. She must not get lost.

  That was vital. She was in the Forest of Andred and once lost in Andred, she would stay lost for ever.

  Andred was older than legend. It swept like a green ocean up to the northern march of the downs, where the soil grew chalky and too thin for trees. The woods of Fallowdene were an outpost of Andred, where the trees had flowed like water into a trough of earth deep enough to sustain them. Andred was twenty miles deep from north to south and fifty miles broad from east to west and the Conqueror’s New Forest of Hampshire was only its western extremity. It was crossed by roads here and there and a few patches of farmland had been carved out of it but these interruptions were few. The trees and the heathland reigned for the greater part unchallenged and there were wild creatures deep within it which scarcely knew the scent of man.

  Most of them feared him and all were shy, even the wolf and the wild boar. Sybil, flitting cautiously among the trees with the homeward path on her left, knew she was unlikely to meet either so near to a path, and if she did, it would probably run away. Anyway, she told herself stoutly, she was agile enough to climb a tree at speed if necessary.

  The going was slower than she had imagined and much noisier. Dead leaves were everywhere and even her light feet sounded to her like a marching army. There were also patches of undergrowth through which she couldn’t push her way and she frightened herself several times, thinking that in avoiding them she had gone too far from the track and lost it. Once, after a particularly bad fright, she sobbed with relief to see it again and risked walking on it for a time. But presently she heard hoofbeats behind her, coming from Withysham. She ran back to the trees and crouched behind a wide-girthed oak, heart pounding, until the rider, whoever it was, had gone past. After that, she went back to her cautious route among the woods. Presently, after what seemed to her like a very long time, she began to grow tired.

  Her feet felt heavy. Roots and brambles began to seem like snares deliberately laid, and trees appeared to move into her path on purpose. She had no idea how far she had come. But the November afternoon was darkening; dusk was near. A gust of wind, getting up suddenly, ripped through the boughs and brown leaves whirled past her face. A mournful whining began in the branches overhead. She began to hurry.

  The ground was too rough and the brush too tangled for running. Stopping to nurse a stitch, she glanced longingly towards the track. But there were more hoofbeats, coming the other way this time, more than one horse by the sound of it. Presently she crept out from the bush which had sheltered her while they went by, and went on through the wood, trying another way to make haste; walking and running alternately. Walk ten steps, run ten steps, walk ten, run ten, trip on something she couldn’t see in the olive-tinged twilight and fall sprawling. She lay face down, trying not to cry, her ankle throbbing where it had now been hit twice on the same place. She sat up to rub it and found herself listening. Not for hoofbeats or even the howl of a wolf but to the wail of the wind and to the nearer, smaller rustlings in the dark undergrowth. To the voice of the forest itself.

  In Withysham, she had prayed to Herne. She had also made a game of him. Her best friend, an orphan girl of peasant stock, had given her new information and she had used it, whispering to the others that she knew secrets about the demons of the Wood, and threatening to call up Herne, the master demon, to snatch them away if they annoyed her or reported her to Sister Ermengarde. She had gained a fair amount of ascendancy over some of the more nervous.

  But the thought of Herne was different here. Rain had begun to splash through the trees and it was almost night. She was by herself in the moaning, pattering gloom and yet not by herself for she was in the midst of Andred and Andred was alive. There was an inhuman anger in the tossing branches and mingled with it, an elemental glee. The forest was aware of her and her fear and her smallness. She was an intruder in Herne’s kingdom, and she had not respected Herne.

  She scrambled up and stood uneasily under a chestnut tree, looking up. High overhead, outlined against a dim patch of scurrying greyness, which was all she could see of the sky, a spray of still-surviving leaves was like the shape of a giant hand, waiting to strike her down. Even as she stared, the wind wrenched at it, bent its fingers back and tore them off one by one. Panic gripped her. She ran, limping, stumbling, bolting headlong through brambles and leaves to reach the path and safety. She had feared wolves and human pursuers but they were only flesh and blood, as she was. The trees and the wind, which were not, were the foe.

  Back on the track, she found herself stumbling head down into a wall of wind. It blew her hood back and her hair, coming unbraided, was turned into soaking rats’ tails. Rain drenched her and leaves snowed round her. When the forest began to hurl missiles at her, her whimpers were of fear but not surprise. Something crashed and broke at her feet; something else smashed to the ground behind her. She flung up her arms to shield her head and then screamed as a dark looming shape stepped into her path and fingers like steel talons bit into her shoulder.

  Although, even in her terror, it did occur to her that she would not have expected Herne to carry a lantern.

  You wicked girl. You wicked girl. She was at home but her mother’s greeting had been a slap and even as she changed Sybil’s clothes and roughly dried her soaking hair and sent Editha for hot broth, she went on scolding. ‘You could have been lost in the forest for ever. You could have been eaten. Ufi and Gurth are out in the weather now, searching for you. Withysham sent word you’d run off. You wicked girl!’

  Editha said it too, in the very act of handing her the broth. Alice said it most fiercely of all, thrusting her small white face at Sybil. ‘What will they think at Little Dene when they hear of this? Do you think they’ll want you now? Running away from an abbey of God, indeed! What a wicked thing to do. How did you find her, Father Bruno?’

  The priest was holding his drenched mantle to the fire to steam. ‘I heard slates coming
off the church roof, in the wind. I took a lantern and went out to see how bad it was. She ran straight into me, out of the trees behind the church. She must have come on foot all the way from Withysham. Ufi and Gurth missed her somehow.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Alice demanded, rounding on Sybil. Tears dripping into her broth, Sybil tried to explain. ‘I’m not wicked, I’m not! Withysham’s horrible, cruel, all rules, rules about this and rules about that and if you don’t keep every last little rule you don’t get enough to eat and the church is so cold and we’re in it for hours every day. I couldn’t bear it. I prayed to come home.’ No need to go into details about the deity to whom she had addressed those prayers. ‘But nothing happened so I ran away. I wanted to come home, so much…!’

  ‘Eat your broth while it’s hot,’ said Wulfhild.

  Sybil spooned and swallowed and snuffled. She had dreamed day and night of coming home but now she was here, it was all dreadfully wrong. It was different. It looked the same; the wallhangings were as usual, the swords on their hooks by the door. But something was strange…

  On the other side of the fire trench down the centre of the hall, a baby started to cry.

  Sybil looked up in astonishment as Alice hurried to the child. ‘Yes, you have a niece now,’ Wulfhild said. ‘Her name is Maud.’

  Her mother sounded pleased. Maud was a favourite, evidently. While she had been immured in Withysham, remembering home every hour of the day and most of the night, had everyone at Fallowdene been forgetting Sybil, giving their love to this Maud instead? ‘Mother, don’t send me back again! Don’t send me back to that place!’

  ‘We’ll talk about that later,’ said Wulfhild. Sybil put down her empty bowl and shivered. Her mother was different too, older and further off, in some way. Wulfhild picked up her damp, discarded clothes and began to mutter over the tears the brambles had made. Father Bruno was studiously not looking at Sybil and the other women were ignoring her as well. Inquisitively, she left her stool and went round the fire to peer into the cradle which held the unknown Maud.

  Alice was leaning over it, crooning. Very little could be seen of Maud herself; she was all swaddled up. But at the foot of the cradle, lying on top of the rug which was its outermost layer, was Sybil’s old stuffed toy, the one her mother had made for her, which looked slightly like a fox, Woollypaws.

  ‘Put that down!’ cried Alice. She snatched the toy away as Sybil picked it up. ‘Leave it alone!’

  ‘But it’s Woollypaws! It’s mine!’

  ‘No, it isn’t. It belongs to Maud now.’

  ‘It’s not Maud’s, it’s mine!’ Sybil held on to the other end of Woollypaws. ‘Anyway she’s too small to play with it!’

  ‘She’ll grow and it’ll be there when she’s ready for it….let go, you wicked girl, let go!’ Alice slapped at her and Sybil released the toy with a cry.

  ‘Now what’s going on?’ Wulfhild came hurrying round the fire trench, as fast as her stick would aid her.

  ‘This naughty child is trying to steal Maud’s toy…!’

  ‘It isn’t Maud’s, it’s mine, it’s Woollypaws! Sybil stamped her foot at Alice and burst into renewed tears.

  Alice seized her shoulders and shook her. ‘Be quiet, be quiet at once! Stop it! You bring nothing but trouble…!’

  ‘Leave her alone, Alice. The toy used to be hers, that’s true enough…’

  ‘She’s almost eleven. She’s too old for toys. She’s got to get ready for marriage. She’s got a lot to learn. Back you go to your abbey, my girl, first light tomorrow…’

  ‘I won’t, I won’t! You only want me to go to make room for her!’ Sybil howled, pointing at Maud. ‘You all love her now and not me. You’ve let her take my place. You’ve given her my Woollypaws! I hate her!’ The method by which, in the abbey, she had bent her contemporaries to her will came back to her. She knew by instinct that some of their fears, on which she had played, were shared by Alice. ‘I’ll curse her,’ she said, and stopped crying in order to rearrange her features in the expression of menacing knowingness which had had such an electrifying effect on several girls who were bigger than herself. ‘I’ll wish for Herne to come and take her away and leave a changeling in her place and then she’ll have to go and live with him for ever in the cold, wet forest…’

  Running frightened through the forest she had known that Herne was not something to play with. In the warm hall, although she was afraid of the anger of the people round her, she had forgotten the anger of the trees. Now it was as if it had followed her inside. Father Bruno’s voice was booming above her with a note of wrath she had never heard in it hitherto, even when he had been angry with her before. Alice, her hands clapped over her ears, was staring at Sybil aghast as though she had suddenly sprouted horns. Editha was making the sign against the Evil Eye. The very air quivered with outrage and fury. The only person who was not angry was her mother, who had burst out laughing, or cackling. It implied that her mother was now on her side but it was not reassuring since it seemed to be enraging everyone else still further.

  ‘She’s bad luck, that’s what she is. A witch!’ Alice lowered her hands and got between Sybil and the cradle. ‘I wonder I never saw it before. The harvests have been better since she’s been gone…’

  ‘Nonsense!’ snapped Wulfhild.

  ‘Oh, is it? And the very evening she comes home, the gale tears the new church roof to pieces, that I paid for? That’s nonsense too, I suppose? She brought the gale with her, I tell you!’

  ‘If Richard were here, my girl, instead of in Scotland, he’d tell you…’

  ‘You like to think he’s an unbeliever like you but I tell you he isn’t!’

  ‘You think you know more about him than I do, his mother?’

  ‘I am of the opinion,’ interposed Father Bruno calmly, ‘that what we have to deal with here is no more than an exceptionally ill-behaved child, but I agree that we have that. There have been gales all through this autumn,’ he said, turning to Alice. ‘The minstrel who visited us at All Souls told us that timber churches had been blown down in London in a storm and that people had been killed, if you remember. We cannot hold the child responsible because there is a gale tonight. But we can hold her responsible for her own disgraceful actions in running away. We…’

  ‘I’m not sending her back,’ said Wulfhild flatly. Sybil, trembling in the midst of them, looked at her mother with hope.

  ‘You must,’ said Father Bruno quietly. ‘She must learn manners and self-restraint. She will be married within three or four years. She must be prepared for that. She must not be allowed to think that defiance and… and blasphemy… will gain her anything. It was very very wrong to run away, Sybil. Two men are still out looking for you! As for this nonsense about pretending to curse people, and calling on demons…’

  ‘She’s just a child. She doesn’t know…’ Wulfhild began. ‘You always defend her because she’s just a child. You won’t see that she’s growing up and what is she growing up into?’ cried Alice. She looked at Sybil as though she were a giant spider. Sybil whimpered.

  ‘She’s desperate because she’s miserable. You heard what she said. They’re starving her.’

  ‘She looks adequately fed to me,’ said Bruno dryly. ‘Children exaggerate, you know. I’ll take her back myself, tomorrow.’

  ‘You will not.’

  ‘He will,’ said Alice. ‘I’m speaking for Richard. If he were here, that’s what he’d say.’

  ‘Oh, would he indeed?’

  ‘If he has his sister’s interests truly at heart, yes.'

  ‘I can’t go back!’ Sybil burst out in terror. ‘Sister Ermengarde will birch me! I can’t, I can’t!’

  ‘You’ll have to put up with it,’ Bruno informed her. ‘You should have thought of that before.’

  ‘I say no! Wulfhild moved towards her daughter.

  ‘And I say yes and I have the right to say it!’ Alice’s head was up and her voice breathless. ‘I’m Richard’s wife. Yes, and the
mother of his child! When Maud was born, Mother, I had from you the first trace of approval since I came into this house. Good. But it was long overdue; I’m entitled to more. Entitled. I have the right to speak for Richard when he’s away from home and it’s time that right was recognised. Whether you like it or not, I believe that Richard would send Sybil back and I say on his behalf that back she goes!’

  ‘I’m going to saddle my mare. I must go out and see if I can meet Ufi and Gurth. I ask you both to consider carefully and resolve this quarrel before I return,’ said Bruno. ‘I have no wish to take sides. But quite apart from her own best interests, Sybil is clearly causing so much trouble under this roof that I would say it’s best that she goes elsewhere.’

  ‘You and Bruno,’ said Wulfhild, turning on Alice as the priest went out, ‘you think you run Fallowdene between you. You’re always together, hatching plots, about church roofs and harvesting Richard’s plants. It was for him to say, I’d have thought, whether we try the stuff out this year or next. Editha doesn’t like being given queer spices she doesn’t know and told to put them in the food, not by you. The time you and Bruno spend together, I sometimes wonder what Richard would say to that?

  ‘Mother!’ Alice flushed with indignation and embarrassment. ‘Father Bruno is a most devout and honest priest.’

  ‘And not a day over thirty, and he’s a man, my girl.’

  ‘Say what you like.’ Alice shrugged and turned back to the cradle to tidy the coverings. The baby, as though the raised voices had been a lullaby, had fallen asleep. ‘Sybil still goes back to Withysham tomorrow.’

  ‘When Richard comes home, we’ll hear what he really has to say about it.’

  ‘He’ll say I did right,’ said Alice coldly.

  Sybil, weeping silently now, stomach roiling in fear of tomorrow and Sister Ermengarde, said nothing. She had already grasped that in a sense they had both lost interest in her, that she was no more than a symbol of a territory over which they were fighting, the territory of her brother Richard’s soul.