Drowned Country

by Emily Tesh

  “My mother is immortal,” said Silver, “probably. I would wager on her over a hurricane. And she has been managing her dangerous business alone without the slightest difficulty since I was five years old. Tobias, she doesn’t need you. Ask her as much—she’ll say the same—and for heaven’s sake, my dear, don’t think of money—”

  He took a handful of Tobias’s shaggy hair to claim him for a kiss. Tobias allowed it; was smiling a little into it. He almost always let Silver have his way. And why should he leave, anyway? To run Mrs Silver’s errands? To carry her luggage? If he wanted to hunt monsters, let him do it here, in the wood, Silver’s wood. Here was the heart of Silver’s domain; here the glade where the aspen trees grew, here the earth which had covered him. Silver could perhaps follow Tobias wherever he went, so long as the Wood had been there once; but the prospect of that much time spent in his mother’s company—not that it wasn’t convenient that she liked Tobias, but must Tobias also like her?

  Silver woke with the birdsong, well before Tobias did. Tobias had confided that it was strange to him being able to sleep through the dawn. It was bloody strange for Silver not being able to sleep through it. After a lifetime of regarding the sun as a cruel tyrant attempting to prevent him from reading as late as he wanted to at night and sleeping as late as he wanted to in the morning, his newmade body suddenly found the first light of morning irresistible.

  He brushed his hair and tied it back, and laughed at the scatter of leaf-mould left on his comb. Somehow it kept being surprising, the way the Wood was woven all through him. Then he threw on the tweed jacket Tobias had left on the back of a chair and went out for a walk through the dewdropped wildland under the glow of the morning sky.

  He took himself down to the aspen glade, there to politely greet the four queen dryads in whom, obscurely, he felt his dominion over the Wood resided. They swayed and rustled in the breeze, their leaves shimmering between green and gold; fat fluffy catkins were shaking off their first thick drifts of pollen. Silver sneezed, more out of habit than because he really needed to. As he ambled back towards his house, he felt Bramble in the trees about him. “Good morning!” he said.

  She faded into view for a moment among the bracken. Spring had given her a crown of white blossom. She was frowning. Silver on impulse kissed his hand to her.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t let him leave.”

  Now

  “Where are we?” said Maud.

  “The Hallow Wood,” said Silver, and at the same time Tobias said, “The wood, miss.”

  They exchanged glances. The wind whispered in the trees around them with a sound like the sighing of an ocean.

  “We’re nowhere near Greenhollow,” objected Maud.

  “If you read my monograph,” Silver retorted, “then you should know that the Hallow Wood is considerably larger—and older—than any individual fragment.”

  “Your monograph was a great many words used to say hardly anything—”

  “For God’s sake, Miss Lindhurst, is this the time?”

  “Don’t patronise me!”

  Tobias’s hand came down heavy and solid on Silver’s shoulder before he could say the several unpleasant things that occurred to him. “Seems to me it’s my fault,” he said quietly, “if it’s anyone’s, miss; but we know our business, Mr Silver and I. There’s nothing to fear.”

  “I’m not afraid!” Maud said.

  Tobias went over to her. He wordlessly took the pack she carried and hoisted it onto his own shoulders without effort. Supplies for one woman, to go between three of them, one Tobias’s size. Silver probably didn’t need food to stay alive, but he did not relish the thought of finding out.

  “As Mr Finch says,” he said, “there’s nothing to fear.” Time was soft here, blurring the landscape at the edges of his vision; Silver was working hard to keep it soft, since he had a dreadful feeling that if he let the two mortals slip back into their proper place in the order of things, they would promptly be drowned under the black ocean which had claimed this place. He had wandered far, first in curiosity and then in a maudlin half-desire to get lost and never come back, but this piece of the Wood was like nothing else he had ever felt. The trees stood straight and strong, old beech and elm. An odd half-light that came from no sun penetrated their canopy and dappled the forest floor. They were green with the foliage of an unending summer that had endured, suspended between one instant and the next, for millennia. Nothing else alive was here. Silver knew it as assuredly as he knew that he had five fingers on each hand.

  He swallowed down his terror and his awe. “It’s going to be a rather stiff walk, I’m afraid,” he said. “And mostly uphill. But we should be back in Rothport soon enough.” He hoped.

  Tobias set the pack a little firmer across his back and nodded.

  “No,” said Maud. “I’m not going back. Give me back my things.” She pulled the revolver out of her pocket but did not point it at either of them—not yet. “I’m going to Fairyland, with you or without you,” she said. “The road is—”

  She stopped.

  Silver didn’t say anything. The sense he’d had on the Rothport cliff of something bent double in the air was gone. This place was still and empty and devoid of all paths.

  “No,” said Maud. “No! I was so close!”

  She gestured wildly with the hand that had the revolver in it. Silver winced. Tobias took several silent steps back from her. “Now, miss,” he said, soft and firm, just as he might have spoken to calm an enraged dryad. “Listen—”

  No dryad, Maud.

  “You!” she spat. “If you hadn’t interfered—again!” She pointed the revolver at Tobias. Her expression was wild but her hand was damnably steady. Silver’s heart lurched in alarm. He opened his five-fingered human hands and spoke. He said, unthinkingly, a word in a language he had never learned. He called.

  And something came.

  It was something living, something wild, something old. It came charging out of the trees in a headlong rush. Silver got a glimpse of hairy flank and a strong scent of rank flesh, and thought: A goat? It dashed between Maud and Tobias, knocking them apart and knocking Maud flat on her back. The revolver fell out of her hand and she let out a startled cry. The beast turned, sending up sprays of dry earth around its hooves, and charged with heavy tread back towards the prone girl; it would trample her to death, and Silver could only stare, thinking at once, She meant to kill and I did not mean to kill—

  But the goat-beast never reached Maud again. Tobias, swift as the wind and immovable as a rock, had planted himself in its path. The beast charged towards him and bounced off his strong shoulder, braced hard against it. He let out an oof but did not budge.

  The creature turned. It was hard to get a good look at the thing: the moonless moonlight of this in-between place sidled away from it, only getting caught here and there in clumps of matted fur. But by God, the smell! It was looking at Silver. Silver looked back. He stared into its mad, slit-pupiled golden eyes and thought, Oh God, what have I done.

  “Silver!” yelled Tobias. “Climb a goddamn tree!”

  The goat-beast let out a shrill screech and hurled itself towards him.

  Were there hooves? Horns? It had eyes, Silver knew: did it have a suggestion of a face? He could hear Maud on the ground laughing with a hysterical breathless sound, near sobs. This was his fault. He had been afraid and had done what seemed natural, and now this was his fault, and by God, the thing was running straight at him—

  He did not know what to do.

  He did some magic.

  He held out his hand and there was an apple in it: small, sour, wizened. The goat-beast came lolloping towards him with a great squealing and a dreadful waft of that rank meat smell. Silver weighed the apple in his hand, waited until he judged the thing was near enough, and then hurled the fruit square at it with his best schoolboy overarm.

  It went through the thing’s flesh. The beast was not quite here; Silver felt the un-hereness of
it the same way he felt the un-hereness of the long-drowned trees. But the apple was as real and solid as Silver’s boots. It lodged in the goat-beast’s half-real heart, and Silver licked his lips and spoke again in that language he had never learned. The words came to him out of the same strand of memory that had known Maud for a child once lost in the woods; a memory that was older than he was, and older than Tobias too.

  The apple erupted: stick and stem and root and bough, the growth of generations unfurling in all directions. The goat-beast squealed in an unpleasantly human voice that cut off in a gargle as a branch rammed its seeking way out of its throat. The tree was pinning it into the moment; its moon-silvered mats of fur were gaining density and texture, and that was a human face, set above shaggy-furred but human shoulders; and the forearms ended in square and powerful hands, though the hind legs were tipped with hooves.

  “A satyr,” Silver whispered aloud, fascinated despite the horror of it. The creature’s corpse was bleeding where branches perforated it. Its eyes were wide and staring and filming over in death. It was very, very dead. He swallowed.

  The apple tree came into flower as he flexed the fingers of his left hand, his throwing hand; and the flowers fell as he let out a breath. They made a white carpet on the dim ground as the fruit began to blush on the branch in dull red clusters.

  Silver felt Tobias’s eyes on him as a physical weight. His stomach was squirming.

  He walked slowly towards the gnarled, bloody mass of tree and corpse. It was more of a hobble than a walk. His limbs were aching through and through, as if he had spent his energy in some great physical exertion. Maud was scrambling to her feet, staring at him. There was a long bruise on the side of her face.

  The satyr smelled just as rank in death as it had living. Gore dripped from every place where the tree’s growing had speared it. Its ribcage and gut were open wide. Blood and viscera fouled the bark. The tree was unperturbed. Silver, dreamlike, watched his own hand reach for a dark apple and twist it off the bough.

  “Surely you’ve read something of the dangers of fairy fruit,” said Maud, with a remarkable if shaky attempt at her usual briskness, just as Silver was about to take a bite.

  And Silver hesitated: and Tobias was there, suddenly, at his right hand. He plucked the apple out of Silver’s limp fingers and threw it away into the shadows under the trees. Silver stared stupidly at him. Tobias had Maud’s revolver in his hands now. When had he picked it up? He took the shot out of it and scattered the powder, and then it went into another pocket.

  “I didn’t really mean—” Maud said.

  “If you didn’t mean to shoot, Miss Maud,” said Tobias, “you shouldn’t have taken aim.” He turned his frown on Silver. “And you ought to know better than to play the fool with old gods’ matters.”

  “Is that what I did?”

  Tobias jerked his chin at the satyr and the apple tree. “Don’t know what else you’d call that.”

  “Well, I—the Wood—”

  “I know the wood,” Tobias said firmly. “Four hundred years I knew the wood. But I never made myself a bloody wizard on the back of it. That’s Fay’s business. Bad business. You should know better.”

  Fay was the dead Fabian: a pet name, Silver had once worked out, with not a little jealousy. Perhaps it was the sting of that jealousy now which led him to say quite coldly, “Mr Finch, I don’t believe our acquaintance as it stands justifies so much familiarity on your part. The Wood and I are not your concern.”

  As a withering setdown this failed entirely. Tobias took it in stride with only a slightly quirked eyebrow—was that disapproval? Amusement? It was so hard to know—and turned back to Maud. “What did he say to you?” he said. “Your elf.”

  Maud looked away. “Why does it matter?”

  “You’re fairy-mad for sure. You’d do better to go home and forget. But since you won’t”—Tobias’s voice held a grim note Silver had never heard—“we’d better see the business through.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maud. “I don’t know what he said. I told you, I can’t remember. I was only a little girl. What does it matter?” Her voice rose. “You interfered—and he interfered—and we’re lost, lost, the road is gone, and I’ve failed—”

  “Ah,” said Silver. “About that.”

  All this time the gore had been dripping down the apple tree, soaking the earth among the roots and remnants of hooves until it turned dark and sodden and began to puddle. In the shine of that gory pool, Silver could feel the twist of the air that marked Maud’s road.

  He said, “I believe it’s just through here.”

  As he spoke, the trees of the drowned forest shimmered and faded from view like a mist. They were still there: Silver could feel them. But they were also not there; or rather Silver himself, and Tobias and Maud, were somewhere else. Could the others even feel the strangeness of it, these two places superimposed one over the other? It made Silver’s teeth ache faintly somewhere near the back of his mouth.

  The horizon opened out wide and pale: a pinkish sky illuminating black earth with rosy light. There were no trees in this place save the apple tree that pinioned the satyr. It was now in full fruit with big round apples that gleamed a poisonous scarlet. The rotten stink of the satyr was overpoweringly thick in the air.

  “Oh,” breathed Maud.

  “Hm,” Tobias said.

  “What?” said Silver. He really thought Tobias could have been at least a little impressed.

  “So that’s Fairyland,” said Tobias. He shrugged. “Nasty place.”

  Two years ago

  Tobias stayed, through May, through June. Midsummer came and went and no dark power rose in the woods; the Lord of Summer was dead as could be. Silver had known it already, but he caught a little of Tobias’s edginess all the same and kept close by him all that day and all that night.

  The Lord of Summer was dead; Fabian Rafela, who had by some evil wizardry bound himself to that ancient spirit, was also dead; only the Wood lived, and Silver lived as its avatar. He went down to the aspen glade a day or two after the solstice to check on the rubbled ruins of the dead god’s altar. Very little of that ancient structure was left on the surface; he could feel broken stone under the earth. There was no life in it; it would not rise again. The aspen trees shivered in the breeze. Their dryads were silent.

  Truth be told, it was Rafela who concerned Silver, not the monster he’d become. Fabian Rafela in life had been an evil man, but he had been a man; nor did Silver think he had ever intended to become merely the crooked mask of an inhuman power. Perhaps he had lost some struggle early on with the demon he’d bargained with. But as Silver wrote up his monograph on the Hallow Wood, and interviewed some more locals about the Wild Man legend for the look of the thing, and ordered books for his library, and kept his lover good company all through the summer, he felt as if he were only going through the motions of what Henry Silver would do. He was something else now, something old, something strange.

  It frightened him.

  What frightened him more was his suspicion that he would go on growing older and stranger every year that passed. The mask of Henry Silver would fall further and further away with the centuries, and maybe he would forget his beautiful house with its beautiful library and end up wandering enchanted eternally in his wood. Tobias had kept the timelessness of immortality at bay with countless invented chores: with building and maintaining his little cottage, hunting the monsters that Greenhollow bred, preparing grimly year after year for midsummer: and on top of that he’d always kept a cat. He indulged the tabby Pearl still, though she was, as far as Silver could tell, entirely self-sufficient on squirrels and sparrows and had no need whatsoever for Tobias to save her fish from his supper.

  Tobias, it had to be admitted, had very little imagination. Silver was unfortunately cursed with a good one.

  Immortality stretched bleakly ahead of him, immortality and the Wood. How would it be when his mother was gone, when Tobias was gone—when no
t only spoilt Pearl but all the lines of her feline descendants had spent themselves? Even dryads, bound to their trees, did not endure forever. Silver looked out on the prospect of millennia and thought: Perhaps the thing that called itself the Lord of Summer started as a mortal man as well.

  More than once he thought of bringing the question up with Tobias, but what could Tobias even say? He had given his advice already: he had told Silver to keep a cat, and it would keep him awake. At some point in July, Pearl produced six kittens. Silver liked cats perfectly well, but he could not imagine finding one interesting enough that it would bind him to humanity.

  Now

  Fairyland was empty.

  There was no living thing, nor any sign one had ever been there. There was no bird or bee or crawling insect, no breath of air, not a single weed—not so much as a dandelion. And there were no graceful winged beings dressed in flower petals like the ones Silver had liked in the illustrations from his childhood books of fairy tales, no lords and ladies adorned in dew and starlight: only this flat empty land. In Silver’s perception it clung on to the edges of the drowned Wood like fog clings to earth. Black standing stones were all that relieved the emptiness: dull guardsmen keeping watch over a dead land.

  Tobias was stone-faced as ever, but Silver thought he could spot the outlines of I told you so in his expression.

  “There must be someone here. Smoke and fire,” said Maud. Her stubborn little mouth was a flat line. “There must be someone.” She looked around as if the fairy she had met long ago might appear suddenly, as if she had expected it to be waiting for her.

  There was no one. Black earth and a pink sky; an apple tree all poisonous bright; the stench of rotten meat; and in every direction flat empty land, broken up only by scattered upright stones arranged in discomfiting patterns which almost, almost, suggested a grand design. Silver had a dreadful feeling the monoliths were moving when he was not looking. He had no idea why this should fill him with anxiety, but it did.