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A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

Page 22

by C. A. Fletcher


  But this greenwood was deeper and greener than any I had imagined. There was more birdsong. More insects, like the big shiny black beetle that gave me a shock scuttling past my head when I leant back against an oak tree on our first halt. It had mouthparts that looked like the antlers on a deer and was as big as my thumb, like a metal toy. And then there were butterflies. I hadn’t really imagined a wood would have butterflies, but they were all around, orange ones, purple ones and my favourites which were black and white and appeared to flap less than the other butterflies as they glided silently between the trees, seeming to use no effort to do so.

  The lack of a distant horizon made me much more aware of the sounds close by me. Not just the horses’ hooves on the ground, or the small branches breaking or whipping back once we’d pushed them aside in order to pass: it was the more intimate noises, the horses’ snorting, and my breathing. And John Dark’s humming. She was always humming when she rode. It was not exactly tuneless, but it was no single tune, and no mix of any ones that I recognised. It was more the idea of a tune, but with important bits left out. I don’t know if she was even aware that she did it. It was mostly okay, but sometimes I found it annoying. Usually when I was tired and hungry, which was when almost anything was annoying.

  I know having the fanciful thoughts about the hobbit story may seem strange because I was on as serious a journey as I could imagine, going to get my dog back from someone who was likely to be ruthless and wholly opposed to my plan. Not the time to be thinking about a child’s book with wizards and elves. I had thought what getting Jess back might involve, and I knew that in the last resort, if it came to it, I would use force. And since Brand was bigger than me, using force likely meant doing it at a distance with my bow, and using my bow meant maiming or maybe killing. The chance of an arrowhead finding an artery even if I didn’t mean it to was real, and I wasn’t cocky enough to think I could just bluff him. So a bad second choice of violence likely lay at the end of my journey if my first better choice, stealth and theft, didn’t work out. I was really holding on to the fact I was good at not being seen when hunting.

  My fantasy was that Brand would be there (not a guaranteed thing) and that I would sneak up on him (this in my mind’s eye meant darkness) and that Jess would be calm enough when she realised I was there (wholly miraculous if it was to happen) that she would then let me sneak her silently away. This would neatly pay Brand back, giving him the rude awakening he had given me: a new dawn and the knowledge he had been outwitted. In some of the daydreaming which I allowed myself, I stole his boat too and sailed home, leaving him arriving at the beach or jetty just too late to do anything than shake an aggrieved fist at me. Or in other versions, he smiled that white dazzle of his and shook his head like a good loser, acknowledging he had been viked and outsmarted by a better pirate. But I was pretty sure that honour among thieves was just a pretty phrase I’d read, and not something that existed in the real world. So daydreams apart, there would be blood at the end of this journey. And I didn’t know how I felt about that. I’m ashamed to say I had felt fine about it in the flushes of anger that Brand had provoked me to—the theft of Jess, the poisoning of my family, marooning me on Iona and the burning of my boat—but violence is an ugly thing and in the calmer moments I racked my brains for other ways to get what I wanted. Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can’t see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren’t and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can’t.

  I wondered if the man who wrote about the hobbit had ridden through the greenwood like this. Despite the bird noise it was a peaceful place that lulled you. Without the compass it would have been easy to get lost. It was a maze without walls, just tree trunks and bushes, and animal tracks beaten through them. John Dark rode with her hood up and the grey hair escaping it, astride a similarly grey horse. From the back, there was something a bit wizardish about her, and it was easy enough to imagine there were other eyes in the forest watching us from behind a screen of leaves or brambles. It was even easy to imagine the bigger trees looking down on us and noticing us passing. I thought a lot about that book as we wove east among the oaks and beeches, and that is certainly why I called the house we ended up taking refuge in the Homely House, because that was the name of the house the travellers in the story made a much needed halt in. And the Homely House we found ourselves in did, in its way, contain a kind of magic, though the magic was in truth just the kindness of long dead people, not immortal elves.

  The woods had swallowed everything on this side of the mainland in a way they hadn’t in the west. I don’t know why there was a difference like that—but it made it a strange journey. Often I’d look at a stand of brambles and realise it was the body of a house, and then look around and realise I hadn’t noticed we were weaving through a collection of buildings in a village or on the edge of a town, surrounded by houses that had collapsed into mulch, or become roofless shells out of which trees now grew to a height of a hundred feet or more. Often the clue was realising the thinner “tree trunks” were old street-light poles that had remained upright and unrotted. Brick and stone houses of course lasted better than the ones built with plaster and wood and plastic, but again most still had roofs that had fallen in and were now just shells full of healthy rot and vegetation.

  On this side of the mainland in the great forest it was much harder to see the hard edges of your world.

  One afternoon we found ourselves riding alongside an enormous cliff of dark green that I later worked out was a yew hedge, and when we came to a gap in it we saw the ash trees on the other side were growing around a pale stone church. The gravestones were mostly tumbled flat, and I only noticed the first one that gave the clue to what all the others were because my horse slipped on it. I looked down, saw the writing “Gone to my Father’s House” and knew it was a graveyard. The squat church still had its roof. It looked hunkered down somehow, like a squat blockhouse determined to fight the encroaching trees, most of which were at least the height or higher than its stubby tower.

  Light was just beginning to fail, even though there were a couple more hours of visibility left in it, but John Dark was tired and made a noise and a gesture that indicated we might as well stay the night here, pointing at the door of the church. I was keen to get on, but not so keen that I didn’t, for a moment, think of agreeing. Even if we couldn’t force the door, the covered stone porch would have made a good dry cave to sleep in.

  Then we heard Jip growling. The air went very still. John Dark suddenly had her gun in her hand, her head swivelling back and forth, trying to see what it was that Jip was reacting to. I unslung my bow and nocked an arrow. A purple butterfly went past between us, but apart from that, nothing else seemed to be moving in the wood. And that itself was ominous. It had suddenly gone very quiet. No birds sang.

  It was so still that Jip’s growl seemed to vibrate the air around us.

  I couldn’t see anything. But I had the same sense of something large, of something aware of us that I had had in that museum, when we’d slept with the lady in the yellow dress and had woken to feel as much as hear something rubbing round the corner of the building in the street below us.

  Pa bon, said John Dark quietly, and backed the three horses out of the graveyard. We both kept our weapons ready and continued on our way, very aware of every noise and movement around us. After ten minutes or so, the ground began to rise and the birds began to sing again.

  I don’t know what had alarmed Jip. I don’t know if it was something about the church, or if there was some animal watching us that he took exception to, but as we rode away he kept up a rearguard action, circling back and standing in our trail, staring down the way we came, hackles still raised and nose testing the wind behind us. It was unnerving in one way, but in another way it was comforting to know he was there to sense the thing
s we couldn’t see.

  Griz, said John Dark. I turned to see she had paused her horse beside a beech tree. She pointed at the trunk.

  The grey-green bark had been shredded, and recently. Something had hacked and dragged sharp scratches through it, exposing the vigorous orange of the underbark and the paler sapwood below it. They were deep, angry gouges, and whatever had made them was not just strong but big, because even the lowest of the slashes were started about five or six feet off the forest floor.

  Pa bon, said John Dark and made her hand into a claw which mimed slashing at the tree.

  Gross griefs, she said. Pa bon do too.

  And then she mimed keeping eyes and ears open, and led on. I paused by the clawed tree trunk and felt the gashes. They were deep and they were still wet. This had happened recently, which meant that whatever had done it was not far away. Maybe it was the thing we had sensed by the church among the ashes.

  Jip peed on the tree in a defiant and matter-of-fact way, and we moved on. Maybe it was a boar like the one that attacked me, I thought. Maybe the gouges were tusk marks. But that would still mean a giant boar, which was not a cheery thought as the night came on. Even less cheery was my real thought which was that they were claw marks, and I had no idea which of the animals I had thought were native to the mainland could have made them.

  Zoos. I’ve read about them and I’ve seen pictures. Places you put animals when their natural habitats got swept away by farms and mines and things. Were they good? Did you go to zoos? Did it feel like visiting the animals in a prison, or was it exciting? Do you think the animals knew they could never go home because home had been cut down and burned and turned into something else, full of people and machines and not them? Maybe they would have been grateful then, happy that you found somewhere for them to be instead of just killing them all. Or maybe they just went a bit mad. I saw a black and white photograph in a book and the chimpanzee was behind the bars and the look in its eyes was just like a person, lost and frightened, even though it seemed to be grinning like a maniac. Maybe it was just showing its teeth.

  Anyway. Zoos.

  I thought about zoos as we rode away from the church and the slashed beech trunk, and what I thought about them was this: what happened to the animals as the world slowly aged and died? Did you kill them in their cages, or did you let them go, to fill up the world that was slowly emptying of you? I thought a dying world would have had more on its mind than shipping wild animals back to the places they’d been taken from, but perhaps I’m wrong. I thought it was most likely that you let them get old like you and then die or maybe put them gently to sleep instead. But there was another thought that stalked me as we rode onwards, which was that maybe someone had let the animals out and left them to find their own way home. And if so maybe some of the animals had just decided to stay. After all, the world was hotter than it had been. The mainland had not been a good habitat for them when their ancestors had been stolen and brought north to the zoos in the first place. Maybe the climate changed enough to make it good for them. I was thinking of tigers and lions but it could as easily have been bears. I hoped if it was something it was bears because bears did not, as far as I knew then, stalk people and horses.

  And, like Jip who kept looking back down the trail, I couldn’t quite lose the itch between my shoulder blades that told me something was watching them every time I turned my back.

  Chapter 25

  The Homely House

  John Dark had the same itch between her shoulder blades. She didn’t check behind her, but she looked from side to side much more often than normal, and she never put the gun back in the scabbard that hung from the saddle in front of her knees. I think she didn’t look back because she knew Jip and I were bringing up the rear, behind her and the packhorse. It was a kind of trust. The packhorse between us was also getting jittery. And again, it may have been because it was the end of a long day of travel, or it may have been that it could sense something out there stalking us, but the spooked horse made me more aware of the shadows lengthening around us as the light dimmed.

  Jip suddenly burst into action, plunging into the undergrowth and barking wildly. We both stopped and swivelled in our saddles, listening for what our eyes couldn’t see. Jip crashed through the undergrowth, still barking, getting further and further away. It was hard to hear if he was chasing something and if so, what it was. And then the faint barking was cut off short and there was no sound of movement that I could hear.

  La pan? said John Dark, and mimed rabbit ears over her head.

  I shrugged and turned back to listen, peering into the late afternoon dimness, ears straining. Jip suddenly bolting away like that was unsettling, and the barking stopping so abruptly was worse.

  I whistled and waited, then whistled some more.

  I was just about to turn back when he trotted out of the bushes, head up, tongue out, looking very pleased with himself.

  John Dark looked pleased too, but I noticed she quickly tried to hide the smile as soon as I saw it.

  Jip, she said, tapping the side of her head, as if testing whether it was cracked. Eel ay foo.

  By this time, I had worked out that eel ay is French for “it is”. The other word was clear, in context, given the tapping of the head.

  Yes, Jip, I said, shaking my head at him. You are foo.

  Jip just kept panting and smiling, tongue lolling redly out of his mouth as he did so. His air of satisfaction, given the fact he was not carrying a new dead rabbit friend, made me think he had chased something off, rather than chased something down. I don’t think Jip could have chased off a lion or a tiger or even a bear, unless it was a very small and unusually timid one, but as we proceeded the itch between my shoulder blades seemed to have gone. And given the fact that neither of us had actually seen anything stalking us, it is possible we had invented the stalker and so brought it along to shadow us only in our minds. We both relaxed a little and pressed on.

  The next halt came about half an hour later when John Dark pushed up through a stand of low hazel trees and pulled her horse to a stop. I emerged beside her and followed her gaze.

  The Homely House sat in a clearing on the edge of a steep slope, with trees crowded in behind, but an open glade in front of it. The trees weren’t green, but a dark purple, which looked closer to inky black in the failing light. They were, I knew by now, copper beeches. They made the stone with which the house was built look pale in contrast. It was a big two-storeyed house, and would have been old even when you were alive. It was wide rather than tall and felt tucked into the crest of the slope, as if it had been comfortable there for centuries, watching the world change below it. There was a high wall on one side of it, and a couple of lower buildings to the other side, built of the same aged stone.

  Bon, said John Dark. E. C.

  She rode on, up to the high wall. There was an oak door, grey with age and studded with big nailheads the size of limpets. She dismounted and tried it. It was stiff and the hinges graunched alarmingly as she pulled it towards her, kicking down the grass tussocks which had grown in its way since it was last opened. And then she stepped through the door in the wall and disappeared. I got off my horse and took a moment to stretch and scrabble the hair between Jip’s ears, and then I heard her calling and followed her in.

  It was—had been—a walled garden. There was just enough order left to see that once there had been a neat grid of fruit trees at the centre of it, and glass houses had been built against the two walls that caught the sun. One of them had collapsed, but the other was more or less intact, and John Dark was standing in it. Her mouth was smiling and dripping with wetness. She had a half-eaten fruit in her hand. I thought it was an apple, but she beckoned me and pulled another off the tree scaling the wall behind her. The day had been a long and hot one. As I walked over to her, I was engulfed in the thickest, headiest smell I had ever experienced. It was sun and it was warmth and it was clean sweetness—all distilled together. Nothing on the island sm
elled like that. And the apple? Wasn’t an apple at all. Its skin wasn’t shiny, but matt and furry, and it was yellow and pink, almost red.

  John Dark grinned and bit some more out of the one in her hand.

  Pesh, she said. Pesh bon, Griz, pesh bon.

  I bit into the fruit. It still held the heat of the long day’s sun and was much softer than an apple, though the only apples I have tasted come from the walled garden on Eriskay, and they are small, hard and sour. This tasted big and generous, and sweeter than anything I had ever tried. It didn’t have the sharp bittersweetness of Brand’s marmalade. It had a shape that filled your mouth, a rounded and warm sweetness that immediately made the saliva run and mix with the juices in anticipation of the next bite. It tasted just like the smell around us, but more so. It was like tasting a smile. You’d have thought this fanciful, I expect. Your shops would have been full of pesh and other things even more exotic. You probably wouldn’t even have been able to remember the first pesh you ate, among all the different tastes you were used to. And of all the glories and riches in your gone world, that’s one thing I don’t envy you for. That’s something I have that you didn’t: the glory of that first pesh, taken in the warm sun at the end of a long, tiring day. It was perfect.

  Not many first times are perfect. That was.

  We turned the horses out to graze, hobbled for the night, and then we faced the house. The windows were narrow and made of stone with diamonds of glass held in place by lead strips, like the house I had left in flames, but this house seemed much older than that one. The memory of having burned it out of spite made me feel a bit bad, but the words painted and still visible across the door of this new place made me feel better.

  WELCOME, STRANGER

  It was the same kind of once bright spray writing that had been used to put the Bible verse on the church in South Uist, but the hand that had written was firmer and more generous. The original colour of the paint had faded to almost white, but the message was still clear.

 

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