A Different Kingdom(106)

The horses were sold, and even Rachel wept the day Felix and Pluto were taken away.

Sean did not keep the sheep in the hollow for long. A pack of feral dogs haunted it, he decided, after losing three animals in quick succession. And he sat out himself, shotgun across his lap, for more than one night watching them Sometimes he thought he heard things, or saw shapes moving the corners of his eyes. Once something big and dark splashed its way across the width of the river and he had been too paralysed to even raise his weapon. The hollow remained empty after that, the green things beginning to slow, inexorable process of regeneration.

MICHAEL HEARD OF the funerals one after the other, and though they pained him, his real grief, oddly enough, was reserved for what they represented: the end of a way of life. An older way.. a way closer to the land and the growing things, was ended, and the country was about to be raped by a new method of farming and an unending guerrilla war. The home he had known would very soon cease to exist.



FOURTEEN YEARS. FOURTEEN years after the mornings he and the chestnut mare had struggled out of the womb of the freezing river he was here, in London. He was a prematurely aged man, a barman-cum-doorman with a smoker's cough and thirty pounds of flesh he did not need. He had sunken killer's eyes and a fighter's nose, blue veins knotting his thick forearms and the red lines of a heavy drinker breaking across his face. The boy he had been, even the woodsman who had hunted with Cat at his side, were a century and a world away; and neither they nor the monsters and marvels that had existed alongside them would ever return.



Or so he had thought.





TWENTY-ONE

CLARE WAS ASLEEP, and the city slumbered with her. It was hot in the room, a summer night hanging heavily in the air with the orange glow of the street lamps.



Michael padded to the window as he did so often in the nights, and pulled the blind aside to look out into the street.

Nothing.

He could feel them though, watching. Sometimes he thought that his senses were quickening again, that the old awareness was coming back and lending him another set of eyes. He sensed unseen things. At night outside his front door he would smell sometimes the reek of mould, the sweet stink of decay, and he would know they had been there.

Traffic, far off. The street was lit with the sickly orange hue of the street lights, but there were shadows everywhere.

He knew too much about that Other World. Maybe that was why they had come for him. Or perhaps it was revenge, a lust for the blood of someone who had wounded their beloved forest.

It still seemed like a dream at times, though. Brightly lit pictures spilling into his mind from another life, when he had been someone else in an impossible place. He had left Cat behind in it. Maybe Rose, too. That pain was real enough.

Impossible to separate them in his mind. They had blurred together with the passage of the years, becoming a single, hauntingly lovely face. Maybe they had always been the same. Perhaps the 'quest' he had taken upon himself had always been absurd.

Perhaps.

Michael lit a cigarette, turning to watch the sleeping girl in the bed. The sheet had fallen from her shoulder and he could see the jewel of sweat in the hollow of her throat. He had kept the windows closed, despite her puzzled protests.

Not fair to involve this girl, this lady of the city, in what he felt was coming. Hardly right. But he felt it might be too late for that. His smell was about her. He had marked her.

Clare turned over in the narrow bed, uncomfortable in her sleep. The sheet slid from her so he was able to see the curve of her hip, white and full, shadowed darkness cupped within it. Her body was soft and generous, so unlike Cat's. No scars there, no hardness on her feet, no nails broken or dirt-crammed.

And yet when he remembered Cat's flashing grin, the sheer life in her gaze, something in his chest seemed to stretch and ache, and he had to shut his burning eyes.

Still there, even now.

He wondered how the time had passed for her back in the Other Place, how quick or slow had been the passage of the years.

He had seen her, here in this room ...

Or had that been his mind chasing its tail?

Mad, he thought. I'm going mad. It was a dream, and now I'm falling asleep again, reliving it with a change of backdrop.

A trio of young, merry men meandered down the street outside singing softly. He watched them avoid a shadowed corner without thinking, and knew that the darkness there was not empty. He smiled grimly, reached for another cigarette, and then thought better of it.

So they had finally caught up with him. He wondered what it was they wanted. Were they going to drag him screaming back into the wood like some latter day Faust?

The Wildwood. It had had its beauty, its bright moments. He remembered quiet campfires, Cat in his arms. He remembered glorious dawns, the nip of cold and the exhilaration of hunting in the first snows. Ringbone's face over firelight, the easy companionship of the Fox-People.