A Different Kingdom(19)

The fox faces had returned to the river hollow.

Like Rose, they had belonged to another time, when he had been someone else. It was strange that Michael could begin to forget Rose's face, and yet remember every nuance of that moment when she had hugged him naked to her in the river. It paraded through his dreams in the nights and filled him with inchoate desire.

The memory of the Fox-People (as he came to call them) filled him with a mixture of dread and curiosity. There were strange things in the woods and fields, the meadows and hills, and only he was aware of them. His literary diet primed him for them, and his ceaseless wanderings inured him to the sudden sights that would skitter out of the shadows at odd times and disappear again—never harming him, no matter how fearsome they appeared. Only the wolves bothered him. Worried, he had asked Mullan, who was as close to the land as it was possible to be without being buried in it, whether he had ever seen anything strange in the trees, any tracks, bones, signs. And the old man had looked at him craftily and asked him if he had been seeing fairies again.

'Dogs. What about dogs, a pack of them? Any signs?'

'What are you getting at, Mike? Are you trying to tell me we've lost some sheep?'

'No. No. It's nothing.' But he worried when Mullan stayed out all night after pheasants, and wondered what would happen if he stumbled across a feasting pack of wolves. It never happened, and Mullan, close to the earth though he was, never noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Perhaps they were his alone then. Michael's wolves.

SOMETHING FROM AN old, old nightmare hung over him, making him cry out. A fox's mask with a dirtdark face below it breathing fetid air on him. He tried to sit up but was pushed down again and a hard, deep voice barked strange words at him. The forest language. Ringbone. His head lolled to one side and he saw that his forearm had been bound with birch bark, black mud oozing out of the crude dressing. The mud stank of urine. He dosed his eyes. He could hear people around him, the crackle of a fire, the wind in the branches of the trees. Underneath him, his bedding rustled as he shifted. He felt a cold palm on his hot forehead.

'Cat?'

'It's all right, Michael. Ringbone and his people found us again, drove off the wolves. You're going to be all right.'

He'd heard that before. Such phrases were very cheap. He dragged open his eyes. Wood poppies. The bastards had drugged him. But he knew Ringbone. He was almost a childhood friend. He raised his good arm in salute to the lean fox man who squatted at his side, reeking of sweat and carrion. The white teeth gleamed briefly in answer.

'Are we safe? The wolves--—'

'They've drawn off for the moment,' Cat said. 'Ringbone's people are keeping watch.'

'It wasn't a manwolf bit me—tell them that—they know that, don't they?'

'Of course,' she said soothingly. 'It was just an animal. They know ... You're all right. They won't eat you.' And she smiled that famous Cat smile, Cheshire Cat, leading him through Wonderland. She looked less tired. There was a pale sun in the air, like a gleam of spring, or autumn jetsam. Her hair was washed and her breath smelled of mint. He felt the old stirrings and laughed at himself.

She set a hand on him, down where the breeches were, confining his erection.

'Tonight, maybe,' she said. 'The Fox-Folk can watch for us.'

'Who will they watch?' he asked lightly.

'Whoever they like.'

I've become a savage, he thought. No modesty left. I'd take her now, in front of them all, if I had the strength.

She seemed to know. She bent low and her minttasting tongue entered his mouth, stabbing like a wet snake. He felt the leaves pushed from her mouth into his, tasted the chewing-gum flavour of them. She withdrew.

'Tonight,' she said, grinning. 'We're almost home, aren't we?'

'Almost.' Her grin faded. 'Not out of the woods yet, though.'

He closed his eyes, ashamed of the sudden fear that had been assailing him. This was not the first time Ringbone and his folk had saved their lives. And yet he could not help but remember a butchery, a grisly feast seen by firelight.in a wood haunted by the howls of wolves. Ringbone's people setting one of their kin to rest after he had been... tainted. A thousand years ago, it seemed. Another world, another life.

IT WAS AN evening in the autumn, over four years from Rose's departure, and the first prickings of adolescent irritability had helped drive him from the supper table to the stables, and then to the open land beyond the farm. A blustery evening, the clouds pouring across the sky and the wind roaring in the half-nude limbs of the trees. The dark creeping up more quickly, the long days of summer far behind, the hay gathered in and built brickwise in bales under the hayshed roof. The grass was wet and gave slightly underfoot, the ground swollen with rain. Even as he stood watching the blank slate where it was usually possible to see the mountains, the rain started again and he cursed (something he had picked up recently), heading for the shelter of the trees by the river, half wondering if there would be anything in them.