There, in the travel-weary quiet of the firelight, Ringbone told them a story. It was one Michael had heard before, though from other points of view. It seemed to be the seminal myth of all the forest peoples, the story of their beginnings. He could even pick out the meaning in the words because he knew them so well. He thought Ringbone might be telling it to comfort them, and himself, out here on the edge of his world.
It was a tale of his people, of all the peoples of the wood and the hills. His tribe were once warriors, he said, and they had been in service to those folk who lived in the villages and fortresses. But they had tired of their task, the patrolling of the stockades and the escort of caravans, and they had set out into the wood to make lives of their own, taking some of the village womenfolk with them. They had split up, splintered and sundered like a tree struck by lightning, and had become the tribes: the Badger-People, the FoxPeople, the Boar-People. They had dwindled, worn down by the beasts of the forest, and whilst they were away more men came from the north, where the trees ended. These men were lost and confused, and they had a speech of their own. They were fleeing the raiders from the sea, they said, leaving a land in flames behind them, and the village folk had nodded at this, remembering their oldest legends. Some of these new men wore robes and carried crosses. The crosses kept the unholy amongst the beasts at bay and the people of the villages welcomed them. And so the churches were built, and the Brothers of the Wood set up their retreats. But Ringbone's people they denounced as pagans, little better than animals, and they were denied the villages except when there was a mart or fair when their trading goods of skins and amber, hunting dogs and river gold, were welcomed. But the tribes remembered that they, not the Brothers, were the true guardians of the land, from the time when the Old Man, the lame one, had brought them across the terrible heights of the southern mountains, through the dank terror of the WoIfweald and through the southern woods. They had come from a place of fear and persecution, and the Old Man had vanished once the passage of the mountains had been forced, returning to the snow-clad peaks which the village folk said marked the world's end. They had forgotten, because of the words and worship of the Brothers, who said that all men came from the north, from beyond the Utwyda. But the tribes remembered the truth of it, that these Brothers were from a different place, another world, perhaps, whereas the true home of all Men in the Wood was south, beyond the terrible mountains, a land of burning and horror where lost cities rose on great hills and monsters worse than the trolls of the forest roamed the deserted streets. The tribes had been god-like there, wielding strange weapons of wood and the black metal—iron, the metal that slew the Wyrim with a scratch, if they had no yarrow to bind to it.
Here Ringbone reached a hand into his pouch and brought a doeskin lump into the firelight. He unwrapped the bundle carefully. This was part of such a weapon, he said, handling it with reverence. It looked like an outsized ring of ancient iron, pitted with corrosion, paper-thin with age and three fingers in diameter. Michael had seen a few others like it, kept as heirlooms by the tribes to remind them of what and who they had once been. Knights, he thought. They went from being Knights to being savages, and it is still there in the back of their mind after all this time.
'Temuid gewenian,' Ringbone said at last, replacing the artifact in his pouch. We will return. And his story was done.
Michael took first watch, and built up the fire to keep their last night in the woods at bay.
IN THE DRIPPING, bird-loud morning a two-hour walk brought them within sight of the little river and the wet, massive stone of the bridge. It darkened as they approached, the early light thickening into the gloom of evening. They passed the humped shape of Michael's hut as the first stars rose. As though it had been a dream, and the time lost in the Other Place had been returned to them.
There were cattle lowing in the meadows beyond, and here Cat kissed Michael goodbye.
'I'll come back,' she said, and was gone.
NINE
'TIME,' CAT WAS to tell Michael, 'is like a lake. You can go and haul out bucketfuls of its water, throw them about, drink them, pour them off, and then go back to the lake and find it the same level as before, with even the ripples you made wiped away.'
He walked in the door of the house the same evening he had come out of it, the grime and mud of two days in the Other Place still upon him. He was late for supper, and Aunt Rachel threw her hands in the air when she saw him.
'Jesus, Mary and Joseph!'
After that there was the broken flask to explain whilst his grandmother folded her heavy arms and listened to his lies and half-truths with what seemed to him like perfect comprehension. Grandfather and Mullan remained smoking thoughtfully by the fire, though Michael saw Pat's old eyes range along the dirty length of the shotgun barrel speculatively.