Mirkady sighed. 'We are more than one person, however.'
Stubbornly Michael said, 'The forests too thick to ride in. Your head would be at the pommel the whole day. I thought one horse would be good for baggage and stuff.'
'The forest is not all as thick as this,' Cat put in. The wine had coloured her lips; they were dark as bruises.
'It is open in places, and there are glades and clearings. And then there are the tracks that men make. We can follow them.'
Michael shrugged. 'Fair enough. Where are we going to get one? And what are we going to buy it with?'
'Iron,' Mirkady said.
'What? You can't buy a horse for a piece of metal. And we haven't got any iron anyway.'
'You can and we have,' Mirkady said smugly. 'Iron is rare here, a precious metal. And that metal club you have tied to the saddle with the wooden head—'
'No,' Michael said, realizing at once. 'That was my great-grandfather's. I'm not giving it to some woodland savage to use as a club. It's a modern firearm. You need a licence and everything.'
'The barrel is worth its weight in gold here, Michael,' Cat said impatiently. 'We need it.'
'You're not getting it.'
She glared at him. Mirkady merely laughed. 'You will remain penniless then, and become footsore before long.'
'We'll steal one,' Cat said.
'We can't...' Michael trailed into silence at her stare. He had an odd desire to seize her face in his hands and crush those lips with his own, but could not with Mirkady there. Cat smiled at him, eyes dancing as though she had read the thought.
'We'll steal one from the next village we come to; a priest's horse. They always have the best.'
Catching some of her mischief, Michael grinned. 'So we're going to be horse thieves? All right. How do we find the horse?'
'Not a problem,' Mirkady said. 'We are close to a village here, scant miles from the South Road that runs almost the length of the Wildwood. We can be there before the middle of the day.'
'Darkness is the best time for thieving,' Cat said, and the little goblin nodded. The best time for our kind to be abroad, but we must be wary now we are out of the bounds of the Howe. All sorts of things roam the woods at night, the hunters and the hunted. Myself, being what I am, most of them will ignore, but you pair have the reek of human blood about you. A sweet drink for many of the night prowlers.'
Michael had the feeling Mirkady was trying to goad him, so he said nothing. The bronze dagger hung heavy and cold at his hip, but he could not envisage himself using it. He vowed to unpack and load the shotgun when he had a chance, to stick to a civilized weapon.
'And we had better find ourselves some wolfsbane to crush on your blades, just in case,' Mirkady added.
TWELVE
WOLFSBANE.
The pub was crowded at this time of day, the tables full and the spaces between covered with people. Their noise and warmth clouded the air and the smoke of their cigarettes was a blue haze in the fading sunlight from the windows.
He was sweating, deciphering three demands at once and tugging down the pump to bring brown beer frothing into a pint glass. In his mind he added up figures, remembered orders and calculated the time left until he would finish. He could smell the yeasty reek of the beer and his own sweat, the smoke in the air. His feet felt flat as slates from long standing. Two feet away from his nose a line of customers pressed against the wood of the bar with money clutched in their fists, clamouring for attention. Just another Saturday.
But he was glad of the crowd. He hated silence as much as he hated darkness, and the press of bodies was comforting. Nothing could touch him here; nothing that was not a part of pavements and tarmac, offices and exhaust fumes. He was safe.
He was tired, too, and the flesh of his stomach was a bulge over his belt. Too much beer, he thought as he set the foaming glass on the bar and reached for another. Too little exercise. Always it had seemed to him that his body operated best on nothing but the essentials. It made use of every scrap of nourishment and rest it was given, wasting nothing. And now there was a surplus: there was too much. He had become soft—a big, soft man with full red cheeks and too much flesh under his chin. A paunch ahead of its time, and a heart gone to seed along with his smoke-stained lungs.
No piglets on a spit here, he thought, listening with a blank face to the shouted order of another customer. None of the diamond clearness that had been a part of his senses as he had travelled through the Other Place. He had been an animal then, had been chipped down like a flint spearhead, and while the process had been an agonizing one it had left him sharp and hard, clear-minded as the bleb of an icicle—and afraid almost every moment.
His lungs ached for a cigarette and he damped his mouth into a thin line and hauled his attention back to the work in hand. He pressed tall glasses up to the optics, dug into the ice bucket, pulled more pints and poked unendingly at the cash register's noisy buttons, the cash drawer hitting his stomach every time it opened as though to remind him it was still there.