It grew late, and the city began its brief sleep. The tiredness tugged at his eyelids and he realized that he had ceased to listen to what she was saying. He was aware only of that nicely cultured voice and the silence it held at bay. He was willing to sit and fight off sleep all night, just to have it continue. As long as she talked and sat there smelling elegantly the wood was kept out of the room, and his ghosts stayed in the memories where they belonged.
But she stopped talking at long last, and sat balancing her empty coffee cup on her knee as though she were in a monarch's drawing room. One hand slipped down to touch the briefcase as though it were a talisman.
'I have to work in the morning.'
'So do I.' There was a pause, long in mute communication. 'I have to get up early.'
'I've an alarm. Works most of the time.'
Another pause. Those dark eyes bored into him. He knew with a sudden flash of insight that in her way she was as frightened of the lonely night as he was. But he kept his face neutral, sure that he had overstepped the mark, transgressed some mutual contract of flippancy.
Finally she smiled; a wide, generous smile. 'Promise me you won't speak Gaelic in your sleep?'
'I promise.'
And this time he was not too drunk, or too tired.
They made love carefully, courteously, anxious not to offend. The earth hardly shifted, but afterwards he laid his head between her breasts and gloried in the feel of her arms around him. No wilderness had worn her lean, no wounds had scarred her skin, and he nuzzled the ripe bloom of her body as though he could bury himself in it, whilst outside the dawn broke open the black sky and in shadowed corners of the streets below the woodland creatures kept their vigil.
A LONG WHILE, it seemed, he floated in some indeterminate place, a Never-Never Land that swirled with known and unknown faces. Cat was there, but she had changed somehow, had grown plump and wide-eyed. His grandfather was present, also—old Pat. And Rose was there. She was crying.
'Come and get me, Michael. Take me home.'
Home.
The Horseman rose up like a black wall, blotting her out. He was immense, black as a starless night. Up and up he towered, tall as a hill—and he became a castle, high-walled and ruinous upon a granite crag, so high that the clouds played about its battlements and .grey moisture beaded it like sweat. Around its knees the trees rose, huge and old, tangled as wire, their roots grinding deep into the loam and rock of the earth. So thick was their canopy that it seemed like a textured carpet for giants to walk upon, and from its dim depths came the sound of wolves howling, as they bred and slaughtered in their thousands.
He opened his eyes with a cry and Cat shushed him, held him close.
'It's all right, my dear. You are all right.'
It was day. He could smell the acrid fire reek in the air, and there was a woman keening softly somewhere, people moving around, muttered talk.
'Mirkady,' he croaked from a dry throat.
'Here, my man.' And the diabolical face grinned a foot from his own.
Michael dosed his eyes again and let himself be held by Cat's warmth. Ringbone's voice dose by. There was a sound of bustle. He opened his eyes and looked into Cat's face.
'They're leaving, aren't they? Going back north.'
She nodded. Behind her a shape loomed, hulking and tusked.
'This part of the wood is no fit place for human man,' Dwarmo said. 'And their hurts are many.'
'They will be more numerous still ere they win their way back to the Forests of Men again.' Mirkady twinkled. Michael felt an urge to strike him. He sat up instead. The pain in his thigh was a hot red thing that impaled him to the ground, and allied to it were three or four other little agonies that gashed his limbs. The Ulfberht lay to one side.
Looking round he could see the funeral pyre ready to be fired, the other, blacker mound nearby that comprised the enemy dead. Hundreds, there must have been. The pitiful remnants of Ringbone's folk were packing up. their meagre belongings, many women bleeding from grief cuts and red-eyed, the men like walking corpses, some with wounds oozing. No more than two score had survived. Michael could count less than a dozen men able to stand. In the midst of their camp were the two horses, gashes and bites marking their flanks. They had survived, at least.
Ringbone squatted before him. There were bark dressings about forearm and bicep. No one in camp seemed to have escaped hurt, Cat included.
'Cadyei?' the fox man asked him. He said he was well.
Ringbone bent his head to the ground for a moment, and then asked him if he and Cat still intended to go on south.
Michael glanced at her and she winked at him, though Mirkady's eyes had darkened. Ringbone ignored the two Wyrim as if they did not exist.
The people were going north, he said. They would not survive if they stayed here. He stopped and Michael saw an obvious struggle on the normally impassive face.