A Different Kingdom(82)

The canopy grew thicker as they travelled, however, the branches entwining together ever more closely and the tops of the trees fighting for space and sun, and they began to move in what seemed like perpetual twilight. The horses' hooves made little sound on the soft humus of the ground, clumping steadily, and the nights were black as pitch, the stars invisible overhead, blocked out by the interwoven ceiling of the trees.

It was dank and chill in this underworld, as if the trees had sealed in the end of winter, the cold air and the dampness. Their lower branches were dead and rotten through want of light, and the dead wood itself was like wet paper, stinking. It became almost impossible to find dry wood for the fire and often Michael and Cat huddled together in the endless darkness of the nights with the horses crowded round them, unsettled and restless.

Navigation became a problem. Though Cat, if pressed, would indicate the rough direction they were to take, Michael felt it necessary to glean information from every glimpse of the sun or stars, for he had a fear they would otherwise go in circles till they left their bones in the leaf mould. He marked trees with the Ulfberht in a desperate attempt to keep them going in a straight line; but he had a feeling that it was unnecessary, that they were travelling a course which had been plotted for them a long time ago.

He climbed a tree once, to try and see the sun, and scaled a hundred feet of an old forest giant, his fingers digging into the rotten bark and the black, evil-smelling stuff grinding in under his nails. He caught a hint, a wisp of sunlight, and knew that up there somewhere the world rolled on. Dawn came every morning and the moon rose. But the highest branches were too flimsy to bear his weight and he had to descend, grubs and mites from the tree infesting his clothing and biting his scalp.

They had enough dried meat and forest roots in the saddlebags to keep them chewing for a few weeks, which was as well since the forest seemed empty of animal life. Not a bird sang in the gloomy mornings, and never a game trail did they find. It was as if the massive bulk of the trees sucked the vitality out of the land, leaving room for no other life. Michael voiced this thought to Cat as they sat shivering one evening with their pitiful campfire guttering at their toes. She nodded.

'Can't you feel it?'

'Feel what?'

'The power here. It is in the very air. The trees are part of it, and thrive with it, but nothing else can unless it is a beast of the Horseman. This place is rotten with magic, Michael. It is sick with it, like a stagnant pond.'

Water became a worry. There were streams in the forest, narrow and choked with roots and mud, and the water in them was dark as porter. They drank nonetheless, but after two weeks of it Michael fell sick. He remembered little but the ground swooping up to meet him as he slid off Fancy's back, and Cat's face bent over him for what seemed an interminable time of vomiting and sweating. Then things became blank, and his mind lost all links with his body. He had convulsed, Cat told him later, which was why there was a chunk bitten out of his tongue, and the healing wound in his thigh had sprung open again like the rind of a rotten fruit.

Two days he was like this, waking on the night of the second to the smell of his own stink and the taste of blood and vomit in his mouth, Cat a red-eyed manikin beside him. Around them the trees loomed as huge and silent as ever, and the reek of the forest seemed somehow worse than that of his own wastes.

They boiled their water after that, though Cat had seemed unaffected by the stuff, and drank it in sparing sips. Michael's bowels remained loose, the constant riding an agony to his reopened thigh and chafing buttocks. He ate some of the horses' barley, which helped, but the horses themselves were growing gaunt through lack of food. The undergrowth, sparse as it was, did not tempt them, and they gnawed at sapling bark and fleeting clumps of wiry heather that clawed for life in the murk of the forest floor. Great ticks fastened on them, white and heavy-jawed. If left to feed they would become as big as Michael's little finger, bloated on blood, before dropping off.

Cat caught frogs in some of the unwholesome streams, and they skinned and ate them warily. Though they tasted to Michael like rotten pork they were not poisonous, and soon they halted to try their luck every time they heard the trickle of water, eking out the smoked venison they had left.

One day, however, they heard the clear tinkle and bubble of free-flowing water, quite unlike the slow seep of the streams they had so far encountered, and steering towards it they came upon a brook running crystal clear between banks of green grass and overhanging briars. They halted, amazed, and drank their fill of the delicious, clean water, better than wine after the filth they had been imbibing. And, even more astonishing, there was a hole in the impenetrable canopy overhead so that for a few minutes a ray of sunlight actually lanced down to set the water alight and gleam off the polished stones in the stream bed. Michael laughed aloud, but Cat was silent and presently she threw up, her whole body arching in agony.