Brother Nennian seemed genuinely pained. 'Forgive me. I find I am prying. It is a hazard I run when I meet so few folk in this part of the world. I glean what I can from them, to digest when I am alone again.'
They finished their meal in silence, the blue evening deepening outside and the air loud with the sound of water pittering down from the treetops. The fire lit up their faces, becoming brighter as the light fled. Again Michael heard a wolf call in the gathering dusk. It sounded desolate. A lonely soul, lost in the deep woods.
Cat helped the Brother to wash up with an odd defiance, as if she dared him to contradict her. She brushed away the trickle of wet that was starting to crawl in the doorway and replaced the wooden sill. Outside the beaten dirt of the clearing was awash with rainwater, puddles shining in the firelight that spilled from the windows. Wind stirred the water into restless rings. Michael saw the two horses standing resting under a lean-to, a line of movement off in the twilight where the goats shifted in their pen and the flutter of the chickens nesting under the eaves of another hut. The coming night seemed peaceful. He might have been in any part of the Wildwood—except for the immenseness of the trees;
How could a man live here, year after year, with nothing but the seasons and the changing weather to mark the time? He had thought once that this journey would be an idyll of sorts, with castles and knights, fairies and goblins. It had not quite turned out that way.
He remembered home, the farm. It seemed so long ago.
Another world.
For two pins, he thought with sudden vehemence, I'd go back now. Leave the whole thing behind and go home, forget about fairies.
And Cat? And Rose?
Things were not as neat and tidy as that. This place lapped over into the world he called his own. That was why he was here, in the end. He was not merely a tourist.
To his surprise, when he turned back to the interior of the hut, he found Brother Nennian smoking a long clay pipe, much chipped and blackened. The holy man grinned, showing square teeth with black gaps between them.
'A weakness of mine, the weed. I grow it, though a small, withered offering it is.'
Michael remembered Mullan's beautiful Peterson, red as fresh blood. The Brother's smoke was surprisingly fragrant. He mixed herbs with it, he told them, and soaked the whole in honey to flavour it. He had skeps of his own farther along the clearing. Bees were one thing the Forest-Folk always respected. Except for the bears, and they were rare here. A troll had sat at the edge of the hallowed ground the whole of one morning and had told him a tale in return for a comb of honey. And the beeswax made the best candles in the world. (Here he gestured to the slim palenesses on a shelf near the low ceiling.) But for some talk the firelight was best.
'Sitting here alone of an evening, with only the fire and the trees for company,' he mused, 'I know that I am not a good priest. It comes to me. My faith is strong enough to keep the beast at bay, if it is faith indeed. But I wonder sometimes if it is not also a love of the wood, for all its horrors. To live here with no man to speak to, in this deep, black forest, this for me is peace ... Maybe it is even prayer.' He looked keenly at Cat. 'You speak the truth about the place, you and your people. The wood is alive, especially here in the Weald. It remembers things.'
A picture of Rose asprawl in the leaves, a man atop her.
Michael lowered his head. The Brother continued:
'I have seen the end of the Brothers' first expedition here, on gloomy days. I have watched their last stand about the cross as the goblins slew them. I have seen the unholy feast that followed. And I have seen the Horseman watching over it:
The Brother's face had darkened. Despite the round goodwill of his features, he seemed grim, forbidding, the firelight carving his visage into canyons of brightness and shadow.
'He comes here now and again, sits on his horse at the edge of the clearing and watches me at my work. No prayer or cross of mine will shift him. I have seen him in the dead of night when the moon is up, and there are werewolves fawning around his steed, goblins black and silent at his back. He sits watching. But then I think of the wood's memories that 1 have seen: my own people butchered like cattle, corpses by the score defiled and mutilated, and it steels me. I can stand there with that faceless stare on me, kneel scant yards from him and pray ... My pipe is out.'
He bent to relight the long pipe with a twig from the fire, and in the stillness they cocked their heads to listen. Something on the wind, far away. Nennian puffed smoke placidly but his eyes were chiselled glints under his brow.
'Him,' he said, so low it was almost a whisper.
Hoofbeats, far away but getting closer. A horse galloping. 'Speak of the Devil and he will surely appear,' Michael murmured, an old saw his grandfather had used.