A Different Kingdom(9)

I've been well educated of late, he mused. I can doctor a horse and skin a rabbit. I can tan leather and stitch wounds. I can kill men. And a little while ago I was a schoolboy, a squeaker, a dreamer.

He shook his head, wondering how much of his life he had lost in the woods and the hills, the wild places. He would get it back, of course, would walk out of this place the morning he had left—but would he remain the same? Would he walk into the kitchen a hulking savage, scarred and bearded, or would he be a boy again? Would that childhood be returned to him?

His fingers scratched through the white hairs of his beard as he shambled to the edge of the firelight. The years had added themselves to him with every mile deeper they had gone into this place, years piled on to his shoulders in a few months. And Cat had aged, also. She was no longer the girl he had met in the wood. That was his fault, his alone. Mirkady had warned him of that, one night in a fairy howe.

He gathered wood with a wandering mind. He was thinking of his grandfather's farm, the swallows in the stables, a fire in the hearth. Pots of tea and bacon and eggs. Clean sheets – Mother of God!—a bed that was dry and warm with the night beyond a window.

He yawned enormously, the bones in his face cracking. He had an armful. It would do an hour or two. Cat could gather more later. He hungered for the fire. For her, as well. Despite his dog-weariness, the thought of her skin under his hand appealed. The last time they had loved they had both fallen asleep before the finish and had lain like Siamese twins, still connected in the morning.

But no. Too risky to chance it. No time for love when the beasts are on your trail.

She was asleep, as he had known she would be, one hand in a fist at her throat. He set the wood down and covered her, the sword digging into his ribs. First watch. And more than likely he would take the dark one before the dawn too. A long night, but as Cat had said the pursuit would have had a rough time of it today. He had perhaps a few hours of peace.

The damn wound was acting up again. Another day and he would open it, cauterize it for the umpteenth time. It was on the big muscle of the upper thigh, deep and angry. The smaller punctures beside it had already closed. Perhaps there was something of the beast's tooth remaining there. It hardly bore thinking about. He knuckled it savagely, wishing away the deep ache and glow. The wild riding did not help.

'Ach ... ' He stabbed the sword into the fire and watched the dull iron cradled by the flames. The blade needed to be reheated properly, in a forge, and then dipped in urine. Though clay would do, he supposed. The interlacing pattern of the iron writhed and turned like part of the fire and the maker's name was etched in runic lines upon the metal. Ulfberht. An old weapon this, the work of a master. It deserved better. Other, worthier hands had darkened the bone of the grip. It had come a long way to end up in the paw of an Ulsterman.

The Ulsterman had come a long way also. A long way from the valley of the Bann. And an ever farther way back, it seemed. If there was a way back. Now there was something to gnaw on in the long nights, something to keep him awake with a vengeance.

How could he have been such a damn fool?

He turned and looked at Cat's pale face, serene in sleep.

Because he had been only a boy, and he had been in love for the first time in his short life. In love with a girl no one else could see, and the fairy tale she promised him.

Likely enough the fairy tale would end here, in these woods, and the Ulsterman would leave his bones here. He rubbed his forehead and saw that the edges of the sword blade were cherry-red. Damn pattern welding. The thing lost its edge so quickly, and needed to be quenched every so often to harden the carbon-rich iron.

For a moment he thought of a round-faced priest who had tempered it once in a woodland forge. Then he shook his head. Best to forget.

The pressure in his bladder was almost painful. He had been saving it up all day for this. When the deep blush of heat was through the blade he whipped it out of the flames, scattering sparks and swearing at the heat of the hilt. Then he tossed it away and leapt up, gasping at the pain in his thigh. He fumbled with his breeches and an instant later let rip, groaning with relief. A veritable torrent gushed out of him in an unending stream and exploded on to the red-hot metal, billowing at once into clouds of ammoniac steam. He coughed and sputtered. In mid-flow he halted himself—not the easiest of tasks—and toed the blade on to its other side. Then he let fly again.

Next time he would use clay, he promised himself.

MICHAEL DID NOT go down to the river's brink. Now was not the time, he thought obscurely, and that knowledge was both weird and familiar. His own notion, but from another time. A grown-up thought, and thus not one to be questioned. He accepted it without argument, and let his feet take him elsewhere.