A Different Kingdom(91)

It was cold, sharp and frosty. He got up and looked outside, stretching. The mud of the clearing had frozen hard, the puddles iced over, though where the sun hit them there was only a shimmer of ice thin enough to be broken by a spider's foot. Mist again, but it was a hazy, gossamer thing this morning lit by the sun. It hung in a broad band halfway up the trees and their tops were crystal clear against the pale blue sky, their trunks the washed-out colour of a pastel painting. As he watched he saw a heron take flight from the stream at the far end of the glade, the great wings wide. Brother Nennian was talking to his goats in a low voice, the sound carrying like a bell in the stillness. After a while he came trudging back to the living hut leading what looked like a large donkey and carrying a rough basket.

'Eggs for breakfast,' he said, grinning.

They started off in the middle of the morning, the food warm in their bellies, and set the sun in their left eye. Within an hour the character of the forest had changed again, and the sun was cut off. Michael's heart sank as the early light was lost, hidden by the encroaching treetops, and the forest floor became bare and dark once more. He felt he was riding into some endless cavern that went deeper and deeper into the heart of the world, a tunnel without end.

Their saddles were piled and hung with supplies. Bannock, honey, cheese, smoked meat and dried vegetables as well as skins of the blessed water which Cat could not drink and a pouch of the Brother's fragrant tobacco. Nennian's donkey, a patient, fleabitten creature, clanged and clanged as they ambled along, irritating Michael. There was a copper pot and various bronze implements hanging from its pommel. Brother Nennian looked like a tinker on his travels.

'What about the animals?' Cat had asked him coldly as they left the sunlight of the hollow behind. Nennian had opened the goat pen before they left.

'They will wander, but there is good grass in the dell and most of them know well enough not to stray into the deep part of the forest. The billy will keep them together, and I have left caches of barley grain here and there. The chickens are good at fending for themselves.'

'You'll have a lean time of it for a while when you return,' she told him.

'Everyone must make sacrifices.'

TRAVELLING AGAIN. THE rhythm of movement claimed them once more as though they had never paused in Nennian's sanctuary. They had strayed off the direct route south to find his clearing, and now the rotund Brother led the way, taking them back on the southward path, but as far as Michael could make out veering off it after a while to the southeast. Within a day Michael's navigation was based on glimpses of the stars and surmise, though the priest led them clanking onwards without faltering, as though the lair of the Horseman were a beacon standing high and bright in the distance,



Little things irked Michael. He was constrained with Cat in Nennian's presence, and to her frustration could not make love to her in the nights beside the fire. In the mornings they were delayed by the Brother as he said mass for himself off to one side, and Michael felt oddly distanced from the ceremony, as though it were a fossil he had left buried behind him. He had enough belated piety in him to quiet Cat's protests and let the priest pray undisturbed, though it cost them travelling time.

He and Nennian ate well, though for some reason—bloody-mindedness, perhaps—Cat insisted on foraging for food, and they looked somewhat askance at her forest roots and skinned frogs. Only the honey could tempt her, and she would wolf down a sticky bannock with relish, refusing everything else and drinking the forest water without fear. It was as if the trees had claimed her once more, and she was slipping into the ways of the wood now that the transient civilization of the sanctuary had been left behind. It worried Michael. When be lay beside her in the nights he could almost believe she was changing in her sleep, shifting in his very arms. She would twitch and shake, and sometimes he thought he heard her snarl.

Mirkady's gift, he thought. It had not been as generous as it seemed. Occasionally he thought he could feel it working in his own flesh, making him loathe the stocky priest on his donkey and causing the clean water to bubble in his throat.

The signs of life they had noticed on approaching Nennian's glade disappeared, and the forest became an empty, stark place, a hall with a thick-raftered roof upheld by the pillars of the trees. Spring was beaten back here, and they travelled in a never changing dark of winter, the cold air moving in trapped eddies and currents under the canopy, the leaf mould on the ground, millennia of autumns, degenerating into thick mud that sucked at the horses' hoofs and exhausted them so the travellers had to dismount and pull the weary beasts along by their bridles ankle deep, calf deep, sometimes knee deep in black glutinous ooze. It did not take very many days for the neat and plump Brother Nennian to begin to take on what Michael had come to think of as the wanderer look. His cheeks seemed to fall in on themselves and the mud-thick habit became looser around the stomach. He stuffed his sandals with rags against the cold and his eyes seemed to sink in his head. Cat took a grim satisfaction out of this transformation, as if it were evidence that the holy man's magic was not proof against the power of the forest.