'Water for two, maybe three days. Food for another four.'
'Toadstools and pondwater.' Cat laughed. 'You'll be sinking them soon, unless you'd like to try chewing your sandals!'
'Shut up,' Michael hissed, and surprised them with the venom in his voice. 'No more arguing. We boil the forest water as soon as we can get a fire lit, and we eat anything we can find. Beetles if need be. But we keep going, even if it means riding south to those high mountains that are supposed to be on the other end of this damned place. All forests finish, and we'll get to where we're going even if we end up eating the horses and walking our feet down to the bones.'
His outburst seemed to subdue his companions and Cat's back was turned resolutely towards him that night, but he did not care. He could sense the tendrils and shoots of the wood worming their way into him, infiltrating his will, and the effort of shutting them out was exhausting him as much as the endless travelling. The wood was telling him to abandon the Brother, to leave him here where the trees could take him. It urged him to wander without a path, to let the weald resculpt him in a more fitting form for the meeting that was coming. Sometimes he thought its voice was an actual sound, an audible whisper that carried above the creak of tree trunks. He had to abandon himself to the Other Place and forget all that he had learned in his former life. He must forget about Ireland, about home, about mass on Sunday and the bustle of a surrounding family. He was merely an orphan in between parents, and he needed the wood in his veins to be accepted within it. Give up; give in, it said. Drowning is easier if you do not struggle. You will find your goal the quicker, and be a happy man at journey's end. The message was as persistent and annoying as tinnitus.
The ground under the trees rose and fell as they continued, becoming a range of wooded hills and giving them drier campsites. Here and there patches of moss-covered stone thrust out of the humus and dead leaves like the bones of the land pushing through decaying skin. Nennian was convinced that these heights were the foothills of the terrible southern mountains, and that they were near to the edge of the forest. It could not be far, he told them, with something of the old confidence back in his voice. Cat ignored him, and even Michael paid him little heed.
The trees grew strange. They diminished in height, though their roof was as thick as ever. They looked as though they had contracted some leprous disease. Instead of soaring straight up they twisted and curved like arthritic fingers, and the bark had dropped off them in places, scab-like, revealing black wood underneath. Their roots crept and crawled over the thinning earth, coiling around stones. They had become contorted, tortured things clawing for life, and Michael's imagination conjured the misshapen trunks into mottled faces and bodies, distorted limbs.
'Can you feel it?' Cat asked in a whisper. Her face was full of awe.
'Feel what?' Nennian demanded irritably.
'The power here, thrumming in the air. Even the trees cannot stand it. It's like a hot air. Michael, can you feel it?'
He could. It was like the light tapping of a drum in his temples, a far whisper. The wood was alive and watching them. He felt that they had wandered into the maw of some gargantuan beast, a whole land become sentient and cunning. And hostile. It leached the strength from his limbs and sucked out what courage he possessed, so that he might have been seven again, seeing the dark shapes crossing the river at twilight, the fear rising to block his throat.
'Mother of God,' he murmured. Brother Nennian was reciting Latin in a low voice.
Their camp was at the base of a rocky bluff, the fire reflecting off wet stone and lighting up a tiny semicircle of the world. Around them was the darkness, the wood, and in the night they could. feel the presence of the trees as though they were a vast silent crowd of onlookers, baleful and disapproving. They were alive. Michael could think of no other word to explain it.
'We are close, here. Very close,' Nennian said, staring at his unlit pipe. Cat was calming their mounts at the edge of light, whispering in their ears and wiping the rank terror sweat from their flanks.
'Did you not pass through this region when you approached the castle?' Michael asked him.
'No. It is ... It is new to me, this place, but I have followed the path I took then, I swear. It is as if the forest could move and shift, the land itself change.'
'He doesn't want us to find him,' Michael said. 'He's delaying us, letting the trees work for him. Do you think your people got this far?'
Nennian shifted his eyes to the encroaching darkness, as thick as felt. 'I do not see how they could. I think we have passed the site of their last battle. It must be well to the north of us. I think no man has ever come this far. It is an unholy place.'
There was silence for a while, and Cat rejoined them. Though the atmosphere had dampened her spirits slightly, she seemed far less apprehensive than either Michael or Brother Nennian. She chewed on a toadstool impassively, and for a moment Michael hated her for not sharing their dread.