A Different Kingdom Read online

  A last hill, she told him. Nearly there. And they found themselves above the trees, looking out on a starlit night at a blue, sleeping earth. It was the Bann valley where Michael lived. He knew its contours as well as the profile of his own face, from the long slope of the plateau in the east to the river and then the low hills leading to the Sperrin mountains in the far west.

  Not a light was to be seen across the whole landscape. Not a house, not a village or town. The land was as dark and empty as an undiscovered wilderness.

  That was what it was in this place, he realized. Wilderness. And sometimes his world and this one met.

  As he watched, he saw a tiny bead of flame-like light strike up miles away in the hills leading to the mountains. A bonfire, perhaps, a big one to be seen over twenty, twenty-five miles.

  Cat was tugging at him, her voice a low hiss of urgency, but he resisted her pull for a moment, staring out at his own country gone wild, drinking in the weirdness. It was his to travel, if he wanted to, and if he was fit for it.

  The wolves were close, the shadow that led them a rippling black shape powering through the trees with two eyes burning yellow and its maw agape.

  'Mother of God!'

  Then Cat pulled him down what seemed to be a deep hole, a dark pit leading into light at its end. A tumble ... did he always have to fall through these things?—and he was lying on leaves with a tree root digging into his neck and the sound of the river peaceful and endless at his side.

  He got his breath back. 'Cat?'

  But she was gone. Back into Wonderland, perhaps.

  Answers... well, he had a few of them now, but they only made him think of new questions.

  BACK IN THE world he thought of as his own, where there were clocks and guns and flying machines, where wolves paced in zoos and girls wore shoes, the long days continued to go by, unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Each was as distinct as a portrait miniature, their procession merging into a larger canvas, a picture painted by memory. Midsummer was weeks gone and there was a barely perceptible shortening of the golden evenings as August drew on and Michael's holidays ran away from him like sand in an hour glass. Cat did not choose to reappear and though Michael prowled the wood like a savage he saw nothing unusual. Or almost nothing. He did come across tracks and managed to persuade Aunt Rachel to get out library books on nature, on woodland and forest wildlife, and an old one on prehistory: cave-men stories, as Rachel labelled them. But she and his grandmother were nonetheless impressed that he was reading books during the holidays.

  The tracks were of the usual animals of northwestern European woodland, except that they were a thousand years out of date. According to the book's identifications, there were boar and wolf, beaver and great deer, wild oxen and bears in the woods. Bears! And yet they were silent and invisible, ghost animals, their only record the footprints in the soft clay of the wood floor.

  Mullan's traps caught themselves a fox and a pair of rabbits. There were signs that one had caught something larger but whatever it had been was gone, leaving the snare bent and broken behind it, the surrounding vegetation thrashed to shreds. Michael, Pat and the old soldier stood staring at it one bright morning in the tail-end of August. Pat pushed his cap back on his head and whistled softly.

  'Something made a right mess here.'

  The trap was still affixed to its ground peg but the links of the chain had been stretched almost to breaking point and the jaws were bent.

  Mullan eased his old bones down to look closer. He picked off a tuft of coarse black hair that was sticking to the metal.

  'Badger?' Pat asked.

  'Not likely. It's too long, too dark. And even a badger would be held fast in a snare like this, or he'd worry his leg off to get away ... No, I'm damned if I know what it is, except some bloody big dog. But there's no blood around. You'd think it had bent open the jaws somehow, not scraped free. Curiouser and curiouser.'

  'He'll be after the sheep next,' Pat said grimly. 'I'd best warn Sibbet and McLoughlin that there's a big stray on the loose, gone feral maybe. Lambing's long over; that's one thing ... Easy, boys, calm down for God's sake.' This—was the his pair of collies which were whirring and snarling a little way off, refusing to come near. They seemed frightened one moment, angry the next.

  'Useless buggers,' Pat said, not without affection. He clapped Mullan on the shoulder, staggering the older man as he was in the process of getting up. 'So much for your traps. There's a few ten bob notes down the drain there.'

  'Rabbit pie tomorrow, though,' Mullan said sulkily. He wheezed and spat, putting one brown fist to the small of his back and grimacing. 'Never seen anything like it. Maybe it was kids skylarking.' They both turned to Michael enquiringly.

  'I haven't seen anything.'

  They laughed, two old doors creaking on their hinges.

  'There's a guilty conscience if ever I saw one,' Pat said. 'But then they always are at that age.' Michael scowled.

  'So what now? We just keep an extra lookout?' Mullan asked.

  Pat nodded. 'No great deal, this time of year. You and Michael could scour the woods again if you like, sit out another night or two.'

  'What we need is a bloody good hunt,' Mullan said, producing the Peterson from his pocket. 'A lather of horses and hounds pounding through here. That'd flush him out, wherever he is.'

  'No ground for horses here,' Pat disagreed, looking about him at the dense undergrowth and the low-hanging trees. There was a light in his eyes at Mullan's suggestion, however. Winter hunts—they were a great occasion, fifty horses thundering across the fields and the hounds baying in a pack. Pat had not ridden in one for years, the last hunter having been sold off when Michael was a mere infant. Felix and Pluto were workhorses, and even Fancy could be justified to an extent, but Sean had drawn the line after Pat's last hunter, a wicked-eyed giant of a horse, had died. Dog food, now. And Pat was getting too old for tearing about the countryside and leaping everything in sight, so said Michael's grandmother.

  'Never clear these woods,' Pat said absently. He accepted a black twist of tobacco from Mullan and rubbed it between his fingers. 'Been here longer than the farm has. They used to be twice as deep when I was a boy, but these parts are too up and down, too wet. Best to let them be.'

  'Sean would clear them,' Mullan said, smiling toothlessly round the stem of his smoking pipe.

  'Sean would skin a gnat for its hide,' Pat retorted. He looked at his grandson quickly, guiltily. 'Damn it, Michael, you're going to be tall.'

  Michael shifted uncomfortably. 'Not my fault.' He felt that his grandfather, and Mullan too, were waiting for him to say something, to communicate some revelation. He studied the ground stubbornly. His grandfather filled the silence with lighting his pipe, the blue smoke a streamer reaching through the trees.

  'Fay bones. Always been tall, our family.'

  'Always been horsemen,' Mullan added.

  'Aye. That too. Used to be fifteen horses on this farm, cobs and Oydesdales. A Morgan once, bad tempered and black. We sent four off to the war, gone for good. A waste.'

  Mullan clamped his lips though Michael was sure there was a comment hovering behind the pipe. He coughed, and said at last: 'Cows need watering. They're drinking like fish these days.'

  Pat inclined his head. 'You'll keep an eye out?' he said to Michael.

  'Sure.'

  'Fine. I want this bastard shot before winter comes. He'll get hungry then, if he stays around, and the next thing you know we'll have lambs disappearing.'

  IT WAS WITH his grandfather's approval that Michael began handling the shotgun, learning the principles of safety, marksmanship and cleaning. There were three of the weapons in the house. Two were side-by-side twelve-gauges, the third an old over-and-under, intricately carved and as light as a toy. It was Russian-made, the wood gleaming with age and polish. Pat's father had picked it up at a fair before his son's birth and carved thin copperplate letters in the stock: Michael Fay, Ballinasloe 1899.

  '
You're young,' Pat had said to him, 'But sensible enough. And it has your name on it, my father's name, so it's only right you should have it. But if I catch you firing it anywhere near the house, or near any of the stock, then you lose it. Understand me, Michael?' And Michael had nodded, eyes shining.

  There was no need to fear the wolves now. With this in his hands he could blow them to kingdom come.

  He built himself a hut on the western bank of the river, south of the bridge, for this seemed to him to be the place where the weirdest things happened, where the tracks were thickest. It was a crude affair, three sided and roofed with ferns a foot thick. Michael reburied the werewolf's skull by its open side, and over it constructed a hearth with stones from the river. He hoped the fire would keep it there, though he sometimes saw it in his dreams-Snarling, skeletal, shrivelled, remnants of gums pulled back from the blackened teeth.

  He watched, and waited, saw September enter the year and tint the leaves, felt the wind pick up in the heights of the trees. He checked Mullan's traps daily, shotgun in hand and game bag slapping at his side, but the wild creatures shunned them no matter how he moved or disguised them. He took them up in the end, leaving the wood dean and untouched once more. Over his horizon school loomed like a dark cloud.

  The wood was an eerie place in the shortening evenings, full of the rushing of air and the whispers of the trees. He heard a voice singing there once, lovely as a summer blackbird, but the sound of it made the hair rise on the back of his neck. It was singing an old, old song, making it into a-dirge, a coronach for dead dreams.

  I overheard my own true love,

  His voice it was so dear.

  Long time I have been waiting for

  The coming of my dear.

  Sometimes I am uneasy

  And troubled in my mind.

  Sometimes I think I'll go to him

  And tell to him my mind.

  And if I should go to my love,

  My love he will say nay.

  If I show to him my boldness,

  He'll ne' er love me again.

  Perhaps it was the Banshee, and there was a death to come in the family. But the death had already happened, he told himself. Perhaps there had even been two.

  He knew this: there was a life to the wood, an awareness. It remembered things, and it was watchful. He could feel eyes on his back every time he entered it. They were not hostile, but they were wary, gauging. He felt as though he were being weighed in a balance. But he could not guess what purpose he was being considered for.

  EIGHT

  THE EVENING THE girl called Cat reappeared he was sitting outside his hut with the fire bright and crackling at his feet, experimenting with weapons. The book Rachel had got out of the library for him had pictures of cave men wrapped in furs and carrying spears and odd-looking axes, flint knives and scrapers. Cro-Magnon man, tallest of the prehistoric humans who had wandered north after the retreat of the ice some sixty thousand years before. Michael was trying to lash a sliver of stone on to a hazel staff, for there was no flint to be found in this countryside. His fingers were becoming raw with the effort. String was not strong enough. He grunted irritably as once more the stone blade shifted awry.

  And when he looked up again, Cat was standing on the other side of the fire, watching him.

  His heart thumped briefly and one hand fell to touch the shotgun he always brought here. She raised an eyebrow, smiling, and sat down opposite him without invitation. She wore the white shift, even in this biting autumn weather. She was human enough to relish the glow of the fire, he noticed. He put the spear aside and rummaged in his bag. 'Hungry?'

  She nodded.

  An apple, a squashed ham sandwich and the dregs of a flask of tea. She wolfed them down, gulping the tea straight from the mouth of the flask. Her elbows were bloody, Michael noticed, and it irked him to see her loveliness marred. If truth be told, she smelled. Not of gorse blossom this time, but of herself. An unnameable smell, at once repulsive and exciting.

  It began to rain, the drops pattering on the thinning canopy of the trees and dripping down on their heads. The evening was falling fast, cloud gathering. Michael threw another chunk of wood on the fire, making the sparks sail up, and withdrew into the hut's shelter. Cat looked up at the sky in something like resignation. She seemed tired, he thought, and he saw now that she was muddy and grimed.

  The rain grew heavier, hissing in the flames.

  'Come inside,' Michael told her. Already the water was beating dark hair lank against her temples.

  'O like the rain.' Grinning. 'I hope it thunders and storms!' And she appeared so like Rose for a moment that Michael blessed himself.

  It became a downpour. Runnels of water were carving channels in the fallen leaves and the bare clay, and the wood was deafening with the rattle of rain beating the trees. Drips began to come through the roof of the hut, but Michael had seen out other showers within and knew it would stand up to the weather. There was an old blanket he kept there for a floor and he shook it out, beckoning to Cat.

  'Come on, you'll catch your death.'

  She had her head tilted to the rain and was catching it in her open mouth, her tongue stuck out to suck it in. She paused to look at him for a moment, then shrugged and joined him in the hut.

  It seemed suddenly very crowded in there. She was wet through. What was it she liked so much about getting wet? The smell intensified. He could feel the warmth of her, and steam was already beginning to curl from her bare arms. A dark nipple looked ready to pierce the wet material of her dress. She pressed against him and he drew the musty blanket round both their shoulders, dizzy with apprehension, drunk with her nearness. Her dampness sank into his clothes. Her hair smelled of earth, rain, and a catch of that gorse blossom, summery as mown hay. He kissed her wet temple, her eye, the lid quivering under his lips. Her hand slipped inside his coat, wormed its way past his jumper to lie cold against his ribs. She had chilled fingers, though the rest of her was steaming, warm, reeking.

  She was asleep. 'Cat?' Whispered.

  Nothing.

  So even fairies had to sleep. He leant back against the wall of the shelter, hearing it creak ominously, and watched the fire fight the battery of the rain. Cat grew cold, goosepimpled, and he drew her across his lap, hugged her tight to his warmth and wrapped his coat around her.

  I'm in love, he thought, and laughed quietly at the rain and the empty wood.

  THE RAIN STOPPED after a while and he shifted his burden to let his arms breathe again. She was awake instantly, eyes open and pupils wide and black in the dimness. The fire was down to a lump of glowing log that smoked fitfully. Night had come upon them in the wake of the rain.

  She sat up, shivering, her hair in wet rats' tails. Michael was damp, too, and cramped. An hour, she must have slept in his arms. He creaked his way out of the hut and stood up, stretching. Overhead branches dripped water on to his face. The fire was all but dead. He should be getting home.

  Cat was sitting with her arms about her knees and the blanket over her shoulders, staring at him. 'What's the matter?' he asked her.

  'Not a thing... Well, I'm cold, if you must know.'

  'You should wear decent clothes.'

  'Decent he says.' She rubbed her raw elbows gingerly. 'It's all right for you.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'It doesn't matter. Get the fire going. This is not my season. Chill rain, the leaves dying, nights a day long. Oh, no.'

  Michael set about resurrecting the fire, wondering what she was talking about. She seemed suddenly petulant, snappish. Warmth would cheer her up, he decided.

  Yellow light flickered over their faces. Cat's shift was still dripping and Michael wondered if he dared suggest she take it off.

  A crow of laughter, ending in a giggle. She had found his spear.

  'A mighty hunter you will be, with a weapon such as this!' She wrenched the stone blade from the shaft with a flick of her wrist.

  'Hey!' He was outraged. He trie
d to wrest it out of her grasp but she wriggled like an eel and sent it flying out of the firelight. He bore her to the wet ground and set his weight atop her, not entirely sure what he was doing, but before he could decide she sent a narrow fist flying into his nose and stars exploded in his head. He rolled aside clutching at his face whilst her laughter rose in the night.

  'A little over-eager there, Michael!'

  'You ... bugger,' he muttered, feeling the slow slide of blood down his upper lip. It smeared the back of his hand.

  She was beside him in a flash, knees sinking in the wet clay.

  She touched his battered nose with her fingers.

  'I'm sorry . I did not mean to pain you.'

  'Aye, right.'

  She pulled him close. 'I would not hurt you, Michael.'

  Was the fire somehow in her eyes or was there a light there, yellow as candles?

  She licked the blood from his lip like a cat lapping milk. He could taste it as her tongue pushed inside his mouth. There was that tightness, that blooming warmth below his stomach. Her fingers brushed him there and he flinched, the breath sawing in his throat.

  'Who are you?' he whispered.

  Her mouth silenced him. They lay down beside the crackling fire and she tugged her shift above her waist. He saw the dark pelt between her legs, thick as fur, and fumbled with his trousers. Cold air and warm flame on his naked skin. He lay on her and she guided him, spoke to him in a low voice as though he were a horse to be calmed. And he was there, in her.

  'God.'

  He pushed and thrust, something within him taking over. Her hands were like claws on his shoulders and he heard her whimper as he pressed her buttocks into the cold earth. The wind was in the trees, oddly like the sea in a seashell: the circulation of his churning blood. And then there was a paroxysm that shuddered through him. He cried out into her shoulder, feeling her hand on the back of his head.