A Different Kingdom Page 5

  One fastened on the stag's near hind and was flung away with a kick. The stag turned and lowered its head. A wolf was caught by a vicious swipe and Michael saw something like a dark streamer ripped out of its belly. One of its fellows darted in and fastened its muzzle deep in the stag's groin. It bellowed and spun around frantically, trying to claw forwards with a hind leg, the antlers swinging madly and dispensing oak leaves

  And then was gone. They had turned a corner round the wood and the duel was out of sight. Demon and the chestnut mare had quietened. Pat and Mullan were still talking horses. Michael sat back with his eyes shining. Wolves. There were wolves in the woods.

  ONE DAY WHILST negotiating a broad fire-scarred clearing they were ambushed and caught, the wolves sliding out from the ragged boulders and the shadow of fallen trees. It was rough, uneven ground for the horses, and they had not torn along two hundred yards before the grey went down with a scream and Michael saw Cat flung away like a doll. He hauled on the reins, dragging the chestnut from a full gallop into a tearing halt. His free hand whipped out the heavy sword from the saddle scabbard. There was a torrent of snarling and snapping behind him and he had to force the terrified horse round with what strength he could muster from his crippled hand.

  The grey was already dead. Wolves swarmed over it like lice, bracing their forefeet upon the body and ripping out chunks of quivering meat with sideways jerks of their heads. Cat was on her hands and knees, groggy from the fall. The wolves were ignoring her for the moment.

  Michael kicked his mount viciously, but the smell of the wolves and the blood was terrifying her. She backed away with her ears laid against her skull. He hammered the flat of the sword on her head and then on the flank. Cat was looking around her with dawning comprehension. Any moment now the wolves would notice her. Snarling wordlessly, Michael scythed the edge of the blade along his steed's rump, and she jumped forward just as the first wolves left the grey's corpse with red muzzles, smelling the woman crouched nearby. The horse powered forward, knocking them aside. Michael swung the blade, felt it tear through fur and muscle, swung again at one which was going for the mare's belly and clipped and crunched the skull. Cat leapt behind him and her slim arms locked around his waist, He stabbed the blade into a yellow-eyed face, and then staggered in the saddle as a heavy weight smote his left arm and clung there. The horse wheeled in panic-stricken circles, and Michael felt the maw of the wolf fasten deep, deep, in his forearm, the mad eyes glaring at him over the blood-soaked snout. He shrieked with pain and fear as the wolf s weight began to drag him from the saddle. Only Cat's arms kept him there, but his right foot left the stirrup and slid up to the horse's neck. The mare's body lurched as she kicked out to the rear, and with what seemed like infinite slowness he brought the sword round for a shortened stab, deliberately chose one of the glaring eyes and thrust the point into the socket. It grated on bone, caught for a second, then scraped free as the jaws opened and the wolf slid silently from sight. He kicked the chestnut onwards and she broke into a gallop. His left arm was numb, and he could see the blood dripping from it. Like that good wine we had, he thought muzzily. It was Cat who saved the sword as it slipped from his fingers, who took the reins from his nerveless hand, who kept him on the horse as they pitched along in mad flight with the wolves loping and snapping around them.

  MICHAEL WAS BEING scrubbed by his grandmother in the bath when she paused in her labour to wipe soap from her nose and fix him with a stare. He squirmed uneasily, thinking of how his body had betrayed him in the river with Rose that time. It hadn't happened since, but he wondered if it had somehow left a mark.

  'You're eight now Michael, aren't you?'

  'Nearly. Will be in December.'

  She shook her head. Her cheeks were flushed and tendrils of wet hair hung over her forehead. Michael saw that the whites of her eyes were ribboned with tiny red veins and the grey irises were cloudy.

  'Too big for someone to be bathing you.'

  Michael shrugged. Rose usually did it, and by the end they would both be soaked and laughing, the bathroom floor a mosaic of bubbles, the air opaque with steam. It was one of the high points of his week. But Rose was in her room, and he thought she might be crying again. He was afraid to go in, yet could not make himself avoid it. He knew he would knock on her door as he mounted the stairs to bed. And, besides, it had clouded over today and the thunderheads had piled up like skyborne anvils. His grandfather had snuffed at the air and prophesied a storm before the morning. It was in the house now, waiting to break. The air was hot, .the sunset bring no coolness. A thick haze had overlaid the western mountains, and the clouds were still piling. Uncle Sean was worried about the barley. It would be just typical for a storm to flatten the half of it, and it nearly cut, he had said.

  'Michael, you're very fond of your Aunt Rose, aren't you?'

  He nodded, eyes wide as a deer's. This was a new topic, and he was immediately defensive, wrapping his arms around his knees in the soapy water. His grandmother wiped his back absently with the sponge.

  'Well, it might be she'll be going away for a time, Michael, and I don't want you to worry about her.'

  'Why? Where's she going?'

  'That doesn't matter. Never you bother your head about it. She'll be away for a fair while, but she'll come back.'

  'When? How long will she be gone?' He could hear his voice shake and tears burned in his throat.

  His grandmother hesitated. 'She'll be away maybe a year, Michael, but it'll soon pass, you'll see.'

  A year. A year was an immense expanse of time. The rest of the summer. School, and Christmas. Would she be away for Christmas? And Easter, and then the summer again. A huge time. Hundreds of days. He bowed his head to his knees and his grandmother kissed his crown. 'Come on, Michael, get yourself out of the bath and dried. I'll leave you to do that yourself. You're a big boy now.' She hauled herself off her creaking knees and out of the door. Michael could have sworn by the tremor in her voice that she was near to tears too.

  The storm broke in the early hours and from his bed Michael watched his grandfather and Uncle Sean battle across the yard with a swinging lantern to check on the horses, brought in from the fields that afternoon. The stables were a lovely place to sit out the rain, deep in straw, lamplit, warm with sleepy animals, the blue night roaring and splashing down beyond the half-door. Michael wiped at the glass. The rain had hardly begun and the air was close and stuffy. Then a bright burst of forked lightning raced down the sky and lit up his horrified face. He launched himself away from the window, some part of his mind counting seconds. When it had reached six the thunder exploded above the roof of the house, rolling from gable to gable, and he thought the glass shook. A whimper crept into his throat.

  Another flare of light, garish across the spilled bedclothes, and another rattle of celestial artillery. He leapt from the bed like a hare, hit the wooden floor with a thump, scrabbled out of his door and darted along the hallway. Rose's door. It was closed. She had not answered his knock earlier in the evening. He opened it to another flash of lightning, and saw Rose pressed up against the window, the bolt burning through her nightdress so that for an instant she was a naked silhouette surrounded by gauze. Then it was wholly dark, and he bumped into her bed, dazzled.

  'Michael! I thought I'd be seeing you tonight.' To his relief her voice was normal, even merry. She loved storms.

  They climbed into bed together under a flickering barrage of lightning and thunder. He clung to her and she smoothed his hair.

  'You're going away,' he said at last, muffled at her breast.

  'It's all right, Michael, it's for the best.' Her hand strayed down to her stomach and he saw it caress herself there. He had a sudden feeling of panic, as though things were about to change irrevocably; and this strange mood of Rose's was part of it, the beginning of it, even. He wanted her to be herself again, ordinary and unafraid, making a joke of everything.

  Why were these weird things happening? Maybe they were somethin
g to do with her, with the arguments in the family. Perhaps she should know.

  'There are wolves in the woods, Rose,' he blurted out. 'And men with fox faces down by the river. There are things out there. Like the face watching us swim.'

  But she was a thousand miles away. 'Watching me, he was,' she murmured. She took his hand and set it on her navel. 'Do you know what's in there, Michael?'

  He struggled with the change of tack. 'Guts and things?'

  She giggled. 'There's a wee girl in there, sleeping now, and when she wakes up she'll come out, and you'll have somebody to play with.'

  He raised himself on to one elbow. 'Rose!'

  'It's true, Michael. That's why I'm going away.' Her voice thickened but he hardly noticed.

  'How did it get there?"He was still dubious. Her reply was drowned in thunder.

  'And she'll come out ... here.' She touched herself again, lower down. His hand pursued hers, below the nightdress, brushed the curly mat of hair, found a narrow dip and followed it until his questing finger was on a moist pout of flesh and Rose tensed. Her hand closed over his, lifted it gently away. There was that tightness again, a steady pressure below his stomach. Rose tapped it, then took it in her hand through his nightshirt, squeezed gently. He thought his breathing would stop. The thunder raged on forgotten. A tense, ecstatic, terrifying second, and she released him, kissed his nose. The lightning made her smile perilous. 'I'm a fallen woman,' she whispered in his ear. 'I'm in mortal sin, Michael.'

  The words were grown up, frightening. The Devil is listening, he thought. Mortal sin. Rose was going to hell, then. And she would never come back to him again.

  'I'll say my prayers, Rose,' he whined. 'I'll pray for you.'

  She laughed loudly, the thunder roaring its way along the roof like a mad horseman. 'Prayers! It's the priest is sending me away, Michael. It's him that's making me leave home. Prayers!' She sat up in the bed, as electric as the racing clouds in the wind-bitten sky beyond the window. 'Say no prayers for me. Save them for the child. It'll be a girl. I know it will be a girl. And they'll take it away like they drown the runt of the litter. It'll be a bastard, Michael. It has no father.'

  Lightning forked in her eyes like luminous cat slits. She was as tense as a bent branch in the bed, blue light illuminating her face. When the lightning died Michael could see her eyes hovering disembodied before him, bright after-images.

  'Don't forget me, Michael. And don't believe all that you hear. They're going to take me away, but if I don't return I want you to find me, to bring me back. Or my daughter,' she added in a whisper. And in the same low tone said: 'My soul.'

  'You'll do that? You'll look for me no matter what they tell you? Promise?'

  He promised, fearful and puzzled.

  She smiled brokenly. 'There are worse things than sinners in the world, little Michael. Much worse.' Then they embraced each other in the narrow bed and lay like lovers until sleep muffled the thunder.

  THE FARM SLEPT, the rags of the storm tumbling off in the west like the rear of a battered army. Down in the kitchen old Demon twitched and sniffed in his sleep, smelling ancient smells, seeing things he had sensed but never known—old things that were lodged for ever in the hind part of his canine brain. Snow and ice, and great rime-coated beasts lumbering through the drifts. The drip of water in caves, the scrape of teeth on warm, marrow-sweet bone. He whimpered, his claws scraping the stone floor, but he was an old dog and did not waken.

  Rachel slept also, her dark tresses unbound in the bed, the hard lines of her face relaxed. She was dreaming.

  Dreaming of her beautiful man, her sloe-eyed suitor with the red lips and skin thorn-blossom pale. The dark man with his clothes elegant and fine on him, tapering from the broad shoulders to the slender hips.

  Still sleeping, her legs scissored a pillow, pulling it in to her.

  But he had left her. Even when she had ... even when she had wanted it, had agreed, was aching for him in the grass with her prayer book thrown aside and her hair fanned out in the buttercups. The flower-print frock was up over her thighs, and if she had dared she would have touched herself where she wanted him to touch her, so desperate was her need. And he had smiled and wagged a finger. Left her without a word, her legs spread in the field and her clothes clinging to her.

  Soundlessly and unconsciously, Rachel wept in her lonely bed. Old Mullan was dreaming too.

  'That's a Papist name,' the recruiting sergeant had said, his UVF badges on his shoulders and his eyes as narrow as keyholes.

  'I'm no Pape.'

  'So you'd say fuck the Pope, then?'

  'I-I would.'

  'Say it.' And he had.

  He was crumbling Flanders mud in his grimy fingers, as hard and pale as old chocolate in the baking sun. The sweat ran down under the lining of his helmet and the dust clung to it, streaking his face. His uniform was hot and sweat-soaked, hitched, and itching, and his webbing gnawed at his young shoulders. The dried-out earth glued itself to the blue-black oily barrel of the 303 and powdered the wooden stock as though claiming it. Far off there was the crump of guns.

  Agnes Fay, Michael Fay's grandmother, lay as still and straight as a felled tree in the conjugal bed, breathing softly to Pat's low snore. She was dreaming of boots. Boots kicking the door of her home and men in two-tone uniforms shouldering in, police tunics with soldiers' khaki underneath. Her mother in an agony of terror, her brothers white, whirling for the revolvers gleaming on the chair. And she had plopped her rump down on them as calm as you please, sat on their metal hardness and refused to move as the Black and Tans skeltered through the house and her father stood with his hands on his head. A girl, merely, she had almost wet herself with fear, but had sat on, her skirts hiding treason and saving her brothers from a bullet in the back yard.

  Sean dreamed of shiny tractors ploughing ruler straight furrows and belching smoke into the blue sky. Behind them the settling seagulls were pushed aside by the rising corn, and a man came scything, his blade like a horned moon brought into the sunlight.

  Pat dreamed of horses, and smiled as he slumbered. Michael did not dream, because he was in Rose's arms.

  His younger aunt was awake, feeling for a bulge that would not be there for weeks yet. Her knuckles skimmed over her boy-narrow hips, and she wondered if it were possible that a new life should burst out of them without killing her.

  She remembered. He had stopped her up so that the slick clockwork of her monthly trickle had been dammed. As she was damned. A dark man, a faceless man, he had filled her with heat and pressed her into the cool leaf mould whilst the river had churned on like the rage of her swimming blood and the night rose dark and thick with trees around her. And now there was another heart beating in there.

  Poor Thomas McCandless. Clumsy and eager, she had blamed him for it, let him have what he had been wanting this long time and then she had named him the father. Poor, gulled Thomas, fumbling and red-faced, afraid to look and yet as greedy as a child. A Protestant father of a bastard child, or so they thought. The real father had been a hooded horseman passing by, and as his mount pulled out of the river bottom in the next morning's dawn its hoofs had sent the crumbling bank tumbling into the water. She did not want to see him again, but thought she would if the baby split her apart in its journey toward the light.

  'Souls are cheap,' he had said as he rode away, and she thought he had laughed.

  IN THE RAINFLENSED back yard the stone was dimly glinting, the gutters pouring night-dark liquid into the rainwater barrels. The wolves padded the stone like ghosts, peopling Demon's dreams with fear and fellowship, Sniffing at the animal smells. The horses laid back their ears in the stables and in the fields the sheep were crowded and alert, but nothing molested them. The farm cats watched luminous-eyed from dry corners. The pack milled about in the starless gloom, silent and searching. Once one pawed at the back door. Then they poured away towards the woods like feather-footed phantoms afraid of the dawn.

  FIVE

&nbs
p; FIVE YEARS PASSED.

  Rose never came back, because she was dead.

  The news filtered down to Michael some seven months after her hasty departure. She had been stolen in the night by the priest and a pair of stern nuns, and Michael had cried his heart out at her white face in the back of the big car, looking not much older than himself. For him she died the moment the door closed on her and the car was out of the front yard. She had left his world and was in another one. Death did not enter into it, and he was unsure as to what exactly it was anyway. Death to him was like a letter lost in the post. Someone had gone somewhere he could not visualize. For him death started ten miles from home.

  No one would tell him how or why she had died; it was under-carpet material, a skeleton to find a closet for. He prayed for her, and for the child she had said she was going to get, but he was not entirely sure if she had been joking with him, even now. Rose had always been a great one for stories.

  After a while, an immense while—three years at least—she receded from the forefront of his mind. Rachel took over with the chickens and made a hash of it, for they distrusted her and she could not find half their nests. So there were eggs for breakfast less often. And Grandfather had thrown one of the hired hands out of the house, Thomas McCandless, a youth who was almost a boy. Michael never learnt why. He spent as much time as possible alone or with Mullan. It was safer that way. He had a vague idea, however, that Rose would come back some day, that he would go down to their pool by the bridge one morning and see her sitting there with her toes in the water waiting for him.