Shadow of the Wolf (17 page)

I
n Robin’s new black world a single image appears, over and over: a lancing knife, descending towards his face, drawing closer and closer, not stopping even when the hot point of the blade disappears inside the jelly of his eye. The blade digs deeper, he relives the searing pain. It stops and there is a moment of relief. Then the cycle begins again.

Something else repeats in his mind, equally torturous. The voice of a young woman:
They
did
follow you! You led them to me!

Since the fight with the soldiers, a year could have passed, or a day. This moment it could be midnight, or midday. Time no longer moved. Why would it? There was no future for it to move towards. True, Robin heard certain temporal clues: the tolling of the bell in the village; the rhythmic creaking of the waterwheel; the
clink
,
clink
of Gord Moore hammering in his forge. But these things no longer marked the passage of time; they were mere echoes of a past life. Spirits sent to taunt him over all he had lost.

The waterwheel moaned:
She’s. Gone. Too. She’s. Not. Coming. Back.
Gord Moore’s hammer spat:
It. Was. Your. Fault.

Sometimes Robin heard people speaking. But whoever these phantoms were, they had merely stolen the voices of
people he used to know. One sounded like Mabel Felstone, but she said things Mabel would never have said. One day Robin overheard her saying: ‘Take Robin to the forest and leave him there.’

And he felt the man who was not Narris Felstone helping him to his feet and leading him out of the house and away from the village.

So Robin found himself in Winter Forest. It was colder, but otherwise it was the same here as it had been in the house. He was still locked in this black coffin, haunted by the image of the lancing knife and the young woman’s voice.

But slowly his mind began to clear and Robin realized it
was
different here, after all. Here there were signs that life was moving forward as it always had and always would. Stags bellowed and grunted, the crack of their antlers echoing through the trees like battling monsters. The otherworldly wail of young foxes fighting for a territory of their own. And everywhere the sense of autumn desperation: the snuffling scratching noises of creatures eating and burying the last glut of food before the dearth of winter. Birds flitting after the final flush of insects.

Robin sat and listened to all this and time juddered back into motion. And that was when a new image appeared in his mind. It was of a man with a ruined face, dressed all in black, and there was an arrow buried in his chest.

This did not happen in the past. This must be waiting in the future. The future existed. Suddenly everything that had happened made a strange kind of sense: his parents disappearing; the fire at the manor; Robin training with Sir Bors; Marian in that cage. All these events were waymarkers leading to this single future event: the man in black with an arrow in his chest. Robin was going to make this happen. He
didn’t know when; he couldn’t begin to imagine how; but this was a fact.

As this understanding dawned, Robin became aware of something else: Narris Felstone intended to kill him. He could not allow this to happen.

Not now.

So Robin said: ‘I am going to kill him.’

It worked. Narris laid down the axe. Next time he visited he brought food and drink, and eventually he brought Robin’s bow.

Robin rolled a small ball of moss in his palms. For the thousandth time he flicked the flint against the firesteel of his strike-a-light. Once again the spark didn’t take. A cold wet wind blew across his face and all around him the ground was sodden and for a moment he wanted to give up – this was impossible.

No,
he told himself.
You made fire with your father countless times, in conditions far worse than this. In swirling snow and thunderstorm. Back then you could have made fire with your eyes closed. So, you can do it now.

He flicked the strike-a-light. This time he smelled smoke. He breathed on the moss and kept breathing until it was smouldering hot and he could no longer hold it in his hands. He lowered the moss onto wood shavings he had whittled with his knife. Gradually, carefully, he added more twigs to the hissing fire, breathed on it, coaxed it fully to life.

He wanted to stand and shout the triumph of it. But he concentrated on keeping the fire fed, while ensuring it could breathe. It had taken him a long time to get to this point – his fingers covered in burns, his stomach churning with hunger. But it was worth it – the feeling of doing this thing for himself.

When the fire was robust he pushed two stones into the flames and after a while he removed them with a stick and spread them with the oat paste Narris had brought. He smelled the oatcakes cooking and again he felt that sense of achievement.

He had cooked a meal for himself.

It wasn’t much, but it had begun.

Robin was sitting in his shelter, arranging sticks on a fire he had built at its entrance. He heard footsteps through the wet leaves. Narris had returned. Robin felt him slide into the shelter. They sat in silence. Rain dripping through the roof.

‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ Robin said. ‘What’s wrong? Have you brought the axe again? You don’t need it.’

No answer. Narris’s slow, steady breathing.

‘I’m learning to survive,’ Robin said. ‘You don’t need to kill me.’

A hand reached to touch his shoulder. Robin listened to the
churr
and
chack
of a nightingale, and from somewhere far off the hooting of an owl.

‘It’s after dark, isn’t it? You don’t normally come here this late.’

Still no answer. Robin turned his head. There was a smell like freshly skinned rabbits. A musky aroma like a dog with wet fur.

You’re not Narris. Who are you?

Whoever it was took their hand from Robin’s shoulder. They edged out of the shelter and got to their feet. They stood there for what felt like a long time.

Finally, a woman’s voice said: ‘Kill you?’ She laughed softly, then said: ‘After waiting so long?’

She laughed again, then turned, and her footsteps faded through the leaves.

More footsteps. This time they brought Narris’s voice. ‘Spiced beer. And sweetmeal, so you can make flatbread. Don’t expect much more where that came from. I have to get back. Mother’s getting worse. Here, your fire is going out.’ He bent to blow on the embers.

‘Leave it,’ Robin said. ‘I can do it.’

‘Fine. But snow is on its way, Robert Wyser says. Next time I’ll try to bring another blanket – anything we can do to make your shelter warmer.’

‘I’m taking care of it,’ Robin said.

Narris left without another word. And by the time he could visit again, Robin would be far from here, and far beyond Narris’s aid.

D
uring the night something had happened to the sound of the world. It had become softer, more muted. Robin put a hand out of his shelter and felt snowflakes on his palm. His eye wounds wept in the cold. Birds had woken more anxious than ever, scurrying desperately after berries, calling frantically to one another.

And there were other noises this morning. Sounds that didn’t belong. They were faint at first, but growing clearer.

A cough. A snort. A metallic rustle and clink.

These noises stirred fear in Robin. They evoked awful images in his mind: red cloaks, studded boots, spiked clubs.

A branch snapped, close by. A man laughed.

Marian’s words turned over in his thoughts:
A nightmare you can never escape because it flows into you. It
becomes
you
.

He scrambled from his shelter. He slung his unstrung bow across his back. He searched wildly for his backpack – found it, hooked it over his shoulder. He turned away from the menacing sounds and stumbled away. He tripped immediately, fell hard on his knees. He got up, ran again, arms outstretched before his face.

‘Look, what’s that?’ a man shouted.

‘A vagrant,’ another voice said. ‘Or an outlaw, all the way
out here. Might be a price on his head. Best take him in. Better than going back empty-handed.’

A snapping noise,
kittissh
.

‘After him. Yah, yah.’

Robin stumbled through the blackness. He ran hard into a tree, fell to the ground, tasting blood, spitting out a tooth. He dragged himself up, shuffled forward in a half crouch.

The snapping noise,
kittissh
. A stinging pain at the back of his leg. He stumbled, fell once more, crawled on hands and knees.

‘Then get off your damned horse,’ one of the men was saying. ‘Get down on all-fours like him if you have to. Just bring him to me. Now.’

Some of the rangers had dismounted and were coming up behind Robin.

‘What
is
it?’ one of them said.

‘A wildling?’ said another. ‘Look at the way it moves. Is it blind? God’s teeth, it
is
– look at the cuts across its eyes.’

‘Deaf, dumb, blind – I couldn’t care less. Grab it and let’s go. I
do not
want to spend the night in this place. Two more traps to check and then home. That thing almost got us lost in here.’

A hard blow to Robin’s ribs. He curled in a ball around his pack, gasping for breath. Another kick to his back.

He felt something being tied around his waist. The rope tautened and he was hauled to his feet. He was dragged, stumbling, and collided with a tree. He was pulled in another direction and fell down and landed hard on his left arm. The soldiers were laughing.

‘Watch this, watch this,’ one of the men was saying.

‘This way, over here, through these thorns.’

Robin stumbled and fell and was dragged up and fell once more.

‘That’s enough,’ another man said. ‘Stop jacking about. You can have your sport when we’re out of this Godforsaken forest. Treadfire, bind its arms. Tie it behind your horse. Let’s get moving.’

Where he lay, face down in the snow, struggling for breath, Robin felt a soldier binding his arms behind his back.

F
rom somewhere high above and far away a fearsome noise began. A grunting, bellowing sound, impossibly loud – like the roaring of fifty king stags.

A ranger was saying: ‘Treadfire, bind its arms. Tie it behind your horse. Let’s get moving.’

And then the noise shook the trees and the pressure on Robin’s back eased. Something – or someone – slumped into the snow.

The bellowing rose again, more monstrous than ever.

Robin wriggled forward and was free. Cords hampered his arms but they were not fully tied. He shook them loose as he ran. The bellowing seemed to have frightened the Sheriff’s men … in which case …

Robin headed towards the noise. He plunged into a wall of the thickest, sharpest undergrowth – thorn and bramble clawing at his skin. He gritted his teeth and charged forward. Ahead of him the fearsome noise had stopped. Behind him he heard the rangers come back to life.

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Get after him.’

‘Where could he …?’

‘You let go of him? Treadfire, you—’

The undergrowth stopped clawing at Robin, opening up to allow him passage. He found himself on a steep incline. He tried to stand but low branches overhung the space, forming a tight tunnel.

He crawled onwards and upwards on hands and knees. The ground was rutted, frosted mud, cutting his palms. Behind him rustling slithering sounds made him imagine the tunnel closing in his wake, vines and branches meeting and locking their limbs.

He kept crawling and he emerged into a flat, mossy space. He sat with his back against a tree, breathing hard, a cold sweat trickling down his neck. He listened for signs that the men had followed up the tunnel, but they were still thrashing around far below.

‘… Nolan … Nolan … you stupid son of …’

‘Where …? How could he have …?’

‘Stupid … Nolan …!’

From what they were saying it seemed one of the men had run off and was now lost. The others moved further away, their voices fading. For now Robin was safe. But he thought about trying to find his way back to his camp, and to Narris, and he knew it was impossible. He was on his own.

He survived for almost three weeks in that place. He explored all sides of it with his fingers. It was a large, open glade, set in a natural bowl, ringed with oak and ash and hornbeam. Within the bowl was a smaller ring of seven yew trees, ancient by the feel of their trunks: hollow and knotted like rope. There was a stream, but it was locked up with ice.

For now the snow had stopped, but it was very cold. Groping his way back and forth, he began to collect fallen branches and to cut cordage from vines. It was painfully slow work, but eventually he constructed a small shelter with a tiny
fire at its centre. He slept on pine needles and moss to defeat the frost.

Hunger gnawed at him. He ate grass and bark just to quieten his twisting stomach. When he was lucky he would dig through a rotting tree trunk and find a devil’s-coach-horse beetle to crunch or a line of weevils to collect on his tongue.

The nights were growing colder. After five days, or perhaps it was seven, or nine, he woke and his fire was extinguished and the cold had sunk so deep in his bones he felt rooted to the forest floor. He felt so weak he was sure, this time, he would not be able to stand. But he struggled from the shelter, got to his feet, and the search for meagre food began once more.

He imagined Marian was with him and they were children again and this was some game they were playing.

Feel under this rock for slugs,
Marian was saying.
Come on, slow goat, you’ll waste away to nothing at this rate. Don’t you dare give up. Over this way, what’s this? Mushrooms!

She was right: a miniature village of fungi, wrapped around the base of an oak. Slimy to the touch. Robin was running a desperate tongue across dry lips. But still he hesitated.

Come on, eat up
, Marian said.

‘Remember, once, a mushroom almost killed you,’ Robin answered her, aloud. ‘These could be the same. I can’t see if they’re safe or poison.’

Don’t be such a baby,
Marian said.
Anyway, you’ve got no choice. You’ll die if you don’t.

‘I might die if I do.’

Then what have you got to lose?

He broke off a piece of mushroom and put it in his mouth. Just chewing now was hard work. But it was beefsteak fungus, and delicious. He feasted.

But that had been days ago. The last of the fungi was long
gone. He dug in the ground with his knife, searching for worms, but they had disappeared far underground and would not re-emerge until spring. There was no sign of any more bugs of any kind. He sat for hours, scraping moss from a log and licking the tangy iced slime from his knife.

His dreams and waking life had swapped places. When he was sleeping he could see the world in all its colours – he was in the dining hall back at Sir Bors’ citadel, eating ducks’ eggs and wheels of cheese and laughing with Bones and the others. And then he would wake, and his eyes would try to open, but there were only layers of blackness: the darkness behind his eyes and the weight of Winter Forest, stretching endlessly in every direction. An abyss as boundless as the hunger in his stomach.

The cold had become a numb presence that was eating him from within. When Robin woke this morning his fingers cracked with frost. There were flurries of snow.

Get up
, Marian said.
Move around. If you don’t you’ll freeze to the spot. You always were a slow goat, but you’ll be a frozen-stone goat if you don’t move around.

‘I’m too cold to move,’ Robin muttered.

You’re too cold
not
to move! You need to rebuild your fire. Get up, find an ash tree. Ash burns green and wet, your father taught you that.

Robin used his knife to strip the bark from an ash branch and then to whittle wood shavings from the dryer wood inside. He rolled frosted moss between his palms to use as kindling. His frozen fingers did not want to grip the strike-a-light and it took him hour upon hour to get even one spark. When finally he did the moss only smouldered, failed to become flame.

Shuddering violently he repeated the process. Each time he thought this would be his last chance: if he failed this time
he would die. Once again he rolled the moss in his red-raw palms. He gripped the strike-a-light in his claw-like fingers. He tried again.

Eventually he smelled smoke and he cupped the flame in his palm and breathed on it and gently lowered the burning kindling onto the wood shavings. He nursed the fire and added ash twigs and crouched over the flame and felt some life returning to his veins. He laid moss next to the fire and when it was dry he stuffed it inside his boots and his surcoat to trap more of his body warmth.

There, you’re winning
, Marian said.
The cold will never beat you.

‘Winning?’ Robin said. ‘Or saving myself for starvation?’

There was no food. He cut strips from the top of his goatskin boots, chewed the bits of leather. He was vaguely aware it was a pointless exercise, but he was desperate for anything to swallow into his stomach.

If he could have peered into an ice-crusted pool he would not have recognized his reflection: at the academy Sir Bors had made the squires keep their clothes clean and their hair short; now Robin’s hair was wild and his cloak was torn on thorns and matted with mud and moss. His once stocky frame was shrinking; his cheeks thin and pale as winter.

Handsome knight
, Marian was saying.
Sir Robin of the goat. Slow hood of the woods.

His thoughts were becoming muddled and he was vaguely aware he was talking to himself. ‘You have to get up now, Robin,’ he was saying. ‘You have not frozen into the ground, it only feels as if you have. You are not a part of the earth, not yet. It’s time for a homecoming feast. Suckling pig and pickled pears. Your parents are here, and Thane and Hal. Get up now or you’ll be late.’

Behind his eyes he sees a giant mushroom, dagger-shaped,
growing and growing until it blots out the sun and turns the world pitch-black.

He had stopped shivering, which he vaguely realized was a bad sign.
So that’s that
, he thought.
Here’s the end.

Even Marian had given up. She had stopped screeching at him to find more food. He tried to keep his thoughts quiet so he wouldn’t wake her.

An hour ago he had found a millipede amid the mush of leaves. He had killed it in his fingers and eaten it thankfully. But the effort of the search had exhausted him. He lay flat, wedging himself against a moss-quilted log, a deathly stupor washing over him.

He knew, for certain this time, that when sleep came he would not be getting back up. Half of him felt impossibly relieved; the other half was consumed by a deep, cold sorrow connected to memories of home: his mother’s singing drifting down the valley; his brothers teaching him to swim in Mill Pond. Marian, and their tower, reading stories by lamplight in their den. Their plans to explore together the far corners of the world.

All the things he had lost and everything that had lain in store but now would never be.

All of it fading. Finally to be washed away by this last bottomless sleep.