| Chapter Two |
|
A yearling fox huddled back on its haunches into the undergrowth. The storm clouds had blocked the moon from the sky and their assault was now only moments away. No time for the fox to run back to its earthy den. A scuttling and a few panicked chirrups and then the gentle pitter patter of a few individual raindrops hitting the evergreen foliage or diving between the bare boughs of the deciduous trees to plop onto the brambled leaves beneath. But in a rush the wind came howling through and, as if ripping the belly of the shaggy clouds clean away, brought a torrent of rain in its wake. The violence of the downpour could surely not expect more than the briefest of reigns. Yet whilst it held sway it suffered every little thing in the forest to bow to its might. Lichens and mosses were seared from their arboreal haunts in the onslaught and washed unceremoniously to the forest floor. The boughs in turn creaked and groaned but the wind seemed indifferent to their plea. A crack-crack like gunfire and a tree lost a limb. It hung limply at its side until the sheer dead weight dragged it down, ripping a trail of bark from the trunk in its wake. Birds screamed, their roost stolen from beneath them, their legs still locked onto the falling bough, a sudden squall diffusing their cries and blurring into them the quavering shriek of a nearby owl as it marked its claim on any spoils, or simply bore witness to the movement of the wind. Somewhere far distant blew a moment's suggestion of the howl of a wolf, but the wind soon snuffed it out with howls of its own, leaving nothing but a dimly remembered fragment of a fairy tale. A wolf in ruby slippers was it? Or a princess who grew fur and ran with the pack? And did she eat the witch who cast the shape-shifting spell upon her, or did she marry the wolf in the ruby slippers? Or were they all still sleeping for a thousand years? The rain beat its merciless rhythm onto the stunned and swaying foliage, like the pounding hoof falls of armies of elfin horsemen, charging through the forest with a singular and inimitable intent. And thus it was that the resonance of the shod hooves of another almost of their kind belied its approach. Head down, it galloped hard along the track, baring its riders to the full pelt of the storm. Face down on the horse's neck lay a small boy, the black mess of his hair indistinguishable from that of the horse's mane. Silent white fingers gripped the sodden black tufts, and the boy was motionless but for the animal's heave and thrust of rhythm as it ran. The woman behind him stooped into the night, her face as impassive as a charging jouster's helmet, her eyes slits to weather the barrage of the storm. The reins had tugged long and she held them yet but not taut, and gripped what she could of the mane, her wrists pinning the boy's hips. The wind had risen into her skirt and the rains plastered it around her waist. Her bare legs shone faintly in the dark, and the nakedness of her womanhood jolted with the horse's rock as it ran spooked along the muddying track. She had lost a stirrup, and stretched with her toe to find it, but it bounced and jumped and clattered into the side of the horse and spooked it all the more, and she could not quite hook it. She was hanging on by a prayer. As the mud oozed and bled it revealed uneven cobbles which formed the bedrock of the path and which tried the animal's fetlocks and checked its speed and progress until it slowed to a canter and thence with a snort and a stumble to a walk. The woman gathered up the slack reins, perhaps a little too hastily, and the horse stretched its neck to pull them long again, would not be so easily tamed. She gave the horse its ground. She had gained a little on it, and besides, it must have counted as nothing beside the distance that the horse had taken her from her husband. But how could she see him gone, imagine him so easily wiped out by a little flame? And by her own hand. He had crawled to the door, surely, rolled the flames into submission in the damp earth. The storm's chill torrents would take away his pain, bathe and restore him with its healing waters. She must have seen him now, picking himself up from the ground, sniffing the air to discern their direction and following them yet, intent on finishing what he had started and more besides. The horse continued its purposeful lope along the track. The winds had ceased their animal howling, but the rains had not tempered in the least. She tugged her sodden skirt and tucked the front hem underneath her, never letting go of the reins. Her movements were slow and laboured, as if the witchcraft night were slowly turning her to stone. Two gnarled hands on the carved staff that stirred the cauldron, chanting and mumbling beneath its breath, the night, its face in shadows, cloaked by its own shroud of starless cloud, stirring the cauldron, muscles tight, smoke from the fire musty and thick, mixing with the cloud and creeping, unseen, around the darknesses of the night's tenancy. She poked with her bare toe at the horse's flank, and this time she caught the stirrup, though she barely seemed to know that she had, and slipped the ball of her foot onto the numb metal. The wind and the rain had all but stripped her of her clothing, and the vagaries of the night must have worn more deeply into her than this, but she squeezed her thighs around the animal's flanks and sat the horse well. Hold on, darling, she said to the boy, but she had left it too long before speaking and her voice sounded strange, eerie and insincere, emotionally weightless. The boy did not respond. She leant further forward and kissed his wet matted hair and pressed her lips harder into his head and rubbed her face in his hair and found the boniest parts of her head to rub against his. And still the rain came down. Oh my son, she whispered. The gusting wind blew wrested clumps of old browned bracken across their path, and scuttling snatches of torn spruce, that stopped and started in animal bursts. The horse shied and side-stepped, tightening its neck in a startled whinny, its eyes rolling white and taut. A dark tawny owl chose that moment to swoop across them from behind, letting fly a vehement screech that hit the horse's ears like a brambled switch. The horse screamed in turn, and threw itself skyward in a terrified rear, scrabbling at the air with its forelegs, shaking its head in blind panic. It hit the ground running and tore through the grim gloom, not noticing or not caring that its load was now much lighter. The woman had slipped over its rump and lay askance in the mud, staring into the distance, her son but another shade lost already to that world of shades and gloom. A searing pain in her belly cut even this last link to him, her eyes snapping shut as the pain struck. A warmth oozed between her legs and she knew it for her waters, and that the baby would not wait. Perhaps she thought she could yet make it to town, but another contraction hit as she tried to stand, and knocked her to her knees. She crawled across the mud and stones, one hand feeling a way, the other clutching her belly, as if that might contain the pain. A shallow impression of a ditch ran alongside the path, and she dragged herself across its dank rotting bottom, and tore her hand and face and knees as she ripped through the brambled curtain on the other side. Travelling deer had worked a tunnel through the spiteful growth, and she finally gained passage to the softness of the needled forest floor beyond. Another contraction struck. This time she knew the accompanying scream to be her own, and smacked a hand across her mouth, in case he should somehow hear. She lay back into the dead bracken, her eyes open and staring through the branches above her to the sky. The clouds were thin and tufty now, ragged stragglers that chased the body of the storm. Here and there a star shone through, and perhaps she chose one to be her lucky star, and fixed her gaze upon this one island of light within the vast specked blackness of the firmament, and panted and pushed, her mind free of anything else in all creation. With a final silent shriek she felt the baby slip into the world, but had not the strength to reach down and cradle its mewling form. She passed helplessly into unconsciousness, the spirit able to will only so much upon the living animal of its body. When she awoke the world was gleaming red, the miracle smear of dawn across the sky. Her child was yet warm and alive, nestled between her legs, and she lifted him onto her belly. He trailed his umbilical cord, and she nibbled through it, maybe half thinking she might yet eat the afterbirth for the strength it would give her, but this she could not do, and tossed it weakly aside. He was pulling upon her breast when the pain in her belly hit again. There lay another child within. Jesus, no, she pleaded, but it was too late to unweave the broderie work of the fates. The woman built a little nest of dry pine needles for the boy, and covered him over with cracked bracken. It would have to serve. The second baby came a little easier than the first, and it was a girl. The woman wiped them both with a rag of her skirt, which was still damp, and lay with her back to a hoary spruce trunk, a baby cradled in each arm, supping there or sleeping, or staring at the world surrounding. She perhaps would have risen and walked the track back to the world, but a warm tongue of sun licked them through the spruce's feathery mast, and she must have yet feared meeting her husband along the way. She would wait until the sun began to fall, and keep to the seclusion of the forest floor. Surely nothing would seem impossible now. She might have thought of singing out for a unicorn stallion to bear them to safety, like the one that had carried her other son away from danger in the night, and had one appeared she would probably not have been the least surprised. Tommy's unicorn was black. I always thought that unicorns were white, she said, and gently kissed the babies' heads. Here, my prince, she addressed the boy. You shall wear a magic suit, made of the finest silks, and she dragged a matt of maple leaves from the forest floor and laid them upon his chest. He coughed with the cold damp. And for you, my princess, a garland of beautiful spring blossoms. She sprinkled pine needles over the girl's head, but the girl did not seem to mind, quietly watching her mother's face the while. She leaned back into the tree and closed her eyes, just to rest them. The bark dug into her back through her thin damp cardigan, and she shuffled down into the needles and bracken and laid upon her back, a baby in the crook of each arm, all dappled in the warm noon sun. When she awoke she was shivering and it was dark and the babies were gone.
|
