‘No. But it’s horrible. Horrible.’
‘It is a terribly dangerous, foolish thing to do. Were you attacked?’
‘There was no one there.’
‘I didn’t mean by people. Stand up. Let me look at you.’
Antros began to examine him, peering into his eyes and ears, then took a step back. ‘You seem all right,’ he said. ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’
A shake of the head. ‘Please don’t ask me any questions. Please don’t.’
Antros felt his heart softening, but he didn’t let it show. There were many questions left to be answered before the lad deserved sympathy. Instead he said gruffly, ‘Best come with me then.’
‘No, no. I can’t.’
‘You must. You have to get away from here. It’s dangerous for you. We have to leave now. Come, boy. Do as you are told.’
‘I most certainly will not.’ He peered at him.
‘Do as I ask, then.’
The boy gave in. ‘Very well.’
*
Rosalind was in some disarray as she padded alongside the young man who had rescued her and taken command of the situation. What was she supposed to have done? She didn’t know who he was, what he wanted. She was all alone in the world and didn’t have any protection. She could have refused to go with him, but didn’t want to risk provoking him, just in case he wasn’t as benevolent as his voice made him sound. She had been warned at school about strange men. Not, admittedly, about walking through deserted forests with strange men armed with a bow and arrow, but she was sure that the general principle was sound. If she was in some sort of danger, she didn’t want Aliena to be caught up in it as well. Rosalind was sure she could find her own way back to the shepherd’s hut. She hoped so, at least.
Her rambling train of thought brought her back to the moment when she had walked so carelessly into the centre of that copse of oak trees. The moment she had looked up she had realised what all the shapes were, half-hidden in the gloom, covered in leaves, and what the sweet smell was.
It was filled with dead bodies, half-consumed, rotting, torn to pieces by birds and animals, decayed by damp and covered in flies and insects. There were dozens if not hundreds of them, strewn over the ground. Before she began to run, she noticed the corpse of a young child, scarcely more than a baby. Its skin was green, its body eaten away, and there was a clump of mushrooms growing out of one eye. Then the smell began to overwhelm her, sweet and not unpleasant until you knew what it was; the sounds, the innocent sounds of woodlands, until you know why they were so loud and insistent.
She sank to the ground and began heaving. She vomited, violently and terribly, all of her breakfast, everything in her stomach welling out of her as those smells and images and sounds crowded into her brain. She clutched her stomach in pain and heaved again, then for a third time.
She was panting and exhausted from the involuntary effort, feeling the prickly sweat on her back and in her hair from the violence, the foul taste in her mouth which was at least better than her memories. She rolled over in the grass and closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of the midday sun on her. Even so, she was shivering in shock and distress.
Her companion swept the distant treeline until he was satisfied they were alone, then sat down a few feet away from her. When she stopped heaving and opened her eyes again he proffered a flask of water.
‘Rinse out your mouth a few times; get rid of the taste. If there are any spirits left inside you it should help flush them out.’
She did as she was told, then wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her jacket.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘They let you off lightly. You cannot have had a bad intent.’
‘Who let me off?’
‘The spirits. You shouldn’t have gone in there. It is not a place for the living. You were an intruder. You were lucky they didn’t possess you, or send you mad.’
Rosalind sniffed. ‘I don’t think they needed to. I think I’m mad already. What is that place, anyway?’
‘Do you really not know …?’
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘I really do not know. I don’t. Nothing. Do you understand? Can’t you just answer a perfectly straightforward question?’
Antros took a step back in surprise at this outburst, especially as, instead of being apologetic, she glared at him defiantly, daring him to reprimand her.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, I can answer a perfectly straightforward question. That is the place of the dead. One of them, at least. For the people of Willdon. When someone dies, their body is laid there, to be returned to the forest. It is a sacred place, under the protection of the spirits. The living do not go into it without good reason. You trespassed and so the spirits entered you and made you ill. I hope that is all they intend.’
‘That was adrenalin.’
‘We do not name them,’ he said. ‘To us they are just the spirits of the forest.’
Rosalind sighed. ‘Whatever you say.’
‘You must be cleansed. I will take you to Pamarchon. He will know what to do.’
‘Pamarchon?’ she said, looking up at him suddenly.
‘Don’t be afraid. He is not as you may have heard. Now I must insist that you come with me.’
‘Oh,’ she replied, her mood changing suddenly. ‘If you insist.’
Antros was caught off balance again. He had expected to have to force the lad against his will.
‘Good. This way. Please.’
*
They walked for an hour – or maybe it was ten minutes; she wasn’t paying attention. After a while she heard voices in the distance. The smell of smoke drifted into her nose, and then the aromas of food being cooked. She heard laughter – a good sign. Happy people don’t get too rough.
A camp site, but quite unlike anything she had seen before. Not that she had ever been camping. Her parents didn’t like that sort of thing. She loved her parents, she really did. But they knew nothing about being young. Rosalind suspected, in fact, that they never had been young. Still, she knew what camp sites were like – identical brown or grey canvas tents, a camp fire, another canvas construction for the toilets. Neat orderly rows. Washing on a line.
This was nothing like that. It was chaotic, for a start, with tents pitched everywhere. If you could call them tents. Some were made of bits of material, true enough. But others were made out of tree branches covered in soil and grass. Some were big, some small. Some rested on the ground, others were dug into a sort of ditch. Some were even constructed out of stone, piled high and resting on logs. All around was disorderly as well. Children ran about screaming, weaving in and out among the adults, playing and chasing each other. Women criss-crossed the ground with jugs of water or washing on their heads. In the far corner some men were having a sword fight, elsewhere others were chopping wood. Everywhere people talked, loudly and cheerfully, while cows and sheep and chickens wandered about, ignored by the numerous dogs and cats equally.
She took in the scene then stopped, open-mouthed. With a rush of amazement she recognised Jay, who was standing about twenty yards away, talking to a woman who was sitting cross-legged on the ground, peeling potatoes and throwing them into a large metal pot beside her. She was about to go over or call a greeting when Antros came back and took her by the arm. ‘Prisoners,’ he said. ‘Don’t go near them.’
42
When Chang stepped through the ironwork in the cellar into the world on the other side, it was not that time stopped; he was aware of its passage, but simply did not know what it meant. He no longer knew anything of himself or his surroundings; he was hungry but had no idea how to feed himself; he was thirsty but it took days before the idea of drinking occurred to him. He crawled in a delirium, with no personality or memories or sense of himself. He stumbled around thoughtlessly, falling and tripping, often lying on the ground in puddles or in bracken so his skin was scratched and bloodied, his clothes tor
n and made filthy.
He heard a murmur of voices but could not understand what was being said. He felt himself being picked up, manhandled onto the back of a cart. He stared upwards into the blue of the sky as the cart lumbered along, not knowing where he was going or why. He should have been afraid, but he couldn’t even manage that.
They took him somewhere, laid him down. Someone removed his clothes and bathed him. Fed him water and some sort of broth; nursed him. He slept, for days and days. As he slept, his memories once more returned, but only partially. Now there were just dislocated and meaningless fragments.
*
After a very long time, Chang realised how great was the damage he had suffered. The effect, he realised, must be cumulative, a disruption on top of a disruption. The only thing he could do – and even that was an effort – was to shut down all the higher functions, the ones fed by the various implants, and operate more or less as nature had provided, by guesswork, memory and intuition. It was desperately hard.
This was Anterwold, then, Angela’s invention, and as he slowly came round and began to observe it, he had to admit her achievement was extraordinarily impressive. Not for the first time, he was awestruck by her abilities. Every leaf and twig and insect seemed to be perfect. The climate fitted in logically with the vegetation, the vegetation with the wildlife, the wildlife with the society that had grown up inside it. He didn’t like it, this primitive, dirty place with its simple bovine pleasures, its lack of movement and incurious approach to everything, but it undeniably worked.
He had no choice but to stay with the people who had found him. They gave him a name, Jaqui; they called him that because, apparently, he reminded them of some character in a story. They, not he, decided he was a hermit. He was expected to speak semi-nonsense and they were ready to interpret his mumbling confusion as wisdom. People began to ask him things, and nodded knowingly at his meaningless answers. Occasionally he saw some obvious stupidity and he could not help himself. He would, very briefly, access his memory to diagnose an illness and then say what should be done about it. He paid for that with splitting headaches but this infirmity, also, was seen as something almost holy. Others asked for advice: should they get married? Would their child be healthy? Always he threw the question back: what do you want to do? This gained him a reputation for wisdom, which he did not deserve, and kindness, which he did not want. He wanted to be left alone, so he moved out of the village into an abandoned shepherd’s hut where he wouldn’t be so bothered. But still they came to ask questions and, in return, they fed him and looked after him. Slowly he realised how fortunate he was. He had permission to act strangely; it was expected. He wasn’t going to starve or be locked up.
But he had to escape; weeks went by before he could reconstruct that last conversation with Angela and realise that his best chance of returning was long past. Six days, she had given him. He had missed it. Nor did he know where he had arrived, so he couldn’t even go back there in the hope that, perhaps, the light would be there.
His one remaining chance was the emergency fallback. The fifth day of the fifth year at Willdon. What in God’s name did that mean? They had heard of Willdon, but not what her instruction meant. But when it passed, Angela was going to try to shut the whole thing down. In theory, that could not be done if he and this girl were still in it, but he knew her well enough not to underestimate her. She might find a way. He did not want to be in here if she did.
*
Chang came across the scholar Etheran after he had been there for three months. He had left the village of Hooke which had adopted him as its mascot and gone wandering to try and find out what Anterwold was. He met Etheran as he stopped at a wayside inn to beg for somewhere to sleep. The scholar watched as the landlord shook his head reluctantly. ‘No room,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘May I beg you to reconsider?’ the scholar said. ‘He looks in need of rest.’
The kindness warmed him, and he answered the questions that followed. Where are you from? Why are you a hermit? He was unlike any person Chang had yet met in this static, unchanging place. There was a flicker of autonomy there and he knew he had to investigate it. Soon he became the one asking questions, pressing to see if Angela’s defences had held up. Could Etheran begin to change, think, develop new ideas?
He probed for answers and found the man alarmingly responsive. He was stick-thin, with long arms and fingers, and he stroked his chin methodically as he listened. But his eyes shone with interest; he laughed with delight when he could not answer something. He seemed to enjoy the encounter.
Etheran even sought him out after he returned to Hooke. Chang deliberately tried to provoke him, to see how far he would go. But even when confronted with his ignorance, even when Chang made him feel like a fool, Etheran came back with questions of his own, and fumbling, confused answers.
It was a very peculiar experience; Etheran was educated and intelligent, but there were many things he simply could not understand, rather like a colour-blind person being told about the blue of the sky. What happened to send people into this exile everyone in Anterwold saw as the beginning of time? Why did they come back? When was this? A look of puzzlement, first at the questions, then at the realisation that they had never occurred to him before.
Etheran was overwhelmed at the thought that there was useful information that existed outside the great Story of Ossenfud. That the stones and rooftops of buildings could say something it could not. The look on his face would have been comical if Chang had not had some inkling of the sheer effort involved, and of the danger if he began to throw off the shackles of immobility.
He left it there that day, but over the next few weeks and months Chang talked to him some more, then wrote him letters, cajoling and encouraging, bitter and frustrated by turns, deliberately trying to push him to breaking point.
Eventually Etheran started coming up with ideas of his own. ‘Could it be,’ he said, ‘that you could add together the rules of the domain holders, use them to date events? In the third year, or the twentieth year, of a person’s rule?’
Once the idea had taken hold it grew in him. Surely you could also use records of birth, of marriage, all sorts of things? Just think what that might tell you … That was his last visit. Two days later Etheran left, his head brimming over with new ideas. But the effort was too much for him. Just as he was getting to the point of understanding, he died suddenly and alone and all his ideas were lost.
Angela’s defences had held. Chang learned this from another scholar. This man, Henary, was brought in by the people of Hooke to look him over and see if he was dangerous. A curious encounter; the scholar did his duty, asked questions, but was clearly not very interested. He did not want to cause the hermit any difficulties, and Chang did not wish to experiment with him as well; Etheran had given him all the information he needed. So he kept him at arm’s length, not least because he could discern little of Etheran’s curiosity. Henary was a more sombre, less readable character altogether.
The encounter passed off without significance, until Henary told him of Etheran’s death. Chang was sad and relieved at the same time. He had almost grown fond of the thin, eager figure, admired the immense efforts he made to break through into a new world of understanding. But it could not be done. Etheran’s heart had given way, rather than allow him to take the next step. That was good, but Chang felt a stab of responsibility, almost as if Etheran had been a real person.
Only at the end did Henary give him something to think about. He was off to Willdon, he said. The seventh Festivity of Thenald …
*
After a few days, Chang left to investigate. He was lucky; after a day, a passing cart gave him a lift most of the way, exchanging the journey for company. The driver, whose name was Callan, was on his way back home.
‘Tell me about this place.’
Willdon, Callan assured him, was the best, most beautiful, most fertile spot in the world. The trees were greener, the crops healthier, the bird
s fatter, than anywhere else. Only when the subject of the Lord of the domain came up did his face darken. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Thenald’s a proud man. I suppose he has something to be proud of.’
‘Perhaps he will die of old age?’
‘Not him. Young and healthy, built like an ox.’
‘Mellowed by children?’
‘May such blessings be given him, but he’s been married a year and no sign as yet. A lovely woman, cleverer than he is, I reckon.’
Chang pondered this as he slept on the floor of the soldier’s hut that evening. What to do? The opportunity to go back would appear on the fifth day of the fifth year of the ruler of Willdon, that was what Angela said, and the current ruler was already in his seventh year and would remain in office until he died. So did he have to wait until then, then wait another five years after that? What if this Thenald lived for another twenty years?
He considered it some more when he first saw Thenald from a distance and realised how strong and healthy he was. He sat and meditated on his options, revolted by one, despairing at the other.
43
The Abasement had been particular to Willdon, and it was both impressive and strangely moving. Other places had similar things, of course, but none were so complete, brutal even, in their display. Henary stood lost in thought as the little party disappeared into the woods, and, though he knew perfectly well why they had left, he still allowed himself a flicker of frustration. Couldn’t it have waited a day? Or even a few hours until they established what had happened to Rosalind? Well, no. It had to be on the precise day, at the precise hour, that Lady Catherine had ascended into her position as ruler of Willdon. Saying it wasn’t convenient, that there were more important things, would have been noted and resented. It would have sapped her power, undermined her position.
At least, before she vanished into the forest, she had set in motion a thorough search. Her retainers and servants were scouring the grounds but Henary had few hopes that they would find anything. The ancient manuscript told him. The girl had fallen in love, and he was certain she had gone after the man whose affections she sought. She had not been coerced or forced. She had not been kidnapped. He almost wished she had been.