The man was about to swing the lure above his head again when the falcon pumped her wings and took off from the tree at a small brown lark. The lark flew up and up, the hawk sticking closely behind, and soon they were on the very edge of sight.
The boy made slits of his eyes so he could watch, as first one bird and then the other took advantage of the currents of air. It almost seemed, he thought, as if the lark were sometimes chasing the hawk. He would have laughed aloud, but the man was too close beneath him.
The birds flew on, one above, one below, then circled suddenly and headed back toward the clearing, this time with the lark cleanly in the lead. The boy’s hands in fists were hard against his chest as he watched, silently cheering first for the little bird, then for the following hawk.
Suddenly the lark swooped downward and the falcon hovered over it, a miracle of hesitation. Then with one long, perilous, vertical stoop, the hawk fell upon the lark, knocking it so hard the little bird tumbled over and over and over until it hit the ground not fifty feet from the man. Never looking away from her dying prey, the falcon followed it to earth. Then she sank her talons into the lark and looked about fiercely, as if daring anyone to take it from her.
The man walked quickly but without excess motion to the hawk. He nodded almost imperceptibly at her, speaking all the while in a continuous flow of soft words. Kneeling, he put one hand on her back and wings and with the other, the ungloved hand, hooded her so swiftly, the boy did not even see it till it was done. Then, standing, the man placed the bird on his gloved wrist, gathered up dead lark and lure with his free hand, and walked smoothly toward the part of the forest he had come from.
Only when the man had disappeared into the underbrush did the boy unwind himself from the tree. Man, falcon, and dead lark were all so fascinating, he could not help himself. He had to see more. So he ran to the edge of the woods and, after no more than a moment’s hesitation, rather like the hawk before beginning her stoop, he plunged in after them.
5. TRAIL
THE MAN’S PATH THROUGH THE TANGLE OF UNDERBRUSH was well marked by broken boughs and the deep impression of his boot heels. He was not difficult to follow. That should have made the boy suspicious, but he was too caught up in the hunt.
In his eagerness to track the man, the boy neglected to note anything about the place, though this was a caution he had learned well over his year in the wild. Still, he knew he could always track back along the same wide swath. So perhaps his hunter’s mind was working.
The thorny berry bushes scratched his legs, leaving a thin red map from hip to ankle, but he was used to such small wounds. Once he trod on a nettle. But he had done so before. It would sting for a while, then slowly recede, leaving only a dull ache that would disappear when his attention was on something else.
Nothing—nothing—could dampen his excitement. Not even the tiny prickle of fear that coursed wetly down his back, between his shoulder blades. If anything, the fear sharpened his excitement.
He walked a few feet, stopped, listened, though it was a blowy day, clouds scudding across a leaden sky. Mostly what he heard was wind in trees. He relied, therefore, on his eyes, and followed the man’s passage through fern and bracken, and the prints alongside a fast-running stream.
Several hours passed like minutes, and still the boy remained eagerly on the man’s trail. Only twice did he actually glimpse the man again. Once he saw the broad back, covered with its leathern coat.
Coat. That was a word suddenly returned to him. Right after, he thought, jerkin. He didn’t know why the two words came together in his mind. So dissimilar and yet—somehow—peculiarly the same. He stopped for a moment, giving the man plenty of time to move on, out of hearing, then whispered the two words aloud.
“Coat.” The word was short, sharp, like a wild dog’s bark.
“Jerkin.” He liked that word better and said it over and over again several more times. “Jerkin. Jerkin. Jerkin.” The last time he said it loud enough to become instantly wary. But when he looked around there was no sign of the man, and he relaxed. Going down into the stream, he bent over to get a drink, lapping at it like an animal. But when he lifted his head out of the water, he smiled and said the two words again. “Coat,” he said. “Jerkin.”
He found the man’s easy trail again and ran a bit, to make up for the lost time.
The second time he saw the man, the man had turned on the path and looked right at him. The boy froze, willing himself to disappear into the brush the way a new fawn and badgers and even red foxes could. He closed his eyes so that they would not shine, so that the blinking of his eyes would not reveal where he was.
It must have worked, because when he peeked through slotted eyes at the man, the man looked right at him and did not seem to see him at all, but kept on stroking the falcon’s shoulder and whispering something to the bird the boy could not hear. The man cocked his head to one side as if considering, as if listening, but the boy remained absolutely still. Then the man turned away and walked on.
The boy followed, but more carefully now, stopping frequently to hide behind a tree or a bush or kneel down in the bracken or lie in the furze. He did not actually have to see the man to know where he was. They were on a well-worn trail now, a path packed down by many years of use. The boy could read the faint boot marks as well as a sharp impression of deer feet, the softer scrapings of badger, even the scratchings of grouse. A dog pack had left its scat, and recently, too. That made the boy nervous, and he remarked the tallest trees in case he had to climb quickly.
His slow reading of this worn pathway occupied him, and he was not paying attention to what lay ahead. So he was surprised when the road turned and opened onto a man-made clearing. A farmhouse squatted near the center of it.
The farmhouse explained the new scents he had been ignoring. For a moment, he hesitated by the last trees and stared.
“House,” he whispered, afraid and yet not afraid. “House.”
6. DREAM
THERE WAS A TRAIL OF SMOKE FROM THE HOUSE chimney and for a long time the boy watched it dreamily. He could almost smell a joint of meat roasting. He could almost remember the crackle of the skin.
Then as the man neared the house a chorus of dogs began to howl. The boy remembered the yellow mastiff and its pack all too well. He stepped into the shadow of the trees and ran back down the road.
As soon as he was too far away to hear the dogs, he forgot them, for his stomach was growling. He had had nothing to eat all day.
It was growing dark, and foraging had to be a quick and careful matter. He found a walnut tree and gathered nuts, as well as late-growth bramble berries. Then, picking up a rock to help him crack the nuts open, he chose a sleeping tree and scrambled up it for the night.
The nuts and berries were enough to stop the fiercest of the hunger pangs. When he fell asleep, the moon hanging over him orange and full, he began to dream.
At first he dreamed of food. Food cooking on a large, open hearth. Then he dreamed of dogs scrabbling on the hearthstones for their share of the cooked meat. The dogs were enormous, with eyes as great as saucers, as great as dinner plates, as great as platters. They stared at him and through him and—in his dream—his skin sloughed off. He watched, skinless, as the dogs ate his skin. Then they turned and stared at him with their big eyes and growled.
He woke in a sweat, shivering, and threw the nutshells down from the tree. He touched his arm and his leg to assure himself that he was whole, skin and all. Then he promised himself he would not fall asleep again.
But he did.
This time he dreamed of women in black robes and black wings who fluttered around him. They opened their mouths, and bird sounds came out.
“Cause!” they screamed at him. “Cause!”
He held out his hand in the dream and was surprised how heavy it seemed. When he looked at it, it was encased in a leather glove with thumb and fingers stiff as tree limbs.
Only one of the black-robed women alighte
d on his hand, her nails sharp as talons, piercing right through the glove.
The pain woke him, and his one hand hurt as if something had pierced the palm. He licked the hurt place and there was a thin, salty, blood taste.
This time he did not fall asleep again but waited, shivering, for the dawn to finally come with its comforting rondel of birdsong.
7. HOUSE
HIS USUAL MORNING INCLUDED A DRINK OF water from the stream and a casual hunt for food. But this morning he saw, through the bare ligaments of trees, the thin line of chimney smoke.
House. The word came unbidden into his mind. And with the thought of house came the idea of food. Not berries and mushrooms and nuts and the occasional silver-finned, slippery fish torn open and devoured bones and all, but food. He was not sure what that meant anymore, but his mouth remembered, and filled with water at the thought.
So he crept back down the path to the edge of the trees and squatted on his haunches, to stare avidly at the house.
There was a stillness about the house, except for that thread of smoke that seemed to unwind endlessly from the chimney.
At the prompting of his stomach, which ached as if it had suddenly discovered hunger for the first time, the boy left the sanctuary of the forest and ventured into the clearing. But he crept cautiously, like any wild thing.
There was a sudden flurry of sharp, excited duckings. A familiar word burst into his head. Hens! He mouthed the word but did not say it aloud.
A high whinnying from one of the two outbuildings answered the hens. “Horse!” This time the boy spoke the word, his own voice reminding himself of the size of the beasts with their soft, broad backs that smelled of home.
He edged closer to the house, sniffing as he went, almost drinking in the odors, his chin raised and quivering.
Then the dogs began to bark and he turned sharply to run.
“Not so fast, youngling,” said the man who loomed, suddenly, by his side and picked him off the ground by the shoulders. The man’s voice was soft, not threatening, but the boy kicked and screamed a high, wild sound, and tried to slice at the man’s face with his nails.
The man dropped him and grabbed both of the boy’s hands with almost one motion, prisoning him as deftly as he had hooded the falcon.
The boy stopped screaming, stopped kicking, but he pulled away from the man, cowering, as if expecting a blow. His face was white, underneath the dirt, but his eyes were so dark as to be almost black, and hard and staring, the green-black of winterberries.
“Now hush ye, son,” the man said in that soft, steady voice. “Hush, weanling, my young one, my wild one. Hush, you damned eelkin. I’ll wash your face and hair and see what hides under that mop. Hush, my johnny, my jo.” The soft murmuration continued as he marched the stone-faced boy all the way to the house and kicked open the door.
8. WILD THING
“MAG, FETCH ME A GREAT TOWEL. NELL, MY GIRL, put water in the tub. I’ve caught a wild thing that followed me home through the wood.” The voice never got hard, though it got quite loud. “Quick now, the two of you. You know how it is with the wild ones.”
Two women with kerchiefs binding their hair and long clay-colored gowns seemed to spring into being from the vast fireplace to do the man’s bidding.
“Oh, sir,” said the girl as she hauled the kettle full of water, “is it a bogle, all nekkid and brown like that? Is it a wodewose?” Her eyes grew big.
“It is a boy,” said the man. “A sharp-eyed, underfed boy not much older than your own cousin Tom. And as for naked, well, he’d not been able to make clothes for himself after his own wore out, there in the middle of the New Forest, poor frightened thing. There are more than one of them put out in the woods nowadays. The nobles can send their extra sons off to a monastery as a gift of oblation, their hands wrapped in altar cloth and their inheritance clutched therein. But a poor man’s son in these harsh times is oft left in the altar of the woods.”
Mag appeared then with the toweling, shaking her head. “He looks not so much frightened, Master Robin, as fierce. Like one of your poor birds.”
“Fierce indeed. And needing taming, I suspect, just like them. But first a bath, I think.” The man smiled as he spoke, ever in that soft voice, while the two serving women clicked and clacked just like hens around the great tub. When at last they had emptied enough water in it and were satisfied with the temperature, Mag nodded and Master Robin dropped the boy in.
The boy had no fear of water, but it was not at all what he had expected. It was hot. Hot! River water, whatever the season, was always cold. Even in the lower pools—the ones he had dammed up for fishing—the water below the sun-warmed surface was cold enough to make his ankles ache if he stayed in too long.
He wanted to howl but he would not give his captors the satisfaction. He wanted to leap out of the bath, but the Robin-man’s great hand was still on him. He didn’t know what to do and indecision, in the end, made up his mind for him, for the fear and the warmth of the water together conspired to paralyze him. And the man kept speaking to him in that soft, steady, cozening voice.
The boy thought about the fawns in the forest, how they could disappear. How he had disappeared before when the man had stared at him. He closed his eyes to slits and willed himself to be gone, away from the man and his voice, away from the women and their hot water, away from the house.
But he had not slept well the last night, his dreams had prevented that. He was hungry, he was frightened, and he was—after all—only eight years old.
He closed his eyes and disappeared instead into a new dream.
In the new dream he was warm and safe and his stomach was full. He was cradled and rocked and sung sweet songs to by women in comforting black robes. They sang something he could remember just parts of:
Lullay, lullay, thou tiny child,
Be sheltered from the wet and wild...
But, he thought within the dream angrily, I am wet and I am wild. He made himself wake up by crossing his fingers, and found himself in a closed-in room.
Alone.
9. NAMES
UNTANGLING HIMSELF FROM THE COVERINGS, the boy crept to the floor and looked around cautiously. The room was low-ceilinged, heavily beamed. A grey stone hearth with a large fireplace was on the north wall. A pair of heavy iron tongs hung from an iron hook by the hearth. The fire that sat comfortably within the hearth had glowing red ember eyes that stared wickedly at him.
Suddenly something leaped from the red coals and landed, smoking, on the stones.
The boy jumped back onto the bed, amongst the tangle of covers, shaking.
The thing on the hearth exploded with a pop that split its smooth skin, like a newborn chick coming out of an egg. A sweet, tantalizing, familiar smell came from the thing. The boy watched as it grew cool, lost its live look. When nothing further happened, and even the red eyes of the fire seemed to sleep, he ran over, plucked up the hazelnut from the stones, and peeled it. His mouth remembered the hot, sweet, mealy taste even before he did.
He ran back to the bed and waited for something more to be flung out to him from the fire. Nothing more came.
But the nut had rekindled his hunger, and with it, his curiosity. He raised his head and sniffed. Besides the smell of roasted nut, beyond the heavy scent of the fire itself, was another, softer smell. The first part of it was like dry grass. He looked over the side of the bed and saw the rushes and verbena on the floor. That and the bed matting of heather supplied the grassy smell. But there was something more.
He scrambled across the wide bed and looked over the side. There, on a wooden tray, was food. Not mushrooms and berries, not nuts and silvery fish. But food. He bent over the food, as if guarding it, and looked around, his teeth bared.
He was alone.
He breathed in the smell of the warm loaf.
Bread, he thought. Then he spoke the name aloud.
“Bread!”
He remembered how he had loved it. Loved it covered with som
ething. A pale slab next to the loaf had little smell.
Butter. That was it.
“But-ter.” He said it aloud and loved the sound of it. “But-ter.” He put his face close to the butter and stuck out his tongue, licking across the surface of the pale slab. Then he took the bread and ripped off a piece, dragged it across the butter, leaving a strange, deep gouge.
“Bread and but-ter,” he said, and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. The words were mangled, mashed in his full mouth, but he suddenly understood them with such a sharp insight that he was forced to shout them. The words—along with the pieces of buttered bread—spat from his mouth. He laughed and on his hands and knees picked up the pieces and stuffed them back in his mouth again.
Then he sat down, cross-legged by the tray, and tore off more hunks of bread, smearing each piece with so much butter that soon his hands and elbows and even his bare stomach bore testimony to his greed.
At last he finished the bread and butter and licked the last crumbs from the tray and the floor around it.
There was a bowl of hot water the color of leaf mold on the tray as well. The bread had made him thirsty enough not to mind the color of the water and he bent over and lapped it up. He was surprised by the sweetness of the liquid and then knew—as suddenly as he had known the name of bread and butter—that it was not ordinary water. But he could not recall its name.
“Names,” he whispered to himself, and named again all the things that had been given back to him, starting with the bread: “Bread. Butter. Horse. House. Hens. Jerkin. Coat.” He liked the sound of these things and said the list of them again.