“They blame us for what happened to their village,” said Roland to Fletcher. “Why should they be grateful to those who took the roofs from above their heads?”
Fletcher looked embarrassed.
“There are those who say that the Beast followed you, and that you should never have been allowed to enter the village in the first place,” he said. He glanced at David quickly, unwilling to meet his eye. “Some have spoken about the boy and how the Beast attacked him instead of you. They say that he is cursed, and we are well rid of him and you.”
“Are they angry with you for bringing us here?” asked David, and Fletcher seemed thrown slightly by the boy’s solicitude.
“If they are, then they will soon forget. Already we are planning to send men into the forest to cut down trees. We will rebuild our homes. The wind saved most of the houses to the south and west, and we will share our living spaces with one another until we have rebuilt. In time, they will come to realize that, had it not been for you, there would be no village at all, and many more would have died in the jaws of the Beast and her young.”
Fletcher handed Roland a sack of food.
“I can’t take this,” said Roland. “You will all have need of it.”
“With the Beast dead, the animals will return, and we will have prey to hunt once again.”
Roland thanked him and prepared to turn Scylla to the east.
“You are a brave young man,” Fletcher said to David. “I wish there was something more that I could give to you, but all I could find was this.”
In his hand he held what looked like a blackened hook. He gave it to David. It was heavy, and had the texture of bone.
“It is one of the Beast’s claws,” said Fletcher. “If anyone ever questions your bravery, or you feel your courage ebb, take it in your hand and remember what you did here.”
David thanked him and stored the claw in his pack. Then Roland spurred Scylla on, and they left the ruins of the village behind them.
They rode in silence through the twilight world, its appearance rendered more spectral yet by the fallen snow. Everything seemed to glow with a bluish tinge, and the land appeared both brighter and yet more alien. It was very cold, and their breath hung heavily in the air. David felt the little hairs in his nostrils freeze, and the moisture from his breath formed crystals of ice upon his eyelashes. Roland rode slowly, taking care to keep Scylla away from ditches and drifts for fear that she might injure herself.
“Roland,” said David at last. “There’s something that’s been bothering me. You told me that you were just a soldier, but I don’t think that’s true.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Roland.
“I saw how you gave orders to the villagers and how they obeyed you, even the ones who weren’t sure they liked you. I have seen your armor and your sword. I thought that the decoration on them was just bronze or colored metal, but when I looked more closely, I could see that it was gold. The sun symbol on your breastplate and your shield is made of gold, and there is gold on your scabbard and on the hilt of your sword. How can that be, if you are just a soldier?”
Roland did not answer for a time, then he said, “I was once more than a soldier. My father was lord of a vast estate, and I was his eldest son and heir. But he did not approve of me or of the way that I lived my life. We argued, and in a fit of anger he banished me from his presence and from his lands. It was not long after our fight that my quest for Raphael began.”
David wanted to ask more, but he sensed that whatever lay between Roland and Raphael was private and very personal. To pursue it further would have been rude, and would have been hurtful to Roland.
“And you?” asked Roland. “Tell me more about yourself and your home.”
And David did. He tried to explain some of the wonders of his own world to Roland. He told him of airplanes and radio, of cinemas and cars. He spoke of the war, of the conquest of nations and the bombing of cities. If Roland thought these things were extraordinary, he did not show it. He listened to them the way an adult might listen to a child’s constructed tales, impressed that a mind could create such fantasies but reluctant to share their creator’s belief in them. He seemed more interested in what the Woodsman had told David of the king, and of the book that held his secrets.
“I too have heard that the king knows a great deal about books and stories,” said Roland. “His realm may be falling to pieces around him, but he always has time for talk of tales. Perhaps the Woodsman was right to try to lead you toward him.”
“If the king is weak, as you say, then what will happen to his kingdom when he dies?” asked David. “Does he have a son or a daughter who will succeed him?”
“The king has no children,” said Roland. “He has ruled for a very long time, since before I was born, but he has never taken a wife.”
“And before him?” asked David, who had always been interested in kings and queens and kingdoms and knights. “Was his father king?”
Roland struggled to remember.
“There was a queen before him, I think. She was very, very old, and she announced that a young man, one whom nobody had ever seen before but who was soon to come, would rule the realm in her place. That was what happened, according to those who were alive then. Within days of the young man’s arrival, he was king, and the queen went to her bed and fell asleep and never woke again. They say that she seemed almost…grateful to die.”
They came to a stream, frozen over by the plummeting temperature, and there they decided to rest for a short while. Roland used the hilt of his sword to break the ice so that Scylla could drink from the water beneath. David wandered along the edge of the stream while Roland ate. He was not hungry. Fletcher’s wife had given him great slabs of homemade bread and jam for breakfast that morning, and they were still sitting in his stomach. He sat on a rock and dug in the snow for stones to throw upon the ice. The snow was deep, and soon his arm was buried in it. His fingers touched some pebbles—
And a hand shot out of the snow beside him and gripped him just above the elbow. It was white and thin, with long, jagged nails, and with enormous force it pulled him from the rock and into the snow. David opened his mouth to yell for help, but a second hand appeared and clamped itself across his lips. He was dragged beneath the drift, the snow falling on top of him so that he could no longer see the trees and sky above, the hands never loosening their hold upon him. He felt hard ground at his back and was overcome by a terrible sense of suffocation, and then the earth too collapsed and he found himself in a hollow of dirt and stone. The hands released him, and a light shone through the darkness. Tree roots hung down from above, gently caressing his face, and David saw the openings of three tunnels, their mouths converging on this one spot. Yellowing bones lay in one corner, the flesh that once covered them long since rotted or consumed. There were worms and beetles and spiders all around, scurrying and fighting and dying in the moist, cold earth.
And there was the Crooked Man. He squatted in a corner, one of those pale hands that had dragged David down now holding a lamp while the other gripped a huge black beetle. As David watched, the Crooked Man put the struggling insect into his mouth, head first, and bit it in half. He chewed on the beetle, all the time watching David. The bottom half of the insect kept moving for a few seconds, then stopped. The Crooked Man offered it to David. David could see part of its insides. They were white. He felt very sick.
“Help me!” he shouted. “Roland, please help me!”
But there was no reply. Instead, the vibrations of his cries merely dislodged dirt from the roof of the hollow. It fell on his head and into his mouth. David spit it out, then prepared to shout again.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said the Crooked Man. He picked at his teeth and extracted a long, black beetle leg that had lodged close to his gums. “The ground here isn’t stable, and with all that snow above, well, I don’t like to think what would happen if it came down on top of you. You’d die, I expect, and not very pleasa
ntly.”
David closed his mouth. He did not want to be buried alive down there with the insects and the worms and the Crooked Man.
The Crooked Man worked on the lower half of the beetle, removing its back to expose its innards entirely.
“Are you sure you don’t want any?” he asked. “They’re very good: crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. Sometimes, though, I find that I don’t want crunchy. I just want soft.”
He lifted the insect’s body to his mouth and sucked at its flesh, then threw the husk into a corner.
“I thought that you and I should have a talk,” he said, “without the risk of your, um, ‘friend’ up there interrupting us. I don’t think you’ve fully grasped the nature of your predicament. You still seem to think that allying yourself with every passing stranger will help you, but it won’t, you know. I’m the reason you’re still alive, not some ignorant Woodsman or disgraced knight.”
David couldn’t bear to hear the men who had helped him dismissed like that. “The Woodsman wasn’t ignorant,” he said. “And Roland argued with his father. He isn’t a disgrace to anyone.”
The Crooked Man grinned unpleasantly. “Is that what he told you? Tut, tut. Have you seen the picture he carries in his locket? Raphael, isn’t that the name of the one whom he seeks? Such a nice name for a young man. They were very close, you know. Oooh, very close.”
David didn’t know quite what the Crooked Man meant, but the way he spoke made David feel dirty and soiled.
“Perhaps he would like you to be his new friend,” continued the Crooked Man. “He looks at you in the night, you know, when you’re asleep. He thinks you’re beautiful. He wants to be close to you, and closer than close.”
“Don’t talk about him that way,” warned David. “Don’t you dare.”
The Crooked Man sprang from the corner, leaping like a frog, and landed in front of David. His bony hand grasped the boy’s jaw painfully, the nails digging into his skin.
“Don’t tell me what to do, child,” he said. “I could tear your head off if I chose, and use it to adorn my dinner table. I could bore a hole in your skull and stick a candle in it, once I’d eaten my fill of whatever was inside—which wouldn’t be much, I expect. You’re not a very bright boy, are you? You enter a world you don’t understand, chasing the voice of someone you know is dead. You can’t find your way back again, and you insult the only person who can help you return, namely me. You are a very rude, ungrateful, and ignorant little boy.”
With a snap of his fingers, the Crooked Man produced a long, sharp needle, threaded with coarse black string made from what looked like the knotted legs of dead beetles.
“Now why don’t you work on your manners before you force me to sew your lips shut?”
He released his grip on David’s face, then patted his cheek gently.
“Let me show you a proof of my good intentions,” he purred. He reached into the leather pouch upon his belt and drew from it the snout that he had severed from the wolf scout. He dangled it in front of David.
“It was following you, and it found you as you emerged from the church in the forest. It would have killed you, too, had I not intervened. Where it went, others will follow. They are on your trail, and growing ever greater in number. More and more of them are transforming now, and they cannot be stopped. Their time is coming. Even the king knows it, and he does not have the strength to stand in their way. It would be well for you to be back in your own world before they find you again, and I can help you. Tell me what I want to know and you will be safe in your bed before nightfall. All will be well in your house, and your problems will have been solved. Your father will love you, and you alone. This I can promise you if you answer just one question.”
David didn’t want to bargain with the Crooked Man. He couldn’t be trusted, and David felt certain that he was keeping many things from him. No deal made with him could ever be simple, or without cost. Yet David also knew that much of what he was saying was true: the wolves were coming, and they would not stop until they found David. Roland would not be able to kill them all. Then there was the Beast: terrible though she was, she was only one of the horrors that this land seemed to conceal. There would be others, perhaps worse than Loups or Beast. Wherever David’s mother now was, in this world or another, she seemed beyond his reach. He could not find her. He had been foolish ever to think he could, but he had wanted so badly for it to be true. He had wanted her to be alive again. He missed her. Sometimes he would forget her, but in forgetting he would remember her again, and the ache for her would return with a vengeance. Yet the answer to his loneliness did not lie in this place. It was time to go home.
And so David spoke. “What do you want to know?” he said.
The Crooked Man leaned toward him and whispered. “I want you to tell me the name of the child in your house,” he said. “I want you to name for me your half brother.”
David’s fear was replaced by puzzlement. “But why?” he said. If the Crooked Man was the same figure he had seen in his bedroom, then wasn’t it possible that he had been in other parts of the house too? David remembered how he had awoken at home with the unpleasant sensation that something or someone had touched his face while he was asleep. A strange smell had sometimes hung about Georgie’s bedroom (stranger, at least, than the smell that usually came from Georgie). Could that have been an indication of the Crooked Man’s presence? Was it possible that the Crooked Man had failed to hear Georgie’s name spoken during his incursions into their house, and why was it so important to him to know the name anyway?
“I just want to hear it from your lips,” said the Crooked Man. “It’s such a small thing, such a tiny, tiny favor. Tell me, and all this will be over.”
David swallowed hard. He so badly wanted to go home. All he had to do was speak Georgie’s name. What harm could that do? He opened his mouth to speak, but the next name spoken was not Georgie’s but his own.
“David! Where are you?”
It was Roland. David heard the sound of digging from above. The Crooked Man hissed his displeasure at the intrusion.
“Quickly!” he said to David. “The name! Tell me the name!”
Dirt fell on David’s head, and a spider scurried across his face.
“Tell me!” shrieked the Crooked Man, and then the ceiling of earth over David’s head fell in, blinding and burying him. Before his sight failed, he saw the Crooked Man scurry for one of the tunnels to escape the collapse. There was earth in David’s mouth and nose. He tried to breathe, but it caught in his throat. He was drowning in dirt. He felt strong hands grip his shoulders as he was pulled from the earth and into the clean, crisp air above. His vision cleared, but he was still choking on soil and bugs. Roland’s hands pumped at David’s body, forcing the earth and insects from his throat. David coughed up dirt and blood and bile and crawling things as his airways cleared, then lay on his side in the snow. The tears froze on his cheeks, and his teeth were chattering.
Roland knelt by his side. “David,” he said. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”
Tell me. Tell me.
Roland touched his hand to David’s face, and David felt himself recoil. Roland, too, registered his response, for instantly he withdrew his hand and moved away from the boy.
“I want to go home,” David whispered. “That’s all. I just want to go home.”
And he curled into himself upon the snow and cried until he had no tears left to shed.
XXIII
Of the March of the Wolves
DAVID SAT on Scylla’s back. Roland was not riding with him but once more led the horse by her reins along the road. There was an unspoken tension between Roland and David, and while the boy was able to recognize both Roland’s hurt and its source, he could not find a way to connect the two with an apology. The Crooked Man had hinted at something about the relationship between Roland and the lost Raphael that David felt might be true, but he was less convinced by the implication that Roland now had sim
ilar feelings for David himself. Deep down, he was certain that it was false; Roland had shown him nothing but kindness, and if there had been any ulterior motive to his actions, it would have revealed itself long before now. He was sorry that he had recoiled from Roland’s touch of solicitude, but to make the admission would have forced him to acknowledge that, even for just the blink of an eye, the Crooked Man’s words had found their mark.
It had taken David a long time to recover himself. His throat hurt when he spoke, and he could still taste dirt in his mouth even after he had washed it out with icy water from the stream. It was only after riding in silence for a long time that he was able to tell Roland of what had taken place beneath the ground.
“And that is all he asked of you?” said Roland, when David had repeated to him most of what had been uttered. “He wanted you to tell him your half brother’s name?”
David nodded. “He told me I could go back home if I did.”
“Do you believe him?”
David thought about the question. “Yes,” he said. “I think he could show me the way, if he wanted to.”
“Then you must decide for yourself what to do. Remember, though, that nothing comes without cost. The villagers learned that as they sifted through the remains of their homes. There is a price to be paid for everything, and it is a good idea to find out that price before you make the agreement. Your friend the Woodsman called this fellow a trickster, and if that is what he is, then nothing he says is entirely to be trusted. Be careful in striking a bargain with him and listen closely to his words, for he will say less than he means and conceal more than he reveals.”
Roland did not look back at David as he spoke, and these were the last words that they exchanged for many miles. When they stopped to rest that night, they sat at opposite sides of the small fire Roland had made, and they ate in silence. Roland had removed the saddle from Scylla’s back and placed it against a tree, far from the spot where he had laid out David’s blanket.