Black Feathers (34 page)

Megan’s lap is the playground of spiders now, many of them as big as her hands. The gauze that traps her against the tree is their web, drawn from a thousand spinnerets, woven and tightened by eight thousand legs. In the night, their tiny eyes reflect white-orange and she knows that every eye is watching her. Snakes have coiled themselves around her limbs and body, nosing their way between the silken fibres, knotting themselves against her. Their heads rest against her in a dozen places, their blind eyes regarding her, their dark forked tongues tasting her terror. Megan stops struggling and sits very still.

“Wise, wise,” says Black Jack, his voice the roar of articulate fire.

In the scorching light that pours from the many wounds in the tree, Black Jack shines like polished onyx. This is not the figure she saw in Covey Wood. This thing before her is a mass of evil intent, of spite and unholy mockery. His deranged face has not stopped grinning. He is more animal than man. His breathing is like the breath of the giant bellows in the blacksmith’s workshop; he pants and heaves as he paces back and forth. His black feathers flash like blades, his breast feathers ripple and shimmer in anthracitic glory with every breath. The tall, flat-topped hat she remembers from their first encounter is split and broken. Feathers burst up through its torn fabric. He has the bloodthirsty black eyes of the raven. Where his boots were, he now walks on scaly, thin bird feet, the claws of which curve down into the soil of the clearing, tearing it up with every step he takes. All his other clothes are gone. What had seemed to her to be a cloak the first time she saw him is now his folded wings. He still has his human arms, though they are covered with feathers, and his hands are invisible inside cuffs of black down.

His face moves and ripples like the surface of a lake on a summer’s midnight, and she sees there many faces: a pale boy with dark hair, a thin adolescent with hunted eyes, a man with the sorrows of the world on his back, the same man’s face twisted in wrath and rage, the same man’s face white in death. She sees the faces of Mr Keeper and Carrick Rowntree. She sees Bodbran and her hooded helpers. Her amu and apa. The fortune-teller from the market. The stallholder who cooked them the barley bowl. Between each shift of visage return the inscrutable, untrustworthy eyes of the raven, a downturned blade of silky beak, feathery lashes, the wild lust of the corvid for the flesh of the dead. Through all of this Black Jack, the one she believed right up until this very moment to be the Crowman, unleashes his raucous caws into the night like a demented spirit, insane in the loneliness of the forest.

He stops pacing, the mad restlessness departing him like vapour.

“What are you doing out here, Megan?”

She says nothing. She won’t. Until he hurts her, of course, which she knows he will do the moment he doesn’t get what he wants. She can’t fight a force like this, but she can hold out a little longer if she tries.

The light from within the tree pulses in a slow rhythm, dimming and brightening the creature in front of her. Its face continues to shift form in the changing glow. Or is that her imagination? Perhaps it is only one face she sees there, and the shadows and flickers of light from the tree are playing tricks on her.

“Suddenly you’re unwilling to talk to me.” His voice has dropped from a roar to a whisper. “How strange.” He approaches a few paces. His feathers are so real, gleam so blackly bright in the darkness she has to turn her eyes away. “You used to tell me everything, Megan. And now you can’t even look at me.”

In spite of the dozens of threads attached to her lashes, she manages to draw her eyes shut. He moves closer. She would turn away if she could but the spiders have pinned her head fast. His face, stinking of rotten meat, comes nearer.

“You know, in some parts of the world, to walk the Black Feathered Path you must surrender your eyes first. Seems a little extreme to me but what do I know? I mean, apart from knowing everything, obviously.”

His voice is the caw of a crow, jeering and dismissive.

She senses his beak very near her eyes and squeezes them tighter, knowing if he wants them he will merely peck them out.

“They say if you don’t seek the Crowman with a true heart you’ll go blind inside, and then you’ll never find him.”

Megan, her face screwed up tight, weeps. Her bladder releases and then the whimpers escape her mouth. The whimpers become sobs.

“Why are you doing this to me? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“We both have our obligations, Megan.” He withdraws, taking his beak out of her face, but she can hear the smile in his comment. “Your destiny and mine are bound together. We are in each other’s bodies, we share the same blood.”

“I’m nothing like you,” she screams in sudden fury.

He stands a few paces away now, by the sound of it.

“We are the same.”

Why is his voice such a gentle whisper now?

“Look,” he says.

She can’t.

“Open your eyes, Megan. If you have any courage left, you must try to see what is really in front of you.”

She allows her eyes to open just a fraction. She sees nothing at first, her vision blurry with tears. She blinks the brine away – something is wrong with Black Jack. He is shrinking, lightening in colour. There is something vast behind him. Megan strains to see now. She recognises this scene. Her focus sharpens. There, just a few steps from her, is a vast tree. In front of it are the white ashes of a dead fire. At the base of the tree is a girl tangled in a poncho and the toppled remains of a shelter. The girl is wrapped in the shelter’s thin covering and cannot move. She struggles in her sleep, facing an army of terrors in her own personal night country.

There are no webs holding her against the trunk of the tree. There are no colonies of spiders creeping over her body. No snakes have coiled around her. Nor does the tree appear harmed or burned. There is no sign of Black Jack, but in a branch not far above the dream-trapped girl sits a raven. Megan could swear the raven is smiling.

She blinks.

On opening her eyes she finds the thin light of morning whitening an insubstantial mist. There is no tree opposite her. Nor is Black Jack there to torment her. She lies amid the collapsed remains of her badly built shelter. Her body is not restrained, other than by a tangle of material.

Above her there is a flurry of wings as a bird leaves the branches just over her head. The raven bursts from the leafless tree and glides out into the fine mist that fills the clearing.

Rarrrk! RRRaaarkk!

His call is laughter.

The far end of the tiny canyon proved to be rich with rabbits.

Gordon set his snares daily and daily caught one or more. He roasted them over the fire, drying and saving their pelts. The rain never stopped, but he was never wet for much longer than it took him to hunt or use the latrine he’d dug. Many of his clothes smelled so bad that he took them outside and washed them as best he could in the rain before drying them once more on the walls of the cave. He also used the rain to shower several times a day, and for the first time in weeks he managed to get rid of much of his own stink. He boiled the rainwater and drank it every day.

The luxury of a dry, warm environment with food and water to spare was at odds with the reflective nature of the cave itself. Outside, travelling, he was free and there was a wide sky above him. His problems, though they were weighty and never left him completely alone, did seem to flee occasionally into the beyond of all that space above him. In the cave, every thought he had came back to him multiplied. To counteract this, to release the pressure, he spent much of the time making entries in his black book, trying to clear his mind.

November ’14

My eyes only

The rain hasn’t stopped for days. I keep thinking this ravine will fill up and I’ll have to swim out, but the water doesn’t seem to collect because of the sandstone.

The cave was made by someone who wanted to hide in these bluffs hundreds of years ago. Maybe a gang of outlaws. If you didn’t know this place existed, you wouldn’t find it by looking. I feel like I was led here.

I keep seeing the bad things I’ve done over and over. And at night I don’t know where I am sometimes. I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming. I see the men I’ve fought – Skelton and Pike, the raiders who killed Brooke. Most often I see Grimwold. In my dreams, they all laugh as though they couldn’t be happier. As though the world is a carefree place and nothing I did to them or they did to me ever happened.

Then I wake up and remember how I sliced Skelton’s eye and knifed Pike in the crotch. I remember how I stabbed the raider in the gut and the look of disbelief on his face. I remember what Grimwold did, what he would have done if I hadn’t stopped him, and I remember how good it felt to punish him. But the next time I fall asleep they’ll be after me. All of them. They hunt me across the moors or the hills, across rivers and through valleys, and there’s nowhere I can go to shake them off. Whenever any of them catch up with me, and they always do in the end, they ask me why I hurt them, why I killed them. They ask me to explain. It’s only when I try to explain and find I can’t that they get angry. Whenever that happens, I usually wake up. And then the walls of the cave are all around me and their questions stay with me but I still can’t answer them.

All I’ve done is make things worse for the people I meet and worse for my family. Why am I wasting my time searching for the Crowman? Most of the time all I can do is hide. I’m scared to talk to anyone for fear they’ll ask too many questions. When I see a village or a town, I go around it. I’ll never find him like this.

Somehow, I believe that the land is leading me with signs. It’s like reading a language in the shape of the world and the movement of the clouds and the patterns made by flocks of birds or the way they sing in the mornings. I act on all these things, but it feels mad every time. When I question why I’ve chosen a particular direction or route, the answers worry me. The wind was carrying me that way or the trees in that wood are calling to me or the wren told me to go this way; that’s madness, isn’t it? What worries me even more is my answer. No, of course it isn’t madness. If you don’t hear the voice of the land, you’re not alive. I can’t even be sure it’s me answering the question.

The cave makes all that stuff worse, but I know without it I’d probably be too sick to travel or even dead by now. Something must have led me here. Something reliable must be guiding me.

I woke up with all these questions whirling in my mind last night. The fire was down to ash and outside there was the rush and patter of the rain. For just a moment my mind shut up and was totally silent and clear. As clear as anything, from inside and all around me came a voice that said:

“
Everything you need will come to hand in the very moment of its requirement.
”

I know I’ve heard that before.

Doesn’t finding this cave just when I did prove it to be true?

I don’t understand what’s going on, but I know I have to try and trust what’s happening.

There is nothing to be done but move on. Packing up takes moments. Megan lets her hand linger on the bark of the tree for a long time before she walks away. The pulse of the tree imparts a kind of strength to her, she thinks, though perhaps she merely regrets having to leave its company.

She sets off in the direction of the opposite side of the clearing. The mist is insubstantial but for several minutes, once she loses sight of the tree, she is surrounded by a nothingness of grey-white. All she can see is the scrubby grassland for several paces in any direction. Above is uniform white. Every point of the compass blurs into indistinct haze. She focusses on a point in the distance where the other side of the clearing will be, in a direct line from where she entered the clearing the day before, but walking a straight line is trickier than she thought.

She stops. Listens into the mist.

The world is silent and still all around her. Not a birdcall or a breath of wind to agitate the branches of the distant trees. She looks behind, trying to penetrate the mist. For long moments she stays this way, not moving. There is no movement and no sound.

When nothing gives itself away, she moves on, making for the forest as swiftly as she can. The mist begins to break up, and by the time she reaches the embrace of the trees, the clearing behind her is devoid of the merest rag of vapour. She can see the tree in the centre and all the way across to the other side.

There’s nothing out there.

The forest yields a few berries and not much more. Megan’s stomach growls, but her pace is strong and determined and she moves easily through the woodland terrain, as though in some way it is allowing her passage. It’s a bright, cloudless day, and the sun penetrates the canopy through a million tiny breaches. Needles of light illuminate small areas of forest floor, bark, moss, branch, thicket and lichen, painting these tiny patches in bright greens and browns. Megan is amazed at how this small touch of colour is enough to raise her spirits.

But for her footsteps the forest is silent. She turns to look behind less often the farther she goes; there’s never anything there, although she catches sight of two wrens on one occasion. To her right the river has returned from the meander which took its course to the far edge of the clearing, but it too flows in silence. The scent of leaf mould and hidden fungi fills her sinuses.

Before the morning is over the forest is thinning, the trees becoming smaller and sparser at its edge. Many of the trees are stunted and unnaturally bent, warped and shrivelled not by age but by disease. She takes out the map for the first time that day. She has reached the area before the map goes blank. Somewhere up ahead is the uncharted place she must enter to find what Bodbran has sent her for. She is more excited now than frightened. Warmth and light radiate all around her, and what could harm her in such golden light, under the watchful eye of the benevolent sun?