Quarter Square (12 page)

I caught flashes of hurried encounters with fellow survivors, whispered conversations, rumours spreading like wildfire and dull shock growing into panic and terror.

“Three mornings after the earthquake people spoke of a wolf-monster eating bodies. We ran immediately. It helped that he was accustomed to searching for an adult couple, not a mother and her young son, which is what we posed as during our escape. We stayed that way for thousands of miles across what is now mainland Europe. By the time we reached the great river—”

“You mentioned that before. What great river?”

“It was a powerful river that started in the Northern Lake and emptied into a wide estuary, where it met the Atlantic. The rivers we now call the Thames, the Rhine and the Seine all flowed into it. We first saw the river a long way from the estuary, near where Kent is now, and we joined a community as mother and son. A few years later we moved west along the river and lived with another community as husband and wife. Then we went west again as father and daughter. We’ve been through that routine so many times. But we only get the chance when you have a long life and Tyac doesn’t find us.”

“He didn’t find us there?”

“We had nearly two thousand years of freedom, living in hundreds of different hunter-gatherer groups and avoiding other Atlanteans like the plague.” She sighed happily. “That was the most peaceful time of all our lives. The climate was warm, and it was a good place to live, with great grasslands and forests, marshes and lakes. There were elephants twice the size of modern ones and lions and sabre-toothed tigers.” Her eyes shone.

I tried to remember those lives but could only picture things from Min’s words. The sabre-toothed tigers in my mind looked like drawings from a children’s book. Maybe the only memories strong enough to stretch across lives involved my terror of Tyac.

“It came to an end,” she said quietly, “as it always does, when we heard stories of a werewolf attacking settlements.”

I reached back and felt the dread. It wasn’t difficult to find but was likely an accumulation from many centuries of running. Always running.

“The clan we were living with at the time were on the move, migrating from the rising floodwaters that filled the fertile plains. We parted ways where the Thames joined the great river. They went north while we canoed west, right past Tyac as he travelled east on the riverbank. We abandoned the canoe and let the river carry it out to sea, then staggered ashore dripping wet and walked north. We climbed the hills and made ourselves a home in Dartmoor Forest with the ancestors of the Axe clan we’re on our way to see now.”

She looked around at the clearing where we’d settled for the night. “The Wild didn’t exist in those days. Or rather the outside didn’t exist. There was no separation. Everything was wild.”

“And the Axe are from the Stone Age,” I repeated. “Like cavemen?”

“Not cavemen. Neolithic farmers.” She rolled her eyes in mock frustration.

The rainfall hadn’t lasted long, but our shelter was finished in case it started again later. I wove a mat for us to sleep on. At least this was something I could do for her, although for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how my wood magic was supposed to help us escape Tyac.

“They were good people,” Min said. “The tribe we’re going to see are their descendants.”

“How come they moved into the Wild?”

“A new wave of immigrants arrived.”

“Who?”

She pursed her lips. “Beaker people, I think. Can’t remember exactly. There have been so many. Whoever they were, it was some bunch of Bronze Agers who started clearing the forest. The Axe had to choose: leave the land of their ancestors or move into the Wild. No contest.”

“How do you know all this?”

“We were living with them at the time.”

“How long has it been since we saw them?”

She squinted into the distance. “About three hundred years.”

“What makes you think they’ll remember us?”

“They will.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m their goddess.”

I stared. What on earth would she would say next? “You’re a goddess.” I couldn’t stop a stupid grin from spreading across my face.

“Yes.” She grinned back. “And you are my consort.”

I shook my head at this new craziness. “How come they can remember me? You said I don’t look the same in every life.”

“No. I always see something deep in your eyes, and sometimes there are physical similarities.” She curled the hair on my cheek around her fingers. “But to a stranger you wouldn’t look the same now as you did last time. The Axe will know you because you’re with me, and they expect my consort to accompany me.”

“Bloody hell. Well, goddess, your palace awaits you.”

We settled inside the hide and snuggled up. Min rested her head on my chest, and from her breathing I could tell she was ready to fall asleep. I held her, feeling her heartbeat and breathing in her fragrance.

“What should I expect? When we meet them, I mean.”

“They use sign language a lot, especially when they’re hunting, signing with only one hand.”

She lifted her left hand from my stomach and flicked her fingers rapidly through a series of shapes.

“What does that mean?”

“It means
go to sleep.
”

She dropped off quickly.

When I was sure she was sound asleep, I worked my jaw and patted my cheeks, determined to stay awake and guard her.

The earth released its sweet breath after the rain, heady and intoxicating. I sat cross-legged, closed my eyes and breathed slowly through my nose, drawing the ancient smell deep into me. It filled me with peace at the same time as it heightened my senses.

The forest wasn’t as silent as I’d thought. The night was full of sound. Random noises formed shapes in my mind that I tried to interpret.

Some of the familiar noises were related. My mind classified them as stealthy movements in several different directions that were coming closer.

Doom dropped into my stomach like a brick. My eyes flew open, and I tried to look everywhere without moving my head. If something bad was coming, I wanted to see it before it knew I was aware of it.

I debated when to wake Min. Sooner rather than later, I decided, to give her chance to come round before we had to run. Or fight. I stretched out to shake her and saw a face in a bush.

I froze with my hand in midair. Blood pounded in my head, and my sense of hearing disappeared.

So did the face. I wasn’t sure if it had ever been there or if my fear was playing tricks on me. I studied that bush while my heart rate calmed and the forest’s noises returned to normal.

Nothing. Just a bush.

Another face. And another. Peering at us from the bushes only twenty feet away.

I jumped to my feet and stared around wildly, and two more faces emerged from the foliage.

Min jerked awake, startled by my sudden movement.

One of the faces pushed an inch or two through its bush and became clearer. At first I thought it was a child. It was about that height, and there was something childlike about its big eyes. But those eyes didn’t have a childlike expression. They looked old and hostile. And the skin of its dirty face was leathery and wrinkled.

All five faces pushed through into the open, and three more appeared between them, all glaring at us. We were surrounded.

Min scrambled to her feet and grabbed my hand.

I cast around for a stick or something to wield as a weapon but found nothing useful, so let go of Min’s hand and prepared to fight.

A new noise came from above, like slow wing beats that went from quiet and distant to loud and close in the space of a few seconds, until they hovered overhead.

What now?

I couldn’t see the creature, but from the flurries each wing beat caused in the highest tree leaves, it had to be something big.

The uglies had disappeared. Whatever was above us, they didn’t want to tangle with it.

Min sang a few notes. Her voice wasn’t strong, but it was as pure and clear as ever.

The wing beats departed in the same direction from which they had arrived. Silence fell around us.

I peered down at Min. “What was that?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I definitely don’t know what those things—” she pointed at the bushes, “—were. Never seen anything like them before.” She stared up into the treetops. “And I don’t know what that was either, but I’m glad it came.”

“What did you sing?”

“I said thank you.”

I hugged her. “I know you don’t
know
what it was, but what do you
think
it might have been?”

“It isn’t a thought really. More a feeling.” Her voice was muffled against me. “It felt like an angel. Not that I’ve ever met an angel knowingly, but if I did, I think that’s what it would feel like.”

I shook my head in wonder. “That’s what it felt like to me too. Not at the time. When it was here, I was terrified. But now that it’s gone, remembering it…”

She squeezed me tight. “Yes.”

Stiff and groggy, we left before dawn. I was going to destroy the shelter, but Min stopped me.

“Leave it for him to find. Anything that delays him is to our advantage.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d frowned at one of her decisions. Sometimes I wondered if being immortal meant she didn’t have to worry about acting too stupid to live, but the thought was ignoble, and she did have all the memories I lacked. I had to keep trusting she knew what she was doing.

Twenty minutes after leaving our overnight camp, we retraced our steps for ten minutes, then climbed a tree and set off in a different direction. Although walking backwards with heel-to-toe foot placements made my tendons ache, I was getting better at it.

Min was more sprightly moving through the treetops than she had been, but we still went cautiously and indirectly towards wherever it was that she was taking us.

We talked as we travelled, and she helped me remember more about my magical talent.

“There’s this trick you’ve used before to help us escape from Tyac. You call it
growing.
You sort of blend us into a tree or a wooden panel.” She sighed. “I hate it.”

I glanced at her in surprise. “Why?”

“It’s like the worst kind of claustrophobia imaginable. It terrifies me. But it’s saved us many times.”

“Saved me, you mean, don’t you? He never kills you, does he?”

“He doesn’t kill me, but he breaks my heart by killing you. That’s what this is all about.”

When we stopped for an hour at midday to let me catch up on the rest I’d lost during my attempt at a night watch, I tried to blend myself into a tree.

“You normally stand with your back to it. Apparently you connect with its rush of life.”

The potential to connect was there. It was like being filled with a thrumming flow, yet also being alert and aware of everything the tree felt. Through this tree I sensed what other trees in the vicinity felt, but I couldn’t do anything that came close to what Min described as
blending into it.

I practised growing during the night while she slept, improving as the hours passed and using it to listen out for wildlife moving, close by and far away.

In the middle of the night I felt a party of humans and dogs jogging a long way off. The sensations were so strong, I could almost see and feel boots thudding on the earth, leather armour rubbing and squeaking, clunks of wooden shields and clinks of iron weaponry and dogs panting hard. I could even count them: twenty-six men and twelve dogs. I woke Min to tell her about the war party.

She sat up stiffly and rubbed her eyes. “Tribes have always fought each other in the Wild. People are pretty much the same wherever they live. We’d better take care we don’t walk into a battle.” She peered through the canopy of trees overhead. “And we’d better get going.”

“It isn’t dawn yet.”

“Even so—” she stood and stretched, “—Tyac may have recovered by now. He’ll be coming soon.”

We stopped again at noon to allow me a quick nap. As I dropped off, I hoped I would soon be able to sleep on the forest floor at night as easily as Min could. She was eager to be off again as soon as I woke up, but I insisted on trying to grow into a tree one more time. If this was such an effective trick against Tyac, I wanted to master it.

I rested my spine against the bark of a tree, closed my eyes, stilled my thoughts and became part of the tree in my mind. This, my tenth or twelfth attempt in twenty-four hours, didn’t feel any different to all the others. But after a few minutes Min gasped, and I opened my eyes to see what had made her anxious.

She stared at me. I tried to ask her what was wrong and discovered my lips could only move slowly. I didn’t have the breath to utter a single word, and I felt the tree around me. It touched me everywhere, outside and inside, hollow and solid at the same time. I tasted the living wood. It had become part of me. I’d become part of it.

We stretched our roots to drink from the deep earth and welcomed the clean sunlight warming our leaves and the breeze tickling our uppermost branches. Vibrations from the movements of other creatures in the forest came to me through the wood, and I translated those vibrations automatically into sounds.

With a focused effort I raised my right hand until it broke free of the bark. Nothing splintered, and no sound came. I swiveled my eyes down without moving my face to find my hand and arm covered in bark, appearing as a limb growing from the tree.

Min shuddered. “I can’t bear this.”

I crooked my finger to beckon her, but she shook her head and hugged herself.

It took considerably more effort to extract myself from the tree than it had taken to blend with it. When I finally made it back into fresh air, I stretched and shook myself, blinking rapidly and working my jaw. My mouth was dry, and it took time for me to work up some saliva.

“Come on, then. You said this has saved us from him many times.”

She shook her head again, her eyes wide with fear.

“I managed to do it alone, but that’s no good. If he finds you, he’ll find both of us. We have to do it together.”

“You can’t imagine how awful this is for me. It comes naturally to you, but I’m terrified. Imprisoned inside a living tree, unable to breathe or move or speak. It’s a nightmare.”

“Are you saying you won’t do it?”

She didn’t respond for several moments. Then she closed her eyes, took deep breaths and gripped my hand. “Keep hold of my hand. Don’t you let go in there.”

We chose the biggest tree around and stood side by side with our backs against the bark.

“Ready?”

“Just do it. And don’t bloody let go of me.”

This time it was easy. I simply closed my eyes, relaxed my breathing, stilled my mind and blended with the tree. Min held my hand with a dry, loose grip. I squeezed her fingers, and her answering squeeze came back in slow motion. She was inside the tree with me.

A new vibration came to my attention: a man running steadily many miles away. My tree sense translated the vibrations so that I saw him as a camouflaged shape moving among other camouflaged shapes.

Breathing heavily, the man crouched to study the ground.

I eased us free from the wood.

Min fell to her hands and knees and gasped for breath. “I hate that.”

“Tyac’s coming.”

“Where is he?” She was instantly alert.

“Near the cave we passed yesterday, searching for our trail where we climbed over the nettles.”

“Let’s go.”

We found a stream shortly afterwards, jumped into the water and followed its current for an hour.

“We might make the Axe village tonight,” Min panted, “if we keep going.”

“Do you know exactly where it is?”

“No. I’ll find them okay when we get into the area, though.”

“Can’t risk it, love. He’s too close and moving fast.”

“He’ll move a lot faster in a few hours, when he’s a wolf.”

“Run.”

Half an hour later we climbed high and travelled through the trees for a hundred yards before shinning down an oak tree into a clearing and setting off in a different direction to the one we’d been going before our climb. Then we doubled back to the clearing as dusk fell.

I didn’t need to grow into a tree to sense the monster now. By resting my hand lightly on the bark, I could hear him coming. He’d found our midday resting place and was in the stream we’d followed earlier. He was hot on our trail, and the way he made the tree vibrate terrified me. After ensuring we’d left no sign of our presence, I pressed my spine against the oak.

“You ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She shot me a brave smile. “We’re going to be in this tree all night, you know. Don’t move until well after dawn. Even if you think he’s gone and it’s safe, keep us in here.” She patted the tree trunk and tried to hide her shudder. “He’s a clever bastard, and he’s a lot better at this kind of thing than we are. Okay?”

“Okay.”

We climbed up to balance on two thick exposed roots, with our backs to the trunk. Min gave me a tender kiss on the cheek, and I grew us into the oak.

It was difficult to measure time accurately inside the tree, but maybe half an hour went by before Tyac made his appearance. I heard him coming all the way, and as he closed in, I noticed something new: creatures of the forest fell still and silent as he approached, and stayed that way until he’d gone. Min and I weren’t the only beings who were utterly terrified of him.

He trotted along the trail we’d followed, and passed the point at which we’d climbed a tree, a hundred yards to the east. But he hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he skidded to a halt, dropped to all fours and snuffled around to our tree of ascent. He seemed to fly up the tree, ripping out leaves and branches and throwing them down. His trip through the treetops was equally frenzied and rapid and destructive. The hundred yards that had taken us twenty minutes to cross, he spanned in three or four.

Again, he charged a few feet past our departure point, then swung around a supple treetop and landed squarely in the top branches of our oak tree.

I felt his heavy presence through the wood. I heard his powerful heartbeat and felt the pressure of his paw pads, the sharp dents of his claws and his breath on my leaves. If I could have shivered in my voluntary prison, I would have done so when hot saliva flicked from his fangs onto my innocent bark.

He plummeted in a controlled fall and landed in the clearing on all fours: alert, his massive muscles bunched under the coarse hair of his back and shoulders.

Min squeezed my fingers, and I returned the pressure, knowing she needed the reassurance as much as I did.

Tyac sniffed the ground, then reared to his hind legs and trotted off in the direction we’d taken earlier. I followed his progress with all my senses as the forest fell silent around him. He reached the point where we’d turned back, and didn’t waste any time investigating that area before returning to us.

I squeezed Min’s fingers again to warn her of his imminent appearance.

He entered the clearing, his ears cocked and his huge head swinging from side to side as he walked directly to our tree. He inhaled deeply, smelling us. He must have known our scents intimately.

He circled the tree, then circled the clearing on all fours, sniffing the ground closely and investigating every tree and shrub.

Finally he stood in front of us and looked directly into my face, if only he knew it. I was grateful that I couldn’t tremble, trapped as we were inside the wood. I felt a tiny pressure from Min’s fingers and stared back into the werewolf’s mad eyes, only inches from my face.

Tyac prowled the clearing again and tested several places for our tracks before returning to our tree. He peered at the bark, the thin crust of wood that was the only thing between him and us. He leaned forward to sniff it, and the stink of his breath assaulted me with its stench of carrion and death. Then he licked the bark, as if it were a delicacy to be savoured.

If my bowels had been free to move, they would have done so there and then.

Eventually Tyac left. Min and I stayed exactly where we were, sealed inside our living hiding place, while I followed the monster’s movements, which wasn’t difficult, because in his rage he ripped every bush and scarred every tree along his path. He roamed a long way, zigzagging randomly, before he stopped moving, although the creatures of the forest maintained their silence.

When he shifted, he moved stealthily. There was another heartbeat in his vicinity, and at the same moment as I realised he was stalking something, he hit it hard. I knew terror on behalf of the deer he had hunted, even as its heartbeat stopped.

As he stalked back to us, I warned Min with my fingertips before he dragged the deer into the clearing, tore it to shreds and ate it. He threw the remnants aside as he stood, belched and wiped a front paw across his muzzle.

Wolves howled in the distance. For some moments, Tyac cocked his head to listen, then trotted from the clearing.

I followed his progress. He travelled in a line and jogged at a steady speed.

I pressed Min’s fingers for the hundredth time, but this time she didn’t apply any pressure in return, and I imagined her reining in her terror. I didn’t know if this would work, but I did my best to soothe her mind by transmitting calm thoughts and feelings to her through the wood.

Tyac didn’t return. He kept moving away from us for a time, then went to ground. I detected no further movement from him and eventually lost any sense of his location.

We stayed in the tree until well after sunrise. When finally we broke free of the wood, Min fell into my arms and sobbed.

“I felt your thoughts. They were soothing, like your voice. Thank you, love. I’ll never get used to that experience, but thank you for your thoughts. They helped.”