Down Station

11

Mary stayed very still, even though the water was cold and the current pulled at her boilersuit. The voices were right above her, above where she crouched amongst the roots and the weeds, with only a thin overhang of soil hiding her. Her chin was in the river, and she was prepared, no matter how much she’d hate it, to take a deep breath and submerge completely. Anything, just so long as she wasn’t discovered.

She could hear the men beating Dalip, the steady grunts of effort as their fists rose and fell. She could hear the wolfman’s taunts. Then she heard him call for her to be found.

She was almost numb with cold by the time they moved off, and she sat, balanced on her haunches, for a good while longer. It could have been a trap, another one, with someone sitting on the bank above her, waiting for her to emerge, and with her in no state to either fight or run.

She listened. The sounds she recognised◦– traffic, music, doors, shouting◦– were absent. The sounds she was now hearing◦– trees, birds, the slow churn of the river◦– were alien to her, but she’d rather hear those than anything else. She was alone. Truly alone now.

She still wanted to cross the river, and put broad water between her and her pursuers. It looked, at least from down at water level, a long way. Especially for a non-swimmer. No one was going to help her, no one was going to offer her a reward for just trying. She steadied herself and moved her waterlogged legs out towards the middle.

Her feet lost the bottom quickly. Her head ducked under, she splashed her way to the surface, gasping, and for a moment couldn’t remember which side of the river she’d just left. One bank was a lot closer than the other, so that was decided for her quickly. The current was carrying her, and the one thing in her favour was the trapped air in her closely woven boilersuit.

She floundered, arms and legs moving in contradictory motion, her boots dragging her down, her sleeves holding her up. The current slackened, her foot struck something soft and she grunted, pulling it back fast. But it was only the river bed’s soft mud, and she was able to stand a few metres from shore, sodden, freezing, dirty, scared.

She looked behind her, to where she’d come from. She could see no one, though she knew the wolfman and his gang were able to blend in to the forest in a way that was almost spooky. They could be watching her now, just like they probably had been, all the way from the sea to here. Watching her wade to the far bank and crawl out, lying on her belly like a worm, in the brown leaves and broken twigs and earthy decay.

Where was she going to go? What was she going to do? How was she supposed to do anything?

Something was sticking in her ribs. She rolled over, reached inside, and pulled out the axe. Dalip had been right. It was very rusty. She wasn’t going to throw it away, though. It was all she had.

She wasn’t going to be able to rescue the others, even if she could find them. She didn’t owe them anything, really, even though the thought suddenly struck her as, if not wrong, certainly unworthy. She didn’t know where such an idea came from. Perhaps she could find someone to help her rescue them, or better still, who would do all the rescuing for her.

No. There would have to be a rescue at some point◦– she assumed that was a given◦– and she had to be involved in some way. She wouldn’t be alone, though. The Red Queen needed soldiers.

The problem was, there was no one here. The woods were empty. She’d have to start walking until she found someone. Not upriver though. Away from it. If she’d started the day with the sun on her right and ended with it on her left, she’d have to travel towards where it rose and watch it circle around.

She was also fucking freezing, and if she didn’t make a move soon, she’d never go anywhere at all.

She emptied her boots, wrung her socks out, and straight away put them back on, hurriedly brushing off the leaf litter and the tiny bugs that had crawled out of it to investigate her toes. Her fingers were stiff and shivery, and tying wet laces was hard. When she put one foot in front of the other, she was so uncomfortable, it was all she could do not to sit down and weep.

What drove her on was the certainty that the others would swap places with her in an instant. She was free. They were not.

She walked. The forest looked the same in every direction. She couldn’t see the distant mountains; she could barely see the sky. The sun was behind her, but she couldn’t tell how far it was from setting. She could be walking straight back the way she’d come, just on the other bank of the river.

And when it did set, she would be alone, in the dark.

She kept on going. She started to pick up on subtle changes in the land around her, though it was muted and dormant under the green canopy. The small streams she crossed, where she slaked her thirst with loamy brown water, ran downhill, diagonal to her path. The ground went from flat to gently undulating to a series of ridges and dips. The trees themselves started to be shorter and narrower, and maybe their leaves looked a little different too.

On one ridge, the rock broke through to the surface, black and weathered. There were no trees there, and she climbed and climbed, hands slipping on the mossy covering, legs aching with effort, until she was finally in the sunlight and above the tops of the trees.

It was evening. The light slanted across the forest, turning it golden, except for a thin broken band where the big river ran. She looked at how far she’d travelled, and it seemed both a long way and not enough at the same time. If she could cover it, so could the wolfman. The notch between the two peaks they’d been heading for was obscured by the angle she was seeing it from, but as she turned, she saw more mountains beyond, blue with distance, rising like a line of filed teeth.

The forest was thinning in the direction she was going. The land rose and fell, and there were large patches where there were no trees at all. Neither was there anything else that she could see. A village might not be visible, but a town might, and a city certainly would. There wasn’t a single building in sight, nor a spire of smoke to indicate a fire.

Empty. The world was empty but for her.

She knew that wasn’t true. There were other people, and if there were those who would trick her, trap her, and◦– then what? What would they do to her once they’d caught her? She’d heard things, wild, wicked things, of women and men treated as slaves and subjected not just to endless hours of work, but every other kind of degradation too. If that could happen in London, where help was often no more than a shout away, it could happen here, where a girl could scream her lungs to bloody ruin and no one would either care or hear.

If there were those sorts of people, there had to be some of the other kind, the ones that would take her in, feed her, teach her, help her rescue Dalip, Stanislav, Mama and the others. Why? Because there did. It was a law of the universe, wasn’t it? For every gold-plated bastard, there was going to be an angel. She just had to find them in this green wasteland.

Where should she start looking? She shaded her eyes against the brightness of the sky, and studied the view in front of her, carefully this time.

Assuming she didn’t want to throw herself at the geomancer, she didn’t want to go near the closest mountains. There was nothing at the coast for her. The hill country, then, where houses might hide in the folds of the ground, where they’d only light fires at night and put them out by morning, like those people who kept their curtains closed and their door unanswered against the debt collectors and the police.

Perhaps the hill country was just that: a different country. It didn’t look it, but there weren’t lines on the ground like there were lines on the map.

She felt hopeful, like she’d discovered something for herself that was useful.

Then the wolf began to call.

Her heart stopped for a second, before beginning to race. She’d stayed still far too long, gazing into the far distance and making plans, when she should have been walking. Now she might have to run. Something she could do, but not for very long. Enough to outrun a store detective or the drugged-up wildlife she grew up around. Not wolves, though. Not them.

Mary stretched her calves, rising up on her toes, like she might have known what she was doing, and started down the ridge to go back among the trees.

She lost sight of all her landmarks, and felt only the pressure on her back, pushing her on. She ran a little, walked a lot, and tried to keep a good pace overall. In keeping with the pattern of when the wolfman put in his first appearance, the gaps between howls were almost unbearably long.

He had wolves, so she guessed he was going to find her. That part was out of her control. What she was determined to do was find someone to protect her from him before then. As she kept on, it grew darker, and the tree trunks began to merge with the gaps between them.

The moon hadn’t yet risen, though the threat of it was in the sky ahead, the highest clouds rimed in white. When it did, she’d be able to see again, but for now, her advance slowed to a crawl, banging between trees like the steel ball in that old pinball machine they’d had in the games room of the first home she’d been in.

The wolves called again. They sounded closer. No, they sounded close. She didn’t know how that worked. Did they pick up scents like dogs, follow them with their noses to the ground, and drag their handlers behind them, like she’d seen in all those cop films? If so, she’d done the right thing in crossing the river to break her trail. Could she do that again?

But there were no more big rivers, just little ones, so she made as much use of those as she could, jumping in their shallow courses and splashing upstream for what she knew might not be long enough before she leapt out and resumed her course.

The moon finally rose, huge and pale and three-quarters full, turning the black forest into a silver miracle. She could see again, and it was enough. She was more tired than she’d ever been, but she knew there was no time to rest. Keep moving. Don’t stop.

The stupid thing was, the old her would have given up by now, sat sullenly against a tree and waited for capture. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? The wolfman had her number, and he was going to track her down with a tenacity beyond that of the most vindictive Met officer.

The new her, the Mary that was slowly emerging under the bright sun and pale moon of here, was made of different stuff. Maybe the old Mary was right, but there’d be no long-suffering social worker to dig her out this time. What she did now actually mattered. It was for keeps.

Up and down another ridge, the sparse woodland clinging to its flanks providing little cover for either of them. She looked behind her, saw nothing, and pressed on.

Almost immediately, there was a howl that sounded like it was right behind her. It wasn’t ridiculous. They’d come out of the woods at her and Dalip like they were ghosts before. So what should she do if they were just over the last rise? How was she going to slip to the side, so they’d miss her completely?

By doubling back on herself.

It felt so wrong, running towards the threat, not away. Any moment, the wolfman and his two pets would be standing in her path, blocking her way, forcing her to the ground with fists and feet and claws and teeth. She ran parallel to the ridge line, where the exposed rock rose from the thin soil like broken bones, and at a place where two huge boulders almost met, she climbed back up and squeezed herself through the gap to the other side.

‘Do not move,’ said the voice in her ear, close enough that she could feel his breath against her hair. ‘Do not speak. They might not be able to see you, but they will be able to hear you.’

Mary froze. The shadow unwound around her, covering her, as if a black veil had dropped over her face. She could still make out the landscape bathed in bright moonlight, but she was one step removed, as if she was watching it rather than living it.

Stone scraped on stone, close by. A clatter of pebbles, a heavy footfall as they steadied themselves. Hard breathing, a soft groan. The patter and pad of an animal and the cackle of a chain looping and straightening.

The wolfman walked right by her, looking into the slit of space afforded by the boulders. The moon shone silver off his wolfskin hood, and his breath condensed in the air in a glowing, transitory cloud. The nearest wolf stretched towards her hiding place, nose in the air, drinking deeply of the night’s scents.

She was in plain sight, and yet it was still searching for her. Nostrils twitching, teeth partly bared, muzzle turning in tiny angles; it knew, it knew she was there, precisely within a single leap of her, and it could do nothing. Confused, it let out a whimpering growl and put its head down in an acknowledgement of failure and submission.

The wolfman, oblivious to the subtle clues, was searching ahead with his own dark-adapted eyes, and pulled on the chain to hurry his pets along. He stepped out of view, but Mary knew well enough not to break cover. She stayed wedged, back and knees pressed against cold stone.

Eventually, a wolf howled, further away, mournful, unfulfilled by the hunt, and the veil about her lifted.

When she tried to move, she was so stiff she fell over, landing hard on her side and stinging her hands. One of the rocks above her moved, unwrapping itself to become the figure of a man.

‘I heard the wolves hunting. I wondered who their prey was.’

‘That trick you did; it looked straight at me, and it couldn’t see me.’ She turned herself over on to her back and bent first one leg in the air, then the other. ‘How did you do that?’

‘Study, hard and long. Practice, painful and repetitive. Will, strong enough to make your nose bleed.’

‘Really?’

‘No. If you have the knack, I could teach you in an hour. It is nothing more than a bit of simple hedge-magic.’

‘Could you?’ she blurted. Magic: actual magic. ‘Will you? Teach me, I mean.’

‘Teach you?’ he said, unfolding himself further, and spidering down the rock towards her. ‘I do not even know your name, girl.’

He wore darkness like a cloak, but it really was a cloak, black and ragged, voluminous and flowing. When he stood over her, he seemed impossibly tall and thin, like a lamppost draped with wind-blown plastic.

He held out his hand for her, and it was like the rest of him: hard, bony, spare. He had no problem hauling her to her feet, though. The top of her head came somewhere below his jutting chin.

‘It is usual, when you save someone from their enemies, to be thanked,’ he said.

‘Are they? My enemies, I mean.’ Mary didn’t know. She’d run anyway. ‘Yeah, okay: thanks,’ she added.

‘My pleasure,’ said the man. ‘And yes. At least, they are my enemies, and we still need to have our wits about us. Stay close.’

It was difficult, as he moved like a stain, visible when slipping from cover to cover, vanishing when stationary. And he moved so quickly, climbing and jumping and crouching, that she, already exhausted, could barely keep up.

When he finally stopped, she slumped to the ground and lay there. The burning in her legs was exquisite, the taste of blood in her throat less so.

‘You have determination,’ he said. She weakly acknowledged the compliment with a raised middle finger.

She became dimly aware of a floor that wasn’t leaves, and walls that weren’t wood. She coughed and choked on what came up, and coughed again, hollow and barking. The sound echoed away.

There was stone under her face, flat, worn and dirty, like a pavement. She got her hands down and raised her head. They were in some sort of building: behind her was a wide arched doorway that led directly into the forest, and the forest seemed to be creeping in through it, along with the moonglow that gave the only illumination. She could hear her own panting, the man’s footsteps in the dark corners of the room, padding about, and above her, the soft mutterings of roosting birds.

He set a bowl in front of her that reflected moonlight off its trembling surface. She unceremoniously plunged her face into the bowl and started sucking. It wasn’t water, but some sort of beer, and she didn’t care. It was as far removed as possible from the cans of cheap lager she’d beg, buy or steal, but she picked up the bowl when she couldn’t empty it any other way. Yeasty froth stuck to her upper lip.

‘Finished dying?’

She coughed one last time. ‘Where am I?’

‘My castle,’ he said.

‘Does that make you a king?’

He laughed. ‘The King of Crows, if anything.’

‘You could do with a new front door.’

‘I will tell my craftsmen to saw the timber first thing in the morning.’

Mary drew herself shakily to her feet, peering around her in the gloom. It was a ruin. If she looked up, she could see the sky through the ragged rafters and birds’ wings. Dark doorways led further in. The man took the bowl from her, and disappeared into one of the rooms beyond.

‘What do I call you?’ she asked. He might have rescued her from one set of dangers, but that didn’t mean he was safe.

‘Your Majesty?’ came his disembodied voice.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Crows, then. Call me Crows. You know about names, do you? What they mean?’

‘I know that the wolfman wouldn’t tell us his. He said others should give us our names.’

Crows returned holding the bowl. He’d pulled his hood back to reveal his face, a fine black face with a long oval head shaved close. ‘So what should your name be? What are you famous for?’

‘I’m…’ and she trailed off. She ended up shrugging. ‘Nothing really.’

‘That is a poor title,’ said Crows. He handed her the bowl, and she drank deeply, almost greedily. ‘What do you call yourself, when the lights go out and all is dark and quiet, in those moments between waking and sleeping when you dream and can still remember?’

‘I can’t tell you.’ She stopped drinking, and looked at him over the rim of the bowl.

‘Cannot or will not?’

‘It sounds stupid.’

‘Others should be the judge of that.’

She muttered it into the bowl, and he cupped his long fingers around his ear.

‘Too soft. Louder, so all the crows can hear.’

‘The Red Queen.’ Her face burned.

‘Oh, oh oh.’ He laughed, and all she could see of him were his fine white teeth. ‘The King of Crows and his Red Queen it shall be. But you’re not a queen yet, are you? What shall we call you in the time before you claim your throne?’

‘Mary,’ said Mary. ‘When do we start?’