Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(39)

The noise came from under them, and around them. It was deep and throbbing; it might have been a laugh, or a cry, or a call; it was not so much loud as everywhere. Saul could feel the vibrations in his feet.

It rose around them and fell, and the wind whipped salty-cold in Saul’s face.

“Hell,” Randolph said.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know, but it came when you mentioned a name, so don’t do that again. Hurry.”

Saul hurried, striding forward, not running because Randolph wasn’t, but walking as fast as he could without tripping on the coarse grass. His feet splashed a little. “It’s getting boggy.”

“Mmm.”

“It shouldn’t really.” Saul tried to keep his tone academic. “We’re very much on the edge of the fens.”

“Mmm.”

“Where’s the bloody castle?”

“Good question.”

The wind came again, harder, pushing against them, with a whine in it like the edge of a razor. Saul, used to flying sand, put one arm over his face and turned his head. Randolph’s dark hair was whipping in the wind, his coat flapping; they were both leaning forward.

“Keep going,” Randolph shouted. “Where it doesn’t want.”

Saul set his teeth. The wind was bitterly cold now, with the unnatural heat of an absent sun gone from his back. The noise rose again: sobbing, whooping, he couldn’t tell.

His ankle turned on a tuft of grass. He stumbled, and Randolph caught his arm and tugged him to his side. Saul leaned in, feeling his warmth, and something more. Randolph’s face was set, he was muttering, and the smell of ivy around him was very strong.

Ivy, green growing things. Trees. That was what this blasted landscape needed, Saul thought. He wanted solid earth under his feet, great oaks wrapped with ivy, graceful birches, the protective hawthorns and rowans of Camlet Moat. He brought the memory to mind again, making himself see the dappled sunlight, gold and green; feel the water on his face and in his throat. That was his England: not the brown peat-water and rank grass of a landscape that at best tolerated humankind, and had been broken because it would not be tamed. He made himself think of woodland that might stretch for miles, and birdsong, and thick foliage through which bright eyes glanced and darted away again.

“I don’t know what you’re doing but keep at it,” Randolph said. “It’s helping.”

It didn’t look like it was helping. Saul had been so lost in his self-created reverie that he hadn’t looked around. Now he did, and saw that evening was drawing in. The sky was dark grey, shot with red and purple lights that looked more like blood poisoning than sunset, and the plants and scrubby shrubs were no more than dim black shapes.

“Christ.”

“Focus,” Randolph snapped. “Harder. Now.”

Camlet Moat, Saul told himself. He’d got good at this over two years in a military gaol in Mesopotamia. There he’d put himself into the sunny chalk uplands of his boyhood, and remembered-created-learned that imaginary landscape in such detail that he could slip back into it during the worst times. He made himself do the same with Camlet Moat now, stumbling into the shrieking wind with Randolph’s arm hard against his, imagining the endless forest, the sunlight, the cool water splashing over his skin. Faces in the leaves and sweet-smelling mulch of years under his feet; bright rags tied to the cloutie tree and a woman’s laughter, here and gone. He didn’t let himself feel the icy bog-water that soaked through his shoes or the whip of the wind; he let the throbbing sound that was more a roar drift through his mind and away.

Randolph’s arm pulled at his. “There.”

There was—oh Christ—a stand of trees. Actual trees. He and Randolph ran then, stumbling forward, holding one another up as in some parody of a child’s three-legged race, heading for the trees while they could still see them against the darkening wind-whipped sky. Saul hurled himself forward, one long stride, another, then his foot came down on nothing and he was stumbling and splashing forward, face down, arm torn from Randolph’s grasp.

The impact on uneven earth and knife-edged grasses, and the shock of the sudden soaking, knocked the air from him. He struggled to push himself up, arms elbow-deep in freezing water, and something gripped his foot.

It’s a hand! was his first wild thought, and then, It’s weeds, just weeds, calm down. He tugged hard, shoving himself to his knees, but couldn’t dislodge whatever held him. He twisted, and turned his head, and saw it.

“Randolph!” he shrieked, and kicked frantically at the bedraggled thing, humanoid, weed-drowned and waterlogged, that rose from the fens like a growth, its too-long arms ending in a ragged, jagged tangle of branchlike fingers that held his foot. The stench of something rotten on the bottom of a pond was all around him, and the joyless laughter was all around him too as the thing dragged him sliding on his back, inexorably down into the marsh.

Something caught his collar and pulled back with startling force against the creature’s grip. The fen-monster shrieked with rage, its open mouth revealing an eel’s chaos of needle teeth, white in the dimness. It lunged forward and Randolph, behind Saul and gripping his jacket, came down on one knee with his free hand out and shouted, “Forthlaede!”

Ivy exploded from the thing’s mouth, eyes, and ears, tendrils looping and throttling, its green stink drowning the bog-rot. The creature let go Saul’s foot to scrabble frantically at the shoots that burst from its every orifice, and Saul felt himself hauled up.