Black Feathers

39

It was a long and fruitless morning. All the snares were empty, and Gordon and John Palmer saw no game for a couple of hours. When they finally came upon a group of rabbits playing near a warren in a steep bank, John Palmer insisted on taking the shot with his air rifle. He missed a simple kill and the rest of the rabbits scattered into the many entrances of their home. The man laid his forehead against the rifle stock, and Gordon thought he would cry again, this time in plain view. It wasn’t that they needed the food – the stocks of cured meat were plentiful – it was the weight of John Palmer’s powerlessness settling heavier on his shoulders. At least, that was what Gordon supposed. The man was on the run with more fear of what was behind him than hope for what the future might hold. Gordon tried to feel some sympathy for him, and couldn’t. John Palmer’s coldness in the face of what had happened to his home and family worried him. The man’s pain was greater than his own, the crimes committed against him more brutal. Their shared misfortunes ought to have brought them closer, but John Palmer was still suspicious of him and that kept them apart.

But when he got right down to it, there was something about Brooke’s father that Gordon just didn’t like. He couldn’t specify what it was, he only knew it was true. His instinct told him to be wary.

For the first time in many days, they returned to camp empty-handed. John Palmer led the way. Suddenly careless of being spotted he took the direct route, foregoing the river bank and walking straight towards the area of forest where their camp was hidden behind a screen of trees. Gordon sensed John Palmer’s failure to provide seething within him and turning to anger, anger that would soon come his way.

“You’ve done a lot for me, Mr Palmer. I could have died in that tunnel if you hadn’t found me when you did.”

John Palmer muttered something gruff that Gordon couldn’t decipher. A verbal waving-away of his own kindness? An oath of regret that he’d ever set eyes on Gordon Black? It didn’t much matter now.

“I’m going to move on tomorrow,” continued Gordon. “I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t grateful for your help. I really am. I hope you and Brooke find a” – he was going to say “safe” and was glad he didn’t – “good place to live soon.”

John Palmer took a few more steps and then stopped. He turned and looked down at Gordon.

“You’re going off on your own?”

“Yes.”

“But where are going to go? How will you survive? This is a dangerous country now. Everything’s scarce. Even food and water.”

Gordon looked around at the land. A grey blanket of sky stretched to every horizon. To the west the landscape rose into high, purplish hills. Everywhere else there was woodland and fen, smaller hills and the valleys between. Plenty of places to travel quietly. Plenty of cover for him and for the animals he would stalk. Plenty of water in the swollen streams and rivers. The land called to him, and suddenly this man John Palmer and his sad story were a weight that Gordon wished to cast off and leave far behind. The land called to him to enter it deeply and lose himself there. We will make you strong, the trees seemed to say. I will feed you, said the voice of the Earth. All over the sky, crows and jackdaws and rooks and magpies were suddenly on the wing. Not a call from any of them, not a swoop or a dive, a mere hanging upon the air in anticipation. We are your dreams, they seemed to say.

Follow us.

“Did you hear what I said?”

John Palmer seemed insulted by Gordon’s confidence.

“I’m going to find the Crowman,” said Gordon. “Do you know anything about him?”

At the mention of the name, John Palmer resumed his walk, opening a gap between them. Gordon caught up easily, his legs stronger now than they’d ever been before.

“Anything at all would be helpful. What you’ve heard about him. Where he’s been seen. Anything.”

John Palmer wouldn’t look at him.

“This is nonsense.”

“If you don’t know anything, it’s OK. I only wondered. I have so little to go on, you see. Just rumours, really.”

John Palmer tried to walk faster, but Gordon paced him without effort, his gait casual against the grown man’s hasty trot. Brooke’s father seemed not to notice the host of corvids dotting the sky in every direction. He saw nothing but the ground right in front of him. Gordon knew he’d get no answer. The man was too closed off. Even if he knew something, he wasn’t going to share. He was too afraid of everything.

Gordon stopped walking and watched John Palmer stalking away across the uneven ground, walking so fast he almost tripped every few paces. This was the condition of John Palmer’s mind. Trying to escape everything: the past, the truth, himself. Gordon let him pursue his folly and slowed to enjoy the last part of the walk back to camp. The beech forest was slate grey and silent away across the fields.

When John Palmer broke into a run fifty yards ahead of him, Gordon knew it wasn’t an attempt to avoid the truth. He’d seen something among those quiet, leafless giants.

Gordon ran too, his booted feet finding easy purchase in the lumpy field and striking the earth surely every time. Without really trying he was running faster than he ever had in his life. And though he began far behind John Palmer, he could already see what the older man had seen.

There were figures moving amid the trees that hid their camp. Gordon drew level with John Palmer and overtook him. He heard the shouts of men. Something zipped past the right side of his head. A figure in the beech wood stopped and reached towards its neck as if stung. The figure took its hand away and Gordon saw a red palm and a red throat. The man – Gordon could see his beard now – fell to his knees, one hand picking frantically at the wound under his chin. Blood came fast and pressurised beneath trembling, slippery fingers. It must have been John Palmer’s finest shot. For once, John Palmer’s instincts were correct. Gordon could sense the malevolence emanating from the men in the trees, men who now retreated farther into the wood.

The wounded man’s neck pumped arterial blood in comical arcs, as though from a water pistol loaded with cheap wine. The portion of his face not covered by hair drained pale as he plucked at the entry wound for the tiny lead pellet that had already ended his life.

Another shot passed beside Gordon, and he heard a man groan in immediate response. As he cleared the tree line and plunged into the woods, he saw more and more of what lay before them. There were several men in the camp, six more at least, and they had already begun to destroy it. At first he couldn’t see Brooke, but that was because he was looking for a blond girl dressed in sturdy outdoor gear. There was no evidence of that there.

Gordon dodged to his left on a sudden impulse as something in the camp exploded in his direction. He side-stepped again, instinct guiding him as he reached for his father’s lock knife and unclasped it. A second explosion erased a low branch beside him. One of the men had fired a shotgun at him and was now slipping two more cartridges into the still-smoking weapon with calm, sure fingers. Gordon came at him as the man locked the gun shut and raised it.

He dived low as both barrels discharged right over his head. His momentum folded the man in half, causing him to sit down. Gordon punched the knife blade upwards into the man’s stomach. He had no idea what he was aiming for; he merely wanted the blade to enter as deeply as possible. He was aware of the man drawing a sudden in-breath and stiffening. He withdrew the knife and rolled away. The man sighed with the exiting of the steel and sat staring straight ahead.

There wasn’t time for Gordon to wipe the blood from his clenched fist or from his red-greased blade. Another of the men ran at him, a dirty machete raised high over his head. He too was bearded, his hair thin and grimy, his furious eyes wide and glaring. The pellet which obliterated one of them did not stop the man immediately, but it gave Gordon the opportunity to rise to his feet and skitter from his path. By the time the pellet had entered the man’s frontal lobe, he’d stopped and stood, blinking, arms still held high, the machete poised to fall. Ruined ocular mucus, the mess of one angry eye, leaked from his left orbit with each confused blink.

“You’re lovely,” the man said, and sounded surprised by the utterance. “You’re so beautiful.” He sat down with the machete still wavering on high. “Yes, that’s it. I hadn’t realised before. I want to love you. It hurts so much and I want to be with you and I forgive you because you are so lovely. So lovely.”

Blood followed the dregs of the deflated eyeball, the flow of it increasing until one side of the man’s face was streaked with it. Gordon stood, expecting him to attack at any moment. The deranged man muttered about beauty and peace and love, all the while his weapon pointing upwards like an antenna receiving divine transmissions.

Four other men, equally shabby and wild, all of them so thin their clothes flapped around their limbs, had grouped by a tree. They had knives. One carried a small hatchet, another a bloodstained hammer. A pellet slapped the tree by which they stood, and their group became a huddle on the far side of its trunk. Their anger and confidence were gone. They seemed ready to scatter. One of them called out.

“We know you, John Palmer. We know what you did. You can’t run from the past, man.”

John Palmer entered the clearing, his gun barrel preceding him. His voice quavered.

“I was protecting my own. That’s any man’s right, and you know it.”

“You’re a murderer, John Palmer. A child-killer. I hope you die of shame and burn in hell.”

Gordon looked across at Brooke’s father. Eventually John Palmer said, “I probably will.”

It was so quiet, Gordon doubted any of the men could hear.

“We’re even now, John Palmer,” said the speaker from behind the tree. “All debts cancelled. All bets off.”

“What do you mean?” shouted John Palmer.

“You’ll see.”

As soon as John Palmer turned away, the men raced into the woods. In seconds they were out of sight. Gordon considered pursuing them, but there was blood cooling and coagulating on his hand and already the fire of conflict was going out of him. Whatever had happened between these men and John Palmer was not his business, except in as much as he owed John Palmer his life.

The man with the shotgun was on his back, his weapon tight in the grip of his dead fingers. He still stared but straight up now, through the leafless canopy and into the featureless grey sky. Gordon sensed rather than saw the circling crows up there, and for the first time in his life he recognised the feeling this gave him. It was as though he had not only been watched over, but studied by something both distant and close by, something unseen high above and also invisibly at his side.

The machete man had stopped speaking of love. He sat with his mouth open. His hands had finally sunk to rest between his legs, the edge of the blackened machete blade biting through the leaf mulch into the earth. From his sightless eye he had seen something wonderful before he died, but Gordon knew it was no more than brain-damaged hallucination.

The noise John Palmer made was a howl of ultimate disappointment.

Gordon turned now, walked a few paces and saw why.

Brooke was hanging outstretched, with her face to the bark of a large beech. At first he thought they’d tied her to the tree because her feet weren’t touching the ground. But the blood that ran in such plenty, down from her upstretched arms, over her bare shoulders and down her naked back and flanks, told a different story.