Black Feathers

61

Some days after he crossed the river, it began to rain so hard that nothing could keep him dry.

When night fell there was no point even unpacking the tent. Gordon found himself in rocky sandstone hills somewhere in Shropshire, and often the best he could do was shelter under an overhang hoping he didn’t sicken in the sodden cold. One morning, stiff and sore from lying on bare rock only partially sheltered from the rain, he looked into his rations and discovered what he knew had been coming for several days. He was out of meat.

On this same day, the rain continuous and heavy, he found a track leading into a small sandstone canyon. At the base of the canyon was a flight of carved steps leading up to a round cave entrance. To the right of the steps was a wooden hand rail. Many of the spindles in the rail were rotten, broken or missing. He guessed he’d found some site of historical interest.

He mounted the steps to the cave opening two at a time, only to discover that the hollow in the sandstone was protected by a steel grille. Exhausted and hungry, he squatted in front of the cave mouth, drenched hair hanging in his face, and peered within. It was deep and very sheltered.

Furious, he stood up and kicked at one of the uprights. There was give, where the concrete into which the steel was set met the soft sandstone around it. He kicked it again and red dust sifted down, streaking and darkening in the endless downpour. For a few minutes he set to using the sole of his boot on each of the struts, and soon all of them were loose. He took out his father’s lock knife and, careful not to overstrain the blade, he scraped around the concrete housings of the steel grid. More sandstone dust fell, briefly staining his hands rusty before the rain washed the grit away.

An hour later, every housing was weakened and he began to kick again. This time the grille gave, tilting back at an angle. Spurred by this, he kicked harder, the soles of both feet already bruised and his legs shaky with the effort of it. When the grille came free it collapsed back into the mouth of the cave, all the struts breaking off at the same time. Gordon grinned to himself in the pouring rain.

He crouched and stepped through into the darkness. Even though water was cascading down the sandstone rock face of the canyon, inside the cave was dry. Not even a drop of water had entered. There were pieces of litter which people had thrown through the grille, but apart from that the space was empty. Judging by the faded, crumbly paper and plastic, no one had come here for a long time. By the gloom of rain-clogged daylight he could see the cave was compact. Like the steps carved into the rocks outside, the hole had been excavated by human hands.

The solidity of the cave’s curving walls was a real comfort. It was almost homely.

He dragged his pack into the dry and pressed every damp item flat to the sloping sandstone. Once his clothes and sleeping gear were spread all around the inside of the cave, he stepped back into the rain and descended the stone steps. The base of the canyon was well wooded and there were plenty of fallen boughs. He sought out the lightest, driest twigs first, taking an armful back to the cave before returning for larger branches. Back in the cave he used his knife to cut kindling from the smaller branches. He scraped hair-fine curls from beneath the bark of a log until he had a pile of tinder. Using a spark-maker he lit the tinder. It caught first time and he crouched to blow on the spreading red glow. Smoke rose and tiny flames leapt from the tinder. He placed the cave’s litter over the flames and built up his kindling a piece at a time until he had a reliable fire. The larger branches spat and crackled but they kept the blaze alive.

Whoever had built the cave had thought carefully about staying warm and dry; the smoke rose up to the curved roof and slowly leaked out through the entrance, which was much higher than the lowest point in the floor. Gordon built the fire as large as he could and went out for more branches, piling them just inside the door to dry. The heat became so intense he was able to strip and add his travelling clothes to the ones already adorning the sloping walls.

Naked, warm and dry, Gordon used his knife to cut his fingernails and toenails. He saved the trimmings and put them in a depression in the rock. After he’d rested up, he intended to scatter these tiny pieces of himself outside as an offering to the land. The maker of the cave had scraped several similar receptacles in the inner walls and Gordon was happy to make use of them. By the light of the fire, which was the cheeriest light he’d seen in some time, he inspected as much of his body as he could.

His palms and fingers were callused and there were a few blisters and cracks in the skin. None of them looked serious. His feet, which had blistered so badly at first, had also hardened over, leathery pads of flesh now protecting his heels and soles from the insides of his boots. There were cuts and scrapes on his shins and knees where he had walked through areas of bramble or caught himself on sharp rocks, but he could see no lasting damage. His belly was flat and there was no spare flesh on him anywhere. He pinched the skin of his stomach and pulled. It was tight, only muscle beneath. His groin had sprouted a mass of dark, brittle curls over the last couple of weeks, and there was no question that his penis and testicles had grown. The cut in his thigh had healed into a shiny pink scar, the one across his palm was still livid and tender. His hair was around his collar now, longer than it had ever been. He knew it smelled but there was little he could do about it. His feet and underarms reeked too, but he had become as used to that as he had to squatting in the bushes to shit and wiping his arse with bunches of leaves or moss.

He was growing. Merging with the land.