The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [27]
His voice. I peered more closely at him, trying to see beneath the herbage. He might look like a resident of the wilderness—a charcoal-burner, perhaps, or a rat-catcher—but he sounded like an Oxford don.
I opened my mouth to pursue this oddity, but a small groan brought me back. Focus, I told myself: Your brains have been knocked about and all the world looks odd. “His injuries want attention,” I repeated.
The hairy man dropped into an easy squat, and a pair of surprisingly clean hands gently pushed aside the larger man’s blood-stained fingers. He looked into the pilot’s eyes and asked, “The bone’s not broken?”
“No,” Javitz answered through clenched jaws.
“This didn’t happen here.”
“I was shot.”
The green eyes travelled from Javitz to me and over my shoulder to Estelle, who had turned her back, literally, on the adults and was laying out a tea-party, supplementing the porcelain cup with acorn-caps and leaf-plates. He frowned, then jumped up and walked around to face her. She raised her head, and the green eyes went wide.
I found I had got to my feet and taken a step towards him, but he did not notice. Slowly, he lowered himself to his haunches. I watched, uncertain, as the two of them studied each other for the longest time. I could see his face clearly, but I could not begin to guess what he was thinking. He studied her face as if its features contained a message coded just for him.
Eventually, his gaze shifted, and he turned to scrabble at the leaf-mould, a small noise that startled my ears into noticing that the incessant engine noise was gone, that the noise of the flames was dying, that the ringing in my ears had given way to silence, blessed and profound.
He found what he was looking for, and held it out for Estelle’s approval: an acorn cup. After she had accepted it and added it to the others, he broke the stillness with a question. “Would you like to come to my house?”
“Yes, please,” she answered, without hesitation.
“Put those in your pocket, then. We’ll make some tea to go in them.”
“Thank you, Mr …”
“Goodman,” he supplied, and held out a hand to her. “But you can call me Robert.”
“My name is Estelle Adler,” she announced, and gave his hand two solemn shakes.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Adler,” he said, and helped her to her feet.
Then he came back to us, with Estelle trailing after. He told Javitz, “If it’s not broken, there’s no point in a splint. Grit your teeth, friend.” And without so much as a grunt of effort, the small man slid his hands under the big American and lifted him like a child.
Goodman took half a dozen steps and vanished among the trees. I retrieved the fur coat, helped Estelle stash the last of the acorn cups in her pockets, and led her to the place where the men had disappeared. The narrow path between the trees would have gone unnoticed unless one had seen them go in. I glanced back at the now-smouldering wreck and took Estelle’s hand.
Three steps inside the green, she dug in her heels. With an ill-stifled groan, I bent to pick her up. She was not, in fact, heavy, and my tired arms forgot their bruises to welcome her.
Perhaps that was the answer to my earlier question, of how parents survived.
“It will be all right, Estelle,” I said. “I’m here.”
“But,” she piped in a worried voice, “shouldn’t we leave crumbs, so we can find our way out again?”
So it hadn’t been just my concussion: It would seem that we were actually setting forth into a fairy-tale.
Chapter 17
The fairy-tale impression only grew stronger as we followed our rescuer, whom my abused brain insisted on calling Mr Green. I had not known that England still possessed areas of ancient woodland such as this. The light, here in what could only be called a forest, was so dim that I followed him more by sound than by the occasional glimpses I caught of his back. Once, when the child in my arms grew heavy with sleep, I stopped to wrap the fur more securely around her; when I stood again, the noise ahead of me resumed.