The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [17]
Eventually the singing stopped and a little while after that he felt a blanket placed over him. He opened his eyes to see the rosy fire still breathing at the heart of white sticks. An owl cried its dry, hoarse cry and the bats still scattered their tiny beads of sound around him. He loved lying in its lap, the continuing forest, the way the roots ate the rot of leaves, and it circled on. To please himself, to decorate his path into sleep, he passed through his mind an inventory of its creatures. He saw the trees, beech, oak, hornbeam, lime, holly, hazel, and the berries, the different mushrooms, ferns, moss, lichens. He saw the rapid, low foxes, the tremulous deer, lone wild cats, tough, trundling badgers, the different mice, the bats, the day animals and night animals. He saw the snails, the frogs, the moths that looked like bark and the large, ghost-winged moths, the butterflies: orange tips, whites, fritillaries, the ragged-winged commas. He recounted the bees, the wasps. He thought of all the birds, the drumming woodpeckers and laughing green woodpeckers, the stripe of the nuthatch, the hook-faced sparrowhawks, the blackbirds and the tree creeper flinching up the trunks of trees. He saw the blue tits flicking between branches, the white flash of the jay’s rump as it flew away, the pigeons sitting calmly separate, together in a tree. He saw the fierce, sweet-voiced robin. He saw the sparrows.
And just before he fell asleep, he saw himself, his head whole, his body stripped down to a damp skeleton, placed gently, curled around, in a hole in the earth.
John woke with one side of his face tingling. He opened his eyes and found that it wasn’t the numbness, but a light rain pattering down onto him; with almost inaudible thumps it fell also into the soft ashes of the exhausted fire. Beyond that, wet trees gleamed.
He pulled the blanket up over his face and soon his breath made a warm, sleepy pocket under the coarse wool.
John woke again to people moving, dogs stretching. Judith, puffing with bellows into a new fire, smiled.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘To that place away up the road?’ she asked. He nodded. He had suspected that she would have guessed. ‘Don’t see why you have to be there myself,’ she said. ‘Anyone who plays the fiddle like that.’
‘Thank you.’ He stood, shook out and folded his blanket, then, not wanting to give her anything to do by handing it to her, placed it back on the ground where he’d slept.
‘We’ll be here the winter most likely, so if you want to come back . . .’
‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘I will, if I can.’ He raised his voice to address anyone near. ‘Thank you. I have to go now.’
‘After a bit of food,’ Judith suggested.
‘Thanks, I’m full enough for a while.’
John hurried away or tried to. First he had to shake hands with all the children who’d run to make a ring around him.
The sun was still low and he reckoned it to be early, perhaps early enough to slip back in unnoticed. The charcoal burners weren’t at their hut. He passed a bird-catcher with two cages swinging from his pole, on his way to London where song was needed.The morning’s catch of finches flew against the narrow bars. The catcher tilted his hat. John did the same and when he’d passed him shook his head at the gross symbol, refusing the easy poem he was offered.
He was back at the gate before Peter Wilkins. With his own key, he let himself back in. He trudged up the path to Fairmead House and was almost in when Matthew Allen stepped out.
He saw John - he couldn’t not, they were barely three feet apart - and looked disappointed.
‘John, this is very bad,’ he began and John felt anger suddenly buckle inside him, with no