Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Charlie risks taking a step. The woman stares at him from her grey face.

“Help, you understand. Someone who can tend his wounds.” Charlie points to Thomas’s head. “Stop the bleeding.”

She does not react but allows him to approach to within two yards. Charlie folds his hands together, an altar boy’s gesture, fingers closed, thumbs resting against the bridge of his nose.

“Please!”

The word does something to her. It is familiar; frightens her, recalls her to a moment in her past. Her head jerks down, her shoulders up, much like a cat’s when startled by a noise. Then she tries it, her lips shaping themselves around the sound. Biting it off. Tasting it. Ready to spit.

“Plea-sseh.”

Her expression does not change with the word. It is as though she has unlearned her face’s gestures. It convinces Livia once and for all that she is living here, alone in the forest, without human contact. All at once the old servants’ stories come back to Livia, about the ghost in the woods. Her father’s soul. His reason: gone missing, roaming amongst trees at dawn. But this woman is as blank as he, and smokes with equal abandon.

There is something odd about her Smoke, however, something that sets her apart. It takes Livia several moments to put her finger on it. She smokes with equanimity. Steadily, near-constantly, always the same light-grey Smoke, subtle like a mist. It clothes her more thoroughly than her rags. In summer, Livia catches herself thinking, she will walk the woods naked, dressed only in her Smoke. The thought brings a flush to her cheeks. Anger, embarrassment. Envy? A moan from Thomas cuts short the thought.

The stranger reacts to this moan. She looks over at Thomas, digs in a sort of satchel that seems sewn onto her very garment, draws forth a fistful of something green. Moss. Dry as it is, it retains an eerie emerald sparkle in the grey of her hand. But she won’t step closer, not until Charlie withdraws and pulls Livia with him, taking her hand as naturally as though he’s held it all his life.

“Please,” he repeats and with a sudden burst of movement the woman sprints over to Thomas’s side, falls on her knees, takes off the bandages and scatters them carelessly by his side. She presses the moss into the wound, starts digging between a tree root, finds a fistful of clammy mud, and smears it on top. Livia starts forward but Charlie’s hand stops her. They can see the mud caking in the cold of the air. The woman, meanwhile, is digging in her satchel, dismissing a dozen herbs, until she pulls out a dried flower and forces it into Thomas’s mouth, slipping it under the tongue. All this takes her barely a minute. As a last step, she knots the strips of soiled petticoat together and quickly slips them into her bag.

When Livia and Charlie walk over to Thomas, the woman withdraws again, crouches in the dead leaves of the forest floor. The poultice looks barbaric and like it will crumble away at the slightest touch. But the bleeding has stopped. Charlie makes to pick Thomas up, then stops.

“We need to get him to safety,” he says to Livia. “Do you have any idea where we are?”

She closes her eyes, tries to picture the forest and the surrounding land. It is hard to transfer distances from horseback to this stumbling through the woods.

“There is a village somewhere. At the far side of the woods. Near the river. But it’s several miles.”

Charlie nods, turns back to the woman, takes a slow step towards her. She does not move. His voice is very gentle when he speaks. Gentle, but not condescending. How long , Livia finds herself thinking, since this woman has been spoken to as a human being not a beast?

“We need help,” Charlie explains. “People. A village. But we don’t know the way.”

When the woman does not respond, Charlie falls to his knees, clears a patch of forest floor. He uses a stick to draw into the dirt. A house, the way a child would draw it: a box with a roof. A stickman, then another, clothed with the triangle of a skirt. When the woman still does not react he adds a clumsy river, writhing like a worm. This means something to her. She copies the picture with her fingers in the air.

“The river? Do you know where it is?” Livia’s words sound hard to her ears, after Charlie’s gentle whisper.

“Riv-ver.”

“Yes, the river. There are people there. Will you lead us?”

The woman seems to consider the request. She crouches motionless for a moment, cocking her head. In profile, she becomes strange all over again, her features foreign: the jawline strong, the small dark eye almost hidden in its thick fold. When she jerks her head to them and beckons, Charlie gives a sudden start.

“I have seen her before!”

“Where?”

“On a picture of your father’s, taken fifteen years ago. But there she had two heads.”

But he does not explain what he means by this, bends down and shoulders Thomas instead, out of whose face mud grows like a dirty tumour.

“Do you think we are being followed?” she asks him as he makes to set off.

“Don’t let’s wait and find out.”

ф

They walk for more than an hour. Very quickly Charlie tires of his burden and at Livia’s insistence they take Thomas’s slumping body between themselves, his arms slung over their shoulders, feet dragging in the leaves. Progress is slow and there is no way of telling how much distance they are putting between themselves and their attackers. The woman walks a good ten paces ahead, melting into the trees seemingly at will, then stepping out a few yards farther on and beckoning with her head. At long last they reach the river. They see it first as a wall of brightness cut into the dark mass of the trees: the sun is out and is hitting the water, reflecting up. It’s so tranquil it makes no sound. On the other bank the trees cluster thickly. Wherever they are, there are no people here.

But their guide has a reason for choosing this spot. She beckons them on, walking quickly along to the riverbank. Livia knows she cannot carry on much longer. Charlie too is staggering under Thomas’s weight, his breathing ragged, the head beetroot-red. There isn’t far to go: thirty steps on the woman stops and disappears in the shrubs to the side. When they reach the spot, she is gone, somewhere in the shadowy darkness of the woods. The riverbank is steep here. Swollen as the river is by the recent rains, they are walking no more than a yard above the waterline.

“Can you see her?” Charlie pants.

“No. But there is something behind this shrub. Something she wants us to find.”

It’s a rowing boat, not six feet long. The forest has very nearly claimed it. Its sides are overgrown with moss and the piece of canvas covering its top is weighed down with leaves and dirt from which grow the grey tendrils of dead weeds. When they slip off this cover, they discover two sculls lying in its bottom, along with a film of rotting water. The smell makes them gag. A bracket of rusted iron is let into each of the boat’s sides, to anchor the sculls. As she helps Charlie push the boat out into the open, Livia’s fingers unearth a carved crest within the moss at its prow. A boar, basking in the circle of a rising moon. She knows it at once. It’s her own crest, her family’s, the ancient emblem of the Naylors.

“My father used to disappear for days at a time. Going fishing. It was his one indulgence.” Livia shivers, is transported back to a distant time. Early childhood. Her father’s hand stroking her hair. “But that was many years ago.”

“Do you think it’ll float? The wood’s half rotten. But it’s tarred from underneath and the canvas kept the rain out.”

“Let’s hope it does. It’s the best chance we have.”

ф