C Fletcher - A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

Vengeance is the same word in both languages.

She showed me her armpits. After she told me about la pest , she showed me there were no boil scars. She wanted me to know she had not caught the disease and was not carrying infection with her the way the electrician had. She meant it to be friendly, to show things were okay between us and that was the way she wanted them to be from now on. Up until that point, I had not thought ahead enough to worry that if he had infected her family, she might be carrying la pest in the same way. It didn’t quite stop the worry she had now raised in my mind, because I didn’t know much about how diseases worked or how the germs went from person to person. I wasn’t that clear on what germs actually are and if they all work in the same way.

So we rode on together, and now I worried a little bit about whether I was going to catch la pest , but not enough to leave. I decided that however it was that germs went from person to person, if it was going to jump from her to me it would have already happened, probably when I was sewing her up, my hands smeared with her blood. But she looked healthy and strong and after a couple of days I forgot about it. There were other things to fill my head by then.

The higher ground began to slope away to the east, and we entered a new area of vegetation. The scrubby moorland, overgrown and extensive as it was, was nothing compared to the huge swathe of trees we now found ourselves descending into. What had been the midlands of the mainland was now really a great forest of broadleaf trees, mainly beech and oaks and sycamores. On the map, the land ahead should have been full of towns and villages, webbed together with roads and railways. It looked clear enough on the map, but as we looked down on it, it was now hard to make out how the variations in the patchwork of forest matched the confident—but much more than a century old—marks on the paper. We were looking down on a wilderness of treetops. Maybe this was what looking down onto clouds looked like. Only green.

This was when my compass really came into its own, because when we entered the wood, there was no more chance of navigating by landmarks. We rode in among the trees and it was immediately a very different world. Because of the sun filtering through the high canopy of leaves, the dappled light all around us was green. It was almost like being underwater. But it was most like being in a story, one from my childhood, the one about the hobbit that Ferg read us one winter when the weather outside was too fierce to do anything in for weeks on end. It was a story I loved, but I had had to imagine the woods and the forests and the strange creatures that peopled them because, as I said, there is no real woodland on the islands: the only dwarves there are the trees themselves, which are stunted things it would be easier to trip over than fall out of.

But this greenwood was deeper and greener than any I had imagined. There was more birdsong. More insects, like the big shiny black beetle that gave me a shock scuttling past my head when I leant back against an oak tree on our first halt. It had mouthparts that looked like the antlers on a deer and was as big as my thumb, like a metal toy. And then there were butterflies. I hadn’t really imagined a wood would have butterflies, but they were all around, orange ones, purple ones and my favourites which were black and white and appeared to flap less than the other butterflies as they glided silently between the trees, seeming to use no effort to do so.

The lack of a distant horizon made me much more aware of the sounds close by me. Not just the horses’ hooves on the ground, or the small branches breaking or whipping back once we’d pushed them aside in order to pass: it was the more intimate noises, the horses’ snorting, and my breathing. And John Dark’s humming. She was always humming when she rode. It was not exactly tuneless, but it was no single tune, and no mix of any ones that I recognised. It was more the idea of a tune, but with important bits left out. I don’t know if she was even aware that she did it. It was mostly okay, but sometimes I found it annoying. Usually when I was tired and hungry, which was when almost anything was annoying.

I know having the fanciful thoughts about the hobbit story may seem strange because I was on as serious a journey as I could imagine, going to get my dog back from someone who was likely to be ruthless and wholly opposed to my plan. Not the time to be thinking about a child’s book with wizards and elves. I had thought what getting Jess back might involve, and I knew that in the last resort, if it came to it, I would use force. And since Brand was bigger than me, using force likely meant doing it at a distance with my bow, and using my bow meant maiming or maybe killing. The chance of an arrowhead finding an artery even if I didn’t mean it to was real, and I wasn’t cocky enough to think I could just bluff him. So a bad second choice of violence likely lay at the end of my journey if my first better choice, stealth and theft, didn’t work out. I was really holding on to the fact I was good at not being seen when hunting.

My fantasy was that Brand would be there (not a guaranteed thing) and that I would sneak up on him (this in my mind’s eye meant darkness) and that Jess would be calm enough when she realised I was there (wholly miraculous if it was to happen) that she would then let me sneak her silently away. This would neatly pay Brand back, giving him the rude awakening he had given me: a new dawn and the knowledge he had been outwitted. In some of the daydreaming which I allowed myself, I stole his boat too and sailed home, leaving him arriving at the beach or jetty just too late to do anything than shake an aggrieved fist at me. Or in other versions, he smiled that white dazzle of his and shook his head like a good loser, acknowledging he had been viked and outsmarted by a better pirate. But I was pretty sure that honour among thieves was just a pretty phrase I’d read, and not something that existed in the real world. So daydreams apart, there would be blood at the end of this journey. And I didn’t know how I felt about that. I’m ashamed to say I had felt fine about it in the flushes of anger that Brand had provoked me to—the theft of Jess, the poisoning of my family, marooning me on Iona and the burning of my boat—but violence is an ugly thing and in the calmer moments I racked my brains for other ways to get what I wanted. Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can’t see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren’t and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can’t.

I wondered if the man who wrote about the hobbit had ridden through the greenwood like this. Despite the bird noise it was a peaceful place that lulled you. Without the compass it would have been easy to get lost. It was a maze without walls, just tree trunks and bushes, and animal tracks beaten through them. John Dark rode with her hood up and the grey hair escaping it, astride a similarly grey horse. From the back, there was something a bit wizardish about her, and it was easy enough to imagine there were other eyes in the forest watching us from behind a screen of leaves or brambles. It was even easy to imagine the bigger trees looking down on us and noticing us passing. I thought a lot about that book as we wove east among the oaks and beeches, and that is certainly why I called the house we ended up taking refuge in the Homely House, because that was the name of the house the travellers in the story made a much needed halt in. And the Homely House we found ourselves in did, in its way, contain a kind of magic, though the magic was in truth just the kindness of long dead people, not immortal elves.