The Dark Between the Trees, page 5
“It’s all that’s left,” said Ames, sourly. “We couldn’t find the river yesterday.”
They were all watching him, Davies realised. He cast about for the sergeant he liked better. “Where’s Harper?”
Half a dozen men turned away to where the body of Willis still lay, and Harper bent over him. Harper was whispering something, that was evidently not for the rest to hear. When he straightened up there was a moment before he noticed all the rest of them looking at him, in which loss was writ large across his face.
They didn’t have a priest. Davies had felt bad about it yesterday, when they’d had to leave so many comrades on the battlefield unburied. But this was worse—now they had time to spare, and no way to give Willis the absolution he deserved. A few more days and they could have met up with the rest of the companies heading north, and one of them, surely, would have a chaplain. Too late for Willis now, though. No chaplain, no quartermaster, barely so much as a drummer with Jessop in the state he was. Thank God for Sam Harper, otherwise Davies would almost be inclined to desert himself.
He called Thatcher and Harper over to one side. “We need to move on, quickly. Get out of this hellhole. No, don’t look at me like that, Thatcher. How long ’til we can get everyone moving?”
“An hour or so,” said Harper. “Taylor is weak, so’s Onslow. We need to go slowly.” He glanced back across at the clearing. “Speaking professionally, I think we should wait a few more hours.” Thatcher started to try to cut across him, but Harper continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “Personally, of course, let’s go on as soon as we can.”
“Right,” said Davies, doubtfully. “You’d better patch up Taylor, then, before we go.”
Harper nodded.
“We need to get out of this place,” said Thatcher. “Alwood—”
“I didn’t want to hear Mr Alwood’s opinions last night, and I don’t want them now.” Davies looked across at the rest of them. There were pitifully few of them. Alwood and Stiles still sat apart from the group, looking down at the ground, still praying quietly. “Are you sure no one saw what happened? Someone must have.”
“The entire last watch has gone missing,” said Thatcher. He appeared to be gritting his teeth. Davies ignored him. Where the oak had been, there was nothing at all.
They buried Willis in a shallow grave. Byrne and Kilburton dug it; Byrne had known Willis the longest. They set up a makeshift cross made of sticks to mark it. The rest sat around, either still too injured for such exertion, or just lost in their own thoughts. Davies sat near Jessop the drummer, who had been bleeding heavily the night before. Today he was subdued, and sweating under the muck of travel and battle, but seemed in reasonable spirits given the circumstances. Harper and Taylor lashed a few makeshift crutches together and handed them around to those who needed them, and they all gathered around the hole where Willis’s body now lay. Most of them had known him for a year or more, a few for most of his lifetime. They were all from the same part of the world, after all. It was more than the fallen man’s banner that kept them together.
They were a sorry-looking lot, quite apart from the crutches. Coats which had been patched several times already were soiled and bloodstained, and would likely remain so until they made it to an actual garrison. Beards grew patchy and rat-tailed, whether their owners intended to have them or not—they hadn’t had much choice about that lately. And, thought Davies, under all that they were thin, sickly, underfed. This war was no good for anyone.
Taylor led the prayers for Willis’s spirit, and for the men they had lost the previous day, in a voice whose flatness seemed to be belied by how tightly he shut his eyes while he was doing it. They stood around the open grave, and for a short while after he had finished the only sounds were low wheezing, and the leaves shaking in the trees around them, and Bill Stiles’s muffled sniffling.
A respectful amount of time; not enough that it would tip over into something other than thinking about the dead. After that they dispersed, and prepared to leave. Willis’s banner lay on the ground next to the spot where he had spent his last moments. They all eyed it nervously—it must be bad luck to take up a man’s banner so soon after he was in the ground. Davies thought he saw Charley Ames smirking, and it was enough: “Ames, you take the colours. They’re your responsibility now. Stop whining, man, your missus would be proud.” No one laughed, and he wasn’t sure he’d expected them to.
He avoided everyone’s eye, and barked orders at them until they had assembled in a way that wasn’t completely desultory. Then he picked a direction to what he recalled had been approximately the north-east, and started to walk in it.
“Sir!” Davies wheeled around. It was Cadwell, halfway down the line. Of course it was; no one else would have dared interrupt. “I thought we were going north-east?”
“We are,” he snapped, and turned back around.
“Beg pardon sir, but north-east is that way.” Cadwell was pointing to a direction almost at right angles from where Davies had been intending to take them.
Davies didn’t move. “Are you suggesting that I’m going the wrong way?”
“No, sir, only—I’m sure it’s that way.”
Ten others—only ten!—all staring at the two of them, from one to the other. On any other day Davies might have had Cadwell flogged for insubordination. But something wasn’t right in this place, and now he was doubting himself. He squinted up at where the sun would be, if it hadn’t been obscured by thick grey clouds. Now he looked, the weak shadows fell in the way Cadwell was suggesting. That couldn’t be right; they’d come from the south-east, which was… nearer to what he thought was north than it was to south. His head hurt. “Harper, Thatcher, to me.”
They shuffled off to one side.
“Which way did we come from last night?”
They pointed in two different directions.
Davies swore. “It couldn’t be bloody simple, could it?”
Thatcher’s eyes were bulging. “It’s the Devil’s doing. It must be. We should get away from this place.”
“The river can’t be far off. We can’t go wrong when we get to it.” He called out to the rest of the group. “Alwood! Pull yourself together. Which way is the river from here?”
Alwood said, “It runs north to south, east of here. But they say in these parts that you should never—”
“Alright, shut up. I don’t want to hear what your mam told you not to do. We’d better go Mr Cadwell’s way, then.” He was being petty, and in the back of his mind he knew it. But he was the captain here, not Cadwell, and the rest of them could put up with it if they knew what was good for them. At the back of the line, Bill Stiles was now staring wildly into the trees in all directions. He was visibly shaking. Davies ignored him. They set off, slowly so that the injured ones could keep up, in a direction that was probably to the north-east.
* * *
Soldiering, when it comes down to it, involves hardly any fighting—not on the regular, at least. If you’re unlucky there’s a little of it, and if you’re very unlucky there’s months of drilling that immediately disperses to the wind the moment you go near a real battlefield with real enemy soldiers in it. But no matter how lucky you are, the fighting and the drilling bits of being a soldier pale into insignificance next to its two chief components: trying to sleep in terrible places, and marching. Sometimes—and again this is about how lucky you are—you might find yourself in a bit of garrison that isn’t soaking wet and doesn’t smell too much like something rotting. But the marching, that’s non-negotiable. Even at the best of times.
It is not fun. It hurts—acutely, if your boots are too big or too small, which is likely, and otherwise it’s a long, dull ache in your legs and your heels and your back and your shoulders.
The ones who could afford the coin to boost their luck often ended up as cavalry. To do that, you needed to be able to buy and keep a horse. These were not those men. This was a company of foot, and when it came to marching, the clue was in the name.
And yet, thought Davies, somehow, when all about was uncertain or just plain dangerous, marching was better than the alternative. It was better than what you might be doing. He had been a soldier of sorts for more than half his life, had walked half the length of England more times than he could count, and plenty of France and the Low Countries besides. England was worse; there were more hills in it, and the food was scarcer. Even here, though, in a bitter kind of way he almost enjoyed the walking. It was better at any rate than standing still and waiting. At least nobody had ever succeeded in co-opting him into the navy.
Behind him, he could hear the murmur of whispered discussion from some other part of the line. It was one of the things Davies usually found most comforting about the march—occasional conversation lapsing sometimes into companionable silence, or sometimes in high spirits into singing. There was no chance of singing now, besides which it was still threatening to rain, but there was something in the character of the conversation that seemed different from usual. It was something about the whispering, which spoke of intending not to be heard.
That probably meant one thing. “Should my ears be burning?” He turned and saw that the few at the back of the group were walking in a clump, like young girls. Ames with his banner held at an alarming angle like a pike, Cadwell, Alwood, Thatcher. Frowning and serious. In front of them Bill Stiles looked like he was about to burst into tears again.
Sergeant Thatcher looked like he’d been caught doing something illicit. He flushed red, and stomped forward with his head down. Turning back around, Davies heard Ames say, “I want to hear what lives here, even if he doesn’t.”
Davies said, “You’re a bunch of superstitious old wives, the lot of you.”
“How do you explain the tree?” said Cadwell, slightly too loudly. They all looked at him.
“I don’t care to, soldier. I only care to get far away from it, and I can’t do that if you’re busy gossiping, can I now?”
Francis Alwood whispered something inaudible, and Stiles took a step closer to him. They were both so young, Davies noticed now—under Alwood’s patchy attempt at a beard he could only have been seventeen or eighteen, and Stiles even younger. A bad influence on each other, surely.
“What did you say?”
And now the group had definitely stopped walking, and were all goggling, and a sense of unease seemed to leap from man to man, growing and becoming stronger as it went.
Alwood tried again to speak, but the words seemed to stick in his throat. Stiles said, “You can’t say it here! It’ll hear you!” His voice was uncannily high pitched, almost a squeak.
“What will hear you?” said Davies, helplessly.
“For pity’s sake,” said Thatcher. “He said, it’s the Corrigal.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Health And Safety
Alice Christopher woke with a sore back and a cold nose, and lay in her sleeping bag staring at the pale blue canvas above her and listening to the birdsong. Judging by the quality of the light, it was still overcast outside, and without dislodging whatever comfort she’d been able to eke out to look at her watch, she was unable to gauge even roughly what time it was. And so she lay there, feeling her nose go numb, sure that if she moved an inch from her cocoon of sleeping bag her feet would immediately freeze.
From outside came the sound of the other tent unzipping. Someone rummaged around her waterproofs, got to her feet and stumped a few steps into the clearing.
And then silence.
Kim’s voice. “Helly? Can I borrow you for a second?”
The sound of shuffling. Another tent zip. Alice was suddenly alert, eyes open, listening hard. Next to her, Nuria made no movement at all, but Alice had the distinct impression that she was also awake.
From outside, a sharp intake of breath, and a muffled “Ssh.” Alice sat bolt upright, and started shovelling on a second fleece jumper. Nuria next to her started to say, “I’m sure it’s—”
“Dr Christopher?” It was Helly, outside.
Kim’s voice said, “Sue? Have you got the camera in there?” Alice pitched herself forward through the inner tent opening, grabbed her boots without putting them on, and lunged for the outer zip. A wave of freezing air hit her, damp and misty from the early morning.
She immediately saw what they were looking at. What they weren’t looking at. Because it was gone: that enormous oak tree that had been the source of their triumph the previous evening, that specifically mentioned star that lit their way and proved they were on the right track, that Alice was on the right track, was not there. It had gone.
It was like she had run into a brick wall at full speed. She sat awkwardly in the door of the tent, boots in one hand, mind almost completely blank, staring agape at the middle of the clearing.
There was movement behind her, as Nuria said, “What’s going on?” and looked past Alice’s shoulder. Then she too saw what was out there and fell silent.
Sue had by now found the camera and switched it on; it gave a cheerful little bleep, and she took it across to where Kim and Helly stood while it booted up. Her expression was curiously thin-lipped, almost angry, and she averted her eyes from the middle of the empty clearing as if it offended her. Kim took the camera and flicked through the last few pictures.
“Look. There it is. Tree.” The little screen was barely two inches across, but the image it showed was unmistakable. There was the oak, at 18:31:14 the previous day, trunk so thick that it could conceivably have been a thousand years old if you didn’t know any better, branches mingling with the rest of the canopy so that it was unbroken in places. There again at 18:31:32, 18:31:48, from another angle at 18:32:19. Solid. Real.
Alice put her boots on slowly, tying the laces entirely by feel—she couldn’t take her eyes off the space in the clearing where the oak had been. Surprisingly, after that first moment of shock, she felt far calmer than she had expected to. It was completely impossible, of course, and yet somehow… it slotted into place in her mind quite easily. Last night she had had the strongest impression, after all, that she had not been looking at the real Moresby Forest, that somehow there was a wood tucked in behind the wood that she was seeing, that something about this place was not only not true but—and she had not been able to put her finger on it then, although now it felt as natural as the absence of the oak tree—that it was actively deceitful.
If there were bodies here to be found, she might just have the best shot anyone had ever had at finding them. This was her chance to know.
The others were talking, and it occurred to her that she ought to be listening.
“…have to come back another time,” Kim was saying.
“This’ll take a much larger team,” said Sue. “There’s no other way to do it. I can’t do anything under these conditions, and neither can you.”
“What’s this?” said Alice, and she went over towards them.
“I’m sorry, Dr Christopher,” said Sue. “But you have to admit we’re out of our depth here. Let’s come back a different day with more people. I’m as disappointed as you.” But she didn’t sound like it. She was still looking at where the tree had been.
“Are you joking?” said Alice. “Nobody has ever had an opportunity like this before, and you want to just turn around and go away?”
“Yes. In case of a natural disaster, I’d want backup. But this isn’t even… What is this? I’ve never heard of anything like this at all. We need to go home, right now.” She addressed this last to Kim and Helly, as if their say-so would swing it.
Kim said, in the tone of a mother being placatory, “Surely the real waste of an opportunity is trying to rush it, and not do it justice? We should definitely come back, but…” She trailed off. She too was looking back at the place where the tree had been.
Alice wanted to say, “But what if it’s changed by then and we never get it back?” but she bit that back. “There must be some kind of reasonable explanation. What do you think, Nuria?”
It was a cruel thing to ask, because she knew what Nuria was like and that Nuria would back her up no matter what her private opinion was.
“It is a unique opportunity,” sad Nuria doubtfully.
Sue threw her hands up. “It’s a stupid idea. With respect. I don’t know what’s going on, I can’t explain it, but—”
“We need backup,” said Kim, firmly. “The safety of this expedition is my job. I’ve never seen anything like this before, or even heard of it. It’s my call to make, and I say we’re going back.”
Helly sighed. “I don’t like it either, Alice. I see why you want to explore. But—but—with my professional hat on, which I have to have and so do you, I agree with Kim. So let’s take a few more photos, just for comparison, and have some breakfast, and come back another day.”
“You don’t understand,” said Alice. She could hear her own voice wobbling. Something was slipping out of her grasp.
“You’ve worked hard for this, I know,” Helly said. “We’ve all seen the risk assessments. But this is beyond a risk. How do you even explain that?”
And Alice couldn’t, not in a way that she wanted to say out loud to people using their best reasonable voices on her, so she stumped off angrily on her own, and the rest of them let her go.
She should have known that the excitement of yesterday couldn’t last, that anything she tried to hold onto with both hands would immediately be yanked away. That was about the shape of it. This part of the forest was wild, and thick, and there was something about it that was not as it seemed, that was being deliberately hidden in plain sight. She kept thinking she could see flashes of it out of the corner of her vision, and she was loath to leave until she had a chance to understand it properly.
Which she would not now get to do.
She had a sudden urge to scream, and gritted her teeth.
The planning of this trip alone had taken months; the permissions and funding had been in the works for more than a year. The risk assessments alone had been a nightmare, for getting into this fenced-off bit of forest—completely outsized in fact, even for a place the military was supposed to sometimes use, not that she’d seen any evidence that they ever did. And that was before she could even think about making a case for the trip’s academic importance, and for bringing any other participants along with her. She had had to fight for it so hard, against people who didn’t think it was worth the money or the paperwork. Then there were people like Alastair Bell trying to poach her grad students, to make out that her research was more obsessive than important—as if he or every academic ever didn’t think a little more highly of their own work than it strictly deserved. As if a mystery like this and the opportunity to answer it weren’t both worth their weight in gold. Alastair would kill to have something like this.
