Wildwood Page 24

  Ash froze. I had just enough sense left to swallow hard and fast, gulping it down, salty and burning. Michael held my face as I sucked him clean, his fingers slackening, his thumbs tracing the planes of my cheeks and brushing my swollen lips. His eyes were unbelievably blue, like pieces fallen from a summer sky. I think my heart stopped for a moment, looking into them.

  Then Ash pulled out of me and somehow managed to stagger to his feet. ‘Avril,’ he said thickly.

  I turned to him and took the wet cock proffered into my mouth, scenting the sharp tang of my shameless want. I sucked those juices off, yearning for his own taste that lay beneath. From the corner of my eye I saw Michael take a step back, running his hand up and down the length of his penis, which showed no sign of flagging yet. Ash leant into me, breathing down his nose. He was far more at my mercy than Michael had been and I seized the chance to get my breath back, taking it slow and teasing. I cupped his balls, tickling the soft skin behind until he groaned. As I fell into the rhythm that would bring him off I shut my eyes, revelling in the smooth sweetness of his cock.

  Without a word, Michael’s hand cupped my chin and drew me gently off Ash. I opened my eyes and his cock was there in my face, still flushed and shiny and thick with unspent lust. Both of them were there, both men standing so close that with a turn of my head I could take either in my mouth. So I did, in turn. I treated them both with absolute fairness, licking like a girl with a melting ice-cream cone in either hand. I tasted them both and warmed each in turn down my throat. Hey, there are worse combinations than raspberries and cream and bitter chocolate.

  Ash seemed to be swimming in and out of consciousness at times; I had to wrap my right arm around his thigh to support him. But his cock wouldn’t stop. I felt him gather towards his crisis and I lavished more attention upon him, but Michael wouldn’t stand for that and this time he didn’t try to distract me from Ash, he simply thrust his own prick between my lips alongside his. Oh, I have a generous mouth, but it’s not that big – it felt as if my cheeks were splitting, and the shock nearly knocked me over. Ash’s eyes shot wide open, but I think he was at the point where he was incapable of withdrawing, in fact I think he wasn’t capable of anything by then except fucking to climax. Both men looked glazed, almost drunk.

  It took some readjustment before I could handle this new situation and I could take neither of them very deep, but take them both I did: both cocks in the burning crucible of my mouth, transmuting darkest rivalry to pure gold. My tongue laved the two smooth bulbs, explored both seeping slits. They stood hip to hip. Michael ran his hand through my hair, supporting my head as the two of them rubbed and slipped over one another and I licked and kissed and sucked them. Ash came noisily, groaning with effort, and I opened with gratitude to the thick wash of his semen. Then straight away, to my utter surprise, so did Michael. Not so copiously, but then it shouldn’t have been able to happen at all. I think it hurt him too; his muscles were clenched so hard I was sure he would go into cramp. Their jism mingled on my tongue and my heart was pounding and I felt like I was about to melt. I held them and held them and would have held them forever, like that, kneeling between them with my lips wrapped about their pricks. What had happened had turned my world inside out. I looked up at Michael with tears in my eyes.

  Then Ash slipped away from me and collapsed to the floor.

  Slowly Michael withdrew. For once he had nothing to say for himself. We just stared at each other, me kneeling in the damp woodland litter, he hunched and pallid, the rucksack with his precious book lying disregarded against a rotting log.

  I think there was a chance then that everything could have changed. If so, then it was my fault it didn’t; I turned away to check that Ash was all right, that he wasn’t bleeding out. By the time I’d done that Michael was properly dressed and had retrieved the rucksack, his expression closed off and sardonic.

  ‘You enjoyed being spit-roast, didn’t you, Avril?’ His voice was a little hoarse. ‘Who’d have thought it when you handed in your résumé?’

  ‘Michael …’

  ‘Is he still with us?’

  Ash’s eyes were partly open when I looked down, but unfocused. ‘I’m not sure he can walk.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to help him, won’t you?’

  ‘Give him a chance –’

  ‘No!’ For the first time Michael raised his voice, his black brows knotted, but when he spoke again he sounded calm once more: ‘He had his chance a long time ago, Avril. And you …’ He shoved his sleeves up to his elbows irritatedly. ‘I really thought there was hope for you.’ He snorted. ‘Get him up.’

  When I’d dressed I helped Ash to his feet, supporting him against me. His bare feet were bleeding I noticed. For a second I caught another whiff of that sweet bovine aroma, but it was a fugitive scent gone as soon as I sought for it. ‘Which way?’ I asked, unsteady under his weight. Ash nodded forwards. His face looked haggard. We set off and Michael brought up the rear silently once more.

  The last part of the journey was through the boggy woodland I remembered with such distaste. This time it was much worse. I slipped and staggered under Ash’s shoulder, my fingers biting into his ribs as I kept a grip on him. He did his best to walk straight but his weakness came in waves and sometimes I had to stop to let him get his feet back beneath him. The water and mud came up to our ankles, sucking with every step, and once I lost my balance too and we both fell to our knees in the ooze. The mist had risen to form a haze that made the sky above invisible. At least the throb of the Green Man’s power was less of a distraction now – not because it had diminished, but because my internal pressure felt now equalised with the external. The wood was in trouble though: everywhere blackened leaves were falling to scab over the surface of the sludge, and bark was peeling off the trunks in necrotic sheets. It was like an acid-rain nightmare or a glimpse of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, except that glimpses from beneath my brow told me that instead of wood beneath the fallen bark the timber of these trees was variously bone or glass or gleaming silver.

  By the time we pushed through the ring of yews Ash and I were mired and panting. I didn’t look directly at the stump; I didn’t dare. I let Ash slide to the floor and rest, his head against my thigh. Michael came through, bent double under the branches, and got his first look at the goal of all his endeavours here.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said softly, recoiling a step.

  It was good to know that something could dismay him, but he recovered quickly enough. He pulled out the book, throwing the bag aside, and opened it. Onto the vellum he laid the wire maquette and, after opening it, Ash’s clasp knife. Then, setting his jaw, he approached the ancient remnant of the oak. I couldn’t look at him straight on, my eyes were watering so much, but I saw him stagger and set his legs as if bracing himself against a high wind. His outline looked smeared, but that might have been a fault of my vision. That arcane pulse was making my skin crawl and a red pain dance at the back of my head. I was glad we’d stopped to pay our dues sexually; I think if we hadn’t we might have torn one another apart here.

  ‘Avril,’ said Michael bleakly, ‘move away from him. Over there.’ A jerk of his head indicated the other side of the clearing.

  I put my hand on Ash’s hair. The ground was trembling beneath my feet and the air vibrating. I didn’t like the look of that open knife at all. ‘What are you going to do?’

  His lips tightened. ‘There’s the small matter of the binding ritual. It requires a sacrifice.’

  ‘You can’t take any more of his blood,’ I protested. ‘It’ll kill him.’

  Michael tilted his head, still looking at the tree. ‘Not your decision, I’m afraid.’

  ‘For God’s sake –’

  ‘Out of the way.’ He swung to face me, lifting the gun. ‘I mean it. Move.’

  I moved in front of Ash. ‘No chance.’ Then it dawned on me that I’d just discovered something about the reality of my love, and the shock left me dizzier than the fear. ‘Oh God,
Michael, don’t. Please.’

  ‘This is the man who used magic on you, remember? He made you fall in love with him.’

  ‘So did you,’ I said, my heart in pieces. ‘It doesn’t take magic to do that.’

  I watched him grimace. I still didn’t completely believe he would put a bullet in me, not even when he aimed the gun between my breasts and cocked the hammer. And, God help me, Michael did hesitate. At that moment the yew branches heaved and into the clearing lumbered Bull Peter, snorting and wild-eyed. Michael jerked back. The changeling looked from me to him.

  ‘Peter!’ I cried, thrusting my hand out at Michael. The bull man charged him, head lowered, roaring.

  I think he managed to fire twice before Bull Peter hit him, but it did nothing to slow his attacker down. Michael was thrown back across the clearing, the naked changeling on top of him, and the two rolled over in a tangle of kicking limbs. Bull Peter was still on top when they came to a halt, but Michael was still conscious and in possession of the revolver. He heaved it from under the bull man’s bulk, shoved it to his neck and fired three times up under the heavy jaw, the reports ringing round the clearing. Bull Peter shuddered and stopped moving.

  Slowly Michael managed to crawl out from under the steaming chestnut bulk. He was clutching his hand to his side as he sat up, and blood was seeping out into the white wool of his jumper like a scarlet poppy blooming. There was blood on one of Bull Peter’s horns, sticky and glistening, blood all the way down to the base. Michael tried to get to his feet but sat back down with a bump, staring around wildly. He looked down at his hand and made a little noise of disbelief. Finally he looked over at me. It was only then that he noticed that I was holding the grimoire.

  ‘Avril?’

  Bull Peter spasmed, a groan issuing from his lips. Michael lifted the gun again and pulled the trigger in a single reflex motion, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber with a snap. Michael’s chest was heaving as he scrabbled away across the bare earth, but he needn’t have worried, the changeling did not move again.

  When he looked up at me his eyes were bright, his voice razor-edged. ‘Give me the book, Avril.’

  ‘Avril,’ groaned Ash, ‘run. Run!’

  I didn’t do either. I took a step backwards, towards the Green Man’s oak. The look of panic that shot across the faces of the two magicians was identical. Michael pointed the gun at Ash but his wrist was trembling and his heart was not in the bluff.

  ‘You’re out of bullets,’ I croaked. My heart was trying to climb out of my throat.

  ‘Avril, for God’s sake, run!’

  ‘Avril, listen to me.’ Michael heaved himself onto his knees, jamming his hand against the seeping hole beneath his ribs as hard as he could. A little blood spilt out from his lower lip. ‘Give me the book. I will give you anything you want if I have the book. Anything. You have no idea what it makes possible.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him.’

  ‘I can save the rainforests, Avril. Would you like that? I can make the Amazon a no-go area for loggers and trappers. I can save the redwoods and the Taiga and the orang-utans in Borneo. I can sink every whaling vessel on the planet in its harbour. I can turn back global warming, for God’s sake! Isn’t that worth it?’

  I stared at him, tears running down my cheeks. I could feel the split in the ancient trunk yawning at my back like a slavering mouth. I could feel the guilt of Bull Peter’s death clawing at my belly. I could feel my instinctive longing to believe Michael; to believe that I mattered to him, that he could be honourable, that there was more to him than power and charm and good looks. I wanted to believe that he deserved what I felt for him – feelings that were in their own way as elemental and irreducible as were my feelings for Ash.

  ‘Just give me the book, Avril. We can do it together.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said sadly, ‘and all I’d have to do is trust you.’

  Turning, I flung the grimoire into gaping fissure, down into the dark. There was just time enough for me to hear both men scream ‘No!’ in unison before the tree exploded.

  The blast engulfed us. For the briefest moment I felt shards of wood and splinters of corroded bronze punching through my flesh, and then I was suspended in a place where the power of the Green Man roared through me like a tide, invading every orifice, boiling the flesh from my bones. I lost my body altogether, swept away in the flood of atavistic memory. I was a bee swarm, a hundred thousand butterflies rising on crumpled wings made of soul silk, a blizzard of dust motes caught in the sunlight and turned to gold. I was a swan maiden tumbling in a gale over a black loch; I was Pan ravishing the moon; I was Culhwch in wild pursuit of the boar Twrch Trwyth; I was Meroudys returning joyfully to the arms of King Orfeo; I was Black Annis cutting the throats of children with my famine knife. They rode through me, all of them, a host of fallen angels, a wild hunt.

  Then the storm dropped me. When I finally returned to my self I was on hands and knees on the woodland floor and I was facing, where once there’d been a huge dead oak stump, a shallow crater scooped from the raw earth. The light was no longer gold. The sun must have risen above the mist and the stripped trunks of the ruined yews, blasted clean of foliage, stood out black against the grey vapour. It was chilly.

  I ran my hand down my torso, seeking blood. There were no wounds though my clothes were in tatters, no protruding splinters, not so much as a scratch on me. I felt shaky but unhurt.

  Looking around me the first thing I saw was Ash, who’d been thrown back against a tree and lay with head and one shoulder shoved up against the base, the rest of his body buried in rotted leaf litter and torn up moss. I crawled over to him and nearly knelt on his hand, limp in the dirt. When I picked it up there were shreds of a silk scarf still knotted around his wrist. Then his fingers closed around mine and he reached up with his other arm to touch me, and in a moment we were clinging together and he’d taken my face in his hands and kissed me. I wrapped my arms round him and we hugged the breath out of one another, frantic with relief that we were both still alive. When I pulled away it was to examine his arm. The bandage and tourniquet had worked loose, but there was only a crust of dried blood on his arm and no hole. ‘You’re OK?’

  ‘Yes. You? You’re sure?’

  Further round the clearing something stirred. I turned just in time to see Michael rise unsteadily to his feet. His clothes were shredded too. He lifted the unravelled edge of the jumper to check the skin on his left side; the puncture wound had disappeared. It was only then that I noticed that so had the body of my poor Bull Peter. I knelt up straighter, my heart thumping. Michael blinked, let the piece of fabric drop from his fingers and met my gaze. I think it was at this moment that Ash really remembered; his hands moved from my arms to close about my wrists. For a moment there was dead silence.

  ‘Avril …’ said Ash, painfully.

  ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ demanded Michael.

  I pulled out of Ash’s grasp and stood.

  ‘You’ve let them out.’ Michael’s voice was jagged with emotion he was trying to keep under control. ‘All the dreams and the nightmares of an island that’s been sleeping for sixteen hundred years: you went and let them out, Avril. Why?’

  I heard it all in that word: the anger; the fear; the awe. I set my jaw. ‘Because I had a choice.’

  They both stared. Then Michael took a pace towards me and Ash scrambled to his feet, moving to my side. There wasn’t any real call for it; I knew that I’d no need to fear Michael any more. But I liked the feel of his hand on my shoulder. Right at that moment it seemed to be the only thing connecting me to the earth.

  ‘Too late, Deverick,’ said Ash. ‘Too late for that.’

  Michael’s eyes flashed but he halted.

  ‘This isn’t your wood,’ Ash added. ‘And not your world any more either, I think. Things are going to be tough for you.’

  ‘I’ll adapt,’ Michael growled. His gaze dismissed Ash and returned hotly to me. ‘That was your decision, was
it? Well, let’s hope you can live with the consequences, Avril.’

  I couldn’t answer.

  ‘And you’d better hope you picked the right man.’ For a moment something bleaker than anger burnt in his eyes. ‘That he can keep you safe long enough for you to learn how to handle your wonderful new world.’

  ‘She’ll learn.’ Ash took my hand and turned it over, displaying my palm on his, his long fingers haloing mine. ‘Can’t you feel it? She was there. Ground zero. She’s part of it now.’

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Oh, don’t you know?’ Michael asked.

  I turned to Ash. His expression was hardly kinder than Michael’s but he held his peace.

  ‘Don’t bother asking him,’ Michael rasped. ‘He doesn’t actually know. And I don’t either. You’ve gone and changed everything, Avril. Everything. The world isn’t going to be the same from now on. Nor are we.’

  ‘I know that.’ I had to whisper because of the lump in my throat. Somewhere in the woods the first blackbird had started to sing, already forgetting the oppressive presence of the Green Man and the explosive resurgence of legend, living in the now.

  Michael shook his head and turned away, too overcome to find words. He ran his hands through his hair. I watched Ash lift my fingers to his lips and it seemed to me that he was not only giving reassurance but seeking it too. I laid my head against his shoulder, trying to soothe my hammering heart, grateful for the arm he slipped around me. Beyond the soft everyday sounds of the wood there were others I could hear, others less familiar. Singing as if of a distant choir, and the winding of a hunting horn, and – in the distance – the beat of impossibly mighty wings.