47Disclaimer: Due to a technical error, I once believed I owned the BBC Robin Hood series. Please hold while a course of drugs and rehab corrects this – in the meantime, there is some fanfic for you to read.
Nervousness has abated slightly – thanks to those wonderful reviews. LoStorico, Dean Parker, Leah Day, Hallows07, Mage Ren and Zaedah, thank you so much for your time and encouragement.
Here is Chapter Two!
Rose fixed her eyes on the dim of the forest with the desperate intent of a racer nearing the finishing line. Each step seemed to carry her nowhere, yet eventually the comforting shade of the trees closed like a breaking wave over her head. She didn't stop, she didn't slow or falter but drove on, leaving the path almost immediately and navigating her way through the forest: it was a part she knew as intimately as a friend. Indeed, she had the former to fill the space that the lack of the latter left, although it wasn't really the right shape. Rounding a large green bush, she spotted it, and her pace quickened. The tree she had been searching for looked entirely nondescript from one side but on the other a bulbous swelling at the base of the trunk made for a perfect natural seat. Slinging her bag down carelessly beside the sycamore, Rose sat heavily on the makeshift chair and leaned back on the trunk, eyes closed, to let out a frustrated sigh that was tearstained at the edges. Work was horrible. Her colleagues were horrible. Fridays were horrible.
Had it really been just over a year since what had happened? No -she had journeyed to and from that office for a thousand years, at least. It felt like an age since she had first donned that strange black suit and stepped from the flat again. Time had passed normally – no, often too quickly – before then, but that was a millennia ago. Since then, there were only pinpricks of specific memory puncturing the grey blur of the months that had lasted forever and gone nowhere. Rose lived in the moment, but not in the colourful, heedless way that most people meant. The moment was all she knew: as soon as it was the past she couldn't be bothered to remember it and there was nothing called the future that she could look forward to. Only a dull moment… then another… and another.
And that was just one year, she thought in numb terror: how many dozens more had she to pass before something really happened again. It was all so endless, so dragging, so pointless –. She stopped. No. Not pointless. She didn't mean that. She wasn't going back there.
The physical tapped her on the shoulder again and Rose was aware of the forest once more. She breathed in deeply, then let the air pour slowly away. That Friday had been particularly horrendous; the other workers in the office had somehow managed to eke enjoyment out of another day of stealthily laughing at her. She didn't know how they managed it – she thought they would have tired of it many months ago but apparently she was still a fountain of mirth. She wondered if they knew she was aware of every barbed joke, or if they really were so stupid as to believe she was blind and deaf to their sneers as she feigned. That day they had found even more reason for vindictive merriment: a group meal that night, and although the news had reached her an invitation seemed to have been lost in the wash. Not that she minded, not really, Rose thought; she avoided spending excess time with her taunters at all and any costs. But she had no-one else to go out with instead.
Opening her eyes, which might have been a little pinker than normal, she gazed up at the peacefully shifting canopy of bright June leaves. I need to get out of this job, she silently declared, the reflections of the foliage swimming on the surface of her eyes. It's stifling me… slowly killing me. And those idiots are enough to put you off people for life, if they haven't already. But there was nowhere else she could go; pretending she had experience, qualifications and putting on her warmest, most convincing smile had only just scraped her into the office. She left and it was back to the bars and clubs, back to washing dishes and fending off lecherous drunks, back to the life she'd sworn she'd leave for good. NO, she would stay, and by twenty-five be an imagination-starved social leper. The thought gave her a wry smile.
With nowhere she really needed or wanted to be, Rose sat for a few silent minutes on the crude chair, drawing on the unhurried peace of the woodland for strength. She was staring at the gently swaying trees, wondering absently whether they were bored, content or had any self-awareness at all when an idea barged in that shook her from her torpor – why didn't she go back to that spot she had come across yesterday? There might be the possibility of throwing some light on the matter of the unexplained noises.
Mind set, she resurrected her bag from the bed of leaves it had slumped down in and made her way back to the woodland trail. Several minutes passed as she travelled determinedly onward, scanning the trees left and right with her sharp eyes for signs she was nearing the area in question. Rose could never understand people who became disorientated in forests. They claimed it all looked the same. Well, so did the council estates and regiments of brown terraces in the inner city, but you never heard of people getting lost there, did you? It was just down to their laziness and inobservance, she thought superciliously, rounding a large bush blocking her view and immediately recognising the place as being the one where she had strayed from the path. Finding the exact spot where the litter had been the day before was easy, but she was to be disappointed.
She could hear the irritating industrial crashes from the Bonchurch Estate building site on the West edge of Sherwood Forest – why they worked late everyday no-one quite knew. Rose suspected they were immigrant workers; the contractors could pay them peanuts and they wouldn't know that it was practically Brit workers' rights to get off early or normal time on Fridays. Aside from that, the only sound in that part of the forest was the spasmodic stirrings in the branches at the movement of wildlife or occasional bursts of near and far tooting from the birds. No gale, no voices. Not a whisper.
Giving it all up as a bad lot (although the questions only niggled more at her brain) Rose headed back for the path and – there! She stopped dead. Roaring, churning, murmuring: it was the unearthly wind-and-words sonance again, only this time it sounded smaller and more concentrated, as if the strange hurricane were contained in an uncorked bottle. Rose took a step forward and the sound grew fainter; a pace to the left and it was back, louder than the first time. She felt as if she were playing some twisted cousin of the game of searching, where children would shout "Warmer! Hot! Very hot!" with unexplained glee until another child found some object. Feeling as if she were following a very stupid dance pattern, Rose took steps in all directions until she found the place where the sound blared loudest: a gargantuan tree, each main bough thicker than the body of a horse, a pillar of hoary eld straining against the tides of time that poured relentlessly over it. Tentatively, she reached out a hand and placed it on the deeply ridged roughness of the bark.
The effect was as immediate and distinct as if she had pressed 'Volume Up'; it now sounded as if the gale was standing right next to her, and it grew marginally louder with every passing second. Chatter that had been an incomprehensible babble resolved into speech and sounds; she could pick out a sloppy, nasal tone, a gruff bark, a shout, a laugh, something smashing, something creaking, something sloshing. Two voices disentangled themselves from the rest and became clear, their conversation fathomable, all the while increasing in volume around her.
"…could call a lacquer, of sorts." It was a female voice that rolled the words in its mouth as if they were rounded sweets – the strong accent was Arabic, Rose thought.
"Need it be thick?" A man's voice, young and curious.
"Only if it is badly made." Glob-glop. A noise like boiling treacle. "No – if it has worked, we should need only a thin coat, provided the surface is completely covered."
"I see. How long does it last?"
"I thought this would interest you. See, if not scratched or worn too much, the enamel will protect the wood for years – outliving us, certainly. If the coated object were kept dry and safe, who knows how long it would last? With good lacquer – a few hundred years, by my reckoning." After a pause, the man spoke again.
"Impressive. So the knowledge of how to make it must be valuable."
"Indeed. One who had that knowledge could make a comfortable living here."
"Could sell their services to the highest bidder and further the destruction of this country, you mean."
"Not if they had scruples!" trilled the woman, sounding part annoyed and part amused. "We're not the only good people in England, you know, Will. Anyway, why would the highest bidder necessarily be someone bent on evil?"
"Because they always have more money than the good people." Rose heard no disagreement from the Arabic woman. There was the clanking of a pot and the thick, bubbling sound again. It had grown very loud, now, pressing upon her ears.
"How is it made, Djaq?"
"Slowly," laughed the woman, then more seriously, "The saps and gums of various trees and plants – plants of Saracen lands, not like any found here. Boiling them together in a certain order, at certain temperatures, very caref –" 'CCAWWW!' The sudden umpleasant shriek startled her almost out her of skin. Sweeping close to Rose and caused the girl to squeak and jump back in alarm, the crow flew up and settled on a high bough, where it continued to croak loudly in its ugly voice. As the blood-rush noise went from her ears and her woodpecker-on-speed heart rate slowed, Rose realised the conversation she had become so engrossed in was gone. She placed her hand back on the trunk: nothing, and nothing too when she removed it again.
Before, she had been too intrigued be the talking to think about its preternatural circumstances. Now, with the usual quiet filling the wood, she was distinctly uncomfortable. There was still no explanation as to the source of or the reason for the things she could hear. And Rose wasn't mad. Not her. The fact that her imagining the noises had been pushed almost out of the question by the complex and mysterious conversation she had heard only served to worry her more. For the second time in as many days, Rose hurried from the clearing with unease bubbling in the pit of her stomach.
Saturday morning was everything a summer morning should be – clear and intensely bright, with vestiges of dawn chill clinging in the air as rose left the flats that had been burnt away completely by the time she reached the forest. Wearing flat boots, loose trousers and a plain blouse beneath her thin fleece, her dull clothes would have been sneered at by any young person she cared to name, but Rose was past being bothered in that respect. Turning into a cold, broke fashion slave wouldn't gain her any friends – not real ones, anyway. Rose stepped off the track and hurried towards the oak. It was so vast that it was hard to see, blending into the backdrop, but once she was aware of it Rose couldn't understand how she had failed to notice it.
Circling the tree slowly, her eyes took in the mossy, ivy-robed side, then the bare brown bark deep trenches. It was passing the side of the great oak that meant she was obscured from the path that she spotted it: a crack slightly wider and darker than the other furrows, as if it reached further back into the trunk. Ebbing and flowing, now quiet, now louder, she could hear the wind and voices; faint today, it sounded as if it were billowing in rolling whispers from the groove.
She slipped her fingers into her notch. It was deep. She pushed her hand in further and wriggled her fingers as best she could in the narrow space. The walls of the ravine were fairly smooth and hard, but it was empty. Feeling disappointed, Rose began to retract her hand and in doing so, her fingernail touched something loose at the very back of the crevasse. She stopped, and pressed her hand up to the hilt into the crack. Still only her fingertips could scrape the object, which rocked and wobbled at the touch: there was definitely something there, but – Rose swiped this way and that in the rift but could do no more than brush it – it was just out of reach. She snarled in frustration, then jammed her hand in further, the hard, abrasive bark grating painfully against the bones of her wrist. Face screwed up at the biting wrench, she skimmed its corner once, twice, and on the third try her fingertips caught it. Holding it as tight as she could with the merest slivers of flesh, she withdrew her hand shakily, praying the mysterious object wouldn't slip from her scant grip.
With a grimace, she dislodged her hand and the tree's captive from the chasm and after wincingly inspecting her bruised and grazed wrist, she turned her attention to the bundle. It was a fabric parcel, shiny and stiff, with an odd sleek feel to it. Rose turned it over in her hands, wonderingly. She could hear the voices and hissing gusts; it sounded as it the packet itself was whispering. Or held the whisperer. Seeing where the end of the material was tucked in, Rose began to carefully bend and pluck at the folds. The thin veneer, disturbed for the first time, cracked; ecru flakes fell away at each movement and spiralled unhurriedly to the ground.
Curiosity and trepidation were building with her, and Rose's fingers trembled slightly as she pulled back the pleats of thin taupe leather. Why did she have the queer, uneasy feeling that it wasn't by chance it was she who had found the package? That is was, in some troubling way, meant for her? She unrolled the last of the delicate hide and stared, breath bated, at the object nestling in the beige folds. It was an elliptical amulet, slender, made of dun-coloured wood that held the lustre of the enamel used on the parcel, although it was in better condition than its wrappings. It appeared to be the source of the now quiet but insistent murmur that had mystified her. Shakily, Rose picked it up. After half expecting her fingers to sink through illusion, it solidity startled her.
Lying in her palm, it felt smooth, cool and light, like a thin, waterworn pebble. There was a hole in the top – to attach it to a cord, Rose guessed – and she could make out an insignia of some sort etched into the wood; a circle with a bow inside. Rose shivered at her unexplained surety of one thing about the mysterious locket: it was old, perhaps hundreds of years so. The varnish had filled up the small grooves of the carving, forming a smooth finish on the face of the medallion which Rose ran an awed thumb over.
An explosive roar burst upon Rose's ear that made her stagger in shock and with a terrible hiss, a monstrous bucket of water seemed to extinguish the sun; all light and warmth fled in atavistic terror as if being chased by a flock of hellish bats. Silently furious, the freezing dark swept over the terrified girl and for a second she could see, hear, feel nothing at all, as if the entire Universe had fallen away from her. Then the darkness entered her mind, too, and she knew no more.
Well, there you go. A rather dark cliffhanger I leave you on, is it not?
Also, I want to name all of my chapters by relevant Shakespeare quotes, so if you ever see a chapter and think you have a better Bard phrase, or just know of any good ones I might be able to use, please feel free to PM or review with them.
I get so much enjoyment out of your reviews. Any opinions, comments, queries or suggestions, please review – I'd love to hear what you think!