‘Snow? If we did, I don’t remember it. But then it seems seasons out of time since I was in that land. Things get a little fuzzy. I don’t think my life began until I met you.’
She did not know whether he was saying this to please her, or not, but she liked it. She knew she was very special to him: that she was his vixen, but she also knew that he had memories of another fox, as she did of A-ho. If they were warm, then so much the better, but the fact that he did not parade these memories before her proved him a caring old dog fox who spared her comparisons which meant nothing anyway.
‘I think I’ll go out soon,’ she said.
She was feeling peculiar. A little tired. She suddenly had the urge to go up to Trinity Parklands and see if Gar was still around. She would like to have seen Gar one last time, before either of them … before something happened. Just a little weariness in her bones, that was all. It would pass off, once she started walking.
‘I might go to the top of town,’ she said. ‘I want to see the trees.’
‘As you wish. I think I’ll rest a little longer. My leg is worse today.’ He had trapped his paw in a drain a few seasons previously and on wrenching it out, had dislocated a bone. The dislocation had clicked back into place, but it had left some torn ligaments inside which had never completely healed.
O-ha carried out the rituals and then walked swiftly to the top of the embankment, under the fence, and on to the path. Ransheen swirled top-snow around her. It was bitterly cold, with a sheet of ice under the snow. Most of the humans remained within their houses and the streets were almost empty. A dog passed by on the other side, only giving her the slightest of glances. Most of the town dogs were now used to foxes – it was only excitable breeds like setters or boxers that bothered to chase them. They never caught her, of course. In the face there were many places to hide, many fences and walls to leap which could not be jumped by dogs. They would not know what to do with her if they caught her anyway. She had given more than one dog a nipped ear or nose. Gone were those terrible days of pack hounds and thundering hoofs.
As she walked along the street, close to the redbrick walls, the sun came out and icicles hanging from the eaves of the houses began to sparkle with frostfire –
– and then,
strangely,
they began
to
jingle.
She stopped and listened, as the sound tinkled along the gutters, increasing in volume, until the whole face was alive with their music. It was as if Ransheen were running Her fingers along the lines of ice cones, sounding their individual notes for her benefit. She wondered what it meant.
Then,
just as suddenly,
the music
stopped.
She stood there, by the window of a shop which was just a sheen of light, bemused by the experience. She could not have been more surprised had the world suddenly tilted and turned on its edge. The dog she had passed went round a corner without pausing in his stride. Clearly he had not heard the phenomena. Thus, she deduced, it had to be a mystical happening, relevant perhaps only to herself.
A kestrel dropped from a building, stooping low over her path. Then it rose towards the sun, to spiral upwards and out of sight.
She crossed an empty cobbled square and pigeons rose in a flock, scattering before her.
Strange that there were no humans abroad.
The tired feeling she had had on waking that morning increased in intensity, until her eyelids drooped and her step began to falter. There was a pain in her breast now, like a dull ache, which seemed both near and far to her. She tried to reach the pain with her mind but it was elusive. She thought it had something to say to her, if only she could make contact with it.
The sparrows which normally decorated the pavements suddenly disappeared. She looked about her, alarmed, to see if they had taken to the air. There was no noise, no sound now. Even Ransheen had stopped screaming at the corners. Everywhere, there was a deathly stillness, a silence which hurt her ears. The street before her had opened up into a wide avenue, with snow-covered trees and tall houses on either side. The avenue seemed to dip at the far end, and then slope upwards, disappearing into the grey clouds. She felt terribly cold.
She stopped and lay down, full length in the snow. It melted beneath her and the thaw miraculously spread, moving outwards from her body. As the snow disappeared from the face, so the warmth returned to her body and the pain began to disappear. Soon the world was a summer place and she felt no reason to move.
She waited, patiently.
She waited, and time passed without passing. She waited through moments that no longer followed, but overlayed each other. She waited for a long time that was not time at all.
While she lay there in her warmth, the streets melted like the snow and the buildings dribbled away to nothing. Grasslands replaced the concrete. Coverts of blackthorn sprang up around her. The land became full and sweet-smelling.
She was at the head of a wide valley which she had never seen before, but which was familiar to her. In the distance there was movement. A fox came through the bracken: a fox with a pure white flame hovering over its head. It walked towards her slowly.
When the fox-spirit reached her it told her to rise up on to her feet and follow it down the valley.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Who is it? Has Camio died? Are you taking me to his body, so that I can send him to you?’
‘I am not the fox who leads the living to the dead. I am the fox who leads the dead to the Perfect There.’ There was a pause, then. ‘Your living mate has been here. He found you in the snow. He has done what you would have wished him to do.’
‘Oh,’ she said, realising now what had happened. ‘He gave me my last rites.’
‘Yes.’
She began to follow the fox-spirit down the long valley, thinking, the Perfect There? But of course, she had now crossed over!
‘Would it,’ she asked, looking into the vacant eyes of her guide, ‘have made any difference if no one had found my body?’
‘You may have had to wait longer, that is all. I would have had to search for you, over the timeless wastes between life and death, but would have found you, eventually.’
O-ha was surprised rather than annoyed.
‘So all the rituals – they weren’t of any real use?’
The fox-spirit replied, ‘They were of use to you.’
She acknowledged this.
‘That’s true. I needed them, once.’
Finally they came to Trinity Wood, with all its old scents and sounds, all its old highways and paths, it soaks and waterholes. Down at the end of the valley, shining like polished redwood, stood a tall, wide structure made of hollow tree trunks. It was magnificent. The trunks were of varying girths and heights and were joined together to form a concave wall which spanned the whole width of the valley. In each trunk was a series of holes, all of different sizes, and from these orifices came the notes of many winds and breezes. The giant pipes were blowing now.
‘The Palace of the Winds,’ explained the fox-spirit.
‘So that’s where Heff is – and so close to my covert. It’s very beautiful. I wonder why I never saw it before?’
‘Because you weren’t looking for it.’
‘I was coming to see you,’ she said, ‘and here you are.’
‘Oh, ya. Here I am, here I am,’ he rumbled.
‘But,’ she was confused, ‘why are you here? With the foxes?’
‘I am here and I am somewhere else,’ he said. ‘You are here, and you are somewhere else. What place must the soul stay? No one place. It is everywhere. I knew it all along. I spoke about this thing. Here you are and here am I. So, and others …’
And the others came out of the covert to meet her, among them the one she had most hoped to see.
Camio went sadly back to the earth after carryin
g out the ritual for the dead around the body of his O-ha. He had been a sceptic for most of his life, regarding life after death, but now he had seen a creature with a flame over its head and things were not the same. More importantly, he found it impossible to believe that he would never find O-ha again. Her scent was still strong in his nostrils, and he knew that it would linger there for the rest of his life. They had done so much together. They had a history which went back so many seasons. Surely that couldn’t be wiped out by something so negative as not life? The flesh had gone cold and still, but the rest still existed, somewhere.
So perhaps he could believe that she was in the place she called the Perfect Here? If that was so, A-ho, her former mate would be there to greet her. Camio wondered if he ought to feel jealous, but could only be glad that she would not be lonely in the valley of death. He and A-ho might even like each other. Camio could not imagine that such necessary but earthly feelings as jealousy still survived in the spirit pure.
Later that day, he went to find his daughter’s earth on another section of the embankment, and called to her from outside so that the other occupants would not feel he was invading the family home.
Mitz came out and said, ‘Camio?’
‘I thought you ought to know – your mother is dead.’
Mitz stood there for a while, and then nodded.
‘You’d better go back, Camio. Get out of the snow. It’s a very cold day.’
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
He started to walk away, when she called, ‘Father!’
He turned. Foxes seldom used titles for each other and Mitz had called him Camio for as long as she had been his cub.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll miss her too, you know. You’re not alone in the way that you feel. She’s gone to a good place.’
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I keep telling myself the same thing.’
He left her then. She was too much like her mother and it hurt him to look at her. Walking along the embankment, he wondered how he was going to spend the hours. He glanced up at the white, swirling skies, not finding an answer.
When he entered the earth – their earth – he was amazed at how large and empty it appeared to be. He wondered about that. When she was alive it seemed there was hardly room to move in there, without touching each other. Now, every sound he made echoed in the stillness. He would surely have to move, make himself a new home. Somewhere smaller, where he could closet his memories.
Mitz was wrong, of course. He was alone in his feelings. Mitz would miss a mother, but the seasons would still turn for his daughter.
As far as Camio was concerned, O-ha had taken the seasons with her.
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Also By Garry Kilworth
Novels
In Solitary (1977)
The Night of Kadar (1978)
Split Second (1979)
Gemini God (1981)
A Theatre of Timesmiths (1984)
Abandonati (1988)
Cloudrock (1988)
The Voyage of the Vigilance (1988)
The Street (1988) (writing as Garry Douglas)
Hunter's Moon (1989)
Midnight's Sun (1990)
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares (1992)
House of Tribes (1995)
A Midsummer's Nightmare (1996)
Shadow Hawk (1999)
Angel
1. Angel (1993)
2. Archangel (1994)
Navigator Kings
1. The Roof of Voyaging (1996)
2. The Princely Flower (1997)
3. Land-of-Mists (1998)
Collections
The Songbirds of Pain (1984)
In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave (1989)
In the Country of Tattooed Men (1993)
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Peter A. Gerrard’s Nature Through the Seasons (Midas Books), Stephen Harris’s Urban Foxes (Whittet Books), Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s Town Fox, Country Fox (Andre Deutsch and finally and most especially, to David Macdonald for his inspiration work Running With the Fox (Unwin Hyman). Any deviation from normal fox behaviour in this novel is the result of creative licence taken by me, and not the fault of the non-fictional works acknowledged here.
Through the jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh –
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
From The Song of the Little Hunter by Rudyard Kipling
Dedication
To Sandy and Andrea
Garry Kilworth (1941 –)
Garry Douglas Kilworth was born in York in 1941 and travelled widely as a child, his father being a serviceman. After seventeen years in the RAF and eight working for Cable and Wireless, he attended King’s College, London University, where he obtained an honours degree in English. Garry Kilworth has published novels under a number of pseudonyms in the fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction and Children’s Fiction, winning the British and World Fantasy Awards and being twice shortlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Award for Children’s Literature.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Garry Kilworth 1989
All rights reserved.
The right of Garry Kilworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11430 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Author’s Note
Part One: The Foxes of Firstdark
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two: Escape from Bedlam
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Three: The Coming of the Stranger
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Four: The Unremembered Fear
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Five: Terror on the Streets
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Part Six: The Time of the Dispersal
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Seven: The Palace of the Winds
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Website
Also By Garry Kilworth
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Author Bio
Copyright