The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Read Free Book Online Page A

my friend.You’re our accomplice now.’The meat was delicious, charred muscle to tear at and smooth soft fat.There was no harm in eating the deer, to John’s mind: they kept themselves; there were many in the forest.They flowed unnumbered through the shadows.
    Afterwards there was more drink and music while bats, in their last flights of the year, flickered overhead. John proved his claim to know their music when he accepted a fiddle from them. He played Northamptonshire tunes and gypsy tunes. He played one that circled like a merry-go-round and lifted them all smiling on its refrain. He played a tune that reached out and up, branching into the trees. He played a tune that was flat and lonely as the fens, cold as winter mist. He played one for Mary. After he’d played, there was singing, John listened to the strong joined voices, adding his own notes of harmony, and his mind’s eye swept back to see them all in the middle of the darkened forest, in the circle of firelight, the bloody-muzzled dogs lying outstretched beside their hard-packed bellies. The people made a well of song; it surged up from eternity into that moment, a source. He lay back, really overwhelmed, and saw stars through the almost bare branches. He closed his eyes and lay there in the middle of the world, denied his wives, his home, but accompanied and peaceful.
    Eventually the singing stopped and a little while after that he felt a blanket placed over him. He opened his eyes to see the rosy fire still breathing at the heart of white sticks. An owl cried its dry, hoarse cry and the bats still scattered their tiny beads of sound around him. He loved lying in its lap, the continuing forest, the way the roots ate the rot of leaves, and it circled on. To please himself, to decorate his path into sleep, he passed through his mind an inventory of its creatures. He saw the trees, beech, oak, hornbeam, lime, holly, hazel, and the berries, the different mushrooms, ferns, moss, lichens. He saw the rapid, low foxes, the tremulous deer, lone wild cats, tough, trundling badgers, the different mice, the bats, the day animals and night animals. He saw the snails, the frogs, the moths that looked like bark and the large, ghost-winged moths, the butterflies: orange tips, whites, fritillaries, the ragged-winged commas. He recounted the bees, the wasps. He thought of all the birds, the drumming woodpeckers and laughing green woodpeckers, the stripe of the nuthatch, the hook-faced sparrowhawks, the blackbirds and the tree creeper flinching up the trunks of trees. He saw the blue tits flicking between branches, the white flash of the jay’s rump as it flew away, the pigeons sitting calmly separate, together in a tree. He saw the fierce, sweet-voiced robin. He saw the sparrows.
    And just before he fell asleep, he saw himself, his head whole, his body stripped down to a damp skeleton, placed gently, curled around, in a hole in the earth.
     
    John woke with one side of his face tingling. He opened his eyes and found that it wasn’t the numbness, but a light rain pattering down onto him; with almost inaudible thumps it fell also into the soft ashes of the exhausted fire. Beyond that, wet trees gleamed.
    He pulled the blanket up over his face and soon his breath made a warm, sleepy pocket under the coarse wool.
    John woke again to people moving, dogs stretching. Judith, puffing with bellows into a new fire, smiled.
    ‘I have to go,’ he said.
    ‘To that place away up the road?’ she asked. He nodded. He had suspected that she would have guessed. ‘Don’t see why you have to be there myself,’ she said. ‘Anyone who plays the fiddle like that.’
    ‘Thank you.’ He stood, shook out and folded his blanket, then, not wanting to give her anything to do by handing it to her, placed it back on the ground where he’d slept.
    ‘We’ll be here the winter most likely, so if you want to come back . . .’
    ‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘I will, if I can.’ He raised his