isn’t a major step, just a question of breaking a small, social convention.
Ideally, it should be the man, as he stands upon the mound.
Motte it says on the Ordnance Survey map, signifying an artificial mound where a Norman castle once stood. In fact, many of these castles were built on the so-called ‘burial’ mounds created as far back as the Bronze Age, when all men hunted and were instinctively aware of the needs of the Earth and the subtle patterns of Her energies.
The female lights another cigarette. It is raining steadily and strands of her short hair are gummed to her face. She waits, smoking.
When, then?
Watch. Listen to the Earth.
He wishes there was some way She could speak directly to him, make Her wishes known. The old shamans would go into trance, make their requests and receive their instructions. He doesn’t have their skills. Not yet. One day, it will all be given to him. In the meantime he must rely on signs and signals.
The female has taken out the hunting horn. Suddenly, she disgusts him, with her sexless, shorn hair, the rings in her nose, her apathy, her negativity, her hatred and contempt for the upholders of tradition.
She moves forward to see the mound through the misty rain, and she steps into the line, which he can see clearly now, falling straight as a sunbeam, having travelled half a mile from St Agnes’s Well and crossing another track leading to Salisbury Cathedral.
The Green Man rises slowly to his feet, parting the bushes. The sounds he makes are small, might be the bustling of nesting birds. And just as the female guides the false horn to her lips, she sees him.
In his glory.
Lowers the horn. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Oh,’ he says dismissively. ‘That doesn’t matter at all to you. It’s what I represent that matters.’
‘What? You sabbing, too?’ There’s uncertainty in her eyes.
‘Sabbing?’
‘Watch my lips. Are You A Hunt Saboteur?’
He is silent for a moment. Then he says, disappointed, ‘You wouldn’t understand, would you? I’m afraid I’m wasting time.’
‘We did say one-thirty at the pub. If you aren’t organized about this you’ll get nowhere.’
He makes no reply.
‘You really stupid or what?’
He hefts the crossbow to his shoulder.
Her eyes widen. ‘Shit,’ the female whispers. ‘Oh, God.’
Emotion! Energy. At last.
What can he see in her eyes? Fear perhaps. He sees that she’s just a girl.
‘You better bugger off. I’ve got mates over there.’
Her tone is bitter but her rain-bubbled skin is soft and fresh. And there glows within her … a kind of desire. A response from the underlayer of her consciousness — and this layer exists in all of us — which moves and bends to the rhythm of nature. She just doesn’t know of it.
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Her face muscles struggle for a contemptuous smile. ‘Those things should be bloody banned,’ says the surface part of her, bravely. But there are hairline cracks in her voice, for contempt swiftly withers in a moment such as this.
And respect arises.
The Green Man laughs. ‘Brace yourself,’ he says encouragingly. ‘Let your spirit be released. Fly with it. Don’t look back. Your energy will be redeemed.’
She isn’t listening. He sees a fever boiling in her eyes, which flick frantically from side to side as she thrusts the hunting horn between her lips.
He shoots her then, with great calm, great precision, through the throat.
The spontaneous surge of pure energy is utterly magnificent and brings him to his knees and then to his face on the forest floor. His heart is full, his head afloat on golden light, the forest around him brilliantly lit as the female also falls to her knees, as though in prayer, her fingers at her throat, the blood jetting down her wrists and into the sleeves of her waterproof coat, her attempt at a scream turning to gurgling liquid.
Her eyes, at last, showing love. The earth-spirit in her has fallen in love with the bearer of such a fine death.
Her hands reach for him. Small, white fingers, imploring.
She cannot turn her head to follow him as he moves around her, fitting another bolt into the bow before shooting her — decently, he thinks — in the back of the neck and prodding her with a foot between the shoulder blades so that she topples forward and gives up her blood, at last, to the Earth.
Shivering with energy now, head filling with white light, he summons her newly released spirit, imagining her shade beside him, free now, liberated from its bitterness and constriction, its feeble pity for the hunted fox. Fulfilled now. Appreciative of her small role in the great rehabilitation.
Raising his arms to welcome the rain, dripping from his body to the Earth, he knows he has never felt so utterly alive. An almost blinding joy fills him as he raises the female’s horn to his lips, tasting the rain and the blood on the mouthpiece, and blows a long, euphoric blast and falls to his knees, laughing.
But he dare not stop, and he dismantles the crossbow as he glides, slippery as an elf, through the slick greenery. He will drive fifteen miles to bury the bow in a badger’s sett at the base of a tumulus called Alfred’s Grave, and then climb to the top of the tumulus and stand beneath a broken pine, shedding his shirt and lifting his arms to the rain, feeling the glory.
Having broken the convention.
And wasn’t it easy?
‘Look at you,’ said Kelvyn. ‘Coming apart, you are. Your jawline’s gone, your cheeks are caving in …’
Cindy peered in the mirror. The blasted bird wasn’t entirely wrong.
‘As for your legs …’ Kelvyn cackled. ‘Well, no wonder you have to wear black stockings. It’ll be bloody surgical stockings before long, you mark my words, lovely, you mark my words.’
‘Shut it,’ Cindy snapped, ‘or I’ll bang down the lid on your neck and leave your head hanging out all night again.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Try me, bach, you try me.’
‘Becoming a nasty old bag, you are. Not getting enough, is it?’
‘Enough what?’
‘You know what I mean. Laughs.’
‘That’s it,’ snarled Cindy. ‘Back in the case. And think yourself lucky. You know what the props boy said to me this morning? He said, Here, Mr Mars, why do you have to keep carrying that thing back and-’
‘Thing?’
‘His precise word.’
‘He’s a dead man.’
‘… why do you keep carrying that thing back and forth, back and forth? Why don’t
