The Pale Companion by Philip Gooden Page B

with branches plaited together and then covered with a kind of mat of leaves. But a small quantity of light was still admitted, enough for me to see my host squatting in the opposite corner.
    “You are welcome to my home,” he said.
    I would have bowed but I was already hunched over.
    “Most gracious.”
    “I can offer you water,” he said, without moving from his squatting position with his arms hooped over his knees.
    “I do not drink it, thank you,” I said.
    I didn’t drink it neither, or not much, and certainly not from the green-mantled pool he most likely obtained it from.
    “Flesh I cannot offer you,” he said solemnly. “Flesh I do not eat.”
    So much for my childish fantasies about being killed and roasted! I settled myself down on the leaf-mould which passed for flooring.
    “To kill even the meanest creature,” he continued, “is to injure one of our fellows.”
    I must have looked automatically at the strips of squirrel and rabbit and God-knew-what-other fur and hide which patched his begrimed body for, seeing my glance (he had very acute sight), he said, “I have not harmed a living creature. I take only from those who no longer have need of covering in this cold world. It is no sin to borrow from the dead.”
    It might have been the dank air of the den but I started to feel shivery. Something tickled at the back of my neck and I reached up to brush it off.
    “No, no, flesh I do not eat. They know that.”
    “They?”
    “My dependencies.”
    He waved a bedraggled arm to the left and for a moment I wondered what he meant, then realized he must be referring to Instede.
    “So they bring me only turnips and green sallets, and goosegogs and raspberries . . .”
    What had Davy said about this man, that he should be looked after. Perhaps this was what he meant.
    “. . . on silver trenchers.”
    Looked after because he was mad, no question of it.
    “That is no more than you deserve,” I said.
    “A king does not go foraging,” said this muddy man.
    By now my eyes had grown used to the near-dark and I could study my host. My intention was to bring this dialogue to a speedy close, however. Poor Robin was plainly out of his wits, and though one may learn something from the mad it is limited. He had once been a handsome man, with a strong, long face. Hunger and exposure had sharpened his features, so that his nose was like a pen. Deep scars and embossed scabs were visible through the grime on his face and arms and legs. This was unaccommodated man himself, a poor forked being.
    Again I felt shivery. A spider, one of Davy’s attercops, suddenly lowered itself in front of my eyes.
    If part of Robin – the kingly part – was mad, another part seemed aware of his predicament because he now said, in a tone of sadness, “I was not ever thus.”
    I waited, for revelation.
    “No lord of a shrunken kingdom was I, but of many acres. Of dale and forest and mead. I could have ridden across them from dawn to sunset without dismounting.”
    “Where was . . . where is . . . this kingdom?” I said gently, noting the poetic way he’d described it.
    He tapped his skull with crooked fingers.
    “Safe and sound in here.”
    He laughed a quite pleasant laugh, not the mad cackle you might have been expecting.
    “Where none can seize it,” he said.
    Or see it, I thought.
    “You don’t believe me, Master Revill.”
    Again, that acuteness! I squirmed uncomfortably on the dank and dirty ground.
    “You have your treasures in mind,” I said, noticing how the jay’s feather stood upright from his hair.
    “Oh I have them here too,” said Robin.
    All this time he had been squatting, hugging his knees with his arms, an awkward position which I couldn’t have sustained for more than a few minutes. Now he reached behind him in the dimness of his lair and brought forward a small leather-covered box. He fiddled with some kind of hasp. He struggled for some time, his nails scraping on the surface. Eventually he