The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Page B

then,’ he said, standing, raising his fists.
    ‘Oho. Someone’s keen,’ Ezekiel answered. ‘Anybody want to take him on?’
    ‘Come on,’ John implored. There was anger inside him. He wanted to hit.‘Someone here must have some bottom.’ He dabbed the air in front of him with soft feints, quick combinations.
    ‘I’ll give you some exercise, my friend,’ one man answered, rising.
    ‘Good man, Tom. John, this is Thomas Lee.’
    John shook hands with his opponent and backed away. The man was large, handsome, smiling loosely, with a dark fleece of hair. Might be he was slow. Around them the gypsies started to whistle and cheer. John’s blood raced now. He tilted his head, focusing. The stone-cold air scraped his lungs.Thomas Lee paced slow from side to side, shrugging with his fists around his hips. He stepped forward, threw out a blow. John ducked it, stepped in, landed a punch full force on the buttons of Thomas Lee’s coat. Thomas Lee grinned, pushing John back by his shoulders. Then he loosed a punch into him that whacked John’s sternum, making him step back further. The stout contact pleased John, who stepped forward again, bobbing behind his fists, watched, planted his feet, swayed from his hips, watched, and darted in again, swinging. His left fist caught the cold stubbled bone of Tom’s jaw. And then the fight began, both men neglecting their guards as they flurried forth punches. When John couldn’t avoid Tom’s, which mostly he couldn’t, he leaned forward fractionally, affectionately into the blows. That way, after a minute or two branches flailed upwards and the hard wet ground thumped along John’s back. He stood up laughing, to applause, his head ringing, the sweet taste of blood on his lips. Again he went at Tom. Again a well-landed fist tilted everything up and beneath him.
    Ezekiel gripped his shoulder. ‘Come and have a swallow, little John.’
    John panted, looked across. Tom was also walking back. ‘Very well. Very well, Robin.’
    ‘Hey?’
    ‘Little John. Robin of Sherwood.’
    Ezekiel helped John up like an old dame, lifting him by his upper arm.
    Back beside the fire, John looked around at the faces flaring with the flames, each so distinctive. How they emerged from the night’s darkness, gathered there in their makeshift camp. Tom patted him heavily on the shoulder and sat. They sang. A child raised John’s arm as champion. Again there was cheering and laughter. John swilled whisky, spat blood, swilled again and swallowed.
    Later John stretched out under thick blankets, his mind marked with the blotchy images, leaching at their edges, and parroting, repetitious phrases - have you the pluck? have you the pluck? - of exhausted thought.
     
    Tennyson sat and smoked on in the darkening room after the girl had left. The logs in the fireplace shifted with a rustling collapse. His large left hand lay on his knee; his right held the warm bowl of his pipe.
    It had been an odd visitation. Certainly it had broken up his solitude and hadn’t been unwelcome. Perhaps she was lonely also, or bored. She’d been very eager to discuss poetry. Maybe she lacked for such conversation.Too much of that, though, and she’d turn bluestocking, fit only for a literary man and what sort of a life was that? Curious girl.Very pale skin.Whitely her narrow face had glowed in the gloom. He thought of her living out here in the woods, surrounded by the mad. An interesting subject. He pictured her again, this time in white, her hair a red rope down her back, glimmering through the woodland shade - not that ‘woodland shade’ would do at all. Barred from the world by the cagework of trees, by ancient trees, the sunset obscured by their limbs. The forest. The silent paths.The mad.Where minds decay and leaves rot. Fat weeds rotting at Lethe’s wharf.
    The figment’s loneliness merged with his own; lyrical, it wandered in the room, wreathed in his smoke. He thought about her and words for her for a while,