by M. R. Carey
Anyway, after a while we got so used to having that needle around that we kind of forgot what it was. Maybe it was on account of Lightning having only the three legs, and hopping around in a funny-looking way. But it also had, like all its kind do, a mouth with rings of teeth that pointed backwards and inwards and a jaw that hooked and unhooked like a ratchet so when it hunted it could eat whatever it catched. Maybe we figured if Lightning ever turned mean we’d be able to outrun it. Only that’s not how it happened.
One day a gang of us was playing bolt-the-door on the gather-ground. We was running around like we was crazy people, and Lightning was running with us, getting more and more excited. Demar made a run from one end of the ground to the other, dodging round three or four that tried to catch her. When she got to the mark, she jumped up high and waved her arms around, yelling free-come. And we all come, laughing and cheering her.
Then suddenly Lari’s needle was on the end of Demar’s arm. It just jumped up, gaped its mouth wider than a water bucket and closed it again around Demar’s wrist.
We didn’t know what to do. Some of us was screaming and crying out, standing there like we was frozen. Demar didn’t make a sound, though her teeth was clenched tight. Her legs give way under her and she went down slowly onto her knees. Her face was white as choker-blossom.
Haijon and me come running, from the two sides of her. But when I got there, I didn’t have nothing I could do. I just kneeled down next to Demar and grabbed a hold of her other hand, gripping it tight, like I could draw some of her pain from out of her by touching her.
“Your father,” Haijon said to her. “Your father’s knives.” He said it like the words was being squeezed out of him. Like the needle was biting on him too, and words was spurting up out of him the way blood comes out of a wound. I seen right away that it was a good thought, but it needed more than just the thinking; it needed us to take her, fast. And out of the two of us, he was the stronger.
“Lift her up,” I said. “I’ll take Lightning.”
Demar seen what we was thinking to do, and she give herself up to it. When Haijon scooped her up in his arms, she let herself go all soft and limp. I grabbed the needle, holding it gentle as a baby though right then I hated it like the dead god’s hell.
We run together across the gather-ground and down the hill to Molo Tanhide’s drying shed, which was where he would surely be on a day as hot as that one was. And I suppose he heard the shouts and screams because he come out to meet us, stepping out of the dark heat of the shed with his face red and his hand wiping across his brow.
He took it all in, right in that moment – the needle hanging off of Demar’s arm, and us carrying her. Demar was his onliest child, and he brung her up all on his own after his wife, Casra, died. She was everything in his life that mattered. He stepped back inside for about a half of a heartbeat and come out again with a knife in his hand. It was his finest knife, ground so fine you couldn’t hardly see the blade edge-on.
We laid Demar down in front of him, and he went to work. Haijon held her, and I held Lightning, as hard and fast as we could.
Knives and wild beasts was Molo’s study. He knowed to slice down through the needle’s throat and then work in a circle, too fast for it to shift its grip or bite down harder. He peeled it off Demar’s right hand like a glove, and he done it near perfect.
But near’s as much as saying not. He took Demar’s first finger, her pointing finger, with it.
He dumped the dead needle, inside out, on the steps of Rampart Hold, like he was giving back to the Ramparts what was theirs. Lari come out to fetch it. She was rocking the dead beast like a baby in her arms, and crying like a baby herself, and cursing Molo for a lawless and a shunned man and Dandrake knows what else. But Catrin Vennastin, that was Rampart Fire, had the sense to see what was what. She dragged the bloody thing out of her daughter’s arms and flung it back down on the ground. “Should of drowned it when she brung it in,” she muttered. And to Molo Tanhide she said, “Bring your daughter inside, and I’ll sew her up.”
“Thank you, Dam Catrin,” Molo says, “but I’ll sew her my own self.” And he did, careful enough that you could barely see the scar. Only a little pucker where the missing finger used to be. The rest of Demar’s hand healed up well enough, though it had a kind of a stippled look to it, like sacking-cloth, where all them thin, sharp teeth had bit into her.
A year passed, without any apology or make-right to the Tanhides from Rampart Hold, nor no public check for Lari. Then one day when we was out playing we passed a little stoneberry bush that had rooted inside the fence and not been burned out yet. “Them berries is all but ripe,” Lari says. “Lightning would of et the lot of them.” Then she gives Demar a look, and says, “If your daddy hadn’t of killed him.”
Demar only shrugged her shoulders, but Haijon was red-faced. “Her daddy done what had got to be done,” he told his sister, looking as solemn-stern as their mother in that moment.
“He could of cut her hand off,” Lari said, “and left Lightning alive. A maimed hand’s not good for nothing anyway.”
Lari was knowed to be mean from time to time, but it was probably being checked by Haijon in front of all of us that made her so stupid mean that day. Haijon took a step towards her, like he was going to hit her, but Demar got in first. She drawed back her right hand, the one with just the three fingers on it, and she smacked Lari Vennastin in the head so hard that Lari spun round before she fell down.
“Well now,” she says. “It seems like a maimed hand is still good for one thing, Lari. It’s good for to play spinning top.”
After that, we called Demar Spinner. And she liked the name, and took it to herself, though her father’s name being Tanhide chimed kind of strange with it. “I won’t have that name for long,” she said, when Veso Shepherd tried to make a joke out of it. “I’ll be Spinner Waiting soon enough.”
For our fourteenth year was upon us. It was almost time for us to be who we was going to be. Which I’ll tell right soon, I promise, after only one more stepping sideways to talk about how we lived. It was a long time ago after all, and you might not have the sense of it.
4
Everything that lives hates us, it sometimes seems. Or at least they come after us like they hate us. Things we want to eat fight back, hard as they can, and oftentimes win. Things that want to eat us is thousands strong, so many of them that we only got names for the ones that live closest to us. And the trees got their own ways to hurt us, blunt or subtle according to their several natures.
There’s shunned men too, that live in the deep forest and catch and kill us when they can. Nobody knowed back then who they was, whether they was just the faceless that had been throwed out of other villages or if they had got a village of their own that was hid somewhere, but they were monstrous cruel and worse than any beast.
Against these things, we of Mythen Rood, like every settlement of humankind, put up walls, hollowed out stake-blinds, set sentries, tried every way we could to pitch our own hate against the world’s hate, giving back as good or bad as we got. We digged ourselves in and weathered it, for what else was there to do?
Each season brung its own terrors down on us. In Winter, the cold could freeze your fingers off if you weren’t wary, and snow fell on top of snow until you couldn’t make your way without web-spreads or walkers. The snow was mostly just water set hard, but sometimes it had silver in it and that was dangerous. If you drunk snow-melt and didn’t sieve out the silver first, it could make you sick in your stomach. Old ones and babies could even die of it.
In Spring the snow thawed, which was a mercy, but sometimes – maybe one time in four or five – it would be a choker Spring, and you would get something else coming alongside the thaw. Of all our mortal threats, I was most mightily afraid of the choker seeds, because they attacked so fast and was so hard to fight. If a seed fell on your skin, you had only got a few seconds to dig it out again before the roots went in too deep. After that there wasn’
t nothing anyone could do for you save to kill you right away before the seedling hollowed you out.
In Mythen Rood, our answer to that was to try to stop the seeds from falling in the first place. As soon as the warmer weather come, Rampart Fire (which in my day, like I told you, was Catrin Vennastin) would send out runners to check the choker trees for blossom. If they found any, she would strap on the firethrower and walk the forest. Rampart Remember would plot her route and ten strong spearmen would journey at her side while she burned out the blossoms before the trees could seed. The spearmen was to kill or fend off any beasts that might come, watching Catrin’s back and her two sides while she played the firethrower across the branches and seared the seeds inside their pods. Against the choker trees themselves there wasn’t any protecting that would avail, so Catrin and her spearmen only went out on days when the clouds was thick and heavy, and if the sun gun to show through they run as fast as they could for the clear ground.
Summer was hardest, because most things was woke and walking then. Knifestrikes flying straight down out of the sun so you couldn’t see them coming, molesnakes out of the ground, rats and wild dogs and needles out of the forest. Anything that was big and come by its own lonely self was give to Fer Vennastin to deal with. Fer was Rampart Arrow. She would take the creature down with one of her smart bolts. And if it was a drone that come, dropping out of the sky and throwing out its scary warning, one of Fer’s bolts would oftentimes do for that too. But she only just had the three of them, which meant someone always had to go out to bring the bolt back afterwards. We couldn’t afford to lose none.
If wild dogs or rats or knifestrike swarms come, we had a different way, which was Rampart Knife. Loop Vennastin had that name when I was younger, then Mardew passed the test and it was give to him when Loop died. When a swarm attacked, Rampart Knife would stand up on the fence or the lookout and carve the beasts into pieces as they come. Then we would cook and eat the meat as long as there was no worms or melters in it. Wormed meat or melted meat we kept well clear of, for even if you digged out what you could see there was always more you couldn’t.
I got to say, our fights against the rats was far between. Mostly it was hunters that seen them, a pack of ours crossing paths with a bunch of theirs in the deep woods and both going on their way, but watching each other out of sight with spears all up on our side and teeth and claws out on theirs.
Lots of people wondered how the rats could come through the forest even in the warmest weather, for it was plain they didn’t fear the sun. Then one time Perliu Vennastin, Rampart Remember, talked to the database about it. The database said the rats had got something inside them that sweated out onto their skin when the sun come out and kind of stopped the choker trees from closing tight on them, or choker seeds from breaking open on them and growing down into their bodies.
I guess I don’t need to tell you how wonderful a thing that would of been for us, to be able to walk through the forest without fear. Trees was our biggest problem, always, and the reason why we lived the way we did. The reason why there was a clear space inside the fence, fifty strides wide, that we burned with fire and sowed with salt. The reason why we never went out to hunt except on days when there was rain or overcast, and why the dog days of Summer meant dried meat if you was lucky, root mash and hard tack if you wasn’t. The reason why we seen the world as being made up out of three parts, which was the village, the little strip between the fence and the stake-blind that we called the half-outside, and everything else beyond.
Choker trees growed fast and tall, and they growed in any ground. The onliest way to keep them back was to uproot or burn out every seed that fell. If a seed landed in the ground, and no one seen it, it would be three feet high by lock-tide and taller than a man come morning.
I know it wasn’t always like that. If you’re going to tell a story about the world that was lost, you’ll most likely start it with “In the old times, when trees was slow as treacle…” But our trees wasn’t like that at all. Our trees was fast as a whip.
If you come across one tree by itself, that didn’t matter so much. You might get a whack, but you could pick yourself up from that. If you was out in the forest though, and the clouds peeled off and the sun come through with no clearing close by, then Dandrake help you. The trees would commence to lean in on you from every side, and pretty soon there’d be no room for you to move between them. Then they’d close in all the way and crush you dead.
Rampart Remember had the knowing of this, but like all things he got out of the database, it was told partly in the old words that we couldn’t figure no more. He said there was a time, long ago, when there wasn’t hardly no trees at all. They had all died, because the earth wouldn’t nourish them nor the rain wouldn’t fall. So the men and women of that time made some trees of their own. Or, as it might be, they made the trees that was there already change their habits. Made them grow faster, for one thing. And made them take their nourishment in different ways, so they could live even in places where the soil was thin, which by that time was most places.
When the trees first took it on themselves to move, they wasn’t hunting. They was just reaching for the sun, which was the most of their meat and drink. But as soon as they moved, creatures of all kinds got trapped between them and crushed. And the trees liked the taste of the dead beasts and the dead men and women. They relished the nourishment them dead things brung with them. There was already plants and flowers a-plenty that had that craving, sundews and flytrappers and such. Now the trees got it too. And being changed so much already, by the hand of human kind, they took it on their own selves to change some more.
They got better at knowing where the beasts was. Better at trapping them, and killing them, and feeding on what was left. And by then the learning that had unlocked the changes in the first place was lost, so it was not easy to stop what had been started. People had got to live with it, and they have lived with it ever since.
When I heard these things for the first time, they made my head spin. It was hard to fathom that the men and women of the old times had such knowing and such power. They was lords of trees, is what they was. They could say “grow” and then “stop growing”, and the trees would do as they was told, like you can make a dog or a horse do. It wasn’t with words that they done it, Rampart Remember said. They done it with things called genetic triggers. Nobody in Mythen Rood knowed what them things was, but most agreed they could of been put to less reckless use.
But I have gone a long way about to get to my point, which is that the story the database told about the rats, and how their sweat stayed on their skins and stopped the trees from coming too close, was big news to us. When Rampart Remember told it in the Count and Seal, there was a plan put together and voted on to make cloaks out of dead rats’ skins so hunters could go into the forest even on sunny days. It got so far as Molo Tanhide making one of these cloaks with skins some hunters took after a fight. But he refused flat-out to put it on and try it.
So Catrin asked for volunteers, offering double rations for a month, then for two months and in the end for three. Ulli Trethor, as was crippled and on lowest share, put up his hand at last and said he would go, but Catrin changed her mind then. I think she seen how it would look if Ulli died, and she didn’t want to have no part in it after all.
For a while after that we had trouble with the rats. They knowed we killed some of theirs, and would attack our hunters in the woods every time they seen them. Nobody died, that I remember, but men and women would come back with rat bites on their arms or shoulders, or their legs gashed with rat claws. It got so fresh meat was scarce for a year or more until Catrin bought peace at last with a gift of cured hides and glasshouse onions.
Summer was like a siege, it sometimes seemed. Hunting was hardest then, and shunned men was hungriest and most desperate. The fences made a difference, and so did the stake-blind, and Ramparts made the biggest difference of all, but whenever you was outside your house you felt like some
thing was about to jump on you and bear you down or bear you away. And if you went outside the gates, then Dandrake watch your back.
So it was in the days of best weather that we stayed inside the most. Sometimes we played in what was called the broken house, which was a ruin on the south side of the village right up by the wall. There was lots of houses left empty in the village, which I think was because we was fewer than we used to be, but the broken house was the biggest, having been a worship place either for the dead god or more likely for Dandrake. It was tall enough that it could of been used as another lookout, except that the floors was somewhat fallen in and it didn’t look out on nothing except the side of a hill. The walls was part-way broke and tumble-down, which meant they was good for climbing. We would scramble up them, turn and turn about, and scratch lines on the stone to show how far we got.
Or we would sneak into the Underhold sometimes, which was as inside as you could get. There was a little window round the back of Rampart Hold that was loose in its frame, so you could lift the whole thing out and slip inside, if you was small enough. I think Dam Catrin and them knowed it was there, but they never minded enough to fix it. There was never any prisoners stowed down there, though there was places for them, and the stores was locked away in rooms we couldn’t get to apart from a big bushel of apricots that had been soaked and baked and set out to dry for Winter. We run through the tunnels and corridors and played hide and go seek or blind man’s touch for hours and hours.
One time when we was playing in the Underhold, I hid somewhere I wasn’t supposed to. There was a door that was really two doors, one set right behind the other. The outside one was just bolted shut but the inside one had a lock plate on it the size of a man’s head. I unbolted the outside door, slipped inside and drawed it closed again.
