To the Dead City

by Alex Bentley

  We were hunting, my father and I, not far from where the events of today took a turn for the worse. We had already bagged two welpa and had found enough honey mushrooms for a month of soups. There was plenty of light left, and my father was considering setting a snare before we headed home. If we were lucky, we might return in the morning to find a foorstig or, if we were very lucky, a kanna. But luck is a bucket with a hole. The moment my father knelt down to begin work on the snare, two men rushed into the clearing. They were as big as my father, but not solid like him. They were wiry, grimy and desperate. One held a sword that looked like it had been pillaged from a barrow, the other an axe that was made for felling small trees, not men. And certainly not men like my father, who had battled against the Sceada when they had attempted to sack Brim, back when I was still in my cot.

  My father was up in an instant, his sword drawn before he was even upright. He strode toward his attackers. The axeman fell first, not even afforded the opportunity to raise his weapon. I didn’t even see where he was struck it happened so quickly. The second man realised his mistake and turned to run. My father’s sword carved through the meat of the man’s neck and shoulder, releasing a mist of blood. The man let out a sound, half whine, half grunt, and fell face first. My father plunged his sword deep into the man’s back, high up, so as to find his heart. Then he returned to the axeman, gurgling on his back, and found his heart too.

  It was all done in seconds.

  When my heart had stopped erupting, I said, “Is it not wrong to put a sword into a man’s back, Father?”

  He shook his head.

  “In a duel, yes. Possibly in battle, too. But not when fighting men such as this. Not when there could be more of them skulking in the Freewood. He could have gone to them and brought them to us. No. Sometimes what must be done, must be done.”

  “We are nowhere other than here,” I said, quoting my mother.

  My father smiled.

  “Yes. Precisely that. We are nowhere other than here.”

  I look down now, at scared, hopeless Dwynan.

  We are nowhere other than here.

  I draw my bowstring back until it is anchored.

  But I can’t seem to let the arrow fly. I just train it on Dwynan as he continues to turn on the spot, having to change my target as he revolves: chest, back, neck.

  And then he stops turning, and I know he has finally considered the possibility that his quarry has scuttled upward. Fortunately, his back is to me as he scans the first of the gesneh trees. But he is slowly tracking round toward my tree, toward my crow’s nest.

  I will have to kill him. What choice do I have?

  But this is not a scabwolf or a welpa. It is a man. A boy, really. A boy I kissed behind the stables at the Festival of Seros. A boy whose soft lips tasted of yellowberries. A boy who before that kiss, used to talk to me about his plans to build a boat and fish off the coast at Brim and live in a house near the shore. He was a good fisherman as I remember, bringing back many Lady Blackbellies, whitecollars and, once, a rumpfish that was almost as big as him.

  But what choice do I have?

  I take a breath and hold it.

  Release the breath, release the arrow, I hear my father say.

  And then the leak-sprung bucket of luck favours me.

  The scabwolf, my arrow still protruding from its shoulder like the spine of a tindhog, lumbers into view, snarling and slobbering.

  The beast captures the entirety of Dwynan’s attention.

  He drops the sword, turns and runs.

  The scabwolf lurches after him.

  Its wound has slowed it considerably, and it is unlikely to catch him. But that is between Dwynan and the scabwolf, and not my business.

  I listen to the muffled whistling of the grefa stone fading into the distance, then I make my way down the tree. I am about to set off eastward when a violent trembling overtakes me. I only have to wonder about the cause for a moment or two.

  I nearly killed someone. I nearly put an arrow into someone, another person. A person like me. It would be a Changing Thing, such an act. It would have altered me as surely as the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups. But I am not sure how.

  I am certain of one thing, however. Such an act, the taking of a life, sits somewhere in my future. Somewhere close by.

  The trembling subsides and I head east.

  After half a mile or so, I find my way clear of the gesneh trees, and I hear the sound of the River Woever off to my right. I am back on track. For the next two hours, I make good progress and do not hear a single grefa stone. But the light begins to fade, and I know I must find somewhere to bed down for the night.

  The hollow trunk of a dead oak provides a reasonable shelter, with just enough space for me to sit, though I desperately wish to lie down. I desperately wish for my own bed in my own roundhouse, but wishes, as my mother would say, cannot mend a sock. I wrap myself in my father’s cloak and, doing my best to ignore the various scuttling bugs and the smell of damp and rot, I try to sleep.

  I must have succeeded because I dream I am in the Jarl’s squarehouse. I dream of my father.

  No… I dream I am my father.

  The Jarl jabs a finger at me from his tall gesnehwood chair.

  “Liar!” he shouts. “Liar! Your child is the Glystgedder! Admit it!”

  “No,” I say, my voice calm despite the tumult of emotions churning inside me. Sadness, fear, rage, panic. “It is not so. It is as I told you. We saw a man who made fire with his hands. It was he who set the grefa stones to whistling. We gave chase, and I lost sight of both the man and my Alys.”

  “That is a lie!” The Jarl rises from his chair and strides toward me. His hand hovers near the hilt of his sword, and mine, without being bid, does likewise.

  I could kill the Jarl, I think. Or my father thinks. It is unclear whose thoughts are whose.

  He is no threat to me, the Jarl. He has drunk too much mead these last few years, eaten too much good meat from the Tanwood, and far too many of the huge round potatoes that grow in the rich soil on its periphery. His middle is like an overfilled waterskin, and his eyes, like his wits, are dull.

  But if I strike him down, his men will be upon me in moments, and I will not survive the onslaught. I am certain that I would be able to take two or three of them with me, but not all. And though I must pretend my Alys is lost to me, I know a day may come—in fact, I feel certain a day will come—when she will need me.

  I force my hand away from my sword.

  “It is as I told you, Jarl. I swear it.”

  The Jarl growls, spins on his heel and strides back to his chair. He sits and glares at me for a full minute.

  “I believe you not, Clainh. I. Believe. You. Not.”

  “It is as I said. There was a man—”

  The Jarl roars. And despite his waterskin belly and lightless eyes, I experience a quiver of fear.

  Then, in a whisper, he says, “If I find you are lying, I will cut off your hands and put out your eyes and send you down to the Woever where the scabwolves skulk. And you are lying. And I will find you out.”

  I cease to be afraid of the Jarl at that moment. I am thinking about the Woever and the scabwolves and how I hadn’t had time to remind little Alys of their strengths and weaknesses.

  The Jarl brings me back to myself with a yell of, “Slek! Slek Mydra!”

  The name fills me with dread. Me and my father both.

  Footsteps approach. I turn and Slek Mydra is standing in the doorway. He is six and a half feet tall and broad as a bear. He is wearing the blood-red leather of the Sceada and his head is shaved, as is the fashion of the men from across the sea.

  “Yes, my Jarl,” he says in that always unexpectedly soft voice of his.

  Mydra was captured during one of Gafol’s run-ins with the men from Scead. He won his freedom in the Trial of Suswylt, the scars from which decorate his face and arms. The Jarl calls him ‘Brother’ now, and there is nothing Mydra will not do
for the Jarl.

  “Find Clainh’s brat,” says the Jarl. “Bring her to me. If the grefa stone whistles, put your sword to her and bring me her corpse.”

  “It is already so,” says Mydra in that almost soothing voice of his.

  It is already so. A Scead expression which means: I am so confident I can carry out your instructions that, at some point in the future, the deed is done.

  I snap awake in the tree hollow and, for a lingering instant, I am both my father fearing for his daughter and his daughter fearing for her father. I am he and I am I.

  Somewhere in the night, a spider owl cries out, and I count backwards from ten, as the old wives’ tale says we must, to undo its death curse.

  Sleep does not find me again.

  Chapter 7

  A Choice of Deaths

  As soon as the sun is peering over the horizon, I am up and heading east. I make good progress, reaching the bridge in a little over an hour.

  The bridge.

  It is hardly deserving of the name.

  It is missing more planks than an old man’s mouth lacks teeth, and greenery has gathered to it as to the hide of a slite. It looks like it would struggle to accept the weight of a water mouse, let alone mine. I consider finding somewhere the river is not so wide and swift, somewhere I might cross, but I remember stories of the snakefish that coil about the stones on the riverbed, their bite so poisonous it turns flesh to liquid in less than a day. It is said the victim of a snakefish bite cannot be burned on a death pyre, as is honourable, because they cannot burn. Their remains are too wet. They can only be poured into a hole in the ground, far from where the crops grow and the animals feed.

  No. It is the bridge or nothing.

  I place one foot on the deck.

  It groans. A deep, throaty sound.

  I take a breath.

  Calm, I tell myself. Appraise the situation.

  The bridge is about a hundred yards across, perhaps less. Which means I can be at the far side in fewer than a hundred strides. Taking it slow and steady, I will be across in just a minute or two.

  I place my other foot on the bridge, and the old wood groans again.

  I start to walk, taking long purposeful strides.

  I am only eight strides in when I reach the first gap. I look down to the fast-moving waters of the Woever. It is only a drop of some twenty feet. I fell from a tree not much under that when I was nine. But there were branches to slow my descent, and the ground upon which I landed was mossy. It knocked the wind out of me for what felt like forever, but I received no permanent injuries and was back to climbing trees the next day. There would be nothing to slow my descent if I were to fall from the bridge. And though there is doubtless some greenery on the bottom of the river, it clings to a bed of rocks and stones. And then there are the snakefish to consider.

  The gap is perhaps a stride-and-a-half wide. A short leap, one foot forward, and I’ll be over.

  But what of the wood at my landing point? Where it is not green with lichen and moss, it is sickly pale, like the ball mushrooms me and Roisa would poke with a stick to watch the air fill with their glittering spores.

  I sidle left and right, looking for a spot where the wood is not quite so fungal.

  Finding the least unsatisfactory destination, I unburden myself of my bow, quiver, waterskin, knife, sword, game sack and my father’s cloak, and toss them across the gap.

  Then I leap.

  The wood does not groan when I land. It squeals. And then it cracks.

  But I am already skipping two steps forward to a sturdier spot.

  I realise I have stopped breathing and give myself leave to start again.

  I gather my things and carry on.

  Twice more I tackle such gaps in the bridge’s structure, and each time the wood squeals at me and cracks, and I skip away to a place where the wood looks like wood and not the flesh of a mushroom.

  The fourth gap I encounter, at just over the bridge’s halfspan, is almost twice as wide as the others I have crossed.

  I will have to jump with both feet. I will almost certainly land heavily. And none of the wood on the other side looks like wood. It all has the quality of a particularly ripe ball mushroom, the flesh of which sometimes collapses in anticipation of the prod of a twig.

  Perhaps if I roll as I land? Or quickly flatten myself, spreadeagled?

  As if to dissuade me from further prevarication, I hear—distant but distinct—the whistling of a grefa stone. The men of Gafol are up early as bedwetters and searching for me. Hunting me.

  “Ged!”

  I have to move quickly now. I am out in the open here on the bridge. A good marksman could pick me off with an arrow from the treeline. What’s more, I can be seen. I can be recognised. Even if I escape, word will get back to the Jarl that it was Alys Clainh, daughter and son of Aryc Clainh, who set the grefa stones to whistling.

  If I find you are lying, I will cut off your hands and put out your eyes and send you down to the Woever where the scabwolves skulk. And you are lying. And I will find you out.

  I remove my belongings and toss them across the gap.

  Then I jump.

  Where my heels strike the deck, it is greased with lichen, and my feet fly out from beneath me. My lower back strikes the soft, fungal wood. My shoulders strike nothing and my head flops back into the hole over which I have just leapt. I am afforded a view of the underside of the bridge, then the riverbank, then the racing waters. I snatch at wood with panicked hands, fingers sinking into the rot, anchoring me in place. Splinters, somehow soft and sharp, slide beneath my fingernails. The pain is disproportionate to the size of the wounds inflicted.

  Slowly, I pull myself back up. Very slowly. I know that if I am too hasty, I will pull the rotted wood away in handfuls. I see the riverbank again. At this horribly slow pace, I see the red caitlins that grow near the water’s edge, and the redder ember butterflies that feed upon them. Then I see the underside of the bridge once more. And wish I hadn’t.

  Beneath the deck are the remains of a criss-crossing structure of supporting joists. It is no longer capable of supporting much of anything, hanging away in places like a sagging net. The joists are studded with pale-yellow cones, about six inches high. I recognise them immediately because I have been taught to be wary of them. Nests. Straggis wasp nests. Perhaps as many as fifty of the things stretching back to the start of the bridge, and who knows how many glued to the bottom of the rest of its span? The nearest nest is an arm’s length from my face, close enough that I can see the enquiring antenna of its occupant testing the air, can hear its low, threatening drone.

  I take a breath and hold it.

  Straggis wasps are attracted to something in the air we expel from our lungs. Nobody knows what. Some say they can sense the tiny portion of soul we exhale with each used breath.

  I am not cautious in dragging myself up now. Fear has the better of me.

  The wood into which my right hand is sunk comes away, like meat from a slow-cooked pig. But the left hand remains anchored, and soon I am up on the deck gasping in air.

  I gather my things and start forward again and see that every gap in the deck between me and the far riverbank is as wide, if not wider, than the one I only just managed to leap.

  And the whistling of the grefa stones is getting louder. In fact, I think I can hear voices too. Someone singing. A hunting song? I think I recognise it. I judge that I have only a minute or two to get across before whoever it is singing—badly—discovers me.

  If I can’t trust the deck or the joists, what of the beams that run parallel down either side of the bridge? I make my way to the left-hand side. The beam is the length of the entire bridge and, with no pier supporting it—not even at the halfspan—it must be strong. I cannot fathom what kind of tree it was cut from. It would have to have been at least three hundred feet tall while it lived. And it does not sag, not in the least. Perhaps something from the time of the Abundance? Perhaps something made with
the Glyst.

  However it came to be, it is clearly strong. But it is narrow, not much more than the width of my foot. I step onto it. It doesn’t groan. With my arms held out straight on either side of me, I start forward.

  It is easy going for the most part, the remnants of the deck making up for the beam’s lack of width. And the intervals where the deck has rotted or fallen away completely are covered within just six or seven steps. I am feeling quite pleased with myself. Until I have just ten yards to go and see that there is no deck at all for that remaining stretch. It’s just a beam. Narrow beam.

  I don’t recall consciously deciding to stop moving, and yet I am suddenly motionless. I tell myself not to look down and then do precisely that. There is more riverbank than water beneath me, scattered with rocks and clusters of spear-like gawgrass.

  Dizziness threatens. I force myself to look straight ahead and concentrate on placing one foot in front of the other.

  “This is no difficult thing,” I tell myself. Once a troupe of performers had come to Gafol. They had eaten fire, juggled, and one of them, a skinny man with the palest flesh, had walked a rope drawn tight from the roof of the Jarl’s squarehouse to the gaddapole at the centre of our village. He had made it look easy, the skinny man. A beam of solid wood, as much as ten times the width of a rope, should present no problems.

  And then I hear the deep drone of a straggis wasp. I cannot see it, only hear it. Somewhere close by, and getting closer, getting louder.

  I find myself motionless once more.

  Over the drone of the wasp, the whistling of a grefa stone—or stones?—and a fragment of hunting song:

  We will catch it and skin it

  We will cure it and cut it

  We will stitch it and wear it

  Our prey, our prey

  This will be a good day!

  I take two steps forward and the wasp makes its appearance, gliding into view from over my right shoulder and passing me by so close I feel the wind from its wings, and its drone drowns out the hunting song. Its black and yellow body is as large as that of a swallow. Its stinger, curved and barbed, is fully extended, more than half the length of its body.