“And—duke? Your lord isn’t Kelaive?”
“Gods, no! I’ve heard about him, even before you came. Our duke’s Kelaive’s overlord, just as the king is his.”
“So the foresters of this wood know that a band of outlaws lives here, and expects you to make enough noise coming so they can avoid you. What if they change their minds? Surely your duke’s offered a reward.”
“My brother wouldn’t take a reward for me,” Ivis said earnestly. “And if he captures the others, there I’d be, right in the middle.”
“What if he’s transferred, or killed, or one of the other foresters gets greedy?” Ivis said nothing in answer; from his expression, he had thought of this before and tried to forget it. Gird looked at all the others. “Listen to me: an army does not go about expecting its enemies to get out of the way. We can’t fight like that. Cannot. Perhaps Ivis’s brother has enough influence on the foresters of this wood, but we will not always be in this wood. We have to leave it someday, and you must know how to move quietly. And we must be alert—we must find the foresters before they find us, and never let them know we were near. Understand?” Heads nodded, some slowly. “Now—the first thing—no talking while we march. No banging on stones or tree limbs. Walk one behind the other, far enough that if one man stumbles, the others don’t fall too. Triga, you should be far enough ahead that I can just see, and you shouldn’t be able to hear us—you listen for anyone else. If you go too fast, I’ll click pebbles twice; if I click three times, stop. You give two double clicks if you hear foresters. Ivis, if you hear anything behind us, give two double clicks. The rest of you—if you hear two double clicks, stop where you are and do not make a noise. Clear?”
Again, heads nodded. Gird hoped that there were no foresters out that day, so they could get in at least one practice before it was needed. He waved Triga ahead, waited until he was almost out of sight on the narrow trail, and started off himself. Behind him, the noise of the others was much less, although he could hear an occasional footfall. Triga led them fairly quickly, and Gird had a time keeping him in sight and avoiding obvious noisemakers. But his followers grew even quieter, as if they were listening for themselves, and learning from their own noise how to lessen it.
The double-click he had been half-waiting for startled him when it came. The others had frozen in place; Gird took a final step and a stick broke under his foot. He grimaced, and looked back along the line. Cob, behind him, grinned, wagged his head, and made the shame sign with his fingers. Gird shrugged and spread his hands. When he looked ahead, Triga had stopped just in sight. Gird could hear nothing now but the blood rushing in his own ears, and the faint trickle of water somewhere nearby.
The click had come from behind him, and now he saw a stirring in the line, silent movement as one man leaned to another and mouthed something. Gingerly, Gird took a step back toward Cob, placing his feet carefully on soggy leaves and moss. Cob leaned back to get the message, then forward to Gird.
“Ivis. Said we were a lot quieter, but should practice stopping. He may do it again.”
Gird wished he’d thought of suggesting it, but at the same time wanted to clobber Ivis. His heart was still racing at the thought of being caught by foresters. He nodded, instead, and murmured “Tell him not too many—we have a long way to go.” Cob nodded, and passed the message back. Gird waited what he thought was long enough for it to reach Ivis, then waved Triga on, and started again himself. He almost trod on the same stick, but managed to stretch his stride and avoid it.
Triga’s swamp, when they came to it, appeared first as softer mud in the trail, and then a skim of sib-colored water gleaming between the leaves of some low-growing plant with tiny pink flowers. Ahead was an opening in the forest, with tussocks of grass growing out of the water.
“We have to turn here, if we’re going around it,” said Triga softly to Gird. The others had come up, but were squatting silently in the dripping undergrowth on the dryest patches they could find.
“Have you ever been out in it?”
“When I was a lad, once. There’s someplace out there with plum trees; I could smell the flowers.”
Gird sniffed. It was just past blooming time for the plums in his village, but wild plums came both earlier and later. He didn’t smell any.
“Did you find the trees?”
“Finally—after I got wet to the thighs, and then when I got home my da beat me proper for running off from the goats—but there’s a dry hummock somewhere, with plums.”
“Right out in the middle, I’ll bet,” said Cob. “O’ course, we’re already wet.”
“There used to be a path partway in,” said Triga. “Follow me and step just where I do.” And with that he was off again. The others fell into line.
Triga’s way led alongside the bog, and finally came close enough so that Gird could see how big it was. Despite the drizzle and fog, he could just make out the forest on the other side, a dark massive shadow. In the bog itself were islands crowned with low trees tangled into thick mats. After a short time, Triga came out from under the trees, and stepped onto one of the tussocks. It trembled, but held him up as he took two steps and hopped to another. Gird looked at it distrustfully. How deep was that dark water? And what was under it?
“One at a time,” he said, and reached a leg across to the black footprint Triga had left. He didn’t like the way his foot sank in, and stepped quickly to the gap between tussocks. The mud sucked at his feet, and let go with a little plop. Across the gap, and onto another tussock. Now he was out in the open, where anyone could see him—anyone sitting snug under the forest edge, for instance. His neck prickled. One of Triga’s footprints had a finger of murky water in it; when Gird stepped there, his foot sank to the ankle.
“I don’t like this,” said someone behind him, and someone else said “Shhh!” Their feet squelched on the wet ground, and Gird cursed silently as icy water oozed through his boot.
Only six of them had started into the bog, when the first foothold gave way and Herf found himself hip deep in cold, gluey muck. He yelped; three gray birds Gird had not noticed fled into the air with noisy flapping wings and wild screeches. Triga stopped and looked back, grinning. Gird said “Wait!” as softly as he thought Triga would hear.
They could not explain what happened without talking; Gird sweated, but endured the noise as best he could, while they established that yes, Herf had stepped carefully in the now-sinking footprint, and yes, all the footprints had been getting wetter, and no, it was clear that nobody else could make it. Herf, sprawled across the tussock with one leg stuck in the mud, was grimly silent.
“All right,” Gird said finally. “First we get Herf out, and back on solid ground. Then all of you in the forest start circling the bog, and looking for other ways in. Don’t get stuck.”
“Don’t walk on moss,” Triga added. “It looks solid, but it won’t hold you up.”
“We can’t come back the way we came in,” Gird went on. “So Triga will have to find us a way across. And now we know that a group trying to follow us would bog down—”
“Although the tracks are easy to see,” said Cob.
“Right. If we use this, we need a way in that we can all take, and that they can’t see.”
Getting Herf loose was no easy matter, and involved five men getting themselves wetter and muckier than they had intended. Two more got stuck, although not as badly.
In the meantime, Gird and the others perched on tussocks noticed that water was creeping up around their feet. “We have to keep moving,” Triga said, unnecessarily, and went on, aiming for one of the brush-covered islands. By the time all of them had made it there, to crouch under the thick tangle of limbs and new leaves, they were mud to the knees and breathless.
“I didn’t know it would be worse with more than one,” said Triga. Gird accepted that as an apology, and nodded. At least some of the little trees were plums, tiny fruits just swelling on the ends of their stems. Water dripped on him, sending
an icy trickle down the back of his neck and along his spine. He hoped his raincape was keeping the grain and beans dry. If he had to be wet and cold, it should be for a good purpose.
“We’d better go on,” he said. “And if there’s a way for each of us to pick his way safely—that might be better than stepping in your tracks.”
“It’s that kind of grass.” Triga showed them again. “Not that other, with the thinner blades; it grows on half-sunk moss, and you can go right through. This stuff is usually half-solid, but you have to keep moving. Try to pick your way several tussocks ahead, so you don’t have to stop except at places where trees grow. All those are safe. I think.”
“Look at this,” Cob said. He pointed to a delicate purple flower on a thin stalk. “I never saw anything like that.”
“They grow in bogs,” Triga said. “A little later, the whole bog will be pink with a different flower—the same kind, but larger. The purple ones grow only on the islands.”
Gird looked at him. This sounded less and less like the knowledge gained on one clandestine visit as a child. Triga reddened.
“No one could find me here,” he said. “I used to come here a lot, before I left home.”
“And not after?”
“The others didn’t want to see a swamp, they said.”
“Well, we’re seeing it now. What else do you know about it?”
Triga began to lead them across the little island to the bog on the far side. “There aren’t many fish, for all this water. Lots of frogs, though, and little slick things like lizards, but wet. Birds— different kinds you don’t see anywhere else. Some of them swim in the bits of open water, and dive. Most of them wade, and eat frogs and flies. Flowers. One island has a wild apple grove, and one has the best brambleberries I’ve ever eaten. Wild animals: something like a levet that swims, long and sleek, and levets, of course. Rabbits sometimes—I’ve surprised them grazing the grass on the islands. Deer come to the edge to drink and once I saw one where the apples grow. They jump very fast and carefully.”
They began to cross to the next island, this time picking individual ways, with much lurching and staggering. But no one fell in the mud, and they all arrived safely and somewhat drier, but for the rain. This island had fewer trees, and starry blue flowers as well as the tall purple ones.
“In midwinter,” Triga said, as if someone had asked, “the bog may freeze on top, but you still can’t trust the moss. If the ice is thick enough to walk on, then it’s safe, but not otherwise. Most years it freezes that hard after Midwinter. But the thaw comes early—I don’t know why—and I’ve put a leg through the ice more than once.”
This time they did not pause, but went on across the island and back onto the bog. Gird lurched and barely kept himself from falling into the muck.
“I’m thinking this might make a better farm than a castle,” he said.
“Farm?” Triga glanced back at him, teetered, and regained his balance.
“Plums, apples, brambleberries, all guarded by this muck. I’d wager that in full summer the flies are fierce.”
“So they are. The worst of them aren’t out yet, the big deerflies.”
“Onions would grow on the edges; redroots on the islands.”
“Some of these grasses have edible seeds,” Triga said. “My mother’s father, he showed me some of ’em. As much grain as wheat, almost. That’s what the birds come for, the swimmers.”
Gird was about to ask how the swimmers could find space to swim, when they came to a stretch of open water. Under the dark sky, with the drizzle falling, it was impossible to tell how deep it was. “Now what?”
“We’ve gone too far down. Turn up this way, upstream.”
Gird could not see any movement in the water; it lay blank and still, dimpled like hammered pewter by the falling rain. Grunting, he followed Triga to the right, trying to pick his way. Eventually that space of water narrowed, and narrowed again, until he could leap across to a tussock that lurched under him. He grabbed the tallest stalks, and managed not to fall. Something hit the water with a loud plop behind him; he broke into a sweat again.
“Frog,” said Triga. “Big one—he’d be a good dinner.”
“You eat frogs?”
“What’s wrong with that? They’re good.”
Gird shuddered, and tried to hide it. That was the explanation for Triga’s attitude, he was sure. Anyone who would eat frogs would naturally be quarrelsome and difficult. “They’re… cold. Slimy.” He remembered very well the little well-frog he’d caught as a boy: the slickness, the smell, the great gold eyes that looked so impossible. His father had shown him frogspawn down in the creek, and he’d prodded it with a curious finger. It had felt disgusting.
Triga shrugged, looking sulky again. “It’s better than going hungry. Food’s food.” He gave Gird a challenging look. “I ate snakes, too.” Gird’s belly turned. What could you say to someone who ate snakes and frogs?
“You eat fish, don’t you?” asked Triga, pursuing this subject with vigor.
“I had a fish once.” Gird remembered the bite or two of fish that he had eaten on his one trip to the trade fair as a youth. They had bought a fish, all of them together, and tried to cook it over their open fire. He could barely remember how it had tasted, though the smell was clear enough. It hadn’t been as filling as mutton. He met Triga’s expression with a grin. “The fish in our creek were about a finger long—the little boys caught them, but no one ate them.”
From the looks on the others’ faces, Triga’s revelations about fish, frogs, and snakes were explaining his behavior to them as well. As if he’d realized that, he led them on faster, landing with juicy splashes on his chosen tussocks. Gird followed at his own pace, carefully. Snakes, too. There might be snakes out here, worse snakes than the striped snakes that wove through the stems of the grain, or the speckled snakes by the creek. He wanted to ask Triga how big the snakes in the bog could be, but he didn’t want to admit he didn’t know. Did they swim?
A sweet perfume broke through his concern about snakes, and he realized they were almost to an island whose scrubby gnarled trees were covered with palepink blossoms. Apples. Gird drank in the delicious scent, so different from the rank sourness of the bog itself, or the faintly bitter scent of the purple flowers. He climbed onto the rounded hump of solid ground with relief. Triga had thrown himself flat on dripping grass, and seemed back in a good humor; he smiled as Gird and the others crawled under low, snagging limbs to join him.
“This was always my favorite,” he said. “Wild apples here, and crabs at the far end, two of them.”
Gird crouched beside him. “What I don’t understand is what made the islands. Why isn’t the bog all bog?”
Triga shrugged. “I don’t know. The way each island has its own trees and flowers, it’s almost like a garden—as if someone planted them that way. But who or why I have no idea.”
“Are any of the islands large enough for a camp?”
“No—probably not. I thought so, but now I see just six of us on one of them, I realize they’re too small. The biggest has nut trees— not as tall as most nut trees—that would give good cover around the edge. But I think even twenty of us would crowd it. Certainly if you’re going to be finicky about the jacks. Out here I always perched over open water.”
The drizzle had stopped, but the apple limbs still dripped cold water on them. Gird looked out between the twisted trunks and caught a gleam of brighter light glinting from water and wet grass. It reminded him of something. He sat quiet, letting the memory come… he’d been crouched under another thicket, another time… dawn, it was… and the shadow had come, the thing that claimed kinship with the elder singers, but claimed also to be different. Kuaknom, it had been. Gird looked across the wet and dripping bog, now slicked with silver as the sun broke through for a moment. There across the uneven wet mat of moss and grass was an island, its trees like miniatures of the forest, bright flowers shining along its shore.
“I know who planted this,” he said. It had come to him, with the beauty of the moment, the glittering, brilliant colors outlined in silver light.
“Who?” asked Triga.
“The singers. The old ones.” He shivered as he said it. Was it bad luck to name them? Would it bring the illwishers here?
“You know them?” asked Triga, sitting bolt upright.
“No… no, but I know the tales. And I met one of their—the ones that went wrong, the kuaknomi.”
“Gods take the bane!” Triga flicked his fingers twice, throwing the name away. “Don’t speak of them!”
“But the others. I know they did. A garden, you said, each island like its own bed of flowers or fruit. I don’t really like it, Triga, but it’s very beautiful.”
“Even the frogs?”
“Even the frogs.”
The sun vanished again behind low clouds, and by the time they reached the far side of the bog, a light rain was falling. Cob scraped the muck from his worn boots with a handful of moss.
“I never thought I’d be so glad to find a muddy trail in a forest,” he said. “And now we have to walk all the way back around to get home.”
Gird gave him a warning look, and he was quiet. They all were, listening to the many sounds of the rain, the almost musical tinkling of the drops of water in the bog, the soft rush of it in the leaves overhead, the plips and plops of larger drops falling to the forest floor. Where, Gird wondered, was the rest of his troop?
Rock clicked on rock somewhere in the wet distance. One click. What was that? Gird peered around, seeing nothing but wet leaves and treetrunks. His heart began to pound heavily. He blinked rain off his eyelashes, and wished fervently that he’d let the damned grain rot, and taken his leather cape along. Then at least he wouldn’t have rain crawling through his hair, trickling down his neck. He didn’t mind arms and legs; he was used to being wet— but not his head. From the expressions the others had, none of them liked it. Hats, he thought to himself. We have to make hats, somehow. Every summer the women had plaited grass hats that lasted the season; they threw them away after harvest.
Surrender None Page 17
