The Stone Arrow

by Richard Herley

  The soil was still relatively dry, black and loamy. He dug with his bare hands, scooping back the earth like a dog. The palisade extended the length of his arm below ground level, no more: his earth-caked fingers found and felt the bottom of the log where the wood had been shaped by adze to a rough four-sided point. The timber, though treated by scorching, was beginning to rot: decay would anyway be more likely in this part of the palisade. Tagart dug deeper, below the points, resting from time to time to flex his fingers and rub the blood and dirt from his hands. His fingernails were clogged; his arms were aching, the left forearm crusted with earth and gore, but he was starting to uncover what he had hoped to find – a panel of sticks set vertically, which went down as far as he cared to dig.

  By late morning he had reached a depth of three feet, not really enough, but it would have to serve. As it was he had displaced a surprisingly large heap of earth which would have to be disposed of when he had finished. Sitting at the edge of the hole, he drew back his legs and kicked at the panel of sticks. It caved in at once, releasing a sickly sweet smell of ensilage. Tagart kicked again, and again, compacting the crushed vegetation behind the panel, making a hollow which he enlarged with his hands, punching and pushing at the dirty yellow straw. When he had hollowed out a space twice his size he climbed outside once more and, using his feet, pushed the spoil into the hollow. He had made the turf very muddy: that couldn’t be helped. He hoped the rain would wash all or most of it away. He had strengthened the trapdoor with three blackthorn sticks, so that it lay flat.

  With a final glance round, he climbed into the hollow and pulled the flap of turf after him.

  * * *

  Sturmer abandoned the last vestiges of inhibition and gave himself entirely to the fly agaric. The fire of the fungus at the back of his throat was a flame that filled his brain and made it huge. Unwittingly his tongue slid from the side of his mouth. A string of blackened saliva dribbled to his chest. He was not aware of the girl retching beside him, nor of the other people in the Meeting House. He was alone, swallowing the core of intense heat, fighting along the borders of self-control, tricking himself into ignoring the filthy taste, refusing to acknowledge nausea, making progress to the farther shore.

  He reached it and in exultation he soared, borne upwards at tremendous speed: his body shrank to a point and vanished, leaving a tingling spot which glowed briefly and was gone.

  He was master of the drug now, riding it, just as the others were riding it.

  Occasionally someone screamed, clawing at his face, and fell sideways to lie unconscious on the floor. Others sat with heads hanging between their knees, while some shouted and argued and gesticulated. A few – those who, like Sturmer, were nearing the peak – sat entranced, moaning and rocking from side to side. The women moved to and fro with bowls, waiting to collect urine from the men.

  The fly agaric fungus, a toadstool with white stalk and gills and a scarlet cap, grew mainly in birch scrub where the ground was poor. It appeared in the middle of high summer after the rains and went on till the end of harvest or into autumn. The fungus was a gift from Gauhm. It enabled the bereaved to go part of the way towards the Far Land of the Dead. The drug was sacred, could only be gathered after special prayer, and was prepared exclusively by the priest.

  The stalks were discarded and the caps left to dry in the sun, after which they were placed in the Agaric Casket, a beechwood box kept next to the altar in the Meeting House. Its lid and sides were carved with figures of visions achieved under the drug; inside, the shrivelled caps were stored in layers of close-fitting trays, one lifting from the other. The trays were replenished each year at harvest.

  The mode of using the agaric achieved the greatest possible distance along the road to the Far Land. The women, who were not allowed to eat it, took most of the taste from the caps by chewing them and rolling them between the hands. The pellets so formed were then given to the men to be swallowed immediately.

  Ten pellets were enough to kill. Since one of the side-effects of consumption was a raging desire to eat more, the women strictly rationed each man’s supply; experienced users such as Sturmer could eat fully nine pellets. Younger men were limited to three or four.

  The drug passed quickly through the system, and the urine of the men, though less potent than the pellets, was carefully saved and drunk by the women. Meanwhile the musicians played, their drums and flutes and pipes making a dirge. They would not eat the drug till later; they sat cross-legged by the window, heads and shoulders outlined against the gloomy noonday light.

  Groden gave a frenzied, meaningless shout. Hernou was lying beside him. In a while she would be ready to drink again.

  * * *

  In total darkness Tagart groped upwards, his fingers feeling for the mat of sticks. Below him his feet found trouble in getting purchase. The mixture of soil and ensilage was yielding to his weight. He knew that if he did not keep moving he would sink to the bottom and suffocate.

  His hands closed on the sticks and he pulled himself up. He dug his toes high into the hole he had made and pushed; the combined effort brought his head through the mat and into daylight. For a moment he hung there, resting, looking out across the village.

  The silo through which he had burrowed, and the one next to it, had been positioned at the base of the palisade so that the haymakers could drop their loads from ladders instead of hauling them round through the east gate. The silos were largely hidden from the Meeting House by the threshing shed and granary. To the left a patch of waste ground led to the river. To the right and ahead were the walls and precincts of a single dwelling-house. Others were nearby, near enough to entail a danger of being seen, but then wherever he chose to cross the palisade there would be some risk of that. In all, this was quite a good place from which to approach.

  Tagart raised himself up and out, sprinted the few yards to the granary, and to the threshing shed, where he stood breathing heavily for several seconds before, in full view of the Meeting House porch, he ran with everything he had down to the river, launched from his right foot, blurred over the soggy stand of vegetation, and with scarcely a splash plunged into the water.

  He reappeared upstream, a few yards nearer the Meeting House, ducked, and swam again. Under the joists of the bridge he came up and clung to the timbers, glad to be out of sight.

  The water here sounded loud in the hollow space under the bridge; the ripples of his movements echoed back to him. He waded into the shallows on the village side and lay flat on the mud, resting with his eyes shut, listening to the current.

  A long time passed before he felt able to emerge from the bridge, a long time before he felt safe even to stand up unaided. But at last some of his strength returned. His pulse had slowed; the pain had receded from his chest, neck and shoulder. He sat up and noticed that the dizziness had almost gone.

  He came out from the bridge. Now he was ready to investigate the village.

  * * *

  Sturmer did not know how his eyes had become focused on the water falling from the Meeting House porch. He found it interesting. He studied the shapes, the drops as they fell, their exquisite variegation of transparent blue. In them he could see the forest on the escarpment, each branch, each tree, each leaf. On each leaf he saw the veins and lobes, the beads of water like gleaming spheres. The spheres were reflecting the forest, the sky, the village waiting below. With slow recognition Sturmer saw the form of a dark young man dressed in nomads’ skins, pausing on the crest and looking down into the village with implacable eyes.

  And then the shimmering globe exploded on the boards of the porch, and Sturmer found himself searching desperately for another to take its place.

  6

  They had removed nearly everything of value from the camp. Fewer than a dozen coils of usable rope remained. All the furs, and all the better skins, had gone, as had all the weapons except those stored in a shelter which, part-burnt, had not been properly searched. What food had not been stolen had been sp
oiled and kicked into the mud. Baskets lay smashed, ovens and hearths destroyed. Tagart had managed to find enough food for two or three meals, a pair of pigskin water-bags, five bows and seven arrows, a spear, a bundle of lime-bark twine, some tallow, two bags of flints which he emptied into a single pouch, a deerskin, and seven goatskins. That was all.

  The air was damp and water was dripping from the trees, but no direct rain was penetrating the canopy. A green twilight made a suffusion of the wet bracken and rain-sodden foliage; the acrid smell of disturbed leaf-litter rose from the ground as he made his way uphill.

  Despite the pain in his chest he was travelling quickly. There was much to do. He had already been to check the bears’ den, and he had been back to the camp three times so far to salvage what he could and take it south-east, about a mile east of the village, to the place where had established his lair: an old yew tree on the slope of the hill, among dense broadleafed forest. The ground under the yew’s spreading branches was dusty and, even after the storm, quite dry. By rearranging and cutting the boughs Tagart had fashioned a hiding-place in the space round the trunk. Once inside he was able to close up the screen of branches, and his seclusion was complete.

  The bears’ den was about a mile to the north. Some weeks before, one of the best trackers in the tribe had returned with news of the spoor: he and Tagart and another had followed the tracks into a part of the forest dominated by oak. One of the larger trees had fallen, and in the root-pit the she bear had burrowed out her den. Brief – and extremely cautious – observation had revealed to the men that cubs were either on the way or present, together with a second, smaller female, perhaps an aunt, which was acting as a nurse. As expected, the male bear was not to be seen, though a few days later crunched mussels – perhaps his leavings – were found on the beach.

  The bears were still in residence. Tagart had heard cubs’ cries.

  He was laden with ropes as he began returning to the yew tree once more. This would be the last trip from the camp.

  From time to time as he went, he stopped and stood squinting up at the trees. Once in every ten or fifteen stops he left behind a coil of rope; frequently he changed his mind, picked up the rope, and went on. The way they would come along this path had to be most carefully anticipated. He could not afford to waste rope. Perhaps he should have taken some from the village this morning after all. Those nets by the riverbank would have been handy … but that would have cost him his only advantage.

  Yet again he wondered what they had been doing in the Meeting House. He had spied on them through a chink in the wattle, unable to understand what was going on. The men intoxicated and seemingly deranged; the women vomiting and drinking urine; twenty-six corpses in a row outside. While watching he had for a moment thought of bursting in with his knife, but his duty had not allowed it. He was obliged to kill them all.

  From the Meeting House he had made his departure from the village, going out through the silo as he had come in. From there had had gone straight to the camp to begin work.

  The last coil of rope was deposited; he returned to the yew tree. It was the end of the afternoon, towards an early dusk, and he had decided that there might be enough time to try for some deer. At this season the calves were about eight weeks old, large enough to accompany their dams and the rest of the herd on the evening visits to the watering-place: the shallows a mile downstream from the camp.

  Tagart approached upwind, and with his best bow slung across his back climbed into an ivy-hung oak commanding a view of the shore, which, muddy and churned, bore a multitude of hoof-slots. Astride a big bough, he took three arrows, nocked one, and rested the lower end of the bow on his instep.

  He composed himself to wait. Just as he had been taught, he disengaged his mind and even managed to push away thoughts of the tribe. With his body completely relaxed, Tagart let time drift over him, trusting his senses to alert him when the deer came.

  The river gurgled and splashed. Rain was still falling. He was aware of the background of happenings on the riverbank, which taken together meant that all was normal, all was well. A water vole came diffidently to the water and with yellow teeth gnawed at a plant stem held in its hands. The wet had made its fur spiky and dark; its eyes, as black and shiny as berries, blinked as it paused in its feeding and sniffed for danger with head moving from side to side. No untoward scent registered: the vole went on nibbling. Presently it discarded the last of the stem and slipped into the water, swimming with nose up and feet furiously paddling, its tail streaming behind. Overhanging leaves hid it for a moment. It reappeared with a length of cowbane stem in its mouth, held crosswise like a dog with a stick. The water thrashed: the cowbane bobbed to the surface, and there was a glimpse of the white belly of a pike. The ripples merged with the current; the pike languidly finned back into deeper water. The vole did not reappear.

  The birds were making an end to their day. Blackbirds chuckled in the undergrowth. A chiffchaff called once from the base of an alder. A cuckoo flew low over the water, swooping, hawk-like, and came to perch, arresting its flight and swaying at the tip of one of the elder bushes lining the river.

  As darkness approached, the woods grew even quieter. The elder bushes, some with a few white flowers remaining, assumed odd shapes and seemed to expand and contract under Tagart’s gaze. The light was failing. Bats were busy with the insects over the river. From time to time he thought he heard the snap of their jaws. He watched them on their black wings, weaving this way and that, stopping short, going on, in concert with the rain scouring every insect from the air.

  Imperceptibly, Tagart braced himself. He was fully alert again. The herd was coming.

  They came forward, one by one appearing between the trees. The leading hind paused by the water as the rest of the herd passed her by: six hinds with calves, four antlered stags, one of which was already stripping its antlers of velvet; and a hummel, a hart without antlers. The hummel was the biggest animal in the herd. Next down was one of the stags, perhaps a ten-pointer, though the light was now too bad to be sure.

  The muscles of Tagart’s arms began to bulge as he drew back the arrow. With his thumbnail resting on the corner of his jawbone, he made allowance for the drop and fixed his eyes on the hummel’s flank. He had chosen the surest spot, just behind the foreleg where there was least chance of missing a vital organ. The light was playing tricks. The movements of the deer as they drank seemed jerky; their forms and the foliage round them had a grainy quality; Tagart readjusted his gaze and with it automatically his aim and his fingers were opening and the supple slap of the bowstring sent the point of the arrow on its intended way.

  Before it had arrived he was nocking the next arrow and taking aim at the ten-point stag. He ignored the hummel, concentrating on the second shot. It flew too high, missed the animals altogether, and he lost sight of it.

  The deer scrambled to turn round and get out of the river. Tagart thought he might have missed the hummel as well, but it was struck, struggling after the others. They were leaving it behind. The hummel bellowed after them, its head oddly twisted, looking down at the mud. He had hit it in the neck. With growing dismay he wondered whether it could still run, whether he would have to follow it, perhaps for miles, before weakness overcame either him or it.

  The hummel was free of the mud now, still bellowing, charging dementedly forwards into an elder bush. It staggered wildly, and charged again, this time into a tree-trunk. Its hind legs gave way and writhing it collapsed to the ground.

  Tagart came slithering down the oak and ran to the wounded beast. The arrow had been driven further into the neck by its fall. The eyes, showing white, stared open; its breath panted past a lolling tongue. Rich blood started to ooze from the nostrils and mouth. A moment later its breathing ceased.

  He worked at speed. With his knife he opened the skin at the anus and along the back of the hind legs. Gripping the cut skin, he worked his blade beneath, severing connective tissue, and one by one allowed the hind legs
to slip out to a quarter of their length, as far as their first joints, which he parted with a few skilled strokes. With another flint he cut through the rectum and behind the pizzle, and with the tail free began to roll the skin back along the body, turning the animal this way and that. The skin slipped free of the forelegs. He dragged it over the head, slit under the eyes and behind the lips, and stood clear.

  Now, with the skin inside-out, he cut a strip from the head and tied it tightly round the neck, below the hole made by the point of the arrow. He turned the skin back, right side out, and went with it to the water, where he allowed a quantity to flow inside. The skin took on the greatest weight of water that he could carry. He slung it over his shoulder and set off uphill.

  As he laboured up the slope he decided to leave the meat where it was till morning. The bears might find it, and he did not care to compete with them in the dark. If anything remained tomorrow he would try to get as much of it stored as he could. He did not know yet how long he would have to depend on his hiding-place at the yew tree; he needed a larder.

  The darkness was almost complete when he arrived with the hummel-skin at a coil of rope he had deposited earlier in the day. Using his foot, he picked up one end of the coil; spilling only a little water, he tied the rope to the open end of the skin, making use of the remaining bones in the hind legs, and, throwing the free end of the rope over a branch just above head height, hoisted the skin and left it dangling. He squatted and held his palm beneath the neck. It seemed to be watertight.

  Tagart stood up. As he did so a new wave of giddiness came over him. He put out a hand out to steady himself against the tree, eyes closed, jaw tightly clenched, but it was no good: he felt his stomach twisting inside him, being wrung out; he fell against the bark, the retching coming in agonizing waves. He slid down the trunk to his knees, sick with grief and horror and exhaustion and shock. He was wet and cold, weak with uncontrollable shivering. The thought of food repelled him, but he would have to eat, and get rid of his clothes, soaked and heavy with the rain and the river. He needed comfort urgently: warmth, dry clothes, food. If he did not get them he would be unable to stop the long slide downhill and, as Cosk might have said, the forest would have him.