The Stone Arrow

by Richard Herley

  He waited until silver rectangles appeared on the end of a charred branch, lifted it from the fire and checked that it went on burning alone. With this brand he laid a trail of fire south-east, coming after half a mile to the hazel thicket, which he fired in three places before throwing the burning brand into its centre.

  For a moment he watched the shimmering further up the slope, behind the trees, his eyes smarting and his face grey with dust and ash. The fire had not yet taken off, even though the wind had picked up and he felt a push of heat on his face.

  He lingered there, overcome by fascination for the flame, seized by a desire to see it all burning, the sky on fire, the wall of flame racing through the forest and destroying everything in its path. All his life he had been ruled by a fear of flame, scrupulously dousing camp fires, obeying the elders, never allowing flame to get out of hand. But now he was watching it develop its full glory, growing and feeding, demanding and consuming, towering into the sky and across the land. It carried for him a lesson of vitality, power, singleness of mind; and it reminded him that the village was waiting below, ready for his arrival.

  * * *

  Along the ridge of the forest columns of pale smoke stood in similar and parallel shapes against the sky. They seemed to be truncated, the white pillars cut off sharp where the rising sun shone on them and made the smoke invisible.

  The forest was on fire.

  Vude waited no longer. No more could be done. There was no cure. As priest, doctor, he had remained till now, going from house to house, trying to make them comfortable. He had wanted to bring himself to kill them, to end their misery, but he could not.

  In the early hours the first terrible herald of death cap poisoning had announced itself, arriving without warning, taking with violent abdominal cramps each of those who had tasted the peppery caps at the agaric ceremony. One by one the symptoms had visited each house, coming again and again as if the stomach were being wrenched to a hard knot and released, only to be racked more viciously than before. No one escaped, save the wounded and the crippled in their beds, the women who had been tending them, and Vude, who by chance had not eaten any of the strange caps.

  Now the victims lay past vomiting, weak with watery bowels, cold sweat on their bodies. Some had crawled into the compound, trying to find moisture to slake their thirst.

  Vude knew they would be like this for two days, growing weaker, until the pain abated and they were able to rest for a few hours before the cramps and the sickness returned in a torment that would make the first attacks seem mild. Disintegration of the vital organs and seizure of the limbs would lead into a period of madness and repulsive visions, relieved at last by coma, collapse, and death. Those who had eaten several caps might suffer for three days; those who had tasted only one might last for ten.

  Vude hesitated by the bridge, his bundle on his back. He was the last to leave the village who could.

  He saw Feno crawling from the doorway of the threshing shed, his face twisted and alien, streaks of filth in his beard and hair. Feno opened his mouth to cry out: no sound came. His lips and tongue were the colour of sand. His head fell forward and he stretched out one arm, the fingers clenching and unclenching in the dust.

  Vude turned and went out by the west gate.

  7

  Tagart could see no movement in the village. He came further out on the escarpment and shouted again, hoarsely, sick and grey and tired. Sweat lined the dust on his forehead and round his eyes. His clothing, crusted and dirty, bore gashes which revealed grimy skin and, below his tunic, the ugly bruises on his left side. His hair and beard were matted and tangled, and his teeth, when he drew back his lips and shouted, showed yellow and broken. But his eyes, though rimmed red and stinging from the smoke, shone clear.

  “Bastards! Bastards! Come out!”

  He half ran, half jumped, a dozen yards down the slope and shouted again.

  From the compound there was no response. He ran stumbling to the bottom of the escarpment, through the anthills, through the nettles. With his right hand fending along the rough bark of the palisade logs, he arrived at the east gate. It would not open. He struck it with his fists, shook it until the latches and hinges rattled, and turned away. With the fields on his left, he ran beside the palisade, down the bank, and into the river.

  The west gate swung freely. He flung it open and entered the village.

  It was deserted. They had gone.

  Only then did he see a man writhing on the ground, face down in the dirt by the threshing shed door; and he saw that there were others, here and there across the compound. He crossed the bridge and, with a pole taken from a stack leaning against the threshing shed, cautiously prodded at the man lying there. A bearded face, tortured and disfigured, lifted to look at him, pleading without words, begging for release.

  Tagart frowned and went further into the village, unable to understand what had happened. The others in the compound were the same, women as well as men, all seemingly poisoned. It made no sense.

  Inside the houses he found more victims of the poisoning. Sprawled on the floor or in reeking bedding, groaning or silent, all had the same look in their eyes, the same twisted faces. In one house, in a cramped chamber noisy with blowflies, he found, as well as a poisoned man, two women with sheepskins drawn over them. The stench of gangrene made him cover his nose and mouth. He lifted a corner of one of the sheepskins. Part of the woman’s body was not there. He realized she was watching him; he let the skin fall and staggered outside into the morning sunshine.

  Arming himself with an axe from the porch, he went from house to house, searching for Groden.

  He found him by an upturned water-butt, behind a house on the far side of the compound. Groden moved feebly in protest as Tagart’s shadow fell across his eyes. He groaned and Tagart heard the voice again, the voice he had heard in the rainstorm by the burning shelters. He thought of Mirin and what they had done to her, what they singly and together had made her endure. And he thought of Balan, and he remembered the man who had killed him, a man with no beard.

  And in glimpses and fragments Tagart began to remember Hernou’s voice in the darkness of the yew, and he saw again the preparation of death cap he had made, and then he knew the nature of their poisoning and how it had come about.

  He took Groden by an ankle, dragged him to open ground, and left him there, the worst torture possible.

  In a house nearby, Tagart found a leather backsack with an osier carrying-frame, fastened with straps and wooden toggles. Into it he bundled a selection of clothes to make him look like a farmer. From a kitchen he chose food for two days, to save him catching his own. Discarding his own flints, he took the best he could find from the farmers’ supplies and put them into the sack, together with baling twine, a length of rope, and a grapnel made from fire-hardened blackthorn. Across the top of the pack he laid a pair of short axes with new blades. He carried the sack into the sunshine and beside it laid a full water-bag.

  Tagart crossed to the Meeting House, an unlighted torch of bundled kindling in his hand. At the far end, just as he remembered it, stood the altar. A flame burned there, a wick held in a bowl ground from the stone and filled with oil.

  8

  Behind the escarpment and down to the sea the smoke made a mountain, black and white and grey. The roar of crackling and exploding branches, fanned by the wind, merged with and engulfed the crash of falling trees, their trunks and skeletons showing black among the flames. As the fire moved on to fresh forest, boiling sap whined and hissed; green leaves scorched and curled and passed through brown autumn to become traceries of veins that glowed and burned instantly to nothing. In its path the fire left black ground: cleansed, purified, ready for new growth.

  On the far side of the barley field, by the spinney of maple and oak, Tagart paused and looked back.

  For the gangrened and dying, the wounded and the mauled, for those he had not dragged from their houses and into the open, the end would be swift. He had
set fire to the village.

  It was achieved. Against even his own expectations, it was achieved. Tagart had overcome all obstacles and discharged his duty to the tribe. He had achieved his goal, using only the forest to help him: its animals, its plants, the weapons it provided. With these and with his own strength and singleness he had realized his ends. From within himself he had drawn on reserves that perhaps not even Cosk had possessed. And now the village was finished. He personally had destroyed it. One by one and in groups he had exterminated its inhabitants and swept away their houses and the things they had made. In a matter of months no trace of them would remain. The forest would take over; the fields would become overgrown, unrecognizable, and then indistinguishable from the virgin woodlands that had stood unchanged for centuries.

  By all the rules, by the code of the tribe, Tagart had been avenged. This should have been a moment of sweet triumph.

  But he felt nothing of that. He felt only bleakness, desolation, and a vast weariness that no sleep could ever assuage. His one goal had been reached. All his strivings were over. He had spent himself, he had succeeded; and been left with nothing. Those corpses lying in the compound, those people: what did he care about them? They meant nothing; they never had. What were they? Could anything about them, least of all their destruction, bring Balan back? Or Mirin? Or the joy he had known in the tribe? Tagart had failed, bitterly, completely, to achieve anything of value or importance. What had he brought on himself? Not victory, satisfaction, but vileness, misery, and three weeks of the worst privation he had ever endured.

  Yet out of those three weeks one glimmer had emerged. Without it there could be nothing to relieve the emptiness of his future. It provided a chance, no more, but from chances he knew he could make much. And most of all it provided hope. The days were too fleet to be spent with a dead spirit. There was one more promise to fulfil.

  Tagart stood and watched the village.

  Swirling, making the sunshine brown and the grass on the slope dark, the billows of smoke and ash drifted towards the forest, particles returning to their birthplace, from five buildings and thirty-three stone and timber houses that rippled and belched an orange blaze and one by one disintegrated, the beams falling inwards with showers and flurries of sparks. In twenty places the palisade was down or had burned away. It would not remain standing much longer.

  Suddenly too heavy for its weakened supports, the roof of the Meeting House collapsed: the stilts and rafters and walls twisted sideways, and the whole structure fell in flames to a mass of burning wreckage on the ground.

  Tagart entered the spinney. On the other side, in its neat enclosure of white stones, the head of the barrow showed newly dug earth. He took some in his fingers and crumbled it. At his feet he noticed a wilted wreath of campion and chamomile. He stooped and held it to his face. No hint of scent remained.

  He stood up. Hitching the pack on his shoulders, he let fall the wreath and set his face towards Valdoe.

  PART FOUR

  1

  Too quick for the human eye to follow, Blean’s tercel hobby swept into the twittering flock of migrating martins and came out on the other side. As it flew it bent its head and tore a morsel from the prize that Blean saw it now held in the clutch of one foot.

  The mines Trundleman was out alone, two miles from Valdoe. He could see the sombre walls of the Trundle encircling the crown of the hill across the valley. The pennons of the Flint Lord flacked and strained at their masts above each guard tower and barrack house. Smoke from many fires was scattered by the wind. The gates stood open to admit the traders and itinerants: preparations for the Crale had begun. In the valley below, the river looped and showed dark-blue in a green pasture, among the nodding foliage of alders and willows. This was the last afternoon of High Summer, the eve of Harvest, and though the sun was shining brightly a chilly breeze turned the white undersides of leaves and made the trees along the field edge sigh.

  Blean whistled. On rapid, shallow wingbeats the tiny falcon climbed to turn, and with the glare of both eyes directed at its master described a low glide that terminated in a jangle of bells as its talons took purchase on the gauntlet. The martin, white feathers bloody, fell to the turf; the hobby, sleek and unruffled, opened its beak and panted, riding Blean’s wrist as he secured the jesses at its legs. He had trained the bird himself, and it was his favourite, his usual companion on these daily walks. It served no practical purpose, it caught nothing for the table, but to see it killing was to Blean a thrill incomparable to anything that the hawk mews in the Trundle could provide. Sometimes he took out one of the austringer’s goshawks, for hares; in the winter perhaps a gyrfalcon for wildfowl; or perhaps an eagle to fly at deer. Most of the Trundlemen favoured peregrines, with their faultless control of wind and sky, but Blean liked his little tercel.

  It was late. Blean gave his thoughts to getting back. The reports from Stobas and the other day-shift overseers still had to be heard, and there was the season’s tally to complete before its presentation to Lord Brennis the following day. After that, work could be forgotten, for a time at least. Even Trundlemen looked forward to a holiday.

  The Crale Festival, marking the beginning of Harvest, was second in the calendar only to the first day of Winter, the new year. To people whose survival depended on their crops, on the abundance of the harvest, the ceremonies and sacrifices of the Crale meant everything. This was the time of adoration and prayer, litany and chant. In every village was heard a petition for Gauhm’s continuing beneficence during the two crucial months of the harvest. She had allowed the wheat to grow: let her now permit it to be gathered in, before the rains of autumn beat the fields and spread the grasses flat. The Crale was also the time of renewal, when the last of the year’s stocks were almost gone. What remained would be replaced by the new and would otherwise be wasted, so for once even the thrifty could afford to be prodigal, squandering all in a few days of eating and drinking: an act of faith, a demonstration to Gauhm.

  Both inside the Trundle and out, the feasting would begin at nightfall. The oxen had already been turning and sizzling for two days; scores of pigs and sheep had been slaughtered. For the soldiers and overseers there would be liquor and free access to the brothel. For the miners and field-slaves there would be extra meat and half a gallon of beer apiece, and the next afternoon a visit to their own brothel in the outer enclosure.

  The older and more tractable slaves might be permitted an escorted walk through the Crale Market. Tents and awnings, now going up in the shelter of the palisade, held booths and stalls where soldiers and farmers would be tempted to make bargains with those who had come from farther afield, bringing pottery and imported wares, toys, sweetmeats, beard-scrapers, talismans and periapts, wooden combs, needles, bone awls, carved and leather work, ornaments, effigies in stone and wood, miniature axe-heads of white marble or polished copper, foreign woven goods, bundles of ashwood handles for every kind of tool, ropes, twines, and leather by the strip and in pelts, furs and untreated skins.

  Under the south-west gatehouse, next to the slaves’ quarters, the animal market had already been assembled, with pens and stalls for cattle, swine, sheep and goats. Other stalls were piled high with wildfowl and game, and animals and birds for pets: goldfinches in sad little cages, badger cubs, squirrels with their hind legs tied. Brisk interest surrounded the traders of grain and vegetable seed.

  The refreshment stalls stood nearby, laden with clay dishes of blackberries, sloe and crab-apple jelly, elder and parsnip wine in jars, and ale and bread and mead and cold meats.

  “What is this?”

  Blean had paused by an open table on which curious bottles had been arranged in rows. The old woman behind it, a crone with stooped shoulders and swollen knuckles, had averted her eyes at the approach of a Trundleman and now scarcely dared look up.

  “Rosewater, master.”

  “What is it for? Perfume?”

  “Yes, master.”

  Blean could have taken the bottl
e without payment, but the idea of the perfume amused him and his sensibility would not allow him to confiscate it. “Four scrapers?” he offered.

  “Yes, master. Thank you, master.”

  “Are four enough?”

  “Yes, master.”

  He dropped the flints on the table and passed through the crowds to the gate, between the walls of the south-west barrack house. The shadows had grown perceptibly longer.

  The afternoon cast a dusty, golden light on the outer enclosure, on the craftsmen and soldiers and freemen moving to and fro among the sheds and dwellings. A hundred paces away across the parade ground, the sunlight made the burnt oak of the inner palisade look more brown than black. Here, standing just outside the ditch, facing south, had been built the Trundlemen’s quarters: long and low, a single storey divided into many rooms and suites, roofed with planks, the walls half-timbered and finished with clay and flints. Blean threaded his way among the openings which appeared for him and crossed to the main entrance, which led through a tackle room where outdoor clothing and gear could be stored. Beyond it a long, dark passage, decorated with the heads and hides of trophies, allowed access through skin-draped doorways to the common room, refectory and, through hinged wooden doors, to the Trundlemen’s various private quarters. Once inside his own suite, Blean handed the hobby and gauntlet to his attendant and went into his chamber to bathe and change.

  Leaving the bottle of rosewater standing on a low shelf by his bed, Blean reappeared, freshly attired, in the sunshine. Strolling towards the mines to complete his day’s business there, he first stopped off at the slaves’ quarters and spoke a few words to the overseer of the kitchens.