Balefires

by David Drake

  The hands reached down for Lena. She would have screamed again, but her mind was folding up within her as a white blur.

  ***

  "Coo-ree?" questioned a liquid voice in Lena's ear, and she blinked awake. A girl with a shy grin was watching her, a child so innocent that Lena forgot to be afraid. Even though the child was as furry as the adult who must have brought Lena to the grassy hollow in which she now lay. A smile that bared square, yellowed teeth split the fur and the little-shorter even than Lena though more compactly built-creature held out a double handful of hemlock nodules, painstakingly knocked clean of dirt. The skin of her hands was a rich onyx black in contrast to the broken, copper-colored fingernails.

  As shyly as her benefactress, Lena took the roots and crunched one between her teeth. The nodule had a rich, almost meaty, flavor and a texture pleasant to her gums. She smiled back. A twittering at the crest of the hollow caused her to spin about and gape at the broad-chested male creature she had met in the woods, now with a smaller companion to either side. On the right was a four-dugged female, slimmer than the male and slightly hunched. The remaining woods man-but Lena's mind still shrieked demon, troll-was another child, obviously male and of lighter coloration than his parents. His cublike roundness had not yet given way to ropy adult musculature, and his nervous smile was a reflection of his sister's.

  Lena stood. Her body had gone cold and the bright sunlight seemed suddenly to glance away as from a block of ice. The adult male had washed since she first saw him: his pelt was smooth and clean save for the smudged left shoulder. Another drop of blood oozed to the surface and the female, seeing it, cooed in vexation and nuzzled the wound. Her teeth chopped as she cleaned it. The male pushed her gently away, his eyes locked with Lena's. Trembling with courage she had not known was hers, Lena bit off another hemlock nodule, then extended the remainder of the bunch toward the watching woods folk. The three before her began to caper with joy, and a warm, furry arm encircled Lena's waist from behind.

  They were foragers and therefore by necessity wanderers, the family of which Lena was now a part. After a month in the bowl which chance or ancient vulcanism had pocked into the Jura Mountains, they spent a pair of weeks combing a stream with a different sleeping place every night. Food was plentiful in that spring and the summer it wore into: roots and berries, spruce tips and the tender shoots of other vegetation; birds' eggs while they lasted, but never the birds themselves. Lena was almost too young to remember the last of her parents' hens. Still, learning that they had succumbed to nest raiding, not slaughter, calmed a remaining bristle of unease.

  She tried not to think of Teller at all.

  Kort was the father of the family, even-tempered but awesomely strong. Rather than climb a hardwood to pick nuts before the squirrels had combed them, he would find a boulder or the largest fallen limb in the neighborhood and smash it against the tree trunk, showering himself and the ground with the ripe offerings. It was Kort, too, who trudged off on day-long journeys to the cave in which the family wintered, carrying in a bark-cloth basket the dried excess of their gleaning. The winter stores were kept beneath a stone too tight-fitting for a mouse to slide around and too massive for a bear's awkward limbs to thrust aside.

  But if Kort's strength was the shaft which supported the family's existence, it was the quick mind of Kue-meh, his mate, which provided directing force. Her fingers wove the strips of cambium into fabric as smooth and as supple as the wool and linen of the villages beyond the Forest. The woods folk used the cloth for carrying bulky goods, not as clothing, though Lena once ineptly wove a crossbelt for herself when her shift disintegrated. Kue-meh guided the foraging, judging its progress and determining when and where the family would move. She could tell at a glance which hickory nut was sound and sweet, which had been emptied in its shell by a worm.

  At first the children were never wholly alone, for there were dangers in the Forest. Not the bears, so much, for their strength and ugly tempers were outweighed by clumsiness and their preference for other food. Even Lena was soon able to scramble up a tree before a peevish grunt gave way to a charge. Lynxes were more of a potential threat, for they were swift and had the blood-lust common to all cats. Still Chi, the female woods child and smallest of the three, weighed forty founds by now and was too strong and active to be a comfortable victim.

  The wolves, though, the wolves…

  They feared nothing very greatly, those lean gray killers. Fire, perhaps; but the woods folk feared it more and Lena learned to avoid the flames after being cuffed fiercely away from a lightning-slashed tree. From spring through fall the wolves padded through the Forest alone and in pairs, tracking a plump doe or a healthy fawn to rip down and devour. Like most powerful carnivores, the wolves chose their prey not for its weakness but for its taste-and after years of chaos and the Plague, some of them had found a taste for men.

  Lena's long legs, and the new sense of freedom brought by roaming the Forest with folk who thought it home, not exile, took her and Faal, the young male, almost into long-toothed jaws. They were digging root nodules, using sharpened stakes and cloth bags while Kue-meh wove. Faal went around one side of a huge hemlock, Lena the other-the far side. The empty woods, a chorus of blacks and greens and browns, spoke to her suddenly. Dropping her equipment with a silent giggle, Lena darted off among the aisles of trees.

  Faal heard the pad of her feet-months in the wild had trained Lena's step, but not beyond notice of ears that had been born there. He followed her without calling or even thinking. Faal was swiftly gaining his father's deep chest, but he showed signs of being in Kort's mental image as well. The two children were gone a minute or longer before Kue-meh looked up from her own work and Chi to notice that her other charges were gone. She hooted in anger, but Faal was already beyond earshot and Lena was ahead of him.

  She was a shuttle racing over a loom of needles and spruce twigs. Faal was stronger and his lungs might have brought him abreast of her in time, but Lena's legs would have been the envy of a doe. Faal on his stumpy limbs could not outsprint the girl. But the two wolves which converged on Lena in a grove of beeches were quicker yet.

  Lena stopped, too startled at first to be frightened. Faal had aimed a playful tackle at her before he saw the reason for her halt. He flopped to the leaf mould instead and skidded. The nearer of the red-tongued wolves lowered its tail and hunched.

  Lena stepped without thought between Faal and the gray killer. The wolf drew back. It was more than the scent of a true man, the reivers with iron and fire, where only woods folk had been expected. There was something within Lena herself that allowed her, a slim six-year-old, to face down a pair of wolves. They stood for an instant, each of them half again the girl's size; then they bolted. Only their fresh spoor was visible a moment later when Kue-meh raced into the glade, Chi under her left arm and a six-foot pine knot in her right hand. Lena and Faal were pummeled heavily for the run, but Kue-meh spent the rest of the afternoon in thought. Afterwards she let all three children stray, so long as her own two kept close to Lena.

  Early hunger and a vegetarian diet should have stunted Lena's growth. Instead she gained willowy inches to quickly overtop Faal and Chi. The woods folk were a cleanly people and the grime that had disfigured Lena's first six years disappeared in the ice-fed stream nearest the hollow in which she joined the family. It never returned. Her skin was clear and did not, even bare to the sun and the wind, take on the swarthy cast of her parents'. In the summer she was a warm brown, traced with the thin scabs of bramble cuts; in the winter her complexion counterfeited the creamy yellowness of old ivory polished by loving hands.

  For all the beauty of her body and skin, Lena's hair was her crown. It had never been cut, a result of her mother's apathy rather than any interest in the girl's adornment. Washed out and laboriously carded with twigs by all four of the woods folk, it flowed down her back like liquid gold. Loose, it was a bright flood behind her as she ran-but then it snagged and caught and diminished. Fa
al began to plait it in the evening imitating Kue-meh's bark weavings. Simple at first, the patterns grew increasingly complex and changed nightly. The hair was Faal's delight. During the long winter evenings he spent hours braiding and reopening her tresses, then braiding them again. Lena bore the attention, but her mind strayed beyond the boy's gentle fingers.

  There was another predator in the Forest, though Lena was twelve before she encountered it. She was miles from the high crag the family then occupied, following Kort to the winter cave, when a horn wound in the near distance. Kort's reaction was to panic. He danced in a little circle of indecision, then began scrambling up a princely fir tree. The bag of stores jerked with every hunch of his back, scattering bunches of hemlock nodules. Kort's feet and long right arm-his left held the bag and, in any case, would not lift above shoulder height since the arrow wound had healed-had shot him halfway up the trunk before he realized that Lena's progress was much slower than his own. There was more than a difference in strength. Though the woods folk did not have opposed big toes either, their control of their foot muscles was much greater than that of Lena's subspecies.

  Kort scrabbled down again, chattering haste in an angry voice. Lena, terrified by the uncertain situation, tried to obey and lost her grip, slipping ten feet to the ground. Kort's nervous rage burst out in a clatter of syllables. Finally the stocky male threw himself up the bole in leaps that would have been impressive even if horizontal. He caught the bag of provisions in the crotch of a huge limb eighty feet in the air, then dropped back to Lena's level in four incredible stages. Slinging the girl with as little ceremony as he had the bag, he remounted the tree with equal speed. Shuddering with fear, pressed between the bole and Kort's great gasping breaths, Lena stared at the ground so far below that it trembled in the breeze. The horn blew again, very nearby.

  A stag wobbled out of a clump of firs, its tongue grayish and drooling from the corner of its jaw. Twenty yards from the tree in which Kort and Lena sheltered, the deer fell under the whipsaw impact of a pair of mastiffs. Each dog looked as large as the victim. The stag cartwheeled. One of the great brindled dogs clamped on the deer's throat, the other caught the right foreleg. There was a flurry of humus. The stag's spine snapped like the first crack that follows the lightning.

  There were a dozen dogs swirling on the forest floor now, hounds trained to back off after guiding the killer mastiffs to their prey. They belled and leaped for gobbets of the deer still thrashing in its death throes. The riders were on them then, two green-garbed huntsmen with full beards and long whips with which they cut at the milling pack… and a third man, a youth whose hair gleamed almost white in a stray beam of sun. He rocked back in the saddle of his great gray stallion and laughed to the sky. Lena froze to see his face lifting, but he was not searching the treetops, he was only bubbling over with the joy of the kill.

  He was splendid, perfect in her eyes.

  There were more riders, scores of men on foot including dog handlers as shaggy and grim as the beasts they dragged off the mangled stag. A huntsman's broad knife flashed and he raised the deer's ears and tail to the laughing youth. An unexpected warmth had driven the fear from Lena's mind. She watched, empty even of wonder at the scene beneath her-more men by ten times than she had ever before seen-while her eyes drank in every motion, every nuance of the young rider in red and gold.

  Quick knives unlaced the deer, spilling the entrails to the reward of the hounds. The mastiffs sat aloof on their haunches, nearly the height of the footmen who skirted them with nervous eyes. Those killers were fed once daily and scorned to show interest in the game they brought down. Only their tongues… they flashed and rolled, infinitely flexible as they wiped clean the bloody jowls.

  The babble thinned as did the crowd below. The hounds were tired and sated. They whined when the handlers chained them in pairs, but they allowed the men to lead them back the way they had come. Two brawny retainers slung the gutted deer on a pole and trotted off behind the youth on horseback. Riders drifted after them, talking and laughing as they passed out of earshot. Nothing remained but a ragged circle trampled black on the leaf mould. The horn was playing a caracol that seemed to hang in the air even after it was actually inaudible.

  "The Ritter Karl," Lena was whispering to herself. She slurred into the heavy Swabish of her parents the name purred by the retainers. "Karl von Arnheim…"

  Kort, already reslinging the load of food, paid her no attention. But Lena continued to roll the syllables under her tongue.

  Months passed. Occasionally there were true men in the Forest: a pair of nervous travelers with packs and staves, whistling into the shadows; a vagabond whose rags were streaked with pus from the ulcers they covered; once a dozen men together, armed and as lean as the wolves… these wore mismated finery and as many as a dozen rings on each hand.

  The von Arnheim hunt did not pass close enough for Lena to hear and run to it.

  The woods folk travelled, but they did not roam. Lena's wanderings, at first for hours and then for days, were a cause of great concern to the family. Kuemeh pleaded with her, but the soft, cooing language of the folk had no words for the emotions that were driving the girl. The pleading stopped in time, for none of the family could catch Lena now if she ran. A foraging people learn not to waste effort. Some useful knowledge came from the trips: food sources that the family could exploit now or in the future, caves that opened into spacious chambers from throats too narrow for a bear to enter. But more and more, Lena's travels were to the edge of the fields of men; and this she did not explain to the woods folk, knowing instinctively that if she had, nothing would have kept Kue-meh from ordering an immediate move scores of miles deeper into the Forest.

  And already the trips were considerable endeavors. Settlements had shrunk back from the trees, save for scattered households as Teller's had been. There were more of those than Lena would have guessed in the days when the Forest was a prison wall, but rarely did the inhabitants attempt to farm the thin soil as had her parents. Most were charcoal burners, blackened men or couples too bent to display sexual distinctions, hiking ever further to find the hardwoods that stoked their greedy kilns. Their huts were ragged shambles, sometimes lean-tos sprawled against some Forest giant; but the kilns were anchors, too slow and demanding of construction to be abandoned for new sites nearer the fuel. The increasing journeys to find an oak in the evergreen forest, then to fell it and laboriously drag back lengths with a shoulder harness, left no time for the necessary leisure of building another kiln.

  Spread by the Plague, the lonely farmers were men who had tried to escape Death by running and had delayed his approach by a score of miserable years. The charcoal burners were caught between the upper and nether millstones of shrunken markets and scarcer raw materials, the farmers between declining fertility and impoverishment of tools. The third group, the meat hunters, had shrunk also though they might have been expected to increase. Game had returned to the fringe lands when men had melted away in the black ooze of the Plague, but the Forest had grown darker. Even those who had made their living in it for decades began to edge out into the sunlight.

  The demons that haunted the minds of humans in the Forest were not the woods folk. In all her ramblings, Lena found no sign of hairy men other than Kort and his family.

  She searched farther, into the lands where farms still sprawled in the open and men plowed behind animals, instead of prodding the soil with a stick. In the dusk she eeled along hedgerows so silently that the hens nesting in them did not stir. Where there were dogs, they rose and stalked stiff-legged over to Lena. After they sniffed at her, they whined and walked away. Occasionally a persistent brute would nuzzle the girl until her fingers stroked a rumbling purr from its rib cage. None of the beasts barked or attacked her.

  The domestic animals were new to her, but she paid them little attention. Lena had come to the lands of men to find a man.

  The farmers' huts were windowless, occasionally stone or proper wood but more
often wattle and daub. The girl's eyes found chinks when the buildings were lighted, raked the faces of sleepy residents when they stumbled out to relieve themselves on the ground. But the man she sought would not be found in a hovel. It was long months before she came to understand that, however, since her upbringing had been silent about the Herren, the Masters.

  As the seasons passed, as a month of searching became twelve, Lena's life was still almost wholly within the Forest. The trips beyond were windows of excitement that sparkled to set off well-loved panels of wood. The tall child had become a tall girl, muscled like a deer but with the same lithe slimness she had borne from the first. The woods folk did most things with grace, but they could not run. Faal watched Lena's sudden fits of exuberance, her flashing spurts across a clearing or through a briar thicket without misstep. His eyes glowed with the wonder and delight of a prophet to whom an angel was descending.

  At night his copper nails glinted as they plaited her hair in wondrous fashion.

  In a human world with little romance, the golden wraith became a legend before she was truly a rumor. Cottagers nodded and swilled thin beer as one of their number embellished an instant's vision. Sometimes Lena became a messenger from God or a Hell-sprite, searching for an infant's soul to steal. More often the stories were rooted deeper in the soul-earth of the peasants than Christ would ever be, and lowered voices spoke of Forest shadows and spirits of the Earth.

  Marvel in most listeners became professional curiosity in gray Rausch the huntsman. His belt knife, honed to a wire edge on a stream-tumbled egg of granite, had silver mountings and the rampant wyvern crest of the von Arnheims. The late Ritter, Karl's father Otto, had presented it to Rausch twenty-one years before to replace the knife his junior huntsman had broken on a boar's scapula. Barehanded, ignoring the blood-slick tusks, Rausch had wrestled the beast to the dirt at the feet of the Ritter's pregnant wife. From that day he rode at Otto's right stirrup and that of Karl after him. He would not have exchanged that blade for the Emperor's sceptre.