They didn’t have another.
In the darkness, firelight flared.
Renn gripped Torak’s arm. The Auroch camp was much closer than they’d thought.
High in the lime tree, they watched tall figures moving with the silent purposefulness of ants. Several gathered round a tree in the centre of camp, smearing something dark on its lower branches. Two more knelt to waken another fire.
Torak was mystified. Why waken one from scratch when you could take a burning branch from the first? And they weren’t using strike-fires. One man spun a stick between his palms, drilling it into a piece of wood on the ground which he held down with one foot, while he kept the drill straight by means of a cross-bar clamped between his teeth. It worked. Smoke curled. The second man fed the flames beard-moss, then kindling. When the fire was fully awake, everyone knelt and touched their foreheads to the ground.
More Aurochs emerged from the Forest. Torak counted five, seven, ten. Each man – and they were all men – bore an axe, a bow, two knives, and a shield: a narrow, arm-length wedge of wood, whose pointed end he thrust into the earth, before drawing off his netting hood to reveal a caked head and bizarrely ridged and furrowed face.
Torak broke out in a cold sweat. Gaup was right. These people were different.
And yet they were setting spits over the fires, and soon he smelt the delicious, familiar smell of roasting woodgrouse, weirdly at odds with the silent camp.
‘Why don’t they speak?’ he whispered.
‘I think it’s to make them more tree-like,’ breathed Renn. ‘That’s what Deep Forest people want above all: to be like the trees.’
‘I can see more shields down there than men.’
She nodded and held up three fingers. Three hunters still out there, stalking the Forest. They’d been right to climb the lime.
They took turns to stay awake. A thin rain pattered into Torak’s dreams, and the Forest became a dark, soughing sea where night birds flitted like fishes. From far away came the oo-hu, oo-hu of an eagle owl.
Renn was shaking his shoulder. ‘Dawn soon.’
He blinked, kneading cramp from his calf. The day was blustery, with a dry south wind. Chaffinches and warblers were already in full voice, the woodpigeons just beginning.
‘I hope Rip and Rek are still asleep,’ muttered Renn. ‘The last thing we need is a raven greeting.’
Torak tried to smile. He thought it less and less likely that their plan would work. Even if it did, they’d have only a brief chance to swim the Blackwater; and then they’d be in Forest Horse territory. And all the time, Thiazzi was getting away.
Grey light seeped into camp, and Torak made out humped shelters around the central beech.
He peered at it. It couldn’t be. Those lower branches were red. It wasn’t the morning sun, the branches themselves – bark, twigs, leaves – had been daubed all over with earthblood. Why, he thought, would anyone paint an entire branch red?
No time to wonder. The sun was rising. Soon they must be on the move.
To the north, something glittered in the tall spruce tree. And there, further east. Renn flashed him an edgy grin. So far, the plan was working. The flint flakes they’d tied to her arrowshafts shimmered and clinked in the wind.
The Aurochs had seen them. Men were pointing, running for weapons and shields.
Swiftly, Torak and Renn climbed down to earth. Wolf appeared, his fur wet with dew. They headed for the river.
Willows overhung the Blackwater, holding in the night. There was no sign of Aurochs. Torak prayed that they’d all been drawn by the decoys. Yanking off their boots and tying them to their sleeping-sack rolls, they made their way down the bank and into the reeds, moving cautiously, so as not to startle any water birds into betraying them. The shallows were choked with leafy saplings felled by a flood further upstream.
‘Good cover,’ murmured Renn.
They risked strained smiles. Maybe this was going to work.
Bracing themselves for the cold, they waded into the river. Torak’s feet sank into a freezing slime of dead leaves, and he saw Renn’s stained lips tighten in disgust. He grabbed a floating sapling for cover. She did the same. They swam after Wolf, who was already halfway across.
The Blackwater wasn’t as sleepy as it looked. It was a struggle to resist its stealthy underwater pull.
Suddenly Wolf veered, and came swimming towards them, his ears pinned back in alarm.
‘What’s that?’ whispered Renn.
Torak’s belly turned over. Those logs in midstream: they were floating upriver. And some of them had eyes.
One raised its head. Torak saw a fierce green face tattooed with leaves. A brown headband. Long hair braided with horse tails.
A Forest Horse raiding party. Heading straight for them.
ELEVEN
‘Get underwater, head back to the bank,’ Torak told Renn just before he dived. He couldn’t find the breathing tube in his belt. Too bad, he’d hold his breath. He only hoped Renn had heard him.
She had. She surfaced soon after he did in the same patch of reeds, and they waited, gritting their teeth to stop them chattering.
The Forest Horses hadn’t seen them. The green men lay on their bellies, paddling silently with their hands, knives clamped between charcoal-blackened teeth.
Not far from Torak, Wolf hauled himself onto the bank and shook himself noisily.
Eyes flicked sideways in leaf-tattooed faces, then back again. A lone wolf was no concern of theirs.
The reeds gave good cover, allowing Torak and Renn to crawl up the bank and get their bearings. Torak was shocked. The treacherous Blackwater had carried them nearer the camp, not further away.
Soaked and shivering, he wondered what to do. Any moment now, the Aurochs would realize they’d been tricked and head back to the river, spreading out to hunt the unknown intruders. He and Renn would be trapped between them and the Forest Horses.
Unless he could steer both sides away from them.
‘Head downriver,’ he told Renn in a whisper. ‘Wait for me past that bend, I’ll meet you there.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Where are you going?’
‘No time to explain! Watch out for traps!’
Telling Wolf to stay with the pack-sister, he started towards the Auroch camp. When he was as close as he dared, he crouched and whipped two arrows from his quiver. Then he took out his medicine horn and quickly smeared the arrowshafts with earthblood. He had no idea what those red branches meant to the Aurochs, but they were easy to spot, which was all that mattered.
Still crouching, he nocked the first arrow to his bow and waited.
He glimpsed a Forest Horse hunter coming ashore: stealthily, keeping upright so that the water ran noiselessly down his body rather than pattering on leaves.
Torak took aim. He wasn’t as good a shot as Renn, but he didn’t need to be. His arrow thudded into a holly a good distance away.
The tattooed head turned to follow it.
From the corner of his eye, Torak saw an Auroch hunter making for the river. His belly tightened. They were faster than he’d thought. He loosed his second red arrow and hit another tree.
Without waiting to see the response, he fled, running fast and low to where Renn was waiting. If his trick worked, both sides would make for those mysterious red arrows, and then . . .
Shouts behind him, a clash of spears. He felt a spurt of savage joy. The Aurochs were fighting the Forest Horses, leaving him and Renn to cross the river and hunt Thiazzi.
Renn’s shadowy figure beckoned from a dense stand of spruce, and he grabbed her hand. Her grasp was hot as ash as she led him through the gloom to the hiding-place she’d found: the hollow ruin of an enormous oak.
Panting, he collapsed against the tree, and as her fingers slipped from his, he gave a shaky laugh. ‘That was too close!’
No reply. He was alone in the tree.
Twenty paces away, Wolf emerged from a clump of willows, followed by Renn, dripping wet
and furious. ‘Where,’ she whispered, ‘in the name of the Spirit have you been?’
TWELVE
‘Who was that?’ hissed Torak.
‘Who was who?’ demanded Renn. His disappearence had shaken her badly, and she was struggling not to show it.
‘Someone took my hand. I thought it was you.’
‘Well it wasn’t.’
He grabbed her hand. ‘Yours is cold, the other was hot.’
‘Of course I’m cold, I’m soaking wet! Where did you go?’
From the Auroch camp came shouts, a scream of pain.
‘Tell you later,’ said Torak. ‘Let’s get across while we can.’
Renn was so cold that the Blackwater felt almost warm. The sodden gear on her back weighed her down, and the river was strong. As she reached the midstream, it sucked her under. She kicked to the surface, spluttering and spitting out leaves. Torak and Wolf were ahead and didn’t notice.
The south bank was a forbidding tangle of willows, and as she neared it, her spirit quailed. She pictured leaf-faced hunters taking aim. She thought, Out of the cooking-skin and into the fire.
If the others were frightened, they gave no sign. Wolf scrambled up the bank, shook vigorously, and started casting for Thiazzi’s scent. Torak waded noiselessly towards the willows.
Watching him scan the trees, Renn shivered. His disguise made him a creature of the Deep Forest: a dark-faced stranger with cold silver eyes.
He flicked her a glance and nodded – clear – then vanished into the willows. As she struggled to free her leg from a tangle of waterweed, he reached out and pulled her in.
‘There’s no-one here,’ he said. ‘I think they’ve all crossed to attack the camp.’
Hastily they dried themselves with grass, stuffing more down their boots and inside their clothes, to warm up. Torak cut some horsetail and scrubbed the green stain off their headbands, while Renn tended her poor, soaked bow.
Wolf found the scent and started south, away from the river and into a boggy woodland of alders rising from brown pools. Renn thought of traps and curse sticks and invisible hunters, and said a prayer to the guardian.
It was difficult country. They had to jump from one clump of alders to the next, and edge along fallen tree-trunks squelchy with moss. The water was clogged with frogspawn. Renn fell in and came out beslimed.
She tried to convince herself that this was a forest just like the one where she’d grown up. She saw a spruce tree whose fissured trunk was studded with cones jammed in by woodpeckers, so they could peck at the seeds. Open Forest woodpeckers did that, too. She spotted a pile of leaves near a badger’s sett; the badgers had been cleaning up after the winter, and had dragged out their old bedding. All familiar, she told herself.
It didn’t work. The trees murmured that she didn’t belong. The woodpeckers were black.
Torak had found something.
Beneath an ash tree, the earth had been scraped to make a muddy wallow. It was five paces across, far bigger than even an auroch would make. Wolf snuffed it eagerly. Torak pushed his muzzle aside to examine a huge, round hoof-print. ‘Some kind of giant auroch?’ he said.
Renn nodded. ‘Fin-Kedinn says there are creatures here that survived the Great Cold. I think they’re called bison.’
He frowned. ‘So they’re prey?’
‘I think so. But sometimes they charge.’
In the distance, an owl hooted. Oo-hu, oo-hu.
Renn caught her breath. In her mind, she saw the dread wooden face of the Eagle Owl Mage.
Torak was thinking the same thing. ‘Could they be working together?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Thiazzi and Eostra?’
Renn hesitated. ‘I’m not so sure. He’s selfish. He’ll want the fire-opal for himself. Besides, Saeunn told me – she can’t be certain, but she thinks Eostra is in the Mountains.’
‘And yet her owl is in the Deep Forest,’ said Torak.
Renn was silent. She watched him rise to his feet and look about. She could see from his expression that whether Eostra was here or not, he was undeterred. He would find Thiazzi.
‘Torak,’ she said. ‘What happened at the Auroch camp?
What did you do?’
Briefly, he told her how he’d set the two clans against each other. It was clever, but his ruthlessness shocked her. ‘But – people might have been killed,‘ she said.
‘That might have happened anyway.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe the Forest Horses were only scouting, you don’t know.’
‘I warned you. I said I’d do whatever it takes to get Thiazzi.’
‘Starting fights? Getting people killed?’
Wolf glanced doubtfully from one to the other.
Torak ignored him. ‘Last spring,’ he said, ‘everyone was hunting me. This time, I’m doing the hunting. I swore an oath, Renn. So yes. I am ruthless. And if you can’t take that, don’t come with me!’
They went on in silence. Renn resolved not to be the first to speak.
The ground climbed steadily, and black spruce gave way to beech. They waded through waist-high nettles and clambered over rotting tree-trunks blistered with poisonous mushrooms. Renn noticed that the trees were taller than in the Open Forest, which would make them harder to climb; and the wood-ants didn’t build their nests only on the south side of the trunks, but all around, which would make it easier to get lost.
No sign of people.
And yet . . .
Behind her a branch swayed, as if someone had edged out of sight.
She put her hand to her knife-hilt.
The branch stilled. If it was Forest Horse hunters, she thought, we’d know it by now.
Torak had gone ahead, and was kneeling to talk to Wolf. She ran to catch up. ‘I saw something!’ she panted.
‘And Wolf smelt something,’ said Torak. ‘He says it smells like the Bright Beast.’
‘That means fire.’
‘It also means ash. The one who took my hand . . . it felt hot.’
Their eyes met.
‘Whatever grabbed my hand,’ said Torak. ‘It’s followed us across the river.’
As the light began to fail, they decided to strike camp under a yew tree.
They’d reached a valley where beavers had dammed a stream to make a narrow lake. Renn saw the beavers’ lodge in the middle: a sturdy pile of branches, some streaked yellow where they’d gnawed off the bark. She guessed it was still occupied, as a few willows remained along the shore. Fin-Kedinn said that beavers liked to eat all the willows before moving on.
Thinking of Fin-Kedinn hurt. She tried to imagine him safely back with the Ravens, busy with the salmon run, but her mind showed him grey-faced, hunched in the canoe. Maybe the worms of sickness were already eating into his marrow. And no Renn to chase them away.
Torak went scouting with Wolf, so to take her mind off Fin-Kedinn, she left her gear under the yew and went to forage. At least the plants were familiar. She gathered handfuls of succulent saxifrage and sharp-tasting sorrel; and as they couldn’t have a fire, she dug up spear thistle and silverweed roots, which they could eat raw.
Rip and Rek flew down, fluttering their wings and making famished gurgles, so she tossed them a couple of roots. Over the winter, she’d persuaded them to come when she called, but they would not yet perch on her shoulders, as they did with Torak.
Feeling slightly better, she went to refill the waterskins. The lake was sheened a dusty yellow with pollen, and around it, the trees leaned over to peer at their name-souls in the water. Renn held the skins down deep, to avoid scooping them up. It had never bothered her before, but here . . .
While the skins filled, she watched the ripples smoothing out, and wished Torak would come back and be Torak again: play tug-the-hide with Wolf, tease her about the freckle at the corner of her mouth. For the first time it struck her that his mother’s father had been Oak Clan – which meant he was kin with Thiazzi. She wished she hadn’t thought of that.
The waterskins were full.
As she pulled them out, her name-soul stared back at her: an inscrutable, clay-headed Auroch.
A figure appeared behind it.
In one nightmare heartbeat, Renn took in clenched fists and a shock of long, pale hair.
With a cry she spun round.
Nothing. Just a stirring of willows, very close.
She whipped out her knife.
A branch creaked. Claws clattered on bark. She thought of tokoroths scurrying down trees, agile as spiders. She left the waterskins and raced back to camp.
Torak hadn’t returned, but the ravens perched high in the yew, cawing in distress. Her gear had been savagely attacked. Her quiver was slashed, its moss padding flung about, and most of her arrows had been snapped. Luckily, she’d hung her bow on the yew, and the attacker had missed it, but her sleeping-sack had been trampled into the dust, her tinder pouch cut to pieces, and her strike-fire smashed under a rock. Malice and rage throbbed in the air like sickness. And over everything lay a scattering of fine grey ash.
Drawing her axe, Renn backed against the yew. ‘I’m not scared of you,’ she told the shadows. Her voice sounded reedy and unconvincing.
Moments later, Torak and Wolf returned. Wolf raced to snuffle furiously at Renn’s things. Torak’s jaw dropped.
‘I saw something at the lake,’ she told him. ‘Then this.’
‘What did you see?’
‘It had pale hair. It looked angry.’
He flinched.
‘Do you know what it is?’ she said.
‘No, I – no.’ He started searching for tracks, but the light was almost gone, and he didn’t find any. ‘Either it knows how to cover its tracks,’ he said, ‘or it doesn’t leave any.’
‘What do you mean? Torak, what is it?’
He chewed his lip. Then he stood up. ‘Whatever it is, we’re not sleeping on the ground.’
The yew didn’t like being climbed. It choked them in clouds of pollen and tried to evade their grip by shedding bark. Twice, a branch whipped round and tried to throw them off. They were scratched and exhausted by the time they’d settled in its arms.
‘The wind’s getting up,’ said Torak. ‘We’d better tie ourselves to the trunk.’
Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Page 87
