She was right, Thorn thought. The big boy was driving the ax blade deep into the larger saplings that he was felling, and each blow rang loudly, the sound echoing and reechoing around the forest. He grunted.
“Keep your eyes open,” he said. “I’ll send the others up to collect the posts and rails.”
He strode back through the thick sand, noting that the first three uprights were already in position, Stig having driven them deep into the sand with a large wooden mallet from the ship. Thorn caught Jesper’s eye and beckoned to him.
Jesper glanced away guiltily, unwilling to meet Thorn’s gaze.
“Jesper,” Thorn called softly, “I’d like a word with you.”
The soft tone and easy words were deceptive. Jesper sauntered across the sand to where Thorn waited, the thumb of his left hand thrust through his broad leather belt.
“Yes, Thorn?” the former thief said, trying too hard to be casual. He knew what was coming.
Thorn smiled at him, then moved closer, so that their noses were ten centimeters apart. The smile faded and the old warrior spoke in a voice that wouldn’t carry to the crew members working on the fence.
“If you ever—ever—break discipline again like you did today, I will kick your backside so hard your eyes will pop out of your head.”
Jesper hung his head, unable to meet Thorn’s burning gaze. “Yes, Thorn,” he muttered.
But Thorn wasn’t letting him off so lightly. “Are you clear on that?” he demanded.
Jesper nodded his head. “Yes, Thorn,” he repeated, still unwilling to look the older man in the eyes.
“We’re a long way from home, Jesper,” Thorn continued. “We don’t know where we are and we don’t know what or who we might encounter. We have to be able to rely on each other. We have to maintain our discipline as a group. If we don’t, people could die. If one person lets the others down, it could mean the end for all of us. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Thorn.”
“Blast you, Jesper, look at me when you talk to me!”
Reluctantly, Jesper raised his head to meet Thorn’s gaze. The anger he saw there was nothing short of terrifying.
“I’ll warn you once. If your laziness or lack of discipline is the cause of any of the others being injured or killed, you will answer to me. Is that clear?”
Jesper nodded. He had no doubt that Thorn meant what he was saying. But a nod wasn’t enough for Thorn.
“Say it. I want to hear you say it. Do you understand?”
Jesper licked his lips. Suddenly, they were dry again, as they had been for the preceding week. But the reason now wasn’t lack of drinking water. It was fear.
“I understand, Thorn,” he managed at last.
Thorn held his gaze in silence for ten long seconds, then nodded fiercely.
“Make sure you do.”
PART TWO
THE BEAR
chapter ten
By nightfall, the perimeter fence of their enclosure was completed. They had yet to fill in the spaces between the two rails with brushwood and saplings, but that would be done in the morning.
Thorn called a halt to their work as the shadows lengthened across the small camp, and the crew set about building small individual shelters for the night, using cut branches to form frameworks and covering them with canvas from the ship. Edvin and Ingvar built a fireplace for a cook fire. Edvin hung a small cauldron from an iron triangle, placing it so that the iron cook pot hung low over the fire.
Stefan walked thigh deep into the waters of the bay and began casting a fishing line into the choppy waves. He’d cut a whippy rod from a grove of willows in the inlet and had a selection of lures hooked into his vest, trying them one after another to find one that might appeal to the local fish.
“Where did they come from?” Stig asked idly.
Hal, now awake and refreshed after the first deep, uninterrupted sleep he’d enjoyed in weeks, nursed a cup of coffee—luckily they had a good supply after their stop in Hibernia. He smiled at Stig’s question.
“Stefan always has his fishing gear with him,” he said. “He’s addicted to the pastime.”
Stig nodded. “I’ve noticed how that happens to people.”
They were interrupted by a shout of triumph from the angler. They looked up to see his rod bending and quivering as a captive fish tried to break free of his hook. Stefan played the fish for a few minutes, allowing it to exhaust its strength against the springy resistance of the rod. Then he brought the rod in and began hauling his line in hand over hand. There was a flurry on the surface of the water a few meters from the shore as he managed to bring the fish closer. Once it was on the surface, he backed away up the beach, dragging it out onto the sand, where it lay flapping and jumping. He grinned at the two watching him.
“It’s a bream,” he announced. “And a good one.”
“We can use it,” Hal said as Stefan knelt beside the fish and quickly dispatched it with a blow from a rock. He tossed it in a rock pool to keep it cool, then rebaited his hook and walked into the water, casting out once more.
Over the next fifteen minutes, Stefan felt a regular succession of jerks and tugs on his line as fish attacked his bait. His fishing rod was rudimentary, but he managed to land another three of the bream, all of them fat and well fed.
Then the brief flurry of activity died away, and he made cast after cast with no reaction, his bait floating untouched on the surface of the bay.
“You’ve scared them off,” Stig called.
Stefan shook his head, frowning. “Sometimes it just happens this way,” he said. “They move on to another feeding ground.”
“Where there isn’t a giant two-legged monster jamming a hook in their mouth and dragging them ashore,” Stig suggested.
Stefan shook his head once again. “No. I think it just happens this way.”
He began hauling his line in, winding it round the fishing pole as it came. Hal gestured at the four fish in the shallow pool beside Stefan.
“Let’s clean those and take them up to Edvin,” he said. “Might as well have them while they’re fresh.”
“You can’t beat fresh fish,” Stig said in agreement.
They gave Stefan a hand gutting and cleaning the fish at the water’s edge. As they threw the entrails and offcuts into the water, tiny fish darted around them, seizing fragments and flashing away at high speed. Stefan tied the four cleaned bream onto a loop of twine, strung through their mouths and gills, and they trudged up through the heavy sand to the half-completed palisade. They stooped under the top rail and stepped over the lower one, making their way to the rear of the enclosed area, where Edvin had built his cook fire. He had brought stores from the ship and arrayed the various casks and pottery jars in a neat stack to one side. He was chopping onions, his sharp knife sliding smoothly through them and separating them into neat discs. He looked up as they approached, smiling as he saw the four substantial fish Stefan was carrying.
“Nice work,” he said. “I’ll do them tonight.”
Hal sat on a nearby rock, eyeing Edvin’s handiwork. His mother was a cook and he could appreciate Edvin’s knife skills, slicing the onions quickly and precisely, and not allowing them to separate into ragged pieces—as they always seemed to do when Hal tried to chop them.
“How are we placed for supplies?” he asked, eyeing the neat stack of casks and jars behind the cook.
Edvin had been expecting the question. One of his first acts, once he was released from the task of building the palisade, had been to take inventory of their food supplies.
“Actually, we have plenty,” he said. “After all, I restocked before we left Hibernia and I laid in enough food for the journey home.”
He paused. The word home had a bittersweet ring to it. Then he shook his head distractedly and continued.
“Most of the fresh food i
s gone, of course,” he said. “I had nets of vegetables and bread, but they were either spoiled by the salt water, or washed overboard. We’ve plenty of dried or smoked food, though: pork and beef, hard biscuit and a couple of sacks of dried peas. We needn’t go hungry.”
There was a note of dissatisfaction in his voice as he listed their supplies.
Hal raised an eyebrow. “But?” he queried.
Edvin shrugged. “But it’s going to be pretty boring eating,” he said. Edvin prided himself on providing good, interesting meals to the crew, and hearing their exclamations of appreciation. In their current situation, cast up on an unknown shore and hundreds of leagues from home, good, nourishing and varied meals would go a long way to maintaining the crew’s morale.
Hal appreciated the fact as well. He nodded and turned to where Lydia was sitting, five meters away, outside the small canvas tent that Ulf and Wulf had constructed for her—though in truth she was more than capable of building her own shelter. She had her back against a rock, her eyes closed.
“Are you asleep, Lydia?” Hal called.
“Fast asleep,” she replied, her eyes remaining closed.
Hal grinned. “I wonder, could you sleepwalk over here for a few minutes?”
With a small sigh, she reluctantly opened her eyes, rose to her feet in one smooth, graceful movement and joined them. She had already guessed what Hal might want to discuss and his words confirmed it for her.
“D’you think there’s likely to be game around here?” he asked.
She cast her gaze around the surrounding terrain. “I’d be surprised if there weren’t,” she said. “There’s freshwater and plenty of greenery and ground cover. I imagine there’d be deer and rabbits around. And probably some form of wildfowl. Plus I heard a strange bird in the trees earlier this afternoon. Made a kind of oggle-oggle-oggle sound. I went to see if I could spot it but it dashed away. From the noise it made going through the undergrowth, I’d say it was pretty big.”
Hal glanced at Edvin. “Deer, rabbits and a big bird going oggle-oggle-oggle,” he said. “How does that sound to you, Ed?”
Edvin grinned. “Sounds good. Although I’ll reserve judgment on any bird that goes oggle-oggle-oggle.”
“It could be delicious,” Hal told him.
Edvin shrugged. “Or it could be like the mythical bongo bird with its iron-hard flesh. It takes hours to cook and it’s a tricky process.”
“What do you do with it?” Lydia asked.
Edvin replied with a completely straight face. “You find a rock that’s the same size as the bird and put them both in a pot. Then you boil them together for four hours.”
“Four hours?” Lydia was skeptical but Edvin nodded emphatically.
“Four hours. Then you throw the bird away and eat the rock.”
Stig and Hal, who had heard the old joke before, both burst out laughing.
“It’s the way you tell it, Edvin,” said Stig.
Lydia, realizing her leg had been severely pulled, raised an eyebrow at the cook. “Well, I’ll try to get an oggle-oggle-oggle bird for the rest of us tomorrow. You don’t have to eat it.”
“What will I eat?” Edvin asked and she eyed him for several seconds before replying.
“I’ll catch a rock for you. You can eat that.”
• • • • •
The following morning, Lydia left camp shortly after breakfast, while the rest of the crew returned to work on the palisade, cutting large bunches of brushwood and dragging it in to camp, then weaving it in and out between the two fence rails to fill in the gap between them.
As she was checking her atlatl and her quiver, making sure she had several of the darts she used to hunt birds, Hal wandered across from his shelter to join her.
“Maybe you should take Ingvar along,” he suggested. “These woods seem quiet enough, but you never really know.”
She smiled as she loaded the darts into her quiver, sliding them in between layers of sheepskin that would keep them from rattling.
“He’s a dear,” she said, “but he’d be a big drawback hunting. Even with those vision goggles you made him, he tends to blunder along, stepping on twigs and fallen branches and bumping into trees. He’ll scare off any game within half a kilometer.”
Hal conceded the point, but he was still reluctant to let her go on her own. “Maybe Stig could—”
Lydia laid her hand on his arm to stop him. “I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself,” she said. “And if I do run into trouble, I don’t want someone else slowing me down while I get away. Remember, I’ve been doing this all my life.”
He grinned, realizing she was right. “Okay then. But take care. And keep your eyes open.”
“That’s what hunters do,” she said.
chapter eleven
Lydia made her way into the cool green of the forest. The early sunlight filtered down through the thick canopy of trees and, as she drew farther away from the camp, the clatter and thump of axes and hammers, and the sound of crew members calling to one another, were gradually muffled by the intervening forest, until they died away altogether.
She paused a moment, enjoying the silence that enveloped her, appreciating the sense of being alone. While she loved the brotherband members dearly, and regarded them as her brothers, sometimes she longed for the days when she was on her own, stalking silently through the woods of her homeland and looking for signs of game. Her eyes misted for a moment as she thought of her home, and of her grandfather, who had been her companion since her parents died many years ago. He too was dead now, killed in the raid mounted by the pirate Zavac.
She shook her head to drive the moment of nostalgia away. Her life now was a good one, she thought. She had friends and a place in the crew. She was a valued member, admired for her skill in tracking and her accuracy with the atlatl.
“Some people wouldn’t mope about that,” she told herself quietly, then moved off again, her eyes scanning the ground in front of her and the brambles and bracken to either side. She was following what must have been a game trail, formed by animals as they pushed through the undergrowth to the water holes by the beach. It was barely half a meter wide in some places, and she had to turn sideways to slip between the narrow tree trunks.
She paused as she caught sight of a scrap of brown on one shoot growing off a trunk. She leaned closer, touched it and studied it closely. It looked as if an animal had brushed against the trunk and left a piece of fur behind. The scrap was over a meter from the ground, so it must have been a long-legged animal.
“A deer,” she muttered, pleased to see evidence that her supposition was correct. She dropped to one knee and scanned the forest floor. It was thick with leaf mold that concealed any tracks. But in one clear spot, she saw an imprint left by a cloven hoof.
Her heart beat a little faster, as it always did when she found herself on the trail of a game animal.
She rose to continue, then caught sight of a small mound of black pebblelike objects. Rabbit droppings, she realized, and she smiled.
“Deer, rabbits and fish in the bay,” she said softly. “We won’t go hungry.”
She frowned. You have to catch them first, she cautioned herself mentally. She paused and deftly set two snares on the path, scattering a handful of dried peas from Edvin’s supplies around each, then continued on her way. A few meters on, she noticed several thin branches broken on the trunk of another tree, at around the same height that she had seen the scrap of fur. She studied the broken twigs. The sap inside them was oozing slightly. The deer, if it was a deer, had passed by the point only recently.
Maybe ten, fifteen minutes ago, she thought. The sun wasn’t strong enough yet to dry the sap. Later in the day, as it moved directly overhead, its heat would seal off the broken ends.
She quietly withdrew a dart from her quiver. In a habit born of long practice, she c
hecked the razor-sharp broadhead. No sense throwing a dart if the point wasn’t sharp, she thought. Satisfied, she clipped the notched end of the dart into the spur of the atlatl and kept it close by her body, ready to throw, but held vertically so it wouldn’t snag on the undergrowth.
She continued in the direction the deer had followed. The narrow path twisted and turned, but always seemed to return to one basic direction. There was a rustling sound from the undergrowth ahead and she stopped in mid-stride, her right foot having just made contact with the ground, the bulk of her weight still on the left.
Carefully, moving infinitely slowly, she tested the ground under her right foot. The thin sole of her knee-high boot allowed her to feel the ground underneath and she checked for any sense of a twig or fallen branch that might snap when she put her full weight on it. Feeling nothing, she advanced another pace, repeating the action with her left foot. Then another, always checking, always pausing.
The rustle came from the undergrowth ahead once more, louder this time as she drew closer to the source. She concentrated on making her movements even more stealthy, gliding through the thick-growing trees and tangled undergrowth with barely a sound. The noise ahead of her had changed now to a rattling that, from past experience, she knew came from a deer clashing his antlers against the branches of a tree. At some stages of the year, they did that to remove the annoying coating, known as velvet, that could build up on their antlers.
Or sometimes, it might be caused by a young stag testing his fighting moves against the branches of a tree before taking on a more dangerous, live opponent.
It proved to be the latter. As she advanced, she became aware that the light ahead of her was becoming brighter, indicating that she was coming to a clearing in the trees, where the sun had more direct access to the forest floor.
The clearing, when she reached it, was a roughly circular shape, possibly formed by animals as they sought to create a place to shelter from the winter storms. Or maybe just formed by chance. In either case, there was a young buck dancing lightly on his hooves on the far side, lowering his head to slash and strike with his half-grown antlers at the trees. As she watched, he trapped a young branch between his antlers and twisted his head and neck quickly, snapping the branch off and letting it fall. Then he leapt backward, ears pricked, eyes alert, as if looking for a riposte from the tree.
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