Warrior Bronze

by Michelle Paver

  ‘If,’ she said.

  After the chill of the cave, it was a relief to get out into the hot autumn night. The moonlight was so bright it made them blink, but a bank of white mist had crept in, and hid the coast from view.

  When they’d dragged the boat from beneath the overhang, Pirra took the oars, and Hylas stayed in the water, swimming with one hand on the prow. To find the stream, he was going to try a trick he’d learnt from Periphas, the ex-slave who’d been his friend after they’d escaped Thalakrea.

  ‘Fresh water feels colder than the Sea,’ he explained to Pirra. ‘With luck, I can find the stream by feel.’

  He was also hoping against hope that Spirit might return. But as they started off, with Pirra quietly rowing and he swimming one-handed, guiding them as close to the rocks as he dared, he saw no gleaming grey back and felt no smooth dolphin snout lightly caressing his flank. Only a shoal of small silvery fishes kept him company, swarming and flickering around his legs. Spirit wouldn’t come again. He could feel it.

  He began to lose heart. What are we doing here? he thought bitterly. The Crows have the dagger. We don’t even know where it is. And for all I know, Issi might be long dead.

  In the two years she’d been missing, he’d tried not to think of her, it hurt too much; but now that he was back, it was harder to keep the memories at bay. She kept butting into his thoughts: his noisy, argumentative, infuriating little sister …

  In the boat, Pirra gave a convulsive shudder. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she hissed.

  Now Hylas felt it too. It wasn’t the stabbing headaches, the sickness and flashing lights that he got before a vision; it was dread, pressing on his heart like a hand.

  Echo lit on to Pirra’s shoulder, and she put up one hand and touched the falcon’s foot. Echo sat hunched, with her head sunk in her shoulders. Pirra frowned.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ breathed Hylas.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘It feels as if – as if she’s scared.’

  ‘Echo? She’s not scared of anything! Except ants.’

  ‘I know. But I feel it too.’

  Suddenly, the fish around Hylas fled in a silent silver explosion, and for an instant, something cut across the Moon. It was moving too fast for him to see if it was bird or cloud, but it was huge, and as the light briefly died, dread rushed through him like a dark wind.

  The thing in the Sky was gone as swiftly as it had come, and once again, the Moon shone bright. Neither Hylas nor Pirra spoke. They didn’t want to voice their suspicions out loud, but both were thinking of the Angry Ones: the terrible spirits of air and darkness who were worshipped by the Crows.

  As they moved forwards, Hylas felt the water turn abruptly colder. ‘I think we’ve found that stream,’ he murmured.

  ‘It can’t be!’ whispered Pirra. ‘These are the marshes!’

  Through shifting veils of fog, the stream showed as a strip of dull silver, flanked by man-high reeds with dry brown heads that exhaled a swampy breath of decay. Here and there, a low hunched willow appeared in the mist, or a tall poplar, standing guard. One of the poplars had died and fallen across the mouth of the stream. In its white skeletal branches, three black cormorants roosted with their heads beneath their wings.

  ‘We can’t go in there,’ said Pirra. Even the throbbing ring of night crickets and the low eep-eep of frogs sounded a warning.

  Ahead of them, the reeds stirred – and Havoc appeared, with a large fish wriggling in her jaws. The lioness cast a casual glance at Hylas and Pirra, then leapt on to the dead tree trunk – waking the cormorants, who flew off into the mist – and sprawled full length, with her hind legs dangling on either side of the trunk. With the fish grasped firmly between her forepaws, she started noisily crunching it up.

  Hylas breathed out. ‘She doesn’t seem too worried.’

  ‘Of course not,’ snapped Pirra, ‘she’s a lion!’

  Hauling himself into the boat, he wrung out his long fair hair. ‘Well I think we’ll have to risk it. After all, the captain said the Marsh Dwellers are Outsiders, like me –’

  ‘And how will you get a chance to tell them who you are?’ demanded Pirra. ‘The captain also said they shoot on sight!’

  ‘Pirra, we can’t go back, and for all we know, these marshes stretch right along the coast! Have you got a better idea?’

  They’d left the boat tied to the skeleton tree, but they were finding it hard to follow the stream, as the reeds didn’t want to let them through. They were dense and tussocky, except where they opened without warning on to treacherous, sucking pools of mud.

  Havoc, having finished her meal, fared better, as her large paws prevented her from sinking; but she stayed close to Hylas, now and then glancing up at him with big Moon-silvered eyes: Are you sure about this?

  ‘Did you see that?’ whispered Pirra suddenly.

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘I saw lights, but they went out … Over there!’

  A dim blue glimmer on the other side of the stream. Hylas had no sooner spotted it, than it blinked out.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ said Pirra beside him.

  ‘And go where? If we can just follow this stream, it’s bound to lead us out of the marshes –’

  ‘If we get that far. If the Marsh Dwellers don’t –’ With a cry, she lurched against him.

  The Crow helmet had been spiked on a fishing spear jammed into a tussock: Pirra had nearly walked right into it. The only trace of the helmet’s former owner was a hank of long black warrior braids that had been roughly knotted to its crest. From the other end of these dangled a large, ragged flap of bloody scalp.

  ‘Now can we go back?’ muttered Pirra. ‘You don’t have to be a Marsh Dweller to know that this means Keep Out!’

  ‘But they meant it for the Crows, not us –’

  ‘And you’re quite certain of that, are you?’

  After a brief, fierce argument which Pirra won, they started back for the skeleton tree; but when its white limbs loomed out of the mist, Hylas halted. ‘We can’t go back,’ he said in an altered voice. ‘The boat’s gone.’

  Pirra stared at him blankly. ‘But you tied it up, I saw you.’

  He licked his lips. ‘The Marsh Dwellers are Outsiders, Pirra. We won’t see them unless they want us to.’

  Now they had no option but to follow the stream inland.

  They hadn’t gone far when it narrowed and became nothing more than a willow-choked creek. Hylas felt eyes on him. ‘Stay close,’ he murmured. ‘They’re all around, I can feel them.’

  Out loud, he called softly: ‘I’m an Outsider, too. I come from Mount Lykas, in Lykonia, but my mother was a Marsh Dweller from Messenia. Like you.’

  No reply. A faint night breeze stirred the reeds and rattled their dry brown heads. The frogs and the night crickets had fallen silent.

  ‘I’m looking for my sister,’ Hylas went on. ‘She went missing two summers ago when the Crows attacked our camp. Her name is Issi. I think that means “frog” in your speech.’

  Havoc emerged from the mist, making them start. Fish scales glinted on her muzzle and in her chin fur. Rubbing her wet head against Hylas’ thigh, she stood and stared into the mist.

  Pirra touched his wrist. Her dark eyes were wide in her pale, pointed face. ‘Don’t call again. I don’t think they like it.’

  Havoc raised her head and snuffed the air. Her tail was taut: she’d sensed something upstream.

  At that moment, lights flashed behind Hylas’ eyes and a burning finger stabbed his temple. He doubled up, clutching his head.

  ‘Hylas!’ hissed Pirra. ‘Is it a vision?’

  He tried to answer, but no words came. Everything around him was suddenly sharper and more vivid. He saw the swampy green smell rising from the reeds. He heard the suck of a frog’s small, sticky feet as it clambered up a stem. And in the midstream, where Pirra saw only weeds, he saw a water spirit rising before him.

  At first, she was a nebulous thing of mist a
nd moonlight, but as she rose higher, pearly flakes of light coalesced until she was as clear as the reeds around her. Her green hair floated like weeds, and her cold white eyes slid past Pirra, lingered briefly on Havoc – and pierced Hylas’ gaze.

  With a grey snarl of a smile, she stretched one long, dripping arm towards him, and held out her hand. On her glistening palm sat a tiny tree frog, black in the moonlight. With the other hand, the spirit pointed upstream.

  Hylas glanced from the tiny black frog to the radiant webbing between the thin, pointing fingers and in a flash, the spirit’s meaning burst upon him. Frog. Issi. In the marshes.

  He forgot the threat from the Marsh Dwellers. ‘She’s in there!’ he cried, crashing through the reeds. ‘Issi’s in the marshes!’

  ‘Hylas come back!’ shouted Pirra.

  He ignored her, squelching upstream with Havoc in his wake.

  Something grabbed his ankle and yanked him into the air, he found himself swinging over the stream by one leg. He was caught in some kind of net.

  But the net had also snagged one of Havoc’s forepaws, and with a snarl the lioness lashed out with her dagger-sharp claws, ripping apart the tough webbing as if it was gossamer, and dropping Hylas into the stream with a splash.

  He surfaced, spitting out waterweed. Havoc had already bounded off into the reeds.

  Frightened and furious, Pirra came floundering towards him. ‘What were you thinking? You could have been killed!’

  Too ashamed to speak, Hylas scrambled on to the bank and hacked at the trip rope round his ankle. It was made of fishskin: thin, but tough. Above him, the sapling, which had been bent double when the trap was set, was now swaying, with the torn net trailing from its crown.

  The water spirit had vanished. Frogs eep-eeped mockingly. Reeds rattled with harsh laughter. Pirra was right. If that trap had been spring-loaded with a spear instead of a net, either he or Havoc would be dead by now.

  And the marshlights were back, a flickering blue ring all around them – although still there was no one in sight.

  Hylas’ hand went to his wedjat amulet. ‘Keep your knife sheathed,’ he told Pirra softly, as they stood back to back.

  ‘I haven’t drawn it,’ she replied. No point. Knives would only make things worse.

  ‘I’m from the mountains of Lykonia,’ Hylas called to the wavering ring of lights. ‘But my mother was a Marsh Dweller, like you!’

  Silence. But the lights began to close in.

  Hylas held up his hands, palm outwards in friendship. ‘I’m looking for my sister. Her name is Issi. She went missing when the Crows –’

  The lights blinked out. A fishing spear skewered the mud a hair’s breadth from Hylas’ foot. He forced himself to keep still. Pirra sucked in her breath, but stood her ground.

  A voice spoke from the reeds in a harsh, guttural accent. ‘We heard you the first time. Stranger.’

  ‘You are not one of us,’ spat the Marsh Dweller, emerging from the mist.

  Squat and pot-bellied, he wore a tunic of grimy fishskin, and his stumpy limbs were smeared with green mud that stank of swamp. Beneath a fishskin head-binding, his pudgy face was a muddy green. His bulging eyes reminded Pirra of a frog’s.

  With his fishing spear, he jabbed at the Egyptian amulet on Hylas’ chest. ‘No Outsider has such a thing. No Outsider would fall in a trap as you did. No Outsider would bring the yellow monster who eats our fish. You are not one of us!’

  ‘I’m from Mount Lykas,’ Hylas said quietly. ‘But I am an Out–’

  ‘And you!’ The Marsh Dweller jabbed at Pirra. ‘You are no Outsider!’

  ‘I’m Keftian,’ she said proudly. ‘The Crows are my enemies.’

  More Marsh Dwellers appeared, some short and squat, others taller and more slender, but all clad in fishskin and smeared with mud. More spears edged closer.

  ‘Keftians are strangers,’ said one in the same guttural accent. ‘We only allow Outsiders in our marshes.’

  ‘Pirra’s with me,’ said Hylas. ‘Where I go, she goes.’

  Havoc chose that moment to appear among the reeds.

  The Marsh Dwellers muttered, some bowing to the lioness as if in awe. They parted to let her through, but when Havoc stood beside Hylas, the ring of spears closed in again.

  Hylas put his hand on Havoc’s head, willing her to keep calm. ‘Don’t hurt her,’ he warned the Marsh Dwellers.

  ‘Why would we do that?’ retorted an old man. ‘The yellow monster is why you’re still alive!’

  ‘Fin, feather and fur,’ said another mysteriously. ‘You will come with us!’

  The Marsh Dwellers didn’t seem to have a leader, and Pirra found it hard to tell them apart. All wore fishskin tunics and were smeared in smelly green mud, the women with a reddish strip of wovengrass around their head-bindings, the men with sludgy brown. All regarded her with the same hostile, frog-like stare.

  There was something frog-like, too, in their clammy touch as they stripped her and Hylas of weapons and hustled them onto rafts. Pirra tried not to shudder as fingers probed the crescent-moon scar on her cheek.

  Echo was nowhere to be seen and, surprisingly, Havoc had gone off again: didn’t she perceive the Marsh Dwellers as a threat?

  Skilfully, they punted through the marshes until they reached a platform of woven reeds, cunningly concealed among willows and dimly lit by rushlights. Hylas and Pirra were made to sit in the middle, and their captors squatted around them with their fishing spears beside them, pointing inwards.

  Baskets of sludgy green stew appeared. Most of the Marsh Dwellers fell on it, scooping it up with their hands and clicking their sharp grey teeth, while darting baleful glances at their captives. A few sat listlessly, shivering and ignoring the food; Pirra wondered if they were sick.

  A basket of stew was plonked in front of her and Hylas. She wrinkled her nose at its fishy stink. ‘What’s in it?’ she breathed.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ muttered Hylas, ‘just eat.’

  The stew contained some kind of meat, but it smelt awful. Hylas forced down a little. Pirra dipped in a finger, and gagged.

  The Marsh Dwellers muttered angrily in their harsh tongue, and Pirra’s thoughts flew to the Crow helmet on the spear, with its bloody dangling scalp. She imagined clammy hands seizing her by the hair. She wondered what was in the stew.

  The platform lurched, and on leapt Havoc, shaking the wet from her fur. But instead of seizing their spears, the Marsh Dwellers respectfully shuffled aside to make way for her.

  The lioness ambled past them and rubbed against Hylas in greeting, touched noses with Pirra, then gave a cavernous yawn. A woman brought a basket of fish and set it before her with a bow, but Havoc merely sat down and started licking the mud off her paws. From her swollen belly, Pirra guessed that she’d already had all the fish she could eat. Had the Marsh Dwellers been feeding her?

  This gave Pirra an idea. ‘Fin, feather and fur,’ she said to the Marsh Dwellers. ‘What did you mean by that?’

  Frog-like eyes blinked in muddy faces. ‘We know what is “fin”,’ said a woman.

  ‘We saw the great fish frighten off the Crows,’ said a man.

  ‘This yellow monster is “fur”. We don’t know what is “feather”.’

  Pirra licked her lips. ‘I think I do.’ Raising her arm, she whistled for Echo.

  The Marsh Dwellers grabbed their spears. Havoc briefly lifted her head, then went back to licking her paws.

  Pirra whistled again.

  To her relief, Echo swooped out of the darkness, right over the heads of the Marsh Dwellers, and settled on the leather cuff on her forearm. Unlike Havoc, the falcon was wary of the strangers, hissing and half-spreading her wings, ready to fly off at any moment. She caused much muttering, but Pirra couldn’t tell if she’d made things better or worse.

  An old man spoke to Hylas. ‘You say your mother was Marsh Dweller. What was her name?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I never knew her.’

  M
ore muttering: they didn’t like that at all.

  ‘I never knew my father either,’ he added defiantly. ‘I only know that he was Mountain Clan, and brought shame on his kin by refusing to fight the Crows.’ A muscle tightened in his jaw. ‘I’m not like him. Pirra and I have spent two summers fighting them. We came to Messenia to – to get something from them, and to find my sister.’ His face worked. ‘I saw something in the marshes, something that told me she’s here –’

  ‘The Crows rule everywhere,’ another man cut in. ‘They fought the rebels in the north and won. They always win. They have their sacred dagger. They can’t be beaten.’

  Hylas and Pirra exchanged glances. So these people knew about the dagger. ‘Where is it now?’ said Pirra.

  Vaguely, a girl waved a muddy hand. ‘The young Crow lord, he is fighting the last of the rebels in the north.’

  Pirra didn’t look at Hylas. The ‘young Crow lord’ had to be Telamon.

  The Marsh Dwellers were all talking at once.

  ‘His father Thestor is dead …’

  ‘Killed in the battle in the north …’

  ‘Pharax is in Lykonia, crushing the rebels …’

  ‘The old one Koronos has taken over Thestor’s stronghold at Lapithos …’

  ‘They have the dagger and the favour of the Angry Ones …’

  Many shuddered and cast fearful glances at the night sky.

  A woman spoke in hushed tones. ‘In the dark of the Moon, Koronos summoned Them. On the red peak of Mount Lykas, in the grove of black poplars, he killed black bulls and burnt them. Thus he gained the favour of the Angry Ones …’

  ‘Since then,’ said another, ‘we hear terrible cries on the wind. We see cloudshadow where there are no clouds. Dread hangs over the reeds like mist, and our people fall victim to the marsh fever …’

  ‘Fin, feather and fur,’ said a woman. ‘This is a charm to protect us from the Angry Ones. You are part of this charm. You will stay with us. You will keep us safe.’

  Echo had flown off to perch in a nearby willow. Havoc stood beside Hylas, her great golden eyes intent on the fishing spear pointed at his chest.