by Shannah Jay
We’ve worked hard to set ourselves up again, near killed ourselves. We’ve never had children, just the inn, you see. It’s a miracle, really, that we kept this place safe—but even faction bullies like a drink or two now and then. Evril brews good ale. And even Farran liked my cooking. Said no-one could make a berry pie like me. That helped considerable.’
‘And now you’re going to have a child as well as an inn.’ Karialla managed to hide her own sharp envy of the other woman’s joy.
Loral’s smile lent her broad face an echo of girlish charm. ‘Yes. I am, aren’t I?’ She shook her head at the wonder of that, then shook it again at the sight of the potvaliant merrymakers roistering around them. ‘Well, I’m not staying in here with that rowdy lot. Brave, aren’t they, now? Took two women to get them going, though.’
‘You were a heroine, Loral,’ Karialla said. ‘You showed us all the way.’
Loral went bright pink. ‘Never mind that. Come on, lass. I need a drink an’ you still look white around the gills.
Nerilla can help Evril give away our good ale.’ She tsk-tsked under her breath at the thought.
Karialla followed her wearily into the back room. Perhaps Loral was right. Perhaps she was still in a state of shock.
Then she remembered Gerrell and the madness in his eyes and she shivered. Cold fear ran up her spine as she remembered that he had promised to return. Would the people resist him again if he did? Or would he come with others behind him, come in such strength that no one would dare resist?
CHAPTER 9 Balas
Shannah Jay TENEBRAK34
At the same time as Deverith was making his way towards the coast, trouble was flaring up in other areas along the River Teneber. The first major outbreak happened to the south, further up the river, where there were many cosy villages which had once been new settlements, but which were now well-established centres of trade, usually specialising in a particular trade or craft.
Merniak was one of the smallest and most remote. It was a place of leatherworkers, who bought nerid skins from the nearby hill settlements and turned them into fine soft leather for garments, or stronger leather for shoes and belts.
They made up the shoes and belts themselves, then sold them in the villages and towns downstream, but they sent the finest leather to Tenebrak, where the most skilled craftworkers in the land lived.
Because of the troubled times, the village had a wall of sharpened stakes all round it. Wood was, after all, quite plentiful in the hills, and if you planted another tree or two for every one you took, you weren’t robbing the land.
Balas was about twelve at the time the troubles started, a restless lumpy sort of boy, who had no aptitude for the trade of his parents. Where other children would practise tanning the skins of small animals, or making items from the scraps and offcuts in their parents’ workshops, Balas hated the smell of the tanning processes and ruined everything he touched. His knives slipped, his needles and awls stabbed and tore at the leather, and when he was forced to help with the tanning, he’d have to rush outside regularly to be sick.
He was also given to prophesying accidents, which made people feel uneasy in his presence—especially as most of his prophecies came true. First behind his back, then to his face, they began to say that he brought the bad luck upon them with his gloomy predictions. He was scolded by his parents, avoided by other adults and mocked by the young folk for this, and yet he wouldn’t stop doing it, said he could not for the life of him. And what he foretold continued to come true.
One morning he woke with a prickling feeling at the back of his neck. Something was wrong. Some danger was approaching.
He went to tell his father, who looked at him and snarled, ‘I’ve told you before to keep your gloom to yourself. It’s just another attempt to get out of today’s tanning! Get on with your chores, boy.’
His mother, sighed and gave Balas a hug. ‘Look, son, go to morning school as usual, hmm, and don’t say anything about this? We’ll talk later. You know your father’s always grumpy on a tanning day.’
‘But—’
‘Balas, we have a very busy day ahead of us. Get off with you!’
But he didn’t go to school because the feeling was growing stronger inside him every minute and he couldn’t have borne to sit still in the classroom. Instead he went and hid in the woodcutters’ shelter, where he sometimes took refuge when everything became too much for him. He’d made a special place for himself behind the woodpile, so that even when people came searching, they didn’t find him. Of course, the woodcutters all knew about his hiding place, but they were kindly people and had kept his secret.
As he’d expected, no one was out there cutting wood that day. The village stores had been replenished and the new wood set out to dry only a few days ago. Today the woodcutters would probably be helping in the tanning like everyone else.
Balas sighed and hunched down in his corner. He didn’t fit in here at Merniak, he just didn’t. His hands didn’t seem made for fiddling around with leatherwork. He stared down at them. Square hands, blunt fingers. There was strength in them but not much dexterity.
Then he heard something and stiffened, straining his ears.
The noise came again, louder this time. Not birds, people. He sucked in his breath, his anxiety flaring higher. People were creeping through the woods, speaking softly to one another. It couldn’t be anyone from the village. The children were in morning school and everyone else would be either tanning or doing their household chores.
He edged himself out of his bolt hole and went to peer through the window of the wood store. Strangers were walking towards him. Should he go out and greet them? That was the usual way in Merniak. But something held him back, that same sense of unease.
These people looked—different. The sight of them made fear creep along his limbs and gather in a hard knot in his belly. Their eyes shone with a wild light and their faces looked savage and predatory. Men and women were alike in that.
Then he suddenly realised what they were and his fear turned to utter terror. Everyone said you could tell raiders by their wild looks. Everyone said they were crazed. And they were right.
He took a step towards the door, thinking to warn his family, but the raiders had already reached the edge of the clearing, so he moved quickly back again. People said raiders killed and tormented for no reason. If they saw him, he couldn’t doubt they’d capture him, perhaps kill him on the spot! And that would help no one.
So he stayed where he was, watching them helplessly.
One of the raiders was holding a huge knife, the sort normally used to butcher animals. She slashed at the foliage as she passed—swish, swish!—and laughed at the destruction she caused. The knife was so sharp the flowers and leaves
Shannah Jay TENEBRAK35
floated down in showers of green, pink and white.
They were coming towards the hut! Panic held Balas frozen for a moment, then he hid himself behind the woodpile, pulling down the cunningly linked pieces of split log that formed a roof for his little refuge. Oh, please, he prayed inside his head, let them not find me, let them not kill me! He’d wait for them to pass then run along a side path and warn the villagers.
But the raiders didn’t pass by. They stopped in the clearing, and from the noises and comments they made, the boy realised they were eating, joking about how good the food was they’d pillaged from some other village. Then they began boasting to each other of what they’d do to the folk of Merniak, how they would kill them and take their possessions.
The women were as bad as the men, their words as wild and vicious.
Balas, crouching in his hideaway, found a crack in the hut wall and peered through it. He watched them sharpen their knives and listened in sick horror to the plans one man was making. This one must be the leader.
‘They’ll die like butchered nerids,’ the fellow said, caressing his knife blade, ‘just like butchered nerids. How they’ll run and squeal as we hunt them down.’
His eyes fell on the hut. ‘Has anyone checked whether that place is empty?’ He pointing his blade at it.
His companions shrugged.
‘Go and check!’ he roared. ‘You! Do it this minute!’
One man heaved himself to his feet, grumbling under his breath, and entered the hut. Balas tensed, but the man merely stood by the doorway scanning the interior. ‘There’s no one here,’ he shouted. ‘And I don’t know why anyone would want to live inside a building, anyway. You can’t breathe when you’re shut up indoors.’ He kicked the woodpile and some of it tumbled down.
Balas tensed and waited for the wood to reveal his hiding place, but although the man continued to kick at the piles, Balas wasn’t revealed. The boy had built his corner with great care, changing the position of the pieces until something inside him felt satisfied with how they fitted together. Now he found how well he had wrought. Although piles crashed down around him, his makeshift walls of wooden blocks held firm.
For a moment he forgot his fear in a sense of triumph. He’d enjoyed setting the pieces together, fitting like shape to like. For once his hands hadn’t fumbled. But as he heard the man go outside again, the elation vanished and his fear returned in full force.
These raiders were getting ready for an attack. How could he get out and warn the people in the village? He knew the answer even as his mind searched desperately for a way. He couldn’t, not without being seen. Maybe after dark he might have stood a chance, but not now. All he could do was stay hidden, keep a rein on his frustration and wait.
When more raiders arrived, tears of despair ran down the boy’s face, for now the clearing was full of them. They were sprawled around, chatting and waiting for darkness. Even if he got out of the hut unseen, he’d trip over a body before he’d gone more than two steps. And there were no other children there, so they’d realise at once he wasn’t one of them.
The hours crawled past. Balas was beyond tears now. Oh, how he wished he’d gone to school and then to help with the tanning! That he was doing any of the chores he’d so hated! Only—if he were, he’d be in even worse danger than he was now.
When his limbs grew numb, he shifted them carefully to restore circulation. When his mind grew numb, he welcomed that and tried to avoid thinking about anything. For he was shivering with the feeling that disaster was getting closer and closer for his village.
In the late afternoon the raiders dressed a small group of people in bloodstained clothes, putting arms that weren’t broken into slings and wrapping bandages around legs that were indeed wounded from their previous raid. They laughed as they did this.
‘The stupid sods will tend our wounds,’ one of them said, hiccupping with hysterical laughter. ‘And then we’ll kill them. I can’t wait to see the shock on their faces when we stab into their soft flesh.’ She slashed her dagger in the air and laughed again.
Another man shoved her in the ribs. ‘Shut up, you fool! We don’t want anyone to hear us.’
When all was ready, the leader stood on a log. ‘Now then, you know what to do,’ he said.
There were grunts and low laughter. ‘Oh, we know all right,’ laughed one man.
‘Then go and do it.’
Balas roused himself from his stupor to peep through the slit in the wall again. The ‘victims’ did indeed look pitiful.
The raiders would get into the village easily, he knew. The people of Merniak had sheltered and cared for other similar groups of fugitives. Hunger growled in his stomach and thirst had made his throat and mouth feel gritty and painful, but what did that matter?
When the ‘victims’ set off to trick their way into the village, Balas sat and prayed to his mother’s gods that the others would follow them and leave the way clear for him. Like his father he didn’t have much belief in gods, but now he
Shannah Jay TENEBRAK36
wished there were some, wished they could answer him, help him.
And all the time the other raiders, quite a large group, sat around outside the hut, eating, joking, boasting and waiting for full darkness.
Balas could feel tears trickling down his face and couldn’t even make the effort to wipe them away.
Not until the second half-moon had risen in the sky did the main group move off. This time there was no joking.
This time there were only stealthy movements, hands patting weapons and eyes gleaming in the moon-dappled half-darkness. The raiders left behind most of their camp equipment and to guard it, the two old crones with shrill voices who had handed out food.
To the boy, twitching with desperation in his hiding place, it seemed an eternity before the old women settled down to doze by the fire. At last, when there had been no movement for a long time, he crept out of the hut, hesitated in its shadow, then darted across the clearing, expecting at every minute to hear one of the old women yelling after him.
But neither of them did. The only noises he heard were coming from the village. Yells a-plenty there were and screams, too, with a deep growl of triumph forming an intermittent bass sound beneath it all. He forgot to be cautious, sobbing aloud as he ran.
He was too late!
Near the first house of the village he stumbled over something. He looked down and gasped. It was a body—dead, hacked, bloody. The blood looked black in the fitful moonlight, for it was a cloudy night. He couldn’t move for a moment as he recognised the face of one of his school friends, then he stumbled aside and vomited.
The feeling of danger prickled in his neck again and something made him duck quickly. There was a sound behind him and a blade whistled through the air, missing him by only a fingerspan. He leaped like a startled rock nerid and fled.
A chunk of firewood whizzed after him, so well aimed that it cracked into the side of his head, but although he stumbled and felt blood trickling down the back of his neck, he didn’t stop running.
Behind him, he heard someone say, ‘It’s only a lad. He’ll not have anything worth taking. Come on! There are still a few holed up at the other end of the village.’
Balas ran on until his breath sobbed in his throat, until his muscles burned with the effort, until his limbs turned heavy and unwieldy as if they didn’t belong to him. He fell several times and at last, he couldn’t get up again, so crawled underneath some raas bushes and lay there, trying not to make a noise. Tears tracked down his face. He’d failed, failed his family, failed everyone.
The distant screams died down after a while, but there was still shouting. As the houses started to burn, there was a chorus of incoherent noise, which had a tone of triumph to it. Not all the houses were burning, just the ones which the raiders had finished looting. One here, another there, flaring up like torches. He was on higher ground and when he crawled to the edge of the bushes, he could see quite clearly which houses were burning.
His own was one of the first to go up in flames. He wept anew as he watched the destruction of everything he’d ever known.
Sometime during the night exhaustion claimed him and he fell into an uneasy slumber.
In the morning he was still there beneath the bushes. He crawled out to find some fruits and ate them for the juice, not hungry, only desperately thirsty, then crawled back again. He couldn’t think what to do and his head was thumping with pain from the piece of wood that had hit him.
All that day Balas lay watching the methodical sacking of his village, the burning of every single house. Towards dusk he watched the raiders leave the ruins, taking several carts with them, carts loaded with booty. They only went as far as their camp in the woods. And they had no prisoners.
When evening came, he wondered whether to creep out of his hiding place and try to escape, but even as he started to move, danger prickled again in the back of his neck, so he stayed where he was, so exhausted by now that he fell asleep again even before the first moon rose.
In the morning he awoke with a start, stiff and bewildered, still feeling strange and distant. Then the memories flooded through him and more tears came into
his eyes. There were noises as if the raiders were stirring and soon he saw them trailing out of the woods and down the hillside. He knew from what he’d overheard that when they needed more supplies, they’d attack some other settlement—and would no doubt succeed.
Most of the hill villages had some sort of fortification around them now, but the raiders’ trick would work again and again unless someone warned people. Their ‘wounded’ spies would open the gates from inside and like ravening fiends, the others would descend on hapless folk to murder and pillage those who’d been trying to help them.
Balas could see it all very clearly in his mind. He could always see the patterns in people’s behaviour, though he couldn’t usually do much about them, even when the things people were doing made the nape of his neck prickle with apprehension. Now, he realised why they’d killed everyone: to avoid their trick being discovered.
But they hadn’t killed him, so he could go and warn other villages.
When the sun was high in the sky and he’d heard no sounds for a long time, he crawled out of his hiding place and
Shannah Jay TENEBRAK37
went slowly down towards the village, taking advantage of every bit of cover and approaching it from a finger of woodland that nearly touched the wooden palisade. His neck didn’t tingle and he met no one.
Inside the palisade there were bodies everywhere. Even the animals had been killed, the nerid calves, the chuckle fluffs, everything. Not for food, just for the sick pleasure of killing.
He was beyond tears as he stumbled to the far end of the village. He stood for a moment outside his home, but it was a blackened smoking ruin now. Hunger growled in his stomach and he felt faint, so went into the half-burned store sheds and found some dried fruit and nuts to eat. After cramming some into his mouth, he stuffed more into a sack to carry away with him.
When he left the village he went instinctively in a different direction from the one taken by the raiders, but apart from that, he made no effort to hide or move quietly. If danger was approaching, well, he’d know it, wouldn’t he? His neck would tingle.
