by Jack Lasenby
I made the wound bleed, squeezed out splinters, hobbled down to a creek, and washed it, found herbs to clean it. Now I wanted to be back with the Children, I could only make slow time. Worse, it was my lame leg.
I re-crossed Kalik’s trading track where it went under some trees. And there I picked up a knife, the wooden handle in good condition though it had lain all summer. I backed away, looking to see I left no sign, climbed the side of the valley, and crawled under the scrub like pulling a blanket over myself. I propped up my leg, and kept a lookout for a long time, then climbed back over the ridge.
Two days later, I limped out of the trees. Chak saw me and screamed. He ran, Kimi after him. They cried and held my hands. For the rest of that day, the little ones wouldn’t let me out of sight.
“I told you I was coming back,” I said, but Tama wouldn’t look at me. Tupu’s face was white. Her cough had returned. I knew I would hear cries, whimpers during the night.
“We’re too close to Kalik’s track. About a day’s walk. So we can’t stay here for winter.” I told the Children of the wild river to the west, how I hoped it might lead to a southern lake. As I talked, I drew a map in the dirt.
“If anything happens to me, you can make your own way to the river. Paku will know how to get you there. It’s going to be tricky, getting across.” I gave Paku the knife I had picked up.
“Is something going to happen to you, Ish?” asked Chak.
“Just in case I have an accident. You’ve seen the map. You all know which way to go now.”
Chak flung himself at me, crying. I hugged him close and felt guilty. What if I had swum the river? Would I have come back? I saw unease in Maka’s eyes.
That night I told them their stories: the Five Friends, the Showman and the Blazed Track. And the little ones clustered, touching me and each other. Their lips forming the words as I spoke.
While I was away, Paku and Tulu had gone back and searched the cliffs we had passed earlier.
“No water handy,” Paku said. “No good for firewood. Cold, and too open. There’s no cave or leaning rock. We’d have trouble building shelters. And there’s no grazing.”
“Good! You’ve saved us time going back,” I said. We talked about other places further back still, but nobody wanted to return towards the tunnel.
Then Puli burst out, as if she could hold it in no longer. “We’ve got a surprise for you!”
Tulu laughed. So gay, her laugh! And we all laughed with her. We could not help it.
“Look!” said Puli. Tulu’s blanket was finished. She had tied it off, set up the warps on her big loom, and begun on another.
“I forgot about your weaving,” I said. “I meant to ask….”
“We worked all day while you were away,” said Maka. “We made Paku and Tepulka help, too.”
“We made them work all night!” Tulu shrieked. She danced, excited. “They’re not as fast as us, but we got one blanket finished.” I had to laugh with her. Everybody pressed around as I wrapped the blanket around myself. I felt the warmth, smelled the oily wool. The little ones all had to have a turn wrapping themselves and sniffing. And then I remembered Puli.
“What about your surprise?” She looked at me with her wide smile. Tama stood behind her, impassive as usual. Between them they held up a length of woven cloth. Patterned with different-coloured wools. Puli had Taur’s eye for design. When we had the chance, I would teach her how to dye wool, to get many more colours.
“You have a gift,” I said. Suddenly I knew what we were going to do. As if the patterns of Puli’s weaving had formed a shape in my mind, a plan.
“What’s wrong?” Maka asked.
“Puli’s given me an idea. Paku says there’s nowhere to camp at the cliffs. We’re too close to Kalik’s track. We don’t want to go further back.” I could see it now, both subtle and clear. I looked again at Puli’s woven piece. At Tulu’s finished blanket. At Maka’s, half-completed. The smaller pieces on the little looms I praised, held them to my face and sniffed.
“Your weaving’s given me a better idea.” I thought of the black cloud in the Cold Hills to the south-east, its dark bruise on the straw-coloured skin of the land below the snow crests.
“Let’s finish all the weaving you’ve begun. It won’t take long with everyone helping. I’ll tell you my idea and we’ll see
Chapter 23
The Terrible Noise
Puli understood at once. Without being asked she began spinning a finer yarn. Before I could describe how I once made needles from scrub wood and bone, she instructed Tepulka and Paku. Remembering the difficulties I had, I came back to see how they were getting on. Tepulka had almost finished shaving a needle of wood. Paku was taking longer, cracking a shoulder blade into long splinters. There was a grunt from Tepulka.
“I did the same thing, the first one I made.” His face made me laugh. “Try drilling the hole first, with one of Paku’s bone splinters. Cut the wood away around it for the head, then make the shank. Even then, you’ll still break more than you make.” I stopped myself. I must learn to stand aside.
Paku had several bone splinters, but only one or two with a head thick enough to take a hole. He drilled carefully, but didn’t have Tepulka’s patience.
When Tepulka held up a wooden needle it was finely finished, like everything he made, even rubbed with wool grease so the wood darkened. I looked at his hands and wondered if he might learn to be a healer. He had the nature to be a good one. I watched Puli double her yarn around the needle, draw it tight, and push the bight of the thread through the eye. She looked up, smiled, and began sewing together some woven pieces.
She tried them for size against Tepulka. Using quick, long stitches, she fastened the pieces together across his shoulders, his chest. A gap left at the neck. She stitched down the sides. Gaps for the arms. Puli would make better ones, but this would always be our first woven tunic. Puli saw where it needed to be slit part-way up the sides so Tepulka could move freely. She made him stand while she adjusted and fastened with those long stitches. When he moved, Puli pricked him with the needle. “Keep still!” There was something new in her voice. We all watched her ease the tunic over Tepulka’s head, sit down, and start to sew with tiny stitches, ripping out the old ones as she finished a seam.
“Don’t go too far away,” she said to Tepulka. “I’ll want to try this on you again.” Maka saw my face and smiled.
“Here!” said Puli. “Finish this seam.” She thrust needle and thread into Maka’s hands, took another piece of woven stuff, and held it up against me. “About time,” she said as Paku offered his first bone needle.
“Where did you learn to sew?” I asked.
“I grew up sewing,” Puli mumbled, lips half-closed on the needle. “Don’t move!” I smiled helplessly over her head at Maka.
By the time we were ready to move, Maka and Tulu had finished sewing both tunics to Puli’s liking. Loose enough for us to move freely and to use our arms. Warmer than our old deerskin tunics. And the oily wool would shed rain.
“We’ll all have one this winter,” I said. “But these two are for something special.” We packed them, Tulu’s and Maka’s blankets, and the other pieces. As she folded it carefully, I looked at the special length of material Puli had woven. And I wondered at her growing confidence, at the air of satisfaction about the camp.
There was a piece still on a loom, unfinished. I went to show Kitimah how to undo it, prepare it for travelling, but Puli was already there, helping take it off. Folding it deftly, to keep its shape. Talking about how they could set it up again. There was nothing much I could teach her.
Paku and I lay in the scrub up the valley wall and watched Kalik’s track. Deer grazed in the open. I crawled down a gully while Paku sneaked from one fold to another, climbed a clear hillock, and watched up and down the valley. When he waved, I signalled Tepulka and Maka who brought the others out of the scrub. The little ones surrounded the sheep, as we’d practised, and trotted after Tama
down the hillside and across the valley floor. Down the sandy patch, through the water, and up the sandy patch opposite. Across the open valley that side, and under the trees.
Tepulka and Maka dragged leafy branches to sweep the sand. Paku joined us.
“Did you see the way the sheep followed Tama?”
He nodded. “What about their droppings?”
“There’s plenty of wild sheep.”
Paku and I checked both sides of the stream for footprints, and ran for the trees. Maka looked back and gave a deep sigh.
“Were you afraid?”
She nodded. Tepulka exchanged a look with her.
One gloomy afternoon, we reached the wild river. There I explained my plan. Paku was to be in charge again. Tulu and Maka would help him. They were to search for a spot where we might build our winter camp. And look for a crossing-place.
“We’ll be well-hidden here. And next spring we’ll put the river between ourselves and Kalik’s track.”
When I described what Tepulka and I hoped to do, some of the Children looked worried. “Last time you said only three days, and you stayed away for ages,” said Chak.
“That was because I hurt my leg. I’ll be more careful this time. Paku will look after you,” I said. “If we’re lucky with our trading, if we get an axe, we’ll be able to build a good camp for winter – and make a raft to get us across next spring.”
Tulu had made Paku a belt and sheath for the knife. He heaved up my woven pack sewn with Puli’s strongest yarn. I got my arms through the straps. Maka helped Tepulka with his and said something to him. Wearing the new woollen tunics, we headed back across the first ridge.
“The Cold Hills,” I said at the top, pointing at the snow-lined horizon east. “That’s what Kalik called them.” Tepulka stared at the same cloud I had seen before among the pale gullies, the bony ridges.
“Why is it so dark?”
“The Iron People burn a black stone called coal. Wait till you smell the smoke! But it burns hot enough to heat metal for working.”
“This tunic’s hot enough, Ish!”
“We’ll be grateful for woollen clothes when winter comes.”
We cut across the head of the valley with Kalik’s track, spent a whole day circling through the hills so our tracks would appear to come from the east. Metal workers were neither great hunters nor wanderers. Still, just in case they looked.
I was watching Tepulka when he stopped and sniffed. Went to say something. We walked a few more steps. He stopped, sniffed again. “Ish!”
I looked at him.
He grinned. “That smell?”
“I can’t smell anything. Unless it’s your new tunic!”
He sniffed again and laughed. “The smoke from that stuff – the coal! That’s what it is!”
“I wondered how long before you’d notice.”
“I thought you’d farted!”
“Not as rotten as that!” I sniffed. “There’s something else … not just coal.”
“It stinks, Ish!”
“Listen, when we speak to them, call me Chech. I’ll call you Terek.”
“Chech. Terek.”
“And if you see anything we want, don’t go saying so. Don’t look at it. If you show you’re interested, they’ll want more for it. Do you understand, Terek?”
“Yes, Chech!”
We swung down between a couple of hills. “It’s a different smell now. Chech!”
“That’s the coal smoke. That other stink, I don’t know what it was. Terek.” And we grinned at each other.
The smell of coal smoke was much stronger before we found their Trading Place. A terrace with a tall post on which stood an iron figure, a squat man holding a heavy hammer. I recognised Thug, the god of the metal-working Coal People in the Land of the White Bear.
Tepulka struck a metal gong with the butt of his spear, a clang so loud we both jumped. We laid our bows, arrows, spears, and knives to one side, went back and sat before the statue.
Two boys. Shouting, staring, running up the hill. “Strangers!” I heard in their cries. An old woman came down, two young men behind her. Before we had even spoken, I saw them staring at our tunics. Their own were of leather. The young men’s scarred by burns. The backs of their hands and their forearms were spark-pocked.
“People of Thug,” I began, bowing to the statue.
There was a gasp. “How do you know Thug’s name?” asked the old woman.
“We come from the east,” I said. “Beyond our country is the Land of the White Bear. The Coal People of that land work metal. And over their forges they have the statue of Thug.” The young men looked at each other. “Each day before they begin work, they ask Thug to bless their hammers.”
The old woman smiled. “We do the same thing.”
“We brought a few miserable things for trade. To see if it is worth coming all this way from our village.” I pointed east.
The old woman put out her hand, touched my tunic. Lips pursed, she hissed in admiration. “What do you want for it?”
I undid my pack and took out a woollen blanket. The old woman hissed again. Tepulka drew another from his pack. She clapped her hands. In the end, they gave us thirty metal arrowheads, five spearheads, four knives, a shovel, and two beautiful axes. Three round-bellied cooking pots. A leather wallet of iron needles. I grinned at Tepulka as I held them up.
I described the shears the Travellers used for cutting wool from the sheep. The young men looked at the drawing I scratched in the dirt. I took two knives and worked them against each other like shears. “But with handles,” I said, pointing at my drawing.
“With a pin through here,” one said. “So the blades cut against each other as they close. Sharpened down the outside.”
He had never seen shears before yet understood at once how they worked. “We can make them!”
“And smaller ones, this big,” I said. “For cutting little things. Yarn. Thread. Hair!”
The young man nodded again, pleased at the idea of working on something new, the challenge. Like Puli’s pleasure in weaving.
“Anything you want made of iron, we will trade for blankets, cloth. All you can make,” said the old woman. “What do you call yourselves?”
“We are the Weavers,” I said. “Chech,” I nodded, “and Terek.”
Henga, that was her name, ordered the boys to bring food. Under a shelter by the Trading Place, they gave us meat they called pork. Boiled and roasted. Delicious! With peas and beans that Henga said came from a people by a lake far to the north.
Henga asked again for our tunics. Offered us leather ones to replace them. I didn’t say no, but asked if we might see the animals the pork came from.
Henga was reluctant. She felt Tepulka’s tunic again, smiled at its warmth. “It is against the law to take strangers into our village,” said Henga. “But you knew Thug. Come, Chech, I can show you where we keep the pigs.”
It was the reek! Coming from pens beside a stream. I recognised the pigs from my memories of the Boar Man in the Animals’ Dance, and from drawings. Black, some brown, and some patched white. With bristly coats, long noses, and strong jaws. Long hairy tails. The boars had tusks. They looked at us the way goats look at people. Inquiring. Intelligent.
I pointed at their tracks, their dung. Tepulka nodded.
“How do you feed them?”
“The children drive them into the valley. They dig up grubs and roots. And they eat scraps. They grow fat on anything!” Henga laughed. “Especially these ones. Poony! Poony!” Henga pointed at a pen of pigs with squashed-looking faces. Chubby friendly creatures that muttered and grunted, coming over to the fence to have their backs rubbed. Round with fat!
“Hee-haw!”
“What’s that?” Tepulka stared amazed up the gully where the terrible noise had sounded.
“That thing?” said Henga. She didn’t even bother to look. “That’s a donkey.”
Chapter 24
A Good Trade
“Ish –” Tepulka began to say, but his voice cracked. He swallowed and said, “Chech….”
I glanced away as if the donkey did not interest me, clicked my tongue, and scratched the back of one of the poonies. My mind would only think of the donkey, but I pretended interest in the pigs. “They’re fat!”
“They’re not much good for anything,” Henga said to Tepulka. “We traded for them,” she said to me, “thinking they might be good to eat. But we tried one, and nobody liked it. Now, the pork – everyone likes that! Here in the Cold Hills, we need the fat in winter. And the People of the Lake, they trade us smoked bear and deer meat, and dried fish.”
I scratched behind a poony’s ears. It groaned, closed its eyes, and pushed against my hand. Its ugly squashed face smiled. “What do donkeys eat?” I asked.
“Grass. There’s hardly enough for them now. When winter comes, they’ll starve, but before that we’ll kill them for their skins. Feed their scrawny carcasses to the pigs. At least we’ll get some meat out of them that way.” Henga laughed.
“I like the poonies,” I said to her. We sauntered down to the Trading Place. Without looking at Tepulka, I knew he was wondering what I was doing.
We looked again at the trade goods. “We will trade you two live pigs,” said Henga. “For your woollen tunics.”
I stood silent a long time.
“Two fat pigs.” I was silent. “For each tunic,” Henga offered. “If you will give us your woven packs as well. And we’ll give you leather packs to replace them, as well as leather tunics to cover yourselves.” She smiled.
“That pork…. It tasted good, Chech!” said Tepulka.
“It would take too long to drive pigs all the way back to our village. I’ll tell you what,” I said to Henga. “Each summer we follow our sheep as they graze through the eastern hills and then circle back home for winter. Those donkeys might save us carrying things.”
