by Hugh Cook
'Shut up, bird,'said Yen Olass, the tone of her command suggesting that there would be dire consequences for disobedience.
The bird stopped singing, and started improvising a bizarre stream of squeaks, sneezes and staccato clucking. Yen Olass leaned back against a tree and stared upwards, trying to see exactly where the bird was. Could she catch it? It flew away, giving her an easy answer to that. She squinched up her eyes, which were still protesting against the daylight. Was there anything at all to eat up there? Nuts, apples, onions? What time of year did apples get born? And did they get born as little apples, or were they something else first?
Up in the trees, Yen Olass saw a bird's nest. Spring meant eggs and baby birds. And that meant breakfast. She stood up. She was still groggy, either from sleep or the lack of it. She shook her head, which protested. She hobbled over to' the bird nest tree. In spring, when visiting the hunting lodge at Brantzyn, she had sometimes seen children scrambling into the trees to plunder nests for eggs. But she had never climbed a tree herself. Oh well, there's a first time for everything.
***
Resbit and Hor-hor-hurulg-murg jerked awake as something crashed into nearby undergrowth. Resbit looked around wildly then screamed:
'Yen Olass! Look out! There's something in the bushes!’
From the bushes came a stream of ferocious language. 199
Resbit did not know what was being said, but she strongly suspected most of the foreign words being used were obscene. Yen Olass came blundering out of the undergrowth. She was scratched and bleeding.
'Don't laugh!' said Yen Olass.
'You're hurt! What happened?’
'Don't laugh,' repeated Yen Olass, as though it was very, very important.
But soon, Resbit was finding it very difficult to keep a straight face.
'Oh, Yen Olass! You thought a little branch like that would hold you? Surely not!’
Yen Olass, supposing that a tree was very much like a horse (if you fall off, you must get back on) was already looking for another nest. She found one, and was soon climbing for it, with both Resbit and Hor-hor-hurulg-murg shouting advice to her. Yen Olass, unable to translate from the Galish and climb at the same time, ignored them.
She was getting up quite high. From here, she could see the river, which was not far away. Clinging to a branch, another branch underfoot, she admired the view. On the far side of the river was a soldier who appeared to be admiring her.
'Yen Olass!’
'Shush!' hissed Yen Olass.
'What?' shouted Resbit. 'What was that?’
'Quiet, quiet!’
'What?' said Resbit. 'In case we scare the eggs away?’
She obviously found that very funny. Yen Olass tore off a small branch and threw it at her. What was Galish for soldiers?
'Enemy!' said Yen Olass. 'Over there!' From the far side of the river, there was a shout. 'Yen Olass!' said Resbit urgently. 'Get down out of there! There's someone across the river!' 'Now you tell me,' muttered Yen Olass. She began to climb down – slowly – finding, to her surprise, that it was much harder to climb down than to climb up. Now that was contrary to reason. The tree was the same tree whether she was going up or down. But she was finding it very difficult.
'Yen Olass – no, no, don't step there!’
Too late. There was a groan of tearing wood, a scream, a crash. And, from across the river, another scream. Harsh commands in Ordhar. The baying of a dog.
'Yen Olass,' said Resbit. 'What are they saying? What are they saying?’
Yen Olass did not translate the soldiers' Ordhar. Indeed, there was no need to. There was more screaming, and Resbit understood, and said, shocked:
'They're killing people over there.’
'Let's go,' said Hor-hor-hurulg-murg. 'Yen Olass, if you can't walk, I'll carry you.’
'Help me up,' said Yen Olass. 'I'm not a baby.’
And none of her bones was broken. But even so, every step cost her.
Did they see you?' said Hor-hor-hurulg-murg.
'I don't know,' said Yen Olass.
The soldier who had looked in her direction might have missed her, as she had been well-hidden in the foliage.
'But they might have heard us,' said Yen Olass. 'Some of us were noisy enough.’
'Yes,' said Resbit, 'especially when we fell out of trees.’
Yen Olass grunted, said nothing.
***
The fugitives had no way to know if the soldiers on the far side of the river had been a patrol which had accidentally come upon some refugees, or whether their escape had been discovered during the night, leading to a deliberate manhunt through the forest. But they had to presume that, since there were soldiers on the far bank of the river, there were likely to be soldiers on their own bank of the river.
They pushed north till noon, then halted, because both Yen Olass and Resbit had absolutely had it. Hor-hor-hurulg-murg permitted them a little sleep, then woke them and made them march. They refused, but, when he threatened to go on alone and leave them, they dragged their weary bodies on for a few more leagues.
When evening came, and they halted, Yen Olass felt stuporous. She and Resbit laid themselves down then and there, and collapsed into absolute sleep.
Yen Olass had expected to sleep forever, but she woke in the night. A wind had got up, and the darkness was full of creaks and rustles, of sighs and moans, of little sounds and larger sounds which might have been animals or people or ghouls or ghosts. She felt the forest surrounding her, enclosing her, hemming her in.
'Yen Olass?’
'Yes?’
'Are you awake?’
'No. This is just a dream.’
'That's not kind, Yen Olass,' said Resbit.
'I can be kind,' said Yen Olass, 'if I try.’
'Then do try.’
They held each other close, and were comforted. They began to talk, and Yen Olass told Resbit about her plan to go west, across the mountains from Lake Armansis to Larbster Bay.
'But what will I do?' said Resbit.
'You'll come with me.’
'Oh no.’
'But you must. What would you do otherwise?' 'That's what I was asking.’
'You will come with me,' said Yen Olass firmly. 'No.’
Resbit was not to be persuaded. She made Yen Olass understand that the people at Larbster Bay were a degenerate clan of thieves, drunkards and slavers.
'They rape rats,' said Resbit.
'What?' said Yen Olass, not sure if she had heard right. 202
'Rats. Small. Four legs. Screeee! They rape them. At Larbster Bay.’
'Go to sleep,' said Yen Olass. 'You're dreaming already.’
'And when I wake, it'll be all over. Yes?’
'When you wake,' said Yen Olass, 'we'll hunt some eggs. First thing. Before we go anywhere.’
'You be careful hunting those eggs. Don't let them push you out of the tree again.’
'Let me tell you a little story,' said Yen Olass, 'about a young woman who fell asleep and rolled into a river.’
'Gamos!' said Resbit, giggling.
Yen Olass realized she had once again used the Galish word for a female horse instead of the Galish word for a human female. But she still didn't see why that was funny.
***
That day, as they marched north, they saw no sign of soldiers, so Hor-hor-hurulg-murg called a halt early in the afternoon. He caught fish in the river, and gave the women one each. Yen Olass found everything in her tinder box was damp, so she spread it out to dry; for the time being, they would have to eat the fish raw.
After the fish, the women climbed for eggs. Then they sat down to feast. Resbit started telling riddles, and Yen Olass tried to answer them. Their Melski guide helped them out with their language difficulties. Some of the riddles were easy enough, such as 'How do you sex an egg?' where the answer was simply 'By growing it into a chicken or rooster.' But one, which baffled Yen Olass, went as follows:
I was sired by a stallion.
>
I am furry as a rabbit.
I live in trees, unsuccessfully.
Yen Olass struggled with it for ages, then finally gave up. She demanded the answer.
'A gamos!' said Resbit. 'A gamos!' And she rolled round on the ground, laughing. 'Now that wasn't fair,' said Yen Olass. 'It wasn't nice, either.’
But her protests just made Resbit laugh all the more.
When Resbit quietened down, Yen Olass heard something rustling in the undergrowth nearby. She stalked it and caught it, raked it out of the undergrowth with a branch, and displayed it for all to see.
'A veagle!' said Yen Olass, naming the hedgehog in Eparget.
'A crel!' said Resbit, naming it in her native Estral. 'The Galish call it a klude,' said Hor-hor-hurulg-murg. 'A klude,' said Yen Olass, committing the word to memory.
Resbit bent over the little klude and cooed to it, saying, 'Skoon, skoon'. From the way she was saying it, Yen Olass guessed that 'skoon' meant 'cute', unless it meant something like 'Oh you sweet little beautiful thing you.’
'It's not skoon,' said Yen Olass. 'It's food.’
'Don't be cruel,' said Resbit.
'I'm not cruel, I'm hungry.’
'However, in the end, even Yen Olass was not game to eat a hedgehog raw, and so the little klude escaped to live another day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When the three fugitives were halfway to'Lake Armansis, they ran into a Melski patrol. After some bloody clashes with the Collosnon army near Lorford, the Melski had withdrawn to the depths of the riverforest, where the odds would favour them. With a Melski to provide them with introductions, Yen Olass and Resbit were spared the indignities of interrogation. Otherwise, they might have found life rather unpleasant for a day or so, for the Melski were in an ugly mood.
Since the Melski ran all the raft convoys on the Hollern River, which was a part of the Salt Road, they were not naive and ignorant savages. They knew the conversation of travellers from all walks of life and from all the nations of Argan and the Ravlish Lands. They were well aware of the nature of empire, and knew they could only stay free by killing enough Collosnon soldiers to persuade the enemy to leave them alone. Defeat would be disastrous. The few humans living in Estar had never been much of a threat to the forest of the Penvash Peninsula, but Khmar's hordes could strip away the entire forest as they sought timber for firewood, houses and shipbuilding.
Melski living elsewhere in the continent of Argan, in isolated places such as the Rausch Vally in the high country east of Trest, sometimes were unsophisticated primitives, slow to see their danger until it was almost too late. But the inhabitants of Penvash had learnt the hard lessons of history from their ancestors. A hundred years previously, invaders had come from Sung, in the Ravlish Lands. They had crossed the mountain pass from Larbster Bay to Lake Armansis; even after four generations, the Melski were still bitter about that invasion. Now, remembering stories their grandfathers had told their fathers, they were preparing themselves for a new and possibly more terrible struggle.
When the fugitives met the patrol, Hor-hor-hurulg-murg conferred with its members, and caught up on the news. Shortly before the Collosnon army attacked Lorford, he had accompanied a flotilla of rafts taking a Galish trading convoy to Lake Armansis. He had left before the journey was completed, returning to the vicinity of Lorford with a patrol, which was how he came to be captured.
Now, he learnt that the Galish convoy had reached Lake Armansis, only to find that a southbound convoy had arrived there by way of Larbster Bay and the Razorwind Pass. The two convoys were camped by the lake while the southbound contingent debated whether to turn around and accompany their fellow traders to the Ravlish Lands.
'Soon we'll go north,' said Hor-hor-hurulg-murg, reporting to the women. 'Then you can join one of the convoys. For now, we wait. We've sent more patrols south. We want the latest news to take to the Galish.’
So they waited.
Yen Olass and Resbit made a small hut by staking the branches of a tree down to the ground, weaving in willow then slapping on mud and clay. They shared the Melski diet of fish, fish and fish; they gathered watercress and went bird-nesting. The Melski ate no red meat, and refused to kill the forest animals, but allowed Yen Olass to borrow a bow. Venturing into the forest, not knowing whether she was the hunter or the hunted – the presence of the Melski was no guarantee against soldiers – she sought out and killed a small deer. If well-fed, she might have thought it cute; hungry, the notion never occurred to her. Yen Olass and Resbit ate their fill, then hung up the rest to ripen, knowing that this would improve its flavour. When the Melski objected to the presence of dead meat, they moved it further away.
While they waited, Yen Olass tried to persuade Resbit to join a Galish convoy. That was surely safer than venturing over the mountains on their own. But Resbit still refused to consider a journey to Larbster Bay.
'We should stay by Lake Armansis,' said Resbit. 'With the Melski. They'd take us in. Hadn't you thought of that?’
'That's a ridiculous idea,' said Yen Olass.
Of course, it had once been her own idea. But a little time in the forest had swiftly changed her mind. The forest was wet, gloomy, oppressive, cold, alien and threatening, full of trees which hated her. She was made to live free in the open spaces, not to moulder away in the wilds of Penvash with the wooden giants nightly elbowing their way into her nightmares.
They argued about it while they waited for the Melski scouting parties to return with the latest news. But when the patrols came in, what they brought was not news but people. They had picked up a small party in Looming Forest: Draven, Haveros, the Princess Quenerain, a sea captain from the Harvest Plains by the name of Menjamin Naraham Occam, a soldier by the name of Saquarius who was a deserter from the Collosnon army, a young woman from Estar by the name of Jalamex, and two boy children of twelve or thirteen who identified themselves as Shant and Mation, both of Estar.
Haveros told the story.
After being released by Draven, Haveros and the Princess Quenerain had fled to the east on stolen horses (and here Haveros did not mind admitting that he was a horse thief every bit as good as his emperor) in the company of some other prisoners. They had been pursued by hard-riding cavalry. As the pursuit closed in, they had been forced to abandon their horses and flee north into Looming Forest.
Now Chonjara had a thousand troops in the forest, hunting them. There was no doubt that his men, thwarted by the failure of the assault on Castle Vaunting, were glad to have the chance of a hunt which promised a kill. One Melski patrol was already believed to have been wiped out by the invaders.
After a brief council of war, the Melski decided the humans should go north to join the Galish convoys, which would doubtless leave immediately for Larbster Bay rather than stay to face a thousand marauding soldiers. Hor-hor-hurulg-murg and three other Melski would take the humans to Lake Armansis, then go deeper into Penvash to alert the Melski nation (which was, in Melski terms, not exactly a nation but 'our arc of the circle', a phrase which Hor-hor-hurulg-murg did not translate, for it would have meant nothing to humans who stood outside the Cycle).
The other Melski would harass the enemy, pick off stragglers and try to kill or kidnap Chonjara. To find him, they would interrogate prisoners. Yen Olass taught the Melski one word of Ordhar: 'glot', meaning 'where'. In Ordhar, 'Glot Chonjara?' was a grammatically correct sentence meaning 'Where is Chonjara?'; for the rest, the Melski would have to rely on sign language and pointed directions.
Haveros estimated that it would take eight days to cover the eighty leagues to Lake Armansis, their pace being dictated by their weakest member, the Princess Quenerain, who was suffering badly from blisters. Chonjara's men would gain on them during those eight days, and might even catch them. They set off as soon as possible and moved as fast as possible.
The only person who was not eager to get to Lake Armansis was Resbit. She almost seemed to think it would be better if Chonjara's soldiers caught them.
She was, Yen Olass realized, truly terrified of making the journey over the Razorwind Pass to Larbster Bay.
'But why?' said Yen Olass, when they talked about it during a rest break.
'Because it's so far!' said Resbit, close to tears.
'It's not far at all,' said Yen Olass, thinking Resbit must have a very shaky grasp of their local geography.
'It's right out of Estar.’
'We're out of Estar now,' said Yen Olass. 'We're in Penvash.’
'We're still by the river,' said Resbit.
'It's always hard to leave a place,' said Yen Olass. 'I know. I've left many.’
And she thought of some of the places she had lived in, and the partings she had said.
'But I've never left Lorford in my life!' said Resbit.
'But you must have been to Trest,' said Yen Olass. 'Or north, or south, or down to the sea.’
'No, never,' said Resbit, starting to cry. 'No, never the sea. The sea eats people.’
And Yen Olass, holding her and comforting her, started to realize what very different lives they had led.
'I'm sorry,' said Resbit, sniffing. 'I shoud be brave.’
'You'll be brave once we eat well,' said Yen Olass. 'Nobody was ever brave on an empty stomach.’
She was sorry to see Resbit so badly upset. On the other hand, she was glad that the Melski had decided all the humans were to join the convoy, because that meant Resbit would be forced to go with her.
Each night, they were exhausted at the end of their march, and each night the Princess Quenerain, her feet steadily disintegrating, was close to collapse. Yet she did not complain: Yen Olass admired her for that. Each night, the princess slept in the arms of Haveros, her very dreams numb with exhaustion. Yen Olass curled up with Resbit, and Draven with Jalamex, to whom he seemed to have laid claim. The others slept as best they could; all of them usually woke before dawn, when the night was coldest.
