‘They held him down. Cut his throat,’ Ben said.
Hana fell to her knees and covered her face. Mam dead, Hawk flown away, now Danatok. But Blossom, speaking aloud, said, ‘There’s been no killing. They must have cut off his thumb. They’ve taken him.’
‘Why?’ Ben said.
‘Because he saw the Limping Man and got away from him.’
‘They’ll drown him,’ Hana whispered. She ran down to the beach, where she searched the sky for Hawk. She needed Hawk. It seemed her courage depended on that black speck circling in the sky. But the sky was empty, and her heart was empty. Hatred of the Limping Man was all she had left.
She sat among the sandhills until the sun was low. Once she saw Ben on the beach, throwing a net he must have found in the wreckage. He walked up the beach carrying fish.
‘You’d better come or you won’t get any.’
Your knife won’t be any good, she whispered to herself.
Blossom came later and sat with her and put her arm around her. Hana did not pull away. She trusted the woman better now but was sorry for her. She was like Hawk but not as strong.
‘Everything gets taken away,’ Hana said.
They walked to the ruined shelter in the dusk. All Blossom’s abilities would be no better than Ben’s knife. There was another world, away from this, where the Limping Man lived. No one could get in there and kill him. But he could get into Hana’s world.
Halfway through the night Hubert arrived. Hana, wrapped in her blanket, saw him walk into the clearing and sit by the ashes of the fire. She heard his voice: Sleep, Hana, and replied grumpily, I will when I’m ready. She did not like the way these people walked into her head without being asked. She would get away from them, if she could, by herself.
She went fishing with Ben in the morning. She was comfortable with him because, like her, he spoke aloud. They netted a dozen flat-fish and cleaned them at the tide line under a roof of screaming gulls. She marvelled at the way his single hand did the work of two and the way his toes picked things up like fingers. He gathered wood and made a fire in the clearing. They cooked the fish while Blossom and Hubert and Lo walked on the beach.
‘What are they talking about?’
‘How to catch the bugger,’ Ben said.
‘They won’t catch him.’
‘Maybe not. I wouldn’t sneak up, I’d go straight at him.’ He seemed uncertain. Was he starting to see that more would be needed than a knife? And more would be needed, Hana thought, than Blossom and Hubert. She had watched them in the morning as they greeted each other. All they did was exchange a smile, and she understood they hadn’t been apart. Hubert in the north, Blossom at Stone Creek, they had spoken as clearly as if they sat over a table from each other.
He was her twin, black-haired, brown-skinned. He moved like her, with the easiness of a cat, and understood her as she understood herself. As much passed between them in a single look as it would take an hour of speech to tell. Yet Hana had no wish to be like them. Although they must have a way of keeping some part hidden, they could never be alone. She would rather be like Lo, who joined with them and spoke with them but kept himself apart. If Blossom died or Hubert died the other would die too. It made her shiver. She had loved Mam as much as these two loved each other yet she had run and hidden and kept herself alive.
Hana knew, without being told, what Blossom and Hubert could do: command, compel, wipe out memory, make, if they chose, someone curl up and die. But even they would not be equal to the Limping Man. They could not be cruel.
‘I’m not going to stay with them,’ she told Ben.
‘Where will you go?’
‘I don’t know. Back to the burrows.’ She thought perhaps she would know how to be cruel. She had no regrets about the bounty hunter she had killed.
‘I’ll go with my father,’ Ben said.
The three on the beach returned to share the fish.
‘Hubert and I are going into the city,’ Blossom said. ‘We’ll find the Limping Man and’ – she hesitated – ‘scrub all the evil out of his mind.’
‘How?’ Hana said.
Hubert said, ‘We know how strong he is, but there are two of us. He might be able to hold one’ – a look of pain crossed his face as he glanced at Blossom – ‘but while he’s busy the other will tie him in knots so tight he’ll never get out.’
Ben fingered his knife. Dogshit, he thought.
Hana thought, They’re children.
Blossom smiled at them. ‘Can you think of any other way?’
‘My father, what will you do?’ Ben said.
‘Sit still for a while,’ Lo said.
‘Will you go with them?’
‘If I go I’ll go by myself.’
‘And take me with you?’
‘No,’ Lo said.
Before Ben could argue, Blossom hissed for silence.
‘Men,’ she said.
‘How many?’ Ben loosened his knife.
‘A troop. A corporal. You can hear them now. They think this part of the forest is cleaned out.’
The sound of shouting came through the trees. It sounded like gulls fighting over scraps of food. Blossom and Hubert slipped away without a word.
‘What are they doing?’ Hana said.
‘Throwing a rope around them,’ Lo said.
‘What sort of men?’
‘Soldiers. City men. A crossbow troop.’
The sound of laughter stopped. A moment later Blossom and Hubert walked into the clearing, with a man in a doublet and cap walking in a dazed way between them. Blood Burrow, Hana thought. He seemed to see nothing.
‘Where are the others?’
‘Sleeping. This one is Foss. He’ll tell us about the Limping Man.’
At the name, Foss lifted his hands and tried to make the straight and crooked sign. Blossom held him still.
‘Who is this Limping Man?’ she said.
‘He’s Lord. He’s Master,’ Foss said, making the sign this time.
‘What does he do?’
‘He leads us. He lifts us up. He gives us the world.’
‘What world?’ Hubert said.
‘The forests. The plains. The seas to fish. But first we must clean the vermin out. Then the world is ours.’
‘What are these vermin?’
‘All who do not believe in him. All who do not love him.’
‘How will you kill them?’
‘With our armies. With our fleet.’
‘Fleet?’
‘We’re building boats. They’re ready to sail. They’ll clean the coasts and burn the villages.’
‘When?’
‘Seven days.’ He was fighting Blossom. He snarled at her.
‘You witches will burn too. He’ll make you scream.’
Blossom nodded. ‘Sit down, Foss. Sleep a while.’
The man sat. His head slumped forward. He farted and snored.
‘He’ll follow this Limping Man till he dies,’ Blossom said.
‘It’s like a stone in his head,’ Hubert said.
‘There’s nothing else there.’
‘Except his old cruelties slopping around like mud.’
‘How will you stop the ships? You can’t fight ships,’ Ben said.
Blossom and Hubert looked at each other. They were uncertain. And, for all their courage, they were afraid.
‘We’ll go there. We’ll find him,’ Blossom said.
‘Make sure you do it before they sail. Find out some more’ – Ben kicked Foss – ‘from this.’
Hubert woke Foss and questioned him about the size of the army. There were men from every tribe, Foss said, from the east, from the sea-coast and from the icelands in the south. Spearmen, bowmen, men armed with pikes and spears. There were squadrons of red horsemen armed with lances, and others with longbows that would shoot arrows over the moon. Lightly held, Foss mimed the shooting. Their leaders, he said, lived in tents outside the city. They worshipped the Limping Man each morning as the sun rose and each evening as it set. In eight days’ time – Foss counted on his fingers – there would be a great burning of witches in People’s Square, and a drowning of the men who consorted with them, and Dwellers too, vermin from the forests. Tears ran on Foss’s cheeks as he thought of the pleasures he would miss. The following morning the army would march and the ships would sail.
‘Tell us about these ships.’
‘Four of them. Lovely ships. Sharp and fast and small. Ha, the sport they will have. Fifty bowmen on each one . . .’ He wept again for his lost share of the pillage and the killing.
‘Foss,’ Blossom said, ‘tell us how to get into the Limping Man’s palace.’
Foss did not know. He was a burrows man. His job was to strengthen the garrison at Saltport. He told them that the ships were moored in the harbour at Port, that was all.
‘Sleep, Foss,’ Hubert said.
‘And never wake up,’ Hana whispered. This man might be one of those who had burned Mam.
Later in the morning Ben and Hana collected the weapons of the sleeping troop and threw them into a pool deep in the forest. They looked at the men snoring where they had fallen: burrows men and men from the half-emptied city of Ceebeedee. They looked peaceful, eyelids smooth, cheeks loose, yet several, mumbling, snarling, were having savage dreams. All wore the Limping Man’s sign on their leather vests. One had the lines tattooed on the backs of his hands.
‘Why don’t I slit their throats?’ Ben said.
‘I’d sooner leave them sleeping here forever,’ Hana said.
At the shelter Blossom and Hubert were ready to leave. Each carried a small pack and a knife in a sheath.
‘What are you going to do, knock on his door?’ Ben said.
They smiled distantly. It seemed to Hana they were already gone.
‘Foss and his men will sleep until morning,’ Blossom said. ‘Be gone from here before they wake.’ They made a small sign of farewell and slipped away like shadows, leaving silence round the shelter, until Foss snored. Ben banged the man’s head with his heel to quieten him. He said to Lo: ‘Where are we going, my father?’
They conversed silently, and Hana, concentrating, found she could hear them like voices in a neighbouring room.
I’m going where I was meant to go, Lo said.
Where? The city?
Into the forest, my son. To think a while.
To talk with the people?
If they’ll hear me. My voice might not travel so far.
What will they tell you?
When I hear them I’ll know. Go with the girl into the mountains.
That’s not where she’s going. And I’m coming with you.
Ben, you’ve given me great joy, Lo said. But I must go one way now and you another –
‘No,’ Ben said.
Lo rose from his seat by the ashes. He approached Ben and laid two fingers on his forehead.
We can never be apart, he said.
He turned away and slipped into the trees, more shadowy than Blossom and Hubert. He was gone before Ben could move.
Hana watched the boy. This, she thought, was like losing Mam. Ben moved one way, then the other. He did not seem to know where Lo had gone. Hana could not tell either but it did not surprise her that a man who was no longer a man should vanish like a shadow on a wall. It seemed to her he would find better ways of fighting the Limping Man than Blossom and Hubert would.
‘Leave him,’ she said.
‘I want to go with him,’ Ben whispered.
‘He doesn’t need you. You can come with me if you like.’
‘Where?’ Ben said. He seemed dazed. Each exit from the clearing was a way Lo might have gone.
‘To the burrows,’ she said. She smiled grimly at the thought: rubble, weeds, stinking mud, hovels made of rusty tin, puddles of foul water. She had no wish to go back. If she wanted to see Hawk again she would stay by the sea and on the hilltops. But Mam had died in the burrows. And the Limping Man was there.
She stuffed her blanket in her pack and fitted it on her shoulders.
‘Are you coming?’
Ben grabbed his gear – his stone, his flint, his blanket. ‘If you know the way.’
‘I know it.’
‘All right. Wait a minute.’
He was dazed with loss, but savage too and looking for a way to restore himself. Hana made no move as he ran at Foss with his knife drawn. He put his foot on the man’s out-stretched fingers and made a slash with the blade, then stabbed and sawed. He picked up Foss’s severed thumb and threw it as hard as he could into the trees.
‘That’s what I’ll do to the Limping Man. Let’s go the quickest way we can.’
Patrols along the coast forced them inland. Ben saw that Hana had lost her way. She had no knowledge of the swamp lying between them and the city: brown reeds, sucking mud, pools with grey mist floating on their surface. Yelping frogs and booming toads deafened them. Swamp birds screamed. The dead water bubbled with reeking odours from deep down.
Ben found berry juice to smear on their skin. It kept mosquitoes from biting but not from swarming round their heads and blinding them. There were flies that drank from the corners of their eyes and leeches that fastened on their legs and sucked out blood. Ben showed Hana how to heat the tip of her knife and burn them off.
‘There’s the city,’ Hana said.
Walls rose in the distance, over a plain beyond the swamp. They were like eroding cliffs and the buildings had jagged bites taken out of them. Only the hill, Company Hill, kept its shape: a hump-backed turtle smeared with grey-green trees. The red building rising in the midst was the Limping Man’s palace. Hana, straining her eyes, made out its decoration of yellow flames.
There were tents around the city walls. She saw figures like black flies swarming among them.
‘There’s no way in.’
‘We’ll see,’ Ben said. ‘First we get across this swamp.’
‘How?’
‘Swim,’ he said.
The pools at the fringes led to deeper ones. They sealed their packs and floated them, turning left and right through channels sometimes hooded with sedge. Mud islands stood in their way and they circled back. They slid on their bellies in shallow water and pulled themselves through rushes and over wet humps where flowers with the stink of corpses grew. Hana was not afraid. She had been in worse places in the burrows. She felt leeches fasten on her arms and legs. They would not kill her. Only men would kill her. She kept her limbs quiet in the water and her head low.
They reached the far edge of the swamp and eased their way into a fringe of rushes. Horsemen were wheeling in squadrons on the plain. Spare horses whinnied in corrals, where handlers groomed them. Tents stood in ordered rows with a man on guard outside each one. Even in the night there was no way for Ben and Hana to cross. They drew back, looking for another path. They would have to stay in the swamp, follow it inland and come to the city that way – or would it be better to find if it led down to the sea? Ben had taken charge. Hana let him. She had never been in this sort of place before.