Stone Spring (43 page)

He thought he was outrunning the fire. The smell of smoke, and a faint sound of crackling and popping, receded behind him. Yet unease remained. Something was wrong.

The net was slung between two giant oaks. He barely saw it before he went flying into it, and his whole body was tangled up as if in thick ivy.

He fell from the tree and plummeted hard against the ground, landing all wrong. Winded, tangled up, he tried to stand.

Hands grabbed him and pulled him down. Huge dark shapes loomed around him. He remembered another time when he was grabbed, taken away from a smiling face, hands stealing him up into the green. Now he was pulled down to the earth.

He heard a scream. Mother.

Then a heavy foot slammed into the pit of his stomach, and he folded over the pain.

63

Shade stood silent before the wooden post.

The sun shone down into the clearing, midsummer light pouring from another flawless sky, and all the posts in the great circle cast long, precise shadows across the clearing. But this post was the southernmost in the ring, and cast its shadow a little further than the others, and that was the one he watched.

All around the clearing the forest crowded dense and dark, and the canopy was a billowing green cloud high above. Birds sang, and a busy squirrel briefly distracted him. Women and children moved quietly around the forest fringe, gathering fungi and berries. He heard the grunts and shouts of the men as Bark put them through their training - wrestling today, it sounded like, fighting with bare hands. Shade vaguely hoped that there would be no serious accidents today, that nobody would die. Not long after becoming the Root on the death of his father he had ruled that no man could earn a killing scar from the murder of another Pretani - unless it was an unavoidable issue of honour, just as Shade’s own brother and father had died. That had cut down markedly on the number of deaths, but they still happened, whether as genuine accidents or as petty grudge attacks.

Such thoughts rattled through his head like birds darting across the sunlit clearing. But he did not allow them to distract him from his purpose.

He was intent on watching the shadow of the southernmost post, as he did every day around this time, when the sun was out and the shadow visible. Every so often he marked the shadow, driving a slim wooden stake in the ground. As a result of his labours the earth before him, cleared of leaves and ferns and other debris, had a whole series of pegs in parallel curving lines, showing how he had marked the shifting of the shadow on previous days. Shade, aged thirty, was capable of great concentration.

It was time to place another peg. He stepped forward and thrust a wood sliver into the ground.

‘You ought to get somebody to do that for you,’ came a heavy, breathless voice.

‘I have to be sure it’s done right, Bark.’

Bark approached, panting hard, swigging water from a skin. Naked save for a sweat-soaked groin pouch, his body was like a slab of oak itself, covered with knotted muscles on his upper arms and thighs, the belly under the thick mat of hair on his chest. A little over twenty, about ten years younger than Shade himself, he was a second cousin, and Shade trusted nobody else as he trusted Bark.

‘So how was the training?’

‘Not bad. The wrestling went well. Only one broken finger, the priest will look at it when he’s worked his latest dose of poppy juice out of his blood. The spear-chucking was a disaster. You know what fourteen-year-olds are like. More muscle than brains. Nearly got one through my own foot.’

Shade laughed. ‘They’ll learn.’ He threw Bark another water sack.

Bark took a deep, thirsty draught, and looked down dubiously at the patterns of sticks. ‘Tell me again why you’re doing this?’

‘Because I want to mark the moment of midsummer. To make the Giving that bit more special.’ Shade’s Giving ceremony was an amalgam of older Pretani traditions with what he’d seen at Etxelur. There was plenty of competition, plenty of feasting and sex and raucous behaviour - and lots of giving, the difference being that those who feared the Pretani gave to them, rather than the other way around.

‘And these shadows you’re chasing are going to help, are they?’

‘Yes,’ Shade said, a little impatiently. ‘Look. Each day the post shadow, cast by the sun as it shifts in the sky, marks out a curve. Like this. It dips closest to the post at noon. But each day that curve moves too, because the sun climbs that bit higher as it gets to midsummer. I’m trying to find the one unique point where the shadow reaches at noon on midsummer day. I started last year, but we had too much cloud. This year I’m doing better. Next year I’ll try again to check the result—’

‘Year after year after year. Why?’

Shade snapped, ‘So that I can put something here. A stone. A bear skull, maybe. And then, for ever, we’ll know when it’s noon at midsummer because we’ll see the post’s shadow hit the skull. You see? I explained it to you before.’

‘You know me. Head like a leaky water skin.’ He shook the empty skin to make the point and threw it back to Shade. ‘In one hole and out the other. Anyhow the turning of the seasons is up to the gods. You should get the priest to do this.’

‘I tried,’ Shade said. ‘All he wants is more poppy juice.’ Shade often wished he had the ear of a decent, sober, sensible, intelligent priest. He remembered Etxelur, and the partnership of Kirike and the wise priest Jurgi.

Bark pointed, faintly mocking. ‘Time for another peg.’

In fact he was overdue. Shade hastened to mark the shadow.

‘Or one of the women. They could do this. The gods know you’ve got enough wives . . .’

That was true enough. There were always lots of widows among the Pretani, and as the Root Shade had had his pick. But all his children had died young, save one, Acorn, a little girl on whom he doted when his hunters weren’t watching.

‘And you should come training with us. You should hear what some of these boy-men say about you behind your back. Some of them are itching to challenge you.’

‘There’s always some hothead ready to gamble his life.’

‘If enough of them have a go, one of them will win that gamble in the end. Look, I’m serious. You need to keep in condition. Standing around watching shadows won’t do that for you. And it wouldn’t do you any harm to take down one of the boy-men some time. Just to show the rest you’re still top.’

It was wise advice, of its kind. ‘I’ll think about it.’

Bark blew his nose noisily into his fingers and wiped his hands on his loin pouch. ‘Right, I’m off for a shit, a swim in the river and some food, not necessarily in that order—’

Somebody screamed. A child, by the edge of the clearing.

The two men exchanged a glance, and ran.

Children came boiling out of the forest like ants from a kicked-over nest. One girl had a basket of fruit, but the others had abandoned whatever they had been collecting. Their mothers ran across the clearing towards them, and some of the men.

Shade saw his own daughter. He ran over and grabbed her. ‘Acorn! What is it?’ The girl, eight years old and still child-slim, was shaking, her eyes wide. She was so scared she couldn’t speak. He knelt before her. ‘Calm down, child. You’re safe now. Tell me what happened. Was it a bear? A cat?’

‘No - no - it came down out of the trees, it just dropped on us—’

‘What came down?’

But now there were more screams from the forest. The mothers with their children scattered, and the men, shouting to each other, tried to form a line before the trees.

Acorn turned and pointed at a stout ash tree. ‘That came down!’ she yelled. ‘That!’

There was something clambering in the branches, Shade saw, some animal, big, agile.

It leapt down into the clearing, teeth bared, fingers outstretched. It was a boy, maybe twelve years old, naked, his skin covered in green smears - a Leafy Boy. The men faced the Leafy, but they stayed out of reach of his swinging paws.

Something was wrong. No Leafy Boy had attacked the people so openly before. And, Shade saw now, the Leafy had a rope tied around his neck, leading back to the forest.

Now another Leafy Boy came flying out of a treetop, landing in a roll that took him into a group of men, knocking them down. He got up snarling - no, this one was a female, a she, with small hard breasts, but as muscular as the first. But she, too, had a rope around her neck.

She leapt onto one of the fallen men. He scrabbled to get away. She grabbed his own club and rammed it in his open mouth so hard that teeth cracked and bone splintered. The man, pinned on the ground, shuddered and gurgled, and blood gushed out of his ruined mouth.

There was a moment of shocked stillness.

Then Bark yelled, ‘Rush them!’ He went in first. He jumped on the boy, and the Leafy bit and scratched.

More of the men moved in on the girl, who still straddled her shuddering, dying victim. She seemed if anything more formidable, and fought with a reckless inhuman ferocity.

Shade himself pushed Acorn away and raced forward, reaching for the blade at his waist.

But then the rope at the girl’s neck was yanked backwards. She clutched at her throat, but she was dragged off the downed man and, struggling and kicking, was pulled back across the grassy floor of the clearing.

The other Leafy was subdued now, his face bloodied, three men sitting on his arms, chest and legs.

‘Don’t kill him,’ Shade snapped. He strode forward past the boy, following the way the girl had been dragged.

At the edge of the clearing a group of adults - people, not Leafies, clad in dirty skins - dragged the girl into the green shade, threw a net over her and bundled her up with rope. Still she kicked and fought.

Shade faced the strangers, his blade in his hand. ‘Who are you?’ he called in Pretani, and then he switched to the traders’ tongue. ‘Show yourselves, if you want to live.’

One of the group stepped forward into the daylight. It was a woman, her body square and strong, her breasts flat under her tunic, her red hair tied back and shot with grey. Her face was familiar, and yet was laid over by a mask of scars. Lines around the eyes and mouth told of bitterness. He had the impression she smiled rarely.

Yet she smiled as she faced him. She spoke the Etxelur tongue. ‘Hello, Shade. Do you remember me? You kicked me out of here, but that was long ago. And things have changed, haven’t they?’

‘What do you want?’

‘To talk.’

It was Zesi.

64

They sat in Shade’s house.

Shade had called for his priest to sit with them, feeling the need for spiritual support in this confrontation, but Resin, poppy-addled and terrified, was barely conscious. Bark, meanwhile, refused to go further than a couple of paces from the Root’s side with strangers in the clearing. He sat just outside the house’s door flap where he could watch Zesi and her grimy followers, who sat around the open-air hearth, sharing a deer haunch.

The two Leafies lay huddled together on the ground, pinned under a net weighted down with logs.

In the house, Zesi told Shade what had become of her in the fifteen years since the summer of the Great Sea, when she had left Albia after the death of the Root.

‘So we got rid of you from here. And then Ana threw you out of Etxelur.’

‘More than that,’ Zesi said, every word dripping with bitterness. ‘I am dead in Etxelur. What you see is a sack of bones walking around. And I nearly did die too, in those first days alone. But you know me. I was always a fighter.’

She grinned, cold, somehow more savage even than the Leafy child-woman she had unleashed on the Pretani. He wondered how he could ever have imagined he loved her. ‘So you came back.’

‘I had no real intention, no plan. Nowhere to go - I knew I wouldn’t be welcome here. Yet I came this way. Perhaps drawn by your memory.’ She didn’t look at him when she said this. ‘Or perhaps it was the forest. You can hide in a forest. Hole up. You can’t do that in Northland, all those open spaces.’

‘So you hid away.’

‘Not well enough. They soon found me.’ She nodded at the band who had accompanied her, most of them men, some women, all of them grimy and tough-looking. ‘Them or their predecessors. Many of that first lot are long dead now.’

‘Bandits,’ said Shade. This was a traders’-tongue word. Bandits, rootless folk who preyed on others, were a plague, especially in the forests where they could hide in the shadows. ‘I can imagine how they treated you. A woman alone—’

‘You should imagine how I treated them. Before they learned to leave me alone one man had to die, choked to death on his own severed cock.’

He was careful not to react. ‘So you survived. And you came to lead them.’

‘Not just this lot. There are many bandit groups. The forest swarms with them. You know that.’

‘I suppose it doesn’t surprise me. You always were a leader. And now you have the Leafy Boys under your sway, I see.’

She grinned. ‘Did you like my stunt? I’m sorry one of your people got killed - it shouldn’t have gone that far.’

‘Death always did follow you around, Zesi.’

‘It made the point, though, about how vicious they can be. Imagine a swarm of them falling on your houses! They would chew your eyes out before you had time to shout the alarm.’

‘And you control them.’

‘Just those we capture. We smoke them out with fires. They have no language; they can’t be trained. And they’ll only eat red meat - never cooked. Some of the men think they’re not human at all.’

‘They steal our infants,’ Shade said sadly. ‘They are human enough.’

‘Hey, you.’ She threw a boar rib at Bark, who snarled back at her. ‘The female over there is a gift, for you and your men, if you can handle her. Some of my men say it’s worth the cost in bites and scratches. We kept her fresh for you. If you spoil her it doesn’t matter, there are always more to trap. Go ahead. Enjoy.’

Bark wasn’t about to leave Shade alone. But he beckoned over one of his men and spoke quietly.

Soon a group of the men, with the bandits’ help, were cautiously separating the male and female Leafies. They hauled the squirming female over to the edge of the clearing, away from the women and children. Then they bent over her, half a dozen of them, like a pack of dogs shoving their muzzles into the open belly of a deer, Shade thought with disgust.