The Winter Road Page 3

  A thick tunic, leggings and boots are in the sack, a noke’s fieldbelt, cheese and a flask. There are furs in the pit and a good knife, as well as the sack holding Mosa’s shirt and the spade I had with me before. I dry myself off a bit with the furs and put the clothes on.

  I will go to live on the coast, follow this river.

  So I hide from the farmers, sniffers and herders, survive in the weeks since my death, using the skills my ma taught me. The river gets fatter and slower. Aoig, what the Old Kingdoms call the sun, melts the snow and brings the world to life proper. I could feel it before, on a brew, what we called the song of the earth, when the brew makes every sense stand out like an agony, and the world wants to tell you too much and you can lose yourself and die in it if you haven’t been trained. But when I cracked open the wax over my face and rubbed away the poultice I could now see the song with my right eye, though I’m hard pressed to describe it.

  Judging by my reflection, a pale streak is all that’s left of that herder’s arrow, there’s the knot of scar at the side of my eye, a lattice of bark and skin, and my eyeball is now all dark like gravy, rolling about the socket like it’s bathed in sand, like it’s an eye that don’t belong there.

  This sight invades my other senses. If I shut my left eye, the pattern of what I see is different: I see the land’s living, I taste it, a sight beyond any fightbrew, a sight that disturbs my dreams with vapours of a knowledge perhaps only the Oskoro understand. All these weeks since I opened that eye I have tried to travel in the twilight, as no amount of beech leaves or poppy seeds eases the headaches and sickness that two different eyes cause. This is the sight of an eagle and we were not made to live with it.

  Standing stones are carved at the borders between the lands of Carlessen’s Families, their grazing rights and sniffing rights and farmland. The land evens out, valleys running ahead to vales and plains. I have not been here before. I follow still the course of the river, a vein of life, food and water, both foraged and stolen. There are many more guards and watchers at theits than I had reckoned with coming out of the mountains. The warlord’s arm is lengthening. So I keep my distance from the river as I follow it, sleep in trees. But the peace I manage to take from the solitude is robbed from me when I’m woken only days out of the valleys the Nakvi-Russ river runs along. Horns, horns of the whiteboys, their screaming, maddening howl, like animals being slaughtered. Like people being slaughtered. These sounds blow through the birch and pine about me, blow past me from the west, at the river. The horns pull tears from my old eye. I hold my head and think about breathing, to only breathe, to stone the fear. The horns are death.

  I string the bow and leap down to the ground from the bough I rested in. I take some snuff to clear and fill my chest for running. Birds take flight, darting out of the edge of woods near a theit; nine, ten huts, pens of pigs, chickens and plant fields. Those that live there are running about gathering their children, men and women taking up spears and passing between them a small bag, some plant to give them a lift. I see the beard hoop of the family’s leader, weavings in his keep’s hair, and it’s those two who stand just ahead of five men. The horns are sounding from the trees to the north of their theit. I glimpse, from this higher vantage point, figures moving between tree trunks, their horns echoing over the dell this Family have their home in.

  They make them wait. It’s what they do. The horns fill the rising morning, scratching at the nerves, shrill screams that trigger the theit’s own babies and children.

  One of the men standing behind their chief starts shouting, looses an arrow in defiance. The horns stop. A man staggers out of the treeline, crying out for their surrender. He has stumps where his hands were, blackened strips of cloth over them. He holds them up in front of him like he can’t get used to them. The chief tries to shout over him. Two of the men behind the chief then run forward to help what must be one of their kin. I almost cry out, it’s so obvious to me. They make forty yards to their man when I see the shivers in the air from the flight of arrows, cutting them both down. The maimed man falls to his knees at their side howling, leaning to one who must be a brother. Two more, a man and a woman, come from different huts, each with a bow and spear to make up the five again that stand with the chief. Then a horseman nudges his mount out from the trees. He wears leathers, fieldbelt, but his face, head and hands are chalked white.

  “Line up the boys, Orgrif! Swear fealty to Samma Khiese! Feed our army with four of your kin and a quarter of your plant and the rest of you live!” Two flaming arrows are loosed, each thirty yards short of the nearest hut, but the intent is clear. The whiteboy knows the chief’s name. Could be a Seikkerson or an Auksen lad, accent suggesting one of those clans. Fucking traitor.

  Orgrif looks to his keep then, and the knot of kin behind him. They speak, and he turns back to the whiteboy and throws down his spear and bow. The others follow.

  I’m relieved. Nobody else needs to die if Orgrif isn’t stupid, and I can move on, keep ahead of them.

  As his keep runs forward to the man on his knees, Orgrif whistles for the others in his theit to come out. Riders trot forward from the trees, nine in a line. Four dismount as they get to where Orgrif and the others are standing. There’s shouting and cussing from his people as the boys, four in all, are presented to the whiteboys. It worries me for they don’t know what the whiteboys will do if they are crossed.

  Hard to hear then what is said, as I’m still over the river. The lead rider, and he carried himself as a leader, walks up to the boys. One spits at him as he leans close, catches him good in the face. I grip my bow and tears spring from my eyes. I’m not ready to watch a torturing. The boy’s mother shouts something. The lead rider puts the boy on the ground with one hard punch. Orgrif makes to move, but a man behind him steps to him and puts a hand on his shoulder.

  The leader puts the boot into the boy, kicks his face a few times, then reaches down to grab him by his tunic and pull him towards his crew. I want to throw up, sick with fear for the boy, who can’t be more than Mosa’s age.

  The other whiteboys ready themselves, all liplicking for some violence as I put an arrow against the bow and draw. I have to stifle a thrill then as I line up the shot; it’s this changed eye, so easy to judge distance, so clear the sense of the air moving between the arrowhead and the leader’s back. I’ve never been more sure of a shot. I hold my breath and let the arrow go, a thrilling certainty to its arc over the river as it hits the leader’s back and makes him stagger forward. As it hits him I move behind the tree I dropped out of. Shouts start up. I draw another arrow, nock it and step out of the trees again, hungry to feel that assurance, for it quelled my fear. The arrow hits one of the mounted riders in his neck as he stares down at his leader and he falls dead from his horse. I’m spotted now so I step further out from the tree, to goad them now they’re leaderless. One of them looses an arrow. It will land behind me, missing my shoulder by a foot or so. I still hold my breath as it flashes past me and I raise my bow again, everyone now looking over the river at me. I loose two more arrows as the whiteboys mount up and head for me. One hits a whiteboy as he drives his horse into the river, the other just misses its mark but catches the horse behind it in the neck, the rider thrown to the bank. The family see what’s happening, and a cry goes up from a couple of them despite Orgrif’s protest, and they run for the fallen rider.

  I run into the trees, take some amony and pray to a magist it isn’t too much to kill me.

  The slope rises steeply amid the trees. I climb up some banks and wait, listening.

  “It gets worse for you, you don’t come out now!” says one of them.

  “Grenned’s chops are smacking for meat, ain’t they,” says another.

  He’s shushed. Three of them give away their positions clear as day, though there’s more than that about. They speak because they’re nervous, because they haven’t been trained not to. These aren’t whiteboys then, or Khiese now thinks some chalk paste’s enough. I still co
unt three to listen for. I pick up a stone and throw it twenty or so yards, its knock against a trunk echoing. A shuffling and whispering about fifteen yards down the slope from me gives away another two.

  I lean out, loose an arrow that hits one of them and lean back in. The boy next to him shrieks and I hear him make a move away from the one I just dropped.

  There’s whispering, but the amony’s strong enough that I’m able to hear one calling for them to retreat. “She’s paid,” he whispers. “Brewed,” says another. Good. I hear from the soft footfall that they’re approaching my position. Some of their sightlines, if they’re with bows, will be stopped by the trees about us. There’s a thrill then I don’t, can’t dwell on, the same as when I rushed those herders. Moments from now it might be nothing matters. As I move out from the tree again, bow raised, I take all doubt and choice away. I’m free.

  As the first arrow punches into the chest of one of the whiteboys and begins drowning him in his own blood I’ve drawn the bow again, easy as yawning, and I kill a second one of them, high in the middle of his chest.

  Two more of them cry out and run at me with spears, ignoring the boy that called for their retreat. I run towards them, only the knife, and I do it because I have only the knife, because nobody does that against spears. I judge the better of the two from his stance and go for him. I’m quick enough, though I have no brew in me but what amony gives.

  He couldn’t have had more than twenty or so summers this one, seems paralysed before me, thrusting the spear at me like I’m to be shooed away. I parry it and step inside, quicker and stronger than him. Stab him twice as he tries to fend me off, take the spear before either he or it hit the ground and keep moving. I have lost the place of those others around me and expect an arrow to hit me before I get my back to a trunk, facing the other of these two. He’s no older, quivering, blowing too hard as he readies himself. He slaps his spear into the bind, I roll it and push the point of mine through his eye. No movement to my sides. I close my eyes. One left. I hear him then, he’s running, north through the trees, denying me a shot at him. Trouble’s coming back double. The people of this theit are dead if they don’t flee.

  I walk out of the trees and wave to the settlers so they know I’m not one of those who attacked them. The horses the whiteboys rode towards me I approach quiet and make my whispers. I could use a horse. They seem easy enough and are happy to be led with my awful singing back through the river and up to the huts.

  A woman comes over; man behind her must have been her keep.

  “I don’t know the Carlessen lingo. Abra or Common?” I ask as I tie the horses to a garden fence. I see Orgrif has gone to join his keep with the wounded man and his dead kin.

  “You kilt them?” says the woman before me. She’s got grey straw for hair, whitening at the roots, and a pale leathery face in which I can see, I think, trust and concern. Her man was aiming to be relaxed with both hands on his spear like it was a staff, but he looks jumpy as a rabbit now I’m close.

  “I did. One got away. More trouble’s coming.”

  “Thucksen’s boy that was, the one leading them out of the trees. His family are five mile northwest and never worth the leather on a lash. You know this Khiese?”

  Words lock in my throat; I can only nod. “There’ll be more of them, and you’ll all pay. I have to speak to Orgrif.”

  “I’m Braidie,” she says, “come on.” She hooks her thin hard old arm in mine and leads me through the plant garden and up a path towards where the others are gathered, mothers holding their boys and girls close, while the one that was punched is hugging his ma while she puts a paste on him where the skin’s split, shushing him all the while. His eye’s all puffed and red.

  She looks up at me as I come near.

  “I owe you his life, his honour,” she says.

  I shake my head. “He strengthened his rope with that one spit.” Which is a saying to mean he did his family and his line proud.

  She cocks her head towards Orgrif, who looks up from the wounded man outside the camp. “He give us all up for nine boys with some chalk on their heads.”

  “That in’t the only way to see it, Grumma,” says one of the spearmen who was stood with Orgrif a short while ago. “That spit’s going to bring this Khiese on all of us, and that brewed-up bitch there just sealed it,” he says, looking over at me.

  “Pity you didn’t stand up to them, Annik, but then you can barely stand up to your sister when she’s knocking your lazy backside around your plant runs,” says Braidie.

  Orgrif comes over then. He nods at me, but they all have questions.

  “How’s Murin?” asks Grumma.

  “Mell’s seeing to him,” he says before turning to me. “You, you’ve got colour, you have any plant’ll help him? He’s in a bad way.”

  “I’ll see if I can help,” I says.

  Mell, Orgrif’s keep, is kneeling over this Murin, rubbing something into his gums when I get there, poppy most likely, for I saw a run of it as I brought the horses up. Murin’s on his back now, shivering and mumbling. His stumps wasn’t done with a sharp enough edge or belted and bandaged soon enough. She’d washed them with vinegar from what I could smell, but it was obvious he’d lost too much blood.

  “Not much I can do, Mell,” I say. I wasn’t wasting birch or bistort on a dead man.

  “He’s got a baby not a season old, and a boy too,” she says, and she wipes her eyes with one hand while smoothing his head with another.

  “Where’s his keep?”

  “Ydka? Sniffing, she’ll be a league or two south.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Teyr. Teyr Amondsen. What Family are you?”

  “We’re Kelssens, of the Carlessen clan. Amondsen, your Family is part of the Auksen clan? You look beat up, sorry for saying. Was it these whiteboys we’ve been hearing about?”

  “Yes.” I had to pen my thoughts in. I take a breath. “You’re not safe now this has happened.” That Annik put the thought in me that my shooting the whiteboy might well have been the wrong thing to do, for all that the boy who spat at him would have been kicked to death.

  Murin stops shivering and is still. He had been looking up at the sky and not at us the whole time.

  “He must have seen the magist Halfussen calling for him,” I say.

  Mell leans over Murin’s body to that of the one he fell down to weep over, who must have been his brother, shot by the whiteboys. She takes their hands and puts them in each other’s.

  “They’ll go into our tapestry together now,” she says. She turns to me, and if my eyes are full it’s because there’s two I love that I hope have found the same path, and it’s them that’s brought me to my own knees next to Mell.

  She puts her arms about me, and I can smell the flowers fresh braided into her hair. Her neck is hot, her cheek wet and I’m overwhelmed, for all this time since Khiese left me to die I’ve not held or been held by another. I pull away quickly because I can’t go back there.

  “Sorry.” I stand up and wipe my face and recover myself.

  Mell stands too. She’s good to look on, thirty years or so. There’s a way some have, a posture and a sympathy in the eyes for sorrow that disarms and welcomes, and she has it. It becomes apparent as we walk back to the theit and the gathering turns to us both, even Orgrif turns. It reminds me why I left my own family, for the strength of women never opens the way to their getting any power or recognition short of the subtle strings that the mothers of chiefs can pull.

  “They’re coming back, Mell, more of them too. You need to tell your kin to leave here.”

  She says nothing.

  “They’re saying Orgrif give up your sons too easily.”

  “I won’t bring him dishonour by speaking against him.” She could be my ma.

  The whole theit’s out now, ranged about Orgrif, fifty odd, including the children. She speaks to them.

  “The
re was nothing we could do for Murin. Someone needs to go and find Ydka and her dut. This is Teyr, she’s Auksen clan.” As she says it she’s looking about the family until she sees the boy, seven years or so, who must have been Murin’s son. Mell goes over to him and kneels down to hug him. She’s leaving the gathering to Orgrif of course.

  “I’ll fetch Ydka,” says a man standing by. “Can I take one o’ those horses?”

  “Yes, I would like to keep one of them to move on, if you’d show me that kindness, but the rest are yours.”

  “You come down from the Auksen lands then?” asks Orgrif.

  “I did.” He wasn’t getting my life story, and it was true to a point.

  “I heard something of this Khiese, this warlord, a few weeks back when I was down at the dock. Is he all over the Circle? Has he taken Hillfast?”

  “If he has I haven’t heard it. You’d do well to gather what you can carry and move south. The Carlessens need to know what’s coming.”

  “I don’t think we will, Teyr. These are our bloodlands.” As Orgrif says this I look about and see Annik among those calling out their approval to this.

  “They’ll be your bloodlands when you return, if Carlessen is honourable. Or you’ll all die when next the horns sound.”

  “These whiteboys in’t for much if an old and paid-out drooper like you got their measure,” says a woman from behind Annik. She’s heavy-looking, Annik’s sister no doubt, a clay pipe in the corner of her mouth, though I can see it isn’t lit. The heat of those about me is somehow as clear to my eye as a smell is to my nose.

  “Must have missed seein’ the shots she made from over the river then, Femke, best I ever saw,” says Braidie.

  “If all of you could shoot well it wouldn’t be enough for what’s coming.” I look back at the horses tied there. Walk away. They couldn’t stop me if I did. Maybe my being here is giving them the grit to stay and I curse the thought.