by Angus Watson
They all shouted for Ottar. They searched behind bushes and in a small cave. Erik found himself looking in places he had already looked.
Sofi quietened everyone again.
“He’s nowhere nearby,” she said. She meant that she couldn’t hear his heartbeat. So he might be nearby. But if he were, he was dead.
Wootah and Calnians stood, looking about, shame-faced and confused.
Erik was in a rage. How had they done it? They were such fools! How could they have lost both children? They’d come so far, through so many dangers, and in the space of a few moments they’d undone it all with their stupid, selfish negligence. They were idiots, not fit to look after children. His old friends the Lakchans had words for people like them. They were a bunch of fuc—
“I can see him!” shouted Sitsi.
“Oh, thank Fraya!” said Sassa. “Where?”
“It’s not good. Can you see something moving on that cliff?”
She pointed to the red cliff, maybe a mile away.
Erik couldn’t see anything, but surely Sitsi was wrong. “He can’t have got that far away,” he said. “He was here when—”
“He’s being carried by a squatch,” interrupted Sitsi. “It’s climbing the cliff with Ottar over its shoulders.”
“Is Ottar alive?” asked Wulf.
“I… think so. I’m pretty sure he’s breathing and I can’t see any blood.”
“Is the squatch female or male?” asked Sofi. Erik saw what she was driving at. The best possible outcome was that Ottar had been taken by Ayla’s sister.
“By its size, it’s a male.”
“Fucknuts!” Erik kicked a rock. “Both fucking kids! What is wrong with us?”
He looked around but nobody would meet his eye.
“We messed up,” said Wulf eventually, “but as far as we know both are alive. Freydis is a strong swimmer and—”
“Did you not see that fucking enormous wave? The girl’s dead and we deserve to be too. What the fuck were we—”
“That’s enough, Erik,” said Thyri.
He stared at her.
“As Wulf said, we messed up. What should we do now? Cluck like foul-mouthed hens or get on with rescuing Ottar?”
Erik felt rage swell his chest and his ears burned. How dare she… he calmed himself. She was right. “Sorry,” he said.
“Right,” said Wulf. “Most of us will follow the squatch. A couple of us should wait for Paloma and Freydis at the river.”
Erik saw Sofi looking from him to Wulf. Was that a wry look in her eye? This was no time for wry fucking looks! How dare she… he calmed himself again. Planning, not ranting. That was the order of the day. He was worried and he was exhausted. They never included that in the sagas, the bit about everyone on a quest being so very tired the whole time and tetchy because of it. Maybe heroes didn’t get tetchy, he mused. Wulf never seemed tetchy. Maybe Wulf was sleeping better than he was…
“I’ll follow Freydis and Paloma in my canoe,” said Keef. “If Freydis ends up on the far bank or an island and Paloma can’t reach her, I’ll get the girl. Paloma’s water shoes won’t work on a raging river.”
Not a bad point, thought Erik. Although there was simply no way the girl had survived such a weight of water and wood. Keef would simply be retrieving her body.
“Yoki Choppa,” Sofi asked, “do you have hair from Paloma or Freydis?”
“Nope. Flood took it.”
“Hmm. Probably should have taken some of Paloma’s hair before she ran off.”
“Probably.” Yoki Choppa’s face darkened. Erik felt sorry for him. Of all the fuck-ups that evening, his was minor but he clearly felt awful about it.
Sofi nodded and turned to Keef. “If you don’t find them,” Sofi asked, “will you be able to find us again?”
“I can track a mosquito through a blizzard with my eye shut.”
“Keef, you’re no tracker,” Sassa shook her head. “Finn’s our best. There’s room for two in the canoe, isn’t there, Keef? Finn should go with you.”
“There is room for Finn. The canoe could take four Finns, but I’m a far superior tracker to the boy. You’ve just never seen me tracking because it’s a mundane task best left to lesser minds than mine.”
Erik had wondered about Keef since he’d met him back in Lakchan territory. Was his pomposity an act? He had decided that Keef was probably taking the piss all the time, even in a situation as serious as this one. Below his mock-heroic posturing, the Berserker was an honourable, brave, kind and very clever guy, Erik was pretty sure. Pretty sure. It was also just possible that Keef was actually a total bellend with his head lodged a good long way up his own arse. Erik hoped not.
“And,” Keef continued, “you might need Finn to read the mind of the squatch that’s taken Ottar. I cannot do that, because I’m not a freak. But you’re right. Someone else should come with me. Someone not too heavy, who’ll be good at spotting a small girl on the riverbank and seeing Paloma’s tracks without having to stop and look for them.”
Everyone turned to Sitsi, who’d been listening in from the edge of the group.
She coloured. “I’ll go,” she piped up, eyes as wide as ever.
“You’re light enough” muttered Keef, also reddening.
What was going on here, Erik wondered? Keef thought he was the father of Bodil’s baby. He wasn’t, of course, Finn was, but Keef didn’t know that and Keef and Bodil were very much a couple. Or were they? Did Keef know he wasn’t the father? If he was the intelligent man that Erik suspected he was, then he must know. And now it looked like Keef and Sitsi had something going on. What was happening?
Erik shook his head. There was no point dwelling on the nonsense of other people’s love lives at the best of times, and this was far from the best of times.
“All right,” said Sofi, as if there was nothing odd afoot. “Keef and Sitsi, follow Freydis and Paloma in Keef’s canoe. Yoki Choppa will take some hair from each of you. If you catch up with them so far downriver that coming back is impractical, stay where you are and Yoki Choppa will find you.”
Keef pointed at his head. Erik had chopped Keef’s hair off to elude the Owsla way back on the other side of the Water Mother. It had grown back to a blond fuzz about half a thumb long.
“I don’t have a whole lot of hair,” he said.
“Don’t need much,” said Yoki Choppa, lifting a little flint knife from a pocket in his breechcloth.
The warlock snicked a pinch of hair from both of them, then pressed a small bundle into Sitsi’s hand. “Take your power animal with you,” he said. “Here is enough to last a few moons for you and Paloma.”
“We’ll be back much sooner than that,” said Sitsi, but she took the bundle.
Erik looked at Yoki Choppa. It shouldn’t take them long to get back. Had the warlock foreseen something? And, come to think of it, he’d had the bundle made up already. How had he known that Sitsi was going to head off after Paloma?
“Come on, Sitsi!” cried Keef. “Let’s go!”
The two of them ran off to the river. Erik looked at Bodil. She was waiting patiently, apparently unaffected by Keef’s departure.
“Why is the river like that?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“All rolling and raging and fuller than it was?”
“Because of the flash flood,” Erik explained.
“Surely a flash flood comes and goes? Like a flash.” Bodil pursed her lips as if she’d made a very good point.
Erik squinted at her, missing children forgotten for a moment. Was she being serious? She held his eye. Apparently so.
“No,” he said, speaking as clearly as he could, “it’s a sudden increase in flow, caused by a storm, or, as in this case, lots of snow melting quickly. The river will stay high for a while. It will probably get even higher as more melted snow flows down.”
“And I didn’t think flash floods happened in rivers,” said Bodil.
“Oh. Where else woul
d they—”
“Come on,” Sofi commanded. “We’ll collect what’s left of our gear and follow the squatch.”
“Up the cliff? It’ll be dark by the time we get there,” said Erik.
“That is the way the squatch went.”
“So let’s stop pissing around and go!” said Thyri.
It was the first cloudy night for a while and about as dark as it ever got when they reached the base of the cliff. The route there had been more difficult than expected; up ridges, down ridges and over a stream that was probably broad enough to be called a river and definitely broad enough to be an arse to cross.
After leading most of the way with Sofi, Erik strode to the base of the cliff and looked up manfully, hands on hips, trying to force a courage that he really, really didn’t feel. The cliff was a black, featureless wall rising hundreds of feet above him. He felt the same dizziness and sharp contraction in his groin that he always got at the top of cliffs.
Fear of heights from below. It was a new one.
They had to rescue Ottar. But did they have to climb a cliff at night? Well, yes they did. A boy’s life was at stake. This was no time for cowardice.
Erik readied himself. He’d get to the top, or he’d fall and burst like a dropped egg on the very ground he was standing on. One way or another, it would be over.
“We can’t climb this now,” said Wulf.
Erik’s heart leapt. But surely they had to?
“You’re right,” agreed Sofi. “The river we crossed flows from the massif. Following its gorge should be less treacherous and probably quicker.”
Erik looked at Chogolisa.
“It will probably be much easier,” she said.
“Oh, good,” said Bodil.
Sassa did not look convinced.
Erik the Angry would never know whether the cliff would have been more treacherous than the canyon, but he reckoned it would have been close. There was a great deal of scary scrambling and plenty of horrible climbing as the gorge narrowed, particularly as they approached the top.
The sky was lightening in the east when Erik finally hauled himself over the last lip and lay on the bare rock, arms agonised and useless, his whole body shaking with exertion. Climbing was a lot more tiring than he’d imagined it could be. When he could finally look up, he saw Yoki Choppa perched on a patch of bare rock between two short, gnarled pinyon pines, hunched over his smoking alchemical bowl.
“He’s alive and over there,” said the warlock, pointing south-east. “About eight miles away.”
“Let’s go!” shouted Thyri, heading off.
“Not that way,” said Sofi. “We’ll follow the cliff top until we get to the point the squatch climbed up, then follow its tracks.”
Thyri opened her mouth to protest, then closed it. “I guess that makes sense,” she said.
Chapter 8
Surfing
Keef the Berserker’s canoe bucked and swished on the raging meltwater, surging through the night. He said nothing apart from the odd hard left!, back-paddle, back-paddle! and so on. Sitsi Kestrel was silent, scanning the banks and the river itself for Freydis’s broken little body.
Dawn came.
The current had eased a little, but they were still speeding along. There was no sign of Freydis nor of her raft, but footprints and broken vegetation showed that Paloma had run westward along the river’s southern bank at a Hel of a pace, as the Wootah would have said. She had not returned, at least not by the same route.
Sitsi wasn’t exhausted and her knees were not sore from kneeling in the canoe because she was Owsla. As well as her personal power animal, the chuckwalla lizard which gave her amazing eyesight, she ate a small amount of tarantula hawk wasp and caribou daily. The wasp and the caribou gave her extraordinary stamina, strength and resilience. She could have kept going all day and another night before even thinking about becoming uncomfortable.
Keef, however, did not have her alchemical advantages. He’d been crammed into a relatively small space and paddling like a frenzied duck all night with neither rest nor food nor drink. He smelled strongly of stale male sweat with a note of fresh male sweat. Usually such a man-ming would have had Sitsi running for the hills, or at least out of nose-shot. She didn’t mind it too much on Keef.
They passed three herons, spaced like guards on the shore. The sun’s golden rays struck the water. Keef’s paddle rate was slowing to almost nothing then suddenly speeding up, again and again.
“Would you like a rest?” Sitsi asked.
He paddled faster, splashing Sitsi with cold water. “Nope.”
“We could stop for a short while and eat something?”
“Are you saying I’m weak?” Keef turned, eyebrow raised over his missing eye.
Sitsi was startled momentarily. “No, no, of course not. It’s just that I could do with a rest.”
“You want a rest? Why didn’t you say? Right paddle!”
They crunched the nose of the canoe into the shingle bank on the inside of a bend, climbed out and pulled the little boat up after them. The far bank was vertical red rock, but their side was a stony-soiled clearing fringed by scrubby woodland.
By the way he moved, Keef was not far from collapse.
“Forty heartbeats here,” he said, “then we’re off again.”
“I could really do with a quick sleep.” Sitsi stretched and yawned.
“Sleep? What about Freydis?” Keef yawned, too. If other people yawning made you yawn, Sitsi had learned, it meant you were a kinder person, more interested in and influenced by others’ feelings.
“Paloma will find her. If she comes back this way while we’re—”
“If they come back this way,” Keef corrected.
“Of course. If they come past while we’re sleeping they’ll see the canoe and know that we’re here.”
“Good point. You can sleep first. I’ll lie here and take the first watch.”
Sitsi was pretty sure that Keef was asleep before he’d fully stretched out on the ground.
She slipped her arms under him, lifted the big man and carried him to a less stony patch. She covered him with her Owsla poncho, picked up her bow and quiver and headed off to find breakfast.
At the treeline, she stopped and looked back. Yes, he was far enough from the river to be safe from a surge in the flood and she could see no serious predators nearby. His chest rose and fell and he mumbled something that sounded a lot like Sitsi.
Paloma Pronghorn ran through the last light of day. She nearly caught up with the wave’s leading edge, then had to divert a few hundred paces from the river to cross a tributary. When the stream was narrow enough to leap she stopped to wash the blood off her face and check the cut on her forehead. A long-tailed lizard with a yellow head and a freakishly blue body watched her. It looked like something a child had painted, badly. Not that she’d ever seen a child paint anything well, despite what their parents always told them.
As she’d expected, the cut wasn’t too bad. She’d known that running off with blood running down her face was an impressively tough look, so she’d risked her wound not being bad enough to need Yoki Choppa’s attention. And, of course, she had a girl to rescue.
Back at the river, she scanned the banks and the churning brown torrent for Freydis the Annoying. It was getting darker. She saw several dozen pieces of flotsam that could have been the girl, but she couldn’t be sure.
She scanned again, looking for movement, then realised she was being naïve. Freydis couldn’t have survived the torrent. She was looking for a corpse. She stood for a moment. The sunset in the west was incongruously lovely. She remembered the day her sister died.
Paloma had been too young to go hunting, so she’d stayed at home exercising, running through the routines devised and enforced by her demanding dad. Her mum had returned alone, her face unbearably heavy with sorrow.
“Your sister’s dead,” she’d said.
She didn’t say how she’d died, and Paloma had never asked
. Paloma had cried, but only because her mother looked so sad. She’d been too young to know what death was.
From then on, until Paloma had left for Calnia to join the Owsla, her mother had spoken about reincarnation more than any other subject. Nobody ever died. Their soul occupied a different body. Paloma was to grieve for her sister, and to miss her, but not to be destroyed by grief.
Although Paloma was pretty sure it wasn’t what she’d intended, she’d used her mother’s words as moral justification for slaughtering an awful lot of people on the commands of Calnia’s rulers. She hadn’t been killing killing. She’d just moved their souls along, probably to a better place where empresses didn’t want them dead.
And now Freydis’s soul had moved along. Paloma would never hear the little girl’s clipped voice again, never hear her sing again, never see her raise her snub nose in defiance of some idiotic adult decree.
She’d liked that girl.
She allowed herself a moment’s grief, then accelerated downstream, resolving to get ahead of the wave at the flood’s leading edge. If she didn’t see Freydis there, she could retrace her steps when the water receded and look for her body. However, given the strength of the torrent, it was going to be a while before the river calmed, maybe even a few days. And, of course, Freydis’s little body might be underwater, bundled along then jammed in some hidden nook where it would swell and decay and be eaten by fish, only surfacing bit by bit as rotted, chewed limbs were pulled free by the current and… it did not bear thinking about.
It was the last light of day when Paloma reached the head of the flood and looked across the churning wave.
She spotted Freydis immediately because Freydis was waving at her.
It wasn’t a Quick! Save me! wave, it was more of a Hello! Look at me!
Paloma, alchemically toughened warrior and the fastest runner the world had ever known, blinked away tears of joy. The girl was lying on the raft. The wave was propelling it along in a way that reminded Paloma of an old dog of her parents that pushed balls from place to place with its nose. Freydis’s perch on the crest seemed fairly stable, but the wave was huge and full of other debris. It was amazing that the raft hadn’t been smashed by a trunk, or flipped and swallowed by the great weight of rushing white water. It was just a matter of time before something like that happened.