Trifles and Folly 2

by Gail Z. Martin

  “Let’s head back,” I said, turning the sails for home. “The sooner we get the harvest in, the quicker we can get back out here and salvage some dignity with a decent catch before the rest of the boats come back.”

  Coltt and Nesh kept up their joking until the boat rocked so badly we nearly lost some fish over the side. As usual, I handled the rudder while the Skinner boys kept the sails. The wind was with us, and the morning breeze was clean. Despite the prospect of harvesting vegetables for the rest of the day, my spirits were high. Everyone in our village has at least a touch of sea magic. Mine was more than a touch, by a good bit. I could listen to the wind like it was telling me a story. The stars, too. Even as a child, I never got lost. Father said I could navigate on a starless sea, and he was right. Coltt and Nesh could barely find their way home from the well at the end of the village, but they could smell where the fish were hiding.

  Good thing, too, because fish kept our little village alive and earned most of the coin to be had. Mother and the women raised some vegetables and a few scrawny hens, goats, and rabbits. We did some trade with the boats and merchants who passed by our inlet. Like every village, Netters Cove had a weaver, a potter, and a blacksmith, a dyer and a hedge witch who gave cures and birthed babies and said the High Words over the bodies when some poor blokes drowned. It was enough to trade for us what we couldn’t build or grow, but not so much that the pirates who sailed the waters just beyond the shoals had any reason to bother us.

  “Look there.” Coltt pointed as we sailed into the inlet. A strange boat was anchored just beyond the shoals, and two rowboats I didn’t recognize were pulled up on shore.

  “Not the usual season for traders,” I mused. But a little extra coin sure wouldn’t hurt.

  Just then I saw a figure burst from the trees at the side of the beach. It was my little sister, Jana, and she was jumping up and down and waving her arms. We were still pretty far out, and I smiled at her enthusiasm. She always missed me when I spent the night at sea.

  It wasn’t until we were too close in to turn around easily that I realized something.

  Jana wasn’t greeting us. She was warning us away.

  “Something’s wrong.” I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth before another figure ran from the trees, toward Jana. It was a man I didn’t recognize, and he grabbed her by the arms, dragging her backward. To make his point, he held up a cutlass and then held it to her throat.

  “Dante—” Coltt’s voice was low, like a growl.

  “I see.”

  “What do you think—”

  “I think we’ll find out more than we want to know once we land the boat.”

  We brought the boat ashore, but there seemed to be no one else around except Jana and the man with the cutlass. He watched us as we dragged the boat up, making sure he turned to face us as we moved, keeping Jana and the cutlass in between us. He was dirty and unshaven, and even at a distance, he stank. His clothes were torn and stained, looking like mismatched pieces he’d stolen off a clothesline somewhere.

  Jana’s eyes were wide with fear. Knowing Jana, she was likely to either bite the man or kick him in the shins, and that was likely to make things worse.

  “Let her go.” I was surprised how steady my voice was, but I was more angry than scared. “I’ll be your hostage. Let her go.”

  The man with the cutlass just laughed. “We’re going to the big building. You three go first.”

  I could feel how angry Coltt and Nesh were without needing to look at them. My worst fears were confirmed when we reached the lodge, a building large enough for our whole village of about fifty people to gather. We used it for holidays or smoking meat or important meetings. Now, all of the women, children, and the men too old to go out on the boats were sitting in silence on the floor. I saw my mother sitting with my other two sisters in the front row. She looked up at me, scared and sick—and defiant. Letta, Nesh’s girlfriend, sat with his younger brother on her lap, holding him close to her and patting his head. They both looked close to panic. Six men who looked as worse for the wear as the man who held Jana were in the building. They had muskets. We were out of luck.

  I had a fishing knife in a scabbard on my right leg, underneath my trousers. Coltt and Nesh probably did, too. I had a small, curved knife on my belt, good for gutting fish and not much else. In my pockets, I had some dirty twine and a few small iron balls we used to help weight the nets. Nothing that would counter six muskets and a guy who looked like he knew how to use that cutlass.

  I knew Coltt and Nesh were waiting for me to make the first move. It’s been that way since we were kids. My heart was pounding, but I took a step forward, careful to keep my hands away from my sides. “What do you want from us?”

  The tallest of the men stepped forward. He stood a head above even the Skinner boys, but his neck craned forward. Dressed in black, missing several of his teeth, with a ripped and dirty cloth wrapped around greasy blond hair, he reminded me of a buzzard. He smiled, showing his rotted teeth. “We’ve been waiting for ya,” he said, and his smile wasn’t pleasant. “They said you’d be home after dawn.”

  “What are ya waitin’ for, Jammer?” A short, wiry man waved his musket toward the captives, and the women shrank back, wrapping their bodies around their children. “Just shoot the lot of them exceptin’ the boys.”

  Jammer took on a crafty look, and I noticed that one of his dark eyes turned out to the right, where an old scar ran along the brow. “I don’t think that’s necessary—yet.” Jammer stared at me. “Of course, it depends on what the boys say to my business deal.”

  “If you need goats and rabbits, take them,” I said, knowing that giving up our livestock would mean a hungry winter. “We’ve got no coin.”

  Jammer’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want your poxy goats. I want someone to go into the barrows and bring out something for me. Someone with magic.”

  “No one goes into the barrows.”

  Jammer leered and waved his musket toward the hostages. “Then I guess it’s time to start killing until we find someone with the guts to try.” He pulled back the hammer with his thumb.

  “I’ll go.” My voice sounded too deep, since I was trying not to let it waver. To keep from squeaking, my throat tightened, making it sound like the words came all the way from my toes. I figured that I couldn’t hide that I was shaking, but I hoped I looked less scared than Coltt and Nesh, although to give them credit, they were still at my back.

  Jammer smiled his unpleasant smile. “That’s a good boy. There’s a very special necklace buried down there. I want you to bring it to me.”

  “And then you’ll leave? Without harming anyone?”

  Jammer seemed to find my bargaining amusing. “Sure, boy. I’ll leave. And I won’t kill anyone if you do as I say.”

  I didn’t trust him. But I’d bought us time, and maybe the men would come back and save us. Maybe there’d be a way to warn them. If all the pirates wanted was a necklace, then why would the dead care? They weren’t using it. But Jammer wasn’t asking me to go to the cliffs where we’d buried our dead for generations. He was asking us to go into the barrows. We didn’t know who or what made the barrows. Maybe they were graves, maybe something else. The entrances had been walled up long ago, but the stories remained. Men had gone in, looking for treasure. No one came out.

  We left the barrows alone most of the time, except in the Dead Moon, when we brought offerings and left them by the walled-up entrance. The hedge witch took a goat and sacrificed it, letting the blood run down into the barrow. He left the carcass there and said the Old Words, something he called a binding spell. Next morning, the carcass was gone. I swallowed hard. If whatever lived in the barrows liked goat blood, maybe it would like Coltt, Nesh, and me even better.

  “Tell me about this necklace.”

  They didn’t send someone with us to the barrows. They didn’t have to. We knew what would happen if we didn’t come back with the necklace. The look in my mother’s
eyes bound me more to see it through than my word to Jammer. I didn’t doubt Jammer would kill them if we failed or ran off.

  “We could light a big fire and warn the men.” Coltt had obviously been giving some thought to our options.

  “One of us could run for the next village,” Nesh offered.

  I shook my head. “If we light a fire, Jammer will see it. We’d have to get the whole way to the other side of the cliffs to hide it, and if we do that, the men won’t know it’s for them. And it’s a day’s walk to the next village. Jammer said to be back by dawn. Even if one of us got there, he couldn’t get back in time with a mob.” I’d thought of the same things on the hike to the barrows. From the looks on their faces, Coltt and Nesh had reasoned through it, too. We had no choice but to go on.

  For autumn, it was a hot day. We were all sweating by the time we reached the barrows. I stopped and took a deep breath. The barrows were about a candlemark’s hard hike directly inland from the village. There were three of them, and they might have been mistaken for hills if the rest of the land weren’t so flat. I’d heard about the barrows since I was a kid. The old women warned children that the barrow wights ate children who wandered away from the village. At first, I thought it was just a tale to keep the children from running off. Then I noticed that even the hunters made a wide circle around the barrows. I’d gone out once with my father to look for deer, and I’d asked why we couldn’t just climb the “hills” for a better view. He’d gone gray in the face and told me they were an evil place and to stay clear.

  Now we were going into them.

  Jammer let us take equipment to unseal the barrows. Coltt and I had picks, and Nesh carried two shovels. The pirates seemed pretty confident we couldn’t use them for weapons. Hell, they hadn’t even cared about taking our knives. After all, they had muskets. I had the awful feeling that whatever was in those barrows wouldn’t be scared of either knives or muskets. Nesh also had a bag of reeds and a flint and steel for torches. Jammer had thrown us some dried meat and cheese with a laugh that told me our meals were numbered.

  “Can you feel it?”

  “Feel what?” Coltt asked. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, and so did Nesh. I could see the change in their expression. My magic felt jangly, like warning bells in my mind. It was the same feeling I got when there was a bad storm coming at sea, long before we saw the waves. That jangle had saved us many a time out on the ocean, warning us to head home before the squall hit. Only now, we couldn’t head home. We were heading straight into the storm.

  Then I heard it. It was faint, like a voice calling from a distance. I pictured the necklace Jammer had drawn with a stick in the dirt floor of the lodge. The more clearly I pictured it, the louder the voice called to me, directing me to its barrow. I didn’t like the voice, but I’d heard it before. I’d heard it in my dreams, bad dreams where a voice tried to call me out into the night, or onto the dark water. It was the kind of voice you knew in your bones only wanted you for your meat. I shuddered.

  “Let’s do this.”

  Coltt and I set to with the picks, while Nesh cleared away the rock from the entranceway. We took turns with the shovel. It was hard work, and it wasn’t until the sun was overhead that we broke through. Whoever had blocked that entrance wanted it to stay blocked. I wondered again what was down there, but I really didn’t want to know. I was afraid I’d find out anyhow.

  Cold air rushed toward us when Coltt’s pick broke through. It should have felt good in the autumn heat, but it smelled like dead things. I saw fear in their eyes as I lit my torch, and I was pretty sure they saw the same in mine. We picked up our picks and shovels and headed in. Maybe we’d need them to dig out another blocked area. Or maybe it just felt good to have something heavy to swing at whatever lived in the darkness. I went first.

  “How do we know where the damned necklace is?” Coltt whispered. Everyone down here was supposed to be dead, but I knew why he was whispering. It felt like we were being watched.

  “It’s calling. Can you hear it?” I could make out their faces by torchlight enough to see that they didn’t hear the voice. Damn. I didn’t like that it was only calling to me, not one little bit.

  I ignored the voice in my head that was screaming common sense and followed the other voice, the hungry one. Inside the barrows, there were tunnels leading in every direction. There were carvings on the walls, too, and just at the edge of the torchlight, I saw statues and slabs that might have been coffins. I didn’t look too hard. I was afraid something might be looking back. Whatever else was down here, it could stay. All we wanted was the necklace, and from the way it called me, I’d have said it wanted us to take it.

  “No rats. No spiders.” Nesh whispered, and I wasn’t sure it was to himself or to the rest of us. But I knew what he meant. We’d gone caving in the cliffs by the sea all our lives. Part of the fun was discovering gross stuff, like bat poop and creepy crawlies. But not here. Things might exist here, but nothing lived. I was now sure of that. We saw nothing.

  I don’t know how long we walked. Without the sun, time meant nothing. The voice guided us, showing me which of the turns to take, which tunnel to follow. It kept getting louder, and I followed it, even though inside, I wanted to run. Running seemed like a sane idea. Nesh carefully marked each turn by chipping an arrow into the wall. Just in case the necklace lured us in and didn’t want us to get out. It occurred to me that maybe the necklace and Jammer had different agendas. Why Jammer wanted the necklace, I didn’t know. Why the necklace wanted to be found, I wasn’t sure, but the suspicions I had weren’t good. I was glad Nesh marked the trail.

  “There it is.”

  “Are you sure?” Coltt didn’t move closer, but he leaned forward, peering through the shadows. The necklace lay beside a small box next to what was probably once a body. It was wrapped in a shroud, but both the bones and the cloth were brittle with age. The necklace wasn’t around the corpse’s neck. It was clasped in its bony hand. I got a glimpse of gold and white, but I didn’t have time to look closely.

  “I’m sure.” My sanity fought every step I took toward the necklace. My will made me keep moving. The necklace was screaming at me, screaming to pick it up. Something in me was very sure there was a good reason the necklace had been sealed in here. I didn’t think it was a good idea to remove it. Then, when I got closer, the screaming was so loud I couldn’t think at all. I just wanted to shut the damned voice up, and I tore it out of the skeleton’s hand. I didn’t care if every barrow wight in the place came after us, I just wanted that voice to shut the hell up.

  I held the necklace in my hand, and there was silence. Beautiful silence. On instinct, I grabbed the box that was next to the necklace. Damn, it was heavy, like it was made from lead. Something told me to take it, too, that voice of common sense I’d ignored since we headed into the cave. The necklace didn’t like it, but this time, I ignored the necklace. I took the box.

  Suddenly, images flooded into my mind, pictures that were so crisp and clear it was as if someone had opened a window in front of me, although we were deep in the cave. Sunlight. Ocean. A path through the forest. The urge to run back along the tunnels for the open air was so strong I was shaking with the effort to fight it. “We’ve got to go,” I said, the strain clear in my voice. “Now.”

  Whether they guessed that the necklace was pushing me or whether they just wanted out, I don’t know, but Coltt and Nesh found the energy to walk back a lot faster than we walked in. I didn’t trust the necklace. I checked at every turn, but each time, I saw Nesh’s marks. I couldn’t get out fast enough. Holding the necklace seemed to open up a whole new level of senses for me, something I’d never felt before in the magic. I could feel things moving in the distance, things that were cold and long dead. Some were angry, and for some, the hatred was so intense I cringed. Some were hungry. There were a lot of them, and I didn’t want to meet them. I couldn’t tell whether they liked me taking the necklace or not. I didn’t want to find out. Witho
ut saying a word, we ran.

  Jammer met us on the path to the village. He’d been waiting for us, even though we were back before dawn. “Did you get it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  I tightened my hand around the necklace in my pocket. “We had a deal. I give you the necklace and you leave. You promised you wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “Give me the necklace. I won’t kill anyone.”

  I knew Coltt and Nesh were watching me. Two more men came out of the trees to stand beside Jammer as if we might jump him and run for it. I pulled the necklace out of my pocket and opened my hand. The moonlight caught it, and it glowed. For the first time, I got a good look at it with my eyes, but I’d seen it clearly in my mind. It had a wide band of gold made from hinged squares. In the center was a huge, white oval stone that seemed to pulse and swirl. It looked alive.

  Jammer laughed and took it from me. He took the box, too. I thought the necklace might stick to my hand or refuse to let me give it away, but Jammer took it like it wasn’t some kind of cursed thing. Maybe it liked him. “Good job,” he said, with a smile I didn’t like at all.

  We walked back toward the village in silence. Jammer was in front of us, with Coltt, Nesh, and me in the middle and the two men following behind. The moon was full and high that night. But even before I saw, I knew. It was too quiet. The magic was gone from the village. Magic only leaves for one reason. It leaves when you die.