Quarter Square

by David Bridger

  “I will.”

  “You’d better.” His anguish was clear to see.

  I felt his gaze on our backs as we left. Poor bugger.

  Everyone accompanied us to the edge of the Wild and stood in a tight group to wave goodbye as we hurried into the woods.

  We couldn’t go very fast, because Min could barely walk in a straight line.

  A hundred yards into the trees I had another one of those muscle jumps and stopped in my tracks.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Min said. “It happens when you enter or leave the Wild.”

  “I remember it from Flo’s funeral. On the way in anyway. Not on the way out.”

  “You were drunk on the way out.”

  I couldn’t deny that. “So where are we going?”

  She squeezed my hand. “To find some friends who will help us.”

  “What are they like?” I asked when we settled down to rest.

  “They’re a neolithic tribe.”

  “Seriously? Stone Age people?”

  “Seriously. You’ve met them before. You might even remember when we get there.”

  “Where is there?”

  “They’re in the part of the Wild that roughly equates to Dartmoor, but we’re not going straight there. The most important thing is for us not to leave an easy trail for Tyac. He’ll be following us, all right, but we need to slow him down.”

  I had no idea which direction we’d been travelling during our night trek and was surprised to find the ground quite hilly inside the forest. I spent most of the time making sure Min remained on her feet, and I trusted her to know where we were going.

  My instincts screamed that I should be doing more than just following her lead. I should be doing something—anything—to protect her. Kill Tyac? Yeah, right.

  “What’s the point of running to these people? Aren’t we taking danger to them instead of to the square?”

  “There’s nowhere safer for us than with the Axe. Thousands of years ago a wise woman of the tribe developed a magical ward of protection that Tyac can’t break through. They pass it down from generation to generation, and they always fortify their settlements with it. If we can find them before he finds us, we’ll be safe from him as long as we stay there. And they’ll be safe too.”

  She stretched out and patted the ground beside her. “We should sleep. A couple of hours, then we’ll leg it again.”

  I lay down, and she snuggled into me.

  I thought my eyes had only been closed for a minute when she was shaking me awake again. “Come on, love. We have to go.”

  Dawn was breaking through the trees overhead, and I guessed we’d probably rested for about three hours. We creaked and groaned as we got upright and helped each other to jog on our way. We travelled through water often.

  “If we ran upstream, our scent would be carried downstream,” Min panted. “We always have to go with the flow to avoid leaving a trail behind us.” She paused to catch her breath. “You know all this. I mean, you’ve known it before, and you’ll soon start to remember it.”

  “Tell me what I need to know until I remember.”

  “Okay. He’ll expect us to run directly away from him in a straight line. Terror does that to people who are being hunted. The only way for us to escape him is to do things he doesn’t expect.”

  “That’s why we’re zigzagging so much.” I climbed from the stream and hauled her up the bank.

  “Yes. Also fugitives tend to seek high ground. They feel if they can put a mountain between them and their pursuers, they’re home free. And there’s always the chance that they might see a possible escape route from the top of a mountain or a high hill. Going around a lump in the ground might take longer than going over it, but if we show up on the skyline, he’s got us.”

  She veered onto a well-trodden wildlife path. “He’ll expect us to take the easiest route, so we’ll do the unexpected, even if that means doing everything the hard way. We’ll make good time on paths like this, but in an hour we’ll leave it and go through undergrowth for a mile or two in another direction.”

  “How can we throw him off our scent?”

  “We can’t. He’s a wolf at night. Well, he’s a man-shaped monster with the strength and speed and hunting instincts of a huge wolf. Best thing we can do is slow him down, so we can reach help before he catches up.”

  “Okay, so how do we do that?”

  “We’ll break our scent every time we change direction by walking backwards over our own tracks for ten minutes or climbing a tree and going sideways for a while. Then we’ll come back down in nettles, brambles, that kind of thing. It won’t stop him, but it won’t be the obvious route. We can’t do much about his tracking ability, but we’ll do everything we can to confuse him while he’s a man during the day.”

  “At least he can’t climb trees when he’s a wolf.”

  The look she gave me made my stomach flip. “He can?”

  She nodded.

  “Fucking hell. Can’t we just hide?”

  “When we’re tired and hungry and hurting, that’s all we’ll want to do. The closer he gets to us, the more we’ll want to find a hole to crawl into. And he knows that.”

  “But you can enchant him again, can’t you? If he catches us, you can sing him away like you did in the theatre?”

  “I told you, that won’t work again so soon. I don’t know how long there has to be between enchantments for the next one to work.”

  She stopped and faced me. “But you have a trick he doesn’t know.”

  “What trick?” And why were we were whispering?

  “Your wood magic.”

  “Tell me about that. Tara said I have wood magic, but I can’t feel it. How does it work?”

  “When Tara told me…I knew for sure that you were…you. Let’s take a breather and see if we can get you started.”

  We slumped to the ground. I leaned against a tree trunk on one side of the trail, while she did the same on the other side and picked up two fallen twigs from the ground.

  “You can do lots of stuff.” She crossed the twigs and held them in front of her like a diviner’s rod. “You could join these together as if they’d grown like that. Try.”

  I picked up two twigs and held them the same way, but nothing happened. I shrugged. “How?”

  “I don’t know how you do it. You just do. Let’s shut up for a while, so you can concentrate. Be quiet and see if you can find it inside yourself. It’s there.”

  I did as she suggested. After several minutes nothing had happened. I didn’t even know what it would feel like when I found it. I tried to still my thoughts, calm my breathing and relax my muscles.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I did so and continued to focus on nothing.

  “There you go.”

  I stared at the twigs in my hands. They’d blended together.

  “How did I do that?”

  She chuckled. “I don’t know.”

  “I wasn’t even thinking about doing it right then. I just cleared my mind.”

  “But you picked the twigs up with the intention of joining them. That’s the closest I can come to figuring out what it is you do. We’d better get moving again.”

  I practised joining twigs whenever I could, but mostly our day was taken up with an exhausting succession of climbs and descents, running along streams and struggling through tough undergrowth. I was totally lost. I simply had to trust that Min possessed some kind of homing signal that was taking us in the general direction of this tribe she relied upon so much.

  “Tell me about the Axe,” I asked again when we stopped for the night. “How did you meet them?”

  “They were here when we first arrived on these islands.”

  “When was that?”

  “Six thousand years ago.”

  A raindrop splatted on a broad leaf nearby, followed by other isolated drops falling through the canopy overhead. I started to weave a sheet of grasses and flat leaves, using magic t
o make us a shelter.

  “Why did we come here?”

  “Before we came to Britain, we lived for two thousand years on the plain where the North Sea is now. You know that used to be land, joining us to mainland Europe, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We lived many lovely lives on that plain. Before that Tyac hunted us all over Europe and Asia for four thousand years after Atlantis sank. We fooled him and sent him east to Russia while we escaped south into Sumer, where we lived for a century among Atlantean descendants. Iraq now.”

  She gazed into the past and smiled fondly. “The Sumerians called us Anunnaki for our magic. It meant ‘those who came from heaven.’ When Tyac tracked us there we gave him the slip again and ran northwest for months, until we came to the great river.”

  I hungered for information. Without knowledge, I would never be more than his quarry. “How did we escape him that time?”

  “We were in Eridu. It’s easier to live invisibly in a city. You died of old age in my arms, gazing out across the Lower Sea from our little villa.”

  Behind my eyelids I glimpsed a moonlit panorama. “On a cliff.”

  “On a cliff, yes.” She stroked my cheek. “And you were reborn a few months later in that same villa to my maidservant, Amalia.”

  “Does that happen often? Keeping it in the family?”

  “Only twice in all our time together.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Amalia? She was an Atlantean. Her grandparents were our dear friends, and I offered to employ her when she married Hud, an acrobat. They were only twelve. Her parents went mad.”

  “I bet they did.”

  “Anyway, by the time you could walk and talk, our bond was strong again. You knew things no normal child would. When you were seven years old, you remembered who we were.”

  I studied the peaceful seascape in my mind’s eye.

  “There was an earthquake,” Min continued. “Hundreds of people died, including Amalia and all her family, except you.”

  I saw it: broken buildings smoking in the dawn light; broken bodies buried in haste; grief and shock everywhere. And something else—something terrible moving in the ruins at night.

  “Tyac was there.”

  She nodded. “We’d had a bad feeling as the Anunnak community grew. Before the earthquake, people were trying to re-create the Atlantean culture. They were working from oral tradition and getting most of it wrong, but it was becoming recognisable, and we knew Tyac would come to investigate sooner or later.”

  I caught flashes of hurried encounters with fellow survivors, whispered conversations, rumours spreading like wildfire and dull shock growing into panic and terror.

  “Three mornings after the earthquake people spoke of a wolf-monster eating bodies. We ran immediately. It helped that he was accustomed to searching for an adult couple, not a mother and her young son, which is what we posed as during our escape. We stayed that way for thousands of miles across what is now mainland Europe. By the time we reached the great river—”

  “You mentioned that before. What great river?”

  “It was a powerful river that started in the Northern Lake and emptied into a wide estuary, where it met the Atlantic. The rivers we now call the Thames, the Rhine and the Seine all flowed into it. We first saw the river a long way from the estuary, near where Kent is now, and we joined a community as mother and son. A few years later we moved west along the river and lived with another community as husband and wife. Then we went west again as father and daughter. We’ve been through that routine so many times. But we only get the chance when you have a long life and Tyac doesn’t find us.”

  “He didn’t find us there?”

  “We had nearly two thousand years of freedom, living in hundreds of different hunter-gatherer groups and avoiding other Atlanteans like the plague.” She sighed happily. “That was the most peaceful time of all our lives. The climate was warm, and it was a good place to live, with great grasslands and forests, marshes and lakes. There were elephants twice the size of modern ones and lions and sabre-toothed tigers.” Her eyes shone.

  I tried to remember those lives but could only picture things from Min’s words. The sabre-toothed tigers in my mind looked like drawings from a children’s book. Maybe the only memories strong enough to stretch across lives involved my terror of Tyac.

  “It came to an end,” she said quietly, “as it always does, when we heard stories of a werewolf attacking settlements.”

  I reached back and felt the dread. It wasn’t difficult to find but was likely an accumulation from many centuries of running. Always running.

  “The clan we were living with at the time were on the move, migrating from the rising floodwaters that filled the fertile plains. We parted ways where the Thames joined the great river. They went north while we canoed west, right past Tyac as he travelled east on the riverbank. We abandoned the canoe and let the river carry it out to sea, then staggered ashore dripping wet and walked north. We climbed the hills and made ourselves a home in Dartmoor Forest with the ancestors of the Axe clan we’re on our way to see now.”

  She looked around at the clearing where we’d settled for the night. “The Wild didn’t exist in those days. Or rather the outside didn’t exist. There was no separation. Everything was wild.”

  “And the Axe are from the Stone Age,” I repeated. “Like cavemen?”

  “Not cavemen. Neolithic farmers.” She rolled her eyes in mock frustration.

  The rainfall hadn’t lasted long, but our shelter was finished in case it started again later. I wove a mat for us to sleep on. At least this was something I could do for her, although for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how my wood magic was supposed to help us escape Tyac.

  “They were good people,” Min said. “The tribe we’re going to see are their descendants.”

  “How come they moved into the Wild?”

  “A new wave of immigrants arrived.”

  “Who?”

  She pursed her lips. “Beaker people, I think. Can’t remember exactly. There have been so many. Whoever they were, it was some bunch of Bronze Agers who started clearing the forest. The Axe had to choose: leave the land of their ancestors or move into the Wild. No contest.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “We were living with them at the time.”

  “How long has it been since we saw them?”

  She squinted into the distance. “About three hundred years.”

  “What makes you think they’ll remember us?”

  “They will.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I’m their goddess.”

  I stared. What on earth would she would say next? “You’re a goddess.” I couldn’t stop a stupid grin from spreading across my face.

  “Yes.” She grinned back. “And you are my consort.”

  I shook my head at this new craziness. “How come they can remember me? You said I don’t look the same in every life.”

  “No. I always see something deep in your eyes, and sometimes there are physical similarities.” She curled the hair on my cheek around her fingers. “But to a stranger you wouldn’t look the same now as you did last time. The Axe will know you because you’re with me, and they expect my consort to accompany me.”

  “Bloody hell. Well, goddess, your palace awaits you.”

  We settled inside the hide and snuggled up. Min rested her head on my chest, and from her breathing I could tell she was ready to fall asleep. I held her, feeling her heartbeat and breathing in her fragrance.

  “What should I expect? When we meet them, I mean.”

  “They use sign language a lot, especially when they’re hunting, signing with only one hand.”

  She lifted her left hand from my stomach and flicked her fingers rapidly through a series of shapes.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means go to sleep.”

  She dropped off quickly.

  When I was
sure she was sound asleep, I worked my jaw and patted my cheeks, determined to stay awake and guard her.

  The earth released its sweet breath after the rain, heady and intoxicating. I sat cross-legged, closed my eyes and breathed slowly through my nose, drawing the ancient smell deep into me. It filled me with peace at the same time as it heightened my senses.

  The forest wasn’t as silent as I’d thought. The night was full of sound. Random noises formed shapes in my mind that I tried to interpret.

  Some of the familiar noises were related. My mind classified them as stealthy movements in several different directions that were coming closer.

  Doom dropped into my stomach like a brick. My eyes flew open, and I tried to look everywhere without moving my head. If something bad was coming, I wanted to see it before it knew I was aware of it.

  I debated when to wake Min. Sooner rather than later, I decided, to give her chance to come round before we had to run. Or fight. I stretched out to shake her and saw a face in a bush.

  I froze with my hand in midair. Blood pounded in my head, and my sense of hearing disappeared.

  So did the face. I wasn’t sure if it had ever been there or if my fear was playing tricks on me. I studied that bush while my heart rate calmed and the forest’s noises returned to normal.

  Nothing. Just a bush.

  Another face. And another. Peering at us from the bushes only twenty feet away.

  I jumped to my feet and stared around wildly, and two more faces emerged from the foliage.

  Min jerked awake, startled by my sudden movement.

  One of the faces pushed an inch or two through its bush and became clearer. At first I thought it was a child. It was about that height, and there was something childlike about its big eyes. But those eyes didn’t have a childlike expression. They looked old and hostile. And the skin of its dirty face was leathery and wrinkled.

  All five faces pushed through into the open, and three more appeared between them, all glaring at us. We were surrounded.

  Min scrambled to her feet and grabbed my hand.

  I cast around for a stick or something to wield as a weapon but found nothing useful, so let go of Min’s hand and prepared to fight.