The Stone Arrow

by Richard Herley

  * * *

  They found his body in the brambles just beside the path. When they saw what had been done to it there was time for no more words.

  They ran.

  Even if they had looked, or known how to interpret it, they would have made no sense of the churn of tracks on the path towards the village. Sticky mud sucked at their feet as they ran, obliterating a set of barefoot marks. A stitch was rising in Sturmer’s side. Overhead the trees made a tracery of grey and green and brown. The faster runners – Morfe and Groden and Boonis – were fifty paces ahead, and even Munn was in front of him, getting further away. Sturmer realized he was being left behind, dragged back by his age, his years, too many years. Domack overtook him. They were on level ground again. Sturmer reached for the effort to try and keep up, the stitch twisting in his side. He saw Morfe turn a bend and become hidden, then Boonis, Groden, and the others.

  Sturmer’s toe caught an exposed root and he fell headlong. He struggled to his knees and to his feet, and with both hands clutched to his side ran on.

  He came out on the clearing by the gorge and its bridge. Immediately he saw that the others had stopped, uncertain whether to go on or turn back. On the far side of the bridge, a few yards from the edge of the gorge, stood a slim, dark-haired figure. Hernou. She had been bound at ankles and wrists; a gag tied her mouth. Otherwise, she looked unharmed.

  “It’s a trap!” Sturmer yelled, as he saw Morfe taking the first stupid step on the bridge, on the logs above the buttressing.

  “We can’t go back!” Morfe called out. “We’ve got to go on and get her safe!”

  “No! Come back!”

  Morfe ignored him. He continued across the bridge. The others watched as he gained firm ground and turned to them. “See! It’s safe! None here but Hernou!” He ran to her to untie her bonds. She was shaking her head furiously.

  Sturmer watched in disbelief as Boonis and Tamben went next on the platform, followed by Emetch and Haukan. Groden ran from the back of the group and shouldered Dopp aside to get on the bridge. “She’s my wife! Let me pass!”

  Just as Groden set foot on the bridge he became aware of ropes rising from the ground and tautening on the far side, heavy weights plunging in the trees. There was a jagged report, a splintering sound, and with a roar the buttressing was coming away from its joints with the platform and the logs were rising and twisting and giving way. The bridge was collapsing.

  Groden leapt back. Haukan, the last across, was unable to scramble to safety and Groden saw him falling with the bridge and into the gorge. An oak beam caught Haukan with its tip and he was pulped against the rocks.

  As he looked up Groden saw Hernou and the four men on the far side; and, from nowhere, from the branches of a tree, from the sky, dropped a white and scarlet creature, an apparition, a god, plumes of white feathers on its elbows and knees and head, taller than a human being, much taller, its face hideously striped with white and scarlet. Tsoaul’s teeth showed yellow as softly he hit the ground.

  Emetch and Boonis were backing away. Tsoaul suddenly crouched and Groden noticed he was holding a spear, a god’s spear with tufts of white feathers. He jabbed it in their direction. Emetch and Boonis turned and ran, across the clearing, to the edge of the gorge, and into space, their legs running in nothing as they fell for a few seconds, shouting as they went, and vanished into the rocks and ferns at the bottom.

  Now Tsoaul turned on Tamben. He stood frozen, mute, unable to cry out or react. Tsoaul’s muscled arms thrust the spear forward, powering the blue and cream scalloped blades of the tang through Tamben’s jerkin and on into his breast. Tamben, incredulous, looked down to watch the spear and with it his life being twisted and withdrawn.

  Only Morfe had retained his presence of mind. On its length of sweat-polished ashwood he swung the head of his felling axe and Tsoaul ducked under the hiss, lunging from below with the bloodied point of his spear, glancing off Morfe’s chest; but the power and momentum of Morfe’s own axe-swing took him off balance. Tsoaul looped the end of the spear forward and snagged at Morfe’s heels. Morfe lost balance and fell.

  Tsoaul seemed shorter, more man-like, as he dropped to one knee, a knife in his hand. In a moment he had drawn the blade across the big tendons at the back of Morfe’s knees. Morfe had been hamstrung.

  “Shoot at it! Shoot!” Sturmer screamed, remembering for the first time that they were armed with bows.

  But before they could fit notches to their strings the apparition had melted away into the forest, leaving Hernou standing, Tamben dead, and Morfe writhing on the ground.

  The bridge had been wrecked. There was no way to cross. To reach the survivors they would have to detour to the head of the gorge.

  “Stinn, Mastall!” Sturmer shrieked at two of the men with bows. “Stay here! If Tsoaul returns, shoot him! The others, come with me!”

  They broke into the trees on the right of the path, running uphill and to the east, keeping the gorge beside them on their left, hands up to ward off branches tearing at their faces and necks, and Sturmer, driven on now by blind dread, dread of what would happen to Tamis and his children, the village and himself, had lost count of the able men destroyed: Ockom, Gumis, Emetch, Holmer, Parn … the victims of the raid … Coyler, Boonis; Haukan crushed by the timber in the gorge … the victims of the bears, Tsoaul’s bears …

  At the head of the gorge the soil was leached and poor and it was here that the briers and brambles grew in greatest profusion. Sturmer ran into the first of the stout loops of rust-coloured stems with their red and green leaves. He did not feel the barbs at his shins, but there was something wrong with his legs and his feet were not working properly and he was falling, off balance, crashing into needles and hooks and thorns. Red appeared everywhere in spots and lines across his forearms and face. He ripped himself free and stood up. Domack was running past him, managing to avoid the thickest briers and right and left things were happening in the trees and Domack was upside-down and being hoisted from the ground at unbelievable speed. Struggling and screaming he was yanked impossibly high into the loftiest boughs of a giant beech. A cluster of bags glimpsed coming down against the light struck a spike and white chalk-rubble spewed forth. Now Sturmer raised his eyes to see Domack seventy feet from the ground, eighty, at the height of his rise, hanging motionless, suspended in the forest ceiling: straight and vertical the rope hung to the ground.

  It quivered, and Domack began to make his fall.

  The ending of his screams left a vacuum. High above the ground the empty counterweights had come to lodge against the branch. They moved once or twice as the weight at the other end of the rope settled itself, and then were still.

  Sturmer struggled free of the brambles. Groden, Feno, Munn and the others started walking forward, not taking their eyes from the place, the one place. The one place ahead.

  “There may be more traps!” Sturmer said.

  He had broken the silence. They passed the spike; they passed Domack’s body.

  “Here!” Deak shouted, ten yards to Sturmer’s right. By a tall tangle of briers, between it and three hazel bushes, he had found thin branches laid side by side, covering an eight-foot square loosely disguised with litter.

  Groden took a piece of wood and prodded at the covering. It gave way at once, and when they saw the spikes below they cleared the rest of the branches aside. The spikes waited, in uneven ranks and files, their tips soaked and dark, made so by a coating of wolf’s-bane. Sturmer looked down into the pit. He thought of Parn and Coyler, of Coyler’s hands reaching up.

  “Fill it in,” he wanted to say, but he remembered Hernou and why they had been running, and, grimacing, turned aside and motioned that the others should follow.

  Mastall and Stinn, the men left on guard with bows, had fled. As Sturmer emerged from the trees he saw that Hernou had gone too; and Morfe, previously lying on his face, was now supine with his arms spread wide. With a cry of anguish, Groden pushed past the rest of the group and ran to h
is friend’s corpse. He went down on one knee and lifted the dead shoulders, cradling Morfe’s head against his arm. The eyes stared vacantly. There was blood on the teeth. And, round the neck, was the ragged wound where his throat had been cut.

  Something in the grass caught Sturmer’s eye. He stooped and rubbed the white-stained blades between his fingers, and, holding his fingertips to his nose, smelled the gritty white paste. He tried to think what the smell could be. And then it came to him.

  Chalk.

  * * *

  Fallott grinned, despite the driving rain and the filthy grey mud. Pode and Bico came behind him, leading the team of goats with their wicker panniers, and in the rear the boy Bewry toiled and struggled to keep up. They were walking men, men who could cover fifty miles a day on the Flint Lord’s roads that went out like the arms of a spider’s web from Valdoe and penetrated far into the coastal strip and the flat country north of the downs. Bewry would have to learn to walk too if he wanted to be a trader.

  Fallott turned and caught Bico’s eye. They had made Bewry walk behind, where the mud was worst. The seven goats, each with two panniers, were heavily laden with salt and tools: axes, arrowheads, and blades of all kinds, already pressure-flaked by the Valdoe craftsmen. The weight of them made the goats’ hoofs sink deeply, turning the trackway to mire.

  On their right the trees opened to give a glimpse of grey-green ocean flecked with white. Fallott scanned the expanse of scrubland as if by instinct, scarcely seeming to move the eyes in his head.

  “Two miles more,” Bico said over his shoulder to Bewry, who was hot-faced and near to tears.

  “We may go on to Hooe,” Fallott said, naming a village twelve miles further east.

  Bewry said nothing. He knew that Fallott was lying. Fallott had been told to go to Burh: he would not dare disobey. Bewry hated Fallott. He hated Pode and Bico too, and he hated the overseers and the soldiers, but most of all he hated the Flint Lord, who had taken him and his sister and murdered their parents and tribe, and whose men had told him his sister would be given to the miners if he did not behave himself on the road with Fallott’s team.

  Fallott drew up his sheepskin. He was a tall, hard, heavy man with watery blue eyes and lifeless brown hair tied in a topknot. The fingers and thumb of his left hand had been smashed and badly set, and under his clothes a puckered scar showed where an arrow had entered one of his lungs: the injury that had ended his days in the Flint Lord’s garrison and brought him by way of the armoury to take charge of a trading team. He was a veteran of three expeditions to the foreign coast for slave-raiding. At that time he had been younger and stronger, but even today he was with good cause shown deference by those in his control. Bewry, a thin child with brown hair and eyes, and an open, small-featured face, was twelve years old. His sister was sixteen and had been showing reluctance to settle with the reality of her new existence; thus the boy had threatened to prove a nuisance. Putting him on Fallott’s team had been deliberately done.

  The ground rose into a grove of blackthorn. Fallott spoke an order and the pace of the team increased.

  Soon they would be arriving in Burh.

  6

  After finishing the man he had hamstrung, Tagart put the woman over his shoulder and made his way north-east through ankle-deep wet leaves, uphill and towards the yew. He covered a wide curve, avoiding a thicket of old hazel where the fallen branches lay in a tangle, festooned with lichens: such woodland was impossible to traverse in silence, at least when carrying a load. Instead he kept to the open forest where ground cover was sparse.

  On the way he collected the rope he had saved from the hummel-skin trap – the one that earlier he had found had been sprung by a badger during the night – and picked a tree suited to his purpose: an oak, squat, densely foliaged, on one of the thicker slopes, less than two hundred paces from the yew.

  He dumped the woman and, taking one end of the rope, grasped a low branch and pulled himself up. He climbed into the middle of the tree, where the trunk forked into five boughs, and fed the rope over a lesser branch a little higher up.

  Over the gag, the woman’s eyes regarded him fearfully as he climbed down and jumped the last few feet to the ground. He knelt beside her and tied one end of the rope between her ankles, knotting it to the ropes forming her fetter. She began to struggle desperately as without a word he hoisted her into the tree, pulling smoothly arm-over-arm on the rope, scarcely slowing as she came into contact with the great bole, slid past it and ascended to the lesser branch. She hung there, bound and gagged, head downward, in the centre of the tree. Her arms, tied behind her back, hung a little away from her body. The weight of them would become a strain that would get worse as each minute passed, within an hour a torture. Tagart did not care. He let out a little of the rope and she came to rest upside-down in the forking of the boughs. He made the rope fast and for the second time climbed up.

  “I’ll be back later with food and water,” he whispered. Upside-down, her eyes and face looked peculiar, as if a mouth should be across her forehead. She was making noises of protest under the gag. The skins Tagart had tied to her body hung in loose folds: with a curious delicacy he rearranged them, tucking a flap between her thighs.

  He descended to the ground.

  At an easy pace he trotted downhill, towards the river. He was still daubed with chalk paste, parts of it dyed scarlet with blackberry juice, and he was going to bathe. That was his immediate task.

  But afterwards?

  He had a hostage, and she could be used in a variety of ways. He had taken an idea from the details of the ceremony she had so foolishly described, but now his larger plan had run out and he did not know how to proceed. With some surprise he realized that he had not expected to survive this long. He had dispatched more of them than one man acting alone had any right to. The labourer; two shot in the dry valley; three in the gorge; one speared; another with his throat cut. Twenty-six killed in the raid; an unknown number killed and injured by the bears; and perhaps others in the deadfalls, and in the hoist-trap at the head of the gorge. Thirty-four certainly dead. The true total was probably double that. But how to proceed? So far he had applied the skills the tribe had taught him, for hunting and luring and waiting. He had observed that the farmers were slow-witted and easily driven to panic. As individuals, few or even none of them were his match. That was the conclusion he had reached. He was wary of underestimating an adversary; but he was just as wary of underestimating his own powers of observation and deduction. From the things he had clearly seen, from the way they had reacted to his attacks, he felt safe in discounting any spark of resourcefulness in those who had, by virtue solely of superior numbers, murdered his wife, his child, his family, and his whole tribe.

  Again he felt the tide of revulsion rising, and again he furiously forced it back. His will had not failed him yet – and it would not do so until he had finished. He knew he was pushing himself on, fighting himself on two fronts, refusing to acknowledge any of the new thoughts that threatened to weaken him and make him give up. But with every act of blood-price, with every man killed, he found it harder to maintain that pitch of loathing which had spurred him to go alone into the den of a nursing mother bear. He did not think he would be able to do the same thing again.

  He wished he had someone to talk to. He wished he could ask Cosk what to do.

  He reached the river and sank beneath the surface to rid his hair and beard of chalk. The river was swollen. He could taste fresh mud in its currents.

  The rain. It had been raining for four days. Was that too long? Perhaps not. The wind was in the west, and even though the crops had been soaked the ground was still dry. Once the flame got hold the corn would burn. If he fired the fields west of the river, the flames would not be able to spread to the east bank, and the forest and he himself on that side would be safe. He imagined the western part of the palisade consumed, leaving that side of the village open. He saw the farmers showing themselves, putting out the flames, and
he saw himself waiting.

  He strode from the river and ran along the bank.

  * * *

  The fly agaric ceremony came to an end at midnight, leaving the village sorrowing for ten more men lost. Only seven of their bodies had been brought back: Sturmer had not tried to recover those in the gorge. Mourners with torches were keeping vigil over the Dead Ground.

  Inside the Meeting House, the boy Bewry was lying awake and unable to sleep. His mind was alive with the sight of the corpses and with the stories he had heard of the Forest God and the disaster he had brought. One of the farmers’ women was still missing, and her husband and his friends were going to search again tomorrow. They had asked Fallott to help.

  “I am sorry,” Fallott had said, carefully.

  They were sitting in the Meeting House, eating the food the villagers had provided. It was late morning, raining hard outside. The flints were laid out on the floor for the farmers to make their choice. Bewry was sitting by himself, leaning against the wall, a beaker of water at his knee. He was slowly getting through the gruel of lentils and beans. He could scarcely taste it: he was just grateful to be still, no longer walking. His feet were blistered and his whole body ached. He was too young to walk so far.

  “I am sorry,” Fallott said. “We must leave at dawn tomorrow. We have other walks to make.”

  “But you are a soldier, Fallott!” said Sturmer, the head man. “With your help we can fight Tsoaul and get Groden’s woman back!”

  “I was a soldier. I am a soldier no longer.”

  “Then leave us Pode or Bico. They know the methods of the Flint Lord and how to fight.”

  Pode and Bico looked at each other in amusement before going on with their gruel.

  “Pray to the Earth Mother,” Fallott said earnestly. “She will save you.”

  “No,” Groden said. “This time we must fight. Please, leave us Pode or Bico.”

  Fallott held his spoon on one side and considered his words. There were many farmers, and, discounting the boy, only three in the walking team. “They are with me because we need three men,” he said. “It is not safe to walk with less; most teams have more.”