From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  “I said, the cow has gone dry,” the woman repeated. The rasp of iron on stone echoed her words. “You know we can’t go on until the harvest with three mouths and no milk.”

  “Woman, I’ll butcher—”

  “You will not.” She slid to the floor and faced him, bandy-legged and shorter on her own legs than when sitting on the stool. “The meat will rot in a month, we have no salt. Three mouths will not last the summer on the cow’s meat, man.

  “Three mouths will not last the summer.”

  She was an iron woman, black-faced and black-hearted. She did not look at Lena, who cowered as her mother stepped forward and held out the wood-hafted knife to Teller. He took it, his eyes as blank as the pit of his mouth opening and closing in his beard. “Perhaps … I can hunt more…?”

  “Hoo, coward!” mocked the woman. “You’re afraid to leave the clearing now for the woods devils, afraid to go out the door to piss in the night!” The reek of the wall across from the pine-straw bedding proved her statement. “You’ll not go hunting, man.”

  “But—”

  “Kill her. Kill her!” she shrieked, and Lena’s clear voice wailed hopelessly as a background to the raucous cries. Teller stared at the weapon as though it were a viper which had crawled into his hand in the night. He flung it from him in a fury of despair, not hearing it clack against the whetstone or the ping! of the blade as it parted.

  The woman’s brief silence was as complete as if the knife had pierced her heart instead of shattering. She picked up the longest shard, a hand’s breadth of iron whose edge still oozed light, and cradled it in her palms. Her voice crooned without meaning, while Teller watched and Lena burrowed her face into the pine needles.

  “We can’t all three eat and live to the harvest, man,” the woman said calmly. And Teller knew that she was right.

  “Lena,” he said, not looking at the girl but instead at his cloak crumpled on the earthen floor. It was steerhide, worn patchily hairless during the years since he had bartered eggs for it from a passing peddler. That one had been the last of the peddlers, nor were there chickens any more since the woods demons had become bolder.

  “Child,” he said again, a little louder but with only kindness in his voice. He lifted the cloak with his left hand, stroked his daughter between the shoulder blades with his right. “Come, we must go for a little journey, you and I.”

  The woman backed against the hut wall again. Her eyes and the knife edge had the same hard glitter.

  Lena raised her face to her father’s knee; his arm, strong for all its stringiness, lifted her against his chest. The cloak enveloped her and she thrashed her head free. “I’m hot, Papa.”

  “No, we’ll play a game,” Teller said. He hawked and spat cracklingly on the fire before he could continue. “You won’t look at the way we go, you’ll hide your head. All right, little one?”

  “Yes, Papa.” Her curls, smooth as gold smeared with river mud, bobbled as she obediently faced his chest and let him draw the leather about her again.

  “The bow, woman,” Teller said. Silently she turned and handed it to him: a short, springy product of his own craftsmanship. With it were the three remaining arrows, straight-shafted with iron heads, but with only tufts remaining of the fletching. His jaw muscles began to work in fury. He thrust the bow back to her, knots of anger dimpling the surface of his bare left arm. “String it! String it, you bitch, or—”

  She stepped away from his rage and quickly obeyed him, tensing the cord without difficulty. The wood was too supple to make a good bow, but a stiffer bowshaft would have snapped the bark string. Teller strode from the hut, not deigning to speak again to his wife.

  There was no guide but the sun, and that was a poor, feeble twinkling through the ranked pines and spruces. It was old growth, save in slashes where age or lightning had brought down a giant and given opportunity to lesser growth. Man had not made serious inroads on this portion of the Forest even before the Plague had stripped away a third of the continent’s population. Fear had driven Teller and his wife to flee with their first child, leaving their village for a lonely clearing free from contamination. But there were other fears than that of the Black Death, things only hinted at in a bustling hamlet. In the Forest they became a deeper blackness in the shadows and a heavy padding on moonless nights.

  They were near him now.

  Teller lengthened his stride, refusing to look to the sides or behind him. He was not an intelligent man, but he knew instinctively that if he acknowledged what he felt, he would be lost. He would be unable to move at all, would remain hunched against a tree trunk until either starvation or the demons came for him.

  Lena began humming a little tune. Though off-key, it was recognizable as a lullaby. Teller’s wife had never bothered to rock Lena to sleep, but their elder daughter, born before the panicked flight into the wilderness, had absorbed enough of the memories of her babyhood to pass them on to her sister. It was not the Plague that had taken the girl, nor yet the demons. Rather, there had been a general malaise, a wasting fed by seven years in an environment that supported life but did nothing to make life supportable. In the end she had died, perhaps saving Teller the earlier agony of a journey like the one he made now.

  Far enough, he decided. A spruce sapling thrust up from among three adult trees. Though its bole was only a hand’s breadth in diameter, the first branches were a full ten feet in the air. It formed a post firmer than that on which Sebastian was martyred.

  “Now, Lena,” Teller said as he put the girl down, “You’ll wait here by this tree for a while.”

  She opened her eyes for the first time since she had left the house with her father. The conifers around her were spearpoints thrust through the earth. Black-green branches shuddered in a breath of wind. The girl screamed, paused, and screamed again.

  Teller panicked at the sound and the open terror of her bright blue gaze. He stopped fumbling at the cord knotted about his waist and struck open-handed, his palm smudging the soot on her cheek. Lena bounced back against the spruce trunk, stunned mentally rather than physically by the blow. She closed her mouth unblinking, then spun to her feet and ran. Teller gulped fear and remorse as he snatched up his bow to follow.

  Lena ran like a startled fawn. She should not have been able to escape a grown man, but the fearsome shadows came to her aid. When Lena dodged around the scaly bole of a hemlock Teller, following, was knocked sprawling by a branch. He picked himself up, picked up also the arrows he had scattered as he fell. He nocked the one with the most fletching, though he could not have explained to a questioner what he meant to do with it. “Lena?” he called. The trees drank his voice.

  A rustle and a stutter of light caught his attention, but it was a squirrel’s flag tail jerking on a spruce tip. Teller eased the tension on his bowstring.

  There was another sound behind him, and he turned very quickly.

  * * *

  Lena, trembling in the crease of a giant that had fallen so long ago that the trees growing around it were of nearly equal girth, heard her father blundering nearby. Her frightened whimper was almost a silence itself, no more than the burr of a millipede’s feet through the leaf mould in front of her nose. She heard Teller call, then a ghastly double cry that merged with the twang of a bow. No more voices, then, but a grunt and the chock! of something hollow crushing against a tree trunk.

  For a moment, then, there was real silence.

  “Coo-o?” trilled a voice too deep to be birdlike. “Coo-o-o?” it repeated, closer now to Lena though unaccompanied by the crackling brush that had heralded her father’s progress. “Coo?” and it was directly above her. Almost more afraid to look up than not to, Lena slowly turned her head.

  It was leaning over the log to peer down at her, a broad face set with sharp black eyes and a pug nose. The grinning lips were black, the skin pink where it could be glimpsed beneath the fine, russet fur. Lena’s hands swung to her mouth and she bit down hard on her knuckles. The creature v
aulted soundlessly over the log. It was about the height of Lena’s father, but was much deeper in the chest. Palms and soles were bare of the fur that clothed the rest of it. Its right hand reached out and plucked away the arrow that flopped from its left shoulder. A jewel of blood marked the fur at that point, but the creature’s torso and long arms were already sticky with blood not its own.

  The hands reached down for Lena. She would have screamed again, but her mind was folding up within her as a white blur.

  “Coo-ree?” questioned a liquid voice in Lena’s ear, and she blinked awake. A girl with a shy grin was watching her, a child so innocent that Lena forgot to be afraid. Even though the child was as furry as the adult who must have brought Lena to the grassy hollow in which she now lay. A smile that bared square, yellowed teeth split the fur and the little—shorter even than Lena though more compactly built—creature held out a double handful of hemlock nodules, painstakingly knocked clean of dirt. The skin of her hands was a rich onyx black in contrast to the broken, copper-colored fingernails.

  As shyly as her benefactress, Lena took the roots and crunched one between her teeth. The nodule had a rich, almost meaty, flavor and a texture pleasant to her gums. She smiled back. A twittering at the crest of the hollow caused her to spin about and gape at the broad-chested male creature she had met in the woods, now with a smaller companion to either side. On the right was a four-dugged female, slimmer than the male and slightly hunched. The remaining woods man— but Lena’s mind still shrieked demon, troll—was another child, obviously male and of lighter coloration than his parents. His cub-like roundness had not yet given way to ropy adult musculature, and his nervous smile was a reflection of his sister’s.

  Lena stood. Her body had gone cold and the bright sunlight seemed suddenly to glance away as from a block of ice. The adult male had washed since she first saw him: his pelt was smooth and clean save for the smudged left shoulder. Another drop of blood oozed to the surface and the female, seeing it, cooed in vexation and nuzzled the wound. Her teeth chopped as she cleaned it. The male pushed her gently away, his eyes locked with Lena’s. Trembling with courage she had not known was hers, Lena bit off another hemlock nodule, then extended the remainder of the bunch toward the watching woods folk. The three before her began to caper with joy, and a warm, furry arm encircled Lena’s waist from behind.

  * * *

  They were foragers and therefore by necessity wanderers, the family of which Lena was now a part. After a month in the bowl which chance or ancient vulcanism had pocked into the Jura Mountains, they spent a pair of weeks combing a stream with a different sleeping place every night. Food was plentiful in that spring and the summer it wore into: roots and berries, spruce tips and the tender shoots of other vegetation; birds’ eggs while they lasted, but never the birds themselves. Lena was almost too young to remember the last of her parents’ hens. Still, learning that they had subcumbed to nest raiding, not slaughter, calmed a remaining bristle of unease.

  She tried not to think of Teller at all.

  Kort was the father of the family, even-tempered but awesomely strong. Rather than climb a hardwood to pick nuts before the squirrels had combed them, he would find a boulder or the largest fallen limb in the neighborhood and smash it against the tree trunk, showering himself and the ground with the ripe offerings. It was Kort, too, who trudged off on day-long journeys to the cave in which the family wintered, carrying in a bark-cloth basket the dried excess of their gleaning. The winter stores were kept beneath a stone too tight-fitting for a mouse to slide around and too massive for a bear’s awkward limbs to thrust aside.

  But if Kort’s strength was the shaft which supported the family’s existence, it was the quick mind of Kue-meh, his mate, which provided directing force. Her fingers wove the strips of cambium into fabric as smooth and as supple as the wool and linen of the villages beyond the Forest. The woods folk used the cloth for carrying bulky goods, not as clothing, though Lena once ineptly wove a crossbelt for herself when her shift disintegrated. Kue-meh guided the foraging, judging its progress and determining when and where the family would move. She could tell at a glance which hickory nut was sound and sweet, which had been emptied in its shell by a worm.

  At first the children were never wholly alone, for there were dangers in the Forest. Not the bears, so much, for their strength and ugly tempers were outweighed by clumsiness and their preference for other food. Even Lena was soon able to scramble up a tree before a peevish grunt gave way to a charge. Lynxes were more of a potential threat, for they were swift and had the blood-lust common to all cats. Still Chi, the female woods child and smallest of the three, weighed forty founds by now and was too strong and active to be a comfortable victim.

  The wolves, though, the wolves.…

  They feared nothing very greatly, those lean gray killers. Fire, perhaps; but the woods folk feared it more and Lena learned to avoid the flames after being cuffed fiercely away from a lightning-slashed tree. From spring through fall the wolves padded through the Forest alone and in pairs, tracking a plump doe or a healthy fawn to rip down and devour. Like most powerful carnivores, the wolves chose their prey not for its weakness but for its taste—and after years of chaos and the Plague, some of them had found a taste for men.

  Lena’s long legs, and the new sense of freedom brought by roaming the Forest with folk who thought it home, not exile, took her and Faal, the young male, almost into long-toothed jaws. They were digging root nodules, using sharpened stakes and cloth bags while Kue-meh wove. Faal went around one side of a huge hemlock, Lena the other—the far side. The empty woods, a chorus of blacks and greens and browns, spoke to her suddenly. Dropping her equipment with a silent giggle, Lena darted off among the aisles of trees.

  Faal heard the pad of her feet—months in the wild had trained Lena’s step, but not beyond notice of ears that had been born there. He followed her without calling or even thinking. Faal was swiftly gaining his father’s deep chest, but he showed signs of being in Kort’s mental image as well. The two children were gone a minute or longer before Kue-meh looked up from her own work and Chi to notice that her other charges were gone. She hooted in anger, but Faal was already beyond earshot and Lena was ahead of him.

  She was a shuttle racing over a loom of needles and spruce twigs. Faal was stronger and his lungs might have brought him abreast of her in time, but Lena’s legs would have been the envy of a doe. Faal on his stumpy limbs could not outsprint the girl. But the two wolves which converged on Lena in a grove of beeches were quicker yet.

  Lena stopped, too startled at first to be frightened. Faal had aimed a playful tackle at her before he saw the reason for her halt. He flopped to the leaf mould instead and skidded. The nearer of the red-tongued wolves lowered its tail and hunched.

  Lena stepped without thought between Faal and the gray killer. The wolf drew back. It was more than the scent of a true man, the reivers with iron and fire, where only woods folk had been expected. There was something within Lena herself that allowed her, a slim six-year old, to face down a pair of wolves. They stood for an instant, each of them half again the girl’s size; then they bolted. Only their fresh spoor was visible a moment later when Kue-meh raced into the glade, Chi under her left arm and a six-foot pine knot in her right hand. Lena and Faal were pummelled heavily for the run, but Kue-meh spent the rest of the afternoon in thought. Afterwards she let all three children stray, so long as her own two kept close to Lena.

  * * *

  Early hunger and a vegetarian diet should have stunted Lena’s growth. Instead she gained willowy inches to quickly overtop Faal and Chi. The woods folk were a cleanly people and the grime that had disfigured Lena’s first six years disappeared in the ice-fed stream nearest the hollow in which she joined the family. It never returned. Her skin was clear and did not, even bare to the sun and the wind, take on the swarthy cast of her parents’. In the summer she was a warm brown, traced with the thin scabs of bramble cuts; in the winter her complectio
n counterfeited the creamy yellowness of old ivory polished by loving hands.

  For all the beauty of her body and skin, Lena’s hair was her crown. It had never been cut, a result of her mother’s apathy rather than any interest in the girl’s adornment. Washed out and laboriously carded with twigs by all four of the woods folk, it flowed down her back like liquid gold. Loose, it was a bright flood behind her as she ran—but then it snagged and caught and diminished. Faal began to plait it in the evening imitating Kue-meh’s bark weavings. Simple at first, the patterns grew increasingly complex and changed nightly. The hair was Faal’s delight. During the long winter evenings he spent hours braiding and reopening her tresses, then braiding them again. Lena bore the attention, but her mind strayed beyond the boy’s gentle fingers.

  * * *

  There was another predator in the Forest, though Lena was twelve before she encountered it. She was miles from the high crag the family then occupied, following Kort to the winter cave, when a horn wound in the near distance. Kort’s reaction was to panic. He danced in a little circle of indecision, then began scrambling up a princely fir tree. The bag of stores jerked with every hunch of his back, scattering bunches of hemlock nodules. Kort’s feet and long right arm—his left held the bag and, in any case, would not lift above shoulder height since the arrow wound had healed—had shot him halfway up the trunk before he realized that Lena’s progress was much slower than his own. There was more than a difference in strength. Though the woods folk did not have opposed big toes either, their control of their foot muscles was much greater than that of Lena’s sub-species.