Paths of Exile

by Carla Nayland

  He felt, rather than saw, Ashhere and Lilla exchange an anxious glance, and added hastily, “I know where we are. I just don’t know who rules here, if anyone does. The South Pennines is a mess. Half a dozen brothers and cousins were fighting over it for years, it got divided and recombined and redivided, and I don’t know who was the last man standing. Or even if Ceretic of Elmet managed to make them all tributary to him He started trying as soon as he became King, but the one thing they could all agree on was that they hated him worse than each other, so he was having a hard time.”

  “So we’re walking into a war zone?” said Ashhere, cheerfully. “Nice. I thought you said we weren’t going to fight?”

  “We aren’t.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Hide,” Eadwine said grimly. “Try to find a way through the forests to Elmet before we’re caught. Hope that the Three Ladies lose interest in us very soon. And hope that Ceretic is more inclined to honour alliances than Caedbaed of Lindsey.”

  “What else could I do?” Ceretic of Elmet snapped at his advisors. “The wretched woman turns up out of the blue in my hall, brat in tow, and throws herself on my protection in front of the whole court! You expect me to turn her away and lose face in front of everybody? She knew that, damn her. So she and the boy and those two tame trolls she brought with her are under my protection now, part of my household, and nobody lays a finger on them without making an enemy of me. Understood? So go and tell Aethelferth’s envoy that.”

  “Aethelferth won’t like that as an answer –”

  “That’s his problem. It was him that let them escape. I don’t see why I should be expected to wipe his arse for him.”

  “Lord King, you dare not anger Aethelferth.”

  “Dare?”

  “Er – it would not be wise –”

  “I am not Aethelferth’s lackey! He gets a free hand in Deira, I get a free hand in the South Pennines, that was the bargain. I’ve kept my half. Princess Heledd is my father’s sister, and that makes the boy my cousin. Aethelferth can’t expect me to betray a blood-tie. What does he really want?”

  The advisors exchanged glances.

  “What of the other atheling, Lord King?”

  “Eadwine? He’s no relation. Half-brother of my aunt’s husband? Aethelferth can have him for all I care. How much was he offering for his head?”

  Travelling through the forest was slow and arduous. At first the ground dipped to a low-lying wet area, with great stretches of swamp and stagnant water surrounded by willow and alder, and they made an unpleasantly damp and fly-plagued camp. On the next day, the ground began to rise slowly but steadily and the forest giants of oak, ash and holly dominated again, with a dense understorey of hazel and thorn. There were few paths, and these were only animal tracks that as often as not petered out or went in the wrong direction. Much of the time they had to find a way through the tangled undergrowth, an obstacle course of fallen trees, clinging brambles, impenetrable thickets, and waist-high bracken. Without the mighty strength of Drust and Beortred they would never have forced a way through. Several times they had to cross sluggish rivers, one of which was large enough to require a considerable detour upstream before they found a place shallow enough to wade across, which put them far out of their intended course. At least, though, the rivers did confirm that they were not actually going in circles, however much it felt like it. Ashhere was convinced that the trees moved when he wasn’t looking, deliberately blocking their path, but whether the forest was enchanted or not it was hopelessly confusing. An occasional glimpse of the sun or a star through a gap in the canopy was their only navigational aid. There was little light and less air. Animals – at least, Ashhere hoped they were animals – rustled in the leaf-litter or snuffled through the undergrowth, but they never saw more than a flitting shadow. In the nights, they sometimes heard wolves howling in the distance. It was autumn, so there were nuts and berries to eat, but it takes a lot of hazelnuts to fill the stomach of an active man. Lilla was invaluable here, for his family had taken the other route to advancement that had opened up after Caer Greu and had left the overcrowded Deiran homelands to clear uninhabited land on the March and the moors, land that their heirs would hold in perpetuity under folk-right rather than at the gift of the king. The March consisted of thirty-odd miles of virtually untouched forest and even on the moors the valleys were heavily wooded, so the settlers in their clearings relied as much on the surrounding forests for their food as on their embryonic farmsteads. Lilla could recognise edible fungi, and unearth wild roots, and find herbs to eat, but still there was never anything like enough. Drust tried to kill a squirrel, but it whisked away to safety in the canopy and it took so much trouble to retrieve his spear that he did not try again. After several days of this they were filthy, ragged, tired, hungry, limping on blistered feet, and despairing of ever getting out of the forest, and to make matters worse it became clear that Eadwine was beginning to fall ill.

  He did not complain, in fact he hardly spoke at all – which was a worrying sign in itself. He staggered on through the day apparently in a stupor, and as soon as they stopped for the night he slumped to the ground and lay like a dead thing until someone roused him and forced him to eat whatever dubious food they had managed to find. To expect him to share in the watches was out of the question, but after the first night his sleep was broken and troubled by dreams. There were no decisions to make or problems to solve, but instead of switching off his mind seemed to have decided to root among his troubles. He muttered and moaned in his nightmares, imagining that his father and brother were reproaching him for their deaths, scorning him for failure, sneering at him for the loss of Deira, even mocking him for allowing Treowin to take his place. He imagined Treowin captured and executed, and pleaded desperately with the Twister to take him instead. He relived the skirmishes at the bridge and the ford, except that this time his stratagems did not work and he saw his companions butchered despite his pleas for their lives. Worst of all were the dreams where he saw Aethelind captured, beaten, raped, enslaved and brutalised by Aethelferth’s soldiery, where he struggled and failed to reach her, where he begged her forgiveness and she cursed him for a coward and a fool. Lilla, who happened to be on watch, heard his rising distress when this dream came on the third night and could not bear to listen. It was a great risk to wake someone from a nightmare, for the wandering spirit might not have time to find its way back to the body, but Eadwine’s anguished whisperings wrung his heart. He shook Eadwine tentatively by the shoulder – and recoiled in shock. The heat was palpable even through clothing. Not a nightmare. Fever.

  In the morning, however, Eadwine’s temperature was almost back to normal and there was little sign of illness beyond an unnatural-looking flush to his face and his obvious exhaustion. Lilla feared they might have to carry him, but he managed to stagger to his feet with Drust’s help and stumble on, his shoulders sagging and his head drooping. Mercifully, the forest was now less dense. The land had started rising again after the last river, as one would expect, but it had kept rising and now the oaks and ashes were giving way to more open woodland of birches and rowan trees brilliant with berries. They felt a breeze, and for the first time in days they could see the sky clearly. It was overcast and dreary, with shredded veils of low cloud moving in the wind, but in comparison to the green gloom of the forest it seemed almost cheerful. The sparse woodland gave way to scrub, and then to a wide moor carpeted with heather, coarse grass and dwarf juniper, dotted with the occasional twisted rowan or stunted hawthorn. Behind them the forest rolled away into the distance like a green sea. Ahead, the moor continued to rise gently, literally until it met the sky. Low, damp cloud swirled down almost to the treeline, so that everything beyond a hundred yards or so faded into obscurity. A fine drizzly rain was partly falling, partly being carried on the wind. It was cold after the closeness of the forest. A buzzard soared overhead, circled as if to examine them, and then with a disdainful flick of a wingtip peeled
away over the moor. Ashhere shivered, and thought that perhaps the forest was not quite so bad after all. This was a bit like the moors of the North March, but somehow bigger, wilder, emptier and more threatening, the kind of place the gods would choose to banish giants and trolls and terrible monsters.

  An eldritch screech and a man’s yell froze his blood and he whirled round, grabbing for his sword with one hand and his hammer amulet with the other. Beside him, Beortred’s rugged face was ashen under its tan and his spear was shaking in his hand. Lilla was clinging to Eadwine, and it was not entirely clear who was holding up who. Drust was bounding across the moor, chasing a sliding shadow that ducked and dived among the low plants. He hurled his spear, a squeal of pain tore the air, he stooped and the squealing stopped abruptly. He came back, grinning in triumph, his spear in one hand and the limp body of a mountain hare dangling from the other.

  “Dinner,” he said.

  “They belong to the Great Mother,” Drust explained, propping the hare’s head reverently in the branches of a rowan tree and wedging the mouth open with a stick. “Ye let the spirit escape into the rowan, which is Her tree, and give Her the skin and the feet, too, and at the next full moon She will make him run again. Always She sends the hare when the Children of the Goddess are in great need.”

  “Right,” said Ashhere uncertainly, prodding the fire. “Er – that’s very nice of her. Very helpful.”

  He cast a pleading glance at Eadwine, who would normally have been fascinated by this rare glimpse into Drust’s theology and could have been relied on to rescue Ashhere from the conversation, but Eadwine was huddled shivering against the trunk of the rowan with his face resting against his knees.

  “How did you hit it from that distance?” Beortred wanted to know, threading chunks of hare onto his knife and holding it over the flames. “I could hardly even see it.”

  “Ye’re a blind Sassenach sheep,” said Drust, grinning. “We hunt hares at home.” He looked around at the desolate, soaking moorland. “This reminds me of home. A bit tame, though.”

  “This is tame?” Lilla exclaimed, edging nearer the fire. “I wouldn’t like to live where you come from.”

  “Ye wouldna last five minutes, laddie.”

  The friendly bickering floated over Eadwine, along with the scent of toasting meat, but he was not really aware of any of it. He was cold, a gnawing sort of cold that made his bones ache and seemed impervious to the fire, and the wound in his side was growing insistently more painful, like a great throbbing ball of flame. He tried to doze, which was a mistake, for he succeeded and was immediately assailed by another feverish dream, in which Eadric was standing over him, taunting him for being too late, again. I came as soon as I could, Eadwine tried to tell him. I did not know you were in danger. I would have died for you! It was no good. Eadric had never been much inclined to listen in life, and he was not much inclined to listen now. Eadwine tried to reach out to him, to catch his hand and make him listen, but Eadric’s form shimmered and faded away into a heap of ashes and a faint smell of smoke.

  “Wake up, lad.” A rough but kindly voice, and a big hand shaking his shoulder. “Come on, wake up. Real food for once!”

  Eadwine lifted his head and found Beortred leaning over him, holding out half a dozen lumps of roast meat skewered on a long eating knife.

  “Hare,” he was informed. “From your hairy friend. It’s hot, take the knife. You need a hand, lad?”

  Eadwine shook his head and reached out his left hand. The smell of the meat made his stomach turn over, but they would worry and fuss if he refused. He nibbled at the meat, slowly so they would not insist on giving him any more. It was not a very big hare, probably one of this year’s youngsters, and it would not go far between five. Better that it should be shared between the four who were most likely to survive. He had not mentioned his growing fears to the others, but he was sure that his wound was not healing as it ought. It should not hurt so much, and it was beginning to swell. Something was wrong, and he had an idea what it might be. Was that why Eadric was so insistent, he wondered? Summoning him? But he would not go to join his beloved brother, for a death by illness rather than by violence would not qualify him for entry to Woden’s hall. And in any case he would be ashamed in that company, with his father and brother unavenged.

  He slid the last piece of meat off the knife with his teeth, and swallowed it. Useful for camp-cooking, a knife with such an unusually long, narrow blade – His heart skipped a beat and then began to race to make up for lost time. He stared at the blade, turning it over and over in his hands. A knife, long of blade but very narrow, no more than half an inch wide…it had gone straight to the heart…your brother was stabbed in the back….stabbed in the back….stabbed in the back.

  “Whose knife is this?” he asked, but he already knew the answer.

  “Mine,” answered Beortred, turning and holding out his hand. Beortred. Captain of Eadric’s hearth-troop. The man who should stay at Eadric’s side to the last, to keep his back against the foe – or stab him in it.

  Eadwine did not relinquish the knife. His hands were trembling. He met Beortred’s eye and held it, the knife gleaming dully between them.

  “How did my brother die?”

  Beortred did not answer immediately. There was nothing necessarily sinister in that, for he was not an articulate man. But it seemed more than merely being stuck for words.

  “He was caught by a Bernician patrol. Only a few men with him,” he mumbled at last. “They were overcome.”

  “Were you there?”

  Beortred shook his head, lowering his gaze. “I was – separated. A – a fall from my horse.” Well, that embarrassing confession of clumsiness might have been enough to explain his hesitancy. Possibly. Eadwine said nothing. Most people were uncomfortable with silences and tried to fill them, especially if they had something to hide.

  Beortred was no exception. “I came upon them afterwards,” he continued. “It – it was too late. Had already happened. I – I could not believe it.” He lifted his eyes suddenly and met Eadwine’s glance. “I would have died for him!” he said passionately. The pain in his voice was raw, heartfelt. Eadwine would have sworn an oath that it was not faked.

  “A pity,” he said, very low and very even, not taking his eyes from Beortred’s face, “that you were not at his side when he died.”

  Beortred looked down, but not before Eadwine had seen something flicker across his face. Deceit? Certainly. Guilt? That as well, and something more.

  “Here,” he said, handing the knife back. “Use it well, Beortred. A most – distinctive – weapon.”

  Beortred’s normally ruddy face was pale and he was sweating as if he too was in the grip of fever. The brief glance he flicked at Eadwine could only be described as furtive. A man with a guilty secret, a man in deadly fear that he had been found out.

  He jumped to his feet and stamped out the fire with startling violence. “Come on then!” he shouted roughly. “Can’t sit here all day!”

  The rain fell all afternoon, a persistent soaking drizzle, and if anything the mist got thicker. It was as disorienting as the forest and a good deal more eerie. The going was no easier either, for the moorland flattened out into a great wide plateau and conditions underfoot got wetter. And wetter. Soon they were floundering in a peaty morass, each man trying to pick his own way between infrequent – and frequently illusory – spots of firm ground. The bare peat had the consistency of thick black porridge, too soft to stand on but too dense to wade through, and apparently without any firm bottom, as Beortred found when one bog-hole swallowed his leg to mid-thigh and then retained his shoe with a triumphant slurp when he managed to haul himself out. Tussocks of grass provided some support, but often would emit a squirt of foul-smelling peaty water when trodden on. The fluffy white heads of bog-cotton and the glowing colours of sphagnum moss they learnt to avoid, after Ashhere blundered into a deep quagmire up to his waist and it took the combined efforts of Drust and Beor
tred, using their cloaks to spread their weight, to drag him out. Lilla supported Eadwine, on the grounds that they were the lightest combination, but even with all their experience of bog-trotting on the moors of the March progress was unimaginably slow and filthy. There were no landmarks close at hand, and the mist made it impossible to aim for any distant mark. They were hopelessly lost, and once they even crossed their own trail and realised despondently that they had gone around in a circle.

  It was getting on for dusk when they finally won out of the bogs and onto drier and firmer ground. They had lost all sense of direction, and the failing light was little help, although they tried to guess the position of the sunset from the relative brightness of the sky and set off in the direction that three out of five believed to be north-west. Three out of four might be more accurate, for Eadwine seemed to be only half-conscious.

  The firmer ground was due to a line of rock outcrops and boulders, formed of some curiously harsh and abrasive rock that they had never encountered before. If you stumbled against a boulder, it seemed it would take the skin off your hands, if you stubbed a toe you looked for a hole in your shoe. Sometimes the rock lay in great flat slabs, easy to walk on – provided that you had not lost a shoe – but riven with deep cracks and chasms falling away into darkness. Some of the chasms were big enough to trap a foot and break an ankle, and in the gathering dark they were treacherous and difficult to see.

  Ashhere collided with a boulder that he could have sworn had not been there a second earlier, put out a hand to save himself, found that the boulder was apparently not there any more, and fell heavily. His shoulder bounced off the edge of a rock slab, and he felt himself falling backwards and downwards, with the great boulder spinning above him. He screamed, knowing it was about to crush him – and then he was lying on his back in springy heather and Drust was trying to make him stand up.