Paths of Exile

by Carla Nayland

  “It jumped out at me!” he gasped. “It was trying to crush me!”

  “Ye tripped,” Drust said. “Ye’re asleep on your feet.”

  “I tell you, it jumped out at me!” He whipped round, catching another movement out of the corner of his eye. A great towering figure, striding through the mist, following their trail. He screamed again.

  “A troll! It’s a troll!”

  He pointed, hand shaking, but the giant figure had disappeared, hidden by a swirl of fog.

  “I tell ye,” Drust insisted patiently, “it’s a rock.”

  “They’re trolls!” Ashhere wailed, sobbing with pain and fright. He clutched for his hammer amulet and found to his horror that it was gone. “The gods have deserted us – trolls all around us – no help – they’re coming to get us – they’ll kill us all –!”

  He clutched at Lilla in his panic, and found he was trembling too.

  “It’s c-c-coming,” Lilla choked out, “c-c-can’t you hear it –?”

  A low moaning, sighing sound came drifting along the trail.

  “Wind in the rocks,” Drust protested, but his voice was also shaking and he had gone very pale. He was not thinking of trolls, which did not figure in his bestiary, but of the White Fairy whose wailing cry summoned men to their deaths.

  Beortred strode forward, jaw thrust out, spear in hand.

  “Troll or whatever it is, it’s got me to get past first! Stay here!”

  “Wait!” Eadwine cried, roused from his daze. “Not one man alone!”

  Beortred half-turned, looking back over his shoulder. His face was pale, the mouth contorted, the eyes glassy with terror.

  “I couldn’t save your brother,” he said, with surprising intensity, “but by the Hammer I’ll save you!”

  Drawing his sword in his other hand, he leaped away into the mist. They heard the low moan again, this time something between a sigh and a hiss, like a heavy beast drawing its breath before a spring. Beortred shouted a war-cry, his voice defiant but ragged with fear. They heard the ring of metal on stone, then the moaning sigh again, and then they heard Beortred scream, a long-drawn cry that faded into silence.

  “It got him!”

  It was never clear who said that, nor who spoke next. Indeed, it may not have been spoken at all, but simply the same idea filling all their minds.

  “Run!”

  Chapter 7

  Ashhere came slowly out of stupor. A cold wind was blowing over the moor and a thin chill rain was falling on his upturned face. It was the rain that had roused him, although it must have taken a long time about it because his clothes were wet through. He shivered, sneezed, shivered again and sat up. Memory came creeping back like a whipped dog.

  He had run until his strength failed. How far? He had no idea. Where were his friends? He had no idea about that either. He bit his lip. How could he have been such a coward? To run away, leaving his lord behind in danger – there was no greater shame. No excuse, not even if a whole herd of trolls were after them.

  A grey dawn was creeping over the moors. He must have been lying here – wherever here was – all night. He peered into the ever-widening circle of gloomy light around him. Tussocky grass, heather turning from purple to biscuit-coloured, fluffy heads of bog cotton. He tried standing up, and discovered that he was still apparently in one piece, with only some more bruises and a stiff back to show for the night’s flight. He had been lucky, far luckier than he deserved.

  His horizon now widened but all it showed him was flat moorland in all directions, disappearing into a damp greyness that was a hybrid between mist and drizzle. He stared around, hopelessly. How could he even begin to search for the others? Which direction to start? A movement caught his eye and he whirled round, hand on sword-hilt even though he knew trolls could not move in daylight, but it was only a miserable-looking sheep with a sullen teenage lamb at its side. They stared at Ashhere for a moment and then galloped away into the gloom, their hooves beating a tattoo long after they had vanished from sight.

  That gave Ashhere an idea. Perhaps sound travelled further than sight in this miserable wilderness.

  “Hallooo –!” he hailed, with all his might.

  Nothing but the sigh of the wind through the grass.

  “Hallooo –!”

  His heart leaped. Just at the instant he had called, he was sure there had been an answer that was not an echo. He waited. Nothing, no – yes! There it came again! He shouted in answer, running over the moor in the direction of the voice, until he slithered down over the lip of a peat hag and met Drust doing the same from the opposite direction.

  “The others –?” he gasped.

  Drust had found them, but Ashhere’s relief was short-lived. They were in far worse shape than he was. Lilla had stumbled into a bog hole in the dark and wrenched his knee so badly that he could hardly walk. Eadwine was with him – it was a measure of their panic that Eadwine had managed to run at all – and his fever had risen again, far worse than before. He lay shuddering and shaking, sometimes conscious of their presence but more often lost in some terrifying delirium. Now he thought he was dead and languishing in the dread realm of Hel, where the cowards suffer for ever in terrible cold with fell beasts gnawing on their rotting flesh, while his father and brother caroused in Woden’s hall and laughed at him.

  Ashhere reached for his hammer amulet, shuddering at the thought of this terrible fate, and shuddered again when he realised he had lost it among the troll-haunted rocks the night before. He was certainly not going back there to look for it, though the prospect of struggling through this monster-haunted wilderness without Thunor’s protection was too fearful to contemplate.

  They looked at each other, feeling how acute was their reliance on Eadwine. Without him they were hopelessly lost, in more than just geography. If it occurred to any of them that if they had followed his orders at the Ouse they would not have been here to get lost, they did not say it.

  “Oh, bugger,” Ashhere muttered.

  The others did not disagree.

  “We canna stop here,” Drust declared.

  Nobody disagreed with that either, but like many uncontroversial statements it was not very helpful. Eadwine had told them to go to Elmet, which was north-west. But how far? And was it still north-west from here? And which direction was which? And where was here anyway?

  Ashhere took hold of Eadwine’s hand and brushed his matted hair back from his face. “Lord,” he whispered. “Please wake up.”

  Eadwine’s eyes flickered open. “I told you – you’d – regret it,” he muttered. “Poor Beortred – what a way –”

  The sentence terminated in a hiss of pain, although he had not moved and nobody had touched him. His face was a ghastly greenish-white, beaded with great drops of sweat.

  “Where must we take you?” Ashhere begged. “Please tell us.”

  “Nowhere – idiot –” With an effort Eadwine drew a quivering finger across his throat. “I’m dying – give me – the kindness cut –”

  “No!” Lilla cried. “No, no –!”

  Eadwine gasped, and there was a desperation in his face that froze Ashhere’s heart. “That spear – it ripped the gut – can’t you smell it?”

  Ashhere swallowed. He had caught the stench of putrefaction from the wound and had begun to fear the same thing himself. A pierced gut was inevitably a death sentence.

  “Nonsense,” he said firmly, hoping that if he ignored the problem it would go away. This philosophy had worked for most of his life, and he saw no reason to change it now. “It – er – it probably needs clean bandages. That’s all. Drust and I can carry you. Lilla can lean on a spear, or hop, or something.”

  “Without food?” Drust said quietly.

  And there was the problem. It was days since they had last eaten properly, and their strength was visibly ebbing away. Even the short distance Ashhere had covered to meet Drust had come near to exhausting him. Unless they could find something to eat, he and Drust would so
on be unable to do any more than sit down and starve beside their friends. And they could hardly hunt while trying to carry a sick man. What Eadwine was asking was the most – the only – sensible thing to do. But that did not mean Ashhere could steel himself to do it.

  “We’re not leaving you,” he said flatly. “We’ll stay with you til the end.”

  A ghastly laugh. “Remember – to cash in – my head –”

  “Oh, dear Lord!” Lilla wailed, and it was not at all clear whether this was addressed to Eadwine or to Lilla’s god, Frey Lord of the Vanir, protector of farmers.

  It was then that Ashhere remembered the sheep. Trolls do not keep sheep. And just as he worked out what the sheep must mean, carried on the wind there came a faint sound of hope. A late-rising rooster crowed to the sky. Somewhere down there was a farm.

  “Saxons! Saxons!”

  The cry ran ahead of Ashhere as he slithered down the last of the steep and awkward path that had taken him down through the woods. How did they know, he wondered, when he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet? He supposed it was his blond hair, or his beard, since Brittonic men generally followed the peculiar custom of leaving the moustache but shaving the rest of the face. He was alone and unarmed, not at all a pleasant situation for him. But they had agreed that they would have trouble fighting a farm full of determined peasants, so their best hope was to beg – which meant that whoever went should look as unthreatening as possible so as not to be mistaken for a bandit. They could not all go, since Lilla and Eadwine would be unable to run if the inhabitants turned nasty, and as Ashhere spoke some of the language the task had fallen to him. He had followed the approximate direction they had heard the cockerel, and found that the moorland was cut abruptly by a steep-sided glen, full of tangled woods and with an unseen stream rushing in the bottom. He had followed the top edge of the wood, come across some sheep tracks, and followed them until he could see that the glen opened out into a much larger valley filled with oak forest. All the sheep tracks converged at the head of a muddy path that wound down through the woods into this large valley, obviously leading to the farm where the sheep and the rooster lived.

  The path ended in a large clearing. The stream from the glen chattered down to meet a much larger river, and around the confluence on both sides of the stream was a large open field dotted with a dozen or so cows. A little above the field, on a flat area beside the stream, a rather tumbledown drystone wall enclosed a large area, a cross between a yard and a paddock, with a midden on the side furthest from the stream and a cluster of rectangular wooden buildings in various stages of decay at the other. One had a thin stream of smoke rising from the thatched roof, and was therefore presumably the house. It looked in rather better repair than the others. Chickens scratched around the buildings. A couple of ponderous sows and a busy herd of well-grown piglets rooted in the yard and in the fringes of the surrounding woods. A fenced vegetable plot occupied one end of the yard, mostly empty apart from weeds, but still sporting some spinach, a few cabbages and a row of turnips.

  Ashhere stopped at the end of the track, where a gate stood open. He held up his hands, palm outwards to show he had no weapon, and composed his face into what he hoped was an ingratiating smile.

  Four women were clustered by the doorway of the house. A pale child aged about fourteen, nervously clutching a shovel, a statuesque middle-aged matron wielding a wood-chopping axe, and two young women, one holding a kitchen knife and one with a cleaver. The one with the cleaver was extremely pretty, with sparkling brown eyes and a cloud of curly dark hair with a ribbon tied in it. She looked Ashhere up and down, and gave him a flirtatious smile. The matron elbowed her crossly.

  “Er – ladies,” Ashhere began, groping for words in Brittonic and elevating them in rank because he could not remember the word for ‘goodwife’, if there was one. “I am traveller. I have hunger.” He patted his stomach, which obligingly growled for effect. The pretty woman laughed, and was elbowed again. “Give me food.” A rarely-used word surfaced, just in time. “Please.”

  He had addressed himself to the large matron, partly because she was the eldest and partly because she was tapping the axe against her meaty palm in a decidedly menacing way. But it was the young woman with the kitchen knife who answered. She was a striking-looking creature, slender and small-boned, with honey-coloured skin, straight glossy black hair pulled back in a braid, and cool watchful green eyes that reminded him of a cat’s.

  He failed to understand a word she was saying, and shook his head unhappily.

  “Lady. I do not understand. Talk slow. Please.”

  She obliged, pronouncing each word slowly and clearly as if to a slow-witted child. This, Ashhere thought, furrowing his brow in concentration, is a bit better. The dialect was somewhat different to the Brittonic spoken in Eboracum Vale, more rounded and flowing. It was reminiscent of Drust’s Pictish, and he remembered that Pictish was supposed to be a hybrid of the language of the Attacotti – who lived in stone towers at the end of the world in the north and ate raw fish – and a form of Brittonic. Presumably this form of Brittonic. He should have sent Drust down, but too late now. At least he understood most of it. She was saying her name was Severa – an outlandish name if ever there was one – and asking him who he was, where he was from, what he was doing and where he was going.

  He tried to reply, but his Brittonic was not good enough for him to begin to explain, and anyway he was very tired and very hungry.

  “Food,” he repeated, more urgently. “Eat. Food. Please.”

  The exotic girl – Severa – said something to the pretty one, who hurried into the house and came back with a steaming bowl and a spoon. Ashhere took it gratefully, thanked her, and turned to go. It was not much between four, but they probably had nothing to spare and it was a great deal better than he might have expected.

  They shouted angrily after him, pointing at a bench, and he understood that he was supposed to eat here.

  He shook his head. “No, lady. I go. I have friend.”

  Severa said something in a sharp tone, reverting to her rapid speech again, but he guessed from her glance around and her sweeping gesture that she was saying his friend should come out of hiding and join him.

  He shook his head again. “My friend is sick. He cannot come. I go.”

  Another torrent of words, out of which he gathered that he was to bring his sick friend to the farm. He shook his head again. The experiences at the bridge and the ford had been salutary ones. Everyone was a probable enemy, even four farm women. He was not going to risk bringing Eadwine into a trap from which there might be no escape.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no!” he insisted vehemently, shaking his head until he felt dizzy. “We do not come. We have danger. I go. Please.”

  Severa tut-tutted impatiently, gave him a withering look, took the bowl and the spoon from him, and disappeared into the house.

  Ashhere watched miserably. Had he just lost any prospect of a meal? He thought about using violence, but the large matron was still hefting the axe and in his present weakened state he was not entirely sure of his chances unarmed even against four women.

  Severa re-emerged, this time carrying a heavy-looking cooking pot. She emptied the bowl back into it, inverted the bowl to act as a lid, hung the spoon from the handle, and handed it all to Ashhere.

  He blinked. The pot was reassuringly heavy and smelled appetisingly of garlic and onions.

  “Thank you!”

  She smiled, a brilliant smile that lit up her remarkable face and striking eyes, and shooed him in the direction of the track as if he had been a stray chicken. As he passed through the gate, he heard the matron take a deep breath and begin a vigorous scolding.

  “Oh, do be quiet, Blodwen,” Severa said, after about five minutes. “Until Samhain Eve what I say goes, and in any case it’s done now, so you might as well save your breath. Luned, lass, he’s gone, you can put the shovel down now.”

  Blodwen was still in full spate.
/>   “– giving our dinner to some stinking tramp –”

  Severa shrugged. “Surely we can spare a dish of pottage for a couple of starving travellers. Anyway, you were complaining this morning that I’d put too much garlic in it. So look on it as an opportunity to make another batch to your own taste. Gwen can finish the butter.” She cast a despairing glance at the pretty dark girl. “Gwen. Is there anything you won’t flirt with?”

  “Did you see the shoulders on him?” sighed Gwen, gazing dreamily up the path. “D’you suppose all Saxons are that big?”

  “He couldn’t’ve been a proper Saxon,” Luned protested shyly, “because he didn’t have any horns. Uncle says they have horns on their heads. Like this.” She put the shovel down and demonstrated.

  Severa snorted. She had a low opinion of Luned’s uncle. “Perhaps they shed them, like stags do in the spring,” she said flippantly, and immediately wished she hadn’t. Luned did not understand sarcasm.

  Gwen heaved another sigh.

  “Didn’t he have lovely blue eyes –”

  “Gwen,” reproved Severa in passing, “at least do some work while you drool.”

  It rained on and off most of the day, and the mist never lifted off the moors. Gruffuyd, Blodwen’s half-witted son who in theory was the shepherd – although privately Severa thought that the sheep probably herded him rather than the other way around – brought the flock down earlier than usual, wet through, cold and despondent even though he had successfully found the missing ewe. Even the sheepdog, normally impervious to weather, looked miserable. Severa thought of the tramp and his sick friend up on the hills, and bit her lip.