Paths of Exile

by Carla Nayland

  “I know that, but nothing left at all? Not even a shoe, or a belt-buckle?”

  “They carried him away to their lair?” Lilla suggested hesitantly.

  “Where are the footprints? Look at the trampling we managed to make, all along the top of the rocks here. Everyone says trolls are big. Heavy. They ought to leave more of a trail than five men.”

  “They flew away?” Drust suggested with a wicked smile, flapping his arms up and down by way of demonstration.

  “Trolls can’t fly,” Ashhere said scornfully. “Everyone knows that.”

  Drust shrugged, and went back to contemplating the view. In his opinion, beasts that didn’t exist might just as well fly as not, but it wasn’t worth arguing over.

  “But what happened?” Eadwine persisted. “It’s as if the earth opened up and swallowed him!”

  Ashhere, who had been standing near a crevice in the gritstone pavement, jumped back hastily and eyed it with some alarm. Drust grinned and Severa, who was sitting on top of the tor spinning wool and watching their growing mystification with some amusement, laughed.

  “Your friend is frightened of something?” she called down. Eadwine translated briefly from Anglian, and she looked thoughtful. “In the village, people say there are cracks in the earth that lead to Annwn, to the Otherworld. At Samhain Eve Arawn the Lord of Annwn leads the dead out to ride over the earth, and if they find you alone out of doors they may drag you back with them.” She crossed herself hurriedly. “But those portals are near Navio fort. Not here.”

  “How does she know?” Ashhere demanded. He eyed the tor askance as if he expected it to gape open and swallow them all on the spot.

  “How do you know trolls can’t fly?” Drust retorted.

  “All right,” Eadwine interrupted, before the argument could get going. “So he didn’t fly away and the earth didn’t swallow him. But he certainly isn’t here. So where did he go?”

  Drust looked round with more interest. “Ye think he wasna deid?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “But we all heard him scream,” Lilla said, shuddering at the memory.

  “Maybe he wasn’t killed,” Ashhere began, “and crawled away later….” His voice trailed away, as they all shared a mental image of Beortred dying in pain and cold and hunger in this wild place.

  Eadwine shook his head vigorously. “That makes no sense either. He would have left some sort of trail, and Lilla would have seen it today. Oh, damn! What are we missing?”

  “A rare species of flying troll?” Severa suggested, handing round the bread.

  Eadwine put his hand over his eyes. “Oh, don’t you start.”

  She laughed. “Myself, I think it most likely he fell from the rocks, confused by mist and fear. Many have done so. But it’s strange there is no trace. Could your friend have missed his tracks?”

  Eadwine shook his head, swallowing a mouthful of bread and cheese. “Lilla could track the west wind.”

  “And anything heavier than a bird leaves marks in this soft ground. Why, even I could track Ashhere back to your camp in the boulders, that first day. And the trail you made is plain to see, even after three weeks.” She gestured along the edge, where the scar of churned peat was an untidy black stripe. “It’s a mystery, to be sure.”

  “That’s it!” Eadwine jumped to his feet, dropping the remainder of his bread. A lamb and its mother, ever alert for such an opportunity, scuffled for it and the mother won. “Severa, you’re a marvel!”

  She was laughing at his sudden enthusiasm and the baffled looks of his friends. “I am? How so?”

  “How could you get away from here without leaving a trail? By following the one that’s already there!”

  “By the Hammer, you’re right!” Lilla beckoned them forward and pointed to a single footprint among the jumble of churned peat, the first clear print they had seen. It was blurred and smudged by rain, but the outline of heel and toe were clearly visible. It was pointing south.

  Lilla put his foot alongside it. “It’s about the right size, too.”

  “Beard of Woden!” Ashhere breathed. “It’s as if he was leaving us on purpose and covering his tracks. But why?”

  “’Tis tae do with yon strange knife, no?” Drust said shrewdly. “I saw ye looking hard at it, and I saw he didna like it. But I dinna ken why.”

  “I’ll explain later,” Eadwine said. “Lilla, could you tell if these prints leave the main trail?”

  “Yes, now I know what to look for. You stay here until I tell you to come on.”

  Eadwine turned to Severa, who had insisted on accompanying them. “Do others go this way, Severa? Shepherds? Hunters?”

  She shook her head. “No. We come from the valley up to the hills and back down again by the straightest way. Besides, if a shepherd had been along here there would be sheep tracks, no?”

  “Good point. Where do you get to, if you keep on in this direction?”

  “If you go far enough, the Great Stone Edge and Heatherford village. Blodwen comes from there, and Gwen is to marry one of the farmers after Samhain. By the valley it is an afternoon’s walk from our village.”

  “And beyond that?” He scrambled up to the tor beside them. “Can we see from up here?”

  They crowded onto the topmost platform. The wide shelf of moorland that swelled above the hafod had gone, and from this tor they could see over a subsidiary ridge and down into the Derwent valley. Opposite, a low hill crowned by twin rocky outcrops just poked out of the trees, and beyond it more flat, dark moors swelled above the forest and rolled away into the west.

  “That is Kyndyr,” Severa said, pointing due west to a cliff-sided plateau. “To its north you have the Bleak Hills, and between them runs the army-path in its valley –”

  “An army-path, did you say?” Eadwine interrupted. “You didn’t mention that before.”

  “You didn’t ask. Is it important?”

  “It might be. Where does it go?”

  “Through the hills to another fort, that my grandfather called Ardotalia. And then on north and west to the mountains and the sea, to his own country.”

  “And in the other direction?”

  She swept her hand southwards in a wide gesture. “Around this end of Kyndyr, then along the far flank of the Withy Hill – you can only see the summit from here, but it is a long ridge in that direction – and so between the Withy Hill and the Swine Hill – ”

  “The conical one?”

  “Yes – and so down to Navio fort and the mines below the Shivering Mountain – you see it there, through the gap, it is connected to the Swine Hill by a long ridge. Arawn sleeps beneath it, and when the miners go too deep and disturb him, he turns in his sleep and the mountain shakes and the rocks slide down. Or so it is said.”

  “Mines? What do they mine there?”

  “Lead, and silver, and the Tears of Annwn.”

  “Which are –?”

  “Blue and white and yellow stones. Like these.” She reached for the second string around her neck, not the one that held the cross, and lifted out a pendant of dull pewter set with a large blue stone veined with white. “They are valuable, so I keep this hidden. My grandfather was given these by a grateful patient, a matched pair. He gave them to me when I was betrothed, and had them set each into a pendant, one for me and one for my husband.” She slipped the pendant back down the top of her dress, and pointed again into the distance.

  “Opposite the Shivering Mountain is the Portal of Annwn, the gate into the Otherworld, where the icy-cold Water of Annwn rushes out and flows past Navio. At Navio the army-path branches. One way goes south and west to Calchvynydd, the Limestone Hills. The Lord of Navio is at feud with the Lord of Calchvynydd, and his men patrol a great dyke that cuts the road, and no-one goes that way except the two lords and their soldiers.”

  So if Beortred had found this army-path, he could not have taken the south-west route.

  “And the other branch?”

  “East,
along the Water of Annwn, until it joins the Derwent.” She pointed due south, along the snaking valley of the Derwent. “After it has passed the Withy Hill the Derwent turns more east than south and runs below the Great Stone Edge. It is like this edge we are standing on – flat moorland that stops suddenly in cliffs and then slopes that fall steeply to the river. The army-path crosses the Derwent at our village, Derwent Bridge, then it goes along the north bank towards Heatherford, and then it climbs above the village and crosses the Great Stone Edge by a flight of steps cut in the rock, and then it goes east over the moor. The moor is not wide there, and Blodwen says that you can see where the moors stop and the road goes down into the endless forest. Where it goes after that you would know better than me. You are the only people in my lifetime to have come from that direction.”

  “Wait a minute,” Eadwine said, sorting the names and what he could see of the topography into some semblance of order. “You say that if you keep following the moor in this direction, above the valley, you would get to this Heatherford? Where the army-path crosses the moors?”

  “Yes.”

  “From here, how long would it take to walk there?”

  “Two, three hours.” She glanced up at the sun. “You have time, but when you cross Chilbage Brook – you can just see the fold in the land – you are on Heatherford ground. Their shepherds will see you and they will not welcome four strangers, armed. They will think you are thieves – perish the thought – and I will not have you picking a fight with them – Blodwen’s family and Gwen’s future husband.”

  “I had rather we were not seen, in any case. The fewer people know we are here, the better.”

  “Better get off the tor, then. We aren’t exactly inconspicuous up here. Your friend is waving for you, anyway. ”

  Lilla had found the place where they had floundered up out of the morass and on to the firmer ground of the edge, a sorry trail of bog holes and splattered peat. And more than this, he had found a few prints, just one or two and none of them very clear, but undoubtedly continuing south along the edge. They followed the direction, past more outcrops of weirdly shaped rocks, until the land began to fall away south over a wide heather slope into a shallow valley.

  “You had better stop here, Steeleye,” Severa said softly. “Heatherford’s sheep are grazing Chilbage Brook today, and I see Rhun and Rhonabwy with them.”

  Eadwine spoke a few quiet words, and all four men went immediately to ground, vanishing into the heather or behind boulders with hardly a sound.

  “That’s a pain,” Ashhere grumbled, when the reason for the halt had been pointed out. “Will they have gone if we come back tomorrow?”

  “I think I’ve lost the trail,” Lilla hissed. “I last saw a print two or three hundred paces back, and he could have gone anywhere down this slope. It’d take days to search it properly, and the other side looks much the same. Is there a ford over that brook, where we might pick it up again?”

  “You can ford the stream anywhere,” Severa answered, when this query was relayed. “Plenty of places you can boulder-hop across without even getting your feet wet. You think your friend came this way? To find the army-path?”

  “Possibly,” Eadwine said cautiously. “It’s almost certainly the quickest way out of the district, and it looks as if he – or at least somebody with his size of feet and one shoe missing – was going somewhere.”

  “Then I’ll go and ask Rhun and Rhonabwy. Unless he was very careful, somebody would have seen him, whether he went west past Heatherford village or east over the Edge. Strangers in these parts are news.”

  “Can you trust them?”

  “I won’t tell them about you, what do you take me for? I’ll say I’m looking for a lost ewe – their sheep and ours are always getting mixed up – and ask for any news. Rhun will tell me all the happenings in Heatherford down to an escaped chicken. He loves to gossip. You stay here.”

  She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, the piercing shepherd’s whistle that carries over hill and dale, and the two distant figures on the sheep-dotted hillside jumped up, peered across the valley, and waved back.

  Eadwine watched her bound lithely down the slope through the heather and hop nimbly across the brook. Graceful as a running deer, he thought, like the spirit of this wild but strangely beautiful landscape –

  Drust nudged him for a second time.

  “I said, can ye trust her?”

  “If she meant us harm she could have sent word to the fort and got us arrested, or murdered us that first night in the hafod when we didn’t set a watch, or just left us on the moors to starve. Anyway, you have a better idea? We must find out whether Beortred did come this way.”

  “Why would he?” Lilla wanted to know. “Was he looking for us, after he escaped from the troll?”

  “Not for us, I think,” Eadwine muttered darkly.

  “What –?”

  “Shh, she’s coming back. I’ll explain later.”

  “He was this tall, Rhun says,” Severa reported, holding her hand above her head to indicate someone roughly the same height as Ashhere. “Heavy-built, strong, hard-looking. Scarred face. Not the kind you’d want to get into a fight with. Definitely not wounded or injured. Fair hair and beard, that’s how Rhun knew straight off he was a foreigner. Filthy, wet, ragged. Left shoe missing. Cloak might have been green. Carried a spear. Sneezed a lot.”

  “That’s him!” Ashhere said excitedly. “That’s him exactly!”

  “Rhun saw him in the middle of the day, about three weeks ago. He was carrying a hare on his spear, coming from the north across the moors. When he struck the army-path he turned east onto it, walking fast and looking over his shoulder and all around, like a man in fear of pursuit. The last Rhun saw of him was a black dot, still following the road across the moor as fast as he could go.” She looked around at the nodding heads and the puzzled faces. “So your dead friend is alive and well and hurrying back where you came from? Why would he do that?”

  Eadwine had considered long and hard before deciding to tell his companions his suspicions about Beortred and Eadric’s death. He had no proof, and to spread slander about another man was a shameful thing. But if he was going to expect them to risk their lives hunting down an assassin, they had a right to know why.

  Lilla was the first to find his voice. “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said, into the shocked silence. “He seemed so – so honest. I can’t imagine him as a murderer.”

  “Neither can I,” Eadwine said heavily. “But how else explain the knife? I’ve only ever seen one knife that shape in my life.”

  “But his own lord!”

  “I know.”

  “Ye’ll have tae kill him,” said Drust.

  “I have to have proof first,” Eadwine answered evenly. “There is no honour in killing the wrong man while the guilty one goes free. But if it is true that he murdered my brother, yes, I shall kill him. Eadric would expect no less.”

  The words, so quietly and calmly spoken, were somehow far more menacing than a furious oath sworn by all the gods in turn. Ashhere shivered. There were occasions when he sensed something out of the ordinary in Eadwine, something that made him superstitiously wonder if the family really did descend from the gods, and it frightened him a little.

  Drust was scowling. “’Twas a sneaky thing, faking yon fight and fooling us all.”

  “We fooled ourselves,” Eadwine answered, with an edge in his tone. He was annoyed with himself for having shared the careless assumption. If he had not been hurt and forced to linger here, he would have missed the one clue that might lead him to his brother’s killer. “But I don’t think he faked the fight. The one thing I remember clearly about that night is Beortred’s face. I’d take a bet that he was as terrified as we were, that he really believed he was going to his death. And –” he hesitated “– and that he welcomed it. Honourable death in battle is an easy way out of all sorts of tangles, if you can get it. But then in the morning he found he wasn’t
dead and there was no troll and no sign of us, so he decided to run.”

  Ashhere’s puzzled expression deepened. “Run from what?”

  “Us,” said Drust, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  Eadwine ran his hands through his hair and started absently twisting it into knots. “Maybe – I don’t know.”

  “Ye’d guessed his secret. He knew ye’d have tae kill him. So he’d have tae kill ye first or flee.”

  “If he was the murderer,” Eadwine said slowly. “Don’t jump to conclusions. We’ve done too much of that already. Stick to what we know.” He began checking off points on his fingers. “I know Eadric was murdered. I’m sure it was with Beortred’s knife. When Beortred thought I had guessed that, he tried to get himself killed and then he ran away. I agree that makes it look likely that Beortred was the murderer. But it doesn’t prove it.”

  “If he wasn’t,” argued Lilla, “why run?”

  “Good question. But if he murdered Eadric, why was he so keen to stay with me in the first place, knowing that if I ever found out I’d be obliged to kill him for it? And the last thing he said was I couldn’t save your brother but I’ll save you. If that was a lie it was a very good one, and Beortred never struck me as a good liar.”

  “Did you know him, then?”

  “Well, I thought I did. I met him at Eadric’s hall, before I came to the March. He seemed a decent sort. Uncomplicated. A good hunter, a good fighter, not overly given to thinking, absolutely trustworthy.”

  “And now we think he stabbed his own lord in the back. It doesn’t make any sense,” Ashhere complained. “Not to me, anyway.”

  “Nor me either,” Eadwine agreed. “But one thing I am sure of, Beortred knows something very important about the murder. So I have to find him.”