***
Iaran and Edris were overseeing the ingathering of the clan’s numerous small family herds when they were approached by an angular, sour-faced father and his cowering son.
‘Tell them!’ the man barked, propelling the boy forward. ‘Go on, now we’re here. You’re keen enough to take a whipping from me – let’s see what your nonsense earns you from these men. I hope you think it’s worth it.’ Turning to the two warriors, he was immediately fawning. ‘My apologies, noble sirs. I did try to thrash the impudence out of him, but he insisted on seeing you.’
Iaran, who had taken an instant dislike to the man, addressed the son directly. ‘What is so important that you would brave the anger of your father?’ He saw the boy’s head lift a little at the word ‘brave’. Not a dullard, then. But the father weighed in again before his son could open his mouth to reply.
‘Nothing but a lot of nonsense about the Bright Folk stealing a calf that he was supposed to be looking after…’
Edris turned with shining eyes to Iaran, who uttered a long-suffering sigh. ‘I suppose I’ll not hear the end of this until I say yes, will I?’
Edris grinned.
‘But alone, mind! I’ll not risk more than one good horse in the dark. If you lame your mount, you walk back yourself.’
Edris turned to the boy, who was cringing under a renewed cuffing from his father. ‘Good drover,’ he said, trying not to sound too sarcastic, ‘I beg leave to borrow your son awhile.’ The man did a plausible imitation of a gaping fish before managing to stammer out his permission amidst many a ‘my lord’ and ‘honoured sir’.
Edris plucked the boy from the ground with a single deft sweep and set him in front of his saddle. Hael clung tightly to the twin saddle-horns, speechless with delight, smelling leather and steel and warrior’s sweat. Edris thought it likely as not they’d find nothing but shadows and a boy’s overactive imagination, but if he had to spend the rest of his life under the hands of such a father, then at least he’d have the consolation of knowing that the man had seen his boy riding with one of the warband – and if that stayed his hand by the measure of only one bruise, well then maybe that was noble enough work for a warrior instead.
10 Holda’s Song
The caral set off again shortly after dawn, bearing three extra – and very unexpected – passengers. Drovers yoked up a half-strength team of their prized red oxen and the clan held its collective breath as the mighty-shouldered beasts stamped and strained, their breath steaming like pistons. The mud of the road was churned up in great gouts as their hooves fought for traction, and, inch by agonising inch, the massive many-tiered structure began to roll forward.
Amongst the wrights there was much anxious muttering and peering at axles, shafts and bearings, but as the caral picked up a ponderous speed, the new wheel turned smoothly, and the looms in the Lower Gallery awoke to life once more.
Satisfied with the repairs, Lady Holda ordered the remaining oxen to be yoked, the sails unfurled, and the caral resumed its rumbling northward course along the wide-rutted wake left by the rest of the nation. They had lost a day, but that could not be helped. They would not get the most favoured trades this year at the Overwinter Market, but the quality of their clothwork would remain unstintingly high as a matter of pride, and the careful thrift of previous years would hopefully mean little more than a few tightened belts.
To say that the Dobunni would find any excuse for revelry was an exaggeration, but not by much. Celebrations were brief, though full-throated. Lady Holda presented the wheelwright with a surcoat of the finest wool worked in intricate detail by her own hands, and a keg of dark valley ale to his prentices, who lingered no longer than propriety required before disappearing with it and a crowd of giggling wiever-girls down into the axle-hold, from which there issued such a din of carousal that some wondered if another wheel hadn’t fallen off.
For the moment, the three otherworldly strangers in their midst were almost completely forgotten about. This was not surprising; they were unimpressive invaders.
The wild rumours which had spread like waves in plainsgrass from the drover boy’s excitable babbling – everything from an attack by cattle-raiders to the very opening of the demon-infested pits of Annwn itself – were dispelled the moment that the strangers were brought in by Edris. Far from being threatening, and possibly even infernal beings, they looked pale and undernourished; one was plainly witless and had to be led everywhere by the other two. They were shorter than the smallest Dobunni by at least a head, upon which their hair was cropped like criminals. Most shocking to a wiever clan – for whom the quality of their garments was not just livelihood but art, identity and pride – was the filthy and ragged state of their clothing. Plainly, these were diminished creatures more deserving of pity than fear, notwithstanding the impossibility of their appearance in this wide expanse of uninhabited country.
Impossible or not, decreed Lady Holda, they were here and must be dealt with according to the traditions of hospitality observed by all the caral nations. For what use was tradition if not as a guide in extraordinary circumstances such as this? It was said that the measure of a clan-mother’s generosity lay in how she treated not the richest and most powerful nobleman, but the meanest beggar – from whom there was nothing to gain but the honour of demonstrating her largesse.
Bex and Ted were therefore surprised, after being kept at swordpoint for an hour while their fate was debated in a language they couldn’t understand, to find themselves ushered into a large, bright ambassadorial cabin on the caral’s topmost tier.
***
To Ted’s schoolboy imagination, fed only by dusty pre-war copies of Mallory and T.H.White in Holly End’s tiny parish schoolhouse, it looked like the inside of a medieval pavilion. It reminded Bex of a yurt where she’d crashed for a night at her first Reading Festival; it had the same TARDIS-like sense of light and room in a confined space – but thankfully without the vomiting hippies.
The guest chamber was kept for the enjoyment of trading representatives from other clans and the occasional Settled merchant, and so was a showpiece of the clan’s craft. Rugs of every shape and texture patchworked the floor around furniture that was just as lavishly carved and upholstered. The walls and ceiling were canopied in tapestries and long yards of richly embroidered cloth, except where windows looked forward over the rolling landscape and were screened with the thinnest gauze, which admitted the view but neither insects nor road-dust. Despite this, it wasn’t cold; light and warmth came from many brass lamps, in the light of which the hangings scintillated with gold thread and semi-precious stones.
‘Jeez,’ murmured Bex to Ted, gazing around at the ostentation. ‘Enemy camp or what.’
Ted had already found the food.
There were few vegetables and only dried fruit this close to the end of the road, but he found broad slices of unleavened bread, small triangular pastries and a stew thick with gravy, sweetly spiced.
‘I wouldn’t touch that,’ she warned.
Ted chewed defiantly without replying. Now she was just being ridiculous.
‘Seriously. You don’t know; it could be poisonous. We don’t know anything about this place. They could be about to…’
But Ted’s eyes were suddenly bulging. He dropped the bread and fell to his knees, clawing at his throat and making hideous dry choking noises. She leapt forward with a cry of alarm, but his choking turned into giggles of laughter as he rocked onto his backside, grinning at her. ‘It’s fine,’ he said around his mouthful. ‘You should try some.’
‘You little shit! That wasn’t funny!’
‘Yes it was. You should stop being so suspicious. Not everybody’s out to get you, you know.’
‘Yeah, well, when I’ve met everybody I’ll…’ She stopped. Sniffed. ‘Wait a minute. What’s that?’ She picked at the food dubiously, then w
ith rising astonishment and delight. ‘That’s not possible.’ She tore off a hunk of bread and scooped a mouthful of the stew, suddenly laughing around it. ‘No way!’
‘Told you it wasn’t that bad.’
‘Not that bad?!’ And then she did something which surprised him more than anything else she’d done in the brief time he’d known her: she flung her arms around his neck and hugged him like a python. He blushed furiously. ‘Ted, this is more than ‘not bad’. It’s only a bloody korma!’
‘…?…’
‘It’s a lamb korma, I swear!’ She made a rapid, disbelieving inventory of the dishes. ‘We’ve got naan bread, some kind of samosa there; that’s – yum – yep, that’s mango chutney or as near as. All we need are the poppadoms and lager and a bunch of drunk rugby players. Who are these people? Oh my god.’ She suddenly remembered the last moments on the stairs of Moon Grove. ‘It was the last thing before he left; Stirch asked him to bring back a…’ but she couldn’t finish, because she was choked up by something very different from naan bread.
She went to the curtained alcove where Andy had been laid upon a wide, low bed, surrounded by pillows and bolsters to prevent him from falling off with the caral’s movement. She brushed some stray hair away from his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know how you did this or where you are, but thank you.’ She planted a kiss on his lips, which Ted thought lingered a little too long for simple gratitude.
They slept well into the next day and so missed the celebrations as the caral resumed its slow journey north across the plains.
***
Despite the small size of the community following the caral, it took Ted a surprisingly long time to find the drover boy. He discovered that the herds-families drove their cattle and sheep far from the broad swath of the heavily-trampled road, in the long plainsgrass sometimes over a mile distant – and in the winter, even further than that.
It was a relief to get out and stretch his legs. More than a relief; it was a revelation, because this land was unimaginably vast, far beyond his experience. Ted’s earliest – and in fact only – memories were of Holly End. Of restrictions, and encirclement, the limits of his horizon bounded quite literally by the Rimwoods and the Spinny at their heart. He could walk the limits of his world in under a day. Every square yard was known: every tree, building, hedgerow and stone. There were no surprises, and the fun of exploration was quickly exhausted.
But here.
It just seemed to stretch on forever. They were travelling across a wide, shallow vale of grass and scattered woodland towards a range of low hills far to the north, under an azure sky so massive that when he looked straight up, it filled his entire field of vision and made him feel like he was flying. There was no evidence of human habitation anywhere, except for the road and the large smudge on it a day distant, where the rest of their people had gone on ahead. The idea that you could travel, and travel, and keep on travelling for days on end without having to turn aside or turn back was both thrilling and terrifying. It was too much for him to fit in his head for very long at a time, so he reined his attention in and focussed on finding the drover boy.
Another odd thing was that wherever he went amongst the trailing carts and wagons, the people saluted him with a closed fist to the forehead, as if doffing invisible caps. As if he were somebody important. At a loss to explain otherwise, he simply smiled, nodded politely, and moved on.
He found the drover boy in charge of a small group of cows and their calves – shaggy, dark-haired beasts of some Highland breed, with blunt noses and straggling brows which gave them permanently bad-tempered expressions. The boy was wearing a scowl fit to match as he stomped along behind them, whacking at the grass with a stick. When he saw Ted, his eyes widened with alarm, and he made the same salute.
‘No, please don’t. It’s fine, honestly,’ he said, eager to reassure. ‘I’m Ted.’ He pointed to himself. ‘Ted.’
The boy imitated him. ‘Hael.’
‘Hael. That’s a funny name. Pleased to meet you.’ Ted stuck out his hand.
Hael was filled with dismay. There was only one possible reason why the stranger could be holding his hand out, and he only had one thing worth giving. From within his jerkin he drew out the leather pouch and, with deep resignation, handed it over. Ted peered inside. It was full of marbles. Crude ones, to be sure, nowhere near spherical, but obviously smoothed and polished with loving care – the sort of treasure only another boy could truly understand the worth of.
‘No,’ he said firmly, pressing them back. ‘That’s not what I meant.’ He grasped Hael’s right hand, placed it in his own, and shook vigorously. ‘See? Pleased to meet you.’
Hael looked surprised, confused, and then grinned widely, pumping Ted’s arm until he thought it might fall off.
‘I’m the one who should be giving you something,’ he continued. ‘I’m sorry if we scared you last night. I think we made you lose a calf. My father’s a farmer too, so I know how bad that sort of thing is. Once I left a gate open, and all the sheep got out, and he made me bring them all back in one by one, on my own. I was only eight. It took me the whole night, and I had to use my torch. Mother wanted to come out and help me, but he said, “No! The boy must learn!” And he still made me go to school the next day.’
Hael understood not a single word of this, but nevertheless recognised the sound of a Da being impersonated, and laughed.
‘I thought you might be hungry,’ Ted went on, ‘so I brought this.’ From his satchel he produced some of the spicy pasties and a big piece of the sweet flatbread which Bex had called ‘Narnia’ bread, which obviously must have been her idea of a joke. ‘Call it a peace offering. No hard feelings?’
From the way Hael tore into the food, it appeared there weren’t.
They ate as they walked together in companionable silence. Hael shared a skin of what Ted assumed was water, but which turned out to be slightly fizzy and tasted of sloe berries. At one point something small and furry darted away from them into the undergrowth, and, wondering whether this world had rabbits, Ted began to collect small stones for ammunition. When Hael asked him what he was doing, Ted showed him the slingshot with an evil grin and fired at the rump of a dopey old cow which had been slowing them down by stopping to graze every dozen yards. She gave an indignant bellow like an elderly matriarch and trotted ahead, scowling back at him through her shaggy brows as if to say ‘Young man!’ Hael hooted with laughter.
‘Here. Have a go.’
As he passed the weapon over, Ted began to get an inkling of how much human experience is universal, and of the things that transcend barriers of language or even the walls of reality itself: hunger, friendship, and the gleam in the eye of a small boy armed with a slingshot.
***
To Bruna fell the honour of attending the strangers’ needs. The fact that she even considered it an honour where most other wieve-maidens of her rank would have seen it as an insult was the very reason for her appointment in the first place.
Unsure of what was customary for people of their kind to wear, she brought a little of everything and did a creditable job of suppressing her mirth when Bex chose an outlandish combination of drover’s boots, wiever’s waistcoat and warrior’s tartan britches. She brought soap that smelled of fresh grass and copper basins of hot water – the best she could do short of a proper bath, what with the drofcaral being a day distant – along with towels, brushes and combs.
She also brought the chirurgeon, accompanied by his wide-eyed prentice lugging a large apothecary’s chest, and one of the tallest women Bex had ever seen in her life. Bruna was able to explain very basically that this was Holda – queen or matriarch or ring-master of this travelling circus. She carried the figure and grace of a much younger woman, even though the hair which hung far down her back in a long braid clasped with gold barettes was iron-s
ilver in colour. She wore a dress of plain, snow-white linen over which was a long sleeveless mantle embroidered in gold with flowers and curvilinear knotwork. Only her hands, when she reached out to lay one affectionately on Bruna’s head, really showed her age; they were deeply lined and calloused, the hands of a woman who has worked long at many hard and thankless tasks. Her eyes glittered with a wry intelligence, and when she turned their regard towards Bex, she felt that for the first time in her life someone was really looking at her.
Through a combination of simple sign language and educated guesswork Holda was able to introduce herself and find out the name of the chirurgeon’s new patient. Beyond that, all she could do was hope that the girl who called herself ‘Bex’ was as intelligent as she looked and didn’t misinterpret what was about to happen.
There was much excited discussion between the chirurgeon and his prentice when they bared Andy and saw that his numerous burns and bites were already beginning to heal cleanly. It seemed to confirm something that they had already suspected, and Bex wondered how advanced their medical knowledge was, for all that they looked like a pair of rejects from Hogwarts.
From the heavy wooden chest, they produced a carefully-wrapped collection of what seemed to be gold and copper jewellery: armbands, rings, torcs and brooches, each of which was an ornate latticework of curvilinear filigree set with pieces of highly-polished yellow quartz. If the ancient Celts or Mayans had ever invented electronic circuitry, she thought, this was what it would look like. They proceeded to fasten them all over Andy’s body, but she became alarmed when some were pinned to his skin.
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