The Flint Lord

by Richard Herley

  “Get ready to pull,” Klay said.

  “You know why I asked you to join me here. I want to talk. I want to make things plain.”

  Klay did not look at him. He watched nets instead. “Go on.”

  “I have no wish to be chief.”

  “If you had no wish to be chief, you would not say such a thing.”

  “I want only to live in peace.”

  “You mean you are not at peace already.”

  “How can I be? You and Bubeck will not let me.”

  Klay’s hands tightened on the cords. “You seek to make trouble here. Why did you come back?”

  “The Shoden are my tribe.”

  “No longer. You left us and went to the Owls. They are dead. You are tribeless; you have no ancestors. They died with the Owls. It would have been better if you’d died with them.”

  “My ancestors are here.”

  “You do not deserve to be welcomed back.”

  “That is for Shode to say. What would you have us do? Spend the winter with the wolves? Die without ancestors?”

  “There are other camps,” Klay said.

  “Where I have no friends.”

  “You have no friends here.”

  “My father was once ’Shode’.”

  It was useless. Tagart had achieved nothing; less than nothing.

  Klay put his face closer to the slit, cutting the conversation off. The nets were waiting and open, the cords stretched tight. Ducks had filled the fatal space: wigeon, pintail, mallard, teal.

  “Pull!” Klay shouted, and they yanked the cords back.

  Like folding wings the nets closed in. A teal escaped; the rest were pinned to the ground by the meshes. The other birds on the floods went up in a roar of alarm.

  Klay was the first out of the hide, splashing through the sleet and floodwater, a cudgel in his hand, ready to dispatch the birds they had caught.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon Altheme came down to the quay to watch the soldiers landing. She stood alone, almost unnoticed in the shelter of the worksheds, her hair drawn back with a carved brooch of jade and ivory. She wore a small jade earring and a necklace of worked scales of nacre and lapis lazuli.

  Altheme pushed her hands farther into the pockets of her sealskin coat, which was made of the pelts of unborn pups. Like nearly everything she owned, it was the gift of her husband, the Lord of Valdoe.

  She gazed at the landing stages and the wooden vessels bumping there. It was three weeks and six days since the night of the storm. She tried to argue with herself: in all the years with Gehan she had conceived not once. Why then should she do so now? She was worrying without reason. It made no sense. A child did not fit the pattern, the destruction of their happiness and their life together. It could not fit: it was too grotesque.

  But the night of the storm would not leave her thoughts. That was the last time they had been together. She could not forget the rain and wind on the shutters and the groaning timbers of the fort. She kept seeing Gehan above her; she kept hearing the name he had breathed. Ika, Ika.

  The afternoon was turning to dusk. Drops of rain began to fall.

  The soldiers had arrived two hours ago. The men were ashore, already finding their quarters in the Trundle four miles away. Now slaves were unloading the rest of the weapons and equipment, packing sledges to be drawn along the road that led from the quayside and the creek.

  The landing stages stood near the head of the creek, accessible at all but the lowest tides. Across the water were clumps of scrub. That was where the savages, the spies, had been captured, a week or so before.

  Altheme left her place by the corner of the worksheds and walked towards the water. The ships, like all that was most costly, drew their design from the mainland, and ultimately from the east. The prows reared up, the heads of monsters carved and inlaid, from flat plank decking smoothed by the adzes and sandstones of craftsmen in the homelands. From stem to stern the largest ship was twenty-nine feet. The larger vessels had two deck-houses, the smaller only one. Low masts carried leather or fabric sails, now furled with white ropes. Shipped oars stood pointing skywards, like the rays of fish-fins. Hatchways lay open as the slaves passed up bags and bundles to those above.

  This was the eighth or ninth such landing in the past three weeks. The number of extra soldiers was steadily growing.

  “What are you doing here?”

  At the sound of Gehan’s voice Altheme took her hands from her pockets and turned. “I wanted a change of air.”

  He was not pleased to see her. He had been speaking to the harbour Trundleman, arranging for another landing stage to be built. “How did you get down from the fort?”

  “An empty sledge, my lord. I meant no harm. They were bringing it down anyway.”

  “And how do you propose to get back?”

  “I didn’t think.”

  “You never do.” Gehan beckoned to a man nearby: the overseer of a team of slaves. The overseer hurried across the quay and inclined his head. “Unload that sledge and take Lady Brennis back to the Trundle. Make haste before it gets dark.”

  The road up to the fort had become a quagmire. The slaves hauled at their harnesses and struggled to keep the sledge moving. Soon they were under the trees; reaching branches made a tunnel of the road. The sledge turned a corner and the flickering lamps of the worksheds were left behind.

  Gehan that evening arrived late for the meal. Altheme had bathed and changed and dismissed her body-slave. For a long time she sat alone in her chamber.

  She heard the voice of the man to whom she had given herself for so many years, the man who had changed so much. He was outside, in the vestibule, taking off mud-spattered clothes.

  Her mind returned to their first encounter, all those years ago. She had been eighteen and Gehan twenty-two. Her father, a merchant, had brought her to Brennis on a visit to see his friend, the fourth Lord of Valdoe. She remembered her first sight of the wild coast of the island country; the ramparts of the Trundle on the top of Valdoe Hill; the docking of her father’s ship; and the sharp premonitory pang she had felt with her first step on foreign soil. She remembered a formal young man with sun-bleached hair and solemn grey eyes who had walked with her by the willows, trout dimpling the river. In him she had recognized the complement of herself. His strength of will had overawed her; but more striking had been his gentleness and his capacity for understanding. Her knew her perfectly – in his company she needed no pretence.

  Seven years ago. A month after their wedding his father died and Gehan became the fifth Flint Lord. At once their happiness began to dissolve. She realized that in her inexperience she had made a mistake. His power in this country was frightening. It had invaded his sanity: it was driving him mad. His idealism had become something else.

  She knew she should go, escape to her father, anywhere. That was her urge, but there was nowhere safe. She could not go home. The trade with Brennis had become too important. Even if she did try to escape, she would be sent back. Outside Valdoe she had no one to whom she could turn.

  Altheme rose from her couch and entered Gehan’s chamber, the room where they ate and slept. His sister was seated on the bed, cross-legged, her blonde hair hanging loose.

  Ika looked up. “Did you hear? The other savage died this afternoon.”

  “I suppose you went to watch.”

  “For a little while.” In Ika’s lap was an oval box. It contained the dried female flowers of hemp, a plant brought to the homelands by traders from the south and east. Ika took some and packed it into a narrow-bowled pipe with a long, curving stem. “Pass me a taper, Altheme.”

  She held the taper to the nearest lamp and lit the pipe, inhaling deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs till it had lost its blueness and become brownish grey; and exhaled. She had been using the drug throughout the day. “For you?”

  Altheme shook her head.

  “Perhaps you should.”

  “No.”

  There was a
draught as the door opened and Gehan came into the room. He went to a table by the window and poured a beaker of mead.

  “Did you see the savage die?” Ika said.

  “I was there, yes.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Not a word.”

  The two had been caught near the landing-place. They had been lying in the bushes, watching the quay. It was rare to find such men away from their tribes at this time of year. The implication was that the landings had already attracted attention and that the men were spies. When interrogated, though, neither had so much as admitted that he could understand the questions. One had been pressed to death in front of his companion. The sight had produced no effect. He had given nothing away. The guards had then exercised their skills on him, to no profit.

  If the two men had been nomads, as their appearance had suggested, their presence at Valdoe might or might not indicate that news of the campaign had reached the winter camp. But if, as was possible, they had been mere outcasts, or pedlars, or wanderers from some place beyond the domain, then the matter was not worth consideration. Gehan tried to put it out of his mind.

  “No guests tonight,” he said. “We’re eating alone.”

  He turned to the door and called for the night meal.

  5

  Tagart shouldered two more bundles of stakes and balanced them. His fingers felt cold under his mittens; his breath fumed as he stood waiting for Edrin to finish sorting through the heaps of gear. Since first light they had been working with the others, carrying bundles down the valley and into the marshes. The previous day the hunters had failed to catch a suitable boar for the solstice celebrations; it had been decided to try again, in a place called Yote Wood.

  The Yote Oak, a hollow tree from which the wood was named, stood in the middle of an island in the marshes, an eyot which the river had not yet worn away. The island was long and narrow, clothed at its edges with dense tangle. Farther in there were beeches and oaks, and it was these that brought the pigs to feed.

  Bristly and squat, burly and dark, the pigs dug with tusks and pushed with snouts, and made small contented sounds of feeding. Their hoofs printed cleft tracks in the mud. At one end of the marshes they had made a wallow and rubbed the bark from a nearby tree. The boars were solitary, nocturnal, lurking by day; the sows travelled at night too, with their piglets, continually chiding them. In the easy soil of the marshes they uprooted tubers and insects, and found and ate toadstools of many colours and kinds. Their hours were spent in continuous foraging, wandering the lakesides and woodlands. Autumn was the time of plenty. When the frosts came and the mud froze, the pigs turned to a diet of acorns and beechmast.

  The hunters used various techniques to catch them. Most efficient, where the terrain allowed, was a line of beaters moving towards a funnel of hurdles, wicker panels. At the end of the funnel, catchers would be waiting with netting and spears. The placing of the hurdles was a matter of extreme skill – a boar could weigh as much as three hundred and eighty pounds. Armed with powerful tusks, spurred by fear, such an animal could not be stopped by wicker alone. The hurdles did not prevent the animal’s progress: they directed it, subtly, from clump to clump and copse to copse. Only towards the mouth of the funnel did the hurdles become more substantial and uncompromising. There the posts were driven in with heavy hammers, the hurdles reinforced. The final corridor towards the netting was made of stakes solid enough to withstand demented barging and butting.

  These stakes were made of oak, and were six and a half feet long, trimmed at one end to a point. They lay at the camp in bundles of six, beside the pile of hurdles, the netting and hole-borers and the rest of the equipment.

  “Which are the new nets?” Edrin said, irritably. He was thirty-six, small and slight, with keen brown eyes and a sparse beard. He rarely smiled or spoke idly. He was ambitious, but he had no presence and commanded little respect. Nonetheless he held a special place in the tribe, which he had earned by his closeness to Shode and by his advice and experience in matters of the chase: his gifts in tracking and deduction were uncanny. What he lacked in physique he made up for in resource and cunning.

  Edrin was a man of deep motives. A member of the Waterfall tribe all his life, he had at one time wanted to be its chief. But now all that seemed to be forgotten. He appeared content merely to advise Shode, to be one of the elders. He had sided with Bubeck and Klay on the question of the Flint Lord, and regarded Tagart and Fodich as scaremongers.

  “Are these the new nets?” he said, turning the heaps over. “Klay said something about repaired nets and new ones.”

  “We should make sure,” Tagart said. The weight of the stakes was beginning to hurt his shoulders.

  “It’s that pile there,” said Berge, a man of twenty with wild beard and hair.

  “Are you certain?” Edrin said.

  Tagart recalled having seen Klay with the nets earlier. He said Berge was right.

  This was to be the final trip down to the marshes and Yote Wood. The rest of the gear had already been deposited there. During the afternoon it was to be assembled in preparation for the drive the following day.

  Tagart, Edrin and Berge set off, downhill, leaving behind the untidy expanse of the camp, the fires and shelters, the dwellings with their roofs of piled branches.

  The river flowed quietly among the bridging logs. Tagart felt a melting on his nose and looked up. “Snow,” he said to Edrin. “It’s already starting. But where are the scouts?”

  “They’ll be back soon enough.”

  Tagart noticed Segle across the river, working at rope-making with the other women.

  Edrin, observing, said, “There are troubles nearer home than Valdoe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is not my place to say.”

  “Say what?”

  “What you are the last to know. But gossip means nothing. The women have too much imagination.”

  At once Tagart understood and was angry. True, since coming to the camp it had been different between him and Segle; alone with her in the forest he had been sure of her, but here, surrounded by new influences, everything had changed. Yet she was his woman and Edrin had no right to make such remarks.

  Tagart said “What do the women imagine?”

  “I cannot say,” Edrin said. “Just remember the penalties.”

  Tagart checked his reply. Among the nomads the marriage bond was held sacred. It was the foundation of the family, the tribe, the spirit group, and hence the foundation of Creation itself. Only a chief, whose actions were divine, could choose his woman as he pleased. For the rest, the laws were harsh. Those aggrieved by adultery could insist on severe redress: for the man, castration and banishment; for the woman, death by burning. After only three weeks in the tribe, Tagart was not confident enough to challenge an elder, nor did he know why Edrin had spoken as he had.

  Edrin glanced sideways at Tagart and saw that he had achieved the desired effect.

  They continued in silence. Berge, walking behind, had apparently not heard the conversation. The snow shower did not persist. By the time they reached the marshes it was over.

  In Yote Wood, near the big oak tree, they found Klay and Bubeck. This was to be another joint venture of the Waterfall and Beaver tribes. In consultation with Edrin and other expert trackers it had already been established where the ending of the funnel was to be sited, here by the oak tree. They were hammering in the posts as the three men arrived.

  The ground was hard with frost, but despite the cold Klay had taken off his stormcoat. He was sweating as his hands took a firmer grip on the haft of the long stone-headed hammer and he swung again, smacking the top of the post held upright for him by another man.

  The corridor of posts was almost complete. It curved to the right, terminating in a gap just wide enough to admit the flanks of an adult boar. Behind the gap stood a framework of poles. Over this the netting would be laid, loosely, so that the animal’s progress would not be halted too
abruptly, but fast enough to ensure that it would be safely tangled before a spear-thrust brought its end.

  Tagart set down his burden.

  “Take the hammer,” Bubeck told him.

  “Yes,” Klay said. “I’m sick of this.” He stood back, wiping his nose on his wrist, and let the handle of the hammer fall.

  In the past weeks Bubeck and Klay had singled out Tagart for the unpleasant or arduous tasks. But Tagart did not belong to the Bubecks: their chief had no power to order him around.

  Tagart turned to Edrin, an elder of his own tribe. Edrin gave a nod: assent to Bubeck’s order, turning it into a mere proposal.

  “Let me take the hammer,” Berge said, picking it up, and the moment passed.

  They finished the corridor of stakes and arranged the netting on the framework. By early afternoon, work on the whole funnel was complete. Everything was ready for the drive the next day; the men withdrew.

  At the meal that night the Shoden, twenty-one people in all, ate as a group. They sat close to the flames, warming their hands, sheltering from an east wind. The leather awnings flapped and whipped as the wind blew the fire to life and threw sparks beyond the guy-ropes and into the night. Tagart watched Edrin, who was eating assiduously, occasionally speaking to his woman and to Shode. He watched the other men in the tribe: Orick, Berge, Grisden, Phale, each with his family. He watched Klay sitting with Yulin, his wife, dumpy and dark, made drab by child-bearing, her brown eyes withdrawn and resigned. More than once she glanced at Tagart and Segle. She gave food to her daughters, two small girls who clung to Klay. Klay was speaking, boasting of all the pork they would be bringing tomorrow from Yote Wood.

  He noticed Tagart watching him and seemed to avoid his eye.

  * * *

  “This way!” Bubeck shouted. “This way! Keep him this way!”

  The boar, disturbed at the very feet of the beaters, was a big one. It had burst from a brake of brushwood as the men moved forward, shouting and screaming and banging with sticks.