“Look outside,” he told Yulin, once he had packed the food she had brought down. “Go up the ladder and look. If it’s safe I will leave.”
Yulin had come close to giving him away. At the fire she had almost spoken to Phale’s woman; but she was afraid of Klay.
“Please, Klay. You have been defeated. There is no dishonour. Tell Phale and let the others fight among themselves. Your place is here with us.” She drew in her breath, frightened that she had dared to speak her mind. “Please, Klay. Please.”
He studied her contemptuously. At another time he might have hit her. “Get up the ladder.”
She obeyed and urgently beckoned. For a moment the way was clear. Using every inch of cover, he darted from the ladder and ran, bent almost double, to a fallen log, to the trunk of a tree, to a pile of firewood, and in moments he was out of the compound and running into the forest.
* * *
As soon as Bubeck saw smoke rising from the hillside below him, he knew why the fire had been lit.
After capturing Klay’s fragment he had followed the river upstream to cross safely at the swamp. It would have been quicker to circle back and cross at the waterfall, but he had already found Tagart’s overnight trail and he knew that Tagart would be returning to the vicinity of the camp at dawn to look for signs of the other contestants. Bubeck did not care to come upon Tagart unexpectedly; he also wanted to leave him a plain trail to follow.
But that trail had been quickly obliterated by the snowstorm. By mid morning, after two hours of heavy snowfall, the wind had freshened to a blizzard and Bubeck had been forced to shelter in the lee of some bushes. Later, looking for some trace of the others, he had wandered south-eastward, near the river. From there he had climbed to the highest slope of the valley and into the top of a beech.
His view, of undulating hillsides covered in trees, was grizzled by the continuous falling of light snow. Since noon the light had steadily got worse. It was now too bad to pick out moving figures: Bubeck had searched the valley for minutes at a time, his eyes watering in the cutting east wind. He had almost given up hope when he saw the thread of smoke.
He tried to fix the position of the fire in his mind and came down the tree.
For most of the day he had managed to keep moving, to keep warm, but even so his hands and particularly his feet were suffering. If he were hiding somewhere like Edrin, not daring to stir, he knew he would be afraid of frostbite.
But he also knew that Edrin would have anticipated this thought. And he knew that if Edrin wanted a fire, he could make it burn very well without any smoke to give his position away.
That meant the fire could have only one purpose. It was a signal: an invitation, an admission that the snow had made tracking a matter of chance and not skill. Above all, in this weather, it was a ploy to hasten the end of the contest. Whether Edrin would be nearby was doubtful. He would be elsewhere, safely awaiting the outcome of whatever encounter his fire produced.
Bubeck started downhill. His feet crunched and creaked and crushed snow into the mouldering leaves and litter of the forest floor; his breathing, wet and warm, returned to him in the confines of his mask.
He stopped to listen.
The silence was not encouraging. The hairs on the nape of his neck began to prickle. He waited a very long time. Snow accumulated on his hat and shoulders, on the sparse and disordered tufts of his eyebrows. He licked meltwater with a small, furtive motion of his tongue.
The fire could not be seen from here, but Bubeck knew it could not be much farther down the slope. He looked in vain for the smoke. Sky and snow had made it invisible.
Finally, measuring each footfall, he continued downhill, stopping every few yards. The woods here were of oak and birch; clumps of brambles were tangled and clotted with white.
He sniffed. A faint tang of woodsmoke had met his nostrils. Another dozen steps. Now he could see the fire, a mound of sticks whose centre had collapsed to leave a bed of embers. The bracken round the fire had been roughly cleared.
He whirled round, but no one was lurking among the trees. Perhaps he was the first to get to Edrin’s fire.
In a conversational tone he called out: “Who’s there?”
No answer.
Resisting the urge to retreat, Bubeck went to the fire, looked round uneasily, and squatted to make a study of the half-burned sticks. Judging from the embers, the fire had been burning for two or three hours.
He stood up and yet again looked round, sensing the presence of something malignant. The wind moaned. Grains of snow flittered to the ground.
Bubeck scrutinized the bracken round the fire. After missing it twice, he found the first of what looked like a series of footmarks, a pocket of crushed bracken. He took a twig and disturbed the snow in the pocket. Its surface was powdery and new but, underneath, a thin layer of snow had been compacted by a man’s weight. The thickness of the powdery layer told him that perhaps two hours had elapsed since the footmark had been made.
His eye followed the line suggested by the mark and found another mark, and another, making a trail. The gaps between them were not great: they had been left by a man of less than average height – Edrin.
He stood up. He had two choices. He could wait here in the hope of catching Tagart unawares, assuming Tagart would be drawn by the smoke: this was obviously what Edrin was hoping for. Or he could follow the trail to Edrin and the third fragment of Mace.
The decision was easy to make. He had anyway decided earlier to leave Tagart till last.
Placing his feet in the marks – just to puzzle Tagart – Bubeck set off. He had not doused the fire: he wanted Tagart to come after him.
He followed the trail downhill and towards the river. More than once he became confused, only to find the trail again by dint of patient searching. The whole of his attention was given to the ground ahead. He was ill-prepared for the blatant message that had been strewn so carelessly across his path; it took him momentarily by surprise. Human urine had been splashed in a place where the footmarks had become vague, near the base of a sturdy durmast oak.
Bubeck just had enough time to look up.
Falling from the height of a bough, plunging towards him, accelerating, came the boot-first weight of a man in a stormcoat, a man who had been waiting up there for two hours.
* * *
Tagart took the impact in his knees. His boots struck Bubeck in the throat and chest, and his hands, gripping either end of the piece of Mace, brought it down with a dull crack on the upturned mask. It hit the bridge of Bubeck’s nose, and with an odd, quiet grunt he collapsed.
Tagart was thrown to one side. His piece of Mace spun away and made a slot for itself in the snow.
Dazed, he lay on his back, his eyes wandering in the pattern of twigs and branches above.
It was Tagart who had built the fire, working and working his makeshift bow-drill, in his palm a concave pebble to press down on the spinning stick until the first miraculous wisp when friction made smoke. Renewing his efforts, blowing on the spot, he had made the flame grow and then catch the dry punk-wood he had scooped from a rotten birch.
From the fire he had left a trail with deliberately shortened strides, and climbed into the oak to wait for Bubeck.
It had taken him a moment to adjust to the shaggy presence of the man below who had stopped to peer at the ground.
Then he had launched himself.
Bubeck’s groans ceased. Blood started to ooze from one corner of his mask, staining the snow.
On unsteady legs Tagart got up and stood over him. Bubeck’s breathing was laboured and hoarse. He had fallen on his pouch. Tagart knelt down and undid Bubeck’s mask to help him breathe.
Tagart could scarcely believe his luck. After the blizzard he had been forced to give up hope of finding Edrin. Instead he had been made to concentrate on Bubeck. And now by this simple ruse he had given himself a huge advantage. He was three-quarters of the way to victory. All that remained was to find Edrin.
<
br /> Bubeck was heavy, like a dead thing. The strength had gone from Tagart’s arms and he feebly and repeatedly tried to push Bubeck off the pouch and roll him aside. It was no use.
He found the strap of the pouch and tugged. The pouch came free at last: Tagart delved into it and brought out the two fragments of Mace. The wood had been varnished by the handling of years, but the splintered ends were newly pale. Tagart tried to fit them together. As he did so he sensed movement in the field of view beyond his hands. He looked up.
Klay was a hundred paces away, approaching fast, following the line of footmarks from the fire. He was fully dressed in dry clothing. A bow was slung across his back, an axe dangled from his shoulder, and held to the ready was a hunting spear. At the sight of it, Tagart began to rise.
He did not notice Bubeck’s eyes opening.
Bubeck’s kick caught him in the side of the head and sent him sprawling. The two fragments of Mace were flung from his fingers. His shoulder struck the tree and he tumbled into the snow, face up.
Bubeck was on him at once, crushing him against the ground. Bubeck’s hat had gone; his eyes were mad gleaming points in smudges of shadow. A stench of sweat, bad breath, and stale fur caught at Tagart’s throat as Bubeck raised his fist to deliver a single tremendous blow.
With a hiss the spear sliced under Bubeck’s arm and carried something with it. A fine red spray hung sprinkled in the air: the point of the spear slammed into the tree, penetrating to the heartwood before its flight was arrested with a loud vibration of the shaft.
Bubeck stared at his forearm, at the inexplicable red flow that was gleaming and welling across his sleeve. He turned to see where the spear had come from.
Axe in hand, Klay hesitated a moment longer. He had missed, and in his panic he saw what he must do. It meant leaving the spear behind, certain evidence of his return to the camp, but he did not consider that. He saw only that he had missed, that Bubeck and Tagart were unhurt, that they were two to his one; and he saw that three pieces of the Mace were lying in the snow, waiting for him.
He snatched them up and ran.
8
Bubeck got to his feet and chased him, shouting abuse. Fifty yards from the oak tree Bubeck tripped and fell. Tagart ran past him, carrying the spear, its flint tip broken, but Bubeck’s kick had left him hurting and dizzy and Klay easily outdistanced him.
Klay disappeared into the trees.
Snow was still falling lightly. Tagart looked back. Bubeck was on his feet again, clutching his arm, approaching with lagging steps. He called out to Tagart. “He’s been back to the camp!”
Tagart began to retreat.
“No! Tagart! Stay! I want to talk!”
Bubeck hurried his pace.
Tagart knew Bubeck. He had already guessed what was coming, but did not want to seem eager to listen. However, the contest had taken a desperate turn. Klay had at least three of the four fragments. If he had already taken the fourth from Edrin, or if he got to it before Tagart could, the contest would be over and Tagart would have lost. By the laws of the challenge, it was true, Klay had cheated, but Tagart did not know how much weight the elders would give to his accusations, especially if, as seemed possible, Bubeck were to rebut them for reasons of his own. Even the spear would be explained away.
Tagart’s best hope was to reach Edrin first: this would be true no matter what Bubeck was about to propose. And it was no more than a hope. Klay may well have got there already, something which would soon be confirmed if his trail were seen to lead directly back to camp. But it seemed likelier that Klay had simply been drawn by the beacon fire after a morning of aimless wandering.
A race was on to find Edrin. If Klay won the race, he would also win the contest. If Tagart won the race, the contest would be prolonged and he would have a chance of taking the rest of the Mace from Klay.
Where was Edrin? More than elementary woodcraft would be needed to sniff him out. But he would not have made his hiding-place impossible to find. The cold would tell on him more severely than on the others, and he would scarcely want to prolong matters. Some process of deduction, then, should give the key to finding him.
What was more, Tagart knew that Edrin would not just be waiting to be found. He would be busy making preparations for the arrival of his visitors. The nature of those preparations would, ideally, need to be revealed by some third person.
Bubeck, breathing hard and warily eyeing the spear, stopped a few paces short. His stormcoat was badly bloodied, the bear-fur caked and white where he had been rolling on the ground. One of his leggings had worked loose and hung at the top of his boot. The flow of blood from his nose, where Tagart had hit him, had ceased and congealed in his beard; he was still nursing his wounded arm.
He nodded in the direction of Klay’s tracks.
Tagart prepared to listen.
* * *
Towards mid afternoon the snowfall stopped altogether. Bubeck and Tagart were following the river south towards the marshes. Beyond Yote Wood it broke into several streams; the valley floor was filled with beds of sallows, osiers and reeds. On higher ground were open leas, profuse with low growths of annual plants and with clumps of grass which could withstand months of submersion. With the rains, the ponds and puddles of the leas coalesced to form small meres.
Bubeck was leading the way, his arm bandaged with a spare boot-lining. He was continuously aware of Tagart behind him with the spear, but he felt hopeful, for, once Tagart had been persuaded to listen, it had been easy to dupe him into apparently joining forces to find Edrin. Tagart had agreed to Bubeck’s proposal almost at once; he had even fallen for his glib reply to the question of which of them would keep Edrin’s fragment. “We’ll worry about that later. For now, we must find him before Klay does.”
So far Bubeck had scrupulously observed the rules of the contest. He had arrived alone at an idea of where Edrin might be: he had neither consulted Tagart nor asked his opinion of the idea, though Tagart had expressed doubts about its logic.
Bubeck did not share them. Edrin would have picked a hiding place that could be found by inference rather than tracking. As a result of his seemingly casual questioning of Klay at the river, Bubeck had deduced that Edrin had drawn South. Thus Edrin was probably somewhere south of the camp. But where? He might be waiting by one of the established paths in that area; or he might be waiting close to the camp. Or if there were a hunting shelter, he might be waiting there. But there was no hunting shelter. The only shelters for miles were those inside the camp – and it was forbidden for him to hide there.
Then it had come to Bubeck. It was so obvious that he marvelled he had not seen it before. There was only one man-made structure outside the camp. It lay on the south side of the river. It would offer Edrin protection from the weather, and moreover it would allow him to sleep, for no one could approach without giving warning by the crash of breaking ice. Lastly, and Bubeck saw this as the finishing touch of ornament on his theory, the structure’s name proclaimed the purpose to which Edrin had put it.
The hide was near the edge of the marshes, on the western side of the valley, overlooking a sheet of water three or four acres in extent. Behind it was a channel of the river and a gloomy copse of alders. A makeshift log bridge spanned the channel, leading to a causeway of broken branches which had been strewn in the mud along the fifty paces to the hide.
The hide itself was the height of a man’s chest, large enough to seat two, made of reeds bundled on a framework of poles, the joints lashed with cord.
Tagart and Bubeck came to the copse of alders. The channel here was eleven feet wide, bridged by the log. Stubs of broken branches projected from it: one trailed in the water, slitting the surface and sending a wake of ripples downstream.
A crust of snow covered the log. It had been disturbed during its formation by the passage of feet. Edrin had been here. At the end of the causeway the shape of the hide was visible.
“He’s done something to it,” Bubeck said.
Many of the reed-bundles had been untied and the framework looked lopsided. Too much light was showing through. The front of the hide had been removed.
“What do you think?” Bubeck said.
“He may have wanted the lashings.”
“Let’s look.”
Tagart glanced round. This was a good place for an ambush.
“You’re armed,” Bubeck said. “You check the hide.”
It was too late for Tagart to argue: possession of the spear had trapped him. Bubeck was using him in just the way he had meant to use Bubeck.
He went out on the log. It was precariously balanced, and the snow made it more tricky still. He reached the other side and started along the causeway.
Bubeck stood watching. The light was failing and he did not notice the heavy, waterlogged willow bough that came drifting downstream, gaining momentum. Behind it stretched a long tail of thin twine – spear-binding twine. Ahead, the bough was overtaking yards of sodden, knotted cord which preceded it to the bridge.
The bough barely broke the surface of the channel; it passed under the log without a sound and travelled onward. Ten yards from the bridge, the cord tightened in a straight line under water. Its end had been tied to the projecting stub of the log, the one that had been partly hidden by the current. As the cord tightened the log jerked and slewed and was dragged into the channel. At a distance, it followed the willow bough as it resumed its stately journey downstream.
The bridge had gone. Tagart heard the noise and looked round. He and Bubeck had been separated by the width of the channel, a width too great to leap unaided.
The Flint Lord Page 7