by Angus Watson
Ula looked up, hope in her wet eyes. “Why didn’t he kill her?”
“No point. A hostage’s value lies in preventing something. As soon as that something happens, the hostage is worthless. Look at it from Zadar’s point of view. You’ve killed some of his, so he’ll come here to wipe you out – you know that?”
“Yes, we’re packing up the village and leaving for Dumnonia today, or possibly Eroo.”
“Aye, smart move. So, you’ve killed twenty of Zadar’s. He’d hoped that having Primus would stop you from doing anything like that, but it didn’t. It’s happened. Why would he kill Primus now?”
“To teach others a lesson?”
“Aye, that is a point, but it won’t happen because Primus is still useful to him. Zadar doesn’t know the situation here. Maybe he’ll come and you’re holed up in the hillfort, so he can use Primus to pry you out. Maybe he’ll keep him and then present him in a few years as the rightful king of Kanawan. But you’re going to bugger off, so there’s nothing Zadar can use Primus for.”
“To bring us back from exile?
“No. He’d have to know where you’d gone to do that. Go through Dumnonia, and he won’t. Primus is safe. And you never know. Zadar might fall soon, and then you’ll be reunited.”
“There’s that…”
“And of course Zadar probably likes the child.”
“Zadar?”
“Aye. People aren’t good or bad. They’re good and bad. That same guy – Weeza – nasty torturing type – loved animals. Made sure the farm animals were well looked after, didn’t eat meat, got in a panic when his pet cat didn’t come back in the evening … Point is, once you get to know a child, it’s difficult to kill them.”
Unless her son takes after his father, thought Dug, in which case Zadar would have brained the wee bugger a long time ago.
Ula put a hand on Dug’s arm. “Thank you. You might be right. But I mustn’t dwell on it. I’m the leader now and I have to save my people. I’ve got to get everyone packed up.” She stood up. “You’re too badly wounded to travel quickly.”
“Aye. Leave me here. I’ll be fine. It’s my fault you had to attack Zadar’s men and get yourselves into this mess.”
“Don’t be stupid. I discussed it with Lowa before Weylin arrived, and it’s been decided. She’s going to take you to a tribe not far away where Zadar has no sway. Their town is in a marsh and you can get to it only if they want you to. Their druid’s a good healer who will help you recover quickly.”
The thought of being taken somewhere by Lowa made him smile. “I’ve heard of the marsh tribe – Mearhold, isn’t it?”
“That’s it.”
“Neutral tribe that the big boys and girls have agreed to leave alone. Why would they risk that for a fugitive from Zadar?”
“I know them. I go there often to get clothes. The island’s secure and they’re not the sort to be frightened by bullies. Besides, who’s going to tell Zadar you’re there?
“Ah, if you say so.” Dug’s chest was blazing with pain now. He reached for the pint of wine.
Chapter 31
It was late afternoon when Weylin heard the faint cries: “Help! Please!”
He dismounted quietly. There was a narrow path burrowing into the woods. He tied the reins to a branch, held his fingers to his lips and said, “Sssshhh!” to his horse. There was no need really. It was a good little horse and hadn’t complained since he’d found in it the woods above Kanawan, even though he’d ridden all night. He’d stopped only a few times, for water mostly and when he’d hidden from Lowa, riding with a large bundle behind her and her bow in her hand. Thank Bel he’d been able to hide before she’d seen him. Unarmed, there was no way he was going to take her on.
“Help!” Another cry. Yes, he was on the right path. It turned a corner and opened into a shrine clearing that had been used as a camp. Over to the right, pinned to a tree by arrows through his wrist and shoulder, was Ogre. His shirt and trousers were dark with dried blood. His earless head was pale with blood loss.
Weylin chuckled.
“Weylin! Please. Water and … get these fucking arrows out.”
“What happened to you?”
“Lowa.”
“She left you like this?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not nice. What did you ever do to her? She’s trouble that one.” Weylin sat on a log, rested his elbows on his knees, placed his chin on pointed fingers and looked up at Ogre thoughtfully.
“Water, please,” begged the earless bandit.
“You know it’s funny.” Weylin shook his head. “I remember asking you for help back in Bladonfort. You tried to make me look stupid.”
“Please.”
“Then you laughed at me behind my back all the way to Kanawan. I saw you smirking with your friends. And my company.”
“Weylin, I’ve got coins. Take my bracelets.”
“Don’t worry, I will. Oh, what’s this?” Weylin picked up Ogre’s small mace. It was a crude thing, just a lump of iron on the end of a stout stick. “I’d like to take those arrows out and help you down, but I think it was you who warned Kanawan that we were coming. You’re the reason we didn’t catch Lowa.”
“You think that?”
“Yup.”
“She stole my girl. She killed my dogs. Now she’s killed my men and left me here pinned to a fucking tree.” Ogre coughed. “And you reckon I warned her we were coming!”
“Yup.”
“Then you really are as stupid as everyone said.”
Weylin’s mace blow smashed Ogre’s knee.
The earless man screamed and convulsed. Weylin smiled to see fresh blood well from his shoulder and wrist wounds. He pulled the mace back and cracked it into the other knee.
“And now,” he said to the whimpering Ogre, “I’m going to get nasty.”
Before he died, Ogre admitted that he had betrayed Weylin and his troop to Kanawan and Lowa. He was a bit shaky on the details of how he’d done it, but the confession was good enough for Weylin.
Part Three
Mearhold
Chapter 1
“All right, you got it? Frog and watercress soup at lunch, as much as he’ll take, more of that barberry jam whenever and as much water as he’ll drink.”
Maggot waved a finger at his nodding child assistant, then led Ragnall by the elbow out of the hut, leaving Drustan asleep under wool blankets on a cot lined with moss. The morning sky was a cover of bright white cloud split by the odd shifting smear of blue. Blusters of breeze carried a salt and mud tang from the marshes to the west. An arrowhead of pelicans flew north across the wind, so low that Ragnall could hear their wings creaking.
Maggot gripped Ragnall by both arms. “We’ll leave Drustan to sleep. He might live.” Mearhold’s druid pointed his fingers at Ragnall’s nose and waggled them. His surfeit of metal rings – at least three on each digit – clacked. He saw Ragnall looking at them and grabbed his fingers to his chest as if to protect his hoard. He leaned in until his face was nearly touching Ragnall’s. He looked about, seemed to decide that nobody was eavesdropping, then whispered, “He might not.”
Ragnall was used to weird-looking and weird-acting druids. In fact, with his plain dress and riddle-free reasoning, Drustan was about the most against-type druid he’d met. Maggot, who spoke, moved and dressed as if he’d lost his mind, was much more the norm.
He wore leather slippers and smart half-length tartan trousers gathered around his bony hips by a leather belt that looked like it had been chewed, swallowed and shat out by a goat. His fat-free, sinewy upper torso was unclothed, but, like everyone Ragnall had seen so far in Mearhold, he was adorned with jewellery and other accessories like a fir tree at winter solstice. About his neck was a band of tight yellow glass hoops, a bronze and shale necklace and two leather thongs, one dangling a disc of skull bone onto his bumpy chest, the other threaded through a triangle of flint. Jangling on his arms were bronze, copper, shale, wooden, iron
and tin armbands above the elbow, and a clutch of varied bracelets below. His long blond hair was swept back, but orange feathers dangled from a headband over his ears and cheeks.
He stared at Ragnall as if waiting for him to say something.
“What?” said Ragnall.
“Exactly! Exactly. You’ve never been here. I’ll show you around. First, we’ll look at people making cloth. Why not? That’s what a lot of people do here. Keeps us afloat, they say. Me, I’ve always thought that it was all the logs piled below us that keep us afloat. But the gods are odd, man.”
Maggot winked and walked off at a nippy pace. Ragnall followed more slowly, still wary on the island’s clay paths, which felt like they might crack any moment and plunge him through into the marsh, or whatever was below them. “Semi-floating island” was how Drustan had described Mearhold in one of his lucid moments on their short but difficult journey.
They passed several large, pristine round huts with thatched roofs and a man wearing even more jewellery than Maggot who was introduced as the glass-bead maker. There weren’t many other people about, but not far away a baby was bellowing, and earthily pungent smoke escaping from the huts’ conical roofs showed that several of the inhabitants were busy with breakfast.
“A fire in every hut?” asked Ragnall. “In summer?”
“Peat burns.” Maggot nodded away from the rising sun. “Over there the land’s made of peat. So yeah, people cook for themselves. And over there – ” Maggot pointed to the edge of the island where a rectangular building looked like it was on fire “ – is where we smoke food. Duck, goose, swan, beaver, frog, bittern, eel, trout, bass, mackerel, snake, snake eggs … you name it, we catch it and we smoke it. Please try the smoked limpets while you’re here. They look like a little bit of person picked up off an old battlefield, but they are very fucking tasty. We also salt a lot of food, but the smoked stuff’s better.”
They passed some children playing dice and a woman working with molten bronze behind a windshield of latticed sticks and reeds, and arrived at the promised group of cloth makers. There were seven of them, men and women working with whorls and looms, singing,
Oh there’ll always be a bigger fish,
To turn an eater into a dish!
Oh there’ll always be a smarter eel,
To turn the eater into the meal!
They watched for a short while before Maggot said, in full earshot of the workers, “Boring, isn’t it? And these cunts do it all day. Come on, let’s go to Gutrin Tor.”
Oblivious to the workers’ scowls, the druid led Ragnall to the clay and wood wharf on the island’s eastern edge where he and Drustan had arrived a few hours before. An array of longboats cut from oak trunks was tied to the low dock, clonging against each other in the current and breeze. Maggot ushered him into the prow of one of the smaller ones. After his sleepless night, Ragnall felt dreamily but brightly awake, with everything a little fuzzy at the edges. He clambered down into the narrow tippy boat.
Maggot unwound the mooring rope from a cleat and pushed off across a clear stretch of water towards a wide channel cut through the reeds. As he paddled, he called out the names of the wildfowl that darted between the reed clumps.
“Coot. Moorhen. Teal, that one. Male tufted duck over there. Look at him with his ponytail and his why-don’t-you-all-fuck-off beak. He’d lose a fight with a dormouse, but he thinks he’s Nanoc the Warrior’s big brother. That all-black one, following behind, is a female tufted duck. Probably his mate. You can see how embarrassed she is.”
“How can there be so many different kinds in one place?” Ragnall asked.
“Yeah, well, we’re good to them. We keep the eagles, falcons, otters, kites and all that away with a bit of clever slinging. The swamp itself protects them from all your other would-be duck eaters: your foxes, your martens, polecats, wildcats, wolves, our cats.”
“Why protect birds?”
Maggot laughed. “Like all things people do, it’s selfish. We like to eat them and their eggs. We treat them well, we get more. Like a good king gets more from his people than a bad one. In the long run, anyway.”
They floated along for a while, then Ragnall asked, “And the village is man-made?”
“More or less. It’s loads of logs, packed with reeds, rubble and the like, then topped, in part, with clay. Clay’s mixed with ash to stop it cracking when it dries, in case you’re interested in the drying of clay.” Ragnall turned his head and Maggot winked at him.
“But why here? Why on the edge of the world? And why make new land when there’s plenty all around?”
“It’s all about the festival. And who says it’s the edge of the world? How d’you know it’s not the middle?”
“The festival?” Ragnall shifted and the boat tipped alarmingly. He gripped the sides.
“Don’t worry about a tip or two. They’ll give you a scare, but they’re more stable than they look, these boats. Although you can turn ’em over if you try hard enough.” Maggot paddled a few strokes in silence.
“Right. The festival?”
“We have a big festival every year – music, dancing … People come from everywhere. You’ve missed it this year. It was about a moon ago. Not that you missed much. It’s not what it used to be. Thirty summers ago, when I was a bit younger than you are now, it was beautiful. Hundreds of us would get totally off our tits on cider and mushrooms, the bards would play all night, and everybody was up for pretty much anything.” Maggot sighed. “Now though, it’s a victim of its own success, isn’t it? Now it’s all about families, food and merchants, more about people bartering and taking coin off each other than getting messed up and having a good time. Which is not the end of the world, because I quite like taking my kids to it now, and I’m not into staying up all night any more, but still…”
They rounded a corner, and the stepped triangular hill of Gutrin Tor rose ahead. Bands of differing greens decreased in size towards a grassy top tipped by a black tower.
“It’s a shame because it had been like it was for hundreds of years,” Maggot continued, paddling regularly. “And that’s why Mearhold is here. Six, seven generations ago there were some people who loved the festival so much that they stayed. There weren’t many of them, just four families, so they built an island rather than live on the land with the wolves and the bandits. Why not, I reckon, eh?”
“Yes, I can see—”
“And it’s safe as the biggest hillfort cos we control the boats. Every night they all come back to Mearhold. There are plenty of other people living around the swamp, but we don’t let ’em have boats. We catch ’em building one and we kill ’em. Seems harsh but, as everyone likes to say, we’re protecting our children. Actually of course we’re protecting ourselves. But that’s fair enough, someone’s got to. And because we’re so serious about it, everyone knows not to build a fucking boat. So we never have to kill anyone – well hardly ever – so it all works. And it’s nice for me to have a human sacrifice every now and then … Here we go. We’re here.”
There were plenty of boats moored at the base of Gutrin Tor but no people about.
“Yeah,” said the druid. “All these boats’ll be going home to the island tonight.”
“Where are the people?”
“I don’t know? Doing shit? Looking for things? Mending stuff? Whatever it is people do. I don’t get involved. Keep your foot in the middle of the boat as you step out, mind. There, that’s it!” said Maggot.
Ragnall climbed out onto the dry dock and took a few paces. The ground felt reassuringly solid after Mearhold Island’s spongy floor.
Maggot waved his arms at the hill. “Gutrin Tor. An island in the swamp.”
The wiry druid strode off along a path up the hill. Ragnall followed.
On the lower slopes they passed peas and beans growing in neat rows, then apple orchards—“for the cider,” smiled Maggot. Further up were barley, oats and wheat. Nearer the top stood stands of coppiced hazel and grazing sheep.
The druid headed up the hill again, loping at an astonishing pace.
Despite his youthful athleticism, Ragnall was soon puffed. He was glad when Maggot stopped and pointed north. “We didn’t make this land. We didn’t even make these terraces.” He waved a hand at the steps in the hillside. “Who did? Dunno. Why? Dunno. Druids, bards, kings and others will tell you who built them and why with absolute fucking certainty. They’ll swear they know. But they don’t.”
Maggot carried on up and disappeared over the final rise.
The square tower was bigger than it had looked from the marshes, maybe ten paces high, made from heavy blocks of dark, pocked stone. It looked ancient. There was a door guarded by a man and a woman wearing the laid-back garb and jewellery of the other Mearholders, but armed with swords and shields. Maggot was nowhere to be seen. Ragnall hesitated.
“Don’t mind us – we’re here to stop animals, not people,” said the woman. “Maggot went up to the top. Asked us to ask you to follow.”
“Thanks!” Ragnall nodded to each of them and ducked through the door.
Inside was a dark staircase. Ragnall guessed that the tower had been built with a double wall, with the staircase between the walls. He could see no way in to the centre, so possibly the middle of the building was hollow and unused. There were a couple of buildings like it on the Island of Angels.