by Paul Stewart
Micah nodded slowly, his heart thumping. He could smell the scent of her hair, sweet and fresh and laced with spices, like new-mown grass. The ache in his chest was almost unbearable. He wanted to take this kingirl in his arms. He wanted to kiss her, tell her it was all going to be all right.
But he couldn’t.
It wouldn’t be all right. He had seen what Thrace was capable of, and it frightened him. Besides, he could feel her wyrme’s bright yellow eyes boring into the back of his neck. And Cara was watching too . . .
Cara. With her dark red hair and green eyes, and that band of freckles that crossed the bridge of her nose. Beautiful, loyal, trusting Cara.
He looked up at Thrace, and her strange, otherworldly beauty struck him with renewed force. The lump in his throat made it impossible to swallow and he didn’t trust himself to speak.
‘You must go now,’ said Thrace. ‘Take your kithgirl, Micah, and go far from here.’
Micah nodded dumbly and turned away, hurrying towards Eli, Cara and the others before the tears came.
Behind him, he heard a soft sighing sound, like the wind through plains grass.
It was Thrace, calling to her wyrme.
Sixteen
The oxcart wouldn’t be going any further, that much was certain. The back axle had cracked and one of the two drawshafts had shorn right through. Besides, with the ox lying on the ground, wheezing with wealdsickness, there would soon be nothing to pull it.
Seth Fallowfoot looked at his wife, his thin lips a grim line. She shrugged weakly, pushing back a strand of greasy hair that had slipped free from her bonnet. She was standing on the far side of the stricken creature, her hands resting on the shoulders of their younger son, who had buried his head in her apron.
‘It’s all right, Kyle,’ she was saying softly.
Their older son and their daughter were pressed up against her on either side, and she took comfort from the warmth of their bodies. The boy’s left knee and elbow were grazed and bleeding from when he’d been thrown from the driving seat of the cart. The girl’s cornflower-blue eyes were filled with tears.
Seth knelt down next to the ox and rested a hand on its neck.
‘Is he going to die, Daddy?’ the girl asked.
‘I fear so,’ he told her, and sighed.
The ox had grown steadily weaker until the moment when its front legs had finally buckled, upending the cart as it had slammed down onto the rocky ground. Now it lay where it had landed, twitching convulsively, eyeballs rolling and blood trickling from its mouth and nostrils.
Just like their mule before it.
The same symptoms. Collapse and bleeding. Then death.
Back at the new stockade in the middle of the badlands, Seth Fallowfoot had been warned that the weald was no place for low-plains creatures. The old-timer with the crooked teeth who had brought them water had told them that the mule and the ox were sure to weaken and die if they went much further; had said they should proceed on foot. But Seth had been deaf to his warnings.
The old-timer had shrugged.
Time and again, farming folk would leave the low plains and attempt the journey into the high country, he’d said, with a sorrowful shake of his head, their worldly possessions packed onto the back of a wagon or cart, pulled by oxen or mules. And he, Garth Temple, gave them all the same advice he was giving Seth now.
Ditch your cart. Your livestock. Your possessions. The only way into the weald was on your own two feet, with as much water and food as you could carry and a loaded spitbolt on your shoulder. Even then, only those with a constitution suited to the thin air of the weald stood a chance. The others – usually one in five, Garth had noted grimly – went the way of the livestock. They succumbed to wealdsickness and died on the journey. Their bones, picked clean by carrionwyrmes, littered the way, stark and white and marking the trail to the high country.
The bone trail.
Seth had thanked Garth Temple for his advice, but told him he would trust in the Maker to guide him and his family to a new life in the weald. A small homestead. Enough cleared land to plant crops. Perhaps a little orchard . . .
He’d tried to ignore the old-timer’s mocking laughter.
The going had been fine at first. Seth drove the oxcart, his wife rode the mule, and the three kids took it in turns to sit with one or other of their parents. But a week later, the mule had collapsed. And now, two days after that, the same thing had happened to the ox.
And Seth wished he’d heeded Garth Temple . . .
Suddenly Kyle broke away from his mother’s hands. He picked up the switch that his daddy used to flick the creature’s rump, to urge it on, and he slashed at the ox’s trembling flank.
‘Get up!’ he shouted, his voice shrill. ‘You gotta get up.’ He darted round and struck the creature’s neck. ‘Get up, get up!’
The ox struggled for a moment, eager to comply, then gave a violent shudder. Its head rolled to one side and with its last rasping exhalation of breath it showered Seth’s boots with droplets of blood.
Everyone turned and stared blankly at the dead animal. From high above their heads there came the sound of raucous screeching, and they looked up to see black wyrmes with tattered wings tumbling down out of the sky like so many broken umbrellas. They landed some way off, one by one, and snarled at the living creatures that barred their way to the dead one.
Seth climbed to his feet, wincing as he did so. He put his hands to his face and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. Then, seeing his wife and children staring at him, concern in their eyes, he smiled.
‘I had hoped the animals would get us further,’ he admitted. ‘But now we’ll have to carry what we can,’ he said, ‘and keep on.’
It took them the best part of an hour to sort out the food and equipment they would need, and pack it into rucksacks and a small wheelbarrow. The trunks and crates filled with items deemed inessential – each one identifiable by the name FALLOWFOOT painted in neat letters on their lids – were abandoned.
Seth told his family they’d come back and collect them when they were settled. The dead ox was left to the scavenging black wyrmes.
The broad expanse of pitted rock shimmered like liquid in the heat as they set off. The landscape was harsh and arid. Apart from the occasional writhing clump of waxy swordweed, there were no plants. Just rocks and gravel and sand that seemed to stretch on ahead of them for ever.
The sun was down close to the horizon when Seth lowered the wheelbarrow to the ground. The others stopped around him, waiting for him to tell them what to do next. He rubbed his temples. He closed his eyes.
‘Y’all right?’ his wife asked at length.
‘It’s this headache,’ he told her. ‘Can’t seem to shift it.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘If I can just—’
Suddenly his face reddened and his chest convulsed. His hands shot to his mouth to stifle the harsh wheezing cough he could not stop. When it was finally over, he lowered both hands and inspected them warily, each in turn. Then he held them up to his wife, who let out a small cry.
The palms were spattered with blood.
Seventeen
Garth Temple plunged the dip-ladle into the trough, bent forward and tipped the cool water over the back of his head. It turned his lank grey hair several shades darker, and when he straightened up it ran down over his neck and inside his homespun shirt. He rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead and eyed the man standing before him.
‘Hot work,’ he said and grinned, revealing a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth.
‘Evidently,’ the merchant observed, with just a trace of sarcasm in his voice.
He was young, but already fleshy and rotund beneath his fine silk robes and fur-trimmed longcoat. And when he had greeted Garth with a handshake, the old wealdtrader had noted with distaste how soft the young merchant�
�s hand was. The mule-drawn carriage that had brought him up from the plains was padded with cushions and covered with an awning of oiled wyrmeleather. Behind it stood five large oxcarts, each one heavy-laden with sawn timber and rolls of roofing felt which their drivers were busy unloading. The young merchant plucked at the fur-trimmed cuffs of his longcoat impatiently as he looked past Garth at the new stockade.
‘I had hoped to see greater progress,’ he said. ‘After all the coin I’ve spent on workmen and building materials . . .’
‘Oh, you can’t cut corners,’ said Garth. ‘Not out here in the badlands.’ He turned and followed the merchant’s gaze. ‘After all, what we’re building here is going to transform the high country – and I know only a far-sighted merchant such as your good self can truly appreciate the rewards the new stockade will bring.’
Nathaniel Lint the Younger nodded, ignoring the familiar oily edge that had crept into Garth Temple’s voice. It had been the end of fullwinter when he’d last been up to the badlands. At that time, he’d only recently taken up with this scrimshaw-den master, while the new stockade had been no more than heaps of treetrunks, piles of timber and sacks of nails, and a clutch of plans sketched out on wyrmevellum. Now, so far as he could determine, with fullsummer fast approaching, the place still looked far from complete.
He surveyed the constructions critically. There was a three-storey hay barn with latticed sides. A hexagonal silo. Half a dozen bunkhouses, all but one roofed and glazed. A lookout tower. A cabin. A store. A tavern, with what looked like its own distilling apparatus barnacled onto its side. And downwind to the east, a corral of sorts – pine fencing and a timber gateway enclosing an expanse of dusty ground.
‘What about the water?’ Nathaniel queried.
‘It took a while, but we found it, just as I promised you we would,’ said Garth. ‘The wellshaft goes down more’n a hundred foot, but the water is pure and sweet.’
The wealdtrader led the young merchant across the unfinished courtyard to the well, where four sick-looking oxen, yoked into the spokes of a giant horizontal wheel, were trudging round in never-ending circles. As the stolid creatures pushed the wheel, an intricate set of cogs and pistons drove a screw-shaped tube, which had been sunk into the ground, round and round on its axis. And as the screw turned, so water was raised from the reservoir deep down beneath the surface. It cascaded out of a wooden spout into a capacious vat, and from there, through a pipe, into the wooden trough.
Garth Temple dabbled his hand in the water. ‘This is just the first of a whole series of troughs. All connected with pipes,’ he explained. ‘We got them rigged up at the bunkhouses, the store, the corral . . .’
‘The corral is finished?’ The merchant sounded surprised, but gratified.
‘A couple days since,’ said Garth, turning, the bright sun causing him to frown. ‘You care to take a look at it?’
The merchant nodded. ‘I surely would,’ he said, and allowed himself a small smile. ‘See precisely what’s become of my investment.’
Again, Garth picked up on the note of sarcasm in the young merchant’s voice. This pampered son of wealthy parents clearly had something to prove. Garth had seen the look in his eyes when he’d first met him in that plains tavern a year ago. Sarcastic, calculating and arrogant, but eager to hear about Garth’s idea for the new stockade.
Garth had regaled the young merchant with tales of the high country over bottle after bottle of sweet plains wine. He talked of the fertile valleys and the great grasslands beyond, just waiting to be farmed – if only the farmers could get to them. The trouble was that plains creatures like horses and mules and oxen succumbed to wealdsickness up in the thin rarefied air of the high country, just as the wyrmes of the weald sickened and died when brought down to the plains.
Garth Temple’s idea was deceptively simple. He proposed to construct a stockade midway between the low plains and the high country in the badlands, a place where both plains animals and weald creatures could survive. Then he, Garth Temple, would stock it with greywyrmes – huge, lumbering, docile creatures, forty-times stronger than an ox and capable of hauling everything an enterprising settler might need to start a new life in the high country.
When they arrived at the stockade, newcomers from the plains would be able to trade their mules and oxen for these wyrmes that would take them up into the weald. And they would pay handsomely for the privilege.
Garth had been gratified at how Nathaniel Lint the Younger’s eyes had lit up at the prospect. If the young merchant provided the materials and spread the word down on the plains, Garth Temple had assured him that he would take care of the rest. They had shaken on the deal, which was the first time Garth had noted his new partner’s soft fleshy handshake.
With Garth guiding the way, the two of them walked side by side round the back of the well, the oxen snorting and coughing as they passed, and across the mudbake stretch of land on the far side. Standing there were a dozen or so tents and benders, their canvas and animal-skin sides fluttering in the light wind, and close by, the men and women who had put them up.
They were a motley bunch, Nathaniel Lint observed. Grizzled farmhands, fresh-faced ploughboys and hungry-looking labourers. Young newlyweds and old married couples. Brothers and sisters from homes too large to support so many back on the drought-scourged plains. And entire families, some of them spanning four generations, from leathery great-grandparents to swaddled babes-in-arms. What they all shared was the exhausted, sunken-cheeked look of the downtrodden; that, and a look of desperate hope in their eyes. For these folk had been gripped by landfever.
It had swept through the plains, the talk of every tavern and marketplace, fuelled by stories of a wondrous place in the far west of the high country. This great rolling expanse of grassland was said to be as big as the lowplains themselves. It was empty and just waiting to be settled by those brave enough to attempt the journey. Land for all. Land free from the lords and estate-owners of the plains who had made their lives there a misery.
Who wouldn’t be gripped by such a fever? Do anything it took to raise the two gold coins a head that Garth Temple was charging to join his wyrmetrain?
Motley bunch they may be, but they were paying customers, the lot of them, the young merchant noted approvingly.
There was an air of expectation and impatience in the air. Women looked up from their cooking pots, hope in their faces. Old folks stole glances at the two men and muttered to one another under their breath. Children scampered around them as they made their way across the campground.
One man – a tall rangy farmer with string-tied boots and a rabbitskin cap – looked up from the stick he’d been whittling. Beside him his wife, a plump woman with a headscarf tied around her head, nudged him with her elbow. The man nodded, flicked the straw he was chewing from one side of his mouth to the other.
‘Garth,’ he said, his voice gruff as he nodded his greetings.
‘Amos,’ said Garth. He did not break his stride, and Amos’s wife nudged him a second time.
‘Y’any idea how much longer?’ he asked.
‘Any day now,’ said Garth. He strode past. ‘Any day now.’
‘You been saying that for weeks,’ said Amos. ‘Hell, you promised us them there wyrmes of yours, and we paid you fair and square up front.’ He shook his head. ‘Reckon we’ll have our money back and take our chances on our own.’
Garth Temple stopped in his tracks. He turned, fixed Amos with a dark look, his lips curling to reveal those crooked teeth of his.
‘Amos Greenwood,’ he said, ‘if you decide to set out with those broken-down mules of yours, there ain’t nothing I can do to stop you. And maybe you might just make it.’ He shrugged, looked around him. ‘Who knows? Maybe them others that decided to set out on their own are doing just fine. That fellow, what’s his name? Seth. Seth Fallowfoot. Remember him and his family? Maybe they a
lready found theirselves that little piece of land they always wanted. Ploughed it up. Sowed their first sack of seed. Maybe.’ His brow furrowed. ‘Or maybe they’re lying dead on the trail, their bones picked clean.’ He shrugged again. ‘Like I say, Amos, who knows?’
He turned away and guided Nathaniel Lint past the settlers.
‘That Amos Greenwood,’ Garth was muttering. ‘Ain’t stopped grumbling since the day he arrived.’
‘There’s no room in the bunkhouses for him?’ asked Nathaniel, glancing across at the line of timber buildings.
Garth smiled. ‘Full to bursting with paying customers,’ he said. ‘More arriving every week. Greenwood and his friends are the overspill. Still, I took their money all the same,’ he added with a chuckle. He patted the young merchant on the shoulder. ‘Your share’s tucked away safe and sound in the strongbox in my quarters.’
He stopped beside the sixth bunkhouse. There was hammering coming from up top, and Garth thrust two fingers into his mouth and let out a loud whistle. A shutter flew open and a tousled head appeared at one of the upstairs windows.
‘Tyler!’ he hollered. ‘You and Jonas get yourselves down here. The planks and roofing stuff have arrived.’
‘Will do,’ the man shouted back, and the shutter slammed shut.
‘I want them bunkhouses complete by sundown,’ Garth called up. ‘The customers are getting restless.’
‘A’right,’ came the muffled reply.
Garth took Nathaniel by the arm and ushered him on. He gestured to the hay barn and the silo.
‘They’re both half-full at the moment,’ he said. ‘Fodder you sent up from the plains.’ He smiled. ‘But in time we’ll be self-sufficient up here. Once the weald starts to get farmed.’
All he needed were the greywyrmes.
Garth Temple led the merchant through a broad gateway and into a vast rectangular yard, open to the sky and fringed on all sides with individual stalls, complete with tether-posts and water troughs. Despite himself, Nathaniel was impressed. He sucked in air noisily over his teeth.