The Parting of Ways

by J. Thorn

  He would find out. And he would punish.

  “My lord,” a voice asked from his side, and he turned to see Carlossa standing next to the old witch doctor.

  Morlan peered at the old man, who was about to open his mouth with one more complaint, no doubt. “Tell me, old man,” Morlan said, indicating the ashes and charred wood before him, and holding up the bracelet so that the other men could see it clearly. “Tell me if someone of my blood died here or if these are the ashes of my enemy.”

  Chapter 36

  Jonah stood, a few feet away from the log pile, watching his son. Gideon had grown up considerably over the last few months, as the Elk and their allies lived next to the river, and it wasn’t the only thing that had changed as Jonah saw the days go by. His daughter, Keana, had aged too, and was almost a young woman, but the change in his son was more prominent. The boy’s once-thin frame was now muscular, and his fighting skills were close to threatening embarrassment to some of the older warriors who now regularly failed to hold the boy in check. And yet he was still very young.

  Jonah smiled and looked out over the camp. That too had changed. It was almost four times the size of the original space that they had claimed, and makeshift wooden walls now surrounded much of it. Jonah squinted. The sun had yet to break through the heavy skies. Winter’s grip remained tight, but it had begun to relent. The water-fowl flew a little lower, their cries becoming more pronounced.

  He frowned as the earth shook. Another one of those, he thought, concerned at the increased frequency of the rumbles that seemed to shake the earth every few days. He tried not to worry about it, but his gut instinct told him that it was getting worse.

  Almost in answer to this thought, the vibration beneath Jonah’s feet increased and, somehow instinctively, he looked to the west. Gideon dropped the axe he was using to chop firewood and wobbled slightly, before regaining his balance, and followed his father’s gaze.

  “What is it?” Gideon asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jonah.

  He stared at the western horizon where the sky met the mountains. The late-winter haze hung on the wind but did not entirely obscure his visibility. The vibration beneath his feet intensified, and Jonah felt his teeth chattering inside his mouth. It continued for fifteen seconds and then stopped.

  Gideon pointed west. “An explosion?” he asked.

  Jonah stared at the plume rising from beneath the mountains. The ancient, rocky hills spat the smoke into the air. It roiled and morphed in the sky, billowing out in all directions. The entire scene unfolded in an unnatural silence.

  “It is far away,” Jonah said, unsuccessfully trying to comfort himself. “It will take days for us to…”

  To what? Jonah wasn’t sure exactly what they would do or could do. This isn’t right. Not natural.

  “Should I summon your Right Hands?” Gideon asked, breaking Jonah’s internal dialogue.

  “The elders spoke of discontent beneath the surface of the earth-mother. They said the ancients called it an ‘earthquake,’ which is simplistic yet accurate. It can move the ground, tear it apart, or even swallow wide swaths of land.”

  “Then what is the plume?” Gideon asked.

  Jonah shook his head. “I don’t know. It could be a ruin that has crumbled because of the earthquake.”

  Solomon and Gunney pushed through the scant trees on the edge of Jonah’s camp. Both men had their battle axes in hand, as if they would pummel whatever strange threat had emerged from beneath their feet.

  Jonah nodded at Gideon. “Go see to your mother and sister.”

  “But I can help—”

  “Go, son.”

  Gideon bowed, looked into the blank faces of Solomon and Gunney, and then ran toward the tent where Sasha and Keana would be preparing the evening meal.

  “What the fuck?” Solomon asked, his beard longer and grayer than it had been when they arrived in Eliz.

  “Not sure about the plume but I definitely felt an earthquake.”

  “Grumble,” Gunney said, tipping his hat at Jonah. “Our old-timers used to call that a God rumble, and over time, the kids shortened it to ‘grumble.’ Whatever you want to call it, these things rarely happen in isolation. When God rumbles, he usually does it more than once.”

  Jonah dropped his axe and put his hands on his hips. He sighed and watched as the plume of smoke on the western horizon continued to expand and spread across the sky. He could not see the source of it any longer.

  “Whatever happened below shook something down. A ruin. Not sure what that was but it’s down, now.”

  “Been some in our clans that lived further south. The elders said these things can happen at any time and that they can be devastating. What if it’s one of the bridges we need to travel back home?”

  Jonah thought back a few moments, when the vibrations had shook his feet and rattled his teeth.

  “We’re going to have to scout it,” Solomon said, not waiting for Jonah to reply.

  The hunter clans, with whom the Elk had shared the land during the winter, began to gather in tight huddles. Each leader spoke in soft, comforting tones. No words seemed to ease the fear of their people. Men shouted and women cried, while children clutched at their mothers’ skirts.

  Jonah turned slowly, watching all of the nomads and clanspeople gather. Regardless of their origin, customs, or rituals, he sensed the same emotion from them all—fear.

  “Find Declan. Send word to Rav and Ghafir. We need to know what they know. These lands are still foreign to me. They are not the same as the northern forests and eternal lakes. This soil is restless.”

  Solomon and Gunney turned and pushed their way through the throng of people surrounding Jonah’s camp. He had led them here. All of them. And now they would demand he protect them in the way leaders should. Jonah spotted Gideon behind Sasha and Keana, and for a brief moment, he thought he saw Seren, too. But he saw a different girl from another clan, and Jonah decided that now was not the time to be selfish and mourn his own losses.

  He felt Seren’s presence even though he had not seen her in months. Despite Gaston’s foolish beliefs, and despite what could have happened to the rest of the Elk who followed him, Seren was alive. Jonah knew it, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if the face in the crowd had turned out to be her.

  The people gathered and tight whispers to the elders soon grew into a roaring cacophony of anger. They demanded answers, and it was Jonah’s job to provide them. He looked around as more gathered around his modest tent, their mouths moving and their arms waving at the plume of smoke oozing from the western horizon. Sasha put a hand on Jonah’s shoulder, and he gave her a smile—the kind a husband gives a wife despite how desperate the situation might be.

  “What is happening?” a man in the crowd asked.

  Jonah decided he had no choice but to be honest. It was not what his father would have done, but that only motivated him to do so even more.

  “The ground is shaking,” he said, the words sounding so obvious and silly that Jonah wished he hadn’t spoken them. “Something to the west has been destroyed.”

  “Will it harm us?” another asked. “I felt the tremors.”

  Rather than attempting false reassurance, Jonah simply shrugged.

  Chapter 37

  The tracker in the long coat and hard, capped boots stopped on the path and crouched down to examine the earth. His gloved hand touched the boot-print in the soil, pushing aside snow, leaves and grass to check the slight depression. He pulled back the mask that covered his face and shuddered at the cool air.

  Other figures gathered around him and behind him, awaiting his verdict. There were maybe twenty warriors, all wearing the same type of long coats and dark winter fur.

  He looked up, peering down the thin path through the grass, before standing and turning to the tall, thin man standing just a few feet away.

  “It’s fresh,” he said, his voice deep and gravely, made harsh by the winter air. “Maybe only an hou
r or so.”

  “Good,” said the tall, thin man. “We are catching them, yes?”

  The tracker nodded. “Yes,” he said. “If we pick up the pace we will have them today.”

  The tall man waved his arm, and in answer to the signal, most of the other armed warriors flooded forward over the grass, following the path. “Then let us pick up the pace and hunt them down,” he said.

  The Cygoa warrior party had followed the trail of the clan of hunters through the woods for days, heading further east as they followed the trail that grew fresher as they travelled. They stopped at a frozen stream and the warriors jumped the gap and headed into the wood, but the tracker stopped jogging and crouched near a fallen branch, touching a dark patch on the ground just inches away from the cracked bow of the rotting tree. He smelled his hand and then stood again.

  Blood.

  “You found something?” asked the tall thin man, the leader of the warrior pack.

  “Blood,” said the tracker. “One of them is injured, I think.”

  “You are sure?” asked the tall man. “It is not the blood of a catch?”

  “No,” said the tracker. “The blood is human. I can tell by the smell.”

  The tall man nodded once more and turned to follow his men. “This explains why they are slow.”

  Two more hours passed as they headed farther into the thickening forest, and the warriors slowed their pace. The snow was thick along the east side of the mountain; jogging through it became more of a laborious task. The tall man could tell his warriors were tiring. They were used to jogging, for miles and miles if necessary, but mainly over flat ground. This thick forest, with its uneven ground and foliage that grabbed at their ankles, was more difficult to move over than the barren ground of their old homeland.

  They moved through a thick copse of trees and then stopped, looking down the slope on the other side. The rest of the warriors hid in the thick trees behind them. Below, on a large area of flat land that must have been carved from the side of the mountain, stood a large, crumbling ruin. It was a decent sized building, and the thin man thought that it would once have been much larger but had crumbled away over the centuries. There were no windows in the gaping holes that ran along the bottom of the building, as was usual in ruins such as these, but the large entrance at the front of the building was blocked up by debris and logs that he could see had been dragged there very recently.

  So they are dug in, thought the tall man. They’ve decided that they can’t run from us anymore, and they’ve stopped to build a defense, to try and fight us.

  The tracker moved up near to the tall man.

  “How many of them are in there, do you think?” asked the tall man.

  The tracker glanced at the building, eyeing the makeshift defenses, which wouldn’t hold for very long, and thought back to the tracks he had been following. “Maybe a dozen,” he said. “No more than that.”

  “Then we greatly outnumber them,” said the tall man. He looked at the building, trying to spot movement within. There was none.

  How best to attack the place? he wondered. Direct assault could be costly. And yet it could be very effective if the group that waited for them inside were expecting something more stealthy. Both, he thought.

  “Split the men into two groups,” he said to another warrior standing nearby. Half will go around the side.” He pointed to the overgrown area near the southern side of the building. There the bushes and trees came within a dozen feet of the outer wall and there were plenty of gaps to go through. “And let the half who wish to go in the front door, screaming, do so. Volunteers for a charge.” Even though he made it sound like it was something that was each warrior’s choice, his men knew that he was commanding half of them to volunteer. If they didn’t, he would volunteer them.

  * * *

  Briar could feel the burn in his arms as he stood on the other side of the gaping hole in the side of the building. The spear felt heavy. After days of moving almost constantly, to stay ahead of the strangers that hunted their group, he was over-tired. But there was nothing else that could be done. If any one of them gave up now they would all end up dead, like the old man, Duz. The man’s body would be frigid and frozen now, lying there at the bottom of the gully, covered in snow. Until the wolves or something else came for him.

  He felt guilty about the older man. He’d known him his whole life—had looked up to the elder hunter as both a teacher and a friend—and it pained him that they couldn’t give him a proper send off.

  Maybe we can go back, he thought. After we’ve rid ourselves of these bastards. Maybe we can go back, find the body, and pay our dues. But he knew that Duz would tell him not to be stupid, that this was the way of things and it was natural. We hunt the wild animals to live and then, one day, they get us back.

  He glanced around the large open space inside the building, looking in turn at each of the other hunters, men he had known for years. They were all tired, but none of them were willing to give up and die just yet. He looked over at Loner. The man was still bleeding from the arrow that took him in the leg, but he thought he looked less pale now. They had carried him most of the way, and he’d nearly passed out twice, but he was strong and would make it, if they could survive this. Loner sat on a table at the back of the room, his bow ready.

  Briar frowned and then hissed to alert the others. There was movement in the woods around them, just west of the building about a hundred yards away, and it wasn’t an animal.

  No, there was one of them. He could see the man through the trees, dressed in his heavy furs and long coat. They were a strange lot, these newcomers, and not at all at home in the forest.

  They will come soon , he thought, and then we will see how well they fight. But as he contemplated this, he felt another of those strange rumbles in the earth. Another one, he thought. What the hell are those things? He’d felt them out on the plains and to the west, but never in the mountains—never this far from the eastern shore.

  Then his attention snapped back to the outside of the building as a roar of voices went up in the tree line. A dozen figures appeared, charging across the clearing between the forest edge and the building. Their voices were raised in a war cry that chilled him to his bones, but he stood and stepped into the shadow, raising the spear, tightening it in his grip. His machete was safely at his side, ready for when the fight was too close for the spear, but first he would stick one of them, maybe two, with the sharp pole.

  Briar watched as the dozen men rushed across the open ground in a close knit group, charging forward as quickly as they could, but then he saw one of them stumble to the side and fall to the ground. Briar felt the ground shake underneath him, and his eyes went wide with fear as dust and small bits of stone fell from the ceiling. The charging group was half way across the open ground, running forward, when the ground opened up and swallowed them. One moment the dozen or so men were thundering toward Briar, screaming at the tops of their voices, and the next the ground tore open below them and they plunged into the gaping maw.

  Briar staggered backward, eyes wide, unable to comprehend what he was witnessing. All along the west side of the building, a wide fissure opened up. The dirt and stone collapsed into the ground with a loud whoosh, and the roar of noise as the crack opened and widened was deafening.

  “What the hell is going on?” came a voice from behind him, and Briar turned to see Loner on his feet and heading toward him.

  “Don’t know,” Briar replied. “Damn ground just opened right up and swallowed them.” He looked up, across the gap that now spanned maybe thirty feet, and looked into the shocked eyes of the man who had stumbled. He was the only member of the charging group to not fall into the gaping hole. The man took a few steps back, seeming to not know what to do or where to go, but then Briar saw him shudder and fall to his knees, a shaft of wood with white feathers protruding from his chest.

  Loner coughed and lowered his bow. He grinned.

  “Nice shot,” said Bri
ar.

  Chapter 38

  Seren shivered as she stood under the low branches of the tree. The snow came down lightly; it was much less dense than it had been for the weeks she had spent in refuge at the house in the forest, but it was still falling. The ground remained thick with the stuff, and she couldn’t run at any decent speed.

  She watched, keeping to the shadow of the trees as the young buck moved through the woods a hundred yards away. She had been surprised several times in the forest area east of the long road that led south from Wytheville. She had expected there to be little game, and in the early days she set about finding nuts and berries and hoarding them in the house. Then, on the fourth day of her stay, she had, almost by accident, caught a deer with a lame leg, one that had obviously been left behind by the migrating herds. And it hadn’t been the last. The buck hiding in the trees opposite, still unaware of her approach, would be the fourth she had taken down.

  She waited, an arrow already notched in her bow, and watched the buck move slowly through the trees.

  Damn thing doesn’t want to come this way, she thought. It would be harder to catch if it didn’t bolt into the clearing, but she had faith that it would.

  Her thoughts drifted as she waited, and an image of Sasha, Keana and her up at the lake, washing clothes when she had been only young, came to mind. Had they reached Eliz? She presumed they had, but wondered who had been lost along the way. Some would be gone, now, she thought. Logan. He was old. She doubted that she would ever see him again, but still held hope.

  I’ll wait until the winter ends, she thought, and the spring brings the thaw, then I’ll pack supplies and head to Wytheville and wait for them to return. All the clans will gather there, including the Elk. I can just camp up in the ruins somewhere, or maybe in one of the outlying buildings on the edge of the city. Then I’ll wait for signs of them returning.