They crowded up behind and beside and before him. Their silence shouted at him.
Finally, voice big, one of the men said, ‘Send him on his way, with a beating to make him mind that he did get too big for his breeks.’
Finnlay Pacenot’s aunt came right up to him. Her face was all red and tight. She slapped his face – whap-whap – left cheek, then right. ‘Look what you do bring us to, you and your selfish grieving. You good-for-naught. Corban is a good, respectable man . . .’ She was panting. She was crying. Acton stared at her, both hands up to his burning face. ‘You do bring down your da’s good name with you.’
Acton did not know he was going to push her until it was done. ‘Leave my da out of this!’ He let his arms fall to his sides. She picked herself up, wiped her hands on her skirts, lifted her basket to her head and stalked through the watching villagers.
‘Turn in his grave he would, your da.’
Acton rounded on the man who’d spoken. ‘I’ll get you for that, when I am big enough.’
‘What would you have? That we do send this to the new Lord?’ said Cam Attling.
The tight ring of people loosed a little. ‘We do settle things our own way, with our own,’ the same man said.
Everyone and no one looked at Cam with his long, Uplander mess of hair, and the Uplander words that fell from his tongue at times. He smiled a little. ‘He is our Lord now.’
Finnlay swung his crop in Cam’s face, so that it whined like the arrow that had killed Jinn. ‘So says a traitor!’
‘Aye!’ shouted someone, and someone else shoved Cam.
Acton screamed over them. ‘Who of you did I ask here? This is mine. You can all get out of it.’
For a moment everyone was silent.
‘Ah.’ It was Da Palfreyman. Something in his way of speaking spread a calm over Acton, over them all. ‘Like that, is it?’ Bent and old as he was, he walked slowly, slowly around the inside of the circle, which gave a little, widening the space around Acton. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we do need to get Farmer up here.’
No one threw Da Palfreyman’s words back at him. ‘You.’ The Headman pointed at Farrow. ‘Fetch him up.’
Farrow ran down the drive, and back up. More slowly, Corban Farmer took the slope up to them, holding his hat and slapping it against his thigh with each step, and each step was solid and even. Acton scrambled to his feet and put the post between them.
‘Boy’ said Corban. ‘Boy?’ His face wore the same look as when he had killed Jinn; when he had reeled under the blow of Acton’s words. ‘Hunh.’ He walked around the post to him. ‘Everyone knows you do not like to be in that house on your own. Come with me – we are both alone – we can learn one another, we can rub along. Surely?’ He turned his hat around and around in his hands. ‘Made me think, you did, sitting up here day after day.’
Acton felt something happen in his head. It was the scream unravelling, and with it the lifting of a pressure, a weight. The easing of it had him bowing his head, rocking forwards and back, crying into his cupped hands and all the village looking on.
‘Well.’ Da Palfreyman clasped Acton’s shoulder. ‘It does bear thinking on.’
Someone else said, ‘For the sake of the Goddess and us all, do we bury that dog.’
‘Where will you have her?’ They were asking him. He shook his head. Words went back and forth among those gathered, too quiet for him to hear, until: ‘Bury her here, then.’
‘Farmer, do you fetch up a shovel.’
Acton sank down on the far side of the post, pulled his knees to his chest and hugged them there. He did not, could not look, but there was no way of not hearing the shovel slice into the ground.
‘Wait,’ said Cam then. ‘The arrow, do you want it?’
A dozen people at once said, ‘Of course he does not.’
‘Do you?’
Acton jerked his head, yes, but did not look up. Someone stepped up before him. All Acton could see were scuffed boot-caps, then a fall of long hair, and a sleeve, hanging, and in his one hand the arrow. Cam laid it down.
Acton caught at the empty sleeve. ‘My da . . .?’
Cam shrugged. ‘I do not remember.’
Acton thought, He does. And said it. Which made Cam start.
‘You did fight with him?’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Cam crouched to Acton’s level. ‘All us Kayforliers, we did fight together.’
‘You did lose your arm when he died?’
‘No. That happened at the end, right at the end.’
‘So my da, he died early on in it?’
‘Not early on.’
‘I never did know.’ He let go his hold on Cam’s sleeve. ‘Not until you came back.’
Cam picked up the arrow and dug at the ground with it. ‘It was strange, that.’
‘Coming back?’
‘Aye. Alone. Strange.’ Cam’s knees unbent, hair and arm and sleeve lifting out of Acton’s sight.
‘Do you help me here?’ said someone, from behind Acton. ‘Aye, set her in gentle-like.’
There was a spattering sound of soil, growing heavier. Acton tucked his head against his knees.
‘Who does have a drop for the beast? To see her on her way to the Goddess?’
‘Here.’
Liquid splatted against earth. Acton took the arrow in his hands and clenched them tight around it, then stood up and looked. Jinn was a mound. The edges of the turves they’d laid over the grave hardly showed.
‘Now, Acton Mansto,’ said Da Palfreyman. ‘And you all. Do you get on home.’
Acton walked along the road, alone, the whole of the village still standing there about his post. He walked into the shadows of the plane trees that grew on the bend of the road, and out of them again into Kayforl’s high street. He walked and he thought. He thought of Corban Farmer as a child. He thought of the war that had taken his father, Corban’s sons, Cam Attling’s right arm. He thought of Isla Caross and Minnet, of Corban Farmer’s man, and of the talk of fetching the new Lord to this. He was past the village proper. He thought of Jinn, and turned his face for home. But his feet had their own ideas and took him back through the village, back up the Ridge Road. No, he bid them, but they were deaf, and they walked him past the gatepost – ‘Jinn.’ He bowed to her, the grave – and down the track to Corban Farmer’s house, the lamps shining gold through the empty windows and lighting the night.
BAN COVERLAST COURTS
Cam dived to the left: rose up on his toes, pushed off and hit the water canted to his uninjured side. A flat tongue of rock lapped into the waterhole. He hauled himself onto it. ‘If I . . .’
Ban watched him set his right shoulder forward, tip his head to the right. Watched him dive left.
‘Anh.’ Cam surfaced. His arm gave way as he tried to pull himself out of the water again, and he had to squirm onto the rock on his belly.
Ban reached to help, stopped before Cam could snarl at him. ‘You do need to practise it, that is all.’
‘Huh.’ Cam lay spread-limbed and gasping on the rock. ‘Practise.’
‘It is not so very long, since . . .’
‘No.’ Cam looked at him and, for a moment, through him.
Ban flipped himself onto his stomach so that sun ran scorching on his back. ‘You—’ He mimicked Cam, right shoulder curving over.
‘Aye?’
‘That is why you are off balance, trying to protect it. Pull your right shoulder back.’
What must Cam do, but get up and dive again.
‘Better,’ said Ban, surprised. Cam only stood over Ban and dripped chill river water onto his back. ‘Ai!’ Ban rolled out of reach.
‘Tell me how to swim, and you sitting here in the sun handing out directions.’
Ban grabbed Cam’s ankle and pulled his foot out from under him. ‘Yah.’
It was Ban’s chore to milk the goats. Goats were different from cows. Evil and stupidly clever. He liked them for that. The nanny turned those long-pupiled eyes that looked all
wickedness on him and tried to tip the pail.
‘I don’t like it.’ Ardow had followed Ban to the goat shed, to help him with the milking. ‘You spending so much time with that Cam Attling, I don’t like it.’ Ardow was third from youngest, but that made him good as lord over Ban, the youngest. Over Ban and Hale, as Jerric was of Ardow, and Marrister of Jerric, and so on to Dance, who was eldest of all eleven of them.
He means, thought Ban, that I did not help today. Which made him feel bad. He did not know how to tell Ardow that, so he said, ‘What does it matter to you?’ knowing it to be wrong.
Ardow only said, ‘He’s come back very wild, from the war.’
Swimming in the river, wild? Ban laughed aloud. ‘He could hardly make the pull to the bank.’
‘Aye, well. Think on it.’
Mam was at the fire, stirring the stew pot. There was always a fire, and a stew pot on it. ‘Where you been, the day?’
‘Here’s the milk, Mam.’
‘Don’t want to tell me, then?’
‘I have some work haying with the Fieldsters,’ Tobian said.
‘Do they pay you?’ asked Da.
‘My food, and feed towards keeping the goats through winter.’
‘Aye, well done.’
Calister brought home fish, guddled from the brook. Da and Mam had gathered blackberries.
Ban got in the firewood and cleaned the pot after supper, for shirking his work all day, for Ardow’s words at him. Eleven sons: not one stillbirth, not one child lost to illness, not one daughter. Not one of them wed, and Dance on the further side of thirty. So Ban and his ten brothers did women’s work along with the men’s.
It was Midsummer that Ban had started to skite off: Cam had been drinking at the tavern, fencing with words, all the village men at him to know how the war had dealt with brother or father, uncle, nephew, cousin, son. Cam slid around their questions.
‘What are you hiding?’ Bailey Nelsan’s da had asked. It wasn’t only him who had looked dirty at Cam, and then muttered to his pot-mate. And Cam . . . Cam had caught Ban staring and Ban had gone red. At the sudden heat in his face he’d turned away. But Cam had come over.
‘Hiding!’ He’d sat on the bench beside Ban. ‘They think they want to know, but they do not.’
‘Why don’t you tell them?’ he had said. Him, Ban Coverlast, who never opened his mouth. Somehow Cam made the words come into his head and out on his tongue.
‘Dead.’ Cam stared into his beaker as if the contents entranced him. ‘Dead, dead, dead. Each and all of them. Spear or arrow or sword or disease. What is there to tell?’
There had been a long pause, then, while Ban found the nerve to speak. ‘They do have a right to know.’
‘If I had never come back – and I nearly did not – who then would they ask?’
‘They would still want to know. Would you not?’
Cam had lifted a shoulder. That he would not want to talk about it . . . Ban thought he could understand: to talk about it was to think about it, when all Cam wanted, it seemed, was to forget.
It was night now, and the eleven of them lay down together, boys by the fire and Mam and Da in the loft. Ban squeezed against the wall for some aloneness. He thought of Cam – the thick dark hair under his arm, fine dark hair on his chest – touching himself, and in his mind making it Cam’s hand on him.
Ban had felt bad going to sleep. He felt bad on waking, and determined to go with Ardow today, work. Coverlasts farmed no land, owned no land to farm, only their goats; they harvested only what nature put there. If Ban did not help in that unending gathering of food, all the family hungered. How was it, then, that he found himself slipping off to the waterhole, to see if Cam waited there for him? Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow I will work.
Cam was floating leaves on the water. ‘Soon it will be too cold to swim.’
‘I could have told you that.’
Cam said nothing.
‘I should be working.’
Cam said nothing again.
‘Why are we not?’
‘Because . . .’ Cam spread his one hand. ‘We’re going to swim.’
While Cam swam, Ban fidgeted about on the bank and told Cam about the guilty feeling he had been holding, the length of summer.
‘I can fix that,’ said Cam. ‘Do you meet me here on dusk.’
That evening Ban followed Cam through the forest to Fenister’s land. First in rank there was the Lord in Dorn-Lannet, who none in Kayforl did ever see – not their own before, nor the Uplander that called himself theirs now. Next in rank were the Fenisters. It was them that the Coverlasts held their land from.
The mouldering leaves were scuffed up, marking a run off the track. Cam followed it and Ban followed Cam, through low and scrubby trees, both of them walking with hands up before their faces at first, then walking side-by-side, through forest groomed and tidied.
Cam led them to the edge of the newly cleared land, overlooked by Fenister’s terraces.
‘Half of what we get off the land goes to Fenister.’ Ban threw stones onto the naked soil. ‘And now he’s clearing it, land we’ve always used.’
Cam looked at Ban. ‘Fenister is fat, and he’s fat because he’s greedy.’
‘Did you care so much for Miss Graceful then?’
‘Aah!’ Cam mimed a wound to the gut. ‘You hit hard, Ban.’ Though he joked about it, though he walked beside Ban and laughed, something about Ban’s words had made a wall between them, though he had not meant them to.
‘They’re a closed-fisted, money-scammering lot.’
‘This does tip the balance a little more your way, then.’ Cam laughed quietly, and the wall between him and Ban seemed gone again.
They kept their distance from the big stone house that was Fenister Fort.
‘Close enough here, I do think.’ Cam had them crouched behind a buttress root of a huge fig.
At that moment, Ardow’s voice sounded in Ban’s head. He leads you astray, does Cam Attling. Ban realised he was afraid.
‘Cam,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s go.’
Cam wasn’t smiling, but Ban could see that laughter was close to the surface, narrowing Cam’s eyes. He butted Ban on the shoulder with his elbow.
There were rabbits out in the fields. Cam had his bow, that he would never draw again. He held it out. Ban shook his head: there was death in the very feel of it. They argued it in silence, in gestures, then Cam took his knife from his belt and – thhhunk – a rabbit was pinned dead to the ground.
Down the trail, there was a crackling of brush. Cam looked at Ban, eyes wide, and Ban at him. Then Cam darted out of shelter, caught up knife and kill. They ran, stopped when they’d put a distance between themselves and the field.
Ardow said Cam was changed since he went to war. Ban had been eleven then and Cam twelve. There would be some change, Ban had argued, from eleven to seventeen, from twelve to eighteen.
‘And what did he see, do, all those years of fighting, to come back half Uplander?’ Ardow was in very earnest. ‘Some say he fought for the Uplanders, not ours. Some say he killed all ours, else how did he come back so fine, horse and sword and all, Uplander in his ways?’
‘Shame on them, and on you,’ Ban had said.
This Cam, his Cam, led him stealthily now, through Fenister’s new game wood. Once he stopped.
‘One rabbit is not enough to feed thirteen.’ And Cam worked them closer and closer to the big stone farmhouse to get another rabbit. Ban began to lag.
‘Come on!’ Cam paused, waiting for him. ‘Do I have to carry you?’
It wasn’t the walking that slowed Ban: it was being so close to Master Fenister. They crouched by the yard’s very walls, and then it happened. One of the hands came to piss over the yard wall and, catching sight of them, set up a hue and cry.
They ran again, and this time Ban led, no longer trying to be quiet.
They stopped to catch their breath.
‘Lost them,’ Cam whispered. ‘H
ave we not?’
‘Not, but we will. After me.’
Their eyes met and they laughed. Ban felt fear turn to excitement.
He lost Cam, where the forest was still given over to itself, undergrowth stringing cat’s cradles between the tree trunks and the trees themselves grown smaller, knottier. As soon as he realised, he stopped. The moon perched fat and low on the horizon, not so much lighting the woods as dappling them with an eerie glow. Ban waited, dread growing in him. At last he thought of the waterhole and made his way there. Cam sat on the diving rock, face all scratched.
Ban hung back in the trees. ‘He . . . he did see you?’
‘Uh-uh.’ Cam shook his head.
Ban came out from cover. ‘What happened?’ He touched his own face.
Cam lifted a shoulder. He didn’t say, but Ban thought he knew. He could see Cam, running, shoving the low branches aside, breaking them in his hand, Fenister’s farmhand become an Uplander soldier and the war still being fought.
‘Don’t tell me I’m not pulling my weight.’ Ban threw the game down upon the table.
Mam upped and slapped him. Ban yelped and dodged back.
‘How did you come by that?’
‘The Fenisters do bleed us. This does just even it up a little.’
He was shouted down.
‘Even? Even what?’
‘That’s never your thinking, Ban.’
‘If Fenisters do have, and Coverlasts do not, then that is what each does deserve, in this life.’
‘No!’ Ban slammed his fists upon the table. ‘It is not.’
‘Cam Attling,’ said Ardow. And everyone fell silent.
Ardow put his hand on Ban’s shoulder. Ban could not speak, was looking down and willing the tears dry in his eyes.
It was strange, he thought later, how something he was so sure about could turn around and become another thing altogether.
Yet he wanted something that matched the poaching, and which . . . which was not following. It wasn’t just words that Cam was drawing out of him. All day he thought about it, and finally it came to him.
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