The Land You Never Leave

by Angus Watson

  Moments later everyone was queuing to let things go and watch them zoom into the ground. Even Sofi dismounted wincingly, plucked some grass and watched it fly down.

  “What is it?” she asked Chitsa, who was standing by the little cave mouth, smilingly smugly.

  “According to Dead Nanda, it’s the window to another world. There’s a whole world down there that mirrors ours. Right now, on the other side, there’s a girl showing people just like you the hole, apart from in the other world they’re not people like us, they’re demons.”

  “Does it always suck like this?” Keef asked, tossing more grass into the airstream.

  “No. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it blows. It depends on the weather down there.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “We just know.”

  “I’m going in!” He waved Arse Splitter around his head.

  “The demons will kill you,” Chitsa nodded.

  “I’ve got to have a look. Wulf, hold my feet!”

  Wulf did so, and Keef squeezed through the gap.

  Everyone watched until a muffled cry came from Keef to pull him out. Once extracted, he stood and dusted himself down.

  “Well?” asked Gunnhild.

  “Dunno. Couldn’t see a thing.”

  Everyone laughed, apart from Chitsa. “You were lucky,” she said.

  “We’ll need to stay here for a while,” said Keef, “widen the hole, make some rope and torches and see what’s down there.” He pointed at the trees on the other side of the canyon. “These trees’ll be good for what we need.” He jogged backwards on tiptoes. “Yes, we can build a frame there,” he pointed, “angle a couple of trunks out from it, rope up a boulder and swing it against the hole. That’ll open up a passage and—”

  “No,” said Sofi. “We’re going to Chitsa’s tribe now to see what they can tell us.”

  “But—”

  “That’s what we’re doing, Keef.”

  “Why don’t you come with me down the hole, Wulf? It’ll be heroic. Imagine! You, me, Arse Splitter and Thunderbolt in a world of demons. It’ll be the greatest story ever told.”

  “Men go down hole,” said Thyri. “Find all the feathers and grass that people have chucked down there and nothing else. Yeah, it’ll be amazing.”

  “Tell you what, Keef,” said Wulf, “right now I’ve got mountains to climb and a desert to cross, plus monsters and firenados to battle. If that gets boring, I will come with you down your hole.”

  “Bjarni would have been up for it …” muttered Keef as they walked on.

  “Which is exactly why we shouldn’t do it,” said Gunnhild. “A fool chooses excitement over duty. He finds shallow pleasure and shallower gains.”

  The first thing that Paloma noticed about Chitsa’s people was that they were all female and all were elderly or young; none were the traditional warrior age. Two of the older women were holding babies. They were around twenty in all, standing in front of four conical hide tents and looking wary—as they should with a bunch of warriors and a dagger-tooth cat walking up to them. It was possible that there were more of them, perhaps hiding and waiting to ambush, but Paloma didn’t think so. Their tents would have slept only about twenty, for one thing.

  A woman stepped forward. By her hat of grey hair, sallow skin and sunken eyes, she had to be the warlock Dead Nanda.

  Sofi reassured her that no harm was meant. Dead Nanda nodded and asked who they were. She was calm and articulate, if a little shrill; not at all what Paloma would have expected from someone who was meant to be dead.

  Sofi told Dead Nanda that they were the Calnians and the Wootah, heading west, then where they’d come from and how they’d got here.

  “Our village was not far west of the Shining Mountains. It was destroyed in a flood, then we were attacked by monsters. That’s when I was killed.”

  “What sort of monsters?” asked Wulf.

  Paloma was glad nobody was asking why Dead Nanda thought she was dead. Her sort of pseudo-warlock affectation was annoying and not to be encouraged.

  “Giant insects, mostly,” she answerwed, deadpan. “That wasn’t so bad, we could defend against those. When a pack of several dozen hairless wolves killed half our number, including me, the rest of us decided to leave.”

  “How did you get across the Shining Mountains?” asked Weeko.

  “We didn’t,” said Dead Nanda.

  “But you are here,” said Wulf.

  “Most of us didn’t make it. The squatches killed every male, young and old, and all the women of warrior age.”

  “Why?”

  “For pleasure, it seemed. They murdered some with their minds; knocked them down as if with an invisible hammer. The rest they tore apart with their hands. There was no fighting them. We tried. We didn’t so much as scratch one of them.”

  “Why did they let you go?”

  “They said—I say ‘said’ but they thought into our minds—that they were letting the young go to grow into adults that they might hunt.”

  “And they let the older women live to look after them?” asked Erik.

  “No. They said that we were bad eating.”

  They spent the afternoon with Chitsa’s people. While Wulf, Sofi and Weeko spoke to Dead Nanda and a couple of others, learning what they could about the Shining Mountains and the Desert You Don’t Walk Out Of, the rest of the Wootah and Calnians hunted and foraged, not to bolster their own supplies—they’d left the Green tribe well stocked—but to add to the refugees’ meagre reserves.

  After a long afternoon gathering herbs and berries under Yoki Choppa’s guidance, Finn finally sat a short way from the large fire they’d built, exhausted. He’d rested for only a moment when he heard Sofi shout.

  “Warriors, make ready. Non-fighters, hide. There’s something coming towards us. I don’t know what it is, but it’s large. Sitsi, it’s there,” she pointed westwards and upwards. “What is it?”

  Finn looked where Sofi was pointing, and saw a black dot in the distance. It doubled in size even in the couple of heartbeats before Sitsi said: “It must be one of the monsters we’ve been hearing about. It’s got oversized insect eyes, fangs like a dagger-tooth, a bulbous naked body like a shaved, pregnant cat and two, no three, pairs of wings flapping very quickly.”

  “How big?”

  “I can’t tell with any accuracy because there are no reference points. Hang on, there’s an eagle passing behind it … no, sorry, to the front of it. A long way in front. It’s very big. Wingspan maybe a hundred paces. I guess the body’s the same length, hard to tell from this angle. And it is heading for us.”

  Finn could make out its flapping wings now.

  “Weeko, Dead Nanda, any ideas?”

  “I haven’t seen anything like that,” said Weeko. “But I think hiding would be a good idea.”

  “Everyone, over to the gully,” shouted Sofi. “Apart from Owsla. And Wulf?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like Sassa on the edge of the gully with her bow, ready to flee but also to shoot.”

  “None of the Wootah are going into the gully,” said Wulf, “apart from the children, and Gunnhild if she wants.”

  Finn gripped Foe Slicer’s hilt. He didn’t, he was surprised to realise, want to go to the gully.

  “Bravery is being afraid but standing your ground,” said Gunnhild.

  Chitsa and her people ran with Ottar and Freydis to the gully. Dead Nanda stayed.

  “Spread out!” called Sofi. Finn found himself on the edge, farthest from the gully.

  The creature flew nearer and grew ever larger. Soon they could all see just how horrific it was. Sitsi hadn’t mentioned its dangling, black, insectoid legs. Dozens of them sprouted from its grey-pink belly like hairs. Instead of a foot, each had a shining spike at the end.

  The gully did have some appeal, Finn admitted to himself, but he stood his ground.

  Then they could hear it, a great leathery flapping, and a strange rasping which
Finn guessed must be its breathing. It rose and fell in the air, as if flying was a struggle.

  “Fuck. A. Duck,” said Paloma when the creature was a couple of hundred paces away and they could see it all the more clearly. Its yellow fangs dripped great globs of goo.

  Sassa looked at her and Paloma smiled back.

  “Sitsi, Sassa, try belly shots first, one arrow each,” said Sofi. “Shoot now.”

  Two arrows whistled off towards the beast and disappeared into its great soft stomach.

  For a moment nothing happened, then the wings stopped flapping and the huge animal fell from the sky. It hit the ground a hundred paces away with a great squelching whump.

  “Well, that was easy,” said Keef. “Bit of a shame I—”

  He was interrupted by a loud buzzing as a swarm of insects rose from the downed monster.

  “Now these I have seen before,” said Dead Nanda. “They’ll die soon enough, but their stings will kill you. They don’t like fire, so arm yourselves accordingly.” She plucked a burning ember from the fire.

  Finn grabbed a burning branch then watched as the cloud of insects spread a little, then coalesced and headed for them, filling the air with their sharper buzzing.

  Finn saw that they were the same kind of wasp that had terrified him back on the shore of Olaf’s Fresh Sea shortly before the Calnians had come—huge black bastards with red wings.

  Just as he’d done back then, he squatted, but this time he had a burning ember to ward them off with. The buzzing was all about for a moment, then it quietened as the wasps fell with a noise like muffled hail. A few of them bounced off Finn and he winced, but then it was over.

  He stood, along with everyone else apart from Gunnhild, who was lying nearby, her body convulsing. He ran over to her.

  His aunt’s neck was swollen and purple, her face red and her tongue protruding. There were two yellow lumps on her throat with red dots in their centres. She’d been stung twice. Her hands shook with the effort of trying to suck in air. She squeaked strangely. Her eyes bulged with begging horror.

  “Help!” he yelled.

  In a moment, Yoki Choppa was kneeling on the other side of Gunnhild with a flint knife pressed into her neck. He grunted as he straightened his arms to press down and cut into her windpipe. Finn watched in horror as the warlock sliced left and right to enlarge the bloody hole, then jammed his blowpipe into the slit.

  Gunnhild slumped and her arms dropped to her side, but her chest rose then fell as she breathed through the warlock’s blowpipe.

  “You saved her!” Finn gasped.

  Yoki Choppa came as close to smiling as Finn had ever seen. “Maybe.”

  Chapter 10

  Eagle’s Bluff

  The Wootah and Calnians helped Chitsa’s people move their camp away from the carpet of dead wasps and stinking remains of bloated monster, while Yoki Choppa picked through its weird corpse collecting samples.

  The following morning Finn was woken by Wulf the Fat.

  “Gunnhild is dead,” he said.

  “What the … how?”

  “I don’t know. Yoki Choppa says it could have been the wasp’s venom, or perhaps she just died. People do. You die—”

  “Yeah.”

  Wulf nodded and walked away.

  Finn lay and blinked tears, then resolved not to cry. He got out of his sleeping sack and walked to where Gunnhild’s body was wrapped in a blanket.

  Erik and Chogolisa were using deer shoulder blades to dig a hole. Freydis was watching them, weeping gently. Sassa was there too, with her hand on Freydis’ shoulder. Ottar was nowhere to be seen.

  “Do you want to see her?” asked Erik, standing up and stretching his back.

  “No,” said Finn. He wanted to remember her alive. “Where’s Ottar?”

  “He’s throwing things into the hole with Chitsa.”

  They buried Gunnhild, then headed off south and a little west, walking hard in the days and sleeping well at night. They left the hills and found themselves back on vast prairie, although the grass was mercifully a great deal shorter than the hip-high stuff they’d waded through in the east. Sitsi insisted this particular prairie wasn’t the Ocean of Grass. Finn didn’t see why it wasn’t; it looked the same to him. He didn’t push it though.

  Although you’d think she might have wanted to console him, Paloma Pronghorn kept her distance at all times. The few times that he managed to engineer an encounter, she was polite, but you’d never guess that they’d shared the most romantic moments of Finn’s life in the Black Mountains. And Thyri seemed permanently pissed off. They trained together every evening, but Thyri hardly spoke and she whacked him even harder than before. His improvement in blocking saved him from serious injury, thank Loakie.

  As Finn walked he tried to think about Gunnhild, but thoughts of Thyri and Paloma kept interrupting his attempts to mournfully muse. He’d decide that he was deeply, heroically, in love with Thyri, then resolve that, no, Paloma was simply the most exquisite person in existence and he had to be with her. It was sad, he told himself, considering nothing was ever going to happen with either of them.

  He tried to be pleased for his father. Erik and Chogolisa looked as happy as post-coital rabbits. They delighted in the animals and birds. They laughed a lot; giggled even. How sweet it was, Finn told himself. Objectively, perhaps, it was a little unfair that the father that had abandoned him should find a second love when Finn was yet to find his first one, but Finn wasn’t the type to feel hard done by. No, by Tor, he definitely wasn’t.

  It wasn’t just Erik and Chogolisa that Finn wasn’t jealous of. Keef the Berserker and Bodil Gooseface also seemed to have found each other. You wouldn’t know it during the day. Keef was as zany as ever and Bodil as dumb, and they didn’t speak to each other any more than they had before. But every night Sofi always put them on the same watch and they shared a sleeping sack. While Finn had managed to alienate both Paloma and Thyri by kissing Paloma, Bodil and Keef had gone from nothing to an established couple who might have been together for years. It was weird. But it didn’t bother Finn the Deep.

  A short way into the third day, Sofi climbed off the cat and limped along next to it. The children rode the beast some of the time, but they walked next to it more and more.

  Walking is good for limbs and essential for the mind, Gunnhild would have said. Finn was surprised to find himelf missing her sayings.

  “Shouldn’t we send the dagger-tooth back to Rapa Hoga?” asked Erik.

  “He said we can keep it while we need it,” said Sofi, ruffling the beast’s ears.

  On they walked. It rained, they got wet. The rain stopped, they dried. Just like buffalo, they were, mused Finn. He spent a lot of time looking at buffalo, trying to keep his mind off the two women. Finn had thought the buffalo’s melancholy eyes were looking into his soul, but when he reached out to their minds he found that they were simply sad because everything died.

  On the eighth day the grassland was punctured by rocky outcrops that Sitsi Kestrel said must herald Eagle’s Bluff.

  “Eagle’s Bluff?” asked Sassa Lipchewer.

  “If I hadn’t joined the Owsla, my parents would have sent me to Eagle’s Bluff. That’s what they’d claimed anyway, but they didn’t say it until I was very much part of the Owsla, and it’s easy to make statements that are never going to be tested.”

  “What is Eagle’s Bluff?”

  “A big lump of rock with a town on it, so they say. I’ve never seen it. The town, so they also say, is an amalgamated tribe of the elite, a gathering of the best warlocks and brightest thinkers from all the tribes. However, that’s obviously flawed, because if you are a great thinker or a warlock, then you use that. Either you stay with your tribe and help them, or you travel and learn. What you don’t do, surely, is gather in one place to show off how clever you are to other braggarts. They say that every single person on Eagle’s Bluff thinks they are the cleverest person there, which sums up for me what a dreadful place it must be
.”

  “Are you the cleverest person in the Owsla?” Sassa couldn’t resist asking.

  “By some measures, perhaps,” said Sitsi, colouring, “but in terms of practical application of intelligence and knowing what’s best for the Owsla, then Sofi is cleverest. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go and shoot our dinner.”

  Sitsi stormed off, leaving an amused Sassa.

  Well before they saw the blunted tooth of rock that was Eagle’s Bluff, they could see a thick column of smoke.

  “Is the smoke normal?” asked Sassa.

  “I don’t think so,” said Sitsi.

  They camped that night in the lee of a bare rock scarp overlooking a valley of buffalo-clipped grass. As if celebrating the passing of the buffalo and the lack of soaring birds above, there were tens of thousands of the little brown prairie dogs tearing about in the last of the light, including thousands of soft-furred, round-headed babies squeaking and leaping for flying insects.

  They’d eaten well yet again. Sassa hadn’t known it was possible to make food as delicious as Yoki Choppa’s creations.

  Despite what lay head, Gunnhild’s death and the mystery of the smoke from Eagle’s Bluff, Sassa felt well and happy tucked under Wulf’s arm, watching the dancing fire.

  “Tell them,” Keef the Berserker was saying to Bodil Gooseface nearby.

  “You’re not meant to.”

  “You’re not meant to go more that ten miles from Hardwork. You’re not meant to cross rivers full of sharks. You’re not meant to hook up with your enemy. You’re not meant to be so awesome with a long axe that everyone thinks you’re a god.”

  “So?” asked Bodil.

  “So you’re not meant to doesn’t mean anything any more. There are no rules.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll tell them.”

  Bodil stood. The setting sun highlighted the red in her dark hair. “Everybody!” she said. “Everybody!”

  They all gathered round apart from Paloma Pronghorn, who was out scouting. Sassa enjoyed watching Finn look around for Paloma, see she wasn’t there, then try and fail to sit next to Thyri Treelegs. Sassa didn’t mean to be cruel—she hoped he would find someone suitable at some point—but she did find his turmoil amusing.