The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  She could only nod, looking at the ground.

  Skuld’s hard face remained doubtful. ‘You said a demonstration?’

  ‘Of course. You see that tree over there, the twisted birch with a knot in it just like an eye? Fifty paces and I can—’

  ‘No.’ Skuld cut him off. ‘I have a better target.’ He made a sharp gesture at the other Jorlith, then folded his arms.

  There was a commotion at the back of the crowd and when the movement ended it spat out two warriors with another man between them, his hands roped behind his back and his face bruised from a beating.

  Algar’s cheeks paled and Alfreda felt the blood drain from her own face.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No, I …’ For once words seemed to fail him.

  Skuld dragged the prisoner closer by the rope round his hands. He was a tribesman, round-faced and very young. ‘He’s marked to die with the moon,’ Skuld said. ‘You’ll only be hurrying his death by a few hours.’

  Algar’s eyes looked everywhere but at the bound man. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He’s a raider.’ Skuld had no difficulty looking at the prisoner. ‘Filthy Janggok scum – his brothers carried off two women and a boy before we caught him. He told us where the others were hiding and now they won’t be preying on decent folk again. It’s time for him to join them where they’ve gone.’

  Algar swallowed hard, but after a moment he nodded. ‘Very well then. You’ll need to position him some twenty paces away. And then stand well clear of him.’

  ‘What if he tries to run away?’ one of the churls asked.

  ‘Tie his legs,’ Skuld said impatiently.

  There was an excited burble from the crowd. They’d thought they were here to see a demonstration, but instead they were about to witness an execution.

  Algar pointed the advanced fire javelin towards the bound man. The brace should have steadied it, but Alfreda saw the muzzle wavering, pointing first up towards the sky and then sideways almost at the crowd. Algar’s hands were shaking uncontrollably, and she clenched her jaw and moved to help him.

  Together they got the device braced, and Alfreda put the small wad of black powder at the bottom of the tube by the touch hole before dropping in the lead ball above it. She’d fashioned it from the dead beast’s armour and her skin flinched away from touching it; she packed straw around it to ensure it was wedged in tight.

  After that, there was nothing to do but dribble a trail of black powder through the touch hole. The preparations complete, she and Algar looked at each other. They didn’t need to speak. She knew what he was thinking: we’re about to murder a man.

  ‘Well?’ Skuld said. ‘Do you mean for him to age to death before you kill him?’

  ‘Stand back, then,’ Algar said, and took his flint to strike a spark at the end of the trail of black powder.

  The flame gobbled the powder until it was inside the fire javelin and the rest ignited. There was no chance to watch the result. There was only a moment of light and force like nothing Alfreda had felt before. And then, without quite knowing how she’d got there, she was lying on her back on the grass, staring at the sky.

  Her ears rang with a pure, clear note that blocked out any other sound. Her joints felt like they’d been loosened by the explosion and and her eyes seemed to lag behind her head as she rose and looked around. After blinking them a few times she could see that the figure standing to her right was Algar. She said his name, but she couldn’t hear her own voice and doubted he could hear her either. He stared into the distance, brow furrowed as if he was picking at a problem without a solution, but when she touched his shoulder, he turned towards her.

  ‘What happened?’ he mouthed.

  She shrugged.

  Their audience, scattered by the explosion, began to regroup around the advanced fire javelin. The explosion had all but destroyed it. The hoops she’d bound round the barrel had torn and the welded rods had mostly fallen apart. The wooden support was nothing but splinters. It occurred to her that she and Algar were lucky to have survived their experiment.

  ‘It broke,’ she said to him as he approached, and for the first time was able to hear her own words.

  He nodded, studying the wreckage of his creation. ‘Oh well. It was loud, at least.’

  ‘It certainly was that.’ She looked for Skuld and saw him with another knot of people twenty paces away, staring at something on the ground. For the first time, she noticed the copper stink of blood on the wind. When Skuld turned to them, he was smiling.

  ‘Algar,’ she said, but he’d already seen. He took her hand in a vice-tight grip.

  As they approached, Skuld waved back the Jorlith around him so that finally they could see what lay on the ground. The metal ball hadn’t struck where they’d been aiming, but it had hit. The prisoner’s legs were gone. Strings of skin and flesh hung from his thighs, and a shard of bone poked from his left stump. A wide pool of blood circled his waist. A few more drops fell to join it from the wrecked flesh, but it was clear the man’s heart was no longer beating.

  Algar made a strangled sound and fell to his knees, retching out a stream of bile. The sharp smell of it joined the stink of blood and shit.

  ‘Well,’ Skuld said, ‘he’s dead.’

  Algar looked up, his eyes red-rimmed. ‘That wasn’t … that wasn’t what I intended.’

  Algar didn’t go to the dance that night. He lay motionless in the bed beside Alfreda, looking up at the wagon’s patched roof. It was too dark to see his expression but she ran her fingers over his face and felt the frown lines in his forehead and the downward tick of his mouth.

  ‘You didn’t know what would happen, Gar.’

  He shifted beside her. ‘I knew it would kill him. I wanted it to – that was the whole point.’

  ‘You didn’t want him dead, not really. You just wanted it to work.’ But she couldn’t quite put into words why Algar wasn’t responsible, the way he could care so much about things that didn’t matter and not even notice the things that did. ‘I love you, Gar,’ she said instead.

  After a while he rolled over, his cheek resting on his hand as he faced her. ‘It did work, didn’t it?’

  ‘Aye, it did. Of course, it also blew up.’

  He shrugged, waving an airy hand. ‘You can build another, can’t you? We’ll go and pick up what’s left tomorrow. No need to waste good metal.’

  ‘You know fine well if I build it that way again it will just break again. And it was pure chance we actually hit him. It’s hard to aim when you’re flying through the air.’

  He laughed, and tickled her side until she did too. ‘We used too much black powder, I think. That’s all our stock gone again.’

  ‘It is. And we don’t have the funds to buy more.’

  ‘We need to learn the formula for ourselves. Back on the plains, Maeng Kin’s prettiest knife wife told me bat shit is one of the ingredients.’

  ‘Was she drunk at the time?’

  He waved his hand again, dismissing all practical problems as he always did, leaving it for her to find the solutions while his mind was already on the next big idea. ‘We can find some and test it. It doesn’t matter – we’ll earn enough to buy the black powder if we need to. The real problem is how to make the barrel strong enough. Smooth, too, so the ball flies true, or we’ll never aim it properly.’

  ‘Well,’ she said cautiously, ‘I’ve heard of a way to cast metal. A mould formed of clay around wax would hold its shape, and I can melt bronze into it if I make a furnace hot enough. A barrel made that way should be smooth and strong.’

  ‘Good, yes. And you could reuse the mould to make more. That black powder fuse will never do, though. It’s far too dangerous to stand so near. Maybe we can have a long, slow fuse, to give us time to run.’ He grinned at her excitedly and she nodded. She’d make the weapon again and make it better, if that was what it took to keep her brother smiling.

  9

  Uin kept his word, and the messengers he’d sent to
spread news of Krish’s arrival returned accompanied by men of substance from all the surrounding land. Their eyes alarmed Krish, so watchful and hopeful on him. And though Dae Hyo had been teaching him the language of the tribes, he found that these Rah twisted the words out of the shapes he’d learned. He left Olufemi to talk to them, and tried to ask Dae Hyo’s advice, but his brother was sullen and unhelpful.

  He understood why. He was Dae. He was. But he and Dae Hyo were a tribe of two and he needed more. If he was going to be a king, he needed to learn how to rule. And to take the Oak Wheel of Ashanesland from his father, he needed an army. The Rah seemed happy to provide a people for him to practise leadership with and soldiers to fight at his command, but Dae Hyo didn’t listen when Krish tried to explain it. He just shrugged and drank more of the throat-burning wine the farmers brewed from their strange underwater crop.

  On his third day in Rah lands, Uin took him beyond the cultivated fields, into the shadow of the jungle that ringed their territory, and showed Krish a string of reed rafts with neat wooden buildings on top of them. The wildlands were close enough that he could smell their wet decay, and hear the croak and chitter of a thousand hidden creatures. But those sounds were soon drowned out by the far louder noise coming from the buildings themselves. It was a constant, rhythmic clattering like nothing Krish had ever heard before.

  Uin saw his expression and smiled. ‘You wonder what it is, great lord? Merely the source of our wealth and the envy of the other tribes. It was my uncle’s uncle who devised the singing spinner. Come, see for yourself.’

  They entered the first house, a single long, low room so crowded that the warmth of all the human bodies added to the humidity of the surrounding swamp was almost unbearable – but Krish was too fascinated by what he saw to leave. All winter long, he’d watched his mother carding goat’s wool and spinning it into yarn. It would take her weeks of work between her many other tasks just to make enough for one jacket.

  Here, each man and woman sat behind a huge and complex wooden contraption, turning a wheel with one hand and moving a bar with the other. And somehow – Krish couldn’t quite fathom how – this fed the raw fibre on to six different spindles as thread. None of the workers looked up at the newcomers; each was dully intent on their work.

  ‘I saw no goats or sheep here,’ Krish said to Uin.

  ‘They don’t thrive in our land.’ Uin walked to the far side of the room, where another group of workers sat on low stools with plant stems clenched between their knees. ‘We use vegetable fibres instead of wool and find it makes a stronger cloth, and cooler too. The best rope is made from hemp, and sails are strongest when they’re fashioned from it, though our cousin tribes aren’t much interested in that.’

  There was more to see. Uin took him to visit five men working on the design of a loom that might take advantage of all the extra yarn they were producing. ‘We’ll power it with water,’ he told Krish, ‘but it would be best made of metal or, failing that, heartwood of the Moon Forest oaks should be strong enough. They’re costly though and we’ve yet to sell enough material to fund the building. When we do, though –’ he grinned wolfishly ‘– we’ll be the richest tribe on the plains, richer even than the Ashane.’

  The Rah were so different from his own people: so angry and forward-looking. Krish realised that he understood them far better than he ever had his fellow villagers. Nothing had ever changed in the place of his birth and nothing new was ever made there. He hadn’t known that things could be different, but a part of him had always yearned for some upending of all his youth’s dull certainties. And now here was another way of doing things.

  The next day, yet more men arrived from outlying settlements. Some of them brought their homes with them, towed by more tamed crocodiles, so that what had at first been no more than a small village became as crowded as Smiler’s Fair.

  Uin held a feast for them at noon on a floating platform on the water, with servants to wave palm leaves to keep off the insects and provide a cooling breeze. Crocodiles floated lazily in the water beside them, snapping at titbits of meat the men threw.

  This time Krish didn’t need Olufemi to speak for him, though he hesitated when they asked him questions about himself. What could he say? He’d begun to see that those Uin brought to meet him were all the wealthiest and most powerful of the tribe. The rest toiled at the singing spinner or in the waterlogged fields. Krish knew if he’d been born here it would have been to that work, not to lead, and he didn’t want his followers to think less of him. But he was happy to ask them questions. He wanted to learn everything about them.

  And as the meal progressed, he found another distraction. Uin’s daughter Asook had been seated opposite him, beside the wife of a trader. He’d paid no attention to her that first night, and in the next days he was too busy. Now he had the leisure to look.

  As Asook and the trader’s wife talked Krish watched her mouth, trying to see if he could make out the words. He watched her lips and her tongue darting out to lick the fat from them. He no longer found the pale tribal skin strange and her body was pleasingly rounded and firm-fleshed. He’d noticed it before, without quite realising it. He imagined how it would feel to put his arms round her. She’d be solid but soft.

  His shoulders twitched with the sudden discomfort of eyes on him and he turned to find Uin watching him watch his daughter. He flushed but the other man only smiled and said, ‘You were impressed with our singing spinners, great lord?’

  Krish nodded, too thick-throated to talk.

  ‘But you’ve yet to see our greatest achievement. Asook?’

  His daughter looked up from her conversation and Krish’s blush deepened even though her eyes didn’t touch him.

  ‘When our meal is finished, will you take Lord Krish to see the reborn land?’

  ‘Of course, Father.’ She looked at Krish then and he couldn’t read her expression.

  She took him out in one of the narrow, flat boats the Rah seemed to favour, with a servant in the rear to pole them through the shallow waterways. No, not a servant: a slave. Dae Hyo had explained that to him and he tried to puzzle it out now, looking at the thin Ashane boy sweating as he pushed them along. His face didn’t show the strain of his work. It didn’t show anything much, except a dazed sort of happiness. Dae Hyo had explained that too. The Rah fed their slaves a drug they called bliss that took away their will and all their misery with it.

  It seemed wrong, though Krish couldn’t quite figure out why. If you were happy, did it matter if you were free? And how free was anyone, truly? Krish couldn’t believe that his own boyhood had been much better than this slave’s.

  He thought of asking Asook, but when he looked at her face, the question dried up in his throat. They remained a while in awkward silence until she suddenly said, ‘You come from the mountains, they say.’

  Her Ashane was accented but otherwise perfect; he wondered if she’d learned it from her slave. When he didn’t respond at once she lowered her eyes, watching her own fingers as they trailed through the water, picking up strands of reddish weed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The White Heights, which are tall, but not as tall as the Black Heights.’

  She nodded, as if the answer didn’t much matter to her, and they both watched the water passing by, the half-drowned fields of the grain he’d now eaten with every meal and knew was called rice.

  ‘Is there much water in the mountains?’ she asked after a little while.

  ‘Streams. And snowmelt in the spring. Flash floods sometimes, but nothing like this. There’s so much of it!’

  She finally smiled at that, and then dipped her hand in the water and held out a cupped handful to him. She nodded at the quivering liquid and so he gently took her hand in his, his heart thudding at the contact, and put his lips to the water.

  A moment later he spat it out again. ‘It’s salty!’

  She laughed, but not cruelly. ‘It’s the sea! I guessed you must never have seen it.’

&nb
sp; ‘The sea is full of salt?’

  ‘All of it. It’s … stronger than normal water too. I don’t know how to say it. You float more easily in it than you do in a river.’

  ‘So this is the sea,’ he said, pointing at the winding waterways clogged with weed.

  She laughed again. ‘Not here. Not quite. You’ll know it when we get to it, but first we’ll pass the reborn lands. Soil we’ve taken back from the ocean.’

  ‘You pushed the sea away from the land?’

  ‘In a way of speaking, yes. Look – see over there?’ On the left side of the stream they were being poled along, a tall earth bank had been constructed and faced with stone. ‘That’s to stop the water rising and drowning the fields. The rice is thirsty and doesn’t mind growing with its feet drinking, but we wanted to grow other things as well, and now we can.’

  The barrier that contained the river water was nothing to the walls that held the sea back. They were taller than him and stretched for miles in every direction, with gates where streams were allowed to trickle through under the command of those who’d built them. He’d never seen natural things so utterly controlled by people.

  His own childhood had been lived at the mercy of rain and ice, but the Rah had told the greatest water in the world how it was to act. Their fields stretched for acres either way, planted with thriving green, red or yellow crops. This was the mastery he wanted to learn. This must be why Olufemi had brought him here.

  Asook lifted a basket from the bottom of the boat. ‘Do you want to eat?’

  Krish’s belly still felt stretched from lunch but he nodded. If they didn’t eat, the slave would turn the boat round and his time with Asook would be over. The dreamy-faced Ashane boy held out his arm to help them both from the boat and then squatted back in his place, the pole across his lap.