Wine and Wingard were reading over her shoulders. ‘Reckon it’s true?’ one of them asked. With them behind her she didn’t know which; their voices were exactly alike.
‘I’m as sure as shit stinks.’ She knew who Eadric was now: the proud thegn with hair the colour of a Jorlith warrior’s. He was also, she recalled, the one who’d protested most strongly at the idea of using the imprisoned blacksmith’s weapon. ‘Bring Eadric to the moot court. I’ll fetch this Alfreda.’
‘And then?’ Wingard asked.
‘Bring the other thegns too,’ she told his twin, ‘and the Jorlith spear-leaders while you’re at it. It will do them all good to be there.’
The cells were on one of the lowest platforms, not quite in permanent shadow – the folk wouldn’t risk that, even for prisoners, not when a fortnight without sun might be enough for the worm men to come – but they were gloomy and constantly under the drip-drip-drip of dank water from the grander homes above. When Cwen had visited Alfreda earlier, she’d thought the sound might have driven the woman mad. She still thought her a little crazed, but now she understood what had made her that way.
The blacksmith was standing in the centre of the small cell when Cwen entered it, her looming form seeming almost to fill the place. She’d been huddled away before, trying to make herself small. Now her anger was evident. Cwen smiled at her. Anger she understood.
‘You don’t like to speak,’ she said to the other woman. ‘That’s fine. Hilda’s the same – lost her tongue when a moon beast put its beak inside her mouth and ripped it out, root and all. She can’t speak but it doesn’t mean she’s got nothing to say. Come with me now and I’ll do your talking for you.’
Alfreda wasn’t a well-looking woman. Her face was drawn, as though she’d eaten little or nothing since the moment they locked her up, and hers wasn’t a body that could do without food. It was as solid and strong as a stallion’s cock, not the sort of body you usually saw on a woman. Her face wouldn’t be hardening any man’s prick, either. It wasn’t a stupid face, though, and after a moment she nodded.
They walked out onto the platform and up the steps in silence. But she felt the eyes on them, peering from behind curtains and around tree boles. The good folk of Aethelgas were no doubt wondering what she was doing letting their dangerous prisoner out, and no chain on her. Well, they’d see.
The hawks had gathered all the leaders as she’d asked. A big muttering crowd of them stood outside the moot hall, mostly thegns and a few churls on the rise.
Bachur had left her in charge and told Cwen to do whatever it took. Cwen thought about Osgar, lying with his guts in a trail behind him. She thought about that a lot. Sometimes she woke with the image in her mind, from dreams she didn’t remember but which left her shaking and miserable. Osgar’s death had been necessary, a price that had to be paid. And she’d cared for Osgar a great deal more than she’d ever care for anyone here.
She didn’t speak to the thegns, just walked into the moot hall with Alfreda a very tall shadow behind her. The thegns grumbled but followed after. They didn’t like her rudeness, she knew that. Well, they could put spikes on her manners and shove them up their arses. She wasn’t here to make friends.
There was a round table, a ring of wood that took up almost the whole hall. It was meant to show that all were equal among the folk, as the Hunter had told them they should be. But the thegns liked to put everything in order, purest to filthiest and best to worst. There was one big chair at the end of the table, carved with owls and broad enough that three men could have sat there. The chairs running round the table diminished in size from that one, so that those opposite were little more than footstools: a perfect hierarchy.
Cwen walked up to the biggest chair, feeling the thegns bristle and watch her every step. She put her foot on it, used it as a step to climb onto the table, and then gestured for Alfreda to sit there. The blacksmith obeyed, her drawn face blank as if the symbolism of the gesture was meaningless to her. Maybe she thought Cwen had chosen it because it was the only one that fitted her brawny bulk.
The thegns understood well enough, though. The discontented murmurs grew into outright rebellion. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ asked a thick-necked thegn with prideful eyes.
‘The meaning is I want you all to sit down,’ Cwen said. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’
It was satisfying looming above them on the table as they reluctantly took their places. She wasn’t sure who she’d usurped at the head, but they all spent a while shuffling around, making sure they were still ranked as they ought to be. One poor man, wearing the only tunic without a thread of gold in it, was left standing at the far end of the table.
Eadric was only three chairs down from her, a place of honour for a man high in the Great Moot. His eyes barely left her the whole time the little dance was going on, and then it was only to look at the blacksmith.
Alfreda didn’t return his gaze. This was a woman, Cwen thought, with a lot of feeling dammed up inside her. A dangerous woman, if the dam broke.
‘You have us here, hawk,’ Eadric said, when the shuffling of feet and chairs was finally over. ‘There’s work to be done. You know this better than us, but you’ve dragged us away from it, so better explain yourself.’
She looked at him for a long, cold moment. She’d been clutch leader since she was fifteen, the Hunter’s second for the last four years, ever since Hrodgar had taken a tusk in the gut. She knew that honey drew flies just as well as shit. But sometimes shit was what you needed.
He wasn’t weak though. He didn’t yield. ‘And that killer you’ve brought,’ he said. ‘I heard she refused us her weapon, so I cannot think why you’ve brought her among us, and unrestrained too.’
‘Unrestrained. A killer.’ Cwen’s eyes swept around the table. They were all watching and her guts knotted. This wasn’t the same as leading her clutch, bringing down a moon beast with their arrows and spears and blades. ‘Tell me again what happened that day.’
‘It’s simple enough,’ Eadric said. ‘That villain Algar’s weapon killed two good men and himself with it.’
‘And he meant for that to happen?’
‘Aye, he was an ill-favoured sort.’
‘But a handsome man, I hear?’
He shrugged with an impressive display of indifference. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t eye a man with that in mind. Perhaps it’s different among the Hunt.’
‘But your bonny daughter saw him with little else in mind, or so I’m told.’
His face went red with rage and although no one else spoke, she felt it: the interest, and from a few men further down the table, the suppressed laughter. So it was true. She hadn’t been quite sure until that moment.
‘That’s a lie!’ Eadric said.
She enjoyed keeping her calm while his ire rose, and seeing how that made it rise further. ‘Is it? She’s a bairn bouncing on her knee these days, I’ve seen his rosy face myself. And no husband to claim the making of it.’
She wondered if there’d ever been such a conversation with her own dad. There might have been whispers about her mum, as her belly grew with Cwen. There must have been a reason they’d prayed to the Hunter to take this bastard child away from them. But Eadric’s grandson had no hawk mark on him. Whatever Eadric might have wanted, his daughter loved the child. She’d probably loved this Algar too.
‘I don’t know how it goes among you thegns,’ she said, ‘but among most people I know of, babies don’t come unless a cock gets put inside a woman’s cunt. Did this Algar put his cock in your daughter?’
Her words drew shocked gasps from the thegns and finally drove the blankness from even Alfreda’s face.
‘The truth of the matter is you had hands on that weapon of Algar’s more recently than he did,’ Cwen told Eadric. ‘He and Alfreda were ready to leave Aethelgas, but it was you who bade them stay. It was you made them demonstrate that weapon in front of all those folk. I think it was you that messed things up, meaning to sa
botage the weapon so only its user died and getting it wrong and killing two other innocents along with him. How right am I, tell me? But tell me true – we hawks know a lie when we hear it.’
That itself was a lie, but they weren’t to guess it. The folk liked to know as little as possible about the lives of the children they sent off to kill and die for them. Eadric’s face was an interesting thing: a visible struggle on it between rage and fear and the temptation to try to squirm out of it.
It was rage that won. ‘So what if I did want him dead? He lay with my daughter, and him some filthy Wanderer, took what wasn’t his to take nor hers to give. He ruined her and if I killed him it was no less than he deserved!’
There was a frozen second after that, everyone too shocked to act. Then Alfreda leapt to her feet, murder in her eyes. Cwen clasped a hand on her shoulder, firm as she could but still not strong enough if the blacksmith really meant to break it. ‘No,’ Cwen said. ‘This is my task.’
She leapt from the table, over Eadric’s head and behind him, so that she was penning him in. ‘You owe Alfreda wergeld for her brother,’ she told him. ‘We’ll take it from the death-reckoning of your estate.’
She’d never killed a man before. She had to think carefully about where she’d place the knife, under the ribs and up. She held it there as blood spilled from his mouth and his eyes went wild, and then screaming, and then just blank.
It felt very different, killing a man, from killing a beast. The thing that had fled from him – that she’d driven from him – was so much greater than what a creature lost in its dying. She’d thought she had been anticipating this moment, but she realised now she’d been dreading it. His blood felt filthy against her hands. But it had to be done. That’s what Bachur had commanded her: to do what was needed.
His body fell backwards, off her knife. It made a messy shape on the floor, the spreading pool of his blood a messier one all around it. The death had bought her more silence from the thegns, and no protests. It had achieved that much, but it needed to achieve more. She sheathed her knife, gory still, and wiped her hands on her tunic before she turned to Alfreda.
‘That’s justice,’ Cwen said. ‘Your brother’s avenged and you’ll have his blood money and his bairn too, if you want to take his lover into your family and have the raising of it. Enough moping. Your people have done right by you. Now it’s time you did right by them.’
21
It wasn’t clear who was winning. Krish cowered in the doorway of an abandoned slave hut with Dae Hyo in front of him and Dinesh behind and decided that it looked like everyone was losing.
‘I’ll tell you what, brother,’ Dae Hyo said, ‘I’ve had better days.’
Krish had never seen battle before, but once or twice a year taletellers had come to his village and shared stories of them. They always sounded so … orderly. Each side lined up, perhaps the greatest warriors duelled, a charge straight at each other and then it was all over.
This, though, was such a mess. There seemed to be no armies, just individuals out for blood. Rich men on lizardback swung swords as they galloped past. Poor men on foot tried to pull them down and stab them with their flint knives. Sometimes gangs would wait in ambush. He’d seen a woman leap from a breadfruit tree on to a rider’s mount and stab him where he sat. And he’d seen three lizard-riders corner a man and take a very long time about killing him.
But not all those mounted were Uin’s men and not all those on foot favoured Krish. Early in the conflict, Krish and Dae Hyo had found a group of farmers to shelter them. But their home had been attacked, the farmers had scattered and when Krish had seen another huddle of men in poor clothes, he’d approached them – only to have one pull a knife and try to stick it in his gut. Dae Hyo had killed him, but now Krish didn’t know who to trust.
The weather had worsened with the conflict. On the first day there was rain, which seemed to congeal into fat drops out of the moist air. Krish felt as if he might drown in it. The third day there was thunder and lightning. Now a storm was brewing, driving them to this slave hut, bobbing on its raft. A small battle raged in the burnt fields all around as the powerful wind grew.
‘We need to find Olufemi,’ Krish said. He’d said it before.
‘We need to leave, brother,’ Dae Hyo replied. He’d said that more than once too. ‘Besides, she’s probably dead.’
She probably was. They’d tried to make their way to her hut more than once, but fighting had turned them back every time. And each side knew Olufemi was allied with him. She couldn’t be safe.
‘We’ll try to find her one more time,’ Krish said stubbornly.
‘I can, I can, I can fetch her for you,’ Dinesh said brightly. He’d found them early on the first day and stuck like a burr ever since. Dae Hyo cast frequent, irate glances at the boy, who seemed to have no instinct for self-preservation and a tendency to speak out at the worst moments, but Krish couldn’t abandon him. Krish owed Dinesh a debt and he couldn’t repay it that way.
‘We’ll all go together,’ Krish said. Dae Hyo scowled but didn’t complain.
The hut that Uin had given Olufemi was by the sea. At first the route was easy, walking between rafts packed so close together there was no water to be seen. The Rah often travelled with their homes towed behind their mounts, each group of allies like a clot of earth that split and fled when enemy rafts came near. It made it seem as if the whole land was at war with itself. But whatever fight had raged here seemed to have long passed. There were scorch marks on the wood-plank walls and silence from within. If anyone remained, they didn’t want to be noticed.
The building nearest to the sea was a wreck, but Krish thought its ruin might have come before the fighting. Moss coated the shattered woodwork and some species of insect had made its nest inside, an improbable cone-shaped structure as tall as a man and made entirely of withered leaves. The little creatures seemed to sense the humans crouching beneath them. Krish saw a line of them leave the nest, antennae twitching and mandibles wide as they marched towards them.
Beyond lay only waterlogged fields, a jetty holding the sailing boats of Rah fishermen and, in the distance, Olufemi’s hut. This was the nearest they’d yet come, but the remaining distance was the most dangerous. The sea was wild today, stirred up by the salt-filled wind. The tide was in and it curled and dashed itself against the raft holding Olufemi’s home. They’d have to wade to reach it and they’d be exposed the whole time. Krish knew that his dark skin made him easy to recognise. With Dae Hyo beside him too, taller than any man among the tribe, he’d be hard for unfriendly eyes to mistake.
‘She’s probably dead,’ Dae Hyo said again as the first of the insects reached and bit them.
‘Probably,’ Krish agreed, and ran forward.
Dinesh came straight after and Dae Hyo only a little behind. Their loyalty warmed him. He’d seen so little of it since the day he’d left his home.
The clean smell of salt water battled the stink of rotten vegetation, which swirled on the water’s surface. It made each step a struggle as the roots and vines below tangled their feet.
A hundred paces out, and the water was to Krish’s knees. The wind had picked up too, or perhaps his strength was failing. It was hard to stay upright as it pushed and pushed against his back, trying to blow him over. He leaned forward and it snatched up the sea and flung it into his face in eye-stinging gusts.
‘Look, Krish, look!’ Dinesh shouted, as cheerful as if they were drinking fermented goat’s milk in their tents. ‘Look – there she is.’
He was right. The door of Olufemi’s hut had opened a crack and the mage’s head poked out of it. She seemed to be looking away from them, at the peaks and troughs of the waves.
‘Olufemi!’ Krish shouted, but the wind stole his words.
‘She should be careful she doesn’t—’ Dae Hyo said, and didn’t need to finish the thought as a sudden blast of wind ripped the door from her hands and pulled her out with it. She hung a moment, legs kicking,
and then fell into the water.
‘Can she swim?’ Dinesh asked.
Krish didn’t know. He knew he couldn’t, but he kept walking towards her all the same. His feet were swept out from under him once, twice, and then Dae Hyo grabbed his arm to pull him up, half-dragging him towards the hut.
Olufemi’s head had disappeared beneath the waves. He didn’t know how deep the water was there. The mage wasn’t a tall woman and the waves were towering now. Even if she could swim, she’d have to fight their power. He saw her face surface for a moment, gagging and gasping for air. It sank again and an arm broke the surface, a foot.
Dae Hyo pulled them on grimly, another three dragging paces through water that was now waist-deep. The wind drowned out all sound but Krish could imagine Olufemi’s cries as he saw her mouth open desperately again above the water before filling with it and sinking.
‘Leave me,’ he yelled to Dae Hyo. ‘Save her.’
The bruising grip on his arm loosened and the full force of the waves snatched at him again. He leaned into it, gritted his teeth and kept his feet. Dinesh did less well. Krish saw the boy fall and rushed to pull him up. They clung to each other as they watched Dae Hyo half-run towards Olufemi with a strength that seemed incredible.
‘Can he, can he, can he save her?’ Dinesh asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Krish said. ‘She’s … I don’t know.’
Dae Hyo had reached the point where they’d last seen Olufemi, but there was nothing except water and white foam seething round his chest. His face was set in a grimace of effort and Krish realised he hadn’t thought to ask if Dae Hyo himself could swim. The warrior’s eyes met his for a moment, and then he shrugged and ducked his head beneath the waves. He emerged thirty heartbeats later, gasping, and barely waited before plunging back down again.
‘Will he die?’ Dinesh asked and Krish hissed, ‘Shut up!’ and kept watching the waves for Dae Hyo’s head to appear again. He waited and he watched and for long, agonising moments there was only the water – until at last Dae Hyo came to the surface, and this time there was something in his arms, a robe-wrapped bundle.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 22