by Jack Lasenby
“Could you feel the maggots wriggling?”
“Clear off,” Katerin told Ruka.
A few days, and Petra was getting around on a crutch Tobik had made him. Although the wound was healing, I suspected he would be lame for life; his body had already been crippled in some way. His chest and shoulders were muscular and strong, his back almost humped, but both legs were short, the feet twisted. Katerin spoke for him usually, but I waited, knowing he had something to say.
“Can we stay here?” Petra asked one evening in the Great House. “Katerin and me?” He asked it almost humbly, in a hoarse voice.
The others looked at me, nodding. Larish smiled hungrily at Petra.
“It’s easier with more people,” he said.
“Selene says we need wool for making new tunics,” Lorne told Petra.
Ruka and Peck grinned at each other. “We know where there’s sheep. But they’re wild.”
“I can catch ours if you’ll take me back.” Petra glanced down at his leg. “I know about handling sheep, but nothing about boats.”
“It’ll take a couple of trips,” Jenek said.
Petra kept his eyes down. Katerin leaned against his side and stared at me.
I looked around a second time. Everyone nodded, everyone but Larish because she was staring at Petra.
“Stay.”
At my voice, everyone laughed, Larish loudest. Petra sighed heavily.
“How will you stop the sheep jumping out of the boat?”
“Tie their feet together.” Petra sat up and grinned at Peck. “Tie yours, you couldn’t do much either.”
Everyone laughed again, Ruka and Peck loudest. I’d watched them following Petra as he hobbled around. They liked having an older man there, even a lame one. And Larish — her attempts to get Petra to notice her had not worked, but things might change now he felt himself and Katerin secure.
“I can’t get up there yet,” he told me in that hoarse mutter, “but the clearings sound as if they’ll do for the sheep. That’s if you can get them here: the boats look small to me.”
“We sailed here in them,” Ruka told him. “From Hornish.”
Petra must have thought it was somewhere close. “We kept sheep,” he said, “in a high valley inland from where Jenek and Tobik found us. The only time we saw the sea was when we climbed to graze the sheep.”
Petra’s voice deepened, lost its hoarseness. He had a story to tell.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Petra’s Story: The Secret of the Diggers
We were sitting inside the chimney, on the benches either side of the fire. Tobik and Jenek lifted a log on to the bed of embers. For a moment, the dry wood curled tendrils of white smoke, there was a thump, and the log snapped yellow flames along its length. Peck and Ruka wriggled and made themselves comfortable. Lorne looked up at me, eyes wide.
“Did you have dogs?” I asked.
Petra nodded.
“How many of you?”
“Seven families and seven flocks.”
“Did you have a village?”
Petra stared into the fire. “Our village was called Karo, built around a meeting house big enough to hold all seven families.
“Four families looked after the sheep. The fifth family did all our potting, the spinning and weaving. The sixth family kept a forge and made iron tools; and they were the carpenters as well. We ran their sheep with ours and got clothes, blankets, pots, and iron tools in return.”
“You know how to make pots out of clay?” asked Larish.
“There was a sickness in Karo when I was little that killed a few, and left some crippled. I got it in the legs, and couldn’t get around much after wards, so I gave a hand with the potting and weaving, and I helped the Smiths at the forge and at their building, too, until my father said I was growing up a jack of all trades and it was time I learned to be a shepherd. But there was another reason he didn’t want me spending too much time with the other families.” Petra stopped. The fire lit the faces turned towards him.
“You said seven families?”
Petra looked into the flames. “The last family dug the gardens and looked after them.”
“What, for the whole village?”
“They did other things as well. They dug the latrines and looked after them. We called them the Diggers.”
“What do you mean?”
“When anyone died, their family carried the body across the creek to the burial ground, what we called the Roop, where the Diggers dug the grave and filled it in. There was a high wall around the Roop, and the Diggers had their cottages just outside the gate. We weren’t allowed to play with their children.”
“Why not?” asked Ruka.
“We thought the Diggers ate the dead.”
“Oh.” Ruka and Peck moaned, and I felt Lorne stiffen.
Petra shrugged and gave his short laugh. “I don’t know where we got the idea from. You know what children are. Anyway, we kept to our side of the creek.
“We had a lot of trouble with wild dogs worrying the sheep, so everyone grew up in Karo knowing how to use a sling. We’d cripple the brutes with a stone, finish them off with a spear, or sick our dogs on to tear out their throats. The rest would disappear for a while, but they always came back.
“We packed our wool down the valley on horses. It was several days to a village called Thorn, where we traded for iron, dried fish, and crops that wouldn’t grow up in our valley.”
“Did they make the iron in Thorn?”
Petra shook his head. “They traded for it with a town much further off. We never saw Wenton, only heard about it.”
“How big was Thorn?”
“Over twice the size of Karo. More than twenty families. But down there in Thorn, they said that Wenton was bigger again, more houses and people than anyone could count. And they told us about the boats there, that sailed on the sea like yours.”
“Why did you leave Karo, you and Katerin?”
“The feud.”
“Feud?”
“There’d always been trouble over the grazing, going right back to the early days. I heard my father tell the story when I was a boy. It all began because one of the shepherding families grazed more than their share of the best part of the valley, and another family complained.
“It was a bit complicated because the first family looked after the Diggers’ sheep as well as their own, and the second family, the one that complained, ran the Smiths’ sheep with theirs. The other families joined in, and they talked and talked in the big house, but couldn’t agree. Next year, the first family grazed more than their share again.”
“What about the Diggers? Did they join in the talks?”
“The Diggers always kept to themselves.”
“The argument went on for years, then one day a boy from that first family didn’t come home with the sheep, and he was found dead with a spear wound, that’s what it looked like. Nobody knew who did it, but everyone had an idea. Then a boy from the second family was found speared, too. Those were the first killings in the feud.
“By the time I was growing up, all seven families had fallen out. We still helped each other when it was time for washing the sheep in the stream down the valley and shearing them, and for packing the wool down to Thorn, but nobody trusted anyone from another family. My father warned me to keep to my own people, but I already knew I daren’t help with the potting, or the weaving, or at the forge any longer. There were more and more arguments about the grazing, and the killing went on.
“Each family began making its own pots, doing its own weaving; then they began looking after their own buildings, making their own tools on separate forges, grazing their own sheep.
“My father said, ‘We did things better in the past.’ My mother said the village was breaking up, and things didn’t work nearly as well. Our pots, knives, and clothes weren’t as good as the ones the Smiths and Potters used to make. Only the Diggers went on as they’d always done.
“Every
now and again, someone would be found dead, and somebody in another family would be killed in return. A feud is catching, like madness.
“Then somebody was found poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” Larish exclaimed.
“The Diggers were the only ones who knew the secret of how to make poison.”
“What did they make poison for?” Everyone leaned forward.
“When the wild dogs got into packs, our slings, arrows, and spears weren’t enough. We snared and trapped them, too, but the packs got big and dangerous, and that’s when the Diggers made the poison.”
“Poison,” Larish exclaimed again. “What did they make it from?”
“There are plants.” Petra had been staring into the fire all this time, but he lifted his head now and looked at Larish. “The Diggers knew which ones.
“They’d poison some goat carcasses, and leave them out as baits. We kept our own dogs tied up. The poison killed the wild dogs, and years would pass before the packs built up again.
“The Diggers burned the poisoned dogs and all the uneaten baits inside the Roop. The high fence around it stopped animals grazing there. We thought the poison in the soil would kill anyone that went near it.
“My father and the other old men called a meeting, and everyone agreed to stop the feuding because each family had already lost its best young men and women, and now somebody had been poisoned nobody knew what would happen next. Unfortunately, none of the Diggers came to the meeting.
“Another young woman was found speared, the baby inside her womb dead; a boy was poisoned in return; and the killing went on. Being innocent didn’t count; you could be killed for what somebody else had done. During all the years of feuding, none of the Diggers had died, but now they began to be killed as well.
“My little sister was out with some of our sheep, not far from the village. Panett was only eight, but somebody killed her all the same, with a poisoned arrow. So my father killed one of the Diggers in return, and he died himself. Poisoned.”
“Who buried him?” asked Tobik.
“The Diggers. They went on looking after the latrines, and burying the dead in the Roop.
“The village got smaller and smaller until one year we were late with the shearing, and didn’t pack the wool down to Thorn. They sent men who saw how rich in grass our valley was. Some of them built huts lower down the valley, their dogs attacked our flocks, and they stole our sheep.”
I looked around the faces. Only Larish was restless. She got up for something and sat down again. I noticed the way she moved, and I saw that Petra noticed, too. That could turn out a good thing for us all, I thought to myself.
“What happened?” Larish asked Petra, smiling.
“Katerin, her mother and I, and our two sons — all that were left of our family — grazed our flock up into the western hills above the valley and stayed in our usual high camp. We did it every year, to make the most of the grass up there before winter. But instead of returning to Karo, we drove the flock through a saddle and disappeared, we thought, into another valley where the boys had found a good place to live by a stream with sunny clearings and plenty of grass. We built a hut and yards there, fenced off a couple of the smaller clearings, and thought we were safe. Then one of our sons crawled home with an arrow in his back. Before he died, poisoned by the arrow, he told us his killer’s name, one of the Diggers.
“Our other son disappeared. We searched and our dog led us to his body — poisoned, too. I helped my wife and Katerin drive the last of our sheep — most of the flock had been stolen by the same people who killed our sons — over a ridge into another valley, and up and over into the next one. There we took them down a creek, to hide their tracks, all the way to the coast where we saw the sea and tasted its bitter water. We found a remote bay and started to build another hut and yards behind a shingle beach. It was there that Jenek and Tobik found us.”
“What happened to Katerin’s mother?”
“I came back from spearing flatfish up the creek, and found three men attacking her. It looked as if she had tried to stop them stealing the last of our sheep. They were holding her down, raping her, so they didn’t see me coming: I speared two, and the third ran with my dog after him.”
“Was that when your leg was hurt?”
“I pulled out my spear and threw it after the third man, but one of the men on the ground was still alive. He stabbed my wife and tried to hamstring me. I cut his throat with his own knife, and Katerin found me crawling back to the shelter we’d built behind the beach. She cleaned the wound, but it turned nasty. I don’t remember much more.”
I did not look at Katerin. She had grown up in the feud, had lost her grandparents, mother, brothers; she probably did not know how to trust us.
“Those three men,” said Petra, “they were all Diggers, so I was scared I was poisoned, too.”
“Won’t the man who got away come back for the rest of your sheep?”
Petra shrugged. “I hit him with my spear, and my dog was mauling him as he ran. I don’t think he’d have lived.
“Family against family, a feud goes on till just about everyone’s dead. My father heard old men tell stories about it in the meeting house, when he was a boy, but he said nobody believed it could happen to us.”
I thought of what happened at Hornish, and Lorne’s question about a stockade came back to mind. I would talk to Jenek and Tobik. We must never let anything like a feud ever happen at the inlet.
“We will get your sheep,” I told Petra.
“It’ll be harder without my dog, but Katerin and I can round them up. The only thing is I know nothing about boats.”
“We’ll look after that,” Jenek told him. “What happened to your dog?”
“He never came back, Katerin said. He might have been poisoned.”
Petra’s voice dropped to its usual hoarse mutter again. He pulled himself up on his crutch and limped outside. Without a word, Larish went after him. Katerin’s mother was dead, but life had to go on.
We built a yard, and as soon as Petra was well enough he and Katerin sailed south with Tobik and Jenek, and returned after dark with four sheep and a long-haired black-and-white dog.
“He was waiting for us,” said Katerin. “He heard us and came running down to the beach. Even then he ran back and rounded up the sheep. He’s called Pelt.”
“What’s he been living on?” asked Ruka, but nobody answered.
The second trip, they were away two days and came back with three of the remaining sheep.
While Petra and Katerin stood with Pelt among the seven sheep in the yard, I asked Jenek, “Did you find anything left of Katerin’s mother?”
He shook his head. “Nor of the men. Lots of pig sign … Pelt went straight up into the scrub and brought down three sheep, and was just going back to get the last one, when we heard barking and shouts away up the hill. Petra called Pelt back, and we got two sheep trussed and into the boat; the third gave us a bit of trouble. Tobik was holding the boat off the beach. Then we heard the shouting fairly close, several voices. We heaved the ewe aboard, and Pelt, and we all had to help Petra in. He’s not too handy in a boat, and his leg gave him trouble.”
“What happened?”
“We got the ewe tied up as Tobik steered around the point and straight out to sea. Whoever was yelling, they’d have had to climb the headland to see which way we went.”
“How far out did you go?”
“We thought of Pokai and kept going straight out till about midnight we turned north. At first light we headed east with the wind behind us until the mountains heaved up. We knew where we were, but it was still good to see Table Island.
“Petra was scared, sailing out of sight of land and spending the night out there, but Katerin had a go at steering and she’s getting the idea.”
“We brought everything they had in their shelter behind the beach,” said Tobik. “Lucky we put it aboard while Pelt was rounding up the sheep.”
He a
nd Ansik carried up a shovel, a couple of axes, and some sacks from the boat. Tobik up-ended a sack and tipped out a heavy iron cooking pot.
“Different to ours. Petra called it a camp oven.”
It was round-sided but flat-bottomed and had three short legs. The lid curved up around its edge. Tobik tapped it.
“To hold embers on top for baking, Petra said.”
“Here’s another,” said Ansik. He lifted off the heavy lid. A bag inside was stuffed full of seeds.
“These are the shears Petra told us about.” Tobik held up two broad blades joined with a pin, and each ending in a handle. He stuck his thumb through one handle, his fingers through the other, closed and opened them so the shear blades closed and opened, too, and he lunged at Ansik’s hair, snipping.
Ansik dodged and laughed. “Petra said he’ll show us how to sharpen them.”
“Easier than a knife for cutting the wool,” said Tobik.
“And look at these!” Ansik opened another sack, fished inside and brought out a couple of broken pieces of pottery.
“Bowls,” I said.
“Here’s one that didn’t get broken.” Ansik held up a round pot.
“That old ewe kicked the sack,” said Jenek, “before we got her trussed again. We were in a bit of a hurry.”
“A mug. I wish we could make some like that. And bowls.”
“We used to get clay bowls and mugs from Lador,” Larish said. “And remember the big pottery jars in the storeroom out the back of the Great House?”
“All smashed in the fire,” I said, “but they wouldn’t have lasted the journey in the boat anyway, not without netting them.”
“We could trade for them, with the town Petra talked about, Wenton.”
“We’d be better making our own.”
Larish looked down and said nothing more.
“We’ll see what Petra can make,” I said. “Big jars would be good for keeping oats and barley, all sorts of stuff. Lucky the seeds were in Petra’s camp oven, so they are dry.”
“They’re wheat.” Petra hobbled in with Katerin.