Forsada: Volume II in the New Eden series

by Peter J Dudley

  “The spirits?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Shack and Garrett have finished quickly.

  Shack says, “You go on ahead. We’ll catch up in a minute or two.”

  Ginger takes two leads and I take two, and we start walking the horses as quickly as they can go up the road.

  “Ginger? If we’re spotted, let go of the horses and just run into the woods, okay?” I look at her as we walk. “Do anything you need to. But just… don’t get caught.”

  “Okay.” She glances back. “Oh, look.”

  I turn back to see the twins pushing the wagon off the road, down the riverbank. Clever. I thought they’d try to push it into the meadow so it would catch fire. But the bank is steep and ten feet high, and the wagon teeters and topples over, splintering and spilling its cargo into the water.

  We leave all the dead men where they are and make for Sikwaa and a big meal courtesy of Darius.

  I could get used to this.

  CHAPTER 11

  We’ve been tracking this Southshaw patrol for over a mile, since just after sun-up. It’s the fourth in a month, and the sixth since we took the wagon at the river, way back at the beginning of summer. Darius settled into Lower in early July, and for a while it seemed he’d be content to leave Upper alone. But when August ended, we began running into patrols like this. Garrett was the one to figure it out: Darius was beginning to clear out the hills, methodically eliminating the country folk between Lower and Upper.

  After almost three months, I’m still not used to this.

  “They’re nervous, Loop.”

  “Smarter than the others, then.”

  “Maybe Darius is running out of stupid ones.”

  I smile but don’t answer. These four are on edge and listening like startled deer.

  Shack taps my shoulder and points. None of us knows this area, across the river way back in the hills, a place they call Sowstar. The woods here are beautiful and thick, and the hills are steep and rugged. It’s home to maybe a hundred families, spread out so much you can’t even hear a loud shout from one house to another. Even footpaths are scarce, and there’s no meeting hall or anything.

  Turner hated the people who live up here. He said they were stupid and mean. I think he was scared of them. Turner had a name for them. Dumbillies or something. I said it once when I was little, and Papi nearly took my head off. “They’re just folks,” he said. He used to take iron pots and simple tools into the hills and come back with blankets and chickens. Just folks.

  I look where Shack is pointing. White smoke curls up out of the trees a quarter mile ahead, a thin, twirling wisp. I track down it, between the trees. The woods are thick, but even from this far away I can see the shape of the low house snuggled into the hillside.

  Like so many of the others, calling this ramshackle a house would be generous. Micktuk’s cabin looks like a castle compared to these hovels. Even hovel is stretching the truth. Some of them aren’t much more than lean-tos pieced together from fallen branches. At least this one has a stubby, stone chimney and the general shape of a house. Must be a woman living there.

  Shack points again, this time at our prey. They’ve spotted the house, too. But yes, they’re stupid. And careless. At least deer will still be nervous when they nibble on a berry bush. These Southshawans switched from deer to wolf in an instant, forgetting that they’re prey as well as hunter. They walk faster, straight toward the house.

  Garrett waves a few hand signals at me from where he’s hiding ten yards ahead. Let them go in, and ambush them when they come out. I nod. Works every time against these Southshaw dopes. So far, anyway.

  We follow, lurk among the trees and wait until they’re at the door. They kick down the door with a crash of broken wood and a whole lot of unnecessary shouting. Just like all the others. When all four of them rush into the house, Garrett and Shack slip onto the flanks. I always get to be the bait, the distraction. It’s a role I like and play well. I take my place behind a thick tree about twenty yards straight in front of the door, and we all wait and listen.

  More yelling, a few crashes and screams. Sounds like girls, a lot of girls. I can see both Shack and Garrett from where I hide. Both have been practicing with their bows a lot, and they’re ready. They keep trying to teach me to shoot, but it’s hopeless. Anyway, why bother with that when I’ve got my knives and my—

  They’re coming out. Shouting and screaming echo off the trees. I risk a peek, but it’s never a risk because they never look around when they’re dragging families from houses. Axes in one hand, hair in the other. These brutes yank four screaming girls and an older man out from the hovel and throw them to the dirt. No—one of the girls is actually the mother.

  The head Southshawan raises his axe over the old man’s head, but before he can bring it down there’s an arrow in his back. The axe falls, the flat knocking the old man’s head on the way down. He bleeds, but it doesn’t look too bad.

  I was supposed to go first. Too slow, Lupay! No waiting anymore to see if they’re killing or taking prisoners. Okay, then. They want to get it over with? We’ll get it over with.

  I leap out from behind the tree and yell as loud as I can. “Hey! Southshaw scum! Come fight someone who can fight back.” Heavy knife in my left hand, leather whip in my right.

  The three look from the dead one to me. One turns and stalks toward me while the other two glance around in confusion. This one’s small and quick. He looks strong, carrying his heavy axe in one hand, raising it as he speeds up.

  The girls cry and screech behind him. Their terror infuriates me, and I relish my anger. How many times has this brute dragged children from their homes when I wasn’t around to stop him? How many other families has he killed? It stops now.

  As he rushes me, I snarl and snap the whip at him. It lashes his face and wraps around his arm. He yowls in pain, stumbles, and drops his axe but keeps coming like a charging bull. Blind and stupid. Maybe you can terrorize those little girls, but you don’t scare me.

  I step lightly to my right and thrust my left hand into his path. His momentum buries my knife deep into his chest. As he blunders past, I let go with a little tug. It spins him as he stumbles and crashes head-first into a tree, collapsing limp to the dirt.

  Back at the family, a third Southshawan is pinned, dead, to the side of the house by another arrow. The fourth has scooped up the littlest girl, only a tot, and holds her out like a screeching shield. His eyes bulge out of his head, and his face is white as a Subterran’s. He squeezes the girl so tight that her screeches turn to choking grunts.

  I coil my whip into my hand again as I stride toward him.

  “Put her down!”

  “No way. Not til I’m a mile away from you.” His voice cracks and squeaks from behind her frizz of pale yellow hair. His back is against the wall of the house.

  “Put her down, and I’ll let you go,” I offer. But I don’t know why. I’d prefer to kill him, but now I’ll have to let him go if he believes me and actually does it.

  “Yeah, right. Maybe you’ll let me go, but these two won’t.”

  “He’s right,” Shack says, an arrow loose on his bow string.

  “No,” I answer. “No, I mean it. Put the girl down, and never come back here. We’ll give you ten minutes head start. That’s all you get, though. I find you in the forest, you end up like him.” I nod at the other one hanging dead on Shack’s arrow.

  “Aw, Loop, c’mon,” Shack whines. “Please let me add one more to my collection.”

  “Collection?” What is he talking about?

  “Yeah, you know. The first finger of the left hand of each Southshawan I’ve killed. Oh, come on, Lupay. You know.” The poor man is so terrified he doesn’t see Shack wink at me.

  Shack has no such collection. “Whatever.” I turn to the Southshawan and waggle my whip at him to draw his attention. “Listen. You put her down by the time I count five, and we have a deal. Otherwise, you get what you deserve.”

&
nbsp; He’s glancing around so wildly now that I’m not even sure he heard me. The old man huddles with his young wife and two other girls off to the side. The little one might have cracked ribs, but good girl. She’s stopped her sobbing.

  “One.”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

  “Two.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Three.” I pull my whip hand back, and Shack pulls back on his bow.

  “You can’t do this!”

  “Four.” I almost hope he holds on to her.

  “All right!”

  He’s the one crying like a baby now as he tosses the girl away into the dirt. She scrambles to her mother, who gathers her in and covers her in a huge hug.

  I pause a moment as he quivers in front of us. His legs tremble, and he looks like he might collapse.

  “Shack,” I say gently, “put down your bow.”

  “Aw. Really?”

  “Garrett,” I call, “back me up on this, amigo.”

  “Shack,” he answers, stepping out of the trees to stand beside me, “she gave the guy your word.”

  “What?”

  “You promised.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, pretend you did.”

  “No.” He still hasn’t put down the bow.

  Garrett puts his hands on his hips. “Now, Shack,” he says in a patient tone, “do as mama says.”

  “Cabron,” I hiss at him. I waggle my coiled whip at the Southshawan again. “You. I think you better start running. Your ten minutes started ten seconds ago.”

  He pauses for a moment and then lights out past Shack and back the way they’d come in. He crashes through the brush and undergrowth. Shack turns and looses his arrow, which thunks into a tree a few feet from the fleeing man.

  “Damn. Missed,” he says with a broad smile.

  Garrett laughs, then pats my shoulder and nods at the whip. “Pretty nifty move with that thing.”

  Shack comes over to yank his two arrows from the corpses. He grunts between his words. “I hear her mama taught her.” He grunts again and leans his whole weight to try to tear the arrow from the wall. “Damn. Not sure I can get this one. Just too strong with the bow, I guess.”

  “My mama did not teach me,” I snap. “Micktuk showed me how to use it. I’ve been practicing.”

  “A lot, from the look of it,” Garrett says before approaching the huddled family.

  He’s right. I like the whip. I’m good with throwing knives—the best of us, really—but I’m awful with a bow and have no stomach for axes. When I saw this whip in Micktuk’s shed a few months back, I asked him to teach me.

  Garrett puts a hand out to the old man. When he stands, I see he’s not that old after all, just white haired with a long, shaggy beard and a slight build. He’s no older than my father, I’d guess. But his wife is not much older than I am, and the girls could be her sisters instead of her daughters.

  “It’s all over now, sir,” Garrett says. “You and your family should come with us. It’s not safe out here on your own anymore with these Southshawans all over the place.”

  This family is just like most of the others we’ve gathered and taken to Sikwaa over the past month. Underfed and not very clean, with too many children wearing not enough clothes.

  “Yissur,” says the man, and the girls gather behind him. “Lead the way.”

  “Why don’t you gather your things,” Garrett says.

  “Things?”

  “Um, yeah. You know. Any other… clothes, or maybe toys the children might have? A cooking pot? Some tools?”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  He disappears inside and comes out with a bundle that looks like an old, wool blanket wrapped around some dead raccoons. I’m not sure I want to know what’s in there.

  “Where we goin, anyway?”

  “Sikwaa,” Shack says with a final, deep grunt as he rends the arrow from the wall and the dead body crumples to the ground.

  “What? Thank you, but we’ll stay here,” the man says, and he sets his bundle in the dirt. Which probably makes the blanket cleaner and the dirt dirtier.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I say as I walk over to the little ones and squat down to look into their beautiful, blue-green eyes. “But Sikwaa isn’t really haunted. That’s just a bunch of old stories.”

  “Beggin’ pardon, Lupay, but it is.”

  His use of my name startles me since I’m sure we’ve never met, but I laugh with confidence. “No. We’ve been living there all summer, with Micktuk and a bunch of others. We haven’t seen one single spirit.” I poke the oldest of the girls. She’s maybe six. “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

  She nods her head with wide eyes and whispers, “Oh, yes.”

  “Seen ‘em myself, twenny year ago,” the man says. “Went up that way fer something, hunting maybe, and seen a spirit right there in that big old place, the one that’s half falled down.”

  I know the building he means. It must have been a grand place three centuries ago. Micktuk’s been inside, but he says it’s too dangerous. The place is all rotted out, and the parts still standing seem to be held up by magic. One wrong step, and you’re stuck halfway through the floor, or worse. But he says it had a huge dining hall, and lots of little apartments, and it was five levels tall. With levitators. I’m dying to see inside.

  The man seems to be looking off into his memories as he finishes, “White face just lookin’ out the window at me. Looked like a person, but whiter’n fresh snow. Just stared at me, and I stared back. I got spooked and ran all the way home. Never been back. Ain’t goin’ back.”

  “Well,” I say, “you can’t stay here. The Southshawans will return, and next time we won’t be around to help.”

  He stands there looking at me, shaking his head slowly. “Rather die fighting them than lose my soul to a spirit,” he says. His slow words chill me and make me wonder if maybe the place is haunted after all. Anyway, he’s not moving. Just like the others.

  Garrett looks at the young mother. “Do you know what they’re doing to the little children? The Southshawans?” He pauses until she shakes her head. “The middle ones they’re putting to work in the fields. The littlest ones, the ones that can’t work—” He stares for a moment at each of her three daughters, and I watch fear creep into her eyes as she waits for him to finish. “Them, they’re just killing.”

  She shakes her head “no” but says nothing. Just like the others. They’re so backwards. They’d rather die for sure at the hands of evil people than face a fear they don’t understand. And which doesn’t even exist except in their minds. It drives me crazy. I want to grab her and shake her.

  Garrett keeps on. “In Sikwaa, there are lots of families now. Twelve or thirteen already, and more coming in.”

  She keeps shaking her head. Her little girls gather round her and grab onto her legs. They stare up at me with big, beautiful, eyes the color of the lake on a gray winter’s day. I can’t let them face the terror of Darius’ wrath after what we’ve done here.

  “There’s no danger in Sikwaa. It’s not haunted. There’s no such thing as spirits.”

  He says it like he’s trying to convince himself it’s true. I look at Shack, who has gone off to the side and busies himself cleaning his hands of the gore from the corpses. Like the other times, it seems he doesn’t want to talk about the Sikwaa legends.

  The young mother looks to her husband, who stands firm and says nothing. Garrett gives me a shrug. He’s ready to give up on them. Like the others.

  No. We’ve done this before. Let the family stay, let the parents get taken off to work as slaves for Darius’ army, let the children get hacked to death in their own front yards. Not again.

  I stomp to the man. He’s nothing much, just a skinny, short thing. I could beat him senseless if I wanted, then cart them all off to Sikwaa.

  “You. Idiot,” I say to him with venom in my voice. “Look at your wife. Look at your
daughters. Do you love them?”

  “What?” He’s insulted. Good.

  I grab his shoulder and spin him to face his wife. “Them! Do you love them?”

  “What? Yes, course.”

  “Then why do you want them to die? Why do you want a dozen Southshaw men to grab them by their hair, drag them screaming from their beds, burn their house down? Why do you want them to see the axes raised, see their sisters chopped in half, then feel the axe themselves?” I yell. I might be shaking him hard, but who cares? Garrett touches my shoulder, and I whack his hand away. “That’s what will happen if you stay here. You—they’ll make you a slave, make you get their army ready to destroy Upper and kill the rest of us. Is that what you want?”

  “I’ll protect them.”

  Men. So macho. So stupid. “Like you protected them today?” It’s a mean thing to say, but he’s an idiot.

  “We’ll move off, into the woods.”

  “They’ll find you. You’re lucky it took them this long.”

  Shack calls from wherever he is, “Really lucky. You have no idea how lucky.”

  “We can go back into the woods. Star. I been to Star once, I know it.”

  Idiot. There’s a road, a clear trail that goes back up into the woods, straight to Star. Darius will send someone that way. They’ll clear it out before they go to Upper. This family is going to die, and they have only this stupid man to blame.

  “Loop, let them go.” Garrett speaks softly at my side. I can hear the sadness in his words, but why isn’t he angry? These three beautiful little girls, not even given their own choice—

  I turn to the young wife. “Do you want your girls to die?”

  She shakes her head, no, but she says nothing.

  “Then come with us. He can go wherever he wants, can go over the mountains to the desolation if he wants, but you can come with us and live.”

  She’s white as a sheet—not one of their sheets, of course, but a clean one—and trembling so much her wispy hair quivers at its downy, fraying ends.