Travellers #2

by Jack Lasenby

  Taur showed me how to make dugouts, roofing them with logs over which he heaped soil. As further protection against the frost, he lined the clamps – that I think is what he meant by the name he roared – with dried grass. Even with plenty set aside for seed, the clamps held far more potatoes than we could eat. I told Taur we could feed them to the animals as well, and he laughed, delighted. There was a generosity in the Bull Man. Everything must be done with gusto. If he built a stool it had to be strong enough to carry several times his weight. If he saved food, then he must save many times more than was necessary. His nature was abundance.

  I smoked eels and trout in golden rows as in my old cave. I hunted deer and dried their meat, but Taur wrinkled his nose. Fish, he would eat a little of that, but he preferred to drink milk and eat cheese, butter, and the thick white stuff he made from the milk. He was a good gardener, and we ate lots of vegetables. It seemed a strange way to live, but I got used to his ways, though I often cooked a piece of meat for myself.

  As summer turned towards winter, I wove and set fine nets for birds in the many trees. I lined a large pot with fat, set a layer of roasted birds inside, and poured more fat over them, then another layer until the pot was full. As winter came on, I caught larger birds, a pigeon with green and grey and white feathers.

  The pigeons gorged on the red berries of certain trees and nodded half-asleep as I took them with long spears. I remembered Hagar’s story of another way of catching them and hollowed out narrow troughs of wood, lashed them in the lower branches of the berry trees, and filled them with water. Taur watched as I set a row of nooses around the troughs. The thirsty pigeons landed, dipped in their heads through the nooses, lifted them, and were strangled. Cooked and preserved in their own fat they filled several more pots. The pigeon meat was delicious, but Taur shook his head. “Gaw!” he muttered, “Gaw!” and I knew he was sorry for the birds.

  From the roof of the hut hung bunches of dried herbs and vegetables. There was my meat, birds, and fish, the clamps of potatoes. That was not all, however. Taur’s biggest cave was filled with racks of cheeses he wiped and turned every few days. I thought he must trade them. That would also explain what he did with all the salted meat and hides. He shook his head and tried to explain, but I found him hard to understand. It seemed a matter of great importance, that he should not eat flesh.

  Taur often looked at the hay and our stores and shouted his pleasure. His huge body demanded much food. Having plenty to take us all through the cold made him feel good, he explained.

  When I asked about the people he traded with, he was quiet. I remembered the Metal People’s wish for secrecy, when we traded with them, and respected his silence. Still I knew Taur was keeping something hidden. He would tell me when he was ready. It could not be important. Yet he worried, stared at me sometimes until I looked up and he glanced away as if guilty of something. It was not Taur’s nature to be devious, except in fun.

  There were pots of honey from the beehives we robbed, jars and jars of butter. One of the most useful of his foods was something he called “Auwh” in his rough voice, what I understood him now to mean as “oats”. He showed me a fenced clearing with the tall grass on which the seeds grew, and I helped him harvest the crop.

  We threshed the oats, beating the seedheads on flat rocks. To winnow we scooped them into the air. A light breeze drifted the husks into great heaps, and the heavier seeds dropped straight down. We stored the seeds in our largest pots. The husks and bits of straw – what Taur called chaff – we stacked for the animals.

  In a hollow rock, we bruised the oat seeds, pounding them with a fire-hardened stub of wood. Boiled with honey they were delicious. Taur even made sweet cakes of the oats.

  If our work separated us, I would often find some reason to go and stand near Taur, just to feel him nearby. He felt the same pleasure in my company. I would waken, listen to the sound of his breathing and smile. Sometimes I reached out at night and touched him for the comfort of his presence. He shouted and leapt among the dogs, patting and stroking them, and they understood his disfigured words. We were so busy through autumn, I looked for the long winter nights, sleeping and talking in front of the fire. One morning an icy breath licked our valley. Snow on the higher hills.

  Then snow speckled the trees lower down. As we thatched a last stack of straw, it fell heavy above. Down the valley drifted a cold mizzle that wet our hair. Taur was delighted with the hats of oily wool I got from our stores. They turned the rain, like the cloak I had worn for years. I thought I would weave a cloak for Taur, too. His cumbersome cowhide clothes weren’t as warm as my woollen ones, and I wanted to show I was grateful for his friendship.

  Chapter 6

  Land Uplifted High

  While I worked on Taur’s cloak, he took a pot of potatoes and the honey-sweetened water in which they had boiled. He added ground oats and made a paste which fermented several days. One morning he warmed a bowl of fine-ground oats and other seeds, lifting both hands full of the flour high before the flames, drifting it through his fingers, and mixed in the frothy, fermented stuff. Flour on his cheeks, he worked the mixture, hands then fists rubbing, kneading, and set the bowl in front of the fire. The dough began to rise. When I glanced again, Taur was beating it down, kneading it once more. I looked at the scars across the backs of his hands, and wondered again at the wounds that left such marks.

  Taur looked up and roared in his friendly way. He set the dough to rise a second time, lowered it gentle inside a heavy pot with a tight-fitting lid, and buried it under hot ashes.

  Casually, peering at a length of yarn as I wove the oily wool tight to shed rain, I asked again about his supply of salt. He stared silent then, as if relieved, roaring his clumsy words, he explained how traders came each spring and swapped salt for his hides, cheeses, honey, and salted meat.

  “The salt traders are gross feeders!” Taur shouted. I hid my face because he ate hugely himself. They began their annual visit with a feast. He had to kill and cook several of his cows. I began to understand why Taur did not eat meat himself, and remembered something Tara’s father, Dinny, had said about the Salt People, that they were greedy eaters of flesh.

  “They are cruel!” Taur roared, waved his hands, described how the salt traders mistreated their slaves, men who carried the salt and bore away his food and hides. Pack animals. The skin on my face chilled. My chest tightened.

  “Slaves?”

  “Urfs!” Taur bowed his shoulders, staggered, flinched, as if whipped.

  I half-closed one eye, squinted, and shambled towards him. Taur stared aghast. I seized a dead ember, sketched a face on a flat piece of wood: scar, missing patch of hair, the leering cast of Squint-face’s eyes.

  “Aghh!” Taur flung it in the fire, ran outside. I went back to my loom.

  Taur returned later. Tears had dried in the flour on his face. He scraped the ashes off the pot and tipped out what seemed a miracle to me, a loaf of bread. He cut a crust hot, spread it with butter and honey, handed it to me with a great smile that made me want to cry. As the fragrance of fresh bread filled the hut, at my first wonderful mouthful, I remembered Hagar describing seeds the Travellers gathered and used to make bread when she was a girl. One year, they returned to the Whykatto, and the wheat grass had disappeared. It never grew again. The insane sun had killed it, Hagar said.

  “Marvellous, Taur! Excellent!”

  “Gurgh!” Taur beamed and offered me another slice. “Eat up!” he roared. “Plenty more!”

  I wanted to ask where he found the wheat grass, but there was something more urgent. “The Salt People,” I said, “where do they come from?” and I pointed north, the way the animals and I had come through the mountains.

  “Gaw!” he pointed east. “Awgh!” He moved his fingers as if walking, pointed to the sun, and opened and closed his hand many times.

  Next morning Taur led me east up his valley. By midday we stood in the saddle at its head, looking down into a valley much deep
er than ours, a straight corridor to the north. The way the Salt People came.

  “Gwoar?” he asked that night, as we ate our evening meal.

  “What am I thinking?”

  “Gahr!”

  “I’m thinking about the Salt People. I have seen them before.” I told him how Tara fell out of the tree those years ago, how she kicked me, menaced me with a dagger, and how we came to love. I told him about Dinny, Sim, and Petra, how we were going to be a family, live at the Hawk Cliffs, fight the demon sun with trees, their green shade, replant the Whykatto.

  As I described the massacre of the Metal People, his face turned dark. At Tara’s murder, Taur – who had never wept for himself – dropped his head and cried into his scarred hands. He was a soft-hearted monster, the Bull Man.

  I heard my own voice go dry. It was better not to cry too easily. Somebody had tortured Taur’s body, torn out his tongue, yet he kept his spirit. It is easy to give in to self-pity, he had discovered, intelligent to refuse it.

  An awful idea struck me. “Taur!” He raised his heavy head, eyes red with tears, nose running, his mouth wet. “Taur, those scars on your hands and back?”

  I had often seen his back when he threw off his tunic as we worked and sweated together. The skin was ridged, lined with parallel scars, rumpled distortions of the flesh. The shoulder-blades stood out on his back like polished ivory wings where somebody had flogged him with a whip, where the skin and muscle had tried to grow back but only covered the bones with a thin integument.

  “Who beat you? Who cut out your tongue?”

  “Gawr.”

  “Who?”

  “Gargh!”

  “It was the Salt People, wasn’t it?”

  “Gahr!” Something clicked in his poor throat. “Grk! It was the Salt People.” He groaned, seized my hands, crushed them till I winced. He had been wanting to tell me, should have told me before, but didn’t know how. Now he knew what the Salt People had done to Tara, he must tell me everything.

  Poor Taur had felt guilty at keeping his dreadful secret, but I understood him, I said. I understood his reluctance to eat flesh, to be anything like his torturers. He bellowed with relief and told me more.

  When he was a boy, far to the south, the Salt Men slaughtered his family, too. They kept Taur alive but flogged the flesh from his back, slashed his hands and face, cut out his tongue, and planted him in this valley as a slave-farmer. Taur knew they kept other slave-farmers, too. Each year they brought fresh supplies of salt and took away his hides, salt meat, honey, butter, and cheese. He did not dare run away because, no matter where he hid, their leader promised to find and torture him again.

  He dropped the cowhide kilt under his tunic. Below his penis was a discoloured scar where they had slashed off his testicles. They did that to all their slaves. Squint-face, their leader, Taur said, was the cruellest torturer of all. So that was why he threw my drawing into the fire.

  I must escape before spring, Taur warned me. If the Salt People caught me here, they would castrate me, too, tear out my tongue, and make me their slave. It did not occur to him that he might escape himself, so profound was the effect of their cruelty, Squint-face’s threat. He pointed west in the direction he thought I should go, gave me his warning and then, for the first time, he wept for himself.

  I took him in my arms, tried to comfort him. I rocked the great shoulders, sang one of the songs my sister used to sing to me when I was little. And as I sang, Taur stopped his crying and tried to sing with me, wet-eyed, runny-nosed, following my voice with his terrible noises, “Gluck! Gawr! Urgsh!”

  After that he often sang to himself, and he was forever asking me to sing, urging me to remember and teach him more of the songs of the Travellers.

  That night I took the green stone fish from my pack and showed it to Taur. He was sitting by the fire, singing – bellowing – his dreadful noises, rocking and comforting himself. He looked up, saw the thing in my hand, and cowered in terror, hiding his eyes. I had to hide it again before he would even listen to my explanation.

  The green stone, Taur made me understand, was thought magical by the Salt People. They worshipped the carving of the fish. I had taken one of their gods. Even if I gave it back, Squint-face would kill me. All his power derived from the carving.

  The Salt People found the green stone in what Taur called the South Land. When he said that I remembered again my father’s stories of the mountain that ate the sun, Hagar’s stories of people who lived in the land of ice and snow.

  “When they need more of the green stone,” Taur said, “the Salt People travel there in a thing called a boat.” The South Land, he roared, could be seen from where he grew up. He described white mountains rising the far side of a great water called the sea.

  With his bellows and signs he said my fish was made of the rarest of green stone, clear and embedded with tear-shaped drops. I wondered aloud how Tara had come by it, and Taur explained Squint-face would have hung it around her neck, a sign she was his.

  “Glaw, Urgsh! Throw away the green stone.”

  “What?”

  “Throw it away!”

  “It brings me good luck. I cannot throw it away.”

  Taur shrugged his great shoulders. Even when I hid it again, he looked suspiciously at my pack.

  When I questioned him, he said he had heard the pack-slaves talk of the long journey across the sea and down the South Land, the return with green stone. He remembered their description of snow mountains, rivers, a desert, and a palm tree whose heart the Salt People ate. The slaves were forbidden to eat it, but one boasted of tasting its delicious white flesh. Taur remembered that because another slave reported the boaster to Squint-face. At once he slew the man who had broken the rule. And then, Taur told me, then the Salt Men did something else, but he broke down and could not finish. I had wanted to ask him about the desert, because that did not fit with my father’s and Hagar’s stories, but did not press him.

  Later, Taur told me more about his home near the bottom of the North Land. The idea of a South Land across a strait of water, of snow mountains and rivers, the source of the green stone, a desert, and the sweet-tasting palm tree, it seemed a childhood dream in his mind, I thought.

  I tried to convince Taur he must escape with me, but the evil done to him by Squint-face made him passive, as if he had no rights. It must be a habit of thinking slaves fell into. It could happen to anyone, I realised, including me.

  There were times I thought it was Taur’s not eating meat that made him give in to the Salt Men. He was their slave, but I did not dare tell him that. He thought himself freer than the pack-slaves, but I saw slavery took other forms as well.

  I thought if only he would eat rich meat, perhaps it would give him the spirit to fight back. Then I looked at his huge shoulders, saw the strength with which he picked up a log, one I couldn’t shift, or how he pushed a heavy cow out of his way with a friendly shove. It was not that he lacked strength. But he certainly did not think of himself as free, not sufficiently to break Squint-face’s wicked spell.

  “You’re being silly,” I told myself. “It’s nothing to do with what he eats.”

  Breaking Taur’s habit of thought, the acceptance of his awful lot, took days of argument but, long before spring arrived in the valley, we hid the stores of food. Taur dried off the cows and selected one with a late calf. I chose the youngest and strongest of my animals. We sledged hay to the most distant clearings and left the other animals and the cows there. The hay eaten, they would wander after spring growth and run wild, escaping slaughter by the Salt People.

  Taur regretted abandoning his cows, and I felt guilty at leaving my older animals. We had come far together. Yet they could not withstand the journey ahead, especially if grazing was scarce. Leaving now we ran the risk of starving, because there would be little growth until spring came

  We loaded the donkeys with food, especially seeds of the oats and wheat, and baskets of potatoes. Everybody carried heavy loa
ds, all the animals. Jak, Jess, Tek, and Trick had their loads. Even Het and her pups, now nearly full-grown, carried small loads. Taur and I had large packs but, as Taur bellowed, unlike slaves we chose to carry them.

  For days I had fed oats to the animals and the cow and calf going with us. They put on condition, their coats sleek. And early one morning, afraid the others might turn up and want to follow, we began our journey. As Taur set fire to his hut, I took charcoal to the nearby cliff and drew a horned bull’s head, its mouth open, bellowing.

  That first day I stared ahead, trying not to think of my animals left behind. Taur moaned and muttered one of his songs, farewelling his cows. We came up through the trees and over the head of the valley. I sent Jak and Jess ahead to lead us south.

  “Urgsh! The Salt Men will expect us to go south. They will follow and catch us.” Taur pointed west.

  Away to the north-west, the mountain still grumbled. Its ash cloud rolled away with a southerly, but I knew it could turn with the wind and cover the grass. I explained that to Taur, but he just pointed west again. We could only move at the animals’ speed. The Salt Men would expect us to go south. That was the way they went to get their supplies of the green stone, so they knew the country there.

  Taur’s western way meant crossing the hills below the mountains. Compared to the country south they looked bleak, but that would help deceive Squint-face. We marched west, Taur bellowing one of the Travellers’ songs I had taught him. Even though he missed his cows, he felt the excitement of starting on a journey. Taur was becoming a Traveller.

  In spring, the river we had followed many days led us west to that strange creature Taur called the sea. A lake so big it had no other shore. When I tasted its water, Taur grinned. I retched, spat. He guffawed. He had warned me, he said. I thought of the poisoned river of Orklun, but Taur said this water was just salt, its fish safe to eat.