Travellers #2

by Jack Lasenby

  “Gaw, Urgsh!” Taur cleared the gap easily.

  “I’ll call you,” I told Jak and Jess. I crouched a couple of times, leapt, almost made it. Swung by my finger tips’ scrabbling, body slammed against the gorge wall. One foot pawed at the weed-greasy stone. A crevice. Shove – let go – flung up my arms – and Taur grabbed my hands, dragged me beside him. Over the bellow of water, Jak howled.

  He dived. Taur and I got him by one front paw and an ear, pulled him up together. By the way her mouth moved, Jess was crying. I knelt, held out my arms. “Jess!”

  A rainbow formed through the spray off her coat. She curved high towards our waiting hands. At the top of her lovely arc, an arrow transfixed her. Body hunched, belly tucked, eyes rolled white, Jess fell. Into the maelstrom. A shout of triumph below, a clatter of more arrows, tinkling on glassy rocks. I grabbed up several, threw myself out of sight up a cleft behind Taur, Jak bounding ahead, tail erect. I remember thinking he did not realise Jess was dead, and heard the unearthly music.

  The cleft narrowed so I had to pass Jak up to Taur. Around us were unstable rock stacks separated by colossal vertical holes. For thousands of years in flood-time, the sediment-laden river had swirled and drilled those circular gaps. At the top, Taur waited, head cocked.

  “Garough?”

  “I heard it before.” I could not bring myself to say anything of Jess. Taur hugged me and he, too, said nothing. I edged back, between my feet looked down, saw the Salt Men, tiny, sketching a flimsy web of poles and rope over the dark slot where they killed Jess. Squint-face was urging them to hurry. I fired an arrow, saw a Salt Man stagger. Squint-face posted some men, bows ready, so I dared not show myself again.

  We fled up another face of slipped cliffs and shaking stacks and it was there – as we toiled up an exposed stretch – an arrow struck my game leg, the one that dragged when I was a boy. I took a step, fell.

  “Urgsh!” Taur worked the arrow out of the wound. I closed my eyes, heard that strange music again. Taur grunted and put the arrow with the others in my quiver. He ripped a strip from his tunic. I gasped as he wound it tight around my leg. Then he was shoving me and my pack ahead of him, half-carried with the impetus of his climb.

  Above the narrow gates of the river, I fell by a rock that shook. Taur’s chest and back heaved for breath. I knew they must catch me now. At least I would take some with me. And first I would kill Squint-face.

  “Take Jak. Up the river. Through the pass. See what’s on the other side. I’ll hold them back.”

  I chanced a look down, saw raging faces tipped up. Eyes flashed. Voices echoed between the cliffs; water spurted thunderous from crack and gap. Dashing a shower of drops from his hair, Squint-face peered. Clear above the brute-brawl of the river, carrying up the slabbed walls of granite came his voice, demonic hate. “Ish!” he called. “Ish!” I slumped face down on the wet rock, remembering how Karly Campy hated me as a child, thinking how deep an emotion is hate, how it consumes, obsesses.

  Jak whined for Jess, would have run back down the cleft, but Taur called him.

  My mind came back into the present. “Go, Taur! Save yourself!”

  Ignoring my order, Taur took my pack on top of his, half-lifted and dragged me higher between pinnacles and monuments of stone split and trembling at the river’s voice. There was cloud now, solid bulges filling the pass above. What lay beyond? The frozen country of ice and snow, the land of the mountain that ate the sun?

  So high the air was bitter. Taur propped me against a great stack. I lay and looked down a steep avenue between snow-capped shafts of stone, a double row of columns. The Salt Men would have to show themselves as they climbed. I laid out all the arrows handy, checked my bow. The string sang. Behind me, Taur panted, tipping out his pack, grunting.

  And I realised we were encircled by giants, upstanding grim grey through the cloud. The stone columns were human giants. I was propped against one. Their eyes moved. I called to warn Taur, but my voice choked. I tried to stand, but my leg buckled. Jak trotted towards me, raised his back leg and pissed on the feet of the largest monster who leaned to looked down the gorge.

  At Jak’s casual irreverence, expecting a roar of rage, I screeched an eldritch scrawl across the silence. Jak scraped his back feet hard in a scatter of snow, cut a caper, barked, and I saw the figures were ancient stone, worn, lichen-encrusted. Snow turbaned their heads. The music was their voices, unearthly harmonies, but again Jak ignored them.

  Each giant, I now saw, was a column of several enormous blocks reared upon each other. Earless, blank-eyed, round-mouthed guardians they stared and threatened the way we had come. Mist shifted behind their hollow eyes – like their mouths and nostrils, pipes drilled through the stone heads. A gust of cold air off a snowfield above moaned through the pipes. Unfit to come upon an assembly of fiends in the wilderness, I thought of Jak’s impertinence and screeched again.

  “Urgsh?” Taur appeared from behind and looked up at the tallest giant, the one on whose feet Jak had pissed. Put huge hands against its lower block, shoved, and the monster creaked, rocked, and balanced.

  “Watch out!”

  “Garawgh!” Taur opened his mouth so the mutilated stump showed. Laughed, rolled his eyes, as if at the greatest joke. He knelt and tightened my bandage. “Garawgh, Urgsh!” He flung one arm around my shoulders, rubbed his cheek against mine, and disappeared again. I could hear him at his pack once more.

  “Save yourself and Jak! Go while you can! I’ll hold them up.”

  Squint-face appeared at the foot of the avenue and climbed between the avenue of stone giants. His men lifted dark faces, teeth flashing at sight of me lying at the top.

  Clink! An arrow chipped stone above my head. “Do you want to kill him now?” Squint-face raged, voice distorted among crags.

  The Salt Men clustered, unwilling to follow him. I tried but seemed unable to lift my bow. Up the steep slope they edged between the towering columns. By the way they moved – scared but jubilant. One shouted something and pointed. The rest looked up in terror at the stone giants. Squint-face climbed on alone.

  A few more steps. He pauses, leans against the feet of the giant figure just below me. Chest rising, falling – I hear him gasp for air. Staring at the green stone dolphin around my neck. Hands twitch, impatient, already reaching out to snatch it. Scar livid across the side of his face and head. Eyes smoking black. So close, I smell his sweat.

  I nock the arrow. Taur and Jak have escaped. “Come on!” I tell myself. If only my shaking hands will draw the bow. But they will not even lift. I stare at the muscles in my arms. Order them to work. Nothing happens. Saliva dribbles from the sagging corner of Squint-face’s disfigured mouth.

  “Ish!” he slavers.

  And from above the Bull Man leaps. Bellowing. The bull’s mask, its dewlapped cape sweeping to a man’s naked legs. Great horns swinging, the head turns towards me. Bulging eyes roll. “Urgsh!” salutes the Bull Man and charges. Thud! Thud! Thud! Arrows. The bull’s cape studded with feathers, gaudy with blood, but his momentum irresistible. The horns lunge, impale Squint-face, lift, slam hard against the giant’s feet. I hear the bone tips shatter on stone, see the scatter of bloody fragments. Gored, Squint-face screams as the giant’s precarious balance shifts.

  “Taur!”

  The stone giant stirs, grates, graunches: shifts like the sky collapsing. Past the Bull Man’s great caped shoulder, Squint-face’s eye appears, fixed on my neck. One hand scrabbles into sight. Fingers quiver, clutch towards the green stone dolphin, and at that moment I realise its insignificance, the futility of possession. I see Tara’s face disappearing beneath the sand of her grave, wonder what might have happened had I buried the dolphin with her. And, as I wonder, the Bull Man’s huge thighs stiffen, knees straighten, and his muscles thrust their force through Squint-face into the toppling giant.

  So long the stone guardian has waited, it is slow to move. Like a tree falling it leans out over the dark cleft, draws the mountain pa
st. Its tower of boulders leaps, falls, bringing down pinnacles and columns, the avenue of giants, erasing the cleft and everything below, carrying mountainside, river, Salt Men, Squint-face, and the Bull Man in his grandeur.

  A wave of air bumps me, soft, and smothering. Dust shrouds the shaking rims around. Shafts and stacks fall in shattered walls, and I hear again the smashing of glass, the collapse of the house of mirrors in the Garden of Dene. Illusion again. Like the reflecting of those deceptions in the glass walls and roofs, echo echoes echo. The roar subsides in a blinding confusion of dust. Jak trembling beside me. The river working, backing and filling, finding a new channel between tumbled turrets. Again unearthly melodies float out of the hollow heads of the remaining moon-faced guardians.

  Below my feet begins a raw cliff face, new-cut by the chasm’s collapse. And over the lip of its precipice the river bends into space. A colossal rainbow springs. Snowflakes spin down the abyss. From around my neck I slip the green stone dolphin. Flung, it climbs the rainbow’s curve, balances green upon the snow-flecked air and, like the river, vanishes into silence.

  Chapter 21

  The Pass

  Taur had rolled and stuffed his tunic and heavy cloak into my pack, a bag of dried meat, and his knife. I rolled myself in his cloak, crawled under an overhang. Shoving in under the rock. Jak crawling beside me. Like Bar all those years ago when the Travellers left me behind.

  I dreamed Jess curved above the river, water flying off her coat, the rainbow shining. Tried to stop her picture there, but she faltered in mid-air, crumpled as the arrowhead swelled and burst out of her side. I groaned, and Jess fell.

  Jak woke me with his whimper. I fed him the meat. He lapped at an ice-edged rivulet, crawled back, and I put my arms around him, buried my face in his ruff.

  When I was little, my father carved me a toy, odd-shaped pieces of wood. Fitted together, they made a picture of Bar, my first dog. I thought of that picture, tried to prevent another forming in my mind. Stared at the rock overhead – its grainy surface. Pushed my face into Jak’s coat – staring at each hair in turn.

  A chaos of pictures jumbled a succession of distortions in my mind. Sometimes the images were smashed reflections, grotesque derangements. Had there been a place called Dene, someone called Sodomah? I wondered who I was.

  I said “Jak” aloud. “Jess,” I said. Then a face came back to me, a name I had forgotten. “Tara!” I repeated her name, the others, then her name again because there was another name I did not want to say, a face I did not want to see, a voice I did not want to hear. I stuck my fingers in my ears, hearing only the boom of my heartbeat, and slept.

  When I woke, Jak was hungry again, but I had nothing more. I washed the wound in my leg with ice water, bound it tight. If I leaned on my spear, the leg would carry me.

  I did not look back at the raw granite edge where the river ran out upon air. Jak limping behind, we toiled through deepening snow up the pass. At first light I renewed the coverings on Jak’s pads, lashed the wrappings tight around my feet and legs, and climbed on, dizzy with hunger, seeing black mountains against a white sky, then a black sky against white mountains.

  In a hollow between cliffs a stag wallowed shoulder-deep in snow. Its eyes rolled back, showing the whites. The air musk with its terror. Fingers blunt, somehow I drew my bow. Jak and I knelt side by side and lapped blood that steamed a crimson trench in the snow. The furry taste reminded me of something in another time, then I was snarling, thrusting frozen hands into the hot guts, crying as my fingers sparked and burned, tearing out and gulping the liver. The opened belly smoked on the glassy air.

  Past icicles like the fangs of a mountain demon, we climbed the narrow throat of the pass. I looked down, saw us puny between precipices. Heavy air enshrouded us in vapour. Under a snow-packed gully, we picked our way between embedded boulders. I remember looking up the gully, its white slope curving to the sky. Jak looked and whined, trotted ahead, wrapped feet slipping on ice.

  Almost through the pass, we gazed down a valley, its southern side blue with evening shadow, the other coruscating sunset gold. Wherever the country of ice and snow lay, the land of the mountain that ate the sun, we had escaped it.

  I heard a voice sobbing. Jak leaned against my leg. Braiding ribbons of light across the valley’s shingle floor below, a river ran east. Through a tangled skein of cloud I saw an endless blue plain, tawny hills and scarps. One more step would take us into the light of this new world, but I turned, limped back. Jack whined again, looking up the white sheet of the gully, and cringed to join me.

  Standing between the boulders embedded to their waists in snow below the gully, I stared back down the dark gullet of the pass. As if I could see through the choke of mist and swirl, over the vast yawn of bluffs, the opal river, the desert, all our long journey.

  Jak took my cloak between his teeth and tugged. “All right!” He bounded under a small bluff, the far side of the gully, whined again. “I’m coming,” I growled. And the air above us cracked. The tilted field of snow unfolded down the gully. I flung forward, weak leg crumpling, hands scrabbling, and Jak dragged me under the bluff.

  A huge hand of air bowled us against its wall. Snow and rocks stormed down the gully. Jak showed the whites of his eyes. Stupid, but I laughed! And Jak bit my arm! I ran after him – skipping, dragging, swinging my leg – towards the vision of the river and the blue plain, my arm hurting where Jak had bitten, still shouting, laughing.

  We looked back, saw the mountainside shift. Over the bluff, a white river in flood, bucking in combers, billowed and surged out of sight. A moment longer, we must have drowned.

  I walled off a leaning rock with blocks of snow, a shelter. One arm bruised, clouted by a leaping stone; Jak’s bloody punctures on the other. Snow packed hard under my tunic and inside my leggings. I picked it out of my ears and nostrils, dug it from under my nails. My pack was filled with more of that driven snow. I gave Jak the raw meat I carried, rolled myself in Taur’s cloak. More of the snow rivers came down, closing the pass above, shaking the mountain. Between their cannonading, the eerie fluting of the guardians.

  I woke crying, burrowed my face into the cloak and cried again while Jak licked my neck. For his smell on the cloak brought back the pictures and sounds I had been avoiding: Taur singing the Travellers’ song; Taur pretending to listen to something outside the hut as he cheated me, playing our game with the wooden counters in the hut on Marn Island; Taur begging me to abandon the green stone dolphin. The picture faded, and once more I saw Squint-face’s fingers clutching over the Bull Man’s shoulder as the stone giant collapsed and carried them, the Salt Men, and the mountainside down and for ever out of sight.

  Chapter 22

  The Blue Plain

  Descending in sunlight next morning. “Taur! Isn’t the sun mild?” I called as if he was just behind me. As I had pretended after Hagar died. And Tara. And as hopeless.

  I knew it was wrong: trying to believe nothing had happened. Not facing the fact of his death. I forced myself to think of his smashed body the other side of the mountain’s stone hulk. Hawk, Hagar, Tara, now Taur.

  “People die,” I told Jak. “We are lucky if we have time to love them.”

  The mountainsides softened by trees. I knew again the comfort of walking under leaves. In the afternoon, we ran from beneath the forest into the rush and glancing lights of the river. A pair of the ducks Hagar called parries honked, whistled, and cartwheeled downstream, dragging broken wings. Jak ignored their ploy, ran upstream, and caught two of their young. I struck Taur’s flint and steel and fed a smudge of smoke to flame. We roasted the ducks, ate, and slept.

  I woke from a scarlet dream of horror and built up the fire. Afraid to sleep again, watched a procession in the flames. Our journey beneath the burning mountain, meeting the Bull Man. Travelling to Marn Island, across the strait, down the Western Coast. Taur grinned as he beat me at some game, bellowed the Travellers’ song, saved me and led us out of Dene and up the o
pal river. With dawn, the flames and pictures paled.

  I slept in daylight. Nights I sat by the fire, escaping dreams of a crone, a squinting eye. When the moon sprang above black ridges and daubed the riverbed white, Jak and I travelled downstream. Several days later the river debouched into the blue plain we had seen from the mountain. Long and level, the lake stretched forever east.

  Filtered through perpetual mist and cloud along the mountains, the sun was no longer a demon but an amiable source of warmth. I could not believe this kinder light, plaited myself a new flax hat.

  Jak looked for Jess. When I fed him, he seemed to wait for her to shove in for her share. When I sent him to head a deer, bring it down past me, he looked around as if for help. There was a fall in his manner, not a lapse of courage but of certainty and, watching Jak, I learned to grieve for Taur.

  On a wall of creamy stone, with sweeps of charcoal I drew the Bull Man. Searched for clays, mixed in dyes and oil from fish. Painted Squint-face’s death, the collapsing mountain, a dog leaping across the arc of a rainbow. I was surprised how my hand remembered Hagar’s and Tara’s faces, even though I found it hard to see them in my mind. My first dogs, Bar and Mak, their faces formed familiar on the smooth rock. I wept and talked to Taur as I painted him teasing me, playing tricks, scything the Salt Men, taking vengeance on Squint-face who killed his mother and father, castrated him, and tore out his tongue. And I remembered the vanity of my search for the source of the green stone, how I deceived myself in the Garden of Dene.

  In the clear air each morning, in the long light each evening, I stared across the blue plain of the lake. “We might find somewhere to live at its other end,” I said to Jak. “A place for a garden. Animals. A farm.” I did not allow myself to think of people – because they died. I had lost my father, my sister, Hagar, Tara, and Taur the Bull Man. And because people die I wondered if I had it in me ever to love again.