My plan went well until I was more or less east of Barna’s city, following the Somulane as it took a northerly bend through the forested hills. I was pretty hungry, and there were backwaters of the river in which I could see trout swimming as plain as pigeons flying in the sky. It was too much for me. I stopped at a lovely pool, put my rod together, baited my hook with a caddis fly, and caught a good fish in no time. And a second one in not much more than no time. I was just casting my line again when somebody said, “Gav?”
I jumped, lost my bait, grabbed for my knife, and stared at the man who stood behind me. For a moment I didn’t know him, then I recognised Ater—one of the raiders who had caught Irad and Melle—they’d told the story in the beer house—he’d said he liked his women soft… A big, heavy man he had been then, but he was a big, gaunt man now, I stared at him in terror, but there was no threat in his gaze. He looked dully surprised.
“How’d you get here, Gav?” he said. “I thought you drowned, or went off. Before.”
“Went off,” I said.
“You coming back, then?” I shook my head.
“Nothing much to come back to,” he said. He looked at my two fish. I knew how hunger looks at food.
“What do you mean, Ater?” I said when I began to realise what he’d said.
He turned his hands out in a helpless gesture. “Well,” he said. “You know.” I stared at him. He stared at me. “It’s all burned down,” he said.
“The city? The Heart of the Forest? Burned down?”
It was hard for him to understand that I didn’t know about the event that loomed so immense in his life. It took me a while to get much sense out of him.
My first concern was that other men would be following him, that Barna’s guards would be on me, take me captive, but he just kept saying, “No. Nobody’s coming. They’re all gone. Nobody’s coming.” He said, “I came over to that village we used to go to, see if there was some food there, but they burned it too.”
“Who?”
“The soldiers.”
“Casicar?” “I guess so.”
Getting information out of him was going to be a slow business. I said, “Is it safe to make a fire?” He nodded.
“Make one, then, and put the fish on a stick and toast them. I’ve got a little bread here.” I succeeded in landing another big trout while he made the fire. He could hardly wait to char the fish over the fire. He ate with desperate haste, cramming the hard bread into his mouth and chewing it painfully. “Ah,” he said, “ah, that’s good, thanks, Gav. Thanks.”
I went back to fishing after we ate; when the trout jump at an empty hook it’s a sin not to let them do it. While I fished he sat on the bank and told me what had happened to the Heart of the Forest. Much of the story I had to guess from his incoherent telling.
Etra and Casicar were allies now, in a Northern League against Vo-tus, Morva, and smaller cities south of the Morr. A lot of farm slaves had been killed during the wars between Etra and Casicar, or had run away, and had to be replaced or recaptured. Towns all round the Dane-ran Forest had long been full of rumors of the great camp or city of runaway slaves, and the new allies decided to go in and find out what was there. They sent an army, a legion from each city, on a rapid march up between Daneran and the Marshes. Barna’s people knew nothing about the attack until outpost guards came running into the city shouting the warning.
Barna gathered all the men who would stand with him to defend the Heart of the Forest. He ordered the women and children to scatter out in the woods. Many of the men ran with them. Any who hesitated or stayed to fight were soon trapped: the soldiers surrounded the walls and methodically set them afire, and then the whole city, hurling torches onto the roofs of the wooden buildings. Barna’s men made a sortie against them but were outnumbered, cut down, slaughtered.
The soldiers ringed the burning town and caught all who fled the holocaust, then ranged out and rounded up people hiding or trying to escape in the woods. They spent a couple of nights waiting till the fires burnt out so they could loot what was left. They found the treasury and divided that. They divided the prisoners, half for Etra, half for Casicar, and then marched back, driving the chained, slaves along with the cattle and sheep.
There were tears on Ater’s cheeks as he told me the story, but his voice remained dull and even. He’d been out with a raiding party when they saw the smoke of the burning city from miles away in the north. They had crept back a couple of days after the soldiers left.
“Barna…,” I said, and Ater said, “They said the soldiers cut off his head and kicked it around like a ball.”
It was very hard to ask about any of the others. When I did, Ater had no answers; often he seemed not even to know who I was talking about. Chamry? He shrugged. Venne? He didn’t know. Diero? He didn’t know. But evidently a number of people had escaped one way or another, and many of them had regathered in the ruined city, not knowing where else to go. Some of the grain supplies had remained hidden and untouched, and they had lived off them and what was left of the gardens. For how long? Again Ater was vague. I guessed that the raid and fire had been about half a year ago, perhaps in early winter.
“You’re going back there now?” I asked him, and he nodded. “It’s safer there,” he said. “The soldiers been raiding everywhere. Taking slaves. I was at Ebbera, over there. Near as bad off as we are. No slaves left to work the fields.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said. I had to know what had become of my friends.
I’d caught five more good-sized fish. I packed them up in leaves and we set off. We came to the Heart of the Forest in the late afternoon.
The city I had last seen silver-blue in moonlight was a waste of charred beams, shapeless mounds, ashfields. At one edge, near the gardens, people had made huts and shelters with salvaged lumber, much of it half burned. An old woman was weeding in the garden, bowed back, averted face. A couple of men sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands hanging between their knees. A dog barked at us, then whined and cowered away, A child sat on the dirt gazing listlessly at Ater and me. As we came near, it too cowered away from us.
I had come in order to ask about my friends, but I could not ask. I could only see Diero trapped in Barna’s house as it burned, Chamry’s corpse dumped in a common grave, Venne driven down the road in chains. I said to Ater, “I can’t stay here.” I gave him the packet of fish. “Share it with somebody,” I said.
“Where you going then?” he asked in his blank way. “North.”
“Look out for slave takers,” Ater said.
I was about to turn back the way we’d come, when something grabbed both my legs so hard and suddenly that I nearly lost my balance. It was a child, the child who’d stared and shrunk from us. “Beaky, Beaky, Beaky,” she cried in a high thin voice like a bird. “Oh Beaky, oh Beaky.”
I had to pry her hands loose from my legs, and then she gripped my hands with sparrow-claw fingers, looking up into my face, her face all dust and bone and tears.
“Melle?”
She pulled me to her. I picked her up. She weighed nothing, it was like picking up a ghost. She clung to me tightly, just as she used to when I came to Diero’s room to teach her letters. She hid her face against my shoulder.
“Where does she live?” I asked Ater, who had stopped to stare at us. He pointed to a hut nearby. I started to carry her towards it.
“Don’t go there,” she whispered, “don’t go there,”
“Where do you live then, Melle?” “Nowhere.”
A man looked from the doorway of the hut that Ater had pointed out. I’d seen him working as a carpenter but had never known his name. He too had the dull look, the siege face.
“Where’s the girl’s sister?” I asked him.
He shrugged.
“Diero didn’t—escape—did she?”
The man shrugged again, this time with a grinning sneer at the question. Gradually his look sharpened. He said, “You want that one?” I stared at hi
m.
“Half a bronze for the night,” he said. “Or food, if you’ve got any.” He stepped forward, trying to get a look at my backpack.
I went through a quick, complex set of thoughts. I said, “What I have I keep,” and set straight off walking back the way I’d come. Melle clung to my neck, silent, her face hidden.
The man shouted after me and the dog, barking, set off other dogs in a chorus of barks and howls. I drew my knife, glancing back constantly. But nobody followed us.
When I’d walked a half mile or so I knew that my little ghost was a great deal more solid than I’d thought, and also that I’d better think what I was doing. Coming across the faint trace of a path, I went along it for some way, then turned aside. Behind a thicket of elderberries that screened us from the path, I set Melle down on her feet and sat down next to her to get my breath. She squatted down beside me. “Thank you for taking me away,” she said in a thread of a voice.
She would be seven or eight years old now, I thought. She hadn’t grown very much, and was so thin her joints looked like knobs. I got some dried fruit out of my pack and offered it to her. She ate it with a pitiful and terrible attempt not to be greedy. She held out a piece to me. I shook my head. “I ate a little while ago,” I said. She devoured the fruit.
I cut a piece of my rock-hard bread into little morsels and warned her to suck them to soften them before she chewed. She sat with bread in her mouth, and her dirty, bony face began to relax.
“Melle,” I said, “I’m going north. Away. To a city called Mesun.”
“Please, can I come with you,” she whispered, her face tightening again, her eyes getting big, only daring one glance up at me.
“You don’t want to stay there, at—”
“Oh no, please no.” The same whisper. “Please no!”
“There’s nobody there who…”
She shook her head again and again. “No, no, no,” she whispered. I didn’t know what to do. That is, there was only one thing I could do, but I didn’t know how I was going to manage it. “Are you pretty good at walking?”
“I can walk and walk,” she said earnestly. She put another little lump of bread in her mouth, timidly, and sucked it as I had told her to do.
“Well,” I said, “you’ll have to.”
“I will, I will. You won’t have to carry me. I promise.” “That’s good. We ought to walk on a way now, because I want to get back to the river before dark. And tomorrow we’ll leave the forest. All right?”
“Yes!” she said, and her eyes shone. She stood right up.
She walked along bravely, but her legs were short, and she didn’t have much strength in her little starved body. Fortunately we reached the Somulane again sooner than I expected, coming down an open glade to a long bend in the river. The fishing there wasn’t like the wonderful pool farther upstream, but I did catch a trout and a couple of perch, enough for our supper. The grass was soft and the light fell sweetly through the trees across the water, turning it to bronze. “It’s pretty here,” Melle said. She fell asleep as soon as she had eaten. She lay in a little heap on the grass. My heart turned over at the sight of her fragility. How could I take this child with me? But how could I not take her?
Luck hears prayers only with his deaf ear, but I spoke to him, to the ear that hears the wheels of the chariots of the stars. I said, “You used to be with me, Lord, when I didn’t know it. I hope you’re with this child now, and not just fooling her.” And I spoke in silence also to Ennu, thanking her and asking her to guide us. Then there was nothing to do but roll Melle up with me in my soft reedcloth blanket, and sleep.
We both woke as dawn was brightening. Melle went off by herself to the riverside, and when she came back she had managed to wash herself quite clean, and was shivering with wet and cold. I wrapped the blanket round her again while we ate a little breakfast. She was shy and solemn.
“Melle,” I said, “your sister…”
She said in a strange, small, even voice, “We tried to hide. Back of the sheep pastures. The soldiers found us. They took Irad away. I don’t remember.”
I remembered Barna’s raider telling how they had taken the two girls from their village, how Ater had been going to toss the little one aside, but they clung too tight together… . They hadn’t been able to hold on to each other this time.
Melle’s chin trembled. She looked down and chewed on her bit of hard bread but could not swallow. Neither of us could say anything more about Irad. After a long time I said, “Your village was over on the west side of the forest. Do you want to go back there?”
“To the village?” She looked up, and thought hard. “I can’t remember it much,” she said.
“But you had family there. Your mother—”
She shook her head. “We didn’t have any mother. We belonged to Gan Buli. He hit us a lot. My sister…” She didn’t finish. Maybe Luck had been with Melle after all.
But never with Irad.
“All right, then you’ll come with me,” I said, in as matter-of-fact a tone as I could manage. “But listen. We’ll be going on the roads, into villages, some of the time at least. Among people. I think it might be better if you were my little brother. Can you pretend to be a boy?”
“Of course,” she said, interested in the idea. She thought about it. “I need a name. I can be Miv.”
I almost said, “No!” but stopped myself. She should have the name she chose herself. Like Melle, it was a common name.
“All right, Miv,” I said, with a little effort. “And I’m Avvi.”
“Avvi,” she repeated, and then murmured, “Avvi Beaky,” with a tiny smile.
“And who we are is this: we aren’t slaves, because there aren’t any slaves in Urdile, where we live. I’m a student at the University in Me-sun. I study with a great man there, who’s waiting for us. I’m taking you there to be a student too. We come from just east of the Marshes.”
She nodded. It all seemed perfectly convincing to her. But she was eight years old.
“What I hope is, we can mostly keep off the big roads and just go through the countryside. I have some money. We can buy food in villages and from farmers. But we have to look out for slave takers. Everywhere. If we don’t meet any of them, we’ll be all right.”
“What is the great man in Mesun’s name?” she asked. A good question. I wasn’t prepared for it. Finally I said the only name of a great man in Mesun I knew: “Orrec Caspro.”
She nodded.
There seemed to be one more thing on her mind. She finally said it. “I can’t pee like a boy,” she said.
“That’s all right. Don’t worry. I’ll stand guard.”
She nodded. We were ready to go. A short way downstream from the bend of the river it widened and shoaled out, and I said, “Let’s cross here. Can you swim—Miv?”
“No.”
“If it gets too deep I can carry you.” We took off our shoes and tied them to my pack. I fastened a length of light rope around Melle’s waist and my own, with a few feet of slack between us. We waded out into the river hand in hand. I thought of my vision of crossing a river, and wondered if soon I’d be carrying the child on my shoulders (which were still sore from carrying her yesterday). But this didn’t at all look like the river I remembered. By picking a zigzag way on the high point of the shoals I was never more than waist deep, and could hold Melle up well enough, except in one place where the current ran fast and deep alongside an islet of gravel. There I told her to hold tight to the rope around my waist and keep her head up the best she could, and I waded in, swam the few yards to the gravel bar, and wallowed ashore, Melle went under only at the last moment, when she thought she could touch bottom and couldn’t. She came up choking and sputtering.
After that we had only shallow waters to wade, and soon came to the far shore.
As we sat getting our breath, drying out, and putting on our shoes, I said, “We’ve crossed the first of the two great rivers we have to cross. This is the land of
Bendile.”
“The hero Hamneda had to swim across a river when he was wounded, didn’t he?”
I can’t say how much that touched me. It wasn’t that she’d learned the story of Hamneda from me. It was that she thought of him, that he was familiar to her mind and heart as he was to mine. We had a common language, this child and I, a language I hadn’t spoken with anyone else since I left my own childhood in Etra. I put my arm around her little thin shoulders, and she wriggled against me comfortably.
“Let’s go find a village and buy some food,” I said. “Hold on, though. Let me get some money out so I don’t wave all of it in people’s faces.” I dug into my pack and brought out the heavy little silk pouch. A faint, smoky Cuga-reek still clung to it, or maybe it had just been close to the smoked fish from Ferusi. I untied the cord, opened the pouch, and stared. I remembered what it had held: bronzes, and four silver pieces. But along with the bronzes there were now nine silver pieces, four of the gold pieces from Pagadi called dictators, and a broad gold coin from Ansul.
My Cuga had been a thief as well as a runaway.
“I can’t carry this!” I said, I looked at the money with horror. All I saw was the danger it posed us if anyone should get the slightest notion that we carried such a fortune. It was in my mind to simply dump the gold pieces out in the grass and gravel and leave them.
“Did somebody give it to you?”
I nodded, speechless.
“You can sew up money in clothes to hide it,” Melle said, handling the dictators with admiring curiosity, “These are pretty, but the big one is the prettiest. Have you got a needle and thread?”
“Only fish hooks and fishing line.”
“Well, maybe I can get some sewing things in a village. Maybe there’ll be a pedlar on the road. I can sew.”
“So can I,” I said stupidly. “Well, all I can do now is put it back. I wish I hadn’t found it.”
“Is it a lot of money?”
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