A Solitary Journey

by Tony Shillitoe

  As she crested a hill and began to descend she spotted firelight through the trees. She stopped. She couldn’t be more than halfway back to camp and no one was meant to light a fire. Warily she crept closer. The campfire was small, but she counted fifteen men around it—some standing, some seated, some lying as if asleep. Two standing men were talking quietly in an alien language, although as she concentrated and her spine tingled the words took meaning. They were discussing a man named King Future and another called King Ironfist and how King Ironfist was planning to take over King Future’s kingdom. ‘Give him time,’ the broad-shouldered man said. ‘He’s never done us wrong in the past, has he?’ His companion grunted agreement. ‘Then let’s do our job and we’ll get our rewards.’

  A cracking twig startled her. A shadow moved to her left. Terrified, she bolted from her hiding place to be hit from the side by something heavy that drove her to the ground. She struggled and kicked and screamed and a fist smashed against the side of her face. Hands held her legs and a weight pressed down on them. As other hands grasped her arms another weight dropped on her chest, knocking the breath from her. She gasped, fighting to breathe, her face smarting from the blow, and willed the heavy object from her chest. Her spine tingled and the weight vanished. She tried to kick, but her legs were held. Men were shouting. She willed the hands holding her arms and legs to release her and she was instantly free. She scrambled to her feet, dodging the shadows of men, although a hand grabbed her tunic and tore it as she pulled free. She ran across the face of the hillside, the moonlight her guide, with men shouting in her wake. When she darted into a dark stand of trees, she glanced back to see the shadows chasing her and ran again into the light on the far side, weaving between the bushes and trees, cutting diagonally up the slope towards higher ground. The shouting faded, but she ran until her legs threatened to buckle and she stumbled to a standstill.

  Looking back down the slope, listening for her pursuers above the thumping of her heart and gasping for breath, she guessed that she had eluded them. She gathered her breath and climbed higher, until she reached an outcrop of granite where she scaled the boulders and slid into a narrow gap to rest and hide.

  Her arms and legs and chest ached from the attack, and she smeared blood from her nose with the back of her arm. Her left cheek was both numb and stinging. There were barbarians in the forest. She hadn’t expected that. No one in her party expected that. She had to warn the others, but she realised that she would have to wait until it was safe to skirt the barbarian’s area before she could get back to her camp to raise the alarm. She sucked in the chill air through gritted teeth despite the pain in her right side. Then she heard voices below, near the rocks. ‘She can’t have gotten too far.’

  ‘I tell you she’s a witch. We shouldn’t be messing around with witches.’

  ‘You idiot, Shortknife. There are no witches.’

  ‘And I tell you what happened back there. Ask the others. They’ll tell you. We had her down and then it was like someone ripped our arms away—like spirits.’

  ‘Keep it to yourself. I don’t believe in tales.’

  ‘Then you tell me how she’s gotten away. They say barbarian witches can turn into animals. Maybe that’s what she’s done.’

  ‘Shut up and look over there. I’ll check around these rocks.’

  The voices stopped. Boots crunched the dead leaves and grass. She held her breath, curled in her tiny space, and hoped the men couldn’t hear her terrified heart. Metal scraped on the boulder. ‘She’s gone, I tell you,’ a voice insisted.

  ‘All right, let’s go that way,’ a voice urged.

  Boots stomped away, but she kept still, willing herself to be calm and to breathe quietly and steadily. There is no point looking if they are out there waiting for me, she decided, and relaxed her tension in her confined hideaway. The air was cold on her nose and forehead and shoulders. How did I escape? she wondered, recalling the attack and her frantic struggle. Why did they let go so easily? She mentally replayed the sequence of events. I wanted them to let me go and they did—but not because I asked. Her mind leapt to the earlier incident when she could see what the others could not across the plains. Who am I? She shivered and hugged her arms tighter to her chest. They called me a witch, she remembered, and wondered what a witch was. The icy air was biting her arms. She couldn’t stay in this position. She needed a warmer shelter, or a fire, or a blanket. But she had to wait.

  The cold was glistening on her skin by the time she eased out of her hiding place to warily survey the moonlit forest. The men were gone. The moon was well on its decline, but she looked for the Great Star to estimate her position. Her problem was establishing how far she’d run. Heading west would definitely take her to the forest verge, but how far was she to the north or south of her camp? The others had to be warned.

  She headed west by the star’s guidance, wary of the forest sounds and firelight as she stole between the trees, weariness countered by her vigilant fear of discovery. She stopped, ready to bolt, each time her progress sent invisible bird wings beating into the darkness and twice she flinched and stared fearfully as small, shadowy forest animals scampered across her path. The moonlight waned and the forest was thicker than she remembered. Was she north or south of her target? Her best strategy was to get onto the plains where she could use familiar landmarks to work out the direction she had to go to find the camp.

  Walking drove out the cold, but she had to constantly rub her arms to keep her blood warming her. What she needed was a fire. She couldn’t recall the cold being as potent on any of the nights since she woke in the village, so the forest had to be affecting the air. When the rapidly fading moonlight revealed wreaths of mist weaving between the trees she quickened her pace, determined to reach the open ground before the mist turned her task into a nightmare. She scrambled around a rocky outcrop and skidded down a steep slope, her boots splashing in water in the darkness at the bottom of the slope. Unintentionally she’d stumbled upon another creek—or had she unwittingly gone in a circle, as she knew could happen to people lost in the bush, and come back to the stream? How do I know that? She crossed the narrow shallow creek, her boots crunching on the shale as she climbed the steep bank on the other side, but as she stood on the lip the earth collapsed, her right ankle rolled under her weight and she pitched back down the slope to land in a thick bush at the edge of the water. Cursing, she tried to stand, but a piercing pain shot through her right ankle and she yelped and collapsed into the bush. ‘No!’ she hissed. ‘No!’ She grabbed her offending ankle between both hands and rubbed it—at first vigorously and then gingerly when the pain bit. ‘No!’ she yelled angrily, and smacked her fist against the branches. ‘No!’ I have to warn the others, she thought. I can’t stop here. I have to warn them. She tried to stand, but the pain forced her down. She swore and rattled the branches and her tears welled. I can’t stay here!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Why haven’t you come to me? he asked. I see you in my dreams just as you see me. I know you’re there. You’ve been there a long time, but you don’t come.

  I don’t know where you are, she told the darkness.

  You know where I am. You were here before—but you didn’t stay.

  She squinted against the solid black. I can’t see you.

  Open the eyes of your mind, he said.

  I don’t understand.

  I need you.

  But I can’t see you, she protested. I don’t know where you are.

  The portal, he said.

  She woke to a world of grey mist and broken branches digging into the skin of her back. Water gently babbled near her head and she thought that she was waking in the village—but she’d already done that, hadn’t she? She sat up, squinting against the dull grey light, and shivered. Everything was grey—the bush, the ground, the water in the creek, the pebbles in the water. The dream rippled like the creek. What is a portal? She felt as if she should know what it was. And the other word came to the surfac
e—glyph. Why am I dreaming words? she wondered. Then she remembered a pale contorted man lashed across the back of a black creature carved from stone and pinned by two battleaxes, one gold, one black. Where did I see that? Movement on the shallow bank made her tense as a black shape, a large bush rat, crept into the undergrowth and disappeared. Am I obsessed with rats? she mused, staring at the undergrowth.

  She rubbed her eyes and got up slowly, warily testing her weight on her right ankle. The pain was gone. She checked the skin and was surprised to find that under the dirt there was no sign of bruising. She brushed the twigs and leaves from her ripped tunic and trousers and clambered up the bank. The mist was thinner out of the creek channel, but she could only choose her direction on the memory of where she’d come from during the night, so she searched for and located the marks she made when crossing the creek and scaling the bank and from them estimated the direction west.

  She emerged at the edge of the forest where the white mist was already dissipating, leaving a crisp frost on the grass to evaporate under the rising sun. She was cold and still in shadow, but the vision of the sunrays caressing the tree canopy and a multitude of birds carolling the advent of sunshine through the forest cheered her. Gazing west she tried to locate familiar hills from which she could determine whether she needed to go north or south to find her travelling companions. The landscape didn’t provide enough clues, except to confirm that she had emerged somewhere near where the group had entered the forest at sunset the previous evening. Taking a guess, she walked south several hundred paces, scrutinising the forest for signs of her party. When she had no success, she retraced her steps and headed north as the morning’s golden sunlight spilled across the landscape.

  She stopped where the scuffed earth revealed the passage of a large group into the forest and, deciding that the bushes and trees looked familiar, she followed the tracks. A hundred paces into the forest she halted in horror before three smoking heaps of charred corpses. Scattered through the trees were torn pieces of faded cloth and the discarded bags and possessions carried by the women and children in their futile flight from the war. Eight mutilated bodies hung by their feet from branches. She guessed without going closer that they were men. With her eyes frantically searching the surrounding forest for the butchers who slaughtered her people, she backed away several paces before she turned and ran.

  She hid until midday, watching and listening in case the barbarians were still hunting for people, before she gathered the courage to creep back to the forest charnel-house. Crows perched on the corpses pecked at the macabre morsels. She ran in, waving her arms to shoo the big black birds away, and they whisked silently to the edge of the clearing from where they watched her enviously with their shining black eyes. She couldn’t look at the faces as she tried to establish from the numbers of dead if anyone had escaped. She was relieved to discover there were no children’s bodies, and she sighed, thinking of Magpie. Only eight of the eleven men were dead. The corpses on the pyres were female, but there weren’t enough to make the hundred or more of the combined party. She searched the camp, alert to the surrounding forest, while the courageous members of the crow murder waddled towards the bodies, glancing at Meg to make sure that she wasn’t going to interfere with their feeding fortune. The disturbed ground and dried blood told her the story of a brutal ambush where the people were cornered in groups and hacked down mercilessly. I could have stopped this, she thought. I could have warned everyone, if I hadn’t been so stupidly clumsy, and she sank to the earth and poured out her grief for the suffering and the killing that she hadn’t prevented.

  When she rose, she looked over the scene of the massacre and knew that she could not bury so many dead. Some had escaped, but to where had they fled? She searched the perimeter of the campsite and found tracks that told her a main party, most likely the barbarians, were headed towards the plain. She saw scattered signs that individuals and sometimes more than one person had run deeper into the forest. There was no point following the barbarians, even if they took captives. What could she do against armed men? Her hope lay in tracking someone who escaped and her best hope was in following a group rather than an individual track. She considered the traces and made a choice.

  Fifty paces beyond the camp, the small party’s tracks divided. At least three people went straight on and one bare footprint belonged to a smaller person, maybe a child. Another two or three went left. One went right. She followed the straight track. Further on, she found the body of a woman spread-eagled in the ruins of a thick bush—Blossom Beekeeper, cut down with a blow to her head and stabbed in the chest. Meg’s grief and anger welled and tears came again. Through watery eyes she saw the tracks did not go on. A barbarian had chased and killed her. But there were more than three tracks heading out and one set was smaller. What happened to the child—if the tracks belonged to a child?

  She rummaged through the undergrowth until she found what she feared most—Magpie’s body curled under a straggly bush five paces from Blossom’s corpse. She dropped to her knees and stared at the boy’s blood-stained rags, the dried blood caked around a deep wound on the side of his head. Mercifully his eyes were closed. Her hand shaking with grief, she brushed the boy’s dark tangled hair, wishing she’d had a chance to wash and brush it for him. Why did he have to die so young? She fought the tears and straightened up to look for a broken branch she could use to dig—Magpie deserved a grave—but rustling in the undergrowth startled her. She searched fearfully until she spied a black bush rat creeping through a bush behind the boy’s head. The animal stopped and peered at her, as if it was unafraid like the scavenging crows. ‘Leave him alone!’ she screamed, and charged wildly. The rat bolted and disappeared. Overcome with exhaustion, Meg sobbed and buried her head in her hands. Magpie deserves a grave, she reminded herself, and controlled her anguish.

  Her search of the ground was fruitless, so she pulled and pushed a sturdy branch on a tree until it cracked from the trunk and sent her sprawling. She got up, cleaned the twigs and leaves from the branch and prodded the ground until she found soft earth and began to dig.

  The task was laboriously slow and she only excavated a handspan’s depth before she slumped to the ground, gasping for breath. Wiping the sweat from her brow and nose she turned to the little corpse to say, ‘I’m sorry, Magpie. I don’t think I can do this.’ You can, she scolded herself within. You have to. Then she stared. Had she imagined it? His leg twitched and he groaned. ‘Magpie!’ she whispered in amazement and crawled to his side. His eyes opened. ‘Magpie?’ she asked fearfully. ‘Can you hear me?’ The boy groaned again and shuddered, but his eyes didn’t seem to focus—only stare blankly at the dirt and dead leaves. ‘Oh Magpie,’ she pleaded, ‘don’t die. I won’t let you die. I won’t let you die.’ She slid her hands under his shoulders and head and eased his head onto her lap, brushing the grass and ants from his bloodied face. ‘I won’t let you die,’ she kept repeating. ‘You hear me? You’re not allowed to die.’ She fumbled with her waterbag and tipped water into her cupped palm, but the boy didn’t register it when she pressed it against his lips. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, letting the water trickle to the ground. ‘I won’t let you die.’ She shivered as a sharp tingling flashed along her spine.

  The forest was moving into shadow. She had sat with the boy most of the day—crooning to him, letting him sleep, brushing his hair with her fingers, gently cleaning the dried blood away with water and cloth torn from her shredded tunic, rising only to relieve herself and stretch her aching limbs. She must have also drifted between wakefulness and sleeping like Magpie because the late afternoon shadows and cooling air arrived much more rapidly than she’d expected. She checked the boy and was satisfied that his breathing was stronger, but she knew she had to move him to a better site and she had to fetch water for them both. She was hungry. She rolled the remnant of her grey tunic into a pillow for Magpie and checked that he was comfortable before she went in search of a sheltered place.


  Her memory of the night journey landscape was vague and didn’t correspond with what she was walking through, but she knew there was a creek to the south so she weaved through the trees, deliberately scuffing the ground to leave a trail for her return, and eventually found a shallow valley with a tiny creek like the one she had stumbled upon the previous night. She chose a spot in the shelter of three large trees with an outcrop of granite as the place to where she would carry the boy and returned to fetch him.

  Carrying Magpie was not as easy as she’d imagined and she struggled to cradle him in her arms, afraid of hurting him. The journey to the creek was painfully slow and when she finally set him down under the trees her back, arms and legs ached. She made him comfortable before she foraged for food.

  The forest was an alien pantry. She collected yellow fungi, uncertain as to whether or not they would be safe to eat, peeled thin moss strips from rocks by the creek, found three fat witchetty grubs in the rotting trunk of a fallen tree and a large green-spotted gecko, and gathered cupped handfuls of nuts and seeds from bushes and trees before the evening closed. The gecko will taste better cooked, she decided. The moss and seeds would also make a good herbal tea, if she could heat water. Emma had taught her that. She reflected again on the name. Was Emma my mother? How do I know her? Emma had also taught her how to make a fire without flint.