by Jack Lasenby
Several times Kalik made the slightest gesture, a movement of his hand, his head, and I knew by Lutha’s smile he was mimicking somebody. The girls watched him, too. Once or twice Kalik stood, took a couple of steps in someone’s manner. Even his voice changed as he became other people, so I began to hear as well as see them.
When he described the Salt Men on the beach behind Hekkat, he leapt, paced and gestured until I saw their leader. I knew the way the Salt Men held themselves, how they strode, how their leaders spoke. Kalik revealed so much of others through their movements – yet kept so much of himself hidden.
A picture formed in my mind. Something I had seen while drifting on an ice island across the strait from the North Land. Taur lying senseless in the shelter, I looked outside into the cold silence.
Our island was in an open patch of water walled by fog – like a flat clearing in a dense white forest. Above the fog, glistening white blue green in thin sun, an icy peak reared. Carried on some invisible current, the iceberg loomed sudden, silent, inexorable. Our floating island of ice fragile in its path.
As I wondered how I might drag Taur aboard the iceberg, ponderous its white castle tilted. Turrets, towers, spires leaned, creaked, groaned. And the huge submerged base rolled itself into sight: vast, dark, and sluggish. I had not known so much of the iceberg was hidden below water. Booming, it crashed down, righting itself.
Its wave ran up our ice island, divided either side of the ice shelter I had built for Taur, spilled off, dribbled to silence. The white horror invisible again in fog.
Something, intuition, warned me that Kalik, too, showed little of his real self on the surface. That image of the iceberg’s hidden mass saved me from saying too much. I took its warning and was grateful, then and later.
If Lutha was the leader of the Headland People, why had she bothered to outsmart him with information? Had she ordered the Salt Men tortured to death? Why were we sitting under the shelter, instead of inside the Roundhouse? I looked closer at Kalik.
His tunic of deerskin fitted him closely. He was brown-skinned, black-eyed. Sprawled gracefully on cushions. Fine-boned arms and legs. Long narrow fingers on shapely hands. I had noticed one or two of the bodyguards stare at him, remind themselves, and look away. The supercilious look again. Were they supposed to ignore men?
Even without knowing who he was talking about, I laughed as Kalik mimicked this one and that. No wonder Lutha loved him. A glance passed between them. A look of complicity, a question from Kalik, a reply from Lutha. My fingers found the emblem at my throat.
Chapter 4
Kicking a Child
Shouts. Feet pounding. The bodyguard let through some panting figures, legs wet.
“Rafts, Lutha! Moving out from the northern shore.”
“How many?”
“Ten at least. Probably more.”
“Did they see you?”
“No.”
Lutha ordered all patrols off the lake, out of the hills behind. “Act as if it’s an ordinary day. Work parties to the gardens. Keep the goats out grazing till late afternoon. The Salt Men won’t attack till just before light tomorrow morning. We want to lure them in, destroy as many as possible.” Efficiently, the warriors moved to obey.
I noticed Lutha’s confidence that her orders were being carried out. Kalik asked me more questions about the Land of the White Bear. He knew I had kept something secret.
“They tried to keep you there, didn’t they?” he asked.
But I knew about people such as Kalik. “A famous ruler in the place that used to be called Europe,” the Shaman once said, “he could talk to a man who came holding a certain idea and send him away believing its exact opposite. Not even understanding he had changed his mind. Charmed.
“Most people who possess charm have little else,” said the Shaman. “They’re sometimes good looking, but not always. Ugliness can be attractive, too. Attractiveness on the surface; selfishness underneath. Once they have what they want, they usually discard you.”
“They tried to keep you there?” Kalik repeated his question and smiled as if he knew what I was thinking. “Do you think there’s another way across the mountains themselves?”
I remembered our attempts to find a pass between the sullen peaks, the Carny’s white bears that drove us back. My best defence against Kalik’s questions was seeming frankness.
“If there is a way, we couldn’t find it.” I shook my head. “Again and again we had to turn back.” In my mind I saw the rockfalls and snow slides started by the bears. “The only gullies that might have led to a pass were too dangerous.” I could hear conviction in my own voice. Kalik would be listening for that.
“We were lucky to escape. Falling rocks, ice, avalanches.”
His eyes flickered. Of course, avalanche was a word I had read in the Library. “Snow pouring like a river. Avalanches,” I said. “That’s what they call them in the Land of the White Bear.”
Kalik seemed satisfied, so I changed the subject back to our escape. “We just got through before the tunnel collapsed behind us. The only other way I know to the Land of the White Bear is the river under Grave Mountain. But you could never come back that way.”
I did not describe the rigours of the Droll’s Tunnel, the heat, the burning belly of the mountain, the long passages through black airlessness, drowned caves, swimming choked through hot sand. And yet, I felt as if Kalik saw into my mind, saw the pictures there. If he understood me so easily, he must also understand what drove Lutha.
Kalik smiled and shook his head as if amused by my thoughts. Again, I was aware of his charm, his sympathy with the way I was feeling, and I cleared my mind of pictures so he could not see into it through them.
Then Lutha was asking me about the people of the Land of the White Bear. How were they ruled? Did they fight each other? Tools? Weapons? Where did they get them? How many people? I answered easily, directly, still keeping my secrets hidden. I was not afraid of Lutha catching me out, but Kalik worried me. His intuitive intelligence. The way he smiled as if he knew I was not telling everything.
If Kalik asked the same questions, I must be careful to repeat everything I had already told Lutha. Although they seemed to be competing, that might be to confuse me, test my honesty.
I pictured the iceberg again, its enormous hidden mass. I could always tell Lutha and Kalik more, but decided to listen to my inner feelings. The Shaman used to say it was sensible to use our intuition, learn how to use it.
Lutha began describing what happened after she left me on the Island of Bones. I was aware of the Salt Men creeping closer across the lake and through the hills, but it was as if she had put them out of mind.
“When you arrived before, Ish, the priestesses were losing control of the Floating Village. Some people wanted to keep fighting the Salt Men. Others didn’t know what to do. If we left it to them, we would be slaughtered. Many seemed like the priestesses: confused by smoking and chewing the leaf.”
I remembered the herbal taint hanging over the Floating Village, the smoke coming out of Hekkat’s mouth.
“They lost the will to survive.” Lutha paused and said slowly, “Some thought it was because we had no men.” She grimaced and looked at Kalik.
“You came at the right time, Ish. Taleet and the the other women went in the morning to watch you drown on the Island of Bones. What they saw was those Salt Men swept to their death. Taleet realised we had almost been attacked again and began to think I was right, we must protect ourselves. With her on my side, I knew I could overthrow the priestesses.”
“Taleet was the big woman?”
“She’s been sick and looks much older now. She brought over a lot of the others with her.”
In her wanderings, Lutha had discovered Kalik’s settlement south of the lake and made friends. Against the rules, she brought him and some of his people to the Floating Village. The priestesses condemned them to death, but Taleet and about half the women chose to leave with Lutha and Kalik.
Soon after, the Salt Men attacked the Floating Village. Some were swept away in the same current that had caught us, but others set fire to the thatched roofs with flaming arrows. They enslaved the young women, slaughtered everyone else. They broke up the raft of logs on which the Floating Village was built. Only Hekkat was left.
“We watched it all from the hills,” said Lutha. “The Salt Men went back up the valley this side of Grave Mountain.”
Lutha chose the Headland and planned its defences. Kalik joined her with his people, and they threw up palisades, built the Roundhouse and huts. They dug out the spring and its pools, made gardens, sent out hunting and fishing parties. When a scout reported smoke signals up the valley below Grave Mountain, Kalik led a patrol and found a fortified settlement being built. They had seen Salt Men building rafts and canoes along the lake’s northern side, crossing the river and coming around through the hills. The Shaman, Nip, and I had been lucky to make it as far as the lake before the Salt Men found us.
“Lutha’s defences make the Headland safe,” Kalik told me. “Training everyone to use a bow and a spear was her idea, daily practices. We have stores of food and the spring. The Salt Men will find us ready.”
I listened to his words but wondered about Kalik himself, his strangely attractive personality, its hidden side. I was still thinking of Lutha’s hitting the girl, and the other things that made me uneasy, especially the relationship between Kalik and Lutha. And Lutha’s disdainful bodyguard. The spurned Raka.
I should have been delighted to be back at the lake, but something about Kalik reminded me of how the Shaman once said good and bad are necessary to each other. That made me think of the Carny and the Droll. Had they really existed? My mind drifted further, and I wondered again why the Shaman tolerated the Carny. How he sometimes spoke of the Droll as if she existed after all.
“I live in darkness, but bring light to these people,” the Shaman once said. “The Carny lives in light and brings darkness. Perhaps both of us are necessary.”
“What about the Droll?” I had asked him. “Isn’t she the darkness?”
“Ah,” said the Shaman. “Now you are beginning to understand. The Carny is the servant of the Droll.”
I woke with a start. The sun gone, only the lake still held the light. From the gloom outside the shelter, I knew, the bodyguards were watching us. Kalik and Lutha glanced at each other, that look of complicity again. Lutha saw I had come to myself and asked, “What were you thinking?”
“I was remembering how your father once said good and evil penetrate each other.”
I saw Kalik smile, just the smallest shift in his eyes. Lutha muttered something. She was not easy with the world of ideas. She would make sure her people survived against the Salt Men, but would she ever question what she was doing, or why?
It was like the protection she had given me because of her father. She had made up her mind, and that was it.
“Now,” she said, and it was an order, “we must rest before the Salt Men attack.” Kalik’s dog lifted its heavy head and watched us go.
The bodyguard, the Maidens, surrounded Lutha, pleased to see us leave. The same girl shivered and hunched over the baby wrapped warm against the night air. The girl herself wore only a light tunic, worn and shabby.
Two guards led me to a hut. From above, where the Roundhouse had disappeared in the dark, a whistle floated on the air. The huge dog appeared suddenly, seized Nip by the shoulder, knocked her over, worried at her throat. I flung myself at the brute, pulling back its head, sliding in my knife, jerking it around inside its own throat until it kicked and shuddered still.
A tear in Nip’s shoulder, bruising around her neck, but the monster hadn’t time to bite through and rip out the great veins. If only I’d been faster, she wouldn’t have been bruised.
The guards were backing away, horror-struck. “Kalik’s dog!” “You killed Kalik’s dog!”
“What did you expect me to do?”
But still they muttered, “Kalik’s dog!”
Inside, I took a deerskin off the bunk and made a bed for Nip – more scared than hurt. Had it been a whistle I heard, the sound that floated on the air just before Kalik’s dog attacked? And why had the dog attacked Nip, a bitch?
In the Land of the White Bear, I had only thought of the lake in terms of the beautiful girl who mocked and kissed me that night in the cell on the Floating Village. Who had given me the knife and the cord, saved us from drowning. The laughing Lutha of my dreams. The real Lutha was different.
Her father’s death shook her, but she recovered quickly. She was grateful, had given me her protection. But she was now the leader of the Headland People, arrogant, cruel. Lutha had helped us escape that other time because it suited her plans. I forced myself to smile – even though my cheeks felt stiff – at the thought that my desire for a family had betrayed me again.
How awkwardly Lutha had held her baby, shoved it back at the girl! She had neither spoken to it, nor held it to her with love. Nor had Kalik. If I had a baby, I would want to look after it myself.
Ever since my father’s death, and my sister’s disappearance, I had wanted a family more than anything else. Yet here were Lutha and Kalik, almost unaware of their baby. And the girl who looked after it, they treated as less than human.
Kalik’s support had given Lutha the chance to fortify the Headland, to build up their strength. So long as she got advantage from the relationship, it might last. Kalik and Lutha were both beautiful, attracted physically, to each other. Both ambitious, they would be equally ruthless.
Ambitious people might wait years for the right moment to seize power. Did Lutha understand that about Kalik?
Had the sacrifice of Jak and the Shaman been a grim waste? The lake was so different from what I expected … I tried to grin at the irony, but my mouth would only pucker.
I worked Lutha’s cord over my head. On it hung a silver bow and arrow. A perfect bow, like a mouth smiling. I slipped it on again.
Later, the guards woke me. Somewhere in the dark above, Lutha’s voice was giving quiet orders. Canoes had been run up on rollers and chocked between the buildings. Children with large pots were filling them from the spring.
“Handy if the Salt Men try their trick with flaming arrows again!” Kalik appeared beside me, laughed, and kicked a child who had spilled a pot of water. A hard kick, indifferent yet vicious, like the blow Lutha had struck the girl with the baby. Humped in pain, the child scuttled into the dark. As if nothing had happened, Kalik continued talking about the Salt Men.
He seemed to be thinking only of the battle. “I killed a dog that attacked mine–” I began to say, but he waved away my words. It was unfortunate. They had few dogs. A fever had swept through killing them. Still it had been the dog’s fault, trying to attack mine. But I knew Kalik was making light of it.
Chapter 5
The Lost Cries of Children
“Stay with me.” Kalik’s voice shook. “You’ll see some action!” By the causeway gate, he shifted, tried the point of his spear. One hand brushed the knife on his belt, went back to it, half-pulled it, thrust it down in the sheath, loosened it again. He breathed fast. Whenever I think of the battle with the Salt Men, I hear Kalik’s breathing, excited.
The darkness rustled, warriors slipping into place behind fences and palisades, climbing to the fighting platforms over both gates. Bows being strung. Fingers trying them, the quick-silenced twangs. Silence gripped as if the Headland dreamed beneath a spell. So quiet, I heard Kalik swallow. Someone pissing against a post, someone else sniggering nervous: the whisper that hushed them both. From the platform of the Roundhouse, invisible herself until the light strengthened, Lutha would be able to see everything spread below.
I trembled and touched my lips, tight, drawn back in a nervous grin. I reached for Nip’s head, and remembered she was in the hut, nursing her bruises.
To the approaching Salt Men, it must seem the Headland slept bandaged in darkness. T
heir rafts edged across the lake, canoes circling, keeping them together. Hugging the ground, more Salt Men slithered out of the hills and across the causeway. The place would be theirs by surprise.
A bird twittered. One bird waking. Then silence as if it had gone back to sleep. The twitter again. A long silence. A third twitter. Its note of uncertainty picked up by another. And another. As they began every morning. One over there. One a bit closer. Another across there. Tentative, trying out their voices. Unsure about the grey in the east.
Then I realised one call had changed. A sharp whistle from the Roundhouse platform. A bird replied from the lake gate, another from beside me, and their calls were lost under the malicious susurrus of arrows riding the air. Shrieks from the lake and the causeway. Horns thrilled and boomed. Cheers. And tock! tock! – arrows from the Salt Men hitting posts, huts, the ground. The sodden knock as, here and there, they struck flesh. Cries. Then light coming up on the lake. Lutha signalling from the platform.
At the causeway gate – from behind fences either side – we speared the attackers. Turmoil. Bellow. Thrust and thrust. Another wave surged across the causeway, folded beneath a wind of arrows. Kalik gave an order. A party sallied out, stabbing, clubbing. The main attack turned, escaped.
“Now!” Kalik and I leapt into a canoe below the causeway. Groans, cries somewhere above. A short passage, and we jumped out, the paddlers after us. Through a gap between gardens and vines we ran. Flung ourselves down.
“Ahhh!” Shrieked horror as we rose out of the ground. Our spears swung and swung again. Kalik and I, hand to hand. Cantering after, hacking, slaying, a howling red blur.
Kalik tripped. A berserker leapt. My spear knocked him off his feet, grunting face down. Stamp on his shoulder. Wrench out the spear. Chop! The pithing stroke. Kalik scrambled up, his fury a blast of heat down my side.
I saw him kill and kill again, heard his roar above my own. And then he was bringing us all together. Quieting the warriors who wanted to scour the hills towards the river. Calling, “Canoes!”