Feeling acutely self-conscious, she flicked it open and turned her back on the parked car. Raised it to her face and stared into the enameled knot painted inside it. This is stupid, a little voice told her. And you’re going to have your work cut out convincing Paulie you don’t need to see a shrink.
Someone was calling her name sharply. She screened it out. Something seemed to move inside the knot –
HIDE-AND-SEEK
This time it was raining gently.
Miriam winced at the sudden stabbing in her head and pocketed the locket. Then she did what she’d planned all along: a three-sixty-degree scan that took in nothing but autumn trees and deadfall. Next, she planted her pack, transferred the pistol to her right hip pocket, retrieved her camera and the recorder, and started taking snapshots as she dictated a running commentary.
‘The time by my watch is fourteen twelve hours. Precipitation is light and intermittent, cloud cover is about six-sevenths, wind out of the northwest and chilly, breeze of around five miles per hour. I think.’
Snap, snap, snap: The camera had room for a thousand or so shots before she’d have to change hard disks. She slung it around her neck and shouldered the pack again. With the Swiss army knife Ben had given her on their second wedding anniversary – an odd present from a clueless, cheating husband with no sense of the difference between jewelry and real life – she shaved a patch of bark above eye level on the four nearest trees, then fished around for some stones to pile precisely where she’d come through. (It wouldn’t do to go back only to come out in the middle of her own car. If that was possible, of course.)
As she worked, she had the most peculiar sensation: I’m on my second moon mission, she thought. Did any of the Apollo astronauts go to the moon more than once? Here she was, not going crazy, recording notes and taking photographs to document her exploration of this extraordinary place that simply wasn’t like home. Whatever ‘home’ meant, now that gangsters had her number.
‘I still don’t know why I’m here,’ she recorded, ‘but I’ve got the same alarming prefrontal headache, mild hot and cold chills, probable elevated blood pressure as last time. Memo: Next time bring a sphygmomanometer; I want to monitor for malignant hypertension. And urine sample bottles.’ The headache, she realized, was curiously similar to a hangover, itself caused by dehydration that triggered inflammation of the meninges. Miriam continued: ‘Query physiological responses to . . . whatever it is that I do. When I focus on the knot. Memo: Scan the locket, use Photoshop to rescale it and print it on paper, then see if the pattern works as a focus when I look at it on a clipboard. More work for next time.’
They won’t be able to catch me here, she thought fiercely as she scanned around, this time looking for somewhere suitable to pitch her tent and go to ground. I’ll be able to nail them and they won’t even be able to find me to lay a finger on me! But there was more to it than that, she finally admitted to herself as she hunted for a flat spot. The locket had belonged to her birth-mother, and receiving it had raised an unquiet ghost. Somebody had stabbed her, somebody who had never been found. Miriam wouldn’t be able to lay that realization to rest again until she learned what this place had meant to her mother – and why it hadn’t saved her.
With four hours to go before sunset, Miriam was acutely aware that she didn’t have any time to waste. The temperature would dip toward frost at night and she planned to be well dug-in first. Planting her backpack at the foot of the big horse chestnut tree, she gathered armfuls of dry leaves and twigs and scattered them across it – nothing that would fool a real woodsman, but enough to render it inconspicuous at a distance. Then she walked back and forth through a hundred-yard radius, pacing out the forest, looking for its edge. That there was an edge came as no surprise: The steep escarpment was in the same place here as on the hiking map of her own world that she’d brought along. Where the ground fell away, there was a breathtaking view of autumnal forest marching down toward a valley floor. The ocean was probably eight to ten miles due east, out of sight beyond hills and dunes, but she had a sense of its presence all the same.
Looking southwest, she saw a thin coil of smoke rising – a settlement of some kind, but small. No roads or telegraph poles marred the valley, which seemed to contain nothing but trees and bushes and the odd clearing. She was alone in the woods, as alone as she’d ever been. She looked up. Thin cirrus clouds stained the blue sky, but there were no jet contrails.
‘The area appears to be thinly populated,’ she muttered into her dictaphone. ‘They’re burning something – coal or wood – at the nearest settlement. There are no telegraph poles, roads, or aircraft. The air doesn’t smell of civilization. No noise to speak of, just birds and wind and trees.’
She went back to her clearing to orient herself, then headed on in the opposite direction, down the gentle slope away from her pack. ‘Note: Keep an eye open for big wildlife. Bears and stuff.’ She patted her right hip pocket nervously. Would the pistol do much more than annoy a bear? She hadn’t expected the place to be quite this desolate. There were no bears, but she ran across a small stream – nearly fell into it, in fact.
There was no sign of an edge to the woods, in whichever direction she went. Nor were there signs of habitation other than the curl of smoke she’d seen. It was four o’clock now. She returned to her clearing, confident that nobody was around, and unstrapped her tent from the backpack. It took half an hour to get the dome tent erected, and another half-hour with the netting and leaves to turn it into something that could be mistaken for a shapeless deadfall. She spent another fifteen minutes returning to the stream to fill her ten-liter water carrier. Another half-hour went on digging a hole nearby, then she took ten minutes to run a rope over a bough and hoist her bag of food out of reach of the ground. As darkness fell, it found her lighting her portable gas stove to boil water for her supper. I did it, she thought triumphantly. I didn’t forget anything important! Now all she had to do was make it through tomorrow and the morning of the next day without detection.
The night grew very cold without a fire, but her sleeping bag was almost oppressively hot with the tent zipped shut. Miriam slept lightly, starting awake at the slightest noise – worried at the possibility of bears or other big animals wandering through her makeshift camp, spooked by the sigh of wind and the patter of a light predawn rainfall. Once she dreamed of wolves howling in the distance. But dawn arrived without misadventure and dragged her bleary-eyed from the tent to squat over the trench she’d remembered to dig the day before. ‘The Girl Scout training pays off at last,’ she dictated with a sardonic drawl.
A tin of sausages and beans washed down with strong black coffee made a passable breakfast. ‘Now what?’ she asked herself. ‘Do I wait it out with the camp or go exploring?’
For a moment, Miriam quailed. The enormity of the wilderness around her was beginning to grind on her nerves, as was the significance of the situation she’d thrown herself into. ‘I could break a leg here and nobody would ever find me. Or – ’ Gunfire in the night. ‘Someone stabbed my mother, and she didn’t come here to escape. There must be a reason why, mustn’t there?’
Something about the isolation made her want to chatter, to fill up the oppressive silence. But the words that tumbled out didn’t tell her much, except that she was – Let’s face it. I’m scared. This wasn’t the sensible thing to do, was it? But I haven’t been doing sensible properly since I got myself fired on Monday.
Unzipping the day pack from her backpack, she filled it with necessities, then set out for the escarpment.
It was a clear, cold morning, and the wisp of smoke she’d seen yesterday had disappeared. But she knew roughly where she’d seen it, and a careful scan of the horizon with binoculars brought it into focus once more – a pause in the treeline, punctuated by nearly invisible roofs. At a guess, it was about three miles away. She glanced at the sky and chewed on her lower lip: Doable, she decided, still half-unsure that it was the right thing to do. But I’ll go ou
t of my skull if I wait here two days, and Paulie won’t be back until tomorrow. Bearing and range went into her notepad and onto the map, and she blazed a row of slashes on every fifth tree along the ridgeline to help her on the way back. The scarp was too steep to risk on her own, but if she went along the crest of the ridge, she could take the easy route down into the valley.
Taking the easy route was not, as it happened, entirely safe. About half a mile farther on – half a mile of plodding through leaf mounds, carefully bypassing deadfalls, and keeping a cautious eye open – an unexpected sound made Miriam freeze, her heart in her mouth and ice in her veins. Metal, she thought. That was a metallic noise! Who’s there? She dropped to a squat with her back against a tree as a horse or mule snorted nearby.
The sound of hooves was now audible, along with a creaking of leather and the occasional clatter or jingle of metalwork. Miriam crouched against the tree, very still, sweat freezing in the small of her back, trying not to breathe. She couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a single set of hooves. With her camouflage-patterned jacket, knitted black face mask, and a snub-nosed pistol clutched in her right hand, she was a sight to terrify innocent eyes – but she was frightened half out of her own wits.
She held perfectly still as a peculiarly dressed man led a mule past, not ten yards away from her. The animal was heavily overloaded, bulging wicker baskets towering over its swaying back. Its owner wore leggings of some kind, but was swathed from head to knees in what looked like an ancient and moth-eaten blanket. He didn’t look furtive; he just looked dirt-poor, his face lined and tanned from exposure to the weather.
The mule paused. Almost absently, its owner reached out and whacked it across the hindquarters with his rod. He grunted something in what sounded like German, only softer, less sibilant.
Miriam watched, fear melting into fascination. That was a knife at his belt, under the blanket – a great big pigsticker of a knife, almost a short sword. The mule made an odd sort of complaining noise and began moving again. What’s in the baskets? she wondered. And where’s he taking it?
There were clearly people living in these woods. Better be careful, she told herself, taking deep breaths to calm down as she waited for him to pass out of sight. She pondered again whether or not she shouldn’t go straight back to her campsite. In the end curiosity won out – but it was curiosity tempered by edgy caution.
An hour later, Miriam found a path wandering among the trees. It wasn’t a paved road by any stretch of the imagination, but the shrubbery to either side had been trampled down and the path itself was muddy and flat: Fresh road apples told her which way the man with the mule had gone. She slashed a marker on the tree where her path intersected the road, crudely scratching in a bearing and distance as digits. If her growing suspicion was true, these people wouldn’t be able to make anything of it. She picked her way through the trees along one side of the path, keeping it just in sight. Within another half-mile the trees ended in a profusion of deadfalls and stumps, some of which sprouted amazing growths of honey fungus. Miriam picked her way farther away from the path, then hunkered down, brought out binoculars and dictaphone, and gave voice to her fascination.
‘This is incredible! It’s like a museum diorama of a medieval village in England, only – Eww, I sure wouldn’t drink from that stream. The stockade is about two hundred yards away and they’ve cleared the woods all around it. There are low stone walls, with no cement, around the field. It’s weird, all these rows running across it like a patchwork quilt made from pinstripe fabric.’
She paused, focusing her binoculars in on a couple of figures walking in the near distance. They were close enough to see her if they looked at the treeline, so she instinctively hunched lower, but they weren’t paying attention to the forest. One of them was leading a cow – a swaybacked beast like something from a documentary about India. The buildings were grayish, the walls made of stacked bundles of something or other, and the roofs were thatched – not the picturesque golden color of the rural English tourist trap she’d once stayed in outside Oxford, but the real thing, gray and sagging. ‘There are about twelve buildings; none of them have windows. The road is unpaved, a mud track. There are chickens or some kind of fowl there, pecking in the dirt. It looks sleazy and tumbledown.’
She tracked after the human figures, focused on the stockade. ‘There’s a gate in the stockade and a platform or tower behind it. There’s something big in there, behind the wall, but I can’t see it from here. A long house? No, this doesn’t look . . . wrong period. These aren’t Vikings, there’s, uh – ’
Around the curve of the stockade an ox came into view, dragging some kind of appliance – a wooden plow, perhaps. The man walking behind it looked as tired as the animal. ‘They’re all wearing those blankets. Women too. That was a woman feeding the chickens. With a headscarf wrapped around her face like a Muslim veil. But the men wear pretty much the same, too. This place looks so poor. Neglected. That guy with the mule – it must be the equivalent of a BMW in this place!’
Miriam felt distinctly uneasy. History book scenes were outside her experience – she was a creature of the city, raised with the bustle and noise of urban life, and the sordid poverty of the village made her feel unaccountably uneasy. But it left questions unanswered. ‘This could be the past; we know the Vikings reached New England around the eleventh century. Or it could be somewhere else. How can I tell if I can’t get in and see what’s inside the stockade? I think I need an archaeologist.’
Miriam crouched down and began to snap off photographs. Here three hens pecked aimlessly at the dirt by an open doorway, the door itself a slab of wood leaning drunkenly against the wall of the hut. There a woman (or a man, the shapeless robe made it impossible to be sure) bent over a wooden trough, emptying a bucket of water into it and then lifting and pounding something from within. Miriam focused closer –
‘Wer find thee?’ Someone piped at her.
Miriam jolted around and stared: The someone stared right back, frozen, eyes wide. He looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old, dressed in rags and barefoot: He was shorter than she was. Pipecleaner arms, legs like wire, big brown eyes, and a mess of badly trimmed hair in a pudding-bowl cut. Time slowed to a crawl. That’s a skin infection, she realized, her guts turning to ice as she focused on a red weal on the side of his neck. He was skinny, not as thin as a famine victim but by no means well-fed. He had a stick, clenched nervously in his hands, which he was bringing up –
Miriam glared at him and straightened up. Her right hand went to her hip pocket, and she fumbled for the treacherous opening. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ she snapped, surprised at herself. It was the first thing that entered her head. Her hand closed on the butt of the pistol, but she couldn’t quite draw it – it was snagged on something.
She yanked at her pocket desperately, keeping her eyes on his face, despite knees that felt like jelly and a churning cold in her gut. She had a strong flashback to the one time she was mugged, a desperate sense of helplessness as she tried to disentangle the gun from her pocket lining and bring it out before the villager hit her with his stick.
But he didn’t. Instead, his eyes widened. He opened his mouth and shouted, ‘An solda’des Koen!’ He turned, dropping the stick, and darted away before Miriam could react. A moment later she heard him wailing, ‘An solda!’
‘Shit.’ The gun was in her hand, all but forgotten. Terror lent her feet wings. She clutched her camera and ran like hell, back toward the forest, heedless of any noise she might make. He nearly had me! He’ll be back with help! I’ve got to get out of here! Breathless fear drove her until branches scratched at her face and she was panting. Then the low apple trees gave way to taller, older trees and a different quality of light. She staggered along, drunkenly, as behind her a weird hooting noise unlike any horn she’d heard before split the quiet.
Ten minutes later she stopped and listened, wheezing for breath as she tried to get her heart under control. She had run parallel
to the path, off to one side. Every instinct was screaming at her to run but she was nearly winded, so she listened instead. Apart from the horn blasts, there were no sounds of pursuit. Why aren’t they following me? She wondered, feeling ill with uncertainty. What’s wrong? After a moment she remembered her camera: She’d lost the lens cap in her mad rush. ‘Damn, I could have broken my ankle,’ she muttered. ‘They’d have caught me for – ’ she stopped.
‘That look in his eye.’ Very carefully, she unslung the camera and slid it into a big outer hip pocket. She glanced around the clearing sharply, then spent a moment untangling the revolver from her other pocket. Now that she had all the time in the world, it was easy. ‘He was scared,’ she told herself, wondering. ‘He was terrified of me! What was that he was shouting? Was he warning the others off?’
She began to walk again, wrapped in a thoughtful silence. There were no sounds of pursuit. Behind her the village hid in the gloom, like a terrified rabbit whose path had just crossed a fox on the prowl. ‘Who are you hiding from?’ she asked her memory of the boy with the stick. ‘And who did you mistake me for?’
*
It was raining again, and the first thing she noticed once she crossed over – through the blinding headache – was that Paulette was bouncing up and down like an angry squirrel, chattering with indignation behind the camcorder’s viewfinder. ‘Idiot! What the hell do you think you were doing?’ she demanded as Miriam opened the passenger door and dumped her pack on the backseat. ‘I almost had a heart attack! That’s the second time you’ve nearly given me one this week!’
‘I said it would be a surprise, right?’ Miriam collapsed into the passenger seat. ‘God, I reek. Get me home and once I’ve had a shower I’ll explain everything. I promise.’
Paulette drove in tight-lipped silence. Finally, during a moment when they were stationary at a traffic light, she said: ‘Why me?’
The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) Page 6