by Angus Watson
“Jab it in a rabbit,” said Sassa. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m more upset about Keef’s boat.”
Sassa followed her gaze, and they watched the little boat that had saved them follow Chnob’s trajectory, up into the unknown.
Her Owsla reformed around her and Sofi Tornado bounced on her toes as the six bears and four giant creatures advanced.
Here was an exciting battle for once. There were too many of the creatures for any strategy that wouldn’t go to shit in a moment, and no obvious way either to counter their claws or to bring them down. Their weapons and their training were based on fighting humans, not monsters.
They’d simply have to go at them and see what happened, and they really might not prevail. Every other fight she’d been in she’d known she was going to win. A new feeling grew in her stomach, a thrilling, rushing feeling. Was this fear? If it was, she liked it.
“Sitsi, fall behind, focus on the large creatures. Take their eyes. Chogolisa to me, I’m going on your shoulders. Talisa and Morningstar, you—”
“Stop,” said Yoki Choppa.
“What?” Her axe twitched in her hand. She’d brained people for less than interrupting her.
“We have to retreat.”
“Oh no we don’t.”
“You cannot risk losing more women. There is nothing to be gained from fighting these monsters.”
She looked at the warlock’s sensible face, then back to the most exciting adversaries the Owsla had ever faced.
Chapter 5
Powerless
Finnbogi the Boggy blinked. Ahhhh! Big buffalo buggered by a bigger buffalo, his head hurt. His everything hurt. He was face down, his mouth full of soil. He lay still. Why move? He had no reason to move.
After ten seconds or ten days, something crawled into his ear. He squashed its crunchy and gooey body with a finger, dug it out, then rolled onto his back. It was easier than he’d thought it would be. So many parts of him zinged with pain that it would have been quicker to list the parts that didn’t hurt, but nothing seemed to be badly damaged.
He was in a trench maybe ten feet deep, looking up between earth walls at a dark sky full of blowing debris. Mostly it was leaves, maize and earth, but a couple of bright red finches somersaulted by, in some trouble by the look of things. He thought that animals were meant to know when things like tornados were coming and get clear? Maybe most animals did. Maybe these two birds had been betrayed by some bastard animal like Garth.
Garth Anvilchin had tried to murder him! He’d known the guy was a shit, but murder? What a bastard!
He tried to sit up but that made his head spin. He lay back down, felt consciousness slipping away and let it go.
“Finnbogi the Boggy!” someone hissed. “Finnbogi the Boggy!”
He opened his eyes.
Freydis the Annoying was looking down at him over the edge of his trench, blonde hair shining around her worried little face. Two young racoons’ sniffing noses appeared next to her.
“Hello,” he said.
“Why are you lying down there? We all came back to look for you. Well, some of us did. Bodil Gooseface is too tired after the run and Aunt Gunnhild Kristlover has hurt her leg and Garth Anvilchin said we’d leave tracks for the Calnians to follow and you were dead anyway.”
“So Garth made it?”
“Made what?”
“He escaped the tornado.”
“Everyone escaped apart from Chnob the White and you.”
“Chnob’s dead?”
“I don’t know. The tornado caught him and took him to the top of the sky. Garth said he was dead. He said you were dead, too, and he said it proved that tornados only caught crunts—I think that’s what he said. But Ottar knew you weren’t dead so we came back to look for you. But come on now, you’ve got to get up and we’ve got to go.”
Louder, she shouted: “Wulf the Fat! Sassa Lipchewer! Thyri Treelegs! Ottar’s found Finnbogi the Boggy! He’s over here! He’s been sleeping in this ditch the whole time!”
Finnbogi rubbed his sore chin, dug his sore hands into the earth walls of the trench and pulled himself to his sore feet. Wulf appeared, grabbed his wrists (sore), hauled him from the trench and bear-hugged him, laughing with manful joy. Behind him, Sassa and Thyri were beaming.
“Well done, Finn,” said Wulf, releasing his grip and clapping him on both arms. “What a great hole you found! And good on you, Ottar,” he ruffled the boy’s hair. “If you hadn’t insisted he was alive we’d be long gone.”
“Garth punched me,” blurted Finnbogi before he realised he was saying anything. His rescuers’ smiles morphed into brow-knitted concern.
“He did what?” said Wulf.
“When he came back to take Freydis off me, he …” He stopped. They were all staring at him—the children, Sassa, Wulf and Thyri. Perhaps he was imagining it, but in the eyes of the women at least, he thought he could see disapproval. Hardworkers did not tell tales.
“He … he didn’t do anything now I think about it. Sorry, something hit my head and knocked me out and it must have been a dream. He didn’t hit me. Sorry.”
Wulf’s eyes bored into his. “Tell me what happened, Finn.”
“Nothing. Really.”
“You said Garth punched you.”
“He didn’t. It’s … things have happened and I don’t like Garth at the moment, and it was a dream, a vision. He didn’t hit me.”
“All right.” By the expression on his face Wulf thought it was far from all right. Sassa, too, was looking concerned, and Thyri suspicious.
They headed south. All around, the ground was churned rock and earth. The few trees were jagged ruins of splintered wood, as if a giant hungry goat had stripped the trunks with a toothy, sucking bite.
There was a wide band of flattened maize, then all was completely normal, maize shifting in the wind, even a bird singing in a leafy tree, entirely as if a devastating weather ogre hadn’t passed by just minutes before.
“Hang on,” said Finnbogi after a while, “what about Erik and Keef? And where’s Bjarni?”
“Bjarni, we hope, is with Erik and Keef,” said Sassa.
“What, why?”
“Don’t worry,” said Wulf, “Erik knows where we’re headed. They’ll catch up.”
“Unless they were killed by the Owsla.”
“I’m sure they weren’t, but, either way, they move faster than us so it would be crazy to wait.”
Sofi Tornado strode along, woodland to the south of her, prairie busy with deer and buffalo to the north, but she noticed neither. It had been the right thing to do, of course it had, but thinking about the retreat from the Big Bone tribe made her shudder with rage and shame.
Their mission was to kill the Mushroom Men, she told herself, and they were still on course to do that. They just needed to skirt the Big Bone tribe’s territory, cross the Heartberry and pick up the trail again. And there had been one gain from their ignominious flight.
Now they had a hostage.
Trussed in a couple of woollen ponchos and slung over Chogolisa Earthquake’s shoulder was the long-haired Mushroom Man who’d attacked her with the axe. When they stopped for the evening, the Mushroom Man would tell them his group’s plans.
This was a positive, she told herself. Great generals know when to retreat. Even quite good ones do, she added. But all she could hear were the jeers of the Big Bone tribe as her women had fled. She had to put it from her mind; to forget old problems and deal with new ones. There was one thing, though, that still troubled her from the events at Heartberry Canyon.
“Yoki Choppa,” she called.
“Yup?” said the warlock, jogging up.
“Shortly after the lightning woman knocked us down, why did you wail like an injured calf?”
The warlock looked at her levelly, then jinked his head, indicating that they should fall back, out of the other women’s earshot.
“The lightning thrower destroyed my alchemy bag an
d its contents,” he said once they were clear.
“So you won’t be able to track the Mushroom Men?”
“That I can still do; the hair wasn’t in the bag and the ingredients I need for the procedure are common.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I can no longer sustain your powers.”
Sofi stopped and turned to the warlock. Three nearby deer that had been watching them bolted.
“My powers or the whole Owsla’s?”
“The whole Owsla’s.”
“But our powers were beaten, trained and poisoned into us when we were children.”
“They were. However, they need to be sustained. You weren’t told—”
“In case we left, or rebelled.”
“Yes.”
“And our powers are sustained by something we eat. That’s why you always cook.”
The warlock nodded. “Power animals. You share three base animals, then each of you has your own animal to give you a specific power. You need to ingest only a tiny amount of desiccated matter from each. I could hold enough for all of you for a month in one palm.”
“What happens if we stop eating them?”
“You’ll notice a difference in two or three days. Within a week your powers will be greatly decreased.”
“These animals cannot be found locally, I take it?”
The warlock shook his head. “The three base animals, which you all eat, are caribou from the frozen north, diamondback rattlesnake from the mouth of the Water Mother and tarantula hawk wasp from a few hundred miles to the west. The caribou gives you stamina. I’m also conditioned to caribou power, which is how I run all day to keep up with you. The snake and the wasp give you strength and speed.”
“And cruelty. Heartlessness.”
The warlock nodded. So did Sofi. She knew this. Not the details, but she’d always known that the lust for killing and causing pain was not in her nature. She just hadn’t ever admitted it to herself. Or cared much.
“What’s my personal animal?”
“Burrowing owl. You have its hearing.”
Burrowing owl? She thought. Bit shit. “Where do we find a burrowing owl?”
“Similar territory to the tarantula hawk wasp, a few hundred miles to the west.”
“Are anyone’s power animals local?”
“Chogolisa Earthquake’s strength comes from dung beetles and I’ve already found one.” Burrowing owl suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad power animal. “She’ll be weaker without the snake and wasp, but she’ll still be the strongest human we’re likely to meet. Paloma Pronghorn’s comes from pronghorns, which live around here, of course, but are not so common, nor so easy to catch.”
“Her nickname …?”
“Made sense because she’s fast. It’s a coincidence that it’s also her power animal.”
“And the others’ animals?”
“We tried to use geographically disparate animals to make it harder for you to find them yourselves if you ever discovered your powers’ source. Sitsi Kestrel gets her sight from a lizard called a chuckwalla and Talisa White-tail’s reaction speed comes from a certain type of hummingbird. Both those animals are found on the far side of the Shining Mountains. Morningstar’s punch comes from an oceanic shrimp.”
“Can we all eat dung beetle and pronghorn?”
“You can, but it won’t have any effect unless you’ve been conditioned to it, and you haven’t.”
“Can any of the power animals be substituted?”
“No. You have to eat the specific animal you’ve been conditioned to. Yours has to be a burrowing owl. Even another type of owl won’t do.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
The warlock shrugged.
“And your entire stash of these animals is gone?”
“Yes.”
“No backup?”
“In Calnia.”
“That was an oversight.”
“It was.”
“So we have two days to catch these Mushroom Men, then we need to go back to Calnia.”
“There are no warriors better trained than the Calnian Owsla, and you will keep a measure of your powers. If we didn’t catch them for a month, you would still beat them with ease.”
“In theory.”
“Theory is all that can ever be applied to the future.”
Garth Anvilchin, Gunnhild Kristlover and Bodil Gooseface were waiting on the path for Finnbogi the Boggy and his rescuers. Bodil and Gunnhild hugged him. Garth watched.
“How did you survive?” gasped Bodil.
Finnbogi smiled. “Let’s just say that when you mix strength, perseverance and a refusal to die with a little magic, you can—”
“He fell into a hole,” interrupted Thyri Treelegs.
“How fortunate,” said Garth, flinty eyes narrow. Finnbogi held those eyes. Before, he’d disliked Garth and been a little afraid of him. Now he despised him. The man had tried to kill him for, as far as Finnbogi could see, no reason other than he didn’t like him much and the opportunity had arisen. How dare he treat his life so cheaply!
Finnbogi would have his revenge.
They set off. Bodil fell in next to him, all wide-eyed and full of screamingly obvious observations about the tornado and questions that a four-year-old would know the answers to. He told her that his head hurt, so would she mind awfully if he walked on his own?
They continued south for an hour, then turned south-west and, to Finnbogi’s annoyance, uphill onto a rolling upland. Prairie stretched as far as they could see on both sides, pocked by copses of young trees. Several times hawks passed overhead, each one mobbed by a pair of tiny birds. The smaller bundles of feather were flitting above the hawks, diving down at them, flying off upwards, then diving again.
“The big birds are quicker, but they can’t fly up,” said Freydis, taking Finnbogi’s hand and emphasising her point by thrusting a finger skyward. “The little birds are slower, but they’re good at going up. So the little birds can drive the bigger ones away and stop them finding and eating their babies, so long as they stay above them.”
“I see. Thanks,” said Finnbogi.
“This is a very old track,” said Gunnhild in a voice meant to be heard by all, “trodden by the Scraylings for thousands of years.”
“How do you know?” asked Garth.
“I can feel it,” said Gunnhild. “The young disparage, then follow the footsteps of the ancients.”
None of them bothered to challenge her. They walked on in weary silence, Garth leading the way, Thyri next to him.
Finnbogi looked over his shoulder. No sign of Keef, Bjarni or Erik.
There were nine of them now, and two baby racoons.
Chapter 6
Vulpine Appropriation
“Okay, okay, I’m fine now! That’s enough! I’m fine! Man!”
Erik the Angry helped Bjarni Chickenhead up from the washing spot where he’d been dunking him and led him to a riverside bench.
After the ravages of the day the evening sky was almost too calm a transition of blues, powdery oranges and pinks, as if an ashamed weather god was overcompensating for its unforgivable earlier behaviour. Eagles soared high, geese bobbed on the river and a family of racoons were splay-legged on the opposite bank, muzzles poked into the water for their evening drinks. Erik could feel that the racoons weren’t threatened by him and Bjarni. The Big Bone tribe did not interfere with their lives, so humans were about as dangerous as trees for them.
“What did I miss?” asked Chickenhead.
“Where did you get to?”
“You and Keef were staying behind, the rest were going.”
“And you?”
“I met a guy with some mushrooms. Thought I’d pop into his hut for a minute. That was what, fifteen minutes ago?”
“Eight hours.”
“Ah.”
“Yes.”
“Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for. I’m glad you’re here. Y
ou can help me rescue Keef.”
“What?”
“The rest of our lot buggered off up the cliff. Hopefully they got clear of the tornado that started up shortly afterwards.”
“I remember a tornado, and … monsters?”
“I’ll get to them. So, the Calnian Owsla arrived, six of them plus a warlock. Before they did anything, Balinda blasted them all with lightning.”
“What?”
“This is the sort of thing you miss when you’re indoors taking mushrooms.”
“You sound like my dad.”
“Your dad sounds like a sensible … hang on, your dad was Brodir.”
“We didn’t get on.”
“Fair enough. Anyway, the lightning only delayed the Owsla. Their big one killed Chucknor, then another killed a Big Bone warrior.”
“Oh dear.”
“Could have been worse. Would have been worse, but then the Big Bone lot revealed their secret.”
“The monsters.”
“Just animals, apparently. Six big bears like Astrid—”
“Ah!”
“And four kraklaws.”
“I saw them. Terrifying, man. What were they?”
“They’re big animals, apparently. They used to be as clever as humans—not that that’s any great achievement—and they conquered this tribe a few thousand years ago. A guy called Fingers of Stone turned half of the kraklaws to stone, so the story goes, and he took the human wickedness away from the rest of them, leaving them no smarter than your average bear. He banished them to the endless forests way to the north of here, apart from a few which the Big Bone tribe kept and trained as guards.”
“Wow, they live a long time.”
“The four that helped out today are descendants of the originals.”
“Makes sense. How did they do against the Owsla?”
“The Owsla took one look at them and buggered off.”
“Sensible.”
“But they took Keef. The big one grabbed him and slung him over her shoulder.”
“Shitbags.”
“So we’re going to go and get him.”
“Double shitbags. Are we going to follow them?”
“No need. Balinda has a seeing eye duck.”