by Angus Watson
“A what?”
“A duck whose eyes she can see through. The Calnian Owsla stopped for the night a while back. They’re next to this.” He pointed at the Heartberry River. “We’re going to borrow a boat, wait until they’re asleep and rescue Keef.”
“Okay … but …”
“You’ll wait in the boat while I get Keef.”
“That is a sensible division of labour. But what about Astrid? How will your bear follow us?”
Erik felt tears prick his eyes. He shook his head. “She was hurt in the fighting; not too badly, thank Rabbit Girl, but she can’t travel.”
“So she’ll catch us up?”
“She won’t. There are six other bears like her here. She’s been looking for her own kind all her life. She’ll be happier and safer in Heartberry Canyon. She’d going to stay. It’s for the best.”
“Shit, man, I’m sorry. Do you want a hug?”
“I do not.”
Erik told himself he wasn’t going to cry, not in front of Bjarni and the Big Bone tribe, but as he hugged Astrid the bear and she moaned and rocked, tears gushed, flooded down his face and he sobbed like a toddler denied a promised treat. He told Astrid to recover quickly and swore to return even though he knew he never would. The bear looked at him and told him that he mustn’t go, he must stay here with her, which made him cry all the more.
He was still sobbing while he made his goodbyes to the Big Bone tribe, apologising through the tears and snot. He was still weeping gently with the odd snort when they climbed into the canoe and paddled away. Through his grief he wondered whether it was just the bear, or whether he was weeping for the other Astrid, for the missed years with Finnbogi, for the life he might have had if he hadn’t tried to march off from Hardwork like a damn fool …
He was almost glad when they found the corpse and he could finally get on with something that stopped him crying. The body was marooned face down on an islet, along with a mass of tree debris, twin globes of its arse glowing in the moonlight.
Erik swivelled his paddle, the canoe nudged ashore and he climbed out. There was rarely much dignity in death, but face-planted in the mud with one’s bright white arse thrusting skyward was a particularly inelegant pose. Erik heaved the naked body over. His head was staved in at one temple, wrist snapped at right angles, stomach and thigh gashed open, beard tangled with sticks and silt.
“It’s Chnob the White,” he whispered.
“Oaden’s chopper,” said Bjarni. “He must have …”
Both men looked up into the night sky, then back down at each other, eyes wide.
“We should burn him,” said Bjarni.
“No time. We have to rescue Keef before they kill him. The river will bury Chnob.”
They left dead Chnob the White on his island perch and paddled on.
A while later they came to a beaver’s dam blocking the way. Erik steered for the bank.
“Hold up,” said Bjarni. “What’s that?”
Bobbing against the twigs and mud of the dam was a small boat. They steered for it. It was Keef’s canoe.
It was beaten about but intact. They took it, walked around the dam and continued, Erik paddling the larger boat and Bjarni in Keef’s. There was no need to say what Erik guessed they were both thinking. If they’d found Keef’s boat and Chnob, had the tornado picked up the rest of their party, dashed them to death and strewn them across the land?
They paddled on under the full moon, through a night almost as bright as day. To Erik, every stump and eddy looked like the body of his son, but they found no more Hardworker corpses nor equipment. Finally they came to the place Balinda had described. They could see the Calnian camp’s fire through the trees.
Bjarni stayed with the boats and Erik crept towards the flames.
The Calnian Owsla ate a hearty but power animal-free supper. Sofi Tornado hadn’t told the women about their imminent decline of abilities. She had told Sitsi Kestrel to shoot a pronghorn if she saw one. Hopefully they’d be on their way home before any of them realised that they were weaker than usual.
They were camped in a clearing used by previous travellers. The only sizeable creature that Sofi had heard in the vicinity was a fox that had gone to ground nearby. Good luck to him, she thought.
“Chogolisa,” said Sofi when the eating was done and they settled to rest, “please can you fetch our captive?”
The big woman plonked the relatively little man next to the fire.
“Stand him up, please.”
She did. He stood straight, arms and legs trussed in two woollen ponchos and tied tight with leather thongs.
“Remove his gag.”
“Hello!” said the Mushroom Man. He jumped round so he was facing Chogolisa. “Thanks for carrying me, it made a fine change from walking. You have a very comfortable shoulder, madam.” He bowed.
His long blond hair and beard was like a wig intended to entertain or perhaps terrify children, and his facial features were small, even in the context of his small head. He was not a pretty man. But he was brave. For now. Soon they’d see how brave he really was.
“What’s your name?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, where are my manners? I’m Keef the Berserker. And you are?”
“I’m Sofi Tornado, captain of the Owsla. This is Talisa White-tail. She’s going to make you tell us where the rest of the Mushroom Men are going.”
Talisa stood, grinning, holding one of her short iron paddle knives.
“Mushroom Men?” said the captive.
“That’s you and your kind.”
“Oh. Weird.”
“It’s because you’re the colour of mushrooms. Apparently you smell like them, too, but I don’t get that. You don’t smell as bad as you look.”
“Thanks. And you’re going to torture me?” asked Keef.
“Yes.”
“I’m just a guest, so not for me to say, but you needn’t bother. I hate pain. I’ll tell you whatever you need to know before you even begin to torture me. I’ll tell you things you don’t need to know. Anything! Ask away.”
“You’ll betray your tribe?”
“I’ll betray whatever you want me to. And they won’t mind. There’s not much to tell.”
“Don’t you want to try at least a pretence at honour?”
“Nope. Just the other day I stubbed my toe and it hurt like a bastard and I thought ‘I could not withstand torture.’ So, there you go, I could stand here and refuse to tell you anything, and Tease a Shite-snail could tickle me or whatever it is she has—”
“Talisa White-tail. And I won’t be tickling you.”
“I’d guessed that, but I didn’t want to give you any ideas. Anyway, point is that I’d tell you everything you want to know pretty much immediately. So let’s skip the middle man and get straight to it. What do you want to know?”
“You’re pathetic.” Talisa White-tail shook her head.
“Sorry to disappoint you, and maybe I’d give your torture a go if I could tell you anything that might benefit your search, but, given that at least one of you is bound to be an excellent tracker who can follow my group without any help from me, I can’t. So, let’s save your effort and my pain. What do you want to know?”
Sofi Tornado quite liked this bizarre alien and his logic. It wasn’t going to stop her torturing him, but it did make it less appealing, which was annoying. “Tell us where your people are now and where they are going.”
“They went south from the Big Bone tribe’s village. That’s the last I saw of them and I don’t know their route. Erik and I were going to help see you off, then we were going to head south and pick up their trail.”
“And where are they headed in the longer term?”
“North-east. We’ve been heading west so far to throw you off track. But our final destination is a couple of hundred miles north-east of here. Place called The Meadows.”
She heard Yoki Choppa lift his head. The fat woman back in Hardwork territory had told them t
hat the Mushroom Men were headed for The Meadows. He’d tried to mask his interest then.
“Why are you going there?” asked the warlock. He was trying to sound blasé, but that was the problem, thought Sofi, of hardly ever speaking. When you did, people knew you had a reason.
“We’ve got this guy called Garth Anvilchin with us. He’s a soothsayer. He predicted that you lot were going to attack, so we trust what he says. He reckons there’s a place called The Meadows where we’ll find peace.”
“What else do you know about The Meadows?”
“That’s it. If Garth knows anything more himself, he hasn’t told me.”
“Really.”
“Really really. He’d have told me. We’re tight, me and Garth. The other day when I’d made a hole in my—”
“It’s time you told me more about this Meadows place, Yoki Choppa,” interrupted Sofi.
Yoki Choppa stood and walked away. Sofi followed. The warlock stopped in the trees.
“Well?” she asked.
“For more than a year I’ve been having dreams about The Meadows.”
The warlock was positively haemorrhaging secrets today.
“Is it a place?” she asked.
“Possibly.”
“Come on, Yoki Choppa, out with it.”
“It’s more than a place. It’s a destructive force and a serious danger. I think it’s linked to the recent extreme weather—today’s tornado, for example.”
“So …” The reason that Ayanna had sent her best troops on this mission was a little clearer. “These Mushroom Men plan to reach The Meadows and use it to destroy the world.”
“Maybe.”
“Ayanna saw Mushroom Men destroying the world. And now we hear they’re heading right for this destructive something? It’s pretty clear, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
She stared into his black eyes. He was hiding something.
“I’m going to find out what these people want with The Meadows.” She turned to go.
“Sofi.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t kill him. Don’t disable him.”
“Why ever not?”
“We can use him to lure the others, and it will be helpful if he can walk.”
“Thanks, Yoki Choppa, I’ll bear that in mind.” She wouldn’t bear it in mind. He was her prisoner. She would do what she liked with him. Besides, she didn’t need him walking. If Talisa severed every sinew in his body, Chogolisa could carry him.
Sassa Lipchewer and the Hardworkers who’d escaped the tornado sat silent for once, so filthy and weary after their flight that it looked like the twister had in fact whisked them up, whirled them around in a maelstrom of muck and splatted them down around their meagre fire.
Although they’d only just finished eating and wouldn’t usually sleep for a few hours, Sassa Lipchewer had the strange sensation that her body was already asleep. Annoyingly, her mind was defiantly and resolutely awake, like a fire raging on top of a sodden haystack.
Why had Finnbogi claimed that Garth had punched him? He’d said he’d dreamt it and was confused, but Sassa was far from convinced that there wasn’t more to it. And how had Ottar known Finnbogi had survived? How did Ottar know all these things?
But neither Finnbogi’s feud with Garth nor Ottar’s oddness was the source of her troubled mind. There was a deep, dark melancholy lurking beneath all her thoughts like sharks circling under a canoe. She tried to tell herself that its roots were her failure to rescue Chnob the White, but that wasn’t it. His death had been his own fault and she’d tried her best. For a while she convinced herself that it was guilt at killing—murdering—Hrolf the Painter, but that wasn’t it either. He’d been on the brink of death. If she hadn’t finished him off then the Owsla would have caught them before they’d reached the Rock River. And it wasn’t her annoyance that Thyri Treelegs had caught up with her and proved to be the faster runner—the big-bummed girl had a lower centre of gravity and was better at running in high winds, that was all.
No, the real sadness, the deep, never-to-fade, desperate sadness was the conviction that she’d killed her baby. She had been certain that she was pregnant. Now she was just as certain that she wasn’t. Falling so far—she had no idea how high Thyri and she had flown—had killed the tiny person that had begun to grow in her. It proved she could get pregnant and she’d be able to do it again, she told herself. But the idea of that tiny life, the minuscule child deep in her womb, growing and struggling to survive until birth, that spark of life being snuffed out all because she’d tried to rescue the idiot Chnob when she’d never had a chance of doing so and hadn’t even wanted to? She pictured her dead baby’s miniature face, its tiny hand—
“So, shall we change our name to the Wootah tribe?” Wulf boomed cheerily. She glared at him for disrupting her important thoughts with his inane frivolity and he winked at her.
“No, never,” grunted Garth.
“I agree,” said Gunnhild. “We are Hardworkers.”
“Wootah!!” said Ottar.
“I agree with Ottar,” said Finnbogi.
“I agree with Finnbogi,” said Bodil.
“The idiots don’t have a say,” Garth snarled.
“So that rules you out,” Finnbogi snapped.
“Easy, easy,” Wulf stood, spreading his hands for calm. “This is a big waste of anger. It’s just something to discuss, not to attack each other over. Now, does anybody apart from Garth and Gunnhild think we should keep the name Hardwork?”
“What do you mean?” said Bodil.
“Loakie’s tits,” muttered Finnbogi and Sassa felt a flash of anger. Since he’d slept with Bodil—or shagged her in the mud to describe it with all the romance it deserved—he’d behaved badly. He’d told Sassa that he’d talk to her and let her down kindly. He hadn’t and she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to.
“Do you think we should change our tribe name from Hardwork to Wootah?” Wulf explained to Bodil.
“I don’t mind. It’s just a word. I don’t think it’s important.”
Bodil, thought Sassa, had made the most intelligent point yet about the matter. Sassa would always support Wulf, but they could call themselves the Squirrel Fuckers for all she cared. There were more important things and she was tired.
“I think we should change our name,” said Thyri. “I think Olaf Worldfinder was proud of the ancestors’ journey and the town they founded, but I don’t think he would have found many—any—of those qualities that made him proud in the Hardwork we left behind. Hardwork was decaying—dead even. We should start afresh. So a new name is a good idea, I think. Wootah is as good a name as any. Wooooooo—tah! It works.”
Finnbogi smirked at Garth, who ignored him.
“Nicely put, Treelegs. Has that changed anyone’s mind?” Wulf looked at Garth.
“Not mine,” said the big-chinned man.
He turned to Gunnhild. She sighed. “Can we really leave a hundred years of history behind?”
“Olaf shook off several thousand years of history when he left the old world, and he changed the name of the tribe. I don’t even know the name of the tribe that sailed from the old world.”
“I don’t either,” admitted Gunnhild. “You make a good point.”
“What would Uncle Poppo have thought?” asked Finnbogi.
“Oh, he wouldn’t have taken it seriously. He didn’t take anything seriously.”
“I think he would have liked it. Wootah is certainly a less serious name than Hardwork.”
“Perhaps … but man cannot change the name of dung and make it meat.”
“Let’s leave it for a while,” said Wulf, “until we meet the others. I’d prefer the decision to be unanimous, so everyone have a good think about it.”
“I’m not changing my mind,” growled Garth. “Wootah? Fray’s cock. You are a bunch of children.”
Erik squatted behind a bush and watched the Calnian warlock cook as the women sharpened their weapons and tended to
their kit. Keef was trussed and propped against a tree in the middle of it all, so Erik’s desired course of action—immediate rescue and successful flight before there was time to get nervous—wasn’t an option. Oh well, he thought, it had been an unlikely hope. Perhaps, he mused, if he walked through them all saying “evening,” “wonderful day for it” and so on, picked Keef up and walked out, they’d be too surprised to do anything. So far, that was his only plan. He was not proud of it.
The women ate and the warlock poked about in his smoking alchemical bowl. They didn’t talk as they dined. In fact they’d hardly said a word to each other since he’d crept up to their camp. Erik approved of that. His gang of Hardworkers—Bodil Gooseface in particular—were always chatting away about nothing as if they felt that silence was a hole in a hut wall that needed to be filled. This lot filled the silence, quite adequately as far as Erik was concerned, with their looks. Talisa White-tail, the one who’d attacked him, was the most jaw-droppingly desirable of the Owsla, although perhaps Paloma Pronghorn was more beautiful, and actually Sofi Tornado was a fine looking woman, perhaps the finest of them. Sitsi Kestrel’s huge eyes, although definitely odd, were also enchanting. Point was, they were all lovely, even the oversize Chogolisa Earthquake.
When Erik had lived with the Lakchans and people had talked about Emperor Zaltan’s magic-powered fighting squad, it had been with half a curled lip of disgust that the elderly pervert had chosen only attractive women. However, Erik thought if he’d been emperor of the Calnians creating an elite bodyguard, and the choice had been between the most eye-poppingly gorgeous girls in the empire or a bunch of burly blokes … well, he could see where Zaltan had been coming from.
Yet, for all their magic, Erik thought to himself, he’d been able to use his fox-learnt stealth to creep up and hide just a few paces from their camp.
Just as he was congratulating himself, the warlock started, as if he’d seen something surprising in his bowl, and looked up. His keen eyes seemed to pierce through Erik’s hiding bush.
Erik held his breath and willed himself invisible, but the magic man clambered to his feet and walked towards him.
“Anything amiss, Yoki Choppa?” said Sofi Tornado.