You Die When You Die

by Angus Watson

  “Nope.” Yoki Choppa stooped, plucked a twig off the ground, returned to his seat and didn’t look in Erik’s direction again. Thank Rabbit Girl, thought Erik as, very cautiously, he began breathing again. He’d been certain that the little man had rumbled him.

  He had been cocky and lucky to get away with it. He’d approached like a fox well enough and remembered to breathe like a fox, but he was squatting like a man. Slowly, thinking foxily, he folded his limbs and collapsed himself until he was curled on his side in a foxy nose to arse circle, halfway under the bush. Now nobody looking at the bush would see him. They could have stepped on him without realising he was there.

  He nearly fell asleep waiting for the women to finish eating, and then enjoyed listening to Keef’s valiant attempt to feed misinformation and avoid torture.

  Then there were more important things to worry about, as the warlock and Sofi Tornado came to stand a pace away on the other side of his bush and discuss The Meadows in whispers that he could hear perfectly clearly.

  Erik thought fox, fox, fox. He pulled his lips back over his teeth, became one with the leaves and the loam and fantasised briefly about stalking a giant turkey. Then he listened.

  So Yoki Choppa knew about The Meadows, too. What, by Loakie’s beard, he wondered, were The Meadows, and why did the voice in his dreams want him to go there? Finally, after Erik learnt that Yoki Choppa had a very different take on The Meadows from the Hardworkers’ ideas of a milk and honey-soaked sanctuary, the two Calnians headed back to the fire.

  “Now, Keef the Berserker, please will you tell me why you’ve been lying to me?” said Sofi Tornado.

  Erik shuddered (like a fox).

  “What? Lying? Me? I never lie. My mother taught me—”

  “Now you’re lying about lying. Try again.” She sounded very certain, the Owsla captain.

  Keef retold his story. It was true, apart from he said that they were going north-east instead of west, and he claimed that Garth was the soothsayer. Presumably that latter lie was to divert attention from Ottar if the Owsla caught the Hardworkers. If? Let’s face it, thought Erik, they’d been very lucky so far. It’s a when.

  “Talisa, cut his ear off, please,” Sofi commanded.

  “Which ear?”

  “Surprise me.”

  With his face pressed into the earth, Erik couldn’t see what happened next, but he heard it.

  Talisa kicked the legs out from under the captive, gripped his hair and held the knife to his ear.

  Sitsi Kestrel stood.

  “Where are you off to?” asked Morningstar. “You’ll miss it all.”

  “Pee.”

  “That’s bad timing.”

  “I’ve seen torture before and it’ll probably last a while.”

  Sitsi followed the track down to the river. She didn’t need to pee. She hadn’t wanted to watch the amusing, cheerful Mushroom Man being tortured. She wondered why. She’d never minded torture before.

  Bjarni Chickenhead heard a yell that sounded a lot like Keef, then he heard someone coming through the woods towards him.

  Please be Erik and Keef, please be Erik and Keef, he said to himself, lying back into the soggy bottom of the canoe. He was in the larger craft, holding onto Keef’s smaller boat with one hand and the branch of a bankside tree with the other. The boats were in between two half-fallen trees which jutted halfway across the seven-pace-wide river, perhaps twenty paces downstream from an old wooden bridge. The water was silver in the moonlight, and the moon itself was like a perfect circular mirror gathering all the light in the world and beaming it onto Bjarni’s hiding spot.

  The steps came closer, then he heard someone walk onto the bridge. He lifted his head, slowly, slowly. It was one of the Owsla! She was pacing back and forth on the bridge, looking down as if lost in thought.

  From Sadzi Wolf and the women he’d seen across the river, he’d thought they were all tall and stocky. This one didn’t look too massive. She was petite even. But she did have a bow in one hand, and he had no doubt that she could use it.

  She stopped in the middle of the bridge and turned her delicate face towards him. All she had to do was look in the right direction and she’d see him lying there in the boat like a crippled deer in a ditch. There was no way he’d be able to scramble clear before she plugged him with an arrow.

  The Owsla girl looked up at the sky and stared like a lovesick teen at the moon with bright, preternaturally large eyes.

  Bjarni’s nose twitched. He was going to sneeze.

  “I am telling the truth,” said Keef. “I meant what I said. I’m a complete pussy. Please don’t hurt me any more. There’s no point, I’ve already told you everything! If you have any other questions, any, I will answer them. I will tell you things that I have never told anyone! I once stole a precious stone from an aunt I didn’t like and threw it into Olaf’s Fresh Sea. When I was young I found some of the other boys sexually attractive. I have masturbated halfway up a tree. One time I ate—”

  “Quiet!” Sofi Tornado smiled. She couldn’t help but like this one. But she could tell by the way he shifted his feet, by the way he clasped and unclasped his hands and by a dozen other signs that he was lying about the direction the others were headed, and about their soothsayer. And about the aunt’s precious stone. The rest was true.

  “You lied about the direction that your group is headed in. I know they’re going west.”

  “But they’re not! The direction so far was all a ruse to throw you off. They’ve turned north-east now, I promise on all the gods and their relatives, and their friends and their relatives’ friends. Please don’t hurt me again.”

  “Talisa, eye, please.”

  “My eye? No, that’s too much.” Keef shook his head. “You’re just doing this because it’s expected of you as captain of the Owsla. I don’t think you want to. Come on, break the mould, be your own person.”

  Talisa gripped him by the hair, pulled his head back and pushed the tip of her finger into the corner of his eye.

  “Ow! Stop that! It really hurts! They’re going north-east, they really are. They still will be after you take my eye out. Think about it! Do you really want a captive with no depth perception? I’ll be a burden!”

  Talisa looked at Sofi. She nodded. The Calnian shoved her finger deep into the Hardworker’s face, twisted and scooped. Keef screamed.

  Usually Sofi got a thrill watching one of her women inflict pain on an inferior being. Was she missing the diamondback rattlesnake in her diet already or was it psychosomatic?

  Or … she’d definitely been feeling less ruthless of late. She’d let the Goachica survivors live. Sure, she’d made a vow not to kill the Lakchans and told herself that it was binding, but would a vow usually have stopped her murdering someone? Surely not.

  Had Yoki Choppa cut the rattlesnake from their diet before the Big Bone tribe had disintegrated his supplies? Did he want them less vicious for his own reasons?

  If he had a scheme, she’d get to the bottom of it. If he’d been messing them about for his own purposes, he was dead.

  Keef’s scream echoed through the trees. Bjarni shuddered. He considered running to help, but the woman on the bridge would put an arrow in him the moment he moved, then he’d be dead and Keef would be in the same predicament. He was stuck, one hand holding a branch, one hand holding a boat, blinking and wrinkling his nose and trying not to sneeze.

  The little Owsla woman with the big eyes drew in a long breath. For a second he thought she going to cry, but she began to sing in a high, sweet and tuneful voice.

  The tune crescendoed towards a long note and Bjarni sneezed.

  The lonely moon shone. An owl hooted. It was all rather magical. Sitsi Kestrel wasn’t an invader in this strange land of monsters and tornados any more, she was part of nature’s cycle, at one with the ebb and flow of the earth.

  She lifted her head and sang a song about lost love. The wavelets on the river twinkled in rhythm with her words, the soft wind s
hivering through the trees’ broad leaves accompanied her song.

  Just before she reached the chorus she heard a racoon or possibly a squirrel sneeze, which bolstered her idea of being one with nature.

  Her song sung, she felt a great deal more cheerful and headed back to camp.

  They were done with the torture. The man was trussed again and Yoki Choppa was dressing his wounds. Sitsi sat down next to Paloma Pronghorn.

  “What did I miss?”

  “Talisa cut off the Mushroom Man’s ear and scooped his eye out.”

  “Did he tell us anything useful?”

  “Nothing that he hadn’t said before we started torturing him.”

  “Oh. Why did we stop?”

  “Maybe Sofi decided he was telling the truth after all. Maybe we’ll try again tomorrow. I don’t know.”

  In all the tales of the Hardworkers and the Lakchans, Erik had never heard of a more heroic display. Keef had shouted a little and screamed once but mostly remained calm and stuck to his story as Talisa White-tail had cut off his ear and gouged out his eye.

  It seemed that he’d finally satisfied the Owsla captain, because she’d stopped the torture. Talisa had been disappointed, which, thought Erik, made her a little less attractive. Or maybe a little more …?

  The women of the Owsla went about their evening business, Yoki Choppa was put on watch and, as far as Erik could tell, all the women went to sleep. Soon the only sounds were the whistles, snorts and rustles of the animals of the night, the soft snores of most of the women and the loud snuffling grunts of one of them. Erik guessed the latter noises came from Chogolisa Earthquake, even though in his experience there was no positive correlation between size of woman and loudness of snore.

  A new sound arose, a soft sucking. The smell of burning tobacco tickled his nose.

  He uncurled from his fox ball and lifted his head, fox-style. Yoki Choppa was sitting on a stump at the edge of the camp, facing away from him, puffing out clouds of smoke into the moon-bright sky. Slowly, foxily, Erik rose into a crouch.

  The women of the Owsla that he could see were asleep, as was Keef, trussed and propped against the same tree as before. Sofi Tornado was on one side of him, Chogolisa Earthquake on the other. The loud snores weren’t coming from the large woman, they were Keef’s. Erik guessed that Yoki Choppa must have given him something powerful for the pain.

  There was a tapping sound as the warlock knocked out the burnt tobacco from his pipe. He stood, stretched, and walked away into the trees on the far side of the camp.

  Erik stood too. Now or never. He fox-crept around the bush, into the camp and over to Keef. A real fox screamed nearby, as if protesting the human’s appropriation of vulpine ways. The big man froze. None of the women woke.

  Keef was breathing raspingly with intermittent snorts. Half his head was bandaged. His spear, Arse Splitter, lay next to him.

  Erik leant forward and gripped the man by the leather thongs that bound him.

  Six feet away, the Owsla captain stirred. Her eyelids flickered.

  Finnbogi had heard the phrase “so tired I couldn’t sleep” and consigned it to that group of sayings that adults spouted because their lives were so boring that they had to make up crap to talk about, and they were so dumb and unimaginative that they couldn’t make up their own phrases. It came from the same dull bucket as choice lines like “too cold to snow” and “you can have too much of a good thing.”

  But now, knackered beyond knackeredness, he was too tired to sleep. Or, possibly, he was too nearly-murdered-by-a-twat to sleep.

  He knew that he should have been worrying about his father, Keef and Bjarni, but he couldn’t drag his thoughts away from Thyri Treelegs.

  The thing was, he could see Thyri didn’t actually like Garth. She always disagreed with him, like she had tonight about the Wootah renaming. When they were together they didn’t just not talk to each other, they actually looked unhappy. They’d kissed when the Lakchans had been about to kill them, sure, but it was only because they’d been about to die and Garth had lunged. Thyri, because she was so stubborn, had carried on the relationship. She simply couldn’t admit to anyone, least of all herself, that she’d made a mistake.

  He wanted to talk to her, to explain how wrong she was, to tell her she had an alternative and that nobody would think any the worse of her for taking it (apart from Garth, of course, but screw him). Finnbogi was sure that she’d rather be with him if only she knew it was a possibility, and she was capable of admitting to herself that she’d been wrong to go with Garth. But he couldn’t think of any way of telling her which wouldn’t make her react like an armadillo poked with a stick. He knew what was best for her—he knew he was best for her—but she was so wilful that if he told her he was the one it would make her all the more determined that he wouldn’t be.

  There had to be something he could do or say that would make her go off that lunk Anvilchin.

  Or, better, he could remove Anvilchin.

  It was straightforward revenge. Loakie and all the gods would approve, and, even if they did meet in Valhalla, Garth wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. He’d tried to kill Finnbogi, so Finnbogi was allowed to kill him. Any god would agree.

  But how to do it? He could engineer a situation when they were apart from the others but, having tried to kill him once, presumably Garth would be on the lookout for an opportunity to do so again. And Garth, let’s face it, would beat Finnbogi in a fair fight ninety-nine times in a hundred. Or even a hundred. So he’d have to make sure it wasn’t a fair fight …

  And now he was losing sleep so he’d be even less able to deal with the problem in the morning. It was impossible. Why did bad things always happen to him?

  Sofi Tornado settled. Erik the Angry tightened his grip on Keef the Berserker’s straps. There was no avoiding it, this next bit was going to make some noise. He prayed to Spider Mother and Tor that Sofi Tornado and the rest of them were heavy sleepers and heaved the Hardworker up and onto his shoulder. Keef wasn’t as big as Erik, but he was heavy enough.

  Keef oofed quietly but stayed asleep. Erik stood and listened, expecting the camp to wake and kill him any moment. Nothing happened. He squatted and picked up Arse Splitter. Keef would be upset if he didn’t rescue the axe as well.

  He turned and almost shouted with surprise. Yoki Choppa was back, sitting on his tree stump. His alchemical bowl was smoking in his hands, but he was looking, with a mildly bored expression, directly at Erik.

  He stared back. The warlock jinked his head almost imperceptibly towards the river.

  The exiled Hardworker did not need to be asked twice. He crept out of the camp, fox-style, speeding up as he neared the river.

  “Nice one,” said Bjarni Chickenhead, sitting up in the canoe.

  “Shhhh,” said Erik. They weren’t clear yet.

  He lowered Keef, still sleeping, into Bjarni’s boat—Chickenhead could paddle with the extra load since he’d been lying about all evening—and climbed into Keef’s little canoe.

  They set off. Erik expected an axe to the side of the head at any moment. Why had the warlock let them go, if not for the fun of chasing and killing then? But no axe came. When they’d rounded three bends in the river, Erik the Angry let himself believe that the rescue had succeeded.

  He felt every muscle relax as he paddled on through the moonlit night, south-west along the Heartberry River towards the Water Mother.

  Chapter 7

  No Excuses

  “It is very odd that I didn’t wake up, wouldn’t you say, Yoki Choppa?” Sofi Tornado sounded calm, but Paloma Pronghorn recognised the tone. It was the same one she’d used ordering Chogolisa Earthquake to tear off Malilla Leaper’s arms.

  The warlock shrugged.

  Paloma looked from one to the other. She did not like this. It was like her parents fighting.

  “And when you returned from checking the periphery it’s strange that you didn’t notice the prisoner was gone, wouldn’t you say?”


  “Yup.”

  If Paloma had been in his position, she would have said that it had been dark, that she had nothing to gain from freeing the prisoner, that the person who’d taken him must have been another warlock using magic, and any number of other excuses. But Yoki Choppa wasn’t saying anything.

  The whole thing was a bit odd.

  When the warlock had woken Paloma to take her turn on watch, it had taken her about a quarter of a heartbeat to notice that Keef the Berserker was gone. Why hadn’t Yoki Choppa spotted it?

  By the tracks, the largest of the Mushroom Men had crept up and lain behind a bush, waited until Yoki Choppa went off into the woods, walked into the camp, picked up Keef and walked out again, down to the river and a waiting boat.

  Then Yoki Choppa had sat for two hours before waking Paloma. It was all very strange, but the idea that the warlock had somehow colluded in the escape was even stranger.

  Sofi seemed to reach the same conclusion and the menace evaporated from her voice. “All right, I suppose it’s possible I might have missed the intruder. I don’t suppose we have any of his hair to trace his whereabouts?”

  “Did you clean your knife after cutting his ear off, Talisa?” asked Yoki Choppa.

  “I did, in the river. I tossed the eye and ear in, too.”

  “Then we can’t trace him.”

  “We have his blood on the ground.”

  “No good.”

  “Okay, please use the hair we do have to find the other Mushroom Men.”

  The warlock nodded, mixed his ingredients, set fire to them, poked about a bit then said: “The Mushroom Man who owned this hair is two miles upriver.”

  “What is he doing there?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Sofi shook her head. “Paloma, see if you can find him. Oh, and if you see any pronghorns, bring one back.”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Dead.”

  Paloma ran, glad to be away from the camp, glad to be running, and glad to be looking out for pronghorns. She wondered why Sofi wanted one.

  Early morning was her favourite time to run, so it was a disappointment when she found the corpse not long after leaving. He was on an island in the middle of the shallow river, naked and torn open by scavenging animals.