You Die When You Die

by Angus Watson

  For a moment she thought he was alive because his stomach was moving, but it was an otter with her head buried in his side and chomping away.

  “Yuk!” she said out loud, then waded across, hissing and waving her arms to shoo the munching mustelid.

  “Do you remember the one who launched that novel attack on Sadzi—getting his throat slit on purpose then blinding her with the blood?” said Paloma Pronghorn, reporting back.

  Sofi Tornado nodded.

  “That’s the chap who’s dead in the river. As well as the cut to his neck, his head was staved in, one thigh and his stomach ripped open, a wrist, both legs and his nose were broken, and he was bruised all over.”

  “Twister,” said Yoki Choppa.

  “Yup,” said Paloma. “Twisted to death.”

  Sofi nodded. “Let’s hope he was the only one it got.”

  “Don’t we want them dead?” asked Morningstar.

  “We have to know they’re dead. If the twister has thrown them all over the woods, lakes and prairies, we’ll have a job finding the bodies.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Our escapee and his rescuer will have rendezvous plans with the rest of them. So we find them and follow them. Paloma?”

  “Consider them found!” She sprinted away again.

  “And catch any pronghorns that you see!”

  “Sure thing!” she yelled. What was Sofi’s sudden obsession with pronghorns?

  “I never knew the world was so big!” cried Bodil Gooseface. “Is it the whole world, do you think? Where are The Meadows? Is that them over there?” She pointed to a shining stretch of prairie.

  “Yes,” said Finnbogi the Boggy. “We can see the whole world and that bit is The Meadows.”

  “It is? So we’ll be there today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shush, Finnbogi.” Sassa Lipchewer shook her head. “It’s not really the whole world, Bodil, nothing like it, and I don’t think that’s The Meadows. But it is a big view.”

  It was certainly the widest view Sassa had ever seen. They’d been walking steadily uphill since they’d left the Big Bone tribe the day before, and now arrived on a ridge where it seemed the land lost all the height it had gained in one go and they could see woods, lakes and prairie stretching southwards as far as the horizon.

  The pace was good, the mood not so much. Chnob the White had been the opposite of popular, but it was still a shock to lose one of the group. The bigger worry was whether they’d lost three more. If they’d simply seen off the Owsla, then Keef and Erik would have caught up. However, if the Owsla had defeated the Big Bone tribe, surely they’d have been on them by now? So what had happened? Had Keef and Erik succeeded in stopping the Owsla but died in the process? Bjarni was even more of a worry, since he’d simply disappeared.

  Whatever had happened to them, Sassa wasn’t going to worry about it and let it put her into a sulk, as had happened to everyone else. You die when you die. She was going to focus on living and keeping the people around her alive. She looked over her shoulder. No sign of pursuit, just Thyri and Garth, today’s rearguard. She gripped her bow. She’d shaken off her lethargy and bad mood and practised again the night before, as she had every night since leaving Hardwork. She was pleased with her progress.

  Paloma Pronghorn might have been the fastest runner in the world, but following the canoes wasn’t as simple as it might have been, because there was no track running along the river. Why would there be? If you wanted to go where the river went, you went along the river. But you needed a boat for that. Quick as she was, Paloma could not run on water, nor through the overgrown tangle of woods that lined so much of the watercourse.

  The other problem was that Keef and his rescuer could have left the river, so she had to go slowly enough that she wouldn’t miss their tracks if they had. She was assuming that if they’d left the river they would have headed south to join the rest of their group, so she kept to the river’s left bank as much as possible, leaping downed tree trunks and whacking her way through choking vegetation with her killing stick. It was painfully slow going.

  If they’d gone north, which they might have done if they were being clever, or if they’d walked carefully up one of the many little streams that fed into the Heartberry River, which they’d have done if they had any sense at all, she’d miss their tracks. Her only real hope was that they’d been stupid enough to stay in the canoes.

  It was well past noon when she spotted the boats. The river was wider here and the canoes were on the far side but there was no mistaking them—Keef the Berserker in his head bandage and the big one with the light brown, shaggy hair. There was another one with them, the one with the ball of curly black hair.

  She pirouetted around and sped back to report.

  Chapter 8

  Old Man Water Mother

  Massbak and Galenar, two young men of the Water Divided tribe, were out hunting. As usual, animal quarry was a secondary pursuit to discussing their tribe mates.

  “I don’t understand,” said Massbak. “Cavanar asked me—practically begged me—to come to his new Shark Clan gathering yesterday evening. When I got there, he looked at me like I’d crapped in his alchemical bowl, then blanked me.”

  “And he’s usually all right?” asked Galenar.

  “We’re friends, far as I’m concerned, good friends. Have been ever since we did our vision quests together.”

  “I bet—”

  “Hold on.” Massbak lifted his bow, peered into the trees, then lowered it. “Thought I saw a deer.”

  “I bet I know what it was. Was Sabula Derinda at this Shark Clan thing?”

  “She was.”

  “And were you talking to her?”

  “Of course I was.”

  “There you go.”

  “What?”

  “That’s Cavanar for you. Sabula Derinda was the hottest girl there, right?”

  “Sabula Derinda is the hottest girl anywhere.”

  “She certainly is. And you were cock blocking Cavanar.”

  “But there were loads of other people, and I didn’t talk to her all evening by any means.”

  “He would have organised the whole thing just to show off to Sabula Derinda and you got in his way.”

  “Surely not. She’s practically married to Big Keller.”

  “Was Big Keller asked?”

  “Not his sort of thing. He’s much more Buffalo Clan.”

  Galenar chuckled. “He certainly is. And Cavanar knows that. His sole intention in creating the Shark Clan was to prise Sabula Derinda away from Big Keller and you pissed him off by speaking to her when he could have been speaking to her.”

  “But he’s an idiot. He doesn’t have a hope.”

  “I agree with you on both counts. He’s the worst kind of idiot, one who’s quite clever but thinks he’s a genius. He’s clever enough to know, deep down, that he’s not really a genius, so, as well as being conceited, he’s sickened by self-loathing. He’s arrogant and insecure—a double twat.”

  “You’ve put some thought into it.”

  “Some people are twats, but nobody needs to be. So why be a twat? That’s why people like Cavanar fascinate me and why, yes, I have put quite a lot of thought into it.”

  “Are you studying me?”

  “You’re not a twat because you have a degree of humility and self-awareness and that governs your actions. The conclusion of my twat studies so far—and this may change, I’ve got a long way to go—is that all people are fools. None of us, even the cleverest, is actually clever. The greatest warrior chief or infallible warlock can trip over a tent rope and land face first in buffalo dung. It’s when we can’t accept our ineptitude and try to cover it up with bluster and posturing that we become conceited and paranoid: twats, in other words.”

  “Good theory.”

  “I’m not convinced yet, I need to study more examples, but it certainly fits for Cavanar and—”

  “Shush. Hide.”

&nb
sp; The young men melted off the path, nipped between trees and lay down. Massbak was glad he was with Galenar. Other people might have stood in the road asking what he’d seen and why he wanted them to hide. But the fact that Massbak had told him to hide was enough for Galenar, and now he lay silently, waiting either for the all clear or for the danger to make itself apparent.

  They didn’t wait long. A man and woman came along the path. The man was a little older than them—in his twenties—tall, muscled and carrying a club with an impossibly large iron head. The woman was elderly, carrying a wooden club set with colourful gems. Their strange weapons, however, were not the thing that made Massbak almost gasp with wonder. He’d never seen such odd-looking humans. Their skin was a weird hue, shiny and light. The man’s hair was curled and the colour of yellow petals.

  There were seven more, each odder than the next. There was an even larger man in a hat that looked a lot like iron, a young girl with hair that shone like gold and another woman with yellow hair. This latter woman, despite her freakish locks and skewed lips, was perhaps even more lovely than Sabula Derinda.

  Massbak knew immediately who they must be. He waited until they were well out of earshot before turning to Galenar and whispering, “Mushroom Men.”

  Galenar nodded. “We’d better get ahead of them, warn the tribe.”

  “Do you think we’ll kill them?”

  “Of course we’ll kill them. Calnia wants us to kill them and we do what Calnia tells us.”

  After several hours’ slow progress along the path-free banks of the Heartberry River, Sofi Tornado, Paloma Pronghorn, Yoki Choppa and the four other remaining Owsla women ran from the trees onto buffalo-grazed prairie. The land sloped down to the winding, sun-sparkling Heartberry River. Silhouetted neatly on the near point of a broad meander were three large Mushroom Men in two canoes.

  Sofi sped up. The river was narrow. There was no way they could escape.

  “That’s not a river, it’s a long sea!” said Finnbogi.

  “Is it?” asked Bodil. “What do you mean?”

  He didn’t bother answering. He looked at the view. For a moment he forgot that his true love was sleeping with his arch enemy, forgot that his arch enemy had tried to kill him and was bound to try again, forgot that his father and two friends were missing, and forgot that any moment now the world’s finest killing squad was going to catch up and slaughter them all. He forgot it all and looked at the river.

  Could there be anything more magnificent?

  This was the reason he’d wanted to leave Hardwork. He wanted to see amazing things. Here, surely, was the most amazing sight in the world.

  From his cliff-top standpoint he could see miles across the insanely wide valley. Flowing along that valley was a body of water too huge, too majestic, to share the word “river” with all the piddling streams that Finnbogi had considered to be rivers thus far. He’d thought the Rock River had been wide. The Water Mother made it look like a ditch in a dry spell.

  There’d been a small island in the Rock River, but the islands in this river could have held entire towns. Indeed, by the trails of smoke rising peacefully into the still evening light, it looked like there were settlements on some of them. A river wide enough for islands that you could live on … It was like something from the sagas.

  There were a handful of canoes near the banks. In the river proper, a couple of larger boats glided downstream at a lick that made Keef’s canoe seem pedestrian. Finnbogi guessed that it must be the current swishing them along so quickly, even though the great body of water looked like it wasn’t moving at all.

  While the Hardworkers’ gods inhabited a far-off world that few saw before they died, the Scraylings’ gods were often visible: a particularly large tree, a white buffalo, a bird—that sort of thing. If the Water Mother was not a Scrayling god, Finnbogi would eat his dad’s breechcloth. He’d always thought that their religion was a little silly before. Now he absolutely saw the sense of it.

  “Wootah!” cried Wulf the Fat behind him, playing with the children and the racoons. They’d made camp next to the rocky promontory overlooking the Water Mother. There wasn’t much daylight left, and Wulf wanted to wait until the following morning to approach the riverside town that they could see from the cliff and ask to borrow boats. People were more helpful in the morning, he’d said. That had seemed like a really dumb reason to Finnbogi when they had killers on their tails who they could escape by crossing the Water Mother. He’d been about to say something when he realised that Wulf wanted to wait for Keef, Erik and Bjarni, but he didn’t want those three to take the blame if the Owsla did catch up … Once again Finnbogi thanked Loakie that he wasn’t in charge.

  “Wootah! Wootah!” yelled Ottar and Freydis.

  Wootah indeed, thought Finnbogi, looking back across the river. No other Hardworkers had seen a sight like this for at least five generations. The enormity of what they’d done, and what they were going to do, made Finnbogi giddy. Already they were very different people from the ones who, just a few days before, had been happy to stagnate next to a lake for the rest of their lives. No longer were they Hardworkers. They were heroes and adventurers. They were the Wootah tribe.

  “Two canoes tied together,” said Gunnhild, walking up to join him and Bodil on the overlook.

  “Tied together?” he asked.

  “Those larger boats, heading downstream, they must be two canoes fixed together. I imagine they separate them to paddle back upstream. Our ancestors were great boat people, don’t you know?”

  Finnbogi did know. It was pretty obvious. You couldn’t cross thousands of miles of salt sea without knowing one end of a boat from the other.

  “Oh yes, they had great boats, with the heads of dragons—”

  “Oi, Boggy!” came a welcome call. It was Thyri.

  He leapt round like a ravenous dog called for dinner.

  “What’s happening, Treelegs?” he asked, scrabbling to regain nonchalance.

  “Fighting practice, you and me, now.”

  “Sure. If you want.” This was the first time she’d asked him since she’d got together with Garth, five days and a million years before.

  Don’t ask her about Garth, don’t ask her about Garth, he told himself as they walked along a path busy with butterflies, the warm woodland air almost overbearingly heavy with the scent of flowers. He fantasised that they were out for an evening stroll from their home at The Meadows. They were having a break from the kids, enjoying the evening air and heading for their secret moss-lined shagging glade.

  Back in the real world, they found a suitable training area in a clearing near the edge of the cliff, and Thyri cut two slender but sturdy branches with her sax.

  She handed him one of them as if everything was normal and there hadn’t been a great gap in their training and she hadn’t made love to a monster even though Finnbogi had to be her true love.

  “What’s going on with Garth?” he asked.

  “Can you block this?”

  “Ow!” Before he’d realised she was moving, she’d whacked him on the thigh.

  “How about this?” She hit his other leg.

  “Ow!”

  “And this?”

  “OW!” That was his arm.

  “And this?”

  “OW!”

  “And this?”

  “Ahhh! Stop!”

  “And this?”

  “OWWW!” That was his ear!

  He fled. She chased him. He ran in circles with his hands over his ears. She was laughing, flicking him on the arse with her wooden cane.

  “Stop, stop, stop!” he cried, laughing despite the pain.

  “You don’t want me to!”

  Whack, whack.

  “Ow! Ow! I do! I really, really do.”

  She stopped and he stood panting and laughing, bent double with his hands on his knees.

  “Now,” she said, “stop pissing about. As I have demonstrated, you need to learn some blocks.”

  “Raco
on’s cocks!” cried Paloma Pronghorn, “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “What, why?” Sofi Tornado looked at the Mushroom Men’s canoes, then hung her head. She’d spotted what was wrong.

  “Those boats haven’t moved since I found them a couple of hours ago,” gushed Paloma. “I was so keen to get back to you that I turned as soon as I spotted them and didn’t check and—”

  Sofi held up her hand to halt the group. The boats were shifting in the current but making no progress. The three Mushroom Men were motionless.

  She walked down to the river to investigate. She was too disappointed to run.

  They’d tethered the canoes’ sterns to rocks on the riverbed, so that they swung with the flow. To make the three figures, they’d stuffed clothes with vegetation, made balls out of twigs for the heads and, by the looks of it, cut off all Keef’s and the curly black-haired one’s hair to decorate the fake skulls.

  There were no tracks on either bank, so they’d swum away downstream.

  “Get some of that hair,” Sofi ordered Paloma Pronghorn. “Yoki Choppa, prepare to analyse it.”

  “They’ve headed south-west,” said the warlock a short while later.

  “But Keef said they were going north-east!” said Talisa White-tail.

  “Yes,” sighed Sofi. She looked up and saw the sun touching the horizon in the west. “Make camp here. We’ll catch up with them tomorrow.”

  Sassa Lipchewer had heard Garth Anvilchin arguing with Thyri Treelegs on the march earlier in the day and sped up to hear the details. If they didn’t want people eavesdropping, she’d reasoned, they should argue in private. She hadn’t caught every word, but the gist seemed to be that Garth wanted to leave the group and wanted Thyri to go with him.

  So it wasn’t a huge surprise when Garth waited until Sassa and Wulf were sitting on their own by the fire, walked up and said: “I think we should leave now. Us three and Thyri, none of the others.”