by Angus Watson
Sofi Tornado was beginning to feel it in her arms and her back, so perhaps the gap in regular caribou consumption was taking its toll, but they were still gaining on their prey.
The woman, girl and three men from the first boat clambered out on the far bank. They could cut the rope now, but it would mean abandoning over half their group. They wouldn’t do that …
“Sitsi, anyone on the shore looks like they’re going to cut the rope, put an arrow in them.”
Sassa Lipchewer saw the Owsla archer kneel up in the canoe and bring her bow to bear. The second Wootah boat was thirty paces from shore, the first Owsla boat not far behind. The second Owsla boat, containing the giant and one other, was a long way behind.
“Give me your hammer, now!” she yelled. Wulf proffered it to her questioningly and she snatched it. Pulling her obsidian knife from its sheath, she dived and sliced at the crossing rope. As the twine sprang apart, something hit her.
Sofi Tornado saw the woman dive. Sitsi Kestrel loosed an arrow. The rope, which had been so firm and vital in her hands, went limp. Everything was still for an instant, then the current had them and they were propelled sideways at a shocking speed.
“Give the paddle to Morningstar, Yoki Choppa!” she ordered. “Morningstar, paddle as if your life depended on it.”
All was far from lost. The second Mushroom Man boat was caught in the current, too. Keef the Berserker at the prow was paddling as if his life depended on it, which in his case it did, but it didn’t matter. The mantis shrimp-powered Morningstar had more strength in her arms than twenty Keefs. They would catch up and put arrows in all of them. Then it wasn’t far to shore and the others.
Sassa touched her head and found blood, but it was only a shallow cut. The Owsla arrow had nicked her and lodged in the stump. A tuft of her hair sprouted from its entry point like a decoration.
She looked up to call to Wulf, but he was already kneeling next to her, doing what she had been planning to do. While all the rest of them were still gawping at the second boat which she’d seemingly abandoned, Wulf had grabbed a spare rope and was tying one end to the shaft of his hammer. He winked at her, then whirled his hammer around his head.
Morningstar paddled like a god. The canoe sliced a white tear through the brown water towards the western bank of the Water Mother.
Paloma Pronghorn, freed from the irksome business of pulling on the rope, sat back and watched the Mushroom Men on the shore. Wulf the Fat—her friend from the Rock River, as she thought of him—was whirling his hammer on a rope above his head. Not a bad idea, she thought, but even if it worked perfectly and they towed their friends ashore, Morningstar would have the Owsla on the bank not long afterwards. The current was seriously powerful so they’d be a fair way downriver, but this time the Mushroom Men would not escape.
She turned to check on the other Owsla crew, just in time to see Chogolisa Earthquake reach for something outside the canoe, overbalance and plunge into the water with a great splash, taking Talisa White-tail and the boat over with her. The canoe’s prow thrust above the surface then sank. Chogolisa’s head and flailing arms emerged from the swift, silt-heavy water. Talisa’s did not.
“Tornado!”
“Not now, Pronghorn.” The leader’s eyes were fixed on her quarry.
“We have to turn back.”
“What?”
“The other boat is over. Chogolisa is afloat but I can’t see Talisa.”
The hammer flew over their heads, Finnbogi half leapt and grabbed the rope. Keef got a hand to it—which he was able to do only because Finnbogi had caught it—and cleated it to the front of the boat.
Wulf, Erik and Bjarni pulled like heroes and the craft bounced across the water. But the Owsla couldn’t be that far behind. Finnbogi turned.
The Owsla were that far behind. They were heading back east, already taken a hundred paces south by the current.
“They’ve turned!” he shouted.
They all looked.
“But why?” Keef asked.
“Calnians don’t cross the Water Mother,” grinned Gunnhild. “They must have been hoping to catch us before we got to the far bank. When they saw they weren’t going to, they turned.”
By the time they’d reached the shore and clambered out, the Owsla boat was out of sight behind an island, far downstream.
“Erik was right!” shouted Bjarni. “Calnians do not cross the Water Mother!”
“I didn’t know it was that hard a rule,” said Erik, scratching his chin. “Maybe there was some other reason? We can’t assume their pursuit is over.” He looked warily at the Scraylings gathered around, but they were keeping a fearful distance.
“Don’t worry, Erik, we’ll still be careful,” Wulf grinned. “Come on everyone, the chase is over! Let’s go! Woooooo-tah!”
He then paused, not certain where they should go.
“You headed west?” asked the eldest of the Other-Siders, craning his neck at them. “Most strangers come out of the river are headed west.” He spoke the universal tongue slowly, in an accent coated with river mud.
“We are,” said Wulf. “Is there a path?”
“Walk a few hundred paces south of here, you’ll find a little path off to the right, next to a dead tree with a big bees’ nest in it.”
“Right.”
“You do not want to take that path, it’s a nasty climb up the cliff and I doubt your little ones will enjoy it. Or the older lady.”
“I see.”
“You want to go north.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Nice road for three miles. Little bit after a walkway over some marsh, you’ll find a lovely broad path turning back southwards and up the bluff. You won’t miss it if you’re looking for it. It’s a longer way up the bluff, a good bit longer than the other path, but that way up the cliff, oh it’s nasty. I haven’t been up the cliff path myself for twenty years and I still remember the last time I did it.”
“I see, thanks!” said Wulf.
“You’re very welcome,” replied the toothless man. “Did the Other-Siders send you?”
“They call you the Other-Siders.”
“They do? Why’s that?”
Sassa found herself walking next to Keef the Berserker on the path up out of the valley and away from their old lives. Walking? She was fairly bouncing.
They’d escaped the Owsla! She hadn’t realised what a terrible weight the constant fear of death had been until it was removed. Now she felt like she could fly.
There was one niggle, or two to be precise. Two niggles called Hrolf the Painter and Garth Anvilchin. There was only one thing she could do about her two murders, she decided there and then, and that was to absolve herself wholeheartedly and unreservedly of any wrongdoing.
Several billion tons of sluggish brown, constantly renewing Water Mother separated her and the Wootah tribe from the old world of the Hardworkers. It was a fresh life on this side of the river, a new start, all their old problems left behind on the far bank. Goodbye, Hardwork—and anything she might have done as a Hardworker.
Goodbye Hardwork.
Hello, Wootah tribe.
Hello, dare she think it, babies.
Of course, some of them had left more than regrets and guilt east of the Water Mother.
“How are your missing ear and eye?” she asked Keef.
“I don’t know. Haven’t seen them for a while. Probably eaten by a badger or something by now.”
“Bits of you? Surely not. They’re going to be eaten by a lion at the least. Probably a dagger-tooth cat.”
“You’re right. Badgers don’t eat hero.”
“How are the holes where those bits used to be?”
“Healing nicely, thanks. I can see and hear just as well as before.”
“Really? That’s amazing.”
“What? Who’s there?”
Sassa laughed.
“Sight is odd, to be honest,” said Keef, “kind of smaller. I’ve got to move my head aroun
d to see what’s going on. And with my hearing, I have a bit of an echo and it’s harder to work out where noise is coming from … but all in all it’s not too bad. I reckon we should all chop off an eye and an ear. It would be a good tribal mark.”
“I can think of better ones.”
“Like both eyes and both ears?”
“I was thinking whole head. It would be an original look and we’d never have to worry about catching our hair on low branches again.”
“Or poking ourselves in the eye when we’re eating.”
“Indeed.”
“People would think twice about messing with people tough enough to cut their own heads off.”
“And if they did attack we wouldn’t have to duck any head shots.”
They were quiet for a minute, then Keef said: “How do you think they’ll string the rope back across the river?”
“I don’t know.”
“Here’s how I’d do it. First I’d get a smaller rope. Made of what, you might ask? There are a few choices. First up—”
“Wootah!” said Sassa.
“What?”
“Nothing, just trying something.”
“Right. Anyway, as I was saying, there are a few material options for your first, lighter rope, each of which has positives and negatives. The most obvious choice would be …’
Not everything, thought Sassa, was different west of the Water Mother.
They didn’t find Talisa White-tail.
As Morningstar propelled them back across the Water Mother, they watched Chogolisa Earthquake dive down again and again, even though she was a terrible swimmer and had never dived under the water before. Eventually she’d had to give in and swim to an island, where Sofi and the others found her, sitting on the mud shore, exhausted and weeping into her hands.
“The rope slipped and I was trying to grab it and …” she stammered as they arrived. “I looked, but you can’t see a thing under that water and—”
“It’s not your fault, Chogolisa. The woman who cut the rope is to blame and she will pay. Come on.”
Sitsi Kestrel watched her captain and saw what she expected—a darted, angry glare at Yoki Choppa. It wasn’t just the Mushroom Man archer’s fault. Talisa White-tail’s blood was on four people’s hands.
Chogolisa could be forgiven, because dropping the rope and reaching for it had to have been an accident.
The woman who’d cut the rope had done what anybody fleeing for their lives would have done, and the cutting of the rope hadn’t directly killed Talisa White-tail. She could be forgiven, too. A moot point, perhaps, since they were going to kill her anyway, but a point all the same.
Sitsi had missed the shot that would have stopped the woman cutting the rope, but nobody could have made that shot. Nobody, apart from her perhaps, if she’d been eating her power animal every evening.
Yoki Choppa’s negligence in keeping all their power animals in one place had slowed them down and prevented them catching the Mushroom Men on the Calnian side of the Water Mother. It had prevented them pulling fast enough to catch the Mushroom Men boats, and it had reduced her ability to put an arrow in a woman who was diving for a rope. He should have split his cache and given some to other people to carry.
The person who could be held accountable for Talisa’s death was Yoki Choppa.
By the look in her eye, Sofi Tornado agreed. Once they’d caught up with the Mushroom Men yet again, and surely killed them this time, there was going to be a reckoning between Sofi Tornado and Yoki Choppa. Most likely, there was going to be a slaying.
Morningstar paddled to the west bank of the Water Mother with Chogolisa holding the back of the canoe and floating along behind. Nobody spoke. They ran north, to the west bank settlement of the Water Divided tribe.
“They went that away,” said the eldest of the group of villagers who gathered to goggle at them. He pointed northwards out of the village.
“Thanks,” said Sofi Tornado.
“You’ll be hoping to catch them up?” The old man cocked his head and opened one eye wide, as if he’d asked an exceptionally incisive question.
“We will.”
“Are they friends or do you mean them harm?”
“We mean them harm.”
“Good. Horrible they were. Funny coloured skin. And that hair? It turned my stomach to look at them. Who knows what trouble those deviants will cause? Had two racoons following them. It was unnatural. They’ll kill us all and defile our corpses, I wouldn’t wonder. We won’t sleep easy tonight knowing they’re nearby. You going to kill ’em?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Go back south a quarter of a mile and you’ll find a path west next to a dead tree with a bees’ nest in it. Fit young women like you will make it up that cliff without a bother. Three miles after the top of the cliff your path’ll join a bigger one. That’s the path they’re on. Go now and go quickly and you’ll get ahead of ’em.”
“Thank you.”
“I hope you do kill ’em all. When you’re done, come back ’ere. I’ve fifteen grandsons, eight unmarried. Some of them might like you more muscly type women.”
“How charming. We’ll be certain to come back this way.”
Chapter 11
Ambush
Usually Paloma Pronghorn would have been up the cliff and away before the others were pondering their second handhold, but she’d hung back to help Chogolisa Earthquake, who’d never been the best of climbers, and was rendered even more clumsy by her reduced power and by her distress at killing Talisa.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Paloma said when she saw a tear running down Chogolisa’s smooth cheek. “I’ve explained why about nine times now, so I’m just going to repeat the words ‘it wasn’t your fault’ until you’ve got it. Got it?”
The big woman nodded and sniffed.
“Good. It wasn’t your fault.”
They carried on up.
At the top they jogged along a vegetation-hemmed track.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Paloma.
Paloma Pronghorn wasn’t that fussed by Talisa White-tail’s death. In all their years of training she’d never actually had a conversation with her and wasn’t going to miss her too much. In fact, she felt positively cheerful. She was, despite it all, having a lovely day. She couldn’t run as fast as before but it didn’t matter. She was out in the beautiful world having an adventure with her friends. She was young, healthy and happy.
She had a bizarre urge to hug someone.
Her overhappiness was, of course, entirely a result of not eating power animals. If you ingest and assume the characteristics of a snake and a wasp, she reasoned, it’s hardly going to make you more skippy. They hadn’t made her exactly unhappy, but she did feel explosively joyful without them.
It did pose a problem, though.
They had to kill the Mushroom Men. She was fine with that, she wanted to get back to Calnia and the Mushroom Men had to die before she could do that. But the idea of actually physically whacking and slicing the Mushroom Men to death, especially the children and her friend from the Rock River, sickened her a little and was even in danger of souring her fine mood.
They arrived at the wider track that the old fellow had said the Mushroom Men would be taking. Nobody had walked on it for a couple of days, so they jogged west until they found a suitable ambush spot where the path followed a stream. The watercourse was bordered by hip-high grassland for about thirty paces, beyond which the valley sides were wooded.
Sofi sent Paloma and Morningstar into the trees on the north side of the valley and told them to wait for the signal, which would be Sitsi Kestrel shooting the leading Mushroom Man.
Sitsi was sent to the south side of the valley and Chogolisa further east along the path to block any retreat. Sofi headed to the west with Yoki Choppa.
“Will you kill the children if they’re on our side of the valley, please?” Paloma whispered to Morningstar once they were hidden in the trees.
�
��How come you don’t want to do it? You’re usually overjoyed to send people into a better world.”
“Not this time.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“You, too?”
Morningstar looked her in the eye and nodded. “I guess we’re missing those power animals.”
“I’m not sure I want the power to kill kids without caring.”
“I don’t know. The sooner we’re back in Calnia and everything’s back to normal, the better. It’s a shame Talisa drowned. She would have killed the children. She didn’t need to eat a snake to make her a bitch.”
“But, ironically, she was too much of a bitch to eat snake. That’s what one guy told me anyway. Talisa the Receiver he called her.”
Morningstar snorted a laugh through her nose. “Seriously, though, let’s leave the children to Sofi. If we kill an adult or two each, she won’t notice.”
“She notices everything.”
“I suppose, but it’s not our fault Yoki Choppa lost our power animals. So long as they all get killed she won’t mind.”
Sitsi Kestrel waited in the shade of the trees on the edge of the shallow valley, opposite Paloma and Morningstar. It was the perfect ambush spot and it was nice and cool.
After an age she heard the clang of metal on metal from somewhere down the valley. That surely meant they were almost there? By Innowak, the Mushroom Men moved slowly.
They appeared shortly afterwards. The tall man with golden hair led, alongside the woman with even shinier golden hair, the one who’d cut the rope. They were sauntering along, chatting away as if they were lovers out for a stroll. It seemed almost a shame to kill them. But Tornado had asked her to start the attack, and it meant that they could all go home.
She’d make it quick. She strung an arrow, drew, and aimed for the big man’s heart.
West of the Water Mother, the grass was greener, the sky bluer, the air fresher and there were even more animals. A small mammal or bird perched on every rock and branch, staring at the passers-by. A black bear and her cub lolloped away into the trees. The big yellow and black bumble bees that had once terrified Finnbogi buzzed enchantingly between yellow, blue and pink flowers. A family of deer approached them with no apparent fear, but Hugin and Munin scared them off with sharp yickers.