by R Magnusholm
The morning was frosty, and his long nose smarted, but at least his belly was full. Over the previous ten days, the clan had had a few successful deer hunts, and large foraging parties ranged far and wide, gathering lots of frozen rowanberries.
Since it was his idea to send large parties further afield, Gnorrk’s heart glowed with pride. So what of it if the shaman had suggested this first? Gnorrk could always roar and push the old fool over. And to think of it, maybe, just maybe, it had been Gnorrk’s idea all along, and the shaman tried to take credit for Gnorrk’s genius.
Yes, that’s exactly how it was.
Deep in thought, he watched the sun lighting the woods as if with blazing flames. He found the image deeply disturbing. In his long life, he’d had to flee a forest fire twice. Once, his village had burned, and his grandma died. And yet sunlight meant warmth, and warmth was nice. Oh yes, indeed it was. He rubbed his nose. So cold. Perhaps fire was a blazing chunk of the sun that fell to earth, and if the sun was good, so a piece of it should also be good. If it could be contained and controlled, it would keep him warm.
A tiger roared in the distance, and Gnorrk winced. He gave explicit orders to all foragers to stick together and to keep a sharp lookout for an ambush, but there would always be at least one fool to wander off alone. A team of warriors would beat a tiger into a pulp, but if the beast sprang upon a solitary bear, that poor unfortunate would spend the rest of the day cavorting over the landscape in a tiger’s belly.
Once more he thought of fire. All forest denizens were instinctively scared of it, even tigers. And yet after the latest forest burn, Gnorrk had faced his fears and had gone to explore the ash-choked glade. He’d found a smoldering log, and instead of fleeing immediately he stopped and watched. Orange flames writhed around the log like snakes eating the wood. While the stench of smoke made his eyes water, and his heart raced with terror, the fire didn’t leap at him, and after a while it subsided and died.
He concluded that fire was a living creature that fed on wood. True, it had a ferocious appetite, and it would happily consume the whole forest, but if it could be contained—
His gaze chanced upon a bare patch of ground in front of his hut, and in his mind’s eye he saw that blazing log there. If the fire ate wood, they could feed it—no shortage of dry sticks in the forest—and as long as they kept the blaze away from their huts and from nearby trees, the flames wouldn’t spread.
The smoke would scare off tigers, wolves, and aurochs. And the flames would keep the bears warm.
Gnorrk sighed. He realized there would be no fire in their village. Not ever. He was the only bear with a vision. If there was another forest blaze, his fellow clan members would simply flee in mindless terror—the way they’d run from the encounter at the Little Salmon Stream when the evil spirits sent a lightning bolt that transfixed a warrior.
Only one bear had been struck, and the flames didn’t spread to anybody else, nor did they set the entire woods ablaze, and yet every Woodlander had run. Cowards.
Gnorrk shuffled his feet at the embarrassing memory. He had also run. Of course, he was the last warrior to do so, and there was the little matter of a giant fire-wolf snapping at his heels. A wolf as big as an auroch, although come to think of it, the beast hadn’t been much larger than a tiger.
Gnorrk shuddered and touched a healing scar on his rump. He’d gotten away by a whisker; no way would he go to the Little Salmon Stream ever again. He touched the scar again, a hazy tangential thought forming in his mind. The wound seemed to be too low to the ground. If the fire-wolf had been as large as a tiger, wouldn’t it have bitten him on the shoulder instead of the rump? Had he only imagined the attacker being so huge? Was it, in fact, just a regular wolf?
And if the evil spirits ate not only fire but also the much more prosaic mushrooms and nuts, perchance they weren’t even spirits but creatures of flesh and blood that could be killed. But on the other paw, the creatures definitely ate fire.
Which meant they were fire-breathing monsters.
Gnorrk’s brain spun inside his thick skull, and he set the mystery of the fire-eaters aside as first one, then two, then many Woodlanders came out of their huts. They stood, stretching and blinking stupidly like moles in the light, waiting for Gnorrk to organize their daily activities.
A thought struck him that they might go east and wallop some heads belonging to the Sunrise Clan who lived by the sea and wore pretty necklaces of seashells around their necks. The Sunrisers had grown soft and fat on the mussels they gathered on the shore and forgot how to hunt or fight. Well, Gnorrk was happy to teach them.
He started making invasion plans.
Chapter 37
On Borrowed Time
John sank another aspen trunk into the narrow trench, straightened the log, and tamped the loose soil down with a moccasined foot. He and Liz had only finished making his footwear yesterday, and although the new auroch hide moccasins weren’t as close-fitting as his battered office-wear oxfords, at least they covered his ankles, so he could wade through snowdrifts without getting his feet wet. He had coated the seams with bear fat to keep moisture away and stuffed the boots with dry moss, and so far his feet stayed amazingly dry and warm.
The new footwear however chafed at the heel, and he kept stuffing more moss to prevent blisters.
He leaned his cheek against the cool log and wiped his brow. The loose-fitting bearskin parka he wore was too warm for hauling timber, even with the hood off.
Liz, similarly attired, climbed a ladder and tied the top of the new log to its companion with a length of willow bark. So far, they had managed to build a fifteen-foot-long stretch of stake-wall, and they had another forty-five feet to go before they fully enclosed their wigwam. It took two trunks per foot of palisade—so they needed ninety more logs. Doable.
Liz tightened the bark bindings, leaned over the jagged top, and said, “A couple more before lunch?”
“Okay.”
They went out of their bramble enclosure and down to the shore of the Fleet. As always, Spot ran ahead, scouting for danger. Thankfully, he found none.
John selected a suitable beaver-gnawed log, a birch, that was some sixteen feet long and slender enough to lift. He hefted the thinner end over his shoulder and started dragging it to camp. Liz grabbed hold of a bough protruding from the log and helped to pull it uphill. They slogged through a deep snowdrift before reaching a trail of compacted snow and frozen slush.
“Ease off, Liz,” he huffed. “The baby.”
“Oh, I think the gods who gave me a new womb won’t let anything bad happen.”
He stopped to catch his breath. “Still . . . we can’t be complacent.”
“Johnnie boy, I’m not lifting the tree, only helping to pull it along.”
After reaching the trodden path, the going became easier, and five minutes later they dragged the log into the camp.
He broke the ground with an antler pick and began scraping out the dirt with an auroch’s shoulder blade he used as a shovel. So far, the winter hadn’t turned as cold as in Canada, and only the top layer of the soil was frozen.
As they worked to extend the narrow trench to add a new log, he kept connecting his mind to Spot’s to check if the wolf could smell the ursines. Despite there being no sign of them since the last skirmish two weeks ago, he couldn’t help feeling that he and Liz were living on borrowed time. Even if they had seen off that particular band of warriors from the north, there were bound to be other bands—from the east and west. Not from the south, though. The ursines didn’t give him an impression of being accomplished boat builders. And although he imagined them capable of making crude rafts, he saw no pressing need for them to cross the wide river that was subject to savage tidal surges twice a day.
He lay on his side and reached deep into the trench to scoop out a handful of dirt. At the current construction rate of seven logs a day, it would take them two weeks to complete the stockade. They also needed to add horizontal and transverse pole
s to reinforce the structure. And then they would have to make more arrows and pile up more rocks for throwing.
Once the hole was done, he debarked the thicker end of the log and placed it in the bonfire until a layer of char formed over the white wood. Together, they hoisted the trunk upright, sliding the still-smoking end into the trench.
Liz began stamping the soil down. “Dad said that birch resists decay better than aspen.”
“Shame, we have mostly aspens here.”
“That’s because aspens are beavers’ favorite food. Easier to chew.”
They made one more trip to the stream and added another log to the palisade before breaking for lunch. After they finished eating, John pulled out his notebook and wrote: Day 150. Cold and sunny. The stockade is 1/4 done. He thought for a while, then added: No sign of the ursines. Food stocks plentiful and morale high. He showed the page to Liz.
“Hmm.” She cocked her head musingly. “150 days is nearly five months, let me check something.” She pulled out her phone from where it was stored wrapped in a plastic bag in John’s cardboard box and switched the device on. The screen was showing 25th of August.
“August!” he chortled, made a snowball, and tossed it for Spot to catch. “The end of blooming summer. I’m amazed the battery charge lasted that long.”
“Unused batteries last longer when it’s cold.” She powered the phone down.
6 “May I scribble some calculations at the back of your glorious diary?”
“Sure.”
She wrote for a while and then looked up. “We arrived on the thirteenth of March. According to the phone calendar, 165 days have passed, but in reality we counted only 150 days. So, the day length here is twenty-five point four hours. Or twenty-five hours and twenty-four minutes.”
He yawned. “Please add that to the daily log.”
She did. As she was stowing the phone into the box, she paused, then rummaged inside. “That package, John, what’s that?” A box the size of a deck of playing cards lay on her palm, dark blue and unmarked.
He shrugged. “Some sorry remnant of the old life. I’ve always been a bit of a hoarder, collecting junk in my desk.”
She opened the box and pulled out a tiny device that had a crank handle and a cable with several attachment leads. “It’s a hand crank phone charger. How serendipitous. Did you know you had it?”
He shook his head. When they had inventoried their possessions on day one, he’d dismissed the box as some useless tchotchke like his model papyrus boat.
Liz said, “They were giving freebies at the Green Energy presentation last year. You must’ve gotten it there.”
“Sure.”
“Well, if we can keep the phone charged, we can play Candy Crush all day,” she said. “Or we can compare the date and time on the phone and in reality, for years to come.”
They worked the crank in turns for an hour to charge the battery from thirty-one to forty percent.
***
Later that night, John arose with a start. The forest had been so quiet, and he’d slept so soundly that he’d overslept and hadn’t replenished the fire on time. And now it was pitch-black inside. Had the fire gone out completely? Cold dread squeezed his heart. Was he too late? As he climbed from under the tiger pelt, he cursed himself for such carelessness. Stooped under the low ceiling, he shuffled toward the stone-lined hearth pit, navigating by touch. Normally, the hearth cast a ruddy glow over the floor, but now there was nothing.
Liz stirred behind him as his fingers brushed against the stone. It was still warm, even hot. Anxiously, he swept off a layer of cinders covering the remnants of the fire with a stick but found no live coals. He dropped the stick and sifted the ashes with his bare hands, jerking his hand away as he touched a hot ember. He leaned over the fire pit and hunted for that one live spark. He huffed and puffed and blew into the hearth. Ash flew into his face, making his nose itch and his eyes water.
And there it was, there, glowing faintly, like a cat’s eye in the dark.
Tinder had been stored inside a hollow in a log they used as a chopping board, and he searched for it blindly, as the glowing ember grew fainter and fainter. Sweat broke out on his brow and trickled into his eyes while his heart raced in panic. His hand closed over a dried stem of hogweed. And yes, thank God, there was tinder next to it. Powder-dry reed fluff and desiccated moss and grass.
Now, he laid a pinch of fluff over the fading ember and gently blew air at it through the pipe. After a tiny lick of flame appeared, he added another pinch, and when that flared up, he dropped a handful of crushed reed stems.
As he fed the growing flames with twigs and then small sticks, he praised Jesus, Jupiter, and Zeus. The disaster had been averted.
Chapter 38
Fort Bramble
Two weeks later, John pushed the last trunk into its hole, thus completing the wall. He craned his neck to gaze at the towering twelve-foot palisade and said, “And now we have a real fort.”
Liz, her face smudged with soot from charring the log ends, grinned and threw her arms around him. They would now add a few diagonal and transverse supports for extra strength. It would be easy to fit horizontal poles at the corners to make four platforms, where a person with a bow could stand to shoot arrows. They had already gathered a pile of long stakes for that purpose.
John had tied a sturdy ladder to the wall within the structure, and a lighter ladder stood outside. Although he doubted that ursines were nocturnal, the external ladder would be pulled up at night.
Liz climbed to the corner platform, unslung her bow, and nocked an arrow. With her hair in a loose ponytail and blowing in the wind, she reminded John of a fierce Amazon archer he’d seen in a book of Greek myths. Her hair grew darker from the roots now, and the crowfeet around her eyes had nearly vanished. She was as trim and lithe as someone half her age.
John’s own formerly receding hairline had turned thicker, and his slight shortsightedness was gone, too. He felt as if he were back in his mid-twenties.
Liz pulled the bowstring back, aimed, and let fly. The arrow arced over the bramble-ringed clearing and thudded into the center of a reed bundle placed at the edge of the woods sixty paces away. Her second arrow was soon in flight and struck the target above her first shot. For the next couple of minutes, she offloaded shot after shot, and soon the reed sheaf looked like a giant pincushion.
He whistled in admiration. “You’re simply Robin Hood.”
She slung the bow over her shoulder and gave him a small curtsy.
As he jogged to recover the black-feathered arrows, he wondered if the ursines would dare to attack them now. He hadn’t been able to climb the palisade, and he doubted the enemy could either. He supposed they might try to undermine the wall, but it would take them time to dig out the logs. They certainly wouldn’t be able to do so with the ground frozen as solid as concrete. And he had twenty short darts and scores of rocks to discourage them, even if Liz used up all her arrows.
He had harvested a hundred arrow shafts, straight and long, from ash trees. Those needed to be fletched, and he’d have to smash more flints to produce sharp flakes and fit them to shafts. Days’ worth of work.
But at least they could sleep in peace now.
Spot ranged around him in excitement, and John mused idly if the animal could be taught to fetch the arrows without snapping them in half with his jaws. Probably not—too excitable. The sun sparkled on drifts of crystalline snow that crunched cheerfully underfoot.
John lifted the sheaf with the arrows protruding from it and carried it to the thirty-pace marker post outside the entrance to the bramble enclosure. After recovering the arrows, he climbed to the corner platform with his own bow. He shot twenty arrows, missing only thrice.
“Not bad.” Liz clapped him on his shoulder. “Practice makes perfect.”
Their plan of defense was simple. Liz would start shooting from sixty paces, and then once the ursines closed within thirty-pace range, he would join her. They’d tr
y to keep the enemy from breaking through the brambles, but once that became impossible, they’d retreat to the citadel and pull up the ladder. From the top of the palisade, they had an unobstructed view over the clearing, except for the segment behind the hazel trees at the back. When the bears made their attack, they would come from that direction if they had any sense. Once the brutes broke into the bramble enclosure and reached the fort, they could be shot like fish in a barrel.
When John and Liz climbed down into the enclosed space for lunch, one problem became apparent—Spot had been left outside. He nosed around the chinks between the palisade stakes, sniffing reproachfully.
“I suppose he’d never learn to use the ladder,” Liz said.
“I’m sorry, Spot,” John thought-spoke. “It’s to keep the bears away.”
He received a flood of despondency in response. The poor animal thought he’d done something wrong to be excluded from the pack. No amount of explaining helped.
John sighed. “We’ll have to eat lunch outside the walls until he calms down.”
This was mightily inconvenient, as they had all their cooking skins set inside the wigwam. Still, John made a great show of bringing a hunk of dry meat outside and sharing it with Spot, as Liz began stewing the meat, mushrooms, and herbs in the cooking skin.
“It’s so gloomy and claustrophobic in here,” she called from behind the towering wall.
“At least you’re out of the wind.”
“Ah.”
Spot waited as John sliced off two slices of meat. He threw one to Spot and chewed another pensively, thinking how little they knew of their surroundings. Ten miles north, a small, fast river ran eastward—a stream that had not existed in the world where red double-decker buses plied the streets of London, and where jet contrails crisscrossed the sky. A huge tidal river flowed two hundred yards to the south, so different from the Thames he had known all his life. He had not the slightest idea of what lay on the other side. Only the Fleet seemed to correspond to the map of London, starting from a tiny lake amid the hills of what might have been Hampstead Heath, meandering eastward and then turning south in a broad curve.