by R Magnusholm
“If they make a move, you’ll probably know through Spot before I do.”
He squeezed her shoulder gently, descended the ladder, and stepped into their wigwam. The fire glowed in the hearth. George was breathing softly in his crib. John stretched on the tiger pelt and closed his eyes. As he sank through the layers of sleep, his mind melded with Spot’s. Together, they left the sheltering cave under the low-slung boughs of a fir tree on surefooted and silent paws.
Chapter 64
Shades of Sound
Easily avoiding the enemy pickets, Spot slid like a shadow among the trees. Now and again, the bears smelled him and growled. But the wolf kept well away.
The nearest enemy camp was a slovenly affair, with the ursines throwing together a few fallen branches and armfuls of torn grass to make a dozen shelters. Most of the bears slept in the open. They posted no sentries. A rich aroma of fish, specifically salmon, permeated the camp. No fire burned here, and no stink of smoke lingered anywhere around the bears. Obviously, this group of ursines didn’t know fire.
A couple hundred yards away lay another encampment. This one seemed better organized with two sentries sitting under a spreading oak, leaning their backs against the thick trunk and conversing in their growly language. Their shelters were better constructed with roofs covered with some hairless skins. These bears smelled of oysters, mussels, and sea salt.
The third camp had shelters made of reeds, similar in style to the first home John and Liz had built in the bramble clearing. This group didn’t consider it necessary to post sentries. The odor lingering around this camp was of the river and swamp, and quite distinct from the other camps. John’s mind, foggy and fuddled with sleep, tried to make sense of this but failed. He struggled to stay asleep, urging Spot on to the next camp.
The fourth camp was the largest and best-organized. A fire blazed in front of a large shelter. Roofed with bearskins, it didn’t look too dissimilar to John and Liz’s wigwam. There was not just one set of sentries, but three. Two guards sat by the entrance to the wigwam. Two other ursines tended the fire, while two more patrolled around the perimeter of their encampment.
All the ursines in this camp reeked of char and smoke. Which meant exactly what? Spot’s limited brain struggled to process this information even with the help of the portion of John’s awareness dwelling there, while John’s sleeping mind kept flying off on tangents instead of working on the problem. Perhaps it didn’t matter. He’d learn the answer when he woke.
Spot returned to the unguarded camp of the salmon-eaters and stole half a fish. He gobbled it up greedily, drank from the stream, and retired to his lair under the low-slung fir branches. The wolf laid his head on his paws and fell into a light sleep, where he’d be able to sense approaching danger and wake up in a blink.
In his wigwam, John turned on his right side and slid into a deep, dreamless slumber.
He awoke two hours later to the sound of a baby’s cries and heard Liz clambering down the internal ladder. Despite having slept, he felt deadly tired.
“It’s been quiet,” she said, reaching into the crib. She cooed to the tiny George, “You want mommy’s milk, don’t you? Oh yes, you do.”
As she fed their baby, John told her what he was able to find out with the help of Spot.
“So, we face an international alliance of bears,” she said.
“International sounds far too grand.”
“Four distinct tribes.”
“Four sleeping tribes,” he said.
For a long while, they said nothing. A low red glow emanated from the fire pit, waxing and waning. Outside the open wigwam door, the night was blind. He poked the embers with a stick, then dropped it in. They’d have to conserve firewood now. At least they had a full trough of water. He wished the auroch-hide tub was also filled with drinkable water instead of the vile tannin brew.
She said, “We might as well both sleep.”
Startled, he looked up from his contemplation of glowing coals. “No, no, that’s reckless.”
“If the woods fill up with angry bears preparing to attack, wouldn’t Spot alert you?”
He stroked his beard. “We can’t rely on him alone.”
He caught a glimpse of Spot’s dream of eating a boar. The wolf gobbled great chunks of fatty flesh, but no matter how much he ate, he remained hungry. Abruptly, his dream changed to where he was chased by his own kind, and the animal whined softly in his sleep.
Liz rocked the baby in her lap, yawning. “If the ursines attack, it’ll be at dawn. It’s too dark to see. Even for them.”
He watched her holding their baby in the shifting firelight, a sight of peaceful domesticity he’d seen so many times before. It was hard to believe that two hundred fierce warriors besieged them. Bears who spoke, used clubs, built wigwams, and knew fire. An uncanny certainty had stolen into his heart: he, Liz, and George would never see another dawn. John shivered, suppressing a vision of flashing ursine teeth and muzzles stained red. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and silently. Panicking or giving in to despair would accomplish nothing. Besides, their stockade was strong. He and Liz were armed, and they had Spot to spy for them.
John stood. “Sleep, Liz. I might join you later.”
He brushed his lips against her cheek and went outside. In the absence of the moon and Jupiter, it was pitch-black. He found the ladder by touch and climbed to the top of the parapet. Cool wind ruffled his hair that had grown to shoulder length. To keep it out of his eyes, he had lopped it short in the front, but as neither Liz nor he were hairdressers, he’d let it grow long at the back and sides. The last time he’d seen his reflection in a still pool of water, he looked like a wild rocker or a Viking.
Darkness enfolded him on all sides. The distant enemy campfire must have burned low, for he couldn’t see even a flicker of light anywhere. Despite his eyes being well-adjusted to the dark, when he peered about himself, all he saw was a thick unrelieved black. That wasn’t anything unusual on overcast nights and not a source of danger by itself. He thought back to the night when he and Liz had stood, shivering, by the entrance to their enclosure, rocks in their hands, listening to tigers roar nearby.
Tonight, the brutes kept silent. Perhaps it was too dark for them, too. Or they were scared off by the mass invasion of aggressive ursines.
Bereft of any celestial illumination, the world became a featureless void. None of the surrounding clearing could be seen, the position of hazel trees behind him revealed only by the sibilant rustling of windblown foliage and the occasional clicking of twigs. To his right, the wind soughed in the rampart of conifers. The familiar peaceful sound soothed and relaxed him. He’d just sit here and listen for a while.
Then maybe he’d sleep as Liz had suggested.
As minutes slipped by, he began to distinguish between the shades of sound the wind made as it rushed through the night forest. In his mind’s eye, he saw their clearing again, insofar as he knew which way he faced. He imagined that was how a blind man might perceive the world.
After connecting to the wolf and establishing that the ursines weren’t massing up for an attack, he climbed down, set the alarm on Liz’s phone to ring in two hours and stretched out next to her. He wondered how his previous family was doing—Ben and Emily must have grown taller—and was there another version of him or was his wife a widow? Useless to ponder, and as a poet said: What else is life but forever saying goodbye?
He slept.
Chapter 65
Before Dawn
Gnorrk woke in the black of the night. He shook awake the bodyguards sharing his shelter and threw the entrance flap open. The time had come to implement his plan to clear a path in the brambles surrounding the dwarf village.
The wind blew briskly, swaying tree crowns and whipping up trailing willow branches by the beaver pond. Although Gnorrk saw none of those things in the dark, his ears and nose worked just fine. All around him, the trees creaked and groaned. Perfect to mask the sound of his warriors closing in on the vi
le dwarfs.
Accompanied by a score of his best stalkers, Gnorrk set off for the enemy village. He walked no more than a few steps before he blundered into a juniper bush. His sensitive nose smarting from contact with the scratchy needles, he continued with both paws outstretched in front of him. A hollow boing sound came from Gnorrk’s right. Someone must have walked snout-first into a tree trunk.
What a moron.
On his other side, some idiot tripped and fell heavily, breaking a dry branch. The crack made Gnorrk wince and growl angrily under his breath. At length, navigating purely by smell, the bears came to the edge of the brambles. The aroma of ripening berries was unmistakable, and Gnorrk sensed that the strange structure built by the dwarfs lay to the left.
He recalled that the village stood in a clearing, with no overhanging trees to obscure the moon and the Auroch Eye from view, but the sky was as black as the surrounding woods.
Perfect. If he couldn’t see anything, the vile dwarfs wouldn’t spot his warriors, either.
“Clear the brambles,” he ordered.
He listened as his troops slowly and carefully cleared the path, working by touch alone. Gnorrk waited patiently, thinking. He didn’t need a combined army of four clans to kill three dwarfs. His twenty warriors would snuff out the whelps in their sleep, and everyone—especially the chiefs of the allied clans—would know that Gnorrk wasn’t just the terror of the battlefield, but also a sneaky and silent killer.
The work was proceeding apace, and they were already two or three steps into the brambles, when something snapped and swung viciously. The brief swishing sound was followed by a thump and a grunt of surprise and pain. Gnorrk froze. Someone was hurt. But why? How?
Could the dwarfs see in the dark? Were they pointing their killing sticks at him right now?
“Get down,” he ordered, taking his own advice.
“Grandpaw, help me!” a disembodied voice groaned ahead of him, far too loud for a stealthy operation.
“Silence, you moron,” someone else hissed. “And get down.”
The stricken warrior groaned louder. Soon he abandoned all sense of duty and warrior code and began emitting agonized shrieks.
Great, Gnorrk thought, if the dwarfs haven’t heard the noise before, they’d be sure to hear it now. Pushing his warriors aside, he advanced at a crouch. He reached the injured bear who instead of getting down stood bolt upright, squealing like a female being taken against her will. Most un-warrior-like behavior. Gnorrk tried to pull him down, but something held him up. Gnorrk smelled fresh blood. Lots of it. He ran his paws over the stricken trooper who was twisting like an eel. Gnorrk’s paw closed over what seemed to be an end of a broken-off tree limb protruding from the wounded bear’s back. Sharp and slick with blood, it had transfixed the young warrior in place. Gored him like an auroch’s horn.
The stricken bear evidently came to the same conclusion, because he started thrashing and yelling. “Aargh, it’s an auroch. An auroch!”
Gnorrk’s warriors bolted, crashing blindly through the thickets. He considered calling the cowards back, but it was pointless. The dwarfs were already stirring awake.
“An auroch got me,” the wounded bear sobbed.
An auroch? No, no. Impossible . . . Gnorrk would’ve smelled the beast a thousand paces away. Unless. Unless it was the magical spirit-auroch the shaman had spoken of a few times to frighten unruly cubs.
He reached in the dark beyond the doomed warrior, probing with his outstretched fingers. Was there an auroch standing a paw’s-length away? But the beast had no odor. And what was it doing in the bramble thicket? Gnorrk found no auroch there, just a springy sapling that kept bending and shuddering. One of its branches had gored the young warrior in his stomach. The wretch would surely die.
Through the interlaced hazel branches, Gnorrk saw one of the dwarfs emerge with a blazing torch atop their strange structure. Were the other dwarfs already pointing killing sticks at Gnorrk? He stooped lower and crawled away. Once under the cover of trees, he straightened to his full height, sniffing the air. His nose told him that all of his warriors had fled, and at least one had voided his bowels in the process. His nose also informed him that a wolf crouched behind him, ready to spring on his back.
With an angry roar, Gnorrk spun around and brought his club down. It whistled through the air and struck a tree root. The wolf was now at his left side, snarling. Gnorrk backed off, growling, then lost his nerve and fled pell-mell after his posse of warriors. The wolf gave chase, snapping at his heels, and just before Gnorrk gained the safety of his camp, he stumbled and went sprawling. As he regained his feet, the wolf leaped and its fangs slashed Gnorrk’s right buttock.
Gnorrk snarled and swung his club about himself, driving the pesky animal off.
Defeated and hurting in such a delicate spot, Gnorrk slunk into his camp, crawled into his shelter, and lay sleepless until morning, alternately seething with rage and shivering with fear.
***
John held a burning pine branch above his head and peered into the dark. The bubble of shifting ruddy light extended some twenty paces, with walls of blackness beyond. Out of the darkness came the most distressing screams and sobs. One of the spring traps must have nailed an ursine. Were other bears already in the clearing, preparing to storm the fort?
He lifted the makeshift torch higher and strained his eyes to penetrate the gloom. While no enemies lurked beneath the walls, nothing precluded them from hiding just out of sight, waiting for him to lower the ladder and come to investigate the disturbance.
The firebrand in his hand burned low, and before it could scorch his fingers, he flung it into the night. As it flew, it flared brighter, and the shadows leaped across the clearing. It landed in the dewy grass, guttered for a while, and went out, plunging the world into darkness.
He heard Liz climbing the inner ladder behind him. She said. “I hope you’re not planning to go out there.”
“Err . . . no.”
“It could be a trap.”
“It’s a trap, all right. One of ours.”
Liz sighed. “I mean they might be trying to lure us out.”
The agonized groans continued. Someone crashed through the trees amid much snarling and growling. A rush of mental imagery from Spot flooded his mind. A gaggle of ursines fleeing through the pitch-black woods. One bear mortally wounded. Another bear, alone and seething with rage. This one was older and braver than the rest—probably a chieftain. All this the wolf perceived through scent alone, for even he could see nothing in the stygian dark.
John ordered Spot to back off and observe, but the wolf ignored him and pursued the ursine chieftain back to the enemy camp, the noise of breaking branches growing fainter with distance. A few drops of rain fell, pattering on the broad bramble leaves beyond the palisade wall. Rain was good. The water trough had been positioned to catch the run-off from the roof. The ursine hit by the trap gradually quieted.
John said, “We can sleep safely till morning. The bastards are terrified now.”
“And so they should be.”
They climbed down the inside ladder and slept fitfully until daybreak, jumping at the slightest sound, but the night passed without further incident.
Chapter 66
The Siege
The dawn found John and Liz patrolling the clearing, their bows ready. Earlier, Spot had reported that no ursines were massing to storm Fort Bramble, but the glade was still surrounded by enemy observation posts.
The golden glow of the rising sun suffused the woods in the east. Outlined starkly against the rosy sky, treetops swayed in the wind. Dewy hazel leaves tickled John’s cheek as he peered from inside the bush at the back of their clearing.
At the outer fringe of the bramble barrier, a dead ursine stood transfixed in place. Its head hung low over its chest, but otherwise it appeared alive. Its wide-open eyes stared glassily at the ripening berries and thorny vines, as if the brute was lost in profound contemplation of botanical wonders. Joh
n felt a tinge of unreality—this couldn’t really be happening.
A crow swooped onto the dead bear’s shoulder and proceeded to peck at its eyeballs. A second crow alighted on the other shoulder, and then a third perched on the drooping head. As was their custom, the birds began squabbling noisily. John turned away. It was a cruel world, and in the last year, he’d witnessed more carnage than the average twenty-first century urbanite saw in a lifetime, unless he were a slaughterhouse worker or a trauma surgeon.
Attracted by the commotion, an enemy sentry peered around a tree forty paces away.
Liz aimed her bow. The ursine was sniffing the air, perhaps suspecting danger, but he clearly didn’t see them. Before she could let the arrow fly, the enemy moved out of sight, blissfully unaware of the peril he’d so narrowly escaped.
She lowered her bow and whispered, “Should I try to nail him?”
“Yeah.”
“I might miss.”
“You won’t.”
“A fifty-fifty chance of a hit at this range.”
He grinned. “Go for it.” A near miss should still unnerve the sons of bitches. “We have one hundred and nineteen arrows, and I’ll make two or three more today.”
“All right.”
To avoid straining her arms, Liz kept the bow at quarter draw, the nocked arrow pointed at the ground. John waited. No way to tell when the ursine might expose himself to a shot. Minutes drifted by. He kept peering toward the front entrance to their stockade, blocked by the deadfall, to make sure nobody tried to sneak up on them from that direction. Not that the enemy could do that quickly or silently.
Out of the corner of his eye, he admired the clean, clear lines of Liz’s profile and the soft fall of her honey-blonde hair, gathered in a ponytail and cascading down her back. Shadows of hazel leaves moved ceaselessly, caressing her face and her slender neck. Under cheerier circumstances, the effect might’ve been erotic, but now the leaf shadows on her dear face were like shifting bruises.