by R Magnusholm
Her one visible eye, narrowed in concentration, glinted with steely determination and deadly purpose. Hers was the fragility of a schoolgirl and toughness of a fighter.
Suddenly, back in the wigwam, their baby awoke with a wail. John and Liz exchanged a weary glance. It had been but twenty minutes ago since Liz had managed to settle him. Babies were like that—unpredictable. John hoped that little George might go to sleep again, but instead he bawled louder.
“I suppose I better go and—” she began.
Drawn by the unfamiliar sound of a human baby, the ursine stepped from behind the tree, its ears pricking.
Liz lifted her bow, pulled back the cord, and let fly. The arrow shot out from between the interlocked hazel leaves, flashed over the belt of brambles, and hit the target in the chest. The ursine jumped up on the spot, clutching at the feathered shaft, spun around, and fled. It didn’t get far. Tripping over its own feet, it fell with a thud among the ferns.
Quickly, Liz nocked a second arrow and raised the bow again, evidently hoping the victim’s comrades might come out to help him and provide her with more targets. The dying bear thrashed, groaning. The groans grew weaker, then stopped. Bracken moved as his comrades crawled to retrieve the body, but they stayed too low for her to chance a shot.
In their wigwam, George roared disconsolately.
“We better go,” Liz said. “Might as well have breakfast.”
Moving slowly and deliberately, she crouched and then crawled from under the overhanging hazel branches. John followed.
On their way back, he picked a blackberry and popped it in his mouth. The tangy berry was barely ripe, and most of the harvest was still green. No matter. They had plenty of cured meat and enough water for at least a week. And if it rained a lot, they could stay besieged almost indefinitely.
After circling the clearing one more time and threatening the watching ursines with their bows, John and Liz gathered a handful of mushrooms and withdrew to their stockade.
The cause of their baby’s distress was the wet bedding of hay and moss that lined his basket. Once that was replaced with fresh materials, and he’d suckled Liz’s milk, he quieted down.
They drank a cup of water each and set about cooking the meat, mushrooms, and burdock root stew.
George lay on his back in his basket, cooing and pedaling his feet in the air. He would catch one foot, then another, apparently fascinated by his toes.
“Flexible, aren’t they?” Liz laughed. “No way could you scratch your ear with your foot.”
Troubled by her nonchalant tone, John looked up from stirring the stew. How can you be so happy, Liz? We’re trapped here.
She caught his glance. “What?”
He hesitated, then said, “The stew will be ready in ten minutes.”
“My dad used to say, ‘yes, we’re surrounded, and our supply lines are cut, so let’s eat.’ Isn’t that a sensible approach to life?”
He pushed his unhappy musings aside and smiled. Siege or no siege, life went on.
***
“They killed one of the Sunsetters,” Split-Ear informed Gnorrk. He slapped his brawny palm over his furry chest. A necklace of bird skulls around his thick neck rattled. “Got him right here.”
“My son,” Gnorrk said haughtily. “Warriors die all the time.”
“I know that, but . . .”
“But what?”
“The killing stick came out of nowhere.”
Gnorrk yawned. “So the dwarfs launched it from hiding.”
Split-Ear remained silent.
Beside them, the forest stream rushed noisily over the beaver dam. Upstream from the logjam, the brook widened into a still pond. Kingfishers flitted over the water in a flutter of blue and orange feathers, diving under the surface to catch tiny fish.
Gnorrk said, “To die in battle is the highest honor.”
“I know that, but the Sunsetters are scared.”
“So? They’re cowards and weaklings. That’s why we’ve beaten them so easily.”
“Some Woodlanders are scared too.”
Gnorrk gave Split-Ear a meaningful stare. “As long as you’re not scared.”
“No, father,” Split-Ear said levelly, but then dropped his gaze and shuffled his feet.
Gnorrk felt uneasy himself. The way the dwarfs killed from a safe distance, without ever coming close enough to be brained with a club, was most unnerving. But what happened last night was even scarier. Somehow, the dwarfs managed to impale a bear with a sharp branch of a sapling. Just how they did that, no one knew. Not even the wisest of elders. The dead warrior still stood there, and no one dared to pull his body down to give him proper rites of being eaten by his clan. Filthy crows pecked and tore his flesh instead.
Gnorrk had to admit, even if only to himself, that he was afraid, too. But he must never show it. Never. He wouldn’t be king for much longer if he did.
He ordered Split-Ear to send half of the Woodlanders back to their village. Gnorrk would tell the other chiefs to do the same. He didn’t need two hundred warriors to keep three dwarfs from water. One hundred was plenty.
“Send home those who are scared,” Gnorrk clarified his order as Split-Ear turned to go. “Only the steadfast deserve glory.”
“It shall be done, father.”
Gnorrk panted in the heat and glared toward the bramble fastness where the dwarfs dwelled. Screened by the intervening junipers and the rise of the land, it was invisible from where he stood. No matter. He didn’t need to see the enemy position to know they had no water. He smirked. Another hot and thirsty day.
He waded into the beaver pond, stuck his head under the surface, and drank until he felt fit to burst. He came ashore, dripping and in high spirits.
Beyond the pond, he spied a hunting party returning with a couple of deer carcasses. Ah, fresh meat. A forager trundled by with a sackful of mushrooms. Also good. Too much meat gave him bad dreams.
He’d eat, drink, sleep, and wait for the dwarfs to go crazy with thirst.
Chapter 67
Blasters and Balderdash
A week later John and Liz were sitting atop the parapet walkway, reposing on cushions they’d fashioned from animal skins filled with dried grass. Their bows lay within easy reach, but they didn’t expect to need them today. Or tomorrow.
In the last seven days, Liz had managed to shoot only one ursine, putting an arrow into its shoulder as the brute foolishly tried to hide behind a pine bole too thin for its stout body. Since then, the enemy watched them from afar and seldom presented an opportunity for a clear shot.
Their water trough was less than half-full, and they prayed for rain. John had begun digging a well but discarded the idea as impracticable. Their clearing lay atop a low ridge, with the ground sloping off on both sides, so the water table was too far down.
The sky, cerulean blue and cloudless, sported two suns. The regular one began setting in the west, while Jupiter floated over the eastern woods. As a little boy, John would sneak off to his local library to read trashy science fiction paperbacks. There, space explorers armed with blasters battled wicked aliens under green skies and multiple suns.
The parallel reality in which he and Liz now lived wasn’t as alien as all that: the sky remained blue, and the second sun was but a blazing dot—an extra bright star—rather than a second sun. The aliens they battled were not tentacle-sprouting monsters, and they fought them with bows and arrows instead of blasters.
His father had once caught him reading in bed—a book that wasn’t a management manual. The old man clouted the young John upside the head, tore the ‘blasters-and-balderdash’ book up, and threw it in the fireplace. John spent the night locked up in a cellar, standing on cold concrete in bare feet. He also paid a library fine.
Since then he’d read ‘belletristic and other garbage’ only furtively.
As he worked on a new arrow, his mind continued to drift, and he speculated if his peculiar upbringing had toughened him for the cutthroat boar
droom milieu, and later, for fighting sabertooth tigers and bloodthirsty ursines.
But whenever he tried to summon gratitude for that education, he failed, and that inability made him feel like a rotten log, all hollowed inside and punky. His mother had told him a thousand times that he was the most ungrateful son. Most ungrateful. Had she been right? If his old folks hadn’t toughened him, would he and Liz have died on day one?
No way to tell.
His classmates—those with doting parents—would probably have run in circles like headless chickens if they were in his shoes. They would have continued to freak out until wild animals put them out of their misery. But maybe not. Liz came from a supportive family, and she’d adapted to the new life, the same as himself.
She squeezed his knee. “Hey, Johnnie boy, why the long face?”
“I’ve had some happy musings about blasters and balderdash.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what my dad called science fiction.”
She sighed. “I wouldn’t mind having a blaster. Even an old shotgun would do.” After staring sharply into the surrounding woods, she added. “With plenty of ammo.”
John finished wrapping the well-chewed ribbon of sinew around the base of the flint point and handed the arrow to her. “This is the last one. I’m out of good shafts.” He glanced at the hazel bushes. They also produced reasonably straight shoots, but the wood was too light and bendy.
“A hundred and twenty-two arrows are plenty,” she said. “Anyway, we won’t have to shoot every single ursine to make them go away.”
“Hmm, the last time we had to kill them all. Even though the last three tried to run, two were already wounded with arrows, and the third got a rock in the snout from me. These guys just don’t know how to quit.”
“Didn’t lots of them leave a few days ago?”
“Uh-huh. Still, at least a hundred are left.”
“Perhaps the rest will leave too,” she said.
He remained silent. Why would the ursines leave? They had plenty of water and food. Or did they? Such a gathering of large animals in one place would have denuded the surrounding woods of foodstuffs within a couple of days. Spot had reported enemy foraging parties ranging far and wide. And it was getting increasingly hard for him to steal food, meaning there was less of it than before. Of course, the enemy was advanced enough to develop logistics to deliver provisions. Maybe that was the reason why half of them left on the second day.
If only there were some way to force the enemy to attack. But how could he and Liz provoke them?
As John ran a hand over the parapet wall, hoping that all those months of toil had not been in vain, a memory of a sci-fi story surfaced in his mind. There, the intrepid explorers used a small drone to lure a monster into the open, so it could be fried with a laser cannon.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. He quickly outlined his plan.
Liz nodded, picked up her bow and quiver, and climbed down the ladder. She headed to the front of their clearing and sat down in the grass behind the wall of brambles. Once out of sight of the ursines, she crawled thirty yards to the back of the clearing where she hid under the hazels. As far as the enemy was concerned, she remained in front of the clearing. Besides, the observers at the back wouldn’t have seen her coming out of their fort at all.
Once Liz reached her concealed position, John sent Spot to parade in the open, outside the ring of brambles. Capable of running three times faster than an ursine, the wolf wasn’t in any real danger and thought it was a good game. Moving purposefully, he circled the bramble reef, as if he were a land-based shark, then settled at the north end and lifted his muzzle to the sky. His howl arose in the still evening air, joyous and shrill, and hopefully annoying to the bears.
John looked through the wolf’s eyes, listened through his ears, and smelled the swelling ursine fury with Spot’s sensitive nose. Half a dozen enemies guarded the back of the clearing, with the nearest two only ten feet away, watching from the heart of a hawthorn thicket.
After five minutes of persistent howling, the ursines had enough. Two of them jumped out of concealment and dashed at the wolf with their clubs raised. They didn’t get far before Liz’s bow sang and one of the brutes took an arrow in its head and dropped like a cut tree. The second bear also hit the ground, taking cover behind some shrubbery. As it scampered away, Spot slashed its foot with his fangs.
The wolf trotted to the dead bear and started to feed. After alleviating his hunger, he lifted his bloodied snout up and howled triumphantly, but no more ursines came out to attack him. He resumed feeding. Back atop the wall, John fought an onslaught of nausea as he disentangled his mind from the wolf’s. The coppery stink of fresh blood was so strong, so real.
Half an hour later, the sun set, and twilight descended over the woods. Liz crept out from under the hazel bushes, sneaked back to the stockade, and climbed the ladder. “One monster less. A shame the second got away.”
“Not quite. Spot bit his foot,” John said, resisting the urge to pluck strands of bloodied ursine fur from his tongue. He reminded himself that his tongue was clean, and it wasn’t him who tore and devoured the still twitching flesh. Oh, the savage world . . .
“So, we inflicted two casualties on the enemy today,” she said. “A little victory.”
John wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and suppressed a gagging reflex.
“What’s wrong?” Liz asked.
“I’ve been with Spot when he was erm . . . dining. His table manners are somewhat terrible.”
“Want to lie down?”
“I’ll be all right.”
She put her hand on his knee. “We have to think of more ways to take the fight to them.”
“I could come out.” He glanced toward the woods. “Instead of Spot.”
Liz shook her head slowly. “We’d have to dismantle the barricade for that.”
“Not dismantle. Just move some deadwood aside.”
“And show the bastards the entrance?” she asked.
“They already know—by smell, I guess. A score of them are at the front and only six at the back. Well, four and a half now.”
Liz’s brow furrowed in thought; she fingered the string of her bow, making it hum a single low note.
John racked his brain for ideas, but couldn’t think of anything else other than sneaking out of their thorny enclosure at night. He’d head to the ursine camp where they had a bonfire, to shoot a sentry. But if the enemy cut off his retreat and prevented him from getting back, the game would be up. Wasn’t that what happened to Hector under the walls of Troy?
He said, “Suppose I come out and stand outside the entrance to flush them out.”
“They might get you before you can scramble back. If a score of them charged you at once, I wouldn’t be able to shoot them fast enough.”
“If the ursines don’t go away,” he said. “And if we get no rain for another four or five days, we’d have to come out at night, run to the river and pray the boat’s still there.”
“It will rain.”
“It will . . . one day.”
“No,” she said levelly. “Not one day. Soon.”
They both looked up at the cloudless sky. The eastern half was indigo-black and frosted with stars, amid which Jupiter peered like a bloodshot eye above the rampart of swaying fir tops. Directly overhead, the great dome of the sky darkened to the deepest shade of cobalt blue, while in the west the sunset painted the skyline with broad stripes of scarlet and gold. Aromas of wild thyme and honeysuckle drifted with the breeze, and nightingales trilled in the silent woods, now near, and now far. Gazing at the sunset sky, it was impossible to believe that death existed.
“It will rain,” Liz repeated adamantly as she gazed at the celestial fires, her eyes gleaming with the reflected light of that conflagration. She turned to him and grasped his hands. “If you believe it hard enough, it will happen.”
He remained silent, and looking into her luminous eyes, he
believed.
“However.” She squeezed his hands harder. “We need to prepare a Plan B if it doesn’t.”
They spent the rest of the evening making plans. Then John pulled up the external ladder and took the first watch of the night, while Liz slept with the baby basket by her side. As he watched the stars wheel across the cloudless sky, and Jupiter rose higher, he came up with a new way to harass the enemy.
Chapter 68
The Cat and Mouse Game
Gnorrk listened to the shrill wolf howls tearing through the night’s stillness. The source of the noise was but thirty paces beyond the forest stream. He stuffed his fingers into his ears and tried to sleep, but it was no use. The piercing notes soared higher and higher, setting Gnorrk’s teeth on edge.
His bodyguards who surrounded him in the shelter tossed and turned, also unable to sleep.
Finally, he had enough.
He flung the door flap open and climbed out. The Auroch Eye flooded the woods with a golden-brown light. It had not rained for days, and dry moss crackled under his feet. The two night-guards at the entrance of the shelter followed him as he headed to the low-burning fire. The firekeepers snapped to attention.
Gnorrk beckoned to the bears patrolling around the perimeter of the camp, and they hurried over. A dozen of his bodyguards milled about, growling irritably. The howls continued. Everyone’s ears twitched.
Gnorrk addressed the guards on patrol, “What’s that?” He pointed toward the source of the noise disturbance beyond the stream.
“Why, it’s water,” one of them answered, misunderstanding Gnorrk’s question and blinking idiotically.
“I mean that horrible noise.”
“It’s a wolf howling,” the second bear said. He seemed somewhat brighter than his comrade.
“I know it’s a wolf,” Gnorrk snapped. “What are you doing about the damned animal?”
The first guard said, “We’re listening to it.”
Gnorrk ground his teeth, restraining an impulse to smite the idiot with his club.
“Go shoo it away,” he ordered. He nudged two of his bodyguards. “Help those fools.”