by Dan Davis
Sif stared, her anger boiling up again. “You should not have entered when the spirits were near.”
“What were you showing him anyway?”
“It is not for you to know.”
He sighed in frustration. “This is pointless. We will be joined soon enough, Sif, you will submit to me, and then you have to tell me all anyway.”
At his confident assertion, her mouth hung open and she stared for a moment before forcing herself to respond. “You have At’ara,” she said and then clamped her mouth shut. Of all the words she could have spoken, why had she spoken those?
Alef groaned and gestured at the sky to ward against bad fortune. “A chief needs a woman who is worthy. And At’ara will give herself to any man in exchange for a trinket.”
“You are not chief yet,” she said quietly. “And I told you, I will not submit to you until I find Zani.”
“And I told you she is gone. The Heryos took her and that is that. Let her go, woman.”
“If the Heryos have her then we must get her back.”
He looked at her as if the spirits had taken her mind. “There is no getting her back from them, you know that.”
Sif leaned in. “A real chief would protect his people.”
Alef scoffed, unmoved by her words. “Was Zani ever one of my people? She kept apart from us and this is what happens.”
“Take your hunters, track her, and free her. Bring her home.”
Pinching his nose, Alef laughed and shook his head. “You have no idea what you are saying. You are not like Zani and you are certainly not like Sama, Sif, you are just a girl who knows nothing. The Heryos are too strong and they are too many and we have no hope of fighting them, not ever. Like the Furun they have their gods watching over them, defending them. They have a god more powerful than you would believe and he will conquer all of this land and there is nothing we can do against such power, nothing, because we have no one to do the same for us and that is why our people will be destroyed.” He broke off, stopping himself from saying more.
“We have the Great Mother.” Sif heard her voice coming out small and timid, as if she really was just a girl.
He rolled his head and groaned in frustration. “Do we? Have you ever seen her? Because I haven’t and neither has anyone else. I doubt she even walks the earth now, if she ever did.”
Sif was horrified at his doubts. “Zani has seen her, spoken to her even, and so has Sama. All the initiated have, in all the tribes, hundreds have seen her, Alef, hundreds and she is out there watching over us and keeping us safe, you know that.”
Smirking, Alef shook his head. “They lied to us. If she was here, she would defend us against the Heryos but she does nothing. Nothing! In fact, I hope she is a lie because if she is here somewhere then she is a coward who will not protect her people. I will not love a god like that and I will not stand by and do nothing when we are abandoned.”
Appalled now she stared at him. “The spirits have taken your wits.”
“Have they?” He waved in the air as if to dismiss her concerns and he stepped closer still, looking down at her. “Did they ever tell you where the Mother dwells? Where is this sacred land? Where is it?” His tone became intense and serious and he touched her arm with surprising gentleness.
Surprised, she shook her head. “It is for the initiated to know.”
“If you could find out, Sif, somehow then she might help us. If the Mother was here she could help our people to survive what is coming. The Mother could help us to find Zani. She would help to bring her back from the Heryos.”
“The Mother?” Sif asked, astonished. “The goddess, Alef?”
“Yes, yes.” His fingers on her arm turned into a grip that tightened and he leaned his face so close to hers that she could feel his hot breath on her skin. “Surely, Sif, surely you could find the Mother?”
She shook his hand off her arm and looked deep into his eyes. There was a strange light in there that was new or that she had not noticed before. “You are mad. Something has you in its power, I see it now.”
That shocked and then angered him. “I am trying to help us, that is all.”
“No,” she said, pushing past him and lifting her bow and her packs onto her shoulders. “If you wished to help you would find Zani and bring her home. But I see I will have to do it myself.”
She turned and strode away while he called after her angrily and then pleading and she expected him to come and grab her again but he did not and she walked on away from the village, resisting the urge to start running while he could still see her.
From the corner of her eye she saw a face duck back behind the wall of another house and she ground her teeth in anger because she had recognised him. Satara had been spying on her from a distance, watching and listening as she spoke to Alef and she was tempted to go and tell him that she knew that he had murdered Sama and that she would kill him in turn. But she did not want to warn him.
Besides, she really did want to look for Zani. If the Heryos had taken her then she had to go south and find her. It had been days now since she had gone but perhaps there would still be some hint of a trail to be discovered. The Heryos were a noisy people who made big fires and left a mess behind and some even rode on the backs of horses. If a raiding party had come through then perhaps other tribes had been raided and the Furun villages in the south, too, and she could follow the trail all the way to Zani.
But Sif had never been so far inland. It had always been forbidden, since the beginning of time, to go to the Furun. Trading was done at special places between the coast and the villages at certain times of the year by the chiefs and other older hunters but otherwise they mostly left each other alone. Since the Heryos had come, though, in the days of her grandfathers, the Furun villages had fallen to new lords who sometimes came into the lands of her people.
“They believe all the earth belongs to them,” Zani had told her once when she was a girl, watching the passing of a Heryos warband from the safety of the woodland. She had been amazed at the way some of them sat on the backs of fat bellied, shaggy coated horses and knew it was powerful magic to have such control over beasts. They had frightened her even from afar.
“All the earth?” she had whispered in reply. “Not our village. Not the seal beaches.”
“Our village, too,” Zani had said.
The girl Sif had been awed. “How do you know this?”
“The Mother tells us.”
Sif, running steadily south through the ancient woodland, remembered it with sadness and with a painful longing. They had been together day and night back then and never once had she felt alone. In fact, she had never conceived of loneliness. Waking each morning, warm and safe beside Zani, sharing her canoe and weaving fish traps together and even holding her hand as they walked the shore or the woodland before finally crawling into Zani’s furs again every night.
It was not much later though when Zani had begun to leave her alone for long stretches and to send her off to forage for herbs by herself in the woods.
Then Zani spent nights out by herself and Sif, lying awake in the darkness listening to the wind and the water outside, discovered what it meant to be alone.
Sif began also to understand that the spirits were calling Zani away from her and though the wisewoman never stopped teaching her the secrets of their people and showing her the nature of the spirits and how to read the signs of the earth she knew that she, Sif, was just one soul amongst many in the village. Nevertheless, she could still remember those years when she had felt like the most important being in this world and that was why she would not give up on Zani now, wherever she was.
Before darkness fell Sif slowed her steady running and found a place to sleep beneath an elder bush at the edge of the woodland.
“Protect me, Elder Mother,” she whispered to the spirit of the bush as she crawled beneath it.
Beyond the treeline the river had spread over the floodplain and so tomorrow she would have to find a wa
y around but now she had to rest and she gathered a pile of last fall’s leaves to sleep on and dragged more over her. They were damp and she could feel the beetles crawling over her legs but it would be warmer than her buckskin alone. Her stomach growled and her hunger annoyed her. She should have spent time gathering food before heading away from the village last night but she had been too angry with Alef and Satara and with all of them to do that and now she would have to waste a day at least and probably more fishing the river or hunting for game. It would be easier if she had others to help her, she thought, bitterly as she fell asleep beneath her blanket of leaves.
She thought she heard voices and footsteps in the night but the wind was too strong to be sure and though she strained to listen she eventually fell asleep, certain that the Elder Mother would keep her safe until dawn.
Not long after sunrise, she stood in the river with her single fishing arrow on her bowstring. Longer than the others, the bone point was barbed and though she had broken almost half the barbs on stones on the riverbed already this spring, it still worked well enough. She stood motionless waiting for a long time as the sun rose and the morning wore on and she began to consider moving to another place when a trout swam lazily between her legs. If she had had her hands in the water she could have grabbed it but she had not been expecting trout. The spirit of the river had seen her waiting here all morning and so had sent the trout to her and she knew not to move her arrow now because the fish would soon offer itself up. Sure enough, the fish drifted back and forth around her until it crossed slowly below her arrow. Drawing back her bowstring with a smooth motion she shot it through just behind its head and waded ashore with the fish held aloft on the shaft. It was big like the ones found in the lake upstream.
“Thank you for your blessing, swift one,” she said as she worked her knife into the belly of writhing, gaping fish.
It would have been pleasant to make a small fire to dry and warm her legs and cook the flesh but she did not have time and so ate it raw on the riverbank before throwing the skin back into the water. The sun was high now, past noon, and she cursed herself once more for her failure to prepare for this journey. She had left late the day before and now it was late today and she had hardly travelled far from the village at all. Still, the nearest of the Heryos were not more than a day to the south now and she could start looking for signs of Zani tomorrow. She would have to hide in the woods and watch their villages from afar. Please, Great Mother, give me the strength and the sight to find Zani amongst the evil men of the south.
There was movement in the trees.
She froze, her eyes darting back and forth across the shadows. The wind had not caused the movement, she knew that. Something large was in there. It could have been a deer and there was nothing to be seen now but the spirits whispered warnings to her and so she grabbed her bow and her packs and ran, keeping low and heading for the trees in the south, away from the danger.
It was no old oak woodland like the one her tribe dwelt in through winter but instead a tangle of dense scrub growing on a spit of dry land above the boggy floodplain by the river but she was glad to reach it all the same. Crouching as she slowed her breathing, she peered back the way she had come, watching, tasting the air and listening to the spirits.
There was something there, moving along the edge of the treeline but keeping to the shadows. No deer moved like that and so it had to be a man moving stealthily and that thought made her fearful.
If it was a man, he had surely followed her from the village and that meant it was Satara. Had he come to kill her, too? Would he send a sling stone at her head and sink her body in the river to be fed on until her flesh returned to the earth, as he had done with the body of Sama?
Taking her best hunting arrow from her bag, she crept away into the scrub and continued deeper. The other side of this strip of trees and brush was not far and she reached the edge quickly, looking out now onto a water meadow of young green grasses rippling and bobbing in the morning wind.
The river wound lazily on her left. The open ground ahead was dangerous to be sure but she could hide in the grass, perhaps. In that grass she could creep forward on her belly out of sight of Satara and then she might hide in the huge woodland of mature trees on the other side and use the shelter of the trees to journey further south into the lands of the Heryos. Would Satara follow her that far, she wondered? He was no great hunter and she was sure she could lose his pursuit in time if she went carefully now while he was close.
While she was planning she was surprised by a sudden explosion of sound behind her as a group of men burst into motion.
Two or three or more they were and though she could not see them through the undergrowth she heard them crashing toward her and she ran without hesitation from her hiding place into the meadow and on through the long grass.
Her mind reeled in confusion. Had Satara brought other hunters to help him? Cold fear gripped her bowels when she realised they could be the Heryos raiding party, come to carry her off as they had carried off Zani.
A voice was shouting but she ignored it and kept running, hearing the men chasing her, until she heard her own name being called.
Sif turned and raised her bow with the arrow on the string, ready to shoot down her pursuers.
The closest of them stopped in turn and held up his hands, one with a spear and the other empty, the fingers spread.
Alef.
It was Alef who had followed her. It was Alef who had chased her. Karu, N’fal, and P’nu were in a line behind him with their own hunting weapons in hand and slowly they spread out to either side, watching her closely, moving as steadily and silently as they did when they hunted seals sleeping on the rocks by the river mouth.
“What are you doing, Alef?” she asked, breathing heavily but keeping her bow ready to shoot.
He smiled and forced a laugh. “I came to help you,” he called and glanced at the others now on his flanks. “Put your bow down, Sif. I am here now. Come. Come, we will find Zani together.”
Sif hesitated as the spirits warned her to be wary. “I don’t want your help anymore, Alef,” she said, watching the hunters.
Alef lowered his hands and clutched his spear again. “Sif—” he began but then he froze, looking past her.
Such a childish trick, she thought, to divert her attention but the other hunters had the same shocked expressions on their faces as they stared behind her at something that had horrified them.
And so she turned.
Her breath caught in her throat and her legs turned weak beneath her.
A Heryos warband had come from the trees.
The chief of them was a giant, towering above the other Heryos, and he was clad in shining bronze scales like a fish and he wore the pelt of some great beast upon his head and shoulders, the fur of the creature damp but fluttering in the wind. The light of the afternoon sun seemed almost to pour forth from him to shine upon her and upon all those around him.
The spirits shrieked and her heart thundered like the sea against her chest for this magnificent figure before her, surely, was a god of the Heryos.
Drawing back her bow in a swift, sure motion, Sif shot him.
23. Healing
“We are fortunate,” Wetelos said, pointing through the trees. “The spirits are with us, lord. There are the Seal Men here and out in the open, so far from the sea.”
They were hurrying. Herkuhlos saw the strange figures out beyond the trees in a kind of wild pasture with the river on one side and woodland on all the others. Four of them wore clothing made from strange skins of mottled grey while the closest one was in buckskin and fox fur.
“Is it safe?” he asked. “They are armed.”
Wetelos stared as if the exertions of their flight had finally taken his strength. “They are not like the Heryos, lord. They are not even like the Furun. Though they are out hunting, they are more likely to flee at the sight of us than to cause us harm. It is well, lord, I will speak to them. But we must
hurry before they run.”
“Wait,” Herkuhlos said, crouching to lay the wounded Pehur onto the ground, holding his head so that it would not flop back. “Perhaps you should wait here with Sunhus,” he said to Amra, pointing at her and Sunhus and then at the ground.
She chopped her hand in the air, her brows knitted in outrage at the suggestion.
All together then, they stepped out of the shadows beneath the trees, pushed through the bushes, and descended the sandy bank toward the long grass of the meadow. As they advanced, Wetelos waved a hand in the air and opened his mouth to call out a greeting.
Across the meadow, the nearest figure turned, froze.
Herkuhlos was surprised to see it was a woman and that she had an arrow ready on her bowstring but he hardly had time to ponder what these Seal People were doing here in this meadow because in a fluid motion that would credit any warrior of Kolnos she bent her bow and shot her arrow.
He flinched and threw his hands over his face but still had time to see the curving flight of the arrow rising and dropping before it whacked against the scales of his bronze armour with a crack. The impact hurt and winded him but the arrow shattered and the pieces flew apart into the undergrowth.
Angry at the unprovoked attack, Herkuhlos moved against her, starting through the long grass and grabbing his club from its strap over his shoulder. He did not intend to kill the woman who had tried to kill him but he would not stand still and let her shoot him and neither would he flee from these people.
And instead of fleeing from him the woman crouched and began backing away as she pulled another arrow from her bag and put it on her string.
There was a blur in the air and he flinched as a stone hit him on the shoulder, launched from a sling by one of the men who were also now retreating.
Wetelos ran forward with his arms in the air, shouting a stream of words and placed himself between Herkuhlos and the retreating Seal Men. It was impossible to understand what he was yelling but Herkuhlos stopped and so did the Seal Men who stopped slinging their stones and even stopped retreating.