‘Perhaps the time has come to consider it.’ Akarin snorted with disgust, Ulstal winced as though at blasphemy, Hirfac shook her head, but Uto went on. ‘Were we not all born savage? Did not the Maker teach us to first speak peace?’
‘So he did,’ said Shebat.
‘I will not hear this!’ Ulstal struggled to his feet, wheezing with the effort.
‘You will.’ Waerdinur waved him down. ‘You will sit and sweat and listen as all sit and listen here. Uto has earned her right to speak.’ And Waerdinur held her eye. ‘But she is wrong. Savages at the Seeking Pool? Outsiders’ boots upon the sacred ground? Upon the stones where trod the Maker’s feet?’ The others groaned at each new outrage, and Waerdinur knew he had them. ‘What should we do, Uto?’
‘I do not like that there are only six to make the choice—’
‘Six is enough,’ said Akarin.
Uto saw they were all fixed on the steel road and she sighed, and reluctantly nodded. ‘We kill them all.’
‘Then the Gathering has spoken.’ Waerdinur stood, and took the blessed pouch from the altar, knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt from the floor, the sacred dirt of Ashranc, warm and damp with life, and he put it in the pouch and offered it to Uto. ‘You spoke against this, you must lead.’
She slipped from her stone and took the pouch. ‘I do not rejoice in this,’ she said.
‘It is not necessary that we rejoice. Only that we do. Prepare the weapons.’ And Waerdinur put his hand on Shebat’s shoulder.
Shebat slowly nodded, slowly rose, slowly put on his robe. He was no young man any more and it took time, especially since, even if he saw the need, there was no eagerness in his heart. Death sat close beside him, he knew, too close for him to revel in bringing it to others.
He shuffled from the steam and to the archway as the horn was sounded, shrill and grating, to arms, to arms, the younger people putting aside their tasks and stepping out into the evening, preparing themselves for the journey, kissing their closest farewell. There would be no more than sixty left behind, and those children and old ones. Old and useless and sitting close to death, as he was.
He passed the Heartwoods, and patted his fondly, and felt the need to work upon it, and so he took out his knife, and considered, and finally stripped the slightest shaving. That would be today’s change. Tomorrow might bring another. He wondered how many of the People had worked upon it before his birth. How many would work upon it after his death.
Into the stone darkness he went, the weight of mountains heavy above him, the flickering oil wicks making gleam the Maker’s designs, set into the stone of the floor in thrice-blessed metal. Shebat’s footsteps echoed in the silence, through the first hall to the place of weapons, his sore leg dragging behind him. Old wound, old wound that never heals. The glory of victory lasts a moment, the wounds are always. Though he loved the weapons, for the Maker taught the love of metal and of the thing well made and fitted for its purpose, he gave them out only with regret.
‘For the Maker taught also that each blow struck is its own failure,’ he sang softly as one blade at a time he emptied the racks, wood polished smooth by the fingertips of his forebears. ‘Victory is only in the hand taken, in the soft word spoken, in the gift freely given.’ But he watched the faces of the young ones as they took from him the tools of death, hot and eager, and feared they heard his words but let their meaning slip away. Too often of late the Gathering spoke in steel.
Uto came last, as fitted the leader. Shebat still thought she should have been the Right Hand, but in these hard days soft words rarely found willing ears. Shebat handed her the final blade.
‘This one I kept for you. Forged with my own hands, when I was young and strong and had no doubts. My best work. Sometimes the metal…’ and he rubbed dry fingertips against thumb as he sought the words, ‘comes out right.’
She sadly smiled as she took the sword. ‘Will this come out right, do you think?’
‘We can hope.’
‘I worry we have lost our way. There was a time I felt so sure of the path I had only to walk forward and I would be upon it. Now I am hemmed in by doubts and know not which way to turn.’
‘Waerdinur wants what is best for us.’ But Shebat wondered if it was himself he struggled to convince.
‘So do we all. But we disagree on what is best and how to get it. Waerdinur is a good man, and strong, and loving, and can be admired for many reasons.’
‘You say that as if it is a bad thing.’
‘It makes us likely to agree when we had better consider. The soft voices are all lost in the babble. Because Waerdinur is full of fire. He burns to wake the Dragon. To make the world as it was.’
‘Would that be such a bad thing?’
‘No. But the world does not go back.’ She lifted the blade he had given her and looked at it, the flickering reflection of the lights on her face. ‘I am afraid.’
‘You?’ he said. ‘Never!’
‘Always. Not of our enemies. Of ourselves.’
‘The Maker taught us it is not fear, but how we face it that counts. Be well, my old friend.’ And he folded Uto in his arms, and wished that he was young again.
They marched through the High Gate swift and sure, for once the Gathering has debated the arguments and spoken its judgement there is no purpose in delay. They marched with swords sharpened and shields slung that had been ancient in the days of Uto’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather. They marched over the names of their ancestors, etched in bronze, and Uto asked herself whether those Dragon People of the past would have stood shoulder to shoulder with this cause of theirs. Would the Gatherings of the past have sent them out to kill? Perhaps. Times rarely change as much as we suppose.
They left Ashranc behind, but they carried Ashranc with them, the sacred dirt of their home kept in her pouch. Swift and sure they marched and it was not long before they reached the valley of the Seeking Pool, the mirror of the surface still holding a patch of sky. Scarlaer was waiting in the ruin.
‘Have you caught them?’ asked Uto.
‘No.’ The young hunter frowned as if the Outsiders’ escape was an insult to him alone. Some men, especially young ones, are fixed on taking offence at everything, from a rain shower to a fallen tree. From that offence they can fashion an excuse for any folly and any outrage. He would need watching. ‘But we have their tracks.’
‘How many are they?’
Maslingal squatted over the ground, lips pressed tight together. ‘The marks are strange. Sometimes it has the feel of two trying to seem a dozen, sometimes of a dozen trying to seem like two. Sometimes it has the feel of carelessness, sometimes the feel of wanting to be followed.’
‘They will receive their wish and far more than they wished for, then,’ growled Scarlaer.
‘It is best never to give your enemy what they most desire.’ But Uto knew she was without choice. Who has choice, in the end? ‘Let us follow. But let us be watchful.’
Only when snow came and hid the moon did Uto give the sign to stop, lying awake under the burden of leadership as the time slipped by, feeling the warmth of the earth and fearing for what would come.
In the morning they felt the first chill and she waved to the others to put on their furs. They left the sacred ground and passed into the forest, jogging in a rustling crowd. Scarlaer led them fast and merciless after the tracks, always ahead, always beckoning them on, and Uto ached and trembled and breathed hard, wondering how many more years she could run like this.
They stopped to eat near a place where there were no trees, only unsullied snow, a field of white innocence, but Uto knew what lay beneath. A crust of frozen dirt, then the bodies. The rotting remains of the Outsiders who had come to stab at the earth and delve in the streams and cut down the trees and plant their rotting shacks among the barrows of the old and honoured dead, using up the world and using up each other and spreading a plague of greed into the sacred places.
Uto squatted, and looked across tha
t clean whiteness. Once the Gathering has debated the arguments and spoken its judgement there is no place for regrets, and yet she had kept hers, as often checked and polished and as jealously guarded as any miser’s hoard. Something of her own, perhaps.
The Dragon People had fought, always. Won, always. They fought to protect the sacred ground. To protect the places where they mined for the Dragon’s food. To take children so that the Maker’s teaching and the Maker’s work might be passed on and not be lost like smoke on the wind of time. The bronze sheets reminded them of those who had fought and those fallen, of what was won and what lost in those battles of the past, and the far past, back into the Old Time and beyond. Uto did not think the Dragon People had ever killed so many to so little purpose as they had here.
There had been a baby in the miners’ camp but she had died, and two boys who were with Ashod now, and prospering. Then there had been a girl with curly hair and pleading eyes just on the cusp of womanhood. Uto had offered to take her but she was thirteen, and even at ten winters there were risks. She remembered Waerdinur’s sister, taken from the Ghosts too old, who could not change and carried a fury of vengeance in her until she had to be cast out. So Uto had cut the girl’s throat instead and laid her gently in the pit and wondered again what she dare not say–could the teachings that led them to this be right?
Evening was settling when they looked down upon Beacon. The snow had stopped but the sky was gloomy with more. A flame twinkled in the top of the broken tower and she counted four more lights at the windows, but otherwise the place was dark. She saw the shapes of wagons, one very large, almost like a house on wheels. A few horses huddled at a rail. What she might have expected for twenty men, all unwary, except…
Tracks sparkled faintly with the twilight, filled with fresh snow so they were no more than dimples, but once she saw one set, like seeing one insect then realising the ground crawled with them, she saw more, and more. Criss-crossing the valley from treeline to treeline and back. Around the barrows and in at their fronts, snow dug away from their entrances. Now she saw the street between the huts, rutted and trampled, the ancient road up to the camp no better. The snow on the roofs was dripping from warmth inside. All the roofs.
Too many tracks for twenty men. Far too many, even careless as the Outsiders were. Something was wrong. She held her hand up for a halt, watching, studying.
Then she felt Scarlaer move beside her, looked around to see him already slipping through the brush, without orders.
‘Wait!’ she hissed at him.
He sneered at her. ‘The Gathering made their decision.’
‘And they decided I lead! I say wait!’
He snorted his contempt, turned for the camp, and she lunged for his heels.
Uto snatched at him but she was weak and slow and Scarlaer brushed off her fumbling hand. Perhaps she had been something in her day, but her day was long past and today was his. He bounded down the slope, swift and silent, scarcely leaving marks in the snow, up to the corner of the nearest hut.
He felt the strength of his body, the strength of his beating heart, the strength of the steel in his hand. He should have been sent north to fight the Shanka. He was ready. He would prove it whatever Uto might say, the withered-up old hag. He would write it in the blood of the Outsiders and make them regret their trespass on the sacred ground. Regret it in the instant before they died.
No sound from within the shack, built so poorly of split pine and cracking clay it almost hurt him to look upon its craftsmanship. He slipped low beside the wall, under the dripping eaves and to the corner, looking into the street. A faint crust of new snow, a few new trails of boot-prints and many, many older tracks. Maker’s breath but they were careless and filthy, these Outsiders, leaving dung scattered everywhere. So much dung for so few beasts. He wondered if the men shat in the street as well.
‘Savages,’ he whispered, wrinkling his nose at the smell of their fires, of their burned food, of their unwashed bodies. No sign of the men, though, no doubt all deep in drunken sleep, unready in their arrogance, shutters and doors all fastened tight, light spilling from cracks and out into the blue dawn.
‘You damned fool!’ Uto slipped up, breathing hard from the run, breath puffing before her face. But Scarlaer’s blood was up too hot to worry at her carping. ‘Wait!’ This time he dodged her hand and was across the street and into the shadow of another shack. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Uto beckoning and the others following, spreading out through the camp, silent shadows.
Scarlaer smiled, hot all over with excitement. How they would make these Outsiders pay.
‘This is no game!’ snarled Uto, and he only smiled again, rushed on towards the iron-bound door of the largest building, feeling the folk behind him in a rustling group, strong in numbers and strong in resolve—
The door opened and Scarlaer was left frozen for a moment in the lamplight that spilled forth.
‘Morning!’ A wispy-haired old man leaned against the frame in a bedraggled fur with a gilded breastplate spotted with rust showing beneath. He had a sword at his side, but in his hand only a bottle. He raised it now to them, spirit sloshing inside. ‘Welcome to Beacon!’
Scarlaer lifted his blade and opened his mouth to make a fighting scream, and there was a flash at the top of the tower, a pop in his ears and he was shoved hard in the chest and found himself on his back.
He groaned but could not hear it. He sat up, head buzzing, and stared into oily smoke.
Isarult helped with the cooking at the slab and smiled at him when he brought the kill home blooded, and sometimes, if he was in a generous mood, he smiled back. She had been ripped apart. He could tell it was her corpse by the shield on her arm but her head was gone, and the other arm, and one leg so that it hardly looked like it could ever have been a person but just lumps of stuff, the snow all around specked, spattered, scattered with blood and hair and splinters of wood and metal, other friends and lovers and rivals flung about and torn and smouldering.
Tofric, who was known to be the best skinner anywhere, staggered two stiff-legged steps and dropped to his knees. A dozen wounds in him turned dark the furs he wore and one under his eye dripped a black line. He stared, not looking pained, but sad and puzzled at the way the world had changed so suddenly, all quiet, all in silence, and Scarlaer wondered, What sorcery is this?
Uto lay next to him. He put a hand under her head and lifted it. She shuddered, twitched, teeth rattling, red foam on her lips. She tried to pass the blessed pouch to him but it was ripped open and the sacred dust of Ashranc spilled across the bloodied snow.
‘Uto? Uto?’ He could not hear his own voice.
He saw friends running down the street to their aid, Canto in the lead, a brave man and the best to have beside you in a fix. He thought how foolish he had been. How lucky he was to have such friends. Then as they passed one of the barrows smoke burst from its mouth and Canto was flung away and over the roof of the shack beside. Others tumbled sideways, spun about, reeled blinking in the fog or strained as if into a wind, hands over their faces.
Scarlaer saw shutters open, the glint of metal. Arrows flitted silently across the street, lodged in wooden walls, dropped harmlessly in snow, found tottering targets, brought them to their knees, on their faces, clutching, calling, silently screaming.
He struggled to his feet, the camp tipping wildly. The old man still stood in the doorway, pointing with the bottle, saying something. Scarlaer raised his sword but it felt light, and when he looked at his hand his bloody palm was empty. He tried to search for it and saw there was a short arrow in his leg. It did not hurt, but it came upon him like a shock of cold water that he might fail. And then that he might die. And suddenly there was a fear upon him like a weight.
He tottered for the nearest wall, saw an arrow flicker past and into the snow. He laboured on, chest shuddering, floundering up the slope. He snatched a look over his shoulder. The camp was shrouded in smoke as the Gathering was in the Seeing Steam, gia
nt shadows moving inside. Some of his people were running for the trees, stumbling, falling, desperate. Then shapes came from the whirling fog like great devils–men and horses fused into one awful whole. Scarlaer had heard tales of this obscene union and laughed at its foolishness but now he saw them and was struck with horror. Spears and swords flashed, armour glittered, towering over the runners, cutting them down.
Scarlaer struggled on but his arrow-stuck leg would hardly move, a trail of blood following him up the slope and a horse-man following that, his hooves mashing the snow, a blade in his hand.
Scarlaer should have turned and shown his defiance, at least, proud hunter of the Dragon People that he was. Where had his courage gone? Once there had seemed no end to it. Now there was only the need to run, as desperate as a drowning man’s need to breathe. He did not hear the rider behind him but he felt the jarring blow across his back and the snow cold, cold on his face as he fell.
Hooves thumped about him, circling him, showering him with white dust. He fought to get up but he could get no further than his hands and knees, trembling with that much effort. His back would not straighten, agony, all burning, and he whimpered and raged and was helpless, his tears melting tiny holes in the snow beneath his face, and someone seized him by the hair.
Brachio put his knee in the lad’s back and forced him down into the snow, pulled a knife out and, taking care not to make a mess of it, which was something of a challenge with the lad still struggling and gurgling, cut his ears off. Then he wiped the knife in the snow and slipped it back into his bandolier, reflecting that a bandolier of knives was a damn useful thing to have in his business and wondering afresh why it hadn’t caught on more widely. Might be the lad was alive when Brachio winced and grunted his bulk back up into his saddle, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Not with that sword-cut in him.
Brachio chuckled over his trophies and, riding down to the camp, thought they’d be the perfect things to scare his daughters with when Cosca had made him rich and he finally came home to Puranti. Genuine Ghost ears, how about that? He imagined the laughter as he chased them around the parlour, though in his imaginings they were little girls still, and it made him sad to think they would be nearly women grown when he saw them again.