*
Finally, the forest opened into a large clearing where dry grass seemed to lap at its edge like an immense lake of autumn yellow. The swell of a low hill rose gently ahead of them, clear and grassy. Although Davin had never ventured this way before, he knew that the Vandin camp ought to lie just on the other side. To both sides of them, the land began to rise into a two long ridges that ran parallel to one another like long sinuous snakes of earth. Top the north, tall mountains lifted their cragged heads. Their profiles stabbed at the sky, all sharp edges and broken-off angles where the rock seemed to protest against whatever force had lifted them so high into the air.
“Bet it’s really cold up there,” Davin said. He needed time to think now that he knew the camp was near. The last thing he wanted to do if there were people there was to walk up on them unannounced. While the Vandin were by all accounts a peaceful people, they worshiped strange gods, and were supposedly quite odd, and that made Davin leery. Regardless of whether the rumors he had heard were true or not, he knew very little of them. And right now, he didn’t like not knowing.
“Probably freezes at night up there. Snow will cover those peaks pretty soon,” Maerillus said.
As Davin thought, his gaze settled beyond the on the distant ridges. Dark stains were clearly visible where water leaked from damp fissures across the jagged stone torsos. The mountains here weep, he thought to himself, and the thought brought a shiver. He still had the sense that something was about to come down on his head. And at that moment, not only did the forest behind them feel oppressive; the highlands themselves seemed to loom over them. Davin shook himself. Now that they were almost there, he was unable to keep up the pretense that everything was going to be fine. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. The knowledge came at him like an itch in the back of his mind, and now all he wanted to do was scratch at it furiously.
“It’s too quiet,” Niam said in a voice barely above a whisper.
Davin nodded his head. He had expected to see or hear someone by now.
“Yeah.” Davin agreed. They all grew quiet and Davin now gazed ahead. The only thing he heard was the exhalation of air through tall tassels of yellow grass. Not even autumn birds whistled or twittered from the forest behind them.
Before Davin had a chance to talk about what to do now, Niam grunted and began walking toward the hill. He and Maerillus looked at one another dumbfounded. Niam turned his head back as he strode away. “Bode wouldn’t let a thing like silence stop him. Might as well get on with it. I mean, either the Vandin are there or they aren’t.”
“Not so fast!” Davin grumbled and hurried along with Maerillus to catch up with him.
Maerillus grabbed Niam’s shirtsleeve. Their smaller friend’s face was set with a stony determination. Quickly, he pushed Maerillus’s hand away. “We might as well be about it,” he said again. “Bode could already be up there doing who knows what.”
“And you want to just barge up there in plain view if he is?” Maerillus asked impatiently. “What if he sees you? What if his gang is with him?”
“We’ll handle it,” Niam said bitterly.
“What’s gotten into you?” Maerillus demanded. “You’ve been acting like you had a stone in your hoof ever since we met up yesterday morning!”
“Nothing,” Niam replied sullenly.
Davin could tell Maerillus didn’t buy it. All he said was, “Your ‘nothing’ could get us into a situation I’d rather not have to handle if I can help it.”
Niam looked away.
Davin moved between the two of them. “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it smartly,” he said to Niam.
“I think me standing up on that hilltop like a piece of red meet before a pack of hungry wolves and telling them dinner’s on sounds like a fine plan. Then the two of you can beat them until they cry,” he retorted. His face was steadily growing redder by the second. “I mean, isn’t that what the two of you do best?”
“What are you talking about?” Maerillus barked in exasperation.
“What I’m talking about is how you get to do that thing you do where no one can see you and he gets to beat the cold snot out of people like Bode while all I get to do is see stupid dead dogs.”
“What would you prefer to do, Niam?” The anger in Maerillus’s voice was unmistakable.
“Well that’s really it, isn’t it?” Niam flashed. “I can’t DO anything, can I?”
“That’s ENOUGH!” Davin interjected. Both went suddenly and sullenly quiet. “You are doing something, Niam. We all are,” he said evenly. His friend looked as if he was about to say more, but Davin held up his hand to keep him quiet. “I know you want to get back at Bode, but that’s not quite why we’re here, and you know it.”
“It’s about a lot more than that,” Niam said under his breath.
“Later,” Davin replied curtly, and laid a hand on Niam’s shoulder to keep him still. “We’ll get to that later.” Niam said nothing and Davin looked at them both. “I can’t play peacekeeper. Not at a time like this,” he said sternly. “I can’t believe the two of you.”
Maerillus let out a long breath. “You’re right.”
“Yeah,” Niam said tightly.
Both shuffled their feet and avoided one another’s gaze.
Davin looked at them both, and several long seconds passed while the tension ebbed away. “We’ve all had a rough time lately, it seems. But right now I need you two to focus.”
When they nodded, he could tell they were done.
“Maer, Niam and I are going to wait down here. I need you to go up there and have a look. Once you’ve done that, we’ll go from there.”
“I figured that’s what you were going to say,” Maerillus said.
“All I want you to do is see what we might be facing. We’re here to prove the story Niam overheard. If there’s anything to it, we’ll let Lord Joachim’s men sort it out.”
“Bet it’s not gonna work out that way,” Niam said in a sing-song voice.
“Cut it!” Davin and Maerillus said in unison.
“Oh . . . I’m just saying,” Niam shot back. His voice was tinged with an I-told-you-so tone. “Nothing’s that simple with us anymore.”
As Davin watched Maerillus walk away, the air seemed to fold around his friend. The spat between his two friends hadn’t helped his edginess at all. After a long wait, Davin began to grow worried when he heard the sound of grass whisking against someone’s pant legs. Slowly the shape of Maerillus unfolded into view.
“Well?” Davin asked eagerly.
With a courtesy nod in Niam’s direction, Maerillus said, “Looks like what Niam heard was right. There’s nobody up there. Place looks completely abandoned—like they left in a hurry.”
“That’s more than a bit troubling,” Davin said. What had Bode gotten himself mixed up with? This seemed far too big for his kind of trouble.
“It gets even stranger. There are odd boxes laying around some of the tents.”
“Boxes? Any idea what they’re for?
“No idea. But I do know that there is something that’s not right about them.” As he said it, he shivered.
“Any signs of Bode?” Niam asked.
“Not that I could tell, but the camp is big.”
Davin thought for a moment. He wanted to leave right now, but the more he had thought about it as they waited for Maerillus to return, the more surely he knew he was going to have to give some accounting for what had happened. Especially with Maerillus’s news about the boxes. “I think we need to go up there and have a quick look.”
“See! This is how it always starts,” Niam said with a dry and humorless laugh. They both turned to him with looks that should h
ave wilted flowers, but Niam just shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I’m just saying.”
With that, Maerillus took his bow from Davin and quickly leaned against it with one knee and strung it. Niam took up his walking staff and Davin held the hatchet he had brought with him to chop firewood tightly in his hands. The walk was a short one. As soon as they crested the top of the hill, they saw that they were in a long, flat valley. The two ridges to the east and west stretched nearly parallel to one another for what seemed like nearly three miles. At the valley’s distant end, the land rose abruptly, and where it ended, the earth gave birth to the highlands good and proper.
Heavy silence lay across the camp as they approached the first ring of large tents. To Davin it felt as if someone had cut through the trunk of a towering forest pine at a flat angle so that everyone knew that it was going to fall, but no one knew when. As they moved into the camp, they saw that the tents were arranged in small, circular “communities,” each with a central clearing where large fire pits had been lit.
Davin moved silently. Grass swished at his feet as he slowly made his way around the tents. Great tripods had been set up over some of the pits, and here and there sat spits, some with charred lamb carcasses. What the crows had not been able to prize away was still stuck to the bones and skewers. When Davin leaned over and looked into a pot, a wave of flies launched up at his face. He jerked back as the smell of putrefying meat hit him with the swarming bugs.
“There’s still food on the pits.” He gagged and looked around.
No one moved. Only the random swell of tent flaps stirred where the wind breathed in and out of the openings. Flies alone now called this place home.
Maerillus’s voice held an uncomfortable edge. “There are still chests full of clothes, blankets, and personal belongings in these.”
With a tight face, Davin asked, “Where are those boxes?” No sooner were the words were out than the feeling that a tree was about to crash down on top of him grew more palpable.
“Over there,” he said with a shiver. “I don’t like them,” Davin—there’s something wrong about them.”
“Great Lord!” Niam exclaimed from another tent, “Someone here tried to pack in a hurry.”
Davin and Maerillus nodded grimly.
“Whatever happened here happened in the evening,” Davin said. “When they were getting ready to bed down.”
“But why would they run off like this?” Maerillus asked, tensely.
“Whatever it was scared them enough to leave everything behind,” Davin said.
“You think it’s like this all over?” Maerillus asked, though by the look on his face he already knew the answer. The silence said it all.
“I think we are about to find out,” Davin said roughly.