Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Part 121

'What is it?'

'Not sure. Don't move.'

That twig could not have speared the leaf by chance. It pierced the leaf blade like a needle, straight down its length, to the right of the midrib. It had to be a signal.

To the right of the midrib.

He glanced to his right, saw only a dim lattice of branches.

There.

Ahead, to the right, a sapling had been bent back and secured by a deft arrangement of crossed sticks. Mounted at its tip was a vicious spike. From the crossed sticks, near-invisible, a rope stretched across his path at chest height. Another step and he would have sprung the trap, releasing the sapling and sending the spike plunging into his side.

Torak licked his lips. They tasted chalky from the disguise. He showed Renn the trap. Her hand went to her shoulder, where her clan-creature feathers had been.

They had to push through junipers to get around the trap, which had been cunningly set between the th.o.r.n.y bushes, to drive its victim towards it. When they were through, Renn hissed, 'This isn't the way we came.'

'I know. And it was sheer luck I spotted that trap.' He didn't need to say it: how many more lay in wait?

Wolf turned his head towards the river, and they followed his gaze. Did that shadow just move?

A moment later, starlight glinted on a spearhead.

The Auroch hunter was maybe twenty paces away, walking upstream. Torak and Renn sank into the bracken slowly, so as not to attract attention by sudden movement. Torak's mind raced. Upriver lay the Auroch camp. Downriver, the way back to the Open Forest, and maybe more lethal traps. On the riverbank, at least one Auroch hunter was keeping watch.

Renn voiced his thoughts. 'We'll have to try your plan right here.'

'Could you make the shots?'

'I think so. If we climb a tree.'

He nodded.

Renn found a tall lime that looked easier to climb than the others, as it had an odd snake of thickened bark rippling down its trunk. 'Lightning-struck,' she murmured, 'but it survived. Maybe that'll bring us luck.'

We'll need it, thought Torak. His plan was simple, and if it worked, their decoys would draw the Aurochs north, away from the Blackwater, allowing them to slip across.

If it worked. He was losing faith fast.

Linking his hands, he boosted Renn into the tree. Then he knelt and told Wolf to stay close, to come back in the Light and be alert for traps.

Wolf's breath warmed his face as his muzzle brushed his eyelids. Stay safe, pack-brother, he told Torak.

He was so trusting. And Torak was leading him into terrible danger.

On impulse, Torak took his medicine horn from its pouch, shook out a little earthblood, and daubed it on Wolf's forehead, where he couldn't lick if off. Stay safe, pack-brother, he said. Putting his hand on the lime's rough bark, he begged the Forest to protect Wolf.

The lightning scar was thicker than his wrist, and he climbed it like a rope. He felt the tree sensing their presence. He asked it not to give them away. Below him, Wolf's silver eyes glowed. Then he vanished into the dark.

Huddled in a fork made by three great limbs, Torak and Renn kept their sleeping-sacks rolled, relying on their reindeer-hide clothes to stay warm. 'We'll wait here till morning,' whispered Torak, 'less chance of being seen.' And less chance of escape if they were seen, but neither of them mentioned that.

Renn pointed to a tall spruce north of the Aurochs' camp. Its upper branches spiked the stars; they should catch the rising sun. From her quiver she drew one of the arrows she'd prepared.

As she took aim, her face tensed with concentration. Her disguise made her alien: as if, thought Torak, she'd become Deep Forest.

Her bow creaked. She lowered it again. The night was too quiet. The Aurochs might hear the tw.a.n.g.

At last a gust of wind woke the trees. She took aim and let fly. The arrow struck the spruce and its burden swung free on the cord tied to the shaft. Renn nocked another arrow and hit another tree, further east; then another and another, each time waiting for the breeze to cover the sound.

Now they had to wait till dawn, and hope the plan worked.

They didn't have another.

In the darkness, firelight flared.

Renn gripped Torak's arm. The Auroch camp was much closer than they'd thought.

High in the lime tree, they watched tall figures moving with the silent purposefulness of ants. Several gathered round a tree in the centre of camp, smearing something dark on its lower branches. Two more knelt to waken another fire.

Torak was mystified. Why waken one from scratch when you could take a burning branch from the first? And they weren't using strike-fires. One man spun a stick between his palms, drilling it into a piece of wood on the ground which he held down with one foot, while he kept the drill straight by means of a cross-bar clamped between his teeth. It worked. Smoke curled. The second man fed the flames beard-moss, then kindling. When the fire was fully awake, everyone knelt and touched their foreheads to the ground.

More Aurochs emerged from the Forest. Torak counted five, seven, ten. Each man and they were all men bore an axe, a bow, two knives, and a shield: a narrow, arm-length wedge of wood, whose pointed end he thrust into the earth, before drawing off his netting hood to reveal a caked head and bizarrely ridged and furrowed face.

Torak broke out in a cold sweat. Gaup was right. These people were different.

And yet they were setting spits over the fires, and soon he smelt the delicious, familiar smell of roasting woodgrouse, weirdly at odds with the silent camp.

'Why don't they speak?' he whispered.

'I think it's to make them more tree-like,' breathed Renn. 'That's what Deep Forest people want above all: to be like the trees.'

'I can see more shields down there than men.'

She nodded and held up three fingers. Three hunters still out there, stalking the Forest. They'd been right to climb the lime.

They took turns to stay awake. A thin rain pattered into Torak's dreams, and the Forest became a dark, soughing sea where night birds flitted like fishes. From far away came the oo-hu, oo-hu of an eagle owl.

Renn was shaking his shoulder. 'Dawn soon.'

He blinked, kneading cramp from his calf. The day was bl.u.s.tery, with a dry south wind. Chaffinches and warblers were already in full voice, the woodpigeons just beginning.

'I hope Rip and Rek are still asleep,' muttered Renn. 'The last thing we need is a raven greeting.'

Torak tried to smile. He thought it less and less likely that their plan would work. Even if it did, they'd have only a brief chance to swim the Blackwater; and then they'd be in Forest Horse territory. And all the time, Thiazzi was getting away.

Grey light seeped into camp, and Torak made out humped shelters around the central beech.

He peered at it. It couldn't be. Those lower branches were red. It wasn't the morning sun, the branches themselves bark, twigs, leaves had been daubed all over with earthblood. Why, he thought, would anyone paint an entire branch red?

No time to wonder. The sun was rising. Soon they must be on the move.

To the north, something glittered in the tall spruce tree. And there, further east. Renn flashed him an edgy grin. So far, the plan was working. The flint flakes they'd tied to her arrowshafts shimmered and clinked in the wind.

The Aurochs had seen them. Men were pointing, running for weapons and shields.

Swiftly, Torak and Renn climbed down to earth. Wolf appeared, his fur wet with dew. They headed for the river.

Willows overhung the Blackwater, holding in the night. There was no sign of Aurochs. Torak prayed that they'd all been drawn by the decoys. Yanking off their boots and tying them to their sleeping-sack rolls, they made their way down the bank and into the reeds, moving cautiously, so as not to startle any water birds into betraying them. The shallows were choked with leafy saplings felled by a flood further upstream.

'Good cover,' murmured Renn.

They risked strained smiles. Maybe this was going to work.

Bracing themselves for the cold, they waded into the river. Torak's feet sank into a freezing slime of dead leaves, and he saw Renn's stained lips tighten in disgust. He grabbed a floating sapling for cover. She did the same. They swam after Wolf, who was already halfway across.

The Blackwater wasn't as sleepy as it looked. It was a struggle to resist its stealthy underwater pull.

Suddenly Wolf veered, and came swimming towards them, his ears pinned back in alarm.

'What's that?' whispered Renn.

Torak's belly turned over. Those logs in midstream: they were floating upriver. And some of them had eyes.

One raised its head. Torak saw a fierce green face tattooed with leaves. A brown headband. Long hair braided with horse tails.

A Forest Horse raiding party. Heading straight for them.

ELEVEN.

'Get underwater, head back to the bank,' Torak told Renn just before he dived. He couldn't find the breathing tube in his belt. Too bad, he'd hold his breath. He only hoped Renn had heard him.

She had. She surfaced soon after he did in the same patch of reeds, and they waited, gritting their teeth to stop them chattering.

The Forest Horses hadn't seen them. The green men lay on their bellies, paddling silently with their hands, knives clamped between charcoal-blackened teeth.

Not far from Torak, Wolf hauled himself onto the bank and shook himself noisily.

Eyes flicked sideways in leaf-tattooed faces, then back again. A lone wolf was no concern of theirs.

The reeds gave good cover, allowing Torak and Renn to crawl up the bank and get their bearings. Torak was shocked. The treacherous Blackwater had carried them nearer the camp, not further away.

Soaked and shivering, he wondered what to do. Any moment now, the Aurochs would realize they'd been tricked and head back to the river, spreading out to hunt the unknown intruders. He and Renn would be trapped between them and the Forest Horses.

Unless he could steer both sides away from them.

'Head downriver,' he told Renn in a whisper. 'Wait for me past that bend, I'll meet you there.'

Her eyes widened. 'Where are you going?'

'No time to explain! Watch out for traps!'

Telling Wolf to stay with the pack-sister, he started towards the Auroch camp. When he was as close as he dared, he crouched and whipped two arrows from his quiver. Then he took out his medicine horn and quickly smeared the arrowshafts with earthblood. He had no idea what those red branches meant to the Aurochs, but they were easy to spot, which was all that mattered.

Still crouching, he nocked the first arrow to his bow and waited.

He glimpsed a Forest Horse hunter coming ash.o.r.e: stealthily, keeping upright so that the water ran noiselessly down his body rather than pattering on leaves.

Torak took aim. He wasn't as good a shot as Renn, but he didn't need to be. His arrow thudded into a holly a good distance away.

The tattooed head turned to follow it.

From the corner of his eye, Torak saw an Auroch hunter making for the river. His belly tightened. They were faster than he'd thought. He loosed his second red arrow and hit another tree.

Without waiting to see the response, he fled, running fast and low to where Renn was waiting. If his trick worked, both sides would make for those mysterious red arrows, and then . . .

Shouts behind him, a clash of spears. He felt a spurt of savage joy. The Aurochs were fighting the Forest Horses, leaving him and Renn to cross the river and hunt Thiazzi.

Renn's shadowy figure beckoned from a dense stand of spruce, and he grabbed her hand. Her grasp was hot as ash as she led him through the gloom to the hiding-place she'd found: the hollow ruin of an enormous oak.

Panting, he collapsed against the tree, and as her fingers slipped from his, he gave a shaky laugh. 'That was too close!'

No reply. He was alone in the tree.

Twenty paces away, Wolf emerged from a clump of willows, followed by Renn, dripping wet and furious. 'Where,' she whispered, 'in the name of the Spirit have you been?'

TWELVE.

'Who was that?' hissed Torak.

'Who was who?' demanded Renn. His disappearence had shaken her badly, and she was struggling not to show it.

'Someone took my hand. I thought it was you.'