The next day was a strange one. Yaret, short of sleep, felt fuzzy and slow-moving: once she had hauled herself from her bedroll, she couldn’t seem to do anything right. She managed to kick over the waterskin, dropped her slice of porridge on the ground, forgot where she had stowed her second shirt, and was ridiculously surprised when the injured rider spoke to her.
He needed a pee. And this time, the other thing as well. He thought she was a man, of course, and in any case it was no problem for her. When Grandda broke his hip she and Gramma had had to do the same. So she tried to roll Eled over gently to deal with it and clean him up, although it was difficult with the splinted leg. He groaned. She realised that he was in severe pain, but that so far he had hidden it. Or maybe he hadn’t felt it fully until now.
“Try and keep that leg still,” she told him once he was again lying on his back, his face damp with sweat. “It doesn’t look too bad this morning.”
This was a lie. In truth the leg was slightly more swollen than on the previous day. She laid a cold wet cloth across it, since there was little else that she could do. The skin felt hot and tight, but not as hot as Eled’s forehead. She put a slice of porridge in his hand, from where it fell in soggy crumbs on to his shirt.
He needed something that was easier to eat. But when she offered him cold rabbit stew, not much of it went in. So she persuaded him to drink more water, and then asked,
“Eled, where else do you hurt? Apart from the leg and your head?”
He touched his chest.
“Yes, your ribs,” she said. “Anywhere else?”
He tried to smile. “Just everywhere.” He was embarrassed, and sad, and his youth was suddenly evident. She tried to think of something that would cheer him up.
“Do you remember I told you that I found your sword? It was on the ground a mile or two away.”
He looked at her questioningly, so she fetched the sword to show him, holding it carefully in its sheath of bark. Eled put out a tender hand towards it.
“Rothir,” said Yaret experimentally.
He stopped and looked up at her. “Rothir? Where?”
Not the sword, then. “Earlier on, you kept saying Rothir. Is that a person?”
Eled did not answer. He touched the hilt caressingly and pulled his hand away with a sigh. What did men find to love so much in swords?
“How far away are your friends?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Far.”
“How many?”
“Some.”
Perhaps he did not trust her enough to say more. How long might it take to win his trust? She had a sharp image of day following day, every day the same, with the fallen rider still lying in this spot, herself still tending him. How many days?
There was no point in thinking about it. In any case she was too tired to think about anything properly. So she left him dozing and went down to the boggy streamlet to wash her clothes and the soiled woollen squares, carefully squeezing the soapy water into the ground so as not to contaminate the stream. Animals had to drink from it. And if other, not so friendly, things were lurking downstream, she did not want to send them any clues.
Then, since the air was mild, she stripped off and bathed. She saw herself from a distance, as if she were a hawk looking down on a small figure splashing in a puddle in the midst of a vast empty plain. A distant hare sat up on a rock to watch her. Further away, she glimpsed a fangol sneaking through the wispy grass before sitting up to watch the hare.
The water was too cold to make her want to linger. However, it woke her up a little. Once dressed again, she returned to the camp and draped the washing across bramble stems to dry. Eled was asleep. She put a full waterskin beside him, and then checked the donkeys. They were grazing happily enough. To wake herself up a little more, she decided on a reconnoitre of the area, continuing her search for Eled’s horse.
Since she had already been south and west to the escarpment, she set out on foot to the north and east. There was no chance of getting lost, even though the further she walked, the less she recognised the landmarks; for the Darkburn forest was a constant presence, marching alongside her half a mile away.
After three miles or so she stopped. The distant Coban hills had turned their shoulders to her and changed their shape, but otherwise the landscape was much as before; a rise and fall of close-grazed knolls and scattered trees all leaning south.
Sitting down against a lichen-covered rock that was warmed by the sun, she scanned the scene around her long and carefully, looking for any movement that might mean another rider, or perhaps a tired stray horse.
Something stirred in a distant thicket and she held her breath until she saw it was an antelope. Once she’d spotted that one, she realised others were grazing, heads all pointing north, well-camouflaged amongst the tumbled rocks.
Venison, she thought. She should have brought a donkey and her bow. Could have carried one back. Too late now. She’d been too tired to plan.
Closing her eyes against the sun, she leaned her head back on the warm rock, awarding herself a two minute nap. After that she would go back to the camp.
Yaret did not know if the two minutes turned to five, or ten: probably no more, but as her head nodded and jerked towards her chest she woke up with a start.
She scrambled to her feet. What was that? She stared and spun round: stared again. Now she could see nothing unusual. The distant antelopes still grazed. Nearer to her was an ordinary bunch of pitted rocks and roots and broken tree-stumps.
But surely something else had been there just a second ago: a small, solid… person? Creature? Object?
Lin.
But lins didn’t exist. Except that they did. Only they didn’t.
They existed enough for some people to speak to them and bow to where they thought they were and treat them kindly. They existed in children’s tales and drinkers’ songs and old folks’ lore. In other words, they didn’t exist. So what had she just seen?
A thing of the imagination, like the lin. It was several years since she’d last seen one, although as a child she’d seen – or thought she had seen – lins aplenty. Children generally did, and were humoured by the adults who knew better. Or believed that they knew better.
But the traditions persisted. So now Yaret bowed to where she thought she’d seen this lin, and recited the Lins’ Grace, the words of courtesy that Gramma had taught her to say on the Dondel Bridge back home. Then, in case the lin in this country didn’t understand Bandiran, she repeated the rhyme in Standard:
“Woodwone, woodwone, hob or lin,
Grace to thee and all thy kin.”
Nothing moved except the breeze in the grass. But it was strange.
A lin, she reflected as she set off walking back to camp, would not appear to her. It would stay hidden. As soon as humans looked at lins or hobs or woodwones – which were all related and possibly all the same thing – they changed to stumps of trees or plants or even animals. Badgers were a favourite, apparently. Some might be able to change to stone although her grandmother had disputed that. Coming from Ioben, Gramma took lins quite seriously.
Yaret looked backwards at the clump of rocks. Nothing. Naturally.
And what would a lin be doing here in any case, out in the open, far from woods or water? The woodwones were the ones who lived in forests. They were tall and branchy, supposedly. Lins were smaller, more compact; they preferred water and hung around bridges. The hobs hung around houses. Why, nobody could explain.
When she got back to the camp Eled was awake again, his eyes wide and darting. He looked anxious and yet not relieved to see her. His forehead felt feverish to her touch.
“Where are they?” he said, “Where did they go?” and then began to mutter in his own language, almost frantically. He was, thought Yaret in some alarm, bordering on delirious. She applied fresh cold cloths to his leg and to his head, which seemed to calm him after a while.
“You went away,” he said, as fretful as a child.
“But I came back,” said Yaret. “I just went to explore the land around here.”
“Did you see them?”
“I saw nobody. But no danger either. I saw a lin.” And to take his mind off his distress and pain, she told him about the lin, and about lins and woodwones in general. It seemed to interest him and to be a concept not altogether strange. Maybe his people had their own versions of lins.
At least her chatter woke him up in a better way than worry. So she sang him the children’s song about the lin under the Dondel Bridge, in a clumsy Standard translation. He listened carefully.
“But they’re not the real words, are they?” he said.
Yaret was impressed that he could tell. “No, you’re right. These are the real words.” She sang it again, in the original Bandiran, with the gestures and the little dance.
That amused Eled. He smiled, his face relaxing. She liked to see him smile, so she danced the Rannikan for him: the children’s dance – it got harder the bigger you grew – with all the tapping of hands to hips and heels, kicking and jigging faster and faster until she was breathless and he was laughing. There was just enough room to do it in the rocky space. She stopped to pant; and saw the lin again, above her.
But of course it wasn’t. It was just a clump of thistles growing from a fissure in the rock. She was dead tired, imagining things that weren’t there.
As she thought this, the donkeys brayed in unison, as harsh and loud as tuneless horns.
Yaret grabbed the sword – no, that was stupid of her, useless – dropped it, and snatched up the bow instead, throwing the quiver across her shoulder, already stringing the first arrow as she moved. She had it drawn up to her cheek before she emerged from the cleft between the rocks.
And saw the horse walking towards her. It looked at her and stopped in mid-step, hoof raised, ready to run. It bore a saddle, one ragged saddle-bag, and no rider.