There ought to have been nobody else here.
So what had caused that sudden rhythmic thudding, as if a frantic heart had started to beat in the grey depths of the forest?
Yaret felt the hoofbeats drumming through the ground before they became audible. It sounded like a solitary horse, but still… In fourteen years of travel through this slice of wilderness, where tangled forest met the lonely grasslands, there had never been a horse – or another human – to be seen.
The hoofbeats were coming closer rapidly, crashing through the undergrowth in reckless haste. Swiftly Yaret picked up the waterskin and stepped away from the bank of the Darkburn.
Here, the Darkburn was no more than a lively brook, not yet a river. After gathering itself upon the moors, it dived into this gnarled forest of ancient oak and hutila and greythorn. Apart from the constant chanting of the Darkburn's waters, this had always been a quiet place.
Until now. The hooves grew louder, faster, their vibration making the faded foliage quiver: the urgent thuddings of a heart that was about to break.
The horse burst through the bushes in a fountain of dead leaves and splintered twigs. It was riderless. And it was terrified.
Foam covered its snorting mouth: sweat ran down its heaving brown flanks from the empty saddle. Yaret stepped forward with vague thoughts of trying to catch it. But the horse barely slowed. Its eyes rolling, its breath harsh and rasping, it plunged away upstream to stumble noisily between the straggling trees at the forest’s western edge, where Yaret had left the donkeys.
The two donkeys looked up in mild surprise, but the horse did not stop. Charging out from the trees, it galloped on, hoofbeats diminishing quickly now, across the open grass until it was out of sight and hearing.
As the quiet returned Yaret stood still, considering that empty saddle. She had no wish to go any deeper into the tree-meshed darkness from which the horse had burst in terror. But a fallen rider might be lying somewhere in those shadows.
She hesitated, unnerved, and irritated by her own anxiety. The horse was nothing to do with her. Easier to just walk away.
Letting out a long sigh of resignation, she stepped into the gloom cast by the trees, alongside the infant Darkburn. Although the stream still sang on to itself, like a child at play, all else was silence. No bird calls, no small rustlings in the undergrowth. The bowed trees waited.
Yaret was readying herself to find a corpse. But she was not prepared for what came next.
A hundred yards in, the stench hit her with an almost physical force. It stopped her in her tracks and nearly knocked her over. A thick miasma of soot and ashes, charcoal and decay, it was death made palpable. It bludgeoned the soul and wiped out any other thought. Her mind went numb with fear.
Sick and helpless, her legs turned suddenly as weak as wool, Yaret fell on her knees. What was this – this burning horror, this overpowering dread as if the end of everything had come? Was this death? It was surely worse than death: for it was rage, despair, grief, hatred of all things, herself included. The annihilation of all hope. It filled her with a roaring emptiness.
She huddled crouching with her head wrapped in her arms, trying to bear it. The grief and fury were telling her to dash herself against a tree, to find some cliff down which to hurl and break her body. Curled in a ball amidst damp stems and leaves, she was aware that nothing else around her – except the gurgling water – moved at all. The very trees seemed stricken.
And then something came. With her arms around her head, Yaret glimpsed it only past the corner of her elbow. Down by the stream it crept: a long, black, burning shadow, crawling in the same direction that the horse had fled in.
She could feel the heat that emanated from it, even at this distance: as fierce as if the thing contained a furnace. Yet there was no sound above the water’s murmur. The dread grew more intense, unbearable. Time slowed and stopped.
Do not move, do not look, she adjured herself. Be a bird, be a squirrel, something unthinking, something not worth notice. Be neither man nor women nor mind nor heart.
She did not move, did not look, but stared at the ground, tried to become the insect in front of her climbing a stalk, not worth a second’s observation. That small brown beetle climbing to eternity was all there was. There was nothing else.
At last time restarted. The cloud of sickness seemed to lift, a little. The heat was dissipating. Trickle by trickle, the oily tide of hatred and despair receded. High in the canopy, a bird gave an alarm call and flew away with a sharp clatter of wings; the beetle reached its leaf, and Yaret raised her head.
“The donkeys!”
They had been in the path of that thing. But as she shakily stood up and gazed towards the forest edge, there silhouetted against the light were the dear familiar shapes of Dolm and Nuolo. She could tell by their stance that they were afraid; but they had not panicked. They had simply moved out of the way. The burning creature had been hunting for a horse, not donkeys.
A horse with an empty saddle and full saddle-bags: the proof that there had been a rider not so long ago. What had the thing been pursuing? Horse or rider? Did it know the difference?
It knew the difference between horse and donkey. It had intent and purpose. It had been hunting for the rider, surely, but had not known the rider was not on the horse.
So where was the rider?
With even more reluctance than before, Yaret made herself walk on into the forest, following the Darkburn as it skipped and swirled downstream.
It was easy to see the way the crawling thing had come. It had laid a trail of smoke and desperation along the water’s edge. In places the wet ground had charred beneath it and the grass had shrivelled into thin dead stalks. On drier ground this would have been a trail of fire.
The dread and hate and horror lingered too, like the aftermath of a bad dream. The stench was fading but left an aura of decay. Only the Darkburn chattered blithely on, quite unaffected.
How big had the burning creature been? The length of a horse, thought Yaret; no, even longer; but much lower to the ground. All body and crawling legs – no head to speak of, just a bluntness. Creeping, but creeping fast. A thing burnt black: yet not entirely. Within the charcoal body there had been a deep, half-hidden glow like red-hot embers.
Enough. Don’t think about it now. It’s gone. You’ll know if it comes back.
She tried to walk silently, following the brook’s amber waters as they ran through the trees. The forest was shadowy and knotted but not threatening, although the Darkburn had a dubious reputation, further down – a hundred miles further down, once it had become a mighty river. Too far away for more than muddled stories to have reached Yaret’s home, up north in Obandiro. She saw no fallen rider, only the scorched trial.
But where had the hoofprints gone? She realised they had disappeared.
Doggedly Yaret retraced her steps until she spotted hoofprints in the mud beside the water. She frowned as she deciphered them. It seemed the horse had slithered down the opposite bank just here; the crawling thing had come from further back downstream to cut it off.
So she leapt from stone to stone across the swiftly-flowing burn, and clambered up the far steep bank, following the trail of skidding hoofprints.
Before long, the ascent became less steep. The ground flattened out into a stand of huge, graceful hutilas still in their late summer greenery, their arched branches showing the first faint tints of brown and gold. Between them there was little cover, only a mat of leathery leaves and strips of peeled bark. No fallen rider lay there. Yaret kept walking, scanning the ground for half a mile, until she came to the northern margin of the wood.
There before her lay the plain – the Darkburn Loft, looking slightly unreal in a shimmer of watery sunlight. A place free of distinctive landmarks or indeed of anything remarkable, it was bumpy with small rocky outcrops and dotted with stooped and stunted trees.
Behind it rose the softly purpled mounds of the Coban hills; far beyond them, a mere haze in the pale sky, were the mountains. West of those mountains, Obandiro waited for her. Home. Yaret sighed and looked back down to scrutinise the ground again.
It was hard to make out any trail. Deer and wild goats grazed the Loft, criss-crossing the thin pastures and creating their own maze of random paths. A horse’s hoofprints were not easy to pick out for someone who was not a hunter by profession. Yaret was no hunter: she was a weaver, and a pedlar of woven goods. Expert in woollen cloth, but not in tracking.
As she walked, she grew frustrated by her failure to see more hoofmarks. Maybe the rider had fallen off miles away. She crossed a sprawling streamlet fringed with watercress, and squinted at the muddy banks: no hoofprints anywhere. Not far away there was a rocky outcrop, so she made for it, intending to climb up and look out from the top.
By the outcrop’s base, amongst large tumbled boulders, was a leg. It was almost hidden in the grass. Once she got closer she could see that the leg was bent at an unnatural angle, and was attached to a body.
At first sight the man appeared to be dead. There was a lot of blood. Two crows perched on a rock expectantly.
She shooed the crows away and knelt down to inspect the man. Some of the blood was caused by the thornbush the body had crashed through in its fall. But by the head, the blood had pooled, warm and sticky, on the grass.
A youngish face, eyes closed, a week’s growth of beard; and in the tangled curls of black hair there was an ominous swelling, blood oozing from it, where his head had struck a rock. But the man was breathing.
Yaret straightened up. “Right,” she said, and looked around, assessing her position. She was twelve miles from her last stop; and she knew that place could offer her no refuge. It was eighteen miles to the next settlement, the first of her stops in the Coban hills.
There was no other farm or village in between. The two of them were stuck here on the nowhere of the Loft, totally alone – apart from a terrifying creature in the nearby forest; and somewhere, a runaway horse.
Surely out on the open plain the horse would easily outrun the creeping monster that pursued it. With any luck, it would lead it miles and miles away…
The donkeys. Better fetch them soon, she thought, make sure that they were safe. It might be possible to move the fallen rider if he could be got across Dolm’s back. Yet even so Dolm would not be able to carry him far. Two miles, if she was lucky. And two miles would be no use.
But the rider was already well concealed here, by the rocks; so perhaps she could just move him enough to get him fully out of sight, and then pitch camp and tend to him.
Why do that? Gather your things now and go! Find the donkeys and get moving. Don’t hang about here, with a dying man at your feet, and that thing of fire and darkness lurking. Go now, go now, GO NOW!
It was her own voice urging her, loud and strident in her head. She did not care for what it told her. But she halted, undecided for a moment, before she answered it.
“No. We pitch camp, and keep him here.”