It was only a small noise in the darkness, but it woke her instantly. She’d snatched up the knife and was already on her feet before she worked out what had caused it.
The man was gasping. Laying down the knife, Yaret squatted by his side. There was half a moon and even underneath the raincover she could see the faint glistening of his open eyes. He was muttering something in a language that she did not know. It wasn’t Kelvhan.
“Hallo?” she said to him quietly in Standard. “You hurt yourself falling off your horse. Don’t try to move: you broke your leg. You’re quite safe, but it’s the middle of the night.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Then he said, in Standard, “I need to pee.”
So that was a good sign, although it involved a lot of fumbling with his breeches and the second cooking pan. Most of it ended up in there, as far as she could tell. It occurred to her that other functions might be harder to deal with. But hopefully that wouldn’t happen in the middle of the night.
The man lay back again.
“Roth,” he whispered.
“Is that your horse? The horse ran away.” She listened to his laboured breathing. It sounded as if he were in pain, but she did not ask because she had nothing to offer him for it.
“Leg,” he said after a moment.
“Your thigh bone got broken. It’s splinted. Try not to move it. Do you want a drink of water?” When he nodded, she propped his head up in one hand and held the waterskin to his lips. He drank.
“Ah,” he said at last, which she took to mean enough. Or possibly it hurts.
“You hit your head as well,” she said. “Try to sleep now till morning.”
As far as she could tell, he was asleep again quite quickly. Soon after dawn, when she got up, he was softly snoring.
So she left the semi-cave, emerging to see a feeble sun perched on the eastern horizon amidst long thin rags of cloud. As she performed the morning ritual of Haedath, she thought of her grandparents: how they would also at around this time be touching the earth, then putting their fingers to heart, lips, forehead in turn, murmuring the same words in Bandiran that she was now murmuring.
A sudden wave of longing for her grandparents washed over her. Someone to advise her, to tell her she was doing the right things. She let the feeling flow through and down to the ground that their feet shared. Then she imagined them setting out upon their daily tasks: her grandmother would go to feed the chickens, milk the goats and check the other animals. Her grandfather, still strong though somewhat stiff these days, would head straight upstairs to his loom.
They might exchange a few words about Yaret, and discuss where she was now – Grandda knew the route backwards, having made the journey to sell his cloth for so many years before he broke his hip. But their speculations would be routine. They wouldn’t worry.
And in fact despite her affection for them both, she wouldn’t want Grandda to be here with her after all. She had come to value greatly the solitude of these annual journeys. The visits to the towns – selling cloth and taking orders – had become almost the least important part of them. It was the lonely stretches in between that made her feel alive.
Yaret looked out across the Loft, at the landscape that seemed to hold so much hidden meaning although nothing disturbed its airy everyday tranquillity. To the west the clouds had cleared and were mere feathers, high and distant as if some giant white owlet had been chased across the sky. Against them wheeled a single bird: no owl, too big, soaring far above a gang of rooks who were throwing themselves around in the air with reckless skill.
She washed and tidied up her things, greeted the donkeys, and walked down to the streamlet to drink and refill the waterskin. The quiet expanse of Loft around her felt both familiar and strange. Although she’d crossed this stretch of land so many times, she’d never stopped here overnight. Usually she camped a further eight miles on, at the Loft’s northern edge. It was a long haul from the last stop at Deloran, but Grandda had never paused here either and she kept to his routine.
She remembered that she had once asked Grandda why he didn’t linger on the Loft. That must have been after her first journey with him, when she was fourteen. He had hesitated before answering.
“Chance of wolves and lions, amongst other things.”
“That’s true of half the places where we stayed,” Yaret had objected. “It wasn’t a bad spot.”
For the Darkburn Loft – long and narrow, running parallel to the Darkburn river and the forest – was a peaceful place to travel through, barring its chill winds: it was high and wild and dry underfoot, the thin soil barely covering its rocks. The Loft had water, wood and wildlife, the three requirements for a camp. Yet Grandda had always crossed it at its narrowest point, heading straight north towards the Coban hills.
“Does nobody live there, on the Loft?” she had asked him.
“Nobody.”
“Something does,” Gramma had put in, “but not people.” Grandda had given his small, stubborn wife a frowning look.
“What does live there, then?” persisted Yaret.
“Plenty of animals,” said Grandda, and this time Gramma kept her mouth shut.
The Loft, it seemed, belonged to nobody. Like the Darkburn forest that enclosed the river, not only was it uninhabited, but nobody laid claim to it. Possibly it was not worth the trouble of laying claim to. Its pastures were too poor, and its winter storms too bitter. The hunched posture of its scattered trees betrayed the force of those bone-freezing winds.
At this time of year, however, as summer slipped into autumn – and now that the rain had stopped – the Loft was not unwelcoming. Everything looked tranquilly uncomplicated in the cool, clear air. Sometimes, in traversing it, Yaret had had the vague sense of another, unseen presence, but that could just have been a result of her grandmother’s obscure comment. Certainly the Loft held no feeling of malevolence.
Walking back to the camp, she ate a slice of last night’s porridge and checked the rider. Asleep; although he woke ten minutes later.
“Hallo,” said Yaret. But he was only half there. When she explained to him, again, that he had fallen off his horse, he seemed to barely take it in. He just shook his head a little as if troubled by a fly.
Yaret made him drink more water. She noted that his eyes were moving oddly; the right pupil looked larger than the other.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Ah.” It came out as a sigh. Maybe telling her his name was too much trouble. Maybe he could not remember it. That was worrying.
“What’s your name?” she repeated.
No answer. He wanted to sleep. That, too, worried her; but there was nothing she could do about it. Perhaps sleep would be the best thing for him.
So Yaret changed the dressing on his head, causing no more than a vague murmur in that unknown language. The swelling was still large and angry but at least there was no fresh blood.
Once he was sleeping soundly, she left him again. Fetching Nuolo, the smaller and more amenable of the donkeys, she led her over to the Darkburn forest.
Half way there she turned to gaze back at the outcrop where the rider lay. Nothing gave away his presence. Dolm was standing guard beside the cleft, but to a stranger’s eyes he could easily be a lone wild donkey. The raincover was hidden and her packs were tucked well out of sight.
The rider’s packs, however, might still be attached to the runaway horse; and the horse might still be in the area. Yaret intended to search for it. She would not go far into the forest. But round its edge she could look for the missing horse and also gather enough firewood to keep her going for a while.
As she walked she glanced frequently at Nuolo ambling unhurriedly beside her, checking her for signs of distress. But the donkey showed none until they reached the point where the Darkburn stream plunged into the trees – the point at which the horse had fled the forest and the burning creature had crawled after it. And then Nuolo was only a little twitchy. There was no trace of the creature’s dreadful stink; nor of the intense onslaught of hatred that had almost overcome her. Wherever the thing was, it was not here. So Yaret crossed the stream.
No further tracks had added themselves to yesterday’s. The hoofprints and the trail of scorched grass looked the same. The landscape showed no other sign of anything unusual. Two goats sneered at her from a distance; a rabbit bounced out of a nearby clump of grass and scampered nonchalantly off.
Yaret began to follow the double trail of hooves and scorched grass west, away from the trees. She would go no further than she was comfortable with. And for a while she was comfortable enough. The trail ran alongside the stream for half a mile or so, before the hoofprints veered away and the blackened trail followed them.
They led to the escarpment – the long, low cliff that formed a natural wall to the western end of the Loft. Several rills tumbled down from it in miniature clouds of spray, to merge into the Darkburn. A few newly dislodged rocks showed where the horse had scrambled its way up towards the plateau at the top.
Had its pursuer followed? Yaret studied the cliff wall. No burn marks there. But further away she spotted a black scrape across the ground. The thing had crawled along the base of the escarpment, perhaps hoping to find an easier path up. Climbing was difficult for it, then.
“Come on, Nuolo.” Yaret began to scramble up the cliff where the rocks made a natural staircase. Behind her, she heard Nuolo’s following clatter and snort. When she reached the top of the escarpment the donkey was a few yards behind her, clambering onto the flat stone shelf with a reproachful look.
But Yaret, feeling exposed, lay down to gaze out at the landscape. She had been up here only twice in her life before today – both times alone; for her grandfather had never shown any interest in wasting his time to climb up here. On each of those occasions a haze had obscured the scene below.
This time it looked quite different. A strong breeze blew, and had cleared away the mist so that the landscape was laid out like a giant map for her perusal. A buzzard wheeled through the air on a level with her eyes: and behind it, dark and forbidding, lay the great mass of forest that concealed the Darkburn river.
The forest was much bigger than she had ever realised. It had the shape of a many-fingered hand, growing to a broad forearm as it wound away to the horizon in the east. Over the impenetrable mass of trees four birds circled, too big for buzzards. Perhaps they were sea-birds. Impossible to say, for she had never seen the sea: it was a thing of legend two hundred miles away to the south.
Also to the south, but much closer, she could see a wide stream meandering over open ground before it dived into the nearest finger of forest. Another Darkburn. She didn’t know which of the many streams were merely tributaries, and which the main channel: for here, at the birthplace of the Darkburn river, all water was Darkburn as soon as it entered the shadow of the trees.
Crossing the ground towards that wandering tributary was a line drawn in charcoal. The crawling thing had abandoned its pursuit, and left the cliffs to cut back towards the river. So maybe it was no more comfortable than she was about being out in the open.
It heralded its coming with the stench of death; it carved a void of fear in passing; it left behind a trail of blackened grass. And now it had headed back to… somewhere else.
Somewhere else was good enough, as long as it wasn’t anywhere near her. Yaret retreated from the edge and surveyed the dry upland behind her for the missing horse. She could not see so much as a hoofprint or a hair.
But there was a brightness on the sloping ground two hundred yards away. Something flashed briefly in the sunlight as she moved. Now she walked warily towards it.
It was a long sword, lying on the nibbled grass. Maybe its scabbard was still tied to the horse; for that was the only place such a sword could have come from, up here amidst the goats and buzzards.
She squatted down and looked at it. To the best of her knowledge, nobody back home in Obandiro owned a sword except the mayor and the miller, and those were for ceremonial purposes only. Although the blacksmith had a small collection in his smithy, they never left their hooks high on the wall. Bows and knives were much more usual. Only Kelvhans commonly carried swords, with bright bejewelled pommels.
This one’s hilt was plain. When she picked it up, she saw the blade was badly scratched and notched. She stood up and swung it experimentally: it was too long for her, and heavy, and difficult to wield one-handed. The leather-bound hilt had room for two hands if required. It was double-edged: a war-sword, then. And when she ran a cautious finger down one edge, it was extremely sharp. Not something you’d want to have dangling unsheathed from your belt…
Which meant she had to carry it outstretched in her hand all the way back down the cliff, while Nuolo followed her. The sword was a dangerous encumbrance and she worried about tripping. What would you want to carry this thing around for? Who would want to carry this thing around, up here in the middle of nowhere?
When she stopped to gather firewood in the stand of hutila trees, she picked up more thick scrolls of leathery bark. Three pieces wrapped around the sword meant she could safely strap it onto Nuolo’s back on top of the firewood. Then, leading the plodding donkey, she made her way thoughtfully to the camp.