Chapter 13
Charo found himself surprisingly reluctant to leave baby Royet behind. He was leaving all the others too, of course, but it was the baby he thought about as they rode north. Which was ridiculous when she was only six weeks old and almost certainly didn’t even know who he was.
It must be because he’d seen her born, he thought, or almost had, at least. Anneke had told him that he’d been a real support while they had waited for the others to arrive. Although Charo doubted that this was altogether true, it might not be altogether false.
It was strange how his relationship with Anneke had changed. He would have thought he would be horribly embarrassed being present while his former teacher gave birth, but when it happened he’d felt adult and sensible and calm. He had surprised himself. And although she was still teaching him occasionally – mainly Standard grammar, and calculations – it was more like being advised by a friend. A friend who carried a sling containing a squeaking baby. Because Royet did squeak. She was funny.
Now he became aware of Yaret eyeing him as they rode along.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Baby Royet,” he said, since there was no reason to lie. “I’ll miss her squeaking.”
“So will I,” said Yaret, with a sudden smile. “But we’ll only be away for eight or nine days. Maybe ten, at most.”
He nodded. This expedition had been Yaret’s idea. She’d put the plan before the council soon after the two injured brothers had appeared from the north, seeking shelter. The new men were quite young, only in their twenties; but both were badly burned, and one was almost blind. It was amazing that they had survived at all, let alone managed to ride for four days to reach Obandiro.
But then they were tough men, being trappers. One night, just before the dawn, they said, they’d been awoken by the sound and smell of fire. The stonemen had raged past their snowy hut in the woods, the darkburns at the front melting a path and setting alight anything that would burn.
The stonemen didn’t bother stopping at the blazing hut – that wasn’t their target; it had just been in their way. The trappers got out alive but injured. They described an army of hundreds, maybe thousands of stonemen, in long streams heading west. Charo didn’t want to believe that estimate, but it must have been a lot.
Luckily the fires had fizzled out quite quickly in the snow. The pair had sheltered in the half-hut that was left to them, the younger tending his blinded brother despite his own severe burns. After two days he managed to find their horses – which had ripped out their tethers and fled – and they set off to ride south in search of help.
And they had found Obandiro. It had been Ziya, the mother of the young family, who had run to meet them, ignoring the grandfather’s warnings, and who had tended their burns diligently since then. The grandfather had reluctantly allowed the two to stay with him in his little house. He said they were less noisy than the children.
Not long afterwards Yaret announced her intention of riding north to the trappers’ territory, to see where the stonemen had been. She wanted to look for other survivors, as well as to work out where the army had been heading for. She was quietly resolute and no-one could dissuade her. Since the winter snows had melted, she said, the round trip would only take about ten days at most. Eventually Charo had announced that he would go north too.
So here he was now, mounted in state on Poda, while Yaret was riding the blind trapper’s horse. It was smaller and rougher-haired than Poda and a little wayward. But it trotted fast enough over the dry ground, which was free of snow now, although the peaks that slowly loomed to the far north were still white-topped.
This was the third day of their journey and already Charo felt himself to be lost in a world that was far wider and more daunting than he had ever realised. All familiar landmarks were left far behind: they had skirted unknown hills and crossed a leaping river he had never heard of by a treacherous stone bridge.
But Yaret seemed to know where they were going, whether by lore or the trappers’ directions or from her previous travels. She spoke aloud her means of navigation, discussing the positions of the sun or stars with him as if he knew the way north just as well as she did. She pointed out unusual landforms as if she were merely reminding Charo of their names. These woods that they were passing through she called the Hallik. It sounded like a trapper word.
And three times she stopped her horse Wulchak – which was a strange name for a horse, but the trappers’ language was full of sounds like an axe falling – and turned in the saddle to stare across at something that he could not see.
“What is it?” he would ask.
“Lin.” And then he’d hear her murmuring the rhyme.
“I didn’t see it.”
“It wasn’t close. It might have been a woodwone,” she said the third time it happened, “given the burning of all these trees. I suppose they have to go somewhere.”
Great stretches of the Hallik woodlands were burnt through and cold. They rode on paths of charcoal. Still, Charo was not convinced that there was a woodwone or anything there at all, although he was a little too much in awe of Yaret to say so. She was a friend yet he sometimes felt he did not know her.
For she seemed unlike any woman he had known, even in Obandiro where male mode was fairly common. His two neighbours who had used male mode had been brisk and businesslike and loud. They had wielded axes and chopped trees but they had not wielded swords. If it came to that, nobody in Obandiro had wielded swords except on ceremonial occasions. The mayor, the miller...
The miller must have been richer than anyone had known. All that money under the ashes of his floorboards – when they dug it out, there had been a hundred coins and more. Both he and Yaret carried some of the silver in their pockets now, although he was not sure how much use it would be, since there appeared to be nowhere in this wilderness they could spend it.
Suddenly Yaret brought Wulchak to a halt again. This time he could see that it was not for a lin.
It was a cart – two carts, coming slowly towards them along the old worn grassy road which threaded between the patches of woodland. The carts were moving so slowly that it seemed a long time before they met. Yaret did not hurry forward.
“We don’t want to alarm them,” she said. However, Charo noticed that she did not attempt to move her sword and bow out of sight as she had yesterday, before they’d spoken to the woodcutter.
Yet the woodcutter had far been surlier than these carts’ inhabitants. He’d refused to answer any questions, and had snapped at them to leave. These people in the carts just looked exhausted; they hardly spoke even when Yaret told them that Obandiro was only two or three days away. There were eight of them including two small children, and a hungry looking dog.
They were all hungry, not just the dog. Because they looked too tired to set a fire, Charo gathered wood and made a fire for everyone to share. Yaret cooked and handed round the two rabbits which she had shot that morning, along with tough old wintergreens and the last of their bread. It didn’t go far. Still, the two families seemed better after eating, and talked a little more in the firelight.
It was the same old story, of course, told in hesitant murmurs: the sudden wakening to dreadful fear, the burning – burning that would not stop; the ashes and the desolation and the blankness afterwards.
“I know,” said Charo to the youngest man and woman, who he thought were probably not much older than he was beneath the soot and grime. “We all know. It’s been the same for all of us.”
“You too? The… the things… and the burning?”
“Most of our town died,” said Charo. It felt very strange to say it aloud. He had never had to say it aloud before because everybody knew and it did not even need to be discussed.
He cleared his throat. “I only escaped because I was a baker’s apprentice. I had to get up early to set the loaves in the oven; and when I was half way up the street I heard something coming, and then I smelt the darkburn, and then I – I just felt so scared that, that I had to run away.”
“So did I.” This was spoken in a very low voice.
“I kept thinking I should have gone back to wake my family. But by then it would have already been too late and we would all have died. There was nothing anybody could have done to stop it,” Charo said. It was Yaret who had talked it through with him and made him see this. She was right: he would have died beside his family if he’d gone back home. The stonemen were to blame, and no-one else.
But he brooded now, as he often did, on how it had been his own error that had saved his life. He’d woken in the night, remembering with a lurch of panic that he hadn’t set the loaves in the warming oven to prove. Stupid, stupid, he’d berated himself as he struggled out of bed.
That was the reason he’d been up before the dawn. It was because he was an absent-minded idiot. His own stupidity had led to him being the only one of his household – and the baker’s – to survive. He had never told anybody this.
And his parents, and his older sisters, whom he had taken for granted, whom he had never really thought about as being separate people, just part of his surroundings, had ended up on the other side of that great burning divide. They were Then and he was Now. There was no bridge across.
For weeks he hadn’t even dared to think about them. For the first two weeks all he could think of was his own traitorous idiocy. How he had let them down by not dying alongside them. He couldn’t put his mess of feelings into any sort of order. Only recently had he ventured to remember them deliberately.
Other memories arose unbidden. It was sometimes dreadful when that happened; but not always. Sometimes he could think of them without having to recall that fatal dawn, that nightmare that had enveloped the streets and transformed everything.
“I know it seems like the end of the world,” he said to the forlorn pair now. “But things will change. They will get better.” Yaret was already drawing a map in the dirt to show the travellers how to reach Obandiro.
But at nightfall, after they had left the occupants of the carts to sleep, he said to Yaret, “Are you sure we should be sending everybody to Obandiro?”
“Everybody? It’s two families. That woodcutter yesterday won’t go.”
“Yes, but what if more people follow? What if word gets around and too many people turn up wanting food and shelter?”
“Then we’ll cope,” said Yaret. “We’ve got shelter enough and we can rebuild once the weather’s better, and we can sow more crops too.”
“We’ve got no grain to sow,” he objected.
“Barley’s already starting to come up in a couple of the old fields. Oats too. The beets and roots will have seeded themselves as well. There’ll be enough to get us going.” She looked directly at him. “What would you have me do? Say no, you must go home to your houses full of ash?”
“No, of course not. But… they don’t even speak Bandiran.”
“The children will learn,” she said, which made him realise with a jolt that she regarded these visitors as long-term, even permanent. “They can make Obandiro a town again. They will all bring something, different skills. We saw that with the grandfather.”
The grandfather was still bad-tempered. He did not like to be called by his name, Lundo, saying it was disrespectful, and demanding to be given the customary honorific for the unknown elderly, Great-uncle. However, he had turned out to be more useful than Charo had expected; for he was a tanner and leatherworker – the stink of his trade being the reason the family had lived outside Byant and hence avoided the worst of the burning. He had brought with him his awl and shears.
Charo had decided that when he got back home, he would have a go at making shoes for the children, if the grandfather would tan some skins as he had promised. Although they now had a number of deerskins and sheepskins, these were hard and somewhat smelly. Ondro said that in the spring he might go south to try and find some cows, which could mean proper leather. Charo had already taken apart his old boots to see how they were made. It didn’t look that difficult. His new boots were a good fit, with Lo’s knitted socks to pad them out. They were well-made and had kept his feet dry through the worst of winter.
So he went to sleep thinking about shoe design and got woken up by Yaret creeping away in search of deer. She came back soon after dawn with a stag slung over Wulchak’s back. They revived the fire and cooked the offal for breakfast. Yaret gave the travellers most of the remaining meat to take with them on their onward journey.
“They should just about make it,” she said, watching the departing carts. Then she set her face to the north and urged Wulchak on again.