Chapter 18
As the land slipped past her, the sadness did as well. Yaret knew this territory; she knew her horse, and she began to breathe more easily as the quiet landscape unfolded before her. After the constant demands of Obandiro’s other twenty-seven inhabitants she admitted to herself that it came as a relief to be alone.
When she set Poda to a canter the horse sped willingly along the dirt trail that led due west. It was overgrown with weeds, making her wonder if anyone had used it in the last few months. Many miles to the north the stonemen also had marched west; but she would rather take this trail than theirs. She knew the spots to camp and sleep and shelter, and for the first day or two could almost pretend she was on her usual annual journey with her load of woollen samples.
But without her donkeys. She missed the donkeys until she resolutely visualised them thriving under Dil’s diligent care. Dolm was a handful, and together with the cart-horses and the trappers’ horses, kept Dil busy; it meant that he would not have time to feel the loss of Poda. Better for them all that way.
As Yaret crossed the Birchfields – which were not fields at all, but swampy woodlands of thin, lichen-decorated trees – the sense of normality increased. This place was untouched by fire; she could almost imagine that no such devastation had happened after all.
When she found a spot amongst the spindly birches that was dry enough to camp, she ate her bread and apple and then rolled herself in her blanket beneath the lacy boughs, as if she was on her usual summer journey. A little cold for summer, though not as chilly as the winter they had endured down in the cellars. It had been a worrying time, as she had needed to ensure that everyone stayed warm enough. The hot stones had worked in the evening but by morning all the heat had gone.
The next dawn she was awoken by the hopeful song of warblers. Early bog-bean was flowering by the ponds; in the water were dim clouds of frogspawn waiting for the spring. She passed two beaver dams that were newly built since last year. Not everything had been destroyed. Not even most things; in here she could pretend that all was as it should be.
Emerging on the far side of the Birchfields to the meagre pasture with its scattered farmsteads, she clung on that sense of normality for a while, until gradually the differences became too obvious to ignore. While the farmsteads here were not burnt out, some were empty and seemed to be abandoned. At several others she got the impression that the inhabitants were hiding. On her approach to one house that she knew well, a strange man appeared round the corner of the building and pulled a bow on her.
“Where is Bina?” she said, naming the owner, but perhaps too quietly for him to hear. At any rate he stood still aiming at her with his bow and saying nothing, until she went away.
Two miles further on, the signs of many feet marching over this land became obvious even to her untrained eye. She could not tell how recently it might have been invaded; for none of the footprints had survived, only the deeply trampled trail. There must have been hundreds of them.
After crossing several empty fields through broken fences, she stopped at a long farmhouse where she’d previously done business. As she approached, an elderly woman came to the door. Yaret recognised her as the place’s grandmother; but to her civil greeting the woman made no reply except to say curtly, “Leave us alone.” She had two small children clinging to her skirts.
“Where are the menfolk?”
“They took them. And the animals.”
“Who did? The stonemen?”
“Is that what you call them? I call them monsters. Go away. Leave us alone.”
When Yaret tried to tell her about Obandiro and the help to be found there, the woman shook her head as if she’d never heard of it. It might as well have been a thousand miles away.
There was nothing to be done except move on. The fields were showing signs of new crops, even if they were only roots and spearweed. This was not fertile country. But the sodden water-meadows were as empty of cattle as their farmsteads were of people. Yaret presumed the cattle had been stolen to eat; but what of all the men? Had they been taken as slaves? Or killed and thrown into some ditch? Although she saw no evidence of such burials, it seemed all too possible.
She rode on doggedly but in increasing apprehension of what might lie ahead. The sparse farms and empty pastures petered out again: in place of them arose the knobbly unremarkable hills known as the Uin-Buin. They were really hardly tall enough to be called hills – rather, they were mounds, but too steep and shrubby to grow crops easily.
None the less they were inhabited. Or so she hoped. If the farmsteads had been vulnerable, the people here were doubly so.
As Poda trudged uphill on the winding track between green hillocks, Yaret looked round with trepidation. The path was too rainwashed for her to read any footprints here. The groves of plum and cherry trees that nestled in the shelter of the Uin-Buin were thankfully unburnt, though still bare of leaves; and the place was worryingly bare of people. Only three fat wood-pigeons plodded complacently underneath the boughs.
The track dipped down again between the steeply rising slopes. She passed through glades that were overhung with leggy hazel stems. No voice was heard: no inhabitant was visible, although a thin waft of smoke drifted in the air. That was not altogether reassuring.
When she reached a tiny glade hidden between two mounds, Yaret pulled Poda up. Dismounting, she unstrapped her saddlebags and looked around. Still no sign of anyone.
But just as her concern was growing, the grassy slope ahead of her was disturbed by an abrupt movement of the turf. An oval door popped open and a head poked out.
“Not today, thank you,” it said, and disappeared again.
Yaret grinned in relief. “Rubila? Is that you?” she called. “It’s Yaretkoro the cloth. I’m not selling today, but I’ll happily buy food off you if you have any to spare.”
The door popped open again, with a faint but distinct noise as of a cork being unstuck. She knew that despite appearances the oval door was made not just of turf, but of scored wood cleverly covered with a living layer of grass, close-fitting in its frame.
“Yaretkoro the cloth is it? You’re very early this year,” said Rubila, shuffling out and squinting against the light, even though the sun was well-shrouded by a thick layer of grey cloud.
“I know I’m too early,” said Yaret. “I’m travelling. It’s a long story.”
As she had hoped, the word story was a key that unlocked the green oval doors of other groundhouses. These doors did not pop but squeaked open as more heads poked out to listen.
“Who’s that? Is that Yaretkoro?”
“It is, and greetings to you, Hubilo,” Yaret called out.
Meanwhile Rubila continued her sideways shuffle down the path to the track where Yaret stood with Poda stamping alongside her. Yaret put out a hand to take her outstretched fingers: Rubila gently stroked it and then reached up to touch Yaret’s wet hair before turning her attention to the horse.
“What happened to your donkeys?” Her stubby fingers were as gentle as a breeze on Poda’s coat. “This one’s big. Smells noble.”
Yaret laughed. “More noble than the donkeys? I don’t think Dolm would agree. But I left them behind this time. I left …” She stopped, unable to list the many things that she had left behind since visiting the Uin-Buin hills last year. So much explaining she would have to do, and she did not know where to begin.
“And how are your grandparents?” asked Rubila.
Yaret swallowed, opened her mouth and said nothing.
But Rubila, her head cocked on one side, heard something in that nothing. “Ah,” she said, “better come in and tell us all about it.” Patting Yaret’s arm, she turned and began to walk crablike back towards her doorway. Considering that Rubila could see neither door nor path, she moved quickly. Yaret hurriedly rummaged in her pack for a pair of candles before she ran to catch her up. The Fiordal people had no use for candles and kept none.
Inside the groundhouse, she had to crouch in order not to bang her head on the passage roof. Her grandfather had always come away from here with a variety of scrapes and scratches on his balding scalp; and Yaret, though not so tall as him, was still taller than most of the Fiordal. The walls and floor of the tunnel were hacked out of a gritty sandstone that was rough against her fingers. However, her candles were not needed, for as her eyes adjusted to the dark a faint glow from the fire-room turned the walls to orange-brown shadow, providing just enough light for her to see her way.
When she emerged into the fire-room itself, a square-sided chamber carved out of the rock, it was like stepping into a wide, low-ceilinged cellar – a warm one, however; much warmer than the cellars she had left behind. Although the fire in one wall was burning low beneath its narrow chimney, the stoves on either side emitted trickles of steam and smells of baking.
Many racks of drying clothes curtained the far end of the room. From behind them, Rubila’s family emerged: all five of them, no longer children now, although none had yet married and set up their own house. Yaret thought, with a pang, that maybe there were too few others for them to choose from – too few potential partners in the groundhouses. And if this place could not manage to regenerate, with its forty houses, how could Obandiro with its mere half a dozen?
But when the common door beside the fireplace was pushed open, with a “Can we come in?” she realised that maybe she’d been too pessimistic. For a couple of the newcomers, stocky young men, were immediately hailed by Rubila’s daughters. Despite their blindness they confidently crossed the room, walking over to exchange fond hugs before they turned to give Yaret a gentle greeting.
Then more of the Fiordal came hurrying in by the same common door, which linked Rubila’s house by tunnels with a dozen other groundhouses – all the ones within this mound. But Rubila’s had the biggest fire-room. Before long there were over thirty people nestled in the kitchen, sitting on low benches or standing round the edges of the room: perhaps a quarter of the Fiordal.
Only two of them were children. Igolo and Brula ran up to her and stroked her gently up and down before clasping her hands.
“You’ve got older,” said Igolo. Yaret knew her hands were rough and chapped from the winter’s work.
“And you’ve got taller,” she told them both.
Although she was smiling, the Fiordal must somehow have realised that all was not well, for they immediately took charge of her. Rubila sat her on the bench and gave her a bowl of soup to warm her hands on. Blankets were brought in – rugs of her grandfather’s and her own weaving – and were wrapped around her until she was, if anything, too warm.
Even more warming than either soup or rugs were the children who snuggled up to her on either side, keen to hear her story. They all were keen to hear it; their only news from outside came from occasional wandering traders like herself. But the adults’ sombre faces showed their apprehension that her news would not be good.
And it was not easy news to tell. Yaret found herself stumbling over the words as she tried to describe the destruction of Obandiro and her grandparents’ farm, but in shielded terms that would not distress the children overmuch.
Igolo and Brula were agog but stayed undistressed. It was the adults – those who had known her grandfather for many years – who wept openly. The children squeezed her arms and patted her shoulders. “There, there,” said Igolo.
“And these people were called stonemen?” asked old Hubilo, tears running down his face from his dark eyes – seemingly all pupil – into his stubbly grey beard.
“Yes. Have you seen any–” Yaret caught herself in time to rephrase the question. “Have you heard any sounds of marching men coming through here lately? Or smelt anything strange?” For they would have seen nothing – at most a hint of a movement, a stir of shadow; she understood that their vision extended no further than the distinction between light and dark.
They had always lived this way, Rubila had once told her. Blind was a word not in their vocabulary. They found it difficult to grasp what Yaret meant by seeing. Shapes they understood, for they could touch them; but they could not see them in their minds.
However, if darkburns had passed this way, she thought, the villagers would undoubtedly have registered their deathly stink. And if stonemen had marched past they would have felt and heard them even deep within the groundhouses. She was relieved when the Fiordal shook their heads, murmuring their incomprehension of such people.
Then they fed her more soup while she spoke of how things were at present in Obandiro. It was as if they hoped that warmth and food could ward off sorrow. So she tried to tell them that the situation was not altogether dark – although she refuted the use of that word. Dark. Why should dark be evil, be terrible? Night had always been her friend. And the stonemen had brought hideous fire and killing heat, not darkness. To the Fiordal, too, light was the enemy – sunlight, anyway, which hurt their eyes.
“But what do they want, these men who plant stones in their heads?” asked Hubilo.
“To conquer. To destroy. I don’t know. It’s not as if they care about the land. They steal livestock but just leave the farms and towns abandoned if they don’t set them on fire.”
“Yet they must have a purpose.”
“I suppose so. Or their leader must, at least. But I don’t know what it is.”
There were baffled murmurings and much shaking of heads. The concept that some people might cause destruction just for the thrill of power, the will for domination, or love of other people’s pain, seemed not to occur to them.
Yet it was something she had reflected on through the long cold winter nights. She could only liken it to the destructive urge of a thwarted toddler. But a toddler had excuses, not least its ignorance of consequences. Whoever ordered the firing of Obandiro, she thought, could have no true reason. No excuse.
Rubila wriggled off the bench. “Come,” she said, “now if ever is the time for sooth-saying.”
“No, thank you,” answered Yaret politely. On every visit to the Fiordal people, they made this same offer of sooth-saying. She had no idea what it involved and did not wish to find out. Her grandfather had once, years ago, given in to their insistence that he should have his fortune told. “Very odd,” was all that he would say about it afterwards.
“Don’t be scared,” Rubila told her now. “The sooth-saying predicts no deaths. That’s not what it’s about.”
“Thank you anyway, but no.”
“Yes,” said Hubilo, standing up also. Brula and Igolo next to her began to pull at her hands to drag her to her feet. She resisted. What use could she make of any sort of sooth-saying? If it was bad, she would only worry in case it should come true: if it was good, it might make her complacent. Unguarded.
“We will go together to the Fioronhall,” announced Rubila, “and there you can decide.”
“Go on, go on,” Brula urged. “It’s fun.”
“It is not fun,” said Rubila reprovingly.
“Yes, it is.”
“Hmph,” said Rubila. “Well, come along anyway.”
It couldn’t be all that serious if a child thought it was fun. The two children were both tugging at her. So Yaret did not resist those small warm hands, but laughingly allowed herself to be pulled up and dragged towards the common door.
She had never been through this way before, and when she saw how dark it was beyond she said, “Wait: I need to light a candle or I’ll bang my head.”
They waited patiently while she retrieved her two candles and lit them at the fire. With them flickering in the bronze candle-holder – a sole find in an otherwise empty cellar – she followed Rubila through the door and down the sandstone passage. In places she had to squirm to avoid being scraped along the tunnel’s sides.
This place was not as old as Obandiro had been, she thought, but old enough. At least, being underground, the people ought to be much safer from attack and fire… She sighed.
“Don’t worry,” said Rubila just ahead of her. “If you really don’t want to hear anything in the Fioronhall, then you won’t.”
In that case she would hear nothing, Yaret decided.
The twining passage seemed to lead into the middle of the hill. The Fiordal before her and behind her walked more easily than she did, without ducking or twisting, hardly even putting out a finger to check where they were. Perhaps they could discern the walls’ presence by the movement of the air.
And now she herself could feel the air move. A moment later they emerged into a cavern.
A big cavern – as big as the Gyr cave, no, bigger; although this space was very different. Unlike the Gyr, it bore no marks of mining. This chamber was not hand-worked as the tunnels and the fire-room had been. Her candles lit up walls shaped smoothly into wave-like hollows, and striped with bands of greeny-gold and copper, rust-reds and pinks and browns, like drifting layers of sand all petrified by time. At its far edge columns rose to meet the roof, twined with the same soft colours. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
Half a dozen of the adults, as well as the two children, had followed her in. She wished that they could behold it as she did, glowing faintly in the candlelight: that they could see the huge banded waves that seemed to move and drift and turn like some vast slow sea created out of stone. Presumably it was water that had worked these undulating walls, long centuries ago.
Despite their blindness the Fiordal were smiling as if they too could see the marvellous sight. Surefootedly, Rubila led them forward until she stood in the middle of the cavern; there she turned around a few times before nodding.
“Here,” she said. Her voice echoed softly. As the others gathered around her with heads slightly tilted Yaret realised that they were listening. All became very still. Even their breathing became muted. Not a movement, not a rustle, not a whisper now escaped them, the children no less silent than the adults.
Such a vast space, thought Yaret; beautiful, it’s true, yet as hollow as the home I’ve left behind, as empty as my life that now is gone. I feel the void inside myself as great as in this cavern.
None the less. Respect your hosts. Pretend, at least. Do as they do. So listen.
At first she thought that she heard nothing. Then she realised that somewhere far away there was a faint ringing, like a distant bell. It came and went. She closed her eyes to hear the better. Some movement of unseen water caused it, maybe: drips falling on one of those twisted columns, or on some sheet of stone, tapping it like a muted cymbal or a chime.
After a while the sound seemed to grow, not fade. More water? She stopped puzzling over the mechanism of it and merely listened, letting the faintly ringing notes wash over her, coming and going, their echoes seeming to revolve all round her as if she were caught in some languorous whirlpool of eddying sound. It was strangely relaxing.
And also strange was the fact that gradually within the sound she began to hear words. Someone was speaking to her through the waves, the waterfall, the swirling toll of many distant bells or one. Was it a male voice, or female? She couldn’t tell. It was probably her own mind struggling to find meaning in the unfamiliar, trying to turn the sound to words.
Yet a word was clearly there, whether conjured by her own mind or not.
Horse.
No surprise. She thought of Poda, grazing patiently outside, the bow and quiver still strapped to the saddle. A great gift.
The word transmuted, changed its shape.
Hunters, hunters.
Or was it huntress? Either way, no surprise, again. She remembered the patient hours spent waiting for a deer; the crackle and snap before the bear had emerged from its thicket.
Listen.
Yes. She should have listened better then. So listen now. The chiming whispers encircled her but did not make her feel hemmed in. They gave her rather a sensation of huge space, as limitless as the sky. She listened to their ebb and flow as they regrew around her.
Home is where you are.
The emphasis was on the you. Who is you? she wondered. Is my home here with the Fiordal? Or simply where I am? That was one to think about. But later on. For now, just listen.
The waves washed over her.
Oh, my dear.
Oh... That surely was her mother’s voice, which she did not remember ever hearing.
Oh, my dear. My dear.
Such love was in it. Yaret caught at the sounds and let them settle in her heart which seemed to be turning over and over. Oh, my dear. Oh, my mother.
But now it was repeated, seemingly by different voices, from all sides of the cavern. My dear. One or two of the voices seemed familiar. Was that her father speaking, a vague memory of smiling tallness? Her grandmother? Someone else?
Or all of them. A whole dead town, she thought, all those former friends and neighbours who stand now at my shoulders; and her eyes flew open, in case they might be standing there around her, their eyes fixed on hers.
But there were only the Fiordal, listening rapt and silent in the candlelight. She wondered if they heard the same words she did. Or did their minds create their own meanings from the whispering stone?
My mind is merciful, she thought: it has given me the words that tell me what I need to hear. That in spite of everything I have a home. That I have been beloved.
She closed her eyes and listened once again.
But now there were no words for her to hear, only the shivering chime and hush of pulsing waves, as if the banded cave held some great shivering gong. The murmurings swept over and around her, time after time, in an endless drift and flow and eddy; and it came to her that – although she had never heard it in her life – what rolled and whispered past her, wordless now, was the long sound of the sea.