Chapter 2
Dil was in ecstasy.
He had never been atop a horse so fine, so grand, so high-stepping. He had hardly been on any horse at all apart from the miller’s old dray horse; and Poda was completely different. Charo had said that Poda looked like a nobleman’s horse and Dil was ready to agree.
Last night he had rubbed her down diligently and today her coat gleamed like a ripe conker. He bobbed in the saddle and was not entirely comfortable, but he was very happy.
Elket and the new person walked alongside. Dil knew she was a woman in male mode but sometimes he forgot. He forgot her name too. Yaret. That was it. She was most important to him as the owner of the horse.
He didn’t understand how a weaver could own such a good horse, however. That was something to be explained later on that evening, after the council, when Yaret had promised to tell them the story of her travels. She was going to explain her leg as well. He had nearby collapsed in amazement last night, in the cellar before bedtime, when she had said,
“Ah, just to warn you. This one’s wooden,” and had pulled her own foot off. Pulled it right off! And then passed it over for him to look at! He rehearsed the story to tell his friend Armendo and then remembered that Armendo was not there. At that, the panic began to grip him and it made him grip the horse in turn until she grew restless.
“What is it, Dil?” said Yaret, who was walking beside him.
“Elket,” he said. “Do you think Armendo is still hiding in the woods?”
“It’s possible,” said Elket. “You never know. He might be.”
“How long would he have to hide before it’s safe to come out?”
“A bit longer, perhaps,” said Elket. “Until those men, you know, have really gone away.”
“The stonemen,” said Dil soberly, his joy at the horse all dissipated. He shouldn’t have thought about Armendo. But how could he just forget him? He missed Armendo and it made him ache in the middle of his chest.
And he missed Ma and Da almost as much, Ma anyway, although they seemed to be already further away somehow – Ma especially. He had cried lots those first few days, hoping Ma would reappear and comfort him; but really he knew that she wouldn’t. He thought he had already got used to her not really being there, because she had been so busy with the baby for so long. And the baby had been so ill. It might have died anyway, even if. Even if. If. Not.
Go away, he said silently, go away, go away, and although he was not quite sure who he meant they did go away after a few minutes and left him sitting on the proudly-stepping horse and with a farmhouse just coming into sight. It was burnt, of course, all the houses were, but as they entered through the non-existent gate he found the ashen shapes on the ground quite easy to ignore. He and Charo agreed that they weren’t people any longer.
“Are they still people?” he challenged Yaret, ready to put her right if she said yes.
“Not like us,” said Yaret. “I think not. No.”
“I keep thinking that we ought to bury them,” said Elket.
“Again,” said Yaret, “I think not. Not just yet, at any rate. It would be a huge and difficult job and it isn’t really necessary as far as hygiene goes. Also the disturbance to the ground would be quite obvious.”
“To those stonemen,” said Dil. “If they come back again.”
“Yes. At the moment, undisturbed as they are, those – those effigies that were once bodies – they protect us. They make the town seem uninhabited, untouched. We might regard them as our guardians.”
Dil looked at the blackened shape nearest the house and at once his perception of it changed. It was now a guardian, a burnt and almost magical thing. It seemed to have acquired a different sense of life.
“Guardians,” he said. “That’s what they are.”
“At present guarding our food,” said Yaret. She helped him climb down off Poda, which he found he was quite glad to do after all.
“Ouch,” he said.
“It’ll take you a while to get used to riding so far. You’ll have to walk back home anyway, because Poda will be carrying a lot of weight.”
That sounded encouraging. And when they entered the burnt farmhouse and descended the ladder to the cellar he saw that there was plenty of food here. Elket stood next to him and just sighed, a great sigh of relief. It was the same way Ma used to sigh after Da had gone out for the day. But that was before…
No. No. Go away.
It went away quite easily this time, because there was so much to look at and discuss and do. What to take first? A bit of everything, they decided, so long as they could carry it. Oats, flour, apples. Dil found a bag of dried peas but Yaret told him to leave those where they were.
“We might need them in the spring,” she said. Dil didn’t understand why peas would be important in the spring and not now, but before he could ask Yaret, she picked up a sack of oats and gave a cry of pleasure at what lay underneath.
“Ah! Excellent,” she said. “These will be useful.”
Dil ran over to see what she’d found. It seemed to be only a pile of old empty sacks and some folded cloth. Yaret unfolded it. It was a long woollen piece, rather blotchy and mildewed. She sniffed it.
“Hmm,” she said. “But we can wash it and use it as a blanket. The winter weather will come soon. Do you get cold at night?”
“No,” said Dil.
“A bit,” said Elket, and he remembered that Elket had given him her cloak. It made him feel slightly guilty but not much because she didn’t have to.
“We can stuff some of the sacks with heather or dry grass,” said Yaret, “or even bedstraw, if we can find any, to make ourselves more comfortable at night.” Dil had been quite comfortable at night. But then Elket had told him he could fall asleep anywhere. She said he could fall asleep on the blade of a knife.
There were no knives or anything so useful down in the cellar. There were some candles and soap, however, which Yaret took. They loaded apples into one of the sacks and carried the cloth and everything else back up the ladder to the horse. Yaret filled the saddle-bags until they bulged and threw a sack of oats over the saddle. When Poda tried to reach round for it with her nose, Yaret smiled and then looked sad.
“My donkeys used to like oats,” she said.
Dil did not want to ask about the donkeys because he assumed they were now black sticks inside one of the burnt sheds. But she went on,
“I had two donkeys. One of them went lame by the river Thore and I had to leave them both behind. So they’re probably very happy running free up there, with the wild donkeys for company.”
He breathed more easily again. “What are they called?”
“Dolm and Nuolo.”
Elket said, “By the river Thore? Isn’t that an awfully long way away?”
“It is.”
“Will the donkeys be in your story tonight?” asked Dil.
“Oh, yes. They play quite an important part. And so does Poda, and another horse called Narba.” Yaret was staring at the sheds but he had the feeling she was looking at something much more distant. Charo did that too sometimes.
He was suddenly quite glad that Yaret was here. Charo was all right but he wasn’t yet a man. Yaret wasn’t a man either but she was half-way; and she was nearly twice Charo’s age, she said. It meant that she seemed to know a lot of things. And she was very calm.
“Before we go,” she said, “let’s look around for anything else that we can salvage. I’m thinking about anything metal and tools in particular.”
So they divided up the farm buildings between them and had a rummage in the ash. Dil knew that he was getting very dirty, and he had no other clothing to change into, but neither had anybody else so it didn’t matter.
He found a spade without a handle, and a garden fork with one prong melted like a worm but the others still proudly straight.
“Good,” said Yaret. “Those could be very useful. We’ll leave them in the kitchen here for now.”
Elket had found in one outhouse a jug – not metal but pottery, with only one thin crack – a metal carding comb, and a whole bunch of iron spikes lying by a wall.
“They were for fencing posts,” said Yaret. “Again, let’s leave most of the spikes here. They’re heavy. We’ll just take a couple with us.”
She washed the jug at the little spring and they all drank from it. The water tasted good. There was a spring behind the inn but the water from it tasted smoky and bitter. Charo said it would improve.
“And I found more cloth,” said Yaret. She seemed to think that cloth was important. It was probably because she was a weaver. “It was in the dye-baths. They must have almost boiled dry; but the cloth seems to be all right, just a bit shrunken. I’ve rinsed it and put it in the cloth-shed to dry out. We’ll take it back next time.”
He liked the sound of that. “Next time, can I ride the horse again?”
“It might be someone else’s turn. Like Shuli’s. Does she ride?”
“I don’t know,” said Dil. “I didn’t really know her much before.”
“She lived with an aunt and uncle just outside the north edge of town,” said Elket. “She said she woke up when the moonlight fell on her face through the window and then she heard people marching past and smelt a smell and had a strange feeling, so she climbed out of the window and went to see what was happening. And when she saw what was happening she ran away.”
Dil knew that this account was not entirely true, because there had been no moon that night. He thought Shuli had probably been up to no good, but there was no point saying that, and in any case it seemed like telling tales.
Yaret paused. “So they came at night?” she asked.
“Before dawn,” said Elket. “It was still dark. My mother woke us up – she was awake every night with the baby – and she pulled us out of bed and told us to run. I only had time to grab some clothes and then she pushed me out of the door and just said ‘Look after Dil.’ We’re on the west-side so we ran straight out across the field towards the woods. There was fire to our left. We could smell – the smell – and we felt – so – so weird and shaky that after a bit we couldn’t move and we had to sort of sit down. Nobody saw us in the field. We were invisible. But we could see fires starting up all over the place and they spread so fast and burnt so high, so high you wouldn’t believe, and then there was a lot of shouting and everything was just burning, burning everywhere. And then as soon as we could move again we ran into the woods.”
Dil listened. This was the most that he had heard his sister speak since it had happened. He knew that she was missing a lot out. They had seen more than that – people on fire – those men running after them with swords, black against the roaring orange dazzle of the flames – the one that – the ones – Go away, go away, go away, go away. It wouldn’t go. He ran over to the horse and began to stroke her frantically, making sure she wasn’t scared. He didn’t want her to be scared.
“It’s all gone now,” he said to her. “It’s all gone.” And eventually it was. The horse was warm and quiet and solid and didn’t seem to be so scared any more.
Yaret and Elket were still talking, in low voices, but he didn’t want to listen to them. So he stayed to stroke the horse until Yaret came over with an apple and some biscuit and they ate that before they set out home. He gave the horse half of his apple because she was such a good horse.
As they left Yaret turned to look back at the farmyard, and nodded. She had already brushed the ash across the kitchen floor with a piece of bushy shrub she’d found somewhere, so that no footprints were visible. Now she did the same in the farmyard.
“We do that at the inn,” said Dil. “It was Elket’s idea.”
“And I am copying it, because it’s a sensible idea,” said Yaret. She smiled at Elket, who said nothing now, as if she’d done all her talking in one go.
He didn’t mind the walk back home. Some of the woods were still nice and not burnt at all although they smelt of smoke. Dead leaves crackled underfoot the way they were supposed to. There was a squirrel and a jay.
“Nuts!” he said eagerly. “Cobnuts! Look, look!” There was only one hazel-tree with nuts and the squirrels had already had a share, but he could still fill both his pockets until they were knobbly. The others filled the jug.
Closer to the town they passed many of the no-longer-human shapes, but now that Dil knew who they were he didn’t mind them. They were the Guardians. He felt that they approved of the day’s work. It was very pleasant to arrive back at the inn and show the food and everything else to Shuli and Charo. He felt triumphant, as though he had saved everyone. A bit, anyway.
“I found a few cobnuts too,” said Charo, “but not as many as you, Dil.” He looked at Yaret. “And I did what you suggested.” He held open the small bag which she had given him that morning. “You were right; there were still quite a lot of beans beyond the south-side in someone’s garden.”
She peered into the bag. “Good. These we will keep in a cool, dark corner of the cellar, for sowing in the spring.”
Now Dil thought he understood about the peas. They were for sowing too. But that worried him. It meant that they would still be here to sow the peas in spring. It meant that they would still be here to pick the plants in summer. It meant that there would be nobody else to do it for them, and maybe no other food. He felt himself start to go tight as the aching gripped his chest again.
Yaret looked at him. “Just in case,” she said. “Because I think there will be many other stores of food to find, and other people to join up with. But it is always good to be prepared for everything you can.”
“All right.”
After that it got better again. Shuli arrived not with eggs but amazingly with a whole chicken.
“A fox had just got it,” she said. “I chased it away. Can we cook it?”
Charo pulled a doubtful face. “I don’t know. I’m worried about smoke. We haven’t tried making a fire yet,” he told Yaret.
“I can understand that. And it has not been too cold. But now is perhaps a good time to try a fire, while the weather is dry and the whole town is still smoking slightly. At least it appeared to be from a distance. There are probably embers still smouldering in places, so any smoke you make will be disguised.”
“We’ll need dry wood,” said Shuli. “Cutting down trees won’t work. They’ll smoke like mad.”
“Perhaps around the edges of the town,” suggested Yaret, “would be the best place to look, where wood stores may be partly burnt but not entirely.”
She looked at Charo, who said decisively, “In that case, we’ll all go out again now, to look for dry wood, so that we can cook the chicken. Bring back all that you can carry.”
“We can store it in the outhouse,” Shuli said. “It still has nearly all the tiles on the roof. I climbed up to check.” Dil wished he had done that.
But he was allowed to go with Yaret and the horse, although he did not ride it. Shuli went with them this time. Shuli said they ought to try the forge because it used so much wood for fuel. Dil thought it would all have been burnt, but she said there was a wood store by the stream, and sure enough there was. Fire had caught its edges but it had not burnt entirely.
They filled the sacks they’d brought. Now he understood why the sacks were important. Sacks and peas. Yaret loaded up the horse. He noticed that she was watching Shuli. Yet she asked no questions, until she said, “Anywhere else?”
Shuli thought. “Holvet’s farm,” she said. “He must have had a wood store. He was a pig-farmer and kept a smokehouse.”
“We should check that for hams,” said Yaret.
“I already did. There aren’t any. The smokehouse is gone now.”
“Pity. Still, we’ve done well here. We’ll save Holvet’s farm for next time.”
“I’ll take a proper look tomorrow,” Shuli said.
Dil led the horse home. She obeyed him every step and stopped when he stopped. He thought he might already love the horse. Yaret didn’t seem to mind; she was still watching Shuli, who was looking around at everything. But they didn’t talk much.
Back near the inn Charo had found a place to build a fire. It was actually a real fireplace in the house two down from the inn. You couldn’t see it until you were right inside the ruined house, but Charo had cleared the cavity and the ashpit. There was still a bit of chimney over it although it went nowhere.
So they built a fire and put the chicken over it, spitted on one of the fence spikes they’d brought back from the weaver’s. They shoved some of Yaret’s roots into the embers and she added some of the red roots from the inn although they all protested.
“I like them,” said Yaret, laughing.
“Then you can eat them all,” said Shuli, “and leave the proper ones for us.”
When they went outside to check, there was hardly any smoke, not enough to matter. They ate the chicken with their fingers. It was tough but very tasty.
“Tomorrow I will look for wintergreens,” said Yaret. Dil opened his mouth to protest that he didn’t care for wintergreens, before closing it again. He hadn’t believed Elket when she told him wintergreens were important, but if Yaret said it then it might be true.
After the chicken they left the roots to continue cooking in the embers and walked down to the burial ground for council. He had so many things ready to say that they were almost bursting from his mouth. But he had to wait.
Yaret said Oveyn, as before, the Ulthared version which made them all listen almost without breathing. Dil thought it might take him another few goes to remember because it was quite long, and strange, but he decided that it sounded comforting even though he didn’t understand it. Then Yaret sat back while they had the council. Charo led it although he was not the oldest any more.
All the news and best things tonight were obvious, of course: food, horse, wood, chicken. Dil surprised himself by adding the Guardians, and then Elket had to explain. Yaret said almost nothing which was strange because she was the oldest. But this time she was quieter than Elket until the plans for tomorrow were discussed.
“We haven’t decided yet what we’re going to do,” objected Shuli. “I mean are we going to stay here or not?” Not staying here had not even occurred to Dil. It alarmed him.
“Where would we go?” he said.
“That is too big a decision to make all at once,” said Yaret. “There are several possibilities.” She waited but when nobody else spoke she went on. “We can stay here in the town, obviously. I think there will be more food and tools to be foraged from cellars and storerooms. It’s just that they are all buried in ash, but we can dig them out. There will be outlying gardens and fields still left untouched. There will be sheep out on the hills if we can catch them. I saw deer spoor in the woods so if they return there will be hunting.” Dil hadn’t seen the spoor and felt put out.
“What with?” demanded Shuli.
“My bow. We can make more bows. How many of you can shoot?”
“I can,” said Charo and Elket together.
“Sort of,” added Elket.
“I want to learn,” said Shuli.
“You’ll need a smaller bow than mine,” said Yaret, “but if we can make one I can teach you.”
“Me too,” said Dil, although he wasn’t sure.
“Not until you’re ten,” said Yaret gravely. That was a long way off; further than he could see at the moment. He was only just nine now. At first he hadn’t been sure that any future would happen. Everything seemed to have stopped. But Yaret was now talking about the future as something assured.
“As long as the stonemen don’t come back I think we could successfully winter in Obandiro,” she said. “Alternatively we could all move to my grandparents’ house; the cellar is big enough, but it is more isolated, and higher up, so it gets more snow. Or we could travel to another town – Byant is the closest – before the winter sets in, and see what the situation is there.”
There was a silence. “Do you think it will be the same as here?” asked Elket.
“We have no way of knowing until we go to see,” said Yaret. “I didn’t come through Byant. On my way from Coba the villages were untouched. But Coba is more than a week away, and things may have changed there too by now.”
“I don’t want to leave,” said Dil. “What if Armendo comes back and there’s nobody here? What will he do?”
Shuli seemed about to say something. Then she stopped. Then she started again, and said,
“You know, he has a point. There might just be more people out there. Travellers, like you.”
Yaret nodded. “I think, for another week at least, we establish ourselves here,” she said. “If the stonemen don’t return then I will ride out to Byant and see how things stand there. The days are shortening fast but if I go within the next fortnight I could be there and back before nightfall.”
“Don’t go yet,” said Dil, suddenly afraid of losing her, and the horse.
“No, I won’t go yet. Tomorrow’s plans?”
They all made suggestions. It was decided that they should look for more firewood, and for more places to store it. Yaret suggested that Shuli should scout for wood and she would go to collect it on the horse.
The others would explore houses, starting on the Cross-street, methodically looking for cellars and storerooms or anything useful hidden underneath the ash. Yaret said that anything metal would be good. Knives, pots, needles, hammers, spoons. And if they found a cellar, they should check not just for food, but for pottery, candles, clothing, anything that they could use.
Charo said he would search the forge and after a moment’s hesitation, she nodded. Any building they went inside, she said, they needed to carefully remove any fresh-looking footprints afterwards.
“At present our tracks are not obvious on the streets,” she said, “but we need to keep an eye on that too. And just in case we see anyone approach the town, stonemen or anybody else, we should agree a plan of action and a signal.”
The plan of action they agreed was basically to hide; and later to meet up at one of four places on the perimeter of the town – the inn, the mill, the Northgate or the Dondel Bridge, whichever was furthest from the danger.
The signal was more difficult to decide. Yaret suggested that they all try bird calls, so they sat there hooting and whistling and squawking until Dil was in a fit of giggles. They fixed on owl because they could all do a shrill “week, week” quite convincingly. It wasn’t very loud but it was better than nothing. He pointed out that owls sometimes called during the day, so an owl call wouldn’t sound too strange, but not very often, so there shouldn’t be many false alarms. And everyone agreed.
Dil felt quite happy by the end of council. There were plenty of interesting things to do and many of them used the horse. Charo had thought of lots of things before, but now that Yaret had arrived it was clear that there were things he hadn’t thought of. Dil hoped that Charo didn’t mind.
So on the walk back to the cellar he told Charo,
“I think you and Yaret both make really good leaders.”
“Thank you,” said Charo, sounding surprised. “But you know the whole point of the council is that we don’t have leaders.”
“I know. But all the same.” Dil felt quite glad that he was only nine and didn’t have to be responsible for anyone else. But he could still be leader of the horse.
Back at the inn he was allowed to brush the horse down and then Elket made him wash himself, and had a moan about his dirty clothes. Since it was starting to get dark and the roots were cooked, they took them down to eat by lamplight in the cellar. Yaret picked some large stones out of the fire and wrapped them in sacks and took them down into the cellar too. When she unwrapped them and piled them up on the earth floor it was almost like having a little fire to sit near. But not a dangerous one. They ate the roots and listened as she began to tell her story.
It was going to be a long story, she said, and would take many nights to tell. It started with her grandparents and the two donkeys. Dolm was the male, the stubborn bold tough noisy one, and Nuolo was quiet and clever but also stubborn.
The donkeys and Yaret marched quickly through various towns and markets on their way to the first important bit. Which was a burnt-out farmhouse, and he seemed to stand inside it with her and feel the wind blow through. But it was all right because she had already made it clear that everybody got away in the carts, and took the horses with them, although she didn’t know where they had gone. But they were safe and it was also very far away and felt safer for that reason too.
He liked the story being so far away. It made it more of a story and less real. Next she was somewhere that she called the loft, where there might be lions, and then all of a sudden there was a horse galloping out of the forest, with no rider.
“My horse!” he cried, and Yaret looked at him and smiled.
“Our horse,” she said. “And I’ll stop there, and go on with the story tomorrow evening.”
Dil didn’t want to wait till tomorrow but then they had some singing and Yaret led them in a round. He was good at singing and didn’t lose his place once. When they began to get ready for bed he realised he was very tired. It had been a much busier day than usual. The roots filled his stomach and the story filled his head quite nicely. He gathered it was going to be a rather scary story but so far he hadn’t had to tell any of it to go away.