The Red Knight by Miles Cameron
The captain nodded. ‘Good night, Bent,’ he said, and touched the man’s shoulder, to say, And over is over, unless you dick up. He’d learned from experts, and he wanted to believe he was doing the captain thing well.
He walked out onto the wall, and there it was again – not the fear, but the feeling he was being watched. Scrutinized. He was ready for it this time, and he reached into the round room, and—
—there was Prudentia.
‘He is looking for you,’ she said. ‘His name is Thorn. A Power of the Wild. Do you remember how to avoid being found?’
He stopped to kiss her hand.
‘How do you know it is this Thorn?’ he asked.
‘He has a signature, and he has cast many times tonight, gathering allies. If you would pay attention to the Aethereal, instead of dabbling—’
He smiled. ‘I’m not interested. Too much like hard work.’
The door was open a crack. He often left it that way to give himself fast access to power, and tonight he could feel that searching presence through the crack in the door – more powerfully, if anything, than he had felt it on the wall.
Of course.
He continued past Prudentia and pushed the door firmly shut. The heavy iron latch fell into place with a comforting click.
North-west of Lissen Carak – Thorn
—the dark sun went out like a torch thrown into a pool.
He was disoriented, at first. The dark sun had dimmed and strengthened, dimmed and strengthened, and years of patient growth of power had taught him not to read too much into the fluctuations in power wrought by distance, weather, old phantasms that lingered like ghosts of their former powers, or animals who used power the way bats used sound. There were thousands of natural factors that occluded power the way other factors might affect sound.
In fact, he thought that the use of power and the movement of sound might usefully be studied together. The thought pleased him, and he spun off a part of himself to contemplate the movement of sound over distance as an allegory – or even as a direct expression – of power. Meanwhile, he sat and breathed in the night air and maintained, almost without effort, the chains of power that bound the trolls, and a third part of him looked for the dark sun with increasing frustration.
A fourth aspect considered his next move.
The conflict at the Rock had now forced a gathering of resources and allies that involved risks and challenges he had not anticipated. If he continued gathering, he would soon reach a level that would at least appear to challenge his peers – already the mighty Wyrm of the Green Hills was awake to him, raising, as it were, a scaled green eyebrow at his speedy accumulation of power and lesser creatures, men and resources. The old bear in the mountains did not love him either. And at some future point the trolls, scarcely people and more like cruel animals as they were – would come to resent his chains and find a way to throw them off.
So might one feudal lord be alarmed – or at least deeply curious – when a neighbour called in his vassals and raised an army.
The allegory occurred to the fourth self, because the fourth self had once been a man – a man capable of raising armies.
Before he’d learned the truth.
And at another level, the fortress was obviously not going to crumple at his command. Albinkirk’s outer wall had fallen so easily that he’d allowed himself to be seduced by the easy victory – but the citadel itself, full of terrified humans, was not yet under his claws and the easy conquests were over.
And whatever the dark sun was, it was powerful and dangerous, and the men of violence who surrounded it were deadly enemies who he would not underestimate again. Neither could he accept their pollution of his land, attack of his camp, or the preceeding endless cycle of challenge and counter challenge that had led him to grant a favour and confront the fortress more directly.
And where, exactly, was his professed friend in the Rock?
Enough.
He had made his choices, and they led to making war. Now he had to marshal his assets without affronting his peers, rip the fortress from the face of the world – a warning and a tale for all his foes – and grant the Rock to the Wild.
And all the while he contemplated this next move, that part of him which was enjoying the cool of night continued to avoid the golden light cast by the Abbess, as if the mere admission of her existence would be a defeat.
Twenty leagues to the south a hundred of his creatures stirred and rumbled and slept in the cold darkness, and two hundred men huddled close to their fires and posted too many sentries, and over the mountain to the north, hundreds of Sossag warriors woke and made their fires and prepared to come to his cause. And west, and north, creatures woke in their burrows, their caves, their holes and hides and homes – more irks, more boglins, and mightier creatures – a clan of daemons, a moiety of golden bears. And because power called to power, they were coming to him.
The trolls would counter the knights. The Sossag would give him more reliable scouts. The irks and boglins were his foot soldiers. By morning, he would have a force to deal with anything that humankind could offer. Then he would close his claws around the fortress.
Of course, there was irony in his trust of men, rather than creatures of the Wild, to fight other men.
With this decision his selves collapsed, one by one, back into the body under the tree, and that body stretched, sighed, and was almost like a man’s.
Almost.
Lissen Carak – Kaitlin Lanthorn
Kaitlin sighed, and half rolled against the figure beside her. She sighed again, and wondered why her sister had to take up so much of the bed . . . and then she suddenly knew where she was, and she made a noise in her throat. The man next to her turned and put a hand on her breast, and she smiled. And then moaned a little.
He licked her under her chin and kissed her, his tongue dabbing away at the corner of her mouth like a questing thing, and she laughed and threw her arms around him. She was not a slut like her sisters, and she’d never had a man in her bed before in her life, but she was not going to be bound by their sordid plans or their poor taste. She was in love.
Her lover ran his tongue across the base of her ear lobe while one lazy finger traced the line of her nipple. She laughed, and he laughed.
‘I love you,’ Kaitlin Lanthorn said into the darkness. She had never said the words before, not even when he’d first had her maidenhead.
‘And I love you, Kaitlin,’ Michael said, and put his mouth over hers.
Chapter Eight
Master Random
North of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter the cook’s first thought was I am still a free man.
He had walked for two days along the road east, and he hadn’t seen another man. Yesterday noon he’d smelt smoke, and seen the fortress rising to the south – a fortress he had to assume was the town of Albinkirk, although his appreciation of the landscape of western Alba was virtually non-existent and he had only the comments of his captors and the mercenaries to go by.
The two traders must have travelled some way to the east, then. And he was virtually back where he’d begun.
Or he was walking in circles.
But the sight of Albinkirk, five leagues or so distant, oppressed him. It was, after all, the place they’d been taking him to be sold. So he turned up the first decent path leading north, into the mountains, and he followed it even though setting his feet to it required an act of courage and marked his first decision.
He was not going back.
He’d rid himself of his yoke. It was easier than he’d expected – given time and some large rocks, he’d simply bashed it to flinders.
Like all slaves, and many other men, he had heard that there were people who lived at peace with the Wild. Even at home, there were those who did more—
Best not to think of those people. Those who sold their souls.
He didn’t want to think about it. But he went north, the axe over his shoulder, and he walked until darkness f
ell, passing a dozen abandoned farmsteads and stealing enough food that he couldn’t easily carry more. He found a good bow, although it had no arrows and no quiver. It was odd, going into the abandoned cabins along the trail – in some, the steaders had carefully folded everything away; chests full of blankets, plate rails full of green glazed plates from over the eastern mountains, Morean plates and cups and a little pewter. He didn’t bother to steal any of these, except a good horn cup he found on a chimney mantel.
In other houses, there was still food on the table, the meat rotting, the bread stale. The first time he found a meal on the table he ate it, and later he burped and burped until he threw it up.
By the twelfth cabin, he’d stopped being careful.
He went into the barn, and there was a sow. She’d been left because she was heavy, gravid, and the farmer was too soft hearted – or just too pragmatic – to try and drive her to Albinkirk in her condition.
He was wondering if he was hard-hearted enough to butcher her when he heard the barn’s main door give a squeak.
He saw the Wild creature enter. It was naked, bright red, its parody of hair a shocking tongue of flame. It had an arrow on its bow, the iron tip winked with steel malevolence, and it was pointed at Peter’s chest.
Peter nodded. His throat had closed. He fought down his gorge, and the shaking of his arms, and managed to say, ‘Hello.’
The red thing wrinkled its lips as if he smelled something bad and Peter’s perspective shifted. It was actually a man in red paint, with his hair full of some sort of red mud.
Peter turned slightly to face the man. He held up his empty hands. ‘I will not be a slave,’ he said.
The red man raised his head and literally looked down his nose at Peter, who shivered. The arrow, at full draw, didn’t waver.
‘Ti natack onah!’ the red man said in a tone full of authority. A human voice.
‘I don’t understand,’ Peter said. His voice trembled. The red man was obviously a war-leader of some sort, which meant that there were others around. Whatever kind of men they were, they were not what Peter had expected. They raised his hopes, and dashed them.
‘Ti natack onah!’ the man said again, with increasing insistence. ‘TI NATACK ONAH.’
Peter put his hands up in the air. ‘I surrender!’ he said.
The red man loosed his arrow.
It passed Peter, missing him by the width of his arm, and Peter felt his bowels flip over. He crouched, his knees going out from under him, and he put his arms around himself, cursing his own weakness. And so quickly I am a slave again.
Behind him there was a scream.
The red man had put an arrow into the sow’s head, and she twitched a few times and was dead.
Suddenly the barn was full of painted men – red, red and black, black with white handprints, black with a skull face. They were terrifying and they moved with a liquid, muscular grace that was worse than all his imaginings of the creatures of the Wild. As he watched, they butchered the sow and her unborn piglets, and he was pulled from the barn – roughly, but without malice – and the red man lit a torch from a very ordinary looking fire-kit and set fire to the shingles of the barn.
It lit off like an alchemical display, despite weeks of rain.
More of the warriors came, and then more – perhaps fifty arrived within the hour. They passed through the cabin, and when the roof fell into the raging inferno of the barn, they gathered half-burned boards into a smaller fire, and then another and another, until they had a fire that ran the length of the small cabin, and then staked the unborn piglets on green alder and some iron stakes they found in the cabin and roasted them. Other men found the underground storage cellar, and pushed dried corn into the coals, and apples – hundred of apples.
By now there were a hundred painted men and women, and darkness was falling. Most had a bow and arrows; a few had a long knife, or a sword, or even, in one case, a pair of swords. A few had long falls of hair in brilliant colours, but most had a single stripe of hair atop their heads, and another across their genitals. They looked odd to him, but it was only after his brain began to grow accustomed to them that he realised that they had no fat on their frames.
No fat.
Like slaves.
No one was watching him. He was no threat, but he was also no use. He had a dozen opportunities to run, and he went as far as the edge of the clearing, where the farmer had been hacking down trees older than his own grandfather to make room for his crops. Then he stopped, lay on the low branch of an apple tree, and watched.
Before the ruddy sun was gone from the sky, he stripped off his hose and his braes – cheap, dirty, torn cloth – and walked back among them in his shirt. A few of them had shirts of deerskin or linen, and he hoped that he was making a statement.
He still had the wallet hanging over his shoulder, and the axe.
And the bow.
He came and stood near the barn-fire, feeling the warmth, and his stomach did somersaults as he smelled the burning pig-flesh.
One of the painted people had set fire to the cabin, and there was laughter. Another painted man had burned himself stealing pinches of pigs flesh from the sow’s carcass, and all the warriors around him were laughing like daemons.
If there was a signal he didn’t hear it. But suddenly, they all fell on the piglets as if a dining bell had sounded, and ate. It was like watching animals eat. There were few sounds besides those of chewing, ripping flesh from bone, punctuated by the spitting out of burned bits and cartilage and the continuing sound of laughter.
If it hadn’t been for the laughter, it might have been nightmarish. But the laughter was warm and human, and Peter found he had stepped closer and closer to the fires, drawn by the smell of food and the sound of laughter.
The red man was close to him. Suddenly, their eyes met, and the red man gave him the flash of a grin – almost a grimace – and waved a rib at him.
‘Dodeck?’ he asked. ‘Gaerleon?’
The other warriors close by turned and looked at Peter.
One man – taller than most, painted an oily black, with oily black hair and a single slash of red across his face – turned and grinned. ‘You want to eat?’ he said. ‘Skadai asks you.’
Peter took another step forward. He was intensely conscious of his legs and neck and face, naked and very different from theirs.
The red man – Skadai – waved to him. ‘Eat!’ he said.
Another warrior laughed and said something in the alien tongue, and Skadai laughed. And the black warrior laughed too.
‘Was it your pig?’ the black warrior asked.
Peter shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was just passing through.’
The black warrior appeared to translate this to his friends, and handed him a portion of pig.
He ate it. He ate too fast, burning his hands on the skin and his tongue on the meat and fat.
The black warrior handed him a gourd that proved to be full of wine. Peter drank, sputtered and then handed it back. The burns on his hands suddenly hurt.
They were all watching him.
‘I was a slave,’ he said suddenly. As if they could understand. ‘I won’t be a slave again. I’d rather be dead. I won’t be a slave for you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But short of slavery, I’d like to join you.’
The black warrior nodded. ‘I was a slave, too,’ he said. He smiled wryly. ‘Well – of sorts.’
In the morning, they were up with the first tendrils of dawn, moving down the narrow road that Peter had climbed the day before. They moved in complete silence, their only communication via whistles and birdcalls. Peter attached himself to the black warrior, who called himself Ota Qwan. Ota Qwan followed Skadai, who seemed, as far as Peter could tell, to be the captain. Not that he issued any orders.
No one spoke to Peter, but then, no one spoke much anyway, so he focused on trying to move the way they did. He was not a noisy man in the woods, and no one cautioned him – he followed Ota Qwa
n as best he could, across an alder swamp, up a low ridge dotted with stands of birch, and then west along a deer trail through beech highlands, with a lake stretching away to the right of the long ridge and the great river stretched out to the left.
They moved across the face of the wilderness, sometimes following trails and sometimes following the flow of the terrain, and their paths gradually made sense to Peter – they were following a relatively straight course west, and avoiding the river. He had no sense of how many of them there were, even when they made camp, because that night, they simply stopped and lay down, all nestled tightly in a tangle of bodies and limbs. No one had a blanket, few had shirts, and the night was cold. Peter found he despised the touch of another against him, front and back, but his revulsion was quickly forgotten in sleep.
In the rainy grey of not-quite-morning, he offered some very stale bread from his sack to Ota Qwan, who accepted it with gratitude, took a small bite, and handed the crust on. Men watched it eagerly, but no one protested when the bread ran out before the mouths did. Peter hadn’t even had a bite. He had expected it to be handed back. But he shrugged.
On his second night with the painted people he couldn’t sleep at all. It rained softly, and the sensation of wet flesh – paint, grit, and a man’s naked thigh against his own – made him get up shiver alone. Eventually he crept back into the pile of bodies, disgusted but almost frozen.
The next day was agony. The whole group moved faster, running the length of a grass meadow curiously criss-crossed by an arterial profusion of canals the width of a man’s outstretched arm. The painted people leaped them with ease, but Peter fell into several, and always received a hand out and a belly laugh for his troubles.
The painted people wore supple, thin leather shoes, often the same colour as their paint so that he hadn’t noticed them at first. His cheap slave shoes were falling to pieces, and the great meadow was littered with sharp sticks pointing up from the ground. He hurt his feet a dozen times, and again, he was helped along and laughed at.
He walked out onto the wall, and there it was again – not the fear, but the feeling he was being watched. Scrutinized. He was ready for it this time, and he reached into the round room, and—
—there was Prudentia.
‘He is looking for you,’ she said. ‘His name is Thorn. A Power of the Wild. Do you remember how to avoid being found?’
He stopped to kiss her hand.
‘How do you know it is this Thorn?’ he asked.
‘He has a signature, and he has cast many times tonight, gathering allies. If you would pay attention to the Aethereal, instead of dabbling—’
He smiled. ‘I’m not interested. Too much like hard work.’
The door was open a crack. He often left it that way to give himself fast access to power, and tonight he could feel that searching presence through the crack in the door – more powerfully, if anything, than he had felt it on the wall.
Of course.
He continued past Prudentia and pushed the door firmly shut. The heavy iron latch fell into place with a comforting click.
North-west of Lissen Carak – Thorn
—the dark sun went out like a torch thrown into a pool.
He was disoriented, at first. The dark sun had dimmed and strengthened, dimmed and strengthened, and years of patient growth of power had taught him not to read too much into the fluctuations in power wrought by distance, weather, old phantasms that lingered like ghosts of their former powers, or animals who used power the way bats used sound. There were thousands of natural factors that occluded power the way other factors might affect sound.
In fact, he thought that the use of power and the movement of sound might usefully be studied together. The thought pleased him, and he spun off a part of himself to contemplate the movement of sound over distance as an allegory – or even as a direct expression – of power. Meanwhile, he sat and breathed in the night air and maintained, almost without effort, the chains of power that bound the trolls, and a third part of him looked for the dark sun with increasing frustration.
A fourth aspect considered his next move.
The conflict at the Rock had now forced a gathering of resources and allies that involved risks and challenges he had not anticipated. If he continued gathering, he would soon reach a level that would at least appear to challenge his peers – already the mighty Wyrm of the Green Hills was awake to him, raising, as it were, a scaled green eyebrow at his speedy accumulation of power and lesser creatures, men and resources. The old bear in the mountains did not love him either. And at some future point the trolls, scarcely people and more like cruel animals as they were – would come to resent his chains and find a way to throw them off.
So might one feudal lord be alarmed – or at least deeply curious – when a neighbour called in his vassals and raised an army.
The allegory occurred to the fourth self, because the fourth self had once been a man – a man capable of raising armies.
Before he’d learned the truth.
And at another level, the fortress was obviously not going to crumple at his command. Albinkirk’s outer wall had fallen so easily that he’d allowed himself to be seduced by the easy victory – but the citadel itself, full of terrified humans, was not yet under his claws and the easy conquests were over.
And whatever the dark sun was, it was powerful and dangerous, and the men of violence who surrounded it were deadly enemies who he would not underestimate again. Neither could he accept their pollution of his land, attack of his camp, or the preceeding endless cycle of challenge and counter challenge that had led him to grant a favour and confront the fortress more directly.
And where, exactly, was his professed friend in the Rock?
Enough.
He had made his choices, and they led to making war. Now he had to marshal his assets without affronting his peers, rip the fortress from the face of the world – a warning and a tale for all his foes – and grant the Rock to the Wild.
And all the while he contemplated this next move, that part of him which was enjoying the cool of night continued to avoid the golden light cast by the Abbess, as if the mere admission of her existence would be a defeat.
Twenty leagues to the south a hundred of his creatures stirred and rumbled and slept in the cold darkness, and two hundred men huddled close to their fires and posted too many sentries, and over the mountain to the north, hundreds of Sossag warriors woke and made their fires and prepared to come to his cause. And west, and north, creatures woke in their burrows, their caves, their holes and hides and homes – more irks, more boglins, and mightier creatures – a clan of daemons, a moiety of golden bears. And because power called to power, they were coming to him.
The trolls would counter the knights. The Sossag would give him more reliable scouts. The irks and boglins were his foot soldiers. By morning, he would have a force to deal with anything that humankind could offer. Then he would close his claws around the fortress.
Of course, there was irony in his trust of men, rather than creatures of the Wild, to fight other men.
With this decision his selves collapsed, one by one, back into the body under the tree, and that body stretched, sighed, and was almost like a man’s.
Almost.
Lissen Carak – Kaitlin Lanthorn
Kaitlin sighed, and half rolled against the figure beside her. She sighed again, and wondered why her sister had to take up so much of the bed . . . and then she suddenly knew where she was, and she made a noise in her throat. The man next to her turned and put a hand on her breast, and she smiled. And then moaned a little.
He licked her under her chin and kissed her, his tongue dabbing away at the corner of her mouth like a questing thing, and she laughed and threw her arms around him. She was not a slut like her sisters, and she’d never had a man in her bed before in her life, but she was not going to be bound by their sordid plans or their poor taste. She was in love.
Her lover ran his tongue across the base of her ear lobe while one lazy finger traced the line of her nipple. She laughed, and he laughed.
‘I love you,’ Kaitlin Lanthorn said into the darkness. She had never said the words before, not even when he’d first had her maidenhead.
‘And I love you, Kaitlin,’ Michael said, and put his mouth over hers.
Chapter Eight
Master Random
North of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter the cook’s first thought was I am still a free man.
He had walked for two days along the road east, and he hadn’t seen another man. Yesterday noon he’d smelt smoke, and seen the fortress rising to the south – a fortress he had to assume was the town of Albinkirk, although his appreciation of the landscape of western Alba was virtually non-existent and he had only the comments of his captors and the mercenaries to go by.
The two traders must have travelled some way to the east, then. And he was virtually back where he’d begun.
Or he was walking in circles.
But the sight of Albinkirk, five leagues or so distant, oppressed him. It was, after all, the place they’d been taking him to be sold. So he turned up the first decent path leading north, into the mountains, and he followed it even though setting his feet to it required an act of courage and marked his first decision.
He was not going back.
He’d rid himself of his yoke. It was easier than he’d expected – given time and some large rocks, he’d simply bashed it to flinders.
Like all slaves, and many other men, he had heard that there were people who lived at peace with the Wild. Even at home, there were those who did more—
Best not to think of those people. Those who sold their souls.
He didn’t want to think about it. But he went north, the axe over his shoulder, and he walked until darkness f
In other houses, there was still food on the table, the meat rotting, the bread stale. The first time he found a meal on the table he ate it, and later he burped and burped until he threw it up.
By the twelfth cabin, he’d stopped being careful.
He went into the barn, and there was a sow. She’d been left because she was heavy, gravid, and the farmer was too soft hearted – or just too pragmatic – to try and drive her to Albinkirk in her condition.
He was wondering if he was hard-hearted enough to butcher her when he heard the barn’s main door give a squeak.
He saw the Wild creature enter. It was naked, bright red, its parody of hair a shocking tongue of flame. It had an arrow on its bow, the iron tip winked with steel malevolence, and it was pointed at Peter’s chest.
Peter nodded. His throat had closed. He fought down his gorge, and the shaking of his arms, and managed to say, ‘Hello.’
The red thing wrinkled its lips as if he smelled something bad and Peter’s perspective shifted. It was actually a man in red paint, with his hair full of some sort of red mud.
Peter turned slightly to face the man. He held up his empty hands. ‘I will not be a slave,’ he said.
The red man raised his head and literally looked down his nose at Peter, who shivered. The arrow, at full draw, didn’t waver.
‘Ti natack onah!’ the red man said in a tone full of authority. A human voice.
‘I don’t understand,’ Peter said. His voice trembled. The red man was obviously a war-leader of some sort, which meant that there were others around. Whatever kind of men they were, they were not what Peter had expected. They raised his hopes, and dashed them.
‘Ti natack onah!’ the man said again, with increasing insistence. ‘TI NATACK ONAH.’
Peter put his hands up in the air. ‘I surrender!’ he said.
The red man loosed his arrow.
It passed Peter, missing him by the width of his arm, and Peter felt his bowels flip over. He crouched, his knees going out from under him, and he put his arms around himself, cursing his own weakness. And so quickly I am a slave again.
Behind him there was a scream.
The red man had put an arrow into the sow’s head, and she twitched a few times and was dead.
Suddenly the barn was full of painted men – red, red and black, black with white handprints, black with a skull face. They were terrifying and they moved with a liquid, muscular grace that was worse than all his imaginings of the creatures of the Wild. As he watched, they butchered the sow and her unborn piglets, and he was pulled from the barn – roughly, but without malice – and the red man lit a torch from a very ordinary looking fire-kit and set fire to the shingles of the barn.
It lit off like an alchemical display, despite weeks of rain.
More of the warriors came, and then more – perhaps fifty arrived within the hour. They passed through the cabin, and when the roof fell into the raging inferno of the barn, they gathered half-burned boards into a smaller fire, and then another and another, until they had a fire that ran the length of the small cabin, and then staked the unborn piglets on green alder and some iron stakes they found in the cabin and roasted them. Other men found the underground storage cellar, and pushed dried corn into the coals, and apples – hundred of apples.
By now there were a hundred painted men and women, and darkness was falling. Most had a bow and arrows; a few had a long knife, or a sword, or even, in one case, a pair of swords. A few had long falls of hair in brilliant colours, but most had a single stripe of hair atop their heads, and another across their genitals. They looked odd to him, but it was only after his brain began to grow accustomed to them that he realised that they had no fat on their frames.
No fat.
Like slaves.
No one was watching him. He was no threat, but he was also no use. He had a dozen opportunities to run, and he went as far as the edge of the clearing, where the farmer had been hacking down trees older than his own grandfather to make room for his crops. Then he stopped, lay on the low branch of an apple tree, and watched.
Before the ruddy sun was gone from the sky, he stripped off his hose and his braes – cheap, dirty, torn cloth – and walked back among them in his shirt. A few of them had shirts of deerskin or linen, and he hoped that he was making a statement.
He still had the wallet hanging over his shoulder, and the axe.
And the bow.
He came and stood near the barn-fire, feeling the warmth, and his stomach did somersaults as he smelled the burning pig-flesh.
One of the painted people had set fire to the cabin, and there was laughter. Another painted man had burned himself stealing pinches of pigs flesh from the sow’s carcass, and all the warriors around him were laughing like daemons.
If there was a signal he didn’t hear it. But suddenly, they all fell on the piglets as if a dining bell had sounded, and ate. It was like watching animals eat. There were few sounds besides those of chewing, ripping flesh from bone, punctuated by the spitting out of burned bits and cartilage and the continuing sound of laughter.
If it hadn’t been for the laughter, it might have been nightmarish. But the laughter was warm and human, and Peter found he had stepped closer and closer to the fires, drawn by the smell of food and the sound of laughter.
The red man was close to him. Suddenly, their eyes met, and the red man gave him the flash of a grin – almost a grimace – and waved a rib at him.
‘Dodeck?’ he asked. ‘Gaerleon?’
The other warriors close by turned and looked at Peter.
One man – taller than most, painted an oily black, with oily black hair and a single slash of red across his face – turned and grinned. ‘You want to eat?’ he said. ‘Skadai asks you.’
Peter took another step forward. He was intensely conscious of his legs and neck and face, naked and very different from theirs.
The red man – Skadai – waved to him. ‘Eat!’ he said.
Another warrior laughed and said something in the alien tongue, and Skadai laughed. And the black warrior laughed too.
‘Was it your pig?’ the black warrior asked.
Peter shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was just passing through.’
The black warrior appeared to translate this to his friends, and handed him a portion of pig.
He ate it. He ate too fast, burning his hands on the skin and his tongue on the meat and fat.
The black warrior handed him a gourd that proved to be full of wine. Peter drank, sputtered and then handed it back. The burns on his hands suddenly hurt.
They were all watching him.
‘I was a slave,’ he said suddenly. As if they could understand. ‘I won’t be a slave again. I’d rather be dead. I won’t be a slave for you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But short of slavery, I’d like to join you.’
The black warrior nodded. ‘I was a slave, too,’ he said. He smiled wryly. ‘Well – of sorts.’
In the morning, they were up with the first tendrils of dawn, moving down the narrow road that Peter had climbed the day before. They moved in complete silence, their only communication via whistles and birdcalls. Peter attached himself to the black warrior, who called himself Ota Qwan. Ota Qwan followed Skadai, who seemed, as far as Peter could tell, to be the captain. Not that he issued any orders.
No one spoke to Peter, but then, no one spoke much anyway, so he focused on trying to move the way they did. He was not a noisy man in the woods, and no one cautioned him – he followed Ota Qwa
They moved across the face of the wilderness, sometimes following trails and sometimes following the flow of the terrain, and their paths gradually made sense to Peter – they were following a relatively straight course west, and avoiding the river. He had no sense of how many of them there were, even when they made camp, because that night, they simply stopped and lay down, all nestled tightly in a tangle of bodies and limbs. No one had a blanket, few had shirts, and the night was cold. Peter found he despised the touch of another against him, front and back, but his revulsion was quickly forgotten in sleep.
In the rainy grey of not-quite-morning, he offered some very stale bread from his sack to Ota Qwan, who accepted it with gratitude, took a small bite, and handed the crust on. Men watched it eagerly, but no one protested when the bread ran out before the mouths did. Peter hadn’t even had a bite. He had expected it to be handed back. But he shrugged.
On his second night with the painted people he couldn’t sleep at all. It rained softly, and the sensation of wet flesh – paint, grit, and a man’s naked thigh against his own – made him get up shiver alone. Eventually he crept back into the pile of bodies, disgusted but almost frozen.
The next day was agony. The whole group moved faster, running the length of a grass meadow curiously criss-crossed by an arterial profusion of canals the width of a man’s outstretched arm. The painted people leaped them with ease, but Peter fell into several, and always received a hand out and a belly laugh for his troubles.
The painted people wore supple, thin leather shoes, often the same colour as their paint so that he hadn’t noticed them at first. His cheap slave shoes were falling to pieces, and the great meadow was littered with sharp sticks pointing up from the ground. He hurt his feet a dozen times, and again, he was helped along and laughed at.