Bloodstone (17 page)

He plied Urkiat with questions, but it had been four years since the raiders had destroyed his village. Since then, he’d been living inland with a small group of survivors from various coastal tribes. They’d been so shattered by the loss of their kinfolk and homes that only this year had they dared send someone north to tell their story at the Gathering.

“Why not try and exact tribute from us?” Darak asked. “As they did your folk.”

“That was only after they’d attacked us and we were too weak to fight anymore.” Urkiat’s expression darkened. Darak knew he hated to talk about what had happened, but he needed information.

“So they’ll come back.”

“They always come back,” Urkiat replied. “Sooner or later.”

Although Urkiat’s facility at learning their tongue had encouraged the raiders to use him as an interpreter, he knew little about the land they came from. He could only repeat the tales told by the other survivors in his village, and pass along the scraps of information they’d gleaned during their visits to the coast to trade pelts for grain.

The afternoon was waning when the reek of decay reached them. They discovered the first body as they emerged from the trees—an old woman lying facedown with three arrows protruding from her back. Eight more bodies lay tangled together at the water’s edge. Crows rose up in a squawking black cloud as they approached.

Most of them were young, little more than Faelia’s age. Although the birds and crabs had been busy, it was clear their skulls had been crushed. When he spied the red hair, he fell to his knees.

But when he turned the body over, he discovered it was not Sinand, but Owan. A tiny crab scuttled out of the boy’s open mouth. With an oath, Darak flung it away.

“Is it the boy from your village?”

“Aye.” He brushed the wet sand from the beardless cheeks. “Why club them to death? Could they have tried to escape?”

“They probably died on the voyage downriver. I’m surprised there aren’t more, given how many captives they took.”

Darak folded Owan’s hands across his chest and made the other bodies decent. And all the while, the guilty thought echoed in his mind: thank the Maker it isn’t Keirith.

He rose to find Urkiat examining the deep furrows that gouged the beach from waterline to grass. “From their ships. A dozen of them, at least. They must have beached them here.”

But Darak was already walking toward the fire pits. The bones of roasted sheep lay among the ashes. His gaze drifted from the charred logs to the forest. Even from this distance, he could see the fallen trees, the heartwood of the stumps raw and pale.

Urkiat crouched beside a fire pit, sifting through the ashes. “Four days old at least,” he said, wiping his fingers on his breeches.

Numbly, Darak walked toward the forest, passing scattered fragments of lives: a woman’s shoe, a torn strip of doeskin, a tooth crusted with dried blood. The trees lay in miserable heaps, delicate branches of birch peeping out from the ancient oaks. Jagged shards, still bleeding sap, reared up from the scarred trunks. They hadn’t bothered chopping them into logs, simply sheared off the limbs to use as fuel.

The sacrilege was even more appalling than the sheer waste. Dozens of saplings had been felled along with five older trees, the spirits that had dwelled within murdered as brutally as the children on the beach. If the raiders had so little regard for life, how would Keirith ever survive?

“We’d best get moving,” Urkiat said.

“We have to gather the bodies and build a cairn.”

“The light will be gone by the time we finish.”

“We can’t just leave them.”

After a moment, Urkiat shrugged.

Darak swept his arm across the beach. “Doesn’t this affect you at all?”

Urkiat’s expression hardened. “Aye, Memory-Keeper. But I’ve seen it all before.”

Keirith came to hate Brudien’s voice, always so calm, always so hopeful, forever singing the old songs, forever telling the old tales. Forcing him to remember his home, his family. Reawakening the fears that they might have been hurt or killed.

When Brudien sang the song of farewell, hot tears prickled in Keirith’s eyes. Every autumn at the full Goose Moon, his father sang it to honor their ancestors’ long journey north, fleeing the invaders who had driven them from their homeland.

He blinked back the tears, but he could not suppress the memories. Memories of days in the forest, drinking in the lessons his father taught. Any child, his father claimed, can observe something in the forest simply by using his eyes, his ears, his nose. A hunter augmented those senses with his skill with bow and arrow, sling and snare. A great hunter not only understood his prey’s habits and feeding patterns, but learned to anticipate their reactions. A great hunter remembered.

Keirith took strength from those early lessons. He promised himself to watch his enemies. Observe their behavior. Remember any detail that might help him stay alive.

Each time Brudien sang the song of farewell, more voices joined in. “The Oak and the Holly are with us,” the song promised, but Keirith knew better. The gods hadn’t saved his people during the Long Winter and they couldn’t save him now. He couldn’t trust them any more than he could trust these strangers. If they found out what the raiders had done to him, they would scorn him. If they discovered his gift, they would revile him.

The Oak and the Holly weren’t with him. He was alone.

S
OMETIME IN THE MIDDLE of the sixth day, Keirith heard a flurry of activity from above. Instead of the inevitable scrape of pebbles, the boat thudded against something and settled into a gentle rocking. Anxious speculation gave way to silence as the door swung open. The dark form of a raider stood silhouetted against brilliant light. He flung the rope ladder into the hole, drawing startled curses from those below.

For a long moment, no one moved. Finally, Brudien spoke. “We are the children of the Oak and the Holly. Like them, we know what it is to fight and suffer defeat. And like them, we will remain strong to fight again—if we have the courage to face the coming days.”

A few murmured assent, but one man shouted, “The coming days will bring death. Better to fight now.”

“Against armed men?” Brudien shouted back. “Twice our number?”

“Should we go forth like sheep to the slaughter?” Dror demanded.

“Nay! Like proud men. Let them see our strength and wonder at it.”

Bent almost double because of his height, Brudien edged through the closely-packed bodies and seized the rope ladder. People muttered prayers of protection as he climbed up. Then Dror pushed forward. “If there’s a chance to make a break, I’ll shout. When I do, take out the nearest guard.”

“Good gods,” Temet said with weary disgust. “Half of us can barely walk, never mind ‘take out the nearest guard.’ ”

“And where would we run?” someone cried.

“Make for the forest,” Dror replied.

Weak from the days of confinement, Keirith’s legs betrayed him, and he had to let the raiders pull him out of the hole. The heat made him gasp; if the air smelled better, it was just as stifling. A raider bound his wrists. Another looped a rope around his neck, tethering him to Temet. A shove sent him stumbling forward.

Images formed before his dazzled eyes: sunlight striking sparks on the blue-green water; a treeless cliff silhouetted against the sun-bleached sky. Below him, a long tongue of stone rose nearly as high as the side of the boat; the line of captives trudged down it toward a beach of white sand. Fishing nets lay stretched like giant spiderwebs across the snowy expanse. Beyond it, clusters of people shouted and waved. Some of the raiders called out greetings in return. Of course, they must have families. Families who greeted their homecoming with the same joy and excitement his folk displayed when a loved one returned from a Gathering.

Make for the forest,
Dror had said. But there was only a sprawling mass of white buildings marching up the side of a hill, row upon row of small, square houses that reflected the merciless sun back into his eyes. In the distance, a dark crag thrust out from the hills, its peak obscured by a haze of yellowish dust or smoke. On its slopes, Keirith made out a few patches of green. There was Dror’s forest, those pitiful clumps of trees.

A shout saved him from tripping as the stone tongue gave way to sand.

Bare-chested men with whips and clubs. The snap of a whip when a captive faltered. Snowy sand sifting through his toes like hot ash.

The world blurred, then re-formed to show him heads bobbing up and down along the line as captives hopped from foot to foot to escape the burning sand. One of the raiders mimicked them, drawing roars of laughter from his comrades.

Keirith kept a wary eye on the raiders hurrying toward their loved ones, but he couldn’t see the Big One. Did he have a wife? Would she rush forward to fling herself into his arms? Would she hurry him home, eager for the touch of those calloused hands, the thick fingers knotted in her hair, pushing her down, shoving her skirts up . . .

He forced himself to breathe, sucking in deep gulps of the hot air. When the black dots cleared from his vision, he spied a pathway of smooth stone and sighed with relief as he left the burning sand behind.

The path twisted between rows of buildings too low to provide shade from the midday sun. He heard snatches of muffled conversation from within. More tantalizing were the smells: frying fish, roasting meat, and spicy scents he couldn’t identify. Saliva filled his dry mouth and he swallowed it gratefully.

Steps led them past more houses that clung to the slope of the hill as if they might tumble off. Those at the top rose up two or three times a man’s height, offering brief patches of shade.

Up ahead, a man shouted. Answering shouts echoed down the line as a man lurched away from the other captives. Good gods, was it Dror? Where did he think he could go?

Whips cracked. Clubs rose and fell. A boy screamed. He saw guards dragging someone away. And then the line began moving again.

He stepped in something wet. Blood, he realized, when he saw the trail of red footprints. They grew steadily fainter as the procession approached another set of steps, steeper than the first. By the time he reached the top, he was panting. His head ached. His legs quivered. The sweat oozing down his sides evaporated before it could even dampen the waist of his breeches. If it was this hot now, what must it be like at Midsummer?

He heard the clamor of contending voices before he saw the open square. Small knots of people lingered before wooden stalls. Women hurried past, clutching baskets brimming with vegetables he couldn’t even recognize. Few bothered to give the captives more than a cursory glance, although one or two pulled their children back.

It must be some kind of market, he thought dully.

As the procession wound its relentless way upward, the world narrowed to the gray stones before him and Temet’s grimy heels, rising and falling in a slow but ceaseless rhythm. Only when he felt the sun beating down on him again did he look up. The guards led them up another flight of steps toward an enormous building. Gods, they could put ten villages inside it. Giant pillars, tall as pines, marched along the path, but the line veered away toward a section of the building that jutted out. Craning his neck, he saw two wooden gates swing open in the wall.

When he passed through, he found himself in yet another open area. Instead of stalls, this one had flimsy shelters lining the walls. He glimpsed fair skin and dark, red hair and black, but before he could guess at the number of captives, the guards brandished their whips and herded his group forward.