The Flint Lord Read online

  With the aid of surprise, the soldiers of the first Lord Brennis marched on this valley and purged it. The problem was solved.

  The first Lord Brennis grew old and tired; other men took his place. His policies were no longer so rigidly observed. And, as one symptom of the decline, the savages began to come back.

  For many years there was no real clash between them and Valdoe. Forest clearance had slowed down anyway; old fields had reverted to woodland. What small friction there was between native and farmer was of little concern to the Flint Lord: Valdoe’s interests were rarely threatened. Gradually the savages ceased to be important. Even as slaves they were of no value. They were just denizens of the forest like the other creatures there, nothing more; and like the other creatures they could sometimes be a nuisance, occasionally stealing livestock or damaging crops.

  Gehan’s father, the fourth Flint Lord, had restored the ideals of Gehan First. In his lifetime he had remade much that Valdoe had lost; and he had won independence from the mainland as a first step in the establishment of an empire in Brennis, but he had died before the work was finished, leaving his son to take over.

  At his father’s death, Gehan had been twenty-three. Now he was nearly thirty. In those years he had upheld the old spirit, the spirit of the old Valdoe, of his father and of Gehan First. The consolidation was complete: expansion had once again begun. In three years, seventy thousand acres of land had been reclaimed or freshly burned. Next summer there would be more, much more. There would, in ten years, be fields and villages beyond the Weald, thirty, forty, fifty miles from the coast. The land would be stripped of timber, the marshes drained.

  There was only one obstacle. Last summer there had been a resurgence of trouble from the savages. In the north-west of the domain they had repeatedly harried the forest clearance teams. Farmers had been captured, tortured, put to death. Stores had been stolen and befouled at a dozen sites. A unit of soldiers, twenty-five men, had been routed. And in the east, one of the most prosperous villages had been sacked and burned to the ground.

  The records of Gehan First had been preserved in stories and paintings. The young Gehan had known them from his earliest days, taught by his father to revere the daring of Gehan First, the ancestor who had come to a fierce land and stolen it from the brigands. Recently the stories had been returning to his thoughts, and with them an uneasy feeling, a foreboding, vaguely recriminating. Yet he knew there could be no guilt in his mind. What he was planning was no more than a military prerequisite of expansion. The savages were an obstacle to the smooth extension of the domain: it was his duty to remove that obstacle. He was going to march on their winter camp and destroy them.

  At the latest estimate of his scouts, there were something like three hundred savages either on their way to the camp or already present. The soldiers who could be safely mustered, leaving enough to defend the coast, were numerically only equal to the enemy. Heavy losses could be expected in even the best-planned onslaught. There was also the difficulty of the season. The camp would not be full, and an attack would be less than completely effective, before the end of autumn. The solstice, Goele, marked the first day of winter and of the new year. Goele was the prime festival of the calendar. For religious reasons there could be no departure in the week of the festival. By then, however, it was almost certain that the snows would have started. In mild years the snow would not be too deep; sometimes there was even a thaw for a week or two, but normally the ground was frozen till spring, when the camp would quickly disperse, too quickly to risk leaving the attack until then. It would have to be made in the snow. Gehan had consulted his Divine: she had forecast a bitterly cold winter, with heavy drifts. Marching in such conditions would require many men.

  The forces of Gehan First, it was said, had outnumbered the savages by three to one. They too had marched in deep snow. The extra soldiers had been brought from the mainland: the same would have to be done again. But such reinforcements took time and great expense to arrange, and the problems of transporting, feeding, and sheltering them were not easily solved. In winter especially, the channel between Brennis and the mainland was rough and dangerous. Weeks might pass before a calm day allowed a crossing. The number of craft available was limited. They were small and slow, capable of carrying only a few men at a time.

  However, it would be done. Even now there were ships across the channel, waiting for the swell to ease.

  The alternative to an all-out assault on the savages’ camp – piecemeal extermination, tribe by tribe, using soldiers already available – was tempting to consider. Not only would it be cheaper and need fewer men, but it could be carried out in favourable weather. The previous summer it had already been tried, but only when there had been no chance of a survivor carrying word to other tribes. Nonetheless, there had been several escapes, and Gehan’s advisers had warned him to stop.

  The capacity of the various tribes for working together was unknown. Given warning by a consistent series of massacres, a force of savages might form and descend on the coast, a force perhaps of daunting size. Such an enemy would be impossible to defeat without help from the homelands, for although the Trundle itself was impregnable, and the contingency of a mass attack had been well foreseen by its designer, supplies of water inside the fort were finite and a protracted siege could not be defended.

  Given all this, a sudden advance on the winter camp was the only way. Using surprise and vast numerical superiority, the savages would be dealt with once and for all, and the work of expansion would again be allowed to proceed in safety.

  Villages beyond the Weald: that was the dream. To attain it Gehan would need all his ingenuity and courage. The details of the campaign had been crystallizing in his mind; he examined them endlessly. They brought him alive, excited him, kept him from sleep, and as the season turned and the weather worsened the anticipation had begun to consume and torment him.

  He could share none of this with Altheme, his wife. Only Ika, his sister, his own flesh and blood, could understand. Only she knew what their heritage was.

  Tonight a storm was blowing. But tomorrow it might be clear. It might be calm. Ships might be launching.

  Under the bedding he put his hand on Altheme’s smooth skin. She stirred drowsily and half woke, still asleep as he pulled her towards him.

  Her eyes opened and she tensed. She drew back from him, bewildered and afraid. “What do you want?”

  Gehan said nothing. He moved on top of her, not looking at her eyes, the dark eyes that were nothing like his own. And her hair was the darkest brown before black; every night she sat combing and brushing and brushing it, no longer speaking to him; and when she undressed, she turned her back and quickly took the wrapper held up by her body-slave, before her husband could see. She had given him no children, no son. Gehan ran his hands under her thighs and pulled them apart. She resisted, in silence. Always in silence now, for months, even long before Ika had come. Once, in the middle of the day, he had found her weeping, her face in her hands, wet with tears. She would not tell him why. Moving inside her, she would not tell him why. He tried to kiss her, to find her tongue with his own, forcing her against the pillows, his hands gripping her wrists. She went limp and the tenseness had gone. Not melted, but gone.

  She looked past him. Outside the gale was streaming the shutters with rain. Gehan saw her dark hair on the pillow, moving more quickly now, loveless and violent. In the channel the seas were mountains. They were keeping the ships on the beach, pounding the shingle, scouring spray along the shore, a wet night, utterly black in the sandhills where men were waiting. Breakers smashed on the line of coast, hurling weed and wood. Solid water fell on the beach and drowned the marshes beyond, reaching towards the homelands, towards Valdoe, reaching towards the hill. And despite the storm the ships were launching. He wanted to shout a warning to the men with ropes. But they couldn’t hear. The ships were breaking up, the boards splintering, the sails ripped away downwind. Men were in the sea, heads and hands vi
sible, shouting, swimming, trying to cling to wreckage. On the sloping walls of waves he saw them. They were drowning, all of them. And as they went down their hair was no longer dark. It was golden; it was fair, forming whirlpools, going under, going down.

  Gehan did not know whose name he had spoken, but as he slumped across her Altheme heard it and she felt her heart flood with fear. It was true, what she had guessed, what she had known. It was true. It was true and now there could be nothing more.

  “Damn you,” he said. “Bitch. Damn you.”

  She shut her dark eyes and listened to the wind.

  3

  Tagart listened again, his head averted and his eyes unfocused on the ground, using all his concentration to filter the sounds of the forest at nightfall. The branches overhead, bare or with a few sere leaves remaining, gave no hindrance to the rain which was falling from a windy sky. As the light failed, the trunks and branches were losing their colours, shades of green or grey migrating to dark and pale.

  Crows were roosting somewhere far away to the south. Their raucous chorus suddenly went quiet, and started again with a few isolated cries. Tagart frowned. He was beginning to doubt what he thought he might have heard.

  He was in his twenty-seventh year, dark like all the nomads, with high cheekbones and a strong, spare frame. He carried a bundle at his side; a fur stormcoat covered his tunic, and below this his leather leggings were fixed with tasselled straps. His woman, Segle, had made these things and her own; he had caught the animals which provided skins. His feet were bare. When winter came he would wear boots, the leather worked with tallow to make it waterproof. Later he would need a facemask too, for the wind, and mittens, and a fur cap to pull down over his ears. The stormcoat was fitted with a hood: this he had pushed back, the better to listen.

  “Did you hear it?” Segle asked him. She was seventeen, the niece of a dead chief, all her tribe murdered by the Flint Lord’s soldiers. Tagart’s tribe, the tribe into which he had married, was also no more. Segle had been with him since the end of the summer. Together they had travelled the country looking for Tagart’s blood-tribe, his father’s people. They had gone as far as the mountains in the north, and turned back down the east coast, through the fens, and inland to the south-west, but of the Waterfall people they had found no trace. Tagart knew that he would be sure to find them at the winter camp: as the autumn had begun to fade he and Segle had started eastwards, along the south coast and towards the routes leading there.

  “Did you hear it?” she said.

  He had not. “What about you?”

  “I might have heard voices again.”

  “Which way?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  It was late. They had to find somewhere dry for the night; they had to build a fire.

  But – if there really were hunters nearby, if they really had heard voices, then shelter, food, and company too, all would be freely given. And what if by some chance that tribe proved to be at last the Waterfall people – what if its leader were Shode, the man who with Tagart’s father had taught him almost everything he knew? What if Shode himself were up ahead?

  “Let’s look.”

  They pushed forward, between the branches of leafless bushes on each side of the path. It was hard to see detail now. More than once a branch slashed back into Segle’s face. She said nothing; were it not for Tagart she would be a slave still, at Valdoe, where she had been taken by the soldiers who had killed her family and friends. She would be a slave still, or dead.

  The path began to climb. After a hundred paces they breasted a ridge. The faint course of the path crossed the ridge and followed the slope down. Below the tangle of undergrowth the rusty leaves of hornbeam trees lay in shallow drifts.

  A hint of cooking came on the wind.

  “Down there,” Tagart said, and through the moving branches Segle saw a twinkle of firelight. A moment later the smell of roasting meat came more strongly, borne on a gust of wind that blew rain from the trees, and with the wind they heard voices and the sound of wood being cut.

  Tagart squeezed Segle’s hand and drew her on.

  Near the bottom of the slope the path opened into a small clearing, and here, beside a stream, surrounding a pile of glowing logs, were eleven low tents made of leather and fur. People were making ready for a meal; four women and a boy were splitting wood with flint hatchets.

  A man stepped into the path, holding a spear. It was nearly dark. Nothing could be seen of his face, but he was dressed like Tagart, in a stormcoat, and when he spoke his voice was harsh.

  “What people are you?”

  Tagart told him. “We heard you from the other side of the hill. We’re on our way to the waterfall camp. My father was in the Shoden.”

  “The Shoden.” The man with the spear looked over his shoulder at the fire. “We also are going to the waterfall camp. We are the Ospreys. Come. You’re welcome to eat with us.”

  * * *

  Tagart found the man first, half dead, in the mud of the path, his eyes open to the rain.

  He and Segle had been walking with the Osprey tribe since the previous day. Their route had curved away from the coast and passed through hilly forest, on the outskirts of cultivated land controlled by Valdoe. Early in the morning they had crossed a system of fields and then the Flint Lord’s road between Valdoe and Bow Hill, following the course of an old trackway which turned north to find a gap in the downs. This was one of the ancient routes to the waterfall camp.

  The rain had not stopped. Everything seemed to be soggy; everyone was miserable and bad-tempered. For much of the time two families had been arguing. Tagart had been glad when Visar, the leader, had told him to take his turn and go on ahead, to make sure of the way.

  For a moment Tagart thought the motionless thing obstructing the path was a rotten log, or a curious lump of earth or stone with pink showing. He did not associate it with human form. Then he saw that it had arms and legs and a head.

  The man’s beard and nostrils were the colour of mud; his hair was matted and knotted with it. From the abrasions on his skin it could be seen how far he must have crawled and how many times he must have stumbled and fallen. Tagart closed his fingers on the man’s wrist and bent to listen to his heart. He was barely alive.

  “What have you found?” said Visar, pushing a way forward.

  Tagart mutely looked up at him and turned back to the man on the path.

  Only when they tried to lift him did they see the furrows on Fodich’s back. Blood and mud had commingled and congealed. Rain dripping from the trees made watery streaks which revealed the rough edges of the wounds, from neck to buttocks and to the backs of his knees.

  The fortress at Valdoe was less than three miles away. Tagart himself had once been a prisoner there; he had once laboured in the mines. He had been given first hand experience of the brutality of the guards and been forced to breathe the atmosphere of corruption and despair in the slaves’ quarters. The place itself was evil, the very ground infected by the man who remained unseen and for whose personal benefit so much suffering was endured. Evil: there was no other way to think of the raw force, almost tangible, which the Trundle and its master seemed to generate. It had crushed and defiled Segle, and she would never fully recover. The Flint Lord had killed her brother and parents and every member of her tribe. And, when she had been the only one left, a Trundleman had raped her, deflowered her on the night she was due to be put into the soldiers’ brothel.

  A sudden constriction grasped Tagart’s chest, rage and sadness, too intense for tears or words. He found it impossible to breathe.

  He wiped the grey mud from the man’s face and cradled the back of his head as other hands lifted him from the path. Tagart stared at the inanimate features. From many small clues he already knew that the man was a hunter like himself. At some time their lives would have been almost identical – even to the point of enslavement. But there things had changed. Tagart had been able to escape intact, unmutilated. Thi
s man had not.

  “It is Valdoe,” Tagart said. “The Flint Lord has done this.”

  The women carried Fodich to the bracken and washed him. They smeared his back with herbal salves. Clean, soft leather was applied to his wounds and bandaged in place. The men cut poles from the woods to make a stretcher. Shortly before noon, the Ospreys were again on their way.

  Tagart offered to help carry the stretcher. The man lay on his front, without speaking, occasionally turning his head and grimacing when uneven ground made the stretcher jolt. His eyes were open: he watched the passing leaves and mud. Towards dusk he slept.

  He was strong, otherwise he could not have survived. Tagart thought he knew his face from some past winter camp. The features were square and resolute, the eyes gentle, filmed with pain. His limbs were powerful and his body well muscled. In age he was between thirty and thirty-five.

  During the night Tagart and Segle sat with him in one of the leather shelters. They gave him sips of broth from a wooden bowl. He tried to clasp the bowl with clumsy fingers and spilled it on his chest. Segle eased his head back. He fell asleep again, woke, drank water, fell asleep. In the early hours he awoke sweating and retched; afterwards he seemed to feel better.

  He was lying face down, his head on one side.

  “Can you understand me?” Tagart said. “What tribe are you? What is your name?”

  He tried to speak. Segle brought the lamp closer and took his hand.

  “What tribe are you?” Tagart said.

  His mouth opened, wet with dribble. He turned his eyes and took in Tagart’s face.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said weakly. “But first I’d like some more of that broth.”

  By dawn, Fodich had finished his story.

  Tagart rose. He was troubled not so much by the account of Fodich’s punishment, but by everything else he had said. “This is too important to be kept,” Tagart told Segle. “I must go and tell Visar.”