The Stone Arrow Page 2

  But as the years passed it was becoming plain that the ancestors had been right. To grow good crops you must clear forest. Clear the forest, burn it, plant the ground, and move on when the goodness has gone. That was the old way. Sturmer’s new way seemed to be wrong. He was sorry to find it so, because what he yearned for was stability. With a stable village, more elaborate buildings would become possible, more children, more families in one place. More people could be freed from working on the soil. Goods could be fabricated, goods for sale to other villages, and possibly, one day, Sturmer might even grow wealthy through trading, like the great Flint Lord at Valdoe.

  The vision was moving further and further out of reach. Despite all Sturmer’s efforts, large areas round the village, once excellent land, were useless and reverting to scrub.

  Others in the Council, led by Groden, kept pressing for a return to the old order. They wanted wider forest clearance, a change of site for the village; more, not fewer, acres under cultivation. Sturmer felt it unwise to resist too strenuously. He was thirty-six – getting old. His position as leader was becoming precarious. It was only a matter of time before a younger man – and who else but Groden? – made a thrust and forced the issue, and Sturmer was not sure that Groden would not win. The younger and rasher men in the village supported him: they favoured an aggressive approach to the forest and the countryside.

  This worried Sturmer in another way. As far back as memory would go, there had been a nomad summer camp by the river some three miles upstream, well inside the forest. The nomads were savages, hunters, in winter foraging in the marshes to the north where they were guaranteed plentiful wildfowl and game, in spring coming over the downs to the forest by the sea coast. In some years they came not at all; in others they stayed a few days or weeks and moved on again. This summer, the nomads had been here all season.

  They were rarely seen in person by the villagers. The odd goat or pig missed from its pen, and even tools and skins stolen from the fields, were never closely pursued. The farmers hated and feared the nomads, and they feared even more the magic the nomads controlled. Their god was Tsoaul, Spirit of the Forest. Through the nomads he worked evil on Gauhm: even now he was struggling to win back the village fields, as he always did, working stealthily and by degrees. First he made the land infertile for crops, making its cultivation pointless. Next he sent weeds. When these were established he sent hawthorn and birch, which soon became scrub. From scrub it was an easy step to forest. Not a square yard of the village was safe from Tsoaul’s work. He infested good land as well as bad; he even wanted the very roofs on the houses.

  Sturmer was worried because each tree that fell brought the nomads a little closer. Every clearance fire reduced the extent of forest available to them and increased the chance of trouble between nomads and villagers.

  In other summers there had been trifling incidents. A scarecrow was burned. Excrement appeared on the Shrine at the cliffs. A pair of youths from the village went to the savages’ camp for a dare: both returned badly beaten and unwilling to talk. Nets were taken from the river; a coracle was dragged downstream and left wrecked. A beacon fire, set up on the cliffs for the midsummer festival, was prematurely burned and the ashes thrown about.

  But this year, in this strange summer, the savages had been here longer, and there had been many more such incidents. Overshadowing them all was the drought.

  Sturmer had gone to the Shrine, where the word of Gauhm was breathed. She told him in a dream of Tsoaul and his new onslaught. The drought was the savages’ work. Obeying Tsoaul, they had seized advantage of the dry winter and spring, and by their incantations had awoken Aih, Spirit of the Heavens. Tsoaul had tried to persuade Aih to combine with him, that both might overcome Gauhm. Aih had refused, but said that during the contest he would not intervene. This had left the Forest Spirit alone, goaded by the savages into greater and greater feats. But in time Tsoaul would overreach and exhaust himself, and then Gauhm would collect her victory. The villagers were not to interfere. To meddle would upset Aih, and then the rain, which was under his control, would never come again.

  Sturmer had explained all this in detail, standing on the steps of the Meeting House. It had done little to help. Was he not head man? Was he not supposed to be in Gauhm’s favour, her priest, her chosen one? Surely if he were a better man the spirits could be won over, persuaded to end the drought.

  Sturmer sensed that Groden might try to use the situation for his own ends. Everything depended on the drought. If it went on much longer, Sturmer’s real troubles would begin.

  * * *

  He rose without disturbing his wife and pushed aside the flap of leather at the doorway. His eyes adjusted painfully to the light. The sun was already hot, the sky a white glare only two hours after dawn.

  The previous afternoon there had been cloud, and the hope of rain. Towards nightfall the air had become close and sultry, with thunder heard far away on the hills. It had seemed as if it must rain, but by dawn the clouds had gone and the emptiness had returned.

  Everything in the village seemed dusty and old, all the life baked out of it by six weeks of total drought. Since the longest day, over a month ago, the heat had intensified so that even the nights were unbearable. Most of the villagers had taken to sleeping out of doors, on the stones by the thresholds of their houses. There was even talk of sleeping on the beach, but no one dared to leave the palisade at night.

  The water in Sturmer’s washing-tub was warm and the colour of clay. Bits of straw floated on the surface. He bent and held his head submerged for a few seconds before straightening up, expelling spray and wiping his eyes.

  It was then that he noticed a party of people among the buildings, coming towards him, and, for a moment, in spite of the sun on his body, and for no reason that he could understand, he felt cold.

  They were walking slowly. In front was Hernou, Groden’s woman, slender and dark, with grey eyes in a beautiful face, her tumble of lustrous black hair drawn back and held by a wooden brooch. Once Sturmer had slept with her; she was only a few years younger than him, much older than Groden, to whom she had borne a dead baby in the winter. She and Groden lived in a house by themselves, rather further from the Meeting House than their status and their ambition seemed to warrant.

  Behind her came old men, women, some of the older children: twelve people in all. Sturmer folded his arms and stood with his body weighted on one side. He remained silent as the deputation arrived. Hernou looked up at him.

  “Look what the savages have done.”

  One of the men was holding out a dead dog for his inspection. Its jaws gaped, the side of the top lip folded back and glued to the gums by a frothy crust of dried saliva. A trickle of blood had caked on the fur from the nostril to the eye. Otherwise there was no sign of the damage done inside the dog’s head by the hazel-shafted arrow, tipped with flint and flighted with mottled quail feathers, that slickly and with tremendous power had burst the animal’s eye and tunnelled through bone, brain and muscle to come to lodge on the inside of the lower jaw.

  With the tips of three fingers Sturmer stroked the quail feathers, making the dog’s head move.

  “The arrow need not be theirs.”

  “The dog is Uli – my husband’s dog.”

  Sturmer acknowledged it.

  The old man carrying him said, “What do they seek by this?”

  “Tsoaul grows stronger every day,” said another.

  “They attack and we do nothing, we stand helpless.”

  “Aih must let us defend the village, if nothing else.”

  “We must do what was said by Groden in the Council.”

  “No!” Sturmer said angrily. “That was turned down!”

  “By Gauhm?”

  “Or Tsoaul?”

  Sturmer rubbed one forearm with the other hand. A suspicion was growing in his mind. “Where was Uli found?”

  “On the Shrine path, by the ash tree.”

  “And when was he last seen?�
�

  “Yesterday,” Hernou said. “Yesterday night. We ate with Morfe and Deak. Groden threw him scraps.”

  “And afterwards? Did you see him in the night?”

  “I cannot say.”

  The old man bent and placed the animal at Sturmer’s feet. The head lolled on one side. Rigor had not yet begun. “He is newly dead,” Sturmer said. “This morning, early.”

  The dog had been shot either at close range, or by an extremely accurate bowman. The arrow seemed to implicate the nomads, as did the place where the animal had been found, but something jarred, something was wrong.

  In all the past troubles with the savages, there had always been an explanation, however outlandish, for the things they had done. Sturmer might have understood had the dog been stolen, or even butchered and eaten. He might have understood had it represented a threat to the nomads or a symbol of trespass on what they regarded as theirs. But for the nomads to shoot an animal of any kind and leave it to be found, for them to indulge in wanton and irrational killing – that went against everything Sturmer had learned about the forest people and their attitude to life.

  There was only one explanation. Now Sturmer knew why he had felt cold. He opened his mouth and heard himself speaking the words.

  “Where is Groden?”

  2

  Zeme was thirteen years old, one of the children who by miracle had survived, her open, questioning face partly obscured by the thick dark hair which fell across her shoulders in a shine, smelling clean from her morning swim. Like her sister Mirin she wore her hair loose. Her eyes were black, with a shy glance, the eyes of her ancestors. She loved the sunshine, this summer of perfect weather: for weeks there had been no rain, days on end filled with blue sky and light; and though she did not say it in words to herself, she loved the forest and the incredible plenty it so freely gave. The woodlands at this season seemed benign and calm, smiling on the nomads and the camp-site, in graceful, patient acceptance as the preparations for the summer feast went on. To Zeme it was only natural that her sister should be the centre of the feast, the first woman of the new tribe, the chief’s daughter, mother of his grandson: Tagart’s woman.

  And today was the day for the feast. Zeme had been looking for flowers since sunrise. They had made fun of her at the camp because they said she was jealous of Mirin, so before dawn she had left to find flowers for garlands which would show them how she really felt. She knew all the flowers, and which were right for each occasion. This morning she had found many appropriate kinds: clary, milfoil, vervain and a dozen others.

  Her arms were full of them as she passed under the trees, returning to the camp. Her sister was in her mind, and Tagart, and the funny things he said: the way he pretended to be solemn and talked in a low voice and then he burst out laughing and he’d been joking all along. She thought about him as a brother, and the way he hunted, with traps and spears and arrows. Tagart was the best marksman in the tribe. He had the straightest eye and the strongest arm. He could even impale a snipe as it zigzagged up from some marshy patch, or bring down a speeding teal over one of the meres at the winter camp. His bow was so strong that Zeme could only bend it an inch. And his arrows, which he made with a flint shaver, he polished with tallow and fletched with goose quills to make them run faster. Sometimes, when preparing for large quarry, Tagart used wolf’s-bane poison on his arrows, but he preferred more passive methods: he said that tracking was hard work. Tagart was an expert in strategy, in waiting. He knew just where to dig the pits with spikes in the bottom, where to place the beaters and fences in a drive, how to use the long soft ropes to make booby-traps and nooses that could hoist a stag from the ground and leave it dangling. Like all the hunters, he lived in the mind of the prey and could tell what they were going to do before they knew it themselves. Much, Zeme conceded to herself, he had learned from Cosk and the other elders, but now Tagart’s word was always sought, his advice valued, his hard work and inventiveness recognized for their constant part in keeping the tribe well fed and safe. Tagart had no fear of the aurochs, the wild oxen with their big horns: when they charged he merely seemed to dance round and round and they fell down dead. Nor had he any fear of the wild boars, nor the lynx, and he had no fear of the wolves, though he said it was wise to leave them alone and they would do the same for you.

  The only animals to fear, Tagart said, were the bears. They were moody and unpredictable, and you were never to go near a bear or its cave, and never ever when there were young ones inside, because that made the bears fiercer than anything in the forest, or in the marshes, or along the white seashore.

  Zeme wished she could go out hunting with the men. It was unfair being a girl. Instead of hunting she had to go out with the women gathering plants. There was a lot to know. Even her mother, Sela, the chief’s woman, said she was still learning and would be a pupil of the forest till the day she died.

  The women went out nearly every day with their hazel and osier baskets, collecting fruits, nuts, fungi, tubers, fleshy stems – whatever was in season. They knew the plants to pick for medicines that soothed pain and helped wounds heal. There were plants to know for dyes and perfumes and for seasonings to add to meat and drink; plants to poison arrowheads and spears and spikes; plants to keep the shelters dry, to make a soft bed, to keep insects away; plants to burn for any kind of heat and flame; plants for charcoal, or carvings, or for making toys. Sela and the others had taught Zeme how to twist fibres into strings and ropes, how to peel bark, how to use plants to know where squirrels or jays had hidden their winter stores. They had shown her how to read the ground by the grasses and sedges that grew there; whether the ground was wet and unfirm, dangerous to traverse; where there had been a fire, even years before; what animal or bird had fed or left its droppings there. And Zeme was learning, like the others, the plants for decoration and for favourable omens and the plants for happiness and long life.

  She came to a stream she knew and walked beside it, allowing it to lead her back to the river and her father’s camp.

  * * *

  The nomad party had been together in its present form since the early spring, when the large camp in the marshes had broken up into smaller units, the families staying together or regrouping as changes in friendship and loyalties dictated. Before the first catkins the nomads had begun to leave, some spreading north into the great river valleys, others moving west along the hills, east towards the low coast, or, like Tagart’s tribe, south over the downs to the chalk cliffs and the vast forest of oak and lime which every year seemed to suffer further incursions from the farming people of the south.

  These were a different breed from the nomads, only partly native, with ideas and blood imported from across the sea. In the west at Valdoe was the largest settlement of them Tagart had heard of, a prison filled with slaves, commanded by one man who had established an army to protect his trading empire along the coast and far inland. The nomads knew of Valdoe because many of them had been captured to work there; a handful had escaped and told stories at the winter camp. The tales were worse than the imagination could make. Yet the farmers were pleased to trade with Valdoe and tacitly to accept the protection it gave from the foreign raiding parties that would otherwise cross the water whenever the weather allowed.

  Tagart’s party was led by Cosk, which meant “Owl”, a man of forty who had led his tribe for nearly ten years. This summer the Cosks were forty-one people: nine couples with fourteen children between them, two old men and three women beyond child-bearing age, a woman whose husband had caught a fever and died, and three young men of marriageable age. Cosk and his wife, Sela, were without sons, but their eldest daughter had brought them a boy, now three years old.

  His name was Balan. In twenty years, after Tagart, if he survived, he might be chief. But, before then, Tagart’s time was coming.

  In the years since his wedding to Mirin, his place as natural successor to Cosk had slowly been confirmed. To Tagart and Mirin had gone the honour of the summer feas
t, a celebration of the world, of renewal and the future. The preparations had been going on for weeks. Young deer, allowed to survive their parents in the hunt, were brought back to camp alive to be tethered until needed. Hares, trapped along the field edges, were kept in cages made of woven sallow. Songbirds had been snared or limed or brought down by whirling lures and stoned with slingshots. In withy baskets in the water were frogs and newts and writhing masses of fish; and the skill of one boy, who seemed to have a gift for finding them, had brought in more than a hundred crayfish, which now crouched in baskets at the water’s edge, their claws and feelers and eyes distorted by the ripples. Along the banks, racks and wrappers of leaves held edible flowers of lime, elder, knapweed, hop, and dog-rose; roots of reed-mace, rampion, parsnip, water-lily and flowering rush; stems of burdock and reed; leaves of deadnettle, plantain, sorrel, comfrey and nettle; hazelnuts and pignuts; and fruit: whitebeam, redcurrant, blackcurrant, barberry, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, sloe, crab-apple and cranberry. There were boxes of beetles, lizards, caterpillars, shrews, voles, woodmice and moles; hedgehogs tied by thongs to stakes; slabs of honeycomb; mints, thyme, fennel and many other herbs. From the beach and estuary the women had collected dulse, kelp and bladderwrack; and shellfish in tubs of salt water: clams, cockles, winkles and scallops.

  It had taken a fortnight to prepare the feast, to build the ceremonial shelter, and to find all the earths and flowers and leaves for dressing the couple and the camp. Now, at mid morning, Emis and Varl were building up the fires with hornbeam logs. The clay ovens were being prepared, and into them went joints of beef, fillets of hare and venison. The heat of the fires made faces red. Across the flames, the air shimmered and made people unrecognizable, trees and branches swirl.