The Stone Arrow Read online

  The smell of them was everywhere on the inside of the palisade: their bodies, their animals, their cooking-fires and the things they ate. She found the scent of the cub at once, leading beside the palisade towards the smell of water. On her left she was aware of lights, and a throng of barking dogs, and she was aware of the fire she feared, coming from the houses; and as she lumbered towards the river she heard for the first time men’s voices raised in alarm.

  Hernou stood up as she heard the shouting. Her first reaction was disbelief. The cries of Bear made no sense. The village was bear-proof; everyone knew it. She ran from her vigil-place to the corner of the Meeting House, by the steps, where there was a better view. The disturbance was on the far side of the village, by the palisade. Figures of men and dogs were outlined in the light of burning brands. And then she saw the running bulk of the bear as it appeared between two houses, and she knew the inconceivable had happened.

  The nightmare of a bear loose in the compound, with nowhere for her to hide, nowhere safe, had come true.

  Sturmer, alerted by the shouting, armed himself with a spear and came out of his doorway. Hernou turned her head as the flap raised and lowered, revealing the light inside.

  “It’s there!” she shouted at him.

  “Get inside! Get under cover! I want no one loose!”

  She held on to the beams of the Meeting House, numb with fear. The other men, and many of the women too, were appearing at their doorways. Sturmer did not stop to argue with Hernou. He was yelling orders, trying to organize the villagers, hoping to pin the bear inside a semi-circle backing on to the palisade, where it could be held at bay with flame and in time wounded with enough spears to kill it. But the bear had already broken through the line and was shambling towards the bakery, away from the palisade. Two villagers had been cuffed aside, another seized and worried in its jaws. The screams of the dying were lost in the confusion of shouting and yelling.

  “Force it into the river! Deak, Tamben, Domack! This way! Over here!”

  Hernou did not wait to hear any more. She thought of hiding in the Meeting House, but its doorway was wide enough to admit a bear. The nearest safety was Sturmer’s house. She ran to its threshold and pushed aside the entrance flap, scrambling through the porch into the kitchen.

  Sturmer had been interrupted at his meal. In front of the hearth were wooden platters, clay spoons and bowls, and cow-horn cups in wooden stands, left half full of food and drink. Hernou passed through the kitchen into the central chamber, and through that into the main room with the tall roof. Here Sturmer’s wife Tamis and her four children were sitting in a rumpled bed of fur and skins, huddling together for protection and comfort. The younger children were crying; the eldest looked up fearfully as Hernou pushed her way into the room.

  “Your house was the nearest,” Hernou said. “Sturmer told me to hide myself.”

  “Have you seen it?” Tamis said. “Where is it?”

  “By the bakery.”

  Tamis shut her eyes.

  “They can kill it,” Hernou said. “I know they can.”

  “We must pray for our lives. Tsoaul has sent the bear; only Gauhm can save us.” She looked with hatred at Hernou, at her grey eyes, her hair, her smooth brown skin, the body that the men still found attractive, watching her deliberate walk as she crossed the compound. Tamis knew that Sturmer had once been hers – and she knew that Hernou wanted Sturmer back. “You and your Groden have brought this on us. You have brought evil to this village.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Then how did his dog die?”

  Even with lights and spears and arrows the villagers had been unable to drive the bear into the river, where it would have been hampered by the mud. Instead it had stopped by the bakery wall. At its feet they saw that it had brought a dead cub with it. Raised up on hind legs, the bear was slashing about wildly with its forepaws. In the flickering torchlight it looked brown and shaggy against the wood of the wall.

  Groden hit it with another arrow in the throat and the bear began a strange, piteous wailing. It stumbled blindly forward and lunged with a wide paw, catching Meed a blow that sent him flying. The bear checked its lunge; and lashed out again, missing Morfe by the width of a hand. He did not move. He had armed himself with a felling-axe, and in the torchlight his eyes glittered and his teeth showed between his lips.

  “The snout!” Sturmer screamed. “Hit the snout!”

  Morfe took no notice. He knew what to do.

  He had positioned himself for just this blow. As the bear wagged its head from side to side the axe-head came sailing down, and, judged by Morfe’s mad, cold, calculating eye, the stone blade struck its muzzle and it had a muzzle no more.

  The bear gave a bellowing squeal and again raised itself up, but went too far, staggered, and toppled backwards. More arrows and spears were raining into its belly and chest. Its head and shoulders hit the bakery wall and broke through the planking, splintering the wood and leaving fresh white break-marks. The villagers ran forward and thrust spears into its belly. The legs thrashed; twitched; and lay still.

  It was only then that they realized a second bear, even bigger than the first, had got into the compound.

  No one saw it clamber over the palisade and run along the line of scent. The mother bear was upon them from behind even as Morfe dealt the nursemaid its death-blow.

  Left and right the second bear was bowling villagers out of the way with swingeing forepaws. Skulls, rib-cages, pelvises were fractured and crushed. Faces were trodden into the ground by huge hind-paws. A woman was taken up in the mother’s jaws and her waist almost bitten through before she was flung aside.

  Sturmer and Groden were frantically pulling arrows and spears from the carcase of the first bear as the mother turned on them, scattering weapons and lights, pawing and swiping and striking down man after man. The mother turned to her side, selected Domack’s wife, ran her down and with bared jaws grabbed her shoulder; now on hind legs, now on all fours, the bear dragged her along, let her drop, reared up with a roar.

  “Get back!” Sturmer screamed as he saw Tamis running across the compound. “Get back! Get back!”

  She had left the house when she had realized there were two bears to be killed, knowing that everyone would be needed, every hand. She had pleaded with Hernou, but Hernou had refused to help and had stayed behind.

  Hernou could hear the screaming and shouting, the cries of the injured and dying, and for the first time she began to fear that there might not be enough people left to deal with the bear. It might win. And if it won, it might in its systematic plunder of the village come here and seek her out. She thought of placing Sturmer’s children at the entrance, as a decoy, so that if the bear came it would take them and not her. But what if the children served only to attract the bear to this house above all others? Surely it was better for her to wait in the entrance herself, where she could see what was happening. If the bear came, she could run into the bedchamber and escape through the window while it forced its way into the back of the house and was delayed by the children. That would give her the best chance of making a run for the gate. And if it did not come here first, but went first to the other side of the village, she needed to know the best time to escape: she needed to be able to see.

  “Stay here quietly,” Hernou told the eldest child. “Your mother will be back soon.”

  Hernou wondered about Groden. He was fighting the bear, she supposed. There was nothing she could do to help him.

  She moved aside the flap of leather into the middle chamber, and crawled through it to the kitchen. Here the lamps were still flickering, casting an unsteady light, smoking and giving off the smell of burning fat; but with this smell was the smell of wet leather and mud, and before Hernou could turn and get into the bedchamber there was a rustling in the porch and she was looking into the eyes of a wild-haired and mud-streaked man, a man she had never seen before, not of the village, but dressed in skins like a savage. His high ch
eekbones and the hard line of his chin gave him under the matted tangle of his hair and beard the semblance of a demon, and Hernou knew she was looking upon the spirit of the nomads in human form: she was looking upon Tsoaul. She was looking upon the Forest God, who had brought down a plague of bears on Burh and would destroy every man and woman and every thing in the village, who was coming for her now because it was she who had incited Groden and it was Groden who had planned and led the raid on the nomads’ camp.

  “Make a noise and I’ll kill you.”

  She could utter no sound, feebly submitting as he grasped her arm and pulled her towards the entrance. She preceded him, crawling through the porch and into the open air.

  In a daze she stood up. The Forest God came behind her, and he too stood up, much taller than she, taller than any mortal. Across the village the screaming was undiminished. Hernou could see lights dancing, the rush of people as the bear changed direction, dark and formless in the night.

  The stars were overhead. She felt only the wind from his fist as Tsoaul struck her. She heard a thin, high keening, and then blackness overtook her and she knew nothing more.

  * * *

  Tagart caught her as she fell and hefted her onto his shoulders. She was not heavy, and he ran between the houses of the village, gained the thoroughfare, and in a few moments reached the east gate. He threw down his load and wrested aside the heavy oaken bars. The shouts and cries far across the village seemed to indicate that the mother bear had been hit – he could not tell how severely. But if she had been mortally wounded and the fighting was coming to an and, there could be no more time to lose.

  He swung the gate aside. No one but Sturmer’s woman had seen him so far, of that he was certain. In his desire not to reveal his existence he had been almost too cautious, leaving it to the last minute before coming out of the river and crossing the compound to the head man’s house, the house of Sturmer, the beardless man, where Tagart had hoped and prayed he would find the woman he had seen at the ceremony. And indeed he had almost left it too long. He had almost missed her.

  Tagart tore off her doeskin garment and dropped it by the gate. There was no time for subtlety: he had to leave something to tell the farmers that she had not merely run away, that they were to follow and try to get her back.

  He slung her body round his neck and in the chilly summer night, crisp with the first hint of autumn, started for the forest and the yew tree where he had made his lair.

  4

  Already the summer was dying, spent and overblown. The breath of decay was blowing through the forest, on old leaf mould, on fallen wood and the dead branches of diseased trees: the rains in their wake had brought the first flush of fungi. From their underground threadworks of mycelium they groped upwards: shaggy caps, opening like feathered parasols that softened into dribbling slime; autumn morels, white and grey and rust; blushers, which stained cut-red like flesh where they were bored and nibbled by beetles; fairy clubs, tiny white antlers powdered with spores; troops of wood mushrooms, appearing as small grey-white bulbs, opening and spreading wide; stinkhorns that smelled of carrion; wood woolly-foots, yellow stainers, puffballs, earth stars, champignons, chantarelles; boleti which appeared suddenly among the grass-blades; and the edible grisettes, opening from fragile white flasks, just like the others of their tribe which were not edible: fly agaric, red and white-spotted; the panther, a poisonous kind; and, on bad ground, the destroying angel: beautiful, a white apparition, with a slimy, shining cap, a poison so virulent that a single specimen in a basket of mushrooms was enough to bring horrible and agonizing death. And there was a fourth kind, more poisonous still, growing under oak trees and beech, coming with the first summer rains, in shape and size like a small blusher, but its cap was a dull and inconspicuous olive-green. It resembled a wood mushroom, and when it was no more than a button could be mistaken for one, but never by the nomads, who knew the death cap and what it would do.

  Autumn was in the air. The small birds of the forest had finished their breeding. The tits, goldcrests, nuthatches and treecreepers were coming together in groups and family parties that would swell and become roaming bands; the robins and redstarts and thrushes, tailless and moulting, skulked in the tangle near the ground; from their eyrie high in the branches of a dead tree, the young goshawks were making their first tentative flights. Cuckoos, whose calls had not been heard for weeks, were moving south, towards the sea; and the swifts, climbing on their black sickle wings with feeble screams, revelled in the banks of cloud and would soon be leaving late young to starve.

  The aurochs, too, were on the move, each bull with his cows. At night their bellowings sounded far through the wooded valleys. Tagart was listening to them as he lay resting and waiting on his bed of yew needles. Beside him was the woman, now tied at wrists and ankles. To keep her warm Tagart had covered her with skins. He would feed and water her too, to keep her alive.

  She regained consciousness. He heard her breathing change, and smiled to himself as she cunningly made her breaths longer as if she had not awoken at all.

  “What is your name?”

  She did not reply. Tagart knew she had heard him, and he knew she had understood. They both spoke the same tongue. Although the farmers’ dialect was thick and guttural, closer to the language of their ancestors on the mainland across the channel, during thirty generations of slave-raiding and intermarriage the old language of the nomads had been lost.

  “Tell me your name.”

  Still she did not answer. He sensed that her eyes were open, that she was afraid. The resinous smell of the yew needles filled the air. The woman had forgotten to regulate her breathing: it was coming more quickly now, and Tagart could almost hear the pounding of her heart.

  “Tell me your name. I shall not hurt you again.”

  “You … you know my name.”

  He frowned into the dark. The woman’s quiet, fear-laden voice came again.

  “You killed Gumis as a sign to us and you sent your servants the bears to avenge the forest people. You have chosen me because of my husband and I know I am to be sacrificed. I am Gauhm’s sacrifice to you.”

  Tagart’s frown deepened. “Not if you tell me what I wish to know.”

  “But you are Tsoaul and know everything.”

  Tsoaul? Who was Tsoaul? “That is true,” he said. “I am Tsoaul. But if you are to be spared I must hear these things from your own lips.”

  She was silent.

  “You must tell me what I wish to know.”

  “Yes.” She almost whispered it. “Yes.”

  “First. Why do you call me ‘Tsoaul’?”

  “You …” She seemed confused. “You are the Spirit of the Forest … that is your name.”

  “I am known by many names.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “Next. Do all the villagers know that I, Tsoaul, have done these things?”

  “Yes. They all know it. They are all afraid.”

  “They know that I caused Gumis to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that I sent my servants into your village tonight?”

  “They know that also.”

  “Next. Tell me of the ceremony in the Meeting House.”

  “I … I do not know …”

  “No harm will come to you. Tell me about the ceremony.”

  “Which one? There are many ceremonies …”

  “The morning after the rain returned. Tell me what you were doing in the Meeting House.”

  She hesitated as if anxious to give the right answer, not quite sure of the question. “We eat from the Agaric Casket to go with our dead to the Far Land.”

  “To go with their spirits when they die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me what you eat.”

  “A toadstool, prepared by the priest. He calls it ‘agaric’.”

  “Explain. What does it look like and where does it grow?”

  “It has a white stalk and a red saddle with scales of white. H
e finds it in the woods.”

  The nomads called it by another name, but Tagart knew it well. “How is it prepared?”

  The woman described the drying process, how the caps were placed in the casket, where the casket was kept. She told him how many caps could be eaten, and she told him the stories the men had recounted of their visions. She said that whenever the agaric was eaten the musicians played, so that the real world could be found again by its music.

  “Who is your priest?”

  “Sturmer.”

  “Is he your husband?”

  “No. My husband’s name is Groden.” She bit her tongue. Had she offended her listener? Did Tsoaul know that she had once shared Sturmer’s bed? Could he look into her heart and know secrets?

  “What is the name of the man in your village with no beard?”

  She hesitated. “Groden.”

  “And you are called by what name?”

  “Hernou.”

  “And is your husband head man?”

  “No. Sturmer is head man. He is head man and priest too.”

  “Sturmer is bearded?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Groden is of importance in the village?”

  The coldness in the question chilled Hernou and made her afraid for Groden. But Groden was in the village and Hernou was here in the forest with Tsoaul and now she saw that she put her own life before Groden’s and she answered:

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  Drizzle came from the ocean on a warm wind, bringing back summer to the sea cliffs and the sea of endless forest. Heavy clouds rolled in the night above the trees. Cold air worked on the clouds and made them rain; the sea broke muddy and listless along the beach, lifting lines and fragments of black weed, too feeble to make a roar of the shingle drag, and where the waves slopped on the white rocks below the seven striding cliffs the water swirled ceaselessly and made no spray. At the mouth of the estuary, on a shingle spit barely emerging from the sea, black-backed gulls stood in roost and waited for first light.

  Thirty wing-beats away the river debouched into the tide race: its flow was swollen with rain, winding and meandering down the valley. The valley basin was wide and flat, hemmed in by steep forest to the east and more gently rising forest to the west. In a past age the river had broken through one of its own meanders, leaving stranded an oxbow lake which had become a calm lagoon. From it rose the voices of wildfowl in the dark.