They came from behind us.
And below.
At least that’s the way they felt to me, a child on the plains who knew nothing. They weren’t real either, not as they seemed to me back then anyway. I came to know that. But it’s how they felt, and still feel now in my dreams: like deep vibrations plunging under the mountains to reach us.
I’d feel them every time Dewar stood and stared out at those mountains, or when only those sad-slow smiles would answer my questions about before. In the early years, weeping would carry at night, every night, and I’d feel them then too. And I'd feel them when I learned not to ask why Mother Far, and only her in our village, was so old.
The before, they always told me, was a time that would be famous all through the realms, for many years. Centuries maybe. And as many miles from our plains as the other side of Ered. Just like the thing that had ended that time, that I could feel thrumming through my muscles and the soles of my feet. Not a knowing, but an echo of a knowing; that far from here, and far bigger than me, the world trembled.
But all of us would stare at those mountains sometimes. Their colours changed every day: grey, brown, black, red, blue. Always a wall between us all and before. There was a day when I swear they shone silver in the morning, and that was the day—I think it was—when I asked Erik if we really had come over them once.
‘That we did,’ he smiled back from his haunches as he kneaded a handful of earth between his palms. ‘That’s how we got here, to the borderlands.’
It doesn’t make sense that he’d have been working that earth, just there, right outside our hut, because they never farmed so near the settlement. But it’s what’s in the memory.
‘What’s on the other side?’ I asked.
‘Hm? Thought you remembered all this,’ he winked. I must have shaken my head. Then Erik clapped his hands of earth, pushed to his feet and put his hat on, though I saw the smile leave his chapped lips as he did. ‘A sacred place,’ he replied, now looking at the silver mountains too. ‘The castle of an ancient, holy people who watch the gulf of the Inwold. Still do, we believe, but their doors are closed now.’
Every one of those words was like a nugget of gold; heavy as it was precious.
‘What about our country?’ I asked.
‘That’s beyond,’ he said and his smile was sad-slow. With a leathery hand, he mussed my hair.
In my own memory, there are fragments of before. Wind on a beach and moaning boats . . . fishermen calling to one another on the gusts from a rough sea . . . When I’d describe these things to Sarah she’d always chuckle in disbelief. ‘How can you remember all that? You weren’t even a year old in Brownport!’
Shreds are all they are. Just tiny glimpses of the place that we were from, and then had left. Flashes of a journey. Erik in the wide-brimmed hat he still wore every day, and Sarah in a shawl I’d not seen since that time, cradling a box. Wagons and faces. Arcs of high cloud above wide-open country. Distant woodlands. Sun-splashed shapes on faraway downs. Green hills that rolled forever. Then snowy drifts. I don’t remember the cold of those mountains at all, but the warmth at their feet . . . that part I do remember. I wasn’t yet a year and a half when we first reached the borderlands of Vorth, but even then I knew a difference well enough. Big skies, brown earth. And the strange, bronze-skinned people from the desert to the south.
The Vedans. In the beginning, they’d given us animals and seed so we could forge our own way in the north of their country. It hadn’t been much, as Erik often remembered, but as Sarah would often remind him, it had been enough. What we had needed. Between the mountains and River Elm that flowed down from the north, the plain was fertile, good for cattle, and the foothills for planting crops. Sorghum, beets, runner beans, and other root crops in winter. Small flocks of sheep we had too, and some cows; goats in the settlements further north. Four or five of our homesteads took root in the river-plain; little specks of Naemia on the doorstep of the desert “outland.”
Our own was the southernmost speck. From where our huts were clustered, on most days, we could see the ribbed blear of coastal sky, and from the foothills on a clear day the blue water of the gulf. There were few trees growing in the plain; the River Elm only named so for the elms that hugged its banks further north, in Elman.
Home was simple, like all of the memories of then: clay walls, twine-bound reed shutters, bulrush mats and coal-fires. Even in the later winters, Vedans would continue to send their hessian sacks of coal across the river. Sometimes grain too, for the chickens that would always peck at my toes. I remember how I’d learned not to be scared of our mule, or of Miss Nindry’s two cows. And I remember other things, like Sarah’s soups and careful ways. The rich smell of Erik’s sweat when he came back from the hills, hands all marked, brow smeared. The tiny, battered book of Exelcian proverbs with which they taught me how to read, and for my numbers the counting frame of stalks and seed-husks. In the heat of the day, the shade, and hours spent splashing in the river’s shallows. Rare summer showers. Even the bitterness of those nights when no amount of stoking could revive the Vedan coals against the winds that reached into the hut. The copper terrier, Scrivens we called him, then just a pup, though I don’t remember where he came from. And the pallet where I slept with my fingers in his fur.
Sarah would tell me stories of our country sometimes, calling figures out of myth to walk through my dreams and back over the mountains to Naemia again. Noble kings and princes, courageous knights, the Wildmen of the woods, that strange man she called “Blue” and, somewhere in it all, the name of that holy grey castle on the edge of the gulf.
‘Before the line of Naemian princes there were kings,’ she would begin in that voice like crisping embers. So many times she’d told it and yet every time it was new. ‘Great King Saremar was the first true king to sit the throne of our land, but he ruled other lands also. Lands as far north as Elman and south to Norwynd’s horn and the islands of the gulf. These, the realms of the Inner World, were the domain of a people who had walked the woods and hills ever since the breaking of the sky. Celestri they were called; beings of the heavens bound in tall mortal forms, who dwelt within a bastion on the shore of the gulf.’
‘Fallstone,’ I whispered. That was the name of Erik’s castle, the one that had fallen from the sky.
Inside her halo of chestnut hair, Sarah’s smile was calm and slow. Her face, in dimming firelight, had gone the yellow of sand; freckles faded, brown eyes gold-flecked. She leaned forward with her stick to poke the coals in the brazier. The wind outside the hut was making sad moans on the clay walls. But within, behind my eyelids, I watched great towers of the sky’s stone fall through the clouds.
I opened my eyes, looked at the stones in their little ring around the legs of the brazier and tried to imagine them as pieces of celestial cities falling to earth. But they weren’t the pieces of kingdoms.
Only soot-dusted rocks.
As Sarah’s stick threw up sparks, she carried on the story: ‘For all their power, the Celestri were but few and their lands too vast for their kind alone. In their grace, they desired to share the Inner World with peaceful peoples and a peace-keeping king. And so it was that, in Naemia’s first days, the Celestri bestowed guardianship of their realm upon King Saremar.’
This time I looked up. ‘Why?’
‘To protect them,’ she said. ‘That was Saremar’s vow and the vow of all the kings and princes of Naemia to come. It’s why the Inwold is sacred.’
Now the tremors were here, seeming to grip the hut’s clay walls. Ignoring them, I asked Sarah another question: ‘What about this land, the desert? Did our kings protect it too?’
A gust raced in under the reeds to shred the flames and wave her hair, putting a shadow on her cheek. ‘Not this land, Florian,’ she said. ‘The desert had kings of its own.’
----------------------------------------
I was four the first time she took me to the place our people came from across the borderlands to barter their livestock and food. One of our chickens had died in the night and so Sarah and I had made necklaces to trade for a new one. The man who kept the chickens greeted Sarah with a warm smile and a hug, but shook his head at the necklaces. Didn’t want them. So we spread our mat under an acacia tree and sat on the ground with our wares, not too far from the bustle of people around their carts. There were five necklaces and, as we waited for someone to want even one, Sarah tried each around my neck. The shells tickled.
Close by was a smaller tree and under it were two skinny boys trying to make the best of its shade. The older boy sat with his head on his knees, while the younger walked in circles, using a stick to scratch a trail in the dust around the tree. The circles were growing, it seemed, bringing the boy closer to us all the time.
‘That’s the second time I’ve seen those boys,’ marked Sarah. ‘That wee one with the stick took a leg of Dewar’s mutton last week, I’m sure it was him.’ When she called, he scampered back towards the older boy, who looked up for just a moment. His face was hot and tired and dirty. Again Sarah waved to the small boy and called. At the welcome in her voice he must have changed his mind about her, because he soon made his meandering way back towards us, dragging the stick.
‘You two get about,’ she said a little shrewdly, a smile spreading through her voice. ‘Are your mother and father also trading today?’
The boy glared, then shook his head.
‘No?’
Then he grunted, ‘Got none.’
Nothing shocked her. ‘And who cares for you?’
‘Con does,’ he said.
Sarah nodded at the acacia. ‘Is that Con there?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Is Con your brother?’
‘Uh-huh, he’s twelve. I’m five,’ he told her briskly. I paid the boy closer attention as Sarah asked his name. Wary, he studied her face, then ogled mine. I stared back, studying him too. Skin sprayed with freckles under a mop of sandy hair, ears that stuck out, and big bulging brown eyes. He looked silly. ‘Jerome.’
‘A good name,’ said Sarah brightly. ‘A knightly name, I’d say. Do you know Florian?’
The big eyes roved over me with suspicion, seeming to try and take in everything about me at first glance for fear of needing to take a second. As he eyed my hair, I ducked behind Sarah. I knew it was blacker than anyone else’s and now for some reason felt scared of what he’d think.
‘Have you eaten anything today?’ Sarah was already unwrapping our bread and tearing off a piece for the boy. At four I wasn’t unaware of the value of things, but the kindness wasn’t wasted. Jerome flung away the stick and squatted right there on our mat, grabbing the bread and trying, twice, to push it all into his mouth before giving up on that method and ripping off a bite of it instead.
Sarah asked him more questions: ‘Does your brother take good care of you? It can’t be easy if it’s just the two of you.’
Mouth stuffed, Jerome nodded.
‘Well! I dare say he’s not as deft with a needle as I am. Look at your shirt, there’s barely anything left of it, child.’
Jerome glanced at his clothes, then up at Sarah again with a quick, impish grin. I smiled as well, with Sarah’s shoulder for cover. She was, at that moment, offering to mend his threadbare shirt and when he nodded, she coaxed with her fingers.
‘Take it off then, and keep to the shade.’ He stripped it off, baring his already bronzed skin to the sun. ‘And here, take some bread over to your brother.’
When he snatched it off her, I was sure that he would eat it himself. But he didn’t, instead running it back to the boy he called Con. I leaned in close to Sarah’s ear. ‘There won’t be enough for Scrivens now!’ I whispered.
‘Oh, there will,’ she assured me and tutted at the shirt in her hands.
She must have worked at it long after I fell asleep that night, since it had been little more than ribbons and, when I woke, it was whole; darned from loose scraps and blanket-ends. And she would have returned it to the trading place the very same day, had the two boys not followed us back.
In Naemia their home had been a town somewhere north of the coast on which we’d lived. No one ever asked more, or what had happened to their parents, and the tremors were in that. They were lucky, Erik said, to have made it as far as they had by themselves. Since reaching the borderlands later than most, they’d simply moved about the plain, sleeping rough, stealing and begging to survive as best they could. But Sarah tamed them, and with Con old enough to help Erik with the farming on the foothills, they became part of our home.
No one ever wanted the necklaces. Mother Far, the old woman, gave us her spare hen.
----------------------------------------
One night, when I was eight, Sarah opened up our travelling trunk and took out the little box.
‘I brought this with me when we left.’
Proudly I told her, ‘I remember. But it’s smaller.’
‘You’re bigger.’ She sat, her smile falling so suddenly that I looked to the reeds of the doorway, fearing something had come in from outside. Leopards would sometimes prowl among the huts late in the night. But there wasn’t a leopard; nothing was there. Sarah stoked the coals to a glow, set the box in her lap and raised its lid.
I looked in at a treasure. A candle, a hook and a pebble. A fork and a bootlace. Some coins . . . ‘These,’ she said, ‘are all Naemian things, and each one tells a story.’
Eager, I picked out the first thing my finger touched.
‘Ah, that’s Erik’s lucky hook,’ she chuckled. ‘I’ve really no idea if it ever did him any good, but he’d bring his boat right back to Brownport when it wasn’t in his hat!’
I put it back in its place, selecting next a tiny glass vial half-filled with something very dark. ‘And this?’
‘Earth.’
‘Oh.’ I frowned. ‘It tells a story?’
‘A sad one,’ she nodded. ‘Sickness, hardship and struggle. Pain. They’re in this earth.’ I watched the firelight play over a caught speck of stone. ‘But also strength, and the wisdom of Wildmen.’
Feeling I was handling a relic, I returned it to the box and took something else: long, thin and grey.
‘A kestrel’s feather,’ she said before I asked.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘From a kestrel of course.’ She plucked it from my fingers and brushed it on my cheek. ‘The bird would bring us messages.’
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
‘Who from?’
‘One we cared for, very much.’
As she said it, her fingers touched a strip of beige cloth in the box and she went quiet for a while. None of these really sounded like stories – not proper ones with beginnings and endings, anyway. But I knew better than to say that while the tremors were stirring.
‘Oh,’ she said, voice brighter again. ‘This isn’t Naemian. Do you remember it?’
She was holding up a necklace; brown and red beads spaced with pearl-white cockle shell. I nodded, glad that it had found its way in here, though not sure why.
Then I reached for something else I noticed; something wrapped in a white cloth or kerchief and pushed into a corner of the box. But before I could touch it, Sarah gathered my hand in hers. ‘That one’s not Naemian either,’ she said, her voice creaking the same way it did when she rubbed her sore legs before bedtime. Her smile was tight, but it was warm inside her hands. ‘It came with you.’
‘Me?’
‘That’s right, Florian. It will have a story of its own, of that I’m certain. All things do. But it’s a story I don’t know.’
More than ever, I wanted her to say something about the long ago times of Naemia. The Wildmen. The Blue Man. Great King Saremar himself. Of course I liked the box of treasures, but it was all tremors inside. No tales my mind could really hold or tell myself over again. Hooding her eyes, she poked the cloth, secured the thing – whatever it was – and closed the box.
The way her work-hardened hands rested on the lid made it very clear, suddenly, that the things inside were more precious than any treasure in the world, and more sacred by far than any sky-fallen castle. ‘Know that these things are for you. They are memories of a kinder place, pieces of our home. You may have been too small to remember that home, Florian, but you must never forget that it was yours as much as ours. You are Naemian too.’ Our faces were so close that, between them, her hair held in the warmth of our breath. Gently, she squeezed my hand in hers. ‘Will you remember?’
I met her eyes and nodded back.
----------------------------------------
Come winter, the mountains stole light early off the plain. Erik and the farmers would return only after dark had fallen, and so most evenings Sarah would send me into the foothills with stews. Now I was eleven, but still small for my age, and the flask always heavy for my arms. When I got there my wrists would ache more than my legs.
‘It’s cold!’ Jerome complained behind me.
‘You shouldn’t have come then. No one said you had to.’ Around my ankles Scrivens nosed the stones I loosened.
‘Why d’you have to go so fast?’
‘Because the—’
‘I know, I know, the stew,’ he droned, lagging farther behind. ‘Bet Scrivens don’t mind if it’s cold.’ The terrier ran back to him. ‘Hey, you seen how skinny your dog is? I can see his bones, Flor!’
I hoisted myself up over a big rock on the track and Scrivens bounded ahead again. ‘He eats fine, Jerms. Besides, I can see your bones too.’
‘I’m big-boned.’
‘No you’re not.’
We climbed onto the plateau. The tang of freshly turned soil made my nostrils itch just like always, and we followed the thin rows of winter crops towards the farmhouse. Spotting us on our way, Con waved to keep the dog away from readied bags. Jerome smacked his leg: ‘Here boy!’
The sky turned blue-grey, the hills purple around the farmhouse. While Jerome played roughly with Scrivens on the porch, I sat cross-legged on the floor. Savouring his stew, Erik tapped a little beat on his knee and hummed something soft that went nowhere.
‘Still hot?’ I said.
Con laughed, ‘It’s never hot.’
Nineteen now, he was taller than Erik, but then so was everyone. He had fair hair, like a girl’s hair, clear eyes too, and a quiet ease to the way he spoke to people. As if he always knew what was best. Like Erik, I supposed, who now sat with his wrist against the peeling old mattock, his other hand turning his cup to swirl the dregs of stew.
‘It’s warm enough,’ he said with a tilt of his head and that half-smile that always made me want to giggle. His skin had got browner and rougher lately; he must have been working without his hat on. We Naemians were dark-haired and pale-skinned, I knew that, but it had never stopped me wondering if, one day, the Vedish sun might change us all. Would we become like the Vedans? So long ago now, it seemed, they’d moved away from the other side of the river, deeper south into their desert. But in my memory at least, their skins had been almost like gold. That couldn’t be right, though. Golden people . . .
I stood for the flask and offered more stew. Both men held their cups out and I replenished each by half. Not much steam rose now but like every other evening since the start of winter, I’d climbed the track as quickly as I could.
Now Con sat forward, cup in one hand and something small in the other.
‘What’s that?’ I asked him.
The clear eyes looked up, fingers beginning to close around the thing before opening again. In his hand was a nugget of wood – smooth, sculpted, polished wood – no bigger than a pebble. Moving closer, I saw it was a fish: each scale and gill shaped in the wood with clever tools. ‘Our father carved it,’ he said.
‘Was he a fisherman?’
He hummed the tiniest of laughs through his nose, looking down at the fish. ‘A carpenter.’
The room went quiet then. As I looked at the fish, thinking how well it would fit among the treasures in Sarah’s Naemian box, I felt Erik’s gaze on me, gentle but fixed. And very faintly, the tremors too, rising through the floorboards of the farmhouse as if out of the hills. When I looked to the porch, Jerome was still playing with the dog but in a half-hearted way; eyes a little empty as he poked Scrivens’ ribs. I looked back at Con, who’d now closed the fish tightly in his hand.
‘Erik was a fisherman,’ I told him. He knew, of course, but I suddenly had to say it. Adding softly, ‘in Naemia.’
Erik’s chair creaked. He leaned the mattock at the wall and reached out for his hat. ‘Best get home, boys,’ he said. ‘We’ve the cart to load yet, but take those parsnips as you go.’ He stood and stretched with a grin.
‘Sarah says to bring the flask back when you come,’ I told him before swapping it for the string-bound bundle.
‘Like every night, then.’
We made our way back across the plateau and returned down the track that would lead out of the hills, onto the plain. The chill of evening nipped our arms, but that wasn’t the reason Jerome walked ahead of me now. I caught him up.
‘Why’d you do that?’ he sulked.
‘Do what?’
‘That stupid fish, why’d you ask about it?’
‘I just wanted to know—’
‘It makes him sad, can’t you see!’
‘Sorry,’ I said, and meant it.
He kicked a stone and Scrivens chased it. ‘Ask me next time.’
‘Jerms, you don’t remember anything about Naemia. You were too small, same as me.’
He’d always had a temper on him. Though we’d never hurt each other, not badly anyway, our games had brought us to blows more than once since they’d lived with us. So when he stopped short, scraping gravel, I was ready to duck. But he didn’t hit me, or even look at me. He squinted past me. I turned and looked the same way through the gathering dusk; up the escarpment that faced the plateau of the farm. Scrivens moaned at the cold.
‘What’re you looking at?’ I said.
‘Uh . . . nothing,’ Jerome murmured. ‘Just thought I saw . . . nah, nothing.’ He peeled his eyes from the escarpment, but even as he moved to walk on, my own eyes locked on a movement.
I hopped onto a rock beside the track. ‘It is something,’ I said. Jerome followed and climbed up beside me, Scrivens coming up third to nudge his narrow snout between our legs. We looked into the gully of the hills, scanning the gloom. ‘See it?’
‘Thought you did.’
‘So did . . .’
‘There!’ he pointed. Across the gully was a something, a definite something. Something moving. Something like people. Two people! Covered with dusty cloaks, they carried nothing as they picked their way along the tumble of rocks on the steeper side. I couldn’t see their faces for the drooping hoods of their cloaks, only the flash of pale hands that pulled them on, gripping the rocks.
‘Ever seen anyone out there before?’ I said.
‘Nuh . . .’ said Jerome, transfixed as I was. Then, in the corner of my eye, I saw his stare break. ‘Two more!’ He thrust his arm out, pointing. ‘And another one, there!’
Others moved the same way down in the gully, a little closer to us, but harder to make out against the shadowy scrub. The longer I watched them, the stranger they looked. It was the way that they moved, as if they were weak or sick or dizzy or something. Even the cloaks they wore were strange; more like mismatched parts of clothes, ripped and torn and heaped together.
Scrivens barked and we both jumped. Behind us, voices were being thrown across the hills from the farmhouse. I looked back up the track to see farmhands jogging across the plateau in the last splash of evening sunlight. Erik broke away from them, shouting at us and waving his hat as if to brush us off the hill. He sounded angry.
No, not angry. Something worse.
‘Go home!’
The tremors gripped me.
Jerome was first off the rock and I nearly fell over his back as I followed him down. As if forbidden to look, I didn’t dare another glance at the figures in the gully. Instead we sped straight down the hill towards home, not even stopping to pick up the parsnips falling from the bundle.
In the wind that night, the reeds over our door clicked, snapped and rustled. They’d always done that, but only now did those noises keep me awake. Scrivens’ head lay on my chest but even his ears were twitching. The coals in the brazier burned so low I could barely make out the eyes ringed around it: Erik, Sarah, Con and Dewar, huddled round, their voices soft as they gave the tremors back their name.
And when I did sleep, it was to find myself alone back above that gully in the foothills. The gully swelled and morphed and darkened; now a deep black hole.
Pale hands reached out of it, for me.
----------------------------------------
The tremors grew stronger. In the months that followed, people from Elman reached our settlements with news, piece by fearful piece. The threat we had escaped those years ago had started moving again, spreading across Elman’s mudflats as it massed out of Naemia. Most of the Elmines had fled north those years ago, and so we knew the ones who reached us were the last survivors of that land. And that every day the threat moved closer to our new home.
It started happening so quickly. Of the northernmost settlement only a few escaped, and now no one tried to hide the tremors from me. For the first time in my life, I saw Sarah weep in Erik’s arms. A silent, savage weeping.
Soldiers came from the desert. We watched from the foothills as Vedans crossed the river: first men and horses, then later men and great war-machines glinting bright on red earth. They went to fight in the north and for a time no more figures could be spotted on the hills. All the same, the men stopped farming on those slopes and turned their hands to the plain. That soil yielded poorly and our meals shrank very small. Some nights we ate nothing, and Erik grew thin.
Then, a full year after that first sighting in the gully, we saw something to the northeast that scared Erik ‒ now I knew it was fear. We saw a line of men, women and children making their way southward on foot. Our people, Erik said, carrying all their backs and carts could bear of their homes in the plain. Soon the same Vedish soldiers we had seen a year before, glinting north with their horses and machines, were seen glinting the same way back south. A man rode into our village – a soldier dressed all in white robes, on a white horse – and announced a thing that spread fear through the village like a fire. His horse was still in sight, riding away to the north, as the quiet-natured people I had known all my life began to pile up their carts, many weeping as they worked.
‘Where are we going?’ I pleaded, more afraid of what no one would say than of the truth. I watched Erik fit the bridle to our mule until he stopped and took my shoulder.
‘The Satrap of Vorth can no longer defend his border, Florian, or protect the people of the borderlands from his war. We’re to cross the river into the desert and make for the fortress city. There we are offered refuge.’
‘You said the desert was dangerous.’
‘The danger here is greater.’ I can still feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder as he urged me to be brave. Brave for Sarah. Brave for Jerome. ‘There will be safety in Antissa.’
The carts gathered at the shallows of the river, set to leave at sunrise. But I couldn’t stand the frightened place my home had suddenly become, and just how much everyone had changed. Somehow, knowing they’d all done this once before wasn’t a comfort. I hated their criss-crossing glances, terse voices, anxious bustling. These weren’t tremors anymore—the world was shaking in its roots. So when Con said he was heading up to the farmhouse for something he’d left behind there, I leapt at the chance to escape with him.
Of course I knew it was the fish. But we hadn’t spoken of it again since that day, and besides, he also wasn’t himself. His strides were long and it was hard to keep up. He didn’t say a word until we were well above the plain and could look back at the huts and the river and the wide view southeast.
That sound. That placeless echo that rose up above the scrape of our sandals; I’ve never stopped hearing it. Con turned on the track to listen, but Scrivens was frisking too loudly in the stones.
‘Pick up the dog, Flor.’
I swept him up, stood still and listened. It was like a mutter from all sides, breaking and bouncing off the rocks. Con slid down to the edge of the track and I followed to stand next to him. Scrivens’ ears flicked my chin, head darting left to right in search of the source of the noise.
Overhead, a dusky buzzard flapped its wings, riding a thermal from the baked earth of the hills. Behind us, the sun had begun to dip behind the peaks, shooting long rays. I shielded my eyes from the glare on the river, then looked north. The sound – a gibbering mutter of many voices – was clearer from here; clear enough at least to tell it was coming from a cleft just above the base of those hills. Inside the cleft was movement.
Con saw it. We looked to the village again, where nothing had changed. Folk hurried and busied among the huts, urgent, but no more so than we’d left them. And whatever Con said to me then I didn’t hear it – didn’t need to. Like Erik, he’d have told me to stay put, stay there and wait while he went to warn the village. But that didn’t happen.
Scrivens leapt from my arms and I claimed that duty.
My feet had never touched so little of the track. Time simply vanished and by the time I reached the plain my joints had numbed in their sockets and I could barely hear Con’s voice shouting behind me anymore. The setting sun turned the earth scarlet as, like a blotch in the corner of my eye, the rabble seeped out of the cleft. I dared one look. Thirty or forty—a ragtag smear of dirty-brown now moving sidelong with me. Spears like black thorns put evil points in blurry edges of its movement. And there were some few in the front, some few who sprinted like dogs or wolves, overtaking me fast.
When I remembered about Scrivens it was a moment too late. As I skidded in the dust he dashed from my heels. ‘Boy, no!’ I flung myself after his tail, missing by a yard, and that was it. The dog was a bolt across the earth, kicking a cloud as he pelted towards them in a fit of yapping. Through the haze in the air I lost all sight of him quickly.
Turning with a cry I couldn’t hold, I ran on. Ran for the huts, where the screaming was awful and there was no need to spread the word. All I needed to do was remember where I’d lived; it had come away from my brain along with everything else I’d known. Each hut was a shell, each abandoned cart now useless, each wailing wide-eyed man or woman the same desperate, fleeing prey. A brazier toppled somewhere and smoke went up with a sizzle. Motions blurred and voices bawled. ‘Get to the carts! Leave everything! Get to the carts! To the river!’ But the attackers were so fast, tearing through the space among the huts as if their arms were extra legs, leaping like leopards, swooping and sprinting on the backs of those who ran. I couldn’t—wouldn’t —see the rest.
Our cart was there. The mule was gone! Inside, no one. Relief swayed me on my feet; they were at the river with the others and that’s where Con would go as well. I fell against our trunk and raised its lid up with both hands, just as reeds snapped back at our doorway.
Sarah’s box to my chest, I dropped onto my haunches and spun against the trunk. It slammed.
Monsters. That’s what Erik always muttered when he thought I couldn’t hear.
It’s what I saw.
A chalky flesh and beetle eyes. A lipless mouth that gabbled something. Wiry limbs clad all in rags that crossed the threshold of my home. The head was smooth with knotted webs of hair that swayed with each weird movement, and there were markings – blue dart shapes – over the skin.
It retched, or hissed or something. I tore away from the trunk to try to back against the wall, but the thing was so much faster. The thorn-like spear in its white hand turned and surged out, the blow as it shattered Sarah’s box pushing the air out of my body. The treasures spilled and, as they scattered, I fell down.
With another inhuman sound made in its throat, the thing stepped over me. I looked up, found its eyes again, blacker than coals, but couldn’t focus on them. Someone was calling my name outside. It was Con! But it had me now.
It had me.
I spun on my belly and tried to sprawl towards the doorway as if there was any chance I could get there. Its foot pinned me, forcing the air out again, but hard—I knew my ribs would crack! Only one thing was in reach, still wrapped in cloth, and I don’t know why I tried to reach it, strained every muscle in my body against the crushing of that foot, but I lunged and dropped my hand on it. Fingers closing.
Con was close—‘Florian!’
I pulled. The cloth came away.
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There isn’t a memory of the night and almost none of the journey. Somehow I was there, on the cart, in a blanket; hiding from the sun with my fingers in my ears. Cart-wheels rumbled. In a fever I slept, then half-woke, I think. Slept again. When at last I woke fully, it was with my face to the day and the heat, the tear-marked cheeks and the long sands of Vorth.
The child who knew nothing didn’t wake.
I was twelve.