Across the Face of the World (68 page)

'No, I did not choose—'

'You did! Yes, all of you chose to let our soil leak between our fingers. You do not fight for it!

You let it be taken by the arro¬gant men of Faltha!' His voice rose almost to a shriek, and his spittle showered all within hearing. And now they come to the very heart of our keep and kill the best among us! Can you not see? Do you no longer have hearts? Better to die winning back what is ours than to live hiding among the rocks while the little we have left is taken from us!'

'You are right, Tala, but what—?'

'What? You say what? Kill them all, that is what! You've seen them die. You've seen them fall into the mouth of Helig Holth. You've seen the Mother take them. They die, just like us! This is what I intend to do. I will lead a fist of warriors, twenty, no more - and we will pursue our enemies. We will return and use them to consecrate the selection of a new priest and a new Widuz Chief. The life of the man who slew my brother is forfeit to me. When he is slain, when I send him screaming into the mouth of the Mother, only then will I be satisfied.

'Now, who will join me? Or do I have to go south to Uflok and ask the widows if they will avenge their dead?'

With a great cry, the warriors of Widuz arose as one man, and Tala the Eldest selected twenty from among them. As they left the room, he paused at the door and said: 'The Widuz Chief will guide you until I return. And then we shall see who is fit to lead our people.' Then he took his fist of men and raced towards the surface.

Mahnum woke to find he was being carried between two strong men. For a ghastly moment he thought he was still in the clutches of the Bhrudwans.

'Where are we? What is going on?' he asked through swollen lips.

'So he speaks the common tongue!' said one of his captors. 'So much the better! He can guide us through this country!'

'I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm no Widuz,' Mahnum replied gently. 'I'm a Trader from Firanes, trying as you are to escape.'

At this the two men let him fall to the ground. Harsh and unbe¬lieving questions came at him from all sides, and Mahnum was hard-pressed to prove his point. 'Listen,' he said, 'have you ever heard a Widuz speak the common tongue?' Nobody had. 'Who let you out of your cells?'

They had to acknowledge that he had. 'I'm wearing the uniform of a Widuz guard 1 slew. See this blood-caked tear? Here's where my sword went in. Do you see any wound there?' Not one of them could.

'Look, just keep an eye on me, or tie me up, or anything. I'm not going to give you away. I'm as keen as you to escape from this place.'

The knot of men and women debated for a moment, a debate cut short by a shout from their lookout. 'Behind us! They come!'

Mahnum assessed the situation with a glance. The group of escaped captives stood on a steep path near the bottom of a valley notched deep into the hills. This must be Chvenchine, he reasoned. Behind them, at the very top of the path, stood a number of tiny figures, picked out by the morning sun.

'Then let's get out of sight as quickly as possible!' Mahnum said forcefully, and ducked into the trees to his left. 'Come on!'

A shout, echoing faintly across the valley, told them they had been seen. Moving swiftly, the others followed him deep into the forest.

This won't do, thought the Trader. All the Widuz need to do is to follow the path. They'll make faster time than us, and will be able to cut us off. We must find the path again! He struck out to the right, down the hill, explaining his thinking as he went.

Two or three of the men were unhappy with the idea of this man in a Widuz uniform leading them, and said so. 'We have no time for debate!' Mahnum replied. 'Go your own way if you don't trust mine!'

So it was that he led no more than a dozen escapees through the great valley that divided Clovenhill in two. They found the path without difficulty, but were helpless to act when shouts and screams were heard from the forest some distance behind them. The five men and one woman who had not trusted him had undoubtedly been caught by the Widuz, and their shrieks gave a chilling indication of their fate.

'There is nothing we can do for them now,' the Trader said gently, exhorting his charges to make haste along the path, 'except remember what happened, and determine that we will not be taken.'

Night and day they struggled along the path, somehow keeping ahead of the pursuing Widuz.

Water was taken from streams on the way, while food was stolen from whatever farms or hamlets they encountered. But always behind came the Widuz, their wrath matched by the desperation of the captives. Sometimes the captives managed to draw well in front, while at other times little more than a mile separated the two groups. On the fourth or fifth morning -

Mahnum was unsure which - he spotted two figures high on a spur on the far side of the river.

Lookouts, no doubt; they will make it harder for us to escape. As if in answer to his fear, the figures vanished from the ridge, heading east. And behind them came the Widuz,. now definitely gaining ground as the captives tired.

It took five days for Leith and Phemanderac to make their way down the steep slope from the caves under Cloventop and out of the land of Widuz. The land was divided in two by Clovenchine, the gorge of the Sagon River, which flowed in a narrow floodplain over three thousand feet below the heights above, though in most places the drop was by no means sheer. The most difficult moment was the crossing of the Sagon River, which they essayed on the first day. They had to turn aside from a manned ferry at a small town directly below Cloventop, for fear the story of their escape had spread; and it was another day's march before they found an unguarded boat. There were many clearings in the wooded country on the deep valley floor, small patches where farmers fought the thin soil and the yearly floods, and from one of these farms Leith and Phemanderac stole enough food to see them safely out of Widuz.

Leith had no real idea of where they were, or in which direc¬tion they should head. His only instinct was to return to the slopes of the volcano, where surely his parents searched for him still. Phemanderac would not consider this, insisting the best plan was to make for Instruere and wait for the others to arrive - if indeed they had not arrived there already. Besides, he argued, neither of them knew the way back to the volcano, and that journey would involve travelling the length of this hostile land. It would be better simply to retrace the path Phemanderac had used to enter Widuz in the first place.

Early on the fifth day away from Adunlok, the two men stood high on a ridge overlooking the Sagon, with a wide view to the east where a great plain stretched away to the horizon. Down in the Clovenchine, two groups of people hurried along the river-bank path that Leith and Phemanderac had abandoned the evening before.

'They're after us,' Leith said simply.

'Possibly,' the thin man agreed. 'They are certainly in a hurry. But why do two groups travel the same road? Why have they split up? Our trail should not be that hard to find!'

'I don't want to be captured. I don't want to be taken back to that fortress. I'd rather die out here in the open.'

'I'd rather live; there's still too much to see. Quickly, we must hurry. If we wish to get down to the plains ahead of them, we will have to run for it.'

The rest of the morning was a blur of uncertain footsteps, of rocks and trees rushing past, of constant pounding as they descended the slopes of the spur they had climbed. This sentinel guarded the eastern approaches to Clovenchine, and had an evil name and reputation unknown to them: Cairn Deargh, the Mountain of Dead Men's Bones. On its upper slopes a lookout was once kept, manned not by the Widuz but by the First Men, designed to keep the ferocious tribal warriors shut in. The bones of the slain were piled at the base of the lookout, and for a time the large pile bore witness to the ferocity of the war. Bones and lookout both were lost now in the regenerating forest. Leith and Phemanderac flashed through this country, scattering birds and animals before them, eyes for nothing save the uneven path below their feet.

Eventually the ground flattened out and their run slowed to a trot, then a walk, and for a few moments they stopped to rest. But the horror of Widuz was still all about them, and long before they had rested fully they were on the move again, drawing on reserves of energy they were unaware they possessed. They walked the rest of that day and well into the night, and early the next morning they came out from under the eaves of the forest and found the wide, grassy plain they had seen from the ridge the day before.

There were no paths through this land, so they struck out across country, uncertain of their exact destination. Somehow they had missed their way back on the ridge, and now they were certainly further south than Phemanderac would have liked. 'There is a road from Stanlow that runs along the Sagon River, which took me two-thirds of the way to Widuz,' he explained.

'When I didn't know better. That is the road I am looking for.'

Leith did not answer, saving his energy for a leap off a bank down into a small stream. Both men splashed noisily across it, then climbed up the far bank into a grove of trees.

'Over this way!' came a shout from somewhere to their right.

Leith froze. Beside him, Phemanderac was the first to respond, grabbing Leith's arm and pulling him to the left. 'Run! Now!'

'Flush them out!' came another voice, this time from their left and much closer. 'They can't be far ahead!'

Phemanderac spun Leith around and they moved quietly back in the direction of the creek. In a moment they stood at the top of the bank, but their escape was cut off by three men standing in the stream. One of the men looked up, saw them and gave a shout. At that moment a group of men, swords and knives drawn, emerged from the trees, surrounding them.

'I'm not going back to Adunlok. They're not throwing me down that hole,' Leith hissed in desperation.

'Well, what have we here?' one of the men said. 'Two deer, caught in our trap. But what kind of deer are these? Foolish Widuz deer, by the cut of their cloth. Don't you know it's not safe for you to browse down on the plains?' His voice had an ugly cast.

Leith could not understand the meaning of the man's words, but Phemanderac spoke up. 'We are not Widuz, although we have borrowed their uniforms. We have escaped from the grim fortress of Adunlok, and seek shelter with Treikans. What manner of men are you?'

'We are a party of Treikan hunters from Inch Chanter,' the man replied evenly. Around him the other men relaxed visibly, lowering their swords. 'We thought you were deer - noisy, fool¬hardy animals, to be sure - but now we see that you are neither deer nor Widuz. Escaped from Adunlok, you say? Now that would be a feat of courage!'

The raven-haired man turned and spoke for a moment to the man beside him.

'This is what we will do,' he said, turning back to the two brown-cloaked strangers. 'We were on the trail of two deer, and we must hunt them down. You will remain here, with Creen here as a guard, and we will come back for you in two hours at the most; then you may come with us to Inch Chanter and tell us your story. Agreed?'

Leith looked at Phemanderac. 'What other choice do we have?'

That afternoon Leith and Phemanderac travelled with the Treikan hunters in the second of two horse-drawn carts. The first cart was filled with the carcasses of two horned stags, great prizes this far south, apparently, and the Treikans joked of the luck the strangers had brought with them.

The air was hot and still, stifling any attempts at serious conversation. Weary beyond knowledge, Leith cast himself into the bottom of the cart and sought rest, finally being rocked to sleep by the swaying of the cart and the rhythm of the horses' hoofs.

When he awoke in the late afternoon the air was hotter still, a sweaty, breathless heat unlike any he had experienced. On the front of the cart the driver sang a lilting tune to the beat of the hoofs, while walking beside him another played a strange instru¬ment by alternately squeezing it together and pulling it apart, as it seemed to Leith. More Treikans walked beside the carts than had been in the hunting party; it appeared that all the workers in the fields were making for the town that still lay some way ahead. For a moment Leith was puzzled; at least two hours remained before sunset, but when Phemanderac tapped him on the shoulder and pointed behind them, he understood why.

Away to the west rose a massive cloud, easily the equal of the stormcloud that had brought snow to Breidhan Moor, and as he watched it appeared to be rolling slowly towards them like a huge wave. It loomed blackly over the fields, reaching out dark fingers; its base sat squarely on Clovenhill, a grey smudge on the horizon.

'Some storm!' remarked one of the men beside the cart.

'When will it arrive?' Leith wanted to know.

'Not for a while yet. Hopefully we'll be well inside Inch Chanter by then.'

A few of the hunters grunted their agreement.

'What sort of weapon is that?' asked a freckle-faced boy, pointing to Phemanderac's harp.

Phemanderac laughed. 'It's not a weapon,' he replied. 'It's a musical instrument.'

The boy's eyes widened. 'How does it work?'

'Let me show you. Just pluck the string here with your finger -like that - now run your finger along the strings ... What do you think?' He didn't have to ask; the boy was laughing with pleasure.

Phemanderac anchored the base of the harp between his feet, then began to play in time with the clopping of hoofs on stone. Leith held his breath; but this time the sound was not magnified by the enclosed space of a cavern, and for a while he was a little disappointed. The subtlety of the rhythm crept over him, however, and he found himself beating time on the side of the cart.

Now others gathered around the cart, drawn by the music. One man began to clap his hands, and invited others to join him. A youngish woman took a long-necked stringed instrument from a pack on her back, and started strumming it. The driver of the cart kept up his song, which seemed to Leith to be a series of sounds rather than words.