Travellers #2 (4 page)

While I worked on Taur’s cloak, he took a pot of potatoes and the honey-sweetened water in which they had boiled. He added ground oats and made a paste which fermented several days. One morning he warmed a bowl of fine-ground oats and other seeds, lifting both hands full of the flour high before the flames, drifting it through his fingers, and mixed in the frothy, fermented stuff. Flour on his cheeks, he worked the mixture, hands then fists rubbing, kneading, and set the bowl in front of the fire. The dough began to rise. When I glanced again, Taur was beating it down, kneading it once more. I looked at the scars across the backs of his hands, and wondered again at the wounds that left such marks.

Taur looked up and roared in his friendly way. He set the dough to rise a second time, lowered it gentle inside a heavy pot with a tight-fitting lid, and buried it under hot ashes.

Casually, peering at a length of yarn as I wove the oily wool tight to shed rain, I asked again about his supply of salt. He stared silent then, as if relieved, roaring his clumsy words, he explained how traders came each spring and swapped salt for his hides, cheeses, honey, and salted meat.

“The salt traders are gross feeders!” Taur shouted. I hid my face because he ate hugely himself. They began their annual visit with a feast. He had to kill and cook several of his cows. I began to understand why Taur did not eat meat himself, and remembered something Tara’s father, Dinny, had said about the Salt People, that they were greedy eaters of flesh.

“They are cruel!” Taur roared, waved his hands, described
how the salt traders mistreated their slaves, men who carried the salt and bore away his food and hides. Pack animals. The skin on my face chilled. My chest tightened.

“Slaves?”

“Urfs!” Taur bowed his shoulders, staggered, flinched, as if whipped.

I half-closed one eye, squinted, and shambled towards him. Taur stared aghast. I seized a dead ember, sketched a face on a flat piece of wood: scar, missing patch of hair, the leering cast of Squint-face’s eyes.

“Aghh!” Taur flung it in the fire, ran outside. I went back to my loom.

Taur returned later. Tears had dried in the flour on his face. He scraped the ashes off the pot and tipped out what seemed a miracle to me, a loaf of bread. He cut a crust hot, spread it with butter and honey, handed it to me with a great smile that made me want to cry. As the fragrance of fresh bread filled the hut, at my first wonderful mouthful, I remembered Hagar describing seeds the Travellers gathered and used to make bread when she was a girl. One year, they returned to the Whykatto, and the wheat grass had disappeared. It never grew again. The insane sun had killed it, Hagar said.

“Marvellous, Taur! Excellent!”

“Gurgh!” Taur beamed and offered me another slice. “Eat up!” he roared. “Plenty more!”

I wanted to ask where he found the wheat grass, but there was something more urgent. “The Salt People,” I said, “where do they come from?” and I pointed north, the way the animals and I had come through the mountains.

“Gaw!” he pointed east. “Awgh!” He moved his fingers as if walking, pointed to the sun, and opened and closed his hand many times.

Next morning Taur led me east up his valley. By midday we stood in the saddle at its head, looking down into a valley
much deeper than ours, a straight corridor to the north. The way the Salt People came.

“Gwoar?” he asked that night, as we ate our evening meal.

“What am I thinking?”

“Gahr!”

“I’m thinking about the Salt People. I have seen them before.” I told him how Tara fell out of the tree those years ago, how she kicked me, menaced me with a dagger, and how we came to love. I told him about Dinny, Sim, and Petra, how we were going to be a family, live at the Hawk Cliffs, fight the demon sun with trees, their green shade, replant the Whykatto.

As I described the massacre of the Metal People, his face turned dark. At Tara’s murder, Taur – who had never wept for himself – dropped his head and cried into his scarred hands. He was a soft-hearted monster, the Bull Man.

I heard my own voice go dry. It was better not to cry too easily. Somebody had tortured Taur’s body, torn out his tongue, yet he kept his spirit. It is easy to give in to self-pity, he had discovered, intelligent to refuse it.

An awful idea struck me. “Taur!” He raised his heavy head, eyes red with tears, nose running, his mouth wet. “Taur, those scars on your hands and back?”

I had often seen his back when he threw off his tunic as we worked and sweated together. The skin was ridged, lined with parallel scars, rumpled distortions of the flesh. The shoulder-blades stood out on his back like polished ivory wings where somebody had flogged him with a whip, where the skin and muscle had tried to grow back but only covered the bones with a thin integument.

“Who beat you? Who cut out your tongue?”

“Gawr.”

“Who?”

“Gargh!”

“It was the Salt People, wasn’t it?”

“Gahr!” Something clicked in his poor throat. “Grk! It was the Salt People.” He groaned, seized my hands, crushed them till I winced. He had been wanting to tell me, should have told me before, but didn’t know how. Now he knew what the Salt People had done to Tara, he must tell me everything.

Poor Taur had felt guilty at keeping his dreadful secret, but I understood him, I said. I understood his reluctance to eat flesh, to be anything like his torturers. He bellowed with relief and told me more.

When he was a boy, far to the south, the Salt Men slaughtered his family, too. They kept Taur alive but flogged the flesh from his back, slashed his hands and face, cut out his tongue, and planted him in this valley as a slave-farmer. Taur knew they kept other slave-farmers, too. Each year they brought fresh supplies of salt and took away his hides, salt meat, honey, butter, and cheese. He did not dare run away because, no matter where he hid, their leader promised to find and torture him again.

He dropped the cowhide kilt under his tunic. Below his penis was a discoloured scar where they had slashed off his testicles. They did that to all their slaves. Squint-face, their leader, Taur said, was the cruellest torturer of all. So that was why he threw my drawing into the fire.

I must escape before spring, Taur warned me. If the Salt People caught me here, they would castrate me, too, tear out my tongue, and make me their slave. It did not occur to him that he might escape himself, so profound was the effect of their cruelty, Squint-face’s threat. He pointed west in the direction he thought I should go, gave me his warning and then, for the first time, he wept for himself.

I took him in my arms, tried to comfort him. I rocked the great shoulders, sang one of the songs my sister used to sing to me when I was little. And as I sang, Taur stopped his crying and tried to sing with me, wet-eyed, runny-nosed,
following my voice with his terrible noises, “Gluck! Gawr! Urgsh!”

After that he often sang to himself, and he was forever asking me to sing, urging me to remember and teach him more of the songs of the Travellers.

That night I took the green stone fish from my pack and showed it to Taur. He was sitting by the fire, singing – bellowing – his dreadful noises, rocking and comforting himself. He looked up, saw the thing in my hand, and cowered in terror, hiding his eyes. I had to hide it again before he would even listen to my explanation.

The green stone, Taur made me understand, was thought magical by the Salt People. They worshipped the carving of the fish. I had taken one of their gods. Even if I gave it back, Squint-face would kill me. All his power derived from the carving.

The Salt People found the green stone in what Taur called the South Land. When he said that I remembered again my father’s stories of the mountain that ate the sun, Hagar’s stories of people who lived in the land of ice and snow.

“When they need more of the green stone,” Taur said, “the Salt People travel there in a thing called a boat.” The South Land, he roared, could be seen from where he grew up. He described white mountains rising the far side of a great water called the sea.

With his bellows and signs he said my fish was made of the rarest of green stone, clear and embedded with tear-shaped drops. I wondered aloud how Tara had come by it, and Taur explained Squint-face would have hung it around her neck, a sign she was his.

“Glaw, Urgsh! Throw away the green stone.”

“What?”

“Throw it away!”

“It brings me good luck. I cannot throw it away.”

Taur shrugged his great shoulders. Even when I hid it again, he looked suspiciously at my pack.

When I questioned him, he said he had heard the pack-slaves talk of the long journey across the sea and down the South Land, the return with green stone. He remembered their description of snow mountains, rivers, a desert, and a palm tree whose heart the Salt People ate. The slaves were forbidden to eat it, but one boasted of tasting its delicious white flesh. Taur remembered that because another slave reported the boaster to Squint-face. At once he slew the man who had broken the rule. And then, Taur told me, then the Salt Men did something else, but he broke down and could not finish. I had wanted to ask him about the desert, because that did not fit with my father’s and Hagar’s stories, but did not press him.

Later, Taur told me more about his home near the bottom of the North Land. The idea of a South Land across a strait of water, of snow mountains and rivers, the source of the green stone, a desert, and the sweet-tasting palm tree, it seemed a childhood dream in his mind, I thought.

I tried to convince Taur he must escape with me, but the evil done to him by Squint-face made him passive, as if he had no rights. It must be a habit of thinking slaves fell into. It could happen to anyone, I realised, including me.

There were times I thought it was Taur’s not eating meat that made him give in to the Salt Men. He was their slave, but I did not dare tell him that. He thought himself freer than the pack-slaves, but I saw slavery took other forms as well.

I thought if only he would eat rich meat, perhaps it would give him the spirit to fight back. Then I looked at his huge shoulders, saw the strength with which he picked up a log, one I couldn’t shift, or how he pushed a heavy cow out of his way with a friendly shove. It was not that he lacked strength. But he certainly did not think of himself as free, not sufficiently to break Squint-face’s wicked spell.

“You’re being silly,” I told myself. “It’s nothing to do with what he eats.”

Breaking Taur’s habit of thought, the acceptance of his awful lot, took days of argument but, long before spring arrived in the valley, we hid the stores of food. Taur dried off the cows and selected one with a late calf. I chose the youngest and strongest of my animals. We sledged hay to the most distant clearings and left the other animals and the cows there. The hay eaten, they would wander after spring growth and run wild, escaping slaughter by the Salt People.

Taur regretted abandoning his cows, and I felt guilty at leaving my older animals. We had come far together. Yet they could not withstand the journey ahead, especially if grazing was scarce. Leaving now we ran the risk of starving, because there would be little growth until spring came

We loaded the donkeys with food, especially seeds of the oats and wheat, and baskets of potatoes. Everybody carried heavy loads, all the animals. Jak, Jess, Tek, and Trick had their loads. Even Het and her pups, now nearly full-grown, carried small loads. Taur and I had large packs but, as Taur bellowed, unlike slaves we chose to carry them.

For days I had fed oats to the animals and the cow and calf going with us. They put on condition, their coats sleek. And early one morning, afraid the others might turn up and want to follow, we began our journey. As Taur set fire to his hut, I took charcoal to the nearby cliff and drew a horned bull’s head, its mouth open, bellowing.

That first day I stared ahead, trying not to think of my animals left behind. Taur moaned and muttered one of his songs, farewelling his cows. We came up through the trees and over the head of the valley. I sent Jak and Jess ahead to lead us south.

“Urgsh! The Salt Men will expect us to go south. They will follow and catch us.” Taur pointed west.

Away to the north-west, the mountain still grumbled. Its ash cloud rolled away with a southerly, but I knew it could turn with the wind and cover the grass. I explained that to Taur, but he just pointed west again. We could only move at the animals’ speed. The Salt Men would expect us to go south. That was the way they went to get their supplies of the green stone, so they knew the country there.

Taur’s western way meant crossing the hills below the mountains. Compared to the country south they looked bleak, but that would help deceive Squint-face. We marched west, Taur bellowing one of the Travellers’ songs I had taught him. Even though he missed his cows, he felt the excitement of starting on a journey. Taur was becoming a Traveller.

In spring, the river we had followed many days led us west to that strange creature Taur called the sea. A lake so big it had no other shore. When I tasted its water, Taur grinned. I retched, spat. He guffawed. He had warned me, he said. I thought of the poisoned river of Orklun, but Taur said this water was just salt, its fish safe to eat.

Taur’s rough song became the beginning for each march, night or morning. He sang of where we had come from, and where we were going. I smiled at his joy. He loved his song and would often roar at me to join in, and the pair of us walked along with the animals, bellowing together, the dogs looking up, their ears pricking and dropping again.

We grazed down the coast. Taur’s cow was still in milk, and we made butter and cheese in skins that slopped on the donkeys’ pack saddles as we went. Our potatoes and oats were running low when Taur led far inland through hills, followed down a river, and brought us to where the North Land finished. West across a lurching grey sea, I saw snow peaks of a large land uplifted high, the source of Squint-face’s green stone. I dared not tell Taur I wanted to find it.