I woke with dawn, the sky a transparent pink hill of light over the dark hill of earth. I was hungry and thirsty. I got up and made up my pack and went on down the hillside, and at the creek in the hollow, where Brigin had not let me drink my fill, I drank my fill. I was alone—so, then, I’d go alone, and live my life as I saw fit. I’d drink where I wanted to drink. I’d go to Mesun, where all men were free men, and where the University taught wisdom, and the poet Caspro lived.
I tried to sing his hymn to Liberty as I strode along, but I never could sing, and my voice in the silence and birdsong of the woods sounded like a young crow squawking. Instead, I let the words of his poems come into my head and come with me on my way, making a quieter music to keep me company.
Things change fast in a forest, trees fall, young trees shoot up, brambles grow across the path, but the way was always clear enough when I looked for it and let my memory tell me where I’d gone. I came to the clearing where we’d picked up the venison, and ate my midday dinner there, I wished I had some of that venison. My pack was getting all too light. I wondered if I should begin to veer eastward again, to come out of the Daneran Forest and try my luck at buying food in a village or a town. But I didn’t want to do that yet. I’d stay in the forest, making a wide pass around Brigin’s camp, if it was still there, taking the way Chamry had taken us till I got to a safe distance from Barna’s city. Then I’d head northeast to find one of the villages outside the forest, on the Somulane, the first of the two great rivers I was to cross.
My plan went well until I was more or less east of Barna’s city, following the Somulane as it took a northerly bend through the forested hills. I was pretty hungry, and there were backwaters of the river in which I could see trout swimming as plain as pigeons flying in the sky. It was too much for me. I stopped at a lovely pool, put my rod together, baited my hook with a caddis fly, and caught a good fish in no time. And a second one in not much more than no time. I was just casting my line again when somebody said, “Gav?”
I jumped, lost my bait, grabbed for my knife, and stared at the man who stood behind me. For a moment I didn’t know him, then I recognised Ater—one of the raiders who had caught Irad and Melle—they’d told the story in the beer house—he’d said he liked his women soft… A big, heavy man he had been then, but he was a big, gaunt man now, I stared at him in terror, but there was no threat in his gaze. He looked dully surprised.
“How’d you get here, Gav?” he said. “I thought you drowned, or went off. Before.”
“Went off,” I said.
“You coming back, then?” I shook my head.
“Nothing much to come back to,” he said. He looked at my two fish. I knew how hunger looks at food.
“What do you mean, Ater?” I said when I began to realise what he’d said.
He turned his hands out in a helpless gesture. “Well,” he said. “You know.” I stared at him. He stared at me. “It’s all burned down,” he said.
“The city? The Heart of the Forest? Burned down?”
It was hard for him to understand that I didn’t know about the event that loomed so immense in his life. It took me a while to get much sense out of him.
My first concern was that other men would be following him, that Barna’s guards would be on me, take me captive, but he just kept saying, “No. Nobody’s coming. They’re all gone. Nobody’s coming.” He said, “I came over to that village we used to go to, see if there was some food there, but they burned it too.”
“Who?”
“The soldiers.”
“Casicar?” “I guess so.”
Getting information out of him was going to be a slow business. I said, “Is it safe to make a fire?” He nodded.
“Make one, then, and put the fish on a stick and toast them. I’ve got a little bread here.” I succeeded in landing another big trout while he made the fire. He could hardly wait to char the fish over the fire. He ate with desperate haste, cramming the hard bread into his mouth and chewing it painfully. “Ah,” he said, “ah, that’s good, thanks, Gav. Thanks.”
I went back to fishing after we ate; when the trout jump at an empty hook it’s a sin not to let them do it. While I fished he sat on the bank and told me what had happened to the Heart of the Forest. Much of the story I had to guess from his incoherent telling.
Etra and Casicar were allies now, in a Northern League against Vo-tus, Morva, and smaller cities south of the Morr. A lot of farm slaves had been killed during the wars between Etra and Casicar, or had run away, and had to be replaced or recaptured. Towns all round the Dane-ran Forest had long been full of rumors of the great camp or city of runaway slaves, and the new allies decided to go in and find out what was there. They sent an army, a legion from each city, on a rapid march up between Daneran and the Marshes. Barna’s people knew nothing about the attack until outpost guards came running into the city shouting the warning.
Barna gathered all the men who would stand with him to defend the Heart of the Forest. He ordered the women and children to scatter out in the woods. Many of the men ran with them. Any who hesitated or stayed to fight were soon trapped: the soldiers surrounded the walls and methodically set them afire, and then the whole city, hurling torches onto the roofs of the wooden buildings. Barna’s men made a sortie against them but were outnumbered, cut down, slaughtered.
The soldiers ringed the burning town and caught all who fled the holocaust, then ranged out and rounded up people hiding or trying to escape in the woods. They spent a couple of nights waiting till the fires burnt out so they could loot what was left. They found the treasury and divided that. They divided the prisoners, half for Etra, half for Casicar, and then marched back, driving the chained, slaves along with the cattle and sheep.
There were tears on Ater’s cheeks as he told me the story, but his voice remained dull and even. He’d been out with a raiding party when they saw the smoke of the burning city from miles away in the north. They had crept back a couple of days after the soldiers left.
“Barna…,” I said, and Ater said, “They said the soldiers cut off his head and kicked it around like a ball.”
It was very hard to ask about any of the others. When I did, Ater had no answers; often he seemed not even to know who I was talking about. Chamry? He shrugged. Venne? He didn’t know. Diero? He didn’t know. But evidently a number of people had escaped one way or another, and many of them had regathered in the ruined city, not knowing where else to go. Some of the grain supplies had remained hidden and untouched, and they had lived off them and what was left of the gardens. For how long? Again Ater was vague. I guessed that the raid and fire had been about half a year ago, perhaps in early winter.
“You’re going back there now?” I asked him, and he nodded. “It’s safer there,” he said. “The soldiers been raiding everywhere. Taking slaves. I was at Ebbera, over there. Near as bad off as we are. No slaves left to work the fields.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said. I had to know what had become of my friends.
I’d caught five more good-sized fish. I packed them up in leaves and we set off. We came to the Heart of the Forest in the late afternoon.
The city I had last seen silver-blue in moonlight was a waste of charred beams, shapeless mounds, ashfields. At one edge, near the gardens, people had made huts and shelters with salvaged lumber, much of it half burned. An old woman was weeding in the garden, bowed back, averted face. A couple of men sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands hanging between their knees. A dog barked at us, then whined and cowered away, A child sat on the dirt gazing listlessly at Ater and me. As we came near, it too cowered away from us.
I had come in order to ask about my friends, but I could not ask. I could only see Diero trapped in Barna’s house as it burned, Chamry’s corpse dumped in a common grave, Venne driven down the road in chains. I said to Ater, “I can’t stay here.” I gave him the packet of fish. “Share it with somebody,” I said.
“Where you going then?” he asked in his blank way. “North.”
“Look out for slave takers,” Ater said.
I was about to turn back the way we’d come, when something grabbed both my legs so hard and suddenly that I nearly lost my balance. It was a child, the child who’d stared and shrunk from us. “Beaky, Beaky, Beaky,” she cried in a high thin voice like a bird. “Oh Beaky, oh Beaky.”
I had to pry her hands loose from my legs, and then she gripped my hands with sparrow-claw fingers, looking up into my face, her face all dust and bone and tears.
“Melle?”
She pulled me to her. I picked her up. She weighed nothing, it was like picking up a ghost. She clung to me
