To those in Leona’s wagon train it seemed that day succeeded day on the southern trail almost without differentiation. The logs kept by Old Eriden, the oldest scout, a white-haired veteran of a hundred such journeys, made little distinction between days except in the tally of the hunt and the number of minor injuries which the children managed to incur. Their track fell behind them, each day warmer under the summering sun, until one morning came with a happening.
Bombaroba noticed it first in his early morning wandering about the camp, his gossipy nosings among the Sisters and scouts, his examination of animals on the picket lines. There was an unaccustomed silence, certain usual noises missing. There was, he was sure, no laughter of babies. The birds that built ground nests in the twined grasses were still. He trudged to the top of a rise to peer around, then ran to take Leona by the hand and tug her with him to see what he had seen.
‘The little animals are gone,’ he said at once. ‘All in the night. Where did they go?’
‘I don’t know.’ Before them the plain was broken by a new feature of the landscape, one she had never seen before. The earth was pocked by giant hemispheres of stone, grey and lifeless, so close together that there was no room for the train to wend itself between. ‘I feel… menace,’ she said. ‘Have the scouts come in?’
‘The night scouts are waiting at the cookfire. The day scouts have not gone out. They are not smiling.’
‘No. I should think not.’
Old Eriden rose to greet Leona. The others watched, muttering among themselves.
‘A strange place, Lady. No way around it unless we ford the river. That would mean going back, for the Unnamed River goes deep here in a canyon of its own making. Behind us, so say my brothers, comes a troop of armed men, perhaps black robes, a very large group. We can ride west to see if there is a way around, but it will be longer than some days, for I have ridden that way in the night.’
‘The hummocks. What do you make of them, Eriden?’
‘I have not seen anything like them before, Lady. Fardur and Bers have both been this far south, but they came by the land between the rivers seeking the ruins of Obnor Gahl. They do not remember any such.’
‘Possibly a new thing.’
‘How can we say? Possibly. But how?’
‘How? Well, I have been as far south almost as Orena, but I have not seen the like before. I shall try to see if there is a way around.’
The old man swallowed. ‘We will go with you.’
‘No, Eriden. I will see to this alone. I am well equipped to do so.’
So, after seeing to the ordering of the camp, she went with Mimo and Werem into the grasses of the hummocky land. There was no wind. The grass seemed yellowed, changed by the still light into carved or painted symbols of themselves which looked unreal. She picked a herb she knew, one often collected for its sharp, resinous fragrance, its cleanly bite, and crushed the leaves beneath her nose. There was only a ghost of odour, a dry, prickly smell as of ancient attics carpeted with dust. She dropped it to stare for long moments at the stains on her fingers, at the fingers themselves which were all at once like carved ivory, covered with a dusty brown crackle, as aged and ageless as a museum piece. Mimo whined and Leona caressed the dog’s head as she went stubbornly on, hour on endless hour.
A long swale opened suddenly into a flatter place, one where the huge stones stood upright in the yellow light, domes of lichened grey set in bristly fringes of furze. Leona stood very still, almost without breathing, as she felt the stones turn. They looked like the tops of great bare skulls with furzy eyebrows just above the surface of the earth and beneath the earth – eyes. A sound came from the deeps – a tiny quake, a shudder, a shimmer in the air. She stood still. From beneath the surface something watched. Listened.
Leona backed away, turned west for a long time, went south again. Here, from a slight rise, she peered down on another plain of the grey stones. Again she felt them turn beneath the earth to watch her. Again she went west.
Deep in the night she returned to the camp to find Bombaroba sitting beside her fire, feeding it with tiny sticks to keep the pot steaming. He ran to her with relief. ‘We have been very much afraid,’ he confessed in a whisper. ‘I promised Bers and Eriden to wake them when you returned, but I do not really think they are sleeping.’ He returned with the scouts in such a short time that Leona knew they had not slept. She told them what she had found.
‘Far to the west is a long swale which leads to the south. There were none of the stones there, but there were many elsewhere, everywhere. I do not want to come close to them, and the swale is the only free lane south I can find. You will think me mad, but we will muffle the wheels and the hooves, and we will start at once.’
So they did. They drove west for long miles, then turned south after tying cloths and leathers around the wheels and onto the hooves of the horses. Every child was cautioned and threatened with dire punishment if a sound was made. Every link of harness was tied up. Still, Leona almost cried out when she led them down toward the swale, for on the gentle slopes which had been empty before were a scatter of the high, stony foreheads of the watchers from below, standing as tall as two tall men from brambly eyebrows to skull top, six man heights wide, bare, grey, ominous.
‘The way is clear between,’ whispered
