'You are deliberately being stupid!' Hamish said, sounding very much like his father had when little Toby Strangerson insisted that three and three made five. 'Look at this country!' He waved at the desolate landscape, the burned houses and ravaged orchards. 'Nevil marched half his army down this coast to Valencia and Toledo and back the same way. Oreste took the rest to Navarre. They destroyed everything. But somewhere in between there must be lands they never reached. There will still be people there, and food. I am sick to death of living on oranges and onions. I want to cut across country to Navarre. We have friends there, even if Nevil does rule it now.'
Toby eyed the hills. 'Cutting across country in Spain is like going through a city without using the streets.'
'It's worth a try. Over there is a valley leading inland. Let's try it. Please, Toby?'
This was serious. Hamish never begged.
'If we go to Barcelona, I might be able to get my hands around Oreste's neck and strangle him.'
'That's a beautiful idea. He certainly deserves it. When you have a vision of yourself doing it, let me know.'
Toby shrugged. 'All right! We'll head for Navarre.'
Hamish looked at him incredulously and whistled. 'Truly? Spirits! I'm going to write home and tell Pa that I managed to change your mind about something.'
'He won't believe you.'
'No. He certainly won't.'
CHAPTER FIVE
At first the valley seemed as barren of life as the coastal plain. Towards noon, though, they sighted a little town on a hillside ahead, a speck of promise amid desolation, although the odds were that it had been sacked and burned like everywhere else. The trail led to it, so they pushed on, dispensing with a siesta. Toby's buskins were rubbing painfully on his raw ankles, but he saw no reason to mention it.
Hamish did not notice his limp. Mostly he prattled about things he had read, often years before, as he so often did. Toby listened in silence as usual. Only once did they return to the prophecy problem.
'Toby?'
'Hmm?'
'No spirit can see the future. The books all say the same — not even great tutelaries ever prophesy. All they can do is assess a person's potential, and they're not much better at it than mortals are. Remember back in Tyndrum? Everyone knew Vik Tanner was a no-good that would never amount to a heap of horse dung while Will Donaldson was a promising lad who would go far. But Will Donaldson fell off a roof and broke his neck. When we went to the shrine at Shira, the spirit said you showed signs of greatness. It didn't say you would live to achieve it. Bordeaux said much the same. It thought you might do remarkable things.'
'Like seeing the future, you mean?'
Hamish growled angrily. 'I still think the hob is playing tricks on you somehow. Let's just hope that it doesn't play any of them around the Black Friars, or you'll find yourself explaining things to the Inquisition.'
Although the hob had no mind, no concept of right and wrong, and little akin to any human sense of purpose, it certainly had strong likes and dislikes. It would reduce a military band to screaming chaos in seconds, usually inflicting serious injuries, and it adored pretty things, which were liable to turn up later in Toby's pockets. When it got angry, people died. But none of that explained the visions.
'Ha!' Hamish peered down at horse droppings in the road as intently as Dougal the gamekeeper tracking the laird's deer.
'Not very recent,' Toby said. 'Two weeks?' He was guessing wildly. Dung had never been one of his most pressing interests.
'Hard to say in this heat. But it's on top of the tracks.' Hamish looked up with his angular face twisted in a pout. 'Don't think we're going to find anyone home.'
'Let's go and make sure.'
The town was larger than Toby had expected. It had no freestanding fortifications, but the outer houses faced inward and their backs presented an unbroken wall of masonry to visitors. The road led to a gate, which had been reduced to charred scraps of timber on half-melted iron hinges — obviously by gramarye, not cannon. Clutching his staff and peering around warily, he limped in behind Hamish, who strutted forward, all eagerness to explore.
No dogs came yapping, no chickens scurried, no goats bleated. The country trail became a steep and rutted mud-floored alley winding between tight-packed stone houses, two or three stories under red-tiled roofs. Most doorways stood open on dark interiors; most of the barred windows were shuttered. The ground was littered as if the contents of the houses had been thrown out into the street: broken furniture, smashed pots, rags, dead cats, shattered rain barrels. Seemingly the place had not been put to the torch, for the usual reek of ashes was missing. In its place was a sickly scent of decay that grew steadily stronger as the visitors advanced. They passed the remains of a body, then another, both far enough decayed for the bones to be visible. When they reached a fork, with neither branch providing a view of anything except another bend and flights of steps, Toby veered right and Hamish followed his lead as usual.
'May be able to find food here,' Hamish whispered, 'real food, not just zitty oranges.'
The idea was mouth-watering. 'If it's fit to eat. What's that noise?'
Hamish cocked his head and then shrugged blankly. 'Starlings?'
Together they rounded a corner and reached a little open place, a cobbled plaza where four or five alleys met. Arcades of gloomy arches surrounded it, and on the far side stood the grandest building of all, the sanctuary, with a tiled facade, marble steps, and a little minaret. The jumble of litter was even thicker, comprised of broken casks, furniture, merchants' stalls, and general rubbish — and a heap of corpses in the center. Here the people had been rounded up and massacred. Bodies were piled head-high, distended like barrels by the sun, swarming with grotesque black shapes that were the source of the puzzling noise — crows and bigger things that might be kites or vultures. They squabbled and shrieked, crawling over their feast in search of juicy titbits.
The visitors' arrival sent them aloft in a wild flapping. Scores or hundreds of black birds whirled upward, raising dust, darkening the sky. Others, so bloated by their feast that they could not fly, flopped around amid the carnage, trying to escape, while a tide of rats swirled across the cobbles and disappeared into the arches and buildings. The airborne flock gradually settled on rooftops to scream at intruders like living gargoyles, nightmare guardians in a town of the dead.
Toby closed his eyes until he could breathe again and his stomach writhed less urgently. Then he risked another look. The carrion feeders had ripped the uppermost bodies to shreds of meat on white bone, but there were many layers underneath. He wondered if King Nevil himself had been here in this plaza, supervising the slaughter.
'Throats cut, mostly. It would be quick. We've seen worse.' Impalements were worse — people left to die on posts. In some villages they had been burned alive, or hung up by their feet, or staked out along the road for miles, and there were other ways to inflict slow and painful death.
'Don't be so sure,' Hamish mumbled through the hand he held over his mouth and nose. 'Women on top, see? Children next, men at the bottom. How long do you think the women lived after they saw their children die? Hours? Days?'
'Too long, I'm sure.'
Yes, the women were bad, but the children were worse — children with rotting green faces, eyes missing, teeth grinning maniacally where the lips had been torn away. There were dead animals in the heap, also, mostly dogs and cats, of course, because the victors would have driven off the livestock or just eaten it.
That thought of eating made his insides lurch again. This was the first settlement they had seen in weeks that had not been burned to the ground. He turned his back on the atrocity and spun Hamish around also, to face the alley.
