Instantly Mother moved, abandoning the nest. She scurried along a branch and jumped to the next tree, moving south away from the approaching fire.
But Old still lay sleeping. Me hesitated for one agonising heartbeat. Then he kicked Old in the small of the back. Old, flustered and frightened, limbs flailing, winced at the pain of his damaged arm.
Then Me turned and fled, after Mother, not looking back for Old.
He barely looked ahead, beyond the next branch, the next tree. He had no need to, for the canopy went on for ever and there was always another tree to escape to. All that mattered was the next branch, the only danger losing a foothold or a grip.
Fires weren’t that uncommon. They were started by storms, by lightning strikes. In spring or early summer especially when dead ferns and bracken and leaves carpeted the undergrowth, a fire could spread quickly. But there had been no storm, he realised vaguely. And this was midsummer, not spring.
He thought he was outrunning the fire. The smell of smoke, and a faint sound of crackling and popping, receded behind him. Yet unease remained. Something was wrong.
The net was slung between two giant oaks. He barely saw it before he went flying into it, and his whole body was tangled up as if in thick ivy.
He fell from the tree and plummeted hard against the ground, landing all wrong. Winded, tangled up, he tried to stand.
Hands grabbed him and pulled him down. Huge dark shapes loomed around him. He remembered another time when he was grabbed, taken away from a smiling face, hands stealing him up into the green. Now he was pulled down to the earth.
He heard a scream. Mother.
Then a heavy foot slammed into the pit of his stomach, and he folded over the pain.
63
Shade stood silent before the wooden post.
The sun shone down into the clearing, midsummer light pouring from another flawless sky, and all the posts in the great circle cast long, precise shadows across the clearing. But this post was the southernmost in the ring, and cast its shadow a little further than the others, and that was the one he watched.
All around the clearing the forest crowded dense and dark, and the canopy was a billowing green cloud high above. Birds sang, and a busy squirrel briefly distracted him. Women and children moved quietly around the forest fringe, gathering fungi and berries. He heard the grunts and shouts of the men as Bark put them through their training – wrestling today, it sounded like, fighting with bare hands. Shade vaguely hoped that there would be no serious accidents today, that nobody would die. Not long after becoming the Root on the death of his father he had ruled that no man could earn a killing scar from the murder of another Pretani – unless it was an unavoidable issue of honour, just as Shade’s own brother and father had died. That had cut down markedly on the number of deaths, but they still happened, whether as genuine accidents or as petty grudge attacks.
Such thoughts rattled through his head like birds darting across the sunlit clearing. But he did not allow them to distract him from his purpose.
He was intent on watching the shadow of the southernmost post, as he did every day around this time, when the sun was out and the shadow visible. Every so often he marked the shadow, driving a slim wooden stake in the ground. As a result of his labours the earth before him, cleared of leaves and ferns and other debris, had a whole series of pegs in parallel curving lines, showing how he had marked the shifting of the shadow on previous days. Shade, aged thirty, was capable of great concentration.
It was time to place another peg. He stepped forward and thrust a wood sliver into the ground.
‘You ought to get somebody to do that for you,’ came a heavy, breathless voice.
‘I have to be sure it’s done right, Bark.’
Bark approached, panting hard, swigging water from a skin. Naked save for a sweat-soaked groin pouch, his body was like a slab of oak itself, covered with knotted muscles on his upper arms and thighs, the belly under the thick mat of hair on his chest. A little over twenty, about ten years younger than Shade himself, he was a second cousin, and Shade trusted nobody else as he trusted Bark.
‘So how was the training?’
‘Not bad. The wrestling went well. Only one broken finger, the priest will look at it when he’s worked his latest dose of poppy juice out of his blood. The spear-chucking was a disaster. You know what fourteen-year-olds are like. More muscle than brains. Nearly got one through my own foot.’
Shade laughed. ‘They’ll learn.’ He threw Bark another water sack.
Bark took a deep, thirsty draught, and looked down dubiously at the patterns of sticks. ‘Tell me again why you’re doing this?’
‘Because I want to mark the moment of midsummer. To make the Giving that bit more special.’ Shade’s Giving ceremony was an amalgam of older Pretani traditions with what he’d seen at Etxelur. There was plenty of competition, plenty of feasting and sex and raucous behaviour – and lots of giving, the difference being that those who feared the Pretani gave to them, rather than the other way around.
‘And these shadows you’re chasing are going to help, are they?’
‘Yes,’ Shade said, a little impatiently. ‘Look. Each day the post shadow, cast by the sun as it shifts in the sky, marks out a curve. Like this. It dips closest to the post at noon. But each day that curve moves too, because the sun climbs that bit higher as it gets to midsummer. I’m trying to find the one unique point where the shadow reaches at noon on midsummer day. I started last year, but we had too much cloud. This year I’m doing better. Next year I’ll try again to check the result-’
‘Year after year after year. Why?’
Shade snapped, ‘So that I can put something here. A stone. A bear skull, maybe. And then, for ever, we’ll know when it’s noon at midsummer because we’ll see the post’s shadow hit the skull. You see? I explained it to you before.’
‘You know me. Head like a leaky water skin.’ He shook the empty skin to make the point and threw it back to Shade. ‘In one hole and out the other. Anyhow the turning of the seasons is up to the gods. You should get the priest to do this.’
‘I tried,’ Shade said. ‘All he wants is more poppy juice.’ Shade often wished he had the ear of a decent, sober, sensible, intelligent priest. He remembered Etxelur, and the partnership of Kirike and the wise priest Jurgi.
Bark pointed, faintly mocking. ‘Time for another peg.’
In fact he was overdue. Shade hastened to mark the shadow.
‘Or one of the women. They could do this. The gods know you’ve got enough wives…’
That was true enough. There were always lots of widows among the Pretani, and as the Root Shade had had his pick. But all his children had died young, save one, Acorn, a little girl on whom he doted when his hunters weren’t watching.
‘And you should come training with us. You should hear what some of these boy-men say about you behind your back. Some of them are itching to challenge you.’
‘There’s always some hothead ready to gamble his life.’
‘If enough of them have a go, one of them will win that gamble in the end. Look, I’m serious. You need to keep in condition. Standing around watching shadows won’t do that for you. And it wouldn’t do you any harm to take down one of the boy-men some time. Just to show the rest you’re still top.’
It was wise advice, of its kind. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Bark blew his nose noisily into his fingers and wiped his hands on his loin pouch. ‘Right, I’m off for a shit, a swim in the river and some food, not necessarily in that order-’
Somebody screamed. A child, by the edge of the clearing.
The two men exchanged a glance, and ran. Children came boiling out of the forest like ants from a kicked-over nest. One girl had a basket of fruit, but the others had abandoned whatever they had been collecting. Their mothers ran across the clearing towards them, and some of the men.
Shade saw his own daughter. He ran over and grabbed her. ‘Acorn! What is it?’ The girl, eight years old and still
