child-slim, was shaking, her eyes wide. She was so scared she couldn’t speak. He knelt before her. ‘Calm down, child. You’re safe now. Tell me what happened. Was it a bear? A cat?’
‘No – no – it came down out of the trees, it just dropped on us-’
‘What came down?’
But now there were more screams from the forest. The mothers with their children scattered, and the men, shouting to each other, tried to form a line before the trees.
Acorn turned and pointed at a stout ash tree. ‘That came down!’ she yelled. ‘That!’
There was something clambering in the branches, Shade saw, some animal, big, agile.
It leapt down into the clearing, teeth bared, fingers outstretched. It was a boy, maybe twelve years old, naked, his skin covered in green smears – a Leafy Boy. The men faced the Leafy, but they stayed out of reach of his swinging paws.
Something was wrong. No Leafy Boy had attacked the people so openly before. And, Shade saw now, the Leafy had a rope tied around his neck, leading back to the forest.
Now another Leafy Boy came flying out of a treetop, landing in a roll that took him into a group of men, knocking them down. He got up snarling – no, this one was a female, a she, with small hard breasts, but as muscular as the first. But she, too, had a rope around her neck.
She leapt onto one of the fallen men. He scrabbled to get away. She grabbed his own club and rammed it in his open mouth so hard that teeth cracked and bone splintered. The man, pinned on the ground, shuddered and gurgled, and blood gushed out of his ruined mouth.
There was a moment of shocked stillness.
Then Bark yelled, ‘Rush them!’ He went in first. He jumped on the boy, and the Leafy bit and scratched.
More of the men moved in on the girl, who still straddled her shuddering, dying victim. She seemed if anything more formidable, and fought with a reckless inhuman ferocity.
Shade himself pushed Acorn away and raced forward, reaching for the blade at his waist.
But then the rope at the girl’s neck was yanked backwards. She clutched at her throat, but she was dragged off the downed man and, struggling and kicking, was pulled back across the grassy floor of the clearing.
The other Leafy was subdued now, his face bloodied, three men sitting on his arms, chest and legs.
‘Don’t kill him,’ Shade snapped. He strode forward past the boy, following the way the girl had been dragged.
At the edge of the clearing a group of adults – people, not Leafies, clad in dirty skins – dragged the girl into the green shade, threw a net over her and bundled her up with rope. Still she kicked and fought.
Shade faced the strangers, his blade in his hand. ‘Who are you?’ he called in Pretani, and then he switched to the traders’ tongue. ‘Show yourselves, if you want to live.’
One of the group stepped forward into the daylight. It was a woman, her body square and strong, her breasts flat under her tunic, her red hair tied back and shot with grey. Her face was familiar, and yet was laid over by a mask of scars. Lines around the eyes and mouth told of bitterness. He had the impression she smiled rarely.
Yet she smiled as she faced him. She spoke the Etxelur tongue. ‘Hello, Shade. Do you remember me? You kicked me out of here, but that was long ago. And things have changed, haven’t they?’
‘What do you want?’
‘To talk.’
It was Zesi.
64
They sat in Shade’s house.
Shade had called for his priest to sit with them, feeling the need for spiritual support in this confrontation, but Resin, poppy-addled and terrified, was barely conscious. Bark, meanwhile, refused to go further than a couple of paces from the Root’s side with strangers in the clearing. He sat just outside the house’s door flap where he could watch Zesi and her grimy followers, who sat around the open-air hearth, sharing a deer haunch.
The two Leafies lay huddled together on the ground, pinned under a net weighted down with logs.
In the house, Zesi told Shade what had become of her in the fifteen years since the summer of the Great Sea, when she had left Albia after the death of the Root.
‘So we got rid of you from here. And then Ana threw you out of Etxelur.’
‘More than that,’ Zesi said, every word dripping with bitterness. ‘I am dead in Etxelur. What you see is a sack of bones walking around. And I nearly did die too, in those first days alone. But you know me. I was always a fighter.’
She grinned, cold, somehow more savage even than the Leafy child-woman she had unleashed on the Pretani. He wondered how he could ever have imagined he loved her. ‘So you came back.’
‘I had no real intention, no plan. Nowhere to go – I knew I wouldn’t be welcome here. Yet I came this way. Perhaps drawn by your memory.’ She didn’t look at him when she said this. ‘Or perhaps it was the forest. You can hide in a forest. Hole up. You can’t do that in Northland, all those open spaces.’
‘So you hid away.’
‘Not well enough. They soon found me.’ She nodded at the band who had accompanied her, most of them men, some women, all of them grimy and tough-looking. ‘Them or their predecessors. Many of that first lot are long dead now.’
‘Bandits,’ said Shade. This was a traders’-tongue word. Bandits, rootless folk who preyed on others, were a plague, especially in the forests where they could hide in the shadows. ‘I can imagine how they treated you. A woman alone-’
‘You should imagine how I treated them. Before they learned to leave me alone one man had to die, choked to death on his own severed cock.’
He was careful not to react. ‘So you survived. And you came to lead them.’
‘Not just this lot. There are many bandit groups. The forest swarms with them. You know that.’
‘I suppose it doesn’t surprise me. You always were a leader. And now you have the Leafy Boys under your sway, I see.’
She grinned. ‘Did you like my stunt? I’m sorry one of your people got killed – it shouldn’t have gone that far.’
‘Death always did follow you around, Zesi.’
‘It made the point, though, about how vicious they can be. Imagine a swarm of them falling on your houses! They would chew your eyes out before you had time to shout the alarm.’
‘And you control them.’
‘Just those we capture. We smoke them out with fires. They have no language; they can’t be trained. And they’ll only eat red meat – never cooked. Some of the men think they’re not human at all.’
‘They steal our infants,’ Shade said sadly. ‘They are human enough.’
‘Hey, you.’ She threw a boar rib at Bark, who snarled back at her. ‘The female over there is a gift, for you and your men, if you can handle her. Some of my men say it’s worth the cost in bites and scratches. We kept her fresh for you. If you spoil her it doesn’t matter, there are always more to trap. Go ahead. Enjoy.’
Bark wasn’t about to leave Shade alone. But he beckoned over one of his men and spoke quietly.
Soon a group of the men, with the bandits’ help, were cautiously separating the male and female Leafies. They hauled the squirming female over to the edge of the clearing, away from the women and children. Then they bent over her, half a dozen of them, like a pack of dogs shoving their muzzles into the open belly of a deer, Shade thought with disgust.
Zesi watched him, her face a mask of wrinkles and scars. ‘Look at us,’ she said. ‘We’ve changed so much. I can’t even count the kill scars on your brow.’
He grunted. ‘Haven’t aged well, have we?’
‘You’ve survived here, Shade. But you’ve achieved nothing. You’ve just held onto what your father had.’
‘Wait until the Giving,’ he said angrily. ‘See how many come to kneel at my feet.’
‘Oh, they fear you. But they’d be rid of you if they could.’
