Aloren (8 page)

“I know,” I said.  “It means ‘between colors’.”

“How’d you––?”

“A human told me.”

“Really?  If everyone had stopped repeating what humans told them––”

“All the world’s problems would be solved because we did what
you
said?”

“Stow it,” snapped Tem, and we did because Tem only snapped when he was very put out.  “The asters have a place-name, now,” he said, moving carefully around disappointment.  “We just need to find out what it is.”

Floy spoke up, “If it’s mentioned even once in an old song, it has to exist somewhere.”

“It may just go by a common name,” I said.

“We shan’t give up hope,” said Tem.

“Or the search,” said Mordan.

“We’re not allowed to,” said Arin.

“Let’s finish the letter before dawn comes, at any rate,” said Tem.

“I lost the quill,” I said.  “Who’s closest to a goose?”

“You,” said Arin.  But everyone was looking at him.  He blinked, startled.  “Oh, no.  No, no, no.”  I shoved him towards the shadows in the tunnel.  “Can’t you use a stick?”  And then he was a flapping swan that threw a tirade of spits when I pulled a feather.  He made for the light and turned back to a boy. 

I knelt on the ground to pare down the black feather with a little knife.  I handed the pen to Tem.

He gave a nod to Arin. “I’ll knight you if ever I make a king.” 

Arin snorted and Tem sat down on the stones with the quill, parchment and ink.  Mordan sat next to him and together they set to work.  Once they both looked up at me and laughed softly.

“I’m funny?” I said.

“You’re gorgeous,” said Tem. 

I scrubbed my face with my apron.  Tem folded the letter into thirds.  “This letter will have to have a seal––Reyna, listen!”  Arin was throwing clods of loam at me.  “You mustn’t seal it until you give it to Ederach.  There’re no names written on the parchment, but it could be very bad if the letter falls into the wrong hands with the seal attached.  Do you understand?”

“Yes.”  I lobbed moss at Arin, then took the letter and dropped it into my bag.

“That saddlebag’s becoming more and more valuable,” said Mordan.

“And I’ve been taking excellent care of it.”  I threw it down to grapple for moss.  The air was thick with it when Floy, standing outside the mouth of the tunnel, heard a noise.

“Hush.”  She looked round.  A drumming echoed through the dark and faded into the cool air.

“Horses,” said Arin.  My last dirt clod clapped him on the cheek. 

Tem’s face turned lard-grey and he walked over to an old cask in a corner.  He gave it a heave with his arms; it looked like a lot of effort for an empty barrel.

“Wake the little girl,” Tem told me.  I couldn’t move––there was shouting now, coming up through the tunnel.  “Wake her and climb up to the loft.”

“It’s beer,” whispered Floy.  “Beer!  They’re all filled with it.  Stars help us.”

“Get up, you little fool.” Mordan shoved me toward the corner. 

I patted Emry around the cheeks and yanked her up by the wrist.  She fell over.  I straightened her and pushed her up the ladder.

“Bloody hell, Tem,” said Arin.  “Brigands?”

“I know,” said Tem.  “It’s too late to leave through the tunnel and too early to fly out the roof.”  Tem smashed a small keg, rotted through, and slapped half a barrel hoop into Arin’s hands.  He gave the other half to Mordan, and taking one himself, called up to me:  “Throw me your apron.”  I tore it off my waist.

“You don’t mean to fight them?” said Floy.  Tem wrapped a shred of apron around one jagged end to protect his hands so that it looked like a grotesque sort of scimitar.

“I mean to hide…”

“No fear,” said Mordan.  “They’ll be so drunk by the time they do they won’t be able to find––whatever they use––”

“Enormous whips,” said Arin, wrapping a cloth round his barrel hoop, “spiked with iron––”

“Quiet.”  Floy took up the discarded half of Tem’s.

“The loft,” said Tem, “all of you.”

Mordan pushed Leode’s rump up the ladder after me so I might pull him over the top.

“Where’s my sword?” Leode grumbled, and Mordan climbed up after him.  Then came Floy, Arin, and Tem, all armed. 

The loft was built into a corner with a pine mast holding it aloft.  It was stacked with empty kegs.  Mordan pulled up the ladder, thinking it might discourage a search. 

“You’ll both have to hide, now.” Tem ushered Emry and me over to an enormous barrel.  He hoisted Emry (who later thought the whole affair a dream) into the barrel, but I struggled as he picked me up and tried to pour me over the side.

“I can fight.”

“No doubt.”  He grunted when I kicked him.  “But what really matters is you haven’t got wings.”  He pushed me down by the top of my head, where I sat disgruntled with the saddlebag in my lap. 

“Get low.”  Mordan tackled Tem from my sight.  The riders burst through the entrance.  I saw only the stars through the top of the barrel, but I heard the men––loud, drunk, and violent with it.

“Mach’s balls, Miggon,” shouted one.  “If yer tryin to collapse the grotty place round our ears, just bang yer head against the stones at the bottom.  Less work then screamin the tower down.”

“I’ll scream till I got the silver in me fist.”  There was a loud thunk and a yelp.  “Give it here, Thew, or I’ll give you another lump.  I’m the one shaked her by the ankles so she spate it out.”

“Spate it out?”

“It’s mine.”

“It’s Fillegal’s, and I’m holdin it safe fer him.” 

A civil war engaged everyone on the ground level.  There came bangs, clangs, thuds, yells, and moans, and then a metallic ring sounded through the tower.

I heard a whir in the air above me. Something dropped into the barrel from overhead. 

The Dravadha broach. 

“Oh, no,” I whispered.

“Throw it back,” said Arin.

“No, don’t,” said Mordan.

“Give it to me,” said Tem, reaching inside the barrel, so I did, and he set it very clearly right on the edge of the loft, whispering to everyone to get behind their barrels. 

There was a scrambling, clawing noise, and I peered over my barrel.  A great, shaggy head appeared at the edge of the loft, red and gasping because its owner had just shimmied up the support.  Leode squirmed forward, and before any of us thought to pull him back, he brained the head with half a barrel hoop.  It disappeared, followed by a thump.

“Got him,” said Leode.

“It was nice knowing you all,” said Arin from behind a barrel.  

Dawn came, then.

“Oh, no,” said Tem, looking above him.  “Not yet, not now.”

He sprouted black plumage at his fingertips, and went completely egret just as another brigand jumped up on the ledge.  His teeth and saber were gleaming with morning green.

The egret flew up and ravaged his face.  The man caught hold of the egret’s neck.

Then something strange happened.  Elde Tem flickered to life, punched the man in the nose, and knocked him over the edge.  The boy flickered off and was gone.  “What in hell?” said Tem, who was an egret again. 

Mordan said, “That happened to me the other week.”

“What?”

“I was raging mad about something, and––bam! I was a boy for a second. You must’ve been really angry.”

“Scared, more like––”

An arrow clattered off the walls, and I ducked.  “Leave,” I shouted, “leave, they’ll shoot you!” 

The men below laughed.  One said, “We’ve found us a nest of wild chickens.”  The boys left through the roof, and Floy flew into my hand. 

My fingers closed round her. “Don’t strangle me,” she said.

I knelt beside Emry, whose eyes were wide as moons, and a brigand stuck his head inside the barrel.  The stench was awful. 

“Bugger me bloody.  It’s a barr’l of girls.”  A hand pushed his head out of the way, and another head looked in.

“Save some for me, Tom, you horny ox.”

“Where’s my barr’l o’ girls?” called someone from the ground.

“Not them kind of girls,” said Tom.  “These is jist liddle lock-shooters.”

“Not even,” said the second man.  “We could play dollies wid em.”

“The last burning gave us naught but a puddle of kids so you keep yer hands off em, Begley Turnip.” 

And Emry and I were hoicked up and passed down to the floor, where I wrapped the saddlebag and Floy up in my skirts before we were assigned riders and carried away through the dark.

Nine

We rode upwards through the tunnel, and came out on the top of Glasgenny Peak.  The countryside looked ghostly and menacing under rags of morning mist.  I sat between the arms of the man they called Begley, who was gentle enough despite wanting to play dollies, and I noticed after a while he had only one ear.  The other was a hole and a seam of scar tissue.  Occasionally I gathered courage enough to glance at it. 

I wiggled to loosen Floy from my skirts.  She darted through the air, and fell back with the four dark birds following in the treetops. 

The riders spread through a copse of aspens, and stopped so abruptly I was almost slung from the horse.  The air smelled of apples.  Further down could be made a valley, lined rim to rim with old apple trees gone red with the season. 

The brigands broke into song and unloaded barrels that had been strapped to carts and dragged goodness knew how through the tunnels and down the slopes.  They dispersed towards a hollow full of smoke and the smell of sausage.  Emry and I were carried along, and dropped beneath the widest, hoariest apple tree, under which sat five other children.

“Aloren,” said Wille.  “Sun bless me birth flowers.  And you brung Emry, too?  Good fun.”

“You’ve gone cockeyed,” I said.

“Gorn.”  Wille shook dew from his hair and rolled his eyes at Seacho Llumrew.

“Daft as your old dad,” Seacho said.  Red-haired Padlimaird put his face in his hands and moaned.  Little Oseavern Tilgy wiped his eyes with his arm, and the oldest, Gattren Grenoak, shivered in her thin dress, muttering about her grandfer and the man who had killed him last night in the fires. 

Emry decided suddenly she wanted to leave.  But when she jumped up, Wille took her skirt and sat her back down.

“Careful,” he said.  “That goon with the snarl over there said something about ants.  Hey, Toughy,” Wille called over to him, “what’s that about the ants?”

“Them’s tracker ants,” said Toughy, who was sitting on a stool, eating an apple.  (His teeth had been filed into sharp points.)  He pointed to a line of black ants circling the trunk.  “If yer shadder so much’s falls over em, they all gets confused, and that line gets broke––and if I catches just one break, yer’re all getting introduced to the rod.”

“Croopus.” Seacho backed up and flattened his hair against the trunk.  “Keep still, all of you.”

“Sure,” said Gattren.  “I’ll keep still as a cat on fire when I get a knife in my––”  A shadow fell over us and a boot scattered the ants.

“If these’re Noreme children,” said the man who cast it, “we shouldn’t have no trouble with the biguns.  Bunch of skinned frogs.” 

He’d a closely trimmed black beard, and a roll of pipe-leaf between his teeth; and glinting between his thumb and finger was the Dravadha broach.  I couldn’t believe he’d called Gattren a skinned frog, who glared at him with such hatred she looked like she might burst into flames.  But he wasn’t looking at her.

“That one’s too small.  Runtish.”  He pointed his pipe-leaf at Emry, and said to the bald brigand standing next to him, “Get rid of her.” 

We gaped.  The bald man walked towards a ruined chimney sticking out from the grass, and I imagined hatchets and knives leaning against it, all gory with runtish children.

“But wait.  Wait.”  Padlimaird climbed to his feet.  “She can read.”  Blackbeard turned and sneered at Padlimaird. 

“You can read, can ye?” he said to Emry.  “Hold it a minute, Thew,” he called to the bald man.  “What says you?  Could we use a midget scholar?”

“We could use her to read maps, I s’ppose, Chief.”  Thew picked at the cravat tied around his neck.

“I was thinking ransom notes, you half-brained simian.  Forged letters, messages, banknotes…  But we gotta make certain.”  He called over to the rest of the wildmen, who were roasting sausages around the fire: “Any o’ ye  know how to spell yer name?  And I don’t mean a X.  Any idjit can read a X.”

“I can spell me name,” said Tom.

“Me,” said Miggon, “I can spell ‘Sheriff’s a-comin.”

“N-O-G-O-O-D,” said Tom.  “Me mam taught me.”

“How bout
Begley Turnip?
” shouted another.  “Write it out here in the dirt, Begs, then we’ll see if she can read it.”

“Bite yer goddamn tongues,” said blackbeard.  “The Virnrayan were a jeweler, weren’t he?  He’ll know how.  Get him up here afore I lose me wasted wits.”

A big man came forward, darked-skinned, with a mop of dreads and a golden tooth.  He pulled a cutlass from his belt and drew five characters in the dirt at Emry’s feet:

N-E-F–E–R.

“N-neffer,” said Emry.  The wildmen laughed and pinched Emry’s bottom.

“She can read Virnrayan, but she can’t pronounce it.”  The man’s tooth glinted.  “In Virnraya single F’s is always V’s, lass, so me name’s more Never than Neffer.  What might your’n be?”

“Emry.” 

He bowed to her like a gentleman, shook her hand, and said, “Welcome to brigand cadet school.”

“Stars preserve us,” said Floy from a bough somewhere above.

Our first lesson introduced us to starvation: how to survive it and how to avoid it.   “Extra quick your hands’ll be in a month,” said Toughy, after he explained we were to receive hardly any food.  “Y’see, Cook in’t too fond of children.  She’ll throw the liddle shits inter her pot should she so much as sees one.”  He showed us his hands.  There were stumps where the thumbs should’ve been, and he said he’d been so hungry as a boy he’d bitten them off and eaten them. 

There were apples a-plenty, so it wasn’t until a few days later, when we packed up and continued on, that my thumbs started looking good enough to eat.  We traveled two days north on foot without eating anything save nuts, worms, and roots, while stumbling ahead of switches flicked lazily from the backs of horses.  The mountains every day and patrols every night made it so we never thought of running off, and we were warned of wiry little Miggon’s tracking skills and Toughy’s chipped saber. 

Outside a town on the Gael we settled for a time in a hollow shaded by big, hollow hemlocks.  The stealing began there.  Wille and Gattren, grown tired of tears from the smaller ones, slipped away for two hours and came back with food.  Gattren with three loaves of bread, and Wille, a sack of potatoes.

“Went smooth as a greased cat,” he said, dropping the potatoes on the ground.

“He did grease a cat,” said Gattren.  “With schmaltz.  And he dropped it into a grocer’s stall which was guarded by a mastiff.”  She shoved a hunk of bread into Emry’s mouth––wailing had got us into trouble.

Other methods were soon discovered.  We threw pinecones into Cook’s concoctions from trees and bushes; and while she fished them out, yelling at Peach, her bleary-eyed slut of a scullion, we nipped in and out with stolen bread and beans.  Nefer, the Virnrayan ex-jeweler, started off our careers by stuffing the pockets of his enormous overcoat with pork and leaving them wide open.  Later, mostly during raids, the brave-hearted progressed to townspeople and stumbled upon coins––confusing, ridiculous things. 

Our depravity astounded Mordan and Floy.  When Padlimaird picked a penny from Tom’s pocket, Mordan said to me, “If I ever catch you stealing I’ll be angry enough to change back to a boy and wallop you over the head.”  I explained that if he wasn’t aware of my learned indifference to wallops then he certainly wasn’t keeping enough of an eye out to know whether or not I was stealing.  Then I assured him that I wasn’t selfless enough anyway, because every coin anyone filched went straight to perpetually destitute black-beard, unless you wanted a truly harmful wallop.

Black-beard’s name was either Marruc Fillegal or Fillegal Marruc.  Nobody was sure which, as we were obliged to call him Chief.  He’d fought his way to that position according to what he said was the Brigands’ Book of Rules (a three-way oxymoron), and he walked about chewing on his leaf roll and holding the position with a tight fist. 

***

Nearer the beginning, before any of the children were tough enough to help on a raid, the brigands had a night of revelry.

When almost everyone had gone over to the brushfire to hear the fiddles, I took Emry’s hand and crept through a coppice of hawthorns towards the cooking smells. Emry’s dimples had disappeared into her hollow cheeks, and it put the fear of death in me.  I’d eaten nothing all day, and my stomach flopped about, and Floy, who should have been there to put a check on my idiocy, was off foraging for her own meal. 

I dug up a stone, eying a cauldron full of stew.  It wasn’t the stew I wanted.  It was the bannocks on the opposite side of the kitchen.  All we needed was a ten-second disturbance. 

Peach was off somewhere with Begley, but Cook’s little eyes shifted everywhere.  She mumbled complaints to herself and moved stiffly about on her gouty joints, adding to this, tasting that, and sniffing the air for sneak thieves. 

She was back to mumbling now, and I tossed the stone towards the cauldron.  Just then the stew started bubbling over the sides and Cook turned round to sort it out.  The stone hit her on the brow with a loud
thunk
.

She marched over to our bush, stuck her arm into it, and pulled Emry out. 

I heard Emry’s shrieks, but didn’t see anything, because I hid my face in my hands until my face was dirty and my hands wet.

When she was done Cook threw Emry back into the bush.  She was unconscious, in a bad state, and I ran to get Wille.  He carried Emry to an out of the way place behind the light.  Gattren emptied a water pouch over Emry’s head, and Emry gurgled, screwed up her face and started bawling.

“The baby.”  Padlimaird stuck his fingers in his ears.  “She’ll get us all whomped.”

“I think,” said Gattren, “you’d be howling something worse if you had half that much blood spurting from your head.”  

“How d’we make it stop?” said Seacho, almost crying himself as he mopped her head up with half his shirt.

“Yarrow.”  Oseavern backed away from her and sat down.

“Yarrow?” said Padlimaird.  “Osh, you’re a doink.  She needs bloodwort.”

“Me mam used yarrow fer everything,” said Oseavern.

“Bloodwort’s a kind of nettle,” said Seacho.  “How about myrtle?”

“Why d’you think bloodwort’s got ‘blood’ in it?” said Padlimaird.

“Bloodwort
is
yarrow,” I said.

“Yarrow, harebells, cobweb, whiskey, hot iron.”  Wille tore a strip from the hem of his tunic.  “Argue anymore and I’ll get a nosebleed.”

“You figure it out, girly-curls,” said Padlimaird. 

“Ask Emry.”   Wille tore another strip.  “Her aunt were the healer.”

“Emry,” I turned to her, frustrated.  “What’d Marna do with a head wound bleeding fast as all hell?” 

Emry began crying fast as all hell.

“Mach’s balls, Aloren.”  Wille jumped up and put his hand over her mouth.  “You have to tell her that?”

“You said––”

“Shh.”  He turned his head.  “I hear fiddlin.”

“You’re behind the bonfire,” I pointed out.

“This is a song I knows.  Goin to let me listen to a song I knows, ain’t you?”

It was a song I knew too, and the brigands were singing it so raucously it cut like a saw through the trees:

   But his face is red as flame from the molasses in his rum.

   He’s got acorns fer his buttons an’ a smile fer a frown

  An’ he makes his mammy weep fer him when’re he comes around.

Wille tightened his belt. 

“Do y’like the dance, Emry?” he said.  “Do ye?”  Then he pulled me up by my arms and forced me into a reel.

 
Tip top tip lads, tip yer hat to Golly Stooner.

   Tip top tip, bow down when he’s about,

   Tip top tip lads, afore the sky’s a-fallen sooner,

   Tip top tip, a’cause he’s true beyond a doubt.

I followed him, barely lifting my feet from the ground.  He said he’d seen more life in an old man’s diddle, and Floy laughed from her tree.  “It’ll happen,” I cried to her.  “I’ll float away.”  But when nothing unusual happened, I stopped thinking on it.  My feet went their own way, kicking up dust and mincing the simple movements past recognition.  Wille looked down at them in awe, and Emry started to laugh. 

“Nobody beats Wille at the two-step.”  He quickened his feet to match mine, but his long legs tangled together, and his face screwed up in exertion.  After he’d been trodden on and kicked several times, he tripped over my feet and fell. 

With dignity he picked himself off the ground, and went to sit with Padlimaird and Seacho.

But’s been making love and laughter with the barrels down below.

He has tankards on his ears an’ both his sleeves are on his legs