Thimblewinter (11 page)

Looking down at the valley from the pass, the village seemed so fragile and insignificant, a few strips of terraced houses, studded here and there with bigger buildings. The surrounding ditch, which had been cleared of silt and mud, was like a new scar on the land. The place seemed to huddle together in the bowl of hills, at the extreme point of the road that ran arrow straight past the old mine up to what had been the main road, which cut across the upland from the deep valleys west and east of us.

My grandmother always said that the village is at the end of the road, the end of the world, that beyond us there was only the mountain. No one would have built a village here, she said, if it hadn’t been for the coal, and when that was gone we had no reason to remain, except for the fact that we were here and we were a community of sorts, divided and divisive, but still sharing something.

Rachel’s take on it was that the people had stayed here because they lacked the energy to leave, the winters sapped them and the summers were little better, so no-one could be bothered to shift. The Romans had come by here, she said, the road that led from the mine to the village and then ran as a track into the pass, had been built by them. Sarn Helen, it had been called, but they’d had the sense to build nothing else here. They’d hurried on their way without stopping, without looking back at the bleak upland gorse and the peat bogs.

But in a way it had saved us. We were so tucked away, time passing like a dream, that we’d been bypassed by the worst of it; the flu hadn’t hit us a bad as others, we’d seen few refugees from the cities on these roads and those that had stumbled upon us had been too few to threaten us. We knew our neighbours and could live in relative peace with those who survived. We’d had a charmed existence, until now that is.

When Rowena had recovered enough to speak and to string together words that made sense, she had told the Sergeant all that he had wanted to know, but few of us wanted to hear. She had been scouring the country around for signs of the winged skull people. To the west, down into the next valley, there been no sign of them, just a trail of destruction they had left earlier in the summer. She said that they’d probably passed us on the way back from this grim tour.

And there was also some sort of pattern, or so the Sergeant thought, in the way they looted and burnt. They had hit the smaller, weaker places - the stragglers as Rowena put it - but forced a sort of tribute from the bigger places, knowing they would need to winter, not just this year but in the future. They’d sent a column further into the west last winter, Rowena said; they’d taken over a number of villages like ours running up one of the western valleys and left some of them garrisoned in spring and some of them burnt to the ground.

“Where did you hear this?"The Sergeant asked.

She said that it was from a prisoner she had taken, but when the Sergeant asked her what had happened to him, she just shrugged and passed a finger across her throat.

On her most recent trip she had cut north, over the mountain and dropped down into the eastern valley further up than she had been before. She made no mention of how she’d fared in the wilderness to the north of us, but by her look she’d had a hard enough time.

She’d shadowed the road up the valley, travelling by night when moving in the day was difficult. All along the road, she said, she saw winged skull guard posts, preying on the few travellers that were still on the roads. It had been totally by accident that she had come upon their main column, almost stumbling into its picket lines one moonless night.

She’d moved among them, slipping into their camp cloaked and hooded with her blanket. It hadn’t been hard, she said, there’d been many women wondering around. She’d listened to them speaking and laughing. They called themselves “the brotherhood” and referred to each other as brothers, though sometimes they referred to themselves as the “blood tribe”.

She’d followed them in their slow progress down the valley.

“They’re like a blood-fattened leech,” she said. “Too bloated to move fast, hauling booty and dragging along slaves.”

She’d left them in the eastern valley, sure that they were heading our way, certain after she had the run-in with their scouts that I had blindly witnessed that previous night.

“So it’s how long? A few days?”

The Sergeant asked. Rowena nodded.

“They move slow,” she said, “but no more than a week.”

“What about your sister?” the Sergeant asked.” Is she a captive?”

Rowena nodded again.

“She’s with them and of them,” she said, “not a captive”.

All this took a long enough time, as Rowena was one of those people who were unused to talking, and had to be coaxed, but in the village way of things the Constable had called a meeting in the Capel to give everyone the news and have their chance to talk. He was scrupulous in telling them everything that Rowena had said and there were those who saw hope in some of her words.

“You say the girl said that they left garrisons in some places,” Edgar remarked, “perhaps if we don’t fight them, they’d do the same with us. Perhaps that’s our best hope.”

There were many voices raised in agreement to this around the Capel. From where I sat at the back, I could see from his face that the Sergeant dearly wanted to speak, but he kept quiet, knowing that ultimately this had to be the village’s decision.

“Edgar,” the Constable spoke in that quiet, courteous way of his. “I know you have a wife and a daughter, and a babe-in-arms.”

Everyone nodded, we all knew this.

“You’ve seen these people. We know that they enslave, rape, torture, kill or starve people to death by taking their food. Do you really think you can trust them with your family’s safety?”

There was a silence, almost a pause for breath, from the people.

“And if it’s not this year, it will be next year. One year we will have to fight them. So let’s do it now, while we are still strong and we have some help here.”

He did, after all, carry the meeting. So we would fight, as I think all of us knew, and we would have just a few days to make our final preparations.

From the rock outcrop where I sat, the place seemed too insignificant to merit such a fuss, but I was pleased and proud in my own way to have been given my task. The sheep were still grazing in the high pastures beyond the pass at the Hafod, and though they were guarded while they were there, it was felt that it was now due time for them to come in, as we could not leave them to human or animal predators while we were under our siege.

The guards were too few to brave the passage down, so I was part of the reinforcement that would aid the shepherds in their task. Rachel had been loath for me to go, but other young people were doing dangerous work; Joshua was up at the Hafod and there were few older ones to spare. So it was that I was sitting here in the late morning sun, Nes close by me and six other villagers near.

I was somewhat angry with Nes, because I knew that Rachel had persuaded her to come. She was my bodyguard so to speak and I was kicking against this. My fifteen year old self was sure that I could fend on my own. So I was sulky and quiet with her. And all she did was moan. I realised then that she was an urban creature and not used to walking in the mountains.

Her feet were wet already and her coat was not made for these cutting mountain winds. Most of the villagers had stout boots or wellingtons and fleeces and parkas, old and ragged, but still warm. She was a mystery to them, this woman, from her clothes right down to the colour of her skin. She in her turn regarded them as unsophisticated. “Cwmers,” she called them once in my hearing; valley people. A word they used in the town to sum up our clumsiness and naivety.

The old man in charge of the party, Ieuan, called an end to our halt and we proceeded up the pass. He had sent two of our party out ahead as scouts; a young man called Tom and woman I didn’t know, one of the prisoners we had freed. Nes and I brought up the rear of the party, as she was carrying an automatic shotgun that Cal had given her, a weapon he had repaired and found a box of cartridges for, which was deemed as best for covering our backs.

Snow had already fallen up here and it added to Nes’ bad mood.

“I grew up in the tropics,” she said, “in West Africa. I’d never seen snow until I came to Europe and I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the cold.”

Sulking though I was, I was unused to Nes talking about herself – in fact, she was often downright hostile to any questioning about her former life, however mild,  regarding it as prying - so I braced myself to ask her about the countryside where she came from.

“I was brought up in a city,” she said, laughing at me, “in an apartment, you’re more of a country girl than I am.”

This did not improve my mood in any way and as I stalked off I heard her add:

“What did you expect? A mud hut?”

She caught me up as we climbed, trying to lighten my mood, talking away in a manner that was uncharacteristic for her.

“There’s no reason you would know much about where I came from. I didn’t know much about you when I met you.”

I must admit, I did quite appreciate the gesture, and we went on in what passed for a companionable silence and got to the Hafod later in the day without incident.

We got there just after nightfall to be heralded by the sheep-dogs. We were nearly shot at by two of the shepherds, who seemed particularly jumpy. They told us that they were sure they had heard someone moving about the night before and the flock had seemed uneasy. We were nodded towards the cottage where the shepherds slept, where I greeted a bleary-eyed Joshua and the third shepherd, Owen, who had both been sleeping.

When we told them why we had come they seemed glad to be on the way home.

“There’s something out there,” Owen said, “whether on two legs or four.”

I had known Josh all my life and he had always been a close friend, but lately we had become shy of each other and awkward in the other’s company. Rachel had laughed when she noticed this and said that it was all a part of growing up, becoming a woman. I had thought then that perhaps I wanted to postpone that, stay as a child, or like a child, for that much longer. But growing up had to be done fast in the valley. And besides, I had already bled; womanhood had come on me, whether I liked it or not.

So Josh and I did little more than acknowledge each other, though the shy glances he occasionally gave me said that he was pleased to see me. It was a cold night, and there was little sustenance, just a broth of sorts and the bread and cheese we had brought. Nes complained some more, but only in my earshot.

The Hafod was in a high valley and the hills around formed a natural enclosure. It had occurred to Nes, I’m sure, that leaving the place was more dangerous than staying, leaving us liable to ambush, and she was a different person when we set out in the morning, done complaining now and alert.

Driving the sheep presented no great difficulty, as the dogs did most of the work. The sheep were used to them and mostly did their bidding, though occasionally broken ground would cause one of them to stray or one would get hung up on a thorn bush. Most of the villagers were spread around the flock as guards, with the shepherds and Joshua and I seeing to the strays and the young ones, cutting them free or shooing them back to the herd. Josh and I said little to each other, but we exchanged easy glances and towards the end of the day we were on close terms again, chatting away as if we were young again and not burdened by the onset of adulthood.

Nes was again in the rear; it was not a popular position, being somewhat dusty, dirty and isolated, but, as she was useless with the sheep and little known by the villagers, no-one was prepared to exchange posts with her. Owen kept her some company; a quiet man himself, more at home on the hills than down in the village, he seemed to appreciate her habitual silence.

We had made good progress and were funnelling the sheep towards the head of the pass in the failing light of dusk. Most of the villagers had started to relax, knowing that we only had to head the sheep into the pass and then down the slopes to the village. Home seemed near to them, but I could see that Owen was tense. He stopped and listened every so often, like a sheep-dog pricking up its ears, and scanned the hills around. Nes, too, was edgy, so I didn’t relax, though Josh was grinning at me from a distance.

The attack came just before we gained the safety of the pass, from the edges of the meadow we were in. The villagers were spread along the margins of the flock, exposed as they herded the sheep toward the gap, just uphill of them. This time it wasn’t the winged skull people, the blood tribe or whatever they called themselves, but a different attacker.

It was their cries I heard first and their horns. They were whooping like I imagined Red Indians must have done and those cries were so unearthly that I froze in my tracks. Shapes had come sprinting out of the dusky edges of the meadow and, at the same time, a flight of arrows had hit the central party around the sheep. I had hung back apace, late to catch up with the others after untangling a ewe from a gorse bush, so I had a clear view of what was happening.

I saw the runners and other faster shapes coming out the dark shadows. Some of the villagers had fallen to the arrows and some of the sheep. In front of me Owen had gone down on his knees, a strange thing to do I thought, until I realised that he had been shot by an arrow.