Dark Mist Rising (10 page)

We were now high into the Unclaimed Lands. Steadily the countryside grew wilder, less fertile, rockier. Fields of crops gave way to pastures for cattle, then to sheep, and finally to goats. No villages, merely isolated farms, poor and small, where Tom bought supplies with the last of my coins.

‘I hope you don't ever tell any of these farm folk your name,' I said as we camped beside a rocky landslide that barely blocked the wind.

‘Oh no,' Tom said. He grinned. ‘I tell them I'm George.

Like your cousin. Peter, how many girls have you bedded?'

‘Girls?' I wrapped myself tighter in Tom's cloak while he took the less warm blanket. Tom was never cold. It had finally stopped raining but I was still wet, seemingly clear through to my bones. Shadow pressed closer to my side, as if he knew how much I needed warmth. The large campfire that we now permitted ourselves danced in the breeze, sending sparks snapping. I don't know how Tom found dry wood each morning. But he always did; there was little he didn't know about the woods.

‘Yes,
girls
. How many?'

There had been only Maggie. I had never bedded Cecilia. I had only held her, adored her, destroyed her. I said, ‘That is personal, Tom.'

‘Oh, piss pots! Why should it be? Me, I've had thirteen.'

Was he telling the truth? I peered at him in the early-morning light. After walking all night, I was exhausted and wanted to sleep. Were there even thirteen willing young girls in the villages around Almsbury? But it didn't matter if he was telling the truth. All that mattered was that I keep the peace with him, so that I could survive.

In that, it was no different from being at court.

‘Thirteen?' I said sleepily. ‘Really?'

‘Yes. I already told you of Betsy Turner and Joan Westfield. My first was Annie Palmer. I was only twelve but well grown, almost like I am now, see, and she was fifteen. One day Annie caught me stealing apples in her father's orchard, and she said ... And then we ... the barn ... only I ...'

His voice faded in and out. The sun rose, its warmth welcome on my wet cloak but making me even drowsier. ‘Really,' I murmured.

‘Nell Potter ... in the dairy house ... Annie found out that she ... Susannah Tenler ... Peter, you ain't listening!'

The tone, reproachful and impatient, brought me awake instantly. One learns that at court: to recognize anything threatening. I needed Tom Jenkins.

‘Yes, I was listening! Susannah, and ... and the dairy house.'

‘No,
Nell
was in the dairy house, and Susannah and I met in the woods. She could milk me like I was a nursing ewe, by damn!'

I knew what I should say, what was expected of me. ‘So many girls! I am envious.'

Satisfaction spread across his handsome face. ‘I daresay not even George had that many girls at my age, did he?'

‘Not half as many.'

‘Nor you, neither?'

‘Only three,' I said. Three seemed a good number, enough to be respectable but not so many as to seem rivalrous.

Tom was one of those whom victory turned generous. ‘Well, I daresay you'll have more girls eventually. Two to one odds on it. Even with one hand.'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Sleep now, Peter. You look tired. You ain't very strong, are you?'

‘Not as strong as you.' The mountain beneath us was not as strong as Tom Jenkins.

He leaned over, tucked his cloak more tightly around me, and said, ‘Are you hungry before you sleep? There's the last of that rabbit.'

‘You eat it.'

‘No, I'll save it for you, when you wake. Sleep now.' He turned away, as if the sight of his vitality might somehow interfere with my rest.

It was impossible not to be fond of him. Brash, vain, only thinly connected to reality, there was nonetheless not a mean fibre in his unthinking brain. Just before I drifted off, I realized that Tom Jenkins made me feel as Cecilia once had: superior. Something I had almost never felt with Maggie.

Maggie. What were she and Jee doing now? I had thought to leave Shadow with them for protection, but he stuck to me as his fleas stuck to him. He scratched now, reaching his leg up to his neck, and it was to the comforting sound of the dog's scratching that I finally slept.

At first, I thought nothing of the dog's disappearance. He was off hunting, or marking territory, or chasing a squirrel. Shadow carried on unceasing warfare with all squirrels. I rose, stretched and got to my feet. My cloak had dried in the day-long sunshine. When I removed it, even my tunic had begun to dry, and gratefully I lifted my face to the sun.

Tom, as was his custom, woke all at once and immediately examined his banked embers. ‘Still some fire. By damn, but I am good. Where's Shadow?'

‘Away somewhere.' I stretched again, luxuriating in the hot sun, the sweet air of a golden late afternoon.

‘Away? Why did you take his collar off?'

Tom's eyes were sharper than mine. He scooted over to my side of the campfire, where Shadow's grey leather collar lay on the ground. Picking it up, Tom ran his fingers over the squiggles etched into the leather.

‘I didn't take the collar off,' I said. ‘He must have worked it loose.'

‘Oh. Well, he don't need it anyway. I wish I knew what these letters mean.'

‘They're not real letters.'

He stared at me. ‘Can you
read
?'

‘Yes.'

This seemed to unsettle him. He scowled. I now had something he did not have. I should not have admitted that I could read. I said, lying, ‘But not very well. Just a few words.'

‘Can George read?'

‘No, not at all.'

‘Oh. Well, I have some bad news, Peter.'

My belly tightened. Tom's face looked unchar-acteristically grave. So it was not my reading, after all, that had unsettled him. He said, ‘Last night, after you slept, I walked to the edge of that cliff we passed yesterday, the one that slants down into that ravine with the creek on the bottom, you remember?'

Of course I did. We had spent hours feeling our way along the further cliff edge in the dark, with me apprehensive of slipping and tumbling over the edge. We needed to cross the ravine in order to follow the Southern Star. Finally we had found a crude rope bridge strung by the folk of the Unclaimed Lands, and we made our way across just as dawn broke. There was no forgetting that ravine, nor the wobbling of the old rope beneath my feet. Had it broken, we could not have survived the fall. But Tom always spoke as if I were so hopeless in this wild terrain that not only could I not navigate it alone, I could barely remember it.

I said stiffly, ‘I remember the cliff.'

‘On the other side, on that great upland meadow we passed through – you remember – I saw lights. Three or four fires.'

Cold slid along my spine. ‘A hunting expedition, maybe.' Two years ago Jee had once mentioned that his father, whose cabin stood near the border of Soulvine Moor, had gone on ‘the long hunt' with several other men.

‘That may be,' Tom said. ‘Or they could be savage soldiers.'

He smiled, and I saw my mistake. What I had taken for gravity, and then for disturbance, was actually Tom's version of quiet excitement. In one sense, he welcomed pursuit by the savages. Things had been too quiet for Tom Jenkins.

Before I could speak, he said, ‘I cut the rope bridge with my knife. So they can't cross the ravine where we did. Ain't that smart?'

‘Yes, it is,' I said with all the enthusiasm I could drag from my numbed brain. The Young Chieftain's men in pursuit ... Again I felt the cord around my skull, the cruel knots cutting into my temples, my eyes straining from their sockets in agony.

‘I daresay George wouldn't have thought to cut the bridge,' Tom said with satisfaction. ‘Would he, Peter? Would he? And now we have a nice supply of rope, to boot.'

‘Very smart,' I said. My lips had trouble forming the words. ‘We need to go now.'

‘Fine.' And then, for the very first time, ‘Where are we going, Peter? Will George be there?'

‘Peter! Did you see that? Did you?'

‘I did. What were you going to do if you caught up with them?'

‘Oh, I'd never be able to catch up with them,' Tom said cheerfully. ‘But it's fun trying.'

Not an idiot. A child.

‘I could have tracked them much further, you know. I daresay I'm the best tracker in The Queendom. My father, the old piss pot, don't ever believe that. Wouldn't let me track nor even hardly hunt. Just watch those stinking sheep.' His voice turned bitter. ‘“Tom Feeble-Wit” he called me. “Tom Half-Brain”. Just because that one time John Crenshaw and me ... I
hate
sheep. I hope all of his get the black rot and that he hisself dies a-choking. Peter, you don't have a father, do you?'

‘No.'

‘You're lucky. Your mother's dead?'

‘Yes.'

‘Mine's not, but she don't never stand up for me. You can't trust women, you know. They're great fun to bed, but either they betray you or they want to own you. And they
cry
. Half the time they don't even mean it, nothing like so untrustworthy as a girl's tears. Women's weapons, I call 'em.' Tom brooded silently by the fire for all of two minutes before grinning and asking, ‘Which of the three girls you bedded was the best?'

All that night we walked at double time, or as close to double time as I could manage, south-east through the Unclaimed Lands. My journey here two years ago had taken only a fortnight, but I had been travelling from Glory, capital of The Queendom. Now I came from the far north-west, and Tom and I had already been on the road three weeks. The moon was waxing, half full. This made night journeying easier, although presumably it would also make easier pursuit by the savage soldiers.

Were they in fact pursuing me? We did not see them again. Sometimes, striding along after Tom, climbing steep trails or balancing on mossy stones as we crossed small streams, I persuaded myself that the Young Chieftain had better things to do than chase me. He had a child bride to capture, Lord Robert Hopewell's army to defeat, The Queendom to subdue and occupy. He would not spare the soldiers to pursue me.

Other times I saw the singer-turned-soldier sprawled along with three of his men on the cottage floor in Almsbury, their throats torn out by Shadow. Saw Lord Solek fall in the palace, in the green-tiled courtyard outside the queen's barred door, cursing me as he died. Saw the countless savage soldiers killed by the invulnerable Blues brought back from the Country of the Dead by the ‘witch boy' that had been me. At those times I thought that the Young Chieftain would pursue me to the farthest edges of creation.

What I did not know, but hoped for desperately, was that he would not pursue me onto Soulvine Moor. Soldiers are the most superstitious people in the world.

Surely by now the savages would have heard from the people of The Queendom what supposedly happens on Soulvine Moor. Not even the wild folk of the Unclaimed Lands ventured past that border. Neither would I, who knew what actually occurred there. I hoped that should I be closely pursued, the savages would go away if I could make them believe that I had sought refuge on Soulvine Moor.

But I did not know for sure.

However, we saw no soldiers that day, nor the next, and no campfires in the night. Shadow did not return. I missed him, that warm bulk beside me. And without the dog often we had no meat. Tom was a fine tracker, as he had boasted, but he had not Jee's skill with snares and had no bow and arrows to attempt larger game. I would not let him shoot the stolen
gun
. That evening there was nothing to eat but a handful of wild strawberries gathered in the slanting rays of the setting sun. My belly growled with hunger.

Tom said, ‘This looks like a real track, Peter, not just a hunting trail. It must lead somewhere. Give me some money and I'll find a farm and buy bread.'

‘There's no money left.'

‘No more
money
?' he said, incredulous, as if money were a thing I could manufacture but had somehow neglected to do so.

‘No more money!'

‘Oh.' He contemplated this. ‘What will we do?'

I was weary. I was hungry. I was afraid. I was tired of travelling with pretty children to care for: Tom, Cecilia. And the dreams were back, haunting me each night. ‘
Die,
my baby, die die, my little one, die die ...
' I snapped, ‘What will we do? We'll go hungry!'

‘Oh.'

We did not speak again. Tom made the campfire, lay down and fell instantly asleep like the healthy young animal he was. I lay awake, dreading that monstrous dream, but when I finally did fall into a fitful sleep, I dreamed instead of food. Fragrant rosemary bread, fresh from the oven. Maggie's thick pea soup with crusty little meatballs floating in it. Roast mutton, sweet cakes shiny with melted sugar, big bowls of—

Crack!

The
gun
fired in the woods somewhere to my left. I jumped to my feet and grabbed, stupidly, for my walking staff – as if it would be any use against the savages' weapons! Dawn coloured the sky with red and orange, and it seemed to my terrified, sleep-dazed brain that the unseen
gun
had spattered the colours across the sky, as it would soon spatter my brains across the wild grass.