The Bone Forest (18 page)

"You don't understand," Inkmarker breathed. "If you put on the ghost mask, perhaps you'll see what I could see."

The shaman had drawn out a bone knife, carved from the shoulder blade of a boar. It was polished, honed sharp. It caught the light from above.

Inkmarker sobbed. He was no match for this powerful man of magic. He darted around the strange well-room, skidding on the slick stones of the floor. The man moved after him. The boy snatched up his hound's mask, and held it to his face, frantically tying the ivy behind his head. He growled, wild and loud. He raised his hands in protection. His eyes glittered as they watched from Cunhaval's running track.

"I'm coming for you!" he shouted, and the other boy stopped turning pages. The dog leapt against the door. It grew larger. It grew fiercer. Its body hit against the door and the house shuddered. The boy ran from his bed to the battered door and listened.

"My dog! Let me have my dog!"

Inkmarker leapt again. His front legs were stretched out, his claws extended. He struck the Wolfhead, struck the door, and the door came down. There was a brief pain, then loving arms around his neck, ruffling the fur on his head and cheeks. Tears of delight. Cries of joy. There were shouts, hard, angry, drunken cries. A man's voice. A woman screamed.

But the boy and his hound were off and running, out through the landing window, over the roof of the garage, down toward the town, where the traffic growled and there was freedom to be had.

The Boy who Jumped the Rapids

The horn-helmeted man had come from the far west, following the ridgeways and woodland tracks, and crossing streams and rivers at the nearest point, not at their shallows. From the state of his clothes it was clear that he had journeyed through the dark forests where the Belgic peoples ruled; from the downwind smell of him, the hint of salt and sea, it was clear that he had traveled across the wide ocean that separated two lands. His hair hung lank and fire-red from beneath his strange helmet, a helmet with stubby horns and sparkling decorations. When the sun was bright the helmet flashed in the way of gold, and sometimes in the way of silver. And again, sometimes it gleamed in the way of bronze. But there was no iron there, not that the boy Caylen could see.

Word had already gone ahead to the forest community of Caswallon's people, and now only Caylen and two men discreetly trailed the stranger as he ran along the high ground, squinting at times into the distance, seeking smoke, perhaps, or the sea. Caylen moved stealthily through the undergrowth, pausing occasionally to watch the horned man as he ran and danced past in the open. The boy had never seen anything, or anyone, quite like this dark-cloaked foreigner; he didn't walk like a warrior; nor did he run, crouched and wary, like a hunter. He ran upright, his cloak streaming behind him, a narrow, skin-wrapped object held firmly in his right hand. At times he actually leapt into the air, twisting about and spinning as he touched the ground again so that his cloak swirled about him. His voice, at these times, was a loud cry, a triumphant cry, echoing away across the woodlands and the grassy downs, and frightening the dark carrion birds that nested in the spruce and ash trees.

At dusk the man came down from the ridgeway and followed the tracks, of hunters and animals both, through the forest until he came to the tall, wooden totem that stood where the river forked. This was the holy place at the apex of the streams.

Within minutes he had found the village, though the village had been expecting him since before noon.

He stood outside the heavy palisade, outside the open gate, and stared across the muddy compound at the low roundhouses, the broken animal pens, the roped dogs, hysterical in their excitement and barking loudly, the huddle of women in their drab green robes, the children, excitedly gathered in a goat-house, peering at the stranger through the thin, wicker walls. He looked also at the line of dark-haired men who stood facing him, their spears and swords held across their chests. Chickens, ducks and gray puppies ran noisily between them, disturbed in their empty-headed ways by the tension in the air.

The man said one word, which might have been "Food." He said it loudly, and there was something in his voice that made the pain of his empty belly obvious.

Then he said, "Help," or a word that sounded similar. His eyes glazed a moment as he looked around at the people of the village, and then he flung back his cloak and held the long, thin package above his head. "Help," he repeated, and lowered the object to his lips, hugging it afterward as he might hug a child. "Rianna," he said, but the name was strange to Caswallon and his kin, and they ignored it.

When at last the Chieftain, Caswallon—who was Caylen's father—stepped toward the horned man, it was to welcome him. The man removed his gleaming helmet and stepped inside the palisade. His scalp, below the helm, had been scarred savagely by a sword. Caylen grimaced at the sight of the hideous wound, and the thought of the agony this man must have borne.

It rained as it always rained in the forest: hard, for a while, driving man and beast into shelter; then gentle, almost like a sea spray. The rolling storm clouds passed away into the east, and the sky brightened. The children were driven out into the gleaming mud pond that had formed within the village walls, and set about the task of laying straw and wood walkways. When they had finished, they gathered the animals from the edge of the woodlands, chased them back into the compound, and then sneaked away among the trees.

Caylen followed the boys at a distance. The day before, he had suffered a beating from the two sons of his father's cousin, the warrior Eglin, blinded during a raid three years ago. These two boys were vicious and compassionless. They joked about their father in an open and openly derisory way, calling him "blind stick," and bragging that they would have taken his head a long time before but it would not have been worth the effort. They spared no wrath from Caylen, stripping him and bruising him with malicious glee. They had carved something on his backside, but the scarring and scratching had obscured its nature from his friend, Fergus, who had helped Caylen to his special place, near the river, and bathed and patched the wound.

"Don't tell my father," Caylen had said, and Fergus had laughed.

"What would
he
do? Nothing! He'd do nothing. Not even with the stranger here."

Caylen had laughed angrily and said he knew that, but he always hoped that one day Caswallon would step in and defend his son from the other village children. It was a vain hope.

Now, with Fergus, he followed the pack, keeping low in the undergrowth that lined a narrow boar-run. The other children walked boldly along the trampled bracken, snagging clothes on bramble and thorn and noisily knocking aside the wood and plant growth with sword sticks.

"That ol' pig'll hear them," said Fergus. "But it won't attack. Not until it thinks it's safe, and that will be us. So let's hurry."

Caylen needed no second urging. He raced along the run and only dropped to a crouch when he saw the bobbing heads of the other boys in front of him, and of course on that heart-stopping occasion when he realized he was standing right by the thicket where the boar was calmly waiting for the noise to pass. He could smell it in there, musty, fetid; its breathing was rapid, almost hoarse. He thought he saw a shaft of sun glint off the cruel, curved tusks, and he realized this was a giant boar, a huge thing, that had probably come down from the deep forests inland.

Caswallon knew it was there, but it was taboo to kill boars for two seasons, because of the goring of the druid Glamach, in the season of Bel. It would make great eating, this one, and was a severe threat to the village while it was alive. But until the season of the fires, and the blessing of Lug, it would forage the near-woods unhindered.

Caylen leapt past it and waited for Fergus. Fergus was a small lad, two years younger than the wiry Chieftain's son, and his face was red with effort, his tawny hair slick and plastered with animal grease which ran down his cheeks as the heat in his flesh melted it. He clutched a tiny wooden knife, and there was such an expression of childish excitement in his face that Caylen felt his own excitement surge again. They went on, breaking through the tangled, thorny undergrowth where the ground was marshy, and finding a clearer passage through the gnarled trunks of oak and elm, where bluebells covered the ground in a single, dazzling azure sheen. The other boys had gone through here too, and Fergus led the way after them, diving from tree to tree, listening to the rustling in the distance, and the sound of bird life disturbed by the intruders below.

When they were near the clearing known as Old Stone Hollow, Caylen led the way to the side. They wormed through nettles, hands behind their necks, and found an old trickle-stream, dried now that summer had been halfway exhausted. From this they peered, through dried bracken and the tangle of a rose bush, at the small, grassy clearing, with the great wind and rain-etched boulder poking up from deep in the ground. In front of this rock a small, wooden shelter had been built, and the red-haired man, stripped to the waist, was busy hammering iron nails into the sloping roof. No house, then, but a shrine of some sort. Smoke rose from his tiny fire, and a fish slowly grilled there. The wrapped object that was so precious to him stood against the boulder. Caylen could see that the man had painted things on that stone, strange shapes and symbols, and pictures of animals too. They were painted in blue and green, and he had painted similar symbols on his arms, and on his chest. Caylen knew of the tribes in the north and east who painted their bodies in this way, but this one was from the west, from the far west, or so his father had said in Caylen's hearing, from the land across a great sea, where a thousand kings ruled.

He didn't even speak their language, although he had learned enough words to indicate his needs. He was here because he was a fugitive, because he was protecting something from evil forces in his homelands.

After a while Caylen grew restless. He drew back from the glade, Fergus following, and began to walk toward the river. They were puzzled by the man, and intrigued, and they were aware, too, that Caswallon and the other villagers were uneasy with him, although he was in no way hostile.

Abruptly they were surrounded by boys, and Caylen felt a stinging blow on his face where a spiky, green nut had been thrown. There was laughter, and the screech of boyish anger that precedes a boyish punishment. But Caylen was in no mood for trouble and he found his temper at exactly the right moment, swinging a dead stick with a loud whack against the leader's head.

He was off then, the boys in pursuit. Where Fergus went he didn't know, and for the moment didn't care. His backside still hurt, and the head that he had struck had belonged to the boy whose knife had carved the pain. They chased him, shouting and yelling, but he was surefooted and swift, and knew the way to the river better than they. He ducked through dense stands of oak, and plunged into bramble thickets, not caring about the scratches to his legs and arms, preferring that pain to the pain of the senseless beatings.

The boys closed on him where the forest thinned, but now he could hear the water, the rushing waters of the great river, and he sensed he was safe, even though a part of his mind still questioned the strangeness of the fact.

He ran down the bank, waded in and felt the river's coldness sting all the way to his waist. The flow was gentle, the mud below soft and sucking. It was a long way across, a good minute's wade, and then he scrambled out, just as Domnorix led the gang of panting youths out of the woods and to the water's edge. Fergus appeared, farther away, and shook his head, smiling but smiling uncertainly. He crouched, exactly as Caylen was crouching, and stared at the gentle water.

The boys threw stones for a while, which Caylen dodged with arrogant ease, even lobbing a few back. Domnorix taunted him. "Only a demon could get across those rapids. Only someone possessed by evil magic could float across those waters. You're an evil thing, Caylen, your father knows it, your mother knows it. Evil. Evil." And others cried, "Possessed, possessed!" And still others taunted him with, "Unbirthed, unbirthed!" or, "Crow's spawn, crow's spawn."

All of this Caylen had heard a hundred times before, and so he sat on the river bank and grinned, watching the boys across the calm waters until they went away.

Fergus walked down to stand across from him. "How
do
you get across, Caylen?" he called, and smiled almost nervously, as if he didn't want to hear the answer.

"I've told you," said Caylen, not angrily, but with a patience that he was determined to preserve for this one friend of his. "I waded across. The water is
calm
. Why don't you try it? It's easy."

Fergus shook his head. He looked at the river, then at Caylen, and he seemed lost; he was more of a child than his nine years made him; and he needed Caylen very much. He seemed stick thin in his baggy cotton trousers and ragged shirt, his limbs scratched by bramble and thorn. Across the water the two boys watched each other, each longing for closer company, each aware that they were united in friendship through the vagaries of life in such a small community.