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:
Golly claims he holds the sky up with his pinky and his thumb
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.
Golly swears he shoots the stars down with his arrows and his bow
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
An’ he rides a chicken backwards while he quaffs em to the dregs.
Tip top tip lads, tip yer hat to Golly Stooner.
Tip top tip, sing praise when he’s about,
Tip top tip lads, afore the stars are rising sooner,
Tip top tip, a’cause he’s true beyond a doubt.
My matted hair flew around me, and I lost control of my legs: step and two, step and two––step and two weave step and two––step front ball change twirl change leap change and on and on, faster and faster until all the children were clapping and I was dizzy and smiling. Wille hooted and sang:
“Tip top tip lads, tip yer hat to dancing Aster.
Tip top tip, sing prayers that she will tire,
Tip top tip lads, afore she starts a-dancing faster,
Tip top tip, or her feet’ll start a fire.”
“Look.” Seacho tugged Padlimaird by the shirt. “Look––she ain’t touchin the ground.”
I looked down; the shadows leaped just short of my feet.
A jolt of alarm went through me. I gave one last kick and saw Nefer’s teeth winking in the trees. I came round, chest heaving. Floy sang to me from her elderberry bush.
“He saw? The man saw?” I felt immensely stupid.
“He saw the whole thing,” she said, and Gattren interrupted:
“You’re a Daralaibel. Why didn’t you say so?”
“Did you see Nefer?” I said, catching my breath.
“Big, dark Nefer?” She eyed me strangely. “No. Did you?”
“He was right there, in that grove before the fire.” I sat down and pulled my legs beneath my skirts.
Padlimaird decided to investigate and slipped into the trees. He came out with plants clenched in his fist––harebells and yarrow––and three great burnt-black bannocks under his arm.
“This was in a little pile,” he said.
“That would be Nefer,” said Seacho, as Gattren, giving my skirts a last glance, took the plants from Padlimaird and sat down to mash the leaves and roots for a poultice.