Darkburn Book 1: Fall by Tayin Machrie - HTML preview

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Chapter 5

 

 

That afternoon the rider woke again, more fully.

Roth?” he said.

Is that your horse? You fell off it, do you remember?”

The man half turned his head. “Not horse,” he said. “Rothir.”

Is that your name? Are you Rothir?”

He closed his eyes, as if in pain. “No.”

What’s your name?”

No answer. But he wasn’t sleeping now.

I found your sword,” Yaret told him. Possibly the sword was called Rothir. People sometimes gave them names, she knew. What was a suitable name for a cumbersome, ridiculously dangerous killing-tool? “It was on the ground a mile or two away,” she added. “But I couldn’t see your horse.”

He opened his eyes and looked up at the raincover, a yard above his head. “Where am I?”

You’re near the edge of the Darkburn forest. I found you here. I’m Yaret, a travelling pedlar. You’d fallen off the horse and broken your leg and hit your head.”

Ah.” That seemed to go in. But possibly straight out again, because half an hour later when he woke up a second time they had an almost identical conversation.

This time she persuaded him to drink a little water, and to chew a bit of purpled porridge. All he really wanted was to sleep. But his sleep was restless and disturbed. She sat down next to him cross-legged to sew, doing her repairs while he dozed and twitched. When he woke up for about the eighth time, with a jolt, he began to speak agitatedly in his own tongue.

Rothir! Parthenal, emal tero arguril…” He muttered on disjointedly, in a tone of anxious warning.

There’s nobody else here,” said Yaret after a while. “Only me. And I don’t understand you.”

He fell silent before speaking again, this time in Standard. “Where are the others?”

I haven’t seen any others. How many others should there be? How far away?”

No answer.

She tied a knot in her thread. “The thing that scared your horse,” she said carefully, “the burnt thing that was chasing you, it seems to have gone away.”

Where to?”

Further down the Darkburn river. I saw its trail leading from the bottom of the cliff to the edge of the forest.” She hoped it had gone further than that, right back into the forest’s dark heart, to whatever hole it had crawled out of. Her camp was still, potentially, far too close to it for comfort; but there was nothing to be done about that.

Darkburn,” the man murmured. Next time she looked up from her mending, his eyes were closed again.

By late afternoon he was another stage further into wakefulness. This time he told her his name.

I am Eled.”

She was aware that by now he was awake enough to lie, but she nodded.

Welcome to my camp, Eled, such as it is. I am Yaret, a weaver and pedlar of woven goods.”

Yaret.” He repeated it carefully.

How are you feeling?”

I think… I broke my leg?”

You did. Does it hurt? I’m sorry, I’ve nothing I can give you for the pain.” She regretted her lack of bitterbark or even star-moss. A foolish omission.

And I lost my horse?”

Yes. I’ve looked for it but I can’t find it.”

Oh!” His dismay was evident. “Then I’ve lost…”

She waited. “I found your sword,” she said after a moment. “I’ve got it here.”

But Eled shook his head restlessly and began muttering again in his own language. It was evidently not the sword that worried him. When Yaret asked if he was still hungry, he turned his head away. He did not want to talk to her.

So she stood up. “I’ll leave the porridge here, beside you. Try and eat some if you can. I’m off to shoot a rabbit, and I’ll have another look for your horse at the same time. The donkeys will stand guard. Dolm! Nuolo!” She called them from the entrance to the cleft.

Dolm was reluctant, Nuolo obedient. As the smaller donkey trotted over, Yaret put her arms around her neck to whisper, “Bray if anything comes close, you understand?”

The words would probably mean nothing to Nuolo; but Yaret’s tone would convey her meaning. The donkey understood how to guard the camp. Nuolo would bray if anything happened that she did not like. And Dolm would bray too: possibly in order not to be outdone, but also to protect Nuolo. He was not the brightest of donkeys but he was fearless.

Picking up her bow, Yaret left the donkeys standing by the cleft and set out rabbit-hunting. She crossed the Loft to a higher stony outcrop where the rabbit droppings were the thickest. Crouching down behind a rock, she waited. It was late enough in the afternoon for them to come hopping out and within a quarter-hour she had bagged two. She said Oveyn for each of them, and then took out her knife and gutted and skinned them on the spot. Crows or a buzzard would clean up the guts as soon as she was out of the way.

Where was the rider’s knife, she wondered? He must have had one; everybody did. Probably lost along with the horse and all his baggage. There was no sign of a horse up here. She would have to provide everything for him.

The weight of responsibility seemed to push her down as she walked back to the camp. On her travels she had no responsibilities except to her donkeys, and to the land – to leave it as she found it. In her absence from her grandparents it was easy not to worry about them, and she never wasted time worrying about herself.

But now she had to worry about Eled. What could she do with him? What if he grew worse? Better not to think about it. No point resenting him. Not his fault.

Yet her mind was heavy. At this stage of her journey it ought to have been light. She picked some clumps of cushion grass to stuff under her bedroll and tried not to speculate about how long she might be stuck here.

That evening’s fire was built out in the open so that the raincover would not end up full of smoke. Both rabbits went into the pot. She could keep on cooking them up each evening, with the soaked peas, until the meat ran out. Which would not take long; but there were plenty more rabbits where those had come from.

She carried the dishes into the cleft and propped Eled up against her packs. Spooning a little rabbit stew carefully into his mouth, she wiped away the juice that dribbled down his chin.

Who are you?” he asked, almost fearful: though maybe less of her than of his own forgetfulness.

She told him, again.

Where am I?”

She told him that, again. Then she said, “How many others of you are there? How far away might they be?”

He was silent. So Yaret did not press him on the subject.

Instead, once he had eaten, she checked his leg; it was still badly swollen. She wished she had some star-moss to apply to it, and to his head, which felt warmer than it should. She had seen no star-moss anywhere, not even by the boggy streamlet. Down by the Darkburn river, perhaps star-moss might grow…

But no, it was not worth making the attempt unless she was sure that it was there – and that nothing else was. Her skin crawled at the thought of going back into those woods. With an effort she made herself ask the question that had been uppermost in her mind all day.

Eled. That thing that your horse ran away from. The blackened thing that burns a trail. What was it?”

Silence. Then he muttered, “You don’t want to know.”

Yes, I do. What if it comes back?”

A pause. “How far are we from the forest?”

A good half-mile.”

Then we might be all right.” That meant they might not be. He closed his eyes, but Yaret persisted.

Eled. Wake up for a moment. Is that burnt thing the only one?”

A pause. “No.” His eyes stayed closed. “The only one like that.”

It was the answer she had dreaded. Now she needed more. “So there are others, even if they’re different? What are they? That thing – what’s it called?”

Another, longer, pause.

Darkburn.”

Yaret gazed thoughtfully at Eled’s tired face. It wasn’t a bad face. In other circumstances, without the bruises, she would have called it attractive. She suspected he was younger than he appeared; perhaps in his early twenties, younger than she was. But some dreadful knowledge seemed written on his countenance, even as it relaxed back into sleep.

Darkburn. If the charcoaled thing was named after the river – or the enfolding forest – it suggested that that was where it lived. Eled had implied that it would not stray far from the trees. There was no scorched grass hereabouts; so the creature had not crawled this way. The horse had merely fled here in its panic, and then in a confused frenzy of terror had stumbled back towards the river. Remembering the singed trail that led from the escarpment to the forest, she was somewhat reassured.

An hour or two later, however, once darkness had fallen, that reassurance seemed of little worth. Yaret lay awake listening to Eled’s shallow breathing which sometimes seemed to be trying to form murmured words; but not words that she knew.

Darkburn. It seemed wrong to call such a horror by that name. It made her imagine the whole forest creeping, burning, tainted with decay. She had always thought of this land as essentially benign. After all, she’d crossed it alone for seven years without meeting any trouble. The Loft had seemed a place apart, with that air of remote suspense which high empty lands often seemed to hold.

As for the forest – it was a much greater forest, she knew now, than she had ever realised. Her grandfather’s rudimentary maps did not go far enough. Grandda had never mentioned such a vast mysterious expanse of trees.

But then Grandda had never talked much about the Darkburn, just as he’d never chosen to linger close to it. She’d always assumed that he was merely anxious to get home on this last leg of the journey. Now she wondered if he’d been anxious about something else.

The injured rider’s breathing grew steadier in the darkness. Still she could not sleep. In the distance, two or three miles away, a wolf howled. After a moment another joined it; they were hunting. Fully alert now, Yaret strained to listen, trying to judge how far away they were. Then she got up and walked out of the cleft, bow and arrow in her hand.

The moon was hidden: wishing to rest, the huntress of the sky had pulled a cloak of cloud across her home. The broad shining road laid by the stars along the great plain of the heavens gave Yaret some comfort, but too little light.

More howls came from the south-west; however, the wolves seemed to be no closer. After a while the howling stopped and she persuaded herself to go back to her bed.

There she lay awake, and annoyed at being awake. She felt too jumpy to let herself fall into the welcoming chasm where sleep waited. Hovering on its starlit edge, she caught glimpses of snatched dreams from across that hazy border without managing to tip herself over into its oblivion.

So much out there that she did not understand. She was not used to this anxiety. Only in the last year or two had concerns about her ageing grandparents nagged at her. The freedom from care – she realised now that it was gone – had been the journey’s chief delight.

This new concern was heavy, and unwelcome. She felt trapped between the rider and the wolves. And what else?

The donkeys, she thought. The donkeys will let me know. The donkeys stayed quiet. So at last Yaret allowed herself to lapse into a fitful, fretful doze.