Then he was down, and the blows didn’t stop falling. His back, his legs, his head. His turban saved him: that, and a clear command stopped the beating before he was crippled.
‘Hello, little darkie. You must think you’ve very clever to have worked it all out. Better you hadn’t shouted it out so all the world could hear, though.’
Dalip forced one eye open. Everything hurt so much, it didn’t matter which bit of him was damaged.
‘Hello, wolfman,’ he said. His lip had split open. He may have lost a tooth, he couldn’t tell.
The wolfman crouched down and plucked the kirpan from Dalip’s fist. He waggled it like a finger. ‘You weren’t going to do much with this.’
‘I had to try.’
‘Of course you did. Now where’s your little darkie friend?’
Dalip spat out blood on the ground.
‘Cat got your tongue? She can’t have gone far. Go,’ he said to the other men, ‘bring her back.’
Dalip couldn’t breathe through his nose, so he lay there, curled up, mouth open, panting. The wolfman was missing something.
‘Where,’ he managed, ‘where are your wolves?’
‘My wolves?’ He rubbed the end of his nose, and gave a sly smile. ‘Is that what you’re worried about?’
The wolfman dropped the kirpan and held his hands out in front of him, curling his fingers around imagined chains. He clenched his jaw, and his eyelid twitched.
His hands did hold chains. Those chains looped around the necks of wolves. The wolves sniffed at Dalip, smelling his blood and his defeat.
‘These wolves, you mean? They’re right here.’
11
Mary stayed very still, even though the water was cold and the current pulled at her boilersuit. The voices were right above her, above where she crouched amongst the roots and the weeds, with only a thin overhang of soil hiding her. Her chin was in the river, and she was prepared, no matter how much she’d hate it, to take a deep breath and submerge completely. Anything, just so long as she wasn’t discovered.
She could hear the men beating Dalip, the steady grunts of effort as their fists rose and fell. She could hear the wolfman’s taunts. Then she heard him call for her to be found.
She was almost numb with cold by the time they moved off, and she sat, balanced on her haunches, for a good while longer. It could have been a trap, another one, with someone sitting on the bank above her, waiting for her to emerge, and with her in no state to either fight or run.
She listened. The sounds she recognised◦– traffic, music, doors, shouting◦– were absent. The sounds she was now hearing◦– trees, birds, the slow churn of the river◦– were alien to her, but she’d rather hear those than anything else. She was alone. Truly alone now.
She still wanted to cross the river, and put broad water between her and her pursuers. It looked, at least from down at water level, a long way. Especially for a non-swimmer. No one was going to help her, no one was going to offer her a reward for just trying. She steadied herself and moved her waterlogged legs out towards the middle.
Her feet lost the bottom quickly. Her head ducked under, she splashed her way to the surface, gasping, and for a moment couldn’t remember which side of the river she’d just left. One bank was a lot closer than the other, so that was decided for her quickly. The current was carrying her, and the one thing in her favour was the trapped air in her closely woven boilersuit.
She floundered, arms and legs moving in contradictory motion, her boots dragging her down, her sleeves holding her up. The current slackened, her foot struck something soft and she grunted, pulling it back fast. But it was only the river bed’s soft mud, and she was able to stand a few metres from shore, sodden, freezing, dirty, scared.
She looked behind her, to where she’d come from. She could see no one, though she knew the wolfman and his gang were able to blend in to the forest in a way that was almost spooky. They could be watching her now, just like they probably had been, all the way from the sea to here. Watching her wade to the far bank and crawl out, lying on her belly like a worm, in the brown leaves and broken twigs and earthy decay.
Where was she going to go? What was she going to do? How was she supposed to do anything?
Something was sticking in her ribs. She rolled over, reached inside, and pulled out the axe. Dalip had been right. It was very rusty. She wasn’t going to throw it away, though. It was all she had.
She wasn’t going to be able to rescue the others, even if she could find them. She didn’t owe them anything, really, even though the thought suddenly struck her as, if not wrong, certainly unworthy. She didn’t know where such an idea came from. Perhaps she could find someone to help her rescue them, or better still, who would do all the rescuing for her.
No. There would have to be a rescue at some point◦– she assumed that was a given◦– and she had to be involved in some way. She wouldn’t be alone, though. The Red Queen needed soldiers.
The problem was, there was no one here. The woods were empty. She’d have to start walking until she found someone. Not upriver though. Away from it. If she’d started the day with the sun on her right and ended with it on her left, she’d have to travel towards where it rose and watch it circle around.
She was also fucking freezing, and if she didn’t make a move soon, she’d never go anywhere at all.
She emptied her boots, wrung her socks out, and straight away put them back on, hurriedly brushing off the leaf litter and the tiny bugs that had crawled out of it to investigate her toes. Her fingers were stiff and shivery, and tying wet laces was hard. When she put one foot in front of the other, she was so uncomfortable, it was all she could do not to sit down and weep.
What drove her on was the certainty that the others would swap places with her in an instant. She was free. They were not.
She walked. The forest looked the same in every direction. She couldn’t see the distant mountains; she could barely see the sky. The sun was behind her, but she couldn’t tell how far it was from setting. She could be walking straight back the way she’d come, just on the other bank of the river.
And when it did set, she would be alone, in the dark.
She kept on going. She started to pick up on subtle changes in the land around her, though it was muted and dormant under the green canopy. The small streams she crossed, where she slaked her thirst with loamy brown water, ran downhill, diagonal to her path. The ground went from flat to gently undulating to a series of ridges and dips. The trees themselves started to be shorter and narrower, and maybe their leaves looked a little different too.
On one ridge, the rock broke through to the surface, black and weathered. There were no trees there, and she climbed and climbed, hands slipping on the mossy covering, legs aching with effort, until she was finally in the sunlight and above the tops of the trees.
It was evening. The light slanted across the forest, turning it golden, except for a thin broken band where the big river ran. She looked at how far she’d travelled, and it seemed both a long way and not enough at the same time. If she could cover it, so could the wolfman. The notch between the two peaks they’d been heading for was obscured by the angle she was seeing it from, but as she turned, she saw more mountains beyond, blue with distance, rising like a line of filed teeth.
The forest was thinning in the direction she was going. The land rose and fell, and there were large patches where there were no trees at all. Neither was there anything else that she could see. A village might not be visible, but a town might, and a city certainly would. There wasn’t a single building in sight, nor a spire of smoke to indicate a fire.