The knowledge of himself was here, and he thought if he could go to sleep in just the right way, he would wake in the morning knowing who he was, knowing why he had been in this battle. Maybe he was a refugee, like the people on the boats.
But when he woke at dawn he didn’t know any more than he had the night before. The sky was barely light, like tarnished silver, and the hills in the south and west black silhouettes. He looked up across the marsh to the battlefield and saw the huge, towering cage.
It was immense, made of whole trees, just as the otters had said, and held together with chain as big as a man’s leg. Its door was propped open, and he. knew he had been in there, and he rose and began to walk toward it almost as if he walked in a dream, stepping around the still-sleeping otters, who lay curled together in a silky brown tangle.
The battlefield was strewn with the bleached skeletons of horses. They were grisly in their broken helplessness, their wild spirits fled, their lovely warm, moving bodies gone, their collapsing bones sinking now into the earth, their eye sockets empty and their brains eaten away, and whatever else it was that had made those wild spirits all vanished. The smell of death and rotting meat lingered, and here and there a hank of hide and hair still clung to the bone. A few saddles lay broken beneath the bodies, though most had been taken away. As Teb stared around him, a ghost of the battle touched him, distant shouting and the thunder of hooves and the clashing of swords rang in his head, then was stilled, and he could not make the battle come clear; but his fear had increased, so he was sweating and cold. And a song of the skeletons and of death formed quickly and harshly, with a stark white beauty.
There were no skeletons of men. He looked for the mound of a common grave, but saw none.
He approached the cage and stood looking, and knew he should remember this. He stared inside at the earth, striped with the shadows of the great bars, and almost knew. Almost. There had been terror in that cage.
And wonder. It was gone now. He turned away at last, strangely lonely, and began to prowl among the tangled heaps of bones, trying not to think of them as horses.
He found a rusted knife in a patch of weed between the bodies and thought it would be fine when it was polished. He found a single boot and let it lie. He saw the paw prints of foxes crossing the battlefield, marked over with hoof prints, and he stood looking at them, puzzling.
Why would fox prints stir him? Why was he so sure they were foxes?
He glanced toward the cage, then toward the grass where the otters slept. He wished they would wake and come to keep him company. But the sky had grown orange with sunrise before he saw Mikk rear up out of the grass to look around him, then soon Charkky, then the others. He grinned and felt better when they came across the battlefield, hah-hahing, to help him search.
They quartered the battlefield back and forth, the otters rummaging around the heaps of bones, soon making a game of it. They chased one another in and out among the skeletons, picking up useless objects—a thrown horseshoe, a broken bridle rein—and stopped to eat the blackberries that grew along the edge of the marsh. Teb listened to their huffing laughter and shook his head and kept searching, though he was growing discouraged.
But then at last, in a small ravine that pushed back against the rising hills, he found a leather pack down among the thick bushes. He pulled it out, undid the strings, and spilled the contents onto the ground.
There was a pair of brown socks with a hole in one toe. A pair of linen drawers for a very big man. Another knife, not so rusted. A twist of tobacco. A sewing kit—needle and thread and scissors—in a little cloth bag. And something dried that might once have been cheese, for it had stained the leather and cloth with its oil. He put the socks and knife and sewing kit in the pack and left the rest. There was no flint, so he kept searching, though in the end it was Jukka who found it as she rummaged into a tangle of blackberries. She found the flint and played with it, ate some berries, then at last came loping up the hills to Teb to ask if this might be what he searched for, this little unimportant-looking bit of metal in the wire holder, with the second piece of metal dangling from it by a chain.
Teb took it from her and gathered some dry grass into a pile, then struck the metals. The sparks made Jukka back off in alarm, huffing at him. The others gathered at once as he got the tiny fire smoldering.
“Hah,” said Charkky. “It smells bad. No wonder we never had any.”
“On Nightpool,” Mikk said, “you’d best do this where old Ekkthurian can’t smell it.”
But to Teb the fire smelled wonderful, and he felt disappointed that the others found it useless and silly. They gave it another look, then went off again playing among the nut grass and blackberry bushes. Teb dropped the flint into his pack, and snuffed out the tiny fire reluctantly. It was much later, when he had stopped to eat some blackberries for his breakfast, that he found the bow, tangled down among the blackberry vines.
It was a good bow, made of oak, but broken. He wondered if he could mend it. He went back among the skeletons to pick up arrows, and soon had ten, then fourteen, that he thought he might use if he sharpened the steel tips and replaced the feathers. He showed the otters how it would shoot once he repaired it, and this impressed them far more than the fire.
“How far will the arrows go?” Charkky said.
“Oh, maybe clear to the hills, if I fix it right.”
Mikk examined the bow, the curves so perfectly formed, the little notches where the bowstring would fasten.
“It would be fine for rabbit,” Teb said.
“Yes, and for shooting sharks from the bank,” Mikk said. “Could you do that?”
“I could try. I could learn to.” Why not? He wasn’t sure how to mend the bow, but he guessed he would think of a way. He had gone to scavenge some strips of leather when Kkelpin came clumsily dragging an iron cookpot.
“Is this of any use? It might make a good bowl for clams.”
“Oh, it’s more than a bowl. I can cook in it. It’s perfect. And it will fit in the pack, I think.” It was not a very large pot and was coated with dirt and ashes. He brushed it off and rearranged the pack so it fit, then went with Kkelpin back to the site of the camp cookfire, but there were no other prizes; it had all been taken away. There should be a big iron grid, he thought, then puzzled that he knew nothing more, was still puzzling over a fleeting vision of men around the cook-fire as they set out for home in late afternoon, the bow and arrows across his knees, and the pack strapped to his waist with a bit of bridle rein. How could he know something down inside but not remember it? What would it take to make him remember who he was and why he had been here? And why did the great cage make him feel so strange?
He watched the sea roll green, shot with light in the afternoon sun, the dark otter bodies flashing beneath the glassy water and dark faces bobbing up to stare at him with laughing eyes, and at last he forgot his own puzzling for the joyous games of the otters. They passed the crowded harbors well after dusk and slipped into Rushmarsh, the raft churning and rocking in the busy water as a crowd of otters dove and played around it in greeting.
But this was more than joyous greeting; there was something wrong. The plunging agitation of the Rushmarsh otters soon infected the six, and from the raft Teb strained to make sense of the tangle of words as everyone talked at once.
“There has been something in the sea,” said Feskken, swimming up to the raft. “Something huge and unfamiliar.” His dark muzzle pointed off toward the darkening horizon, as the old pale female joined him.
“It came to the mouth of the bay,” she said. “It was thrashing and churning out there, and then lay still for a long time, as if it were watching us.”
“It stayed until the sun went down,” Feskken said; “then it sank deep, too deep for us to feel its vibrations. Maybe it went away, maybe not. You had best spend the night in Rushmarsh.”