“Who?”
“The soldiers.”
“Casicar?” “I guess so.”
Getting information out of him was going to be a slow business. I said, “Is it safe to make a fire?” He nodded.
“Make one, then, and put the fish on a stick and toast them. I’ve got a little bread here.” I succeeded in landing another big trout while he made the fire. He could hardly wait to char the fish over the fire. He ate with desperate haste, cramming the hard bread into his mouth and chewing it painfully. “Ah,” he said, “ah, that’s good, thanks, Gav. Thanks.”
I went back to fishing after we ate; when the trout jump at an empty hook it’s a sin not to let them do it. While I fished he sat on the bank and told me what had happened to the Heart of the Forest. Much of the story I had to guess from his incoherent telling.
Etra and Casicar were allies now, in a Northern League against Vo-tus, Morva, and smaller cities south of the Morr. A lot of farm slaves had been killed during the wars between Etra and Casicar, or had run away, and had to be replaced or recaptured. Towns all round the Dane-ran Forest had long been full of rumors of the great camp or city of runaway slaves, and the new allies decided to go in and find out what was there. They sent an army, a legion from each city, on a rapid march up between Daneran and the Marshes. Barna’s people knew nothing about the attack until outpost guards came running into the city shouting the warning.
Barna gathered all the men who would stand with him to defend the Heart of the Forest. He ordered the women and children to scatter out in the woods. Many of the men ran with them. Any who hesitated or stayed to fight were soon trapped: the soldiers surrounded the walls and methodically set them afire, and then the whole city, hurling torches onto the roofs of the wooden buildings. Barna’s men made a sortie against them but were outnumbered, cut down, slaughtered.
The soldiers ringed the burning town and caught all who fled the holocaust, then ranged out and rounded up people hiding or trying to escape in the woods. They spent a couple of nights waiting till the fires burnt out so they could loot what was left. They found the treasury and divided that. They divided the prisoners, half for Etra, half for Casicar, and then marched back, driving the chained, slaves along with the cattle and sheep.
There were tears on Ater’s cheeks as he told me the story, but his voice remained dull and even. He’d been out with a raiding party when they saw the smoke of the burning city from miles away in the north. They had crept back a couple of days after the soldiers left.
“Barna…,” I said, and Ater said, “They said the soldiers cut off his head and kicked it around like a ball.”
It was very hard to ask about any of the others. When I did, Ater had no answers; often he seemed not even to know who I was talking about. Chamry? He shrugged. Venne? He didn’t know. Diero? He didn’t know. But evidently a number of people had escaped one way or another, and many of them had regathered in the ruined city, not knowing where else to go. Some of the grain supplies had remained hidden and untouched, and they had lived off them and what was left of the gardens. For how long? Again Ater was vague. I guessed that the raid and fire had been about half a year ago, perhaps in early winter.
“You’re going back there now?” I asked him, and he nodded. “It’s safer there,” he said. “The soldiers been raiding everywhere. Taking slaves. I was at Ebbera, over there. Near as bad off as we are. No slaves left to work the fields.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said. I had to know what had become of my friends.
I’d caught five more good-sized fish. I packed them up in leaves and we set off. We came to the Heart of the Forest in the late afternoon.
The city I had last seen silver-blue in moonlight was a waste of charred beams, shapeless mounds, ashfields. At one edge, near the gardens, people had made huts and shelters with salvaged lumber, much of it half burned. An old woman was weeding in the garden, bowed back, averted face. A couple of men sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands hanging between their knees. A dog barked at us, then whined and cowered away, A child sat on the dirt gazing listlessly at Ater and me. As we came near, it too cowered away from us.
I had come in order to ask about my friends, but I could not ask. I could only see Diero trapped in Barna’s house as it burned, Chamry’s corpse dumped in a common grave, Venne driven down the road in chains. I said to Ater, “I can’t stay here.” I gave him the packet of fish. “Share it with somebody,” I said.
“Where you going then?” he asked in his blank way. “North.”
“Look out for slave takers,” Ater said.
I was about to turn back the way we’d come, when something grabbed both my legs so hard and suddenly that I nearly lost my balance. It was a child, the child who’d stared and shrunk from us. “Beaky, Beaky, Beaky,” she cried in a high thin voice like a bird. “Oh Beaky, oh Beaky.”
I had to pry her hands loose from my legs, and then she gripped my hands with sparrow-claw fingers, looking up into my face, her face all dust and bone and tears.
“Melle?”
She pulled me to her. I picked her up. She weighed nothing, it was like picking up a ghost. She clung to me tightly, just as she used to when I came to Diero’s room to teach her letters. She hid her face against my shoulder.
“Where does she live?” I asked Ater, who had stopped to stare at us. He pointed to a hut nearby. I started to carry her towards it.
“Don’t go there,” she whispered, “don’t go there,”
“Where do you live then, Melle?” “Nowhere.”
A man looked from the doorway of the hut that Ater had pointed out. I’d seen him working as a carpenter but had never known his name. He too had the dull look, the siege face.
“Where’s the girl’s sister?” I asked him.
He shrugged.
“Diero didn’t—escape—did she?”
The man shrugged again, this time with a grinning sneer at the question. Gradually his look sharpened. He said, “You want that one?” I stared at him.
“Half a bronze for the night,” he said. “Or food, if you’ve got any.” He stepped forward, trying to get a look at my backpack.
I went through a quick, complex set of thoughts. I said, “What I have I keep,” and set straight off walking back the way I’d come. Melle clung to my neck, silent, her face hidden.
The man shouted after me and the dog, barking, set off other dogs in a chorus of barks and howls. I drew my knife, glancing back constantly. But nobody followed us.
When I’d walked a half mile or so I knew that my little ghost was a great deal more solid than I’d thought, and also that I’d better think what I was doing. Coming across the faint trace of a path, I went along it for some way, then turned aside. Behind a thicket of elderberries that screened us from the path, I set Melle down on her feet and sat down next to her to get my breath. She squatted down beside me. “Thank you for taking me away,” she said in a thread of a voice.
She would be seven or eight years old now, I thought. She hadn’t grown very much, and was so thin her joints looked like knobs. I got some dried fruit out of my pack and offered it to her. She ate it with a pitiful and terrible attempt not to be greedy. She held out a piece to me. I shook my head. “I ate a little while ago,” I said. She devoured the fruit.
I cut a piece of my rock-hard bread into little morsels and warned her to suck them to soften them before she chewed. She sat with bread in her mouth, and her dirty, bony face began to relax.
“Melle,” I said, “I’m going north. Away. To a city called Mesun.”
“Please, can I come with you,” she whispered, her face tightening again, her eyes getting big, only daring one glance up at me.