She frowned. Save for a few children playing at the water’s edge, the sea looked empty. ‘He said he could swim well. He could hold his breath.’
‘He’s a forest boy. Do you believe him? Perhaps he was trying to impress you.’
‘Oh, for the love of the mothers…’ She stood and quickly shucked off the rest of her clothes. ‘You’d better go find his brother, priest. Men! There’s always something.’
And, without looking back, she ran down to the sea. The beach sloped shallowly, even beyond the water’s edge, and she had to cross perhaps fifty paces of clinging, tiring, muddy sand before the water was past her knees. Then she threw herself forward into water that shocked with its chill, and began to swim, heading out the way she had seen the Pretani boy go.
At first the water invigorated her, but she was fighting the current of the incoming tide and soon tired. She stopped and trod water, and wiped the salt water from her eyes and mouth, her hair clinging to her neck. The sea around her glimmered in the low sunlight, and the shore seemed a long way away. ‘Shade! Shade, you Pretani idiot!’
‘Yes?’
The voice was so close behind her ear that it startled her and she lost her tread. She fell back in the water and got a mouthful of brine that made her cough.
Shade took hold of her under her armpits and steadied her, laughing. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No thanks to you. You worried me.’
‘I told you I was a good swimmer.’
‘Well, I didn’t believe you.’
‘And I can hold my breath. Look-’
‘Don’t bother.’ They were holding hands now, circling. ‘How does a boy from the wildwood of Albia get to be a good swimmer?’
‘It’s a joke of the gods.’ He was smiling, his face and beard clean of dirt, his smooth skin marked only by the hunting scar on his cheek. ‘A swimmer in the forest. You may as well give a salmon legs. But I don’t mind. I suppose I’ll never be able to hunt like my brother, or lead men in battle, or boss women around. But at least I can swim.’
His hands were warm in hers, his eyes bright. Their legs tangled, and they moved closer together. She could feel the warmth of his thigh between hers, and then she felt his erection poking at her stomach.
He pulled back. ‘I’m sorry-’
‘Don’t be.’ She pulled him to her. His face filled her vision, shutting out sea and shore and people. The world seemed to recede, taking with it all her responsibilities, her mixed-up sister, her fretting over her father, the workload she guiltily enjoyed. All that existed was the water, and this boy.
She took his shoulders and lifted upwards, clamping her legs around his waist. With a gasp he entered her, and their lips locked.
12
‘Hungry,’ Moon Reacher whimpered. ‘Hungry!’
‘I know, child,’ said Ice Dreamer. ‘So am I. We will stop soon.’
Soon. For now, they walked.
They walked east away from the setting sun, which this late in the day cast a pink glow the colour of Dreamer’s piss when she squatted. To the south, their right, was the forest’s scrubby fringe, birch and pine and a dense undergrowth now shot through with spring green. And to their left, the north, stretched a plain of grass and scrub and isolated stands of trees, where raccoons and voles ran, and sometimes you would see deer or bison or horse in distant herds. Some days it almost looked pretty, with scatters of early spring flowers.
And there were people, fast-moving, elusive hunters on the grass, and enigmatic shadowy foragers in the green depths of the forest. These weren’t Cowards. Dreamer and Reacher had walked far from the Cowards’ range. But they weren’t True People either. They were other sorts of strangers, folk Dreamer had never seen or heard of.
Dreamer kept them heading east, following the boundary between the southern forest and the northern plain, looking for a place where there were no people at all, nobody to drive them away. They walked as they had for uncounted days, while the world washed through its cycle of the seasons, and winter slowly relented. The child with a wounded leg that had now stiffened and smelled of rot, so she had to lean on the woman to make every step. And the woman with burdens of her own, the baby growing lustily in her belly, the pack on her back that weighed her down, the enduring ache in her torn thighs and her lower belly. They walked, for there was nothing else for them to do.
A faint breeze stirred from the east, lifting Dreamer from her numb self-absorption. She stopped, and Reacher stumbled against her, panting hard. Dreamer pushed back her deerskin hood and sniffed the air. For a moment she thought she tasted salt. Another lake ahead? But then the breeze shifted around to the north, to be replaced by the richer, dry, almost burned smell of the grassland.
Leaning heavily on Dreamer, Reacher tugged her sleeve. ‘Hungry!’
‘I know, child.’ Dreamer glanced around. The light was fading and they needed to find shelter. They were on the fringe of a dense clump of forest. She could detect no sign of people, smell no smoke, see no markings on the bark. She decided to take the chance. ‘Come on,’ she said to Reacher. ‘Just a little further.’
They limped together into the shade of the trees. They were mostly pine, tall old trees sparsely spread. It had rained recently – that was going to make it harder to find dry wood for the fire – and there was a rich warm smell of green growth and the rot of the last of the autumn’s leaves.
They came to a fallen tree that had ripped a disc of shallow roots out of the ground, leaving a rough hollow shaded by the root mass, a space that might give a little shelter. A little way away she saw a glimmer of open water. This would do. She dropped her pack with relief.
She spread a skin over the damp ground and helped Reacher lie down, favouring her bad leg. Reacher curled up like a baby, knees tucked up to her chest, and seemed to fall asleep immediately. Dreamer longed to rest herself, but she knew that if she lay down she wouldn’t be able to move again.
So she collected branches from the fallen tree, dragged them back to the root hollow, and leaned them against the roots to make a roof over Reacher’s body. She shook out more of her skins and laid them over the branches, then piled up bracken and leaves and dirt. This crude shelter would keep out any rain, and seal in the warmth of the fire – if she could get it started. She tucked the rest of her kit inside the shelter to keep it dry, the bag with the nuts and dried meat, the remains of Stone Shaper’s medicine bag.
Then she pulled out their traps and set them carefully around the forest floor, driving stakes of splintered bone into the ground. Maybe they would be lucky tonight. As she moved, she picked up bits of branch and bark, the older-looking the better; everything was wet, but last season’s falls would at least be dry inside and might burn.
At last she took a skin sack and filled it with water from the brackish pond, and crawled inside the shelter.
Reacher slept, still and silent. Dreamer carefully took her ember from the medicine bag. She placed it on a strip of bark, and began to feed it with dried moss, blowing carefully.
While the fire was taking, she dug with her fingers into the dirt, looking for worms and grubs.
Every time she built the fire she remembered their first night, after Mammoth Talker had led them into the kill site of the Cowards.
When the men had done with her they had walked back to their meat and their fires. Dreamer, half-conscious, naked, her body a mass of pain, could barely move.
An unknown time later Reacher had joined her, as naked as she was, the blood streaming from that gash on her leg. Reacher had helped her up, and they had hobbled away. Later Dreamer found she had slung Stone Shaper’s abandoned medicine bag around her neck. She didn’t remember picking it up. She hadn’t seen Stone Shaper since, and didn’t imagine she ever would again.
Nor did she remember how they had got back to the shelter under the rock ledge, where the rest of their stuff waited, untouched. That first night they had been able to do no more than huddle together under a heap of skins.