He grinned. ‘Thanks. I’m enjoying learning how to hunt from the masters. The range of signs they look for, the animals’ scent, piss, scut, saliva, signs of feeding, broken twigs… Even a bent blade of grass tells a story. And they don’t just track the animals, they seem to try to guess how it thinks, where it will go, the decisions it will make. Remarkable. No wonder the Pretani eat so well.’
‘I thought you’d turn back in a day, or I’d be carrying your pack after two.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m a priest. Priests don’t have to do a lot of walking, or carrying. But I was a boy before I became a priest. I won a lot of the kids’ challenges at the Giving feasts – this was when you were small, I guess you wouldn’t remember. Once I was chosen I gave all that up. People don’t want to find themselves being beaten in some race by a priest – or, worse, to beat him. It complicates relationships.’
‘How were you chosen?’
‘Old Petru touched my shoulder one day. You remember him, the priest before me? He told me he saw I was more interested in people than in hunting or fishing.’
‘In people? Not in the spirits?’
‘Petru said the way to hear the spirits is to listen to other people. I think he was right. And listening is the point of having a priest in the first place.’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He studied her coolly. ‘Even when no words are spoken, there is always something to listen to.’
That confused her, and she went on the offensive. ‘I still don’t understand why my father was so keen for you to come with me.’
He glanced over at the Pretani. ‘A man of Etxelur beside you when you sleep will make you seem less available to our hosts.’
‘I don’t need some man to fight for me.’
‘I understand that. As does your father. But he doesn’t want you fighting at all. There has been enough fighting. That’s why he chose me. I am a man, but not a man who fights. Now, are you going to eat the rest of that mushroom or not?’
She took some more mushroom, but the flesh was heavy, tasteless. Suddenly it made her nauseous. She left the rest to him.
The nausea didn’t go away. That night she slept badly, her stomach churning.
And in the morning, in the dawn light before most of the Pretani woke to begin their ritual of comparing overnight erections and noisy pissing, she found her belly convulsing. She staggered to the root of a tree and threw up, expelling half-chewed lumps of fungus. Jurgi rubbed her back until the vomiting was over, then gave her a wooden cup of water. He wasn’t perturbed; oddly he seemed to have been expecting this.
It had probably been the mushrooms.
30
The Root, following well-defined tracks, led them south until they broke out of the woodland and reached a coastal strip just north of an immense estuary. This was the mouth of a river pouring from the south-west, such an immense flow that the sea was discoloured by fresh water far from the shore. The Pretani called this the Great River.
Zesi knew where she was, roughly. All of Northland was like a great neck connecting Gaira and the eastern lands to the peninsula of Albia to the west. Just here that neck was close to its narrowest; only a few days’ walk south of here was another mighty estuary, fringed, so she had heard, with cliffs of dazzling white rock – the homeland of the snailheads.
They walked on, skirting the mud flats of the river mouth, disturbing flocks of birds. On the salt marsh sea lavender grew, attracting buzzing bees, and redshank and curlews fed busily. In the distance Zesi often saw threads of smoke rising, and flat-bottomed boats sliding over the glimmering waters: folk of the marshes living off prawns and crabs and eels and birds’ eggs, as such folk did everywhere. She felt a flicker of curiosity. Would these isolated folk speak the same kind of language as the Pretani, or Northland folk, or another sort of tongue entirely? But the Pretani marched on without stopping, and she never found out.
Now they followed trails that ran south and west, parallel with the river and pushing deep into the heart of Albia. Willow grew by the water’s edge, and where the river widened into a flood plain trees grew sparsely, mostly hazel and alder.
But it was on the higher land away from the flood plain that the true forest started to take hold, dominated by oak and lime, with groves of hazel in their green shade. Some of the oaks grew huge, much larger than any tree Zesi had seen before, with massive wide trunks that towered up to dense tangles of branches. You had an overwhelming impression of age, of weight, of stern solidity. Zesi could see why the Pretani’s imaginative lives were so dominated by such trees.
But she found the country difficult, claustrophobic. Away from the scraps of higher ground the great trees grew so thickly they formed a canopy that excluded the light, and at the oaks’ feet little grew save ferns and mushrooms amid a litter of dead, crisp-crunching leaves. Sometimes she would hear the rain hiss on the leaves far above, but barely a drop would reach the ground. The most attractive places were, oddly, places of death. When one of the great trees fell, perhaps struck by lightning, it could bring down its neighbours and open up a stretch of the canopy. In the brief gift of sunlight plants and saplings grew feverishly around the wreck, competing to reach the canopy before it sealed over again.
It was always quiet here in the gloom, with the birdsong restricted to the canopy far above. She rarely saw animals or their signs – deer and wild boar, perhaps a squirrel scurrying in the higher branches, badger setts, mouse holes around tree roots. But the Pretani hunters were usually successful when they went on a raid.
And the nights were strange, the forest full of the cries of birds and animals she didn’t recognise. Sometimes in the dark she heard shuffling, twigs cracking and leaves rustling. There were bears in these woods; the Pretani told her all about the size of their claws.
The Pretani were at home here. In the forest shade, with their dark fur cloaks and massive frames, they were like figures carved of oak wood themselves. As they walked they looked out for the hives of wood ants, huge brown mounds that could be as tall as a person. The Pretani would shove their arms into these and bring out handfuls of big wriggling insects that they popped into their mouths and ate like berries.
Jurgi said the hives reminded him of Novu’s rapt descriptions of Jericho.
On their third day in the forest, with the sluggish river a few hundred paces away, they came to a particularly gnarled tree, obviously very old. It was not tall, but its branches were a tangle, its flank scarred by the stumps of fallen limbs. Its bark was cracked and punctured, and the trunk was pocked by deep holes.
The Pretani seemed to recognise the tree. The hunters dumped their packs by the roots and dispersed to empty their bladders, set up lean-tos. The Root slapped the tree’s bark, and walked around it as if checking it was healthy.
Zesi murmured, ‘He treats that tree like an old friend.’
‘The very old trees are special,’ Jurgi said. ‘The priests come to them for certain types of plants and fungi and insects that flourish nowhere else. And then there’s the very age of the thing. Look at it, bent like an old man – a witness to generation after generation. These Pretani aren’t altogether without sensitivity. ’ He sighed, and began to unfold his and Zesi’s packs.
Zesi walked off into the forest, looking for wood for the fire. She came to a younger oak with a broken, dangling branch. It would come away with a hard tug, she decided, and would make a good mass to be dragged back to camp.
She thought she heard something overhead, a rustle in the leaves. She glanced up but saw nothing but shadows.