Tyler was frozen for a moment.
Then he started to sob.
Dawn was a watery grey by the time Redmede got them back to camp. He feared everything by then – feared that the camp had been hit, that the Jacks were all dead too – he was awash in fear as the rain fell and fell, and first light found him stumbling like the greenest runaway serf through the wet woods just a few hundred paces from his fire.
There was no hiding Tyler’s state. The man was moaning, and Redmede cursed himself for leaning too hard on a sick man.
Somehow, with curses and cajolery and all the persuasion he could muster, he got his Jacks to pack their gear and leave the warmth of the fire and march.
By midday they were all soaked to the skin – both by the fitful rain and the wet forest, wet grass, wet ferns. There was no wool, no matter how well woven, that could repel so much water. His shoes squelched when he stepped, and when they had to cross a deep stream swollen with days of rain, every man and women simply ploughed through it, bows over their heads. No one tried to skip across the stepping stones.
By mid-morning, they had to carry Tyler again and there was some grumbling about it. Bess put a stop to it, and she and another woman carried the old ranger without complaint.
In the early afternoon, a boy from Harndon sat down by the trail and refused walk any further. ‘I just want to go home!’ he said.
Redmede was numb. He shook his head. ‘The Wild will eat you,’ he said.
‘I don’t care!’ the boy wailed. ‘I can’t walk! Me feet’s rubbed raw, an’ I haven’t had any food in days. Got the rheum. Let ’em eat me!’
Redmede hit him. The boy looked at him in stunned disbelief.
‘Get up and walk or I’ll kill you myself,’ Redmede said.
The boy got heavily to his feet and started to hobble away. He was crying.
Redmede felt like a caitiff.
Bess stood at his shoulder and shook her head. ‘That wasn’t the way, Bill Redmede,’ she said. ‘You sounded like a lord, not a comrade.’
‘Fuck you, Bess,’ he spat. Then he held up a hand. ‘That’s only weakness talkin’. I was up all night with Nat. The boglins attacked us.’
Bess’s eyes widened. ‘But we’re allies!’
Redmede shrugged.
And they headed west.
An hour later they came to the third stream of the day. The advance guard splashed across and the main body followed, and on the far side they found another abandoned irk village – this one with the roofs intact. In a moment they were inside, drier than they’d been in a day, and within an hour there were fires lit.
There was no food and Redmede couldn’t get more than a handful of volunteers to leave the huts and stand guard, so there he was, standing silently behind a screen of leaves, when he saw movement across the stream. The irk village was cunningly placed and difficult to approach, on a bluff of packed earth with low ramparts and palisades. But Redmede had posted his guards out across the cornfields – these, unfortunately, were bereft of corn.
He watched the movement. They weren’t boglins – they were both cautious and, by comparison, clumsy. He saw a flash of green – and a man emerged into the open. There was just enough light in the sky for Redmede to know him.
The man standing at the edge of the ford was Cat.
Behind him was Grey Cal.
Redmede held on to his whoop of delight and instead whistled the recognition call. Grey Cal straightened up, and whistled ‘Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son’ in response. Redmede called like a meadowlark, and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, he was embracing his lost sheep.
Cal hugged him tightly. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘That was nasty. This loon saved my life.’
Cat chuckled and smiled to himself.
‘We had a deer, but we dropped it when the boggles gave chase,’ Cat said. ‘The little bastards are everywhere.’
Cal nodded. ‘I lost my boys,’ he admitted. ‘We had to run. When they didn’t run far or fast enough, they got ate.’
Redmede nodded heavily. ‘We don’t have any food,’ he admitted in turn.
‘We don’t either,’ Cal said. ‘And a body can’t hunt. It’s just giving meat to the boggles.’ He shrugged. ‘Not to mention this fucking rain.’
Cat produced some raspberries. ‘I’ll share,’ he said in his odd, sing-song voice.
Redmede hesitated, but decided that if he didn’t eat then he might as well die. The wiry boy had filled his whole copper with the berries – they were delicious, and the three men ate their fill.
‘You carried them all this way?’ asked Cal. ‘No offence to Bill, but we could’a stopped an et anytime.’
Cat smiled enigmatically. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Not until now.’
In the morning, people were hard to wake and slow to rise. The more experienced men went and stripped sassafras by the stream to make tea. Cat, prowling the high ground north of the village, found the hives, and came back sticky and triumphant, and every man and woman had two cups of hot, honeyed sassafras tea.
And six or seven berries.
‘Just enough to make you fucking hungry,’ Bess said on behalf of everyone’s thoughts.
And then they went west. Again.
The streams were coming more and more frequently, and their crossings became sloppier with each one. The advance guard no longer stayed a hundred paces ahead of the main body, not even after noon when Redmede halted them in the watery sunlight and reset the intervals.
He pointed at the low hills to the north. ‘There’s boglins in those hills,’ he said. ‘Or worse. Stop slacking off or we’ll all be dead.’
‘Dead anyway,’ shouted someone in the crowd.
Redmede swallowed that and took charge of the vanguard for a few miles. But well before it was time to make camp, Cat appeared at his shoulder and jerked a thumb in the direction of the rear of the column. ‘They’re falling behind,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘More and more of the green ones. Some are just sitting by the trail.’
‘You and Cal go and find me a campsite,’ he said.
Redmede saw Bess carrying Tyler. He patted her shoulder, squeezed Tyler’s hand, and headed back along the column. However far he went, the men at the end told him that they were keeping up and there were more further back.
He’d just found the same boy as the day before, sitting under a tree, when he heard shouting from the front – now far away.
The boy didn’t wait to be argued with, or struck. He got to his feet and started hobbling forward, cursing. He was crying again.
‘Are there more behind you?’ Redmede asked, but the boy just kept going.
Redmede stood on the trail in complete indecision for a long moment – and then unslung his bow and slowly drew it from the heavy linen bags. He’d messed it up properly – he needed to sharpen up the march order and keep his people together. He needed folk he could trust at the front and back. He wasn’t going to lose anyone else. He started to walk back, sure that his headcount was six men short, and equally sure that something was watching him. With practised ease he began to string his bow, the bottom nock firm against his sodden right foot. He pulled and found how weak he was when it was a struggle just to get the string in place. But his string was dry enough, and his bow was dry. He put a shaft on the great bow, and breathed a little easier as he jogged back east into the gloom.
He rounded a sharp curve in the old trail and saw boglins. There were thirty or forty, all together in a mass, and two of his people, back to back, hitting the little things with their walking staffs while a third man fought with a sword – somewhat wildly, but with effect.
Redmede had feathered three boggles before he really realised what he was seeing, and then the boggles were gone, and the thin man with the long sword stumbled – obviously wounded.
They were deep into twilight – the best time of day for boggle eyes and the worst for men. Redmede ran forward.
He saw what had happened to his other men. They were the reason the boggles had been all clumped up, and they were red ruins.