Nita Qwan felt his brother’s eyes on him. He sighed. ‘I’ll fetch him,’ he said.
Ota Qwan flicked him a hard smile. ‘Good. You won’t have to carry your buckets.’
He ran – and swam – back across the meadow to the ford, after a long look at the moving line of boglins. There were hundreds of them, and they were making no attempt at concealment but were passing along the eastern edge of the meadow.
They were heading for the ford.
He beat them to it.
Despite a hard summer of constant conditioning, he was breathing hard when he splashed through the water. The boy was lying flat, already rigid with terror but doing his best to conceal it.
Nita Qwan looked at the water’s edge – then at the far distant wood line to the east, and to the north, and made his decision.
‘They are on their way to cross here,’ he said. ‘We will go north. Around them. Come – I cannot carry you.’
The boy nodded grimly and they began to burrow into the dense alders that ringed the ford. Crawling through alder was almost impossible. The sight lines were less than five yards, and in Nita Qwan’s vivid imagination it seemed ideal terrain for the little boggles. He could all but see one coming, its horrible mandibles spreading wide to show its tooth-lined pink throat-
They crawled anyway, and when they had crawled for some time, they began to hear the rustling of the boglins. They were heavy enough to break the sticks forming the little beaver dams that filled the meadow, and quiet enough otherwise to make only a rustling noise as their sinewy legs passed through the grass.
‘Faster,’ Nita Qwan whispered. The nearest boggle was a short bowshot away.
They went down a short bank and were back at the stream – or another feeder stream. But the bottom of the stream was firm gravel, they didn’t have to crawl, and the icy cold water seemed to make walking easier for Gon, who didn’t complain despite the red blood he left on every wet rock as he went.
Their stream bed wound back and forth in short twists like a swimming snake. In no time Nita Qwan lost his bearings, and attempts to look over the side of the stream were fruitless – the tangle of tiny fir trees and alder bushes and fifty species of marsh grass made seeing any kind of view impossible, and the babble of the brook at the bottom of their course obscured all noise.
Nita Qwan cursed the other men, who were doubtless better at this and should have volunteered. But he kept going, as he had no other plan, back and forth up the stream bed.
Suddenly he stopped.
He could smell the boglins. The hard metallic scent – he remembered it from the siege of the rock.
‘Down,’ he hissed.
They curled up under the bank.
Even over the babble of the brook, they heard the rustling.
The boy’s heart was pounding so hard that Nita Qwan could feel it in his back. He was curled tight against the boy, his feet braced against a long-dead birch log, his arms wrapped in the roots of a still-living fir that sheltered them. The two of them were pressed tight into the roots, covered in swamp mud, but the boy’s foot continued dripping blood.
Nita Qwan’s thighs were burning with the effort of holding the boy up against the roots. He counted to one hundred.
The rustling was close.
He smelled that sharp odour again – and another. It burned the back of his throat; metallic and yet organic, like a strong musk.
And then it began to rain. It was a gentle rain, and in his fear and his desperate effort to find them some hiding place in this open meadow Nita Qwan had missed the change in temperature and the colour of the sky. The rain fell in big drops, heralded by a gust of wind that flattened the grass to the west, and for a moment Nita Qwan could clearly see a long line of boggles walking, heads down, across the open grass, headed north and west across the ford.
And then the rain line struck harder, and he couldn’t see so much as fifty feet. The rushing rain filled the stream and the swamp in moments, and banished the acrid boggle smell.
Nita Qwan didn’t know if they were still there, or not. He hung from the roots, waiting, watching the river fill under his belly, feeling the boy’s terror. He thought of his wife’s arse when she hoed corn, and that helped him for a bit. But in the end his muscles were screaming like a man being eaten alive, and he gave a gasp and they both fell into the icy water.
It was still only a few inches deep. And if there were any boglins about, they either didn’t see the two soaked men, or didn’t care. Faster and faster, the two humans worked their way upstream, across a long beaver dam built by beavers of the normal size, and then they were at the northern edge of the meadow.
The dam that stood there defied belief. Even with his gut muscles protesting, freezing cold, and lashed by the rain, Nita Qwan had to stare at the beaver dam he had mistaken for the edge of the woods. It stood as tall as an Alban town wall, forty feet or more. Whole trees – big trees – studded it. Water seeped through it and under it, coming from a body of water somewhere above. It was extraordinary.
‘Come on,’ Nita Qwan said. Visibility was cut to a short bowshot or less, and the rain was torrential. Climbing the dam had everything to recommend it – it would be hard for the boglins to follow them, and would give them better visibility. And Nita Qwan imagined that the top of the dam would be easier walking.
Nor was he disappointed. It took them long minutes to get up the dam – all brought on by the boy’s injured foot – but the top was as wide as a cart, and in some places covered in grass. And on the far side of the damn was a body of water that continued into the middle distance, covered in dead, standing trees, each one of which had a great nest in the top – and it was studded with more beaver castles.
They moved as quickly as the boy could over the top of the dam, and came down only a mile or so north of their camp. They passed two open pools of Wild honey, and Nita Qwan tried to mark them in his mind. The boy still had his buckets, so they filled them in the rain and moved on.
Twice they heard the mechanical buzzing sound of the great bees, but they didn’t see one. They walked on and on, and eventually Nita Qwan lost his little remaining faith in his sense of direction and stopped. He made his way to the light that he could see on his right hand, fearing that it would not be the great meadow, but it was, and he made his way back to the boy. The boy’s trust in him was total, and almost as frightening as the boggles had been. Then the light began to fade, the rain came harder, and Nita Qwan began to know real fear.
Finally, an hour or so before dark, he smelled smoke – and became conscious that he’d smelled smoke for some time. He saw a glow through the trees, and then a hard-edged flash of red-orange light, and he knew he was close. The two of them went faster and faster, and gathered more petty injuries and briar scratches in the last short distance than they had in all the rest of their long walk. At last, they came to the camp. Young Gon had his back slapped a dozen times, and he bore the teasing with dignity. Nita Qwan was amazed to see that the young man said nothing of their adventures.
Ota Qwan looked at the two full buckets of honey and nodded. ‘I knew you were the right man to send,’ he said, somewhat smugly.
‘You know there’s a dam the size of a city about a league north of here?’ Nita Qwan said, when they were alone and smoking. Everyone else was asleep, which Nita Qwan had found was a good time to talk to his brother. The other man didn’t bridle and resent his words so much when he didn’t have an audience. Ota Qwan had doubled the guard, though, because tonight, they had more to protect. The whole camp smelled of Wild honey – twenty-four buckets of it. The buckets were so full that insects clustered on them – Gas-a-ho’s buckets had already leaked a little and the smooth white birch bark was covered in needles stuck to the honey.