The red thing wrinkled its lips as if he smelled something bad and Peter’s perspective shifted. It was actually a man in red paint, with his hair full of some sort of red mud.
Peter turned slightly to face the man. He held up his empty hands. ‘I will not be a slave,’ he said.
The red man raised his head and literally looked down his nose at Peter, who shivered. The arrow, at full draw, didn’t waver.
‘Ti natack onah!’ the red man said in a tone full of authority. A human voice.
‘I don’t understand,’ Peter said. His voice trembled. The red man was obviously a war-leader of some sort, which meant that there were others around. Whatever kind of men they were, they were not what Peter had expected. They raised his hopes, and dashed them.
‘Ti natack onah!’ the man said again, with increasing insistence. ‘TI NATACK ONAH.’
Peter put his hands up in the air. ‘I surrender!’ he said.
The red man loosed his arrow.
It passed Peter, missing him by the width of his arm, and Peter felt his bowels flip over. He crouched, his knees going out from under him, and he put his arms around himself, cursing his own weakness. And so quickly I am a slave again.
Behind him there was a scream.
The red man had put an arrow into the sow’s head, and she twitched a few times and was dead.
Suddenly the barn was full of painted men – red, red and black, black with white handprints, black with a skull face. They were terrifying and they moved with a liquid, muscular grace that was worse than all his imaginings of the creatures of the Wild. As he watched, they butchered the sow and her unborn piglets, and he was pulled from the barn – roughly, but without malice – and the red man lit a torch from a very ordinary looking fire-kit and set fire to the shingles of the barn.
It lit off like an alchemical display, despite weeks of rain.
More of the warriors came, and then more – perhaps fifty arrived within the hour. They passed through the cabin, and when the roof fell into the raging inferno of the barn, they gathered half-burned boards into a smaller fire, and then another and another, until they had a fire that ran the length of the small cabin, and then staked the unborn piglets on green alder and some iron stakes they found in the cabin and roasted them. Other men found the underground storage cellar, and pushed dried corn into the coals, and apples – hundred of apples.
By now there were a hundred painted men and women, and darkness was falling. Most had a bow and arrows; a few had a long knife, or a sword, or even, in one case, a pair of swords. A few had long falls of hair in brilliant colours, but most had a single stripe of hair atop their heads, and another across their genitals. They looked odd to him, but it was only after his brain began to grow accustomed to them that he realised that they had no fat on their frames.
No fat.
Like slaves.
No one was watching him. He was no threat, but he was also no use. He had a dozen opportunities to run, and he went as far as the edge of the clearing, where the farmer had been hacking down trees older than his own grandfather to make room for his crops. Then he stopped, lay on the low branch of an apple tree, and watched.
Before the ruddy sun was gone from the sky, he stripped off his hose and his braes – cheap, dirty, torn cloth – and walked back among them in his shirt. A few of them had shirts of deerskin or linen, and he hoped that he was making a statement.
He still had the wallet hanging over his shoulder, and the axe.
And the bow.
He came and stood near the barn-fire, feeling the warmth, and his stomach did somersaults as he smelled the burning pig-flesh.
One of the painted people had set fire to the cabin, and there was laughter. Another painted man had burned himself stealing pinches of pigs flesh from the sow’s carcass, and all the warriors around him were laughing like daemons.
If there was a signal he didn’t hear it. But suddenly, they all fell on the piglets as if a dining bell had sounded, and ate. It was like watching animals eat. There were few sounds besides those of chewing, ripping flesh from bone, punctuated by the spitting out of burned bits and cartilage and the continuing sound of laughter.
If it hadn’t been for the laughter, it might have been nightmarish. But the laughter was warm and human, and Peter found he had stepped closer and closer to the fires, drawn by the smell of food and the sound of laughter.
The red man was close to him. Suddenly, their eyes met, and the red man gave him the flash of a grin – almost a grimace – and waved a rib at him.
‘Dodeck?’ he asked. ‘Gaerleon?’
The other warriors close by turned and looked at Peter.
One man – taller than most, painted an oily black, with oily black hair and a single slash of red across his face – turned and grinned. ‘You want to eat?’ he said. ‘Skadai asks you.’
Peter took another step forward. He was intensely conscious of his legs and neck and face, naked and very different from theirs.
The red man – Skadai – waved to him. ‘Eat!’ he said.
Another warrior laughed and said something in the alien tongue, and Skadai laughed. And the black warrior laughed too.
‘Was it your pig?’ the black warrior asked.
Peter shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was just passing through.’
The black warrior appeared to translate this to his friends, and handed him a portion of pig.
He ate it. He ate too fast, burning his hands on the skin and his tongue on the meat and fat.
The black warrior handed him a gourd that proved to be full of wine. Peter drank, sputtered and then handed it back. The burns on his hands suddenly hurt.
They were all watching him.
‘I was a slave,’ he said suddenly. As if they could understand. ‘I won’t be a slave again. I’d rather be dead. I won’t be a slave for you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But short of slavery, I’d like to join you.’
The black warrior nodded. ‘I was a slave, too,’ he said. He smiled wryly. ‘Well – of sorts.’
In the morning, they were up with the first tendrils of dawn, moving down the narrow road that Peter had climbed the day before. They moved in complete silence, their only communication via whistles and birdcalls. Peter attached himself to the black warrior, who called himself Ota Qwan. Ota Qwan followed Skadai, who seemed, as far as Peter could tell, to be the captain. Not that he issued any orders.
No one spoke to Peter, but then, no one spoke much anyway, so he focused on trying to move the way they did. He was not a noisy man in the woods, and no one cautioned him – he followed Ota Qwan as best he could, across an alder swamp, up a low ridge dotted with stands of birch, and then west along a deer trail through beech highlands, with a lake stretching away to the right of the long ridge and the great river stretched out to the left.
They moved across the face of the wilderness, sometimes following trails and sometimes following the flow of the terrain, and their paths gradually made sense to Peter – they were following a relatively straight course west, and avoiding the river. He had no sense of how many of them there were, even when they made camp, because that night, they simply stopped and lay down, all nestled tightly in a tangle of bodies and limbs. No one had a blanket, few had shirts, and the night was cold. Peter found he despised the touch of another against him, front and back, but his revulsion was quickly forgotten in sleep.
In the rainy grey of not-quite-morning, he offered some very stale bread from his sack to Ota Qwan, who accepted it with gratitude, took a small bite, and handed the crust on. Men watched it eagerly, but no one protested when the bread ran out before the mouths did. Peter hadn’t even had a bite. He had expected it to be handed back. But he shrugged.
On his second night with the painted people he couldn’t sleep at all. It rained softly, and the sensation of wet flesh – paint, grit, and a man’s naked thigh against his own – made him get up shiver alone. Eventually he crept back into the pile of bodies, disgusted but almost frozen.