Page 60 of Circle of Days
Seft looked outside. There were bodies of woodlanders and herders on the ground, but the only living people he saw were herders. Those woodlanders who were not dead must have retreated, he deduced. Wounded herders were being helped by those who had escaped injury.
It seemed the woodlanders had not stolen anything. Clearly robbery was not the purpose of the raid. So it must have been revenge. After what had been done to them, it was hardly surprising.
Cruelty begets cruelty, Seft thought, and violence begets violence.
The elders met in the morning, as the smoke of cremation formed a dark cloud over Riverbend. Everyone was still shocked. Nothing like this had ever happened to them. Even Scagga, always spoiling for a fight, seemed shaken.
However, he took his usual belligerent attitude, albeit with a tremor in his voice. “We have to make sure these savages can never do anything like this again.”
Ani said: “Best way to do that would be not to burn woods again.”
Scagga shook his head. “We can’t allow these people to live.”
She said angrily: “Do you really not know that what happened last night was your fault?”
“Don’t you dare say that, you stupid bitch.”
Keff intervened. “No more of that talk, please, both of you. Concentrate on what we need to do now.”
Scagga said: “All of Bez’s tribe must be killed. It’s the only way for us to be safe.”
Ani said: “There may not be many left to be killed. The farmers murdered all the children and the old. We know that a certain number have simply left the tribe. And a lot were killed last night.”
“I don’t care!” said Scagga. “If there are two left, we must kill them. Or one!”
Ani stopped arguing. She knew, from conversations earlier that morning, that most herders felt the same as Scagga. For once she had no alternative to propose. Scagga could at last have the war he had been advocating for years.
He would be happy.
Bez sat with his back to a tree in the remnant of West Wood, with Gida by his side.
He had been wounded in the raid. A herder had stabbed his backside with a knife.
He had struggled to walk from Riverbend to West Wood.
Next day the wound became swollen and painful, and soon the whole of his leg turned a nasty shade of brown. He felt hot.
When the wound began to stink, he knew his life was coming to its end.
The tribe no longer existed. Half had been killed by farmers in the massacre.
Half of those who remained, the adult men and women, had died in their attack on Riverbend.
The rest were drifting away in ones and twos.
They talked loosely of leaving the Great Plain.
Some headed for the Northwest Hills, where they knew the landscape.
Others favored crossing South River. It was unknown territory, but that was its appeal.
They would try to exist on squirrels and hedgehogs and wild vegetables, and hope that someday another woodlander tribe might welcome them.
Bez covered his leg with earth to suppress the smell. He had stopped eating, but he had a jug of water beside him. Gida sat with him during the day, and lay beside him at night, under their shearling coats.
She would not talk about where she might go after he died.
They recalled their life together, with its joys and sadnesses. “How lucky we are to have Lali,” said Bez. “So smart, and almost as beautiful as you.”
“Much more so,” Gida said with a laugh. “But how sad that Fell died.”
Bez touched the necklace of bear’s teeth at his throat. “Worst time of my life,” he said. “Until they burned our wood.”
Gida brought up a more cheerful memory. “Remember the time we tried to make love in a tree?”
Bez laughed. “We were young, we thought we could do anything.”
“I don’t believe we really considered how dangerous it was.”
“You held me so tightly!”
“I was afraid you’d fall.”
They ran out of memories and began to sing. There were songs about hunting deer, and finding birds’ nests, and falling in love. Sometimes they sang the songs that sent children to sleep.
As the afternoon darkened, Bez said: “The woodlander life is happy. We eat hazelnuts when we’re hungry, we make love with anyone who’s willing, and we accept death when it comes, as animals do.
But our way of life cannot go on. Soon all the people will be herders or farmers, jealously guarding their cattle and their fields, working hard and living unhappily. ”
“It’s a shame,” said Gida. “But we had a good life.”
“Yes, we did,” said Bez, then he closed his eyes, as if to sleep.
Joia watched the young men and women getting ready to march. They had been told that the survivors in Bez’s tribe had returned to the remnant of West Wood, and they were going there to kill them.
Some looked angrily determined, no doubt aiming to avenge the deaths of family members.
Others were laughing and joking, happy to be part of Scagga’s army.
Herders loved to go somewhere in a huge crowd on some mission.
As they put arrows in quivers and measured bowstrings, they must have known that the object of the exercise was to kill and be killed; but that did not seem to spoil their mood.
No one in Joia’s family was involved. Neen and Seft were the right age, in their twenties, but neither wanted to kill woodlanders, despite what had happened on Midwinter Night.
Ani was too old but she would not have gone anyway.
Neen’s children were too young, happily.
Joia wondered whether Ilian would be eager to fight in a few years’ time. So many adolescents were.
Scagga appeared and shouted: “Time to go—now! Everybody. It’s a short day and we don’t want to be walking half the night.”
They began to move through the village. People came to their doorways to wish them well. The marchers relished the attention, the cheers and smiles, the blown kisses and a few real ones.
On impulse Joia joined them. She did not know what was going to happen, but she wanted to be there and see it. And with Ello ill, there was no one to reprimand her. Without telling anyone, she walked with them out of the village.
They were about fifty, she counted. They sang rhythmic songs that helped them keep a steady pace, and they had funny chants that made no sense but rhymed. The effort of an all-day walk with nothing to eat was part of the fun.
The festive mood struck Joia as grotesquely inappropriate.
Water was scarce, and they followed a predetermined route that took in some of the few streams and ponds left by the drought.
It was dusk when they smelled roast beef and knew they were near the village of Old Oak. Joia guessed that Scagga had sent a quickrunner forward to tell Zad to slaughter a cow.
They all had to sleep in the open, but it did not rain, and as Joia drifted off to sleep she had the impression of some romantic activity around her. That would be another attraction of a long march.
In the morning there was hot soup and cold beef, then they set off on the final leg of the journey. Now the mood was somber: today they had to kill an entire woodlander tribe, or what was left of it, and there was no doubt that the woodlanders would fight back.
They passed Farmplace and saw the women and men in their fields. There were fewer farmers since the massacre.
Going west, they passed the shocking sight of the burned wood.
The few trees left standing were black and leafless, stark monuments to the dead forest. In the distance, a green blur was the remnant of the wood.
As they got closer they strung their bows and readied their arrows.
Joia, who had no intention of killing anyone, stayed at the back of the march.
She expected that at any moment the woodlanders would burst forth from the greenery brandishing their clubs and axes, but the place was oddly quiet. Could it be an ambush? The herder army entered the wood cautiously and immediately came to a clearing with a couple of houses but no people.
Joia noticed flakes of black in the bushes and in the trees. Then she saw a flash of white on the ground. She thought about what these things might mean.
Scagga ordered his army to spread out and search the remainder of the woodland. Joia remained at the clearing, waiting for them to come back. She knew how it would be and, sure enough, they returned to report that there were no woodlanders anywhere.
The young men and women of Scagga’s army now looked bewildered.
Joia remembered that she was a priestess, and thought that perhaps the gods had led her here for a reason. She decided to speak.
She raised her voice so that everyone could hear.
“This is a cursed place,” she said, and she had their attention immediately.
“Here the little children and the old folk of Bez’s tribe were murdered by the farmers.
” She spread her arm to indicate what was all around.
“Open your eyes. In the bushes, on the leaves, even in the trees, you see flakes of ash.” They all looked and saw what she meant.
“So many people were cremated here that their ashes have not all blown away yet.”
Everyone knew about the massacre, but standing here where the helpless children and old folk were slaughtered brought it vividly to their imagination, and they looked appalled.
Scagga clearly did not know what to say.
Joia picked up the white object she had seen on the ground.
“You may have seen this necklace before,” she said.
“It’s made of bear’s teeth. A woodlander called Fell had it, and when Fell died it went to his brother, Bez, the leader of the West Wood folk.
Somehow it survived the cremation.” She looked directly at Scagga.
“You came here to kill Bez, but you’re too late.
He’s already dead, and all that is left of him is his necklace. ”
She paused to let that sink in, then added: “The rest of his tribe are either dead or gone away. There is no one left to kill.”
They were silent for a long moment.
Then Joia began to sing the song for the dead.
Some of the marchers looked at her as if she were mad.
But she kept on singing, for she could see people weeping.
Another woman put down her bow and joined in the song, then a third and a fourth did likewise.
Scagga was angry but bemused, not knowing what to do; and soon most of his army were singing, many crying at the same time.
The birds fell silent in the trees, and the leaves quivered as the voices shook the air.
The sad remnant of West Wood trembled with a lament for the people who now lay, silent forever, beneath the soil of their ruined homeland.