Brian Ruckley - Exile

‘Well, the Free are waiting for them at some pass called the Hung Gate,’ Wren said. ‘I imagine that’ll be the end of the Huluk Kur.’

‘Hung Gate’s a good idea, right enough. Tight ground, could let the few beat the many. And if all the dying’s going to get done up there, we can rest a little easier. That’s far enough north of here we won’t even be able to smell the corpse-fires.’

Wren watched him for a moment or two. He would not meet her gaze. Still, there was just a hint of a softening. There had been that fleeting interest in her abilities, and he seemed almost willing to talk. A crack in the wall, or just a trick of her stubborn hope?

‘Let’s get to the rest of the snares,’ Ammenor said after a little while.

‘I’m done.’

Ammenor leaned against a twisted pine. It stood alone on exposed ground. The wind and cold had stunted and bent it.

They had been walking for a good hour. Wren did not know how these things usually went, but suspected that a single squirrel was a miserable haul. Ammenor hung his head and closed his eyes as he sucked in the mountain air.

Wren clasped the edges of her blanket about her neck. She rubbed at her cheeks. Her feet were almost numb now.

‘There are two more snares down there,’ Ammenor said.

He gestured towards the wide open, rock-strewn land ahead. Wren looked where he pointed, frowning in suspicion. She could guess what he was about to say and did not like it.

‘See that broken tree?’ he asked her. ‘The stump?’

Two or three hundred paces further on stood a chest-high stump of a tree that had been blasted by lightning or snapped by the wind. Wren said nothing.

‘There’s a snare on the far side of it. Then another the same distance on, in a straight line. It’s in a gap between two juniper bushes, beside a stream.’

He glanced at her expectantly. Still she said nothing.

‘I have good days and I have bad days,’ Ammenor said. ‘That’s what the entelechs get you. Today’s not as good a day as I thought it was.’

She felt a sliver of pity for him.

‘You can find your way back to the Cold Men?’ he asked her.

She thought about it and, not without reluctance, nodded.

‘Be kind enough to check the last snares for me,’ Ammenor said. The words hung in that imprecise space between statement, instruction and request, having a bit of each about them. ‘Do that and you can have another night of shelter and food.’

Wren did not know whether he was trying to lose her or whether he truly needed her help. In the end, she chose to believe the latter. And she did, she was sure, know her way back to his cottage so what harm could come of that belief?

‘Thank you,’ Ammenor said quietly as he pushed himself away from the tree.

She watched him walk heavily back the way they had come. He did look exhausted. His shoulders were low. His limp was worse, more marked, than it had been before. Wren pursed her lips. He might not be the man she had hoped and needed to find but that was not entirely his fault. He was who he was; it had been her dreams and longings that tried to make him something else. She could hardly blame him for not answering the question she had shaped her life into.

Then he glanced back over his shoulder and called out, ‘Gather some firewood on your way back, would you?’ And Wren decided she might be able to spare a little blame for him after all.

She found the first snare without any difficulty, there at the base of the blasted tree. Empty like all the rest.

The second was not so easy. Between juniper bushes beside a stream, Ammenor had said. The stream was nothing more than a feeble trickle in a tiny channel winding its way between turf and rocks. He had neglected to warn her that there were dozens of low, scrubby junipers strewn along its banks though. Dozens and dozens and dozens.

Wren doggedly kept searching longer than was entirely reasonable. She never found the snare. Beyond the little stream, the ground grew rough and uneven. It was a confusing muddle of rocks and grass and lichens and snow patches, all the different shades and textures conspiring to disorientate the eye. The sprawling junipers hid traps, and eventually she stubbed her toe, hard, on a stone.

Cursing, she straightened. For the first time since she had parted from Ammenor, she lifted her gaze towards the horizon. Until that moment she had been watching her footing, searching the ground. By coming down here she had emerged from the shielding wall of a long, high spur and could only now take in a huge sweep of the hills and mountains in a single glance. That was what she did, and as she did it she saw the Huluk Kur. All of them.

It was like nothing she had ever seen before. A fragmented, disjointed river of humanity creeping its way across the rugged landscape. Not an army, but an entire people. Thousand after thousand. The closest of them were barely a mile from where she stood. The rest stretched out beyond sight.

There were bands of men mounted on rugged little horses, riding at the head of the march. They were spread out. Behind them came everyone and everything else. Men, women and children; some riding but most walking. Trains of horses and mules carried great mounds of baggage. Simple two-wheeled wagons trundled along. Lines of captives, ropes yoking their necks together, walked in the midst of the column. Most of them were bent low by the weight of the supplies they carried.

Wren stared at this spectacle with something approaching awe. They were too far from her for any clear sound to carry but she could imagine it. The rumble and the grinding and the clatter and clank. She had thought she understood what it meant when people spoke of the Huluk Kur being on the move. She had not. It was the kind of thing that could only be truly understood by seeing it. A black and grey and brown host laid out over hill after hill, trudging snow to mud so that it left a dark stain across the whole landscape as if some sky giant had reached down and gouged a furrow across the earth with a single massive finger.

Her eyes tracked back along the length of the vast column. Beyond it, rising from behind the distant peaks its tail was still crossing, there were indistinct pillars of smoke. They left corpses behind them, Ammenor had said. Fires too. This was havoc on the march.

And it was all wrong, Wren thought grimly. It must be. Everything Ammenor had said, everything she had assumed meant that the Huluk Kur should be far away. There was no pass for them to cross here, only high cruel ground and snow and wind. The Free and the King’s army were waiting for them at the Hung Gate. That was not here.

The sound of stone on stone might be unremarkable in a place such as this, where the bones of the earth were exposed to the air. There was something in the single grating rasp, though, that made Wren shrink down before she was even sure where it came from. She made herself small.

A band of Huluk Kur were coming out from a stand of lean pine trees. They emerged cautiously onto a field of loose rocks and scree. Stones moved beneath their feet. Wren was above them, barely two hundred paces distant. Hidden, she hoped, by the undulations of the rough ground. She glanced over her shoulder. Instinct again. Marking the position of sun and skyline, to be sure she would not silhouette herself.

They must be scavengers or scouts, ranging ahead and away from the main host. They were on foot, for which she gave small thanks. Nothing else about them was remotely encouraging or comforting. They were heavy with muscle and thick-furred jackets and weaponry. They moved across the hillside with all the ease and alert confidence of wolves.

Wren pressed herself down, entirely out of sight. Her last glimpse of them stayed with her though. The closest of the brawny men had wrapped around his belt a roll of blue cloth. Another had a blue tunic tied about his neck like a short cape. She knew what that meant; she did not need to concern herself about the Clade any more. The cruel men who hunted her had met something much worse than themselves in this bleak land.