“Stay with me.” Kalik’s voice shook. “You’ll see some action!” By the causeway gate, he shifted, tried the point of his spear. One hand brushed the knife on his belt, went back to it, half-pulled it, thrust it down in the sheath, loosened it again. He breathed fast. Whenever I think of the battle with the Salt Men, I hear Kalik’s breathing, excited.
The darkness rustled, warriors slipping into place behind fences and palisades, climbing to the fighting platforms over both gates. Bows being strung. Fingers trying them, the quick-silenced twangs. Silence gripped as if the Headland dreamed beneath a spell. So quiet, I heard Kalik swallow. Someone pissing against a post, someone else sniggering nervous: the whisper that hushed them both. From the platform of the Roundhouse, invisible herself until the light strengthened, Lutha would be able to see everything spread below.
I trembled and touched my lips, tight, drawn back in a nervous grin. I reached for Nip’s head, and remembered she was in the hut, nursing her bruises.
To the approaching Salt Men, it must seem the Headland slept bandaged in darkness. Their rafts edged across the lake, canoes circling, keeping them together. Hugging the ground, more Salt Men slithered out of the hills and across the causeway. The place would be theirs by surprise.
A bird twittered. One bird waking. Then silence as if it had gone back to sleep. The twitter again. A long silence. A third twitter. Its note of uncertainty picked up by another. And another. As they began every morning. One over there. One a bit closer. Another across there. Tentative, trying out their voices. Unsure about the grey in the east.
Then I realised one call had changed. A sharp whistle from the Roundhouse platform. A bird replied from the lake gate, another from beside me, and their calls were lost under the malicious susurrus of arrows riding the air. Shrieks from the lake and the causeway. Horns thrilled and boomed. Cheers. And tock! tock! – arrows from the Salt Men hitting posts, huts, the ground. The sodden knock as, here and there, they struck flesh. Cries. Then light coming up on the lake. Lutha signalling from the platform.
At the causeway gate – from behind fences either side – we speared the attackers. Turmoil. Bellow. Thrust and thrust. Another wave surged across the causeway, folded beneath a wind of arrows. Kalik gave an order. A party sallied out, stabbing, clubbing. The main attack turned, escaped.
“Now!” Kalik and I leapt into a canoe below the causeway. Groans, cries somewhere above. A short passage, and we jumped out, the paddlers after us. Through a gap between gardens and vines we ran. Flung ourselves down.
“Ahhh!” Shrieked horror as we rose out of the ground. Our spears swung and swung again. Kalik and I, hand to hand. Cantering after, hacking, slaying, a howling red blur.
Kalik tripped. A berserker leapt. My spear knocked him off his feet, grunting face down. Stamp on his shoulder. Wrench out the spear. Chop! The pithing stroke. Kalik scrambled up, his fury a blast of heat down my side.
I saw him kill and kill again, heard his roar above my own. And then he was bringing us all together. Quieting the warriors who wanted to scour the hills towards the river. Calling, “Canoes!”
Several followed ours in the growing light. Lamentations, thuds floated across from where Lutha’s warriors surrounded the rafts in a frenzy of killing.
At the river, we landed on the far bank. The Salt Men who had escaped through the hills and around the bottom of the lake struggled across from the Island of Bones. Some drowned. Others crawled from the water, exhausted. As they scrambled up the bank, we loomed above their screams.
We harried those already across, slew the wounded. One fired an arrow at Kalik which I struck off course with the broad face of my spear-blade. Luck. “Thanks, Brother!” Kalik slew the bowman before he could fire again. Under the lowering face of Grave Mountain, the rest retreated to their fort up the valley.
Its stockade fell at our first rush. Between the huts we speared our way. I stopped when only women, children, old men were left. Kalik led his warriors on, killing now for lust.
The fighting petered out, Kalik getting control of himself and the others. I interfered too late, saw a woman cut down needlessly. Her baby tossed in the air, impaled. Kalik ordered a hutful of women and children led back to the canoes.
Further up, we ran down a Salt Man, beat about for others. In the saddle at the valley’s head, Kalik and I circled through trees down the other side of the watershed, but found no recent tracks.
Back to the lake, past the burning remains of the fort. As we went, Kalik ordered the line of corpses down the valley stripped of their gear and weapons. Our dead, like the enemy’s, abandoned.
In the evening by the lake the prisoners waited. Some had disappeared on the way. The Salt Women lamented, dishevelled, the children in terror, but Kalik ignored their despair. As we paddled between two bodies lolling towards the river’s mouth, he smiled grim.
“It will be long before they dare attack again.”
“Yes, but they will return.” I knew something of the persistence of the Salt Men now. I had thought I understood the nature of evil, too, but was beginning to wonder. Did we need to kill the women? Children? Old men? And what about the prisoners?
“Lutha will celebrate tonight!” Kalik threw back his head and shrieked. A scream of blood and killing. And jagged through the growing darkness, a woman’s shriek replied: delight and death.
“You’ll see a difference in the Maidens. Lutha will order the wine.”
“Wine?”
“Like drinking blood!”
Torches flamed. Kalik and Lutha, both of them blood-covered, danced towards each other across red sand. The Maidens chanted and swayed as they moved up to the Roundhouse, circling, raising spears and bows. The air reeking of death, rent with screams of triumph. Edged. Hysterical.
More torches on long poles. Lutha gestured, and the Maidens carried out tall jars. Women. Children. Men. Shouting, leaping in the swirling light, frenzied.
A canoe wallowed in below, paddled by Salt Men. They knelt, slipping over, hauling themselves up under blows, paddling awkwardly. Their captors doubled over, laughing, pointing down into the canoes. Hands bound to ankles, the prisoners tossed ashore. Three of them tumbled and dragged through the gate and up to the Roundhouse where Lutha and Kalik danced and shrieked.
Now the Maidens were working out the sealed stoppers. Tipping the jars into clay mugs. One thrust into my hands. In the ruddy torchlight, it looked like blood. All about me, people were jostling, drinking. Waving to have their mugs refilled.
“Drink it, Ish!” A Maiden urged. She had used my name! She bent graceful, pouring for someone else, I stared. Tall, slim, she straightened, turned back, and smiled. Those great eyes … Raka! The Maiden who had been punished by Lutha.
“Wine! Haven’t you drunk it before?” She took my mug, drank, and something dark trickled down her white chin. She laughed, didn’t wipe it. Held the mug to my mouth, and I tasted the aromatic gush. My head swam. Where had I smelled, tasted that rich earthy flavour before?
Raka was laughing, filling more mugs. Turning back to me. Refilling mine. Drinking from it. Watching me over the rim. Smiling. Eyes that had flared with rage as she levelled her spear at my throat the day before.
The Maidens were fetching more jars. Shouts, laughter grew. And floundering hamstrung, bleeding, the three Salt Men tormented by children and grown-ups. Casual blows and shouts. Kicks. I turned away.
Behind the crowd, Raka found me again. She swayed tall between the drinkers, took my hand, led me into the dark.
I was filled with delight by the wine. By who I was. Part of me said it was the effect of drunkenness. Another part enjoyed the sensation. The first voice, the one that always seemed to be warning me, quietened. In a hut, Raka drank from the mug. Laughed. “We must be quick!”
It was long since I had slept with a girl. I found the same urgency in Raka. And when we were done, lying in each other’s arms, she wept.
Suddenly I understood this was some revenge of Raka’s upon Lutha. I was even more confused. So much seemed impossible to understand. Then she was on her feet, saying we must be there for the ceremony. Hand in hand we ran uphill. Just before we lifted out of darkness into the band of torchlight, Raka kissed me and vanished.
Kalik thrust through the crowd. Handed me a full mug. “Empty it!” I copied him. The roars, the torches, the faces spun. I stumbled. Kalik laughed, dragged me forward, and we were separated by a drunken old woman who waved a dripping mug. A procession of long-cloaked, hooded figures emerged from the Roundhouse. The crowd roared even louder. Beneath her hood, I was sure I could see Lutha. The hood fell forward, shadowed her face again. A tall figure behind must be Raka.
Between us the prisoners knelt, wobbling on raw stumps. Several of the cloaked figures picked up the first between them, threw him on a split slab of timber in front of their leader. A single voice began a chant in a language I did not understand. One by one, other voices joined.
The hooded figure moved to the top of the slab. Others knelt around it, restraining the Salt Man, pulling back his head so the throat curved upwards. And the figure standing above raised an arm. The sleeve fell back from a small brown hand I recognised.
The torches went out. The chanting stopped. Silence. And the only light, a narrow ray struck the raised hand now holding a knife. Like the beak of some ancient bird it fell.
The torches flared. The sacrifice jerked. I heard blood spurt. And as the chanting around me swelled, the priestess raised high a bowl, lowered it to her mouth, drank from its stained rim. Passed it across the corpse to Kalik who drank, too. Screamed joy! Mouth red.
The priestess hacked, plunged in both hands, and tore out the dripping heart. Showed it to the crowd’s roar, turning, holding it high.
The other two butchered, the crowd parted. Air shaking with heat! A hole containing red-hot stones, an earth oven. I backed away. It was what Taur and I had seen on the Green Stone River all over again. However bad the Salt Men, we were no better if we stooped to the same evil. Backing between gore-covered revellers, I heard earth being shovelled over the ovens. Cries for more wine. I got Nip and my pack from the hut, slipped down to the lake.
I scrubbed black stains of wine or blood with handfuls of sand and was looking about to escape when the air filled with the lost cries of children, and a canoe laboured out of the dark, crunched up the beach. Eager for the feast, their guards ran captured Salt Children through the gate and up to the huts inside a stockade. I smelled their terror as they passed, saw shocked faces, wounds and, suddenly, I knew it was not enough to escape on my own, that when I left those children were going with me.