Entangled (56 page)

They were across the stream now and out of the clearing, following a well-beaten trail through the forest. Leoni hovered right in front of the group, gliding back as Ria moved forward. She didn’t know why she did it – some impulse, some whim – but she reached out her diaphanous aerial hand and touched the other girl’s shoulder. Ria halted in her tracks, as though she’d felt the contact, and looked at her.

Ria had magnificent eyes, wide and bright under long lashes, with hazel irises lit by flecks of gold and violet.

Resisting an overwhelming urge to shoot twenty feet into the sky, Leoni stayed where she was, wondering if she’d been seen.

Ria didn’t move either. There was an intense eager expression on her face. Her companions too had stopped and their eyes were fixed on her. She reached out her hand and probed the air, then shook her
head as though to clear it. As the look of recognition faded from her eyes she stepped right through Leoni and marched off along the trail without a backward glance.

So … not seen, then.

But sensed.

Definitely sensed.

It was a gift of their entanglement, Leoni was sure of that, a connection that seemed to break all the rules of aerial bodies in physical realms. Because of it, despite her fears, she had indeed got her warning through to Ria about Sulpa’s tracking device.

‘Together you and she possess great strength.’

Leoni darted over the heads of the little group of humans and Neanderthals, leaving them behind as she hurtled along the trail through the forest. If she could communicate with Ria then she could scout for her, warn her of dangers in her path, keep her safe from ambush.

She could be useful.

She could help.

Leoni followed the trail to the edge of the forest but for all that way she saw no sign of danger and neither human, nor animal, nor bird, nor insect moved.

The open land ahead still had some tree cover, being dotted with little coppices, and rose in rolling undulating hummocks towards a ridge line about two miles distant. Leoni sped up to it only to find more of the same landscape stretching in all directions.

Once again there was no danger in sight.

She flew a mile further.

Two miles.

Five miles.

Still nothing.

But when she crested the next ridge the Illimani were suddenly everywhere – a big force, perhaps five hundred of them, streaming up the side of a hollow where they’d been concealed from view. It was easy to identify the leaders – two monstrous warriors, tall and massive, swaggering in the middle of the front rank. They looked so similar they had to be twins. Their hair hung in filthy matted dreadlocks to their waists. What distinguished them from each other were their scary headdresses.
One of them wore the long curved horns of a bull, the other the toothy snarling skull of some giant species of bear.

Their line of march would take them straight to the forest through which Ria and her companions were trekking.

Leoni somersaulted in the air and streaked back to warn Ria.

The body dangling from the tree was stiff, dead, faintly putrid and cold to the touch, which meant this had not happened today. If luck was still with them there was a good chance the Illimani who had done this had moved on in search of new victims.

On the other hand, it was also possible they were still here.

With Ligar in the lead – it was he who knew this track – Ria and her companions picked their way through the forest.

There were corpses everywhere, most stripped but some still wearing the distinctive plaid of the Merell. Not all of them were nailed to trees. Dozens had been impaled on long wooden stakes. Many others appeared to have been flayed alive. A few had been beaten to a pulp with stones and some had been roasted over slow fires at the side of the track. Everywhere, thick and cloying, the smell of death filled the air.

Ahead in a clearing, beside a bright stream, stood the remains of a large Merell camp. Utter destruction had been unleashed here. Fifty tepees had been reduced to scorched frames, hundreds of multilated bodies were heaped up in piles, and the ashes of a great bonfire were filled with charred human bones.

They didn’t stop to count the bodies but it looked like more than four hundred adults, men and women of all ages, had been killed. As usual the children of the camp were nowhere to be seen.

When at last Ria emerged from the forest with her companions, high sun had come and gone and vistas of rolling uplands lay ahead, dotted with little stands of trees and bathed in mellow afternoon light.

In this undulating terrain, just over that ridge line, or on the other side of that hill, or hidden in that hollow, an entire army could lie in wait and you would not know until you came upon it. So perhaps the strong intuition to hide by which Ria now found herself seized was just her logical mind at work.

And yet …

It was almost as if a voice was whispering an urgent warning in her ear …

‘Hide now!’

Although she had seen nothing she was certain it was the golden-haired girl whom the blue woman had called Leoni – her ally from the future, come to help her defeat Sulpa. She’d felt a presence in the forest but had convinced herself she’d imagined it. Now, with the hairs on the back of her neck crawling, she knew she had to act.

They were climbing towards a ridge line up an open slope of rugged tussocky grass. Back below them and off to their right about a thousand paces away was a small coppice of gnarled and ancient oaks.

Ria pointed it out to her companions. ‘We need to hide in there,’ she told them. ‘Right now!’

Bont was surly: ‘No, Ria. I’m going on.’

‘If you go on you’ll get us all killed. Something’s coming.’ She bared her teeth at him. ‘Believe me, Bont,’ she hissed. ‘SOMETHING’S COMING!’

For a moment he blinked at her in astonishment. She was expecting a volcanic outburst of temper but instead he shrugged acceptance and then they were all running headlong downhill towards the coppice.

Ria was the last to reach the shelter of the trees.

As she turned and looked behind she saw a host of armed men, naked and shaggy, surging like a tide over the ridge line and pouring down the slope behind them.

She dropped to her belly and wriggled deeper into the undergrowth, peering out through a tangle of brambles and ferns. The great oaks of the coppice towered above her, swaying gently in the afternoon breeze, their leaves rustling. All around she could sense the explosive tension and fear of her companions. If even one of the advancing braves had seen her in those last few heartbeats before she darted into cover then it was all over.

But their luck held.

Descending the long slope ten abreast, in disciplined ranks, the Illimani pouring over the ridge showed no interest in the coppice and pursued a course that would pass, at the closest point, about a hundred paces north of it.
‘Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven’
– Ria silently counted the ranks as they crested the ridge –
‘forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty.’

Fifty ranks of ten.

A column of five hundred men, like a vast millipede swarming across the land.

And with seven thousand Illimani at his disposal, it was quite possible that Sulpa had sent out a dozen death squads of this strength to roam the countryside in search of tribes like the Merell and the Naveen. Their natural subdivisions into small units made them easy targets for annihilation; very few of the bands, on their own, had sufficient numbers to challenge five hundred fierce and ruthless men.

Ria’s gaze was drawn to the head of the column, now less than a bowshot away, and to two impressive braves who marched at the centre of the front rank, naked as the Illimani always were and so alike they had to be twins. Both loomed over the others around them, and had big flushed meaty faces set into almost identical angry sneers. She guessed their age at thirty or perhaps thirty-five summers. Their massive upper bodies seemed as wide around as the biggest trees in the coppice, their legs and arms bulged with bands of muscle but, despite their bulk, both had the lithe, balanced, threatening walk of fighters. Their pale hair, braided into thick locks, hung down almost to their hips, both of them wore spectacular headdresses, one of aurochs horns, the other fashioned from the skull and jaws of a cave bear, and each carried a heavy axe with a double-headed obsidian blade.

‘He who wears the aurochs horns is Martu,’ Driff ’s thought-voice spoke up in Ria’s mind. She knew the name meant ‘Bull’. ‘He leads this five hundred, but Sulpa favours him. There is talk he will give him command of the whole army. The other one is his brother, Sakkan.’ This name meant ‘Bear’. ‘He is Sulpa’s torturer. If the spirits hear my prayers my blades will take his head.’

Ria looked to her left to where she could just see Driff ’s blue eyes glaring out of the underbrush. The thing about thought-talk was that it conveyed emotions as well as words and when he spoke of his desire to kill Sakkan she also felt the intensity of his hatred for the man.

Burning hatred.

Like a fire in his heart.

She glanced quickly at the oncoming Illimani, now very close, and back to Driff: ‘What happened?’ she pulsed.

‘Sulpa declared my mother and father traitors. Sakkan tortured them. I served as his assistant. In the end it was I who killed them.’

Ria’s eyes swung back to the solid phalanx of marching men. The thick soles of their bare feet thumped down on the earth with a sound like repeated blows. Their course had not changed and they would still miss the coppice, although perhaps by less than the hundred paces she had originally estimated. ‘May the spirits hear your prayers,’ she said softly to Driff. ‘But not now.’

Sakkan had broken away from the column and was striding towards them.

Had the hulking Illimani heard their thought-talk? Surely not. He made no call for support and he wasn’t behaving like a man who’d detected enemies. He paused in mid-stride, and a look of concentration crossed his face before he cocked a leg and released a series of thunderous farts.

Could it be he was just going to take a shit?

Ria knew she was well hidden. Driff, too. And although she had a clear mental picture of where everyone else was – Bont and Ligar to her right, Grondin, Oplimar and Jergat about ten paces behind her – she couldn’t actually see any of them amongst the trees and thick undergrowth. Hopefully Sakkan wouldn’t see them either. ‘Everybody stay absolutely still!’ she pulsed. ‘Not a word, not a breath, or we’re dead.’

‘We can kill him,’ suggested Driff.

‘That would be incredibly stupid. Think about it. If he doesn’t go back to the column how long will it be before all five hundred of them are in here after us?’

Sakkan had reached the edge of the coppice and the column was already streaming by, fifty paces away. He stepped past the first trees. His right foot, large and dirty, came down within a hand’s breadth of Ria’s face. Then he was past her and into the little patch of clear space between her and the Uglies that they’d all avoided when they’d concealed themselves.

With a sigh of satisfaction he chopped his axe into the ground, squatted down, planting one massive hand on each knee, and farted again – a high-pitched, strangulated squeal, ludicrous coming from such a huge man. Ria bit back a giggle that rose in her throat and glanced sideways to Driff, just discerning his outline as a shadow close to the ground.

A shadow with raging blue eyes, a hatchet gripped tight in each hand, rising to a crouch.