Carpet People Read online

  When he had finished the air trembled. He flopped down on the wreckage and sat with his head in his hands, and no one dared approach. There were sidelong glances, and one or two people shook themselves and hurried away.

  Snibril dismounted and wandered over to where Pismire was standing gloomily wrapped in his goatskin cloak.

  ‘He shouldn’t have said the Unutterable Words,’ said Pismire, more or less to himself, ‘It’s all superstition, of course, but that’s not to say it isn’t real. Oh, hello. I see you survived.’

  ‘What did this?’

  ‘It used to be called Fray,’ said Pismire

  ‘I thought that was just an old story.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it was untrue. I’m sure it was Fray. The changes in air pressure to begin with . . . the animals sensed it . . . just like it said in the . . . ’ He stopped. ‘Just like I read somewhere,’ he said awkwardly.

  He glanced past Snibril and brightened up.

  ‘You’ve got a horse, I see.’

  ‘I think it’s been hurt.’

  Pismire walked to the horse and examined it carefully. ‘It’s Dumii, of course,’ he said. ‘Someone fetch my herb box. Something’s attacked him, see, here. Not deep but it should be dressed. A magnificent beast. Magnificent. No rider?’

  ‘We rode up the road a way but we didn’t see anyone.’

  Pismire stroked the sleek coat. ‘If you sold all the village and its people into slavery you might just be able to buy a horse like this. Whoever he belonged to, he ran away some time ago. He’s been living wild for days.’

  ‘The Dumii don’t let anyone keep slaves any more,’ said Snibril.

  ‘It’s worth a lot is what I was trying to say,’ said Pismire.

  He hummed distractedly to himself as he examined the hooves.

  ‘Wherever he came from, someone must have been riding him.’

  He let one leg go and paused to stare up at the hairs. ‘Something scared him. Not Fray. Something days ago. It wasn’t bandits, because they would have taken the horse too. And they don’t leave claw marks. A snarg could have made that if it was three times its normal size. Oh, dear. And there are such,’ he said.

  The cry came.

  To Snibril it seemed as though the night had grown a mouth and a voice. It came from the hairs just beyond the broken stockade, a mocking screech that split the darkness. The horse reared.

  A fire had already been lit at the break in the wall, and some hunters ran towards it, spears ready.

  They stopped.

  On the further side there was a mounted shape in the darkness, and two pairs of eyes. One was a sullen red, one pair shimmered green. They stared unblinking over the flames at the villagers.

  Glurk snatched a spear from one of the gaping men and pushed his way forward.

  ‘Nothing but a snarg,’ he growled, and threw. The spear struck something, but the green eyes only grew brighter. There was a deep, menacing rumble from an unseen throat.

  ‘Be off! Go back to your lair!’

  Pismire ran forward with a blazing stick in his hand, and hurled it at the eyes.

  They blinked and were gone. With them went the spell. Cries went up and, ashamed of their fear, the hunters surged forward. ‘Stop!’ shouted Pismire. ‘Idiots! You’ll chase out into the dark after that, with your bone spears? That was a black snarg. Not like the brown ones you get around here! You know the stories? They’re from the furthest Corners! From the Unswept Regions!’

  From the north, from the white cliff of the Woodwall itself, came again the cry of a snarg. This time it did not die away, but stopped abruptly.

  Pismire stared north for a second, then turned to Glurk and Snibril. ‘You have been found,’ he said. ‘That was what brought this horse here, fear of the snargs. And fear of the snargs is nothing to be ashamed of. Fear of snargs like that is common sense. Now they have discovered the village you can’t stay. They’ll come every night until one night you won’t fight back hard enough. Leave tomorrow. Even that might be too late.’

  ‘We can’t just—’ Glurk began.

  ‘You can. You must. Fray is back, and all the things that come after. Do you understand?’

  ‘No,’ said Glurk.

  ‘Then trust me,’ said Pismire. ’And hope that you never do have to understand. Have you ever known me be wrong?’

  Glurk considered. ‘Well, there was that time when you said—’

  ‘About important things?’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’ Glurk looked worried. ‘But we’ve never been frightened of snargs. We can deal with snargs. What’s special about these?’

  ‘The things that ride on them,’ said Pismire

  ‘There was another pair of eyes,’ said Glurk uncertainly.

  ‘Worse than snargs,’ said Pismire. ‘Got much worse weapons than teeth and claws. They’ve got brains.’

  Chapter 2

  ‘Well, that’s the lot. Come on,’ said Glurk, taking a last look at the ruins of the hut.

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Snibril.

  His possessions fitted easily into one fur pack, but he rummaged through them in case anything had been left behind. There was a bone knife with the carved wooden handle, and a spare pair of boots. Then there was a coil of bowstrings, and another bag of arrowheads, a piece of lucky dust and, right at the bottom, Snibril’s fingers closed round a lumpy bag. He lifted it out carefully, taking care not to damage its contents, and opened it. Two, five, eight, nine. All there, their varnish catching the light as he moved his fingers.

  ‘Huh,’ said Glurk, ‘I don’t know why you bother with them. Another bag of arrowheads would fill the space better.’

  Snibril shook his head, and held up the coins which gleamed with varnish.

  They had been shaped from the red wood of the Chairleg mines. On one side each coin carried a carving of the Emperor’s head. They were Tarnerii, the coins of the Dumii, and they had cost many skins at Tregon Marus. In fact they were skins, if you looked at it like that, or pots or knives or spears. At least, so Pismire said.

  Snibril never quite understood this, but it seemed that so great was the Dumii’s love for their Emperor they would give and take the little wooden pictures of him in exchange for skins and fur. At least, so Pismire said. Snibril wasn’t sure that Pismire understood finance any more than he did.

  The two of them made their way to the carts. It was less than a day since Fray had come. But what a day . . .

  Arguments, mostly. The richer Munrungs hadn’t wanted to leave, especially since no one had a clear idea of where they would go. And Pismire had gone off somewhere, on business of his own.

  Then, in the middle of the morning, they had heard snarg cries in the south. Someone saw shadows gliding among the hairs. Someone else said he saw eyes peering over the stockade.

  After that, the arguments stopped. The Munrungs were used to travelling, as people suddenly pointed out. They moved around every year or so, to better hunting grounds. They’d been planning this move for months, probably. It wasn’t as if they were running away, everyone said. No one could say they were running away. They were walking away. Quite slowly.

  Before mid-afternoon the area inside the stockade was filled with carts, cows and people carrying furniture. Now the bustle was over, and they all waited for Glurk. His cart was the finest, a family heirloom, with a curved roof covered with furs. It needed four ponies to pull it; huts were things you built to last a year or so, but carts were what you handed down to your grandchildren.

  Behind it a string of pack ponies, laden with the Orkson wealth in furs, waited patiently. Then came the lesser carts, none as rich as the Orkson cart, though some almost equalled it. After them came the poorer handcarts, and the families that could only afford one pony and one-third shares in a cow. And last came the people on foot. It seemed to Snibril that those who carried all their personal goods in one hand looked a bit more cheerful than those who were leaving half theirs behind.

  Now they needed Pismir
e. Where was he?

  ‘Isn’t he here?’ said Glurk. ‘Well, he knows we’re going. He’ll be along. I don’t think he’d expect us to wait.’

  ‘I’m going on ahead to find him,’ said Snibril shortly.

  Glurk opened his mouth to warn his brother and then thought better of it.

  ‘Well, tell him we’ll be moving along towards Burnt End, along the old tracks,’ he said. ‘Easy place to defend tonight, if it comes to it.’

  Glurk waited until the last straggler had left the stockade, and then dragged the gate across. Anyone could get in through the broken walls, but Glurk still felt that the gates should be shut. That was more . . . proper. It suggested that they might come back one day.

  Snibril was trotting up the road ahead of the procession. He rode the white horse, a little inexpertly, but with determination. The horse had been named Roland, after an uncle. No one questioned his right to name it, or to own it. The Munrungs, on the whole, agreed with Dumii laws, but finders-keepers was one of the oldest laws of all.

  A little way on he turned off the road, and soon the dazzling white wooden cliff of the Woodwall rose above the hairs. Roland’s hooves made no sound on the thick dust that lay about, and the Carpet closed in. Snibril felt the great immensity of it all around him stretching far beyond the furthermost limits of the Empire. And if the Dumii road might lead to distant places, where might this old track lead?

  He sat and watched it sometimes, on quiet nights. The Munrungs moved around a lot, but always in the same area. The road was always around, somewhere. Pismire talked about places like the Rug, the Hearth and the Edge. Faraway places with strange-sounding names. Pismire had been everywhere, seen things Snibril would never see. He told good stories.

  Several times Snibril thought he heard other hooves nearby. Or were they black paws? Roland must have heard them too, for he trotted along smartly, always on the edge of a canter.

  Dust had drifted up between the hairs here, forming deep mounds where herbs and ferns grew thickly and made the air heavy with their scent. The path seemed to grow drowsy, and wound aimlessly among the dust mounds for a while. It opened out into a clearing right by the south face of the Woodwall.

  It had dropped from the sky, many years before. It was a day’s march long, and a good hour’s walk wide. Half of it had been burned – unimaginably burned. Pismire said there had been one or two others, elsewhere in the far reaches of the Carpet, but he used the Dumii word: matchstick.

  Pismire lived in a shack near the old wood quarry. There were a few pots lying around the door. Some thin half-wild goats skipped out of the way as Roland trotted into the clearing. Pismire was not there. Nor was his little pony.

  But a freshly-tanned snarg skin was hanging by the cave. And someone was lying on a heap of ferns by a small fire, with his hat pulled down over his face. It was a high hat that might once have been blue, but time had turned it into a shapeless felt bag about the colour of smoke.

  His clothes looked as though they had gathered themselves round him for warmth. A tattered brown cloak was rolled under his head as a pillow.

  Snibril left Roland in the shade of the hairs and drew his knife. He crept towards the sleeper and made to raise his hat brim with the knifepoint.

  There was a blur of activity. It ended with Snibril flat on his back, his own knife pressed to his throat, the stranger’s tanned face inches from his own.

  The eyes opened. He’s just waking up, Snibril thought through his terror. He started moving while he was still asleep!

  ‘Mmm? Oh, a Munrung,’ said the stranger, half to himself. ‘Harmless!’ He stood up.

  Snibril forgot to be frightened in his haste to be offended.

  ‘Harmless!’

  ‘Well, by comparison to things like that,’ said the stranger, indicating the skin. ‘Pismire said one of you might show up.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Gone off to Tregon Marus. He should be back soon.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I like the name Bane.’

  He was clean-shaven, unusual in anyone but young Dumii boys, and his red-gold hair was bound up in a plait down his back. Although in some ways he did not appear much older than Snibril himself, his face was hard and lined except for his grin. At his belt hung a fierce-looking short sword, and there was a spear beside his pack.

  ‘I was following mouls,’ he said, and saw the blankness in Snibril’s face. ‘Creatures. From the Unswept Regions, originally. Nasty pieces of work. They ride around on these things.’

  He indicated the skin again.

  ‘Weren’t you afraid of the eyes?’

  Bane laughed, and picked up his spear.

  Then Pismire was with them, the rangy figure riding into the clearing, long legs almost touching the ground on either side of his pony. The old man showed no surprise that Snibril was there.

  ‘Tregon Marus has fallen,’ he said slowly.

  Bane groaned.

  ‘I mean fallen,’ said Pismire ‘Destroyed. The temples, the walls, everything. And snargs everywhere in the ruins. Fray has crushed the town. It was at the epicentre right underneath,’ he went on wearily. ‘It has been a long, horrible day. Where’ve the tribe gone? Burnt End? Good enough. Very defensible situation. Come on.’

  Bane had a small pony, grazing among the hairs. They set off, keeping close to the wooden cliff.

  ‘But what is Fray?’ said Snibril. ‘I remember you telling stories about old times . . . but that was long ago. Some kind of monster. Not something real.’

  ‘The mouls worship it,’ said Bane. ‘I’m . . . something of an expert.’

  Snibril looked puzzled. The Munrungs didn’t have gods. Life was complicated enough as it was.

  ‘I have theories,’ said Pismire. ‘I’ve read some old books. Never mind about the stories. They’re just metaphors.’

  ‘Interesting lies,’ translated Bane.

  ‘More like . . . ways of telling things without having to do much explaining. Fray is some kind of force. There were people who used to know more, I think. There were old stories about old cities that suddenly vanished. Just legends, now. Oh, dear. So much gets forgotten. Written down and then lost.’

  The little old tracks that ran everywhere in the Carpet did not go straight, like the road, but wound in and out of the hairs like serpents. Any traveller who walked them, and few did, rarely met anyone else. Yet the paths were never overgrown. The Dumii said that they had been made by Peloon, the god of journeys. The Munrungs privately held that the Carpet itself had made them in some mysterious way, although they didn’t say this in front of the Dumii. They didn’t have any gods themselves but were generally polite about those belonging to other people.

  Beneath the rugged tip of the Woodwall that was called Burnt End the track divided, going west and north. Glurk stopped his cart and looked up at the burnt, black crags. For a moment he thought he saw a movement high above. He sniffed the air.

  ‘I have forebodings,’ he told his wife. ‘We’ll wait for Snibril.’

  He jumped down from the cart and walked back along the track. There it was again, something scrambling away . . . no, just a shadow. Glurk sniffed again, then shook himself. This was no way to behave, jumping at shadows. He cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘Gather the carts round in a circle,’ he cried. ‘We’ll camp here.’

  If you could put up with the unpleasantness and the ash, Burnt End was a safe place to be. The hairs had broken, when the Woodwall fell on to the Carpet, so there was not much cover for attackers. And the sheer white wood wall on one side reduced the chances of an attack. But the feel of the place was unsettling. Glurk bullied the tribe until the carts formed a wall, ponies and cattle penned inside. He ordered an armed man to sit on top of every cart, and set others to lighting fires and readying the camp for the night.

  Keep ’em busy. That was one of the three rules of being chief that old Grimm had passed on to him. Act confidently, never say ‘I don’t know’, and when al
l else fails, keep ’em busy. He’d hunted around Burnt End before, and the deathliness around the blackened wood could be unnerving even at the best of times. The only thing to do was work, laugh loudly or sing or march about with spears, before everyone’s fears got the better of them.

  Soon, cooking fires sprang up within the ring. Glurk climbed on top of his cart, and peered back down the track. Fires got seen by . . . things. Yet there was nothing like it to embolden the heart, and a hot meal did wonders for the courage. Were snargs out there? Well, they could deal with snargs. They had always been about, the nasty cowardly things. Snargs had just enough brains to know not to attack a village. They preferred to track the lone traveller, if the odds were high enough. Glurk didn’t like the change.

  After a while Glurk climbed down and took his hunting knife from under the seat. It was carved out of a snarg’s thighbone and as good as a sword if it had to be. He thrust it into his belt, and accepted a bowl of soup from his wife.

  Night wore on, and the guards nodded. Outside the bright ring, deeper shadows padded among the hairs . . . and it seemed as though, around the ring of light, a darker ring had grown.

  They attacked to the south of the ring. There was a howl. Then a cart rocked. Its guard leapt for his life. It was Gurth, Glurk’s eldest son.

  ‘All arm! All arm! Hold the ring!’ cried Glurk, and leapt across the fire with a spear in either hand. One he hurled as he ran, and he heard it hit.

  These were not like the snargs he knew, came a cold thought out of his mind. They were daring to attack, and they carried men on their backs, or things like men at least, with green eyes and long teeth. For a moment Glurk hesitated, and an arrow grazed his arm.

  Horses screamed and pulled the picket stakes out of the ground, stampeding through the running people.

  Glurk saw another cart go over, and then above him loomed a snarg with a shining collar. There was a roar, and a crash, and . . . darkness spread along his arm, and drifted across his mind like nightfall.

  *

  The fires made a beacon for the three as they led their mounts down from the hidden path.