The Wanderers Read online

  August 1, 2017 Volume 7 No 10

  The Wanderers

  by Ian McHugh

  Part One: To The End of the Earth

  “Which way did my mother go?” Rhy-lee asked her father one day.

  “North,” he said, and pointed without looking. Young as she was, she could see the small collapse that happened inside him when he heard the question, knowing that one day she, too, would leave him. ‘Distant heart’, her name meant. Her grandmother and aunts made sure that Rhy-lee and her father could hear when they said that her name was well chosen.

  Rhy-lee loved her father. But even so, in her quiet moments, she took to climbing the ridge above the village, where she would sit with the warm red-and-white brush of her tail curled around her legs and just the inquisitive tip of her nose sticking out from the hood of her parka. She would look out from the top of the steep north face of the downs, over the forest and the bare plain beyond, all the way to the horizon.

  Rhy-lee watched the plain change its colours, season by season, white to green to yellow to brown and back to white again. She wondered what her mother, that mysterious woman, had found out there, and whether she was wandering still. Her mother’s name, Tiere-lene, meant ‘never turn’.

  As she grew older, Rhy-lee began to set out on treks of her own. Some curiosity would catch her – a circling hawk, a distant crag that she had never climbed – or she would be taken by the simple urge to walk, and she would be off. For single days, at first, then for one night, then two. She knew her father fretted while she was gone, and that her grandmother and aunts would mutter among themselves where he could hear. But her wandering heart would not be stilled.

  She tried to resist it, for a time, and become so miserable and ill that her father chased her out the door. When she returned, tired, filthy and elated by the things she had discovered, her father chucked her under the chin and said, “Come, tell me your stories by the fire.”

  Once, she was away for three nights and returned with a bloody gash on her forehead that would certainly scar. In her hands, she carried a pair of antlers. She had been to the forest, she said, where she had been startled by a stag who accused her of coming to hunt his harem. She had tried to retreat but the stag had blood in his eye and insisted on a fight. She showed her father her knife, broken just above the hilt. The antlers she offered him as a gift, but when she saw his sick look and the tears in his eyes, she dropped them to the ground and hugged him fiercely.

  “Soon, now,” said one of her aunts, where Rhy-lee and her father could hear, and the others nodded in sage agreement.

  “Well enough that it happens before she marries and has a man and children to leave behind,” said her grandmother.

  So they were dismayed when a young man of the village named Culm-mane, a homebody like her father, offered her his shawl and she accepted.

  Her father refused any dowry. “You know what she is,” he said. He addressed himself to Culm-mane, but his eyes were on Rhy-lee. “She has her mother’s heart. Make best of the time you have with her, and live for what children she gives you.”

  Rhy-lee and Culm-mane were married and, in due course, Rhy-lee gave birth to twin sons. Yfan-wyn and Aoin-rhys they were named, when they reached their second year – ‘secret path’ and ‘safe haven’ and, like Rhy-lee, their names reflected their natures. Yfan-wyn was an explorer from the moment he could wriggle out of his bassinet and squirm across the floor. Aoin-rhys was his father’s son and would watch from the bassinet, his nose tucked under the fluffy tip of his tail, while his brother went about his business.

  Rhy-lee loved her husband and adored her sons. But still, she obeyed her wandering heart. Every so often, once her boys were weened, she would give it release for one night, or two, or three. But she always came back. She would touch her nose to Culm-mane’s and pick up her two boys and it was enough.

  As he grew older, she began to take Yfan-wyn with her. He would come back, his eyes as bright as his mother’s, and regale his grandfather and father and brother with his adventures. Aoin-rhys preferred to stay at home with his father or, when Culm-mane was out tending the village flocks, with his grandfather.

  And then Culm-mane was killed. He was out searching one night for a missing ewe and her lambs and found the animals being butchered by a company of wolves, one lamb already spitted over the fire. The wolves caught Culm-mane and tossed him over a cliff.

  “Wolves,” Rhy-lee snarled. For a week, she stayed home and grieved with her boys. Then she went out. She took her bow and iron traps and hunting spear. She was gone for six nights.

  When she returned, she had three wolf tails hanging from her belt. She would not speak to her sons of what she had done, just touched her nose to each of theirs and held them and, later, sang them to sleep with a cracked and weary voice. Afterward, sitting with her beside the fire, her father chucked her under the chin, which he hadn’t done since she was a child, and looked at her with serious eyes.

  He held her while she wept. He did not comment – and growled at Rhy-lee’s grandmother and aunts for their comments – when Rhy-lee tanned the three wolf tails and sewed them onto her parka.

  After that, Rhy-lee returned to sitting at the top of the ridge, gazing north. Yfan-wyn would sit with her, the two of them silent side-by-side, tucked up in their parkas and with their tails around their knees. And the urge grew in Rhy-lee – long delayed – to go, to walk and not stop and fill herself up with the world.

  Aoin-rhys stayed home and sat on his grandfather’s lap by the fire. “Mother will leave soon, won’t she, Grandfather?” he said, one day. “And Yfan-wyn will want to go with her.”

  “Yes,” said his grandfather.

  “And I will stay here with you.”

  His grandfather smiled with tears in his eyes. “I would like that.”

  So, when the day came that Rhy-lee had to go, her father said to her, “Take Yfan-wyn. Aoin-rhys will stay with me.”

  Rhy-lee started to shake her head. “It is dangerous, out in the world.”

  “Then better if he wanders with you than being left to wander on his own,” said her father.

  Rhy-lee recalled the nights she had lain awake as a child, camped out in the open and staring at the sky, trying to find some memory of her mother, wondering why she couldn’t have waited, just a little while, and taken Rhy-lee with her. She looked from one son to the other. Aoin-rhys hugged her hard, then Yfan-wyn took her hand.

  When they were packed, Rhy-lee’s father chased her aunts and grandmother back into their houses, then he and Aoin-rhys accompanied her and Yfan-wyn to the top of the ridge.

  “Thank you,” Rhy-lee said to her father, touching her nose to his.

  He chucked her under the chin. “Come back one day,” he said.

  Then Aoin-rhys and his grandfather watched while Rhy-lee and Yfan-wyn picked their way down the steep north face, stayed until they had splashed across the river and disappeared beneath the eaves of the forest.

  And then they went home.

  Yfan-wyn stuck close beside his mother as they went deeper into the forest. He was not so frightened, yet, but she had never before taken him beyond its fringes and he knew the story of the antlers above the mantel in his grandfather’s house.

  Rhy-lee chose a path where the locked branches of the trees were most dense and so the undergrowth the sparsest. The leaves on the trees were brown and brittle. Many had fallen already, breaking up the canopy with patches of light. Underfoot, the moss that coated the rocks and the exposed roots of the trees was brown, too, and powder-dry.

  At a creek crossing under open sky, pushing through thick bracken, they came face-to-face with a doe and her fawn. For an instant all of them froze. The doe and fawn looked at them with enormous, frightened eyes.
Rhy-lee raised her hands, showing her empty palms. She caught Yfan-wyn’s arm and led him into the creek to splash across.

  Yfan-wyn stumbled, staring at the deer, and Rhy-lee had to drag him upright. He took in the deer’s narrow faces and frail-looking arms with their short, black-hoofed fingers, the barrels of their bodies poised on spindle legs, tensed to spring and flee on all fours. He couldn’t make them fit with the frightening tale of the stag his mother had fought in her youth.

  Then they were out of the creek again and the deer were lost behind the bracken screen.

  At night they rested in the high boughs of a tree, where wolves couldn’t reach.

  “The stalking cats won’t trouble us,” Rhy-lee said. Those beasts would take a deer, but avoided people who were eaters of meat.

  “It feels strange to not be going home,” said Yfan-wyn, not quite willing to voice his fear.

  “Yes,” Rhy-lee agreed. “It does.”

  “It feels good,” he said, because it felt like that, too.

  He saw the flash of her teeth and eyes. “Yes.”

  He was quiet a moment, reassured by her smile. Then the magnitude of what they were about welled up again, so much greater than any of their past wanderings together. “How far do you think we will go?”

  His mother looked past him, as though seeing past the trees and over the horizon. “Who knows?”

  “I miss Grandfather and Aoin-rhys,” he said, softly.

  “Yes. Me too.”

  “I miss Father.”

  “Yes.” The word was a rasp of air, with barely any sound.

  Yfan-wyn hesitated, then confessed an idea that he had been nurturing since before his father died. “Perhaps we could find the end of the earth, so we can go back and tell them.”

  She reached across to chuck him under the chin. “I think they would like that.”

  When they came, at last, to the far side of the forest, Rhy-lee stopped and looked out over the vast brown plain, speckled with the first dusting of snow. She felt Yfan-wyn slip his hand into hers.

  “It is a long way to the end of the earth,” he said.

  “Yes. It is.”

  Rhy-lee took in the distance to the horizon and filled her lungs. She felt bigger somehow, as though life in the village had kept her small, and now at last, out here, she had the room to grow.

  They walked throughout the day. When Yfan-wyn began to lag, Rhy-lee slung her pack around to her front and carried him on her back. They shot hares for their dinner, and Yfan-wyn was very pleased to have shot his own, cleanly and on the first attempt. The animals’ fur was speckled white, their winter coats already growing through. Rhy-lee and Yfan-wyn camped in a little hollow that would hide the light of their fire from curious eyes.

  In the morning, they awoke to find snow falling thickly. There was a rumble in the earth beneath them. They sat up and saw bison streaming past, a vast herd of them, jostling and lowing in their simple tongue, more than beasts but not-quite people. The steam of their breaths hung in a cloud over the creatures’ backs.

  Another movement caught Rhy-lee’s eye. She gasped and grabbed at Yfan-wyn, but it was too late to duck out of sight. Stooping grey figures loped towards them – three in a staggered line, their lean bodies clad in rough furs, heavy hunting spears dangling from bony paws and round shields slung across their backs. Their yellow eyes were fixed on the bison herd. The closest wolf almost stepped on Rhy-lee and Yfan-wyn before it glanced down. Its eyes met Rhy-lee’s, the flat gaze of a predator, with no recognition of one person to another.

  And then the wolf was leaping over their little hollow, accelerating.

  A surge went through the herd, and the bison were running. The wolves yipped and whooped. A bison bawled in pain, crying out for help. Wolves closed in from all sides.

  Rhy-lee clutched at Yfan-wyn’s parka. Her heart rattled. She lifted him, pushing. “Move,” she said. “Move!”

  Quickly, they gathered up their packs and weapons.

  “Don’t run,” said Rhy-lee, but she hurried him, nonetheless.

  She didn’t let Yfan-wyn slow until the wolf pack and their kill were far behind, long lost in the veil of falling snow. They forded a river where it sprawled over shallow beds of rounded stones. Yfan-wyn slipped over and had to be pulled up spluttering from the water. On the far bank, Rhy-lee scooped out a hollow in the settling snow, and made a low mound of the stuff for a windbreak. Yfan-wyn sat and shivered while she lit a fire, his teeth chattering so hard Rhy-lee could hear them over the sound of the river. He stayed there, huddled in his parka and sheepskin blanket, with only his sodden tail visible, drying in the heat, while Rhy-lee went back to the ford with her spear and fished.

  The land around the river was so flat that it seemed the banks hardly rose from the water at all. The horizon was lost from view, and the grey-white land and the grey-white river and the grey-white sky all blended together.

  Rhy-lee stayed awake after darkness fell. During the night the snow stopped and the clouds rolled aside. She watched the stars wheel overhead. A few hours before dawn, she awoke Yfan-wyn to take his turn.

  He yawned himself alert while she rolled up in her blankets and went to sleep. Yfan-wyn pushed back his hood, hoping that the cold around his head would keep him awake, and the better to listen. His ears twitched, searching for any sound over the chuckle of the river as it played with its stones. The land about was still.

  In the morning, there was a blue sky and ice floes on the river. On the horizon to the north, they saw that the land rose and cracked.

  Yfan-wyn took a turn at fishing, this time. There was a curious restfulness in it, standing tense beside his mother with the icy water rippling against their shins, spears poised to strike the instant any silver shape darted away from their shadows. His feet were numb with cold. All he could feel was a dull sensation of the rounded pebbles underneath.

  Sitting down for a hot breakfast, he spoke the thought that had been turning in his head since the previous morning. “Mother, how did you kill three wolves?”

  Rhy-lee didn’t answer immediately, but sat and looked out to the horizon. At length, she said, “Let us not waste a good day.”

  When they reached the cracked upland, late in the morning, and climbed its slope, they saw that they would not be able to make their way along the top. It was so broken apart by the criss-cross of cracks and ravines that there was no way across.

  “Through the ravines, then,” said Rhy-lee. Before they descended, she looked back over the plain. There was a herd moving along the river in the distance, of bison or caribou, dark against the snow. Closer at hand, white herons waded in the shallow water, fishing with their beaks. She saw no other movement.

  It was slow going through the ravines and tiring. Sometimes, when they seemed to be turning too far from their course or came to a dead end, they scrambled up the crumbled, heath-covered sides and along the top to a crack that better met their needs. Occasionally, one or other of them had to climb up just to get their bearings, then back down into the deepening shadows below. At nightfall, they camped on a stub of ridge top that was sheer on three sides. Rhy-lee took first watch with an arrow nocked loosely to her bow.

  Yfan-wyn was woken by grey pre-dawn light. His mother still sat watch. She looked at him with red-rimmed eyes.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “We have been followed,” she said.

  Yfan-wyn felt a chill of fear. “By the wolves?”

  “One wolf,” she said. “Alone and therefore sick or mad. Probably driven out by the pack we saw. It would have crossed our trail while it was still following them.”

  “What will we do?”

  “We shall have to kill it,” she answered. “Today. We will find a place to ambush it.” She reached over to squeeze his hand.

  Yfan-wyn followed her through the ravines with his ears pointed backward, straining for any sound of steps behind. He looked back frequently, dreading what he might see. Whenever he turned his attent
ion to the placement of his feet, the fur stood up along his spine. When, inevitably, he stumbled, Rhy-lee picked him up by his parka and set him in front of her.

  “I will keep watch behind,” she said.

  She called a halt not long afterwards. They were in an unusually long, straight stretch of ravine. “Here,” Rhy-lee said. She pointed up to the ridge top ahead, where the ravine bent to the right. A clump of snow-capped boulders perched on the rim. “I will hide there and shoot when it comes past here. You,” she said, turning to look up the scree beside them, “hide up there. Once you hear me shoot it, jump up and shoot it from behind if you can and I haven’t killed it cleanly.”

  Yfan-wyn chewed anxiously at his lower lip, his tail curled up behind his legs. “I want to stay with you.”

  She shook her head. “You’ll be safer this way. It might have a shield. If I don’t hit it cleanly and it comes at me, I don’t want you close.” She knelt in front of him and held his shoulders. “And if you’re behind it, you can shoot it if it charges me.”

  He swallowed, then nodded, wide-eyed.

  They went past the bend in the ravine to climb up, so that the wolf wouldn’t see where they had ascended. Rhy-lee lay her spear beside her feet and stood with her bow ready at the place she had chosen. She watched Yfan-wyn scamper along and throw himself flat where she had told him to hide. He looked so tiny, carrying his bow and cut-down spear. He was tiny, she thought.

  She squatted down behind the boulders and stilled herself, bow across her knees. She listened.

  For a time, she heard only the wind, humming softly along the cracks in the broken landscape. Then a clink, a scrape of grit over stone. A low cough, half caught words – the wolf, muttering to itself. Mad, she thought.

  Then silence.

  Rhy-lee strained her ears. Nothing.

  There was a clatter of falling rocks, a loud growl, a scream from Yfan-wyn. Rhy-lee leapt to her feet, raising and drawing her bow in the same motion.

  Yfan-wyn sprinted towards her along the ridge top, his weapons abandoned. The wolf bounded after, gaining quickly despite a lopsided gait. Rhy-lee glimpsed ragged clothes and patchy fur. It was armed with a stone-headed axe, but no shield or other weapons.