The Bones of the Earth (The Dark Age) (3 page)

He also could not believe what the other villagers, his people, his relatives had done: nothing. They buried Oresh and Mladen, they laid Grat’s mother down on a straw bed. They talked and argued and yelled and cried.

But they just let the Avars take the girls away.

He remembered how his father, Swat, had sat down beside Roslaw with a pitcher of ale. “I know we don’t have much. But if we gathered everything we have, food, ale, the few treasures any of us have, maybe we could negotiate with them, get the girls back.”

Roslaw just shook his head.

“
It’s too dangerous,” said Bogdan, a small nervous man with a continual tic in his left eye. “They would just take what we offered for the girls and kill everyone who came to talk!”

“
We would need to arm ourselves,” Swat had tried to say reasonably. But other men gathered and the whole thing became a squabbling, useless argument.

It was at that point that Javor had known what had to be done—what he had to do. He could almost see himself doing it. He went quietly to his hut, found the little wooden case his mother had shown him the day before and took out his great-grandfather’s long dagger. Even in the dim light of the hut, he could see the angles and spirals on the blade, the fish-shape of the handle. The blade’s curve was comforting, as if there were no other shape a blade could be.
Like a big tooth.
He wrapped it in a soft cloth and tucked it into his belt, then stepped out of the hut and toward the edge of the village.

At that moment, he heard a sound like an owl’s call from the hut. Anyone else would have wondered about that: why is there an owl in my hut? Why is it calling during the day? But Javor was focused on something else.

“
Where are you going?” said a voice at his side. Javor jumped, but it was only Hrech.

“
I’m going after Elli and Grat. Are you coming or not?”

“
Are you
crazy
? Are you trying to get killed? Do you even have a weapon?”

Javor took out the fish-handled dagger. Hrech goggled. “Where did you get that?”

“
It was my great-grandfather’s. Come on.”

“
Javor, you can’t,” Hrech sputtered, arguing what would become for him a refrain for the day. “You can’t catch up with mounted men when you’re on foot. And even if you do, what could you do by yourself?”

“
I have to do
something
. No one else is.”

“
No one else is
stupid
enough!” Hrech felt more afraid now even than when the raiders were in the village. “You’re one boy against 10 armed men, and all you have is a fancy knife!”

Javor took long strides into the grass the horses had trampled. Behind him, the adults argued and cried and whimpered, oblivious to the two boys leaving. “They’ve got to stop to rest sometime. I’ll keep going and sooner or later, I’ll catch up with them. Are you going with me?”

Hrech scrambled to keep up with Javor’s long strides.
Poor guy never has been able to see straight,
he thought. “The only thing you’re going to accomplish is to get yourself killed.”

“
I don’t care. If Elli’s gone …”
What
? He did not think past that. “I’ve got to do something,” he repeated. He started to run along Avars’ trail.

Hrech knew he could not stop Javor, but he also knew his friend would not be able to survive on his own. Javor was bigger and physically stronger—he didn’t know it, but he was the strongest bachelor in the village—but Javor acted very young, like a child. “I’m with you,” Hrech panted. “But I’ll need a weapon, too.” He ran as fast as he could back to the village and found Swat’s axe beside Javor’s hut. By the time he had caught up to Javor again, he did not have enough breath to argue anymore. So he had followed Javor. By noon, his throat was parched.

He finally made Javor stop to drink at a clear stream. Javor hadn’t realized just how thirsty he was, even though the sun was high and hot. He touched his hair: it was hot on top, wet in the back. He drank some more, then splashed water over his head. Hrech did the same.

“
I don’t care what you do. I’m taking a breather,” Hrech said. Javor said nothing, but sat beside his friend in the shade of a birch tree. Hrech looked up at his friend. He could see Javor withdrawing into himself. His jaw went slack, his lips parted slightly. He stared at the birch tree as if he were trying to count its leaves, but his eyes were not focused. Hrech knew he had to say something to bring Javor back to the here-and-now. “So, what now?”

Javor looked up the stream bank, where the Avars’ trail led into the trees. “Our only hope is that the riders are not too worried about putting much distance between themselves and us, and that they’ll stop soon to rest and eat. But then, they’ll probably rape the girls.”

Hrech winced. It was another trait of Javor’s to say out loud exactly the thing you didn’t want to think about.

They hadn’t taken any food or anything for the night. But Javor remembered Elli screaming as the rider dragged her by her long hair. And he thought of all the men of his village, waiting for someone else to make the first move.
If we had all rushed them when Mladen did, we would have saved the girls. But who else would be dead?

“
I hate to repeat myself, Javor, but we’re two kids with a knife and a wood-axe, and there are ten of them with armour and swords and gods know what else,” Hrech argued. “We won’t stand a chance.”

“
We’ll catch up with them at night, sneak into their camp quietly, free the girls and steal the horses,” Javor replied, surprising himself. “The moon will still be pretty big tonight,and the sky will be clear. We’ll have enough light.”

“
There’ll be at least one on watch,” Hrech protested.

“
Then we’ll have to kill him quietly,” Javor answered.
Where did these words, these ideas, come from?
“We’ll have to be careful not to make any noise that would alert them. But they won’t be expecting us. They’ve done this before, I’ll bet. And I’ll bet that  every time, the poor villagers were too afraid of getting killed to follow and rescue two girls.

“
I think they’ll get really drunk, eat everything they can, rape the girls, then tie them up and fall asleep. We’ll sneak up when they’re deep asleep. If there’s one on guard, we’ll have to kill him quickly before he can alert the others. I’ll sneak up behind him and ... and cut his throat.” Javor felt the dagger’s fish-shaped handle. The way it fit in his palm calmed him. “You untie their horses and lead them away, but be sure you don’t make any noise doing it. Then we’ll untie the girls. They’ll probably be tied up near the guard. Then we’ll get out of there as fast as we can.” He was making this up as he went along, but it all seemed to make sense.

“
They’ll follow us, you know, to get the girls back. And to revenge their dead guard,” Hrech said.

“
You’re right. Well, we’ll have to kill all of them. First save the girls, take them someplace safe, then sneak back and cut their throats while they sleep.”

“
I—I don’t think I can do that, Javor.”

“
You’ve killed chickens and pigs, haven’t you?”

“
I can’t kill a sleeping man,” Hrech said in a very small voice.

Javor turned to look at Hrech directly, something he almost never did. “Do you know what they’re going to do to the girls? First, they’ll rape them repeatedly. They’ll each take their turns with them, keeping them for their amusement as they ride back to wherever the Avars stay. When they get tired of them, they’ll kill them and leave their bodies to the vultures and dogs. And they’ll go to another village and take more girls.

“
If Elli and Grat are really lucky, the raiders will sell them to a slave trader and they’ll go to Persia or someplace even farther and live the rest of their lives as slaves for some prince. Either way, we’ll never see them again alive, unless we do something right now. Are you with me or not?”

Hrech fell into step without another word, his face miserable.

At nightfall, they stopped by a stream to rest and drink. They found some nuts and sour pears. Hrech fell asleep, but Javor couldn’t.
Elli
, he thought. He thought of her thin legs, cut and dirty, of the tears on her face as she was pushed astride the horse.

When the moon rose, Javor woke Hrech and they slowly followed the horses’ tracks. From the droppings, they knew they had almost caught up to the riders. The group must have stopped long before nightfall and had a lazy afternoon.

The trail soon led into the forest. Javor and Hrech crept ahead, trying not to make any noise, listening. Javor winced every time they broke a twig or made a branch swish.

Soon, they heard a girl’s sobs. The moonlight would not penetrate the shadows under the trees, so Javor felt his way toward the sound. Hrech stepped on his heels  and whispered “sorry.” A twig cracked underfoot and the sobs stopped with a sudden inward breath. Javor squinted: a darker shadow under a tree seemed head-shaped. Javor fell to his knees and found himself touching Elli’s soft hair. Her fist was in her mouth. Grat was beside her, trembling with the effort to stop sobbing.

The girls were bound to the tree with a thin rope looped around their waists and wrists. Hrech stepped around Javor to cut the rope with the axe, frustrated because Javor never seemed to know how to do anything practical. He pulled Grat to her feet. “Where are the soldiers?” he whispered. No answer. “Did they let you go?” Javor and Hrech led the girls to a narrow path. “Are you hurt?” Hrech asked as they stumbled along, but Elli would only shake her head. She pointed toward a clearing. When they reached it, the girls would go no closer. Leaving Hrech with the girls and holding his dagger in front of him, Javor stepped into the clearing.

It was hard to make out at first what he saw in the moonlight, but when his foot struck something that rolled, understanding hit him like a cold wave. It was a severed head; the Avar helmet rolled off it and continued a short distance before it fell over in the grass.

Javor was surrounded by the dismembered bodies of the whole troop. Ten heavily armoured men had been literally torn apart—
maybe more. They may have had friends.
Everywhere he looked there were legs, arms, torso, heads. A shadowy heap turned out to be a horse, its throat torn open. Javor turned and turned, his head swimming.
What could have done this?

Trembling, he returned to Hrech and the girls. He could only shake his head when Hrech asked, “What is it? What’s there? What is scaring you all so?” They found the path and went the opposite way they had come, hoping it would lead home. In the next clearing they came to, they found two of the soldiers’ horses, grazing, wearing their saddles and bridles. The boys took the reins. No one thought of riding the horses—no one in their village had a horse and no one knew how to get on, let alone hold on and ride.

Finding their way home was easy—they just followed the same path that had brought them to the raiders’ camp. Hrech and Javor fell behind the girls and whispered. “What was in that clearing?” Hrech demanded.

“
The soldiers. They’d been torn apart.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
What I said. Arms and legs and heads ripped apart.”

“
More soldiers? Greeks?”

“
No. That wasn’t done by swords. It was like—like when you eat a chicken and pull the meat off the bones. It was ... I don’t know. Unbelievable.”

They drank at a stream. Hrech made a fire while Elli and Grat washed. They had nothing to dry themselves with and shivered, even though the night was warm. Grat didn’t say anything, only sobbed continually. Finally, they huddled together for warmth. Again, Hrech fell asleep. Javor felt weary, too, but could not sleep. If he closed his eyes, he saw the dead, mutilated raiders in the field.
It’s no more than they deserved,
he thought.
But still—what had done that?