Chapter 9
Trees, rivers, valleys whooshed past us as Arawn moved. He led us through a blur of fields of wheat and barley, between apple orchards and vegetable plots. I was used to moving fast but even in my old body I could not have matched this pace.
We stopped so abruptly that I tripped, fell forward and would have careened into the dirt had Arawn not grabbed my collar. He helped me right myself and I brushed down the front of my tunic which was completely covered in dust.
“What was that?” I coughed. Arawn grinned.
“That was rushing. You were always so proud of your speed, Mallt. I never mentioned that I can outpace you.” His smile died as he noticed Belis trying to peer past him.
Arawn stepped aside, revealing a wide-open paddock, completely overrun with thick black brambles which had grown up around trees, now cut down to stumps. Red ribbon had been strung around the edge of the miasma of thorns, dividing the fouled land from the fair.
“It grew up overnight. Seeds of darkness must have blown across the border. Only my strongest magic has been able to confine it within the ribbon and yet it edges a little wider every day.” Arawn eyed the knots of thorns with distaste.
“When I send a work crew to cut it down, the thorns slash their skin and turn them to the shadow. When I take up a scythe and start to work, my mind clouds the same way it did when we attacked the shadowbitten.”
I stared at the field. I had little experience of farming, knowing only what I had gleaned from years of wandering through homesteads on my travels, but this seemed like more than a week’s work for a hundred farmers than for two women.
“We tried setting fires, but the brambles suck water from the earth and do not burn. I had leather gloves and aprons made but they are so cumbersome that we could cut only a small amount each day and the thorns bloomed again at night, doubling the land we had cleared.”
Belis glanced at me and then approached the thicket. She reached out a hand to the vines. A breeze shifted them and they seemed to curl in on themselves.
“We should test our theory,” she said. “See if the thorns can poison us.”
“Careful,” I whispered. Belis nodded at me then dropped her hand into the brambles.
She picked up a trailing branch, thumb-thick and covered in thorns. With a wince she closed her hand around it. I moved towards her but Arawn caught my shoulder.
“Drop the branch and come back towards us,” he said. “Let me see.”
Belis held out her palm. The thorns had bitten deep and the calloused skin was dotted with blood.
Arawn picked up her hand and cradled it between his own.
I felt tension building in my chest as he closed his eyes, concentrating on the rips in Belis’s skin.
If this didn’t work, if Belis fell to the shadow…
“It’s clean,” Arawn said, and the relief in his voice was echoed in my sudden release of breath. “The corruption isn’t working on you. I can’t sense it in your blood.”
Belis grinned at me. “I told you it was a good idea.”
“It’s a start.” Arawn let go of her hand and stared over at the thicket. “You haven’t fallen to the shadow but it still injured you. If it hurt you badly enough you could die and then you would be as vulnerable as the rest of us.”
“We won’t then,” I said. “Belis has been teaching me how to fight, and I’m getting stronger already. We should come up with a plan, strike now!” Belis nodded eagerly beside me.
“No.” Arawn looked back at us. “One pinprick is not enough to prove you’re strong enough. We should wait. I will rush us back to Caer Sidi and call a council.”
“We are ready!” Belis insisted. “I’ve fought in battles, besieged towns, killed Roman soldiers with twice my experience. And Mallt was the Goddess of Death. We can do this.”
Arawn gave a half-smile. “You are very young, child.”
“I’m not a child,” Belis snapped, and in the morning sun she seemed to glow with fury. “I am a princess of the Iceni, baptised in the blood of battle. I have tasted defeat and victory and defeat again. Let me prove my mettle.”
Arawn glanced at me but I was still staring at Belis. “Very well then, my lady.” He gave the honorific enough of a twist that it hovered between respectful and ironic.
“If you want to prove yourself then here is a task for you. If you can clear this land by nightfall then I will consider moving faster. I want the thicket gone and the stumps uprooted or it will regrow in the darkness. When you have done that, it must be ploughed and sown with linseed. It must be sown by nightfall, so the crop will grow overnight, pushing out the corruption and ready to harvest by the time the morning dew has dried.”
Arawn nodded to his right. “You will find pitchforks and spades and scythes over there, beside a bag of seeds.” He extended a long finger towards the next field.
“By nightfall,” I whispered. Arawn grimaced and ran a hand through his hair as he stared out at the field.
“No citizen of Annwn could do this thing,” he said, “nor could I, the lord of this land. If you can do this then maybe there is a hope.”
He turned on his heel and was gone. Belis and I stood alone at the edge of the thicket, staring up at a sky that was suddenly filled with a twisting flock of starlings.
“Well,” I said after a moment. “We had better begin.”
I began by pacing out the length of the field in the ultimately vain hope that it was smaller or less ravelled than we feared.
It was worse. I could not even reach the ribbon for much of the length of the sides, having to make great detours around particularly heinous brambles.
Belis had collected a scythe and was trying to cut her way along the fence line but without much success.
She had not cleared more than a yard in the time it took me to walk the entire perimeter.
“We need those gloves,” she said, already panting from the effort. “It’s all very well slashing at these vines but I can’t pull out the roots without ravaging my hands – look!” She displayed her palms which were already brutally scratched. A few of the deeper cuts were beginning to drip blood.
I eyed the undergrowth warily. I had never bothered about it much in my old body, but I had encountered bramble hedges enough during my brief sojourn as human to rankle at the thought of plunging my bare hands into it.
I remembered Belis’s effort in removing the rowboat from the thorns at the fishing village.
That had been a patch of daisies compared to this.
“Should I see if I can go and find some gloves?” I asked, picking up the other scythe. Belis ran a hand through her hair.
“There’s no time to lose! I don’t even know where you’d go for them. Arawn’s gone, and there’s no one to ask for help.”
“Gods be good!” I dropped the scythe and grabbed one of the pitchforks. “If I move the vines around can you reach them without cutting your hands?”
Belis tried it. It took a bit of manoeuvring but combining the fork and a shovel seemed to hold off the worst of the thorns. We cleared another two yards that way, working together. I took a step back and leaned on my spade.
“I’ll have to take a break soon, this is terribly hard work.”
“No, Mallt, look!” Belis stared up at the sky. “It’s mid-morning already. We’ve barely made any progress.”
“Dammit.” I looked around. We were not even a hundredth of the way through clearing the brambles. If we kept going at this speed we would still be working at the thicket for a month. I felt panic rising in my throat, wrapping phantom vines around my arms that stung almost as much as the real ones.
“We’ll have to split up, both of us use the spades,” I said. Belis looked like she was going to cry.
“It’s no use, we still won’t be fast enough.” Her knuckles tightened around the scythe. “We’re not going to make it.”
“This was your idea and now you want to give up? Before we’re halfway through our first day?” I snapped at her, letting my panic turn to frustration. “Would your sister give up? Would your mother? I thought you Iceni were made of stronger stuff than that.”
She stared at me. I was a little shocked at my own words. She was usually the one who pushed me to keep going. But her strength had made me stronger and now I could give it back. Belis gritted her teeth. “Fine. We keep going.”
I nodded and turned back to the brambles, hacking at the roots with my spade.
She retrieved the other one and joined me.
We worked side by side, stabbing and cutting at the thorned vines.
Before long my hands were torn to ribbons and blood was trickling down my forearms to my elbows.
The thicket was almost thigh-deep, clawing at the fabric of my leggings and scratching my calves.
I kept going until the shovel was so slippery with blood that I could barely hold onto it.
I paused and dabbed my hands on my tunic. I’d made more progress than I had expected: I’d cleared a ten-yard strip. Belis had done even more: she was almost as far again into the bramble patch. I glanced up at the sky, expecting the sun to be overhead for midday.
Strange. It hadn’t moved. I stepped backwards into the area I had cleared, dodging a thick tree stump and moving to where we had stood before switching back to the spades.
I wasn’t mistaken. The sun was exactly where I would have expected it to be at mid-morning.
Something else caught my eye, a hawk hovering over the field, but as I stared longer I realised that it wasn’t riding the wind.
It was flying, beating its wings but so slowly that it seemed frozen in the air.
“Belis!” I called. “Look up!” I watched as she paused from her work. As she stared into the sky I noticed the movement of the hawk begin to quicken, until it had swooped over the whole length of the field and landed in a stand of trees. Belis looked at me quizzically.
I grabbed my shovel and ran to join her, skipping through the piles of cut branches.