“These brackers, Graf said they were big. How big, exactly?”
“Twice my size, full grown.” Her eyes scattered over the devastation. “Yes, they could tear down a house, one or two of them.”
“And the tree?”
It was too much of a question; nobody had ever considered what it might take, to bring such a giant to the earth. But then she said, “They never did anything like this before.”
“You’ve lived with them on your border,” Melory noted. “There must have been friction. Some man of Portruno killed one of theirs, maybe? Took something they held dear? Broke their eggs?”
“Don’t have eggs,” Erma corrected automatically, eyes still not quite able to stay still on anything. “I’ve known brackers since my Ma showed me where their places were. Never anything like this.” She stalked through the ruin, going to see the trail out.
“Change,” Amorket pronounced, and I turned on her in case she was about to make this about us, as though the Order’s mere existence could have tilted some intrinsic balance in the world. From her expression, she was arguing with something inside rather than picking a fight with me.
“Erma.” Melory picked her way after, grimacing. “You and your hunters keep an eye on them, these brackers?”
Erma’s pretence at not hearing her was obvious even to me.
“You just mark their places and stay away, or you go back and see what they’re doing? Big neighbours, and many. I’d want to know.”
“You’re asking if we saw this brewing?”
“I’m asking what you’re not saying out loud.”
The hunter stopped still, staring out into where the tree line started, at the edge of what had been Portruno’s fields.
“What are you, ghost-bearer?” I could barely catch her voice. “You come here with the outcasts, but you’re blessed of the tree. And her,” no need to even point Amorket out, “still less anything I understand. Will that ghost you carry call me out to the Lawgiver, do you think?”
I frowned at Melory, not sure where the words were leading.
“My ghost’s a doctor, and I’ve fought it down before. I am . . .” And what, exactly, was Melory now? “A scholar. I dwell among the Bandage-Men. I know more than any living about the ghosts and our ancestors and all the secret things of the past.” No idle boast. “So tell me.”
“When I was little,” Erma said, still facing away from us, “my Ma took me to where the brackers live, just as her Ma did with her, just as I’ve done with all three of mine that lived to an age for it. She took me to where a pole was stuck in the ground, a clear space no tree would move to. The ground was crusty with white crystals the brackers crap out. She had a wooden carving, held it in her two hands. I never could make out what it was of, but it was stained red as Severance. She set that on the pole, and she blew a pipe she had with her, that made no sound at all, and we sat down to wait. And the brackers came.”
At last she turned back to us. “Three of them, bigger than I’d ever thought. So scared, I was. But my Ma, she went to them and started making marks in the ground, just slashes: she does three, then they do two. She does four, then they do three. Or maybe it was different numbers. Done it enough myself, since, that I don’t rightly recall.
“They go then, and I’m asking and I’m asking when can we go home and what was all that? But we spend all night there, me twitching at every sound, sure the brackers are coming back to kill and eat us. And next morning, there they are. And they have a handful of game—just broken animal bodies, a mereclet, a couple of vissids. Things we wouldn’t hunt but that I’d seen driven off from the fields before. And they have some of this . . . hair, fur. It’s from their beasts, I know now. This cloth.” She tugged at her tunic. “Lasts near forever, keeps out the wet. Hunters’ shirts they call these, back home. Only we get to wear them, because only we know where the weave comes from. So they give us this, and Ma has her sack open and hands over some knives and some pots, even a gourd of tunny, and they match these things up one against the other, so I can see the same numbers there, as the scratches in the earth: some of these for some of those. You understand?”
“Your Ma traded with them?” asked Melory, wide-eyed.
“Not just her,” as though it was an accusation. “All the hunters. All of us who become hunters get shown it. It’s the way, but . . .”
“The Lawgiver can’t know.”
“It’s not ghost business,” Erma said sullenly. “Right from the start, the ghosts say, keep away from the brackers. They have their places and we have ours. Only . . .”
A tradition. What she had was what we have built these last ten years. A new way of doing things, a mystery, an Order. I couldn’t imagine what hard times or chance meeting led to what she’s describing, but I understood how it had been perpetuated, passed down one hunter to the next. Knowledge learned and taught, not simply distributed by a ghost. I could curse, that we only discovered this now, when the brackers had gone mad and destroyed a village, when this mystery of Erma’s was of no use to anyone.
I wondered what Sharskin would have made of it. Even after all this time my thoughts still went to him. Would he have welcomed this sign that people had made something of their own, without the ghosts? Or would he have crushed it, because it was not his?
After that, we made to leave Portruno to the scavengers. Perhaps people would travel here to recover anything left unbroken. Crafted things were valuable, after all, though there was little that had not been . . .
I wanted to say smashed. I wanted to cast what I was seeing as mindless devastation: the beasts had run mad, as it is easy to imagine beasts doing. But the more I looked at the ruin, the more I saw fragments of pattern.
Melory had seen it, too. She was standing by a flattened house, looking at objects strewn next to where its entrance would have been. Except they were not strewn. The word was arranged. There was a hoe, a rake, a knife, an arm. The hand was attached, but the fingers had been pulled off and set beside the knife, longest first. The whole sequence was in order of length. It was not an animal thing to do. It had a dreadful sense of a child’s game played with grisly pieces.
Seeing that, we saw odd elements everywhere we looked. A circle of disjointed limbs, arranged so that the large ends all met in the centre; a house where the curved staves of the walls had been stacked neatly one atop another; a clutch of tree branches snapped off that had been leant together as though to form a model of the uprooted original. There was something chilling in it all, past mere death and ruin.
I’d been a wanderer ten years. I had travelled from village to village, creating the traditions that kept the Order alive. The forest was my place. But now I looked into the trees and shivered.
At our call, Erma turned from the tracks and led us back towards Tsuno. In all our minds, no doubt, was the fear that we would find another ruin, another toppled tree, all my followers vanished or torn apart trying to defend the place. We were strong against beasts, we of the Order. Animals were as frightened of us as people. Except these brackers were not acting like animals, and so our greatest weapon might mean nothing.
We came back to Tsuno to find it still there; no bracker had come near it yet. However there was news. Some of Erma’s hunters had gone to spy on the new village the brackers were building for themselves on Tsuno land. They reported that the brackers had a human prisoner amongst them. More, they said it was no villager; it was one of ours.