The Family Trade

There was no sign of an edge to the woods, in whichever direction she went. Nor were there signs of habitation other than the curl of smoke she’d seen. It was four o’clock now. She returned to her clearing, confident that nobody was around, and unstrapped her tent from the backpack. It took half an hour to get the dome tent erected, and another half-hour with the netting and leaves to turn it into something that could be mistaken for a shapeless deadfall. She spent another fifteen minutes returning to the stream to fill her ten-litre water carrier. Another half-hour went on digging a hole nearby, then she took ten minutes to run a rope over a bough and hoist her bag of food out of reach of the ground. Darkness found her lighting her portable gas stove to boil water for her tea. I did it, she thought triumphantly. I didn’t forget anything important! Now all she had to do was make it through tomorrow and the morning of the next day without detection.

The night grew very cold without a fire, but her sleeping bag was almost oppressively hot with the tent zipped shut. Miriam slept lightly, starting awake at the slightest noise—worried at the possibility of bears or other big animals wandering through her makeshift camp, spooked by the sigh of wind and the patter of a light predawn rainfall. Once she dreamed of wolves howling in the distance. But dawn arrived without misadventure and dragged her bleary-eyed from the tent to squat over the trench she’d remembered to dig the day before. “The Girl Scout training pays off at last,” she dictated with a sardonic drawl.

A tin of sausages and beans washed down with strong black coffee made a passable breakfast. “Now what?” she asked herself. “Do I wait it out with the camp or go exploring?”

For a moment, Miriam quailed. The enormity of the wilderness around her was begi

Something about the isolation made her want to chatter, to fill up the oppressive silence. But the words that tumbled out didn’t tell her much, except that she was—Let’s face it. I’m scared. This wasn’t the sensible thing to do, was it? But I haven’t been doing sensible properly since I got myself fired on Monday.

Unzipping the day pack from her backpack, she filled it with necessities, then set out for the escarpment.

It was a clear, cold morning, and the wisp of smoke she’d seen yesterday had disappeared. But she knew roughly where she’d seen it, and a careful scan of the horizon with binoculars brought it into focus once more—a pause in the treeline, punctuated by nearly invisible roofs. At a guess, it was about three miles away. She glanced at the sky and chewed on her lower lip: Doable, she decided, still half-unsure that it was the right thing to do. But I’ll go out of my skull if I wait here two days, and Paulie won’t be back until tomorrow. Bearing and range went into her notepad and onto the map, and she blazed a row of slashes on every fifth tree along the ridgeline to help her on the way back. The scarp was too steep to risk on her own, but if she went along the crest of the ridge, she could take the easy route down into the valley.

Taking the easy route was not, as it happened, entirely safe. About half a mile farther on—half a mile of plodding through leaf mounds, carefully bypassing deadfalls, and keeping a cautious eye open—an unexpected sound made Miriam freeze, her heart in her mouth and ice in her veins. Metal, she thought. That was a metallic noise! Who’s there? She dropped to a squat with her back against a tree as a horse or mule snorted nearby.

The sound of hooves was now audible, along with a creaking of leather and the occasional clatter or jingle of metalwork. Miriam crouched against the tree, very still, sweat freezing in the small of her back, trying not to breathe. She couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a single set of hooves. With her camouflage-patterned jacket, knitted black face mask, and a snub-nosed pistol clutched in her right hand, she was a sight to terrify i

She held perfectly still as a peculiarly dressed man led a mule past, not ten yards away from her. The animal was heavily overloaded, bulging wicker baskets towering over its swaying back. Its owner wore leggings of some kind, but was swathed from head to knees in what looked like an ancient and moth-eaten blanket. He didn’t look furtive; he just looked dirt-poor, his face lined and ta

The mule paused. Almost absently, its owner reached out and whacked it across the hindquarters with his rod. He grunted something in what sounded like German, only softer, less sibilant.

Miriam watched, fear melting into fascination. That was a knife at his belt, under the blanket—a great big pigsticker of a knife, almost a short sword. The mule made an odd sort of complaining noise and began moving again. What’s in the baskets? she wondered. And where’s he taking it?

There were clearly people living in these woods. Better be careful, she told herself, taking deep breaths to calm down as she waited for him to pass out of sight. She pondered again whether or not she shouldn’t go straight back to her campsite. In the end curiosity won out—but it was curiosity tempered by edgy caution.

An hour later, Miriam found a path wandering among the trees. It wasn’t a paved road by any stretch of the imagination, but the shrubbery to either side had been trampled down and the path itself was muddy and flat: Fresh road-apples told her which way the man with the mule had gone. She slashed a marker on the tree where her path intersected the road, crudely scratching in a bearing and distance as digits. If her growing suspicion was true, these people wouldn’t be able to make anything of it. She picked her way through the trees along one side of the path, keeping it just in sight. Within another half-mile the trees ended in a profusion of deadfalls and stumps, some of which sprouted amazing growths of honey fungus. Miriam picked her way farther away from the path, then hunkered down, brought out binoculars and dictaphone, and gave voice to her fascination.

“This is incredible! It’s like a museum diorama of a medieval village in England, only—Eww, I sure wouldn’t drink from that stream. The stockade is about two hundred yards away and they’ve cleared the woods all around it.

There are low stone walls, with no cement, around the field. It’s weird, all these rows ru

She paused, focusing her binoculars in on a couple of figures walking in the near distance. They were close enough to see her if they looked at the treeline, so she instinctively hunched lower, but they weren’t paying attention to the forest. One of them was leading a cow—a swaybacked beast like something from a documentary about India. The buildings were grayish, the walls made of stacked bundles of something or other, and the roofs were thatched—not the picturesque golden colour of the rural English tourist trap she’d once stayed in outside Oxford, but the real thing, gray and sagging. “There are about twelve buildings; none of them have windows. The road is unpaved, a mud track. There are chickens or some kind of fowl there, pecking in the dirt. It looks sleazy and tumbledown.”

She tracked after the human figures, focused on the stockade. ‘There’s a gate in the stockade and a platform or tower behind it. Something big’s in there, behind the wall, but I can’t see it from here. A long house? No, this doesn’t look … wrong period. These aren’t Vikings, there’s, uh—”