Kalik Read online

  Kalik is the fourth and final volume in Jack Lasenby’s award-winning ‘Travellers Quartet’ – the other titles are Because We Were the Travellers, Taur, and The Shaman

  By the river, our people lie

  By the river rushing by.…

  Ish is introduced to Lutha’s Headland; a cruel and primitive society driven by fear and superstition. He quickly distrusts a quality in Lutha and her beautiful, elegant friend and lieutenant Kalik.

  Ish wishes to escape but realises he cannot go alone – as this would mean leaving behind a group of terrorised children.

  In this novel Jack Lasenby weaves in threads of ancient myths, religions and folk tales from cultures as diverse as Ancient Persia and old Russia. His inventiveness reminds us how vital the power of story-telling is, And how it creates a sense of history, community and identity for all.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Maps

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE – Lake Ka

  I A Bundle Wrapped in Soft Deerskin

  II Displaying the Baby

  III The Iceberg

  IV Kicking a Child

  V The Lost Cries of Children

  VI Leadership and Infection

  VII Cat’s Cradle

  VIII Something So Obvious

  IX Friends Must Stick Together

  X The Blazed Track

  XI Imagining Things

  XII Promise and the Secret of Fire

  XIII Dreams of Dreams

  XIV Death on the Skids

  XV A Flash of White

  XVI “It Works!”

  XVII Cold Kiss

  BOOK TWO – Lake Tip

  XVII “Be Rabbits!”

  XIX “Bears Don’t Have Horns.”

  XX The Smell and the Sound

  XXI The Feast

  XXII Puli’s Pattern

  XXIII The Terrible Noise

  XXIV A Good Trade

  XXV By the River Rushing By

  XXVI Something for Chak

  XXVII Paku’s Leg

  XXVIII Lifting the Danger

  XXIX Twelve Again

  XXX “It’s My Story Now.”

  XXXI What Tupu Found

  XXXII The Ooze

  XXXIII The Wooden Doll

  XXXIV The Satisfied Mind

  XXXV Thirteen

  About the Author

  Also by Jack Lasenby

  Copyright

  A Note

  Kalik is the fourth volume of the ‘Travellers Quartet’, the story of Ish’s growth and his search for a family.

  In Because We Were the Travellers and Taur, Ish survives banishment from his tribe with the help of Old Hagar. Hunted by the Salt Men, he and his friend Taur the Bull Man escape from the North Land and cross to the South Land. Taur dies saving Ish.

  In The Shaman and the Droll, Lutha of the Floating Village on Lake Ka helps Ish escape with his dogs, Jak and Nip, but they are swept down an underground river. They emerge in the Land of the White Bear where the Shaman teaches Ish reading and writing, the skills of Healing, and of Judging. There, also, Ish dreams of Lutha.

  Finding he is to be blinded, Ish escapes the Droll and her servant, the Carny. With the Shaman, Jak, and Nip, he makes his way back to Lake Ka. The Shaman is killed by the Salt Men and dies in Lutha’s arms – the daughter he had never seen. Kalik begins at that point.

  By the river, our people lie,

  By the river rushing by….

  from the Travellers’ Song of the River

  Book One

  Lake Ka

  Chapter 1

  A Bundle Wrapped in Soft Deerskin

  The canoe hangs in the jaws of the rapids. Bearing the Shaman’s body, the raft tilts, slides down the hole where the river vanishes under Grave Mountain. Up the glassy slip, away from the fanged wave, I fight the canoe thrust and thrust and thrust. Lutha slumps, shocked by her father’s death, their brief, sole meeting. Behind me, Nip whines.

  Up the chute of snarling water inside the Island of Bones. Through the rip at the mouth. Leap out. Drag across shallow shingle into Lake Ka’s still water. Out of the river’s tug, I slip back in and collapse over my paddle.

  Too much had happened too quickly. I had escaped being blinded, had beaten the Carny and the Droll. Jak and the Shaman both dead. And here I was back in the canoe, on the lake, with Lutha! So close in the sun I smelled her skin, sweet as honey.

  I stretched out one hand, began to say, “I’m sorry –”, stopped. My fingers tightened on the paddle until the knuckles bulged white. The canoe shook with my trembling. Viciously, I dug, shoved against the water, sent the canoe left.

  Lutha stirred, lifting her head, coming back into herself.

  “Are you all right?” I looked past her shoulder and gaped. Where the Floating Village should have been – thatched roofs peeping over the palisade – only the stone statue reared out of the water, surmounted by Hekkat’s enormous two-faced head. For the first time I saw it had a third face. I was still staring when, from the beach behind the Triple-Hekkat, a canoe speared.

  “Salt Men!” Lutha grabbed her paddle. “Up the lake, idiot!” She spun the canoe right, and we fled, tossing spray. Paddles hissing we surged forward, surged again, then the canoe was running, barely touching, skimming on our fear of my old enemies.

  Even in danger, something in me resented being called an idiot. (I was no boy to be ordered about!) The Salt Men’s canoe had several paddlers. (I had studied, had become a Healer.) They must catch us. (I could have been the Shaman, the Judge!) I paddled even harder. (I’d show her!)

  Confident cries. The Salt Men catching up. I worked even harder but, through a red mist, saw Lutha’s paddle drag. Taunts echoed from ahead as well as behind. A horn brayed, and Lutha slipped something over her head. Silver trickled like water through her fingers.

  “Don’t give in now, idiot!” I muttered, but it came out at as a groan. I gulped air, paddled on. We ran into the shadow of a headland. Along its cliff-top a wall of posts, people moving behind them. Over our heads, a flight of arrows twittering. They plunged, tossing up a white hedge. The Salt Men shouted, gesticulated, but dared come no closer.

  As several canoes sprang from a beach below the headland, Lutha turned. “For my father!” I half-closed my eyes, but she dropped something over my head. Silver again, like the run of water. My hand found something hanging at my throat. There was a sense of something familiar, then I knew I was remembering something else I had once worn round my neck.

  “You’ll be safe only so long as you wear it.”

  I craned to see what it was. “Watch this!” said Lutha. The Salt Men spun and fled, paddles spanking, light dancing. It looked comical. I stopped laughing as three canoes cut off their escape, and Lutha’s trap slammed shut! So that was why she had been alone on the lake, why she deliberately slowed our canoe. Sweat still trickled warm down my chest, drops from my forehead, but the skin on my spine puckered cold.

  Excited voices cheered her ashore, crying her name. A group of young women armed with spears. One at the front – tall, flashing eyes – levelled her spear’s sharp tip at my throat. Her eyes flared wide as she saw the thing around my neck, and Lutha struck down her spear.

  “Ish is under my protection!”

  The girl flung herself crying on the sand, and Lutha trampled, spurned her. The girl crawled, grasped at her hand but Lutha looked away.

  The girl stared at me, a blue-eyed glare so intense it was like the spear thrust. I staggered. “She’s jealous! Of me?”

  The young women carried Lutha off through a gate in the palisade and up the hill. Two came back, lifted the fallen girl to her feet, calling her Raka. Another came running.

  Expressionless, she spoke through or past me. “Follow!”

  “Where ar
e we going?” Silence.

  “What was all that about?” Silence.

  “What’s wrong with Raka?” I gave up and looked around.

  So many! Men. Women. Babies. Children. I thought of the people I had read about, the huge numbers who had once lived in the cities of the Walls. Lutha’s Headland People were more than I had ever seen in one place. They must have been over a hundred! Two hundred?

  I saw the swing of Lutha’s red-hemmed skirt, her brown legs I remembered in the canoe that other time. Warriors fell back, saluting with their spears. When they saw what hung about my neck, they saluted it, too. Nip and I followed up a mound to a large round house.

  On the steps, Lutha turned. A pretty girl brought her a bundle wrapped in soft deerskin. I heard myself grunt. Even before Lutha took the bundle almost carelessly, pulled back the corner of the deerskin, I knew what it was.

  Chapter 2

  Displaying the Baby

  The baby butted blind, mouth working. Lutha ignored it. Sending for people, rattling off names. All older women, they pushed to the front, waited silent. Lutha held the baby high, turning, displaying it. A girl. The old women sighed. Lutha swaddled the baby. The women crushed between us. A mewl turned to sucking, a whimper, then sucking again. The old women sighed.

  I tried to control my face, afraid people would read my thoughts. But the women were too intent on the baby to notice. Lutha’s voice described my earlier visit to the Floating Village, how the priestesses of Hekkat ordered her to leave me on the Island of Bones. There were nods as several women remembered, eyes still fixed on the baby.

  “Ish brought back my father, but he died, shot by the Salt Men. He has gone back down the river, under Grave Mountain.”

  Lutha’s voice was matter of fact. No grief. I remembered her years ago on the Floating Village, sure of herself, but she had a different quality now.

  The grey heads bobbed. A ripple of sighs. A quavered, “That’s right, Lutha.” Placatory. As if Lutha’s silence was permission, the speaker continued. “Our men disappeared before you were born. Chasing the Salt Men across the river. Swept away, we thought.”

  A shriek from behind the Roundhouse made me flinch. Neither Lutha nor the women took any notice. Awful, it came again. And again.

  The old voice went on: “None came home.” The woman said something else, but I was listening to her voice. Why should I remember it? Our first arrival at the Floating Village, the people rejected us. Not just rejection, but deliberate cruelty: luring us to death. Then Lutha saving us. As the memories poured back, I knew I was feeling an even older sense of rejection, at being cast out of the Travellers after my father died. “Self-pity!” I hissed under my breath.

  A big woman had been in charge on the Floating Village. Bully-mouthed, she whipped the back of her knife across my throat, burning the skin. She cuffed me, dragged me before Hekkat where the priestesses pronounced my doom. She stuck a spear into me, prodded Jak and Nip. She made sure Lutha followed the priestesses’ orders, abandoned us on the Island of Bones, to be drowned. It was her! Old now, body shrunken, her voice quavered.

  The baby cried for a moment. Lutha’s face appeared between the heads and shoulders and nodded. “Your story!” she ordered. The old women opened a circle about me.

  I swallowed and described how Jak, Nip, and I escaped from the Island of Bones, thanks to Lutha. How our raft was swept into the tunnel under Grave Mountain. How we emerged in the Land of the White Bear and were rescued by the blind Shaman.

  Several times Lutha asked me to explain something. At last I realised all my reading in the Library and the long discussions with the Shaman had taught me words and ideas Lutha and her women did not know.

  I kept my words simple. Told of the Shaman’s cave, of the villagers on that frozen coast. Catching seals, birds, hunting and being hunted by the white bears. For some reason I said nothing of the Library, of the Shaman teaching me to read and write. Nothing of the Carny and the Droll, their determination to blind me. The work of Lutha’s father I described as Shaman, Healer, Judge. And I spoke of how we escaped under the mountain, how Jak died, and the Salt Men killed the Shaman.

  And all the time, I kept thinking of the baby. Kept wondering about my long-cherished love for Lutha, the jealous behaviour of the girl on the beach, Raka. And about that terrible shriek.

  Chapter 3

  The Iceberg

  A horn brayed. Lutha shoved the baby at the girl who took it tenderly. “Tell them I must know now!” She ran up a flight of steps to a platform connected with the upper storey of the Roundhouse. I went to follow, still wondering about the baby’s father, but the bodyguard of young women crossed spears to bar my way.

  Another of those shrieks. Nobody else seemed to have heard its agony. Lutha stared towards the hills behind. I followed her gaze: tiny figures filed from the hills and on to a causeway. The Headland was almost an island.

  I shaded my eyes with both hands as if to see better, but closed my ears with my thumbs against another shriek. On three sides of the Headland the palisade was built along the tops of cliffs. A fourth wall of posts closed off the beach. Fighting platforms at intervals and over the lake and causeway gates meant attackers came under fire before they could get close enough to shoot their own arrows.

  Thatch-roofed wooden huts, each with its stack of firewood, lined the terraces below the Roundhouse. Steam rose from earth ovens. The Roundhouse was elaborately roofed – wooden shingles. Water from a spring stepped down through pools. Storehouses on tall legs – spike-fringed against rats. Within a stockade, its high gate defended by guards, were two long, low, windowless huts. Canoes were drawn up under the causeway and on the beach.

  At the far end of the causeway: gardens, orchards, and a glint of blue, a stream. I had wanted to be a Farmer and Gardener, to settle in one place. Old Hagar argued Travellers did not have such a thing. Lutha had found a place of her own.

  The tiny figures had grown to a patrol filing between pole fences this end of the causeway. Attackers would have to run a gauntlet between defenders protected by trenches and platforms. A tall figure leading the patrol seemed to spring rather than just walk. Now they were being admitted, trotting up.

  I took my thumbs out of my ears. The air shook with a dying gibberish shriek like blood painted on the air. As the patrol formed a line below Lutha, a young woman ran from behind the Roundhouse. She climbed halfway up the steps, whispered something urgent.

  The patrol leader was followed by a dog who lifted his great head and stared at Nip, looked from her to me, lifted an ugly lip, showed fangs. The man saluted Lutha, smiled. The flicker of a look at me, and he stared at Lutha’s emblem around my neck.

  “Three lots of Salt Men camped in the hills, Lutha.” His voice lilted, amused, musical. “More on the beach behind Hekkat. Two canoes and seven rafts. They’re ready for an attack, but when? We tried to catch one on his own, but had no luck.”

  Restless, even as he spoke, he moved his weight from foot to foot. His least movement had a quality of litheness, of balance. Straight-backed, head poised, elegant. Smiling.

  Lutha smiled back. Physical attraction hung between them, almost visible. I gaped at their beauty. Hurt, confused, I had to admit the sense of her choice.

  Her bodyguard moved uneasy. A couple whispered. Lutha’s face changed, a sudden expression of superiority. The man’s face changed, too, so brief I almost missed it. He looked dashed. Then his smile was fixed back in place.

  “When will they attack?” said Lutha. “First light tomorrow morning.”

  The shrieks! The captured Salt Men tortured. Why was it so important to Lutha, to know first?

  She swung down the steps. My eyes staring at her legs beneath the jig of her short skirt, its red hem dancing above her knees. I looked away.

  “See everything is ready! They must think we are asleep.”

  A sweeping bow and gesture from the patrol leader dismissed his own information, recognised Lutha’s. His humility was convinci
ng, the movement as graceful as all his others, but Nip nudged against my hand. I glanced down, saw what she was watching: the man’s toes tightened, clenched the ground, relaxed.

  “This is Ish,” said Lutha. “Kalik!” She explained my appearance with her father, and his death.

  Lutha signalled to the young women who surrounded an open-walled shelter beside the Roundhouse. We followed her towards it, Kalik questioning me.

  “You came under the mountain with Lutha’s father? What did you call him? The Shaman!” And I found myself wanting to impress Kalik, to tell him about the things I had kept secret. Such was his charm, he would have had me talking about the Library, the Carny, the Droll. Something stopped me just in time.

  The girl holding the baby stood beside the shelter. We were walking by them: the baby squealed: Lutha struck the girl. Kalik talked on as if he had seen nothing. The armed young women impassive.

  A red weal across her face, the girl rocked the baby, patting, distracting it. And Lutha strode into the shelter ahead of Kalik dancing behind her, talking. I heard a private note to their voices. A tear trickled down the girl’s cheek, across the raised red blotch. Impassive, she made no move to wipe it away. “Ish!” Lutha called and, Nip at my heel, I followed Kalik and his menacing dog.

  In baskets of plaited flax, the bodyguard brought steaming fish, potatoes, green-leaved vegetables. Lutha passed her hands above. “Thanks to the Mother,” she intoned. I thought of the last time I had seen food cooked in earth ovens and put the memory out of mind.

  About the shelter, the young women sat and ate. I saw Raka, the jealous one, slip into the outside of the circle. The others drew away from her. At last, somebody offered her food, but she sat face lowered.