Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [8]
Five days passed. They came to another ridge and crossed it. There were many streams to get over; some of the land was marshy and the going was more difficult. But he was fascinated by the gradual change in the landscape. Bleak as the plain was, it contained far more vegetation than there had been in the tundra to the north; and though it was still very empty, game was not so sparse. The children barely noticed the change, for now even the boy was too dazed to protest: his thumb was no longer in his mouth; he and Vata moved like automatons, staring straight ahead of themselves as though in a dream while Akun strode beside them at her stately walk. But they kept a steady pace and he did not let them cover more than ten to twelve miles a day, conserving the last reserves of their strength.
“Soon you will see the great forest,” he promised them. And each day, to encourage them, he repeated what his father had told him. “It has many kinds of different trees, and plenty of game, and strange birds and animals that you have never seen before. It is a wonderful place.” They would listen to him, then stare blankly, straight ahead, and he prayed to the goddess of the moon, who watched over all hunters, that this information was correct.
On the sixth day disaster struck, and when it did so, it came in a form unlike anything the hunter had ever dreamed of.
He woke at dawn, to a clear, chilly day. Akun and the children, wrapped in furs and huddled together beside a clump of bushes, were still sleeping. He stood up, sniffing the air and staring towards the east where a watery sun was rising. At once his instincts told him that something was wrong.
But what? At first he thought it was something in the air, which had a curious, clinging quality. Then he thought the trouble was something else and his brow contracted to a frown. Finally he heard it.
It was the faintest of sounds: so faint that it would never have been picked up by any man other than a skilled tracker like himself, who could discern a single buffalo three miles away by putting his ear to the ground. What he heard now, and what in his sleep had troubled him all night, was a barely perceptible murmur, a rumbling in the earth, somewhere to the east. He put his ear to the ground and remained still for a while. There was no mistaking it: some of the time it was little more than a hiss; but it was accompanied by other grating and cracking sounds, as though large objects were striking against each other. He frowned again. Whatever it was, this sound was not made by any animal: not even a herd of bison or wild horse could generate such a trembling of the earth. Hwll shook his head in puzzlement.
He stood up. “The air,” he muttered. There was, undeniably, something strange about the air as well. Then he realised what it was. The faint breeze smelt of salt.
But why should the air smell of salt, when he was close to the great forest? And what was the curious noise ahead?
He woke Akun.
“Something is wrong,” he told her. “I must go and see. Wait for me here.”
All morning he travelled east at a trot. By late morning he had covered fifteen miles, and the sounds ahead were growing loud. More than once he heard a resounding crack, and the murmur had turned into an ominous rumble. But it was when he came to a patch of rising ground and had reached the top that he froze in horror.
Ahead of him, where the forest should have been, was water.
It was not a stream, not a river, but water without end: a sea! And the sea was on the move, as ice floes stretching out as far as he could see, drifted past, going south. He could hardly believe his eyes.
Along the shoreline, small ice floes buffeted the vegetation, and tiny waves beat on the ground. This was the hissing sound he had heard. Further out, the tops of great trees were still visible here and there, sticking out of the water; and occasionally a small iceberg would crack and splinter the wood as it rubbed against them. So that had been the strange cracking sound that had puzzled him!
Before his