The Carpet People

originally. Nasty pieces of work. They ride around on these things.’
    He indicated the skin again.
    ‘Weren’t you afraid of the eyes?’
    Bane laughed, and picked up his spear.
    Then Pismire was with them, the rangy figure riding into the clearing, long legs almost touching the ground on either side of his pony. The old man showed no surprise that Snibril was there.
    ‘Tregon Marus has fallen,’ he said slowly.
    Bane groaned.
    ‘I mean fallen ,’ said Pismire ‘Destroyed. Thetemples, the walls, everything. And snargs everywhere in the ruins. Fray has crushed the town. It was at the epicentre right underneath,’ he went on wearily. ‘It has been a long, horrible day. Where’ve the tribe gone? Burnt End? Good enough. Very defensible situation. Come on.’
    Bane had a small pony, grazing among the hairs. They set off, keeping close to the wooden cliff.
    ‘But what is Fray?’ said Snibril. ‘I remember you telling stories about old times . . . but that was long ago. Some kind of monster. Not something real.’
    ‘The mouls worship it,’ said Bane. ‘I’m . . . something of an expert.’
    Snibril looked puzzled. The Munrungs didn’t have gods. Life was complicated enough as it was.
    ‘I have theories,’ said Pismire. ‘I’ve read some old books. Never mind about the stories. They’re just metaphors.’
    ‘Interesting lies,’ translated Bane.
    ‘More like . . . ways of telling things without having to do much explaining. Fray is some kind of force. There were people who used to know more, I think. There were old stories about old cities that suddenly vanished. Just legends, now. Oh, dear. So much gets forgotten. Written down and then lost.’
    The little old tracks that ran everywhere in the Carpet did not go straight, like the road, but woundin and out of the hairs like serpents. Any traveller who walked them, and few did, rarely met anyone else. Yet the paths were never overgrown. The Dumii said that they had been made by Peloon, the god of journeys. The Munrungs privately held that the Carpet itself had made them in some mysterious way, although they didn’t say this in front of the Dumii. They didn’t have any gods themselves but were generally polite about those belonging to other people.
    Beneath the rugged tip of the Woodwall that was called Burnt End the track divided, going west and north. Glurk stopped his cart and looked up at the burnt, black crags. For a moment he thought he saw a movement high above. He sniffed the air.
    ‘I have forebodings,’ he told his wife. ‘We’ll wait for Snibril.’
    He jumped down from the cart and walked back along the track. There it was again, something scrambling away . . . no, just a shadow. Glurk sniffed again, then shook himself This was no way to behave, jumping at shadows. He cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘Gather the carts round in a circle,’ he cried. ‘We’ll camp here.’
    If you could put up with the unpleasantness and the ash, Burnt End was a safe place to be. The hairs had broken, when the Woodwall fell on to the Carpet, so there was not much cover for attackers.And the sheer white wood wall on one side reduced the chances of an attack. But the feel of the place was unsettling. Glurk bullied the tribe until the carts formed a wall, ponies and cattle penned inside. He ordered an armed man to sit on top of every cart, and set others to lighting fires and readying the camp for the night.
    Keep ’em busy. That was one of the three rules of being chief that old Grimm had passed on to him. Act confidently, never say ‘I don’t know’, and when all else fails, keep ’em busy. He’d hunted around Burnt End before, and the deathliness around the blackened wood could be unnerving even at the best of times. The only thing to do was work, laugh loudly or sing or march about with spears, before everyone’s fears got the better of them.
    Soon, cooking fires sprang up within the ring. Glurk climbed on top of his cart, and peered back down the track. Fires got seen by . . . things. Yet there was nothing like it to embolden the heart, and a hot meal did wonders for the courage. Were snargs out there? Well, they could deal with snargs. They had always been about, the nasty cowardly things. Snargs had just enough brains to know not to attack a village. They preferred to track the lone traveller, if the odds were high enough. Glurk didn’t like the change.
    After a while Glurk climbed down and took hishunting knife from under the seat.