Atto sniffed. "What's that up ahead? I smell woodsmoke. And shit."

Alain smelled it, too, and more besides, a pall in the air that he had come to associate with despair. He started forward, but Mara did not walk until Atto told her to, and she hung between the two men, nervous of the hounds and shy of each footfall. She had brown hair pulled back away from her face and mostly covered by a scarf, and a pleasant face at its liveliest when she was exclaiming over the beauty of flowers, but her shoulders were hunched all the time. She was like a dog wondering if it is about to be scolded. Alain pitied her, caught between two strong-minded men, yet he also wondered what would happen if she ever spoke up for herself.

The hounds, ranging ahead, loped back with ears raised and noses testing the breeze. Where the path bent under the trees they came upon a haphazard ring of settlement, hovels built out of crooked branches and roofed with patched canvas or tightly woven saplings smeared with leaves mixed into mud, now dry. The woods had been hacked back around the shantytown, leaving gaping holes in the canopy. There must have been three-score people squatting here, huddled in threadbare cloaks, staring at the travelers with the numbed anger of folk leached of hope and weakened by hunger. It stank, and it seemed people had done little more than move a few steps away from their ragged shelters to relieve themselves, not even digging pits or designating one spot for refuse. What possessions they owned sat in baskets or chipped pots. In one cage, guarded by a young man with a sharpened stick, rested a scrawny hen. Children crouched in the dirt and did not scamper along the path as healthy, curious children do when travelers pass by. This lapse caused even Atto to look nervous. He slammed the butt of his spear showily on the ground with every other step so everyone would see they were armed. Mara covered her nose and mouth with a hand and was stifling either cries or retches.

The people watched as they passed. None spoke or moved to disturb the lonely crackle of fire in the single pit dug into the ground and fueled by smoking green wood. Their silence was its own voice, telling him that these ragged folk had given up hope. They did not stir until they heard a new sound.

It came first as a hollow rat-a-tat, as if a distant woodpecker drummed its spring call. Alain was so surprised to hear bird life that he halted and tilted his head, seeking the direction of the sound. All around the hush deepened. One woman gasped audibly. Goaded by that noise, people stumbled up, grabbing children and sacks and baskets. They bolted for the shelter of the woods. By the time the band of cavalry swept around the bend, shouting and laughing, the clearing was empty, the shelters and fire pits abandoned. One forgotten little child sat on its naked rump with hands balled into fists and face red as it bawled in terror.