‘Only by reputation,’ Wareth said, and in his mind he could well see the future the captain offered him. In his staff, hovering around the command tent. Away from the battle. The image rose like an island from the seas of his confusion and fear. I can weather the scorn. I’ve lived with my own long enough. ‘We were kept entirely separate, and hardly saw one another. They were the cats, the night-shift in the shafts.’

‘I know, Wareth. This isn’t the first pit I’ve emptied. I’ll take those names, lieutenant.’

‘When I said “reputation”, I did not mean it in a good way.’

‘Right now, that distinction is irrelevant.’

Wareth looked down at the man. ‘I think, sir, that we will lose this civil war.’

‘Keep that opinion to yourself.’

‘As you wish.’

‘Now, the names, lieutenant.’

* * *

The stench of a burned forest slipped in through every pore. Its stink soaked skin and the flesh beneath. It lurked in a man’s hair, his beard, like a promise of fire. It fouled clothes and the taste of food and water. Glyph walked through heaps of ash, around blackened stumps and the bones of tree-falls with their charred roots stark in the still air. His face was covered by a rag, leaving exposed only his red-rimmed eyes. He wore the hide of a deer, turned inside out in a feeble effort at disguise, as the deerskin’s underside was pale grey. He had rubbed handfuls of gritty ash into his black hair.

He could see too far in this forest, now. In past winters, there had been enough evergreen to offer up places to hide, blocking lines of sight, to allow a hunter to move unseen if care was taken.

Among the Deniers, it was the men who hunted. This tradition was older than the forest itself. And the great hunts, in the spring and again at summer’s end, when all the men set out, bearing bows and javelins, making their way through the forest to where the last herds still walked in their seasonal migration, far to the north now – these things too were old beyond memory.

Traditions died. And those who held fast to them, cursing and filled with hate as their precious ways of living were torn from their hands, they dwelt in a world of dreams where nothing changed. A predictable world that knew nothing of the fears that every mortal must face. He recalled the tale of the lake, and the families that lived on its shore. In all of their memories, reaching back to the very beginning, they fished that lake. They used spears in the shallows during the spawning season. They used nets and weirs at the streams that fed the lake. And for the creatures that crawled upon the lake bottom, they built traps. It was their tradition, this way of living, and they were known to all as the people who fished the lake.