Roo nodded, but after three or four fumbling footsteps, Erik collapsed. Roo tried to help his friend up. “Why’d you have to be so damn big?”
Erik gasped for air and said, “Go on without me.”
Roo felt the hair rise upon his neck and felt panic slash through his stomach. Finding strength he didn’t know he had, he forced Erik to his feet. “And have to explain to your mother how I lost you? I don’t think so.”
Roo silently prayed that Erik could hold on long enough for them to find shelter and hide from the dogs. Roo was terrified. One of the heartiest lads in Ravensburg, Erik had stamina almost as legendary as his strength among the boys he grew up with. His ability to work from dawn to dusk since the age of ten, his ability to carry iron ingots to the forge, his ability to withstand the constant weight of draft horses leaning on him while being shod—all had given Erik an almost superhuman stature among the townspeople. His weakness was as alien to Roo as it was to Erik himself. Roo found it far more frightening than anything else that confronted them. With Erik at his side, he felt he had a fighting chance to survive. Without Erik, he was helpless.
Roo sniffed the air. “Do you smell something?”
Erik said, “Only the stink of my own sweat.”
“Over there.” Roo motioned with his chin.
Erik put his hand against his friend’s shoulder and rested a moment as he sniffed the air. “Charcoal.”
“That’s it!”
“There must be a charcoal burner’s hut upwind.”
“It might mask our scent,” said Roo. “I know we can’t go much farther. You’ve got to rest, get your strength back.”
Erik only nodded, and Roo assisted him as they moved toward the source of the smoke. Through light woods they stumbled as the sound of the dogs grew louder by the minute. Erik and Roo were not woodsmen, but as boys they had played in the woodlands near Ravensburg enough to know those searching for them were less than a couple of miles behind and coming fast.
The woods thickened and grew more difficult to navigate, darker shadows confusing their sense of direction, but the smell of burning wood grew stronger. By the time they reached the hut, their eyes stung from it.
An old woman, ugly beyond belief, stood tending a charcoal kiln, feeding small cuts of wood into it, banking flames as she ensured the wood burned down properly; too hot, and she’d have ashes.
Seeing the two young men suddenly appear out of the gloom, she shrieked and almost dove inside the rude hut beside which her kiln rested. The shrieking continued and Roo said, “She’ll bring them down on us if this keeps up.”
Erik tried to raise his voice over her shouting. “We mean you no harm.”
The shrieking continued, and Roo added his protestation of no evil intent to Erik’s. The woman continued to shriek. Finally Erik said, “We had best leave.”
“We can’t,” answered Roo. “You’re on your last legs now.” He said nothing about the wound, which continued to weep blood, despite the rags pressed against it.
Stumbling down a small incline to the charcoal burner’s hut, they confronted a simple piece of hide that served as a door.
Erik leaned his weight against the mud-covered wall and pulled aside the leather door. The woman huddled back against the bale of rags that served as her bedding, shrieking all the more.
Erik finally shouted, “Woman! We mean you no harm!”
Instantly the shouting ceased. “Well,” she answered, her voice as raspy as a wire brush on metal, “why didn’t you say something?”
Erik almost laughed, he felt so light-headed and giddy. Roo said, “We were trying to, but you kept screaming.”
Getting up off the rags, showing a surprising nimbleness for her age and weight—easily as much as Erik’s and he stood a good foot and a half taller than she—the woman stepped out of the hut.
Roo reflexively stepped back. She was the ugliest human being he had ever encountered, if indeed she was human. From her appearance, she could possibly be one of those trolls he had heard about that haunted the woodlands of the Far Coast. Her nose was a lumpy red protrusion, resembling a large tuber, with one big wart on the tip of it, from which several long hairs grew. Her eyes could only be called piggish, and they wept from some sort of inflammation. Her teeth were blackened stumps with green edges, and her breath was as foul as anything Roo had remembered smelling that wasn’t dead. Her skin looked like dried leather, and he shuddered to consider what her body under that assortment of filthy rags might resemble.
Then she smiled and the effect was heightened. “Come to pay old Gert a visit, have you?” She tried to be girlish as she combed her fingers through grey hair tangled with straw and dirt, and had the boys not been so tired and frightened, they would have laughed. “Well, my man is gone to the city, so maybe—”
“My friend is hurt,” interrupted Roo.
Suddenly the old woman’s manner changed again as she caught the sound of the dogs on the wind. “King’s men are hunting you?”