White Ghost and the Poison Arrow (5 page)

The walk back to the village from here takes her a while, but
it is a nice day. The clouds are covering the sun, meaning she is
not finding it too hard to see from the light. “
I have to put some coal dust under my eyes when I get back to
the village.”
Arella thinks.

Once back at the village, Arella quickly goes to her small
tent, picks up a fresh pair of leggings and cloak. Arella’s stomach
growls at the smell of meat coking over the fire. “Nope. Can’t stop
to eat. I have to get myself clean and make this bow.” Arella is
determined to do this by the time the sun goes down. Before leaving
her tent, Arella takes some flint, for sharpening her dagger and
making a fire. She puts the flint in her boot next to the dagger
for safe keeping. It scratches against her skin a little. She moves
her sock up her leg to stop the rubbing. On her way out of the tent
she sees an old fire that has long since burnt out. She puts her
fingers into the ashes and rubs it under her eyes.
“
This will make seeing much easier.”
Arella leaves the village with strange looks and
whispers from the others, but no more than usual.

Once she has collected the anamoa wood, she comes to the edge
of the forest, where the trees meet the water, she decided to
follow it round. Walking between the trees and the water is tricky,
but it means she can get to a place where she will be able to bathe
and make her bow in peace. After a short walk, Arella comes to an
area where the lake is shallow and clear, surrounded by trees and
completely hidden from view. She looks at her reflection in the
water and sees a sight that makes her laugh. A skinny fourteen year
old girl, with dried mud and blood in her hair, dirty but smiling.
“
This is what the others in the village
must have seen. No wonder they were looking at me like I was
strange.”
She takes off her clothes,
upbraids her hair and slinks into the clean water. It is a little
cooler than she would have liked it, but refreshing all the same.
The sun has now come out and Arella can’t help thinking that if the
sun was out earlier, the lake might be warmer than it is, but it is
clean all the same.

Fish swim in the water under her feet, sometimes catching her
toes and making her laugh. Arella dips her head under the water,
washing away the dirt and blood from the days trials. She feels a
sharp pain in her head as she does this from the cut caused by
falling on the root. “
Nothing that won’t
heal.”
She thinks to herself. Arella is
used to scratches a bruises, clumsy as she is, she hardly goes a
week without getting some kind of injury.

Once she is
clean, Arella pulls her clothes into the water from the rock they
were resting on a begins scrubbing the dirt out of them too. She
steps out of the water and climbs onto the slippy rocks at the side
of the lake.

Arella’s skin
dries quickly in the warm sun, and she is soon dry enough to put
her new clean clothes back on. Her hair is still dripping wet.
Arella wrings it out, getting as much of the water out of it as she
can, and sits running her finders through it, un-knotting it as she
goes, until it is silky smooth. She takes the wet hair, pulls it
all to one side and braids it once again to keep it out of her eyes
while she works.

Arella lays her
wet clothes out on one of the black rocks, these are the hottest
and will help to dry her clothes quicker, and puts her boots close
to them too. “I love the feeling of bare feet on warm rocks.” She
thinks as she walks around. As she looks around her, she has a
sudden realisation; the land here is perfect. There is a clearing
behind her, surrounded by a thick growth of trees and bushes, the
lake to her front, and only a narrow passage between the two to her
left, and no way in without going in the water from any other way.
This would be perfect to make a small camp for herself, the first
step in moving away from her tribe. Three of the trees at the edge
of the clearing grow close together, their branches spreading far
to the sides rather than up, Minora trees. Their pale white wood
spotted with dark green moss is strong, and low hanging branches
make for perfect climbing. If Arella could gather enough materials,
she could make those trees into a house, away from the ground, nice
and safe. Perfect!

Arella is
suddenly no longer tired as excitement washes over her. She knows
this will take a few days at the lest to do, but the thought of
having her own home fills her with joy and energy. “Let’s not get
ahead of yourself Arella. We said we were building the bow first,
so this is what we will do.” Arella takes the anamoa wood in her
hand and begins to carve away the bark from the root. The dark
purple wood underneath shines wet. She carves and carves for hours,
trying to create the perfect shape.

The sun is
setting by the time Arella has finished carving her masterpiece.
The root has made the perfect bow shape, and is still strong even
without the protective bark. “Almost like it was meant to be.”
Arella smiles. Next Arella searches the bank of the lake for the
reeds that line most banks. They are plentiful, and useful for more
than just the delicious roots at the bottom. With this though
Arella’s stomach growls loudly. “I need to stop neglecting my
stomach.” She laughs to herself. It growls again. “So before making
the string, I think I need to make a fire and cook some food. Sure
bulbs are nice raw, but they taste much better cooked.”

Arella takes
her flint out of her boots and the dagger too. She gathers dried
reeds from the dying plants around her and some twigs from the
ground in the clearing. By the time she has gathered all of her
fire materials, the sun has all but gone. She piles the dried reeds
up on top of one of the rocks, and strikes the flint off the
dagger, creating sparks. After only four strikes, the sparks take
root in the reeds and a small fire starts. Arella adds a few of the
smaller twigs to the fire first to get it going, the adds bigger
and bigger ones as the fire comes to life.

She takes the
grue bulbs from the ground near the lake, removes the reeds and
places them on the black rock, weighed down by a few flat stones to
stop them drifting away, ready to be dried out and used to make her
bow string. Arella then pokes sharp sticks through the three fleshy
bulbs and holds them over the fire to cook. The moon is now high in
the sky, a clear night full of stars and only wisps of clouds
floating effortlessly across the blackness. The moon half full, but
the wolves still howl into the night from across in the forest on
the other side of the lake. “Soon I will be as free and independent
as those wolves.” Arella thinks to herself.

Arella eats her
cooked bulbs whilst listening to the sounds of the night. Crickets
chirp happy songs and jump around in the bushes and grass; the
wolves howl at the moon, declaring territory; an owl hoots in the
distance, answered by a screech from closer to where Arella sits;
fish swim in the lake, the light of the moon reflected off their
silvery scales. Beauty is all around, and Arella could not be
happier to be sat out in it, feeling free and at peace.

Once Arella has
satisfies her hungry, she takes the drying reeds from under the
rocks. They have dried out quickly on the black stones, and are
ready to thread into her bow using the light of the moon and glow
from the fire. She makes holes in the bow at the top ready for the
string part of the reed. She then takes the reed in her hand and
feels along its width for the string. Inside she feels a hard lump
and uses her fingernail to cut into the reed to reveal the string.
Once the white string like material is revealed, Arella hooks her
thumb and finger round it and begins to pull it gently out of the
reed. This takes her some time, but when she is finished, a long
section of unbroken and very strong string is in her hands. She
wraps it around both her hands a couple of times and gives it a tug
to test its strength. The satisfying twang the string makes when it
does not break tells her that it will be worthy of her bow. She
then begins to thread the string through the holes in the top and
bottom of the bow, tying them at both ends, although loosely at one
end so she can test the tensile strength before tying tight for the
finishing product.

After a while of testing with small stones and pulling on the
string, Arella is happy with how the bow feels in her hand, almost
like an extension of her own arm, and she sets it to the side.
Happy that she has made it to the best of her ability.
“
Next I have to build the arrows.”
She says to herself. She knows that getting the
balance on the arrow right won’t be easy, but to be able to use a
ranged weapon for defence and hunting would make Arella the
happiest girl alive. She takes out the arrow she found on the
ground after the young men left the clearing and examines it. The
feathers on the end are damaged, and Arella dies not think it will
fly very well. She sets it along with the bow.

With a full stomach, Arella begins to feel the tiredness
setting in. She knows she cannot sleep on the floor, too many
predators around that might take advantage of her there, so she
must make her way into a tree again. Luckily, the white trees she
will make her home are covered in moss. This will make sleeping
there much more comfortable. She climbs into the tree, sits back
against the trunk and watches as a shooting star flits across the
sky above her. “A shooting star is the gods way of telling you
something big is coming.” Nayleen used to say to Arella. This
worried her a little, but gave her excitement at the same time.
Something big could be good, or it could be bad. The gods would
never tell you this, only that it would happen, and it would be
soon. Arella looks at the positions of the stars in the sky.
“
Today would have been Nayleen’s
birthday.”
She thinks to herself. Nayleen
died three weeks after her birthday, and Arella remembers the day
well. She’d been taken on a hunting trip, to help the men remove
the bison horns before returning, an ancient tradition to help ward
off evil spirits, although Arella cannot see how that would keep
spirits away. When she returned, she had a puncture in her ribs on
the left hand side where one of the bison had gored her. She died
after four days later, consumed by fever as an infection set in.
Arella was beside herself for weeks after. She would not eat, did
not sleep, and it was then that she developed her talent for knife
throwing. She vowed that she would never be as vulnerable as
Nayleen was without a weapon to defend herself. Sleep soon took
over and Arella drifted off into a peaceful and welcome
sleep.

Arella’s dreams
are full of stars and bright lights, and the feeling of happiness
is all she can remember when the morning comes. A pleasant night’s
sleep, compared to last night anyhow.

The sun was
just coming up as Arella opened her eyes, light streaming through
the thin cover of leaves above her head. The orange sky made her
feel warm, but opened her eyes to the first problem. No roof.
Arella needs to make a roof before anything else. Stop the rain
from getting in when it does rain, then she can work on a base and
walls. She stretches out her arms and legs before using the low
hanging branches to climb down from the tree. She leaves her bow in
the tree, resting on one of the small branches, hooked on with the
string to keep from falling off, makes sure her dagger is tucked
safely into her boot and sets off into the forest to look for the
branches she needs to make the roof.

After a couple of hours of collecting fallen branches, Arella
had a decent sized pile of them by the base of her soon to be tree
house. They were all different sizes and types of wood, and it had
been hard work collecting some of them. Luckily in a forest as
dense as this one, there are plenty of fallen branches. While
eating one of the grue bulbs she cooked last night, Arella begins
cutting the sprouting branches away from the main branch to make
them smooth and straight. She then piles them up on her other side.
“
I wonder how many branches it will take to
make a roof.”
She wonders to herself. Her
pile of branches is quite large, but she is not sure if it will be
enough.

Arella needs
more reeds for binding the branches to each other and the tree. She
gets herself up off the ground, brushes the bits of bark and moss
off herself, pulls her hood up over her head and begins walking
along the edge of the lake, further into the forest in search of a
bountiful supply of reeds.

Arella sees a
large bank of reeds just up ahead on the other side of a small
sandy beach area by the lake. The black sand glitters with gold and
white. It looks beautiful and Arella is mesmerised by this. She
heard familiar laughter coming from the trees in her direction and
quickly hides herself in the bushes closest to her. Just as she
hides herself from view, the young men from the tribe she has been
watching emerge from the forest.

All of the
young men are smiling, and are in high spirits. From the looks of
things, Arella thinks they are planning on doing combat training
today. They all start by stretching out. Sweat gleans on the arms
and heads of the young men, hot from walking through the forest.
“Why have you chosen here for training today Nashoba?” Nootau
asks.

“So when I
knock you on your arse you don’t get too badly hurt.” He quips
back.

“It will be you
who lands on his…”

“Enough
children.” Mato says. “Let’s just begin the training already, words
will mean nothing when my fist makes contact with your face.” This
brings about more laughter from the others, but the training begins
then.