“Well,” I said after a moment. “We had better begin.”
I began by pacing out the length of the field in the ultimately vain hope that it was smaller or less ravelled than we feared. It was worse. I could not even reach the ribbon for much of the length of the sides, having to make great detours around particularly heinous brambles. Belis had collected a scythe and was trying to cut her way along the fence line but without much success. She had not cleared more than a yard in the time it took me to walk the entire perimeter.
“We need those gloves,” she said, already panting from the effort. “It’s all very well slashing at these vines but I can’t pull out the roots without ravaging my hands – look!” She displayed her palms which were already brutally scratched. A few of the deeper cuts were beginning to drip blood.
I eyed the undergrowth warily. I had never bothered about it much in my old body, but I had encountered bramble hedges enough during my brief sojourn as human to rankle at the thought of plunging my bare hands into it. I remembered Belis’s effort in removing the rowboat from the thorns at the fishing village. That had been a patch of daisies compared to this.
“Should I see if I can go and find some gloves?” I asked, picking up the other scythe. Belis ran a hand through her hair.
“There’s no time to lose! I don’t even know where you’d go for them. Arawn’s gone, and there’s no one to ask for help.”
“Gods be good!” I dropped the scythe and grabbed one of the pitchforks. “If I move the vines around can you reach them without cutting your hands?”
Belis tried it. It took a bit of manoeuvring but combining the fork and a shovel seemed to hold off the worst of the thorns. We cleared another two yards that way, working together. I took a step back and leaned on my spade.
“I’ll have to take a break soon, this is terribly hard work.”
“No, Mallt, look!” Belis stared up at the sky. “It’s mid-morning already. We’ve barely made any progress.”
“Dammit.” I looked around. We were not even a hundredth of the way through clearing the brambles. If we kept going at this speed we would still be working at the thicket for a month. I feltpanic rising in my throat, wrapping phantom vines around my arms that stung almost as much as the real ones.
“We’ll have to split up, both of us use the spades,” I said. Belis looked like she was going to cry.
“It’s no use, we still won’t be fast enough.” Her knuckles tightened around the scythe. “We’re not going to make it.”
“This was your idea and now you want to give up? Before we’re halfway through our first day?” I snapped at her, letting my panic turn to frustration. “Would your sister give up? Would your mother? I thought you Iceni were made of stronger stuff than that.”
She stared at me. I was a little shocked at my own words. She was usually the one who pushed me to keep going. But her strength had made me stronger and now I could give it back. Belis gritted her teeth. “Fine. We keep going.”
I nodded and turned back to the brambles, hacking at the roots with my spade. She retrieved the other one and joined me. We worked side by side, stabbing and cutting at the thorned vines. Before long my hands were torn to ribbons and blood was trickling down my forearms to my elbows. The thicket was almost thigh-deep, clawing at the fabric of my leggings and scratching my calves. I kept going until the shovel was so slippery with blood that I could barely hold onto it.
I paused and dabbed my hands on my tunic. I’d made more progress than I had expected: I’d cleared a ten-yard strip. Belis had done even more: she was almost as far again into the bramble patch. I glanced up at the sky, expecting the sun to be overhead for midday.
Strange. It hadn’t moved. I stepped backwards into the area I had cleared, dodging a thick tree stump and moving to where we had stood before switching back to the spades. I wasn’t mistaken. The sun was exactly where I would have expected it to be at mid-morning. Something else caught my eye, a hawk hovering over the field, but as I stared longer I realised that it wasn’t riding the wind. It was flying, beating its wings but so slowly that it seemed frozen in the air.
“Belis!” I called. “Look up!” I watched as she paused from her work. As she stared into the sky I noticed the movement of the hawk begin to quicken, until it had swooped over the whole length of the field and landed in a stand of trees. Belis looked at me quizzically.
I grabbed my shovel and ran to join her, skipping through the piles of cut branches.
“I know how we’re going to do this!” I called to her. I pulled up, panting for breath. “I know how we can clear the field before nightfall.”
“How?” Belis looked unconvinced. She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a streak of blood which mingled with the sweat.
“Time! Look up at the sky. We’ve barely taken any time to clear since we started again.”
Belis looked up and frowned. “So?”
“So, I didn’t understand how we are so much faster now. It feels like we are moving much more slowly, each movement hurts, it seems like it takes forever. But it’s the other way around!”
“I don’t understand,” Belis said, “we’re slower but we’re faster?”
“Did you ever have a day that felt like it went on forever? A bad day that you just wished would end but seemed to drag longer than a day should? Or the opposite. A day that was so good you wanted to hold onto it but it was gone in a snap?”
“Yes.” Her eyes were wary and I saw the flash of pain behind them. “But it’s not real, it’s just how you perceive time.”
I grinned at her. “Here it can be real! When we’re digging by hand, cutting our hands to pieces and wishing for it all to end, the time moves slower. We can achieve more in less time, we can buy time with our suffering. Clearing these thorns is so terrible, so painful, that we have almost infinite time to complete it.”
“That can’t be right?” Belis snorted.
