Scion of Cyador

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Ser?” questions Tashqyt.

  “Barbarians,” Lorn affirms. “Yesterday, I’d guess. Everything’s almost burned out.”

  Nothing moves in the hamlet, except the smoke, drifting on a breeze so light that Lorn cannot feel it as he leads the Mirror Lancers and District Guards down the grass-covered hillside and toward the stream.

  The streambed is northwest of the hamlet and separates Lorn’s force from the hamlet with a miniature gorge perhaps four cubits deep. Lorn turns the chestnut northwest and rides for almost half a kay before finding a place where livestock have crumbled the edges into a ford of sorts. The scouts cross first, and the water is less than a cubit deep on the legs of their mounts.

  On the other side, Lorn sees a movement and turns to his right. There, a reddish-colored dog turns and slinks down the side of a dry irrigation ditch whose banks have been trampled down. A figure in brown lies sprawled facedown in the flattened grass beyond the ditch. The back of his tunic is covered in large splotches of darker brown. The flies buzz around the dead man.

  Lorn gently urges the mare away from the body and rides parallel to the ditch, along the livestock path and toward the easternmost hut. The two scouts ride almost two hundred cubits ahead, but rein up by the hut, glancing back at Lorn and the main force.

  Again, Lorn suspects he knows why. As the mare nears the dwelling- earth-walled, with a single window on the east side-Lorn swallows as he catches sight of another body. As he guides the chestnut onto the dirt lane that leads southwest toward the other dwellings, he moves his head slowly from the half-naked body of a woman, perhaps nearly as old as his mother, lying as if flung against the sod wall of the hut. He does not look closely to see exactly how she was killed. Nor does it matter, save that she suffered greatly and was slain in pain.

  “Just follow the track past the dwellings,” Lorn orders the two scouts. “Keep an ear for anything.” He pauses, then turns to Swytyl. “Have your lancers check each dwelling, by pairs, just to see if there’s a child or someone alive. And have different ones do each hut.”

  “Yes, ser.” Swytyl turns to ride back to his squad, which is still on the livestock trail.

  “You don’t think anyone’s alive, do you?” asks Tashqyt.

  “No. But I wouldn’t want to go off and leave a child or an infant to die because we didn’t look.” As Lorn speaks, once more, he senses the chill of a chaos-glass, a chill that lasts but moments before it vanishes.

  The sharp-featured squad leader shakes his head as the four-abreast column, lances still ready, rides along the dirt lane that approximates a road through the hamlet.

  There are bodies everywhere-far more than Lorn would have imagined for a hamlet so small-but the pattern is the same around each dwelling. The men have been slain quickly, as have small children. The women have been used and killed, even girls too small to be women and women who are grandmothers.

  The overcaptain could have done without riding through the hamlet, having seen the work of the barbarians too often in years previous, but few of the Mirror Lancers he leads, and none of the District Guards, have seen such. So he rides slowly past each sod dwelling, letting the chestnut carry him back toward the southwest and away from the Grass Hills. Behind him, there are no murmurs from his force, none that he can hear.

  In the grassy expanse to the south, Lorn sees scattered dark shapes, cattle that have scattered after the carnage, and some grayer forms-sheep.

  As they pass the last dwelling, Lorn reins up. “We’ll wait to hear from Swytyl.”

  “Halt!” orders Tashqyt.

  Lorn sits on the mare, under the increasingly hot and bright harvest sun. “The stream goes along the road. We’ll water farther on. The barbarians didn’t mess it, and the locals kept their jakes away from it.”

  Tashqyt nods.

  Shortly, Swytyl rides up. The squad leader is pale.

  Lorn looks at Swytyl.

  Swytyl shakes his head. “No, ser. There be not a soul living.” He swallows hard. “Even… even babes.”

  “You see why…” Lorn does not finish the sentence.

  “Yes, ser.” After a moment, Swytyl adds, “Ser… there be many bodies…”

  “We’ll have to leave them,” Lorn says. “We don’t have the spades or the time, and if we delay here, what happens if they get to another hamlet?”

  Tashqyt and Drayl, who has eased his mount forward to hear Swytyl’s report, both nod.

  “We’ll follow this.” Lorn points to the narrow road or track that heads southwest, generally following the stream. Hoofprints on hoofprints cover the dusty trail. “We’ll stand down and water in a bit.”

  He urges the chestnut forward, after the barbarians, wondering how many more miscalculations he will make, hoping there will not be too many more.

  XXXIV

  The sweat oozes down the back of Lorn’s neck, and the sun beats on the right side of his face as he rides southwest through the valley so wide and long that the Grass Hills that surround it on three sides are mere smudges on the horizon. Only to the southwest are no true hills visible, and that is where the river is.

  Tashqyt rides to Lorn’s left, as they make their way through the early afternoon, and as Swytyl rides up to join them.

  “What did they find?” asks Lorn.

  “Scouts say that the tracks ahead circle to the west, and that hill over there,” the round-faced Swytyl reports. “There’s a burned-out stead at the base of the rise. Bodies, too. Not pleasant. Like that hamlet.”

  “They were already there before we left the beaches. At the hamlet,” Lorn adds, after a moment.

  While the first hamlet that the Jeranyi had raided was little more than a group of dwellings and barns where herders grazed and raised cattle, so small that it had no name beyond its borders, Lorn still regrets that they had not been there when the raiders arrived. Now the nameless hamlet will remain so, since the Jeranyi had left no survivors. Had such a hamlet existed near Isahl, there would have been walls and berms, and frequent patrols by Mirror Lancers. East of Biehl, folk are not prepared for the raiders.

  The trail that Lorn and the lancers and guards have followed southwest from the hamlet indicate that cattle or other livestock have been driven regularly toward a tributary of the River Behla, some forty kays southwest, where presumably they were added to those floated downstream on railed rafts for sale in Biehl and Ehyla. Intermittently, hides come with the cattle, according to Neabyl.

  Taking such a small hamlet as the raiders have already would not have satisfied such a large group of Jeranyi, as Lorn is certain, and the raiders are following the livestock tracks and dirt roads to a larger town on the tributary-Nhais was once the name, although Lorn is far from certain that the name has continued, so old was the map he had found in the back room of the administration building. His glass-screed and hand-drafted maps have so far proven more accurate than those few surviving in the Biehl lancer compound.

  Beyond Nhais to the south and west are other, and richer targets, such as the vintner’s warehouses at Escadr and the cuprite mines at Dyeum. Whether the barbarians will dare to travel that far is yet another question. But if none stop them, Lorn fears the worst.

  Lorn glances across the browning grass that reaches above the chestnut’s knees. As if to underscore Swytyl’s words about the barbarian atrocities, a thin line of smoke circles into a green-blue sky that holds but high and thin hazy clouds. The air is hot and still. “Did they see any signs of riders?”

  “No, ser. Not even dust.”

  The dust would not rise high in the still air, but with no dust in sight, the barbarians are at least four or five kays west or southwest of Lorn’s force.

  Lorn nods. “We’ll catch them.”

  He hopes to reach Nhais and the river before they do, circling around and in front of them. He also hopes he has not waited too long in setting forth, but he has pushed Commander Repyl as much as he had dared without revealing exactly what he had known beforehand.

/>   XXXV

  Lorn has reined up, turning the chestnut more to the south so that he is no longer squinting against the low afternoon sun that has been angling into his eyes from the right. His neck is red and raw, and burns from sun and sweat. The sweat that oozes from under his garrison cap keeps stinging the corners of his eyes. Yellowish dust coats his trousers and those of all the lancers, as well as the legs of all their mounts. The eight squad leaders and Lorn form a rough semicircle, listening to the sandy-haired and round-faced Swytyl.

  “They are but little more than five kays before us, and they will be drawing up into their camp before long. We can reach them if we hasten- before they reach Nhais…” suggests Swytyl.

  Several heads around the circle nod. The black-haired Tashqyt is not one of them. Nor is the grizzle-bearded senior squad leader of the District Guards.

  “They ride slowly,” Lorn says. “We have been hastening, and the day has been long. What if they turn, and what happens to our mounts and their riders?”

  This rime both the older District Guard squad leader and Tashqyt do nod.

  “We are not looking for a battle a quickly as possible. We wish a great victory with few casualties,” Lorn points out. “We will catch them on the morrow-when they reach the river there. The town is west, but the river winds. They will follow the river. So we will turn more westerly, and arrive at the town before they do.”

  “If they do not follow the river?” asks Swytyl.

  “Then we are between them and the town, and the town will not suffer, and there will be no heaps of bodies of the people of Cyador.”

  The other squad leaders nod.

  “There is always the chance that they may find another hamlet,” Lorn says slowly. “The maps do not show such, but it could happen. But we are the only force here, and we dare not let the barbarians by us to ravage a town such as Nhais, with scores of folk.”

  Tashqyt nods, then the other squad leaders.

  Not for the first time does Lorn hope he is correct, but if he is wrong this time, the herders and the townspeople will suffer less. The last time, a hamlet suffered because his screeing had not picked out that the herding hamlet even existed-and because, he reminds himself, he had miscalculated his force’s abilities and those of the raiders.

  Still, while he would not have wished harm on the people, fighting there at the base of the Grass Hills would have been difficult, and impossible to contain the raiders.

  Lorn looks around at the faces that study his. Is he putting too much trust in plans and maps? Doubtless he is, but the tracks across the grasslands show he faces more than tenscore barbarians, perhaps as many as fifteenscore, and his four companies could number little more than half the barbarians, and half his men have no firelances. Yet there is Nhais, undefended except for him, and Escadr and Dyeum beyond. So he must try to pick where and how he fights.

  If he can.

  XXXVI

  Lorn had forgotten what patrols are like in the heat of the Grass Hills-or the valleys nearby. Dust is everywhere, settling into boots, clothing, ears, eyes, and nose. His exposed skin is red, and his neck is peeling. Sweat burns his eyes, and they water much of the time. While the wind is welcome for its cooling, it brings more grit to his eyes and nostrils. Water must be rationed, and finding water for the mounts and then watering them in the scattered streams takes more time than he had recalled.

  Even though it is harvest, and not the height of summer, heat rises in waves off the browned grasses by late afternoon. Then, by late at night, the air is chill, and Lorn and the lancers shiver under their single blankets.

  In the hot early afternoon, he has reined up the chestnut mare on a low rise overlooking one of the few narrow streams feeding the river. Below him, the companies are finishing watering their mounts. While they do, Lorn studies the maps and the terrain around him, now becoming more hilly as they approach the river, and the town of Nhais. From what his maps show, Lorn judges that Nhais lies another twenty kays or so to the southwest, while the river is no more than ten to south. He and the lancers should be able to reach the town, or within five kays of it well before twilight-if his maps are accurate, and if the dirt track remains passable.

  He looks up as three riders near-Swytyl and two of the lancers used as scouts. The lancers bear a look of concern, but Lorn waits until they rein up. Then he only says, “You have something new?”

  “Ser… the barbarians have forded the river, and they have raided another small hamlet, perhaps of halfscore dwellings. They have halted…” Swytyl pauses, and Lorn understands all too well why the barbarians have halted.

  “There is little we can do now.” Lorn nods and keeps his sigh to himself. Another miscalculation, of sorts, but not one that would change his course, even had he known, for in the heat, he cannot push his men too hard and expect them to fight their best. And that they must do, outnumbered as his force is.

  “They look to be traveling tomorrow along the south side,” Swytyl adds. “The hills are high, and the river narrower and deeper to the south. There are several hamlets on that side, and none on this, not before Nhais. Not that we can see.”

  “There is a way to cross the river at the town, a ford less than a kay south,” Lorn says. “We will ride longer tonight. For if we cannot cross the river to attack them, neither can they cross to attack us, even if they know we are here. We will rise and move earlier in the morning, while it is cool, and we will cross the ford and travel upstream. We will also check to see where the river is deepest along a certain bend.”

  Swytyl raises his eyebrows.

  “We will try to circle and attack them where they cannot ford the river to retreat.” Lorn offers a grim smile. “After all their efforts, I believe we owe them that.”

  Swytyl nods. “Yes, ser.”

  “Have someone watch the river, though, as we ride toward Nhais.”

  “Yes, ser/Again… Lorn can but do his best, and hope. He does not mention that, if he fails, the way lies open to Escadr and Dyeum. It is enough that he knows.

  XXXVII

  The sun has not even risen when Lorn and his force ride in along the dusty north road and into the center square of Nhais, into a square consisting of little more than an open dirt plaza, surrounded by low buildings, but the gray light is bright enough to show the poverty of the place. On the west side is an inn, with a front porch covered by a sagging roof and supported by peeling, whitewashed timbers. The inn’s signboard depicts a brown bull. On the north side of the square are a chandlery and a cooper’s. On the east is a long low building, with boards nailed across the windows and the door. The whitewash has peeled away from the shutters, and the wood is cracked and weathered. The south side of the square has three buildings of two stories each hunched together. The end two structures lean into the center one, but none bears a sign, and the shutters and doors of all three are closed.

  The structures, except for the inn, show walls of a reddish brown brick. The inn has mud-plaster over the brick. That Lorn can tell from where the whitewashed plaster has broken away. All the roofs but that of the inn are of some form of woven withies, Lorn thinks, something he has not seen before in Cyador. The inn’s roof is of ancient and cracked red tiles.

  Nhais is not the kind of town that Lorn thinks of as Cyadoran. The dwellings are unkempt, without hedges or privacy screens. Many are without shutters. The streets are unpaved and dusty now, and will be muddy in rain and snow.

  Lorn glances toward the inn once more, where three men stand under the sagging porch. Otherwise, the square is empty.

  “Poor town,” whispers Tashqyt.

  “Poorer still if we don’t stop the raiders,” Lorn murmurs back.

  As Lorn and the first squad of Mirror Lancers pass the inn porch, the murmurs of the three men drift toward the riders. Lorn listens, his hearing chaos-sense aided.

  “…Mirror Lancers… an overcaptain. What they doing here?”

  “…you want to ask?”

  “Jerem said… ra
iders in the north…”

  “…let ‘em go… less said the better.”

  “Better lancers ‘n raiders…”

  “Some choice…”

  If they had seen what Lorn has seen, he reflects, they would not think such. But most folk do not reckon well what they have not seen.

  Lorn and Tashqyt turn down the street leading southward, toward the ford, the dust-muted sounds of hoofs drowning out the murmurs of the men on the inn’s porch. The houses by the square give way to huts, then a handful of hovels near the river.

  The town is set on a low bluff, and less than twenty cubits above the river, and beyond the last poor hut, there is a slope down to the water. The river is lined with bushes and low willow trees, and the leaves of both are dust-covered. From bank to bank is less than a hundred and fifty cubits, and, in the dry time of early harvest, the river is low. Mudbanks protrude from the brownish water. Wagon tracks lead down the slope and up the far side a hundred cubits away.

  Lorn turns in the saddle. “We’ll cross in single-file by squads. Then we’ll head back east along the river. Upstream of the town, we’ll find a place to water the mounts.”

  “Well upstream,” suggests Tashqyt.

  Lorn nods.

  “Cross by squads, single-file!”

  “By squads, single-file,” echo the squad leaders.

  The chestnut sidesteps slightly as she takes a first step into the brownish water, but the river is so shallow at the ford that Lorn’s boots never touch the water’s surface. He reins up at the top of the bluff on the southern shore, scanning the river and the land and hills to the east. But he sees no one, not even animals or livestock, just a few scattered dwellings farther to the south and west.

  Once the entire force has crossed, Lorn gestures to Swytyl, then waits for the squad leader to near before speaking. “Send out the scouts… at least five kays east of here. We’ll ride along the river road here until we find a good place to water the mounts. Then, we’ll keep moving north.”