by E. E. Knight
The hunters, if they didn’t give up upon reaching the edge of Galahall’s grounds, would either have to go round either side of the ridge or lead their horses up a very treacherous climb and then down again. By the time daylight came, she’d be deep in the Thickets.
Stog would have to find his own way home.
Will they never give up?
The question hardly left her mind as she made her best speed through the Thickets, a sort of sore-footed trot. Winded, thirsty, hungry, scratched at nostril and earhole, under-limb and tween-toe by the endless thorns, even her left eye had been poked, and it hurt abominably.
She plunged into yet another strand of bramble as she heard the clattering noise of the men behind.
The men signaled each other by rapping pairs of hollow wooden pegs, setting up a clatter that might have been designed to drive her insane, as though the thickets were full of maddened woodpeckers. Her mouth was so dry, nothing but cottony saliva covered her teeth, and all it did was catch dust and dirt kicked up by the horses thundering past her hiding spots.
Her one solace was the thought that she’d probably burned Galahall to the ground. What else could cause the thane to summon every man with a horse and boy who could whack two sticks together to this wild and uncomfortable corner?
Wistala listened and then crept up another dry ravine. The soil in this part of the Thickets kicked up a chalky dust, and even the thorn-vines and succulents looked sickly and undersize. Nothing took root at the hilltops, or anywhere the wind could reach. She stayed just below the empty crest of it—no need to create a silhouette for one of the hundreds of pairs of eyes looking for her to see—and took a bit out of a green segmented plant. Its buds were bitter-tasting but juicy enough to at least give the illusion of moisture.
She could see the twin hills of Mossbell in the distance, green and alluring, but she didn’t dare make for them. Who knew what the thane might do to Rainfall if he thought her host had sent her on purposes of possible assassination or proven arson?
Instead she headed for the river, carefully cresting yet another slope. They wouldn’t—couldn’t get their horses easily into the gorge, and it would be a brave rider who’d swim his horse into the rocks of the fast-flowing river.
The beaters must have spotted her tracks, for the noise level rose and several came together clack-tchick-clack-clack-tok-clack, no rhythm at all, just a crescendo of sound driving her on.
A man negotiated the precarious rim of the finger of land she had to cross. He bore a horn of metal, a long tube wound about itself like a sleeping snake. Obscenely close-set eyes surveyed the thorny runs from above a scarf wrapped round to keep out the dust. He bore a short spear with a long, sharp head and tapered tail.
He’d chosen his spot well. She couldn’t cross behind him, not without a climb in the open, though a brief one, perhaps exposing her to the noisemakers in the thickets.
But a good deal of thornbush filled a gentler slope leading up to his vantage. He amused himself by relieving himself into it.
Wistala was downwind, and the odor struck her nose like a challenge, the clattering in her ears a rattle of an enemy drake’s griff. She crept slowly through the densest brambles, sliding around the clusters of branch with their pitiful clumps of earth held tight by roots, until his shadow practically fell on her through the thorny lattice.
She took two steps closer, marked the route she’d use in the final dash—
He saw her approach too late and extended his hand, not the one holding a weapon, but rather to show some kind of talisman.
Wistala exploded out of the thorns, touching rock once as she leaped onto the hunter. She struck high, throwing her weight into his chest to knock him off the narrow crest of the hill.
They tumbled off the hill and down the other side—the direction she needed to go anyway. She dug in with her claws and shut her eyes to keep out the dust. Down—they both broke against a rock, its impact harder on her lighter body but bloodying the unprotected skin on his arm—and she went for his neck.
Vertebrate prey were most vulnerable there. If you got a good grip, you opened windpipes and blood vessels, and they couldn’t bite or gore you back. Her teeth closed, and she tasted blood and heard a strange high wheeze. The man’s hands raked at her face but found a nostril instead of her more vulnerable eye or ear holes.
He went limp.
She dropped the crushed neck, the man’s eyes dry and empty. She opened his gut with her saa to make sure of him, and his body gave a reactive twitch. . . .
The corpse twitched again as she found his liver.
Tearing the oblong organ loose, she raised her head and let it slide down her throat in two big gulps. She sucked blood from the wound, and saw something in his hand shining in the sun. Tarnished gold or brass—either would be welcome. She nibbled it free from the leather thong fixed to it that the man had wrapped about his wrist.
It was a thin round device of hammered heavy metal, a hominid figure in a circle. Hominids had strange superstitions and believed in invisible forces that attracted or repelled evil or good. Was this some kind of proof against dragons?
She licked it. No sharp taste of poison, just the thick metal-saliva. Satisfied, she sent it down her gullet to join the liver, where it would gravitate to the pocket of her innards that absorbed metals.
Smelling, listening, she picked her way south.
All the way across the next flat, the terrified, dead eyes of the man stayed with her. She’d killed a hominid from ambush. Rainfall might call it murder. While hungry, she wasn’t starving, and attacking him had been a foolish risk.
The fact of the matter was, she’d let her temper get the better of her and killed to spite the beaters behind.
She heard a faint, wailing horn. The beaters had probably come across the body. Two more blasts, some kind of signal?
The wind out of the southwest whistled as it cut through the thick thornbushes all around her. The gorge must be near; she couldn’t see any more hills to the south.
A faint and rising sound of hoofbeats came across the wind. Wistala found a rock and climbed near the top, keeping to the shadow side so light wouldn’t reflect off her scales.
Riders! A dozen at least, traveling in pairs, their horses and legs garbed in some sort of leather tenting, perhaps to keep out the thorns, trotted through the brambles, lance-tips sparkling in the sun.
All moved to cut her off from the south. She heard howling; they had dogs with them. Even if the riding men blundered past, the dogs would smell her out.
The thane’s men no doubt wanted her hide in return for some burned shingles and draperies! From Rainfall’s description, Hammar wasn’t the sort to leave an account unsettled.
Wistala gulped, the blood she’d wetted her throat long since caked over by the dry dust she breathed. Her thoughts felt slow and thick as her blood. The men would probably . . .
Dry!
She came off the rock, spat one jet of flame into the tangle right, then trotted a few steps and started another fire left.
The thin branches supporting the thorns caught fire easily, and the wind pushed the flame northwest.
She’d set up a signal to every beater in sight.
But the men would keep from downwind if they knew what was good for them.
Wistala walked along between her two columns of conflagration, nostrils held low to keep out the smoke. At new thickets, she helped spread the flame with another torf or two.
Horns, more confused signals from beyond the smoke. But most of the noise was well behind her.
Now the fire raged so she couldn’t hear anything but its crackling. Her scales reflected the worst of its heat, but she still panted, trying to see through the smoke. A stand of pine, a little above the flat, was burning, and she made for it.
The flame had already consumed the dropped needles; only the tops of the trees burned now. The tough old pines would be green again next spring, but if she wished to be breathing in a year’s
time—
Wistala took a deep, lung-filling breath from below the smoke layer, picked a gap, and dashed. She felt flames licking at her flanks. The betweens of sii and saa burned in the hot soil, and she instinctively closed her digits, and she was through, coated with nothing but a thick layer of soot.
And suddenly she breathed cool, dry air, the inferno behind eating its way northwest under a mountain of smoke. From far to the west, she heard more calls as the hunters searched in smoke and confusion.
Wistala got her bearings, noted happily that the sun had fallen almost to the horizon, and moved toward the river.
She negotiated the gorge and swam downriver to the bridge and the landing where they’d tried to smash the troll. The river refreshed after the heat, ash, and dust.
The burns between her digits were painful, made more so once she climbed up the rough stairs from the landing when the blisters burst, but she’d learned a valuable lesson that would outlast the pain about her body’s resistance to fire. Next time she’d close up her toes, she thought as she passed over Mossbell’s road wall.
A dim light glimmered from the stone-flanked skylight to the library. Perhaps he was still up, reading. She smelled horses in the turnaround by the old fountain.
Wistala decided that the stable might not be the best place for her to sleep. She climbed up her yew tree and made herself as comfortable as possible in the branches.
Exhaustion allowed her to sleep.
She found Rainfall out the next day, gathering blueberries into a satchel that smelled of strawberries, acorns, hickory nuts, and onions.
“How went the hunting expedition, Wistala?” he asked with his back to her. Perhaps he smelled her approach—he had a sensitive nose.
“I . . .” She groped for the right Elvish word. “I’ve misspent your trust and lost Stog.”
He turned, his countenance a foggy morning. “I heard a most curious story from one of the thane’s riders. Two nights ago, the most astonishing creature crept into Galahall.”
“Yes—”
“According to the eyewitnesses, it was bluish, had two heads on long necks, one at either end, feathers all about the face, and shot flame from its glowing eyes. Half the country is rooming with their sheep as men stand guard with fire buckets. I don’t know what to think. Should I be on my guard that a two-headed featherface come to burn down my hall?”
Wistala’s mouth opened and then shut again.
Rainfall suddenly laughed. “Rah-ya! I’m sorry, Wistala—I shouldn’t torment you. Come inside and have a little soup and what’s left of those rabbits. I wish to hear this story.”
Wistala fought the urge to nuzzle his cheek against hers—she could just reach if she stood on her hind legs—and instead turned a quick, happy circle.
“What?” he asked as they walked. “You thought I’d be cross with you? Ever since I dragged you out of the river, there’s been excitement. Save for the awful loss of Lessup, and, of course, our Avalanche, I’d say those old tales out of the East about dragons being omens of good fortune have been proved. And don’t worry about the mule; Stog will turn up. He’s smart enough to find his way home.”
They went into the house, and he passed her a platter that held the remains of his stew and grease-fried entrails.
As she ate, she told the whole story—save for the death of the hunter. She didn’t feel a bit sorry for the damages to the thane’s Galahall, but relating the loss of Stog made her miserable, as well as her confession that she’d failed to return with his granddaughter.
“I wish you’d have discussed this adventure with me before you’d set out. I would have saved your claws the burns and wear.”
“But it’s not right.”
Rainfall poured himself a little more wine and juice squeezings. “Had you come back with her, I would have taken her in both hands. But then I’d have escorted her straight back to Galahall.”
“But you could conceal her, as you did me—”
“Tala, how can I make it plain to you? The thane misuses the law, certainly, whether he breaks it in his misuse is not for me to say. But that doesn’t relieve me of my obligation to live by it. Laws stand only by common consent; enforcement can do only so much.”
He paused and waited until she nodded, then went on: “The thane at least keeps most of the Hypatian traditions, which are just as important as laws in their way. In other provinces, there are thanes who rule like the despots of old. I’ve heard of thanes who force their landholders to will their estates over to him, lest they be labeled traitors and executed, then find an excuse to execute anyway once everything is set down in writing. All quite legal on the face of it, but appallingly against the Hypatian tradition. Hammar will die or go into his dotage eventually, and Hypat will appoint a new thane.”
“Someone like you should be thane, then. An elf is better than any man.”
“Oh, that racial rubbish. Have you been listening to the soldiery? There was a time when Hypatian citizenship was what counted, not the shape of your legs and angle of your shoulders.”
Wistala took a last mouthful of fried entrail. “So you’re content to let those blighters in Galahall rut about your granddaughter, and not see her again?”
“What’s that? Rut?”
“That tower. There were babies in it. Well, a baby.”
Her host’s face writhed. “How young? Perhaps he’s warded a child. . . .”
“I’m not sure. Still suckling at his youngish mother, anyway.”
Rainfall passed his hand through his hair, dropping a long, thin willowlike leaf or two. “He wouldn’t. Not wards of the thane! Oh, if only I’d been more provident with my gold plate, I could sell it or melt it.”
A thought struck Wistala. “The form of the wealth doesn’t matter?”
It took a moment for her words to register. “Well, the thane is entitled to assess the value of anything that isn’t Hypatian coin. What do you have in mind?”
“Another expedition.”
Chapter 15
A moon and a blustery week of storms later—five weeks as the hominids reckoned things—Rainfall and a group of local men and boys stood on one of the wall-crossed hills of Tumbledown, speaking with the local shepherds and farmers.
And Stog, incredibly.
Stog stood in this distant field with some other working beasts, all muddy, thin, and miserable.
The expedition had come to fruition easily enough. Wistala, after looking at a map and taking a trip to the nearest hilltop with a good view south of the bridge, decided that the same road Rainfall had in his charge cut through near Tumbledown—or Hesstur, as Rainfall insisted on calling it.
“One of the eight sister cities from the founding of Hypat,” Rainfall explained after Wistala described the three hills and wet ground in between. “It was burned in one of the barbarian wars.”
A good deal more history followed this, but without being able to see the battles and kings and generals and so on Rainfall spoke of, the names and dates left Wistala’s head almost as soon as they entered it. If only hominids could pass mind-pictures down!
Rainfall had no difficulty pulling together some men and their sons for the trip. The killing of the troll had given Rainfall something of a local reputation, Wistala guessed, and it even attracted one of the thanedom’s low priests. She seemed a sturdy woman, in her black robe and tassled hat, white hair at her temples making the rest of her black hair, cut so evenly at the bottom, it might be mistaken as a helmet, look darker.
Wistala had to watch it all from a distance. Her presence had to be kept hidden for her—and Rainfall’s—safety.
They made quite a procession. Thick-shouldered farmers and their thicker-shouldered horses, Jessup with a smart new leather work apron driving his cart loaded with feed for hominid and animal, the low priest with boys in tow, showing them strange roadside mushrooms, flowers, and berries. Rainfall walked at the head, wearing layers of heavy traveling clothes, leather-fringed sandals, a cloak, and
even a short, slightly curved sword with a guard at the hilt.
She traveled ahead of the group on the overnight journey south, moving before dawn and after dusk and sleeping out the day while the others caught up. Now and then she met with Rainfall on the road a little ahead of the party. The journey was uneventful, save for some boys throwing dung-balls from cover as they passed through a muddy village. One clod hit Rainfall in the thigh.
“Wish I’d seen that,” Wistala said.
“Boys being boys. Their parents should soap their tongues until they learn civil expression, though,” Rainfall said. “ ‘Elvish maggot.’ Right in the heart of the village, too. An old woman bowed and apologized for the insult. Perhaps it was the star.”
Wistala had not seen the golden device before. It had eight short points around the edge and a blue jewel at the center. Some mark of his status as the bridge-keeper and road-warden, she guessed.
So, led by Rainfall’s star, they came to Tumbledown and saw the field with Stog.
The low priest—her name was Feeney—and Rainfall conducted the negotiations with the locals of Tumbledown. Then both sides withdrew, the newcomers to their tents with a purchased sheep, the shepherds and smallholders to their cottages and ricks and cots.
Rainfall wandered the woods until Wistala caught up to him. They sat together on an old wall dividing one part of identical forest from another.
“I let Mod Feeney do the talking. We will split whatever we find exactly in half with the locals. They claim that the ruins have been explored a dozen times a generation, and that they’ve been stripped to the last lumik.”
“Lumik?”
“A bit of art that throws off light when you rub it.”
“Then they’re doubly wrong. I’ll show you one when we enter. I saw Stog in with the other animals.”