Demontech: Gulf Run

by David Sherman

  But no matter what plan he might come up with to gain the royal riches, at this time there was nowhere to go with them. Besides, thought and planning take time, and with the Jokapcul so close in Dartmutt and likely already extending their perimeter, and the caravan making haste to gain distance from them, there was no time for such thinking. And there were more immediate concerns—the growing number of refugees attaching themselves to the caravan. Who were they, and what might they have that was worth taking?

  No, any banditry would have to wait.

  “Hello, friend,” the bandit leader said to a red-faced, puffing man who stumbled out of a forest trail onto the road. Zlokinech, one of his men stopped with him.

  The sleeves of the man’s linen coat were tied around his neck so he could wear it like a cape. Under the dirt and wear of long travel, the coat itself was dyed in bands of color from top to bottom so each band blended into the next in the Bostian manner, and was piped in royal purple. The sweat-stained cotton shirt that would have been mostly hidden by the coat sagged off the man, and his trousers were bunched and bloused around his waist, held up by a belt that drooped a very long tongue—the clothes belonged to a much larger man. But the redness of this man’s face and the shortness of his breath told Veduci they were indeed his; their looseness was because he’d lost a great deal of weight recently. He looked like he had been a well-off merchant.

  Veduci stopped while the man paused to catch his breath. He knew some Frangerian, which was the trading language, though he hadn’t admitted it to Spinner and Haft. If this man was a merchant, he probably did as well. Veduci talked calmingly to him in that language. “We’ve been on the road since Eikby, running from the Jokapcul in Penston. We’d hoped to find succor in Dartmutt, but got there just as the barbarians invaded. Now we go farther north. Where do you head?”

  “My wagons—I don’t know.” Pant. “I’d thought to find passage on a ship in Dartmutt.” Puff, and a shake of his head. “But—my wagons! You saw?”

  Veduci nodded. “We arrived just in time to see.”

  The caravan chugged and jerked by, mostly unnoticed by the merchant. The refugees paid them little attention. The soldiers who passed gave them a quick once-over and kept going.

  “My wagons—they’re lost!” Pant. “Now I don’t know where to go.”

  “Where is your family, your retainers?”

  “My—” Gasp. He looked about madly. “They were—” Puff. “They were right,” pant, “behind me.”

  “We’re here,” a reedy voice said.

  The merchant turned to the voice and scurried to it, arms spread wide. “I was afraid I’d lost you!” Pant. He flung his arms around the beardless youth who followed him from the forest trail.

  “Mother comes on the cart,” the youth said, pushing to free himself from his father’s smothering grasp; he was an age where a boy no longer wants to be hugged by a parent.

  “The cart—” Sob. “My wagons!” He spun to Veduci. “My wagons! I emptied an entire wagon’s worth of cloth bolts and metal household items crossing Skragland, all in exchange for food for my family and people!” Pant. “I still had four wagons when we reached Dartmutt.” Heave. “I tried to bring them when we fled the city, but the Jokapcul were too fast.” He buried his face in his hands. “They came and slaughtered two of my drivers.” Cry. “The other drivers cut horses free and rode away, leaving my wagons behind.” He lifted his face and his voice rose as well. “They could have continued driving. The Jokapcul who killed the two drivers stopped to plunder those wagons—my other two wagons were safe, we could have left with them!” He ended with a wail.

  A pony cart emerged from the trail, led by a young man who walked next to the pony’s head. A stout woman as finely—and dustily—dressed in clothes too large sat on the cart’s small bench. A lass of not quite marriageable age sat on top of chests in the back of the cart, and another in full flower walked behind. The pony strained under the load it hauled.

  Now more of the refugees looked at the newcomers. Some didn’t recognize them as such and wondered idly why the pony cart had stopped. A few slowed to make space for them in the column, resuming their pace when the newcomers didn’t join the caravan.

  “Who are these?” the cart driver asked, awed by the steady stream of people moving along the road.

  “We’re refugees from Eikby, near Penston,” Veduci quickly replied. “We are protected by many heavily armed soldiers led by Frangerian Marines who are leading us to safety.”

  The young man breathed in evident relief. “That’s who they were. I saw some soldiers moving north in the forest. I didn’t know who they were, and they made me afraid for my mother and sisters. But they just looked us over then continued on without speaking to us.”

  Veduci nodded. “A flanking patrol, to screen us from surprise attack or ambush.” He noticed a small team of soldiers approaching, curiously eyeing him and the merchant, and gestured at the passing caravan. “Join us. You are safer with us than anywhere else. Please.”

  “Thank you, good sir,” the merchant said, and told his son to guide the pony cart into the next opening. The driver of an approaching wagon saw and slowed enough for them to move in.

  A thin smile was on Veduci’s face as he made note of where the merchant and his family were in the column—he had noticed the telltale bulges of money pouches under the merchant’s coat. And he knew the most precious goods the merchant carried had to be in the cart his son drove. He let them get a short distance ahead, then stepped out to follow before the approaching soldiers reached him.

  Zlokinech made sure they were far enough ahead of the soldiers that he wouldn’t be overheard before quietly asking, “Tonight?” He smiled as he tapped his fingers on the hilt of his short sword.

  “No. If anyone is killed and robbed, suspicion will immediately fall on us. We don’t do anything until we are someplace where it’s safe to leave this caravan. I will say when; do nothing until then. Make sure all know that.”

  Zlokinech nodded. “Do nothing until you say.” He went off to make sure the others knew.

  Spinner watched refugees in ones and twos and fives pass through the caravan and continue their aimless flight as he rode toward its van, where Alyline and Fletcher led the way, a hundred yards behind a squad of Zobran Royal Lancers.

  “Nearly as many join us as not,” he said when he reached the van.

  “We’re orderly,” Fletcher observed. “And they pass through our flankers on the right. They see we know what we’re doing, so they see safety with us.” He shrugged as he watched a trio of refugees race across the road a few yards ahead, with no more than a worried glance their way. “Those who bother to look,” he added.

  “They think we know what we’re doing,” Alyline said with a sniff.

  “Oh, we know what we’re doing, all right,” Fletcher said. “We’re doing our very best to get ahead of the Jokapcul and stay there.”

  “Pfagh!” Had she been a man, or a cruder woman, the Golden Girl would have spat. “What we are doing is the same as them, running for our lives without a safe destination.”

  “We’re heading north of the Gulf,” Spinner corrected her. “The entire Jokapcul strategy is to make landings at cities and large towns. There are no towns on the north coast for them to conquer, only small fishing settlements—”

  “You know this?” Alyline challenged.

  He nodded. “Frangerian Marines don’t only defend ships at sea, we guard them in port. We have to know what is where on all seacoasts. I’ve made the Princedon Gulf passage twice.”

  She sniffed again, thinking Spinner’s knowledge of the north shore of Princedon Gulf—and Haft’s as well—was probably learned from tavern tales told by seamen and sea soldiers, rather than from visiting it. She didn’t ask him, but Spinner being Spinner, and mindlessly in love with her, would have had to admit the truth of her suspicion.

  Instead she demanded, “And then?”

  Spinner repressed a shrug. “We
follow the coast to Handor’s Bay.”

  “Pfagh! And you think the Jokapcul ships can’t get there faster than these refugees can walk?”

  “They have to stop and consolidate sometime. Besides, they’re still moving north from the southern coast, fighting in Skragland. They’ll soon enough run out of the soldiers they need to continue around the coast and will have to stop.”

  She opened her mouth to give a retort, but Fletcher cut her off.

  “He’s right. The Jokapcul Islands are said to be densely populated, but they don’t have an unlimited population of military-age men. Either they pull back from the interior or they stop their advance along the coast. They have to.” There was a note of uncertain hope in his last three words.

  “We have only the word of panicked refugees that the Jokapcul are continuing inland,” Alyline said, but quietly, not argumentive.

  Neither man responded, and they rode on in silence for a piece, before Spinner turned back to ride the length of the growing caravan once more. There were more than three thousand souls in the caravan by the time Haft sent word back from the advance scouts that they’d found a good place to stop for the night.

  Half squads of four or five soldiers, woodsmen, hunters, and half-trained fighters flanked the column a couple of hundred yards to each side during its march. Silent, the giant nomad from the steppes, wandered with Wolf at his side, patrolling close enough to the cleared land surrounding Dartmutt to keep an eye on the Jokapcul. His primary purpose was to give the earliest warning possible if the invaders began moving west or northwest. Secondarily, he would kill any enemy soldiers he could without endangering himself—or take a prisoner if the opportunity arose. He shuddered at the thought of handing a prisoner, even a Jokapcul, over to the untender mercies of Alyline and the other women as they had once before, but the women could get information from a prisoner when the men failed. That thought brought another: Did anyone in the caravan of refugees speak Jokapcul?

  Before this war, the Jokapcul had some trading with the western nations of Matilda and Oskul, so some merchants and others were likely to speak the language. He shook his head, certain there were no refugees from the far west among those who traveled with them. Surely there were others elsewhere in the world who spoke Jokapcul. Not likely very many, though. Still, one of them might have joined the caravan. They needed to find out. Perhaps a Scholar? He knew there were Scholars who devoted their lives to the study of the Far West, including the Jokapcul Islands. But he didn’t know of a Scholar who had joined them. That was something else they needed to find out. Even if he didn’t speak Jokapcul, the Scholar might have other arcane knowledge that could be useful. He had learned during his travels that Scholars were to the soft people of the southern lands what the venerated elders were to the nomadic peoples of the steppes—fonts of vast and valuable information.

  When the setting sun cast the forest’s shadow all the way to the walls of Dartmutt, Silent turned west and headed back to the road the caravan was on. Wolf padded at his heel. Many refugees had passed him during the day, wandering aimlessly, lost in the forest. Some of them had fled in terror at sight of the giant and his wolf, or kept a wary distance. Those who didn’t, he directed to the refugee caravan and told them it was the safest place for them to be—at least, he told those with whom he could find a common language. But he had killed no Jokapcul, nor taken a prisoner. He did, though, have new questions that needed answers, and observations about the Jokapcul to pass on.

  INTERLUDE

  THE DESERTS

  High-Low, High-Low,

  to Desert Lands We Go

  (Part 1, Low)

  by

  Scholar Munch Mu’sk

  (Reprinted with permission from

  It’s a Geographical World!

  without the illustrations,

  on which someone else holds right-to-copy)

  STEPPING-STONES

  A vast tableland, a humongous two-tiered plateau, fills much of the southeastern quadrant of the Continent of Nunimar. On the north, it stretches from the Princedon Gulf to Elfwood Between the Rivers and the Easterlies, and is bounded on the west by the Eastern Waste. The plateau begins abruptly with an escarpment that juts up a day’s wagon journey north of the city state of Dartmutt and travels east until it rises into the barrier wall of the Sentinel Mountains, which continue onto and around the bend of the Inner Ocean. A third of the way to its northmost reaches, the plateau is cut across its entire width by another, much higher escarpment. That southern portion is called the “Low Desert.” The larger, northern portion is the “High Desert.”

  Little is known about the Low Desert, and less about the High, though much is speculated about both. Indeed, only the Dwarven Mountains and the eerie Land of the Night Dwellers are less known and more speculated about. It is likely safe to say that the more outrageous the speculations, the less factual they are.

  Other than in its several-hundred-league length, the southern escarpment of the Low Desert isn’t much as escarpments go. For most of its length, it is a mere twenty or thirty feet in height, though it does jut out nearly a hundred feet in a few isolated spots; never, though, in its entire length does it flatten to nothingness. As one can easily see, the Low Desert’s escarpment is dwarfed by the hundred-mile-long escarpment that borders part of the Great Rift on Arpalonia and towers one or two thousand feet for its entire length. Even more spectacular, though markedly less lengthy, is the so-called “Dwarven Giant” that girds a portion of the west side of the Dwarven Mountains. Although a mere fifty miles in length, the Dwarven Giant is a mile and more of sheer drop. So insignificant in appearance, despite its length, is the Low Desert’s escarpment that some travelers have called it “tedious.”

  PROVISIONS FOR LIFE

  The vegetation of the Low Desert has likewise been described as dulling to the senses. Most of the Low Desert is covered with patches, some many acres in size, of hardy grasses that are able to find root in its extremely sandy soil. A number of breeds of low-lying, succulent bushes also eke out a living there.

  Only in widely scattered oases centered on perennial ponds so large they might better be called small lakes can trees be found. Unlike the forests that abut the lands to its west and southwest, the Low Desert itself only supports two types of trees; though, as the reader shall see shortly, one of the trees has variants. One kind of tree, without noticeable variants unless size is a variable rather than a function of age, is broad and flat and spreads out in a wide cone from its base, like a fan. Obviously enough, it is called the fan tree. The fan tree (tarehe umti ) has a central trunk, or stem, that goes from the ground to the tree’s topmost tip, but branches sprout from it beginning mere inches above its roots. Long, slender leafs grow both up and down from the branches, and are long enough that each upward growing leaf nearly interlinks with the downward growing leafs from the branch above it, so that the entire appearance of the tree seen from a modest distance is that of a gossamer fan. The fan tree grows to a height of about twenty feet. The other tree, called, for unknown reasons, the “bumber” tree (refu umti ), is even more curious in appearance. It sports a tall trunk bare of branches and leafs until its apex is reached. There, it sprouts long, broad leafs that spread out, caplike, and looks like nothing so much as a fat-handled, small-capped parasol. One variant of the bumber tree grows as high as forty feet and bears large, hard-shelled fruits that dangle from just below its crown of leafs. The other, which seldom reaches thirty feet, bears beneath its crown large bunches of succulent fruits the size of a large strawberry.

  Curiously enough for a desert, the Low Desert is spotted with numerous pools of potable water, and veined with many small streams. Many of the streams emerge from or empty into pools, but not all the pools have associated streams, nor do all streams have understandable sources or mouths. In most instances, geographers don’t know where the water comes from; certainly not from rain, as little rain falls on the Low Desert.

  Despite the evident barre
nness of the Low Desert, the resourceful traveler needn’t carry provisions for an entire journey. Indeed, there is a far more generous larder of foodstuffs available than one might normally expect to find in a desert, albeit some of it must be approached with caution. The plenteous grasses (majani majani ) are too hardy for human consumption without the flour ground from its seeds first being immersed in liquid for extended periods of time. As the inhabitants of the Low Desert generally use the fermented milk of their domestic riding and burden beasts as that liquid, the bread and pasties of their diet are the only such known that will inebriate the unaware who partake of them too plentifully. Some of the bushes found around pools have edible berries, nuts, or seeds. Most of the berries can be eaten as plucked, though it is wise to first brush (or better, wash) the sand off them. The berries of the quaintly named crawl’em bush (tukio baya ), on the other hand, are extremely toxic if eaten raw. The name of the crawl’em bush is said to come from the reaction of a person who eats a handful of the berries; he falls to the ground and crawls in circles until he dies. Yet if the berries are first crushed, then boiled in copious amounts of water, they yield a highly nutritious and tasty porridge. Most of the nuts and seeds from the bushes must be roasted before they can be consumed by humans, though lesser animals seem to have little problem deriving sustenance from them. The fruits of the bumber trees need no particular preparation prior to use in repast.

  Meat is also available in the form of three different breeds of gazelle and two of antelope. In the vicinity of the northern slopes of the Sentinel Mountains, there is also a large-horned sheep, the meat of which tastes like mutton that’s been left in the sun too long. Small, ground-dwelling mammals and lizards are also to be found, mostly near pools of potable water. If one is truly desperate for meat and unable to catch other game, it is claimed that the riding and burden beast of the inhabitants of the Low Desert, the “comite,” can be eaten without too deleterious consequences.