Demontech: Gulf Run

by David Sherman

  “No full squads?” Silent asked. He’d seen a few squads moving westward during the day.

  Spinner shook his head. “They came singly or in pairs. They were pretty demoralized. I managed to assign all of those to whom I talked to various squads. Nearly all of our soldiers have been in at least one battle where they beat the Jokapcul, so I hope they can raise the morale of the new men I gave them.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then added, “It’s probable that many of the men who joined today are also soldiers, but they threw their uniforms away.”

  Silent nodded agreement at that. “I’m sure there are still a few squads that haven’t passed through us yet,” he said. “I’ll try to get some of them to join us tomorrow.”

  “Most of the Zobran Border Warders speak Skraglandish,” Haft said. “Take one of them with you to translate if you meet Zobran soldiers.”

  Silent started to object that he didn’t need a Border Warder to accompany him because he spoke some Zobran, then realized the Border Warders were more fluent in Skraglandish than he was in their tongue. Besides, it would give him an opportunity to improve his Zobran. He nodded.

  “Do any of the Skragland Borderers speak the Dartmutter dialect?” he asked. “There are Dartmutter refugees and soldiers out there. I don’t think any of the Zobrans can understand that dialect.”

  “I’ll find out,” Haft replied.

  “Our flankers on the left reported seeing soldiers out there, walking parallel to us,” Fletcher said. “There may be a hundred or more, if I interpreted their reports right.”

  Spinner grimaced. “Sergeant Geatwe of the Zobran Prince’s Swords told me he thought he saw bal Ofursti skulking along out there.”

  Haft grinned. “Well, if he wants to come back in . . .” He cracked his knuckles.

  There was nothing more they could accomplish that night, so shortly after, they said their good-nights and everybody but Spinner and Haft headed for their tents.

  Spinner began readying himself for the night, but Haft stood in the middle of the tent, lightly drumming his fingertips on his thigh. He looked at his cot as though mentally measuring it, then toed the rug as though checking its softness. He gripped the tent’s center pole and looked from it to the front and the back of the tent, again as though measuring, and moved his hands as though feeling a wall under it. Once more he toed the rug. Not once did he look at Spinner. But Spinner finally looked at him.

  “You don’t sleep alone anymore, do you?”

  Haft grinned broadly. “Not when I can avoid it.”

  “And you’re trying to figure out how to bring her in here and have privacy.”

  Haft nodded brightly.

  Spinner groaned and picked up the blanket from his cot. “It’s all yours,” he said, and pushed through the tent’s door flap.

  Haft looked around the now empty tent, wiping his hands together gleefully, eyes glowing. “Now where are you, Maid Marigold?” he murmured.

  “Here I am,” she replied, poking in through the door flap.

  He turned and smiled at her. “So you are.” He held out his arms and she darted into them. “Were you huddled outside the tent all this time, waiting?”

  She answered him with a kiss.

  From elsewhere came the sharp report of a slap, and Alyline’s voice exclaimed, “Get out of my tent!”

  Then Doli’s voice said, “My tent is big enough for two.”

  By then Haft and Maid Marigold were so involved they didn’t hear Spinner’s muttered, “I’m sleeping in the open, where I can be immediately ready if there’s an attack overnight.”

  In the morning, the Zobran Border Warder called Tracker and the Skragland Borderer named Meszaros went into the forest between the road and Dartmutt with Silent and Wolf. The caravan was near the northern edge of the city’s surrounding farms, so they went far back as a rear flanking guard. Tracker and Meszaros stayed fairly close to Silent and were just as glad Wolf ranged on his own. It wasn’t that the two border soldiers feared the animal—Meszaros spoke for both of them when he said, “Wolves aren’t good, and they aren’t bad, they’re just wolves is all. Just when you think you’ve got them figured out and you know what they’re going to do, they go and do something different and you realize you don’t understand them at all."

  Silent didn’t respond to that, he was confident that he knew Wolf very well—and that Wolf would do pretty much exactly what any free-ranging member of his own tribe back on the steppes would do in a given situation.

  The best part of an hour and a couple of miles behind the caravan, Wolf led them to the first of what Silent expected to find a lot of—a dispirited squad of a dozen soldiers.

  These were Skraglander Kingsmen, the innermost guards of the King of Skragland—which gave truth to the rumors that the king was dead or in hiding. The black bear pelts the Kingsmen wore as cloaks identified their regiment, but other emblems worn on the cloaks suggested they came from different elements of the regiment, that they hadn’t started their journey into the Princedons as a squad. Half had double-bladed axes, the others two-handed swords. They sat around a fire; a quick look around by the border soldiers told them the Kingsmen didn’t have anyone on watch. Yes, Silent concluded, dispirited and close to giving up. He signed the two men with him to stay in place, then moved so silently and slowly that he was seated in the circle before the Kingsmen realized they had company.

  Silent’s hands were empty and in clear view, with his wrists draped over his crossed legs. He didn’t flinch when one Kingsman grabbed his axe, ready to fight. Silent’s only movement was to rotate his hands palm up, emphasizing their emptiness. The other men scrabbled for their weapons, twisting around to peer fearfully into the trees.

  “Where did you come from?” the axe wielder demanded with a tremor in his voice. Silent recognized the tab on the collar of his cloak as the insignia of a senior sergeant of some sort.

  “I come from your best chance of survival,” the steppe giant said in gravelly softness. He kept his expression friendly.

  “What do you know of survival?” the axe man demanded.

  Silent rolled his shoulders in a half shrug. “Enough to know the people I’m with have fought the Jokaps many times and beaten them every time.”

  The sergeant snorted. “Nobody beats the Jokapcul.”

  Silent looked at him levelly. “Then it’s too bad I don’t collect trophies from the dead. I could impress you with them.”

  “You lie!”

  He slowly raised his right hand to point his thumb over his shoulder. “A couple of miles back that way is a caravan with near three and a half thousand people. ’Bout four hundred are soldiers, including some Skraglanders. All of them have fought the Jokaps. Most of them—the ones who’ve been with us for more than a few days—have beaten the Jokaps in battle. We also have a war wizard. I don’t see a war wizard here, but we could use more soldiers.”

  “Why should I believe anything you say?”

  Silent’s face went hard. He gave the senior sergeant the kind of look a fighter gives an enemy he’s about to defeat. “Because my companions and I could have killed you instead of me sitting down to talk.”

  “You don’t have any companions!”

  Silent slowly raised his left hand and pointed a finger straight up. An arrow zipped past the sergeant and thunked into a tree just to his rear.

  “Yes I do,” Silent said softly, his expression again friendly. He flicked his eyes at the leader’s axe, still hefted and ready to use. “The Jokaps beat you. We beat the Jokaps. You don’t scare us, so how about you put that down and let’s talk.

  “I am Silent, a wanderer from the Tangonine People of the northern steppes. What is your name?” He reached out a hand.

  The Kingsman looked at the hand for a long moment. He couldn’t help but see how big it was, how much strength it had. It took no stretch for him to envision that hand yanking him across the fire if he took it. He took a steadying breath, lay down his axe, and reached for the hand
.

  “I’m Upper Sergeant Han, Second Company, Skragland Kingsmen.” He attempted to squeeze exactly as hard as Silent did, but the hand he grasped was so much bigger than his, he couldn’t get the leverage to squeeze.

  Silent smiled, shook Han’s hand, and let go without applying undue pressure. He raised two fingers of his right hand and flipped them forward. Tracker and Meszaros came to sit flanking him at the fire. Wolf stayed out of sight, prowling in case anyone should come up.

  “How do you come to be here?” Han asked. “The Northern Steppes are far from the Princedons.”

  Briefly, Silent explained how he had gone wandering to see the sights of the world. He told them of being at the border post between Skragland and Bostia when two Frangerian Marines showed up, then encountering them again when they were fighting the Jokapcul. He didn’t mention that he was still at the border post when the Jokapcul invaded Skragland. He skipped over the aborted journey up the Eastern Waste, but told briefly about Eikby and the successful battle there and skipped other parts of the journey. He gave a rough outline of the plan they had for reaching safety. The telling only took a few minutes.

  Upper Sergeant Han didn’t believe everything Silent said, and the plan, as the giant related it, was spare, but it was better than a dozen soldiers wandering alone, waiting for the Jokapcul to catch and kill them.

  “We will join you,” Han said at last, and looked at his men. None objected, and some nodded eagerly, glad of the chance to join a larger group instead of being so few among the enemy.

  Silent gave the Kingsmen directions to the caravan and watched them leave, then said to Tracker and Meszaros, “Let’s see if we can find any more.”

  By the end of the day’s march, the caravan was growing to five thousand people, more than half of whom were women and children and a liberal sprinkling of oldsters. At least half of the day’s new men were soldiers, former soldiers or other armed, partly trained men. Somewhere, somehow, they had to find time and a place to train the rest of the men to arms.

  There was some good news: Plotniko had located a Dartmutter trader who spoke fluent Zobran and another who was reasonably conversant in Skraglandish. And Zweepee had found a caravan master who understood feeding people on the move. Although his largest caravan had been fewer than a thousand people and their animals, he knew more than anybody else with them about how to handle storage and distribution of provisions.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  On the second day after the Skragland Kingsmen joined the refugee caravan, Haft sat in a high crook of a tree near the edge of the forest three miles east of where the road past Dartmutt turned to follow the north shore of the Princedon Gulf. The forest ended abruptly there, almost as though a mad gardener had decreed that on this side of a line there would be trees and undergrowth in all their wild profusion, and on that side there would be nothing higher than a man’s waist. The mad gardener hadn’t been totally successful; in the middle and far distance Haft noted a few trees. They all looked stunted and thin. The road that made its way across the gently rolling landscape to the east showed some sign of recent use, but the only people visible consisted of two troops of Jokapcul light horse that had just merged onto it from another road that followed the western shore of the Gulf a couple of miles to the east. In the far distance thin tendrils of smoke rose from just beyond the horizon. Haft had seen such tendrils before—they were from a burning village.

  Haft looked to the southeast. More troops of Jokapcul horsemen were headed north along the coast road; troops of marching infantry stepped off the road to make way for the horsemen. Beyond them he saw coast huggers beating their way between Dartmutt and the north coast, where they disappeared over the horizon. He couldn’t see Dartmutt; it was far enough south that the entire city would have to be burning for him to even see smoke rising from it. He might be only a one-day wagon ride north of the city, but that one day ride was for a single horse-drawn wagon with mounted escort, not for a caravan that was now over six thousand strong.

  He unseated himself and carefully climbed down. His perch had been high enough that the trip took several minutes.

  When he reached the ground, he shook his head at the two Zobran Border Warders and the Skragland Borderer who had accompanied him.

  “The Jokapcul are taking the north coast of the Gulf,” he said redundantly. “We need to go back and take a closer look at that other road.”

  The border soldiers nodded and immediately headed west, paralleling the road at ambush depth—if someone had set an ambush on the road, they’d come onto its flank instead of walking into its killing zone.

  Once they were away from the forest’s edge, the canopy was thick enough that few bushes and treelings grew to impede their way; they covered the distance quickly but carefully. It took them a little over an hour to cover the three miles to where the road turned to the east. Kovasch, the Skragland Borderer, had slashed blazes into a tree to tell the column’s point squad they’d gone east and to wait here; they were as clear and easy to see as they remembered. Kovasch cut a sign over the “wait here” mark to indicate it no longer held. They unhobbled the horses to ride back east a hundred yards to where a narrower road ran into the main road from the north. Their horses’ tackle made little noise.

  Haft dismounted and plucked the hobbles off the back of his saddle. The other three remained mounted.

  “Lord Haft,” said Kovasch, the Skraglander, “we can cover more ground if we ride.” They spoke in Skraglandish, though it was the native tongue of only one of them. It was Haft’s weakest language but the only one they had in common.

  “We’ll spot an ambush more easily on foot.” Haft bent over to wrap the hobbles around his mare’s fetlocks.

  “Ambush? From whom?” Birdwhistle, one of the Zobrans, asked. “You said yourself the Jokapcul are headed east. And none of our flankers have reported any of them moving into the forest.”

  Haft warily ducked under the mare’s neck to its other side. The mare snorted and stomped its hobbled hoof, almost yanking the other end from his hand. He hopped nervously back.

  Hunter, the other Zobran, hid a laugh behind his hand. The Border Warders, like the Borderers, mainly went about on foot, but all of them were comfortable with horses. Haft shot them a glare.

  “There could still be bandits,” he said.

  “The only bandits we’ve seen since we left Eikby are the ones who joined us before we reached Dartmutt.” That was Hunter, when he got over his laugh.

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  Birdwhistle pointed. “What’s that slung on your saddle?”

  Haft straightened up and looked. He saw nothing out of order. “What?”

  “That big tube, that’s what.”

  He looked curiously at Birdwhistle. “It’s a demon spitter, as you well know.”

  “That’s right, a demon spitter. And the little demon who lives in it seems to like you. Do you really think a demon that likes you will let you walk into an ambush without a warning?”

  Haft blinked, turned his head and studied the demon spitter for a long moment. It had never occurred to him that the demon in it might be able to give warnings. He’d ambushed Jokapcul with demon spitters a few times—even hid by a trail a few yards from a stopped Jokapcul horseman who carried a demon spitter—and he’d never seen a demon give any warning to the Jokapcul.

  “No, they can’t do that,” he finally said.

  “How do you know?” Hunter asked.

  “Well, they’ve never warned the Jokapcul.”

  “Maybe they don’t like the Jokapcul,” Kovasch said. “Ask him.”

  Haft looked at his three men, all still on their horses. “You just want me to look stupid, that’s why you want me to ask the demon.”

  Kovasch leaned forward in his saddle. “Trying to learn something new is never stupid.”

  Haft studied the three and finally sighed. “All right, if it’ll get you off those horses so we can get on with the reco
n.”

  He lifted the demon spitter tube from his saddle and cradled it in his arm so the small door on its side faced up and rapped lightly on it. The door popped open and the demon poked its head out.

  "Wazzu whanns!" the diminutive demon demanded.

  “We’re going up that road,” Haft said, feeling foolish. “Can you give me a warning if there’s an ambush ahead?”

  The demon put its gnarly hands on the sides of the door opening and levered itself up to where it could look at the smaller road. "Naw ambutz. Goam’up." It dropped back inside and slammed the door firmly behind itself.

  “That sounded clear enough,” Birdwhistle said.

  “It didn’t say it could give a warning!” Haft objected.

  “It said there’s no ambush,” Hunter declared.

  “It sure did,” Kovasch agreed. He kneed his horse close to a broad-boled tree next to the road and blazed a mark on it to show the point squad which way they’d gone, and another to tell them to wait there. After a few seconds thought, he added two more marks that meant there was danger to the east.

  The three turned their horses and set onto the side road.

  “Are you coming?” Birdwhistle called back over his shoulder.

  Grumbling, Haft replaced the demon spitter and removed the hobble from his mare. He was the commander, it wasn’t right that his men should outmaneuver him that way in deciding what they were doing. Mounted again, he trotted to the head of the short column. A few minutes later, grumbling again, he was in second place in the column. He would have been in the lead but his mare didn’t like leading, she always wanted to follow another horse. He grumbled, but didn’t do anything about it. As uncomfortable as he was with horses, even after months of riding, his docile mare was the only horse he could abide riding for any length of time.

  The forest to the north didn’t end abruptly, as it did to the east. Instead it petered out, as though it had become tired and slowly decided it didn’t want to go any farther. The first change, a mile or so north, was in the canopy, which thinned out enough to let sunlight reach the ground and allow undergrowth to flourish. Within another mile or so the canopy had thinned further, and undergrowth almost totally covered the ground. They noticed that the trees had thinner trunks, were shorter and more widely spaced. In a few more miles, they were so much smaller and more widely spread out that the landscape resembled parkland more than forest. The ground rose gently and, through the trees, they could see a horizon that looked too close. They rode toward it.