“My most abject apologies, lady,” Veduci said, evidently abashed, though he was no such thing. “I should have realized! He had known full well she probably didn’t know how to mount a man’s saddle, he wanted her to feel a weakness from which he could easily and gracefully extract her—to her gratitude. “Allow me.” He placed his hands firmly on her slim waist and savored for a moment the feel of the smooth, soft flesh through her thin gown. “When I lift, raise your left foot to the stirrup. I will help you erect, then—I hesitate to say it—you must swing your right leg back and over the horse. Are you ready?”
“Yes.” She sounded almost eager.
He lifted her effortlessly and held her steady while she fit her foot into the stirrup. He didn’t let go while she clumsily maneuvered her right leg over the horse’s back, and still held on while she settled herself in the saddle. When he let go he let his left hand casually brush down her thigh and his right briefly caress the small of her back.
She looked down at him as though thinking, You did that deliberately, you took liberties with my person. But I allow it—this time.
The escarpment bowed inward and receded three or four miles from the road. A light forest grew between the highway and the heights. The scouts continued to find no break giving passage north through the cliffs. The road angled slightly north of east, so the shore of the Princedon Gulf, which also angled slightly north, came no closer. Not that it seemed to matter—the Border Warders scouting toward the coast reported that the Jokapcul seen moving east more than a week earlier didn’t appear to have reached so far—either that or they’d gone farther, maybe all the way out of the Gulf. So far as anyone could tell, the coast was clear all the way to the Inner Ocean, where the caravan would turn north toward Handor’s Bay, or another open port.
In mid-morning, Guma—the lieutenant of Lancers—raised his hand and reined in his horse when he saw Lyft canter-ing through the main body of the point squad; Lyft and Naedre had ridden ahead to the left front to inspect the forest. Haft, who’d been telling Guma to assign three more lancers to scout the edge of the distant cliffs, halted to hear what Lyft had to say.
Lyft snapped off a salute when he skidded his mount to a halt. “Strange men are camped ahead,” he reported. “About a mile off the road. Not Jokapcul. We saw about two hundred before I came back to report. Naedre is watching them.”
“If they aren’t Jokapcul, are they refugees?” Haft asked.
Lyft again shook his head. “They didn’t look like refugees. I think they’re the Desert Men I’ve heard about. They wore sand-colored robes and, instead of horses, had strange-looking beasts such as I have also heard live in the desert.”
“What were they doing?” Guma asked.
“What did the beasts look like?” Haft added. He’d seen Desert Men and their beasts once when the Sea Horse stopped on the desert coast to catch game for the ship’s galley.
Lyft answered Haft first. “They are taller than a horse and have very long necks that hold their heads up high. They look as fat as an unshorn sheep, but their coats seem to be short-haired. Their color was mottled white and gray and tan. I think they can hide easily in the desert.”
Haft and Guma nodded; the description matched what they’d both seen.
Guma repeated his question. “What were they doing?”
“Nothing. They looked like they were resting in camp.”
“What kind of security did they have out?” Haft asked.
“None that we saw.”
Haft looked into the trees in the direction Lyft had come from. No security? That didn’t sound right. “What about women and children? Wagons?”
Lyft shook his head. “Only the men and their riding beasts.”
“I don’t think they use wagons,” Guma said.
Haft nodded absently. A couple hundred men with no women, no children, no wagons, and no security—just sitting calmly in the forest outside their desert. Next to the road. It seemed ominous, or at least very strange. “How were they armed?”
“Swords, lances, bows.”
“What about demon weapons?”
Lyft shook his head. “I didn’t see any.” He shrugged, not that he would have necessarily recognized any demon weapons other than the couple he already knew.
“Send someone back to tell Spinner,” Haft told Guma. “And send someone to make contact with the Border Warders, tell them what we found and find out if they’ve seen anyone.”
“Right, Lord Haft,” Guma replied. He twisted around on his saddle to signal two men to come up. They cantered away in opposite directions as soon as he gave them their orders.
“Now,” Haft said to Lyft, “I want to see what you and Naedre found.”
The forest between the road and the cliffs still had the leafy trees the caravan had traversed since Eikby, but in far lesser profusion. There were no towering lookout trees or dense canopy.
Some of those trees sent bare trunks twenty or thirty feet up before they sprouted thin branches with long, thin leafs. The leafs met each other, so each branch looked almost like a single, long, broad leaf. The branches came out in a circle from the same place and bent gracefully groundward after first climbing up a short distance. Altogether the trees gave the impression of being tall, thin mushrooms with green caps. The refugees, native to Dartmutt, called them “bumber trees.”
Other trees weren’t nearly as tall, ranging from knee high to a child to thrice a tall man’s height, and were even stranger than the bumber trees. The fronds of these trees branched out fanlike just above the ground, in such profusion and equality of thickness that Haft couldn’t discern which was the main trunk and which were branches. Maybe none was the main trunk; Haft couldn’t tell without examining them closer than he had time to spare. Each shaft sprouted leafs its entire length, and when Haft looked closely, he saw each leaf sprouted more leafs—and that each of the branchings from the base of the tree to the smallest branching off a leaf was fanlike, so that no leaf or branch blocked another from the sun. He thought these were very strange trees. Seen from east or west, they were mere inches wide, from north or south they fanned nearly as broad as they were tall.
The little undergrowth that took root in the sandy soil was mostly sproutlings of the larger trees, though there were scattered low-creeping bushes with purple berries. Here and there wind and blown sand fought an unending war to polish or pit rock spires that poked up more than twice the height of a man or were piled in jumbles.
Small birds flitted low over the ground, from berry bush to berry bush, snatching fruit on the wing. Lizards basked in the sun, or took shelter from it behind the fanning trees. Some, larger than others, lay unmoving alongside or under the berry bushes, heads tilted up, mouths slightly agape, long tongues rolled up inside. A feeding bird flitted too near to one of the larger lizards, whose head moved almost too fast to see before its tongue shot out to snag the bird and whip it back to the lizard’s mouth. Crunch! Feathers, a foot or two, and a long-beaked head, protruded from the lizard’s mouth. After a moment the lizard swallowed and all evidence of the bird was gone.
Lines of insects crawled here and there, bearing gifts of detritus from there to here. Long-legged hoppers munched on fan leafs before hopping to a more succulent leaf to munch some more. Low slung, small crawlers made their ponderous way from one lizardly leaving to another, nearly indistinguishable from the sandy soil.
The only sounds in this strange forest other than the rhythmic plopping of the hooves of their horses were the shrill pipings of the flitting fliers, the occasional crunches of feeding lizards, and the rustling of leaves moved against each other by the breeze.
More than half a mile from where he’d returned to the point, Lyft held up his hand and dismounted. “We go on foot from here, Lord Haft,” he said quietly.
Wordlessly, grateful to get down from the mare, Haft dismounted. He looped his reins around a branch of one of the fan trees and looked around, wondering how he’d be able to find his way back
to this spot if he had to leave quickly—the ground was sandy, but firm enough so it didn’t easily take a man’s footprints.
Lyft slid his lance into its saddle loops and drew his sword. “Ready?” he asked.
Haft loosened his axe in its holder but didn’t draw it. He nodded. Lyft easily loped deeper into the forest, Haft following just as quietly. Little more than a hundred yards farther, Lyft turned abruptly where a fan tree shaded the south side of a jumble of rocks and disappeared from sight. Haft started, then drew his axe as he darted to the place where the lancer had vanished. He found no mystery to the disappearance; instead, he found that the rocks were piled in a U large enough to shelter several men from the wind and blowing sand. Lyft and Naedre looked to him to join them.
Before Haft could ask how Lyft had managed to find this place so easily, or why Naedre was here instead of where he could watch the Desert Men, Naedre held a finger to his lips and signaled for Haft to follow him.
To Haft’s surprise, Naedre didn’t leave the shelter of the rocks, but slithered into a gap in the rocks that his body had blocked from Haft’s sight. The gap was a tunnel barely wider than a man’s shoulders, just high enough for Haft to hold his head upright to see where he was going. Haft didn’t go far; not much more than five yards, before he emerged from the rocks and found himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Naedre in a hollow blocked in all directions by a thicket of fan trees. He heard the burble of water.
Haft looked along the ground below the fan tree directly in front of him. A sparkling stream about fifteen feet wide flowed under the trees—it was wider by two or three times than any other waterway they’d crossed on the north side of the Gulf. Men in desert garb lounged along both sides of the stream, their mounts on tether lines behind them. The mounts, yes, the strange beasts of the Desert Men. Tall as a man at the shoulder, with long necks that allowed them to eat high leafs or graze ground growth; their backs bulged up so they were far taller than their legs said they should be—Haft wondered if what he’d heard was true, that the beasts stored food and water on their backs so they could go for long times without food or drink. There were weapons aplenty; bows and quivers, lances, swords—always more than one per man—and each man had at least two knives visible about him. Haft looked closely but saw no demon weapons, or anything that resembled a spell chest in which demon weapons might be stored. He saw many sleeping blankets laid out, but no tents were pitched; there were cooking pits with small fires flickering in their bottoms. One area away from the bedding and fire pits seemed to be designated for latrine use, which surprised Haft. The men were quiet. What little they said to each other they only said to men close enough to hear a whisper.
And there were no women or children.
They watched for fifteen minutes and then a little longer. Haft couldn’t think of a peaceful reason for so many armed men to gather without their women and children—and so quietly. Yet he was puzzled by the evident lack of purposeful activity in the encampment or the reported lack of watchers around it. When he’d seen enough, he tapped Naedre and the two slithered back into the tunnel through the rocks and returned to where Lyft waited for them. Once out of the tunnel, Haft looked at it and wondered if it would carry voices. He remembered that neither Lyft nor Naedre had spoken before he and Naedre entered the tunnel. He dipped his head to the side and they nodded in reply. The three loped back to where the horses were. Haft was surprised at how close Naedre’s horse was to his and Lyft’s.
“Did you check around for sentries or other groups?” Haft asked when they stopped.
Lyft gave him the kind of look a junior man gives an officer who asks a question so dumb it doesn’t deserve an answer and said, “Of course, Lord Haft. We searched from the road to five hundred yards away from it, and found no one, nor did we find sign of anyone other than those who we already knew had been there.”
Haft nodded. He was sure the two men had done exactly as they said. He was also sure they weren’t as skilled at spotting sign as the Border Warders and Borderers were. He was almost sorry he’d used the Royal Lancers for the point squad. But the Royal Lancers were stronger fighters than the others, and the point squad was more likely to have to fight than the border soldiers with whom he’d run the reconnaissance before they turned onto this eastbound road.
A passage from Lord Gunny Says came to him. You never have exactly the men or weapons you need in exactly the balance you need. Neither does the enemy. That’s why we train in as many different ways as we do: So that when we need someone or something that we don’t have, we can do a better job of covering the lack than our enemy can. Our superior ability to substitute who and what we do have for what we don’t have is a major part of why we win all of our battles.
Well, Haft didn’t think he and Spinner had done the best possible job of substituting in this case. He looked to the south. There were Border Warders there. Some of them probably accompanied the man Guma had sent to alert them when he returned. They could search the area for sign of more.
“Go back and keep an eye on them,” he told Lyft and Naedre, “while we decide what to do.”
He watched where they ran as the two loped back to their observation post and shook his head. He knew the only reason he could see the sign they left was that he’d seen them lay it. But he was confident the Border Warders would see it when they came. He climbed onto his mare and trotted back to the point squad.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Birdwhistle and Tracker were two of the original Zobran Border Warders to join the band, long weeks before it grew large enough to become a refugee caravan. Like most of the Border Warders, they’d both been poachers before accepting the prince’s pardon in exchange for putting their skills to the warding of Zobra’s borders. Like their brethren in mottled green surcoats, they were highly adept at stealthy movement in forest and glen, though more so in forest than glen. Their tracking abilities, of both game and man, were superlative—if they didn’t see a sign of man or beast, that sign probably didn’t exist. And they were excellent marksmen with their bows—longbow for both, now that Birdwhistle had demonstrated its value in combat to Tracker, who had previously used the short bow.
The land they traversed between the north shore of the Princedon Gulf and the road the caravan followed was different from the forests and glens of Zobra that were so familiar to them. The forest had fewer trees, and those were nearly all bumber trees whose mushroom-cap branches cast little shadow and fan trees that light filtered through. In short, more light reached the ground, which left fewer shadows for them to move through unseen. The very ground was different. In the forests of Zobra they had spent their lives moving through, the ground was soft underfoot, covered with centuries of fallen leafs and twigs, mulch that returned life to earth to make fresh life. Here, the decaying cover was thin and spotty, the dirt was coarser, almost sandy, filled with pebbles, and stippled with stone. The hardness of the ground, and its pebbles and stones, didn’t take sign as well as the forests of Zobra.
Still, they could see sign. Here, a deer had passed, nibbling on the leafs of low branches. There, a boar had rooted for succulents hidden beneath rocks. They exchanged a glance and a grin when they spotted pug of cat—they knew Haft was afraid of big cats. And they found they could move unseen even with the lack of shadows; had they not been unwilling to ease their watch for Jokapcul or other threats, they could easily have taken that deer when they passed unnoticed within thirty feet of it.
It wasn’t until they found improperly buried scat and dirtied leafs that they found sign of man. They cast around in overlapping spirals, looking for more sign, before Birdwhistle found a carelessly tripped rock. Flat and as big as a man’s palm, it had been moved from its earlier resting place, exposing the lichen that grew on the pebbles on which it had sat. They followed a line from the incompletely buried scat through the disturbed rock, and twenty paces farther found a glob of sputum spattered on some pebbles. Two paces farther still, they came across an a
lmost imperceptible indentation in a stretch of coarse dirt; though it didn’t show clear shape, they knew it was a human footprint. On closer examination they found the rounded end went toward the scat, the broader end to the east—the direction they’d followed the other signs to reach the footprint. It was hard to tell in the sandy soil, but they were certain it was recent. The sign they’d seen gave no evidence of who left it, but they doubted it was an innocent fisherman or local hunter. They nocked arrows and continued.
Birdwhistle kept his eyes up, watching for men; Tracker bent his neck, searching the ground for sign. They cast from side to side as they went—and both listened intently for sounds not made by wind or animal.
They didn’t pay particular attention to the smells that wafted on the sea breeze from the Gulf, since the salt tang in the air would interfere with anything they might smell at a distance, though scents came to them before sounds or visual signs. But ignoring that smell was almost a mistake. They dismissed the unpleasant odor of rotting fish until they smelled it mixed with burned wood. Then they recognized the scent as an unpalatable sauce much relished by the Jokapcul, who made it from the juices of fish they baked in the sun. The two scouts exchanged a glance and a nod and changed their course gulfward, flickering from shadow to shadow through the thickening trees nearer the Gulf.
Birdwhistle clacked his tongue in the call of a red-throated nutberry bird. Tracker stopped and moved only his head to look at him, then where Birdwhistle looked. Two Jokapcul soldiers in metal-studded leather jerkins lounged under a bumber tree, one leaning his back against its trunk, the other laying on his side. Neither wore his helmet nor held his sword in hand. Both Border Warders clenched their fists on their bows—these two would be easy to kill.
But they weren’t here to fight, they were here to find danger before danger found the refugee caravan.
At a barely discernible signal from Birdwhistle, the two scouts eased back until they were out of sight of the two enemy sentries.
Demontech: Gulf Run Page 19