by Tracy Falbe
He shook his head and drew out the festering pus that was his jealousy. With it, he encoded the spells that he cast. Through the night, he walked the edges of his trap and imbued its concealed mechanical energy with his wicked ingenuity.
Chapter 39. Into the Highlands
“There is no doubt. People are creeping about,” Thal said to Altea as they watched the dark woods.
“I hear them too,” she whispered. Her ability to interpret woodland noises still felt new to her.
“Five, maybe six of them,” Thal estimated.
He and Altea occupied shadows at the base of a thick tree close to their camp. They had taken first watch while the others rested.
Pistol growled tentatively, expecting a fight.
“I might have to make them rethink their plans,” Thal suggested.
He lifted his pistol, and Altea braced herself for the noise, but no target presented itself. The hilly woodland along the road became overtly silent.
The quiet persisted until a scuffle behind them made them whirl, but they recognized Valentino. The Condottiere bent his tall frame and attempted to scuttle along with a low profile. A gallant charge on horseback suited him much better.
“Did sleep elude you?” Thal asked.
“I got a few winks,” Valentino said. His eyes probed the night.
“I think some rogues plot an attack,” Thal warned.
“Mileko said many desperate people wander these hills,” Altea said.
“I say we find out if they could be friend or foe,” Thal said.
“They could prove to be both,” Valentino said with a mercenary’s honesty.
Thal pulled his hat on snugly and said, “Valentino, give me a chance to slip toward them and then call out a challenge. I’m going to try and take one prisoner.”
“I still say we should set off that canon right in their faces,” Valentino said.
“We can always try that next,” Thal said and withdrew. Pistol trotted eagerly at his side with his tail high.
Altea listened to his faint movements as stealthy as fog moving over moss. When the lurkers started prowling again, their sounds stood out starkly in comparison.
“They’re moving closer,” Altea whispered to Valentino.
He nodded and raised a hand to his mouth. “Who goes there? We’ve got guns on you!” he shouted.
They overhead a muffled conversation and some scurrying. Pistol’s bark announced Thal’s attack. Much yelling and scuffling played out in the dark.
“Stay back or I’ll turn his head into pudding!” Thal yelled.
“Come on,” Altea said over her shoulder to Valentino as she rushed toward his voice. Pistol guided her quickly to Thal’s position. His back was against a tree and he held a man around the neck with his arm. He pressed his pistol against the man’s head.
Altea spotted three of the man’s comrades. Thal’s threat stymied them, but the standoff might not last.
“Over there,” she said to Valentino, and he charged the others with his sword. Two escaped, but he knocked one off his feet. He cried out and then begged cravenly for mercy when Valentino got a blade under his chin.
Pistol bounded about the area, barking in every direction. His behavior indicated that the others were fleeing for the moment.
“Altea, tie this man for me,” Thal said.
Thal flung down his prisoner and kept him pinned with a boot on the back. The prisoner frantically tried to resist Altea, but she wrestled his arms into position and bound them. Gripping his wrists caused her thumbs some discomfort, but the exhilaration of success made the pain irrelevant.
“Are you managing with yours?” Thal called.
“Yes,” Valentino grunted.
Roused by the commotion, Mitri and Ansel ascended the slope swiftly and took custody of the prisoners. Johan, Mileko, and Lenki arrived next, and Thal asked them to stand guard while he questioned his new acquaintances.
Altea lit a couple lanterns when they reached their camp. The prisoners presented a ragged sight. They were young men with gaunt eyes and sprouting beards. The soles of their boots were half split off, and their tattered socks soaked by snow.
“What ill intent did you have toward us?” Thal asked.
The two prisoners stared at their captors with wild eyes as if they expected immediate execution. Valentino encouraged that belief by threatening to slit their throats if they did not speak up.
“We was just curious!” blurted one boy.
Valentino raised a hand to cuff the poor liar, but Thal gestured for him to end his display of intimidation.
“Tell me about your leader?” Thal asked.
The young men frowned, which Thal interpreted as their realization that they should not reveal the names of their associates. Thal judged that they possessed some sense of loyalty.
“I think they need something to eat,” Altea observed, and the prisoners’ fear switched to interest.
“Will you talk to me for some bread?” Thal asked.
The prisoners looked at each other, and neither could think of a reason to turn down a free meal. Thal had Ansel release them from their bonds while Johan fetched them bread. They bit into the loaves with less manners than dogs.
By now Sarputeen had stirred himself and inspected them. Their chewing and bulging faces could not hide their nervousness as the elder one scrutinized them. They noted that he appeared to be a man of the Church after some fashion, but their feral lifestyle made them perceptive of wildness in others. And this one seemed more Green Man than brother of the cloth.
“Why do you harass us simply for traveling a road?” Sarputeen finally asked. He employed the local Magyar dialect with ease, which left the young men feeling unable to lie to the strange one.
“We take what we need?” one of them said.
“You chose poor hunting today,” Sarputeen remarked.
Thal added, “After watching us all day, did you not see how well armed we are? Your numbers must be strong to think you can overrun us, even at night,” he said.
The one who had answered before shoved the last of his bread into his mouth and refused to answer. The tasty snack had put his comrade in a generous mood because a hearty baked loaf of rye had not crossed his lips since last he stole one.
“It was much debated among us,” the youthful bandit admitted. “We came close to learn more about your arms if we could.”
“To see better what we had to steal,” Valentino groused accusingly.
“Indeed,” Thal agreed. “And robbers such as you deserve not my mercy, but I will let you go. But warn your master not to meddle in our affairs. I have no cause to seek new enemies, but I’ll not treat your intrusions lightly again.”
The captives shifted hesitantly as if unsure that he meant to release them. When no one said anything, they took their first steps away, but Sarputeen halted one by placing his hawthorn staff across his chest.
“I am Sarputeen, and my business is with Tekax. Tell that to the others for those names might mean something,” he said.
The concern on the youth’s face showed that he reluctantly recognized at least one of those names. Sarputeen lifted his staff away, and the two bandits scrambled away up the wooded hill. Pistol gave them a few parting barks for good measure.
Thal said, “Mitri, you and Ansel take the second watch. Everyone else should try to get some sleep.”
Valentino rubbed his eyes and accepted that he needed some genuine rest. The two lads from the village, Paul and Rudolf, who had accompanied them for adventure looked to him for reassurance. The advance of the bandits had spooked them as they slept on a dark road the farthest they had ever been from the place of their birth even if it was only two days’ travel from their home hearths.
“Go on, lads,” Valentino said. “Bandits will be the least of your concerns on this trip.”
The group dispersed to their bedrolls under a crude canvas canopy. They had set it up between the limbers that conveyed the two commandeered
cannons. Altea stayed by Thal, whose attention was fixed on the hill.
“You’re going after them?” she surmised.
“Our spies must be spied upon,” he said. He leaned in for a tender kiss.
“I’ll be back before dawn.”
As he ascended the hill, he shifted among the crisscrossing tree shadows on starlit snow. Pistol left small tracks on a course parallel to his.
With Thal gone, Altea joined Sarputeen. The sorcerer fingered his staff and stared pensively into the tunnel of darkness that marked the remote road through the trees.
“This is the road that leads to Tekax,” she said.
“Mileko says so,” Sarputeen said. “We’ll pass through Gyongyos and then my destination will be before me.”
“Can these canons really help us?” she wondered. The cumbersome weapons slowed them and yet they seemed such insignificant things to take against some high tower.
“If nothing else, they will prove my resolve to Tekax,” Sarputeen said. “But let us not talk of it,” he cautioned and looked to the Heavens suspiciously.
******
The frosty forest could not penetrate Thal’s natural warmth. He welcomed the drowsy peace of the Highlands. The dormancy brought on by winter had allowed the land to set aside its Earthly concerns, and his thoughts gained clarity in the cold quiet.
Mileko had told him that many homeless people eked out survival in this area after being driven from lower lands by Ottoman conquerors. He considered the privation that they must experience, especially as the bitter season tightened their belts.
When he reached the top of a ridge, he saw the lanterns and watchfire of an encampment below. The thin snow brightened the landscape a little so that he could view their shelters and spot a few men moving about. He judged that several dozen people occupied the area from the accumulated scent at their obvious latrine area adjacent to their scrappy cabins and tents. The hardscrabble community reminded him of another time that he had come upon a camp at the edge of a forest in Bohemia. Those people had not been entirely noncriminal but not evil either.
He watched his two prisoners rush back to their comrades. Their reunion perhaps interrupted talk of a rescue mission.
Pistol came alongside him and growled lightly. Thal passed a hand affectionately over the dog’s head. “They are not my first choice for friends either,” he said because the wretched and desperate could be dangerous.
He approached the camp from a side where no fires or lanterns burned. He passed among the tiny cabins. Moss and mud clogged the gaps between the narrow logs. He stopped at one and placed his ear against the bark covered wall. Within he heard the gentle wheeze of sleeping people. A deeply congested cough wracked one person. Thal tested the scent of the area and confirmed that women lived there.
A jagged lane of sorts led onward among the huts and tents that followed a pattern laid out by the trees. Ahead men stood around a fire. Thal stole silently toward the place. Crouching behind a barrel, he spied the two youths who he had let go. Three older men were conversing with them.
“Tekax and who?” a man with an eye patch asked.
“Supperteam.”
“No, he said Sarperteen,” the other insisted.
The man with one eye rubbed his chin as if something nagged at his memory. Shaking his head, he looked to his comrades and said, “Who are these people with canons claiming their business is with Tekax?”
“Jember, we should just leave them be like they told my boys,” a man in a fur hat said.
“It’s him!” one of the former captives cried out. He gripped his friend who crumpled with horror at Thal’s uncanny arrival.
Thal smiled when the three other men turned and saw him. “Did they tell you I fed them?” he asked and gestured toward his new acquaintances.
“No,” Jember said, and his single eye flashed judgmentally.
The boys frowned guiltily, knowing that food was to be shared in winter. “We was prisoners and had to eat it,” one of them mumbled, but the three men had ceased listening. They pulled their knives and regarded Thal warily. They glanced around, obviously expecting others to be descending on their position, but only Pistol sniffed around.
“I’ve not much in the way of supplies for so many, but we would give you what we can by way of passage through your territory,” Thal said with much politeness.
The men glanced to each other waiting for someone to pounce first, but something about Thal restrained them. He looked too healthy to be some wandering mad man, and his apparel was in good order and his weapons abundant.
“Are ye the one who took my boys prisoner?” the fur hat man asked.
“Are you who was prowling close to my camp in the dark?” Thal said.
The man growled lightly, uncertain about his next words or actions.
Jember, as the better judge of men, grasped that this was one of the rare strange ones who crossed the Highlands, and their business always concerned Tekax. He noted the thick wolf skin only partially concealed by a cloak.
“You must be a kreisjager seeking bounties from the lord of the tower,” Jember declared.
The reference to a wolf hunter irked Thal. “My business with the lord of the tower, as you call him, is not that. I intend to make him pay for sending assassins against me and mine,” Thal said.
The mention of assassins clearly troubled the trio of grown men.
“My business with Tekax need not trouble you,” Thal continued. “I’ve come to learn whether you are my foe. If so, let us broker a peace and I shall pass soon from this place.”
Jember and his colleagues were not accustomed to being spoken to with formality, and they regarded Thal with confusion. Pistol started barking behind him, and he whirled to see two more men advancing on him. One bore a club with nails sticking out of it and the other had a dagger. Pistol charged them boldly and his snarling bravery produced great inconvenience despite his small size. Thal drew his falchion to fend off their sloppy attack. He took care not to draw their blood but smacked their arms painfully with the flat of the blade.
Jember and his partners joined the fray, but their clumsy attacks fared no better than they had by the road when Thal took prisoners.
The young men shouted from the spinning periphery of the scuffle for their elders to stop.
“He offered us food!” one of them shouted.
“Don’t make him shoot you!” fretted the other.
The attackers withdrew a step from Thal. They panted in a circle around him. Their breath steamed like hot springs in the cold. Thal watched them for another attack. Jember held his jaw where he had received a stout punch. He understood that Thal could have just as easily shoved a blade in his guts. His men were no weapon masters either. They were creatures of the ambush and little else.
“Enough of this. Let us talk,” Jember decided, and the other men retreated a little more.
Thal sheathed his falchion. “You’re hard people to make friends with,” he said and extended a hand to Jember.
“No one wants to be our friends,” Jember grumbled. His hand felt like bread dough within Thal’s shockingly firm grip.
“I’ll warn you that I make a poor choice of enemy,” Thal said.
Up close, Jember noticed the subtle strangeness about Thal’s eyes and overall bearing. He was glad when his hand slipped away from the other’s grip without injury.
“And you say you’re the enemy of Tekax?” Jember asked.
“I am,” Thal said, and his unhesitating declaration startled the leader.
“Do you intend to attack his tower with your canons?” Jember asked.
Thal warned himself that he might be in the presence of one of Tekax’s spies. “I thought they might provide some service,” he answered.
“Have you seen his tower?” Jember asked incredulously.
“Is there something I should know about it?” Thal wondered.
Now Jember grew cautious. Speaking of Tekax at all was bad luck. He would need t
o pray and toss salt to cleanse his mouth of the name. “I know only not to go there,” he muttered.
“But it is where I am bound, and I ask that you not attack my party for I would find that...annoying,” Thal said, giving the trifling word ominous meaning. “In the morning, send your lads to the road, and we’ll share some food with you before we continue.”
Jember blinked. Generosity was not often directed toward his community, and he felt a tiny pang of guilt over the failed attack that he had plotted. It had only been a reconnaissance, he reminded himself, so perhaps he had not really been in the wrong. Robbing the road was all that he had.
“We’ll not trouble your party if you would give me your name,” Jember said and then offered his own.
“I am Thal, son of Sarputeen,” Thal said.
The name of his father tickled the memory of Jember again as if he had heard it in a scary tale told around the campfire when he was a boy.
“I’m pleased that we could meet and avoid unpleasantness,” Thal said. He glanced among the other men, who watched him with wary disbelief. Each one had experienced his deft deflection of their attacks, and they reflected on the audacity of his solo entry into their community.
“I wish you well for what it might be worth,” Jember offered.
“All goodwill has great value,” Thal said. “Let me take my leave of you.”
“I doubt I could stop you,” Jember said.
Thal only smiled, glad that he had impressed upon these desperate folk the importance of leaving him be. Dire circumstances and not black hearts had made these people dangerous cutthroats, and he hoped that they might manage some redemption in the future.
As he passed the lads who had briefly been in his custody, he said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, and Thal guessed that they hoped to sneak another meal just to themselves when they picked up supplies.