"A long way from home."
Do you think I don't know it? Jacom thought bitterly. At least I had a home- a true home, on my father's land, not just a rented hovel in some city back street. I'm the biggest loser here, by a very wide margin. If you had one hundredth of what I had you'd have deserted long before we set foot upon the road.
Aloud, he said only: "We have a way to go yet, I fear and we don't have much choice about the company we'll keep while we're getting there."
"You little realise how badly you need a friend or two, captain,"
said Checuti, in a sadly sympathetic fashion.
"I only hope that you learn better before it's too late."
As the thief-master walked| away Purkin spat on the ground.
"I could cut the bastard's throat, sir," he said speculatively.
"Surreptitious, like."
"No, sergeant," Jacom said with a sigh.
"Don't do that not yet, at any rate. It pains me to admit it, but we might yet need him."
"Not thinkin' of turnin' back, then?" said the sergeant, with a sidelong glance at Kim.
"No," said Jacom.
"There's no question of that. However difficult this business becomes, I'm in it to the end. I'm a captain in the king's guard, after all. People like us don't give up easily, do we, Purkin? In fact, people like us never give up, while we have breath in our bodies."
"No sir," Purkin said, with a careful respectfulness which might or might not have been feigned.
"I suppose we don't."
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l ucrezia soon found cause to regret the fact that the men from Ebia had been so rapidly overtaken by their enemies. Djemil Eyub had not had the opportunity to tell her much about what to expect in the southern part of the forest and the lands beyond, and her new captors were not in the least inclined to answer, even when she volunteered to trade information on a point for point basis.
The leader of the mound-women, who eventually confided that her name was Jume Metra, seemed to possess considerable intelligence she was, at least, highly efficient in the business of organising the efforts of her taciturn companions but she was remarkably incurious. She was not at all averse to making arrogant little speeches, but she was extremely parsimonious with information and explanations and she seemed utterly dismissive of the possibility that she might learn anything important from Lucrezia. Either the old maxim that knowledge was power had never penetrated the depths of the so-called Corridors of Power, or its meaning was construed differently there.
Although the warrior women would not untie her hands except when she was given food and water the princess was not treated badly. They did not take her belt away, and seemed indifferent to the possible purposes of the various potions which it contained. Had they questioned her about it she would have laid claim half-truthfully to esoteric medical expertise, but the fact that they didn't even bother to ask made her battery of poisons seem almost contemptible.
When they crossed the river again the mound-women allowed her to ride on one of Hyry's horses, but they remained on foot. Although the horse was on a leading rein it might have been possible for her to force it to a gallop and leave her captors behind, 335
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but while her hands were tied she would have
no way of steering the animal and she knew that would probably end up lost, alone and vulnerable to any passing predator.
It was obvious that the warrior women did not feel at home in the forest.
They were always watchful, ready to react to the slightest noise or movement, and their caution seemed to Lucrezia -- who was used to Elema's ease and confidence to be out of all proportion to the actual dangers posed by night cloaks and constrictors. The company's archers persistently and indiscriminately fired arrows at any creatures they glimpsed in the treetops, but they very rarely hit their targets and frequently lost their arrows.
Lucrezia understood that in spite of their superficial impassivity they were every bit as frightened as the Eblans. They too were far from home, and they too found the strange foliage and the dense thickets which grew about the boles of the trees profoundly unsettling.
On the far side of the river they collected some luggage which they had set aside during the attack, but Lucrezia had little opportunity to examine the contents of the various bundles. It appeared that the only sizeable objects they habitually carried with them, apart from arms and armour, were lanterns. They were the strangest lanterns Lucrezia had ever seen. They used neither flames nor captive fireflies, relying instead on some kind of fungus or lichen which emitted a soft white light that was hardly discernible in the purple daylight. Lucrezia inferred that the so- called Corridors of Power which she supposed to be tunnels excavated by drago mites in their huge artificial hills must be lined and lit by the same fungus.
Although the women who took turns leading her horse remained stubbornly uninformative Lucrezia refused to give up her attempts to question them.
Indeed, the more obvious it became that the women were firmly committed to silence, or at least to evasion, the more determined she became in her attempts to elicit more informative responses. She repeated certain questions over and over in the hope that sheer nuisance might shake angry answers loose, and she also tried to think up new questions by the hundred, in the faint hope that she might eventually hit on a magical key which would unlock the secrets dammed up in her captors' steadfast minds. It quickly became a kind of game and
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although she was forced to consider the
possibility that it might also be a game to the women, she couldn't quite believe it. Their reticence didn't seem to be born of fear, but it seemed nevertheless to be deep-seated and natural to them. Her own stubborn pride wouldn't let her give away any information which might be of value without adequate recompense, but there seemed to be no reason why she shouldn't speculate aloud about them, and so she began to propose hypothetical answers to her own questions, in the hope of provoking some kind of confirmation or denial.
"You're clearly primitives," she told a tired Jume Metra while they ate a very frugal and unsatisfying meal after a long morning's trek through the unchanging forest.
"You're little more advanced than the dark landers although you obviously have a very different social organisation; as hunter-gatherers you're dismally incompetent. You don't feel at home in the forest, although you don't show the least trace of that fear of the dark which is inclined to affect people who live under the sun, like the Eblans. That's obviously because you live mostly underground, in harmony with the drago mites The dark landers think you're the descendants of children stolen by drago mites to serve as slaves. I think they're probably right, although I'm keeping an open mind. Perhaps you're only half-human, bred for a modicum of cunning but not for real imagination or initiative, conditioned from birth to be obedient to the voice of this mound-queen of yours who is, by your own admission, nothing more than a mouthpiece for the drago mite queen."
"You can't begin to understand," Metra countered unemotionally.
"You are the half-human, not I. Ours is the true way, the true being."
"There's a good reason for my inability to understand," the princess pointed out.
"But I do know some things about you, don't I? I know that you're fond of fighting, that you're unimpressed by the idea of Xandria's walls, that you have hardly any metal, and that you have at least some respect for Goran the Forefather's dictum that the worst sin of all is forgetfulness. On the other hand, you don't give much evidence of being masters of the ancient lore."
"True humans do not need to babble ceaselessly to show what they know and remember," Metra told
her, with the air of one quoting a familiar saying.
"That which humans know and do not 337
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say is no less secujs than that which
is shouted into the empty dark."
"That's a saying we don't have in Xandria," Lucrezia admitted, making a note of the fact that the woman preferred to speak in plurals. She decided to try yet another strategy.
"We're not so very different, you and I. You seem to regard me as an alien some fabulous beast that you've captured as a prize for the greater glory of your beloved mound-queen but we're both gold ens both fully human in spite of the insults we've traded. We can be friends, you know. You and I; your people and mine."
"We are warriors," Metra replied, as if that precluded the very notion of friendship.
Lucrezia remembered what Hyry had told her about the drago mites beehive-like social organisation, which had surely been confirmed by Metra's references to the drago mite queen. Could it be that the society of the mound-women was organised in a mirror-image of their associates, and that Metra's company really were warriors and nothing but warriors'? If so, perhaps they really were incapable of friendship, incapable of anything resembling normal social intercourse. But how, Lucrezia wondered, could a single human individual take on the sole burden of reproduction for a whole tribe?
And how could the drago mites - which were, aft pr all, unintelligent creatures have imposed this alien pattern on their human commensals?
"Yes," Lucrezia said pensively, 'you certainly are warriors. I thought the Eblans' fear of their pursuers rhight be based in an exaggerated notion of how far away from home they were, but they really did have good cause to be terrified. Why were you so enthusiastic to slaughter them? Not because they posed a threat to you, that's for sure. Did you come into the forest purely and simply to chase and murder the Eblans? You say they attacked you but they told me that you attacked them. Either way, a long pursuit is a ludicrous waste of resources. You must have had some other objective - but what? Perhaps you can't tell me because you don't actually know? Are there other mound-women nearby not warriors but some other kind? Is your mound-queen waiting nearby? "
Metra laughed derisively at that.
"No," Lucrezia said promptly.
"Of course she isn't. She's safe in 338
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the nest, with the drago mite queen
whose voice she is... in the blighted nest. Perhaps she's not safe at all.
You've been away a long time. Perhaps she's already dead. Perhaps the Corridors of Power have become a single vast mausoleum."
That struck a nerve, as it had been intended to. Metra scowled, her eerily beautiful features becoming ugly but she said nothing.
"Who's really in command of your expedition?" Lucrezia asked, feeling that she was now playing the game of diplomacy as ruthlessly as it could be played.
"It's obviously not you. Will your commander be satisfied, do you think, when you bring back a single captive woman?
Wouldn't you have been wiser to wait, as I suggested you should, for my friends? Or is warrior nature so deeply ingrained in you that you can't respond to any substantial company in any other way than all-out attack? I can't believe that it's too absurd. "
"Be quiet," Metra said.
"What needs to be said will be said, in time."
Lucrezia took this to mean that she would get the explanations she desired, but not from Metra. It was a reassurance of sorts, but it left the important question dangling. If these warriors were only warriors, and the mound-queen was a thousand kirns away in her mound, who or what was really in command of this raiding party?
"You're running away now, aren't you?" Lucrezia said, changing tack again.
"Having completed your allotted task in wiping out the Eblans, you're in full retreat because you know that the dark landers have gathered their forces together. The war band we met may have been a little premature in claiming a glorious victory, but their ragged army really has put your drago mite friends to flight, hasn't it? The invasion is all over. Am I just some scrap you can throw to the mound-queen, in the faint hope of persuading her that the whole thing wasn't just a waste of time?"
"Time is never wasted," Metra said flatly, almost as though she were correcting some elementary mistake in the discourse of a child. She stood up, turned away, and signalled to her followers to tell them that it was time to move on. It was one of the others who helped Lucrezia back into the saddle and led her away.
They moved on very quickly, and Lucrezia knew that they must be travelling at least as fast as Fraxinus and Phar. If Elema had 339
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succeeded in fetching
help, any would-be rescuers would need fast horses and some expertise in tracking as well as a considerable advantage of numbers to have any chance of catching up with her. She knew that the probability of any such rescue was small, but she was careful to conserve the hope.
Soon after they had got under way again, however, that hope dwindled almost to nothing. Lucrezia caught her first glimpse of something huge and alien moving through the trees on a parallel course, and her heart immediately sank. She knew full well what the glance must signify: her captors had caught up with a company of the unearthly monsters whose allies or servants they were, and the two parties were fusing into one.
She noticed the change in the attitude and bearing of her guards before she was able to get a clear view of one of the monsters. They had earlier been walking as if they were half-entranced by anxiety, but now they relaxed and their gait became easier. Her horse, by contrast, raised its head to sniff the air, and clearly did not like the scent it caught. The animal began to look around warily, and the woman leading it had to shorten the leading-rein.
On the basis of the information given to her by Hyry Keshvara Lucrezia had imagined that drago mites must resemble beetles or hairy wolf-spiders writ extremely large- an image which had by no means been contradicted by the realisation that the helmets and breastplates which the mound-women wore were probably parts of drago mite exoskeletons. She saw now, though, that the difference between drago mites and the insects she knew was no mere matter of magnification. As the mound-women and the drago mites came closer together she was able to study the unearthly creatures in all their horrific detail.
She saw that the decorations of the warrior women's helmets were impressionistic imitations of structures which the drago mites bore on their own heads: the huge antennae mounted on top of each glossy and dark-hued skull, and the serrated jaws and manipulative pal ps which were arrayed about each wide mouth. The drago mites eyes were not, however, the compound eyes typical of insects. They were forward-mounted, with great vertical lids which closed like curtains upon huge jet-black orbs. Their necks were thick, more like a bull's than an ant's, armoured by a series of overlapping plates.
The last and broadest of these neck
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plates extended into an ornate frill
as it curved over each creature's shoulders.
Each drago mite had six legs, mounted and jointed like an insect's, extending horizontally from the body to the first and biggest joint and then descending vertically to complex and very hairy feet. These legs seemed to Lucrezia to be very slender considering the bulk of a drago mite even the smallest must have weighed at least three times as much as a man but they were versatile.
After a few minutes' observation she understood that the feet could be clenched into supportive pads or 'opened' into complex webs of finger-like pal ps she saw drago mites which had paused
at the thickets surrounding the tree-trunks, supporting themselves on four legs while the two front legs became 'arms' and 'feet' unfolded into 'hands'. The movement of the creatures was fundamentally in sectile in that they tended to keep three
'feet' on the ground in tripod formation, but she observed that they could change gait relatively easily, to walk on their four hind legs much like any earthly quadruped.
The drago mites bodies were lean, slightly flattened in the vertical dimension. Each one had a dorsal ridge of backward- slanting spines and a smoother ventral shelf, rather like a keel. Their scaly sides were decorated with elaborate patterns and each one had a second set of hairy pal ps at the hind end.
It might be possible, Lucrezia judged, for a woman to ride such a beast, provided that she were thin enough to slot herself in between the two largest spines but the warrior women made no move to mount their companions, or to use them as beasts of burden. The drago mites for their part, showed no conspicuous interest in the horses and donkeys which the women had in train.
It was not long before Lucrezia glimpsed drago mites of a second type, with much larger heads and more fearsome jaws, stouter in the legs and more compact in the body. These, she knew, must be warriors, ranged on either side of the column of workers with whom the company of human warriors had merged.
The stab of alarm which Lucrezia had felt when she first caught sight of the drago mites was slow to fade away, even though she had every reason to believe that they shared a common purpose with her captors.
When they looked in her direction with their huge eyes, though, they displayed no evident interest at all, and it 34i file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (345 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:22 AM]
was easy enough^ think that
the disinterested attitude of the warrior women was a simple reflection of the calm impassivity of their unearthly allies.
As the combined force walked on through the forest, hour after hour, Lucrezia became more used to the proximity of the monsters. The horses- including the one she rode- became quieter, accepting the nearness of the drago mites She continued to study the creatures, eager to find evidence of their authority over the mound-women and perhaps to identify the true leader of the combined force, but there was no sign of any tyranny of the un human or of any commands being communicated between species. She began to wonder whether the awe and fear with which people habitually spoke of drago mites might simply be an unthinking response to their ugliness and their un earthliness exaggerated by the effect of unfamiliarity. Perhaps, she thought, they were as meek and mild as sheep. Perhaps it was the humans who were masters here after all, the drago mites serving as their hunting dogs.
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