They readied themselves and then moved out onto the road, first along the side, moving from cover to cover as long as possible.
Soon enough the ground opened out into the bog. The alders rose in a thick mass, but the road ran virtually straight across, and Thru could see clearly right across to the far side of the swamp.
Thru studied the woods there, but saw nothing to give him further pause.
"Come on!" he cried and led them out onto the road.
As they ran, the chooks surprised him again by the determined pace that they maintained, their heads down, lunging forward on long strides of their legs. Iallia was the one struggling to keep up. Thru stayed with her, encouraging her to keep up a steady jog. It seemed to take an eternity crossing that open space. But at last they edged up a slight slope out of the bog and back under the trees. The road curved down to find the northern bank of the river, with which it kept company through the valley to the next village, some miles farther downstream.
Thru felt a surge of elation. They'd made it across the bog. Now they could make reasonable time under the cover of the trees. He decided to trust to their luck, and so they stayed on the road.
It was nearly their undoing. The attack came as a surprise despite all his care. An arrow whipped past his face, and he felt the wind of its passage. Another arrow sank into Pikka's chest, and she fell down with a squawk of agony. Thru saw the two riders suddenly urge their mounts out from between the trees nearby. The men had swords in hand. With whoops they came cantering down the short slope to the road.
The chooks fled in panic. Iallia tripped over her own feet and fell. Thru advanced to meet them alone.
As they came on, he held position between them. Then, at the last moment, he sprang to his right, putting himself on the far side of the horse from that rider's sword arm. That also drew their attention away from Iallia, who was just getting back to her feet.
The man swung his sword over in a practiced move, however, and should have cut Thru's neck to the bone except that Thru did not stay still to be cut. He swung aside, dodging the slashing steel, then took Iallia under the arm and shoved her toward the trees.
The riders had halted in a cloud of dust. Then they turned their mounts and came back, whooping some more.
Hidden from their view, Thru took his bow from around his neck and fumbled an arrow to the string. The riders came confidently up the slope, swords twirling in their hands.
Thru's arrow sliced out of the shadow and sank into the leather breastplate of the leading rider. Alas, the stone point did not penetrate all the way, and the rider received a shock but no more. He kept coming.
Thru was forced to dive for safety under a bush. The horse went by. The sword sliced through the bush but missed Thru by a hair's breadth.
He rolled out from under. The other rider had caught up with Chenk. The sword flashed high, but Thru was too busy dodging to follow what happened next. His ankle turned on a root, and he went down on one knee. The horse struck at him, and even as he dove to the side of the tree he felt a heavy blow on his right shoulder. He rolled, wincing from the pain.
The rider was trying to get the horse to trample him, and Thru did not have time to get back on his feet. Then Iallia came whirling in with a fallen branch in her hands. She thrust it up into the man's face. He gave a startled cry and toppled backward, falling from the saddle. Thru twisted aside from the horse's hooves, got to his feet, and hurled himself at the man.
Iallia swung her branch again, but it was semi-rotten and it snapped softly across the man's shoulders. He caught her a terrific blow to the belly with his fist and sprang to his feet, sword in hand. Iallia dropped like a rock, clutching her belly, unable to breathe.
Before he could finish her, though, Thru was there. They came face to face, chest to chest, grappling. The man snarled, spit, and snapped at him. The man was the bigger, stronger of the two. He tried to knee Thru in the crotch. Thru slipped the blow and sagged sideways, pulling the man slightly off balance. Then Thru's hip turned, getting under the man's thigh, and in a moment the man was down on his back.
Thru evaded a wild slash with the sword. The man rolled over, desperate to get back on his feet. Thru sprang on his back. His knife came round and sliced across the man's throat.
Thru had only started to regain his feet before he had to dodge wildly as the other rider arrived on the scene. Thru heard the man's sword take a chunk out of the wood just above his head. The horse was carried past by its momentum. Thru turned back, wrenched the dying man's sword from his hand and took his stance again.
The horseman turned, but he held his horse back. He hesitated, not liking this change in the odds. After a moment's thought he turned his mount and moved down to the road, where he spurred it to a gallop, back up the road, back to the mountains.
Thru turned his attention to the others. Iallia was back on her knees, recovering her breath and clutching her belly. Ten yards farther on though he found the chooks. Chenk had survived, and Dunni and Mukka, but poor Pikka was dead, and Dunni was inconsolable.
There wasn't time to bury Pikka properly. Instead, they consigned her body to the river and watched it float out of the shallows into the stream where it was picked up and carried away.
Then they went hurrying down the road.
Getting to the next village was everything now, so Thru cast caution to the winds and pushed his little party down the open road as fast as they could run.
The fact that the surviving rider had ridden back toward the mountains told Thru that the man expected to find the rest of the horsemen back there. In other words, something incredible had taken place in the mountains, since the army of pyluk had not killed and eaten the men. It also informed him that the riders had indeed been seeking them. The chook nest below the falls must have been discovered and their tracks followed eastward. Once that rider returned to the main party, the enemy would know that there were fugitives ahead and that they were taking news of what had happened in the mountains down to the coast.
Thru knew the pursuit would be relentless.
So they struggled on. Iallia was close to being spent. She was tottering, staggering, and Thru had to help her stay on her feet again and again.
Chenk and Dunni were also slower than before, and poor Dunni wept constantly for his dead Pikka. Only Mukka matched Thru in possessing her old energy. Every so often Thru allowed them to stop while he put his head down to the ground to listen. No hoofbeats were to be heard, yet. They crossed another section of alder swamp, after which the road curved gently to the south while the river Dristen settled out in a proper river again. They came around a last curve and there, a mile ahead, stood the village.
Thru gave a shout of triumph. "They have boats!"
He pushed them on, impatient to board one of those boats and head downstream. From this village on, there were no more rapids on the Dristen.
"Hurry."
He could see at least three small boats, the round-bellied kind of dinghy popular on the river. With a relatively shallow draft, these boats could work through swamps and shallows with ease. They usually had a pair of oars, and larger ones might hoist a sail.
The houses, a half dozen humble stone buildings with slate roofs, were empty. No one had ventured back since Thru had passed through days before.
A quarter mile from the village, Iallia stumbled and fell. She lay there like a dead thing.
"Come on, Iallia," said Thru. "We can't delay."
Iallia barely raised her head. Thru took her arm and hauled her to her feet.
"Come on," he said fiercely. He started dragging her down the road.
And then they all felt the rumble underfoot.
Horses!
"They're coming!" cried Chenk, bouncing up into the air in alarm.
"Run!" shrieked Mukka.
Somehow Iallia found new strength. They all did, in an exhausted, almost demented way, weaving along the road.
Well before they reached the village, though,
they heard a roar of triumph behind them. Thru looked back. A thick knot of dark shapes had come bounding around the bend.
Iallia gave a moan of terror. She would have crumpled to the ground again to await death, but Thru would not let go. The chooks gave sharp squawks of dismay.
"Run," croaked Thru.
Fortunately for the small band of fugitives, the horses had already covered many miles at a hard pace. They, too, were exhausted and had to be whipped on.
The village drew closer with agonizing slowness. Thru was half carrying Iallia, half pushing her along. Chenk even added some shoves from his blunt head.
And then, at last, they were among the houses. Thru looked back. The horsemen were still two hundred yards behind.
"To the boats!" he rasped.
At a simple wooden dock, the boats were tied up on the downstream side. Iallia virtually fell into the middle boat, which was the only one large enough to take them all. The chooks jumped in, too, and the boat began to drift away from the dock at once.
"Jump, Thru," urged Mukka.
But Thru instead jumped down into one of the other boats and threw its oars into the river. He climbed back onto the dock and did the same thing with the other boat. Then he cut both boats free and pushed them out from the dock.
The delay was nearly fatal. He heard Iallia scream a warning. When he turned around, one of the horsemen was galloping right out onto the dock with a long spear aimed for his heart. Thru had barely time enough to throw himself into the water as the man rode past.
He fell in between the boats and swam out to the far side. Before he surfaced, he saw another figure break the water in a cloud of bubbles.
The horseman was after him.
Thru was exhausted, but he was an excellent swimmer, like all the watermots of the Land. The cool water revived him, and he turned easily, swimming like a fish, and then floated between the boats as they drifted along, hidden from the man swimming toward them.
He heard the clatter of another horse on the dock and shouts from the village streets. "The boats!" he heard a voice scream in harsh Shashti. "Get the goddamned boats!"
Thru ducked below the surface and swam down. The man had stopped just on the other side of the two boats, treading water while he searched for Thru.
Knife clenched between his teeth, Thru dove under the boat.
The man didn't see him until it was too late. Thru was able to drive his knife home in the man's belly. Blood billowed in the water while Thru swam on, curving back toward the boats, which had continued to drift away from the dock. The boat with the chooks and Iallia aboard was leading the group by at least twenty paces.
The screams of the dying man alerted the rest to a danger in the water. But another man dove in anyway and began to swim with ungainly strokes toward the leading boat. The men on the dock called out warnings.
Thru took a deep breath and submerged. Under the surface he could clearly see the man's legs kicking clumsily in a cloud of bubbles.
More noise came from behind, and Thru glanced back. Additional men had jumped in. He had to finish this and get aboard the boat and row it down the river. The archers would be at work very soon, and the boat was still in range of the shore.
He came up beneath the nearest swimmer, but somehow the man was warned, some sixth sense perhaps, and he lashed out with a wild kick that spun Thru around in the water. The knife missed his belly by a fraction.
Thoroughly frightened and angry, the man drew his own knife and slashed at the water around him. Thru didn't have time to deal with him, so he surfaced and swam for the boat. An arrow sank into the water just ahead. He instantly submerged once more and swam below the surface.
More arrows fell around him, but he went deeper where they could not harm him. He surfaced for air and drew more shots, but they went wild. Then he came up near the boat, and with a few strong strokes he pulled himself to its side.
He had an arm up inside and was hauling himself out of the water when he was suddenly grappled from behind. A man had wrapped an arm around his waist. The man's knife was coming up. Thru flung himself backward, aimed a punch with his left hand, missed, and fell back into the water. The man's knife stroke went nowhere.
Thru tumbled through the water. Other swimmers were coming.
His own knife came out, and he pushed himself down five feet before curving back up right behind his attacker. He surfaced and buried his knife in the man's back. Then Thru was gone, leaving the man struggling while his blood stained the water. Thru swam for the boat. Again he got an arm over the side and heaved himself up. The archers were holding their fire because of the men who were close to the boat.
One man got an arm over the side and began to haul himself out of the water. Chenk slammed his beak down into the man's hand, producing a shriek of pain, and then he was gone, slipping behind them.
Thru set the oars in the oarlocks and dug in for a powerful stroke.
An arrow sank into the wood of the boat's side.
"Get down," he hissed to Chenk and the others, and they crouched as low as they could.
He dug in again and heaved the boat onward. The men in the water receded quickly as the boat picked up speed. But Thru knew they would capture the smaller boats and follow as soon as they fished the oars out of the water. He could not rest.
Suddenly Chenk and Dunni moved to stand in front of him.
"We can help!"
"I don't see how."
"Like this," said Chenk. The big birds crouched in front of Thru and on either side of him. As he brought the oars forward, they swayed back, and as he began to pull them toward himself, the chooks pressed forward, adding their strength to his own. The stroke grew deeper and faster.
As the boat shot ahead, Iallia sat up and took hold of the small tiller that helped to steer the craft. Now they were moving at a good pace and with some direction.
A final flight of arrows sank into the water around them, and then they were effectively beyond range from the dock.
While the archers remounted, Thru and the two rooster chooks drove the oars as hard as they could manage. The dinghy flew across the water, angling to the far side of the river where a channel ran down between small islets and the farther shore. There were rocks here and snagged trees, but the range for the archers would be close to their limit.
Meanwhile, the swimmers had captured the two smaller boats and found that their oars were gone. There was much shouting back and forth with the men ashore as they began a search for the oars.
Thus it was a race between the boat and the bowmen, and Thru and the chooks, aided by the current, were gaining slowly but steadily. They were aided by the fact that the river swung southward around a rock crag, while the road went inland two hundred yards before it passed through a natural break in the rock formation and went on to rejoin the river farther down.
Iallia gave a shriek and leaned hard on the tiller, and the boat barely dodged a boulder that rose in midstream before they shot back into the middle of the river. Beneath the crag were other rocks, and the current picked up as the river moved sharply downstream.
Thru knew that soon the river flowed into a lake. They would be safe from archers while they crossed it. They might even outdistance the horsemen, because the direct route across the lake to the point where the river began again was much shorter than the road.
The boat swung around the crag, and they curved back to the north. The bowmen were through the gap in the rocks now, but still too far for a shot.
"Come on!" cried Thru. "We can do it!"
The chooks responded magnificently. With each stroke of the oars, they pressed their breastbones to the oars just inside of Thru's hands. As he pulled they pushed, and the oars dug into the water hard and pressed them forward again. Iallia steered for the far side of the river once more to take them out of range.
A few minutes later, the river widened into the lake. They pushed on, heading across the broad expanse of water to the far side where the river wen
t on into the west.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The message had been sealed with that imperial A, and she had hesitated before replying, consumed with doubt. They had seen each other a few times since Aeswiren had brought his army to Dronned, but never in private.
All her time had been taken up by the task of setting up the hospital, organizing a staff of nurses, while at the same time attending the classes given by Filek Biswas, with Simona as translator, concerning medical science. At times Nuza had thought her brain would simply burst with all the knowledge she was trying to cram into it.
She had given little thought to the man she owed her life to, who was sitting outside the walls of Dronned in that camp with ten thousand armed men.
She was uncomfortable sometimes when she remembered the closeness that had existed between them. Had she let him come too close? Certainly, she had never told Thru all that had gone on between herself and the Emperor. But, then, what else should she have done, alone in that far-off land with no friends except one, and he the mightiest man in the entire country?
In the end she swallowed her doubts and made her way into the Shasht camp on the old battlefield. The warrant with the imperial seal was enough to get her past the guards, and her ability to speak Shashti took care of the one guard who was inclined to question it.
She found him waiting for her, barefoot on a lovely rug, a lush version of "Mots at Prayer" in the style of the great Misho.
"I have missed you," he said, typically blunt and to the point.
"And I you, Lord, Great King of Shasht."
But he knew she hadn't, not really, and he understood. He was man, she was mor, and they were of different kind under the sun.
"Now, don't lie to me. Remember, I know you well."
She recalled how penetrating those eyes of his could be. "No, Lord, I will not deceive you. I owe you too much for that."
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