by Lee Duigon
“Who would have thought it?” said Chagadai. “We very badly misjudged you, friend! We thought you’d come to help the Zamzu have us for their dinner.”
“The Zamzu thought so, too!” Jiharr said, grinning. “But all the people who are left in Zeph-land have had enough of the Thunder King. His hand brought us only poverty and terror, and never-ending war from which we had no profit; but your hand brought healing, when I should have died.”
“Not my hand,” said Gurun, “but God’s.”
“I know! I understand. You told me so, and I believe you.” Jiharr placed his hand on his heart and bowed his head—a Zephite act of homage. “When the Thunder King came, he took away our gods. They couldn’t do anything to save us. Better for us now to follow Obann’s God and fight for Him. He will take away the Thunder King! He will heal the nations.
“But where is your great warrior who gave me my deathblow when we fought? Does he still live? I haven’t seen him.”
Ryons’ heart went cold. Uduqu! When he was still a slave, assigned to watch over Obst when Obst was a prisoner among the Heathen, and this army still belonged to the Thunder King, Uduqu had taken Ryons into his wigwam and laughed at the boy’s sassy remarks: treating him not as a slave, but as a child to be jollied and protected by the men. Uduqu had always protected him.
“We’d better find him,” Ryons said. He couldn’t bear the loss of that old man. “But you’re the king now,” Uduqu would have said, “and so you ought to act like one.” So Ryons didn’t cry, although he wanted to.
They found Uduqu in the middle of the battlefield, lying on his back between the bodies of two huge Zamzu dead of terrible wounds from the sword of Shogg. Uduqu’s hand still gripped the weapon.
“This is a great loss!” Gurun cried.
“They paid a high price for him,” said Jiharr.
But Obst, who, like Ryons, had been protected by Uduqu and traveled far with him, couldn’t keep his composure.
“Shaffur is right—we ask too much of God!” he said. “And maybe God asks too much of us!” Tears flowed down his cheeks. “It’s too much! It goes too far! Lord, will you leave no man alive out of all your people?”
Uduqu’s eyes slid open.
“Can’t a man get a little sleep?” he said.
Ryons almost leaped onto his chest. “Uduqu! Are you hurt?”
With a yawn and a groan, the Abnak sat up and rubbed his eyes. “No, I’m not hurt—just so cuss’t tired, I couldn’t stay awake another minute. Had to lie down. The fight was over, and we won, and I thought my two arms were going to fall off—”
He had to pause because Gurun started laughing: laughed until she couldn’t see through the tears, laughed until her belly hurt and she doubled over. Ryons had never seen her so, and it made him laugh, too. It made his head spin, and he had to sit down and laugh some more.
CHAPTER 41
Homeward Bound
Roshay Bault lost no time getting down the mountain. The townsmen he ordered to double up with riders on the strongest horses. It was an ordeal for most of them.
“Do you want to slow down and wait for the Wallekki?” he said. “They might change their minds about having let us go.”
He would have liked to march right through the night, but he saw that too many of the men were too tired for it. The captains agreed that the road wasn’t wide enough to allow any kind of attack but a direct assault upon a narrow front. With the last of their strength, the Ninneburky men cut down saplings and dragged and piled them into a tangled barrier across the road. It wouldn’t stop such a mass of horsemen as Chutt had, but it would slow a charge. “Nothing much more we can do,” said Kadmel. “But maybe they won’t be coming after us.”
“Chutt has nothing to gain by shedding Obannese blood,” Roshay said.
Early in the morning they set out again, leaving the barrier in place. By riding all day without a halt, they were in the foothills by late afternoon, and tomorrow would see them on the plain, homeward bound.
It troubled the baron that he was making so much better time than Martis and the children could make on foot through the thick of the forest. He trusted Martis, with Wytt and the Abnak, to find the safest path. But how safe could it be and how long would it take them to come down? If he were alone, he would turn back and look for them—“and probably get myself lost in the woods like a cuss’t fool,” he thought. No, that die was cast; there was nothing he could do except to pray the children came home safe and sound. In any event, he consoled himself, sending them off with Trout and Martis had to be better than it would’ve been to have let Chutt see them.
They camped another night, set out again at dawn, and when at last they came out onto the plain, they found an army waiting for them.
It was King Ryons’ army, the half of it he’d left in Lintum Forest, who had come all the way from there to rescue the men at the Golden Pass. They’d been delayed because they’d captured Chutt’s host of wagons and the men who drove them.
The chiefs were more surprised to see the baron than he was to see them.
“We didn’t expect to find you still alive,” said Buzzard, the Abnak chief. “Your lady sent us up to save you, but we only expected to avenge you. How did you escape?”
“They let us go in return for the gold,” said Roshay.
“Wulloo! You let them take it?”
“We had to—it was our only chance. Besides, it’s all blood money. It won’t do them any good in the end.”
“We can go up and take it back,” Tughrul Lomak said. “And now we have all these carts to fetch it down.”
Roshay shook his head. “We have a truce,” he said, “and the enemy has honored it. We must not be the ones to break it. By my advice, we ought to release these carts and let them go on up.”
The Fazzan chieftain laughed. “Now there’s pure foolishness, if ever I heard it! But it’s just what our teacher would tell us to do, if he were here. I’m all for it.”
“And then what?” said the Dahai chief. “March back to Lintum Forest without a battle?”
“I think that would be best,” Roshay said. “Lord Chutt, who commands the Wallekki up there, is a traitor to Obann. The Thunder King’s gold will be his undoing. Let him swallow it, I say. It’s poison.”
“Well, Baron,” Buzzard said, “we came all this way to bring you back to Ninneburky, and that’s what we’ll do. Chief Zekelesh is right—this is what Obst would have us do. And I think we’ll have a battle soon enough, after those people come back down the mountain.”
Chutt’s men with the carts were amazed when the chiefs released them. But the Obannese militiamen, who’d rounded up carts for the baron, would not be going with them.
“We’ll return these carts to their rightful owners later, after we get home,” Roshay said. “I’m relieved to see you all again. Chutt wasn’t lying when he swore he hadn’t harmed you.”
Kerdig, the captain who’d sent the trooper back up the mountain to warn the baron, grinned. “Not half as relieved as we are to see you again, sir!” he said. “But is it true that this high councilor has the law on his side? Is that why you let him have the gold?”
“His law is a dead law, Captain,” Roshay said. “There is no more High Council of Obann. There’s only King Ryons, and we are his men. But you acted prudently, and I commend you for it.
“Now let’s go home.”
They were too far from the road to see or hear Roshay and his men pass down the mountain. Ellayne would not have believed her father had surrendered the gold. She and her companions plodded through the woods, always downhill, with Wytt going on ahead to find the best paths and sniff out trouble.
They’d had to stop once, for half a day, because there was a big animal in their way devouring a berry patch, and Wytt said they ought to keep their distance. He didn’t know what kind of animal it was: a big, hairy beast with a horn on its head and a short temper was how Wytt described it. Something told him great caution was required.
&
nbsp; “I’ve never heard of any animal like that,” Trout said. But when the wind shifted, he caught a little scent of it and made a face. “It has a nasty smell,” he said. “I didn’t know there was any creature like it in these woods.” Whatever it was, when it finally left, it made a racket in the underbrush. They waited until Wytt said it was safe to go on, and they found the whole berry patch pressed flat.
“I wish we could have seen it,” Fnaa said.
“Your mother will have my scalp if I don’t get you home in one piece,” Trout said. “That means no adventures with funny animals.”
“They’re not all dangerous,” Jack said—remembering the first time he and Ellayne saw the great knuckle-bears at dawn, shambling back to the fringe of Lintum Forest after a night of grazing on the plain. It was not a sight he would easily forget. Obst said they, and all the other strange beasts that people were seeing nowadays, were a sign that God had changed the world.
“It’s still best to keep out of their way,” said Martis. “Come on—we have a long way to go.”
Ysbott’s two followers thought their plan was simply to wait until all those Wallekki departed, and then find some way to retrieve their own cache of seven sheets of gold and enjoy fabulous wealth for the rest of their lives. Hrapp and Gwawl weren’t much for enduring hardships, but they’d endure more for the sake of the gold. “I’ll move to the big city and buy a fine house there. No more cobbling for me!” Hrapp said. “I’ll get me a beautiful young wife,” said Gwawl, “and deck her out in jewels.”
“You already have a wife,” Hrapp pointed out.
“Well, I want a better one!”
Ysbott found it hard to bear, listening to their prattle, but they were well out of earshot of the camp and he let them go on as they pleased, knowing it was the only way they had to keep up their spirits.
His own plans seemed to be dissolving into a mist. Seven sheets of gold now seemed to him a paltry thing, when there was a hundred times as much, and maybe more, in the possession of the barbarous Wallekki. What a cringing cur Roshay Bault turned out to be, to give it up without a fight!
All Ysbott knew for sure was that he himself would never leave this gold, not if he had to stay up here all year. He would never lose sight of it. If the Wallekki removed it, he would follow them to the ends of the earth. They had no right to it! What he could possibly do to get it all for himself, he couldn’t imagine. His mind was stopped, like a traveler confronted by a towering sheer cliff he couldn’t climb. But he would not turn back. He would not give up. He felt now that it was his gold and that the Wallekki had robbed him. He swore not to let them keep it.
He still had the deadly mushrooms in his bag, which he would feed to Hrapp and Gwawl when he deemed the time was right. That time had not yet come.
That first night in camp, Lord Chutt slept beside a stack of gold in a plain canvas tent he’d brought from Market City. Someday he would sleep again in a soft bed with silken sheets in a marble palace. Tomorrow he would put the men to work digging out the rest of the gold from the heap. Soon the carts would arrive, and they could start loading the gold.
And after that? What if there was a hostile army waiting for him at the bottom of the mountain?
“I’ll have to send messengers to some of the great men, enlisting their support,” he thought. Obann was full of oligarchs and rich men and military men, and quite a few of the presters, too, who would welcome a restoration of the old order. Chutt knew most of them by name. They would support him if he had the gold. They would interfere with any efforts to take it from him—always provided that he acted within the boundaries of the law. He must be able to justify anything he did.
Outside Chutt’s tent, Chief Ilfil and Captain Born posted guards. Neither of them wished to see the leader assassinated, and neither of them quite trusted the other.
“Your men shall watch mine, and mine shall watch yours,” Ilfil said to Born.
“And you and I shall watch either other,” Born thought, but didn’t say.
Outside the camp, Helki slept in a nest made of piled leaves, under the shelter of an old uprooted tree. During the afternoon a few of the Wallekki, carrying dead bodies out of the camp, passed within arm’s length of him. He let them pass unharmed, and they never suspected he was there.
Helki’s ears and nostrils slept but lightly. If a predator approached, or anything else out of the ordinary, he would wake instantly, with his rod in his hand. Those who lived alone in the forest without this gift of instant wakefulness didn’t live for long.
At any time he pleased, he could steal into the camp, strike a blow, and vanish back into the forest before the Wallekki knew he’d been among them. He hadn’t yet decided to do that, nor had he ruled it out. It might be, he thought, a way to get them fighting among themselves again.
CHAPTER 42
The Boats
The night following the battle—the Battle of Looth’s Hill, they called it, much to the delight of the Attakotts—Ryons and most of his army slept inside the walls of the fort beside the lake. They slept soundly, lulled by the soft splash of wavelets on the sand and the calls of birds that hunted fish by night. Jiharr and his people, with some of Shaffur’s riders, stood guard over five hundred Dahai prisoners outside the fort. The surviving chiefs of the Dahai said they wished to become Ryons’ men and follow him from now on. “No one ever dreamed the king of Obann would come here,” said their spokesman. “Until today, no one ever saw the Zamzu defeated in a battle.”
“We defeated them before,” said Hawk, “when they invaded Lintum Forest.”
The chieftains would decide tomorrow whether the Dahai could be trusted and taken into service. Meanwhile, Jiharr promised to follow Ryons all the way to Kara Karram beyond the lakes, with as many of the Zeph as would go willingly. “But I think they all will,” he added. “The time has come to make an end of the Thunder King.”
When the next day dawned, most of Ryons’ men lined up on the shore and stared out over the lake, the Door of the Sun. A body of water whose farther shore could not be seen—to many of them, that was something new in their lives.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t bring a lot of Obannese men with us,” Obst said. “To them, this great lake would be like the sea. They’d be afraid of it.”
“It’s not so bad,” said Chagadai. “A few of us Ghols crossed the lakes on ships when King Thunder sent us west, back when we had Szugetai to lead us. They were big ships, big enough to carry many men and horses. We could cross a big lake in a single day, when it would have taken many days to ride around it. But I see no great ships for us here—just these boats. I don’t know what good they’ll be.”
The boats lay overturned along the shore, more of them than anyone cared to count. Gurun went down with her Blays and turned a boat right-side up. It took her and half a dozen of her men to do it, because the boat was heavy. She climbed into it, bending over to study its planks, measuring it. After a few moments, she stood up and turned to beam at the chieftains.
“Why, these are very good boats!” she cried. “Look—this one comes equipped with a mast and a sail. And it’s very solidly built! Bring me some of those Dahai prisoners, and they can tell us how long it takes to cross the lake.”
This was of great interest to the chiefs. They gathered around to examine the boat.
“It looks dangerous,” said Shaffur.
“Indeed not!” Gurun said. “On Fogo Island where I was born, we practically live on boats such as these all summer long, catching enough fish to feed us all through the winter. We catch whales in our boats, too. And that is on the sea itself, not a little lake like this.
“I can hardly wait to be out on the water! There is nothing to fear: a man will fall off a horse before he falls out of a boat. Or would you rather toil all around the lake shore and be months doing it?”
The Dahai came, half a dozen of their chiefs, under guard.
“My people built these boats,” said their spokesman. “This lake
we cross in half a day. It’s much longer than it is wide. The Zamzu don’t like the water, and quite a few of them were sick with fear. We enjoyed seeing that! The opposite shore of this lake is Dahai land. It would be no hard feat for us to ferry this whole host across the lake aboard these boats.”
“What about our horses?” Shaffur demanded.
“Horses, too,” said the Dahai, “as long as they don’t make a fuss. But I think we will have to make two trips to bring all the horses.”
“Your sails aren’t quite as big and heavy as the ones we use in my country,” Gurun said.
“We make them as our fathers taught us.”
Gurun turned to the chiefs. “Well, then!” she said. “We have the boats we need to get across the lake, and men who know how to sail them. As for me, it will give me pleasure to sail and steer a boat again. I won’t need anyone to show me how.”