The Shasht War
Page 27
A cart pulled by a pair of donkeys rumbled by while two sleepy voices continued to argue about whether there'd be snow for the festival or not. Thru heard a reference to the Old Style Almanac, which predicted little snow for the coming winter. The crop of mulberries had failed, which meant no snowfall until well past the beginning of the month of Ribrack.
Thru took a breath and then crawled farther into the trees. Every moment he expected the shout from behind him, but it never came, and after a few seconds he was hidden in the pines. He halted, barely daring to breathe. Peering back through the branches, he watched the wagons roll along. No one had called an alarm.
Now he turned and ran, moving as quickly as he dared through the little forest of pines and birch. The trees thickened after a while and progress slowed. He searched for a game trail, but the ones he found ran parallel to the road and he wanted to climb the ridge. The going became difficult, pushing through tangles of branches and dead trees.
Then he came upon a place where bare rock rose in a staggered cliff, much collapsed with piles of huge boulders resting on one another like a child's discarded blocks.
Thru hid himself in the recesses, and listened for any sound of pursuit. Reassured after a full minute, he began his climb.
After an hour he reached a ledge, and dawn broke, offering him a view of the valley below. He could see the wagon train quite clearly, a line of brown and white, some miles to the north.
He sat on the ledge and ate some of the bread and cheese, plus a dried apple. He climbed farther, reached the top of the ridge, and examined the world below once more.
He was free. He sucked in a breath of clean air. He had taken another step toward the uncertain future. He resolved to die rather than allow himself to be taken captive again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
A week of living in the wintry hills had brought Thru to a fine understanding of hunger and cold. It was reminiscent of his days at Highnoth, only colder. But he had employed all the woodcraft he'd ever learned from his father, and with the stolen knife and the twine he'd staved off starvation with a few lean rabbits taken in his snares.
In the interim he scavenged for acorns and chestnuts, and even tried chewing bark and twigs. The country was bare. For a while he wandered east as far as the hills that looked down upon a near circular lake. Houses and fields were visible around the water and along the river valley that ran off to the south. He went back to the west and roamed across another range of hills until he could see a reek of smoke ahead. He crossed a road to get closer. From the next ridge he saw a large village in the valley below. He retreated back into the deeper hills.
Fortunately, he'd found a tight little cave, in a stratum of grey rock beneath a hill with a curious sharp tip, like a hook. He lined the narrow space with brush and dry leaves and wove it into a nest in which his body heat kept him from freezing to death at night.
The land was bare, though. He wandered the hills in search of food, but animals were scarce. Only a distant pack of wolves to the north howled. Once he saw a deer and it bounded away the moment it caught his scent. Not that it mattered, he had no means of killing a deer, except through a snare. At home any mot with a bow could find meat for his family's table on any day, within an hour or two in the woods. Here, in bony, picked-over Shasht, there was nothing.
The lake in the east drew him back. In the evening he saw lights in the great houses. Those houses had to be the zobbi. Somewhere in these hills lay the zob of Simona's family.
Inevitably hunger drove him back to the southern edge of the wilderness, where he gazed longingly on the flocks of well-guarded sheep on the hillsides. Large dogs guarded these sheep, and the smoke of the shepherds' fires a little farther off assured him of a hot pursuit if he dared to take a lamb.
He moved on, working his way cautiously across the bare hills toward the settlements. Nothing but scrub pine and saplings grew here, and these only in isolated places. Every other tree had been harvested for firewood, long before.
At an outlying farm he noticed poultry pecking in the yard. The smell of roasting meat and bread came from the ramshackle farmhouse. He closed in as carefully as he dared. A dog slept on the back porch, but Thru was safely downwind of the dog. The cooking smells were maddening. He got as close as he dared, without being seen by either the chickens or anyone in the house. Now he waited, hidden behind an old broken cart, watching the chickens and the house.
After a while the door of the house opened and two men came out, picked up tools from a chest on the porch, and strode out of the yard and down the lane toward the fields. The dog merely rolled over and went back to sleep. A little later a woman wearing a heavy cloak of homespun came out and threw crumbs to the chickens, who descended on them with much clucking and flapping of wings.
Thru was struck by the parallel with giving out to the chooks in his home village. There was the same wild excitement in the birds.
The woman went back inside, and the dog, taking advantage of the opportunity, slipped in behind her, determined to scrounge some scraps.
By that point Thru would have been happy to eat the bones set aside for the dog, or even the crumbs the chickens were eating, but instead he went for a chicken, an older bird, a rooster, with his comb dulled by the years.
The chicken was so involved in the pecking of crumbs that he failed to notice Thru's swift, but silent rush across the yard. Then Thru caught the bird around the neck and swung it up in a smooth motion while turning and racing back for cover. The woman returned, scolding the dog as she came.
The old rooster flapped furiously, shedding a feather or two, but could not get a squawk past the hand that gripped its throat.
Behind the shed Thru killed the bird with a single stab from the kitchen knife. He listened carefully. The door banged again. He dared to sneak a peek backward. The dog was busy with a bone, the chickens continued to peck over the crumbs; only a single feather fluttering across the yard betrayed the disappearance of the old rooster.
Thru went back into the hills and ate the stringy old bird that night.
Every two or three days after that he made his way down into the settlements to steal food, a few handfuls of grain here, a chicken there. His depredations were noticed in time, and the farm folk became more watchful. The dogs were deliberately starved to sharpen their wits and children were driven out to scour the lanes in case a runaway slave was on the loose.
Thru noticed the new state of awareness when he came down for his sixth raid on the farms. He saw a pack of children searching the hedgerows and heard dogs barking back and forth between the farms.
He kept his distance from the farm buildings therefore and gave up any thoughts of taking another chicken. Instead he broke into a locked turnip shed set on a muddy lane far back from any farmhouse.
He took a few turnips, pushed them into his coat, and slipped out again, but was seen by a yellow dog as he climbed over the back fence. The dog began a frenzied yipping and howling that soon set other dogs barking.
Thru hastened up a lane between low-set stone walls. The village behind him had come to life. Men were hallooing to one another amid a general uproar from the dogs. All around him were open fields, filled with stubble and no cover except for the stone walls. Off to his right, after a mile the fields gave out on sandy soil, where a few pines and scrub birch struggled to make a living.
He ran along crouched down behind the stone wall and hoped he could remain unobserved.
At one point he had to pass quite close to a flock of goats, working over the stubble in the field. The goats sensed his passing and moved over to investigate. Their movements aroused interest in other eyes, and soon after he heard a fierce shout behind him and knew he'd been spotted.
Thru legged it for the sandy barrens ahead. The sound behind him rose up in volume, topped by a crescendo of barks and yips from the dogs of the village now in hot pursuit up the lane.
He had a good lead, perhaps half a mile, and that was just enough t
o allow him to reach the end of the lane, run up a rubble-strewn slope, and vanish into the bracken.
He ran on, not daring to waste a moment looking back. The trees grew widely spaced, the brush was broken up by many small trails. He ran at a steady lope now, his breath coming relatively easily. Thru was not the speediest of runners, but he had endurance.
The slope tended upward, and further off he saw a ridgeline and a mighty crag. The crag was familiar. He remembered that it stood near the road up from Shesh and was crowned by a grim tower. He kept on running hard, and the sound of the dogs behind him grew fainter. Now they searched for his scent in the trees, but being simple village dogs first they ran off one way, then another, while cursing men tried to organize them and get the dogs with the best noses on the track.
He climbed a bank of scree, then some sand dunes and broke out onto an upland meadow. Across this he ran at full tilt, his breathing now labored. The crag loomed above the meadow.
Far behind him he heard a new, chilling sound, the call of the man hounds. The slave takers had joined the hunt. The pursuit was coming on quickly. Looking back he could see small dots, hurrying onto the meadow.
He tore through trees and brush, heading downslope for a hundred feet until he emerged at the edge of a thirty-foot drop, falling precipitously to a mountain stream in a canyon. He ran along the edge, downstream, hoping to find a place he could get down the side and up the other, but nothing presented itself. Then he spotted a pine that had toppled and bridged the canyon. Quickly he walked out onto the pine.
A young tree when it toppled, it was no thicker than Thru's leg. It bent beneath his weight, and he wobbled for a moment in the middle. Thirty feet below the rocks and boulders of the canyon were waiting if he slipped. Another step, the whole tree sagged beneath him and he rushed his next, got a foot on the tree, and wobbled there for a long moment while he waved his arms around and somehow kept his balance.
His next step caught a broken stub of a branch and set him lurching, once, twice, and on the third the tree was gone, falling into the canyon and he was launched, but only weakly, toward the far side. He landed hard, with his chest and shoulders alone above the cliff top. It knocked the wind out of him and for a moment he started sliding backward. At the last moment his outflung arm caught a handhold, and he broke his descent. He hung there suspended for a few seconds with his legs milling in the air until his foot found a crack below and gave him something to lever up from.
Now he pressed his free hand down, heaved himself up, and in a few moments rolled onto his back on top of the cliff.
Barely on his feet, he heard the hounds break free of the trees just across the canyon. They halted at the edge of the canyon and bayed in frustration.
He staggered on into the trees. The hounds bayed endlessly, but their barks faded as the distance grew.
He climbed upward along the spine of land between two stream gorges. The ground was increasingly rocky, and the tree cover had thinned out. By this point he was breathing hard and needed a rest. When he emerged onto a flat rock ledge with a good view of the ground behind and below, he paused to look back.
Beneath him lay a view all the way back to the villages. The scrub of sand barrens fell away to the brown fields of stubble and houses, wreathed in smoke. Farther away the land was hidden in a haze of smoke from other villages.
And then the hounds broke into view about a half mile behind, climbing up a switchback trail between clay-colored boulders. Even farther back he caught sight of men, in red hats carrying spears with bright banners.
He whirled and ran on up the narrow deer trail. After a hundred paces it turned back on itself as it wound up the steep slope. Dense brush covered the draws on either side, but Thru knew that the hounds would smell him if he hid there.
He kept on the trail, toiling back and forth as it mounted up the ridgeline through patches of rock and boulder, climbing steadily. At length he crested the ridge and ran on down the farther side.
But now he heard dogs below on his right. The pursuers had taken a shortcut and were much closer than he'd thought. He tried to redouble his speed, but he was too worn out, and could only maintain his steady pace. At least downhill it was less taxing than before.
He worked through an area of berry bushes, then passed through some dwarf pines clinging to bare rock. Here there was no grass, only patches of leprous-colored moss and lichen. Thru had no time to contemplate the strange beauty of the lichens as he scrambled along the rock ledges and down the gorse-lined draws.
And then there came a sudden scrabbling of paws behind him, and he turned to find three village dogs closing in. By chance they'd outrun the rest. They saw him, dropped down into the draw, and came for him.
Thru turned to fight, crouching, pulling out the kitchen knife in a smooth, fluid move.
The dogs rushed in. One tried to bite his ankle; he pivoted away and kicked it in the ribs as it passed.
The others dove in. He kicked a second, but felt the third rip into his right ankle. He shook it off, but the first dog was back and jumped at his crotch. He got his knee up and it bounced off, but the small yellow one had hold of his other ankle and he stumbled. At the same moment the biggest dog leaped at him. They collided heavily, and Thru landed atop the dog. He finished it with the knife in a moment.
The other two retreated, barking furiously. Thru ran. Both ankles were bruised and bleeding. Shortly, more dogs followed, and now he could hear the hounds getting closer. Once the hounds caught up he'd be done for, because they'd hold him until the men came.
He turned and ran on. They followed.
Up the steepest slope he went, and the dogs closed in again and charged him in a tiny hollow where a pine tree had grown up with three separate trunks. Thru was below them, and thus they launched themselves straight at his throat and shoulders.
He caught the first with a fist, then the knife and whirled it away to bounce off the tree and fall under their feet.
The second tore the side of his neck and chewed on his shoulder before he hit it hard enough in the belly to loosen its grip. The third came straight on into his chest, and he fell backward, toppling as he went. His head struck the tree trunk and momentarily dazed him. The animal snaked its head toward his throat. He held a hand up, there was a burst of pain as the dog bit his hand, then shoved its snout under his arm, going for the throat again.
He struggled and clubbed it clumsily with the good hand. Again, it bit him but he hammered it so hard with his right hand that it went down and he stabbed it with the knife.
The remaining dog scrambled out of the hole behind the big pine tree, yowling. Thru got to his feet and drove himself up the little slope to get away. His hand hurt, but he could not stop. With only this single yellow village dog left, he had to push on.
Other dogs were calling, and getting much closer, but there was still just the one that was close. It called and followed him, but kept its distance.
Thru's only chance to evade the rest of the dogs closing in was to kill this one. He picked up a rock the size of a small white ball and slowed his step, luring the dog closer. It was incautious and kept coming, only turning away when it was just out of reach. He threw the rock with all his might and was rewarded with a strike that clipped the dog on the side of its head and flung it headlong.
He continued to run, but it was getting hard to keep moving in his semi-starved condition.
The dogs behind had found the bodies around the pine tree. Their calls took on a slightly different tone for a moment. But they didn't linger for long.
Then he saw salvation. Ahead lay a sharply defined spur of rock with a vertical cliff face about twelve feet high. Beyond the spur lay an area elevated above similar cliffs, and beyond that the upper part of the crag loomed.
He reached the bottom of the cliff, cut from resistant limestone. Lots of chinks made good handholds. But his hand hurt badly, and he had to grit his teeth and bite his tongue not to cry out as he climbed the cliff.
The hounds were coming, and with them would be men. He rolled over, got to his feet, and lurched on through scrub and dwarf pines growing from the rocky surface.
Suddenly he came upon a low stone wall that cut across the surface. A wooden gate lay to one side.
Thru paused for a moment to take in his surroundings. Beyond the gate the track he'd been following joined a road. The road curved around the top of the crag out of sight.
He approached the gate with caution. The wall was well made, squared and mortared. The arch of the gate bore an inscription in Shasht characters that he could not read. Beyond lay the road, laid in brick and well maintained.
The gate was locked, but he climbed over and passed inside. Trees lined the road. He even saw squirrels. The road made progress a little easier, and he climbed around the crag once more and then came out onto a paved space beneath the massive stump of the tower.
The great door of the tower suddenly swung open. Thru halted in his tracks. A man emerged. He was a tall man, thin, gaunt-faced, wearing a wide-brimmed white hat. He carried a cudgel in one hand, and Thru made ready to defend himself...
But the man only smiled at him and indicated the open door.
"Go on in, friend. I can see you are a victim of persecution, as I am myself. You are welcome at the Tower of Quarantine."
Then the man trotted away. "I have to be sure the gate is locked. There are dogs out in the forest. I won't have them coming in here."
Thru spent a few moments staring after the fellow, digesting these extraordinary words. The man had been friendly. He spoke accent-free Shasht, and he had gone down to the gate to keep the hounds out.
Thru knew he had little choice except to trust the man. He went up the steps and into the tower.
Inside, in the dim light he found a series of doors and rooms, and at one end the stone steps that rose to the second floor. He climbed. The second floor was considerably more refined, with painted walls and rugs on every floor. A fire burned in the grate in one room, and Thru was drawn to the warmth it gave off. He had been cold for many days.