If the woodcutter guide had returned alive, Pelekarr privately reasoned, rumor would already be racing up and down the land of their horrific defeat. But if not, if the man had met the fate he deserved for abandoning them somewhere in the forest, avoiding the towns would be prudent until the company could return with heads held high to demand their payment.
“All wounded will part from us here and seek healing in town. But the rest of us will venture back into the trees with lances ready. This time, we have an ally that will tip the scales in our favor.”
He motioned at Perian. “The White River girl knows the ways of the beasts we fought, knows the paths through the forest. We will not rest while our comrades lie unburied on the battlefield. We will earn our pay and restore our pride. And when next we greet our friends among the infantry, there will be admiration in their eyes!”
There were mutters among the men still, but these died away quickly. And Pelekarr saw nods of approval as well. He didn’t wait for dissenters to argue the point. Directing the sergeants to gather the wounded and assign a travel detail to go with them, he remained mounted to demonstrate his commitment to continue the journey at once.
The men tightened their saddles, traded weaponry with some of the wounded so that each man was again fully equipped, and turned their faces to the west again. They still had a score to settle.
Within a quarter of an hour the wounded were on the way back to town, and the main column was re-formed on the road. They passed the turn to Greenfield without slowing, hugging the forest’s border as they traveled south. Another hour on, and they reentered the trees at the same place they had two days previously.
Barely half of the current company was mounted, some of the horses having been sent east to carry the wounded back to Dura. The troopers on foot marched as swiftly as they could, unused to this much walking. The green gloom enveloped them, and this time they knew exactly what they were facing. But the sergeants kept the pace hot, and flankers trotted out on either side.
At least the trail was clear. The passage of two days had not obliterated the trail of a hundred horse, and Perian’s woodcraft was not needed yet. She trotted next to Pelekarr’s stirrup, at the head of the column, scanning the forest constantly. The woman was back in her element, and enjoyed superb physical condition—better than many of the troopers who followed. Though young and fit, they were accustomed to riding and had had a hard time of the last few days.
Keltos and Makos were two of the luckily mounted, inheritors of fallen comrades’ mounts, along with Arco and Somber. All the sergeants were mounted: cavalry officers suddenly in command of foot troops.
The forest again seemed to swallow them, draw them into its emerald heart and then hold them there as the tension slowly crawled up their spines. It was hard to focus on the task at hand with so many memories fresh in the mind. The sergeants saw that strict silence was maintained. Until their guide had a chance to sniff out the threats that lay ahead, the captain didn’t want anyone setting off another massacre with careless noise.
They reached and skirted the pond without seeing anything larger than a fan-tail bird. As the column approached the meadow where their battle had been fought the tension increased to an unbearable level. Men sweated in their bronze, eyes darting, blades and spears ready.
And onward, inward. For cavalrymen bred in the sunny plains and cypress groves of Kerath, this was a soft and lush hell. The green tunnel through which they stepped oppressed them, pushing too close. It was smothering and damp—but in its own, ancient way strangely inviting. It choked, it caressed, it seemed to pull them farther in, wrapping itself around their limbs and their minds. Keltos felt he was strangling. He inhaled the pungent sweetness of the rotting leaves, deep underfoot. His eyes seemed sharper, noticing the pale little mushrooms grew in the shade of mossy boulders and fallen logs. Patches of red lichens crusted tree bark in colored blotches that looked like splashes of blood.
Then, finally, they were there. Through the trees the clearing appeared, open grass for a hundred yards in the middle of the forest. Here and there the light gleamed on metal sunk in the ground—bronze armor and helmets, lance tips and cutting blades. As they approached, carrion birds rose heavy and flopping to wing awkwardly toward nearby branches. They croaked resentfully at those who had come to interrupt their days-old feast.
Despite the horror of the place, Perian apparently saw nothing to fear. She dropped from the captain’s horse and boldly strode into the open. The rest of the column followed, bunching behind the captain and his right-hand sergeant when they halted.
“Keep your men back,” the barbarian girl told the captain. “I don’t need the earth trampled anew, to confuse the trail.”
They watched as the young woman walked back and forth, bending low to scan the grass at various points. If she was shocked at the aftermath of battle, she didn’t show it. The stench in the field was enough to make some men gag, but the barbarian seemed to ignore it.
“You had ill luck here. The behemoths eat trees most of the year. It is only during the rut, a few weeks at a time, that they become eaters of flesh.
“They haven’t been back. Their tracks lead southwest. Fed for a while after you left the area, so there will be precious few of the apes for you to glean. I am sorry.”
The captain cocked an eyebrow at the strange suggestion. “Your sympathy is appreciated, Perian,” Pelekarr said. “But we are men of war, and know the risks.”
The girl looked curiously up at him. “Your people have another way now?”
Pelekarr regarded her blankly.
Perian laughed lightly, looking back and forth at Deltan and the captain. “How are you to collect your bounty? What proof will you show that you killed anything?”
The captain’s consternation was painfully obvious, both to Perian and to the men watching behind. Most weren’t close enough to hear, but Keltos and Makos could.
“Your barons pay for scalps, ears, hands. Not for tales and bold claims,” Perian explained, still grinning in surprise at the naiveté of the soldiers she was guiding. “At least, so it has always been in our dealings with the Ostorans, in days past. Do they not require the same of Kerathi soldiers?”
Pelekarr grimaced. “Such was never an issue for us before.”
Deltan scowled sidelong at the captain. “But we are no longer soldiers of the king. I fear that the baroness took us for fools, sir. No doubt she’ll refuse to pay up, without proof of death, and we’ll be out our pay for a week’s worth of hard fighting, not to mention the death of half our comrades.” He swore under his breath, something he would never normally dare to do in the captain’s presence.
Keltos understood the depth of his frustration. After the losses they had sustained, losing out on the pay meant another hard blow to the company’s morale. Maybe a killing blow this time.
Pelekarr sighed heavily. “Have the men collect what scalps they can from the fallen apes, sergeant. And check the trees. There may be some bodies the behemoths missed. Then we’ll do what we can to lay our fallen comrades to rest.”
Deltan turned angrily and gave curt orders.
“Captain Pelekarr, might I put in a word?” Makos spoke up. The captain turned to look at the horsemen waiting patiently at attention in a row behind them, and singled out the one who had spoken.
“Trooper Vipirion. Speak.”
“Captain, our guide said that the creatures are plant-eaters for most of the year. If their digestion is as slow as that of my family’s cattle herd, the apes’ bodies may yet be intact. Were we to cut the beasts open before the day is out…”
Pelekarr stared at the young trooper with a speculative look. Then he smiled. “We could yet take the scalps, messy as the job may be. You’re a thinker, young lancer.” He glanced at Perian. The barbarian girl shrugged, as if to say it was worth a shot.
Deltan spoke up with renewed optimism. “And since Trooper Vipirion, among all of us, has had the closest look at a behemoth’s belly, we
may well heed his words, Captain.”
Makos flushed as the men around him grinned, and Sergeant Bivar slapped him on the back. “Thank you, sir.”
Men fanned out slowly across the field, hacking off ape scalps and collecting equipment in small piles. The already distasteful task of handling the dead was made even more so as the rotting corpses set up a reek that made the horses snort and stamp their hooves in agitation. A team of horsemen dragged the bodies of the humans near the tree line and arranged them in rows facing eastward. A rotating team dug hasty graves into the soft loam and buried the fallen.
There was one companion Keltos couldn’t bury, though. His mare Hetta was in the belly of one of the behemoths. His face was set and pale as he scanned the field, and Makos kept a respectful silence. No infantryman would understand, but when a man trained, fought, and depended on an animal of such grace and beauty as the Kerathi mares they’d brought to Ostora, he developed a bond.
The two friends combed the trees on the western side of the meadow, looking for ape bodies. They found only one, in the lee of a massive log. It was a young male ape, face up, eyes already picked clean by carrion birds. The cause of death was an obvious saber-cut across his shoulder and back. It was a fearsome wound, and seemed a miracle that the creature had been able to drag itself this far toward the trees.
Keltos felt a mix of revulsion and something approaching pity, even as he pulled his bronze dagger and cut the scalp free. The ape was far from human, yet similar enough to suggest an eerie kinship. Keltos reminded himself that these creatures were responsible for the death of Hetta, but it made little difference. Even as he stared at the inhuman, monstrous face with its jutting yellowed teeth, receding forehead, and wide nostrils, again the surreal sense of brotherhood came to him, and he wondered what the dead ape’s thoughts had been in the moment of its death.
The pickings were slim. The few ape carcasses that had escaped the behemoths’ attention were half-devoured by scavengers, and the work was finished quickly. Within an hour, they were on the trail again.
A blind man could have followed the trail of broken tree trunks, shredded and trampled undergrowth, and great muddy tracks that made a veritable road through the forest. The going was easier for the entire column and Keltos pondered the irony of the hunted making an easy path for the hunters to use in their pursuit. The creatures of this land were beyond imagination. If he told those he’d left behind in Kerath of such things, they’d never believe it for a minute.
But there would be no chance to tell them of anything. He shook his head and glanced at the barbarian girl to put his mind on other things. She murmured low words to the captain as they rode, gesturing at the spoor along the way. Huge gouts of blood had dried upon the rocks, proof that Makos’ foolhardy charge had hurt the behemoth deeply.
Southwest, the terrain grew rockier and began to rise. Great outcroppings of speckled granite bulged and heaved from the ground on every hand. The trees turned to conifers, which drastically reduced visibility and forced the column to move slower. But the scent was a bracing one, and Keltos reveled in the dry, spicy scent of fallen needles.
Ahead, the sound of roaring water was heard, and at length the column broke from the trees to find themselves paralleling a sizeable river that ran north to south. No leisurely, meandering body of still water this. It was a cold torrent, rushing down a vast sheet of steep granite featuring several small cataracts. The river’s volume and velocity guaranteed that anything caught in its flow would be instantly sucked down and repeatedly smashed as the endless cascade slowly ate its way into the granite. In another ten thousand years this would be a vast waterfall. Now it was simply an impassable barrier.
Impassable even, it seemed, for the beasts they pursued. The trail seemed to indicate that the creatures were trying to find a suitable place to ford the foaming torrent, for their trail meandered exactly with the contours of the river.
“It’s the White,” Perian said when asked by the captain. “It parallels the Cadien to the sea, with the lands of the Silverpath on the north bank. Upstream is all wild country, wilder the further northwest you go. Source is in the Atacanthians, but my people have never traveled there.”
“Will there be a place to ford nearby?” said Pelekarr.
“For the behemoths. Upstream about a league it flattens out. Still moving fast, but not like this. They’ll have crossed there. For us, a little further. We’ll have to backtrack, pick up the trail.”
The men chafed at the delay, imagining the digestive juices of the behemoths dissolving all sign of the apes. All of that blood and sweat, for a bunch of ghost apes and ghost pay.
Their spirits rose the farther they marched along the riverbank, however. It was good to be out of the trees and in the open, hearing the roar of the water and breathing deep of the spray. The sun gleamed in golds and brilliant whites from the quivering cascade, where small birds chirped and darted. The wind stirred the conifers in a sighing roar, and clouds scudded across the blue vault of the sky.
Keltos wrinkled his nose. The wind carried a stench.
Perian had already noticed it. She said something to Pelekarr and he threw up a clenched fist. The column halted while the barbarian girl tested the air.
“Something dead,” she told the captain. “Judging by the amount of blood on the trail, your work may be half done. The soldier who stabbed this thing, he seems to have done a good job of it.”
And so it proved. Around the next bend, half-obscured by the trees, lay a behemoth, stone dead. Vultures and kites heaved off the massive carcass—a small mountain of rotting flesh—and winged heavily across the river. Men turned their heads, cursing; the merciless breeze brought every nuance of decay to their noses.
“Faugh,” Keltos muttered. “It will take a week to get the reek out of my nostrils.”
“My apologies,” Makos said with a smile. “Next time I’ll leave the creature alive to avoid offending your nose.” He trotted ahead to inspect his handiwork.
“Shameless braggart,” Keltos spat after him, but Makos didn’t hear.
Slowly the column approached behind the captain and their guide. Though the huge beast was obviously dead, the men were nevertheless wary, lances held ready for thrusting. But it was all unnecessary. From the rotting beast’s side still protruded an arm’s length of lance, smeared with crimson slime. The behemoth had scratched and bit at the wound, trying vainly to pluck the long thorn from its side.
Deltan whistled long and low. “Impressive.”
Makos was staring at the creature with a mixture of pride and revulsion. Keltos clapped him on the back, and Arco rode past and did the same. Every horse trooper was smiling broadly; the cavalry was vindicated. One of their own had taken the monster down with one lance. Even the gruffer sergeants were grinning in admiration.
Captain Pelekarr turned in his saddle. “Well done, Trooper Vipirion. That was an act of valor to make the gods themselves proud.” He grinned as wide as Keltos had ever seen him do. “This will show Damicos once and for all that we cavalrymen are superior in skill and feats of nobility. I cannot wait to see his face when he learns of it.”
“We must be wary,” Perian broke in. “Now the surviving beast is on its guard. It may even be lying in wait for us somewhere ahead.”
“Are they as intelligent as that?” the captain asked. “I had not thought them capable of such cunning.”
“Not cunning. Instinct. A mating pair, broken up like this… the survivor may linger in hopes of avenging its fallen partner.”
“Noted.” Pelekarr was again all business. “Sergeants Bivar and Deltan, see to it that the men maintain silence and vigilance. The other behemoth could be nearby.”
“Aye, sir.” The sergeants rode down the line, spreading the word. The column bristled with ready spears.
Pelekarr consulted with the barbarian woman and they agreed that she should scout up the trail on foot with a couple of dismounted lancers for protection, to get a vantage point o
n the river crossing. Makos was an obvious choice to be her bodyguard, as he had proven himself against their prey once already, and Keltos was ready as ever to go along.
The two lancers dismounted and stood next to the barbarian guide, looming large on either side and nearly dwarfing her with their armor and skyward-pointed lances. Their bronze cavalry sabers hung at their sides. The shorter weapons would be useless against a charging behemoth, but they looked good and might help if they came into contact with something smaller.
Pelekarr waved them forward, and the entire column watched as the two young troopers followed the flaxen-haired girl with the strange markings on her arms. They paralleled the river bank for a stone’s throw, then veered right into the trees so they could cut across to high ground that would overlook the stretch of river that lay beyond a couple of low hills nestled around the rushing water.
Perian moved like a cat, eyes seeing everything, choosing where she placed her feet. Her escorts tried to mimic her unsuccessfully, each acutely aware of every rustle and snapped twig. The pines were dense, and though they moved as quietly as they could, needled branches swished and slapped against them. Twigs hit their armor and snapped off, and leg-guards noisily scraped boulders and clanked on fallen logs. The guide shot them a warning glance, annoyance and pity mingled in her face, but there was little they could do.
Finally, clearing the pines, they found themselves only a short distance away from both river and promontory. The air was moist and cool and the roar of the rushing water throbbed in their ears. A wide granite shelf half-buried in the earth rose at their feet and continued westward to join the rocky promontory, its top covered with fallen pine needles of a dusty-orange color. On this carpet their feet were almost silent, and Keltos felt some measure of self-respect returning.
From the top of the outcropping they could see the river again, white patches of flowing water through the trees. The tall, old-growth timber blocked their view of the rest of the ground ahead, but they were close.
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