“Exploded by their own powder? Maybe they were Tassini, instead.” Yulen grinned.
It was the Captain’s turn to laugh, then he nodded. “A Tassini would defecate in his own yurt. But Tassini are also too stupid to operate cannons. This one’s simple-minded even for a Tassini.” He jerked Bassin’s head up by the hair, then let it flop back down against the duckbill’s flank.
Now I understood a little more. These big guys were part of a Clan, the Casuni. There were two other Clans, maybe more. Bassin, the feral loner, was from a Clan called Tassini. Tassini were primitive. The Marini Clan lived far from here, and were smart enough that they had artillery. My captors thought I was Marini. Flattering, I guess.
They rode in silence for a minute.
Yulen said to his Captain, “Do you suppose the Marini have started poaching Stones?”
“For the first time in three hundred years?” Captain Blackbeard snorted, glared down at me, and sighed. “I hope you’re no poacher. For your own sake. Casus roasts Stone poachers in their own armor.”
A distant bugle sounded.
Yulen, the Sergeant, drew a curved, hollowed tooth as big as a walrus tusk from his pack, and bugled back.
Blackbeard stood in his stirrups and shaded his eyes. “It’s Lieutenant Brendin’s Troop.”
I twisted to follow Blackbeard’s gaze. Far across the rolling prairie, another duckbill-and-rider gaggle strode like monstrous ostriches, trailing a dust plume. Above them a tiny shadow flitted, zigzagging like no bird, and my transponder detection circuit beeped in my earpiece. Jeeb.
I had tasked Jeeb to find Ord. Jeeb wasn’t some mutt who could be sidetracked if a rabbit crossed his path. Jeeb wouldn’t shadow a cavalry troop unless—
Captain Blackbeard said, “Looks like Brendin found poachers of his own.”
Sergeant Yulen nodded, as he visored a hand over his own eyes. “I count three bodies.”
My heart sank.
Twenty-Five
Ten minutes later, Blackbeard’s cavalry crossed paths with the distant group.
The other troop’s Lieutenant, if I was reading his fancier armor style right, rode forward, grinning. He led a second, riderless duckbill by its reins. Where a rider would have been, there clattered an empty jumble of roped- together Eternad armor segments. I saw my own helmet, two stars on its fascia. I counted segments that added up to two old crimson suits and one modern suit, with three-up-three down chevrons clearly visible on its fascia. And “Ord” stenciled on the breastplate.
I shook my head and closed my eyes.
Blackbeard said to the new Lieutenant, “Find any Stones on the Fisheaters?”
The new Lieutenant, whose beard was brown, shook his head. “None they confessed. They answered questions with nonsense, or silence.”
Blackbeard’s eyes narrowed. “No Stones at all?”
“We stripped their armor, and searched them lips-to-assholes. Their armor is of new design, by the way. Light as magic. If the Fisheaters have any on offer at The Fair, I’ll trade all three of these poachers for a set in my size.” The new Lieutenant shrugged. “But question them yourself, over the embers.”
Embers? I squirmed. But the Lieutenant had used the future tense. My heart pounded. Maybe . . .
Blackbeard shook his head. “No time. Already, we’re going to have to overwork the mounts. The men would set us on the embers if we make them late to The Fair.” He turned to Yulen, and pointed at me. “Sergeant, strip the armor off this one, too. Dump him and that addled Tassini back with the Lieutenant’s other Fisheaters. Just have one man guard all five. We’ll make better time.”
Five minutes later, I shivered in my uniform underlayer. Yulen left me my boots and gauntlets. Without them, my tied hands and feet would have been frostbitten in hours.
As I lay bound at his feet, Yulen watched Blackbeard and the Lieutenant’s troops trot in column toward the horizon. The troops’ mounts, spares, and pack animals added up to a hundred, so much tonnage that I felt the prairie shake beneath my shoulder blades.
Yulen reached into his saddlebag, and drew out a double handful of brown wafers. They resembled Bassin’s patties, but appeared to have been baked, and they actually smelled good. He knelt beside me, tucked them in my chest pockets, and patted the bulge with a great hand, on which remained two fingers. “For you and your friends. It’s four days’ ride to The Fair. Brendin will starve you, otherwise.”
As six-foot-five barbarians who roast enemies over embers go, Sergeant Yulen was a nice guy.
“Thanks, Sarge.” I bit my lip, because the words blurted out in my new-learned language, which called itself Casuni.
His eyebrows rose, then he smiled and nodded. “That’s more like it. I never met a Fisheater who wasn’t clever. And slippery.”
“You’re wrong. But you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Just thanks for the kindness.”
He loaded me and my armor onto his duckbill, then he led his mount toward the lone cavalryman the Lieutenant had left behind. Our new minder, draped in pistols and blades in the Casuni fashion, dismounted and hefted Bassin onto one duckbill among a remuda of five, all grazing head-down. On each of three duckbills squirmed one bound but obviously live Earthling in his quilted Eternad underlayer.
My heart leapt.
Yulen and the minder made the duckbills hunker low, and sat the other three captives upright in their saddles, bound hands grasping the saddles. Then Yulen hefted me so I rode upright, too, in the saddle on the vacant fifth duckbill.
Yulen said, “Kindness? I show Marini kindness when groundfruit is in season.”
“When’s that?”
He grinned. “Groundfruit is never in season.” He slapped my duckbill’s rump; it trotted, and he shook his head. “Fat prisoners just bring higher ransom. That’s all.”
“Crap, Sarge,” I said.
He grinned as our five-animal caravan bounced away.
Our new minder paid out twenty feet of rope between him and us five. Then he turned his back on us as we rode, ignored us, and focused on eating his lunch while in the saddle.
After a day’s backseat driving, I knew how to steer a duckbill, and to distinguish the girls from the boys. I kicked my mount’s flanks, and she trotted forward, alongside Ord, Howard, and Jude, who rode three abreast.
Jude said, “We thought you were dead!”
I smiled. “I thought you were dead.” I asked Ord, “What happened?”
“Same as you, Sir, I expect. We survived the crash, found one another, gathered up the gear and anything we thought might be useful. Then we got engulfed by an overwhelming, more mobile force. A firefight would have been pyrrhic.”
“Our gear?”
Ord nodded toward the main body we were chasing across the prairie. “The ’Bots shut down and folded. The cavalry loaded them and everything else up on pack animals. I gather from what I just heard that Jeeb taught you their language, Sir.”
I nodded. “He’ll sleep-teach you all tonight.”
“The language barrier didn’t keep them from asking questions.” Beneath one eye, Ord wore a mouse the size and color of a plum.
“Bad?”
Ord shrugged. “Enthusiastic. Rudimentary.”
Jude said, “Jason, these are dinosaurs!”
Howard said, “Parallel-evolved dinosaur analogs. They aren’t dinosaurs. They resemble them.”
I steadied myself with my tied hands against my saddle, and turned to Howard. “If they’re dinosaur analogs, there shouldn’t be people analogs here for sixty million years, true?”
As we rode, Jude, Ord, and I swung in our saddles like metronomes. Duckbills rode easy once you caught the rhythm. Howard pogo’d up and down in his saddle, wincing and poking his glasses back up on his nose every few strides. “T-true.”
“Then who are all these guys that tied us all up and gave Sergeant Ord the analog of a shiner?”
Howard shook his head. “I have a theory about that. But it’s a little odd. I need mor
e information.”
Ord nodded toward Bassin, who wide-eyed us as we spoke among ourselves in English. “Who’s this?”
“Bassin the Assassin. Harmless little guy. I thought he was a caveman. He’s a subsistence-level prospector, a cast-off from a Clan called the Tassini. These cavalry, the Casuni, don’t like Tassini.”
Ord asked, “Sir, you’ve been listening to the cavalry. What do they want with us?”
“They came to investigate the big bang when we crashed. They think we’re from another Clan they don’t like. ‘Marini.’ The Casuni cavalry call Marini ‘Fisheaters.’ The Marini are smarter than the Casuni. Everybody’s smarter than the Tassini.
“The Marini are smaller than the cavalrymen, and they look like us. The cavalry think we’re survivors of some Marini raiding party that snuck in here to poach valuables from their Clan. They assume the rest of our party got blown up when a powder wagon exploded. They’re taking us to some swap meet. To ransom us back to our fellow Fisheaters.”
Jude frowned. “What happens when the Fisheaters don’t want us?”
I shrugged. “These guys roast poachers alive.”
That night, Jeeb latched onto Ord, Jude, and Howard in turn and dumped each of them a language download. But they didn’t get to speak it much, because our minder was always struggling just to keep us in the main body’s dust cloud.
According to Jeeb’s mapping, during the four days after we Earthlings got back together, the Casuni cavalry traversed the interior prairie of Bren’s largest continent, from the Stone Hills to the navigable headwaters of the River Marin.
That was like traveling twelve hundred barren grassland miles east from the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi at St. Louis. Earth horse cavalry of the 1880s couldn’t have sustained a third of that speed. In fact, last-century Panzers couldn’t sustain that pace.
As we traveled, other Troops intersected our line, from north and south, with their own booty. The total column grew to four hundred in all, cavalry, spare mounts, and cargo duckbills.
We picked up information by eavesdropping as the column traveled. Prisoners like us were rare, especially since we were, obviously to them, Fisheaters. Mostly, the Casuni cavalry collected taxes in kind from Tassini prospectors all along the Stone Hills, then let the little guys go back to work. Poor Bassin became a cropper only because he was associated with us Fisheaters.
The new minder didn’t share Sergeant Yulen’s appreciation of the need for prisoner segregation. Once twilight, as we rode east, trailing the main body by two hundred yards, Jude said in English, “Jason, we should make a run for it.” He nodded at our minder, ahead. “The four of us can take this bozo.”
Howard said, “I don’t know. The other Clan may treat us better, Jason.”
Ord looked to me. “We’d have to retrieve our weapons and armor to sustain any escape, Sir. That would be difficult.”
I was pretty sure that the drafters of the U.S. military command structure hadn’t contemplated its application outside the Solar System, but everybody here seemed to think decisions were up to the ranking officer. Even though that was me.
I jerked my head back at Bassin. “Whatever we do, we don’t abandon my friend back there, if he wants to come.”
Ahead, the column halted, and so did we.
Commanders pointed off our left flank.
Five minutes later, three groups of five riders each separated from the column, and ran off at right angles to our line of march, until they disappeared into the darkness. Graceful in their saddles, they skimmed the prairie at an easy thirty miles per hour.
Jude breathed, “Cool!”
I walked my mare back to Bassin, who usually trailed us by twenty yards. He had been hearing snatches of our conversation for days, so it probably didn’t surprise him when I pointed at the outriders, then asked him in slowly pronounced Casuni, “Bassin. You know what these men do?”
He squinted ahead. The minder had his back to us, watching his comrades ride out.
Bassin answered in Casuni, “They’re flank-security outriders. Their armor and tack weigh 60 percent of a standard trooper’s, for better speed. Tonight, they’re thinning out predator packs. A column of five reinforced Troops like this one is as large as a migrating herd. The predators shadow large columns as they would herds, picking off stragglers.”
I sat back in my saddle and stared at Bassin like he’d grown horns while I watched. There was more to my prospector friend than he let on.
In the distance, yellow flashes bloomed.
The rattle of the shots echoed across the prairie a heartbeat later.
I stood in my stirrups, but in the darkness, I couldn’t see the fighting.
The cavalry pumped fists in the air, and roared like their team had won the World Bowl.
Our minder trotted back to us, jerked his head at me to get back to my place in line, and we moved out.
The outriders dragged back rib slabs so big that it was clear the predators would make short work of four Earthlings in long johns.
I said to Ord and the others, “As for escape, we’d never outrun Casuni regulars, much less the outriders. If we did get away, we don’t even know what the predators look like, much less how to fight them. None of us even knows where the waterholes are out here. We sit tight for now.”
Ord nodded.
Howard nodded, too. “I agree. What did Bassin have to say, back there?”
I cocked my head. “Not much we wouldn’t have guessed. But he said it the damnedest way.”
The rib slabs were enormous, and they got roasted and distributed later that night, but not to the five of us. We rationed the flatbread Sergeant Yulen had slipped me, and listened to our stomachs rumble.
The next morning, Bassin’s mount went lame, and he got separated from us.
For the rest of the ride, we escaped rain and snow. That meant we only got water because my duckbill had a nose for it, detoured frequently, and dug out subsurface springs and puddles with her blunt-clawed forelimbs. She had a hint of strawberry in her bristly mane, so I called her Rosy.
At sunrise on day five in the saddle, the main body halted, then fanned out in a line. Trailing as usual, we caught up at a walk.
The only sound and movement in the chill dawn was the ting of duckbill bridle hardware as the huge animals shook their heads, and their snorts of steaming breath. Riders and mounts stared at the scene before them.
The cavalry was drawn back a yard from the top edge of an escarpment that stretched north and south for miles, in the form of a ten-foot rock cliff. The escarpment divided the continent’s high prairie from its coastal plain. It also demarcated the obviously undefended border between the Plains Clans and the Fisheaters.
Below the short cliff, the land beyond sloped away into a shallow, green basin that stretched to the horizon. Through the basin’s center a broad river curved, silver in the sun. Forested arcs split meadows in the river flood plain, and sunlight glinted off flocks of something that wheeled above the water.
My jaw dropped, but not at the natural beauty of the Headwaters of the River Marin.
Strewn across the valley like spilled candy were round multicolored cone-topped tents. Hundreds were red, more indigo, many violet. Between the yurts and the river rose hundreds more tents, multi-peaked like sailing ships, striped in yellow or garnet, and hung at their centerpoles with pennants that twisted in the breeze like rainbow pythons. Beyond the peaked tents, on the river, two hundred wooden ships rocked at anchor under scimitar-shaped sails.
Beside me, Jude stared at the vast encampment and whistled. “Now that is what I call bump!”
Down the line, Yulen turned in his saddle and spoke to a cavalryman whose beard was barely more than blond fuzz, and whose armor was as elegant as Blackbeard’s. “First Great Fair, boy?”
The youngster nodded, then swallowed.
“Your father says you keep with me.” Yulen pointed below. “For one month each year, that’s the biggest city on
Bren down there. With more wickedness than all the janga dens of Marinus.”
I turned and stared at Jude, then stared back across the thousand miles of arid barrens we had just crossed, slashed by frigid winds, patrolled by man-eating monsters, ruled by dinosaur-riding cutthroats. But Yulen thought the pretty scene below held worse peril for a young man. My promise to Munchkin, to protect Jude, seemed more tenuous than ever.
Yulen said to his young student, “If you met a Fisheater yesterday, what would you have done?”
The boy patted one of his pistols, and grinned. “If you see a snake and a Marini, kill the snake last.”
Yulen wagged a finger. “But at the Fair, you nod, and raise an empty palm, and greet him, ‘Peace of the Fair to you.’ He’ll do the same.”
The boy frowned. “Tassini, too?”
Yulen clapped the boy’s shoulder, then smiled. “Don’t worry. If you see either of ’em after the Fair, you still shoot ’em.”
Blackbeard drew his sword, circled it above his head, and looked left and right at his troops. He grinned. “A Stone for any man who bathes in the Marin before me!”
Then he bellowed, spurred his pinto, and I watched four tons of dinosaur lurch forward and try to fly.
Twenty-Six
Blackbeard’s duckbill stallion hit the broken scree apron at the cliff base like a snowboarder off a stair rail, rolled on its rear haunch, and came up galloping downhill like there was free beer at the bottom.
Down the line came more bellows and whoops. Duckbills and riders Niagara’d over the escarpment. Our minder dropped our lead and spurred his mount over the edge.
The ground shook as three million pounds of dinosaurs stampeded.
Rosy raised her head, scenting the river—more water than she had drunk since spring. I tugged back her reins and looked north and south. “Easy. There’s got to be another way down this—”
Rosy launched herself into space.
“Crap.” I leaned forward and clutched the down on her neck like a life preserver.
Rosy feathered a three-point landing on hind claws and tail, then trotted downslope. Ord and Jude, pale but in their saddles, trailed us by ten yards.
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