The Wayward Knights

by Roland Green

  Knocking came. Fulvura opened the door to admit a tall human in blued mail, with plate covering the legs, arms, and head. Indeed, the helmet was so close-fitting that only the eyes were visible.

  But Sir Darin undid the helmet fastenings with quick twists of his powerful fingers. The "comrade" combed long brown hair with her fingers, and grinned at Sir Darin as if they were alone, not only in the cabin but aboard the ship.

  That smile told Zeskuk that he now faced Sir Darin's elven-blooded wife Rynthala. Her name was not unknown to Zeskuk, but he had never imagined that she would be so nearly of a height with her husband. He had encountered full-grown minotaurs of both sexes whom she could look in the eye.

  Then he caught a glimpse of the humans. Plainly this was as much of a surprise to them as it was to him. To all, that is, except Captain Torvik. The others were straining, and in some cases exhausting, their self-command, not to gape and stare.

  The minotaur chief decided to put his visitors out of their misery. "Sir Darin, Lady Rynthala," he said. "You are well suited for what you have come among us to do. I rejoice in your coming."

  Another knocking heralded the scribes with the copies of the agreement, in both Common and minotaur. All that was needed was filling in the names of the observers and signing—Zeskuk and Juiksum for the minotaurs, Sir Niebar, Gildas Aurhinius, and two merchants for the humans.

  It would not even be necessary, it seemed, to allow the observers time to pack their gear. Fulvura was already packed, and except for her weapons (two chests of them) always traveled light. As for Sir Darin and his lady, it seemed they had all they needed aboard the human vessel, carefully loaded by Rynthala in her guise of a "guardsman."

  Zeskuk endeavored to end the meeting as quickly as possible without giving the appearance of dismissing the humans. The cabin was growing stifling, his stomach was rumbling for more than biscuits smeared with meat paste and ale from a barrel scarcely cooled under the keel, and the humans were looking very much as if they had things they wanted to say to one another without minotaurs present.

  The minotaur chief did not dishonor himself or his guests. He waited until their ship had cast off before he put his head down on the cabin table and bellowed with laughter.

  Sir Pirvan stood on the afterdeck of Giggling Wench, staring into the dusk as the minotaur fleet receded. The breeze was up, and the sails were full and drawing. The oarsmen were, for the most part, lounging on deck. The steersman was below and, Pirvan hoped, out of hearing.

  Torvik hurried aft, as fast as he could without appearing undignified, Pirvan wanted to bark at him to hurry, but did not dare. He was angry enough that he had to look down at his feet to be sure his boots were not charring the deck planking.

  "You wished to speak to me, Sir Pirvan," Torvik said. It was not a question. Indeed, the young captain sounded quite unrepentant.

  Some of Pirvan's anger leeched away, Torvik sounded now remarkably like his father and mother, when they had chosen some course of action from which they would not turn aside, no matter what others thought or said. Blazing at Torvik would not only give mortal insult, but it would waste breath.

  "Did you know that Sir Darin was bringing Rynthala, disguised, aboard the ship?" Pirvan asked.

  "I suspected it," Torvik said. "But I could not be sure. Even had I been sure, would it not have been a matter to be judged among the knights? I could not withhold help to Sir Darin on such slight grounds. And are Solamnic Knights afraid of their wives?"

  Pirvan nearly saw red for a moment, as cowardice could not be a jesting matter under the Oath and the Measure. Then he realized that the Oath and the Measure held no sway here.

  "Yes," he said. "Or at least as much as any husband with wits in his head. You will discover that when you wed. I'm surprised that watching your mother has not already taught it to you."

  Torvik grinned. "I will take your warning to heart," he said.

  "Take another warning, too," Pirvan said, his smile fading. "Do not hold back knowledge we might need. I saw your face when Zeskuk spoke of the attention of the gods influencing the weather. I held my tongue, because your secrets may not be yours to reveal. But consider carefully the price others may pay if you are silent."

  "I have," Torvik said. "It is true. I learned things during my escape from the sea creature that are others' secrets. But I am not bound by oath to keep them. Only by honor and good sense. I can tell you, and Gildas Aurhinius. I can and will tell anyone, if there is danger to the sea otters from my silence."

  "You spoke freely enough about their driving off the monster, and your crew did the same," Pirvan suggested. "I think that most humans and even minotaurs would be fools to go flinging harpoons after hearing that."

  "Both races have their share of fools," Torvik reminded the knight. "Gratitude might not be enough to spare the shallows-dwellers."

  "The shallows-dwellers?" Pirvan said. "That, if I recall truly, is the old name for the Dimernesti."

  "Yes."

  Pirvan was tempted to ask for the rest here and now, but refrained. He suspected that he had already learned all he needed to know.

  He also suspected that it was not only honor and good sense binding Torvik's tongue. The young captain's face reminded him of his own, when he had realized that he was falling in love with Haimya and she with him, while she was still bound to another.

  Chapter 11

  Sirbones stared at the clouds piling up on the northwestern horizon. Their tops were still foamy white, but lower they were shot with gray, and toward the bases some of them had turned black.

  And was it just his imagination, or did he see flickers of lightning in the lower blackness? It would not be long before he could he sure, as the clouds seemed to have grown taller, closer, or both even in the little time since their appearance. Or was that, too, his imagination?

  Sirbones turned to his companion, an Istaran priest of Majere, and said, "Has anyone tested those clouds to see if this is some magical storm conjured up to blow on us?"

  The priest looked at Sirbones as he might have at a rip in a new robe. He was sweating, and his face was so round that Sirbones doubted that the other lived as simply as was expected of those who served Majere. "Why don't you do it yourself," the priest asked tersely, "if you've reason to fear?"

  Sirbones smiled. "Mishakal seldom gives her servants serious weather magic, or even magic-detection spells," he said. "Healing demands too much strength. Majere allows one to cultivate the mind more widely, or so I have heard."

  "Not widely enough to tell cloudbursts from chaos," the Istaran said. "At least not in this land. I've heard that it rains about every other day, except in the seasons when it rains every day. If you couldn't face that, why did you come?"

  Clearly the Istaran had no fear that the god to whom he was sworn would condemn him for insulting another cleric. When younger, Sirbones might have envied the other how that freed his tongue. Age, however, had given discretion to Sirbones's tongue as well as aches to his bones. He smiled again and said, "Well, as long as the rain does not wash anyone away, it matters little whence it comes. I am too old to plunge into torrents and snatch people from their jaws."

  The Istaran shrugged, uttered what was less than a word if more than a grunt, and walked away.

  Left alone, Sirbones had a moment to look forward, at the slope up which the humans would soon be advancing. Fifty paces in front of him stood the vanguard, two bands of well-armed men.

  The men on the left looked like a dozen brawlers abducted from the waterfront of Istar, but they had good swords and knives, sound helmets, and a double-bitted felling axe for every third man. Also, two of them had bows, and Sirbones doubted that he was the only man who wondered where they had come by those bows, if they knew how to use them, and where the arrows would go if they flew at all.

  A dozen men and women from Red Elf held the post of honor on the right, as they well deserved to. Torvik himself led them. Sirbones would have been happier if Torvik himself had re
mained aboard ship. The young captain had not wholly recovered from his ordeal. But Torvik was adamant, resisting not only Sirbones's persuasion but Tarothin's blandishments and the next thing to a direct order from Sir Pirvan.

  Oh, Sirbones thought. To be young enough to have that much strength to sacrifice in the name of honor! Two years' rest in his home temple had restored him as much as his years would allow. He feared that might not be enough to see him through to the end of this—battle? Quest? Expedition?

  Before he could decide on a word, he noticed that a second, longer shadow had joined his. Then an unmistakable smell made his nostrils wrinkle of their own will.

  "Can't stand the smell of honest work?" Fulvura said. She was doubtless trying to whisper, but a minotaur whispering could be heard in a blacksmith's forge chamber.

  "Thinking of what we're about," Sirbones said politely.

  "Finding out who wants both men and minotaurs dead," the minotaur said, not so quietly. She spoke Common well, although with a pronounced accent.

  Heads turned in the vanguard. They, at a glare from Fulvura, turned back to look ahead to where the ground began to rise and tangles of brush, vines, and scrubby trees covered more of it. Even without magic, Sirbones suspected they would lose people to the serpents that brush undoubtedly hid.

  "Then I'd best be well up toward the front," Sirbones said.

  "I'll guard your back, if I may," Fulvura said. Sirbones looked at her, decided that the offer was serious, and knew that it could not be refused.

  "I'm grateful," Sirbones said. "But don't turn your back on those Istaran bravos."

  Fulvura snorted. She sounded remarkably like a bull about to charge.

  "They had better watch theirs," she said, loudly enough for Sirbones to see Istarans flinch. He looked at her weaponry and decided that she could well be right.

  She carried a bundle of three shatangs (minotaur throwing spears) across her back, and a double-edged battle-axe in her right hand. On a metal-studded leather belt she wore several katars (minotaur daggers), with blades of varying length and elaborately decorated hilts. She also wore spiked metal wrist guards on both arms, and a tunic of sharkskin sewn with steel disks. Sirbones suspected that the tunic alone weighed more than he did.

  Altogether, he would wager that the humans would be glad Fulvura was with them, and their enemies would regret it. Any humans attempting treachery against the minotaurs would also regret it, if they lived long enough.

  Drums rolled—at first only a few, then a dozen, then too many to count. A trumpet blared, but the bellowing of two hundred minotaurs drowned it out almost at once.

  The ground seemed to shake as the minotaurs surged forward, toward the foot of the trail to the Green Mountain. The sun sparked fire from the weapons all of them carried, from the helmets a few of them wore, and from the great banners clustered at the head of the column.

  Sir Darin Waydolsson hoped that the standard-bearers would not be so zealous in competing for the lead that they fell to fighting among themselves. This was not a contest in the arena; today no minotaur should make himself enemy to any other. He also knew that to ask this of minotaurs, one needed to be a god, not a mere Knight of Solamnia.

  The standard-bearers did not come to blows. Axes and clabbards, the saw-edged minotaur broadswords, had widened the path enough to let the whole band of them strike the slope at once. There they halted, while warriors flowed forward to either side of them to take the lead.

  More axes and clabbards danced in the warriors' hands, and at least one tessto. The great spiked club with a thong at its hilt was the one minotaur weapon even Darin had not been strong enough to learn well, and it seemed in any case more suitable for the arena than for the battlefield. But again, only gods could safely give a minotaur unasked-for advice about fighting.

  Darin felt his wife slip her arm through his and rise on tiptoe to whisper in his ear: "The minotaurs seem a mob rather than a war band. Is this their way?"

  Darin nodded. "They train mostly to fight in the arena," he told her, "where even melees take place on level ground, or ships' decks. Also, a minotaur is not at ease submitting to discipline in ways that give another authority over him.

  "Much as I honor Waydol's memory, I always thought that was as important as any other reason he had for fleeing south. But do not judge too soon, or by the minotaurs you may have seen as slaves in Istar. The minotaurs do not call themselves the 'Destined Race' or the 'Chosen Ones' for their prowess at berry picking or lute playing!"

  Rynthala's grip tightened almost painfully, and Darin remembered that she had never been to the Mighty City in her life, nor seen much of its settled lands except Tirabot Manor. Minotaur slaves were rare in Solamnia, and Sir Pirvan would no more have kept one than he would have made a human sacrifice of his wife or daughter.

  "You can see Istar for yourself when this is done," he said. "I have some honor time coming to me."

  "If we can trust the Istarans to be good hosts," Rynthala murmured. "But we go together there, too. Guard each other's backs again."

  Darin smiled. "It was not always at your back where you wished me close," he said. Then he looked at the sky. Half of it had now vanished behind the oncoming clouds. He had not voyaged far enough to see such a warm-seas storm for himself, but Waydol had memorably described them.

  The question tonight might not be guarding one another's backs from minotaurs while they slept. The problem might well be sleeping at all.

  The clouds had begun to blow wind on the marching column. Darin and Rynthala had nearly closed with the vanguard when the first attack came. The humans were close enough to see the minotaur with the tessto whirl it, and see something fly into the air, caught in the hilt loop.

  It was a snake, easily twice as long as a man. Darin had just time to see that before lightning flashed from the clouds above. The bolt split into a dozen spears of raw yellow fire, and half of them lashed the ground. Sand turned suddenly red hot and flew in all directions; minotaurs bellowed as pain seared even their tough hides.

  Most of the other bolts seemed to strike where Darin could not see the results. All except one.

  That one took the flying snake in midair. The blaze of fire briefly dazzled the knight. When he could see again, he saw fifty, a hundred, perhaps more snakes flying through the air where there had been only one.

  They were not as large as the first snake. They didn't need to be. What they lacked in size, they made up for in viciousness. Also, in the length of the fangs that flashed in the sudden twilight as they opened their mouths to bite.

  Darin felt something slap his shoulder, then a whick of disturbed air as steel flashed within a hairsbreadth of his neck. He turned to see Rynthala, face the color of a snow-field, stamping on the two writhing halves of the snake she'd slashed off his shoulder.

  Before it could bite? He felt his neck and looked at his upper arm. Rynthala interrupted him. "It didn't bite you," she said. "Let's go help our friends."

  Darin wanted to laugh at his wife pulling him out of a battle-daze. But she was right. Minotaurs had thick hides and thicker clothing, but that did not mean they had no vulnerable spots for a snake to thrust its fangs.

  He drew his sword and prayed to Kiri-Jolith that the island's wizard had not used this same trick on the human column on the other side of the island.

  One arm of the storm had advanced faster than the others, bringing rain down on the human column by the time the magical attack began.

  The snakes here wriggled out from under bushes rather than sailed through the air. The shadows, particularly under the trees, made it hard to see the dark-scaled creatures, as long as a man's arm, attacking in a frenzy.

  The humans fought back in an equal frenzy, but they had thinner skins than minotaurs, and not everyone wore boots or heavy clothing. Fangs sank deep and human fighters screamed and clawed at flesh turning purple-black or red-orange around the twin fang marks.

  Some people slipped on the wet ground and fell in the
path of the snakes, to be bitten on the face. They did not scream as long as the others, but nobody could look at what had been their faces after they stopped moving.

  Pirvan was fighting in as close to full armor as he ever had. Past fifty, he was still faster than most warriors, and preferred to rely on that speed. He wore boiled-leather breeches and a boiled-leather tunic almost as rigid as steel, but a good deal lighter and nearly as proof against fangs and thorns. What else he might have to face, he would worry about when it came at him.

  He also wore a leather helmet that protected most of his head and face but let him see to either side. That kind of vision had been life or death to a thief in the streets of Istar. It was the same to a Knight of Solamnia in a battle against who knew what sort of evil on a strange island in the hot northern seas.

  His hands held a shield, with the edge sharpened for striking, and a short, heavy-bladed sword. He had been offered an axe but knew he could use any sort of sword better. He had never been muscular enough to wield armor-chopping weapons anyway.

  A man ahead clutched at a bush that Pirvan half-expected to attack him with writhing, thorn-studded branches. The man fell into the bush and managed to entangle himself as thoroughly as any foe could have wished. A snake lurking under the bush attacked. It struck first at the man's booted foot, then at his leg, loosely garbed in sailor's trousers. The fangs missed flesh both times.

  Foiled in its early attacks, the snake started crawling up a branch. Pirvan saw that the man might not untangle himself from the bush before the snake reached striking distance.

  "Don't move!" Pirvan shouted. The man struggled more frantically. Branches waved. The snake fell off, nearly at Pirvan's feet. He stamped down, and felt the spine snap.

  Good. The snakes might have magically-enhanced poison, but they were still of the same flesh and blood as nature had made them. Pirvan leaped back, dragging the man with him. The man howled as broken branches ripped his skin.