The Fugitive Prince (Bell Mountain)

by Lee Duigon

  “Yes, Preceptor.”

  “Clemen, take these good people to my house with you and wait for me there.” He turned to Hlah and May. “Thank you for bringing this man for me to see.” And to May, “And thank you for bringing your baby. You have reminded me that we work for the future of God’s people. All of them.”

  Chapter 47

  How Gorm Blacktooth Was Routed

  You would think that men who lived in Lintum Forest all their lives would be expert woodsmen; but in spite of the trust that Wusu put in them, this was not true of Lintum Forest’s outlaws. Those men were predators who hunted easy prey—peaceful settlers and if all else failed, each other. Each band knew its way around its own particular territory, but no bandit could hope to match Helki in woodcraft.

  In the days following the fire, Helki often came close to the army. They never once caught sight of him, nor found his tracks. Many times Wusu’s scouts came within arm’s length of him without knowing he was there. When scouts who did that came alone, they never came back.

  Helki plagued the Heathen. He raised alarms at odd hours of the night, fraying the warriors’ nerves. He brought Andrus along one night, and Andrus brought down a fine-looking Hosa warrior with a single arrow. That caused a stir. The scouts ransacked the neighborhood, but Andrus had slipped away before his arrow reached its mark.

  Helki’s rangers felled trees across paths that the army was likely to use, necessitating the hard labor of clearing them out of the way. An army used to forest campaigns might have shrugged these off as pinpricks, but this was not that kind of army. The Hosa especially hated their predicament.

  “This is an accursed venture,” Xhama said, “and no good can come of it.” But Wusu wouldn’t listen to him.

  Sometimes Helki brought Cavall with him. He didn’t know the Zamzu had a superstitious fear of dogs, but he soon learned it. When Cavall howled in the middle of the night, it upset the Zamzu terribly. Then it was the Hosa’s turn to dole out mockery.

  “If we could only bag that mardar,” Helki said to his six men, “the rest of them might just give up and go home. It’d be risky, though. He keeps himself in the middle of the crowd, and there wouldn’t be time to get off a second shot at him. We mustn’t let them catch even one of us alive—too big a risk to the king.”

  But of course they wanted to try it. “We’re all good shots,” Andrus said. “If we shoot six arrows at him all at once, one of them is bound to hit him. And that might well be the end of our troubles.”

  Or the beginning of new ones! Helki thought. “If all six of us go,” he said, “then where do we put the king? I won’t bring him within a mile of that army.”

  “But if you could make them leave the forest without a battle?” Ryons said. “Couldn’t you leave me in a safe place, Helki, while you try to get the mardar? I promise I’ll stay put!”

  Helki’s men pressed him hard, and he listened to them for a long time before he finally gave in.

  “All right,” he said, “I reckon it’s a chance we have to take. I’ll choose King Ryons’ hiding place myself, and none of you will know where it is: safer, that way. The hawk and the hound will watch over him while we’re gone.

  “Remember—one shot each, and only one, all at the same instant: and then we skedaddle out of there. No one is to be taken alive. You’d be fools to let that happen, anyhow. What the Zamzu don’t do to you, the mardar will.”

  “We know it,” Andrus said.

  The same day, Martis and the children came to Carbonek with six prisoners. Bandy quickly put them under guard.

  “Yes—King Ryons, he was here,” he answered their questions, “but he not here now. He go with Helki, go to other end of forest so they can fight Heathen. Maybe they come back soon, I hope.”

  The defenders of the castle had not been idle, meanwhile. Gorm Blacktooth and his men had come too close, so Bandy found one of their camps and let Baby loose on it. One of the outlaws was killed, and four fled screaming into the forest. Bandy himself, and his tomahawk, accounted for two others. But they didn’t know where the rest of Gorm’s men were.

  “How you catch six Ysbott men?” the Abnak wondered.

  Ellayne was about to blurt out, “I did it!” but Martis didn’t let her.

  “I think that’s something better kept a secret for the time being,” Martis said. “I’ll tell you about it later.” It wasn’t until after they were settled in the camp and given supper and getting ready to sleep that Ellayne had the chance to ask Martis why it had to be a secret.

  “You can’t go around telling people you’re a witch or the servant of a witch,” he said. “If we encourage people to believe these ancient objects have magical powers, we’ll be doing the Thunder King’s work for him.”

  “We’d be taking Noma’s place,” said Jack, who quickly saw what Martis was getting at.

  “You didn’t complain when I made those men surrender,” Ellayne said. “You went right along with it.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have!” Martis said. “Those devices, you know, were made by people who perished in the Day of Fire. Lord Reesh practically worshipped those people and the works of their hands. It just seems to me that we shouldn’t be too eager to make use of those works.”

  “The prisoners will talk about it,” Jack said. “You know they will.”

  “Then we’ll have to be careful about what we say, when people ask us to explain what we did.”

  Ellayne didn’t argue, but it took her a long time to get to sleep. Thinking it over, she remembered a time, early in their journeys, when she and Jack explored a kind of tunnel made by the people of the Empire times—a tunnel that ended in a massive blockage made of dead men’s bones. That, too, was something left over from the old days.

  Now she wished she’d never touched the cusset thing; but it was much too late for that.

  Wytt finally found the Forest Omah. They’d moved out of the area to avoid the gangs of outlaws tramping all around the woods. Very few of the human beings in Lintum Forest ever see the Omah, who make it their business not to be seen. But most of those humans believed all kinds of stories about the Little People—who could give a hunter good or bad luck as they chose, put a fatal curse on a woodcutter, or keep a person under an enchantment for a hundred years, to turn instantly to dust the moment they lifted the enchantment.

  Wytt showed the Omah the lock of Ellayne’s golden hair that he wore around his neck. That was all they had to see, to be convinced to follow him and help him. These Omah didn’t know how to sharpen sticks as weapons, but they learned quickly.

  “We take things from big men, stick them with points when they sleep: scare them and make them go away.” That was Wytt’s plan, as best it can be rendered into human speech. These Omah had never thought of doing such a thing; but they would do it now, as a service to the Girl with Sunshine Hair. No human being, not even Ellayne or Jack, could explain why. It is something that is between the Omah and the God who made them.

  Several dozen of them followed Wytt back to the outlaws’ stamping grounds. They found the campsite where the children and Martis had been captured. When that trail led to Carbonek, Wytt realized that his friends were safe and he could carry out his plan.

  Gorm Blacktooth had a camp some ten miles from the castle. He moved it every two or three days, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, and Bandy hadn’t found it yet. He had twenty men with him, more or less, with a few out scouting.

  This camp was in a clearing by a little pool of fresh water. A huge black tree towered over it. Fires burned at night to discourage bears. Around the biggest fire sat Gorm and a dozen of his men, dining on roasted possum and stolen corn. Gorm was a small, stocky man with a hideous black tooth, much esteemed by other outlaws for his cleverness.

  “When Ysbott and his lads join us tomorrow,” he was saying, “and we all sweep down on that castle at once—now that we know Helki’s not there!—it’ll be easy pickings. We’ll be living high on the hog for a long time af
ter that, my boys!”

  While he boasted, Wytt and a few of the Omah scrambled up the tree, unseen, and settled down to wait. The others hid among the underbrush, careful to avoid three men on sentry duty. The night wore on, the fires burned low, and eventually the men lay down to sleep. With their chief asleep, the sentries sat down and nodded.

  Wytt imitated the call of a whip-poor-will, and the Omah came out of hiding. By twos and threes, and silently, they picked things up and carried them into the forest, whatever they could manage—weapons, boots, food, a cooking pot, and one man’s fur cap that lay beside him. When they were done, Wytt signaled for the Omah in the tree to go down and take up their positions. He clicked once: and half a dozen Omah jabbed their sharp sticks into a sleeping sentry. They shrieked as they stabbed him, a noise to wake the dead. Certainly it woke the camp. The stricken man sprang to his feet, bleeding from half a dozen little wounds, and howling with pain and alarm. But except for Wytt, concealed in the tree, all the Omah had already run away.

  “I’ve been stabbed!” cried the sentry. “Somebody stabbed me!” The whole camp was in an uproar, and Gorm had to knock a few heads together before he could get the fires lit again. Only then did they discover that many of their possessions had been stolen.

  “But who could have done it?” someone said. “If it was Helki and his men, they would have killed us while we slept.”

  “Well, I got stabbed!”

  “Go on—let me see!” By firelight Gorm examined the man’s wounds. “These are flea-bites, you big baby! You didn’t get a proper stabbing with a knife.”

  “I didn’t see who did it, Gorm.”

  “Because you were asleep, burn you for a lazy crock!”

  “But who could have come into the camp and taken all our stuff?” another man wondered. “Why, even our cooking pot is gone!”

  “And my otter-skin cap, too!”

  They were still trying to sort it all out when the black of night gave way to the grey of early morning. And then Wytt climbed out on a low-hanging branch and shrilled at them.

  “Look at me, rodents! We are mighty, we are sly! You stink! Eaters of dust!”

  He danced on the branch, threatening them with his little stick, and made so much noise that they all looked up and saw him clearly. But before any man could think what to do about it, with the ease and swiftness of a squirrel he ran out to the end of the branch and launched himself into another tree, and so vanished from their sight.

  “The Little People!” someone cried. “I saw it! Did you see him, Gorm? It was the Little People who attacked us.”

  “And put a curse on us, too!”

  “It was a squirrel,” answered Gorm, “nothing but a chattering squirrel.”

  “It was no squirrel that did this!” said the sentry, brandishing his punctured hand.

  “Nor stole our cooking pot!”

  “Nor took my hat!”

  Before the morning was an hour older, the campsite was deserted. Gorm Blacktooth couldn’t rally his men. He could only follow after them, berating them, as they retreated as far from that place as they could go.

  As for Wytt, he was already halfway back to Carbonek.

  Chapter 48

  In Forest and in City

  Prester Jod bent over the man on Constan’s bed. Sunfish had been bathed, his hair and beard cleaned and combed and trimmed. Constan stood at the foot of the bed, and Hlah and May toward the back of the room. They’d answered the prester’s questions as best they could.

  Jod stood up straight. “Preceptor,” he said, “I think you know who this is as well as I do.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it were possible,” said Constan, “but there can be no doubt of it. You’ve recognized him, too.”

  “Your pardon!” Hlah interrupted. “But who is he?”

  “He’s one of us,” Jod said. “Indeed, it was widely expected that he would be the next First Prester, Lord Reesh’s choice. But then we all believed he perished in the fire that brought down the Temple. His name is Orth, Prester Orth.”

  “But I found him wandering in the swamplands by the Chariot River!” Hlah said. “How did he get there? It’s a mighty long way from Obann. And he’s never been able to tell me anything about it. He couldn’t even remember his own name.”

  “He is one of our greatest scholars,” Jod said. He shook his head.

  “His house is at the other end of Temple Street,” Constan said. “I wonder if any of his servants are still in the city. They will know him when they see him.”

  “His house has not been sold?”

  “It’s boarded up.”

  “Let me think!” Jod said. He sat on the foot of the bed, studying Sunfish. No one spoke. Finally he said, “What do you think would happen, Constan, if we returned him to his own house? We would have to open it and air it out first, and bring back as many of his servants as we can, to clean it up. But what if he woke up one day in his old, familiar surroundings? I wonder if that might revive his memory.”

  “It might,” said Constan, “if accompanied by earnest prayer.”

  “He shall have that. I’ll pray for him myself.”

  “And us, too,” Hlah said.

  Jod smiled at him. “You are his truest friends,” he said. “Yes, I think your prayers will do him good.”

  That same morning, Helki left Ryons in a thicket with some food and water. Cavall lay down beside him, and Angel perched in a nearby tree.

  Only Helki knew the location of the thicket. He’d had to make a path to it, which he would unmake as he left.

  “Whatever you do, Your Majesty, don’t leave this thicket,” he said. “I reckon I’m the only one can find you here, so you stay put till I come back. Don’t wander! There’s liable to be a lot of excitement in these woods before this day is done. But I ought to be back by sunset.”

  “I’ll stay,” Ryons said, “but I’d rather go with you.” He had a bad feeling that after today he might never see Helki again.

  “So the Heathen can catch you and take our king away from us?” Helki said. “Don’t even think of it.”

  “Be careful,” Ryons said.

  “I’m always careful. That’s why I’m alive.”

  Helki ruffled the boy’s hair, patted Cavall, and backed out of the thicket. For a few minutes Ryons could hear him covering his tracks, putting everything back the way it was; and then, except for his hawk and his hound, he was alone.

  It would have cheered him to know that his own army, full of friends, had reached the northern fringe of the forest and was preparing to march to Carbonek. The Abnaks were sure they could find the castle. The Attakotts and some of the Wallekki would remain behind to keep watch on the plain. The Ghols, eager to find the boy whom they called “Father,” had to be restrained from plunging into the forest ahead of everyone else and getting lost.

  But the only army anyone in Lintum Forest knew about was Wusu’s army. And Helki was on his way to ambush it with six good archers, hoping to deprive it of its commander.

  Helki himself had little hope for the plan, but his men wouldn’t be satisfied until they tried it. At the very least, he thought, the attempt would slow the army and put a strain on its provisions. “As long as none of us gets caught, it might be worth it,” he thought.

  “We can’t all miss!” Andrus said, as they hurried to get ahead of the army and prepare the ambush.

  “You can, and you probably will,” Helki said. “But no one ever robbed a nest without first climbing up a tree.”

  Wytt waited until Jack and Ellayne were alone, coming back from gawking at Baby in his log corral. When he leaped into Ellayne’s arms, she almost fell backward in surprise.

  “Where the mischief have you been!” she cried, and kissed the top of his head.

  In chirps and chitters he told how he’d found the Omah and dispersed the outlaw band. He was just finishing when Martis joined them, and Ellayne had to repeat the story.

  “The curse of the Little People!” M
artis said, smiling at the thought. “They’re probably still running, those men.” He paused abruptly as an idea came into his head. He told Jack to find Bandy and bring him back, alone.

  The Abnak’s eyes went wide when he saw Wytt perched on Ellayne’s shoulder. He let out a long whistle of astonishment.

  “You make friends with him?” he marveled. “Men say there were plenty of Little People around here once, when they first come to this place. But then the Little People went away. Now they come back?”

  “No—he’s been with us for a long time,” Jack said. Abnaks seldom saw Omah, and believed they were harmless as long as women were careful to put out a pot of gruel for them. Otherwise they would steal Abnak babies.