Realizing this, Brown John groaned with fresh panic, dropped his tunic and cupped his hands around his mouth, shouting, “Zail! Belle! Wait! Don’t go in the water!”
The girls did not hear him.
Brown John, slipping and sliding and jumping, descended the sheer bank and started across the rocky bed, shouting, “Zail! Wait! Wait!”
The girls took no notice, and he ran recklessly forward, fell facedown, and boulders kissed his cheek, chest and shins. Slightly dazed, he climbed painfully onto his hands and knees and held still. The shrill clear notes of a horn were rising above the roar of the rapids. The cue.
Brown John jumped up and screamed, “Wait!”
The girls still did not hear him. Zail, the lead girl, kneeled on her raft and, hanging on to its rope handles, rode it, squealing and laughing, down the funnel of water. One by one the others followed, bobbing wildly and nearly spilling over as the water tossed their small rafts about and washed over their lovely bodies and laughing faces.
They swept onto the natural water slide, swirled around the bend in the river, and the unseen audience waiting at Clear Pond roared approval.
In reply, each girl raised an arm, unclenched a tiny fist, and streamers of glittering yellow and green unfurled behind them.
The audience applauded, and tambourines and drums caught the rhythm of the streaking beauties, turning the ride into a dance.
Brown John stood limply, his exhausted body heaving for breath. He could see Clear Pond now, and the girls were performing beautifully, just as he had trained them to. But without that extra sparkle he had planned on. Only Robin Lakehair had the skill, and nerve, to ride her raft in a standing position.
One by one the girls splashed into the large pond and rode the current, twirling their rafts and posing provocatively for the audience lining the shore.
Grillard strongmen, standing on a shelf of rock several feet under the water, waited where the pool widened. More shelves of rock rose out of the water behind them to form a natural stage which faced the audience on the opposite shore. The stage was backed by boulders which rose like massive stepping-stones up the blunt face of the mountain spur. More strongmen stood in a chainlike line which wound its way across the stage, then up over the boulders to a promontory rock out of which grew a scrub oak.
Brown John knew the spot well. It was here that he had first seen Robin Lakehair and asked her to help him save the forest from the Kitzakks.
As the girls neared the waiting strongmen, they lay down on their backs, crossed their arms across their breasts and held themselves as rigid as arrows. The first strongman plucked Zail off her raft, raised her over his head and passed her to the next strongman. In this manner she traveled across the stage and up through the boulders to the promontory rock where the two largest strongmen waited. As she began her ascent, her body was rolled over and over, and her diaphanous wrap began to unravel colorfully, much to the delight of the men in the audience.
When she reached the top, one of the strongmen took hold of the end of her wrap while the other raised her arrowlike body high over his head. With a grunting heave, he threw her out over the deepest part of the pool a hundred feet below. Just before she began to fall, the strongman holding her wrap gave it a hard yank, and Zail spun around in mid-air. The wrap swirled away from her body in a flurry of colorful circles, and she dove out of their center, naked except for the glittering yellow jewels gracing breasts and groin, and plunged into the water.
The crowd rose as one body and applauded, whistled, wanting more, and one after the other the girls obliged.
Brown John could not refrain from smiling, then suddenly his blood ran cold.
Two strongmen on the promontory had pitched forward and were flailing awkwardly in the air. One landed safely in the shallow water, but the other hit a rock with a loud grunt. He rolled several feet, then lay still. The audience gasped. The girls, now all in the pool, screamed. Then all movement stopped, and a hush fell over Clear Pond.
A huge man, nearly seven feet tall and massive, had emerged from behind the scrub oak and now stood poised on the promontory rock. A plain tattered cloak covered him, but his stance was proud, arrogant, regal. With a deliberate flourish, he removed his cloak and let it fall to his feet. His armor was smooth, a rainbow of plates fading from indigo at his shoulders to smoky blues to roses to white at his legs. A silver-white helmet graced his big-jawed head, and he stood in a whiplike stance. Rising off his back was a silver-grey stump, like the dorsal fin of a shark.
Brown John almost whimpered.
The audience gasped and edged back.
The Grillards, as if driven by unseen adversaries, fled off the spur and gathered together on the stage. Among them were Brown John’s sons: Dirken, in his black tunic with its grave umber patches, and Bone, in his giant codpiece as red as his hair. They moved to the front of their tribe, facing the demon spawn standing above the stage, and stopped short.
A small hooded man with a smooth grey face had appeared beside the huge warrior and laughed mockingly. Suddenly he stopped and raised a fist, shouting in a language the bukko did not understand.
A dozen short, thick men promptly appeared along the rim of the spur, and the shadows of more could be seen among the trees behind them. Their flesh was a greyish brown, and their faces had nostrils but no noses. Their tiny ears were pointed, and tufts of fur sprouted between the seams of their leather armor at their shoulders and elbows. Swords and quivers and knives rode their belts, and they held loaded crossbows in hairy hands.
The audience on the far bank, hushed and trembling, began to back away from the pond. Those in the rear of the crowd were already fleeing into the forest.
The Grillards gathered on the stage shifted anxiously in place with their eyes on the crossbows aimed at them, and raised their arms.
Brown John, stumbling forward in desperation, moved for the natural water slide.
Three of the noseless soldiers moved down off the spur onto the stage and, grunting and waving their crossbows at the Grillards, made a passage between them as the small smooth man, with surprising agility, bounded down the rocks. He strode between the Grillards and waded into the water until he stood among the bobbing faces of the terrified dancing girls.
He grinned, scratching his groin with both hands, and his lewd voice rang through the silence.
“My, my, you are the pretty ones! You’re not going to make it difficult for me now, are you?” He chuckled. “Which of you is Robin Lakehair?”
The girls moaned and spoke all at once, saying Robin wasn’t among them, that they didn’t know where she was, and pleading not to be hurt. Then Zail shouted them to silence and brazenly and defiantly rose partway out of the water, taunting the small man with her half-naked beauty. “She’s not here, little man. You’ll have to come back for tomorrow’s show.”
“Don’t play with me, whore!” he snarled. He waded close to Zail, examining her, and shoved her back in the water, grunting, “You’re too old.” He glared at the others and they whimpered, clutching each other in fear. “Be smart, girl, I know you’re here,” he growled. “So you might as well give yourself up… and save your friends a whole lot of pain.”
The girls wailed and hugged each other, babbling incoherently.
Grumbling, he waded as close to the girls as he could without falling in the river, and leaned over studying their upturned faces. “Damn! You’re all so bloody pretty, I can’t remember what you looked like.” He straightened. “You have one last chance, Robin Lakehair. Show yourself now, or these pretties won’t stay pretty much longer.”
The girls screamed that Robin wasn’t there, and the Grillards on the stage shouted the same thing.
The small man didn’t listen to them. He grunted, “What a waste,” and waded back onto the stage. He looked up at the huge man, lifting empty hands, and shouted, “I’m sorry, Lord Baskt, but they won’t cooperate. And I can’t pick her out. They’re all redheads.”
Baskt
nodded and strode to the edge of the promontory rock. There he gathered, and dove out over the pond. He easily cleared the rocks below and plunged down toward the water. There was a flash of light and a roll of thunder just before he hit the water, and it splashed in a flurry of geysers which could only have been made by a man three times his size.
What remained of the audience fled screaming into the forest.
The Grillards stood staring helplessly at the pond, holding each other.
Brown John, finally reaching the water slide, plunged in, and slid for the pond, his eyes fixed on the girls.
Their heads were turning and twisting as they watched something moving under the water. Then their eyes filled with horror, and they screamed.
A shark fin cut through the surface and moved toward them.
Screaming and flailing, the girls tried to swim and climb out of the water.
The fin slashed down into the water, vanished for a moment, then a pointed snout erupted from the liquid green, followed by the huge barreled body of a great white shark.
Two girls wading onto the stage saw it and fainted, falling backward into the water.
Brown John screamed, “No! No!” and hit a rock with head and shoulder. Nearly unconscious, he splashed into the pond and went under. The current caught him, brought him back to the surface, and gasping for air, he looked across the pond with dazed eyes.
The water seemed to be churning itself into geysers of white foam flecked with red streaks. There was screaming, a soaring crescent-shaped tail, flashes of huge teeth in an underslung jaw. Pieces of young girls were impaled on them.
The old man moaned pitifully, passed out, and the current carried him away.
Some time later, when he came to, his paunchy belly was hung up on a shelf of rock which formed part of the stage, and he was drowning in a foot of water. He raised his head out of the water, coughing and spitting repeatedly, and dragged himself onto dry rock. Gasping for air and shaking with exhaustion and terror, he looked around.
There was no sign of the shark. Clear Pond was void of sound and movement except for the flowing river, as if he had dreamed the entire thing. Then he saw them.
At the far end of the pond, where the river spread out and trickled through a man-made rock dam, the noseless, furry soldiers were wading in the shallows. They held pronged spears, stabbing them into the water. When the spears came back out, unidentifiable bits and pieces of bloody bone and flesh were stuck to the prongs. These they matter-of-factly removed and dropped in sacks slung over their shoulders, then went back to stabbing.
Brown John, snarling with fury, tried to rise, but dizzied and dropped back. He blinked his eyes and stared at the rock below him as a swirl of water washed under him. He lowered his head to drink, but stopped, and white showed around his shocked eyes.
The water was red with blood.
He tried to crawl away from it, as if it would contaminate him, and the effort drained his strength. He dropped facedown on a dry shelf of rock, and blackness filled his mind.
Twelve
GOODBYE
An hour later, Brown John sat huddled in a blanket facing his sons, Dirken and Bone, across a small fire. Around them, the Grillard women and children were gathered, faces tear-stained and bodies trembling and sobbing. Behind them, the men were noisily forming the colorful horse-drawn wagons into two lines on top of the spur. The wagons were loaded, ready for the trail.
“How many were there?” Brown John addressed the question to Dirken.
“I counted nine in the wagon when they rode off, seven on horseback, and I don’t know how many in the forest standing lookout. But they weren’t trying to hide. You could still see their dust when they were a mile from here.”
“Heading which way?”
“Northwest. I’d say toward Small Tree.”
“What are the filthy demon spawn after Robin for anyway?” growled Bone. “What good does it do them murderin’ poor helpless girls?”
The women nodded and murmured, asking the same questions.
“I don’t know,” Brown John said evenly, “but I’m going to find out and put an end to it.” He stood. “You two will take charge of the wagons.” The brothers nodded and he added, “You’ll split up and leave this part of the forest. Folks around here are superstitious. They’ll think you’ve got some curse on you now and will drive you away from their villages. So head east. Bone, you take the southern road. Dirken, you take the northern.” He lowered his voice. “In a week or two, after everyone has had a chance to get over this, start looking for some new dancing girls.”
“New girls?” Bone blurted in outrage. “You’ll never replace…”
“You will!” his father cut him off. “And you’ll use your heart and brains as well as that lizard hiding in your codpiece.” He looked at Dirken. “You both know the code… we can’t let this tragedy stop the wagons.”
Dirken nodded. “What are you going to do?”
“What I have to,” Brown John said. “The Council of Chiefs will no doubt want me to find Gath and have him deal with these brutes… and that may take some doing. I haven’t seen him for weeks.”
Bone and Dirken both stood, and Dirken, dark of face and mind, asked, “Did you hear about Robin?”
“She’s disappeared!” Bone said it.
Brown John, without expression or emotion, said, “Don’t worry about Robin. Just get our wagons as far away from here as fast as you can… in case they realize they don’t have her, and come back.”
They nodded, and the bukko hugged his sons, waved goodbye to the others, then mounted a horse that had been saddled for him. The saddlebags bulged with provisions, a wine jar, cheese, bread and meats wrapped in cloth. He headed up the spur, again waving goodbye, and the Grillards did the same, then began to climb on their wagons.
When he was out of sight, he looked around carefully to see if anyone was watching him, then moved into the concealing shadows of overhanging pines. He waited there, listening until he heard the sounds of the rolling wagons fade away. Then he rode back to where his mare and Jakar’s stallion were hidden. Taking the two horses by their reins, he led them through the trees heading toward the sheer cliff of jagged rock. Reaching a thicket where the sound of waterfalls was loud, he dismounted and tied the horses to a tree, draped the saddlebags over a shoulder and hurried forward on foot.
Thirteen
TROUBLE
Panting and stumbling, the bukko came around an elderberry bush growing out of the creek bank and stopped, looking up.
In front of him, massive granite boulders, stacked upon and leaning against each other, rose up through a gorge to the distant heights of the sheer wall of jagged rock. Spilling waterfalls draped over and fell between the boulders. Some were mere trickles, others tumbled through gullies, churning themselves to white water, or spread out over flat rimrock and fell like living curtains, while the largest plunged in heavy torrents for hundreds of feet to crash into pools raising clouds of wet mist. There they again found passages through cracks and guts to form eddies that gathered and spilled again, down and down, until they destroyed their wet bodies on the boulders of the creek bed and tamely flowed toward the river far below.
To the southeast, the mountain was exposed rock. To the northwest, pines covered it almost to the crest. Here and there shafts of afternoon sunlight speared horizontally through gaps in the trees, and touched a pool or gush of white water to make them shimmer in the deep shade, like gorgets of wet light.
The water’s roar obliterated all other sound.
The bukko wiped beads of spray away from his eyes and stared, the pain and tragedy and guilt slowly draining from him as nature’s vital beauty flooded him with awe and wonder. He looked from side to side, searching the blurring mists. Seeing no sign of Robin or Jakar, and no cracked twig, crushed bush or muddy track that revealed they had passed this way, his brown eyes thinned with worry, and he started up the face of the falls.
A half hour later, so
aking wet and exhausted, he was halfway up the steep gorge, standing uncertainly on top of a slippery round boulder. A torrent of water, as wide as a small house, fell beside him, and a flat-faced boulder, half again his height, blocked his passage. Groaning unheard in the wet din, he squeezed a booted foot in a narrow crack on the face of the bothersome rock. He set himself, then jumped up and stood in the crack, grabbing for the top of the boulder, and took hold of it. He hung on for a moment, gathering breath, then hauled himself up onto the rock. There he crouched proudly on his knees and elbows with his wet cheek against the cold rock, then rolled onto his side, and saw his naked foot, groaned again.
He got back onto his hands and knees and looked forlornly down at his boot stuck in the crack. It was out of reach. He removed his other boot, set it aside, stood, and examined the area. There still was no sign of Robin or Jakar.
He continued up the falls barefoot.
Reaching a large pool, he moved behind the wide waterfall to the narrow ledge protruding from the rock behind it. There he waited, peering through the waterfall to see if he was followed. But only nature’s wonders shared his trail. With his face to the rock, he moved sideways along the ledge until he was a foot from the vertical corner of the flat-faced boulder. There the ledge narrowed sharply and ended. Directly in front of him, mist billowed from behind the corner of the boulder, caused by another waterfall dropping through a stone chasm. Gingerly, he looked down over a shoulder.
One step forward or to the side would undoubtedly provide a spectacular bit of drama he could never duplicate on a stage, and deposit him back where he had started, at the bottom of the falls, in more than several pieces.
Trembling, Brown John pressed his cheek against the slick rock. When the shudder passed, he cocked his knees for balance, spread his arms wide and flat against the rock and leaned toward the sharp corner with his free hand groping blindly around it. His fingers came to rest on a rough iron bar and gripped it tightly. He sighed with relief and suddenly lost his balance, falling forward.
[Death Dealer 02] - Lords of Destruction Page 6