by Logan Jacobs
I chuckled to myself. So far, so good. This job seemed fairly pleasant and not too perilous at all yet, despite the sly and stubborn ways of my charges. Maybe I had walked right into the best deal of my career, after all. I just hoped my luck would hold up.
Naturally, it wasn’t long after that that my hackles started prickling.
Chapter Six
There wasn’t any particular reason for it. At least, not any conscious reason. But I’d always had quite a strong sixth sense for these things. Not strong enough to qualify as an actual magical ability, but it almost functioned that way.
Before I said anything to the others, I tried to figure out in my own head what it was exactly that was perturbing me so. Maybe the birds and small critters seemed to be flitting and scurrying out of sight. But they could’ve just been doing that because of our approach. The twins and their mares weren’t exactly practiced at blending into the landscape, after all. Or maybe the wind smelled just a little different. Not strongly enough for me to be able to identify any particular scent, but nonetheless, it just didn’t smell quite as clean and empty as it had half an hour ago. Of course, that could be attributed to a shift in the currents, or a herd of wild animals a mile away, or a carcass somewhere that was picked clean to bones and barely detectable to the nose any longer.
Either way, I patted Theo’s side to signal to him to move out of the twins’ way and let them pass us. We were heading into a wide open plain where I could see clearly that no threats lay ahead. Behind us, however, there were some groves of trees and sufficiently dense underbrush to hide something or someone that could be stalking us.
“What’s the matter?” Janina asked curiously as the mares carrying the twins ambled past us. The hapless luggage mares trailed a little ways behind me and Theo. Throughout our trip so far, the twins had been switching off between the four horses so that they could take turns carrying the significantly lighter load of one slim human body each, and the heavier load of about ten various cases of clothing.
“Most likely nothing at all,” I replied. “But if I say, ‘Run,’ then just start galloping straight ahead, both of you, and don’t stop.”
“Well, that’s a reassuring thing to say!” Janina scoffed sarcastically.
“I’m trying to provide you with actual security, not a false sense of security,” I replied. “It’s a simple instruction. Do you understand it?”
Both she and Katrina confirmed that they did.
For the next several minutes, we rode on in a tense silence. The twins kept darting glances backward at me over their shoulders, their ocean-colored eyes wide with concern, and their lips slightly parted inquisitively, but I didn’t meet their gazes from beneath the brim of my hat, because I had nothing helpful to tell them. I could feel Theo underneath me starting to sweat with anxiety and guessed that his mood mirrored theirs. Even the mares, who were too dumb to understand the situation consciously, could sense from their riders’ behavior that something was off and started to grow restless.
As the sun continued to shine, and the golden grass continued to rustle peacefully in the wind, I started to wonder if maybe I’d alarmed the whole group for no reason.
Then, the ululating war cries burst through the air, echoed by the cawing of birds as they rose up and scattered.
For a brief moment my initial, irrational reaction was a sense of relief, that I hadn’t gone crazy or lost my touch.
Then I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Run!”
The twins shrieked and kicked their horses into a gallop. The luggage mares whinnied and chased after them. Theo and I, meanwhile, wheeled around to face our foes.
Savajuns.
I had known that before I ever laid eyes on their bare brown chests and red-painted bodies, adorned with dangling animal teeth, skulls, feathers, and anything else that they thought would make them look fearsome. Their sun-leathered, scowling faces and glossy black hair that hung down to their waists, their lean thighs that gripped the bare backs of their horses as effortlessly as if they had been born to ride. The bows and the tomahawks raised in their fists.
I had heard their war cries before, and the sound rarely boded well for the listeners.
Their war cries could be a magnificent sound when they tore from the throats of enemy tribes charging at each other, or one tribe charging at the armed defenders of a white settlement, but in this case I thought they were a bit inappropriate, given that there were five Savajun raiders bearing down on us, and their targets were one man and two helpless women.
The West was a vast country, filled with thousands of scattered tribes that were as much strangers to each other as we whites were to them, and the odds that I had ever encountered these particular five Savajuns before were extremely slim to say the least. Not to mention that they weren’t even close enough to see my face clearly yet. So there was no chance that they could possibly recognize me, which meant that they had no reason to imagine this was anything remotely resembling a fair fight.
No. I was pretty sure that what they saw were a pair of defenseless and beautiful women, who were traveling with inadequate protection. And that what they intended was to kidnap them and force them to live as their captive “wives.” Not all Savajun tribes were guilty of this barbaric practice, some abhorred it just as much as the noblest of Old World nations would have. But many embraced it, since their men tended to have a lustful obsession with the pale skin of our women, particularly if they had hair in colors like blonde or red that never occurred among the native population.
I couldn’t let the twins fall into their grasp, and not only because that would mean I wouldn’t get paid. Every part of me was repulsed by the idea of women, of anyone really, being used in that manner against their wills.
I glanced over. The twins were galloping away as fast as they could, which wasn’t particularly fast. The mares weren’t all that athletic, and the girls were no more than passable riders. The Savajuns could certainly catch up to them. But they were converging on me instead, with the evident agreement to use their combined strength to neutralize the threat first, rather than splitting up into two parties to fight me and chase down their prey, which is what I would have done in their place.
An arrow whizzed by my ear, so close that it ruffled my hair. Then another struck the ground by Theo’s front right hoof, which caused him to rear up reflexively. At least there only appeared to be one archer among the Savajun party. The other four all held bladed weapons instead.
I didn’t want to keep moving in the same direction as the Elliott twins, because that would bring the fight closer to them, but I also didn’t want to move in a completely different direction than them, because that might cause the Savajuns to start following them instead and just let me go. I also didn’t want to charge straight at the Savajuns, because they were coming down a slight decline, and going to meet them uphill would give them even more of an advantage than their numbers already did. But staying exactly in the same spot was the worst idea of all, because Theo and I were both likely to get shot full of arrows that way before we had any chance to defend ourselves.
So we started to canter side to side in short bursts of varying distances, just to make ourselves a more difficult target for the archer’s arrows. In this way we successfully avoided most of the arrows. One arrow hit one of Theo’s saddlebags, where the gold must have stopped it, because it didn’t pierce through to his side. It did, however, shatter at least one vial of potencium, because after that the saddlebag started leaking purple fluid. Another arrow struck one of his iron horseshoes and bounced off.
“I guess horseshoes really are lucky,” I remarked.
“But what if we used up our luck on that?” Theo inquired a bit breathlessly.
I wasn’t obliged to answer that question, because the Savajuns were on us then. They rode around us in a circle, continuing to ululate, while I drew my sword and waited for one of them to come within stabbing distance.
Of course, “stabbing distance” for me was a rather fle
xible measurement, which these men didn’t realize yet.
So when one of them broke from the circle and veered inward to take a swing at me with his tomahawk, I started to swing my sword in return, and once its momentum was already carrying it in the proper direction, I lengthened it to about six feet of steel and sliced clean through the Savajun’s neck long before he could reach me. Then I quickly shrank the sword back down before its weight could drag it to the ground or pull me out of the saddle.
The Savajun’s headless body toppled off his horse and was quickly trampled beneath the hooves of his companions as their frenzied circle rushed onward. The bloodied feathers of his headdress scattered like a plucked chicken’s. And his head itself rolled to the middle of the circle and bumped up against Theo’s hoof, to which Theo reacted with a neigh of disgust and by lashing out with the contaminated hoof. He connected solidly with the head and no doubt left a significant dent in the skull, but I couldn’t really tell because it sailed into the air and flew thirty yards into the distance, as the other Savajuns howled with outrage.
They stopped circling then and charged me all at once. I couldn’t fight in four directions, so I spurred Theo forward, with the intention of barreling straight through the Savajun who was facing us.
“Get the fuck out of my way you goddamn imbecile,” Theo hollered at the Savajun’s horse, who reacted by pricking its ears back and freezing in its tracks.
Theo shouldered the horse out of the way, while I couched my sword like a lance and ran its rider through. Then I had to let go of the hilt because I didn’t have time to yank the blade back out of the Savajun’s ribs as Theo ran past and trying to keep ahold of it would have either dislocated my shoulder or pulled me out of the saddle.
That left me and Theo momentarily clear of our surrounding enemies, with two down and three to go, but it also left me weaponless.
So I ripped the stuck arrow from out of the saddlebag and expanded it until its shaft fit my grip like the haft of a spear.
Then after Theo had used his immensely powerful limbs to propel us about thirty feet ahead of the pursuing Savajuns, he wheeled around. The three of them were clumped together facing us trying to catch up. The archer was on the right, with another arrow nocked to his bow. If we charged him, then we would give him a clear line to shoot us without hitting either of his two companions. Obviously it didn’t make sense to charge the Savajun in the middle and subject ourselves to simultaneous attacks from both sides. So without my even needing to tell him, Theo appraised the situation in the same fashion as I did, and immediately charged toward the tomahawk-wielding Savajun on the left.
I raised the spear-sized arrow in my hand, cocked my elbow back, and drove it forward straight through the face of the Savajun before his tomahawk could reach me, which caused his features to crumple inward except for his grinning teeth which stayed firmly in their place, and his brains to spurt out from the back of his skull. Then as I released the arrow, my hand darted down to the handle of the tomahawk before it could fall from the Savajun’s suddenly limp grasp, and I seized that weapon as Theo’s hooves carried us past our now deceased enemy.
There were only two Savajuns left alive out of the original five, but one of them was the archer, the one that posed the greatest threat to us. At the moment, however, he was within a few yards of us and didn’t have enough time to utilize the range advantage of his weapon and focus in on us as a target.
As soon as Theo passed the horse carrying the corpse of the Savajun with an arrow through his face, he turned to bring himself perpendicular to the archer’s horse, so that his left flank was lined up with that horse’s hindquarters. I swung the tomahawk that I’d just taken from the dead hand of the other Savajun and sliced into the back of the archer’s neck. His horse bolted forward at just that moment, so it didn’t turn out to be the clean beheading I had intended. Instead his head swung forward and dangled onto his chest by a few threads of flesh, while blood started spurting out from the stump of his neck and soaking his horse as well as the last surviving member of the raiding party.
The horse reacted by neighing in panic and running and leaping around in order to disentangle itself from the corpse. The fifth Savajun reacted by taking one last glance at me, then plastering himself to the neck of his horse and urging it to flee across the plains.
But I couldn’t let that happen. Even though he was clearly too terrified to pose any further threat to me or the twins, there was the possibility that he would report our whereabouts to other members of his tribe, and that they would then try to track us down for unfriendly purposes. Five Savajuns without any extraordinary fighting abilities, I could handle myself. But twenty of their strongest braves? Reinforced by the tribe’s First Sorcerer? That wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.
“Get him,” I muttered to Theo. All I had meant by that was to request that he use his running prowess to bring me within reach of the fugitive. Theo, however, evidently decided to take a more active role in the task.
Intelligent, talking animals very rarely occurred among the population of any nonhuman species, and they couldn’t be bred intentionally, since they were usually born to ordinary animals, and usually birthed ordinary animals themselves. The only exception was if two intelligent animals mated-- then, the offspring invariably turned out to be not only infertile, but mentally retarded and physically deformed. Some types of people considered miracle creatures like Theo to be inherently more worthy of respect and luxurious treatment because of their human traits. Other types considered them useful tools to be exploited, just like other farm animals, but with much broader and more sophisticated purposes. Regardless, virtually all Westerners agreed that talking animals were extremely valuable and that their owners were lucky to possess them.
Savajuns, on the other hand, believed that it was impossible for animals to talk, and that any who did therefore had to be possessed by demons. And they usually tried to defeat these supposed demons by killing their hosts. For that reason, if we were attempting to have civil relations with a group of Savajuns, Theo usually grudgingly held his tongue.
Not in this case.
“That’s right, you little bitch, keep running!” Theo screamed. Odds were the Savajun couldn’t even understand the words, unless he had either had trading or political dealings with white settlers and had picked up a few key phrases for the purpose, but Theo’s tone was nonetheless hard to mistake.
The Savajun didn’t react at all initially. I was the one more startled than him by Theo’s outburst, which he couldn’t possibly have failed to hear. I realized that this was because he must have assumed it was my voice. So I joined in Theo’s effort.
“You’re just gonna die with a tired horse!” I yelled.
Upon hearing a distinctly different voice behind him, the Savajun’s head whipped around with a wild stare as he wondered where the second enemy had come from.
“You can’t outrun a demon,” Theo yelled. His gums curled up around his long horse teeth and spittle sprayed from his jaws as he enunciated each word. I, meanwhile, kept my face perfectly still and my mouth shut as the Savajun stared.
He finally realized how it was possible that he was hearing two different voices taunting him and turned back forward with a loud exclamation in Savajun that sounded a lot like an obscene word that my half-Savajun ex-lover had once taught me. Then he drove his horse on even more frantically than before.
I could tell from the horse’s gait that it was quickly getting exhausted, and Theo was probably twenty-five percent larger and more powerful. He wasn’t really built for endurance, but at a dead sprint it was hard to beat him.
After another few moments of gaining on our prey, Theo pulled up alongside the other horse. He matched it stride for stride as it tried to veer away. But I could tell he was wary of colliding with the panicked other horse and getting his limbs entangled with its, which could cause grievous injury to one or both of them. It was hard for me to reach the Savajun with the tomahawk in my hand
as it was, and I didn’t want to expand the tomahawk too much and risk losing control of the much heavier lengthened implement as the horses swerved.
So, I tapped Theo in the spot we had agreed upon to signal my intentions and to prepare him for the weight shift. Then, I stood up in the stirrups, took a deep breath, and launched myself at the Savajun riding next to me, and tackled him off of his horse.
He flailed frantically in my grasp, and we somersaulted together as we struck the ground. It took all my effort to just avoid the tomahawk in his hand and try to land gracefully enough not to break anything. As my enemy and I broke apart and I started to roll head over heels, that required flinging away the tomahawk that was in my own hand, so as not to split my own skull open.
When I finally lost enough momentum to be able to spring to my feet, I saw that the Savajun, across from me, was already upright as well, and seemed just as unharmed by our fall as I was, save for minor bruising and a momentary dizziness that was making him stagger like a drunk. The look of panic had left his face. Instead he was scowling, and there was an elated gleam in his black eyes, probably occasioned by the fact that he had, somehow, miraculously kept ahold of his own tomahawk, and had certainly observed my lack of a weapon by comparison.
He was a youth of about twenty, well-muscled in a very lean sinewy sort of way, and he had hawkish features and eagle feathers woven into his braid. Stripes of red war paint crossed his cheeks and chest. Strings of yellowing teeth that I couldn’t identify, but that had surely belonged to some quite fearsome beast based on their size and sharpness, adorned his wrists and ankles. All in all, he appeared to be the ideal specimen of the Savajun warrior. Except, of course, for that bit about trying to flee from battle. But the raiding party hadn’t respected the twins’ wish to flee from them and leave us alone, so I wasn’t about to respect his belated wish to flee.
He let out a triumphant cry and charged me with the tomahawk. I jumped backward to avoid his first wild swing that would have carved my stomach open. Then as he raised his tomahawk for a second time, I ran forward and seized his wrist. He tried of course to yank it out of my grasp. We struggled for a split second. Then I managed to get my hand on the haft of the tomahawk itself, and I knew that it was over for the Savajun warrior. He mustered more force than before to yank the tomahawk out of my grasp, and might have succeeded, if not for one very important factor. His empty hand simply flailed backward into the air, while the suddenly miniature tomahawk remained in my more constricted grip.