Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon.txt
Page 14
things at once. Deal with what we can handle; solve the immediate problems,
then worry about the next thing. She got unsteadily to her feet. “There’s a
storm coming. That’s our first problem. We have to get shelter, then—water,
warmth, and weapons. I think we’d better salvage what we can while we can
before the rain comes and ruins it.”
He got shakily to his feet, nodding. “Right. The tent—even if we could cut
poles for it, I’m not sure we could get it up properly with both of us hurt. I don’t
think the basket will be good for much in the way of shelter—”
“Not by itself, but two of the sides and part of the bottom are still intact,” she
pointed out. “We can spread the canvas of the tent out over that by hand, and
use the remains to start a fire.” She stared at it for a moment. So did he.
“It looks as if it’s supported fairly well by those two saplings,” he pointed
out. “The open side isn’t facing the direction I’d prefer, but maybe this is better
than trying to wrestle it around?”
She nodded. “We’ll leave it where it is, maybe reinforce the supports. Then
we’ll clear away the wreckage and the supplies, cut away what’s broken and
tie in more support for the foundation by tying in those saplings—”
She pointed with her good hand, and he nodded.
“Look there, and there,” he said, pointing himself. “If we pile up enough
stuff, we’ll have a three-sided shelter instead of just a lean-to.”
That, she agreed, would be much better than her original idea. In a
moment, the two of them were laboring as best they could, her with one hand,
and him with one wing encased and a sprained hind-leg, both of them a mass
of bruises.
He did most of the work of spreading out the canvas over the remaining
sound walls of the basket; he had more reach than she did. She improvised
tent stakes, or used ones she uncovered in the course of moving supplies,
and tied the canvas down as securely as she could manage with only one
hand. One thing about growing up in the household of a kestra’chern; she had
already known more kinds of knots and lashings than even her survival
instructor. She wasn’t certain how Tad felt, but every movement made her
shoulder ache viciously. There’s no choice, she told herself each time she
caught her breath with pain. Rest once it starts to rain; work now. She wasn’t
sure what time it was. They hadn’t gone very far before they had come
crashing down, and they hadn’t been unconscious for long, or else they would
have awakened to find insects trying to see if they were dead yet. Scavengers
didn’t wait long in this kind of forest. That meant it was probably still early
morning. If the rain threatened by those clouds held off, they had until late
afternoon before the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm struck. If our luck
hasn’t gone totally sour, that is. . . .
Eventually, they had their three-sided shelter; the limp tent canvas
stretched tightly over the remains of the basket and the three young trees that
had caught it. There were some loose flaps of canvas that she didn’t quite
know what to do with yet; she might think of something later, but this was the
best they could do for now.
They both turned to the tumbled heaps of supplies; sorting out what was
ruined, what could still be useful even though it was broken, and what was still
all right. Eventually, they might have to sort out a version of what could be
carried away in two packs, but that would be later.
She would fight to remain here, and so would Tad. Walking off should not
become an option until they were certain no one was going to come looking
for them.
Always stay with a wreck, if you can. That much she also remembered very
well from their survival course. The wreck makes the best target for searchers
to find and the first place they’ll look for you when they spot it.
If they could stay here, they had a shelter they could improve more each
day, plus what was left of the supplies. Even things that were ruined might be
useful, if they had long enough to think of a use for them. If they were forced
to leave, there was a lot of potentially useful and immediately useful gear they
would be forced to leave behind.
If. That was the trick. She could not for a moment forget that something out
there had drained away their magic without any warning at all. If the wreck
made a good target for searchers to find, it also made a good target for other
things to find—including whatever knocked them out of the sky. Assume it’s
an enemy, and assume he attacked. That was the wisest course of reasoning
and the one she had to begin planning for.
For that matter, there was no telling what prowled the forest floor. Just
because they hadn’t yet run into any major predators, that didn’t mean there
weren’t any. The longer they stayed in one place, the easier it would be for
predators to locate them.
“Thank goodness for Aubri,” came a muffled sigh from her right, and Tad
came up out of his pile of seeming-rubbish at the same moment. He held in
his talon a nonmagical firestriker, and Blade put aside the pile she’d been
sorting to take it from him. Now she could make a fire with the dry, shellac-
coated splinters of the basket and pile damp, green wood around that fire so
that it could dry out enough to burn.
Tad remained with his pile; evidently he’d found the box that had held all of
the nonmagical gear that Aubri had insisted they take with them. She eyed the
improvised shelter for a moment. Think first, plan, then move. If you ruin
something, there’s no one around to help with repairs. And not much to make
repairs with.
She wanted a way to shelter the fire from the rain, without getting too much
smoke into the shelter. And she didn’t want to take a chance on ruining the
shelter they already had.
Right. There’s the tent flap. I bend those two saplings over and tie them to
the basket, then unfold the tent flap and tie it down—there. And I think I can
do that with one hand. Then maybe we can create a wind barrier with long
branches and some of those big leaves. Plan now firmly in mind, she one-arm
manhandled the saplings into place, then pulled the flap of canvas out over
the arch they formed to protect the area where she wanted to put the fire.
Carefully she tied the end of the tent flap to another broken tree, fumbling the
knot several times; if it wasn’t caught by a big gust of wind, it would hold. At
least they wouldn’t be lacking in wood, even though it was very green. They’d
brought down a two or three days’ supply with them when they fell and they
also had spare clothing to use for kindling. Build the fire first, then see about
that barrier.
She scraped the leaf-litter away from the ground until she had a patch of
bare earth, then carefully laid a fire of basket-bits, broken boxes, and some of
the leaves she found that were actually dry. With the striker came a supply of
tinder in the form of a roll of bone-dry lint lightly pressed together with tiny
paper-scraps. She pulled off a generous pinch a
nd put the rest carefully away,
resealing the tinder box.
The firestriker was a pure nuisance to operate, especially one-handed. She
finally wound up squatting down and bracing the box with one foot, and finally
she got a spark to catch in the tinder and coaxed the glowing ember into a tiny
flame. Frowning with concentration, she bent over her fragile creation and fed
the flame carefully, building it up, little by little, until at long last she had a
respectable fire, with the smoke channeling nicely away from the shelter. At
that point, everything ached with strain.
Breathing a painful sigh, she straightened, and looked over at Tad to see
what he’d found. The thing that caught her eye first was the ax. That, she was
incredibly glad to see! It was small enough to use one-handed, sharp enough
to hack through just about anything. And right now, they needed firewood.
She got painfully to her feet and helped herself to the implement, then
began reducing the debris around their improvised camp into something a bit
more useful to them.
She tossed branches too small to be useful as firewood into a pile at one
side. If they had time before darkness fell or the rain came—whichever was
first—she’d make a brush-palisade around the camp with them. It wouldn’t
actually keep anything out that really wanted to get at them, but animals were
usually wary of anything new, and they might be deterred by this strange
“fence” in their path.
And anything pushing through it is going to make noise, which should give
us some warning. Now just as long as nothing jumps over it. When Tad needs
to urinate, we’ll collect it and spread it around the perimeter, the scent of any
large predator should scare most foragers and nuisance animals away. And
other than that, it is a perfect day, my lord.
The branches holding huge leaves she treated differently, carefully
separating the leaves from the fibrous, pithy branches and setting them aside.
When she had enough of them, and some straight poles, she’d put up that
sheltering wall.
Every time she swung the ax, her body protested, but it wasn’t bad enough
to stop her now that she had some momentum going. If I stop, I won’t be able
to move for hours, so I’d better get everything I can done while I’m still mobile.
Evidently Tad had the same idea; he was sorting through the supplies with
the same single-minded determination she was feeling. He’d found her two
packs of personal supplies, and his own as well and put all of them in the
shelter; laid out next to them was the primitive “Aubri gear.” In between
swings of the ax she made out candles and a candle-lantern, a tiny folded
cook-stove, canteens, two shovels, and three leather water bottles. Two
enormous knives good for hacking one’s way through a jungle lay beside that,
also a neat packet of insect netting, fishing line and hooks, and a compass.
He’d gotten to the weapons they’d carried with them as a matter of course,
and she grimaced to look at them. They were largely useless in their present
circumstances. Her favorite bow was broken; the smaller one was intact, but
she couldn’t pull it now. Nor could she use the sword Tad was placing beside
the oiled-canvas quivers of arrows. Beside that he laid his set of fighting-
claws—which might be useful, except that he couldn’t walk while wearing
them.
And what are we going to do if we ‘re driven away from here and something
attacks us on the trail? Ask it politely to wait while he gets his claws on ?
But her heart rose in the next moment, because he had found a sling! He
placed it beside his claws, and two full pouches of heavy lead shot beside it.
Now that she could use, and use it well, even with only one hand!
That gave her a little more energy to swing, and his next find added to that
energy, for it was a short spear with a crosspiece on it, like a boar-spear. It
had broken, but mostly lengthwise with the grain of the haft, and what
remained was short enough to use one-handed. I can keep us fed with the
sling; with the knife and the spear I can fight things off. He has his beak and
talons, which are not exactly petty weapons. And he has some magic.
All gryphons had at least a small command of magic; Tad didn’t have a lot,
not compared to his father, but it might be useful. . . .
But she shivered again, thinking about what Tad’s magic might attract, and
decided that she had chopped enough wood. She ringed the fire with the
green logs, stacked the rest at the back of the lean-to, and piled the remains
of the basket that she had chopped up wherever she could under shelter. I
don’t think I want him using any magic until we know for certain that whatever
sucked the magic out of the basket isn’t going to bother us.
She joined Tad in his sorting, sadly putting aside some once-magical
weapons that were now so much scrap. Unfortunately, they were shaped too
oddly to be of any immediate use. The best purpose they could be put to now
was as weights to hold pieces of canvas down to protect more useful items—
like wood—from the rain.
She found the bedding at the bottom of the spill and took it all into the lean-
to to spread on the ground, over mattresses of leaves and springy boughs.
She made another trip with more assorted items and the weapons and gear
she could actually use now. The rest, including some broken items, she laid
under a piece of canvas; she might think of something to do with them later.
Most of the equipment was just plain ruined, and so was a great part of
their food. The rations that survived the smash were, predictably, the kind a
mercenary army normally carried; dried meat and a hard ten-grain ration-
biscuit made with dried vegetables and fruit. This was not exactly a feast, but
the dried meat would sustain Tad, and the hard ration-bread was something
that a person could actually live on for one or two months at a time.
He wouldn’t enjoy living on it, but it was possible to do so without suffering
any ill consequences.
She paused, and took a closer look at the smashed and ruined food. At the
moment, some of it was still edible, though it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
Better save the rations for tonight, and eat what we can of this. She
gathered together enough of the food to make a very hearty meal, and placed
it by the fire, then laboriously took the rest out into the forest and deposited it
a goodly way away from the camp. Better not let the local fauna associate the
camp with food. They could set snares another time, for the curious, to
supplement the dried-meat ration.
Time for that windbreak-wall beside the fire. She stuck the ends of four of
the long, whippy branches into the soil and tied the tops to whatever she
could reach along the supported tent flap, using her teeth and her one good
hand. Then she threaded the leaves on another of the long branches,
overlapping them like shingles. When she came to the end of the branch, she
tied that along the base of the four wall supports, about a hand’s length from
the ground, once again using teeth as well as her hand. Then she
went back
to threading leaves on another branch, and tied that one so that it overlapped
the one below it. It didn’t take very long, and when she finished, she thought
that the result, like the shelter, would hold up fairly well as long as no violent
winds came up, which wasn’t too likely under the canopy.
When she left her completed wall, Tad was already sticking brush into the
soft loam of the forest floor to make that brush-fence she had considered. She
joined him, just as thunder rumbled threateningly in the distance. She took a
quick glance over her shoulder, saw that everything worth saving was under
some form of shelter and that the fire still burned well. It’ll survive, I hope.
We’ll just have to hope our luck has turned. She joined Tad in constructing the
“fence.” Their new home wasn’t much of one, but it was, after all, better than
nothing. The work went quickly; the earth was so soft here that it didn’t take
much effort to thrust the thin branches down well enough to anchor them
securely.
Thunder rumbled right above them; she glanced up just in time to catch
one of the first fat drops right in her eye.
A heartbeat later, as they were scrambling back to the shelter of the tent,
the sky opened up. Together they huddled under the canvas; it was a very
close fit, but no closer than it had been when the tent was still a tent.
Water poured out of the sky at a fantastic rate. Now she was glad that she
had brought everything under the lean-to that she could, as she found it; she’d
seen waterfalls with less water cascading down them! It all came straight
down, too, without a sign of any wind to blow it sideways. There must have
been some high winds at treetop level, though; the trunks of trees nearest her
swayed a little as she watched them. The trees acted as a buffer between
them and whatever wind the storm brought with it.
There was no moment when lightning was not illuminating some part of the
sky, and there were times when she saw the fat raindrops seemingly hanging
in the air due to a trick of the flickering light.
The rain knocked loose what branches hadn’t come down with them; one
or two thudded against the shelter, and she was glad that there was canvas
and the basket between them and the debris. Canvas alone would have