by John Daulton
The current wasn’t swift, but there was a solid thirty spans from bank to bank. The water was clearer this far downriver, away from the convergence of the many creeks and lesser rivers that formed the Desertborn, and at least he could see through its hazy green transparency. By the time he was halfway across, he’d come even with where he’d seen Kaige grappling with the naiad. As the current carried him past, he could see the hole into which the naiad was dragging the youngster. Kaige was still putting up some fight, but not much. He’d been alert enough to hook his boots into some roots, preventing the water nymph from dragging him all the way in, but that seemed to be all he could maintain. He couldn’t possibly hold his breath much longer.
Ilbei swam for all his might toward the opposite bank. The rope around his waist went taut and threatened to swing him back to the bank to which it was tied. He dove down and grabbed roots jutting out from the opposite side. They were slick as a snot-covered ice lance and extremely hard to hold, but desperation gave him claws. He pulled his way back upstream, one root at a time as if they were the twisting rungs of a submerged ladder. Finally, he got to where Kaige’s boots were. He came close enough to grab the soldier’s ankle. Planting his feet against the edge of the hole, Ilbei hauled with all his strength, drawing the soldier out like a great arrow from a muddy wound. Through the water, he could hear Kaige trying desperately not to breathe the river in, the anvil thumps of stifled gasps, his lungs pounding against his will with an insistent reflex. Ilbei grabbed him by the front of his pants and an ankle and lifted him upward, thrusting with short, powerful legs, driving for the surface and shoving him into the air.
He saw the furious face of the naiad coming out at him as he did. She was beautiful beyond anything he’d ever seen, a pale blue figure of statuesque femininity with a face nearly divine. Her nose was narrow and dainty between two sea-green eyes. Her lips, though twisted into a silent snarl, promised a kiss that would finish a man on the spot. And yet, despite that promise, that lure, Ilbei did not lose his head. He blinked and turned away.
He’d left his pickaxe, his weapon of choice, on the raft, but he had a sharp knife, which he drew and held poised to strike. His own breath was growing short, but he knew better than to rise up and offer the creature his feet while he breathed. Who would pull him out?
“Back, shrew!” he called, but the words, submerged as they were, were drowned by the water coursing by.
She did draw back—and stopped. He glanced over his shoulder and saw it. He also saw that her rage was gone, as if knocked loose by his threatening command and carried off by the currents. She looked as if she might cry.
He watched the melting away of her anger, the softening of that beautiful face, her succulent mouth turned down at the corners and quivering a bit. It was heartbreaking. She was so sad. So beautiful. So tempting. Light dappled her soft blue skin, her breasts gently buoyant, all torment, taunt and promise. Ilbei wanted to apologize. To explain. He started toward her, his knife hand lowering, his free hand reaching out, but he was just old enough to realize his mistake. He caught her watching him. His own eyes narrowed, his lips curled in. With a quickness that belied the bowed nature of his legs, he pushed off from the bank, not up toward breath—where she had expected him to go, where she darted in anticipation—but downstream, low and away.
He straightened his body like a dart and shot out into the current where it was swifter, then bent himself against the current as the rope went taut again. This time, he angled his body like a rudder and steered himself upward and toward the opposite bank.
It worked well, and quickly, and he came right up, gasping for air, grasping into the mud for the purchase by which he might haul himself free. He shouted at his companions as soon as he could breathe well enough to do so. “Pour the gods-be-damned wine! Pour it into the water!”
He got hold of a thick clump of weeds and clambered up onto the bank, still gasping as he wriggled clear of the water. He spun round and crabbed backwards, his knife in his fist, ready to fight. He watched the churning current for signs of her, for where she would rise up and once more set the full force of temptation upon him, the will-draining power of a magical allure, but she did not. She did not chase him at all.
She was moving toward the others instead, swimming against the current as easily as if she were in a quiet little pond, raised to her waist above the waters and having mesmerized them all to statues, their round mouths as hollow and vacant as their minds.
“Give her the wine, for Mercy’s sake, ya fools. The wine!” He shouted it as he ran back up the bank.
Jasper was the first to look up, Ilbei’s voice jarring him free of the stupefying loveliness for a time. He blinked rapidly and made a point of looking up and away.
“I love you,” the water creature said, looking directly into Meggins’ eyes instead.
“I love you too,” Meggins replied. He stepped toward her, reaching out with the wine he’d brought at Ilbei’s command.
“Meggins, ya sod, pour the wine into the water,” Ilbei called, still closing the distance between them as fast as his bowed legs could run.
Meggins turned, dazed, the addled remnants of his mind staring through the orifices of his pupils like a prisoner through his cage.
Ilbei snatched the wineskin from his hand and yanked the stopper off, but Jasper grabbed his wrist and yanked it back as Ilbei began to squeeze. The jet of red liquid shot uselessly into the grass.
“Jasper, by the gods!” Ilbei began to swear, but Jasper, for once, cut him off.
“Potameide,” the young wizard said, his head shaking steadily side to side. “She won’t like the wine.”
Ilbei scowled at him, blinking, confused. Meggins took another step toward the beautiful figure in the water beckoning him, her soft eyes batting, lips pouting at his delay. The water running from her body shaped her figure with a sheen. “Be with me,” she said to him.
Ilbei jerked his hand free from Jasper’s grasp, but Jasper snatched at it again, spastically, his grip on Ilbei’s wrist weak, but his purpose urgent and clear. “You’ll only anger her with that. You need mead. Give her mead if you must give her alcohol, or better still, just honey. Even milk will do. But not wine. She’ll kill us all if you poison her water with that wine.”
Ilbei glared at the scrawny magician, deciding whether to break his fingers or heed what he had to say. “They taught us wine up north. Everyone knows wine will suit a nymph, satyr-lovin whores they are.”
“Some northern varieties, yes. The nymphs of Great Forest and the Daggerspines are known to favor wine, but not this one. She’s a potameide of the old-world kind. Just look.” He pointed with a movement of his face, unwilling to let go of Ilbei’s wrist.
Meggins stepped into the water. Ilbei heard the splash and grabbed him by the waist with his free hand, scooping him into the crook of his arm and flinging him up the bank as if he were some great fish Ilbei had caught. He spun back to face Jasper right after, his hand twitching to pour the wine. But there was such conviction in Jasper’s eyes.
Jasper saw the hesitation and pointed. “Look,” he said again. “Count her ribs. There are only three pairs visible below the line of her breast. Potameides have only twenty ribs. You can see the missing floating pairs are conspicuously absent. There can be no doubt.” He jerked his scrawny arm forward as if feinting with a short, pale spear. “Just look.”
Ilbei turned back, glanced at the breathtaking beauty approaching and looked quickly away. He didn’t want to fall under the spell.
“I can see your future,” she promised Meggins, who was on his feet and heading for the water again. “Can you imagine our happiness together?”
“I can! I can!” Meggins replied.
Ilbei backhanded the bewitched private, belting him so hard he was knocked clean out, crumpling as if his body had lost all its bones. “Sorry, son,” Ilbei said, even as he turned back to Jasper—who had made the mistake of looking the nymph in the eyes again. “Son of a jackal,�
�� he swore. He slapped the gangly wizard, more gently than he had Meggins. Jasper blinked back at him, thoughts returning once again. “Go get it then,” Ilbei commanded him.
“Get what?”
“The honey. In Hams’ crates.”
Jasper had to blink a few more times to figure out what Ilbei was talking about, but a glance toward the potameide reminded him. He paused briefly, regarding Meggins lying there motionless, but he went straight off down to the raft after. He jumped aboard, stumbling upon landing, but he managed to catch himself before falling off over the far side.
Ilbei turned and threatened the nymph with his dagger, taking care to stare at her stomach, which was hardly less compelling than her face, but not so pleasant as to cost him his ability to think. “Stay off my lads, sister,” he said. “They got troubles enough without the likes of you gettin yer hooks into em.”
“I love them,” she said. “They shine with the beauty of youth.”
“That they do, and I’m fixin to make sure they rot it off slow, same as I done. Now stay where ya are, or I’ll carve ya up so as ya ain’t so fine to look on no more. Blimey, I will.”
“I can make them happy,” she promised.
“Happy for a half minute, then dead. Young fellers like these don’t weigh them both the same—least not once the first is done. But I got the measure of it fine.” He stepped forward with the knife. “Save us both the trouble and swim on along.”
He looked down to the raft and saw Jasper rifling through Hams’ supplies. He glanced back to his left where Hams stood, still mesmerized. At least she had no interest in the older man. Stunned stupid though he was, he was not easing himself into a drowning death by her attentions. There was some advantage to the invisibility of old age.
She glided nearer to the shore and put one long, slender leg up onto the bank, the water running down it like a skin of glass.
“By the gods, woman,” Ilbei gasped. “Climb back into that water afore I have to do somethin will haunt me all my years.” His heart yammered in his chest, his pulse pounding.
Jasper was running up the bank, his skinny legs visible, as he’d drawn up his robes like a lady saving her skirts from a muddy road. “I have it. I have it,” he called.
He was panting by the time he’d covered the distance between the raft and Ilbei’s position on the bank. He paused when he saw the long, water-slicked limb of the potameide, and traced the line of Ilbei’s seeming hypnotism from the shapely flesh back to Ilbei’s glazing eyes.
“Oh dear,” he said. He turned to the idyllic vision of feminine allure and, careful not to look her in the eyes, held out the honey he’d found, twisting off the lid of the jar. “A gift,” he said, staring carefully at the water’s edge. He poured the honey down, the line of it, like Hams’ first line of drool had, lowering itself lazily into the water, a golden thread that thinned as it stretched toward the river flowing by.
The moment it touched the water, they could all breathe easier. It was as if, in that instant, some smothering cloud had lifted, a numbing fog blown off by a honey-flavored wind.
Ilbei staggered backward, stumbling as if he’d been in the midst of a tug-of-war when the rope broke. He landed on his backside at the top of the riverbank and sat watching as the naiad, Jasper’s potameide, knelt at the water’s edge, winding the honey around her finger as the current stretched it like a rivulet of molten gold. She pulled her hand out and slipped a slender digit into her mouth, sucking on it slowly—sumptuously by Ilbei’s account. Her breast swelled with contentment, also sumptuous by Ilbei’s account, and she smiled at Jasper and reached for the jar. He handed it to her, and then she slipped away, melting back into the water as if she were made of the stuff.
Jasper watched after her for a moment more, then turned back to Ilbei, who was still staring into the place where she had disappeared. “You see,” Jasper said. “A potameide.”
Four full minutes would pass in silence before Ilbei nodded, acknowledging that Jasper had been right.
Chapter 4
With Kaige collected from the opposite shore and Meggins revived with a splash of cold water, Ilbei’s squad made their way downriver to the landing point. They found the other raft hauled out of the water at a place just above where the Softwater River joined the Desertborn. As expected, Ilbei and his raft mates were late enough that the occupants of the first raft were not only out of the water, they were well underway setting up camp. Someone had a fire ablaze, so Ilbei sent Hams scurrying to do his part in preparing the evening’s meal for the platoon, near two dozen fresh-caught trout flopping on a line over his shoulder as he ran.
Ilbei helped Kaige pull the raft up the bank, and then the two of them made their way to the camp being erected on a modest rise a few hundred spans from the river.
Soldiers worked in pairs to put up small two-man tents, and Ilbei had paired Kaige with Jasper despite the obvious intellectual conflicts. He was fairly sure Ferster Meggins would have tormented either of them to no end, and if the wiry warrior angered the giant one, Ilbei suspected Meggins would be mangled straight away. And perhaps worse, if Meggins upset Jasper, well, it was hard to tell what the magician might do. Despite over a day on the river, Ilbei still hadn’t found out what the wizard was capable of.
He’d thought about asking, but there wasn’t a polite way to do it—not that Ilbei bothered with that sort of thing when it came to his men. The truth was, magicians always left Ilbei a little unsettled, no matter how many years he’d worked with them. Most times they were useful enough when need arose, but that was, being completely honest, relatively rare. There just wasn’t that much fighting anywhere these days. It had been a long time since the Orc Wars were won, centuries, and the occasional flare-ups that did happen were always just that: flare-ups. Some clan of orcs or another, emboldened by an imbecile chieftain, would come pouring out of a mountainous pass somewhere, hack into a farming village, fishing town or mining camp, and then kill everyone, eat some of them and burn the rest. Shortly after, the savages would be annihilated by the overwhelming forces of Her Majesty’s army, which she could get teleported into the area on nearly a moment’s notice upon receiving word of the attack. And that was pretty much it. The simple truth was that only in small seams along the edges of the duchies and marks—where boundaries were gray and enthusiasm for authority meant not spitting when someone spoke a noble family’s name—was there much cause for regular army work: situations like the mission they were on. If Ilbei could have had his way, he’d have come without a mage. Without any mage, not just without Jasper. He hardly needed a wizard to deal with simple highway robbery.
But Ilbei didn’t get his way, because they hadn’t asked him. So here he was. And there was Jasper, buried by the onslaught of a dingy white army tent, the poorly planted pole having collapsed, leaving him to thrash about beneath the canvas. Ilbei sighed as he watched. It looked like a ghost having a seizure. Jasper’s tent mate stood silently by, the brawny Kaige seemingly torn between assistance and laughter. Ilbei wondered if his decision to pair them had been a terrible one. He’d hoped between the two of them they’d make one functioning soldier, but perhaps he’d missed his bet.
He stomped over to the moaning heap and set himself to liberating his mage, hauling folds of canvas free and snapping at Jasper to “be still” while he untangled the rope from the wizard’s neck and left arm. “How can ya come from a place like Alumall and not know how to pitch a tent?” he marveled as he worked. “Ya said ya weren’t present fer most a’ yer boot camp, but surely yer people back home took ya out of the cabin from time to time?”
“Why would they?” Jasper asked upon being freed. He sat back on his heels and smoothed his robes over his knees.
Ilbei started to answer, but the expectant look on Jasper’s face suggested that whatever the answer was, it should be obvious. It wasn’t, but Ilbei didn’t care what it was. He was sure it would be ridiculous, so instead he set himself to teaching Jasper how to pitch the tent, ho
ping that somehow the process would stick.
An hour later, the platoon, minus two sentries, sat around the fire devouring the evening’s meal. For a time, all that could be heard was the tink-tink of tin spoons and steel knives on the metal trays, the men and women ravenous as a locust swarm.
Not long after, wineskins were passed around, and a soldier from Corporal Trapfast’s squad, a young woman whose name Ilbei had only recently learned was Auria, began to sing. She was accompanied on a fiddle by another woman, who Ilbei had also recently learned was the singer’s sister, Decia. The song was a melancholy one, a story of a garden and long-dead mother’s house. Mournful as it was, Auria’s voice was beautiful. The longing notes and homesick lyrics lay upon Ilbei like the gray clouds of a rainy day, the sort where one can sit on a porch and watch out across the landscape as silvery drops stir up the sweetest scents, wet soil and peat. Home smells.
The boys back home used to call him Hound Dog for his sense of smell, and it was true he had a gift, albeit a reluctant and temperamental one. He could smell a polecat over a mile away, where most folks needed to be within at least a few hundred spans. He could smell ants the moment they crawled into a room. The first time he’d announced that, all the boys had laughed—until he led them straight to a line of the insects just forming through a crack in the floor. They figured Ilbei had set to fool them with that, however, claiming he’d known the ants were there all along. To prove it, they’d blindfolded him and taken him out into the woods. “Find us some ants now,” they challenged.
So he did. He led them to six colonies within a hundred paces of where they stood and told them that somewhere on the other side of a fennel patch there was a blackberry cluster and beyond it a big termite mound.
Several of them tried to find where Ilbei was peeking through his blindfold—which they couldn’t, as he wasn’t—then they ran off together to verify the termite mound was there. Which it was. And thus he was dubbed Hound Dog, and he bore that brand for nearly twenty years. Until his young wife died.