When Born-in-Snow returned to camp an hour before sunrise, his hands and war club were dark with blood.
He silently hitched his mammoth to the wagon, and they made their way into Craal.
The journey to the fortress seemed to last hours. As they neared, Wisteria expected shots to ring out from one of the towers, but Born-in-Snow guided his mammoth through the great gates and entered the quiet city.
From the pass above, the fortress had appeared to be huge, but up close, it seemed small, and Wisteria could see that the city had been made to look larger from above, for the front wall was merely a façade that nearly blocked off the entire pass.
Within, the streets were quiet and deserted. No one stirred at the windows. No dogs barked from the streets.
The load on the wagon creaked as the mammoth plodded through the narrow streets. Holding pens stood in a courtyard—iron cages with frozen watering troughs—all located where the captives could be constantly watched.
In the ground around these cages, thirty-two red spears were raised in a circle. Impaled upon each spear was the body of a Blade Kin, or their wives or children.
“Shall we burn the city before we leave?” Scandal asked.
Phylomon said. “I can think of no better way to alert the army below than to set fire to their fortress.”
“We can’t just leave the fortress to be used again!” Tull answered.
“Even if we tore it down stone by stone,” Phylomon said, “Do you think it would stay down for a month? No. leave it. Let’s search the houses, to check for survivors.”
So Wisteria followed, and the men traveled together, spears at ready. Scandal proved himself an eager warrior, and he raced from room to room ahead of the others, picking up gold bracelets, bottles of wine, and stuffing them down his shirt.
In one dark hole that smelled of feces they found four starved Thralls, two men and their wives, slaves who had been caught trying to escape. All four had been brutally tortured, branded with hot irons. Phylomon gave the slaves their freedom, and they fell at his feet.
“God bless! God bless!” the Thralls said.
“Please,” Phylomon told them, “take what you want from the city and run to your freedom quickly. We don’t know how long it will be before more Blade Kin arrive.” The men gave thanks and went to loot the guard towers of weapons.
Phylomon searched diligently, and in one guard room he found what he desired. “Traveling papers!” he said, holding them in triumph. “No good citizen of Craal would be caught in the wilderness without them.” He filled them out on the spot. “Congratulations,” he said, giving the papers to Tull, Ayuvah, Scandal and Wisteria. “You are now all vassals, owned by Lord Tantos of Bashevgo, High Lord of Retribution. May you serve him well!”
When they reached the inn, Scandal ran ahead of all of them, and he threw open the doors and shrieked. Wisteria peered in. On the floor was a cleaning woman, naked to the waist, her left breast removed, scrubbing the blood of her dead masters from the floor with a rag and a barrel.
She moaned a monotonous song as she worked, and seemed unaware of the party entering the room. She had dark brown hair and a wrinkled face.
Wisteria cried, “Javan? Javan Tech?” she asked, for the woman fit Phylomon’s description perfectly. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
The woman slowly turned to gaze up to Wisteria with blank eyes. Horror filled Wisteria. Yet when the woman gazed up, she proved to be a stranger, someone Wisteria had never seen before.
“You’re free!” Scandal told the woman. “We came to free you.” The slave continued working, singing her tuneless song, wiping the blood from the floors.
“Leave her,” Phylomon said. “Her mind is gone.”
“Wait!” Wisteria said, “Wait!” and she knelt beside the old woman. “Do you know your name?”
“Ruva Brightman, better than most,” the old woman crooned, weaving her words into the song.
“Where were you taken slave?” Wisteria asked.
“In South Bay. South Bay. Far away in South Bay,” the woman said.
“Who took you slave?”
“Feremon Scatman, will catch you when he can,” the woman sang.
Wisteria looked for a quill and paper, but found only paper. She knelt on the messy floor and wrote the woman’s accusation in blood, handed it to Phylomon.
“If you find him, kill him.” Wisteria said.
Phylomon put his arms around her, and Wisteria buried her face into his fur robes and wept.
***
Chapter 16: Escape into Craal
On the southern edge of the fortress at Gold River Pass were four long stone buildings. The muddy ground in front of them had been trampled by mastodons and oxen. As the day warmed, a cold gray rain splattered in the courtyard. The men checked these buildings last, and found thousands of large clay pots filled with grain, beans, corn, and dried fruits and vegetables.
The party stood for a long time, looking at the pots, and Phylomon frowned. “Food for the armies of Craal,” he said. “Enough to feed ten thousand men for a summer.”
“But there couldn’t have been fifty Blade Kin in this tiny fortress!” Scandal said.
“The food must be here for warriors yet to come,” Ayuvah said, and Tull realized that he was right.
Phylomon licked his lips. “The army down on the plain. They must be what, fifteen miles from here?”
“I’d say twelve,” Tull answered.
Phylomon said, “Then unless I am mistaken, the bulk of them could be here by mid-afternoon.”
Scandal’s eyes widened, and as one they rushed for their wagon. Tull loaded some of the foodstuffs into the wagon hurriedly while Ayuvah ran downhill to scout the road into Craal, and Phylomon spoke to Born-in-Snow in finger language.
When they were ready, Born-in-Snow leapt atop his mammoth’s back and urged the beast forward at a run.
For two hours they hurried down the road, making eight miles, until they reached the foothills below. By then, they were down beneath the snow line, in a land of scrub oaks and dry grasses. They heard mastodons trumpeting in the distance.
Ayuvah came running back up the road toward them. “A great army is coming; my heart stops with fear! They bring war mastodons and wagons, and many warriors.”
Born-in-Snow pulled his own mammoth off the road, leading it into the woods, and for the next half hour everyone struggled to cover the huge tracks of the mammoth, hiding their trail. They pulled their wagon behind a small hill and into a grove of pine.
The trumpeting of the mastodons became louder, and Born-in-Snow’s mammoth trumpeted a challenge in return, then shifted from foot to foot, sniffing the air.
Born-in-Snow climbed down, pushed his mammoth’s shoulder, and after a moment of confusion the great beast lay on its side and feigned death.
Tull and Ayuvah got their war shields and hid behind them in the shadows of the pines as they watched the army of Craal pass in the rain. Two hundred mastodons walked before them, shaking the earth and dragging sleds loaded with food and tents.
Thralls, Neanderthal slaves, stood atop two of the mastodons and pounded great drums, keeping time for the march. Many mastodons wore armor of leather with brass rings sewn in, helmets for the head, and they were covered with red blankets while their tusks were studded with iron.
The Blade Kin followed behind—men in black lacquered armor with red capes, earless Neanderthals with Black Cyclops insignia upon their shields. All of the Blade Kin carried both rifles and swords. Tull tallied seven thousand of them before they passed.
“At the rate they are going, it will take three hours for them to reach the fortress,” Ayuvah said. “When they see what we have done, they will hunt us.”
Phylomon murmured his voice soft and strained, “As long as they don’t find where we left the trail, we will be all right. They obliterated our tracks for us down this far. With any luck, they’ll race up higher into the hills, into the snow, thinking that they are in
search of escaping slaves. Snow has been falling all night, covering our tracks over the pass.” He pondered a moment, then ordered, “Ayuvah, start leading our people into the woods. Go three or four miles north, but make sure you can’t be seen from the pass above, then wait in the woods. I’ll erase your trail.”
“You must also hide our scent,” Ayuvah said. Neanderthals had a much stronger sense of smell than humans, and the Blade Kin were trained to hunt by scent.
“The rain will have to hide it for us.”
Ayuvah guided the party through the woods, skirting meadows where the summer dirt was packed, while Phylomon stayed behind to obscure their trail.
That night it continued to rain heavily, and they traveled in the dark, guided by the Hukm.
No Blade Kin ever came searching for them.
The next morning, Scandal credited Phylomon’s skill at obscuring their trail for their luck in escaping, but Phylomon said, “We have escaped for a day, but our trail through the woods will not be hard to pick up, if the Blade Kin follow it. I suspect that right now they are searching for us on the other side of the pass, but in time their gaze may turn this way. We must make it to a road quickly, a well-used road where our tracks will mingle with those of others.”
So they crept through the shadows of the mountains.
For two days, he guided them until they came to a dirt road, rutted by wagon tracks, heading north. The men stood looking at the road. It had grown thick with summer grass, yet it had seen heavy use only recently.
“Where do you think it leads?” Scandal asked.
Phylomon smiled at them. “It links Seven Ogre River and Greenstone. This is the road the cooks use when they go to make their serpent catch. If I am not mistaken, we have but a hundred miles to go!”
Tull breathed a great sigh of relief. He had hardly imagined that they could be so close.
There were fresh wagon tracks everywhere, leading up from the heartland of Craal. Some wagons were pulled by oxen, others by mastodons. “It appears we are not far behind the fishermen for the Lords of Craal,” Phylomon remarked. “It is a good sign. From now on, we will be just another fishing party.”
So the group began to travel in disguise.
Scandal’s forged documents proclaimed him a newlywed cook with Wisteria as his wife, out to hunt serpents as a delicacy for high Lord Tantos, while Tull and Ayuvah drove the mastodon—mere slaves. Phylomon, Born-in-Snow headed for the woods and followed at a distance.
Tirilee’s scent had abated, and Phylomon had half a mind to let her rejoin the group, but didn’t dare.
So she followed behind discreetly, blending into the trees, a ghost on their trail that Tull only spotted from time to time.
Twice that afternoon, small bands of soldiers stopped the travelers on the road and harassed them. The soldiers were all Neanderthals, Blade Kin in black armor, but few of them carried rifles. When they saw Scandal’s traveling papers, signed by the High Lord of Retribution himself, they grew timid and slinked away.
For a week the party traveled north into Craal, and every day they spotted more soldiers, as if the search for them were heating up.
In that time Tull came to see that Craal’s sky shone as blue as it had at home, that its grass could be as green, as anywhere on Anee. Nature seemed to conspire to prove her beneficence, and whereas earlier they had suffered under stifling rains, now the sun came out and shone splendidly, as it sometimes will in the fall. Tull almost welcomed the checks by the Blade Kin, for he relished the fear that came upon their faces when they read Scandal’s documents.
They reached the river, high up where the serpents did not run, and passed through a forest of aspen.
That night, when Phylomon and the others crept into camp to eat, Tirilee looked back at the trees longingly, and the aphrodisiac perfume of her body wafted through camp.
***
Chapter 17: First Catch
The next morning, Tirilee was gone. Scandal stood gazing up the trail behind them, toward a hill where a stand of aspen gleamed, its bark stained gold in the morning sun. “She’s found her trees. We’ve likely seen the last of her.”
Tull felt a pang of loss. He would have liked to have wished her goodbye, given a gift of food. But he knew that it was better this way.
That day, they entered a nameless mining camp where dirty-faced Neanderthals watched them pass. Ayuvah said, “I’d have thought there would be more people here.”
“There were forty-six million people in Craal at last census,” Scandal said. “Two million in the city of Craal itself, seven million on the Cinnabar Plains, five million in the isles of Bashevgo. But the Crawlies are farmers and miners. They don’t wander in the wilderness like Pwi. Even Denai has over a hundred thousand people.”
Ayuvah whistled, for in all of the Rough there were not so many people.
The Seven Ogre River began to wind alongside the road, disappearing from time to time behind stands of oak and alder. It was not nearly so deep or wide as the Smilodon River, and it meandered through low hills.
Tull hoped to find the serpent hatchlings quickly, but they followed the path downriver for a week before they came upon the first fishermen, six Thralls heading home. They had a long, flat wagon pulled by eight oxen. The sides of the wagon were only two feet high, and the wagon was caulked to keep the water in. There were several hatches for access to the serpents, and Tull guessed that the monsters were kept in separate compartments.
The Thralls eyed Scandal’s strange gear, particularly the enormous barrel on back of the wagon, and Tull realized how unbalanced his barrel was compared to their own long sleek wagons.
“You are a couple of weeks late, aren’t you?” a Thrall asked.
Tull’s mouth seemed suddenly too dry to speak, and he wondered if he had missed the run altogether.
“Our mammoth died,” Ayuvah put in, “and we had to turn back for another.”
“Did you catch many serpents?” Tull asked.
The Thrall gauged Tull warily. “Enough. If you hurry, you will reach the end of the run.” Tull nodded, and would have passed by if the Thrall hadn’t spoken again. “Your mammoth’s tusks show that it is owned by Hukm.”
Ayuvah said, “My Lord bought it from a trader who stole it from Hukm out in the Rough.”
“Your Lord is an idiot to send it so close to the White Mountains,” the Thrall said. “May the gods grant that he die young so that you can be sold to a wiser master.”
“Tchezza fae. So be it,” Tull and Ayuvah said in unison.
When the fishermen had passed, Tull stopped the mammoth for a moment and peered back at Scandal.
“God,” Scandal said, holding his chest. “Goddamn.”
“We’re too late for the harvest!” Ayuvah said, almost weeping.
“I thought we were only a week behind schedule,” Scandal said. “I thought it wouldn’t matter!”
“The harvest came earlier than expected,” Tull said. “If we’d known, we could have pushed harder.” He looked back at Scandal and Ayuvah. Wisteria sat beside Scandal, face pale. She began to sob.
“We don’t stop tonight,” Tull said. “We keep moving until dawn. The mammoth can rest when we camp.”
That night, they drove by moonlight through the hills, and at dawn they began to pass fishing camps. At each camp, several Thralls would stand out on a rock that jutted into the water, all holding a single long pole. The pole had a ball of fur tied to it, often with colored rags that looked like feet, and buttons for eyes. They were using jigs that looked like muskrats, Tull realized.
The Thralls bobbed this ball of fur up and down, up and down, trying to entice a serpent to rise and bite.
Scandal had them pull over to a likely spot—a wide bend thick with oak brush for cover, some large flat rocks thrusting out near deep pools.
As soon as the wagon stopped, Tull cut a long sapling, got some hide and cloth from the wagon, and began making a lure. The others turned the barrel upright and filled it
with water.
Chaa had said that Tull must catch the serpents alone, so he found a rock, put his pole into the water, and began to fish.
The pool was deep and blue, and the water flowed over it clear as glass. Tull could see the bottom—speckled rocks and dark patches of algae. He spotted big fish—fall run salmon and huge, striped bass.
The serpents, he knew, often eeled along the bottom, and their backs could change shades of silver, black, or yellow to match their surroundings. They hunted in packs of dozens, or even hundreds, and they acted in concert to drive the fish upstream in great schools so that they could feed at leisure. The water was thick with fish.
Tull put his lure in and began jigging up and down, up and down. For an hour, nothing happened, and his shoulders became weary. Just when he was about ready to take a rest, he saw a huge gaping mouth filled with knives for teeth rise from the river bottom and take the lure.
He shouted for the others and tried to sling the serpent out of the water, but the serpent was huge, and instead of Tull pulling it from the water, the serpent tried to drag him in.
He dropped his pole and jumped to the bank. The serpent wriggled after him. Its head was nearly a yard wide—large enough to swallow him whole, and it had bright red eyes. Twin pairs of spines sprouted from its back, and it watched as Tull clambered up the bank. When he was safe, the serpent slithered back and dove, clutching the lure in its jaws.
Scandal and Ayuvah heard Tull shouting, and they stopped to look at the monster.
“We’ll need smaller ones than that,” Scandal said. “No more than four feet.”
Tull made another lure and tried the rest of the afternoon, but quickly learned why the Thralls had four men working the same jig. The serpents were big, and all of them tried to drag him into the water. One even tried to climb up onto the rock with him and take his leg, totally ignoring the lure. Terrified, Tull reacted quickly, leaping from its jaws. Ayuvah and Scandal begged to help, but Chaa had been explicit—only Tull could catch the serpents.
Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series Page 10