“Give him a beer,” said Ragnarson.
“Eh?”
“Be the hospitable thing to do, wouldn’t it?” He had drunk too much. In that condition he developed a childish sense of humor. There was an old saw, “Drunk as a hoot owl,” about which he had developed a sudden curiosity.
Mocker set his mug before the bird. It drank.
“Well, we’d better see what old Black Face wants.” Bragi recovered the message. “Hunh! Can you believe this? It says he’ll forgive all debts and transgressions—as if any existed—if we’ll just catch him the woman called Mist. That old bastard never gives up. How long has he been laying for Visigodred? ’Tain’t right, hurting a man through his woman.”
Mocker scowled. “Threats?”
“The usual. Nothing serious. Some hints about something he’s afraid to mix in, same as Visigodred.”
Mocker snorted. “Pusillanimous skulker in subterranean tombs, troglodytic denizen of darkness, enough! Let poor old fat fool wither in peace.” He had begun to grow sad, to feel sorry for himself. A tear trickled from one large, dark eye. He reached up and put a hand on Ragnarson’s shoulder. “Mother of self, longtime passing, sang beautiful song of butterflies and gossamer. Will sing for you.” He began humming, searching for a tune.
Ragnarson frowned. Mocker was an orphan who had known neither father nor mother, only an old vagabond with whom he had traveled till he had been able to escape. Bragi had heard the story a hundred times. But in his cups, Mocker lied more than usual, about more personal things. One had to humor him or risk a fight.
The owl, a critic, screeched hideously, hurled himself into the air, fluttered drunkenly eastward. Mocker sent a weak curse after him.
A little later Nepanthe came out and led them to their beds, two morose gentlemen with scant taste for their futures.
T
HREE:
Y
EAR 1002 AFE
T
HE
L
ONG,
M
AILED
R
EACH OF THE
D
ISCIPLE
i) A secret device, a secret admirer
Elana rose wondering if Bragi had reached Mocker’s safely. How soon would he be home? The forest was a refuge for Itaskia’s fugitives. Several bands roamed the North Road. Some had grievances with Bragi. He took his charter seriously, suppressed banditry with a heavy hand. Some would gladly take revenge.
She went to a clothing chest and took out an ebony casket the size of a loaf of bread. Some meticulous craftsman had spent months carving its intricate exterior. The work was so fine it would have eluded the eye but for the silver inlay. She did not know what the carving represented. Nothing within her experience, just whorls and swirls of black and silver which, if studied overlong, dazed the mind.
Her names, personal and family, were inset in the lid in cursive ivory letters. They were of no alphabet she knew. Mocker had guessed it to be Escalonian, the language of a land so far to the east it was just a rumor.
She didn’t know its source, only that, a year ago, the Royal Courier, who carried diplomatic mail between Itaskia and Iwa Skolovda, had brought it up from the capital. He had gotten it from a friend who rode diplomatic post to Libiannin, and that man had received it from a merchant from Vorgreberg in the Lesser Kingdoms. The parcel had come thither with a caravan from the east. Included had been an unsigned letter explaining its purpose. She didn’t know the hand. Nepanthe thought it was her brother Turran’s.
Turran had tried Elana’s virtue once. She had never told Bragi.
With a forefinger she traced the ivory letters. The top popped open. Within, on a pillow of cerulean silk, lay a huge ruby raindrop. Sometimes the jewel grew milky and light glowed within the cloudiness.
This happened when one of her family was in danger. The intensity of light indicated the peril’s gravity. She checked the jewel often, especially when Bragi was away.
There was always a mote at the heart of the teardrop. Danger could not be eliminated from life. But today the cloudiness was growing.
“Bragi!” She grabbed clothes. Bandits? She would have to send someone to Mocker’s. But wait. She had best post a guard all round. There had been no rumors, but trouble could come over the Silverbind as swiftly as a spring tornado. Or from Driscol Fens, or the west. Or it could be the tornado that had entered her thoughts. It was that time of year, and the jewel did not just indicate human dangers.
“Ragnar!” she shouted. “Come here!” He would be up and into something. He was always the first one stirring.
“What, Ma?”
“Come here!” She dressed hurriedly.
“What?”
“Run down to the mill and tell Bevold I want him. And I mean run.”
“Ah…”
“Do it!” He vanished. That tone brooked no defiance.
Bevold Lif was a Freylander. He was the Ragnarsons’ foreman. He slept at the mill so he would waste no time trekking about the pastures. He was a fastidious, fussy little man, addicted to work. Though he had been one for years, he wasn’t suited to be a soldier. He was a craftsman, a builder, a doer, and a master at it. What Bragi imagined, Bevold made reality. The tremendous development of the landgrant was as much his doing as Ragnarson’s.
Elana didn’t like Bevold. He presumed too much. But she acknowledged his usefulness. And appreciated his down-to-earth solidity.
Lif arrived just as she stepped from the house.
“Ma’am?”
“A minute, Bevold. Ragnar, start your chores.”
“Aw, Ma, I…”
“Go.”
He went. She permitted no disobedience. Bragi indulged the children to a fault.
“Bevold, there’s trouble coming. Have the men arm themselves. Post the sentries. Send someone to Mocker’s. The rest can work, but stay close to the house. Get the women and children here right away.”
“Ma’am? You’re sure?” Lif had pale thin lips that writhed like worms. “I planned to set the mill wheel this morning and open the flume after dinner.”
“I’m sure, Bevold. Get ready. But don’t start a panic.”
“As you will.” His tone implied that no emergency justified abandoning the work schedule. He wheeled his mount, cantered toward the mill.
As she watched him go, Elana listened. The birds were singing. She had heard that they fell silent when a tornado was coming. The cloud cover, just a few ragged galleons sweeping ponderously north, suggested no bad weather. Tornados came with grim black cumulo-nimbus dreadnoughts that flailed about with sweeps of lightning.
She shook her head. Bevold was a good man, and loyal. Why couldn’t she like him?
As she turned to the door, she glimpsed Ragnar’s shaggy little head above a bush. Eavesdropping! He would get a paddling after he brought the eggs in.
ii) Homecoming of a friend
Elana sequestered herself with her teardrop the rest of the morning. She held several through-the-door conversations with Bevold, the last of which, after she had ordered field rations for dinner, became heated. She won the argument, but knew he would complain to Bragi about the wasted workday.
The jewel grew milkier by the hour. And the men more lax.
In a choice between explaining or relying on authority, she felt compelled to choose the latter. Was that part of the jewel’s magic? Or her own reluctance to tell Bragi about Turran’s interest?
By midafternoon the milkiness had consumed the jewel’s clarity. The light from within was intense. She checked the sky. Still only a scatter of clouds. She returned the casket to the clothing chest, went downstairs. Bevold clumped round the front yard, checking weapons for the twentieth time, growling.
“Bevold, it’s almost time. Get ready.”
Disbelief filled his expression, stance, and tone. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“They’ll come from the south.” The glow of her jewel intensified when she turned the pointed end toward
Itaskia.
“Send your main party that way. Down by the barrow.”
“Really…”
What Lif meant to say she never learned. A warning wolfs howl came from the southern woods. Bevold’s mouth opened and closed. He turned, mounted, shouted. “Let’s go.”
“Dahl Haas,” Elana snapped at a fifteen-year-old who had insinuated himself into the ranks. “Get off that horse! You want to play soldier, take Ragnar and a bow up in the watchtower.”
“But…”
“You want me to call your mother?”
“Oh, all right.” Gerda Haas was a dragon.
Elana herded Dahl inside, stopped at the weapons rack while he selected a bow. The strongest he could draw was her own.
“Take it,” she said. She took a rapier and dagger, weapons that had served her well. She had had a bit of success as an adventuress and hire-sword, herself. She added a light crossbow, returned to the horse left by Dahl.
She overtook the men at a barrow mound near the edge of the forest, not far from the head of a logging road which ran to the North Road.
In military matters Bevold was unimaginative. He and the others milled about, in the open, completely unready for action.
“Bevold!” she snapped, “Can’t you take me seriously? What’ll you do if fifty men come out of the woods?”
“Uh…”
“Get run over, that’s what. Put a half-dozen bowmen on the barrow. Where’s Uthe Haas? You’re in charge. The rest of you get behind the barrow, out of sight.”
“Uh…” Bevold was getting red.
“Shut up!” She listened. From afar came the sound of hoofbeats. “Hear that? Let’s move. Uthe. You. You. Up. And nobody shoots till I say. We don’t know who’s coming.” She scrambled up the mound after Haas.
Lying in the grass, watching the road, she wondered what prehistoric people had built the barrows. They were scattered all along the Silverbind.
The hoofbeats drew closer. Why wasn’t she back at the house? She wasn’t young and stupid anymore. She should leave the killing and dying to those who thought it their birthright.
Too late to change her mind now. She rolled onto her back, readied the crossbow. She studied the clouds. She had not looked for castles and dragons in years. Childhood memories came, only to be interrupted when a rider burst from the forest.
She rolled to her stomach and studied him over the crossbow. He was wounded. A broken arrow protruded from his back. He clung weakly to a badly lathered horse. Neither appeared likely to survive the day. Both wore a thick coat of road dust. They had been running hard for a long time. The man’s scabbard was empty. He was otherwise unarmed.
She glimpsed his face as he thundered past. “Rolf!” she gasped. “Rolf Preshka!” Then, “Uthe, get ready.” While the bowmen thrust arrows in the mound for quick use, she waved at Bevold. A lot of horses were coming. She had no idea who their riders might be, but Preshka’s enemies were her own.
Rolf had been her man before Bragi, though Ragnarson didn’t know the relationship’s depth. She still felt guilty when she remembered how she had hurt him. But his love, rare for the time, and especially for an Iwa Skolovdan, was the unjealous kind. The kind that, when at last she had set her heart, had caused him to help her snare Ragnarson.
Preshka, like Bragi, was a mercenary. After Elana’s marriage he had joined Ragnarson as second in command. When Bragi had gotten out, Preshka had joined the party that had beat its way in to the landgrant. But he had been unable to put down roots. Two years later, Bragi’s foster brother, Haaken Blackfang, and Reskird Kildragon had come by. Rolf had gone off with them, leaving a wife and child mystified and hurt.
In her own way, Elana cared for Preshka as much as her husband. Though their relationship had remained proper since her marriage, she missed him. He had been around so long that he had become a pillar of her universe.
Now he was home. And someone was trying to kill him.
iii) Sons of the Disciple
A flash-flood of burnoosed horsemen roared from the wood. Elana had a moment to be startled by their appearance so far from Hammad al Nakir, another to wonder at their numbers—there were forty or fifty, then it was time to fight. “Go!” she shrieked.
Her bowmen leapt up, loosed a flight that sent the leaders tumbling over their horses’ tails, caused tripping, screams, and confusion behind.
Bevold’s group swept round the mound, loosed a flight, abandoned their bows for swords. They crashed the head of the line while confusion yet gripped their foes. In the first minute they looked likely to overwhelm the lot.
“The riders!” bellowed Uthe Haas. “Aim at the riders.”
“Don’t count your chickens, Uthe,” Elana replied from the grass. There was little she could do with her crossbow. “Take what you can get.” Haas, smelling a victory still far from certain, wanted the mounts as prizes.
They almost pulled it off. Half the enemy saddles were clear before they recovered.
The wild riders of Hammad al Nakir had never learned to handle the Itaskian arrow-storm. The appearance of Itaskian bow regiments had ordained their defeat during the wars. In a dozen major battles through Libiannin, Hellin Daimiel, Cardine, and the Lesser Kingdoms, countless fanatics had ridden into those cloth-yard swarms, through six hundred yards of death, and few had survived to hurl themselves upon the masking shieldmen.
But the commander here wasn’t awed. He seized the ground between Lif’s men and the barrow, eliminating the screen Bevold could have provided, then sent everyone unhorsed to get the bows.
“Those are soldiers, not bandits,” Elana muttered. “El Murid’s men.” Royalist refugees from Hammad al Nakir were scattered throughout the western kingdoms, but they were adherents of Haroun’s. They would not be after Preshka. Assuming Rolf was still a friend of bin Yousif.
She got her chance to fight. Two quick shots with the crossbow, then the attackers arrived. Her first had deep, dark eyes and a scimitar nose. His eyes widened when he recognized her sex. He hesitated. Her rapier slipped through his guard. She had a moment before she engaged again.
The man had been middle-aged, certainly a survivor of the wars. If these were all veterans, they were El Murid’s best. Why such an investment to take one man, nearly a thousand miles from home?
Her next opponent was no gentleman. Neither was he a dainty fencer. He knew the limitations and liabilities of a rapier, tried to use the weight and strength of his saber to smash through. As he forced her back, she met his eyes over crashing blades. He could have been the twin of the man she had killed. The fires of fanaticism burned in his eyes, but, having endured the wars, were dampened. He no longer believed El Murid’s salvation could be delivered to the infidel with hammer blows. The Chosen, even in the grace and might of God, had to spread the faith with cunning and finesse. The idolaters were too numerous and bellicose.
The man wasn’t so much interested in killing her as in forcing her out of position. Without a shield, rapier-armed, and physically less powerful, she was the weak point in the defense box they had formed. Her chance lay in taking advantage of his effort.
She parried a feint, thrust short and low at his groin, backed a step
before
he unleashed the edge-blow meant to force her to do just that. She made no effort to parry. His blade slid past a fraction of an inch from her breast. Being a half-second ahead gave her time to thrust at his groin again before he returned to low guard. She scored.
His blocking stroke smashed into her blade near the hilt, bent it dangerously, forced it from the wound. Her own momentum took her to her knees. She used her impetus to prick the thigh of the attacker on her opponent’s left. Then she had to get the rapier up to block her antagonist’s weak followup.
Instead of raining blows upon her while she was down, he used his greater strength to force his weapon down while he tried to knee her in the face. Again she let him have his way. With her left hand, beneath their locked blades, she used her dagge
r, going first for the big vein inside his left thigh, then the ligaments behind his knee. Neither blow was successful, but she hurt him. He backed off to let another man take his place.
The man she had pricked went down. Uthe grabbed the opportunity to force her inside the box. No gentlemanly gesture, she realized. She was becoming more a liability than an asset.
Between and over the heads of the fighters, she tried to see how Bevold was doing.
Not well. He was trying to reach the mound, but his men had become hopelessly disorganized and it seemed unlikely any could push through. Half his saddles were empty anyway. As she watched, Bevold himself succumbed to a blow on the helmet.
And desert men by ones and twos continued to straggle from the forest. Soon they would send a detachment after Rolf.
She looked homeward to check Preshka’s progress. There was no sign of him, but she did see something that buoyed her spirits. Riders in the distance, only specks now, but coming fast, straight through the grainfields.
“Bragi!” she shrieked. “Bragi’s coming!”
Uthe and the others took it up as a war chant, vented a moment of wild ferocity on their enemies.
Elana felt something underfoot. She looked down. Her crossbow. She still had quarrels. She snatched it up, cocked and loaded it, looked for a target.
Just then the man on Uthe’s left, growing too enthusiastic, broke the shield wall. An enemy took instant advantage. He paid the price of his foolishness. The man to his left fell as well.
That two-man hole, for the seconds it existed, loomed ominous. Elana put a bolt into a man trying to open it wider, clubbed a second with the crossbow, bought time for the gap to close.
A square then, with Elana cramped inside, too crowded to do anything but jab with her dagger.
Why was Bragi taking so long?
Only a minute had passed since she had spotted the riders, but it seemed an age. What good help that arrived too late?
iv) To ride against time