“Going to be a fine day,” Ta-se-ho said. “A little cornmeal?”
Aneas watched Looks-at-Clouds get to hir feet with the odd bonelessness that marked the changeling’s physicality. Then s/he walked stiffly after rising; teetering slightly.
“What happened?” Aeanes asked. He smiled gratefully at Ta-se-ho, who put a horn cup of hot tea with wild honey in his hands. The oldest man in the camp, Ta-se-ho was always the first one up; he did everything well, and he seldom complained. And he made fine tea.
Ta-se-ho smiled back. “It must be difficult, giving so many orders,” he said. His Outwaller tone held just the hint of a suggestion of censure.
“You think I give too many orders?” Aneas asked, stung.
Ta-se-ho shrugged and went back to building up the fire. Cigne, the Occitan woman, came silently through the camp on her worn moccasins and reported the camp secure and the sentries unmolested. She stared at Looks-at-Clouds and then caught her hand and kissed her.
“Now that’s a nice piece of news,” Cigne said. “Oh, and Tessen has a doe,” she added. “Cynthia and her bring it in.” Her Occitan accent was very acute when she was tired or excited, and the woman had been up most of the night.
“Sleep,” Aneas said.
She shook her head. “Non, merci,” she said. “I want to help with the boats.”
“We will move tonight if we have the boats ready,” Aneas said softly.
“All the better,” Cigne said. “Clouds, ma cheri, you walk odd-ly.” Cigne laughed and put her arm through the changeling’s arm.
“It is rather odd, is it not?” Looks-at-Clouds said. “Curious. Fascinating.”
Aneas, greatly daring, kissed the changeling on both cheeks. “It’s good have you back,” he said.
“Yes,” Looks-at-Clouds said. “Yes. Interesting.”
Not the reaction he’d expected.
“Guard!” came a call. A horn blew to the south.
Aneas caught his bow from against the tree under which he’d slept and ran for the horn, but he was too late for the action.
“A party,” Lewen said. “A dozen warriors, one of the antlered monsters, some bogglins.”
An antlered former-man lay at the irk’s feet, a single heavy shaft all the way through the thing’s head at the height of the brow ridge.
“I followed Tessen and Cynthia,” he said with a shrug. “Just to cover them. I found these.”
Monts, the royal forester, went past, stopping only to lay a hermetically charged wand on the corpse and then springing to his feet.
“Don’t get caught in a counter-ambush,” Aneas called. He felt like someone’s father, sending them to their first tournament; a foolish reaction, as Monts had probably seen more battle than he had.
By the time the sun was high, the last six canoes were coming together as fast as Irene’s work party could supply pine roots, which they were tearing from the ground in handfuls. The vessels were twenty-four feet long; their hulls were made from the bark of whole trees; each boat had spruce gunnels, forty or fifty ribs, and stems made from trees that had been warped by wind and weather. Aneas had never even seen one built before, although he’d seen them, full of furs, moving on the Great River in his youth.
Ta-se-ho was an exacting builder, and he’d ordered a whole hull unlaced and redone because he didn’t like the wrinkle in the hull. Aneas had the sense to let the older man have his way, and the old man pronounced himself satisfied at noon.
Monts returned without loss, having run down a pair of northern Morean turncoats but no more.
Aneas nodded. “It’s not so bad, brothers,” he said. “If he has patrols looking for us … then he’s not atop us. Double the guards; pack. We’re off at last light.”
He watched Irene and Looks-at-Clouds gathering more spruce root; saw Quill Garter (his own name for a particularly tall Outwaller woman) gathering the tips of spruce trees in a net bag, watched four bogglins stripping a patch of mushrooms. By midafternoon, most of the rescued canvas was dry; the food, such as it was, was packed; a group of Nita Qwan’s Outwallers were weaving baskets to carry food in the boats, and Aneas had seldom felt so useless. He rolled his own blanket roll very tight, and then spent almost an hour of real time casting about in the aethereal.
Late in the afternoon, a wyvern returned, looking smug, which in a wyvern was a certain contracting of the skin around the eyes and beak, and brought Aneas word of two Gallish ships in the river, just off the mouth of the Cranberry River.
“Twenty leagues,” the young wyvern said, as if extremely proud of this feat of counting in human terms. He said it six times.
Aneas bit his lips to avoid laughing, and then gathered his war council: Black Heron, Lantorn, Looks-at-Clouds, Ta-se-ho, Nita Qwan, Monts, and Deadlock, a relative newcomer, an Albinkirk ranger with years of hunting in the north country. But with fewer than two hundred rangers, the council was scarcely secret or private, and a dozen other men and women squatted or sat.
“We leave in an hour,” he said. “The skies are clear, and we can be at the mouth of the Cranberry in the dawn.”
“Are we going to board this ship?” Deadlock asked. He was a tall, thin man with dark skin and black eyes—an Adnacrag longhunter.
Looks-at-Clouds leaned forward. “There have been big changes in Galle,” s/he said. “Let us be careful.”
Aneas looked at hir, puzzled. “Big changes in Galle?” he asked. It was a very odd thing for hir to say.
S/he smiled. “I only repeat what I have heard from Ta-se-ho,” s/he said.
Ta-se-ho raised an eyebrow at the shaman, shrugged, and nodded agreement. “The Red Knight told us that the King of Galle had fallen and that things were changing. At the Inn of Dorling,” he said.
Irene, unsummoned, spoke up. “If we hit them in the dawn, they will not further divide our councils,” she said. “If we stop to parley, and they mean to fight …”
Ta-se-ho grinned at her. “You would make a bad enemy,” he said. “But in this, I think you are wrong. It is wrong to attack men you do not know.”
“Galles slaughtered our people last spring,” Gas-a-ho said.
Ta-se-ho shrugged. “Hurans,” he said. “Not our people.”
Aneas looked around the circle. “I hear what you say. We will be ready to strike them in the dawn,” he said. “If I can find a way to talk, perhaps I will. But desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“Do they?” Nita Qwan said. “Perhaps desperate times reveal who we really are.”
As the shadows of the pines stretched out across the lake, the big canoes slipped into the water and the surviving rangers took the paddles and poles they’d carved themselves and began to move the light craft across the mirror-smooth surface of Cranberry Lake. The paddles dipped, and shone in the sun, sparkling in a near-perfect rhythm, and Cynthia raised her voice and began a tavern song, and every ranger knew it, and their voices rose over the Wild:
Come all ye brave heroes
Lend an ear to my song
and I’ll sing ye in the praises
of brandy and rum
There’s a clear crystal fountain
Near Alba doth flow
Give me the punch ladle
I’ll fathom the bowl …
I’ll fathom the bowl
I’ll fathom the bowl,
Gi’ me the punch ladle
I’ll fathom the bowl.
The long canoes slipped along the water and into the deepening darkness.
The first check was the giant beaver dam at the foot of the Cranberry Lake where the Cranberry River flowed out between two great stone headlands linked by a dam fifteen feet high and seventy feet long, broken only in the middle by a flow-way no broader than the bottom of a single canoe.
Each canoe had to be emptied of rangers, sent through the flow-way while two rangers held hand lines, and carefully pulled alongside the dam downstream to be reloaded, but they managed without a single mishap, and before the waxing moon rose ove
r the mountains, they were away on the river, which flowed silently by like a river of ink, so calm that the stars were reflected whenever the water flowed flat and straight.
Aneas had never been this far north, and he depended utterly on Ta-se-ho and Gas-a-ho for scouting. They were well ahead in a small canoe and he worried for them. But the river was broad and easy, moving in languorous curves after the first dam, and for hours they raced along until the moon had climbed behind them and begun to sink again. And then, when the river widened, they came to a rapids, as broad as an inland sea, and Ta-se-ho paddled back to lead them well to the west against the looming bank, and even there, most of the boats had to unload and line along the gravel beach, where many a toe was stubbed on rock in the darkness.
Past the rapids, a deep pool and another dam, this one lower and narrower. This time, they had to unload the more heavily laden boats; after the first, and nearly rolling his own boat, Aneas ordered a dozen men to clear all the brush off the point, and he helped build a brush platform for unloading; it seemed faster to him than waiting as people moved one at a time over the broken ground.
Ta-se-ho listened to his orders with some amusement. After waiting awhile, he looked at the sky and nodded. “I’ll go poke ahead,” he said, as if embarrassed to hear Aneas. Perhaps he was.
Aneas waved him away, and Irene leaned against him, hacking alder roots with her axe, and he steadied her when she looked as if she’d fall into the water.
She looked up, startled.
And grinned. “You,” she said.
He found he was grinning back.
“What’s wrong with Clouds?” she asked, suddenly serious. “Not hirself.”
“Whoever s/he is when s/he’s himself,” Aneas quipped.
Irene ripped her Alder victim from the thin soil with a grunt of triumph. “Point taken,” she said. “But watch him. Her. There’s something …” Irene shrugged. And went forward into the darkness.
The very first hint of pale light in the east, and they still weren’t all over the dam; the stars hung above them, and twenty men and women stood and smoked on the cleared spit of land while another twenty moved their canoe, cursing the darkness and everything in it. Beaver dams are not smooth under water, and barefoot men and women in one layer of deerskin moccasins were victim to every sharpened branch and every beaver-gnawed end.
“Aneas!” a voice snapped. It wasn’t loud …
Aneas had nodded off. He sat up, looked around.
Ta-se-ho was shouldering through the resting rangers. He paused and took a long pull at another man’s pipe and then squatted. “The Galles,” he said. “I’ve seen them. We’re very close.”
Aneas nodded. “Yes?”
“They’re under attack. Right now.”
“Orley?” Aneas asked.
Ta-se-ho was handed a lit pipe and he had a pull, drank some water, and sat straighter. The old man was tired. “Must be,” he said. “I didn’t wait to watch. The banks were crawling with bogglins.” He glanced at Krek. “No offence, little brother.”
Krek opened all four hinges of its jaw and closed them.
Looks-at-Clouds stepped off hir canoe, which had already loaded. “Listen,” s/he said. “You should rescue them.”
Aneas nodded. “Perhaps,” he said. “Easier said than done.”
Looks-at-Clouds raised one slim eyebrow.
A chill went down Aneas’s back.
Nonetheless, he put his sudden speculation away to be examined later and looked at Tas-a-go. “Show me the lay of the water, and the land,” he said.
Ta-se-ho sketched the way a pair of Gallish round ships lay in the bay formed where the Cranberry River ran down into the Great River. He drew in the moonlit silver sand and blackish mulch of the riverbank, and Aneas’s mind ran swifter than the river.
“Why don’t they just weigh anchor and float away?” Aneas asked.
Looks-at-Clouds nodded. “Doubtless they are waiting for us,” s/he said. “For a rendezvous. Perhaps your brother?” Looks-at-Clouds raised both eyebrows.
Aneas shook his head. “I cannot risk everything on that possibility,” he said.
Ta-se-ho shrugged and handed his pipe to Looks-at-Clouds, who took it and blew a beautiful smoke ring into the moonlight. “Orley is right there, his creatures have their backs to us …” He smiled. “Odd time for you to be cautious.”
Aneas was watching Looks-at-Clouds. He pursed his lips. And looked at Nita Qwan.
The dark-skinned man shrugged. “We can’t slip by. Day is coming.”
Irene, unbidden, put in, “Better to ambush them than be ambushed.”
Aneas could not pin down why he felt so disoriented, so cautious. “Very well,” he said. “What do they have for boats? Orley’s people?”
The light was just strong enough for Aneas to see Irene’s face as slightly more than a pale blob; he could, if he put his mind to it, count the boats behind him. The moon was growing pale, and the air was like wet hair—lank and uncomfortable. Aneas’s boat was the lead boat; dangerous, but he wanted to keep the ability to make decisions at the last moment.
The last two leagues of the Cranberry were a series of long, slow curves, so that the mouth of the river couldn’t be seen; the river grew, if anything, broader and flatter, and the high ground on either side that defined the banks consisted of steep, wooded ridges that could be seen to converge somewhere ahead in the darkness.
But for the last two curves, they’d been able to hear the thin wailing or keening of bogglins, and to see the mast tops of the round ships, like giant naked trees towering over the horizon and with the eerie, unseelie play of the northern lights behind them.
The canoes raced along with the current behind them and all the paddlers together.
Aneas stood, rocking the round-bottomed craft, and held out his left arm, and silently, his craft slipped to the left, closer against the bank, and the column followed him. They were moving at the speed of a galloping horse, and as the muddy, alder-thicket banks changed suddenly sandy beach and kelp-covered rock, he saw bogglins milling in the early light, and boats—canoes like his own, and cockle-boats, made of hide stretched tight over frames. There were dozens of boats, or perhaps hundreds.
Then the canoes were turning, turning, as the left bank widened into a beach, and the whole of Cranberry Bay lay open before his eyes in the new dawn. The moon hung just over the masthead of the larger of two heavy round ships, and the water around her was black with small craft and bogglins fighting to get up the sides. To his left, the open beach, and now, to his right, a spit of land even more densely covered; antlers, and a cluster of tall Rukh, as many as six or eight, and back in the marsh a great hastenoch roared a challenge to the sun as the first bright rays pierced the eastern horizon and turned everything from shadowed greys to salmon and rose.
Aneas looked hard at the shore on his right hand, flashed a look back to the left, and made his decision.
“Lay us for the ships,” he said to Ta-se-ho, who had the steering paddle.
Men and monsters on the beach to his right were beginning to be aware that the canoes coming past were not their own.
Aneas went into his palace and unlimbered a series of shields, now his standard response to any combat, layering a general shield of gold with a series of smaller shields in green.
Then he activated his first working.
Light leapt from each of his ten fingers and arched away into the morning; five embers rose to his left and five to his right. On the spit of sand, a green shield leapt into existence; to his left, three heavy curtains rose, and an umbrella of green so dark it was almost black.
Aneas’s workings had specific bounds of grammar, and as they met with the shields, they stopped and slid down, down, like falling sparks against a sheet of metal, until they touched the ground, where they burst, not with light or heat or shards of death, but heavy coils of smoke, dense and grey-green.
Looks-at-Clouds shot him a look in the real, hir emerald eyes wide
. S/he smiled, the smile of a cat with one paw on the mouse, and s/he loosed a single pulse of light from one finger of hir own hand, violet-white.
Aneas turned his head and closed one eye as the shaman’s deadly casting left a streak through the welling smoke and detonated like a thunderclap on a green shield, tearing a gash longer than a canoe through which s/he placed a second working.
Other casters did as they had been bid, throwing fire in the real. Shields in the real cost much more in potentia and ops than shields in the aethereal and were relatively rare at the opening of engagements; the left bank proved to be fully protected, but the spit of sand was covered only in the aethereal, and every bark canoe and hide boat on the sandy beach burst into violent fire that under-lit the sorcerous smoke; the orange light of the sun rising in the west picked out the smoke, played on the rising column of ash in the west, and the whole scene was lurid.
The six long canoes raced on. Black Heron stood, loosed an arrow forward, and knelt to keep the trim of the canoe; stood and loosed again. His arrows arched into the smoke and vanished.
The smoke picked out the play of the ops and the river behind them was crisscrossed with green and gold light. Some of it sparkled against the various shields cast by the racing canoes, but many missed, passing astern harmlessly, or detonating against the shields on the other side of the river. Arrows began to rise out of the smoke and fall around them, but unaimed, they were more a threat than a danger.
And then, in the blink of an eye, they were on the boats crowding around the two ships. At point-blank, and with no interference from an enemy sorcerer, Aneas put his hand flat, almost on the mirror-calm water, and loosed a prepared phrase; a dark plane, like brown ink faster than a racing tide, rolled out from his left hand and into the packed cockle-boats. Every boat it struck lost a strip of hide wider than Aneas’s hand at the waterline; hundreds of bogglins were simply cut in half, and their hide boats sank instantly, unmade.
Ghause’s sorcery was still very potent in Aneas.
With his right, he wrote “Friends!” in Gallish on the smoke behind him, and none too soon, as a bolt from an arbalest missed him by a hand’s breadth and popped through the heavy bark of his boat as if the stuff were as thin as a lady’s shift. Water began to pour in. There were shouts in Gallish.