Will nodded. “So how did you stamp them out?”
“Oh, after the war, Crowley and I mounted a bit of a campaign against them. After a while, they seemed to decide that Araluen wasn’t the best place to go moondarking. Most of them moved on to Gallica, where conditions were more conducive to their trade.”
“Most of them?” Will asked. “What about the others?”
“They stayed here,” Halt said grimly. “You’ll find their graves up and down the west coast if you look closely.”
“You and Crowley were quite a team in the early days, weren’t you?” Will asked. A ghost of a smile touched Halt’s mouth.
“We had our moments,” he said. Then he began to slither back from the top of the ridge, staying low until he could stand without being skylined to any observer below them. Will followed and looked expectantly to his old teacher for orders.
“We’ll head north toward that beach,” Halt said. “We’ll camp on the ridge and keep watch for any activity on the headland or on the low ground inland from the beach.”
“You’re sure that’s where they’ll set up?” Will said.
Halt shrugged. “You can never be sure of anything. But it’s the most logical place. Any farther north and they’d be too far away from Hambley itself. Besides, the coastline curves in to the east up there, so the whole topography is different. This spot is close enough to the real town to confuse any skipper who’s not on his toes. We’ll scout through the woods as well, to see if we can find their camp. If they’re in the area, they shouldn’t be too hard to find. They won’t be trying to remain hidden the way we will be and it’ll be a big camp.”
“You said there could be fifteen to twenty of them . . . ,” Will began.
“That’s right. And they’ll need carts and horses to carry away the cargo, so the camp will be a big one.”
“Can we handle that many?” Will asked tentatively.
Halt looked steadily at him. “These men are cold-blooded murderers,” he said. “But they’re not warriors. They’ll get one warning to surrender, then we start shooting. Crowley and I handled this many. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“That was Crowley and you,” Will said. He was surprised by Halt’s answer.
“You’re better than Crowley.”
Will would have been even more surprised if Halt had added what was in his mind: You’re probably better than me, too.
They struck north and set up a small, well-concealed camp in a thicket of trees on the inland slope of the ridge. Abelard and Tug were unsaddled and left to graze close to the camp. If by chance they were discovered, their shaggy coats and lack of saddles or bridles would probably lead their discoverers to assume they were wild ponies. There were numbers of those roaming the hills in small groups.
There would be no campfire, and the two Rangers sighed as they resigned themselves to a diet of cold water and hard rations for the duration of the mission. They set up an observation post on the ridge, digging a shallow pit, then roofing it over with dirt, branches and leaves so that they could watch the beach and the headland unobserved. It was not unlike the sort of hide that hunters built, Will thought. Then he smiled grimly as he realized they were hunters. But they were hunting men.
There were still a few hours of daylight left when they finished. Halt gestured to the pit.
“Keep an eye on things,” he said. “I’m going to scout around and see if I can find any sign of a camp.”
Will nodded. A camp would confirm that they were on the right track. After all, they were still working off information received from the anonymous informant. It could well be a wild-goose chase. But one of the first things a Ranger learned was to watch and listen patiently for hours or days on end.
Will moved in a crouch to the observation post, which was on the slope of the ridge overlooking the beach, and crept inside. He settled down, made himself comfortable and leaned back against the dirt wall. They had left an observation slit that ran the entire width of the hide, and as he sat back in the deep shadows, he had an uninterrupted view of the headland and beach.
He reached into the satchel he had slung over one shoulder and took out paper, pen and a small traveling inkwell. The draft of his speech was in there too, but for the moment he would content himself with noting down impressive phrases to include in it. He could do that while keeping a keen eye on the beach below him. Reading or rewriting the speech would be too much of a distraction. But jotting down the odd descriptive phrase would only take a second or two at a time.
One such came to mind—a description of Horace and Evanlyn—and he quickly unscrewed the inkwell, dipped in his pen and jotted it down.
The much beloved boon companions of my tender youthful years, he wrote. And muttered to himself, “Oh, that’s good. Very good.”
He scanned the beach and the headland again, but nothing was moving. Then he jotted down another phrase.
It is with prideful joy that I have the temerity to add my unstinting adulation to what has already been avowed before this eminent assemblage . . .
“I do like that. Very much,” he said to himself. He sighed happily and leaned back against the earth wall of the pit, waiting for further inspiration to strike.
It took Halt less than two hours to find the camp.
Not surprisingly, it was the smell of wood smoke that first alerted him to the presence of people in the woods. It was faint at first, but as he followed in the direction from which the light breeze was blowing, it became stronger. Then he began to notice other signs. A dog barked. Then he heard the ring of an ax on wood. The sounds and smells took him back over the ridgeline, into the woods on the seaward side. Eventually, he found himself looking down into a cleared hollow in the trees.
There were half a dozen tents pitched in a neat group, and several cooking fires were already lit. Off to one side, four solid-wheeled carts were parked. Beyond them, he could make out horses tethered among the trees. People moved about the campsite, talking and calling to one another. There was no real attempt at concealment, as there was nobody to remain concealed from—so far as the moondarkers were concerned.
He counted the people he could see. Sixteen of them, and all men, he noted. And that last fact was further confirmation that this was a moondarkers’ camp.
He watched for a few minutes as several of them began to prepare the evening meal. His stomach complained quietly as the delicious aroma of meat roasting over the fires wafted around him. He silently withdrew from his vantage point.
“Nothing to do here but get hungry,” he murmured to himself, and headed back to the smoke-free, roasted-meat-free camp hidden on the reverse slope. He thought about what his dinner would be: cold water, dried meat and fruit, and hard bread.
The thought didn’t make him more kindly disposed toward the moondarkers.
5
AS WILL HAD OBSERVED, A GREAT DEAL OF A RANGER’S TIME WAS spent sitting, watching and waiting. This could go on for days, then there would be brief periods of heart-stopping action.
He and Halt alternated in the observation post, each spending three hours at a time watching the sand flats and the headland below them.
In the hours when they weren’t on watch, they exercised the horses and hunted for small game. One welcome change was that Halt had decided they no longer needed to maintain a cold camp. The moondarkers were a good distance away from their campsite, with the ridge between them. Plus the Rangers had chosen a site at one of the highest points on the ridge. The chance that one of the moondarkers would walk uphill and stumble upon them was slight.
All the same, the older Ranger insisted that they could not light the fire if the wind was blowing from the north, as it might carry the smell of their wood smoke back to the enemy. It was a slim chance that they would notice it even then, as their own camp had three or four large cook fires and the smell of pine smoke was everywhere. But a slim chance was a chance, and Halt was unwilling to take it. As he said, being careful had helped him stay
alive all these years and he was looking forward to maintaining that record.
This meant that Will could prepare more interesting meals for them, and that at least gave him something to do in his off-duty time. It also gave the pair of them something to look forward to in the boring schedule of watch keeping.
The schedule they had adopted meant that Halt had the last watch—when the sun had dropped behind the ridge. They’d get plenty of warning when the moondarkers were preparing to act. To avoid the risk of discovery, the moondarkers would wait till the last minute to set out their false fires and beacons. They’d do that by daylight, and until they did, there was no need to keep watch through the night.
Will took to bringing both their evening meals to the observation post. They would eat together and discuss their tactics for such time as the moondarkers might strike.
“I’ve been thinking,” Halt said on the third night. “We might have to look at getting some help.”
Will grinned at him. “I thought you said we could handle sixteen people easily,” he said.
Halt nodded in acknowledgment of the point. “I did say that. But it occurs to me that I’m going to need you on the headland while I’m on the beach. That might make things awkward.”
“How’s that? What will I be doing on the headland?”
“You’ll be attending to the beacon fire. We’ll have to let them light it before we act. Until they do that, we have no proof that they’re actually trying to bring a ship ashore. We need to see the ship and we need them to light the fire to lure it onto the beach.”
“The fact that they’ve prepared a signal won’t be enough?” Will asked.
Halt shook his head, frowning. “It’s not concrete proof. They could always claim they were planning a bonfire to celebrate someone’s birthday. Or that they were planning to roast a pig or a sheep. We need actual proof. Unfortunately, Duncan is a bit of a stickler for that. At the same time, we have to make sure that they don’t actually cause the ship to run aground.”
“So you want me to wait till they light the beacon, then I’ll put it out while you arrest everyone else?” Will said.
Halt raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you have any idea how big this fire is going to be? It’s not a campfire you can kick some sand over. It’ll be a great stack of logs and oil and combustibles and it’ll be at least two meters high. Once it’s going, you won’t be able to simply ‘put it out,’ as you say. You’d need a bucket chain to do that—and in any case, there’s no water source for half a kilometer.”
Will hadn’t thought of that. “So what do I do?” he asked. In answer, Halt reached inside his jerkin and produced a small packet wrapped in oilskin, about six centimeters by three.
“You throw this in the fire,” he said.
Will took the packet and examined it. It was tightly packed, but he could feel the grainy nature of the contents as he squeezed the oilskin. It felt as if the packet was full of coarse sand.
“What is it?” he asked. Halt tapped it with his finger.
“It’s a colored dye and it’s highly flammable,” he said. “When you throw that in the fire, it will flare up and change the flames to some bright color—I’m not sure what it will be. They’re usually yellow or red. Whatever it is, once the ship’s captain sees the flames change color, he’ll realize that this isn’t the real beacon and he’ll head back out to sea. But we’ll have the proof we need.”
“All right. That makes sense. But how are you going to cope with the sixteen moondarkers on the beach while I’m doing this?” Will asked.
“I’m going to need help,” Halt said. “I’ll wait till we know they’re planning to strike—when they have their beacon and their lanterns and spot fires prepared—then I’m going into Hambley to confront the head of the village watch.”
“I thought you said they’re probably in league with the moondarkers?”
“Not actively. They’ll turn a blind eye and pick over whatever the moondarkers leave behind. On top of that, if they know we’re in the area, they’d probably warn them off. But I’ve been keeping an eye on the village when I’ve been off watch, and there’s been no traffic in there from the moondarkers’ camp.”
“So if you go into the village at the last minute and give them no time to send a warning to the moondarkers, they can hardly refuse to help you,” Will said.
“Exactly. They might be reluctant. But they’ll have to provide men from the village watch to help us. They can hardly admit to a King’s Ranger that they think it might be a good idea for a ship to be wrecked on their coast.”
Will chewed his lip doubtfully. “You’re putting a lot of faith in the respect people have for Rangers,” he said.
Halt inclined his head, conceding the point. “True. But I’ve done it before and it’s never let me down in the past. These people aren’t really criminals. They’re desperately poor and they lead a hard life. But if they understand they can be punished for not lending us a hand, they’ll come on board.”
“Of course, they could just knock you on the head and drop you off the end of the harbor mole,” Will said. Halt considered the idea.
“They could. But it’s not likely. After all, I’ll be prepared for them to try something like that—as unlikely as it might be. Plus they’ll know there’s another Ranger in the area. I’ll make sure I tell them. I doubt they’ll take the risk then.”
“So I throw the dye in the fire and you arrest the moondarkers on the beach. It seems we have every contingency covered,” Will said. In spite of his questioning Halt’s plan, he knew how strong the aura of power and authority that surrounded a King’s Ranger could be in these out-of-the-way villages.
“You never have every contingency covered,” Halt said somberly. “There’s always something that can go wrong.”
He finished the last spoonful of the savory rabbit stew that Will had prepared, scraping the last vestiges out of his bowl.
“Any more?” he asked hopefully.
But Will shook his head. “Sorry. You finished the last of it.”
Halt grunted moodily. “Thought so.” He glanced at the lengthening shadows. Already, the land below them was in deep shade and the sea had taken on a silver-gray sheen. “Well, I doubt they’ll be starting anything now. We might as well have coffee back at the camp.”
“That’s why I stick with you,” Will said.“You’re full of good ideas.”
The following day, the moondarkers went to work.
Will noticed the first sign that something was happening halfway through his morning watch. A horseman came pelting down the coast road below the ridge. Then, when he was level with the spot where the moondarkers’ camp was situated, he turned off the road and urged his horse up a narrow, steep trail through the trees. Will quickly lost sight of him, but there was no doubt as to where his destination lay.
He scrambled out of the hide and, staying low, ran back over the ridge to tell Halt.
“Odds are there’s a ship making its way toward Hambley,” Halt said. “It’s standard practice for them to leave a lookout up the coast to spot any ships approaching. If that’s the case, they’ll be setting up their fires today.”
“What do we do?” Will asked.
Halt jerked a thumb in the direction of the moondarkers’ camp. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”
They left the camp together, moving like wraiths through the trees, blending into the shadows and the gray-green undergrowth so that they were barely visible. An observer would have had great trouble seeing them at any distance greater than twenty meters. But such was their training and the constant practice they carried out that they moved instinctively, without thinking about what they were doing.
As they stepped through the undergrowth, their feet in their soft-soled boots sought out twigs and branches underfoot before they set weight on them. If they felt an impediment, it was quietly nudged aside with a toe, then they proceeded, letting the weight settle gently onto the extended foot so that they moved w
ith barely a sound.
It looked simple—the way anything looks when it’s the result of years of meticulous practice.
It took them half an hour to reach the vantage point from which Halt had originally observed the moondarker camp.
Will pointed to a lathered horse tied up outside one of the tents. Obviously, it belonged to the messenger who had arrived earlier. He was about to comment on their lack of care for their horses when three men emerged suddenly from the tent. One of them, a tall, black-bearded man in a leather vest and breeches, began shouting orders. The camp came alive as other tents disgorged their occupants.
They began to load the carts Halt had observed on his previous visit, stacking them with ready-cut firewood and lanterns and long willow poles. The horses were gathered in from the spot where they were tethered and harnessed between the carts’ shafts. The men gathered tools and sacks of provisions. Ominously, they also buckled on swords or shoved clubs through their belts.
“We’ve seen enough,” Halt said. “Let’s get out of here before we’re noticed.”
They headed back to the concealment of their observation post. Some time after, they saw the moondarkers emerge from the forest at the bottom of the hills and move out onto the flatland adjacent to the beach.
Three of the carts were unloaded there, the men thronging around them and carrying piles of cut firewood and lengths of iron, setting them up in positions determined by their leader—the tall man in the leather vest. Will watched curiously as the man moved away from his companions, his back to the ocean, and began directing them where to build fires and set up the lengths of iron—which fitted together to form tripods. From time to time, he referred to a sheet of paper in his hands, indicating that a pile of firewood should be moved slightly in one direction, and one of the tripods be brought forward or back a little.