Damicos went to bed that night on the third floor of the hostel with a feeling that he was about to embark on the great adventure of his life. It would make his career, or break it, and on the far side of the venture he would either be famed and revered, or dead and forgotten.
He was ready to face that test.
CHAPTER 8: THE WILDS AGAIN
Once again, the forest engulfed them.
Running eagerly ahead of Pelekarr, Perian passed the boundary ahead with a rustle of leaves—and she was gone, eaten by the green.
The captain eyed the tree line nervously. Part of his mind considered it an act of persistent folly to return so soon to the vast, brooding woodlands that spread silently across the land. He knew well, now, what terrifying dangers this wilderness hid. But he stepped his horse quickly along, knowing that the men watched him from behind, and passed into the forest himself.
The column followed a faint path, winding through the green tangle like a worm. And moving slowly under the spreading branches, seemingly cocooned in living emerald, it was difficult to avoid the thought that the forest was a living entity which, having devoured the entire company, was now digesting them step by step.
Though they were entering the forest leagues to the north of their previous campaign, it was the same wilderness, the same sensations and rhythms. Old-growth trees loomed on all sides, already ancient when the first Kerathi settler set foot in Ostora, lichen-crusted and ivy-draped. Moss furred the boulders and roots, a carpet of livid jade.
Tiny mushrooms, speckled red-and-white, contrasted with toadstools of a pale yellow, clustered like small jewels here and there in pockets of loam or against fallen logs. Shelf fungus of bright orange fed on the rotting bark of collapsed trees. Insects buzzed and hummed on every hand, and in places where the sunlight streamed through the canopy butterflies whirled delicately. At the faint edge of hearing, the trickle of water could be heard as tiny brooklets of crystalline purity gurgled their way through the fallen leaves and loam, meandering to unknown destinations.
It was a secret, silently-contained world, breathless in itself. It seemed to wait for something, eternally. And Pelekarr realized, gazing at the trees under which they travelled, how it was that humans could come to worship such things. There was something ethereal, even god-like, in the solemnity and antiquity of the trees. They existed in time and space, they could be reached out and gripped, yet they were a world unto themselves, a hidden secret world of unutterable strangeness in which things of flesh and blood were not welcome, were not even considered important. What did humans, with lifespans measured in mere decades, know of the great mysteries? What did they know of mold and lichen, of beetle and wind and hawk, of thunder in the summer night?
Pelekarr bowed his head in reverence. He was no heathen barbarian to worship trees, but he understood how it could be. He felt the draw of the trees, and resisted it. But he looked long into the dark jade heart of the forest even while he refused to bend to its pull, and he nodded in respect to it.
Others felt the strangeness too. He heard Bivar mutter something just behind him.
“What did you say?” Pelekarr asked.
“Someone ought to take an axe to all of them,” Bivar repeated.
“Who would do such a thing? You?”
But Bivar did not answer.
They traveled on, Perian leading the way with the captain just behind on his horse. The deer path they’d been following soon vanished and the White River woman chose whatever routes seemed best to her. They were uncomfortably near the area where they had previously encountered her clan’s village, and Pelekarr knew she would avoid it at all costs.
The column moved as quickly as they could, but the terrain made a meandering course necessary and it proved difficult to judge how much ground they were covering. None were at ease, and the archers kept bows strung and shafts in hand. At least the shaded forest depths were cool, and they could drink freely from their water-skins with so many brooks nearby.
Finally, perhaps an hour past midday, they broke free of the deeper woods into an open, grassy country dotted with young conifers and snarled with fallen timber, much of it charred black. Years ago a forest fire had burned here, clearing a vast space. Westward the burned land stretched, marked here and there with a tall dead spike of a tree, blackened and branchless. Far to the south and north the arms of the forest still marched. A breeze sent the tall grass waving.
“Thank Mishtan!” Tibion the cook wheezed, leading his mules out into the sunlight. “If I never see another tree root or bramble patch until my dying day, it’ll still be too soon.”
He went up and down the short pack train, checking his utensils and supplies to ensure that nothing had fallen off, though he needn’t have worried. Two troops of foot soldiers brought up the rear, and they had watched the supply train with the eager eye of infantrymen with bottomless stomachs.
Crumbly Tib breathlessly fanned his red face and muttered about the flies and the ‘oppressive heat of this fetid jungle’, earning angry glares from the two large hoplites Pelekarr had assigned to assist the cook in transporting the company’s food supply. One was The Yak, the largest man in the Tooth and Blade, and the other was muscular young Scathis. They had put in far more effort than the portly cook in getting the mules past every obstacle they encountered, and both were sweating from the exertion.
It was a welcome relief to all to feel the unhampered sunlight on their skin and feel the wind on their faces. The captain called a quick halt to rest the horses and eat a small meal. As the men dismounted and dug into their saddlebags, Pelekarr turned to his barbarian companion.
“How much further to the river?” he asked.
Perian pointed the direction. “Many hours yet. We will not arrive there today, not at this speed.”
“Hmmm.” The captain frowned at the burn, noting the tangled sprawl of downed timber, silver-gray and splintered from sun and frost. “Is there no faster route? I was given to understand this campaign would be more suitable for horses, but it was slow enough going in the forest. And now this.” He waved a hand at all the obstacles impeding his horsemen, the litter of fallen trees every few paces. “We’ll be slowed to a crawl. And in the open. Easy to be seen.”
“It is still the best way.”
“You do not fully understand the difficulty of managing horses in terrain like this, Perian. If we headed south from here, would we not reach the river sooner? Easier travel along the riverbank, perhaps.”
The scout nodded, reluctance plain on her face. “Somewhat. But the other side of the river is Silverpath territory. They are a large and warlike clan. Should we meet them, we will be fighting for our lives in a long retreat through the forest we have just left.”
“We have nearly a hundred men at arms with us, Perian!” the captain pointed out with some exasperation. “Enough to easily handle these belligerent Silverpath warriors, I should think—if we can get to more advantageous terrain.”
“We should angle northwest instead,” the woman stubbornly insisted, “and then come back down to reach the river just below the rapids. That is where we will find your lumber camp—a great fort, I would call it.”
“But we can barely trudge in this stuff, let alone mount a charge over all this fallen timber,” Pelekarr replied, with a shake of his head. “We will press on straight to the river, despite the risk. We have the manpower for it, and I do not fear these Silverpath as you seem to.”
Perian bit her lip. “You are the commander, Captain Pelekarr. I cannot command your troops for you.”
“No, you cannot.”
“But this is a dangerous route, and we must remain unseen at all costs! I will go before the column; see that no man advances past my position.”
Pelekarr waved at his sergeants to adhere to Perian’s demand. “As you say.”
So they swung south, still in the open but curving westward on the verge of the burned land where there was less fallen deadwood to hamper their momentum. Th
ey made better time and camped that night in the open burn, without fires. Close enough to the forest for cover if they needed it and far enough into the burn that enemies could not approach too close while screened by the trees.
In the hour before dark, every man labored to move several of the fallen logs into a rough triangle, using the horses to pull the largest timber. When they were finished they had a crude stockade, waist high, of weathered logs. The horses were picketed into a smaller adjacent stockade and fed on fresh hay the men cut with their swords. The great fire that swept the place years ago had enriched the soil of the place, and grass grew thick and tall among the snarl of downed trees.
The night passed uneventfully and by daybreak they were on their way again, with prayers to Telion for safe passage.
But two hours before midday, Telion turned his back upon them.
CHAPTER 9: DEEP FOREST
The long column of hoplites wound its way through the dense tree growth, slapping at yellow-jackets they had disturbed underfoot. It was cool on the forest floor but the weight of bronze armor and prolonged exertion still caused the sweat to run in streams. They’d been marching since mid-morning, but by Damicos’ reckoning had only advanced about two leagues. And they had a long way to go before the heavy forest would break.
“Marching a column through this is like a man trying to dance while bound hand and foot,” Damicos overheard Cormoran telling his young friend Fieron.
“It’s still more to my liking than lingering on the coast,” Fieron replied. “It’s tough going, sure, but if we succeed we’ll be lauded as heroes for the rest of our lives!”
“And if we don’t we’ll rot in an unmarked grave for all time,” Cormoran shot back.
“Ah, but what use is a finely engraved headstone to the man that lies under it?”
The forest was thick, but Damicos judged it far from impenetrable. To protect her secrets, Ostora had layered defenses; the dense tangle of wilderness they now hacked their way through was merely the first. And if the maps he’d seen and the word of the trapper were accurate, beyond the forest began the mountains, and beyond them no one knew. No one, Kairm claimed, had ever penetrated the mountain range and seen what lay beyond.
But they didn’t need to cross the mountains, thank Mishtan. Nestled somewhere in a small valley among the foothills of those mountains was a city, and Damicos was going to find it. Neither forest nor beast would stand in his way.
Of such beasts, there were many. Damicos marveled at the primitive, teeming vivacity of the land. It was choked with life—a vast menagerie that defied the imagination. Not all were monstrous, or even strange. But the sheer volume of fauna, coexisting in a whirling vortex of an ecosystem, provided a constant reminder of human nothingness that he and other soldiers had been forced to acknowledge on more than one occasion.
Many of the beasts of Ostora were similar to Kerathi animals: the panthers here, for example, were larger versions of leopards and lions back home. But Ostoran wildlife, in the wake of the great ice fields that had apparently retreated northward but a few centuries earlier, had achieved a massive size that dwarfed any possible Kerathi equivalent.
The deer here were roughly analogous to antelope in Kerath, but there were other deer-like creatures which had no copy across the sea. The bears of Ostora weren’t the sleepy, pig-like snufflers Damicos knew; here the size of their tracks made the hair on the back of his neck rise. Some dwelt in caves, others with shorter muzzles and longer legs roamed the forests and fields seeking prey to pull down and crush with massive paws from which dangled claws that could shred an oak into slivers.
Glyptodonts, saber-toothed cats, packs of dire wolves as large as a man—everything outsized and overpowered. It was a riot of massive life that made a man feel small, made him want to crawl into a burrow for another thousand years until these great beasts had vanished from the earth and it was safe again for men to be men.
The first league in, Kalabax’s troop had scared up a nest of bat-like creatures from the hollow of an old tree they passed. The creatures were sized like one of the owls in the old country, big enough to carry off a squirrel, but not large enough to cause the men any trouble.
What they encountered at the third league was.
They heard the beast before they saw it, and that was a mercy. Damicos, at the head of the column with Kairm by his side, had dismounted from his charger some way back to rest his steed. Kairm led him by a few paces and suddenly froze in his tracks, hand held up for a halt. Damicos whirled and sent the signal down-column. His soldiers stopped, alert and ready, but seven ranks behind, there rode two mounted fools chatting gaily, as oblivious to the sudden halt as they were to Damicos’ furious glare.
Tarsha Pac and his daughter, Jivenna, had insisted on going along at least as far as the first camp, despite the protests of Kairm and Damicos. As friends of Jamson, they were essentially wealthy tourists. Tourists who wished an adventure worthy of boasting about when they returned to whatever land they called home—Borath, was it?
They were both attired in colorful silks that Damicos knew couldn’t last long on a journey like this, but the pair seemed happy enough at the moment, although their presence slowed the company considerably. They had to duck a branch at every step, but somehow were still making a racket in conversation with their adventurous friend and co-financier, blissfully unaware of any reason to quiet their approach.
Something was shuffling with a meandering gait through the brush ahead, with an occasional crack of breaking branches, seemingly uncaring of what heard it. Whatever this was, it was big—not behemoth-big, perhaps, but larger than a man. All down the column hoplites gently pushed their helmets down over their heads and angled their spears outward.
Damicos opened his mouth to whisper a question to Kairm when a loud call echoed out of the trees. It was so sudden and unexpected that Damicos almost jumped. The thing that made such a sound had to have lungs like huge bellows. It was a screeching honk, like someone playing the bugle and failing utterly.
“Bull elk,” Kairm said, drawing a short bow from a sheath at his waist and quickly fitting a broadhead shaft to the string. “It smells your horse.”
“Will it charge us?” Damicos asked.
“It isn’t backing away. You should get a couple of your men up here, with shields and spears, just in case.”
Damicos flicked two of his fingers in the air over his head and immediately Hundos and his troop of seven ran forward to stand blocking the rest of the vanguard from danger.
They saw a dark shape moving in the trees ahead now, coming toward them slowly. It was indeed big, significantly higher at the shoulder than Damicos’ horse. Its antlers were the most impressive part, however: they spread outward for several cubits to either side, and curved upward in a palmate wall ending in spikes like curved scimitars. At this season the things were encased in soft brown velvet, but the captain was under no illusions as to the lethal threat such antlers could pose when driven by bulging neck muscles. Damicos marveled that the creature could bear so gigantic a rack and keep it from tangling in the trees.
Jamson was at the captain’s side in a moment. “Ah, this is one of the great elk the barbarians are so fond of hunting, when they can manage to bring one down. Magnificent!” He turned to motion to his friend to come forward and get a good look, but at that moment the creature charged forward.
Hooves pounding the grass and muscles rippling along its glossy brown flanks, the elk surged toward the men with a loud snort. It came into the light in a clear patch between towering trees, and Damicos saw its eyes. They were fixed on his own mount, and they looked angry. Small red lights burned in their depths.
“Plant spears!” Hundos bellowed. Four of his men rammed their spear-butts into the earth, angling the tips toward the charging animal. The other three raised theirs, ready to stab.
But the beast broke off several paces before encountering the wall of steel, and danced back a few paces, blowing and turning its he
ad to see its foes better in the meager light filtering past the canopy. With each turn, those giant antlers swung to and fro.
Now several more men had dashed forward, spears out. Damicos backed his horse up a few steps, and Jamson quickly retreated into the center of the mass of armed men.
“Did I not tell you, my friends?” he laughed. “With this many men no creature alive dares challenge us! Mishtan preserve us, what a brute!”
Damicos whispered to the tracker without turning his head away from the monstrous elk. “Kairm, do they travel in groups? Should we be worried about our flanks?”
The trapper shook his head. “No, he’s a lone stud trying to decide what we are, and too big to be afraid.”
Damicos didn’t think the lone elk, huge as it was, presented a serious threat to his phalanx of armored men. It might crush one or two of them if it was desperate, but then it would surely fall to their spears.
The elk seemed to sense this as well, and without a compelling reason driving it to attack, the creature turned and sauntered into the forest. The men listened carefully to the sound of its receding hoofbeats. It bugled once more, just as loud.
“Looks like it’s decided to cede the path to us this time,” Kairm said. “Almost a pity. That much meat would feed the whole expedition tonight.”
Damicos shook a fist in the air, claiming victory, and several of his men laughed.
“It’s a fair bit easier now to face such obstacles,” Kairm admitted with a grin, “then when I’ve come alone with naught but a pack and a bow.”
The column proceeded after a short break to reorganize the ranks and pass word along to the rear of what they’d seen. They found that they had stopped only half a league from the bank of a small river. Jamson and his friends pushed forward to gather on its bank, and Damicos watched the girl, Jivenna, eagerly stoop to drink of its clear, flowing waters. She didn’t bother to scan the area for dangerous water creatures, and he found himself irritated again by her foolishness in coming. She was plump, pampered, and gaudy in both dress and manner. He doubted she or her father would stay with the company for much longer. When they left, it would take men away from the expedition to guard them safely back.
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