“If it’s not the main body, it’s a big group,” Stig put in. “We’ve seen forty or fifty of them patrolling and they’ve all been different riders.”
Hal had instructed the watchers to note down any distinguishing features of each patrol—the color of the leader’s horse, or any unusual colors among the other horses, or distinctive items of clothing or weaponry. While it was often difficult to identify individuals at this distance, the Herons were reasonably sure that they had seen five different patrols, making up the forty or fifty horsemen that Stig referred to now.
“They must be quite a way off still,” Lydia said. She made up the fourth member of the party discussing the patrols. “If it’s a big camp and they were close, we could expect to see the loom of the light from their campfires at night.”
“Maybe they just have good fire discipline,” Hal said. “They might be keeping their fires small to avoid giving warning that they’re in the area.”
“Why would they bother?” Thorn asked. “So far as they know, there’s nobody here looking for them.”
“We’re keeping our fires small,” Stig said.
Thorn turned to look at him. “That’s because we know they’re there,” he said. “They don’t have any idea that we’re here watching.”
“We hope,” said Hal.
“Yes. We hope.”
“The point is,” Lydia said, “we can argue back and forth about whether they have small fires or whether they’re a long way off. The only way we’re going to know is if someone goes and has a look.”
“Someone?” Hal said.
“Well, me and someone. I assume you’d want to go and take a look yourself,” Lydia said to him. “And you’d be crazy not to take me along. Without me to show you the way,” she continued, grinning at him, “you’d be stepping in holes and falling over your own big feet.”
“Good to see you have such faith in me,” Hal said, returning the grin. “But I agree—”
“That you’d be falling over your own big feet?” Stig asked.
Hal gave him a disparaging look. “No. That Lydia and I should go and see if we can find the Temujai’s main camp.” He looked back at Lydia. “I suggest we get started tomorrow morning before first light. That should get us clear of the shore before the Temujai start nosing around.”
* * *
• • • • •
The moon set just after the third hour the following morning. Hal waited another half hour, then signaled for the mooring ropes to be cast off. Ingvar and Stig used their oars as poles, digging them into the muddy bottom of the little inlet and shoving the ship backward into open water.
She slid smoothly out of her hiding place and onto the surface of the lake, the motion slowly falling off as the impetus of the final shove from Stig and Ingvar died away.
“Oars,” Hal ordered in a soft voice. “And quietly,” he added.
For once, there was no clatter of wood on wood as the rowers raised their oars and slid them out through the rowlocks. The four designated rowers handled the long wooden shafts with exaggerated care, avoiding any unnecessary noise. And the oars themselves were wrapped in rags where they passed through the rowlocks, to muffle any sound. Hal didn’t expect any Temujai to be abroad at this early hour. So far as they could see, the riders had confined their patrolling to daylight hours. But you never knew.
“Give way,” Stig commanded quietly, and Stefan, Ulf and Wulf all leaned their weight back on the oars, sending the Heron gurgling through the water. Tiny lights of phosphorescence gleamed in her wake as she gathered speed and headed for the shore, a little to the north of their current position. During the afternoon, Stig, Hal and Thorn had surveyed the shoreline from their hiding place among the trees and picked out the best place for them to land.
This had been the subject of some debate. Hal was inclined to have the ship drop them off and then return to its hiding place on the island. Thorn had vetoed the idea and Stig had agreed.
“I’m not dropping you off and leaving you,” the old sea wolf had protested. “If we go back to the island and you get into trouble, it’ll take too long for us to get back to pick you up. We’ll find a good spot to moor up and we’ll wait for you.”
“But if you do that, and a patrol comes by, they’ll see you,” Hal pointed out.
Thorn, however, was adamant. “So far, they’ve stayed away from the banks. They’ve stayed well inland. If we rig our nets to break up the shape of the Heron, chances are they won’t notice it. After all, they’re spending all their time looking south.”
“But if they do spot you—” Hal began.
Stig overrode him. “Then we can always shove off and head back out into the lake. But this way, we’ll be on hand if you need us.”
“They’ve got a point,” Lydia told Hal. “I don’t like the idea of being chased by horsemen without any chance of escape.”
Reluctantly, Hal allowed himself to be convinced. Thorn was, after all, their battlemaster and the person they looked to for tactical decisions like this. Eventually, they picked out a spot where a small promontory ran out into the lake. It was a narrow spit of land about thirty meters long, where they could moor Heron and form a defensive position across the neck of the promontory.
“If we’re attacked, we’ll form a shield wall with the ship behind us,” Thorn said. “And we’ll moor with the bow inward, so we can use the Mangler if we need to.”
The sky in the east was still dark as they ran the ship alongside the jutting finger of land. Jesper and Edvin hurled grapnels ashore from the bow and the stern, and they hauled the little ship in, parallel to the bank. Once they were in position, Stig heaved the narrow gangplank up onto the bulwark and slid it out until its butt end rested on the soft mud that formed the shoreline.
Hal and Lydia waited impatiently for Stig to set the gangplank firmly. Once it was ready, Thorn slapped Hal on the shoulder.
“Get going,” he said. “We’ll look for you tonight.”
“It might take us more than a day to find the Temujai camp and get back here,” Hal reminded him.
“Then we’ll look for you tomorrow night too,” Thorn replied, and shoved him gently toward the gangplank. “Now get going. It’ll be light before you know it.”
Hal and Lydia crossed to the shore and headed off into the waist-high grass, Lydia leading the way. Thorn watched them go, nodding approvingly. The long grass, soughing gently in the predawn breeze, would make progress a little difficult as they forced their way through it. But it would provide excellent cover if they had to hide from a Temujai patrol.
He turned to the crew, who were standing by expectantly. “Right, lads,” he said, “let’s get ashore and set up a defensive position on this spit of land. Edvin, you get the lashings off the Mangler and make it ready for action.”
He paused as they began to move about their tasks, then snapped at them. “Get a move on. We could have unfriendly visitors any minute!”
* * *
• • • • •
The Herons selected the narrowest part of the promontory as the place to set their defensive position. Here, the eight of them could form an effective shield wall, denying the horsemen access to the narrow spit of land beyond.
As they had seen at Fort Ragnak, they dug a ditch across the spit of land, a meter and a half deep. They threw the spoil behind them, forming it into a low earth rampart behind which they would shelter and set their shield wall. The ditch would discourage the horsemen from riding straight at the shield wall. Their horses would balk at the obstacle and slow any headlong charge. They had cut stakes of wood from the trees on the island and they set these now in the ditch. The upper ends were shaped to a point and they angled them outward, as a further deterrent to the riders. They set more sharpened stakes into the earth wall.
Thorn inspected the finished result with a critical eye and dec
lared himself satisfied.
“That should do it,” he said. “Now let’s rig the nets over the ship to conceal her.”
The fishing nets, covered with irregular shapes of canvas dyed green and brown, were draped over the stumpy mast, and attached to the bow and sternposts.
“Don’t haul them tight,” Thorn called. “We want the whole thing to look lumpy and irregular.”
Once the work was completed, he walked inland for about fifty meters and looked back. The freshly dug earth of the low rampart was still visible, but that would fade in a few hours. More important, the obvious shape of the Heron was completely concealed. He half shut his eyes and studied it. Under a cursory glance, he thought, it would pass muster as a low hillock on the promontory.
“Let’s just hope they don’t give it more than a cursory glance,” he said to himself as he walked back to the promontory, the long grass swishing around his legs.
chapter eighteen
The long grass would provide good cover for Hal and Lydia in case they spotted a party of horsemen. But it had at least one major drawback.
It was wet with early morning dew, and as they walked, they left a trail where they had knocked the moisture off the long strands of grass. Hal turned after the first few hundred meters and looked back. With the sun rising in the east and casting a low-level light over the plain, the two dark trails they had left through the silvery-coated grass were painfully obvious. He pointed the fact out to Lydia, who shrugged fatalistically.
“Nothing we can do about it,” she said. “And once the sun’s fully up, the dew will evaporate and the trails will be obliterated.”
“Let’s hope the patrols stay away until the sun is fully up, then,” Hal said, a worried tone in his voice.
“We haven’t seen an early morning patrol so far,” Lydia reminded him.
He pursed his lips. He didn’t like taking things for granted. It wasn’t in his nature to simply hope for the best. But as Lydia had said, they didn’t have any choice in the matter. All he could do was will the sun to rise faster and dry out the grass.
They crested a low ridge about five hundred meters from the shore. As they did, Hal turned to look back at the promontory. He could make out the freshly dug earth of the rampart, and see his crew moving about behind it. The ship itself, draped in the concealing nets, was an amorphous shape alongside the bank. They pushed on and the promontory was lost to sight as they found themselves alone on the massive, grassy plain, swept by the wind and dotted here and there with clumps of low trees and bushes. It stretched from one horizon to the other and again he was aware of the sensation of being adrift in a massive, grassy sea.
The long grass swished about their thighs as they pushed through it. After some time, the effort of doing so became quite intense and strands of the stuff tangled around their legs, trying to trip them. The flattened stalks formed a slippery, uncertain surface underfoot.
“Be nice if we had horses to do all the work,” he said.
Lydia merely grunted in reply—a reaction he took as meaning “save your breath.”
They trudged on as the sun rose higher in the sky. Glancing behind them again, Hal was encouraged to see the tracks of their passage had virtually disappeared as the dew evaporated. In fact, the rising moisture had formed a low ground mist, which helped conceal them further.
“Stop!” Lydia said. Her voice was quiet, but the urgent tone in the command was obvious. He froze in place, resisting the urge to turn and look at her. On previous occasions like this, she had dinned into him the fact that movement of any kind invited detection. He had been shoving his way through the thick grass with his head down. Now he kept it there, but raised his eyes to scan the land ahead of them.
“What is it?” he said softly.
“Temujai. Maybe a dozen of them, half left, about three hundred meters away.”
To be so close without having been spotted sooner, the riders must have been traveling through a patch of dead ground—where the terrain dipped slightly and created a large area hidden from sight. He swiveled his eyes to the left now, while being careful not to move his head at all.
He could see them, just. They were at the limit of his peripheral vision: a line of riders on the shaggy brown and piebald mounts he had become accustomed to seeing.
His eyes were aching with the strain of keeping them swiveled left and up. He relaxed them now. Lydia was in a better position to observe them.
“Have they seen us?” he asked.
She hesitated before replying. “I don’t . . . think so,” she said. “They haven’t changed direction and no one looks as if they’re calling attention to us.”
“Which way are they heading?” His nerves were shrieking with tension at simply standing here, unmoving, while an enemy passed by in plain sight. But he knew it was their best chance.
“Toward that ridge we just crossed,” Lydia said. “If they keep on in that direction, they’ll come out pretty well opposite where we left the ship.”
“The ship!” Hal said, with a sudden jolt of panic raising the pitch of his voice. “They’ll see it! They’re bound to.”
“Not necessarily,” Lydia told him, her voice calm and reassuring. “It was pretty well concealed when we looked back at it. As long as the boys see them and don’t move about, they should be fine.”
“But if they do?” he insisted. Once again, he refused to simply wait and hope for the best.
“If they do, the crew can shove off and sail out into the lake. Or they can stay and fight. They’ve got a strong defensive position there and they’ll give a good account of themselves. Besides, from what Thorn told me, the Temujai usually underestimate their opposition and that can be fatal. You can relax now,” she added. “They’ve passed behind us.”
Without realizing it, Hal had been holding himself tensed in every muscle. He let them relax now and felt a flood of relief through his limbs. He turned slowly and stared after the Temujai as they rode toward the crest in the land. The rolling grasslands might look to be flat and even, but they were covered in low ridges and dips that created dead ground—as witness the sudden appearance of the patrol he was now watching.
“They’ve stopped,” he said as the leader signaled for his men to rein in at the crest.
“Normal procedure when you pass over a ridge. Naturally, the commander would want to check out the ground beyond. But significantly, they didn’t seem to worry that they’d be skylining themselves as they passed over the crest. So it would seem they don’t expect any danger in the vicinity.”
“You say,” Hal said.
She smiled at him tolerantly. She was used to moving around on land and staying concealed. Hal was infinitely more at home on the open sea, where he knew the risks and dangers and could allow for them.
“I do indeed,” she told him. “Look, they’re on the move again.”
The patrol leader raised his right hand and made a forward motion with it. The riders urged their ponies forward, trotting in single file over the ridge and down the other side. Hal was relieved to see that they were moving at an oblique angle to the spot where the Heron was concealed. It appeared that Lydia was right. Within several minutes, they had disappeared from sight.
“Let’s go,” Lydia said, turning to the east once more and pushing on through the long, tangled grass. The wind had risen now and it soughed gently across the plain, setting the long strands of grass moving, rolling like waves on the ocean.
Hal shook his head at the soft, pervasive hissing sound. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies,” he said.
* * *
• • • • •
Ka’zhak, deputy commander of the Temujai patrol, urged his pony forward until he was level with his commander and best friend, En’tak.
En’tak heard him coming and looked around, surprised to see him. As the deputy leader of the patrol, Ka�
�zhak’s position was in the rear.
“What is it?” he asked. He knew that his friend wouldn’t have left his position for the sake of a friendly chat. There must have been something that caught his eye. He held up a hand to command the patrol to halt.
“Don’t look right away,” Ka’zhak cautioned him. “But there’s something down by the water’s edge.”
“What kind of something?” En’tak asked.
Ka’zhak hesitated. “I’m not sure. But it doesn’t look right.” He waited, then said, “You can look now. But try not to be too obvious about it. It’s off to our right and a little behind us.”
Pretending to stretch his back and ease himself in the saddle, En’tak casually stood in the stirrups and twisted his upper body to the left, then to the right, to look in the direction Ka’zhak had mentioned.
“What am I looking for?” he asked.
“There’s a shape—a strange shape—on the bank,” his friend told him. “A mound of some kind.”
En’tak frowned. He could see the odd, irregular shape there. It could be a low clump of bushes. Or a mound in the earth.
Or it could be something else entirely. As he watched, there was a flash of light and movement from the right-hand end of the mound. Something alien. Something not natural.
* * *
• • • • •
“They’ve seen something,” Stig muttered. He and Thorn were crouched in the cover of the low rampart. He glanced around hurriedly. None of the crew’s shields were visible. They were piled on the port side of the ship, under the concealing netting. The crew were on board as well, under the netting and crouched in the cover of the port rowing wells.
“Maybe,” Thorn said. “Or maybe they’re just resting. Oh, Loki’s ingrown toenail!” He added the curse as he noticed something on the ship. The camouflage netting, draped over the bow post, had been loosely secured. With the recently arisen breeze, one corner had worked its way free, revealing the heron-head mascot at the top of the bow post. Brightly painted and well maintained, it bobbed slightly up and down in time to the ship’s movement on the ripples. He glanced over his shoulder at the position of the midmorning sun. The brightly painted figurehead could have caught its rays and reflected a flash of light.
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