"I'm only interested in the princess," Jacom told him, to make his intentions perfectly clear.
"If Keshvara still has her when she arrives to join you, I'll be taking her home immediately."
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Fraxinus had made no answer to that, but it was plain to see that he was anxious about Keshvara, and not at all certain that she would contrive to join the expedition and that rumour had reached his ears about Checuti's allegation that the princess was unwilling to return to her father's care.
Jacom had as yet no firm plans as to what he would do if Keshvara and the princess failed to appear by the time the caravan reached the far side of the forest, nor what he might do if the latter refused to return with him to Xandria. For the moment he was hoping--rather forlornly that everything would go smoothly.
In addition to the six dark landers Fraxinus and Phar had four gold ens with them to help tend the horses and the donkeys and to drive the two narrow but heavily laden carts which accommodated the greater part of their supplies and trade goods. One of the four gold ens was a young woman named Merel Zabio.
It didn't take Jacom long to figure out that she was Andris Myrasol's cousin, and that she was expecting the big amber to catch up with the expedition as soon as he was able to do so. She was most definitely not glad to have Jacom and the guardsmen along, and she repulsed all his attempts to question her.
Jacom considered the possibility of placing her under arrest, but Aulakh Phar went to some trouble to persuade him to promise that he wouldn't take any action against her or the amber.
"We're a long way from Xandria now," Phar pointed out, 'and he really wasn't the person who injured your guardsman. Anyway, if he turns up, we still need him. I'd rather have his map on hand than rely on my vague memory of it. To tell you the truth, I'm anxious about his failure to show- Merel caught up with us easily enough, and he ought to have been able to do likewise, given that he seems to have escaped from your men without injury. I don't know what Checuti's playing at, bur it's a complication we could well do without.
"
Jacom agreed to reassure the girl that he meant no harm to her or her cousin, and that he accepted what he had been told about Myrasol not being involved in the robbery. He ordered Purkin and Herriman to do likewise, but she continued to steer well clear of them.
As the trail they were following gradually dwindled away the carts made slower progress, but the gigantic trees were so widely 267
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spaced that there
w_as rarely any serious impediment to their passage. Fraxinus's team worked with practised efficiency, its members ceaselessly occupied whenever the caravan paused. Only the young dark landers seemed to have much time on their hands, and they also seemed to be the only ones interested in the soldiers. Before the end of their third day in the forest Jacom had befriended a dark land boy six or seven years of age, whose name was Koraismi.
Koraismi seemed to be fascinated by Jacom: by his colouring, by his uniform, by his manner, perhaps even by the frustration which continually seethed beneath the surface of his words and actions.
Jacom gave the boy a few coins, and small metal implements of the kind that were always in demand in the forest, where such things had even shorter lives than in Xandria. In return, Koraismi proudly brought birds which he had shot down with poison- tipped darts from his blowpipe. Herriman plucked these and cooked them very carefully to make sure the poison was denatured. The boy kept the soldiers supplied with various other comestibles too, some more appetising than others.
In addition to these gifts of food Jacom got a ceaseless stream of information from Koraismi, mostly based on gossip picked up from the other dark landers they met. Jacom assumed that no more than half of these rum ours severe likely to be true, but it was difficult to tell which half it might be. Sometimes Jacom got the same information, later, from Carus Fraxinus but when he received contradictory accounts he had not the slightest idea which to favour.
Koraismi told him that many evil things were now abroad in the forest, and that the dark landers disagreed among themselves as to exactly what needed to be done. One group, the Uluru to which Koraismi apparently belonged favoured direct action to drive all invaders from the forest, but other groups including a secret organisation of witches called the Apu had different and altogether wrong views. Koraismi thought that all the trouble in the forest and the Dragomite Hills had been caused by Serpents, who had been secretly planning a war of extermination against men since time immemorial. Koraismi assured Jacom that some human beings had Serpent's blood in them, which would cause them to turn traitor against their own kind when the final war for file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (273 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:21 AM]
possession of the world was to be fought, and that the Apu too were likely to turn traitor if their menfolk couldn't keep them under control.
Jacom thought it impolitic to mention to his new friend that Princess Lucrezia was reputed in Xandria to have Serpent's blood. He wasn't superstitious himself, but he couldn't help beginning to wonder why it was that the princess was allegedly determined not to go back to Xandria, and whether her removal from the citadel might not have been an accident after all.
Fraxinus confirmed, when Jacom asked him, that Serpents had been sighted in the forest, and that their presence was as unusual in its way as that of the drago mites and their alleged riders.
"But there's nothing to fear," he added.
"Serpents keep themselves to themselves and aren't in the least aggressive, no matter what dark lander superstition might say. These legends about drago mites kidnapping human children at the behest of Serpents which secretly control everything that goes on in the so-called Corridors of Power deep within the Dragomite Hills have no basis in fact, so far as Aulakh and I can tell."
Jacom accepted this as the verdict of a wise man, although he couldn't help noticing the scrupulous qualification with which the judgment was concluded.
Exactly how much, he wondered, did Carus Fraxinus and Aulakh Phar really know about the nature and inclinations of drago mites Koraismi also told Jacom that the dark lander army which had gone south was the biggest ever raised, and that every steel blade in the forest had gone with them, because blowpipe darts were no good at all against the armoured hides of drago mites
"Those rider-women better watch out, though," he said, with pride.
"We'll shoot every last one of them off their monster-mounts' backs and bring them back as prizes. We'll trade them to Khalorn as field workers or whores."
Jacom wasn't at all sure that Koraismi knew what a whore was, but didn't press him on that point. Again he was careful to crosscheck the information with Fraxinus.
"The dark landers fight wars like anyone else," Fraxinus told him, 'but their wars are usually petty affairs of clan against clan- ambushes and skirmishes rather than battles and sieges, involving a couple of hundred men at most.
This is different, although the 269
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men who've gone^outh are probably split
up into war bands of sixty or eighty rather than gathered into a single army.
Dragomite workers have always scavenged the southern borderlands of the forest, but the darker regions are too far from the hills to offer a profitable return and there's long been a tacit boundary between drago mite territory and dark lander territory. The dark landers have never had to organise themselves against the drago mites before, and I don't think the men who've gone south have the faintest idea what to expect. The one thing I'm certain of is that they won't want to fight a long and bloody battle if they can possibly help it
. If I had to bet I'd wager that they'll all come home in ten or twenty days, boasting about the way the drago mites and their supposed riders turned tail rather than face them, and beat a hasty retreat to the hills.
"I suspect that the drago mite workers in the forest are confused and desperate, but if they have warriors with them they might well be dangerous; perhaps the best thing would be to let them alone unless and until they start trying to build new mounds. What the likelihood of that is I can't tell- so far as I know, no human has ever been inside a drago mite mound and returned to tell the tale. No one's ever seen a drago mite queen, or even knows for certain that they really do have a socpl organisation identical to that of a beehive. , " I also suspect that the humans who've come into the forest from the south aren't connected in any significant way with the drago mites I think they'll turn out to be Hyry's bronzes traders like us, hoping to forge profitable links with' the north. I'm hoping that we can meet them before they get into a serious conflict with the dark landers but we might well be too late for that. If we can link up with them, they'd be invaluable as guides to the territory beyond the hills. "
With this last point Koraismi fervently disagreed. His greatest hope was that the expedition would not encounter any humans in the distant reaches of the forest, because he was utterly convinced by the stories of humans and drago mites working together to evil ends. He was openly derisive of the merchant's scepticism.
"This Fraxinus thinks he is a very great man," Koraismi said, 'and his ancient companion thinks he is supremely wise. They come into the forest bringing iron and silver, cloth and spices. We
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are city folk, they say, as
they swagger through out little villages.
We know how to make things; our artisans know all the lore of the world before the world; we are rich. They think we are simple, stupid folk, easily cheated in the game of trade. They hire our men to be killers and carriers but when those men return from the cities of the north they speak of a great wilderness of stone, burned and bleached by the naked sun, where the rich walk among hordes of the very poor: labourers condemned by law forever to rebuild the mighty walls, or to work in mines, or to ply oars in huge slow ships. Your precious cities are full of beggars and thieves, but we have no beggars here, and no thieves. Men like Fraxinus and Phar cannot know what is happening here in the forest. Men are men, they say, and all men are traders but I tell you, friend Jacom, that what is coming from beyond the forest is evil and tainted, and that those who try to trade in tainted goods may themselves become tainted. The Serpents and their kin are avid to reclaim the world that once was theirs from the men who came from the world before the world, and they have been waiting for thousands of generations for the children of men to forget the ancient knowledge which allowed their forefathers to win the world. That is why there are Serpents in the forest now, and humans serving drago mites
"Have we forgotten the ancient knowledge?" Jacom asked.
"Are you talking about city folk, or have the dark landers forgotten it too?"
"We dark landers have forgotten too much," Koraismi admitted dolefully.
"But not as much as your people. You think that your people have forgotten less than we have, because you have your lore masters and your guilds, but it is not so. Your golden women come to learn the arts of poisoning from the Apu, and Phar is always prying into the secrets of the Uluru. We know secrets which golden arrogance lost long ago."
All of this might have been more believable, Jacom thought, had Koraismi been some ancient wise man who had actually seen such things as drago mites and Serpents with his own eyes, but because it came from a boy it sounded exactly like the kind of tale that all boys loved, redolent with mystery and melodrama. Aulakh Phar, by contrast, must have been thirty if he was a day, and he did lay claim to having seen drago mites and Serpents though never a 271
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Salamander -- with his own eyes. He was more than willing to talk about them when Jacom and Sergeant Purkin found an opportunity one midday.
"Dragomites are frightening," he confirmed.
"It's not that they're so very powerful, nor that they're as enthusiastic for the taste of human flesh as vulgar horror stories claim, but they're ugly and they're unearthly, and you know when you look at them that those big jaws could cut a man in two- and that's just the workers, never mind the warriors.
Like all insects, you see, they wear their skeletons on the outside instead of the inside, and like honeybees the great majority of their kind are sexless instruments with no proper self-interest. We mustn't forget, though, that they're not really insects. They're unearthly, and it doesn't do to make too many assumptions about the parallel evolution of earthly and unearthly species. Whatever honey the drago mites may make surely can't be sweet to human tongues.
"Serpents are ugly and unearthly too, but not nearly so fearful.
They're slender and scaly but if the brains inside their bulbous heads are as big as they seem they're certainly not stupid. It's easy to get paranoid about what might or might not be going on behind those beady black eyes, and I can see how they got their reputation for being patient plotters, but I never heard of one offering violence to a human being and the ones I've talked to have been unfailingly polite. "
"Do you believe that the world was theirs before men came?" Jacom asked curiously.
"Did our forefathers really arrive in a ship, as invaders?"
"Perhaps- and perhaps not," was Phar's cautious answer.
"Some say that we're all products of evolution, that all our ancestries can be traced to the first stirrings of life in the primeval mud, and that the separation of life-forms into earthly and unearthly is a distinction without a difference. Maybe there are just two different lines of descent which diverged very early in the history of life, with honey-bees, horses and humans being the ultimate products of one and drago mites Serpents and Salamanders the ultimate products of the other. Whatever the truth of the matter, you musn't take dark lander anxieties too seriously. The kind of people who choose to live in a Forest of Absolute Night are bound to be a little strange."
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Jacom didn't repeat Phar's opinion of the dark landers to Koraismi, but Koraismi knew it well enough. Koraismi informed him that the dark landers had a saying about people living under the sun being touched by the sun, and lots of proverbs about the tendency of direct sunlight to dazzle and burn.
Darklanders, he affirmed not without some justice had the keenest vision of which men were capable, by virtue of living in such quiet light, and they alone could see clearly what was happening to the forest. . . and what, in the fullness of time, would happen to the world.
"Mark my words," Koraismi said, 'the world is not a safe place. There are too many things in it which do not like mankind. Their enmity must be recognised, no matter how polite they seem. Your Xandrian traders might think that we dark landers are dull of mind because we have no rich merchants, but we have a saying: A man who lives by barter alone will one day give his fortune for a poisoned pig. I tell you this because you have told me that your father is a grower of fruits and a keeper of herds, friend Jacom, and because I think you will understand. It is good to be a fighting man for a while, and a wanderer else I would not be here now but it is also good to know when to come home. "
Jacom thought that such advice would sound infinitely better coming from a much older man, but he also felt a certain affinity for the sentiments expressed. Was it possible, he wondered, that even a half-naked dark lander boy had more true wisdom than a physician-adventurer like Aulakh Phar? And if it were, what in the world was he doing marching his remaining men over the
edge of an abyss, in search of a rebel princess with Serpent's blood?
^73
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A.
15 while hyry keshvara wrung the water out of a motley collection of clothes, then draped them over the earthly bushes which formed a ragged rampart along the river bank, Lucrezia sat on a tussock of grass staring out across the dark watercourse at the solid-seeming wall which ran along the opposite shore. It was black now, but in the morning when the ribbon-like tract of starlight exposed by the width of the river turned to true day-blue it would be purple and green, brighter and gaudier than anything she had seen for a long time.
The river was broad and sluggish here they were no more than fifty mets below the ford but it narrowed again downstream where the dredgers only had Soft silt to deal with.
"This is a good place to wait," the trader said, when she had finished.
"There's a ready coign of vantage in that sagging gnarly tree which leans out over the water from there we can have a clear but discreet view of the crossing-place. Elema says there isn't another for thirty kirns and that Fraxinus will certainly head for this one. The caravan can't pass us by without our knowing nor can anyone else."
"What if Fraxinus and Phar never arrive at all?" Lucrezia asked.
"What do we do then?"
Serpent's Blood Page 33
