by David Drake
Heat hammered Cashel's feet despite their thick calluses. He tried to get up but found he was still dizzy. He lifted his torso slightly and shoved himself backward with his hands. When his forearm touched the edge of the pavement, he set his palms on it and managed to lurch into a sitting position.
The flames were still too close. He crossed his left hand over his face to keep his lips from blistering, but he continued to watch even though he could feel the hairs on the back of his arm shrinking and breaking in the heat.
A blazing cocoon wrapped the plant. Blackened layers seared off, laying bare the green beneath that charred away in turn. Cashel thought he heard the plant scream, though maybe that was only the keen of steam boiling out of the shrivelling body.
Cervoran hadn't moved. Cashel stood and eased him back from the flames. The wizard obeyed with the waxen calm of a sleepwalker. The front of his clothing, the new set of tunic and trousers, was already singed brown.
Civilians had come out into the courtyard to join the soldiers, but more than the heat of the flames kept them at a distance from the dying plant. Sharina looked across to Cashel. Her face was set as she rose from her patient, but now it brightened into a smile. Two soldiers were leading off their injured comrade, his arm splinted with lengths of spear shaft.
The side of the plant's body ruptured, gushing more sea water than would've fit in the jar Cashel had thrown. It gushed onto the burning oil, stirring the flames for a moment into greater enthusiasm. Things slithered in the water, swimming or skittering on flattened legs; each held pincers high.
"Crabs!" shouted a soldier and jabbed his javelin at the thing that squirmed toward him through the dying flames. The point missed, sparking on a pebble in the soil. The soldier recovered his weapon, but the pallid creature ran swiftly toward him. He raised his foot to stamp on it, but it sprang upward to fasten its pincers on opposite sides of his ankles where the sandal straps crossed.
It isn't a crab, Cashel thought as he snatched up a javelin lying against the pavement with its slender iron head bent. It's got a tail, so it's a crayfish or -
The tail curled into a nearly perfect circle, burying its hooked sting a finger's length in the soldier's knee joint. He fell backward, screaming on a rising note.
Cashel whipped the spear butt around, snatching the flat-bodied scorpion away from the soldier's leg and squashing it on the ground. The yellow horn sting broke off in the wound.
No male peasant was ever without a knife for trimming, prying and poking, but Cashel wasn't carrying one at the moment because the simple iron tool wouldn't have looked right among all these folk in court robes and polished armor. He knelt and worked the sting out of the soldier's flesh with the point of the man's own dagger.
The knee had turned black and swelled up big as the soldier's head, and his body was thrashing in four different rhythms the way a beheaded chicken does. Well, you did what you could.
Cashel straightened. Sharina was standing beside him. He dropped the dagger and hugged her to him with his left arm. He still held the dripping javelin in his right hand, and his eyes searched the dying fire for any more scorpions that might dart from the charred ruin of the hellplant.
***
Several times Garric stepped into muck that would've sucked him down if he hadn't jerked back quickly, but he didn't have any real trouble keeping up with Scarface and his companions. The pasture south of Barca's Hamlet had marshy stretches, and there're some sheep that seem determined to bog themselves thoroughly every chance they got.
He grinned. Celondre, one of the greatest poets of the Old Kingdom and of all time, had given Garric a great deal of pleasure. His pastorals of shady springs and gambolling lambs never included the shepherd struggling out of a bog with a half-drowned ewe bleating peevishly on his shoulders, however.
A bird belled like an alarm and shot straight up, almost at the feet of the man who was leading. He cried, "Wau!" and jumped backward, tangling his legs and falling over. Garric was startled also, dropping into a crouch. His ancestor's reflex swung his hand to the sword he wasn't carrying.
Scarface at the end of the line was the only one who didn't react. He called a good-natured gibe at the man who'd fallen, then added something in a harsher tone to get the line moving again.
"That one's a hunter," Carus said, assessing the situation. "The others are fishermen, maybe, or just farmers. Scarface I'd pick for a scout."
Why isn't he leading, then? Garric asked silently. He wasn't arguing, exactly; just trying to understand what Carus saw and he did not.
"Because they all know where they're going, lad," the king explained. "I'd guess that means it's not very far. And it also means that they're more worried about what might be following them than they are about what's ahead, which is something to keep in mind."
As Carus spoke, the path wound around a clump of snake-leafed trees. Ahead rose a series of hummocks some four feet above the general level of the landscape. The hummocks stood in water and were edged with walls made from vertical tree trunks; pole-supported walkways connected them. The surrounding ponds must've been spoil pits from which the dirt had been removed to fill the raised beds.
A man on one of the hummocks saw Scarface's group coming. He waved a hoe and called, "Urra!"
The leading spearman raised his net and spun it in an open circle in response, then looped it back around his waist. Other figures cultivating the raised beds, men and women both, straightened and looked toward the newcomers. A few waved.
"There's the fort," Carus said. "Well, fortified village."
He snorted mildly and added, "It wouldn't be hard to carry, not unless the ones inside are better armed than anything we've seen thus far. And even then it wouldn't be hard."
It was raining again, but even without that Garric wouldn't have been able to differentiate the stockade from the smaller planting beds spaced in front of it. We aren't planning an attack, are we? he thought, amused by his ancestor's focus on the military aspects of any situation.
"No, butsomebodyis or the defenses wouldn't be there," Carus responded crisply. "And if that somebody knows what he's doing, those defenses won't be much good."
The group reached a walkway like those between the beds-and connected to them, Garric saw as he looked ahead in the mist. Scarface clucked something to Garric and took his arm, leading him to the front of the line. The bed, saplings lashed to stringers of heavier timber, was barely wide enough for them to walk abreast.
The gate in the stockade opened. A man standing on the platform above it raised a wooden trumpet to his lips and blew an ugly blat of sound. The people who'd been in the fields started trooping toward the village in response.
An old man wearing a headdress of black feathers stepped into the gateway, ccompanied by a much younger woman. She held the man's left arm, apparently helping to support him. In the old man's hands was a jewel which gleamed yellow even in this dull light.
"Wizardry!" muttered King Carus in disgust.
Well, we knew somebody brought us here, Garric thought calmly. Now we've got a good idea who it was.
The feathered wizard raised the giant topaz, a duplicate of the one in the crown of First Atara, and cackled in triumph.
Chapter 4
A dog ran out of the gateway and began yapping as Garric and Scarface approached. It was black with a white belly and paws, medium sized and non-descript. Scarface sent a clod of dirt at it, catching the dog neatly in the ribs. It yelped and bolted back into the village, brushing the wizard on the way. He staggered and might've fallen if the woman accompanying him hadn't tightened her grip.
"That's the first animal we've seen," Carus said with a frown. "There hasn't been a cow, let alone a horse. There hasn't even been a chicken!"
Garric grinned. His ancestor knew could order a battle or site an ambush, things that not even the most educated of peasants could've been expected to know. That didn't mean that peasants knew nothing, however.
Their feet'd rot, Garr
ic explained. Back in the borough we couldn't pasture the flock in the bottomland for more than a week at a time or their hooves'd get spongy. The clothes here're fiber, not wool, and I'd guess they eat a lot of fish with their vegetables.
The two men on top of the gate came down a ladder inside the stockade. The trumpeter stepped out of the way, but the fellow wearing a feather robe joined the wizard and his woman. They exchanged brief glances; not hostile, exactly, but cold enough to imply rivalry rather than friendship.
When Scarface reached the mound on which the village stood, he touched Garric on the chest to halt him and stepped forward to talk to the chief. The wizard waited with the big topaz in the crook of his right arm, wearing a disdainful expression. The woman eyed Garric with frank appraisal.
"Well, that one likes what she sees or I miss my bet," Carus said with a chuckle. "And I don't, because I saw her sort often enough myself back in the days when I wore flesh."
Garric glanced at the woman, then looked away. He tried to hide his feeling of disgust, but he felt his lip curl despite him.
It wasn't that she was unattractive, but she had a dirty air that went well beyond the simple physical grime inevitable in a village on a mud bank. The woman Katchin the Miller, Cashel's uncle, had married was much the same sort. Katchin had been a boastful, grasping, unpleasant man, but over the years Garric had come to feel that the dance Katchin's wife led him was sufficient punishment for all the man's flaws.
After listening to Scarface for some while, the chief gestured him aside and glared at Garric in what was probably supposed to be an intimidating fashion. Since Garric was taller by half a head, that didn't work very well. The edges of the chief's cloak were worn, and the feathers seemed to be a jumble of anything that could be netted or trapped with birdlime.
The chief raised his hands high in the air and began a speech, his voice cracking repeatedly. He held an edged club the length of his arm, a sort of wooden sword. It could be a dangerous weapon, but the blade of this one was carved with a complex knotted pattern.
Lowering his arms, the chief tapped himself on the chest with his free hand and said, "Wandalo! Wandalo!"
There was a fair chance he was giving his name rather than saying, "It's a nice day, isn't it?" Garric touched his own chest and said, "Garric. My name is Garric."
The wizard spoke, then raised the topaz slightly. He gestured with it toward the chief, who backed a step with an unhappy grimace.
The wizard looked at Garric and said, "Marzan." He touched his own chest and repeated, "Marzan!" He then spoke imperiously to Scarface and turned.
Scarface shrugged uncomfortably. He made a little gesture with his free hand, indicating that Garric should follow the wizard who was stumping back into the village with the woman's help. She looked over her shoulder at Garric.
"This lot don't like wizards any better than I do," muttered the ghost of King Carus.
Fortunately, thought Garric as strode after Marzan, I don't have that prejudice myself. Because I can't imagine how we'll get back to our own place and time withoutthe help of a wizard.
The village stockade was a single row of tree trunks sunk into the soil and sharpened on the upper end. An earthen platform on the inside gave defenders a two-foot height advantage over anyone attacking, but there were no towers or arrow slits. Garric realized he hadn't seen bows or any other missile weapon.
Carus snorted when he realized that the palings weren't pinned together. "With six strong men and a rope I can pull down a hole wide enough to roll wagons through!" he said. "I'm not sure I'd bother with anything beyond a straight rush by a company of my skirmishers, though."
There were about two dozen oval houses with shake roofs and walls of lime plaster on a wicker framework. Each was raised a foot or so on posts; the ground was sodden already, and in a bad storm there must be a serious risk of flooding.
The windows had shutters, but most of them were open. In some birds on long tethers chirruped at Garric, nervous at the sight of a stranger. Fine-meshed fishnets hung under the shelter of the eaves.
The streets-the paths that twisted between the buildings-were paved with clamshells. Shells were probably the source of the plaster too; nowhere since he'd arrived in this land had Garric seen outcrops of stone that could be burned for lime. The quality of the woodwork was impressive, particularly because the people didn't have metal tools, and he thought Ilna would've been interested in their skill with cords and fabrics.
Marzan and the woman led Garric to one of a pair of houses in the center of the village. Both were enclosed by waist-high openwork fences, adornments rather than meant for privacy or protection. Gnarled wisteria grew over one side of the fence around Marzan's compound, but it wasn't blooming at this time of year.
The woman opened the pole crossbar and stepped aside for the wizard to enter. As he shuffled past her into the compound, she looked at Garric and said, "Soma!" She touched her chest, then grinned widely and lifted the top of thin, waterproof cloth to show her breast before she followed Marzan.
Garric's face was set as he closed the bar after him. He heard Wandalo speaking at a distance and looked back. The top of the chief's head was just visible over the house roofs. He must be standing on the platform above the gate to harangue the villagers whom he'd called from the fields.
Garric wished he knew what Wandalo was saying. Though based on what he'd seen of the man and of rulers of Wandalo's type elsewhere, he probably wasn't missing much.
Garric had to duck under Marzan's doorway, but the hut's ceiling was generously high. Light came not only by the windows but through the roof itself: the shakes were placed in overlapping strips with air spaces between. The design wouldn't work in high winds, so the current vertical drizzle must be the normal state of affairs.
The floor was of planks fitted with narrow gaps between them to deal with roof leaks and tracked-in mud. There were couches on both long walls. In the center of the room a small fire burned on an open hearth of clay laid in a wooden framework. There was no chimney, just the louvered roof: the three of them disturbed the air when they entered, making Garric's nose wrinkle at the swirl of sharp smoke.
Marzan seated himself cross-legged near the hearth and motioned Garric down across from him. Garric squatted, the usual method of sitting in Barca's Hamlet when there weren't chairs. Soma went to the other end of the hut and took baskets from a pantry cabinet made of joined reeds.
The wizard placed his topaz carefully on the floor in front of him where strips of darker wood were inlaid into the planks. They formed a hexagon with the yellow stone in its center.
Marzan smirked at Garric and removed the longest of the three black feathers from his headdress. Using that as a pointer-as a wand-he touched it to the corners of the figure in turn as he chanted, "Nerphabo kirali thonoumen…"
The topaz glowed. The light at its heart was faint but brighter than the dimness of the rain-washed hut. Flaws in the stone became shadows that moved.
"Oba phrene mouno…," the wizard said. He was using words of power, addressing beings that were neither humans nor gods but formed a bridge between them. "Thila rikri ralathonou!"
Garric had always thought of the words of power as things which a wizard read. Marzan was illiterate-there was no sign of writing in this community-but he rattled off the syllables in the same sing-song voice as Tenoctris used to chant the spells she'd written in the curving Old Script.
The cultured, scholarly Lady Tenoctris was part of the same fabric as this savage who probably didn't understand the concept of writing. Different from them on the surface but at heart the same nonetheless were Cashel and Ilna. Their mother, a fairy queen or something stranger yet, had passed to them the ability to see the patterns which formal wizardry affected through spells and words of power.
Here in humid gloom lighted by the glow in the heart of a yellow stone, Garric had a brief glimpse of the cosmos interconnected and perfect. Do Ilna and Cashel always see this? he wondered; but there wa
s no way to answer the question, and perhaps the question had no answer.
"Bathre nothrou nemil…," Marzan chanted. "Nothil lare krithiai…"
The shadows in the topaz moved faster. Garric felt them grip him the way they had when he stared into the diadem on First Atara. Instead of drawing him down this time, the motion sucked a face up from the yellow depths of the stone.
A cat, he thought, but the forehead was too high and the jaw was shorter than a beast's. The image opened its mouth in a silent snarl; the teeth at least were a cat's, the long curving daggers of a carnivore. The eyes were larger than a man's and perfectly round. The pupils were vertical slits.
"Corl," a voice in Garric's mind. The wizard's mouth continued to chant the words of power.
Marzan's chant was a barely heard backdrop, a rhythm outside the crystalline boundaries of the stone. The cat-faced image drew back to show Garric the whole creature: two-legged and as tall as a man, but lithe and as quick as light playing on the waves of the sea. It wore a harness but no clothing; a coat of thin, brindled fur covered its body. In its four-fingered left hand was a bamboo spear with a point of delicately flaked stone; in its right was a coil with weighted hooks on the end.
The cat man leaped onto a vaguely seen landscape from a fissure in the ground. Garric couldn't tell whether the fog shrouding the figure was real or a distortion of the stone which the wizard used for scrying. A second of the creatures followed the first, then three more. They loped across the sodden landscape, moving in quick short leaps rather than striding like men walking.
The cat men were armed with spears or axes with slim stone heads, along with the hook-headed cords. They formed a widely spaced line abreast as they vanished into the mist. The images faded.
"Coerli," said the voice in Garric's mind as Marzan chanted. "Coerli…"
