by David Drake
The trees in this stretch weren't knocked about like the ones were back where they'd met their guide. A lot of them were pines on this thin soil, but there were near as many chestnuts, some of them huge trees with boles thicker than Cashel standing with his arms spread straight out to either side.
Cashel heard a buzzing that seemed to come from the treetops. He looked up, trying to find the source. It was way too late in the year for bees to be swarming, and there wasn't anything else that The helmet turned lizard-quick and said, "Stand against a tree trunk and don't move! Don't hide, just get against a tree. They'll see movement, but you're all right if you keep still!"
Protas opened his mouth to ask a question. Cashel gripped him by the shoulder and backed against a big spruce whose branches didn't start till several times Cashel's own height up the trunk. He didn't know what was going on, but he didn't doubt that they'd be better off doing what they were told just now instead of arguing about it.
The helmet hunkered down among the rocks, drawing in its legs like a box turtle closing up. It held the blade of the butcher knife under its body.
When Cashel was sure the boy wasn't going to jump he relaxed his grip, though he didn't move his arm away. Protas swallowed stiffly, but he didn't so much as turn his head. There was lots of things the boy didn't understand because he hadn't been raised in places where those sorts of things happened, but he was a quick learner. That was certain sure.
The noise was getting louder. Cashel didn't move, just waited, and sure enough something high up in the air swam into sight. It looked a lot like a white bird, but it was the size of a ship and its stubby wings were rigged as sails. Black smoke oozed from the bird's open beak, rising only with difficulty.
Cashel couldn't tell for sure-the bird was near as high as the clouds-but it looked like people in armor stood in stood in the open back half of the body. He thought about their guide. There was armor, anyway, and maybe it had people in it.
As Cashel watched, the wings canted and the creature started to come about. The figures in the stern turned also, raising round metal shields. They shouted in ringing, angry voices, too thinned by distance for Cashel to understand the words.
"Don't move," the helmet grated. "On your lives, don't move!"
The bird was silent except for the creaking of cordage and the cries of the crew. The buzzing didn't come from it, so Three saucers with silvery wings burred down from the clouds, curving toward the bird. In the belly of each saucer rode what looked like a man-sized frog holding a lance. The frogs were trying to point their lances toward the bird, but as they gestured their mounts wobbled awkwardly.
The leading saucers almost flew into each other. As they jerked apart wildly, flame shot from the bird's beak in a great, arching jet that briefly enveloped the third saucer that trailed the others. The wings melted like ice in a furnace.
The saucer flopped onto its back and the frog tumbled out, blackened and burning. From its wide mouth came a scream like steam jetting from under a pot lid. The bird's crew shouted in triumph.
One of the surviving saucers dived away, but the other looped up over the bird. The rider was actually upside down when his lance sent a bolt of crackling lightning into the open back. Several armored crewmen flew apart, helmets and segments of limbs spinning away from the bird in smoking arcs.
The survivors sent arrows sailing after their attacker. They didn't hit the rider, but at least one stuck in the saucer's glittering gossamer wing.
The bird was rising. Its outlines blurred in the overcast, then faded entirely. For a time Cashel could still hear the buzzing sound, but the saucers didn't come into sight again. At last the sky fell silent.
"We can go on now," the helmet said. "And quickly-we were lucky this time that they stayed high. You saw in the valley what happens when they fight closer to the ground!"
"Aye, we did," Cashel said. He understood the blasted trees, now.
"You mean that we might have been hurt by accident if the ships had stuck the forest instead of each other, Master Helmet?" Protas said.
The route they were following was steeper than it'd been. Sometimes it was simply steep, places where Cashel used the quarterstaff as a brace to lift him up to the next firm footing. The helmet flowed over whatever was in the way like a centipede climbing a wall, not slowing down a bit. Protas scrambled along right behind it, putting a hand down for a grip whenever he needed to.
"No, I don't mean that, boy!" the helmet said. "I mean if they'd been lower they might've seen us-and they'd have killed us if they had. You're easier prey than their usual enemies, you see. Perhaps you think the talisman would save you-and perhaps you're right, it would. But it wouldn't help me!"
Or me either, it sounds like, Cashel thought. Well, he hadn't expected their guide was the sort who worried much about what happened to other people. "Other people" if you wanted to call a walking helmet a person, that is.
The top of the ridge was a bald with only small plants clinging in crevices filled with leaf litter. Part of it was bare even of that: a blast of fire had scoured not only the surface but fused the rock to a glassy polish. Half caught in that but untouched by heat that'd melted dense granite on both sides of the line was a star with as many points as the fingers of one hand.
"Stand in the pentacle," the helmet ordered. "And be quick about it. There's no cover here, and if they see me they'll hunt me down even if I get back into the forest."
The wind whipping up the back side of the bald was fierce, strong enough that even Cashel had to lean into it to walk to the center of the star. Cashel put his left arm around Protas; the boy'd done all right with the wind, but his trouser legs and the hem of his tunic were flapping fiercely.
"Master Helmet?" Cashel said. "What are they fighting about? The frogs and the folk in the bird?"
"Fighting about?" said the helmet. "There's no about. They fight to fight, that's all. It's the same as in your world."
"No sir!" said Cashel, surprised at how hot that made him. "There's fighting on our world, that's so; but there's good and evil fighting at the bottom of it!"
"Do you think so?" the helmet said. "Well, I'm a fool too, just as I said."
Laughing in a nasty, knowing way it pointed the jagged butcher knife toward Cashel and Protas. Light as red as a sunstruck ruby sprang from the blade. Again solid stone vanished from under Cashel's feet, and he felt the illusion of falling through a starless void.
Chapter 11
Torag's keep loomed like a gray lump out of the green/gray/black marsh. The sun had been up for two hours and it wasn't raining.
Garric grinned. In this land it passed for a bright morning. He'd wanted to arrive promptly at dawn to have the full day for their business with the Coerli, though.
"I hope we've got enough time to finish the job in daylight," he said to Metz as they came out of a grove of trees whose foliage dangled like sheets of moss from the spreading branches. "If we don't, we'll none of us survive the night to come. Torag isn't much of a general, but even he's smart enough to know that he has to kill any Grass People who've learned to fight before the danger spreads."
"The Coerli kill without being smart," Metz said in a distant tone. "They only have to think if they don't intend to kill."
He looked at the sky. "There's enough time," he said. "If we can do it at all."
Every adult in the village was with them. Everybody whom Garric'd judged was capable of making a seven mile march, that is. There were about fifty in all, as many women as men. They were burdened with bundles of brush, every fishing net in the community, and the rolled-up wall of a house. Unrolled, the wicker mat would let them cross the bog surrounding Torag's keep without sinking knee-deep at every step.
Then the hard part would begin.
The Corl in the watchtower finally saw them and blew a warning on his trumpet. After a moment he blew twice more, nervous blats of sound that were as much fright at the unexpected as an attempt to rouse his fellows.
"With the cat beasts," King Carus said, "now is better than right at dawn."
The ghost's voice was calm and analytical, but underneath it was the leaping delight of a warrior about to enter battle. He went on, "Their own folk wouldn't attack in daylight, and till now there's nobody else in their minds who might. The guard wasn't alert, and the rest of the animals have had time to go to sleep."
"All right, everybody!" Garric called. He raised his voice by reflex, though he knew the Bird would project his words to the villagers at heightened volume regardless. "Keep close to each other but not so tight you can't move. Be ready to raise the nets when I say so. Just keep marching on. And remember-this world is for humans!"
He'd hoped for a ringing cheer in response, but apparently that wasn't part of the political process among the Grass People. He grinned wryly. At least they didn't freeze in panic where they stood. That might've happened if they'd been a little more sophisticated and thus knew what they were getting into.
"Metz?" Garric said as he and the scarred hunter strugged through the belt of furze bushes around the bog. Coerli raiders had passed back and forth often enough to mark a path, but the cat men moved with such delicacy that the path wasn't wide enough for human beings. "It's time for you to go to the rear like we planned. We'll need a leader back there if they get around us."
"Youplanned," Metz said. All the villagers wore broad-brimmed hats of linen stretched on a wicker frame. They were meant for rain covers, but they ought to give reasonable protection against overhead blows. "My uncles can take care of the back. I'm staying where I am."
Turning, he said, "Get that mat up to the gate, Kimber! Come on, you kin of Wandalo! Remember what the cat people did to our chief!"
The four men and two women carrying the house wall staggered toward the bog. They dropped the loose wicker roll sooner than they should have, starting to unroll it a good ten feet back on firm ground. Garric judged that the mat wasn't going to reach all the way to the walls unless "Fill in the last with firewood!" Carus ordered. His practiced eye had measured the gap with a certainty Garric couldn't match. "And move it! You'll need it sooner than you can get the wood-carriers up from where they're marching!"
"Bring up rolls of brush!" Garric shouted. "Quick, before they figure out what they're going to do!"
Torag and half a dozen of his warriors mounted the step inside the wall and looked down on the attacking humans. The chief himself seemed stupefied by the event, unable to grasp it even though he watched it happening. One of his warriors gave a rasping shriek, a sound of wordless anger that the Bird couldn't and needn't translate.
The walls of Torag's keep-even just the part the Coerli themselves inhabited-were far too long for fifty humans to encircle, even if they'd all been trained soldiers. The alternative was to keep the attacking force together and smash through the stockade at a single point. The cat men could come at them from any direction, or they could flee beyond any chance of human pursuit.
"If Torag were smart enough to run now, lad," Carus said, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword, "then he'd have been smart enough to've chased you down the night you escaped. No, lad; it'll be a fight."
He spoke with the cheerful satisfaction of a gambler about to collect his winnings. The sword on the ghost's hip was merely an image like every other physical attribute of the king today, but the enthusiastic readiness to fight was just as real as it'd been a thousand years before.
Sometimes a mind like that is a good thing to have on your side and the kingdom's side. Right now it was a good thing to have on the side of the Grass People…
The crew-the family group-pushing the matting got to the end of the roll and rose from their stooped posture. They were still a dozen feet from the base of the wall.
"Go on back!" Garric ordered, walking just behind them with the axe in his right hand and a minnow net spinning overhead in his left. "Get the firewood up herenow!"
The flattened wall wobbled underfoot, but it didn't sink out of sight in the muck. Not only did it spread the weight of the people standing on it, the buoyant wicker resisted being forced under the surface.
The shrieking warrior leaped from the wall onto Garric. Garric did the only thing he had time for in the second it took the Corl to drop: release the thread-fine net already spinning in his hand. The pebble-weighted mesh wrapped the warrior, binding the barbed blade of his outthrust stabbing spear to his right thigh.
The warrior crashed into Garric, knocking him off his feet. The Coerli weighed no more than half-grown human children, but that was still a solid mass hitting from twenty feet up. Garric rolled, trying to raise the axe that he'd managed to drive straight into the bog when he went down.
The warrior dropped his tangled spear and drew a flint knife from his harness. The movement was a single blur.
Duzi they're fast! but Garric's left hand closed on the cat man's wrist. The ghost in Garric's head had started his arm moving well before the Corl had decided to act. The warrior's thin bones crunched like chalk breaking. He shrieked in pain and tried to bite; Garric slammed him back against the matting.
Metz brought down his stone-headed mace. He'd aimed the blow at the Corl's head but the blow landed at the base of the creature's throat instead, crushing the collarbones and windpipe both. The cat man's nostrils sprayed blood as he spasmed into death.
"Raise your nets!" Garric screamed. He grabbed his axe hilt with both hands to pull it out of the muck, but his left hand threatened to cramp. The hysterical strength he'd used to crush the Corl's wrist came with a price. "Raise your nets!"
The gate started to open inward. Garric glanced up. Torag and his warriors weren't looking down from the wall any more. Duzi! Are they going to sally straight out the main gate? Are they thatstupid?
The gate jerked the rest of the way open; sure enough, the wicker bridge was there, ready to be spread over the bog. The Coerliwere that stupid, or at any rate they were that ignorant. The Grass People didn't know what war was, but neither did their enemies. The Coerli were hunters and raiders, not soldiers, and they'd just met a soldier…
Garric got to his feet. He smelled smoke. Villagers back in the line must've started a fire already. Garric'd meant to burn a gap in the stockade when they got up to it, but what were they thinking of to start one now?
The mat was crowded. Villagers with brushwood were coming forward. They got tangled with the nets their fellows stretched high on fishing spears whose springy, two-pronged heads were ideal for lifting the mesh.
The nets were supposed to form a barrier on both sides of the mat. That was more or less how it worked, but inevitably some of those holding the nets managed to tilt their spears inward, narrowing the walkway from its original six feet or so. There wasn't enough space for all the people and their gear unless everybody was careful-which would've been a greater marvel under the circumstances than the Lady coming down from the sky and declaring peace.
"Throw the-" Garric began but caught himself. "Throw the wood into the bog to get it out of the way," he'd meant to say, but that wouldn't work with the nets in place. He hadn't thought it through. The plan was falling apart and it was his fault!
The cat men's wicker bale lurched forward awkwardly, pushed by warriors rather than by their human slaves. They weren't used to the work, and their narrow pads didn't grip as well as human feet on the wet ground churned by past traffic; the roll jammed in the gateway.
Torag gave a great snarling roar and vaulted over the bridge. Warriors followed him in quick succession, each spanning the gap like a pouncing leopard.
Metz spun the minnow net he carried. Torag twisted in the air, avoiding the fine mesh but bowling the hunter over with his feet instead of braining him with the wooden mace as he'd intended to do. Metz fell back into the woman holding up one end of a heavy gill net, one of those the villagers used to drag their ponds; Torag tumbled on past into the bog.
Garric brought his axe around in a swift, slashing diagonal. Carus' instinct told him he
couldn't miss the warrior leaping at him-but he did; it was like trying to cut a wisp of smoke. The Corl's long legs rotated away from the stroke; still in the air, the creature stabbed Garric through the right shoulder. His spear had barbs on the end of a stiff wooden point. It burned like a hot wire as it pierced the muscle.
The creature landed on its feet. Garric grabbed the Corl's right elbow so it couldn't bound away as it'd thought to do. He drove his right fist at the long cat face, using the butt of the axe helve because they were too close for him to swing the weapon normally. His whole right arm was afire, but the Corl's skull deformed at the blow and it lost its grip on the spear.
Garric hurled aside the twitching corpse and lifted his axe to strike again. Several humans were down, but besides the warrior he'd killed there were three more struggling in the bog and a fourth tangled on the inside of the gill net. Two women were methodically beating that one to death with their loads of firewood. The individual sticks were too light to make effective clubs, but the women were using their whole bundles end-on like giant pestles on the cat man's ribs.
"Throw them!" shouted Donria. A shower of burning brands spun over the fighters to land in the gateway. They'd been cut from an oily brush that lit easily and burned even when green, though with low, smoky flames. They were only sticks, not dangerous as missiles, but the Coerli, already uncomfortable to be fighting in broad daylight, feared and hated fire.
A warrior poising to leap from the wicker hurdle instead sprang backward with a howl. Those behind him shoved the rolled wicker out of the way and began pushing the gate leaves closed.
"Get'em!" Garric cried. He jumped forward and tripped to splash at the end of the villagers' own mat; his foot was tangled in a net.
The butt of the spear wobbling from Garric's shoulder hit the ground end-on, driving the point all the way in till the thicker shaft stopped it. He lost his grip on the axe and shouted in fury.
