The Starfollowers of Coramonde

by Brian Daley

  When they’d gone, the Warlord turned and stalked away, his visage fierce. He’d heard the story of the Yalloroon’s suffering; it had lifted him to a pinnacle of rage. He nearly trampled Bodur, who jumped from his way. Hightower scarcely registered it. “Brodur-Scabbardless, commandeer me the first twoscore horses off the ships. Then handpick thirty-eight more men, best of our very best. We are going riding.”

  Springbuck and Gabrielle made themselves as comfortable as possible in Kalakeet’s dirt-floored common room, along with Balagon. The Ku-Mor-Mai had not had much chance to acquaint himself with the ageing warrior-priest. The Divine Vicar was a figure out of fables, leader of the renowned One Hundred. Well along in years, like Angorman, he was a canny and vigorous man. His sparse white hairs were gathered by a simple leather circlet, and he wore black ringmail under his white vestments. On his right forefinger was the heavy seal ring of his station, and at his hip hung his famous two-handed blade, Ke-Wa-Coe which, in the Old Tongue, means Consecrated of the Goddess.

  It was strange for the son of Surehand to be in Gabrielle’s company again without Hightower. She, on the other hand, gave no indication that she felt the same.

  The food the little Speaker put out for them was pitiful, crusts and oddments of meat scraps, and runtish vegetables along with some puny fish. Kalakeet apologized, explaining Salamá didn’t leave much. Springbuck expressed surprise that the Yalloroon didn’t live under closer control.

  “At times we do, in closest arrest, and at other times not, according to the whim of the Five. Yet, there are worse things than short rations, or going homeless, or coming to steely harm, Ku-Mor-Mai.”

  Gabrielle asked what he meant. Kalakeet elaborated. The Yalloroon had lived under Shardishku-Salamá for an uncertain time, since they were forbidden records. Once, they’d lived peacefully at the ocean’s shore. Thus, they’d been unable to resist armed conquerors, adherents of the Masters who’d ground them down with painstaking intimidation, torture and execution. The Yalloroon had fought back once, disastrously. None who’d taken up arms were punished, but every other man, woman and child was, and many of them were killed. Some rebels committed suicide out of remorse and others simply became despondent; no uprisings occurred again. Several groups set out to escape, by land and sea, but all were brought back, saying they’d found no place not controlled by Salamá.

  The Yalloroon became playthings in a game of transcendent cruelty. They suffered ever-new terrors, humiliation and pain, being tested, they concluded, in some cold experiment to learn how to separate people from pride, from hope, from any other quality that might inhibit total submission.

  They’d considered racial suicide. But one woman had stood up at one of their meetings, saying, “There is only one reason they could wish to erase us so utterly. They know we are better than they.”

  The weaker and less angry knew they couldn’t bear it. Many took their own lives or each other’s by agreement. Those who were angriest, though, vowed to keep the things Salamá wished to destroy. So, while the Masters could quite easily have them killed, or broken with physical torture, or compelled by direct duress, separating the Yalloroon from their self-worth had met insurmountable resistance.

  Springbuck was amazed. In some way, Shardishku-Salamá itself had lost face, its clinical subjects refusing to behave as they ought. The Yalloroon had been unshakable in their belief that they were being tormented simply because they were better. From it had flowed the strength to resist. Erring, the Five had converted these unimposing people into a human alloy capable of being shattered, but never bent, the diametric opposite of the intended result.

  “But then,” interrupted Balagon, “as far as you know, we could be of Salamá, and all this, even the Trailingsword, a ruse.”

  “As happened generations ago,” responded Kalakeet. “An army came, and declared us liberated. There were celebrations and thanksgivings. After a week, they revealed the terrible truth, a sudden and subtle blow that started a more severe round of atrocities.”

  “You have little reason to believe us then,” Springbuck observed, “but you are no longer alone.”

  “And whether that is true or false, Ku-Mor-Mai, we welcome thee. If it is betrayal, that is thy crime, not ours.” He said it in an old, formidable dignity. The Ku-Mor-Mai bowed homage to that.

  “When deeds are tallied,” he answered, “none will match those of the Yalloroon.”

  Balagon voiced agreement. Splendid Gabrielle took Kalakeet’s hand and inclined her head over it.

  Springbuck began asking questions about the area. He answered Kalakeet’s questions about Coramonde, but told nothing of his actual plan; information could be extracted from the bravest man. A cartographer arrived with revised maps for the Speaker’s review, and the Protector-Suzerain ordered the expedition’s healers to move among the Yalloroon and be of whatever service they could. Night and the Trailingsword came on, and Kalakeet lit hoarded stubs of candle.

  The door banged open. Hightower filled the frame, reeking of the fight, with new damage to his armor, eyes smouldering. The first engagement with the Southwastelanders on their own soil had already been fought.

  He sat, to tell them about it. Hearing Kalakeet’s story, he’d become infuriated. Seeking release, he’d reconnoitered the countryside with Brodur and select men at his back. They’d encountered three times their own number in enemy cavalry, stumbling into them by chance in a winding pass. The Southwastelanders had been astounded but Hightower, with no more hesitation than it made to drop his lance level, had gone in among them, irresistible. His men, with scant choice, had borne in after. The southerners, less heavily armored and without room to maneuver, had stood their ground.

  The Warlord had driven completely through their ranks. Springbuck could picture that; he’d seen the old giant in combat, where getting in his way was tantamount to suicide. Gabrielle’s face wore a pride the Ku-Mor-Mai couldn’t begrudge.

  Hightower and his men had cut the Southwastelanders to pieces, and sent them reeling back down the pass, shivering in fright of these terrible new foemen, found where there ought only to have been helpless Yalloroon. The men of Coramonde had ridden back to the city singing, with a foeman’s head on every lancetip.

  Springbuck set his hand to the Warlord’s hilt, pulled the greatsword from its sheath. It was streaked with the dark blood of enemies, red coming to brown in the candlelight.

  “Lord Hightower has delivered the first statement of our long communiqué of war.”

  The Speaker reached out timidly. The very ends of his fingers reached the cold blade, rested there for a second. He drew them back as if burned, awed at the brown stains on them. Then he buried his head in his hands, weeping.

  Wrestling within the son of Surehand were loathing of the squander of war, against satisfaction in the delivery of the Yalloroon.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Who asks whether the enemy were defeated by strategy or valor?

  Virgil

  THE Lord of the Just and Sudden Reach gauged the dust of enemy horsemen. One of the riders of his advance party, doing the same, estimated, “They will be here in perhaps forty minutes, Majesty.”

  Reacher shook his head. Those were swift desert chargers, bearing lightly armored Southwastelanders. They would arrive at the little way station here, where the men of Freegate had stopped, sooner than that. He looked to the courier who’d just come up from the main body of his army.

  “How far back are my sister and the array?”

  The man answered unwillingly, knowing it was bad news. “No less than an hour and another half, my Lord. They are harried by unarmored bowmen on fleet steeds who, firing at them, outrace pursuit. The Horseblooded might have chased and caught them, but the Snow Leopardess would not allow her force to go asunder. She will come as quickly as she can. It might mean delay, your Grace, or it might mean a fight.”

  “It is Katya,” Reacher replied. “It will be a fight.” But she was handling things entirely correctly
. It wouldn’t do to let the Horseblooded become separated from the slower-moving mailed warriors of Freegate, risking piecemeal combat in unfamiliar country. She couldn’t know this way station was here, deserted by its few sentinels, commanding high ground that would be defaulted to the thousand or so Southwastelanders coming at full speed.

  Reacher had come ahead with two hundred men to scout the terrain in depth, only to find Southwastelanders within minutes of this strong position on its high ground, approaching from the opposite direction. He studied the hill, its grass burned brown by the overbearing sun. To the west, enormous broken teeth of stone formed a jagged hedge, sloping away toward the uneven, ravined land that led to the Central Sea. The position was secure enough there. The way station and its outbuildings were close by the side of the Southern Tangent, at the crest of the rise; from there the hill fell away to the east. It descended into gullies, draws and washes etched from the earth. That it wasn’t more heavily fortified was due to the fact that it fronted league after league of barren, uninhabited land to the north, guarding the farthest parts of Salamá’s domain. South of here, the Southern Tangent was said to stop, vanishing beneath a region of desert.

  The way station was indefensible by two hundred men against a thousand or more, but that same thousand might hold it against many times their number. The Lord of the Just and Sudden Reach dismissed the idea of trying a useless holding action. That only left it to come back with his whole army and dig the desert men out, using precious time and costing a toll of men.

  “We leave now,” he told the soldiers who waited tensely. They relaxed a bit, hearing it. “Have all buildings been searched?” he added.

  “It is being done, my Lord,” said the captain in charge of scouts. “There are some outbuildings left; it is nigh accomplished.”

  “Where is the Lord Van Duyn?” The American had been eager for a look at the Southwastelands, asking to come in the advance party as a favor Reacher could hardly deny.

  “He is gone up onto the roof of the way station,” one said, “to see the lay of the land.”

  Edward Van Duyn eased the hauburgeon that always seemed to drag at his shoulders, rubbed dust from his gold-rimmed glasses and rechecked his estimate of the enemy’s rate of travel. The prevailing wind blew down the slope, out of the highlands behind him, toward the plains. Distances were difficult to judge with the brazen sun directly overhead.

  Van Duyn might easily have remained back in Freegate, or returned there when Reacher had made his decision under the Trailingsword to go south. In the capital, he would have had the contiguity device close to hand, ready for escape from this Reality if the Masters should prevail. But Katya was accompanying her brother, not to be kept from his side in time of danger even by her feelings for the American. Threatened by prolonged separation from her, Van Duyn found himself unwilling to accept it.

  There was another reason for his going, less subject to analysis. He’d found himself recalling Coramonde’s Highlands Province and how, at the end of a day’s toil at the model farm or surveying for the new dam, he and the Snow Leopardess and many others would gather in the community bath and sauna they’d built. There they’d baked out the chill, laughing, joking, buffing themselves lobster-red in the heat. They’d spun a hundred plans and dreams, more than their tomorrows might bring, but no less worth conceiving.

  He’d had something then, challenges and ideas, accomplishments and hopes. He’d been accorded the friendship of the Highlanders, seldom given to outsiders, a thing of bedrock palpability, irrevocable. He’d thought of that often since the Province had been swallowed up by the polar magic of the Druids. To be sure, there were incalculable other Realities to which he could withdraw by Contiguity; he was frank enough with himself to own up that, in doing so, he’d sever a part of himself. In this line of thought, he’d been drawn more and more into the effort to cast down the influence of the Masters.

  Reacher was suddenly standing beside him, having come up without the slightest sound. Van Duyn stifled his surprise. The King never meant discourtesy; it was just that, peerless hunter and tracker, he went with an unlabored, unthinking stealth. Standing just over five feet, lean and broad-shouldered, Reacher, it was said, could cross a field without disturbing any blade of grass. His wild, simple upbringing left him uneasy in the company of most people. His preference for passing among them inconspicuously had given him a rumored talent for invisibility.

  Besides that there was, Van Duyn suspected, the matter of the King’s reflexes. The American had never been able to measure Reacher’s response time, but it was vanishing small. What attitudes and outlooks would he have developed, moving through a world of comparative sluggards with something like instantaneity? Anyway, nothing to make him outgoing.

  “How soon?” asked the King forthrightly.

  “I should say less than half an hour. They can catch us on open ground if we withdraw, can they not?”

  “Unimportant; they will not pursue. They will occupy this ground.” He tugged at his high, ring-mail collar. Reacher disliked panoply, being used to the brief hunting gear of the Howlebeau who’d raised him, and whose foster brothers were the huge wolves of the steppes. The King had often run with the packs, a member among them. For that he was sometimes called “Wolf-Brother.”

  After the conference at Earthfast, Reacher had led his armies far down the Southern Tangent, to the edge of Freegate’s boundaries. The Horseblooded had come, keeping their compacts with the men of the Free City and the strong bonds their hetmen had with the King. Southwastelanders had been raiding and sacking far into Freegate’s territory, and retribution had been overdue.

  The King’s scouts had ferreted out the southerners’ advance base, hidden in the heart of the wastes. Reacher had made a long march and taken the place by surprise. On the same night, the Trailingsword had burned in the sky for the first time.

  The Masters were using a young and warlike race, the Occhlon. Though prisoners had been reticent to the point of fanaticism, it had become clear that the Five weren’t simply fostering border troubles. This was some major effort, wherein they were fielding every man-at-arms they had. Andre deCourteney’s warnings in Earthfast stayed prominent in the King’s mind.

  Though communication with Coramonde had been lost, Reacher had heeded military imperatives, decrees of legend, and his own wilderness instincts, letting the Omen lead him toward Salamá. The Freegaters and Wild Riders had sent the desert men flying, unable to match the northerners’ numbers. This way station marked the end of lands to which neither side had any claim, and the beginning of the Southwastelands.

  “If they reoccupy this place they’ll hold us back, won’t they?” Van Duyn more stated than asked.

  “For a time. We here are too few to repel them.” He pulled the mailed coif up over his blond hair. Van Duyn picked up his Garand and they went back down the cylindrical stairway.

  Departure was interrupted. From the last building to be searched, two warriors emerged with a struggling man braced between them. The captive, sobbing and pleading, was thrust on his knees before the King.

  “This one was bound, gagged and hung by his sash,” explained the captain, his longsword drawn. “There was a pair of laden donkeys also, which he says to be his.” The captive waited like a mouse among snakes.

  Reacher examined the Southwastelander curiously. The man was no soldier, and hardly a spy. He was dressed in overused robes, his conical hat battered and dusty, his beard matted and dirty. Around his neck hung a medallion stamped of brass.

  “What else is there?”

  “In the stable, my Lord? Nothing more.” The captain’s gaze went south, where the enemy’s dust was nearer.

  Reacher pointed to the medallion. “What emblem is that?”

  The southerner’s eyes slid away. “Only my employer’s.”

  “A minor official’s medal, Lord,” supplied the captain, who knew something of Southwastelanders. “This man would be an area newsgiver, and collector of tri
bute.”

  “And what news did you give the sentinels here?” Van Duyn asked. The King was pleased his question had been anticipated. The prisoner hesitated.

  The captain’s edge flicked up under the newsgiver’s chin. The prisoner squeaked and gabbled, “That all is well, and our armies in firm control of the wastelands. Th-that victory is assured.”

  Van Duyn grinned. “Only, as you passed that encouraging dispatch, we were seen riding down; made you a liar, didn’t we? So the angry sentinels left you for us, apropos of your falsehood?”

  The collector-newsgiver admitted it. The American chortled. “You poor sucker. Your employers never told you what happens to propagandists when reality catches up, did they?”

  “I did believe it to be the truth, I swear upon my father’s eyes! Why else would I have stopped up here before turning south? Eee, spare me my life, I beg; I can make good recompense.”

  “What payment is that?” pounced the captain.

  “Do you but bring my donkeys, and I will show.” When the animals were fetched, he unpacked a long, thin sack. He opened one end, and spilled out a thin stream of red powder.

  “Earnai,” the captain said, “Dreamdrowse.” He rattled the newsgiver by gathered lapels. “Why did the sentinels not take it?”

  “Have mercy! Am I a madman, to risk my life by telling those provincial scum I was transporting the product of a season? And later, before I could buy back my freedom, I was gagged unspeaking.”

  Reacher turned to go. The discovery had no tactical significance. Maybe, he thought, the Southwastelanders would find it and make themselves stuporous, but he doubted that. The collector-newsgiver, released, slumped in astonishment. They had no time to go slowly, with a prisoner, and it wasn’t the King’s way to slay offhandedly.

  But Van Duyn was stirring the red powder with his boot. He called the Wolf-Brother back. “We could put this to work, you know.” Getting no response, he continued, “This is the form they call ‘mahonn’, am I correct?”