by Robert Brady
Shela had been quiet for days now; the two Andaran women as well. Usually three Andarans would talk each other’s ears off exchanging gossip in the oral tradition, telling and retelling the same stories, making them a part of the tribal memory.
Not this time. All of the women sat sidesaddle, an indication that they were expectant with child.
With Shela, I knew it to be fact. With the other two, more like wishful thinking. Little Bird and Sings Softly weren’t real happy with me and had made no secret of it. Blizzard had snubbed their mares, and I hadn’t been too kind about it, either. They’d also continued to offer themselves to me until Shela had warned them off, and that was just a slap in the face.
When you get right down to it, I’m not a real nice guy.
One of the girls came from the Wet Belly tribe, the other a Drifter. Both kept to the south of Andoran. That made it perfect – I wanted to check out an anomaly on the Fovean map and it could be found down there. We forced-marched for sixteen days, the weather becoming ever colder, seeking out these two tribes in the south.
My outriders located them – Wolf Soldiers who had once been Wet Bellies, cast-out from the tribe, thieves in a land where honor meant everything.
When news got around that I pressed south with that many warriors, tribes sent scouts to pick out our path and to get away from it. We ignored them. The Drifters and the Wet Bellies, once it became clear that I was bound for them, brought their resources together, their women miles south of the men, their herds to the west. They waited for us as the month of Life ended, a line across a sea of wheat, the cold wind blowing tufts of grain like a rolling sea before us.
“There must be over a thousand between them,” Two Spears informed me. His sister rode next to him, quiet. “I had no idea these tribes were so huge.”
“Supposedly they fight Slee all year round,” I said. “Small tribes would have had to move.”
Slee looked like a cross between a Man and a lizard. They can’t talk but they do fight in groups, and they are vicious. They eat, among other things, the flesh of Men and Uman.
“They look ready,” another of my majors, Dev Nevala, informed me. An Uman woman, she had been Sentalan, and stabbed her lover for cheating on her. She was faster with her sword than I was with mine – I really liked her.
“Let them be,” I said. “Two Spears, order your men to pull bows and arrows. I want them in groups of twenty, to circle the enemy to the right and left. Spread out like they are it will take us all day to fight them, and then we’ll be exhausted and they’ll be fresh. If we can drive them together, we’ll hold them against the foot, and then we can bring our lances to bear on them.”
“Why not just charge them one-to-one,” Tartan asked me. Shela had picked him out a spirited chestnut mare with a thick barrel, muscles on muscles in her hind quarters. He sat her next to Two Spears, on the other side from me. “We have lances, they have swords – they’ll never touch us.”
“They have bows, and they’re deadly with them,” I informed him. “Go one-to-one with them over a distance like this and we’ll lose most of the horse and have to try to take them with the foot – in fact, we’ll never catch them, and then we’ll leave here with nothing.”
“So, we break up…” Tartan tried to work it out.
“We make so many, smaller targets that their line becomes a liability,” Two Spears informed him. “They’ll break up on their own, and we’ll draw them into the center where we can engage them.”
Tartan nodded. That might happen if we fought, of course. There were no guarantees. Not in this business.
I kicked Blizzard’s barrel and he started to trot forward. Shela followed with the two Andaran women, Tartan and twenty lancers. Two Spears and Dev held the troops as they unpacked their arrows. Our supply train, half empty now, trundled far to the rear, a token guard on it.
Twenty came out from their side, as well. They were bare-chested, their dark hair free on the wind. They bore scimitars unsheathed on their saddles and bows over their shoulders.
Two separated – they would be the chieftains of the Drifters and the Wet Bellies. The other men would ride behind them.
Both sides stopped when about twenty feet separated us. I sat Blizzard, looking the two Andarans over, waiting for them to talk. If it took all day, I didn’t care.
There is an art to this.
“You bring back our daughters,” one said. From what I knew of Andarans, he would be the Wet Belly. His long mustachios were shot with grey, his hair beaded at the ends as only they did.
“I’m done with them,” I said.
That got an eyebrow up. “And the service of your stallion?”
I laughed. “For a night with your daughters? Not likely.”
That pissed him off – good to see that it wasn’t just a family trait of Kills’.
“You took the daughters and you didn’t seed the mares?” the other, a Drifter, demanded. He was smaller, younger, his mustachios barely to his chin, his hair black as night and his nose like an eagle’s beak.
“The daughters served to assuage me for the insult,” I said. “Kills with a Glance of the Long Manes gave me his daughter.”
“We are a much larger tribe than the Long Manes,” the Wet Belly said.
“Maybe not after today,” I said.
That got a nervous look at my army. Those were Wolf Soldiers. Normally there would be Aschire archers – one could only assume they lay hidden somewhere. The Aschire were invisible, and the Wolf Soldiers invincible.
They probably didn’t kid themselves into thinking that they could beat me. They had fought Confluni, they were no stranger to running now to fight another day. They might not like it, but it sure beat being dead.
So the trick was to get them pissed off enough to do something stupid.
“If you want the daughters, you can have them,” the Drifter informed me. That got a look from the Wet Belly. Two women, however, were a small price to pay, and I had been infamously decent to Shela.
“I don’t want them,” I said. “They’re defiled.”
That made for an insult.
The Drifter and half of their men had their scimitars out. “You city scum,” he spat at me.
I really wanted the Wet Belly, but I would settle for the Drifter.
“You have the nerve to fight me?”
“I will bury you here,” he informed me.
I kicked Blizzard in the ribs. He leapt forward. The Drifter reacted no slower, probably more experienced at fighting in the saddle, definitely less encumbered and a better equestrian than I.
He came at me from the left, thinking that it would make my lance useless. Its end whipped before him and peeled him from the saddle before he came within scimitar range. He did manage to hit the lance with his weapon – I had never seen anyone fast enough to do that before.
I rode over him with Blizzard, turned and leveled the lance at his body. I might as well not have bothered – he lay dead, his head crushed in by an iron-shod hoof..
One of the girls wailed. The other put a hand on her shoulder.
Half of the Andarans started forward, thinking combat must be on, and hesitated when the rest of the entourage did nothing.
“I’ll claim half of his horse, and half of his cattle,” I informed the rest of them.
The Wet Belly laughed. “If you can find them.”
“You think you’re leaving this field before I know where they are?”
I could see the look on his face – he would bolt and take his chances. He couldn’t count on the Drifters now. They would likely take off and choose a new chief. A good portion of the men would split the tribe and head for his – I just made him a lot stronger and he knew it. He probably counted on taking those horse and cattle himself.
“You run and it will be a slaughter,” I told him. “Those are Wolf Soldiers – you know what they do. We’ll be raping your daughters before the sun sets.”
That got me a look from Tartan. I’m
sure that’s not what he thought he came here to do.
“And if we give you the Drifters?” he asked me.
Andarans did that, too. If I raided and took their horse and their cattle, the Drifters would fight. What I offered him was a chance not to have to join in on it. He could peel off his horse, his women and his livestock and be gone.
That’s what I offered him. He opened his mouth to betray his allies.
The scimitar that took him through the spine leapt out of his chest like vengeance. He spread his arms, and his horse bolted, smelling blood.
I charged the man, now weaponless, who had done it. It had been worth a try, anyway. At least there would be chaos as they figured out who lead them.
In a fight, I usually didn’t worry that much about myself anymore. That first time, in the Great Northern Mountain Range, and then in Myr, I had been afraid that I might die, but the more times I didn’t, the easier it became not to think about it.
Tartan was a different story – this would be his first fight, and I wanted him to engage, but I wanted him to live through it, too. Andarans are pretty tough, and the warriors he met would be blooded.
He charged after me, probably the right thing to do, and skewered the man next to the man whom I did in, who had killed the Wet Bellies chief.
His lance snapped, and he fumbled for his sword when two of them charged him. He didn’t even realize that they had engaged him until he pulled his sword, looked up, and there they were.
I took one from behind. The other pinked his arm before he stabbed the man in the face. His horse bolted from the blood smell, and he ended up carving the guy’s head like a pumpkin, trying to free his sword. He made the mistake of watching it happen and then he was puking his guts out down the side of his mare.
That was a huge mistake – never barf on your horse. The warm liquid makes the horse think that it’s hit and it will take off, which is what happened. So here we had a battle, and Tartan heading east with his feet out of his stirrups.
“Shela,” I commanded. I couldn’t leave the field. She nodded and took off after him. He wore heavy armor, she didn’t – she would catch him fast enough.
The two Andaran women took off for their tribes. Half of that line turned tail and headed south, about a quarter on both sides came for me, and the rest didn’t know what to do.
Dev’s foot actually double-timed it close enough to me where I could leap within our ranks before the Andarans could get to me. Two Spears had our lancers arcing out west in squads of horse, driving in deserters with arrow-fire and rounding up attackers. Just as the mounted Andarans engaged the foot, they found themselves surrounded by my lancers and crushed against our shield wall. Pikemen and swordsmen killed Andaran and horse alike, suffering minimal injury, as our lances ripped them apart.
It probably took two hours before we marched south again with most of our numbers, a herd of Andaran horses and an embarrassed former prince with a yellow discoloration on the breastplate of his armor.
“So what did I do?” I asked him. We’d made night camp in our small city. We had no wood for spears around the perimeter but had lined up our pikes along the outer wall. If the Andarans charged us they would lose their first two ranks before they met us.
“You killed one chief,” Tartan informed me, trying to buff his breastplate, “and got the other to get himself killed, and then they had no –“
I shook my head. He didn’t get it. That might be better – let him get it into his head that he didn’t know everything.
“I picked a fight with the first one to get the second to desert on him,” I said. “They’re tribes – they feel a bond of honor within the tribe, but not much obligation between the tribes. The Wet Belly forgot that he had the people he was about to betray sitting right behind him, however. That was my mistake, too – I should have separated them first.”
“So you wanted to leave one alive?” Tartan pressed me.
I nodded. “It will be easier in the long run this way, but I was afraid I would have a worse fight than I had. I didn’t expect them all to run like that.”
“We caught half of them,” Two Spears informed me. “The rest will be heading for the women and the cattle. I have men following them – in the morning we’ll take that, too.”
“So we leave these people to starve?” Tartan asked me. I caught the look on his face. The Conqueror had been called a heartless monster, after all, who ate babies.
I shook my head. “I think you can guess what happens after that,” I said.
“But it didn’t go as you planned,” he pressed me. He leaned forward, and for a moment I saw his father in him.
Two Spears laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Lad,” he said, “it never goes as planned. If you want to be a good earl or a good general, you do it when your plans fail, and you aren’t rattled and win anyway.”
Tartan nodded. If he could get that, then he would be ok.
We had found their herds as I expected, and their women and old men, tending them. Two Spears and Shela both assured me that they had grouped their aurochs together for security. No one in Andoran had a herd that big.
Seven hundred head, an equal number of horse. This meant real wealth on the Andoran plains, the makings of a rogue tribe.
As Thorn had informed me a whole lifetime ago. Now I just waited for independents to come in and offer to run my herds, and that had been happening all day.
The tribes traded women and cattle all the time. Men usually stayed with the same tribe their whole life, unless that tribe was overrun or fell on hard times. Then it wasn’t uncommon for a tribe to dissolve and its members ply for membership into another tribe.
They could marry in, or they could go through the ceremonies, depending on who they were and who they joined. Wet Bellies and Drifters existed so close to each other that they could be interchangeable.
My rogue tribe called itself the Wolf Riders, and I knew everyone in it, and had been accepted by them all, because they came to me. I can honestly say that the horses didn’t seem to mind me, the aurochs remained ambivalent and the two bulls could care less, so long as I stayed away from them.
As far as anyone was concerned, that made me an Andaran.
Two Spears didn’t plan to join my tribe, but he gave me permission to marry his sister, and that satisfied one of the two things I had come here for.
Shela stood next to me, our baby standing between us, looking out onto the natural lake where the Great Mid River met the Safe River.
“Daddy,” Lee informed me, “it’s pretty.”
“Yes, it is,” I agreed with her. Turning to Shela, I asked, “Does it have a name?”
Shela had her cheek pressed to my chest. “No name that I know,” she said. “It’s too turbulent for swimming, and tradition says the fish stay away from the shore. If someone sailed down here and went east, they would have to brave the Slee and the Swamp Devils.”
No one did that.
Her tears felt wet on my shirtfront. She had been weepy this pregnancy. At first I thought it might be my deflowering of the Andaran girls, but she assured me that she could care less about that. She’d accepted a physical act that needed to be done.
“Ready to be a married lady?” I asked her.
“I lived very happily as a slave,” she informed me, without looking up at me. The sun was setting in the west and this view looked really, really nice.
“Ooooo,” Lee informed us, pointing at the pink colors.
“You can stay a slave, if you want,” I informed her. “But it is –“
Her soft fingers closed my lips. She knew – no need to tell her. Stay a slave and I would eventually have to marry someone, and that would mean nothing but trouble. She knew I loved her. She might have seen it as weakness, it might have made her warm inside, she didn’t feel ready for that talk and we had our whole lives to get to it.
Lee hugged her bebe and took a tenuous step toward the water. The beach mud lay ankle deep, and what
child could resist that?
“Stay away from the water,” Shela warned her, absently. I had tossed a stick in there and it had floated off to the south faster than I could have run to catch it.
My new ships, my Sea Wolves, were out there on that natural lake, crews testing them, plying the wind. One had snapped a mast before we got here, and another had nearly flipped over when a strong wind caught it broadside and all of its canvas had pulled it sideways. The ships that had born us here had brought extra wood, and we could pillage the Confluni forest if we had to. As far as I knew, they didn’t come this far south.
One of the Eldadorian captains who were part of the test had told me how impressed he was with the whole thing, and how much he wanted to go forward with it now. Based on how I’d had to drag him kicking and screaming into the program, that was good news.
We could see the ships out there, the sun setting past the edge of the lake, turning the sky pink and orange. Water lapped at the black mud at our feet, the smell of Men and horses washed over us from the camp when the wind changed and took Shela’s black hair.
We’d go back to Eldador the Port when the testing completed and update how we built the ships. This sort of testing is invaluable when you’re breaking new ground. I had a general idea of how wooden three-masters worked but I couldn’t do the job of an architect and I didn’t know enough about it to explain it effectively to someone who could.
Meanwhile, I had other things to do here.
I sat Blizzard on the plains to the east of a village I’d been calling ‘Wisex,’ on the shores of a lake with no name, with Shela to my left and Two Spears to my right, both mounted, and Tartan Stowe on a horse behind me. A dozen lancers flanked us, most of them Andarans in Wolf Soldier greys, the wind catching their long, black hair and the dour expressions on all of their faces.
A lot of the lancers were Andaran and most of them weren’t too happy about this new tribe. They saw it as an outsider intruding on their ways, which were sacred to them no matter where they lived. We were facing three tribal war chiefs right now, all on horses and each with no less than a dozen warriors behind them, and none of them looked too ecstatic, either.
