by David Drake
“Master Cashel!” Cervoran piped. “I have need of you!”
Cashel was frowning, not because of the situation but because there didn’t seem to be anything for him to do. The quarterstaff was no use on plants, though it felt good in his hands. It reminded him of the days he sat with his back against a holly tree, watching the sheep on the slope below him and listening to Garric play a pipe tune. Cashel couldn’t sing or make music himself, but he loved to hear it when others did.
Feeling good wasn’t going to beat these plants nor would happy memories. The spear he’d thrown didn’t seem to have done much good either. Besides, the plant that’d attacked the palace had looked like a pincushion from the soldiers’ spears by the time he and Cervoran came up from the cellars, and it didn’t even slow down till the fire got burning good.
Regretfully, Cashel laid his staff on the catwalk. The wicker mat hanging from the rail would keep it there unless the ship sank. Until the ship sank likely enough, but the crew’d fight till then and Cashel sure would be fighting.
A sword’d really be the best thing, but Cashel was hopeless with them. He hadn’t seen any call to learn to use one despite not liking them the way he’d done with other things.
A broad-bladed hatchet with a square pein stood in a hole in the mast partner—the piece where the mast would be stepped. Cashel drew it out. He’d rather have a full-sized axe, but the hatchet would do. The haft was short but it’d let him grip with both hands; if he had to get close, well, he’d get close. He’d been in fights before.
Hellplants pulled themselves toward the bow from either side, using their grip on the leading oars like men crossing a span hand-over-hand by a pole. It wouldn’t have done any good for the crew to cast the oars loose the way they’d done before, since this time the monsters were in front of the ship. Backing water wouldn’t help either, since the plant they’d gotten past was swimming up in the wake.
The one behind was the one Cashel’d probably try to deal with, seeings as Chalcus was in the bow—one foot on the outrigger, the other on the ram—waiting for whichever of the front pair came in range of his sword first. Cashel stayed where he was for the time being. He figured his job was to protect Ilna and Tenoctris the best way he could, and just now he wasn’t sure what that’d be.
You didn’t win fights by being too hasty. Of course this time Cashel didn’t expect to win, but he wasn’t going to change ways that’d served him well so far.
“Master Cashel!” Cervoran said. That high voice was as nasty to hear as a rabbit screaming, but like the rabbit it sure did get heard. “I have need of you!”
Cashel hadn’t thought about the wizard since he’d carried him aboard. Cervoran was holding out that piece of skull again. “Fill this with sea water,” he said when he saw Cashel was looking at him.
Ilna nodded agreement, but Cashel hadn’t been going to hesitate anyhow. Nothing he’d come up with for himself to do was going to be much good. The first plant he got close to would’ve known it’d been in a fight, but the monsters were the size of oxen. They didn’t have a head or a heart you could split with an axe, either.
Cashel took the cup and dropped it down the front of his tunic. He could climb down one-handed, but just now he figured the other hand had better be holding the hatchet.
He swung over the railing, pushed a couple standing crewmen aside with his feet, and dropped. The bench he came down on creaked angrily and threatened to split; he’d landed heavier than he’d meant.
The Heron dipped like a lady doing a curtsey: a hellplant had grabbed the outrigger with more tentacles than a hand has fingers and was pulling its huge body out of the water. Chalcus slashed, his sword twinkling like lightning in the clouds. Feathery tufts of green fluttered up.
The ship’s bow lifted, but another tentacle snaked around Chalcus’ ankle from behind. Without seeming to look, the sailor jerked his leg up against the plant’s strength and flicked his dagger across. The plant’s tough fibers parted, and the curved sword whirled in an arc of its own through a couple more gripping tentacles.
The plant behind them had reached the stern. Crewmen there started hacking at it. Most used swords, though one fellow shoved in a pike. He was still holding the shaft when two tentacles lifted him screaming into the air and pulled his limbs off one by one.
In the bow, chips flew from the outrigger as oarsmen swung their swords with more enthusiasm than skill. Somebody was bound to cut a friend’s hand off the way they were acting, though Cashel didn’t suppose it’d matter much in the long run.
Cashel fished the cup out, then dipped it full. He turned to lift it to Ilna’s waiting hand. His sister was one of those people who didn’t wait around wondering what was going to happen next. Cashel could never figure why there were so few folk like her, but that made him happier for the ones he did meet.
With one hand on a deck support and the other holding the hatchet against the top railing, Cashel lifted himself up to where the women were. Tenoctris chanted over her little triangle on the decking. Cashel could see an occasional rosy gleam of wizardlight in the air, but anything else happening was beyond him.
Ilna had her paring knife out. Its blade was good steel, not like the knives forged from strap iron that every man back home in the borough carried. Cashel figured the tricks Ilna did with twine didn’t work on the hellplants or she wouldn’t have taken the knife from her sleeve. That was too bad, though he didn’t doubt she’d give as good an account of herself with the little knife as any of the sailors would with their swords.
He grinned at her. She sniffed, looking peevish but resigned to a world that didn’t work the way it ought to. That was so much his sister’s normal expression that Cashel guffawed loudly. It took more than a whole army of plants to change who Ilna was.
Cervoran held the cup over his brazier and started chanting again. The charcoal hadn’t gone out with all the tossing around it’d gotten, though the sticks were just ghosts of what they’d been, nested in a mound of white ashes.
Cashel couldn’t figure how the wizard stood the heat that rippled the air above the cup in his hand. Maybe he just didn’t have any feeling in his fingers.
Cashel looked down at the fight. He was itching to mix into it, but he knew there’d be time aplenty. They’d all get their bellies full of fighting today…
Timbers were crackling and the Heron rode way deep in the water, but it was next to impossible to make wood really sink. Chalcus cut like a very demon. He was bloody in a dozen places and lost his leather breeches; pulled clean off by a tentacle, Cashel supposed, but it hadn’t slowed him a mite. Ilna’d found herself a man and no mistake.
From the height of the deck Cashel saw plants in all directions. There was a lot of seaweed floating in the Inner Sea. Once back home when the winds and currents were just right, he’d seen the whole bay on the other side of the headland from Pattern Creek filled with slowly turning greenness. This was the same, only the green swam toward them.
Cervoran’s eyes were open but they weren’t focused on anything, as best Cashel could tell. Thinking about previous times he’d seen the wizard, he wasn’t sure there was a difference. Cervoran was alive, no question about that; but Cashel got the feeling he was riding in his body instead of living in it the usual way.
A hellplant dropped away from the starboard bow. Chalcus had hacked its tentacles off, however many there were. That was a wonderful thing, but the plant on the port side was struggling with the crewmen there. Chalcus sat on a bench with his head bowed forward to make it easier for him to drag breaths in through his open mouth.
Cashel knew better than most what fight took out of you, even when you won. Chalcus’d be back in it soon, but nobody could keep up for long what he’d been doing.
Cashel looked critically at his hatchet. The blade was straight and as broad as his palm; it had a good working edge, put on with a stone some time since it was last used. Rust flecked it, which pleased him. Steel rusted quicker than iron did, he�
�d found.
The haft was hickory like his quarterstaff. He grinned. Hickory was a good wood for tools, hard but with more spring to it than cornelwood or elm. Besides, he liked the feel of it.
The sea around the Heron was solid green, a mass of waving fronds and bodies like fat barrels. There were more plants than Cashel could count with both hands, many more. Chalcus was back in the fight. Men cut and screamed and died in the grip of arms stronger than any animal’s.
A hellplant had grabbed the outrigger to starboard. It’d driven the sailors back, and now a tentacle waved toward the raised deck. Cashel couldn’t wait any longer. Instead of cutting at the arm—the plant had who knew how many more?—he lifted one foot to the railing. He’d leap on top of the plant and with the hatchet—“Phroneu!” Cervoran cried, his voice stabbing through the ruck of noise. Cashel glanced instinctively toward the wizard. The water in the skull was at a rolling boil, frothing over the silver lip.
Cervoran’s case was open at his feet. In his free hand he held a small velvet bag, the sort of thing a woman used to store a fancy ring or broach. Cervoran shook the contents, a dancing and glittering of metal filings, into the water. They burned with a savage white glare, and around the Heron the sea burned also.
Cashel slitted his eyes and turned to cover Tenoctris. The brightness was beyond imagining; it was like being put next to the sun. Beyond imagining…
The blaze—it wasn’t flames so much as hot white light—mounted higher than the mast would’ve been, higher than the tallest tree of Cashel’s memory. Hellplants shrivelled. Bits of them lifted and spun into the air, black ashes disintegrating into black powder and vanishing.
The hammering glare stopped abruptly. Cashel opened his eyes and lifted his body off Tenoctris. He’d supported most of his weight on the railing, but he was still glad when she looked up and him and said, “Thank you. Thank you. Are you all right, Cashel?”
While the light blazed Cashel hadn’t been aware of any sounds, but now people were screaming or praying or just blubbering in terror and pain. The air stank with a combination of wet straw burning and cooked meat. The sea as far as he could tell was black with drifting ash.
Men who’d reached over the side of the ship had burned too. Most of them’d been dead already or next to it, snatched out of the Heron by a plant’s crushing tentacles. Some had probably been pushing forward to fight, though.
Well, it’d been quick. And it was done, so that was good.
Tenoctris was all right. Ilna was down in the bow, wrapping a bandage over the torn skin on Chalcus’ right forearm. Cashel looked at Cervoran, not exactly his business the way the women were, but maybe Cervoran too.
The wizard stood like a wax statue, neither smiling nor concerned. The empty velvet sack was in his left hand, but he’d dropped the skull to the deck again.
Cashel bent and picked up the cup. There was no telling when they’d need it again.
Garric’s head hurt. The blinding surge of pain every time his heart beat was all his universe could encompass just now. He wasn’t sure how long he lay like this, he wasn’t sure of anything but the pain.
Then he noticed that other parts of his body hurt also.
“It means you’re alive,” noted the ghost in Garric’s mind with amused dispassion. “There came a time I couldn’t say that, so be thankful.”
I’m not sure I’m thankful, Garric thought, but he knew that wasn’t true as the words formed. He grinned and immediately felt better. Carus, who during a lifetime of war had been hurt as often and as badly as the next man, grinned back in approval.
Garric opened his eyes. He was being carried under a long pole, lashed by the elbows and ankles. His head hung down. Two women from the village had the back of the pole; when he twisted to look forward he could see two more in front. It was raining softly, and there was only enough light for him to tell there were people in the group besides the women carrying him.
A Corl warrior bent close to peer at Garric, then raised its head and yowled a comment. Other Coerli answered from ahead in the darkness. The women supporting the front of Garric’s pole stopped and looked over their shoulders.
The cat man slashed the leading woman with his hooked line, held short and jerked to tear rather than hold. The woman cried out in pain and stumbled forward again.
Two Coerli walked toward Garric from farther up the line, a female wearing a robe of patterned skins and the maned giant who’d knocked him unconscious. The male was twice the size of the ordinary warriors, taller and about as heavy as the humans in this land. The female was as big as the warriors but unarmed. A crystalline thing sat on her right shoulder. It was alive.
“Can he walk?” the big male asked. Garric’s ears heard a rasping growl, but the question rang in his mind.
“You!” said the female Corl, looking at Garric. She had four breasts, dugs really, under the thin robe. “Can you walk?”
“I can walk,” Garric said. He wasn’t sure that was true, but it seemed likely to get him down from the pole. With his legs freed and maybe his hands as well, who knew what might happen? “How is it you can speak my language?”
“We can’t,” the female said. “The Bird speaks to your mind and to ours.”
The crystal thing on her shoulder fluffed shimmering wings. Well, they might’ve been wings. It wasn’t really a bird, but Garric supposed that was as good a name as any.
“Where do you come from, animal?” the big male demanded.
“My name is Garric,” Garric replied. “I’ll answer your questions as soon as you’ve let me down from here to walk on my own. Otherwise, there’s not much you can do to me that’ll hurt worse than I feel already.”
“That’s not entirely true,” noted Carus. “But a little bluster at a time like this can be useful. It’s the best you can do till you’ve got a hand loose, anyway.”
Now that Garric was fully awake, the jouncing ride was excruciatingly painful. The Coerli must have better night vision than humans; they moved with complete assurance, avoiding puddles and trees fallen across the trail. The women carrying Garric couldn’t see much better than he did, though. Somebody slipped at every step, and once both of those in front fell to their knees. The jerk on Garric’s elbows made his mind turn gray.
“All right, put him down,” the big male said. “But keep him tied. Nerga and Eny? Walk behind the big animal and kill him if he tries to run.”
“Female animals, put the male Garric down,” the female Corl said. She looked at Garric and added, “I am the wizard Sirawhil, beast Garric.”
The carriers stopped abruptly. Presumably they’d heard the big male just as Garric had, but they hadn’t reacted till they got a direct order from the wizard. Now they more dropped than lowered Garric onto the muddy ground.
The big male glared at Garric, fondling the knob of his wooden club. “I am Torag the Great!” he said. A warrior cut Garric’s ankles away from the long pole. “No other Corl can stand against me!”
A flint knife sawed Garric’s elbows free. His wrists were still tied in front of him by thin, hard cords, but one thing at a time. He rolled into a sitting position and looked at his captor.
Let me get my hands on you and I’ll show you what a man can do, he thought. Aloud he said, “Why have you attacked me, Torag? I was not your enemy.”
Torag looked at him in amazement. He turned to Sirawhil and snarled—literally from his own mouth, and the tone of the words ringing in Garric’s mind was equally clear, “What is this animal saying? He’s a beast! How can he imagine he’s an enemy to the greatest of the Coerli?”
“You hit him on the head,” Sirawhil said with a shrug. “Perhaps he’s delusional. Though—”
She glanced back; Garric twisted to follow the line of her eyes. Women from the village carried the bodies of two warriors. The cat men’s corpses were light enough that a pair of bearers sufficed for either one.
“—while he’s only an animal, he’s a dangerous one.”
&n
bsp; “Resume the march!” Torag ordered. In a quieter though still harshly rasping voice he added to Sirawhil, “We can’t get back to the keep by daylight, but I’d like to put more distance from the warren we raided. Just in case.”
He prodded Garric with the butt of his club. “Get up, beast,” he said. “If you can’t walk, I’ll break your knees and have you dragged. Maybe I ought to do that anyway.”
Garric rolled his legs under him, rose to his knees, and then lurched to his feet without having to stick his bound hands into the mud to brace him. He wobbled and pain shot through his body—ankles, wrists and a renewed jolting pulse in his head—but he didn’t fall over. He began plodding after the Corl warrior who was next ahead in the line. Torag and the female wizard fell in beside him.
“He’s not a great thinker, this Torag,” Carus said. “He’s too stupid to hear a good plan even when it comes out of his own mouth.”
He’s not really afraid of me, Garric thought.
Carus laughed. The king’s good humor was real, but it was as cold and hard as a sleet storm.
“Why are you so big, beast?” Torag said. “Are there more like you back in the warren where we captured you?”
“Its name is Garric,” Sirawhil said to her chief. “Sometimes using their names makes them more forthcoming.”
Garric looked at the Corl in amazement. Didn’t they realize that he could hear what they said to one another?
“The Coerli think only what they say directly to you will be translated,” said an unfamiliar voice in Garric’s mind. “It’s never occurred to them to test their assumption. They’re not a sophisticated race.”
Neither of the Coerli had spoken. The Bird on Sirawhil’s shoulder fluttered its membranous wings again.
“I don’t come from around here,” Garric said. “I’m a visitor, you could say. All the members of my tribe are as big as me or bigger.”
