by David Drake
Torag looked at Sirawhil, his face knotting in a scowl emphasized by his long jaw. “Is the beast telling the truth?” he demanded. “I don’t know,” Sirawhil said. “Usually they’re too frightened to lie, but this one does seem different.”
In a sharp tone she added, “You beast women! Is the male Garric a stranger in your warren?”
“I know where he comes from,” called one of the woman carrying the dead warriors. “My husband Marzan brought him. Make somebody else take the pole and I’ll tell you all about him.”
Garric turned. He understood the words only because the Bird translated them in his mind, but the tone of the speaker’s voice identified Soma more clearly than he could see through rain and darkness. “Nerga, discipline that one,” Sirawhil said off-handedly to the nearest warrior. Nerga lashed out with his line. Soma tried to get her hand up, but the Corl was too quick: the hooked tip combed a bloody furrow across her scalp.
Soma wailed in despair but didn’t drop the pole. Head bowed and her left hand clasped over the fresh cut, she stumbled on.
“Speak, animal,” Sirawhil demanded with satisfaction.
“My husband sent men out to find the stranger,” Soma said in a dull voice, no longer bargaining. “The stranger is a great warrior and was supposed to protect us.”
She raised her head and glared at Garric. “Protect us!” she said. “Look at me! What protection was the great warrior?”
“Does she tell the truth, animal?” Torag said to Garric. He wore a casque of animal teeth drilled and sewn to a leather backing. As he spoke, he rubbed them with his free hand.
From the chief’s tone he was trying to be conciliatory, but he hadn’t taken the wizard’s suggestion that he call his prisoner by name. Indeed, not a great intellect… and the fact Torag rather than somebody smarter was in charge of the band told Garric something about the Coerli.
“I told you the truth, Torag,” Garric said. “I’m a visitor here. Why did you attack me? My tribe has many warriors!”
Walking had brought the circulation back to Garric’s legs. That hurt, of course, but he’d be able to run again.
If there’d been anywhere to run to. And he knew from seeing the Coerli move that at least in a short sprint they could catch any human alive.
“Where does he come from, Sirawhil?” Torag asked, scowling in concern. “If there’s really many like him…”
“I can do a location spell,” Sirawhil said. “We need to stop soon anyway, don’t we? It’s getting light.”
“I’d like to go a little farther…,” Torag grumbled. Then he twitched his short brush of his tail in the equivalent of a shrug. “All right, if he’s alone. If there was a whole warren full of them close, I’d keep going as long as we could.”
“I’m hungry, Torag,” whined Eny, the second of the warriors told to guard Garric specially.
The chief spun and lashed out. He used the butt of his club rather than the massive ball, but it still knocked the warrior down. Eny wailed.
“You’ll eat when I say you can eat, Eny!” Torag said. “Watch your tongue or I won’t even bother to bring your ruff back home to your family!”
Eny rolled to his feet almost before his shoulders’d splashed on the muddy ground, but he kept his head lowered and hid behind Nerga. Torag snorted and called, “All right, we’ll camp here till it gets dark again.”
He looked at Sirawhil. “Learn where the animal comes from,” he said forcefully. “And learn how many there are in his warren. That could be important.”
“Sit here, Garric,” Sirawhil said, pointing to a hummock: a plant with fat, limp leaves spreading out from a common center. “You and I will talk while the warriors make camp.”
It looked a little like a skunk cabbage. The best Garric could say about it as a seat was that it wasn’t a pond. He didn’t have any reason to argue, though, so he squatted on one edge facing the Corl wizard squatting opposite him.
“If they call this light,” said King Carus, viewing the scene through Garric’s eyes, “then they must see better in the dark than real cats do.”
Garric nodded. The eastern horizon was barely lighter than the rest of the sky, but even full noon in this place had been soggy and gray. Dawn only meant it was easier to find your footing between ponds.
Warriors began trimming saplings for poles and stripping larger trees of their foliage. The Coerli hands had four fingers shorter than a human’s; the first and last opposed. They looked clumsy, but they wove the mixed vegetation into matting with swift, careless ease.
After staring silently for a moment, Sirawhil opened her pack of slick cloth and took out a bundle of foot-long sticks polished from yellow wood. They were so regular that Garric thought at first they were made of metal.
“Don’t move,” she said. She got up and walked around the hummock, dropping the sticks into place as she went. Only once did she bend to adjust the pattern they made on the ground, a multi-pointed star or gear with shallow teeth.
The Bird shifted position slightly on her shoulder to keep its place. Its eyes, jewels on a jeweled form, remained focused on Garric as Sirawhil made her circuit.
Garric watched for a moment, then turned his attention to what the rest of the party was doing. He wondered how the warriors were going to build a fire on this sodden landscape. Perhaps there was dry heartwood, but most of the trees he’d seen were pulpy. They’d be as hard to ignite as a fresh sponge.
“The Coerli don’t use fire,” said the Bird silently. Its mental voice was dry and slightly astringent. “They don’t allow their human cattle to have fires either. In the villages the Grass People keep fuel under shelter to dry out and light their fires with bows.”
“Do you come from here, Bird?” Garric asked. He flexed his legs a little to keep the blood moving. He was used to squatting, but being trussed to the pole had left the big muscles liable to cramping.
Sirawhil looked up as she finished forming her pattern. “We captured the Bird when we first came here to the Land,” she said. “Torag and I are the only ones who have such a prize. The other bands can’t talk to the Grass Animals they capture, so it’s a great prize.”
“I am Torag the Great!” the chieftain roared, looking over at Garric and the wizard. “I’ve torn the throats out of two chiefs who thought they could take the Bird from me!”
Nobody moved for a moment. His point made, Torag surveyed the camp. The warriors had raised matting around a perimeter of a hundred and fifty feet or so. Though the sun still wasn’t up, it’d stopped raining and the sky was light enough for Garric to count a dozen Coerli and about that number of captive humans. All the latter were females.
Torag gestured toward a plump woman. She’d been one of those carrying Garric when he was tied to the pole. She moved awkwardly; she seemed to have pulled a muscle in the course of the raid and march.
“That one,” Torag said.
The woman looked up, surprised to be singled out. Eny grabbed her by the long hair and jerked her into a blow on the head from his stone-headed axe. The woman’s scream ended in a spray of blood. Her arms and legs jerked as she fell.
Eny and two more warriors chopped furiously at her head for a moment, sending blood and chips of skull flying. The rest of the band growled in delight. The Bird didn’t translate the sound; it was no more than hunger and cruelty finding a voice.
The three killers stepped back. Another warrior threw himself on the twitching corpse, his flint knife raised to slash off a piece. Torag roared and lifted his club. The warrior looked over his shoulder but hesitated almost too long. He leaped sideways with a despairing snarl; the chief’s club hissed through the air where the warrior’s head had been. It made a sound like an angry snake.
Torag knelt, raised the dead woman with his left hand, and tore her throat out without using a weapon.
Garric stared at Sirawhil to keep from having to look at the butchery. “You eat people?” he said in disgusted disbelief. He saw it happening, but part of h
is mind didn’t want to believe what was perfectly clear to his eyes.
“Torag doesn’t usually let the warriors have fresh meat,” Sirawhil said nonchalantly. “They begin to mature if they do, and he’d have to fight for his position. In the keep they eat fish or jerky. Here on a raid, though, there’s no other food so he’ll share the kill.”
The big Corl leaned back. His muzzle was red and dripping. He stared around the circle of longing warriors with a grin of bloody triumph, then took a flint knife from his belt. He stabbed it into the woman just below the left collarbone, drawing the blade the length of the chest. The edge ripped through the gristly ends of the ribs where the joined the breastbone. Placing one furry hand on either side of the incision, he tore the chest open.
“Flint’s sharp, that’s true,” Carus said, grim-faced. “But he’s a strong one, Torag. I wouldn’t mind showing him how much stronger I was, though; or you are, lad.”
In good time, thought Garric. He’d seen women and children killed by beasts—and by men, which was worse. There was a particular gloating triumph to the way Torag tore out pieces of the victim’s lungs and gulped them down, though. In good time…
Sirawhil squatted on the hummock opposite Garric, within the figure of sticks. She began chanting. The sounds weren’t words or even syllables in human terms, but Garric recognized the rhythms of a wizard speaking words of power.
The spell helped to muffle the crunches and slurping from the other Coerli. Torag had eaten his fill and allowed his warriors at the victim. The sound was similar to that of a pack of hunting dogs allowed the quarry of their kill, only louder. The captive women huddled together, whimpering and trying not to look at what was happening to their late companion.
Garric closed his eyes, feeling a wash of despair. A lot of it was physical: he was wet and cold, and his body’d been badly hammered. But this was a miserable place and situation. He didn’t see any way to change it, and especially he didn’t see any way out. What had brought him here?
“The wizard Marzan summoned you,” said the Bird’s voice. Garric’s eyes flew open. “Summoned one like you, that is. He knew the Grass People, his race, can’t stand against the Coerli, so he used his art and the power of the crystal to bring a hero to help them.”
I haven’t done much good thus far, Garric thought; but the weight of hopelessness had lifted. He’d killed two cat men, and so long as they kept him alive there was a chance of doing better than that. Ideas were forming below the surface of his mind. His experience and that of his warrior ancestor were blending to find solutions to a very violent problem.
“Where do the Coerli come from?” Garric asked. He spoke aloud though he obviously didn’t have to. It didn’t seem natural to look at something, someone, close enough to touch and talk to him without moving his lips.
“This place,” the Bird said. “This Land. But from the far future. There’s a cave in a chasm some fifteen miles from where we are now. It’s a focus for great power. Coerli wizards have learned to use it to carry them back to this time to hunt.”
“They’re trying to conquer their own past?” Garric said, hoping to gather enough information that he’d be able to make sense of it… which the fragments he’d heard thus far certainly didn’t permit him to do.
“The Coerli don’t make war,” the Bird said. “They skirmish over boundaries with neighboring bands, and they hunt. They’ve hunted out their own time, so they come here for game. Torag and other chiefs have built keeps in this time. Many more will follow as their own world becomes more crowded, but they don’t think of it as conquest the way your people would.”
Torag wiped his muzzle with a hand which he then licked clean. He and the other cat men were lost in their own affairs, though some of the captive women watched in puzzlement as Garric talked. Unless the Bird translated them, his words were as meaningless to them as to the Coerli.
“They have no reason to overhear,” the Bird said. “Don’t think that because you’re the same species that your fellow slaves are your friends.”
It stretched one wing, then lowered it and stretched the other. They were small, no bigger than Garric could span with one hand, but when he looked into the light that shimmered through them he had a momentary vision of infinite expanses.
Garric grinned. “I’m not a slave,” he said quietly.
He lifted his hands slightly to indicate his bound wrists. “For the moment I’m a prisoner,” he said. “But they’ll never make me a slave, Bird.”
Sirawhil stopped chanting and slumped forward. Garric was so used to helping Tenoctris that he reflexively reached out to catch the exhausted wizard. Even without full use of his hands, he kept her from rolling off the hummock as she’d started to do.
The motion drew Torag’s attention. He was on his feet, raising his club with the sudden snapping movement of a spring trap releasing.
“I’d wondered what would happen if we jumped him while he was full of food and relaxed,” Carus observed with a wry smile. “Your knees broken is what’d have happened, I suppose.”
In good time, Garric thought. Aloud he said, “Your wizard worked a great spell, Torag. Should I have let her drown in a puddle?”
The warriors looked up also. They’d finished their meal for the most part, though one was still gnawing a rib. The corpse was reduced to scattered bones and a pile of offal on a patch of bloodstained ground.
Instead of replying to Garric, Torag growled, “You, Sirawhil! What have you learned?”
The wizard lifted herself upright, but she splayed her legs on the hummock instead of making the greater effort to squat. She rubbed the back of a hand over her eyes and tried to focus on the chieftain.
“I’m not sure, Torag,” she said. “He comes from very far away. There’s a great deal of power involved in his presence.”
“There’s no chief in the Land more powerful than I!” Torag said.
“It’s not that kind of power,” Sirawhil said wearily. “It’s wizardry, Torag, and it’s greater wizardry than I can fathom. It isn’t—”
She glanced toward Soma, who tried to burrow out of sight behind the other captives. The women had learned what it meant to be singled out in this company…
“—anything that the wizard in the warren we raided could’ve done by himself. I think we should take him back home for the whole Council of the Learned to examine.”
“Are you mad, Sirawhil?” Torag said. He sounded more amazed than angry, the way he had when Garric treated him as an equal. “If I leave here, some other chief will take my keep. Or—”
And here the growling threat was back in his tone.
“—do you think I’ll let you and the Bird go back without me? And take a valuable animal?”
“Torag,” said the wizard, “this thing is too big for me. We need to take this Garric to someone who can understand him, even if there’s a risk.”
“It’s not too big for me,” Torag said complacently. “We’ll go back to my keep and I’ll decide later.”
He looked at Garric, his ruff lifting slightly. “Nerga and Eny, tie him up again. Tie all the females too, just in case. I’m not taking any chances till I have him in the pen with the other animals.”
You’re taking a big chance, Garric thought as the warriors came toward him with coils of hard rope. You’re taking the last chance you’ll ever take. But in good time…
Sharina stood on the sea wall of Mona harbor, watching the Heron ease toward the quay on the stroke of ten oarsmen. The trim bireme that’d rowed off at mid-morning was now a shambles, the outriggers broken in several places and the hull scorched by the sky-searing blaze Sharina had seen leap from the sea about the ship.
She’d been ready to die when she saw the fire, but it’d vanished as suddenly as it’d appeared and the Heron, though at first wallowing, still had figures on her deck. Cashel, big and as solid as a rock, was obvious among them, and Sharina’d breathed again.
Admiral Zettin had manned and led out te
n ships as soon as he saw something was happening to the Heron. They now passed back and forth at the harbor mouth.
You couldn’t keep warships at sea for long periods—there wasn’t room for the crews to sleep aboard, let alone food storage and a place to cook. For now, though, it was important to Zettin to be seen to be doing something; a notion that Sharina understood perfectly. She only wished there was something she could’ve done besides wait and pray to the Lady—silently, because it wouldn’t do for the Princess Sharina to show herself to be desperately afraid.
She smiled. Attaper, leading her personal guard at this dangerous moment, saw the expression and grinned back. Did he realize that she was smiling at the fact her duty was to be seen to be unconcerned? Perhaps he did; but maybe even that experienced, world-wise soldier thought Princess Sharina really had been confident, no matter how confusing and dangerous the situation seemed to others.
Lady, make me what I pretend to be, Sharina prayed in her heart; and smiled more broadly, because she seemed to be fooling herself as well.
Cashel used his staff to jump ashore while the Heron was still several feet out from the quay. It was a graceful motion but completely unexpected, though Sharina’d seen Cashel clear gullies and boggy patches that way frequently in the borough. Here it called attention to him, which Cashel never liked to do; but Sharina stepped toward him and he folded her in his arms. At last she could fully relax for at least a few moments.
“Tenoctris is all right,” Cashel said in a quiet rumble. “Ilna’s sitting with her on the deck because she’s so, you know, tired; and maybe you couldn’t see with the wicker matting in the way.”
“I knew they were all right,” Sharina said, simply and honestly. “Because you are.”
She stepped back and gave the battered bireme a real examination. The crew was climbing out, some of them helped by their more fortunate fellows or by men waiting on the dock. The benches and hollow of the ship were splashed with blood—painted with blood on the port bow where the fighting must’ve been particularly intense. It seemed to Sharina that nearly half the crew was missing, and many of the survivors had been injured.
