The sun hung directly overhead at mid-day when Mark, disbelieving, saw the first rider appear a mile away on the road east.
Maybe it’s just some local, Mark thought when no others appeared. That hope vanished when the man stopped, turned in his saddle, and looked behind him. Seconds later, a line of horsemen appeared. Mark counted. Five, seven, eight, nine. Hope faded. Twelve.
“Fuck, fuck, FUCK,” he hissed. “How did you follow so fast? Don’t you guys ever sleep or shit?”
Any lingering hope that the number was a coincidence vanished when Mark saw beardless faces and bandages on two of the men.
“Damn all you Narthani pricks to whatever hell you believe in!”
He hustled back to their camp two hundred yards away and walked behind a rock formation with a spring flowing down the slope. Alys cried, “Papa!” and ran to him. He picked her up and walked over to Maghen.
“It’s them, isn’t it? I can see by your face.”
He nodded and handed her Alys. “They’ll be coming to the fork soon. I’ll go back, and we’ll see which way they go. Go ahead and start breaking camp and getting the horses ready. I’ll return as soon as I can.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, hoping to reassure her.
Back at the lookout position, he saw the twelve riders approach the river fork. They followed the main branch for about two hundred yards, then stopped. The first man he’d seen got off his horse and led it forward, the others trailing thirty or forty yards behind. The man kept his head down, swinging it slowly back and forth.
“Oh, shit! He’s a tracker!”
It had never occurred to Mark there would be tracking specialists, like out of a Western movie. An unpleasant movie clip flashed to his consciousness: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The two outlaws were pursued by experts who included an Indian tracker calling himself Lord Baltimore. Unable to lose the pursuers and desperate, the two outlaws jumped off a cliff into a raging river as their only hope of escape. He couldn’t envision his family duplicating the movie.
“He must suspect something,” Mark mumbled to the nearby rocks. “Maybe no recent hoof prints. Hell, maybe he’s half bloodhound and doesn’t smell us anymore.” How didn’t make any difference.
The man walked back to the others and talked to one of the Narthani. Then the other eleven dismounted and sat in place, while the tracker left his horse and walked back to the river’s fork. Mark didn’t doubt he was checking whether they had left the main road.
“He can’t track over the rock,” Mark whispered, hoping.
The tracker stopped where Mark had led his family onto shallow sloping solid rock with an inch or so of water flowing down it. They had stayed on the rock until near the last cascade and then went into a creek entering the fork. Another three hundred yards and they’d left the creek bed and rode on grass until they moved into their observation position. Mark held his breath as the man leaned down, as if inspecting some telltale sign of the quarry’s passing. Mark sighed when the man walked back to the others.
“Maybe he didn’t find anything.”
The tracker and the presumed leader of the party talked for two or three minutes. Then the leader waved his arms at the resting men, who got back on their horses.
“Okay, so which way are you going?” Mark said under his breath.
The twelve men mounted again and started out . . . continuing west on the road.
Mark sighed, and every muscle relaxed from the tension.
“They didn’t find where we left the road,” he whispered again to the wind. “For a moment I thought we had left some signs on the ground, but I guess not. We need to move. The road up to here is traveled enough that our hoof prints are mixed with those of other horses. But if the damn tracker is good enough, he might be able to recognize specific prints and eventually realize ours are missing.”
The next two days they moved from first to last light, never pushing the horses at more than a trot and alternately riding and walking. Both evenings, they quickly built a concealed fire near water. Maghen used their one pot to make a “sort of” stew from a mixture of dried meat and vegetables. They slept by the fire, leaving the stew pot covered and to be eaten cold when they awoke.
Every time they topped a hill or ended on an open stretch of land, Mark paused to look behind. He couldn’t shake an itch he felt. Either the men had lost their trail, or they would backtrack to the fork and catch up. He hoped that if he didn’t see the men for another two or three days, his family might be free of pursuers.
They didn’t make it to those days.
The sun was at its zenith the next day when they crested a ridgeline. Trees had given way to rock surfaces the last few hundred yards, and Mark could see over the tops of trees into the valley behind them. As usual, he paused to look back.
A hundred of them could be in the valley, and I wouldn’t know it, he thought. Too many trees in the valley floor.
He shifted the reins to turn his mount and start it downslope when a tiny flash caught his eye. He turned back. Could it be sunlight reflecting off water? A random flash in his vision, something he might experience in his peripheral vision if he moved his eyes too fast at night? The sun was still high in the sky.
He strained, focusing on the approximate area where he’d seen the flash. The more he concentrated, the closer objects seemed.
“What is it, Mark? Do you see something?”
“Maybe nothing. I thought I saw a reflection from the sun, but—”
Another flash. In almost the same spot. Then another, but, estimating as best he could, the position of the second flash must have been a hundred yards from the first one.
“Shit! I’m seeing more reflections from the sun.”
Maghen didn’t speak, but he glanced her way and saw her drawn expression.
He kept scrutinizing the trees. The intervals varied from a few seconds to a minute or more, but the flashes continued, and their positions changed, unmistakably moving along the Kaldwels’ route.
He looked at Maghen. “It’s them,” he said woodenly. “It has to be. Who else would be following the same route we took? The spacing of the flashes indicates several of them. It must be the sun reflecting off metal. I only saw the flashes because we’re higher than them and above the trees.”
“How far behind are they?” asked Maghen. She clutched a slumbering Alys, who had dozed off when they left the trees and moved into unfiltered sunlight.
He knew she meant in time, not distance.
“We had to wind around on this slope a lot, so I’d say from where they are to the beginning of the slope, then up it, maybe two and a half hours. Possibly three if we’re lucky. But when they get closer, at some point they’ll recognize how close they are, and they might speed up.”
“What can we do?”
He looked down into the next valley. “From here on, there’s not going to be any rock surface to hide our tracks. We’ll be on the ground and grass the whole time. If they really have a tracker and he’s as good as we must assume he is, he’ll have no trouble following us. From here, we can see that a good-sized stream runs through the next the valley ahead. Our only chance to lose them again is to find forks in the route and hope they take the wrong ones.”
He knew Maghen wasn’t fooled.
“Time is running out, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer directly. “We’ll push the horses down to the stream and follow it until we find a fork.”
Mark needed time to think about what to do next, and they had to maintain enough distance from the pursuers to retain their options. They alternated between galloping for ten minutes and dropping to a trot for ten minutes, then repeating. After two hours, they stopped for ten minutes at a stream to allow the horses to drink and rest.
The faster downward slope added distance from their pursuers. They paralleled the watercourse for three miles downstream before coming to a smaller stream that merged with the one they were following. Mark hesitated. Which way to go�
�continue on the main branch or take the smaller merging watercourse? He tried to put himself in the tracker’s boots. If Mark were the follower, which way would he suspect the pursued had taken?
“Maghen, I can’t be sure, but let’s assume they’ll think we took the small stream and not the larger one. I’m only guessing, but we can’t outrun them. I think our only chance is for me to ambush them and hope enough of them are shot to discourage the others from continuing.”
“You mean we will ambush them,” said Maghen, her face pale but her voice firm.
“Can you do that? Can you shoot and kill men?”
“At best, they intend to take my husband from me and use me and Alys to make you do whatever they want. At worst, they might kill us all. I’ll shoot every one of the bastards if I can.”
Mark smiled, despite their situation. “That’s my girl. We’ll take the larger stream, as long as it doesn’t get too deep and slow us down too much. They’ll have to follow by staying in the stream because it looks like the trees along the main stream beyond the fork are too thick for anyone to easily climb the banks. We’ll have advantages, and we’ll need them. We’ll look for a spot where they can’t ride directly up the bank where we’ll be waiting. The water will slow them down, and it’ll be hard for them to fire back, control their horses, and respond to the ambush.
“Our other advantage is that they seem to want me alive—at least, that’s what the man in Landylbury said. He shouted at the other men not to kill me. That’s got to make them hesitate to fire at us.”
Mark didn’t add the qualification that his assumptions weren’t certain or how the pursuers’ priorities could change once they were under fire.
He suppressed urging the horses to go faster—they would only tire, working against the water, and the pursuers would have the same issue. About two miles from the fork, the bank on their left varied from eight to twelve feet high. It was covered with brush and boulders that might have rolled down from the hill the stream curled around. The opposite bank was only three to five feet high, but the brush was just as thick.
“This is it,” said Mark. “We’ll have them in as good a position as I think we can find. When they come, we’ll shoot at the leading ones and hope the trailers pull back. What we don’t want is for them to split up, with some behind us along the stream and other ones ahead to block us from moving. This is also a good spot because the stream behind us runs almost straight for several hundred yards, so we’ll see them coming.”
In another hundred yards, they found a place where the bank had caved into the stream, forming a ramp. They led the horses up to the higher bank’s top, then parallel to the stream for another fifty yards.
“We’ll leave the horses here. I’ll go back, find positions for us to wait, and take all the firearms there. You settle Alys. Then change the riding gear to the fresher horses and tie the others to trees. If it comes time to flee, we’ll leave the packhorses and ride hard with only the two riding horses.”
Maghen nodded and dismounted. She set Alys down on the ground and handed her both of her stuffed animals.
“Be a good girl, baby, and play with Abba and Milo. Mama and Papa have work to do.” Alys took the animals, hugged them to her, and watched her parents with wide eyes. She had been quiet the last two days, as if, even at her age, sensing things and fearing the unknown.
Mark gave his wife a quick hug. “I’ll take the horse with most of the firearms and then bring it back.”
Mark took the horse’s lead rope and returned to the stream to set up for the ambush. He didn’t have time for an exhaustive search for the best spot. He quickly chose one where they both could hide behind a cluster of boulders measuring two to seven feet in diameter.
Maghen’s position would be closest to the horses, in case things went to shit. He would stay to delay the Narthani, while she and Alys fled to the forest-covered hills and mountains to their south. How they might survive, Mark didn’t know, but he would do everything he could to give his family a chance. Even if they killed or captured him, wounded or not, his family might escape.
In Maghen’s position, he left both double-barreled shotguns and the four smaller pistols. He picked his position twenty yards farther downstream. There he left the two rifles, a common smoothbore musket, and both double-barreled pistols. That gave them fifteen shots, eight from Maghen and seven from him. The rifles were overkill for the distances, but any hit would put a man out of action. Ironically, the rifles were the easiest to reload. He didn’t know whether there would be time to reload, but if there was, he could step behind a large boulder to do it.
He checked the positions and glanced down the stream. No sign of men and horses. He ran back to Maghen, pulling the packhorse behind him. His wife knelt, saying soothing words to Alys. The two riding horses were stripped of all extra weight, except for a single water bag on one horse. The other horses stood hobbled and tied to trees. He handed the reins of the packhorse to Maghen.
“It’s set up. You’ll have the two shotguns and four smaller pistols. I’ll have the rest. The powder and shot are also there, though I don’t know if we’ll have time to reload. If you’ve fired all your rounds, look to me for what to do. I’d probably yell either to reload or run back to Alys. Then the two of you take one of the horses and head into the forest to the south.”
He looked at his daughter, engrossed in watching a large Anyarian insect-like creature. “Do you think Alys will be quiet if we’re both gone?”
“I don’t know, Mark. She’s gotten so quiet it worries me, but that could be a good thing for today. I’ll feed her and rock her for a few minutes, so maybe she’ll fall asleep.”
“If they hear her before we’re ready to fire, we’ll just have to fire early. Keep your eyes on me and fire only when I signal. If they’re too far away for you to aim at the riders, go for the horses. Even a minor hit should put them out of control.
“Assuming they don’t detect us, we’ll be hidden where you can see me. Just watch me. If I signal with a fist pointed in the direction of the stream, then start shooting. Concentrate on the lead man first, then work along the line of riders.”
Mark made Maghen repeat his instructions. She did, word for word.
“All right. I’ll go back and watch for them. As soon as I see them, I’ll run back for you.”
Mark estimated that just over an hour had passed when the first rider came into view. It wasn’t the tracker or one of the Narthani. It was the large man Mark had wounded in Landylbury. The second rider was a Narthani, the third rider a beardless youth—almost certainly a Frangelese. The fourth—Narthani. The fifth and sixth—Frangelese. He waited, expecting six more riders. When a fifty-yard gap opened from the sixth rider to where they first appeared, Mark ran to get Maghen. She saw him coming from forty yards away. He waved for her to come, turned, and raced back to the stream bank.
Maghen went to where Alys had been sleeping on a blanket laid between boulders. Two wide eyes on a small face stared back at her.
“Alys, baby, Mama has to go for a little bit. You may hear some noise, but Mama and Papa want you to stay here very quiet and protect Abba and Milo. Can you do that?”
Alys nodded, eyes wide, face pale. She hugged the two stuffed animals closer with one arm before drawing her special blanket to cover her friends and herself.
Maghen wanted to hug her and tell her everything was all right, but the words stuck in her throat. With a sob, she ran to follow Mark. When she reached the stream, he waited at her position.
He put one arm across her shoulder and drew her head close, then whispered in her ear. “They’re about a hundred and fifty yards away and coming as fast as they can in the water. There’s only six of them and one packhorse. They must have split up to follow both forks. Remember, shotguns first. Target the first man and move down their line as they fall. I’ll start in the middle. Maghen, this is a better chance than I’d hoped for. If we shoot these six, the others might turn back. Try to be calm and
make every shot count.” He squeezed her hard and scurried on hands and knees to his position.
She saw him pick up the smoothbore musket. At this distance, the inaccuracy of smoothbores was not an issue. He nodded to her and turned away to peer around a boulder and through the brush.
Mark could see only twenty yards toward the six pursuers, but he heard their horses and occasional words he couldn’t make out.
They must not know they’re getting close, he thought. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be talking so loud.
He glanced and saw Maghen staring back at him. She crouched, gripping one of the shotguns.
When the first rider reached Mark, he confirmed it wasn’t the tracker. Then a Narthani passed without glancing toward the embankment. The third rider was a teenage boy, and Mark decided to change his first target from the third rider to the Narthani in the fourth position.
Mark edged a half step to his right to clear the boulder when he rose to fire. He looked at Maghen and made the fist-forward gesture toward the stream. From here on, there was no coordination, only shooting. He hoped Maghen was doing the same and that both of them hit something.
When they stood to fire, they had clear firing lanes, except for a few twigs and small branches Mark hoped they would miss.
Boom! Mark’s smoothbore ball hit the fourth rider in the side of his chest and knocked him off his horse.
THUND! came from Mark’s left—a shotgun.
He dropped the smoothbore and grabbed a rifle. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the third horse rear on its hind legs, throwing the rider. Mark hurriedly cocked the rifle and swung the barrel toward the Narthani in the fifth position. The man had his musket off his back and was bringing to bear on Mark when the sling caught on part of the saddle.
THUND! Maghen’s second barrel blasted from the first shotgun.
The Narthani’s second of delay gave Mark time to align and fire.
BOOM! The Narthani catapulted away as if a rope had jerked him out of the saddle, to land twenty feet distant.
A musket ball hit a rock near Mark, throwing shards on his face but missing his eyes.
Passages Page 37
