“You see, all of the land was under a curse in those days, and the land was mourning the death of the king. ‘How did he die?’ I asked the innkeeper, but he says the king is not quite dead, but that he was mauled by the devil pig and was dying. The king went to kill the devil pig because everyone was afraid of it, but the devil pig got him first.
“’Take me to your king.’ I said, and they showed me the way to this very castle, but none would walk with me for fear of the devil pig and his army. The whole kingdom was in terror of the thing, but he did not trouble me between the tavern and the castle. Sure enough, I go to meet the king, and he’s been gored very badly by the devil pig, and the bitch of plagues has been at him, so he is festering, and he stank like rotten fish. To be honest, I don’t know how he lived so long as he did, the poor bastard.
“So he tells me the whole story of the devil pig. It used to be a pet of the baker, and he fed the thing until it was fat and huge, but boars don’t make good pets. One day the thing turns on the baker and eats him, and he kills the poor bastard’s wife and kinder, too.
“The men of the town went to kill the thing, but it was very clever pig and got off into the woods. Soon it ran into other boars in the forest, and it murdered its way to the top, I guess, until it was the clan chief of all of the boars. Great big packs of the things took to roaming the forest, and they would hunt and kill men, for it taught them not to fear us. Farmers in fields, kinder on walk to temple, woodsmen, hunters, travelers … Anybody out and about was fair game for this army of devil pigs, and this bastard was the leader of all of them.
“The king tells me all of this, then he says his whole kingdom is in danger. ‘What kingdom? Is this not all part of the kingdom of Mortentia?’ I ask him, but then he explains that this is the forgotten kingdom, the Kingdom of the Green Hills.
“He took my hand, and his hand was hot and dry from the fever. ‘If you will kill this boar, I will give you the crown.’ He promised me, for he could see that I was not impressed with the thing and not afraid of it. Many people were there who witnessed him saying this, and I did not want to seem afraid. Also, it seemed not too terribly difficult a task for a Thimenian. Maybe difficult for Mortentians, but not for a man good and true from Valtheim.
“For many days I hunted him, sleeping in the trees and seeking him out by day. Many of his lesser captains I killed, hogs that tried me alone or in groups, and believe me, it is not a breakfast banquet being hunted by wild pigs. I had a good steel boar spear and no pig ever marked me, but many times they tried me in packs, and I had to run up into the trees, which are luckily all nice oak trees and good for climbing.
“Finally I found him, or rather he found me, walking on a trail not half a league from this very castle. One minute I was walking along quietly, and a moment later this son-of-a-tark is in the middle of the path, running at me, all nine hundred weight of him. Let me tell you, I moved like lightning to escape that first charge, putting an oak between us. He came around after me and I got my spear into him good and deep, but the weight of him snapped the shaft.
“Then he was on me, but I rolled onto his back and went to work with my knife. He marked me plenty in that first pass with his tusks and feet.” Here king Otten lifted up his arm and showed a long line of scar tissue. “Once I got on his back, he couldn’t get at me. I had the haft of the spear for a handle to grab onto, and I did not let go, by Sheo. He knocked me into trees and brush, and I got plenty more cut up, but the whole time I was working my Thimenian steel on him. The noise and the blood smell brought out all of his brothers, and they were all around waiting for me to fall off.
“The son-of-a-tark was already half-way to being butchered when he finally gave up and died, and we left a trail of blood from the woods all the way into the main street of the town, which was his decision, not mine. All of his captains were closing in on us when he died, but when that happened, they ran away like a pack of skulking Borni. We hunted them down, and we are still hunting them to this day, and in fact you are eating one of their kindred.” Otten pointed at the roast sow that was the centerpiece of the feast.
“It took us three men to bring the bastard’s head back to the king, and when he saw it he smiled, and he had his revenge. He died the same day, and so I became the king, who was never more than a warrior.”
The dinner progressed, and the feasters went from eating boar to a massive pie made of potatoes and meal, then a dessert of something figgy. By the time they reached the last course of the meal, Lanae was feeling overstuffed and sleepy. Wine had flowed freely with the talk, for whatever Otten lacked in refinements, he more than made up for with a steady stream of talk and cursing and good fellowship that soon put all of his guests at ease. The diplomatic purpose of the meeting was accomplished with little fanfare, for between courses Otten put the question to Emric quite candidly and quite undiplomatically. “So Baron Emric, you have seen the queen and you have seen the prince and you know they are both alive and not prisoners. You now know that the letters you have got from Maldiver are full of lies. You have to choose between following a king who is a lying piece of excrement, declaring yourself an independent kingdom, or swearing allegiance to the king in the baby basket, which means swearing allegiance to the queen as regent. In the first way lies dishonor, in the second lies defeat and in the third way lies war against Dunwater and Elderest. This is why you came to dinner, no?”
Lanae watched the emotions play across the baron’s face. He was an experienced man, she knew that from his talk, but he was neither duplicitous nor practiced in hiding his feelings. Otten’s easy flow of simple talk had disarmed him of the niceties of speech that would have let him put off the decision to another day. Confronted with it plainly, he was forced to reply in kind, and she noted to herself that a sort of genius lay behind Otten’s stratagem of putting him off of his guard. Finally the baron nodded. “Yes. Put in simplest terms, those are the choices. We’ve fought both Elderest and Dunwater before, of course, although never both at once. Maldiver naming the Hammers in rebellion makes it impossible for me to choose any other course than the third.”
At that he stood, then briefly took a knee to the queen and kissed the top of her hand. “My queen, I offer fealty in the name of the Barony of Arker and the family of Emric the Just. We shall await your command and counsel.”
Eleinel looked at him solemnly, then took his hand in hers. “Baron Emric D’Cadmouth of Arker, I accept your fealty and pledge to honor it in all that I do. Arker shall stand for the king, and the queen shall stand for Arker.”
Lanae smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. She and the queen were no longer fugitives in Mortentia proper, and they would have safe haven now in both the Kingdom of the Green Hills and in Arker. Of course, once this pledge was duly posted, war would come now south of the Whitewood like it raged in the north.
Chapter 94: Tuchek on the Redwater River, south of Northcraven
The scouts walked slowly, and from time to time one of them would stagger, as the burden of a long day’s march after a very short night caught up with them. It was very late at night, or very early in the morning, and a pale half moon cast the dreary shadows of the marching men against the snow. Even Tuchek’s eyes felt grainy and tired, despite the cold, and despite the danger he knew that they were in.
Four hundred and eighty three men were strung out in a line behind him, walking single file, each man looking to the man ahead of him for clues as to what lay ahead. Tuchek was their leader, at the front of the file, and the scouts possessed a language of hand signals and low calls that was their only way of communicating in the near darkness. To his right lay the Redwater River, and already they had found and holed three war canoes. Two sleepy Cthochi had guarded each canoe, and he had killed all six of them himself, for he dared not let even his best Mortentian scouts attempt to ambush a Cthochi. His sword had remained in his scabbard, for it was knife work in the dark, and very personal. Idly he wondered if he knew them. Certainly he would know some
of their families.
They’d left the fort when the half-moon rose, counting on its light reflected on the snow to show them the war canoes hidden along the western bank of the Redwater. They also counted on the late hour to dull the senses of the guards they knew would be posted. So far they had been very lucky. Tuchek was dressed in light gray and black leathers, as were the rest of his scouts, and none of them wore armor. The glint of light reflected on armor or the chink of metal striking against rock or chain links rattling together would be a dead giveaway in the quiet night. Even the destroying of canoes had to be done silently, with the men placing knife or axe against their birch bark hulls, placing a cloak over the weapon and then applying pressure until holes were formed.
Between the time Aelfric had given him this mission and the rising of the moon to begin it, Tuchek had held an impromptu course with his scout captains on the methods to be used for the task. “Strike first for the throat.” He’d told them. “If you come from behind, put your left hand over the mouth, then drive the knife up and under the ribs. Strike silently but very swiftly, that’s the most important thing.”
“And if we can’t get close enough?” Manderin had asked.
“If you can’t get close enough under cover for a silent kill, signal back for archers. Anyone who has to be shot, I want no fewer than four arrows in him, and all loosed at the same moment. If an alarm sounds, silence it. Mob them if you have to. If a general alarm sounds, we abort this mission and hot foot it back to the expanded fort. If we’re too far out for that, grab whatever war canoes you can find and get in the river and row for Northcraven. Every war canoe we steal is sixty less warriors the army has to deal with tomorrow.”
And so the mission had begun, and so far it had been successful, but Tuchek did not trust the night. He missed the sounds of the night birds, as few as there would be on a winter’s night, there should at least have been a few inquiring calls of owls or other nocturnal fliers. There had been nothing, and Tuchek had not encountered so much as a sleepy deer. Something was keeping the animals quiet, and most likely it was a large group of men nearby. The wind carried a faint tang of smoke also, and they were upwind of the fort and the town of Redwater.
Still, he encountered no one other than the guards that he killed, silently and professionally, and Tuchek’s senses were alive to the night.
Three hours into the mission the cold grew more intense, and the snow began to crunch beneath Manderin’s feet when he walked as it hardened with the cold. He tried to put his feet into Eskeriel’s bootprints, but in the poor light from the high riding half moon it was not easy to do. Like Eskeriel, Manderin’s senses were alive to the night, and like his leader, Manderin was uneasy with this mission. He knew the Earthspeaker, at least by reputation, and he knew it was unlikely that the man would leave his war canoes as lightly guarded as he had. He’d noticed that all of the guards Eskeriel had killed seemed young, and they wore their hair long and without ornament, a sign that they were as yet unblooded.
Manderin was a half-breed, but he’d been raised to the age of ten in the Earthspeaker’s camps, and he knew his enemy well. He’d been lured to the Mortentian side by a love of good things, and also by his father, a forester in the service of Northcraven’s duke. When Kamdin O’Olden became aware that his mother, Sleeps in the Day, had born a child, Kamdin had insisted on meeting Manderin, and the two had become friends. As a half-breed, it had never been easy among his own people, but Kamdin had taken him to Northcraven, and he’d spent fifteen years learning to be a forester in the duke’s service. It was purely a matter of luck that he hadn’t been in Northcraven’s service when the war broke out, having been hired just a month earlier to scout for the walled town of Redwater.
There had been some sort of truce between Redwater and the Cthochi, but Manderin was certain that was over with now, with the coming of Aelfric’s army. Manderin knew there would be no more truces or understandings with the Cthochi until they either defeated the Mortentians finally or were themselves defeated. One of these days he was likely going to have to kill someone he knew well, and the thought made him uncomfortable.
Stealthy though they were, the scouts made good time along the river bank, but the sound of his feet crunching in the snow made him nervous. It was a distinctive sound, and could be heard from no small distance. When Eskeriel stopped ahead, Manderin came up to him and whispered. “The snow has become crisp.” He told his captain. “We won’t be surprising any more guards in this.”
Eskeriel, whom Lord Aelfric sometimes called Tuchek, nodded, and Manderin could see his troubled features by the reflected moonlight on the snow. “Aye. This knifing isn’t going to work on this stuff.” He gestured to the snow. “Go back and bring up four bowmen, and fetch me a strength bow also. We are going to have to shoot them from a distance.”
In a few minutes four scouts with long bows arrived, and they handed Eskeriel a powerful long bow also. “Bring the men up into four columns and bunch them up.” Eskeriel commanded. “We’ve done what we can by stealth. We will go on doing what we’ve been at, but from now on we shoot the guards when we find them.”
“And if they cry out?” Manderin asked.
“If they cry out, we hope no one is close enough to hear, and we put them down hard. And it’s not a matter of if they cry out, it’s a matter of when. We can’t be as sure of a silent kill with the bows, but there’s no use trying to sneak up on them on this hard snow.”
“You know they’re going to catch on to us.” Manderin replied. “There have to be some larger camps around here. We’re in no shape for a battle.”
“Aye, but neither are they. If it looks like a battle shaping up, get to the Redwater and get into the canoes if you can. Otherwise hide, run or fight. This is just another part of the war, friends. Unlikely we’ll come out unscratched.”
For half of an hour they crept silently through a dense and dark wood, and the snow was not thick on the ground. It was very dark there, and even the moonlight had trouble getting through. The underbrush was thick, some kind of evergreen with thorny leaves still on the branches, and the branches reached out to cling and tear at Manderin’s clothing and skin. The frozen air had a crisp, clean smell to it and it stung to breathe too deeply. Bunched as they were, there were no few incidents of scouts stumbling into each other in the darkness. In the light of day, it might have taken them five minutes to pass through this belt of dense forest, but in the darkness every step had to be decided upon carefully, and Eskeriel, ever the leader, tested each patch of ground with the bottom of his bow before stepping on it. Their feet slipped and slid across two frozen streams, and there were a few whispered curses, audible no more than a few feet away.
When at last they broke from the deep forest onto a broad and snow covered clearing, they could see the prize they had been looking for. At least fifteen large war-canoes bulked darkly in a pile on the bank of the river, still and black in the half moon light. A stream of smoke pointed the way downward to a campfire on the near side of the piled up canoes, and three pointed pole and hide tents surrounded the fire. Manderin could see the walking forms of two, wait … three guards, staggering with sleepiness as they dully trod a sinuous circuit between tents, fire and canoes, lingering most often by the fire. For several minutes Eskeriel watched them, moving not an inch, despite the fact that the men from the Silver Run army must have been invisible against the blackness of the forest behind and about them.
Slowly the men massed at the edge of the forest, and the archers moved foremost. They needed no commands, for the wide expanse of snow made attacking the guards by the knife impossible, as any attacker must be visible for at least a minute or two attempting to cross it. Once the archers had assembled in a double rank with the forest behind them, Eskeriel raised and lowered his arm in a silent command to loose arrows. At least ten arrows sped toward each of the walking guards simultaneously, and their fletchings sounded like a stepped on snake as they cut the wind.
Most o
f the arrows found their marks, and the three guards dropped silently, even the farthest one, who must have been at least a hundred and fifty paces from Manderin’s place at the edge of the wood, but at least one arrow went astray, perhaps knocked out of line by colliding with another in the air, and it punched into the side of one of the hide tents, even as Eskeriel led Manderin and several other sword carriers toward the tents. A cry of pain escaped the tent, and then other answering cries from the other tents.
In a long minute Manderin was at the entry flap to one of the tents, and a giant Cthochi carrying a long spear greeted him. His sword met the man’s thrust in a better than average parry, and in a moment other swords struck, but while he delayed the scouts at the entry to the tent, the sound they had all been fearing emanated suddenly from it. A talking drum began rattling its desperate tattoo of alarm into the night, and before Manderin could reach the drumspeaker and kill him, answering drums began rattling from the west, and very close.
At this point the Redwater cut through several hills, and this was the manner of its course all the way down to its delta in Northcraven City, so that an elevated ridge lay on both sides of it, in some places lower than at others. Immediately to the west of the canoe landing the ridge was quite low, only five paces at most, with a gentle slope down toward the river. All along that slope dark forms began appearing against the snow, for there was a war camp of several thousand Cthochi and other Auligs there. Manderin silenced the drumspeaker with his sword, but already warriors were assembling along that ridge, and the scouts knew that they were seen.
“Archers! Run for the canoes!” Eskeriel commanded, and about three hundred of his men did so, abandoning all notions of stealth to race pell-mell across the snow toward the war canoes, which were only a few paces from the river’s edge. They pulled the canoes down from the pile they were in, and began sliding them toward the river. Meanwhile the remaining scouts who were spear or sword men, began forming a loose skirmish line against the Cthochi, who were now streaming down the ridge toward them, no more than a fourth of a league distant. Eskeriel began backing his loose line toward the canoes, but the bowmen were having a hard time getting the canoes loose, for many of them were packed with snow and ice.
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 125
