“There’s a lot to be said for that,” Jakyr agreed. “Although sometimes a battlefield is no cleaner. I’d rather have been in your shoes than face Karsite demons.”
Since that was a conversation Mags
really
didn’t want to listen in on—having
far
too vivid memories of the Karsite demons still—he had Dallen drop back to the caravan again. Lita had slowed the vanners; the caravan was pitching a little on the uneven track.
“Problems?” Mags asked.
She shook her head. “As long as it gets no worse than this.”
“It don’t, milady Bard,” offered one of the Guardsmen. “In fact, this’s the worst of it.”
Sure enough the track smoothed out again, and it wasn’t more than a candlemark later that they found themselves threading an entrance between two sheer stone faces. It looked as if a giant had cleft the hill with an ax, making a passage between two halves of an exceedingly tall hill. A small mountain,
he
would have said.
It was a good thing that he was used to the mines, because that passage would have been claustrophobic. As it was, a couple of the Guard looked very uneasy until they came out on the other side.
And the other side was a pretty, if unremarkable, tiny pocket valley, ringed completely by hills with very steep—in fact, he would have said, sheer—cliffs on the valley side. It was as if that same giant had taken his fist and punched a cup into the hills.
“Now . . . this is odd,” Jakyr said, looking around himself. “Very odd . . .”
“How odd?” asked Milles.
“Well . . . I’ve been to a lot of strange places, so I’ve seen a bit more than your average Herald,” Jakyr replied. “And if I had just come on this place . . . I’d say it was a Hawkbrother Vale. . . .”
A Hawkbrother Vale?
:You know, he’s right,:
Dallen said.
:It has the look of a Vale, a long abandoned one, but a Vale nevertheless.:
“Huh.” Milles looked surprised. “I thought they were a myth.”
“Not even close.” Jakyr dismounted. “I’ve met ’em. I’ve been to two Vales. The only thing missing here is the giant trees, but those won’t flourish once the Hawkbrothers leave, and they’d have fallen a long, long time ago. Or got cut down. Those big trees, they’re mighty tempting to a woodsman. You could build your entire Guardpost from the wood from
one,
and who knows? Maybe someone did. One way to know for sure. Go on, Jermayan. You’re better at this than me.”
The Companion shook his head briskly, then closed his eyes and raised his nose as if he were sniffing the breeze. Then he trotted straight over to a little grassy depression, like a bowl about the size of a four-room cottage, and pawed at the center of it.
“That tears it,” Jakyr said with some satisfaction. “He says that’s where the Heartstone was. It
was
a Hawkbrother Vale, but it’s been abandoned for a long, long time. Probably long before Valdemar took this piece into its borders.”
“Couple hundred years, then?” Milles replied speculatively.
Jermayan trotted back to his Chosen. “Oh, at least,” said Jakyr. “I’d reckon more than that. There’s no hint that there’s anything uncanny in all the Guard reports hereabouts. If you had the weirdling beasties you generally find around a Hawkbrother Vale, trust me, you’d
know
about it.”
He looked over at Lita, who had been watching all this with her mouth open in astonishment. “Did you hear all that?”
“I heard it, but I can scarcely believe it,” she said. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d suspect you of tale spinning.”
“It’s no tale, Jermayan agrees,” the Herald told her smugly. “Well, you always wanted to see a Vale. Now you can.”
:Guess I won’t be the only one digging through this place,:
Mags told Dallen.
:By the look on her face, she’s likely to be digging more than you,:
the Companion replied.
• • •
The caravan fit very nicely into the side of the entrance to what they were already coming to think of as the “living quarters.” It would definitely be out of the way of wind and snow; that kettleful of coals would heat it up nicely for sleeping, and Lena and Bear were already acting as if it were their own little cottage. Not that he blamed them; it was the one place here where they could be guaranteed absolute privacy without leaving the comfort of the group cave.
So far as Mags was concerned, they could have it. A heap of straw, one of the canvas bow tents atop that, and the featherbed from the lower cupboard bed atop that, plus his and Amily’s bedrolls made a place just as cozy. There were a lot of little side caves, like private rooms, with hollows in them that were just bed-size. They were all off the main cave, tucked into the wall in such a way as to give a great deal of privacy. He reckoned if there was a way to fit a curtain across the entrance, he’d have almost as good a situation as a room with a door. If this had been a natural cave, he would have regarded this configuration as wildly unlikely, and would have assumed that something was drastically amiss—most likely, that this place got flooded on a regular basis and the hollows were water-worn. But if this had been a Hawkbrother Vale, any number of things became a possibility.
Really, the fact that it had been a Hawkbrother Vale explained everything that had seemed far too convenient. The chimney area . . . the well . . . the storage caves that were so bone-dry it was safe to store fodder in them . . . it all made perfect sense. Someone had been living here for a very long time, and the Hawkbrothers had shaped the place to suit them.
As they all settled in—the Guardsmen temporarily, the rest of them more-or-less permanently—he asked Lita who those “someones” would have been.
“...because I thought Hawkbrothers lived in trees,” he concluded, helping her move all of her instruments and personal things to areas cut into the side of her chosen side cave that were so flat and even they could only have been shelves or open cupboards for the previous occupant.
“You thought correctly,” the Bard said. “What would have been living here were the
hertasi.
Gentle, manlike lizards, about so tall.” She measured the height of her breastbone. “They were—are—the servants to the Hawkbrothers, and they prefer to live in caves or tunnels underground. All this—” she waved her hand at the cave around them, now brilliantly lit by lanterns placed in niches that clearly had been made explicitly to hold lanterns “—is just what they would have had when everyone first moved in here. Before they left, they’d have made themselves all manner of structures and comforts. It would have been every bit as nice as the Collegia down here. I’m serious. The
hertasi
like their little comforts.”
“It’s not bad now,” he observed. She laughed.
“It’s a blessed sight better than what I thought we’d find. Jak promised me once he’d take me to a Vale.” She made a face. “Well, this is as close as I’m like to get, so I’ll enjoy what I have.”
With the Guards’ help, Jakyr had already set up a kitchen, and there was a good dinner cooking away. He was making flatbreads, grilled on a griddle, while a good rabbit stew bubbled in a pot. The vanners had been tethered outside while it was light, but just to be safe, Mags had moved them in and tied them to the caravan when it got dark. The Guards had brought their mounts in as well. Now the little herd stood, hipshot, dozing, with the remains of their hay and grain within easy reach.
The Companions had inspected every hollow and settled on one each. Mags had filled the chosen spots with straw, and they had settled in, too. It had been a long day for all of the hoofed ones, and they hadn’t gotten the benefit of naps in the caravan the way the humans had.
“Well, now I envy you,” Milles said, as he came up to Mags, watching Jakyr for the sign that the food was ready.
“Because of what this place was?” Mags hazarded.
The Sergeant nodded. “I’d give a hand to be able to explore it properly.” He sighed. “Who knows what you’re likely to find!”
Mags smiled. “Know what’d suit me best right at this moment?” he asked, then answered the rhetorical question. “Supper!”
The sergeant laughed. And a moment later, Mags’ wish was answered.
9
T
he Guardsmen left first thing in the morning; Mags, as usual, was awake even before he heard them moving about. They were quite quiet; moving carefully so as not to make much noise, drawing water, building up the fire, preparing to make use of the cold rations they had brought with them.
Well, it was going to be a very long, chilly trip, and Mags couldn’t see sending them off on little more than a couple of bars of trail rations. Not that the things weren’t edible; they were, and really not bad, either, so long as you didn’t mind gnawing on them like a beaver on a branch. Still.
Mags used one of his cooking lessons to make them a basic sort of breakfast; he took the trail rations and some cut oats and made a very good porridge with it, which was even better when he loaded it with dried berries and added a little honey. They were more than happy to wait for him to cook it when he offered, and they were equally happy to clean up the dishes after they finished. When everyone had a belly full of hot food and the mess had been disposed of, Mags saw them off—everyone else was
still
asleep—and got a lantern. He had a good idea how he wanted to spend his time until Jakyr woke, at the very least.
Knowing that this cave had served the former occupants as a living space, there was one thing that should be here
that no one had yet located (or at least had yet identified) that was pretty vital to comfort. He had a pretty good idea where he would put such a “room” if he were the one laying out the cave, so he went looking for it. Knowing that the cave complex had been created by Hawkbrothers made his task a bit easier. If this were all a natural cave, the former occupants would have had to make do with how they found things. But this was, in part at least, not so much a cave as an excavation. So positioning should follow rules of logic.
He was looking for a small room. It would be off the main cave, accessed by a narrow, but smooth-floored, descending tunnel . . . and hopefully with ventilation coming into it and going up through another chimney crack.
As soon as he found such a tunnel, he followed it, and . . .
Well, well, well.
Logic had not failed him. The tunnel ended in a small roomlike area. At the back was a large niche, big enough for three people to fit in with room to spare. The niche was about knee height, with a flat bottom, a sort of floor to it. The sort of thing that, if you were in, say, a Palace, would have a statue standing in it. But here, there were three equally spaced, carefully smoothed depressions, and in the depressions were large holes.
This was the privy. And this was, by the standards of what they had planned on creating, a very nice privy.
Even if the bandits had used this, it had been so long ago that whatever mess they had created here was long since cleaned away by time, insects, and the atmosphere of the cave itself. He peered down one of the holes, holding his lantern over his head and deflecting the light downward; it was too deep to see the bottom.
That was a good sign. The deeper it was, the farther away the deposits would be.
He dropped a pebble down one; he heard a far-off “tick” when it landed, not a splash of water, which was what he was hoping for. The last thing they needed was to have their water supply contaminated. So the well they were getting their water from was either a true well, or the water source had no direct connection to this cave.
Of course, if
he
were building such a thing . . . beneath the well opening above would be a good deep pool, preferably rain fed or fed by a slow spring. Something with high walls around it. Overflow would only be periodic, and it would flush what was deposited here down deeper into the caves and away from the drinking source.
Maybe some day someone will come here and get into these lower caves and see if they did make it that way. Meanwhile, judging by everything I’ve read about the Hawkbrothers, we can trust them to have made good work of this.
There was more, because this had been Hawkbrother-made. On the left side of the little room was another niche that ended at about waist height, with another, deeper depression. This depression had a much smaller hole in it.
In short: this was a basin for washing the hands and face. It had probably once boasted a plug for the bottom.
This could not have been better unless it had the same sort of flushing-water setup the Palace and Collegia had. With a slight smile he left the little room and went hunting for supplies.
Amily woke up first. It had been very nice sleeping cuddled together (at last!) even if they hadn’t done anything but kiss and fondle. They’d certainly kept each other warmer than they would have been sleeping separately. He rather thought that no one had noticed that they had gone off together last night, since Bear and Lena had retired right after supper to the caravan, Lita had gone to bed not that long after, making up for the fact that she had not
had the luxury of a nap on the way, and Jakyr had stayed up with Milles, talking. It wouldn’t be too long before someone noticed, however . . .
Well, cross that river when they came to it. Amily wasn’t a Bard, so Lita probably wouldn’t say anything. Bear and Lena certainly wouldn’t. That left Jakyr, and if Jakyr took against it, Lita would almost certainly come out on their side. The ensuing argument would probably cause both the Herald and the Bard to forget what they were arguing about.
When Amily emerged from their cavelet, still sleepy eyed, he took her by the hand and conveyed her wordlessly to his little discovery in all its newly decorated glory. Beside the latrines, a big bag of soft hay. In the other niche was a wax plug that fit in the hole of the “sink”, and on the stone shelf of the “sink,” a lit lantern, a box of soft soap and a bucket of water with a dipper.
Amily stared. “Was all this—I mean the stone—here already?”