Battledragon (27 page)

Lessis laughed with the count.

"I wish that were possible, Count. Unfortunately, we have only a single batrukh, and it could never carry a horse."

Only Endysia was moved to mirth by this sally.

Steenhur had seen batrukhs. His eyes bulged. "Did I hear you correctly, Lady, a batrukh?"

"Yes, and a fine fellow he is. I call him Ridge-eyes because there is a pronounced ridge of bone above each of his eyes."

Steenhur turned his astonished gaze to Baxander, who merely shrugged. This was a Great Witch; they were capable of anything.

Count Trego, however, thought Lessis was joking and he laughed heartily.

Lessis brought the laughter to a halt by informing them that it was imperative that they indeed start the army marching for Koubha that very night. There was no time to waste whatsoever if they were to save Koubha and King Choulaput.

"What has happened to require such a drastic response?" said Baxander.

"The Kraheen invaded Og Bogon a month ago. They defeated the king's own army two weeks past at the crossings of the great river. Choulaput is heavily outnumbered and is now besieged in the capital. The Bogoni have been at peace for too long, I am afraid. Their spears have grown rusty. The walls of the city are not in good repair. The Kraheen are a disciplined foe, inspired by their Prophet, and they have sent a considerable force, perhaps thirty thousand in all. They must have bought off the tribes because we knew nothing of their approach before the invasion began."

Baxander hesitated, pressing his palms together as he considered.

"Our fort will not be finished," he began.

"General, I doubt that we will see this fort again for a year or more. We have a great journey to make."

Baxander swallowed. So, the worst had come true: They were actually going to have to march the entire force into the interior. He had prayed that this would not come to pass, even as he and his engineers had worked to make it possible.

"I see." His mouth set in a line. "By the breath, this is a gamble, Lady. Two entire legions."

"We will also have the Czardhans, and the Kassimi army that is marching south from Bakan to join us at Koubha. Plus several small forces from the Bakan states themselves."

"Then, we shall do the best that we can with what we have," said Baxander with a wan grin.

Lessis smiled back.

"Now, I must tell you what we have seen in the interior. Lagdalen, do you have that map?"

The girl came forward and unrolled a map they had brought from Koubha. It was beautifully made, drawn in black, green, and blue, on a piece of antelope skin.

"Here lies the coast, this is Sogosh, this is Koubha." The map unrolled. A great river snaked across the continent. A rampart of mountains cut it in half.

"These are the Ramparts of the Sun, for that is what the Kraheen call them. Here," she indicated a large blue triangle, "lies the great inland ocean they call the Nub."

Floating in the blue was a femur-shaped island.

"And this is the Bone in the Nub."

"He who drinks from the Water of the Bone will never come home, 'tis said," muttered Admiral Cranx.

"Aye, Admiral, it is a bitter draught, and if we are not quick, it will be forced on the entire world."

Shortly, the conference ended, and they filed out of the tent led by Count Trego.

Outside, Lessis found the Czardhan standing transfixed, staring at the huge shape crouched on the ground beside the tent. The batrukh was oblivious to the presence of the men all around it. It was waiting for Lessis, and when she appeared, it gave a low crooning cry and bent its huge neck toward her.

Then, to Count Trego's astonishment, Lessis and the young girl climbed onto the back of the thing, and with a few enormous flaps of its vast wings, it took to the air and disappeared into the night.

They marched through a shimmering landscape besieged by heat. Dust arose in great clouds from the marching feet of men, oxen, horses, and dragons. Behind the columns flew a great gathering of vultures, eagerly awaiting the bones and scraps left behind by twenty thousand hungry men every day.

Despite the dustiness of the road, this remained the lush coastal plain, and they were surrounded by mixed forest of gums and palms wherever the land had not been cleared for farming. At times when the road dipped down to cross another small river, they passed through swampland with enormous trees hung with moss and vines. In the higher elevations, there were farms and villages with round-roofed houses and long sheds for the cattle and goats. This was prosperous land, long settled and at peace. As the strange army of pale-skinned foreigners marched through these little places, the people hid themselves. Such things as the knights of Czardha were terrifying enough, but then there were the battledragons. These monsters, with their enormous swords across their backs, were too much for the people to take. In some places the folk broke from concealment and ran screaming when they saw the dragons marching in.

On the third day, the army began climbing a long, gentle slope through mixed forest until at last they emerged from the trees on the higher ground. Around them stretched high golden grasses, with clumps of trees every quarter mile or so.

The Royal Road soon deteriorated into little more than a wide rutted track, dry and dusty at this time, though on other occasions it could obviously be a sea of mud. General Baxander had seen it as both, and he knew how fortunate they were to be marching during a dry spell. He refused to complain about the dust.

In this he was alone. The dust was incredibly pervasive. It dulled their metal, coated their throats, played havoc with the sensitive membranes around dragon eyes, and formed a persistent grit in all their food.

Almost as worthy of complaint were the biting insects, which despite daily spells from every witch in the column, proved a continual torment.

Baxander had learned from the terrible experience of the first night that they could not camp close to water, especially swamp water, of which there was a great deal in the wetlands near Sogosh. At night, vast clouds of gnats and mosquitoes arose from such places. They camped well away from the low spots thereafter, which meant arduous water details for men and dragonboys. Woodcutting and collecting was equally important, since all water for drinking had to be boiled first by order of the witches.

The heat and humidity also corroded leather. Relkin's store of resistant ramgut was more precious than ever, and he refused to part with any except for the most vital purpose.

The dragonboys were forced to make new thongs every day. This was an arduous process in which they took fresh hide, soaked it overnight in salted water, then cut it into strings and dried them on racks placed across their wagons.

The results were crude and lacked the strength of good Cunfshon cordage. The thonging stretched easily and soon rotted and gave way under the strain of holding a dragon's gear together.

Fortunately for everyone the dragons' feet had held up very well. This had been something of a surprise. For the first two days they'd worked feverishly with blister sherbet and Old Sugustus as dragon feet, grown a little soft at sea, blistered and bled. Then on the third and fourth days, the great reptilian feet healed and hardened. Eventually even the Purple Green was marching without much pain.

Everyone felt it was a minor miracle, though some put it down to the conditioning exercises they had gone through for the last year in training, plus the effects of Old Sugustus skin toughener.

Moreover, they had covered considerable ground on each day with the dragons marching the whole way. Baxander's engineers had set up posts along the way and stocked them with oil-soaked torches. These allowed the ox trains to keep moving well into the night. By extending the line of march and keeping the wagon trains in almost constant motion, the legions were able to move as quickly as men and dragons could march in an eight-hour day. Since there was no mud, they had marched every day from dawn until the onset of the worst heat, and then again for the evening into the first hour of darkness. The end result was something close to twenty miles a day. By the end of the week they were close to Koubha.

Now that they were seeing larger villages, a sure sign of proximity to a big place, the rumors were flying again.

The most dangerous one was why the witches insisted on every man taking quinine every day. The powder was dissolved in warm water and gulped down with expressions of disgust at the bitter taste. It was supposed to prevent disease, they were told, but the real reason, they believed, was to suppress their sex urges. This was necessary, so the rumor would have it, because in Koubha there were thousands of the most sexually sophisticated prostitutes in the world, and they were waiting anxiously for the blond men of the north.

When this rumor reached Lessis, she gave a wild groan and called for a meeting of all the witches on the expedition. Afterward the witches did their best to convince the men that the quinine was unconnected to their sexual urges, that the risk of disease was very real, and that there were no women in Koubha waiting anxiously to make love to an army of blond men from the east. The women of Koubha all belonged to the king and were only allowed to make love to their own husbands with his strict permission. To make love with anyone else was to risk losing their heads to the king's axman. The reason to take quinine was to avoid the terrible fever sickness that was endemic in this land and carried by mosquitoes.

But nothing could shake the image now imprinted indelibly in ten thousand male minds. Many men refused to take the quinine draft. Lessis feared malaria would soon be rife.

"It is the great secret of the kings of the river," she would tell everyone with great passion in her voice. "Without this medicine the river cannot support civilization. Without it we cannot hope to march to the Ramparts of the Sun."

Every stop, as the men ate huge meals of noodles, corn bread, and local vegetables, all drenched in pungent sauce, they cheerfully discussed the latest nuances of the rumor. The witches were in despair.

Baxander told Lessis that at the least, it had overtaken gripes about the allied forces, the Czardhans, the Kassimi, and the little armies from the Bakan nation states. Some of this griping had become too venomous for comfort.

The Kassimi, in particular, had aroused the ire of the marching legionaries. The Kassimi force consisted of just one thousand horsemen and three thousand foot. In command of this force were several hundred princelings, each with a retinue of servants and women, who regarded the expedition as a grand and dashing adventure. Each of them wore out several horses every day, galloping about the countryside hunting wild game.

Their worst attribute, as far as the legions were concerned, though, was their habit of riding up and down the columns in excited groups, their horses kicking up the dust. The marching columns had to swallow enough without this.

General Baxander was highly sensitive to the difficulties inherent in wielding an army of such disparate allies. The core of the force, of course, were the legions, but the army was weak in cavalry and the Kassimi were great horse soldiers. Even the princelings, for all their faults, had one great virtue: they were incredibly brave and driven to outperform each other at feats of arms. And so the general was slow to try and rein in the boisterous Kassimi.

The order came down for a halt.

With a roaring clatter and commotion, they broke ranks and went to work. The wood wagons were rolled up, and fires were quickly stacked. Water details struggled off, under cavalry guard, while their stored water was used to boil noodles and make broth. Woodcutting details went out into the forest. Every boil-up took several cords of wood. While they burned the wood to boil their water and cook their food, they also used the heat of the fires to dry out more wood, so that every regiment carried ten cords of wood and enough water for two boil-ups.

Relkin and Bazil drew the woodcutting detail. They groaned, but Relkin was secretly glad. The dragons loved the water detail because they got to put their huge bodies into water somewhere and get wet and just a little cooler. In the meantime dragonboys fought off clouds of hungry mosquitoes. In the woods there were far fewer mosquitoes.

They found Vlok and the Purple Green already lined up for the detail.

"Oh-ho, the usual suspects," said the Purple Green.

"What does that mean?" said Bazil.

"I don't know, but the boys have been saying it lately."

Bazil snorted. "So, what are we suspected of?"

"Nothing. Forget it."

"Baz," said Relkin, "it's just what we call a figure of speech."

This concept aroused old Vlok, however, and Relkin found himself trying to explain just exactly what a figure of speech was. This took time.

Dragon Leader Wiliger paused to inspect them briefly. The dragons carried enormous axes, dragonboys carried small axes and wore their dirks. Wiliger was obsessed with fine details these days and spent a little while fussing over the trim on Swane's trousers. They were of blue cotton twill with red braid that was supposed to stop short two inches below the waist and one inch above the ankle. Wiliger had made himself a measuring rod to assist him in inspections. Swane was just a little short on the waist side of his right trouser leg. It was hardly enough to waste any time on, but Wiliger hemmed and hawed for half a minute while they stood there, glaring impatiently at him.

At last he gave them the order to proceed.

The nearest usable wood lay in a thicket of dead and dying scrub trees, on the edge of sorghum fields.

A column of wagons and men entered the thickets. Dragons arrived, and soon there came the sound of trees being felled with enormous blows of the ax. Mule teams came forward, dragonboys darted in and out to attach trees to the mule-team traces, and then the trees were hauled back to the rear, where sawyers cut them in lengths and work details split them up for firewood and loaded them onto the wagons.

Away on the hillside they could see the water details on their way back from the nearest water hole. Huge fires were roaring in the camp, and dinner would soon be ready.