Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
“I expected to find you below,” he said without preface. “I didn’t think you’d be able to walk today, let alone leap the hilltops.” He leaned over and put the spare horse’s bridle into my hand.
I looked up at the beast in even greater confusion. “Did you… steal this horse, Arlin?” I asked him, and he grimaced. “There you go again, little moralist I did not steal it. It was an extra. Get on.”
I did not argue further. Mounting was difficult with the bulk of the
pack and my weapon in my right hand, but the beast stood quiet. “It’s an old cavalry
horse,” he said. “Not sprightly, but used to anything. And it’d better be,
carrying you.”
The horse had the sort of spine that projects above the rib cage a good ways. I would not choose such a creature for bareback riding if I were given the choice. “I’m not such a clumsy rider as that, fellow. It’s only that lately I haven’t—”
“Believe it or not, optician, I didn’t mean that as an insult. Though”—he turned and gave me a disgusted glare—“you certainly deserve a few. And after I vouched for you to the king.”
“I am sensible of that.” I pressed the horse even with Arlin’s, “I owe my liberty to that introduction. Perhaps my life.”
“You owe me nothing,” he said, reversing his attitude completely. “I think you could have taken them all down. All the Royal Guard and the field marshals, too.”
“I think the king ought to be grateful to you as well,” I continued over his words. “If I hadn’t had a chance to warn him about the attack coming… you do believe me about the assassins, don’t you?”
“That’s where we’re going,” Arlin said without changing his sullen expression. “You’re going to show them to me.”
I did not imagine that the Rezhmian nomads had slept late this morning, so to be yawning where I had left them the night before. We saw no sign of activity along the east–west road, but I had not expected them to prepare their assault so close to the king’s night camp. In only a few miles we would reach the intersection where that broad road ended and the traveler must turn south and uphill to the broken mountains of the border, or north along the precipitous hills I had walked the past few days. That north–south road was narrower and more uneven, and the ground rose close at either hand.
Assuming the nomads had excellent scouts (or some other information concerning the movements of the king’s company), they would have done as I had done to escape their discovery the night before, and traveled parallel to the road behind the first or second ridge of downs—where we were heading now, in fact.
The day was going to be cold and windy, and the white cook’s linens were not sewn for warmth. When I began to lose feeling of the reins in my hands I called a halt, dismounted, took off my pack and then my shirt, and put the woolen homespun next to my skin. This caused Arlin to announce that he had changed his mind about my origin, for anyone who could wear such a garment on bare skin had to be base-born. The cook’s shirt I put over my head, with the sleeves pressing back my frozen ears and tied at the nape of the neck. I advised my companion to leave me where I stood, lest he suffer the embarrassment of being killed by invaders in the company of a fellow as sartorially backward as I.
We had reached the hill above the intersection of roads, and there was nothing to be seen below except the rectangular outline of an old building foundation. It might once have been a small inn; what other building would stand alone so close to a border between unfriendly nations I don’t know. Nor do I imagine the place had prospered or survived very long. I remembered very well the glossy, charred wood of the village only a day’s walk from here, and the vandalized grave.
It had been King Rudof’s intention to turn north at this junction and continue his review of the realm with Morquenie and Satt territories, but I had no way of knowing whether the Red Whips knew the king’s habits only, or his intentions as well. The former might be learned through stalking, and by the use of spyglasses like mine. The latter meant treachery. I did not let my horse top the bare hill, but pulled him up a few yards below, on an uncomfortable slope. Arlin stared puzzled for a moment but followed my lead. “You don’t want to be seen on the skyline, is that it?” he shouted over the wind.
I nodded and bellowed back, “Neither do the Rezhmians! They’ll be somewhere down between the rises, spread out like the trickle of a stream! Hard to see, even from close by!”
“A hundred men, hard to see?”
Again I nodded, and because I don’t have a voice for bellowing, I led him down into the shelter of the hills. “They could hide more than that number. It was those tactics that caused the defeat of our army in the last incursion. Remember?”
Arlin snorted. “How should I remember? I wasn’t even born then.”
“Neither was I, but I studied my lessons.” I didn’t know why I was continuing to act like an arrogant schoolboy in the presence of this fellow. My manners distressed me, and I determined at that moment to behave myself, especially since I might be about to be cut down by enemy arrows. It would be a shame to die disgusted with oneself.
I turned north and went very cautiously along the path I had run eight hours before. My companion did not object, but he asked how I had chosen this direction, and I replied that if the assassins were working by chance, they would be as likely to
be north as south of the crossroads, and if they had information, they would likely be north. That gave north two chances out of three.
It was easier to ride down here, where a seasonal stream ran over new grass. I let my old horse pick his way, and as Arlin had intimated, the beast was no fool. It also was easier to talk, which Arlin did. He returned to the subject of my vows and limitations, and interrogated me strictly, while his pretty mare danced left and right over the trickling water, wasting a lot of effort trying to keep her feet dry.
Was I permitted to drink distilled liquors? he wondered. To gamble? To wear silk? To fornicate, perchance? To marry? I replied with what restraint I could muster (for the subject had received overmuch attention in the past day) that what I was not permitted to do was to give over responsibility for my actions. Not to another, nor to chance. That in itself was a vow among vows and a limitation encompassing most other limitations. I said this much and then I asked him to leave off, for as we rode I was trying to see through the hills themselves, and hear noises not yet made.
Arlin did leave off, for he was offended. He spat on the ground and prodded his mare over the stream, yards away from me, where he rode on in a pretense that we were two separate travelers with no connection, until his mare squealed and reared and he called out.
My beast stood calmly enough over the two bodies thrown between large
rocks. The old cavalry gelding was used to the smell of blood. The uniforms had been blue and white.
I said the obvious: “The king’s scouts.”
Arlin dismounted and turned one of them over. The tailored coat had been pierced many times by a blade. “I knew this man somewhat,” he said. He held his sweating horse with a firm hand on the headstall.
Without getting down I could read the tracks coming around the hill from the road and then leading north in our direction. Only hoofprints. No shoes on the hooves, either. I remarked to Arlin that the Red Whips might as well not have feet, for all the walking they did.
He sprang up in the saddle again, and his mare quieted from the accustomed weight on her back. Without another word I motioned him behind me, for there was movement between the hills to the west, by the road. I pressed the chestnut slowly forward.
Two more riders, dressed darker than the dead scouts, were trotting at the grassy shoulder of the far side. They were so far ahead of us that we could not tell whether they were wearing the black and yellow of the field marshal’s personal horsemen or the rough leather and bright silk of the nomads. Fortunately, I had had the forethought to assemble my spyglass before leaving camp, and now Arlin pulled it from the top of my pack and put it to his eyes. “Ours,” he said at last. “And a couple of fools, too: riding down the road as though down Barya Boulevard with girls admiring them. We can catch up with them and tell them what we have seen.” His mare turned on her hindquarters, leaped back over the stream like a deer, and continued north. I followed on my old gentleman as best we might. I doubted the field marshal’s scouts had anything of interest to tell us, or they would have turned back to report. The prints of the enemy embossed the wet ground all around us: dozens of horses. I wondered if Arlin had any notion where he was going. For myself, the hair on my arms and neck was beginning to rise up with fear.
In only two minutes we had come even with the Velonyans, and Arlin followed a path between two grassy mounds to the road. I followed after, glad to see no hoofprints going in our immediate direction.
The scouts were halted together, and one was pointing up and ahead of him. We were so close I could see the horses’ breath fogging in the air. Arlin hailed from the other side of the road and both men started in their saddles, put their hands to their swords, and turned to stare at us, their faces empty of any expression except surprise.
Another cry came from the road ahead, and without warning the road two hundred feet ahead was crawling with small, ewe-necked, slab-sided, slope-rumped horses ridden by men no handsomer than they.
Arlin opened his mouth and pointed at the two scouts, who were so terribly close to the enemy. “We can’t help them!” I shouted. “Run! Run!” His mare wheeled, and my horse let himself be hauled around. Neither was a dull brute, and they took off with a will down the rutted road. Through the crisis of the moment I was kept aware of the old gelding’s spine.
Arlin looked back over his shoulder. “They’ll never catch us, riding those!” he called. Lest he become overconfident, I answered, “They don’t have to!” I, too, looked back, just in time to see the first of the stubby arrows of the Rezhmians sail close between us.
Arlin gaped, disbelieving, but Arlin seemed to share the Velonyan contempt for foreign customs and weapons: contempt built on perfect ignorance. Powl had made sure I knew that the Red Whip archers were superior to ours—it was to be expected in a people who both hunt and fight from running horses. Remember, my king, it is not illegal for a common man of that nation to possess a bow.
I had no chance to share any of this knowledge with my companion, for even as I noted the accuracy over distance of our pursuers, one of their shots hit my horse just above the hock. The beast plunged, floundered, and went down on his knees, leaving me standing beside him, watching the assassins come on. They shouted a welcome as they saw me before them.
Arlin committed an act of great stupidity. He skidded his mare to a stop and spun her once more. I screamed for him to go on, I stamped in place, but the gray mare’s legs bunched beneath her and she leaped back the way she had come. He was above me, he had me by the back of the collar and was trying unsuccessfully to haul me up in front of him, and then I saw him flinch, clawing at his right arm. I grabbed his leg and the saddle and I jumped up behind.
The mare took a hit as well, glancing off her croup, which served only to urge her more heroically on. Arrows hissed around us, then clattered at her hooves and then fell too far behind for me to hear. The shouts of the riders also faded, but I could hear them screaming, “Old horse! The old horse!” for five very nasty minutes. I wondered if any had stopped to put my old horse out of its agony.
Arlin was rigid with pain, and the hand that held the reins gripped white-knuckled the high pommel of the saddle. His other hand he had thrust into the lacings of his jacket, and the arrowhead through his upper arm looked too bloody and awful to be real. With a word of warning I pressed the arrow farther through. Arlin screamed like a cat in anger, and the horse hopped once and went on. I reached around him with both arms and broke off the triangular steel arrowhead. With the movement of the horse it was a very rough business, and Arlin almost went off the horse. When I could let him go again I pulled the arrowhead out from behind.
The overburdened mare was booming like a drum with every step, and her lungs also were beginning to whistle. We were going slower now, and I looked back to find our lead only five hundred feet. There were perhaps thirty of the nomads behind us, and their ugly ponies seemed to have as good a wind as Arlin’s high-bred dancer.
It stumbled, and Arlin cried out from the shock on his wound. Our pursuers cried out also, like hounds who see the hare before them. The mare went on.
Before us was a tiny settlement I could not remember having seen on the way north. But it was not by the road; it was in the road, and the houses were on wheels. I was looking at the wagons of the king’s company, standing all alone with their draft horses standing placidly in sixes before them. I could not understand, but as we came I shouted a warning, as though our appearance weren’t warning enough.
We pulled even with the first wagon, which had wheels that rose above my head and sides of waxed canvas. I reached around and gave the horse a check, for Arlin was too near fainting to do it himself. I looked back at the Red Whip riders; the sight of the king’s supply wagons had not daunted them in the least. They would be with us in seconds. In mystification I glanced down left and right at the ground and saw the marks of the king’s soldiers leaking away into the hills.
“Behind the wagons!”
I could not locate the voice, but I had a sudden insight, and I let the mare’s failing momentum take us down the row of wheels.