The Books of the South: Tales of the Black Company (Chronicles of the Black Company) (10 page)

Not that they were unfriendly. Too much the opposite. Their ways were much easier than ours in the north. Those sleek, delectable little brown beauties had never seen anything like Murgen and Otto and Hagop and their boys. They all wanted a taste of novelty. The guys were cooperative.

Even Goblin got lucky often enough to keep an ear-to-ear grin on his ugly clock.

Poor hapless, inhibited old Croaker planted himself firmly among the spectators and longed his heart out.

I do not have the hair it takes to pursue a little casual funtime bouncy-bouncy while a more serious proposition is watching from the wings.

My attitude caused no direct verbal comment—those guys have some tact, sometimes—but I caught enough snide sidelongs to know what they were thinking. And them thinking made me think. When I get introspective I can become broody and unfit company for man or beast. And when I know I am being watched a natural shyness or reluctance sets in and I do not do anything, no matter how auspicious the omens.

So I sat around on my hands, getting depressed because I feared something important might be slipping away and I was constitutionally incapable of doing anything about it.

Life sure was less complicated in the old days.

My temper improved after we scaled a last excessively vegetated and overly bug-infested mountain range and broke out of the jungle onto high plateau savannah.

From there one of the more interesting aspects of D’loc-Aloc seemed to be the fact that we had not attracted a single volunteer soldier. It said something about the peace the people had with their environment. And something about One-Eye and his long-gone brother.

What the hell had they
done
? I noticed he made a point of avoiding any talk about his past, his age, or his earlier identity while in the jungle with Baldo and Wheezer. Like anybody would remember something a couple of teenagers had done that long ago.

Baldo and Wheezer planted us as soon as they had us outside the country of their own people. They claimed they had reached the limit of territory they knew. [They promised to round up a couple of trustworthy natives who could take us on.] Baldo announced that he was going to turn back despite his earlier contract. [He claimed Wheezer would do us just fine as intermediary interpreter.]

Something had happened to disenchant Baldo. I did not argue with him. His mind was made up. I just did not pay him the full fee he had been promised.

I was thrilled that Wheezer was going to stay. That guy was a second-rate soul son of One-Eye, full of ridiculous mischief. Maybe there is something in the water in the jungle of D’loc-Aloc. Except that Baldo and everyone else we met was almost normal.

I guess my magnetic personality draws the One-Eye/Wheezer types.

For sure there was fun in the offing. One-Eye had been taking it from Goblin for two months with never a spark in response. When the blowup came it was sure to be a beauty.

“The whole thing is backwards,” I said as Lady and I mulled things over. “One-Eye is supposed to pick at scabs while Goblin lays in the weeds waiting like a snake.”

“Maybe it’s because we’ve crossed the equator. The seasons are reversed.”

I did not understand that remark until I had given it hours of thought. Then I realized that it had no meaning. It was one of her droll, deadpan jokes.

15

The Savannah

We waited six days at the edge of the savannah. Twice bands of dark-skinned warriors came to look us over. The first time, Wheezer told us, “Don’t let them lure you off the road.”

He said it to One-Eye, not knowing that I had picked up enough of the chatter to follow what they said. I have a fair gift for tongues.

Most of us old hands do. We have to learn so many.

“What road?” One-Eye demanded. “That cow path?” He indicated a track that meandered into the distance.

“Whatever is between the white stones is the road. The road is holy. As long as you stay on it you’ll be safe.”

On first pitching camp we were warned not to leave a circle circumscribed by white stones. I guessed the significance of the lines of white stones running southward. Trade would demand sheltered routes. Though little trade seemed to be moving these days. Seldom had we encountered any sizable caravan heading north since leaving the empire. We saw no one headed south. Except perhaps a walking stump.

Wheezer continued, “Beware the plains peoples anyway. They are treacherous. They will employ every blandishment and deceit imaginable to draw you outside. Their women are especially notorious. Remember: They are always watching. To leave the road is death.”

Lady was intensely interested in the discussion. She understood, too. And Goblin cracked, “You’re dead, Maggot Lips.”

“What?” One-Eye squeaked.

“The first set of sweet hips that shakes your way will lead you right off to the cannibals’ cookpots.”

“They aren’t cannibals.…” Sudden panic tautened One-Eye’s face.

It took him that long to realize that Goblin had understood him while he was talking with Wheezer. He looked at the rest of us. Some of us gave ourselves away.

He looked that much more distraught. He whispered to Wheezer with great animation.

Wheezer cackled. His laugh seemed half chicken cluck, half peacock call. It cost him a coughing fit.

It was a bad one. One-Eye beckoned me. “You’re sure you can’t do something for this guy, Croaker? He busts a lung and dies, we’re hurting.”

“Nothing. He shouldn’t be traipsing around to begin with.…” No point singing that song. Wheezer refused to hear it. “You or Goblin ought to be able to do him more good than I can.”

“You can’t help a guy who won’t let you.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “How long before we get us some guides?”

“All I hear is ‘soon’ when I ask.”

Soon indeed. A pair of tall black men came up the road at a steady, hardy trot. They were the sleakest, healthiest specimens I had seen in a long time. Each carried a sheaf of javelins across his back; a short-hafted, long-bladed spear in his right hand; and a shield of some white and black striped hide upon his left arm. Their limbs moved in perfect cadence, as though each man was half of some marvelous, rhythmic machine.

I glanced at Lady. No thoughts were evident on her face. “They would make grand soldiers,” she said.

The two trotted straight to Wheezer, feigning a vast indifference to the rest of us. But I felt them studying us sidelong. White people had to be rare this side of the jungle. They barked at Wheezer in an arrogant tongue filled with clicks and stops.

Wheezer did some heavy kowtowing. He responded in the same language, whining like a slave addressing an ill-tempered master.

“Trouble,” Lady prophesied.

“Right-o.” This contempt for the outsider was not a new experience. I had to get busy and establish who said “Jump!” and who asked “How high?”

I talked to Goblin using the finger speech of the deaf. One-Eye caught it. He cackled. That stirred our new guides’ indignation.

It would be touchy. They had to give me what they themselves knew was provocation. Only then would they accept being put in their place.

One-Eye was getting big ideas. I signed him to restrain himself, to prepare some impressive illusion. Aloud, I demanded, “What’s all the babble? Get into the middle of that.”

He started nagging Wheezer.

Wheezer carried on like a man caught between a rock and a hard place. He told One-Eye that the K’Hlata did not bargain. He said they would go through our things and pick out what they thought was worth their trouble.

“They try that and they’ll get their fingers bitten off at the elbow. Tell them that. Politely.”

It was too late for polite. Those guys understood the language. But One-Eye’s growling threw them. They did not know what to do next.

“Croaker!” Murgen called. “Company.”

Company indeed. Some of the boys who had given us the fish-eye earlier.

They were just the specific for the bruised egos of our new friends. The boys jumped up and down and howled and banged their spears against their shields. They hurled taunts. They pranced along the stone-marked boundary. One-Eye trotted after them.

The fish were not biting. But they had a little bait of their own. Something got said.

The two warriors howled and attacked. That caught everyone off guard. Three outsiders went down. The others subdued our guides quickly, though not without further mishap.

Wheezer poised on the boundary, wringing his hands and carping at One-Eye. While crows circled high above.

“Goblin!” I snapped. “One-Eye! Get with it!”

One-Eye cackled, reached up, grabbed his hair, and yanked.

He peeled himself from under that silly hat. And the fanged and fiery thing behind the peeling was ugly enough to turn a buzzard’s stomach.

Which was all show, all distraction, while Goblin got on with the meat of it.

Goblin seemed to be surrounded by giant worms. It took me a moment to realize all those squirms were lengths of rope. I shrieked when I saw the state of our gear.

Goblin howled with laughter as a hundred chunks of rope went slithering through grass and air to pester, climb, bind, garrote.

Wheezer pranced around in an absolute apoplectic fit. “Stop! Stop! You’re destroying the whole concord.”

One-Eye ignored him. He put the mask back over the horror while punishing Goblin with ferocious looks. He resented Goblin’s ingenuity.

Goblin was not finished. Having strangled everyone not already carved up or nominally friendly, he had his ropes drag the corpses across the boundary.

“No outside witnesses,” One-Eye assured me, blind to those damned crows. He glared at Goblin. “What might the little toad have been up to?”

“Say what?”

“Those ropes. That was no spur-of-the-moment piece of work, Croaker. It would take months to charm that much line. I know who he had in mind, too. No bloody more nice, polite, long-suffering One-Eye. The gloves are off now. I’m going to get my revenge before that little bastard catches me with my back turned.”

“Preemptive vengeance?” There was a One-Eye concept for you.

“I told you, he’s up to something. I’m not going to stand around and wait.…”

“Ask Wheezer what to do about the bodies.”

Wheezer said bury them deep and do a prime job of camouflaging.

“Trouble,” Lady said. “Any way you look at it.”

“The animals are rested. We’ll outrun it.”

“I hope so. I wish…” There was something in her voice that I could not decipher. I did not get it till later. Nostalgia. Homesickness. Longing for something irrevocably lost.

*   *   *

Goblin dubbed our new guides the Geek and the Freak. Despite my displeasure the names clung.

We crossed the savannah in fourteen days, without mishap, though Wheezer and the guides panicked each time they heard distant drums.

The message they dreaded did not come till we had left the savannah for the mountainous desert bounding it on the south. Both guides immediately begged to be allowed to stay with the Company. An extra spear is an extra spear.

One-Eye told me, “The drums said they’ve been declared outlaws. What they said about us you don’t want to hear. You decide to go back north again you’d better think about another way to get there.”

Four days later we made camp on some heights overlooking a large city and a broad river that flowed southeast. We had come to Gea-Xle, eight hundred miles below the equator. The mouth of that river, sixteen hundred miles farther south, lay at the edge of the world on the map I had made at the Temple of Travellers’ Repose. The last place name marked, with great uncertainty, was Troko Tallio, a ways upriver from the coast.

Once camp was set to my satisfaction I went looking for Lady. I located her among some high rocks. But instead of studying the view she was staring into a tin teacup. For an instant the cup appeared to contain a pinprick spark. Then she sensed my approach. She looked up, smiled.

There was no spark in the cup when I looked again. Must have been my imagination.

“The Company is growing,” she said. “You’ve accumulated twenty men since leaving the Tower.”

“Uhm.” I sat down, stared at the city. “Gea-Xle.”

“Where the Black Company was in service. But where wasn’t the Company in service?”

I chuckled. “You’re right. We’re wading around in our own past. We put the present dynasty in power down there. When we left it was without the usual hard feelings. What would happen if we rode in with Murgen showing our true colors?”

“There’s only one way to find out. Let’s try it.”

Our gazes met and locked. The multiple meaning sparked between us. It had been a long time since that lost moment. We had been evading moments like this, a sort of delayed adolescent shyness and guilt.

The sun settled in a glorious conflagration, the only fire there was that evening.

I just could not get past who she used to be.

She was angry with me. But she hid it well and joined me in watching the city put on its night face. That was a cosmetic job worthy of an aging princess.

She did not need to waste energy getting mad at me. I was doing a fine job being mad at myself. “Strange stars, strange skies,” I observed. “The constellations are completely out of whack now. Much more and I’ll start feeling like I’m in the wrong world.”

She made a snorting sound.

“More than I do already. Hell. I’d better rummage the Annals to see what they say about Gea-Xle. I don’t know why, but the place bothers me.” Which was true, though I’d only just realized it. That was unusual. People intimidate me, not places.

“Why don’t you do that?” I could almost hear her thinking,
Go hide in your books and your yesterdays. I’ll sit here staring today and tomorrow in the eye.

It was one of those times when no matter what you say, it will be the wrong thing. So I did the second worst thing and went away without saying anything at all.

I almost tripped over Goblin going back to camp. Though I was making a racket stumbling through the dark, he was so intent he did not hear me.