The thing crawled toward them in the certainty of a honeysuckle twisting its way along a railing. Except for the fact it moved, Cashel'd have said it was a plant. He guessed watching it that he was going to have to admit it was a plant anyhow, even though it did move.
The ring of soldiers'd been keeping a good distance between themselves and the plant, though the blood and mangled bodies scattered over the ground showed that hadn't always been the case. Cashel didn't blame them for backing away a bit now.
"Throw the jar at the Green Woman's creature, Cashel," Cervoran said. He didn't shout, but his voice cut like bright steel through the noisy air.
The plant was definitely coming toward them. Coming toward Cervoran, anyhow, and Cashel stood just behind and a bit to the side of the revived corpse. He shifted the jar, feeling it slosh. He'd have to loft it with his body and right arm like a heavy stone, using his left hand only for balance.
Positioning the jar showed Cashel how much it'd taken out of him to get this far, but he could still manage the throw. He couldn't do it with the troops in the way, though.
"Give me room, you fellows!" Cashel called. "Give me a clear shot!"
One of the soldiers closest to Cashel turned his head back to see who was giving orders. The roots the plant crawled on moved no faster than earthworms, but a feathery tentacle uncoiled like a bird striking. It caught the top of the man's shield while he was looking the other way.
The soldier shouted as the tentacle jerked his shield toward the monster. He dropped the staple at the right rim, but his forearm was through the loop behind the shield boss. The plant slashed side to side, using the screaming man as a flail against the other troops.
"Throw the jar," Cervoran said, standing like a statue with the lantern in his hand. "It is necessary."
The third stroke flung the man loose to tumble onto the ground near the wing on the other side of the courtyard. He lay there moaning. The plant continued to wave the shield for a moment, then flipped it away and started toward Cervoran again.
The man's arm was broken, probably broken in several places, but the circle of ripped-off limbs around the creature showed that the fellow was lucky anyway. Sharina knelt beside him, cutting a bandage from his tunic with her Pewle knife.
Being thrown around that way had been hard on the soldier, but it'd given Cashel the clear path he needed. The plant was about twice his height away. He stepped toward it, bringing the wine jar up and around as he moved.
The strain drew a blood-red mask over Cashel's vision; then the jar was out of his hands and he was falling backward in reaction. He felt light-headed, barely aware of the tentacles uncoiling toward him from either side. His shoulders slammed the ground-if he'd landed on the edge of the pavement he might've broken his neck, but he hadn't-and as his legs rocked down he could see normally again.
The jar squelched into the center of the plant's body without breaking, then fell back to smash on the ground. It'd been filled with olive oil, not wine. The dent in the great body where it'd hit was bruised a darker, oozing green, but the creature resumed its crawl toward Cervoran.
Cervoran threw the lantern. It broke open, spreading its flames across the oil-sodden ground with a gradual assurance much like the way the plant itself moved. For a moment the plant continued to come on, now shrouded by a pale yellow column. The tiny rootlets burned away from its feet and the tentacles reaching toward Cashel shrivelled; the creature stopped.
Heat hammered Cashel's feet despite their thick calluses. He tried to get up but found he was still dizzy. He lifted his torso slightly and shoved himself backward with his hands. When his forearm touched the edge of the pavement, he set his palms on it and managed to lurch into a sitting position.
The flames were still too close. He crossed his left hand over his face to keep his lips from blistering, but he continued to watch even though he could feel the hairs on the back of his arm shrinking and breaking in the heat.
A blazing cocoon wrapped the plant. Blackened layers seared off, laying bare the green beneath that charred away in turn. Cashel thought he heard the plant scream, though maybe that was only the keen of steam boiling out of the shrivelling body.
Cervoran hadn't moved. Cashel stood and eased him back from the flames. The wizard obeyed with the waxen calm of a sleepwalker. The front of his clothing, the new set of tunic and trousers, was already singed brown.
Civilians had come out into the courtyard to join the soldiers, but more than the heat of the flames kept them at a distance from the dying plant. Sharina looked across to Cashel. Her face was set as she rose from her patient, but now it brightened into a smile. Two soldiers were leading off their injured comrade, his arm splinted with lengths of spear shaft.
The side of the plant's body ruptured, gushing more sea water than would've fit in the jar Cashel had thrown. It gushed onto the burning oil, stirring the flames for a moment into greater enthusiasm. Things slithered in the water, swimming or skittering on flattened legs; each held pincers high.
"Crabs!" shouted a soldier and jabbed his javelin at the thing that squirmed toward him through the dying flames. The point missed, sparking on a pebble in the soil. The soldier recovered his weapon, but the pallid creature ran swiftly toward him. He raised his foot to stamp on it, but it sprang upward to fasten its pincers on opposite sides of his ankles where the sandal straps crossed.
It isn't a crab, Cashel thought as he snatched up a javelin lying against the pavement with its slender iron head bent. It's got a tail, so it's a crayfish orThe tail curled into a nearly perfect circle, burying its hooked sting a finger's length in the soldier's knee joint. He fell backward, screaming on a rising note.
Cashel whipped the spear butt around, snatching the flat-bodied scorpion away from the soldier's leg and squashing it on the ground. The yellow horn sting broke off in the wound.
No male peasant was ever without a knife for trimming, prying and poking, but Cashel wasn't carrying one at the moment because the simple iron tool wouldn't have looked right among all these folk in court robes and polished armor. He knelt and worked the sting out of the soldier's flesh with the point of the man's own dagger.
The knee had turned black and swelled up big as the soldier's head, and his body was thrashing in four different rhythms the way a beheaded chicken does. Well, you did what you could.
Cashel straightened. Sharina was standing beside him. He dropped the dagger and hugged her to him with his left arm. He still held the dripping javelin in his right hand, and his eyes searched the dying fire for any more scorpions that might dart from the charred ruin of the hellplant.
* * *
Several times Garric stepped into muck that would've sucked him down if he hadn't jerked back quickly, but he didn't have any real trouble keeping up with Scarface and his companions. The pasture south of Barca's Hamlet had marshy stretches, and there're some sheep that seem determined to bog themselves thoroughly every chance they got.
He grinned. Celondre, one of the greatest poets of the Old Kingdom and of all time, had given Garric a great deal of pleasure. His pastorals of shady springs and gambolling lambs never included the shepherd struggling out of a bog with a half-drowned ewe bleating peevishly on his shoulders, however.
A bird belled like an alarm and shot straight up, almost at the feet of the man who was leading. He cried, "Wau!" and jumped backward, tangling his legs and falling over. Garric was startled also, dropping into a crouch. His ancestor's reflex swung his hand to the sword he wasn't carrying.
Scarface at the end of the line was the only one who didn't react. He called a good-natured gibe at the man who'd fallen, then added something in a harsher tone to get the line moving again.
"That one's a hunter," Carus said, assessing the situation. "The others are fishermen, maybe, or just farmers. Scarface I'd pick for a scout."
Why isn't he leading, then? Garric asked silently. He wasn't arguing, exactly; just trying to understand what Carus saw and he did not.
"Because they all know where they're going, lad," the king explained. "I'd guess that means it's not very far. And it also means that they're more worried about what might be following them than they are about what's ahead, which is something to keep in mind."
As Carus spoke, the path wound around a clump of snake-leafed trees. Ahead rose a series of hummocks some four feet above the general level of the landscape. The hummocks stood in water and were edged with walls made from vertical tree trunks; pole-supported walkways connected them. The surrounding ponds must've been spoil pits from which the dirt had been removed to fill the raised beds.
A man on one of the hummocks saw Scarface's group coming. He waved a hoe and called, "Urra!"
The leading spearman raised his net and spun it in an open circle in response, then looped it back around his waist. Other figures cultivating the raised beds, men and women both, straightened and looked toward the newcomers. A few waved.
"There's the fort," Carus said. "Well, fortified village."
He snorted mildly and added, "It wouldn't be hard to carry, not unless the ones inside are better armed than anything we've seen thus far. And even then it wouldn't be hard."
It was raining again, but even without that Garric wouldn't have been able to differentiate the stockade from the smaller planting beds spaced in front of it. We aren't planning an attack, are we? he thought, amused by his ancestor's focus on the military aspects of any situation.
"No, but somebody is or the defenses wouldn't be there," Carus responded crisply. "And if that somebody knows what he's doing, those defenses won't be much good."
The group reached a walkway like those between the beds-and connected to them, Garric saw as he looked ahead in the mist. Scarface clucked something to Garric and took his arm, leading him to the front of the line. The bed, saplings lashed to stringers of heavier timber, was barely wide enough for them to walk abreast.
The gate in the stockade opened. A man standing on the platform above it raised a wooden trumpet to his lips and blew an ugly blat of sound. The people who'd been in the fields started trooping toward the village in response.
An old man wearing a headdress of black feathers stepped into the gateway, ccompanied by a much younger woman. She held the man's left arm, apparently helping to support him. In the old man's hands was a jewel which gleamed yellow even in this dull light.
"Wizardry!" muttered King Carus in disgust.
Well, we knew somebody brought us here, Garric thought calmly. Now we've got a good idea who it was.
The feathered wizard raised the giant topaz, a duplicate of the one in the crown of First Atara, and cackled in triumph.
A dog ran out of the gateway and began yapping as Garric and Scarface approached. It was black with a white belly and paws, medium sized and non-descript. Scarface sent a clod of dirt at it, catching the dog neatly in the ribs. It yelped and bolted back into the village, brushing the wizard on the way. He staggered and might've fallen if the woman accompanying him hadn't tightened her grip.
"That's the first animal we've seen," Carus said with a frown. "There hasn't been a cow, let alone a horse. There hasn't even been a chicken!"
Garric grinned. His ancestor knew could order a battle or site an ambush, things that not even the most educated of peasants could've been expected to know. That didn't mean that peasants knew nothing, however.
Their feet'd rot, Garric explained. Back in the borough we couldn't pasture the flock in the bottomland for more than a week at a time or their hooves'd get spongy. The clothes here're fiber, not wool, and I'd guess they eat a lot of fish with their vegetables.
The two men on top of the gate came down a ladder inside the stockade. The trumpeter stepped out of the way, but the fellow wearing a feather robe joined the wizard and his woman. They exchanged brief glances; not hostile, exactly, but cold enough to imply rivalry rather than friendship.
When Scarface reached the mound on which the village stood, he touched Garric on the chest to halt him and stepped forward to talk to the chief. The wizard waited with the big topaz in the crook of his right arm, wearing a disdainful expression. The woman eyed Garric with frank appraisal.
"Well, that one likes what she sees or I miss my bet," Carus said with a chuckle. "And I don't, because I saw her sort often enough myself back in the days when I wore flesh."
Garric glanced at the woman, then looked away. He tried to hide his feeling of disgust, but he felt his lip curl despite him.
It wasn't that she was unattractive, but she had a dirty air that went well beyond the simple physical grime inevitable in a village on a mud bank. The woman Katchin the Miller, Cashel's uncle, had married was much the same sort. Katchin had been a boastful, grasping, unpleasant man, but over the years Garric had come to feel that the dance Katchin's wife led him was sufficient punishment for all the man's flaws.
After listening to Scarface for some while, the chief gestured him aside and glared at Garric in what was probably supposed to be an intimidating fashion. Since Garric was taller by half a head, that didn't work very well. The edges of the chief's cloak were worn, and the feathers seemed to be a jumble of anything that could be netted or trapped with birdlime.