The Last Banquet (Bell Mountain) (24 page)

“I name you Sunfish,” he said. “It’s a good name to start out with, a very popular name. It brings good luck.”

“Sunfish I am, then,” said Orth, beaming. If this was madness, Hlah thought, then it was a new kind that no one had ever heard of. But some of the refugees around the fire, maybe for the first time in a long time, had smiles on their lips.

Except for the end facing the mountains in the East, Oziah’s Wood was now surrounded. Heathen camps had sprung up everywhere. Wallekki riders patrolled the gaps between them, watching the eaves of the forest against any sortie by the rangers.

The children and Martis had been taken to a camp some miles from the edge of the forest. Farther in, the rangers were gathering their women and children at another camp with food supplies to last the winter. Scouts came in every day, constantly reporting on the movements of the enemy. A white-haired man named Huell was in command.

“There’s at least four thousand of them out there now,” he told Martis. “Worse news—they have about half a thousand Abnaks, maybe more. We’re not afraid of the Wallekki or the Zeph, but Abnaks are as good as rangers in a forest. And murdering devils, to boot! They’ll know what to do, once they’re in here.”

It was a cold morning with a light snow on the ground. Outside the forest it would be colder. “They won’t want to sit out there in the wind much longer,” Huell said. “They’ll be coming in soon.”

“Your archers will be ready,” Martis said.

“They’ll pay a price to come in here,” the ranger agreed. “But I don’t think we can make it high enough to keep them out.”

Chillith, standing nearby with Jack and Ellayne, shook his head. None of the men noticed, but Ellayne said, “What is it, Chillith?”

“Hear me, Martis, and all you others,” said the Griff. “The Heathen gather to invade Oziah’s Wood, but they will not come in. They cannot enter.”

Huell laughed, not merrily. “Tell it to the Heathen, blind man! They sure as sunshine are fixing to come in, and there’s no way we can stop them.”

“Someday I will speak to them,” Chillith said, ignoring Huell. “They’ll see my face and hear my voice. But they will not come into this forest.”

“How the devil do you know that?” Huell said. “I hate loose talk!”

“You’d better listen to him,” Ellayne said. “He’s a prophet.”

“He’s an extra mouth to feed and no use in a fight.”

“There will be a fight very soon,” said Chillith, “but it will not be yours.

“You ask me how I know this thing. I cannot answer. Your God took away the sight of my eyes, so that in my darkness I would know that He is God. It is He who will keep the Heathen out.”

“What—does God whisper secrets to you, a Griff?” The ranger’s scowl was lost on Chillith, who only shrugged.

“No,” he answered. “I don’t think your God would speak to me. Not in words. Nevertheless, I say what I know to be true. God has made me to see without seeing.”

Huell spat and turned away. “We’ll have our archers ready, anyhow,” he said, “just in case you’re daft as well as blind. Don’t tell me you believe him, Martis.”

“I was there when God took away his sight,” Martis said. “He went to sleep a seeing man, like you or me, and woke up blind. Yes, I believe him. But if the Heathen do come in, I’ll kill as many as I can.”

They hadn’t seen Wytt in two days. But tonight, after everyone had bedded down to sleep, he came for them.

In this camp the rangers slept in low, domed huts. You couldn’t stand up in them or prepare a meal, but they were just right for keeping warm while sleeping. Jack and Ellayne had a hut of their own—a ranger built it for them in less than an hour—and Wytt came in and woke Ellayne, nuzzling her cheek and chattering softly in her ear. Ellayne shook Jack awake.

“Wytt wants us to come with him, right now,” she whispered. “He wants us to see something.”

“See what?”

“He just says come and see.”

They knew Wytt’s ways and trusted him. They knew he couldn’t say everything he thought. He’d led them across the plains to Lintum Forest and saved their lives more than once. If he said “come,” they would come.

It didn’t occur to the Omah to explain. His mind didn’t work that way. He never thought of trying to tell the children what he’d been doing for two days. He wasn’t like a human being, with the ability to lay things out in his mind and analyze them in an orderly way. Where his thoughts came from, no human being could know. Jack and Ellayne communicated with him, but didn’t know how: it just happened. Obst told them it was a gift from God.

The camp was not a proper camp with a fence, birch-bark cabins you could stand up in, or sentries. Some of the rangers patrolled the woods by night. The rest slept.

Ellayne and Jack crawled out of their shelter, following Wytt. They were fully dressed, but they missed the winter clothes they had when they first set out from Ninneburky. Ellayne’s teeth soon began to chatter. “Cold!” thought Jack. Winter was early this year.

They crawled out of camp; Wytt put them on a path, and they stood up.

“I can’t see a thing!” Ellayne said. Anyone who has ever tried to make his way through a forest in the dead of night, without a light, knows what darkness really is. She groped for Jack’s hand, found it, and held on. A few steps in front of them Wytt chirped, urging them on. They couldn’t see him, but they could follow the sounds he made. By and by their eyes adjusted and they could see well enough to avoid blundering into trees.

“Where are we going?” Jack asked. To see Omah, was the answer that he got. “What’ll we say to any ranger who finds us here in the middle of the night?” he wondered. Wytt didn’t tell him that there were Omah in the woods distracting rangers from this path. Not that he didn’t want Jack to know; but all he could think of at the moment was to lead the children to the edge of the forest as quickly and quietly as possible.

They had miles to go, and it seemed even farther in the cold and dark. Wytt’s path was more direct and much shorter than any used by the rangers, and in most places too narrow for the children to go side-by-side. Had it not been so much shorter, they never would have reached the forest’s edge by midnight. But it was, and they did, and they were both exhausted.

“Stay here. Watch and see,” were Wytt’s instructions.

“I couldn’t go another step, anyhow!” Ellayne gasped.

They were in an evergreen thicket, looking out on one of the Heathen camps. It was close enough so that they could see a fence of sharp stakes all around it and campfires and lanterns inside the fence. Jack thought it was a good bit too close.

They were still panting when the underbrush began to rustle and Omah came out all around them. These were Forest Omah, dark-furred, almost invisible at night. They chattered, chirped, and purred, and Wytt went back and forth among them. He was telling them not to be afraid—here was the girl with hair like the rays of the sun. He reminded them that many of them had already seen her from hiding and knew he spoke the truth.

“What is it about your hair?” Jack whispered. “Every Omah in the world gets all excited over it!”

Ellayne didn’t know. When they’d first set out on their journey, they had camped for a night among some ancient ruins and Jack had cut her hair to disguise her as a boy. That was how they had met Wytt. He and all the other Omah in that ruined city had gathered up her hair and made a celebration with it, dancing and waving it about. It was something that Wytt had never explained to them because he didn’t know how—something secret, they had come to believe, between the Omah and God, that no human being would ever understand.

The Forest Omah milled around the children’s ankles like a thousand cats—always clockwise, round and round, like a dance. There might have been a dozen of them, there might have been a thousand: it was too dark to tell. Maybe it went on for an hour; maybe it only seemed like an hour. But at a sudden squeal from Wytt, the Omah all went rushing out onto the plain.

“What are they going to do?” Ellayne said. “Attack the camp?” Wytt was leading the Omah, so she couldn’t ask him.

They’d seen Wytt, all by himself, kill a sleeping man, and knew a swarm of Omah could kill many sleeping men. Was that what they were going to do? Even if the camp had sentries, they wouldn’t see the little hairy men crouched down in the tall grass. No fence would keep them out. But how many warriors, out of hundreds, could they possibly kill?

“I wouldn’t want to be sleeping there tonight,” Jack said.

Ellayne wished she were sleeping in her own bed in her father’s house under a heap of blankets. The fires flickering in the Heathen camp seemed to taunt her: there was warmth for her freezing hands and feet, but she couldn’t get at it. She could only blow on her hands and stamp her feet. And she didn’t dare make noise doing it. In the stillness of this wintry night, she was afraid the slightest noise would carry to the enemy.

What were the Omah doing? They’d been gone for hours—minutes really, but it felt like hours—and nothing was happening.

Jack muffled a sneeze. She glared at him. “If you don’t mind!” she hissed.

“Sorry. My feet are going numb.”

“Mine are already gone.”

“We don’t know the way back to the camp,” he said. “I just thought of that.”

“Please try to think of something else.”

Before he could answer her, there was noise—an explosive burst of deep and angry voices in the camp, a mob of men alarmed, enraged. And then the ringing clash of steel on steel and screams: it froze the children in their tracks. It was a noise of battle.

It was time to go, but neither Jack nor Ellayne had the slightest idea which way to go.

Then they heard a high-pitched riot of squealing and chirping in the grass, and the host of the Omah came flooding back into the forest. Ellayne yelped when Wytt suddenly jumped into her arms.

“We kill some,” he reported, “and now they kill each other. They see us, think they see devils.” He made a squeaking noise that was Omah-laughter.

“They’re killing each other out there?” Jack asked, pointing to the camp. A few of the shelters were on fire now and burning brightly. He thought he could see dark shapes moving in front of the light.

“Wytt, can you take us back to our camp now?” Ellayne said. “We’re cold.”

They had to wait. Omah were milling all around them. You could hear a rhythm in their chattering, as if they were rejoicing. It was too dark to see, but Jack supposed each of the little hairy men was brandishing a pointed stick—with blood on it. The eyes and throats of sleeping men—he didn’t like to think of it.

“Now we go,” Wytt said. Out on the plain, more of the Heathen camp was burning. Horses screamed now, too. At any moment, Jack thought, men would be fleeing from the camp—“straight at us.”

Wytt guided them. After a time, the celebration of the Forest Omah died away as one by one or two by two they stole back to their nests and burrows. The sky was grey with dawn when Jack and Ellayne laid eyes on the rangers’ camp again. Wytt vanished into the underbrush.

Everyone was already up and about. Martis saw the children and came running to meet them.

“Where were you?” he cried. “I was about to beg the rangers to track you down—and I would’ve had to beg because just now they have more important things to do!”

“Why is everybody so excited?” Jack asked.

“Because the Abnaks are fighting with the Wallekki and the Zeph. They burned down one of their own camps during the night—we’ve just had word. More scouts are going out to try to find out why that happened.”

Naturally the rangers had been watching all the Heathen camps, day and night. They would have seen the battle in the camp. But they would’ve been too far away to see the Omah.

“It was the Omah who did it,” Ellayne said. “We were there; we saw. Wytt led them, and they snuck into the camp. They started the battle somehow. Next thing we knew, the Heathen were killing each other.”

“They had to see Ellayne before they did it,” Jack said. “That’s why we had to be there. Wytt came and got us. You know how he is.”

Martis sighed and ground his teeth. “All I know is I’ve had a very bad half-hour worrying about you two! I’ll have more to say about that later. But let’s find Huell and tell him what you saw.”