The Sword of the Lady (67 page)

″We found him in the woods. Not long dead, and from his back trail, he came up from the place we′re going,″ Edain said, laying the man down. ″Arrow in the lung; he kept going until he couldn′t, then lay down and died.″

″He was trying to make Erling Jimsson′s steading, I think,″ Asgerd put in. ″It′s the closest.″

Thorlind made a sound.

She went to her knees beside the young man as she came up and saw his face. She took the stiffening body in her arms, holding the boy′s head against her shoulder, rocking him. Her voice was naked:

″Oh, Olaf, Olaf!″

Heidhveig pushed herself erect, leaning on her staff.

″I know him,″ she said quietly to Rudi, underneath the muted sounds of her pupil′s grief. ″He′s her nephew Olaf Knutsson, her younger sister′s son and Kalk′s oldest great-grandson, just fourteen. Something terrible must be happening at Kalksthorpe. He is . . . was . . . a very swift runner, for a boy. They sent him for help, but someone shot him on the way.″

Rudi nodded. ″I′m sorry if we′ve brought ill luck upon your folk,″ he said.

Thorlind looked up. ″You haven′t. Whoever′s attacked us has. If you owe me anything—″

″That I do, lady, and freely I acknowledge it.″

″Then give me blood for my blood! I will raise a
nithing
-staff and curse whoever did this, but I need a sword to do the work.″

″I will that,″ Rudi said gently. ″By the Morrigú I swear, and by Macha and Badb Catha, and by the greater One that the Three make.″

Then his voice went hard and brisk. ″We need a scouting mission. I′ll lead it.″

Ingolf cocked a brow. ″That′s grunt′s work,″ he said bluntly. ″Your more-balls-than-brains Majesty,″ he added, with a dry tinge to his voice. ″Grunts can be idiots. They mostly just get themselves killed. Bossmen . . . Kings . . . can′t afford to be stupid. Your life isn′t your own to throw away anymore.″

Rudi looked at him. It was on the tip of his tongue to say
if I′m the King, I give the orders
. But . . .

He sighed. ″You′ve talked me into letting someone else do the work, you silver-tongued bastard of a man. I can deny you nothin′.″

Then he looked about. ″Mary, Ritva, you′re going. And Edain. Are any of you Bjornings familiar with the land here? Fighters only,″ he added.

The Norrheimers looked at each other. A few raised hands uncertainly. Asgerd cleared her throat.

″I′ve come here six times . . . no, seven, but I was a little girl the first time. My father brings hides and wool and butter after the first hard snow to trade for cloth and tools and stockfish. We stay a week or two, and I know the neighborhood a little.″

Rudi flicked his eyes quickly to Edain and his half sisters. They all nodded, quick slight jerks of the chin.

″Good, you′re the fourth,″ he said aloud. ″You′re also the youngest and least, and don′t forget it. Get me what I need to know, Edain, then get back, and quickly. The rest of us will move forward, but slow and cautious. We′ll sprint the last bit, I expect.″

″I wish we had our destriers,″ Odard said.

Rudi grinned. ″I doubt there′s room for a charge of knights here, my lord Gervais. Now, Asgerd, show me on the map how we can approach. I′m thinking the main trail is a
bad
idea the now, until we know exactly who it is has come calling at Kalksthorpe.″

 

 

 

″Be patient with them, Jawara,″ Abdou said.

He hunched his shoulders against the cold wind off the sea, and even more against the itching feeling of being immobilized here ashore while his ships swung at anchor. The sea was his element; this continent was alien and hostile. He liked feeling that way. It kept you alive.

″Supposedly they′re some sort of Muslims,″ he went on.

Abdou al-Naari was a tall lean man in his thirties, with skin the color of old saddle leather, part-owner and captain for his kin-corporation of the corsair schooner
Bou el-Mogdad
, named after a fabulous ship of the ancient world. His subordinate Jawara was shorter, a little younger than his thirty-six, thicker-built and ebony black, with three scars like chevrons on each cheek; he had named her sister ship
Gisandu
—Shark.

Jawara looked over at the men they were now allied with, the core of disciplined ones in the reddish-brown armor with the rayed sun sign on their chests and the rabble of savages around them. When he spat, it was for the benefit of both groups; and perhaps also for the man in the green robe and turban who was standing and talking with them. In the old days that dress would have meant he was a hadji, one who′d made the pilgrimage to Mecca. A few men bold enough or mad enough or lucky enough or all three had made the journey across the length of the Sahel and the Red Sea since the Change and found nothing human left in the Holy City except dry gnawed bones. Now the green cloth merely meant a pilgrimage to Touba, where Cheik Bamba of the Mouride Brotherhood had dwelt.

Jawara′s voice held a sneer as eloquent as the gobbet of spittle:

″If they′re Muslims, I′m the Emir—and I′m not freezing my balls off here. I′m sitting in my palace at Dakar, sipping coffee and smoking good khif this very moment under a screen grown with jasmine, while pretty girls bring me plates of
cheb-ou-jen
with
yète
.″

Abdou spat himself, and shivered as it froze on the ground with a slight audible crackle. The thought of good hot coffee and some decent food was enough to make him want to howl. They were both bundled in furs and wool over their armor, and the wind off the estuary was still enough to make a man feel as if he was walking about while three days dead. Gray sky, gray water, dun-colored patches of rock, dark green pine, pale snow; it was all calculated to convince you that you′d become a ghost without noticing it.

The memory of mangroves alive with brightly colored birds beneath cerulean skies, of blue, blue breakers turning to white foam as they went crashing on silver sands beneath rustling palms seemed infinitely distant. He was hungry for it, the sights and the warmth and the very
smell
of smoked fish and onions and tomatoes cooking in peanut oil.

″The Marabout says they are believers,″ Abdou said. ″And
he′s
supposed to be a very holy man.″

″If he′s a holy man, I′m not the Emir. I′m his third wife,″ Jawara said.

Abdou grinned. ″I thought you were his catamite with a bottom sweet as a ripe mango?″ he said innocently.

Jawara made an obscene gesture at him, and they both laughed. Abdou did have his own doubts about the Marabout. Supposedly he was in favor with the new Grand Khalif of the Mourides, and the captain had welcomed him along on this venture when he turned up asking for a place—it reassured the men and made them feel God′s blessing to have a cleric around.

He himself wasn′t so sure. His own family were of the older Tidjiane brotherhood anyway, not the Mouride. And he was an educated man, literate in Wolof and in his native Hassaniya dialect and in the classical Arabic of the Holy Book, and even a little in
Française
, the dead
kufr
language of the sciences; also he spoke enough English for trade and war. He′d spent time at the Emir′s court, as well, and he inclined to orthodoxy. The brotherhood founded by Cheik Bamba had been powerful in his land for a very long time and more so since the Change, but the reverence the Mourides paid to their hereditary religious leaders struck him as little short of
sherk
, idolatry.

There were two of them always with the Marabout, wild-looking men with their hair in plaits and great brass-bound ebony clubs in their hands. Both loomed like giants, and Abdou was not a small man.

And . . . how did he know where to find these so-called Muslims? It was as if they were
waiting
for him here on this begotten-of-Shaitan wilderness shore.

″Well, at least the plunder should be good,″ Jawara said, working his hands in his gloves; one dropped caressingly to the pearl-encrusted hilt of his scimitar. ″This nest of pagans has been scouring the God-smitten cities on these coasts longer than we have. And they make some very clever things themselves.″

″And they′re a nuisance when they clash with our people,″ Abdou said. ″Yes, we′ll probably get a richer cargo than we could scavenging the ruins ourselves. But I hate losing good men getting it. This will cost us more than fighting a few ignorant cannibal savages in the dead lands. These Norrheimers may be pagans, but they know too cursed much how to make good armor and war engines and fight in ranks, for instance. Bad as fighting the Ashanti.″

Jawara brightened. ″There′ll be women, at least, when we take the place. That warms a man up!″

Abdou shrugged. The dwellers here were polytheists and so legitimate prey by sharia, the holy law, but experience had shown these northern peoples were useless as slaves. If you took them back to a civilized climate they just sickened and died of the fevers. On balance it was a good thing, because it made it impossible for the English Nazarenes to invade the House of Peace rather than just make punitive raids. Besides, he found the fishbelly skins and skeletal faces of whites repulsive; even after so long at sea, he′d wait until he got home to Fatima.

″Get your mind out from between these hypothetical womens′ thighs, Jawara: first we have to break their wall and beat their fighting men,″ he said sourly. ″
And
hope no English ships come by before we can. This is far too close to the
Gezira-al-Said
, the Isle of the Prince; may God sink it.″

The coast of the river estuary ran northwest-southeast here, with a hook of land protecting the site of the town. On the landward side was a wall of tree trunks, squared and sunk deep, bolted together with heavy steel rods and wound each to the next with metal cable. A little in from that was another wall, and the space between was tight-packed with rock and rubble to make a bulwark of solid strength. Blockhouses of large tight-fitted logs laid horizontally studded the wall, with two by each of the gates. The seaward approach was protected by more logs—but those were sunk in the seabed, angled outward, their ends tipped with vicious metal blades like the heads of giant spears. He could see some of them from here, frosted and menacing and bearded with icy tendrils of weed, but some were always underwater even at low tide. Only the dwellers knew the paths through them.

His own ships were anchored safely out of range offshore, their rigging half blocked from here by the rearing complexity of the pagan temple′s shingle roofs. Both were two-masters built in the Saloum delta of sapele and iroko, low fast snakelike craft designed for speed at sea and handiness around shallow coasts. The pagan war boats were formidable where they had room to move, but they couldn′t thread their way out through their own obstacles, not when they had to come slowly and in the face of catapults throwing globes of stick flame.

He′d come in out of the dawn three days ago and caught them tied up. That blockade duty pinned his ships down as long as he stayed here, though. Which also meant he couldn′t dismount more than a pair of light engines for besieging the town, not nearly enough to do significant damage.

The Marabout—Cheik Ibra, he was called—was in conversation with one of the strangers. They were too far away for Abdou to follow the talk, but close enough for him to hear that it was in English. That made his mouth tighten. How
had
Ibra learned that tongue? In the lands of the Emirate of Dakar only seafarers did, and of them only a few.

″Ahmed,″ Abdou said, raising his voice slightly.

His son trotted over, proud in his fifteen years, a slim young man who already bid fair to be taller than his tall father someday. He was prouder still of being on his first foreign voyage.

″My father? I mean, Captain?″

″Fetch the learned Cheik for us.″

The boy walked over to the strangers with self-conscious dignity. He transferred his spear to the left hand that also held the grip of his shield, so that his right could touch brow and lips and breast as he bowed and murmured a polite formula. The perhaps-holy man nodded and walked over to the two corsair captains.

″I have good news, God willing,″ he said cheerfully; he didn′t even seem to mind the vile weather here.

″God willing indeed,″ Abdou said. ″What could be good about this place except seeing the last of it, when that is His will?″

″Confounding the pagans and plundering their goods?″ the Marabout asked dryly. ″And
then
seeing the last of it?″

Jawara nodded. ″Yes, but how? Charging those walls would leave nothing but heaped corpses—and if I′m to be a martyr, I want to be a victorious one. And we can′t sit here long. Too likely a warship of the accursed English Nazarenes will come by, may God confound
them
. Their merchants put in here to trade every now and then, too.″

All three men nodded. In theory the Emir of Dakar had agreed to forbid these waters to ships from his realm after the defeat he suffered at the Canaries from the united
kufr
fleets a decade ago. Abdou and Jawara had both been there, fighting beside their fathers in their first real war, and had been among the lucky minority who escaped alive from the arrows and flamethrowers and the waiting sharks.

In practice the Emir had neither the power nor the wish to control the ships that sailed from the tangled swamps and creeks of the Saloum delta, looking for revenge as well as wealth. Their folk
needed
the salvage of the ruined cities, not just metals but gears and springs and glass and a hundred other things; and the English charged usurer′s rates for such. But the treaty allowed their navy to attack vessels in the exclusion zone on sight, which they did with ghastly efficiency.