Corsair (37 page)

But Gareth still had twenty men down, ten killed.

They made stretchers for the wounded and pushed on.

• • •

Gareth considered his musketry, had a rather evil idea. Men who were known for their shooting ability were left behind in hides. They would snipe the Linyati when they hove into sight.

But Gareth had made things a little more sophisticated: the musketeers were to shoot down any Linyati carrying the cannon, any Linyati in robes, anyone who seemed to be giving orders, and of course, any Runners.

Iset added another category — anyone who walked in second or third place behind the Slaver at the point of the column. These, he explained, would either be officers or experienced soldiers taking a breather from being on point themselves. The point men would also be shaken.

Gareth went back with a three-man team, was offered a shot when the Linyati were in sight. He shook his head. It seemed, illogically, a little too much like cold-blooded murder, even though he knew the Linyati weren’t human at all.

What they were, he didn’t know yet.

His high moral resolve broke as he saw a Runner. He took a musket, aimed, fired, missed.

The other three, cover broken, shot quickly at the center of the column, then ran, seeing skirmishers move out from the main column.

• • •

As the days passed, the sailors grew leaner, more able to keep the march. Gareth thought they were moving just a bit faster than the Slavers, and allowed himself a bit of hope.

Labala announced that he had a new skill: blister mechanic.

• • •

The snipers reported seeing two, possibly three other Runners with the column; they tried to shoot them, but they seemed to be charmed.

• • •

They’d marched eight days from Noorat, and each patch of jungle, swamp, small clearing, seemed exactly the same. If it weren’t for their compasses, Gareth would have thought they were marching in circles.

According to his plot, the pirates were now even with Batan, but with the pursuit, he dared not turn to the coast, for fear of being trapped.

• • •

Labala rubbed out the triangles scrawled in the dirt, blew out the smoldering brazier.

“All I can give you, Gareth, is my feeling. Which isn’t good. The wizards with them are seeking a specific person with our column.”

“Me?”

“No,” Labala said. “So you needn’t come up with another noble self-sacrifice. Nor me, which was my next thought.”

“Who, then?”

Labala held out his hands, perplexed.

• • •

“This,” Tehidy said proudly, “is mine own creation.” He pointed up thirty feet, to the crotch of a tree. In it, on end, was a log about as big as a man’s trunk. Stuck into it were sharpened lengths of wood.

“Now, you see,” Tehidy said proudly, “a poor Linyati comes loping along this path, probably looking all about for one of our shooters, and he never sees this little vine across the trail.

“He kicks it — please, Gareth, don’t get too close, I don’t trust your coordination — and the vine, which runs around that branch and up to yon log, which is poised most delicately, yanks said log down, swinging all along the track, impaling the first, probably the second, and possibly the third man in line.

“No waste of gunpowder, or of men,” he said. “Now, the new man in front will be watching the trees, and he won’t see the pit we’ve dug farther up the trail, with spikes at the bottom.”

“Ingeniously nasty.”

“From you, that’s high praise. Now, my friend, I’d like to comb out all ships’ carpenters and have them form a rear element, building these traps as we go.”

“Do it,” Gareth said.

The traps, of various styles, worked to a greater or lesser degree.

But the Linyati kept coming.

• • •

“This pirate’s life isn’t as romantic as it should be,” Cosyra said, using a smoldering ember to tease a leech fastened to her leg. It dropped off, and she stepped on it, grimacing.

“I had romantic images, even back in Noorat when you decided we were going to take a little hike, of pastoral campfires at night, me dancing some sort of wild dance in the firelight, while the pirates clapped in unison.

“Then we’d go off into the shadows, where you would have built a leafy bower, and make mad, passionate love.”

“That’s hardly fair for the others,” Gareth said. “Ignoring the fact I’m not even sure what a leafy bower is, let alone how to build one.”

“Screw the others,” Cosyra said. “You’re the one I’m in love with.”

“Speaking of which,” Gareth said, “have you considered what you want to do when we get back to Ticao?”

“That’s why you stay captain,” Cosyra said. “It’s your incurable optimism.

“But I’ve given it a thought. Assuming my fellow lords don’t want to have me up before the king for some sort of malfeasance, running off with a rogue like you, maybe I’ll consider marriage.”

Gareth gulped.

“Or maybe not,” she said. “Speaking of which, I’ve arranged things so I’ve got third watch, at the head of the column.”

“Glad to see an officer doing her duty,” Gareth said, not sure if he was glad of the change of subject.

“Duty my left nipple,” she said rudely. “There’s nobody around at that time of night, and I don’t think we’re likely to be attacked from the front, so you might come visiting.

“Also, you’ll note my hair is a little wet? I slid off and dunked myself downstream in that creek we’re getting water from. So
I’m
clean.

“Doesn’t that suggest, o my captain, you might do the same? Pirates don’t have to be stinky all the time, you know.”

• • •

The animal track they’d been following crossed a definite path the next morning. That would make easier going for the column … and for the Linyati. Also, it led further into the interior, rather than to the coast, petering out in a tumble of abandoned stone shacks less than a mile east.

Gareth thought a moment, then decided that any semi-civilized people in this wilderness must, of course, be enemies of the Slavers.

He ordered the troops to take the path west, then consulted Labala.

“I’ve sensed more watchers,” the wizard decided gloomily. “Different from the Linyati.”

“Friendly? Enemy?”

“Dunno,” was his reply. “Guess we’ll have to wait to see whether we get hit with rocks or posies to find out.”

The men at the head of the marchers also reported eerie feelings of being watched, invisibly.

The first watcher was seen, or perhaps sensed, by Labala, who looked up into a tree, yelped surprise, and swarmed up it, moving with incredible speed for a man of his bulk.

The young man squatting in the tree, watching, gape-mouthed at the monster coming at him, fumbled an arrow out of his quiver, and then Labala had him in an armhold.

Squirm as he might, the man couldn’t get free, and Labala brought him to ground. The young man was roped to a tree, and Gareth and Cosyra came forward.

The man’s eyes were like saucers in his brown face, especially looking at an armed woman.

Dihr and his crew tried all the languages they knew, but without success.

Labala used his language spell on himself, Dihr, and Gareth.

“Who are you?” Gareth asked.

The young man shook his head violently.

“I am Gareth,” Radnor said. “I lead these men. We mean no harm.”

“Then why my name?”

“It is our custom.”

“Magic men want names,” the young man said. “It gives them power over you.”

Gareth muttered.

“Very well. We’ll call you … Wind, for if it weren’t for our wizard, you could have blown right past us.”

“That is not a bad name,” the man grudged. “I will allow that.”

“Godsdamned big of you,” Froln growled.

“Where are your people?”

“My people? Half a day march, in a direction I will not name. My masters? Two days up the path.”

“Masters?”

“Masters, with strong powers, like you must have, to chance these cursed jungles and their demons.”

“But you did the same.”

“Only because I heard you coming, and my curiosity bit me, and my village knows me to be a fool at times. Now I’m doomed to be your slave.”

“We have no slaves.”

Wind looked skeptically at Dihr.

“Then who is he? Dark men like me with light men are always slaves.”

“I am one who chooses to march with these men,” Dihr answered. “But I was a slave once. Of the evil ones who wear metal hats.”

“I know them,” Wind said excitedly. “They come into our land, take slaves, burn our villages. Sometimes our Masters can fight them with their magic, but mostly the Masters are too taken with their own business, or are too lazy to come help us, for they consider us far beneath them.

“I should not have said that,” he said. “I will be punished if you tell my Masters I said they were lazy.”

“We will tell them nothing,” Gareth said.

“Poor timid bastard,” said one of the pirates, Shenshi, the one who’d lost a duel to Cosyra. “Scared of us, scared of his damned Masters, scared of the jungle … but you can’t blame him.” Shenshi picked up the bow Wind had carried, took an arrow from the quiver.

“Look at this damned toy,” he said.

“No, no,” Wind protested, trying to reach for the bow.

“Keep a quiet tool, there, sonny,” Shenshi said. “I won’t hurt your little toy.” He fiddled with it, shook his head.

“No more’n, what, ten, maybe fifteen pounds pull? Arrow’s about as straight as my old woman’s lies. Feathers don’t look like they even came off the same bird. Not even a stone or metal point, just sharpened wood.” He touched the tip. “Ouch. Sharp, though. Guess it’d do for monkeys or birds. Small birds. Haw.”

“Forget about that,” Gareth said. “Wind, what are your Masters like? Do they look like you?”

Wind shook his head violently. “No, for I am little, and they are great.”

“Are they the same color?”

“Of course. All proper men look like me.”

Labala and Dihr grinned at each other.

“Lad’s got common sense,” Dihr said. “I’ll wager that — ”

There was a gurgle of agony. Gareth spun, saw Shenshi stagger, gasping for air, hands clawed. He took two stumbling steps, fell face-first, lay very still.

Labala knelt, turned him over. Gareth looked away from the agony-stricken, flushed face, the bulging eyes.

“He’s dead.”

“What could — ”

“The arrow,” Dihr said. “Poisoned.”

Gareth cautiously picked up the arrow, noted a dark stain at its point, “I guess he ain’t as harmless as he looks,” Froln said. “Hard way to find it out, ain’t it?”

“Do not harm me,” Wind said. “I tried to stop that man.”

“We won’t hurt you,” Gareth said. “What Shenshi did was of his own foolishness. Nomios, take four men and bury the idiot, which should remind all of us to watch ourselves closely in this unknown land.” He turned back to the native.

“Wind, about your Masters? You said they strike against anyone strange, and that they — all of your people — hate the ones we call Slavers.”

Wind looked at the corpse on the ground, then at Gareth.

“Yes. That is true.”

“On the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Gareth said, and changed back into Wind’s dialect, “we want you to take us to your Masters.”

“Oh no,” Wind said. “For surely they would kill me for disturbing them.”

“Then take us to where we can find them for ourselves,” Gareth said.

Wind looked at the armed men around him, slowly nodded.

“I will do that, for I sense I must. I will take you to the great city of Herti.”

Cosyra shook her head.

“Enemy of my enemy? Considering how afraid he is of his own rulers, if that’s what they are … Gareth, I hope your logic, if that’s what it is, works back of beyond.”

• • •

The path wound through the jungle, almost imperceptibly getting wider, until it was a road. Dihr pointed out that the jungle on either side of the track was now scrubby, secondary growth.

Gareth suddenly realized the road was now paved, with overgrown, untended cobbles.

He ordered Iset to put flankers out.

“Hells fire,” Thom Tehidy remarked as he passed with a scattering of mercenaries, “it do appear to us country folks, we’s approachin’ civi … civi … eddicated folks, it do, it do.”

Then, on a crest, they saw stone buildings beyond — huge, flat-topped, shallow pyramids.

Civilization, indeed. But as they drew closer, they saw the pyramids were overgrown, vines curling up the buildings’ steps.

Gareth asked Wind about that.

“We used to be much greater,” he explained. Then he glanced around to see if anyone was listening, lowered his voice. “Some say the gods have turned against us … or that our magic has become weak.”

He clamped his mouth shut, looked frightened.

Gareth, feeling a chill, made sure the men had their weapons ready, and the four cannon were loaded and their gunners close at hand.

Now the road wound between these pyramids, and Gareth could see they were honeycombed with tunnels, the disused entrances half-blocked.

There were scattered megaliths, some toppled and broken.

A scout called an alarm, and a spotted cat, as big as a lion, growled from atop a pyramid and bounded away.

They moved on, more slowly.

Tehidy ran in from one flank.

“Gareth,” he called, beckoning. Gareth and Cosyra followed him.

Tehidy stopped beside a raised circle, like a well only larger, and pointed down grimly.

At the bottom wasn’t water, but stacked bones, human skulls scattered among them.

“Sacrifices,” he guessed.

“Sort of,” Tehidy said. “Look at them more closely. Notice how they’ve all been cracked, for their marrow?”

Gareth felt his stomach turn.

“I suppose,” he managed, “that’s one reason for a population decline.”

“Why,” Cosyra said, “am I thinking we ought to turn around and hustle back the way we came?”

“There’s some say,” Gareth said, “the Linyati also have their favorite dishes.”

“Mercy,” Cosyra said, with mock enthusiasm, “what a
great
adventure this is turning into.”