Demontech: Rally Point: 2 (Demontech Book 2) (6 page)

“Nobody move!” Spinner shouted.

The seven men playing at dice jerked at the command and spun to face it, their hands reached for their weapons but stopped before touching them. Facing them at the top of the rise were a dozen men, half of whom held bows with arrows nocked and drawn, but not aimed. The others held swords. Two of the men glanced at their weapons, but the bowmen’s range was so short that their arrows would be in their targets before any of the seven could grab weapons and jump out of the way.

“Who’s in charge here?” Spinner demanded in rough Zobran. He shifted his crossbow so it was pointed at the sky.

Three of the men looked uncertainly at one another, the others stared at the bowmen covering them. No one spoke right away.

At the same moment fifty yards farther along the road, Haft shouted, “Don’t move!” as he and a dozen horsemen abruptly appeared in a semicircle facing the six armed men at that end of the rough encampment.

“Who’s your commander?” Haft asked in harshly spoken Zobran.

He may as well not have asked for all the response he got.

Screams of frightened women and children came from the trees away from the road. A loud, male voice called out, “Be calm, no one’s going to hurt you.” The screaming continued and the sound of running feet came to the two groups at the roadside.

The thirteen men in the two groups jerked their heads toward the sounds, but none dared move. Outnumbered as they were and without their weapons in their hands, they couldn’t fight. But their women and children were being threatened, they had to do something. The tension was palpable.

“Don’t do it,” Spinner said at his end as one man finally began to inch his hand closer to his bow.

“Move and die,” Haft shouted at a man whose eyes flicked to his sword.

Women and children burst upon the two groups and pulled up sharply at the sight of the armed men facing their men. The women and older children stood unsteadily, frightened and not knowing what to do. Small children bawled, then clung to their mothers and buried their faces in their skirts. A woman fell to her knees and cried with her face in her hands.

A man in the first group, one of the three in the blue tunic of a Zobran Royal Lancer, swallowed and held his hands open and wide. He slowly rose to his feet.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “We’re poor refugees, we have little more than the clothes on our backs and a little bit of food.”

Spinner lowered his crossbow and looked at the man. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Guma.”

“You’re in command?”

Guma looked at the others, they looked away. “As much as anyone,” he said as he looked back at Spinner.

“Poor refugees?” he asked. “You are arrayed more like bandits sitting in an ambush.”

“If we were bandits sitting in ambush, you wouldn’t have been able to sneak up on us like you did.”

“So you didn’t expect anybody to come along now, that’s all,” Spinner retorted. “But you were in position if anybody did.”

“Defensive position, we don’t plan to ambush anybody.”

“How do you explain the peddler’s wagon. Who did you steal it from?”

“The peddler is part of our party.”

Suddenly Silent shouted,
“No!”
from behind the women and children.

An arrow
whizz
ed past Spinner’s head.

There was a yelp and inarticulate shouts, then Silent called out, “I’ve got him.”

“Hold!” Spinner shouted. “Be calm! Nobody gets hurt if everybody stays calm.”

“That goes for you too!” Silent snarled at a half-grown boy struggling in the crook of his arm. The giant held a bow in his free hand taken from the boy. “This whelp thinks he’s ready to be a fighting man,” he said, not yelling but loud enough for everyone to hear. “That kind of thinking can get people unnecessarily killed.” He looked around and saw a woman with a anguished expression wringing her hands. “Is this one yours?” he demanded.

The woman whimpered as she nodded.

Silent put the boy on his feet and gave him a shove in her direction. “Keep better control of your sprat before he gets himself in trouble he can’t get out of.”

The woman ran to her son and hugged him tightly then looked at Silent. Silent nodded curtly.

One of the other Royal Lancers tried to take advantage of the distraction and started to grab for his sword. Not everyone was as distracted as he thought—an arrow
thunk
ed into the ground inches from his hand. He froze and looked up, his face white. Five horsemen had drawn arrows pointed at him, the one who had shot was already drawing another shaft.

“The next arrow kills,” Spinner announced.

A young woman who had stood silently sobbing near the group of men covered by Spinner and his horsemen suddenly screamed and bolted. Half blinded by her tears, she stumbled through the six men who still sat or lay as they’d been when Haft and his men came upon them.

One of Haft’s men, a Kondive Islands sea soldier, suddenly shouted, “Wanita!” He broke ranks and galloped after the woman. As soon as he was close enough he bounded out of his saddle and grabbed her. His momentum carried both of them to the ground.

“Wanita!” he exclaimed, and held her face in his hands. He kissed her. She struggled to break away, but he held her close and cried the name again and again.

Suddenly she stopped struggling and looked into his face. She gasped. “Pisau! Is it really you, Pisau?” she said in a language only one of the others understood. She rubbed a wrist at her eyes to push away the tears.

He kissed more of her tears away. “It’s me, Wanita,” he said in the same language, his voice almost unable to get through his constricted throat.

“Pisau!” she cried and threw her arms around his neck. “I thought you were dead!”

“And I you, my love!”

Tension broke as everyone, including Silent, who broke off from searching the camp, gathered around the two where they rocked on the ground with their arms holding them close, murmuring to each other as they kissed.

After an embarrassing moment Spinner cleared his throat. “Do you know this woman, Pisau?” he asked in Frangerian.

The Kondive Islander broke his face away from the woman’s and grinned up at the Frangerian Marine. “Know her? She’s my
wife
! I searched for her when the Jokapcul took Zobra City. Someone told me he’d seen her killed. I never would have left the city without her if I’d thought she was still alive.” He turned back to his wife and repeated what he’d just said in their own language. She giggled and said something. He laughed and spoke in Frangerian. “She says she wasn’t killed, but she’ll show me the scar later.”

“Then these people are really refugees?” Haft asked.

Pisau asked Wanita. She nodded, then struggled out of his grip to stand up. In broken Zobran, she said that some people in Zobra City had taken her in and hid and cared for her after a Jokapcul soldier stabbed her.

The Jokapcul thought they had locked the city down tight but unlike the free port of New Bally, which the invaders had taken in a matter of hours, Zobra City had been subject to invasion many times during its history, and people knew how to retain communications with the countryside, and routes out of the city unnoticed by their captors. For weeks, people and uncaptured soldiers slipped out of the city and made for what they hoped were rendezvous points where they could get organized and begin resistance to the conquerors.

When Wanita’s wound had healed well enough, her saviors—who were among the people she was traveling with—had taken her on their own exodus. But the Jokapcul were more successful in beating down all resistance in the countryside than they had been in the capital city, and the rendezvous points were worthless. This group, eight Royal Lancers and five other men, three of whom were former Zobran soldiers, along with several wives and children banded together and headed east in hope of meeting more Zobrans en route to the head of Princedon Gulf. Until their capture they hadn’t met any other refugees, though they’d often had to avoid Jokapcul units marching northward.

Silent took himself away to bring the rest of the company forward while Spinner and Haft told their story to the refugees. Then the two bands agreed to join forces. They sealed the agreement with a communal dinner to which both parties contributed. The new people were surprised by the way Alyline, Doli, and Zweepee took charge of preparations. Baecker again constructed a temporary oven and they had cakes and pies, which were a particular delight to the refugees from Zobra City. Nobody begrudged a wandering bee the crumbs it dined on.

While the dinner was being prepared, the half-grown boy who shot the arrow at Spinner approached him.

“If the giant hadn’t startled me by yelling, I would have hit you,” the boy said belligerently. “You know that, don’t you?”

Spinner looked down at him. The fuzz on the boy’s cheeks and upper lip told him the boy was of age to learn the ways of men. One of the ways of men was learning how to use weapons and fight.

“I believe you,” he said. “Did you learn something today?” The boy looked at him curiously, not knowing what he meant. “Did you learn that it’s a bad idea to shoot arrows at people who outnumber you and aren’t shooting at you?”

“If you hadn’t been refugees like us, if you were the bandits we thought you were, it wouldn’t have mattered that you outnumbered us and weren’t shooting. You would have killed us anyway. By shooting you when you weren’t shooting at us, we could have taken some of you with us. Maybe we could even have scared you off.”

“If we were bandits, maybe. But we aren’t, so you would have been wrong. We thought you were bandits and you would have proved that to us. We would have killed all of you because you put an arrow into me.”

“I’d do the same thing again,” the boy said defiantly. He turned and walked away, head high and back erect. Wrong or right, he was the only one to fight back when the armed men cornered them; he was proud of that.

Spinner sighed at the boy’s retreating back. The boy was both right and wrong. Being both right and wrong can get people needlessly killed. He hoped the boy learned that lesson before failing to learn it killed him.

Guma, the reluctant leader, had been in the Zobran army for three years. His troop was in the countryside on training maneuvers when the Jokapcul invaded. They found out about the invasion when they were attacked by two troops of Jokapcul light cavalry. The fight didn’t last long—the Jokapcul had magicians with them, the Zobrans didn’t. As far as he knew, he and the seven other Royal Lancers in this group were the only survivors from the troop.

“Our captain was killed by a phoenix. I was close to him when it happened, the phoenix’s wing just missed me. It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen. They had demon spitters as well. It wasn’t much of a battle, mostly it was a slaughter. More than half of us were dead or down with wounds before they even closed to sword and lance range.”

“How did you survive?” Spinner asked.

Guma shrugged. “We ran. Some of us ran before they reached us.” He looked away from the two Frangerians. “Those who didn’t run soon enough died.”

Haft opened his mouth to say something, but a sharp glance from Spinner stopped him. Haft grimaced; he had little use for soldiers who ran from a fight, but he kept his peace.

“Ealdor’s family,” he named another lancer, “was visiting their home village,” Guma continued, “which wasn’t far away. We went there and got them. A few of the villagers joined us, but most didn’t believe the Jokapcul would murder civilians and destroy the town.” He went silent for a moment, looking west. “I hope I’m wrong,” he said softly, “but I’m afraid they’re all dead now. Dead or slaves.” He shook himself, then continued his story in a stronger voice. “A little east of there, we came upon Mangere, the peddler, and he joined us for protection.”

Haft snorted. “Mangere, the peddler with a full wagon. And you told us you only had the clothes on your backs and a little bit of food.”

Guma smiled. “Little enough for this many people trying to survive.”

“It’s more than we had for more people.”

“But you have officers who know how to lead. We didn’t even have a sergeant.”

“Officers!” Haft hooted.

“That’s enough,” Spinner said sharply. He thought they were better off if the Zobrans believed he and Haft were officers until they proved themselves. Haft gave him a crooked grin, but didn’t say more. “Please continue,” Spinner told Guma.

“We passed not far from the farm Sulh grew up on,” said another lancer, “so we gathered his family as well.”

There was more. Two of the other Royal Lancers also gathered family, and other refugees joined them for what protection could be afforded by eight leaderless soldiers. There were a few unwed or widowed women in the group, but not as many as there were men without wives.

“That Kondivan of yours—Pisau?—made several men unhappy when he turned out to be Wanita’s husband. We understood that she didn’t want anything to do with a man, not so soon after what happened in Zobra City. But when she was ready . . .” He shook his head ruefully.

“Fortunes of war,” Spinner said with sympathy. He understood waiting—he was waiting for Alyline.

Just then the Golden Girl walked up to them, backed up by Doli and Zweepee. She thrust a sheet of paper at Spinner, who jumped to his feet like a puppy eager to please.

“I don’t imagine you’ve done this yet for the men,” she said.

“What?” Spinner looked at her quizzically, then at the paper. It held a list of names, many with numbers or other annotations next to them. He handed it to Haft and looked at the women. “What is it?”

Haft glanced at the paper and smacked himself on the head. “She’s way ahead of us, Spinner.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is a roster of the women and children. It gives the ages of the children and shows which children belong to which women.” He cocked an eyebrow seeking confirmation. Zweepee smiled and nodded at him. “And, unless I miss my mark, it tells which women are with their husbands and what special skills they have,” he added smugly. “Am I right?” He grinned.

“You’re not always the fool you normally seem,” Alyline acknowledged in a tone friendlier than the words.