Doom's Break (20 page)

Thru made sure to stay out of sight as he followed the path of the riders. Fortunately, the hooves of so many animals set up a vibration in the ground that he could often detect when he couldn't actually see them. He stayed on the slopes above, keeping to the deer trails.

There were no other mots around. The alarm had passed swiftly up the valley, and the folk had dropped everything and run for their lives. Thru imagined that Toshak had already heard of the incursion and was organizing a response.

Still, the question remained: What were these men up to? They had known by now that all the villages around were emptied of their populations. And they were surely aware that getting back to the coast and the safety of their ships would be highly hazardous. The woods would be alive with ambushes.

The whole thing seemed quite mad. Even the destruction in Warkeen village had been haphazard, almost halfhearted. A few houses had been burned, among them that of the Gillos, but most of the village had been spared. Thru had never heard of this pattern before. Usually the men burned the whole village if they had the chance. This time they didn't bother to burn any of the other villages they passed through. Instead, they would stop to water their animals and do some looting. They would eat, sometimes lighting a cooking fire in the kitchen of a mot house. Then they'd mount up again and move on.

This was the pattern they'd kept up all day. Thru had managed to stay close to them by dint of a prodigious effort.

Ahead of them, around the curve in the valley, the village of Round Pond came into view. The famous pond—broad, deep, and perfectly circular—glistened in the late-afternoon light. No smoke rose from any of the chimneys, though. The folk and the animals were long gone.

Thru turned up onto the hilly ridge that rose on the northern side of the village, which, like nearly every village in the Dristen Valley, was built close to the river, often around a bridge.

He worked his way around to a point where he could see down to the main square. The men tethered their horses in groups along the cobbled main street. They broke into the houses and pulled out furniture, mats, pottery. Some they burned on a big bonfire. Some they rolled up and put among their things. Others they despoiled or smashed with gleeful laughter.

The captives were not in sight. Thru assumed they had been put in a cellar somewhere under guard.

The bonfire blazed. Some kind of biscuit was handed out to the men who ate it greedily, hungry after a long day in the saddle. The biscuit was accompanied by a wineskin. The cooks were working up a huge pot of porridge.

Suddenly the crowd stirred, and voices began chanting something. A huge figure, their leader, so Thru had decided from previous observation, shouldered his way close to the fire. The leader said something, and the men roared with laughter.

More furniture was thrown onto the fire. Thru saw a fine old dining table, no doubt an heirloom centuries old, tossed into the flames. Meanwhile, other men had rolled out a barrel of ale from the tavern. It was quickly broached and mugs were handed around. The leader took a mug and quaffed it and then made a joke and all the men laughed.

He raised a hand and commanded silence. The huge man paced about the inner ring around the fire, staring into the men's eyes. Then he bellowed something at them. Thru caught the word "monkeys" and guessed at least part of what the huge man was saying. If Thru could get within bowshot and had a decent steel point, he'd be happy to show this man what the monkeys could do.

The leader finished speaking, and a group of men went to the door of a house a little farther up the street and returned, dragging old Disha Mux behind them. Disha screamed when she saw the fire and the crowd of boisterous men.

The leader caught hold of Disha by the neck and pulled her off the ground so she dangled beside him. She looked like a doll in his huge hand; he shook her and made jokes that provoked gales of laughter from the men.

Thru stared, horror-struck, as the huge man took hold of one of poor Disha's arms and began turning it in the socket as if he was dejointing a rabbit for the pot. Disha's shrieks rang off the hills while her arm was torn from the socket and waved above the fire.

The men howled with mirth at the old mor's agony.

The giant shook Disha like a rag, snapping her neck and cutting off her awful screams. Then he tossed her body to the men by the fire. Thru's gorge rose as he watched them gut the old mor and clean out her viscera before they skinned her and cut her into pieces that were set on sticks over the coals. The odor of roasting flesh began to rise into the air.

A second captive was brought out, a mor whom Thru did not recognize. This time a hatchet was used to dispatch the victim, a single blow smashing her skull from behind. Her head was then cut off, and the process of turning her into meat unfolded as before. Thru forced himself to watch to the bitter end.

Doing so, he witnessed something strange. The arm that had been torn off poor Disha was cooked over the fire and returned to the giant man. He nibbled on it and then passed it around the group standing beside him. It didn't take too long before the arm began to come apart. As they split at the elbow and then disassembled the arm bones, each bone, gnawed and clean, was handed back to the giant. He examined each one, then handed it to a servant who stood behind him collecting the bones in a small sack.

Intrigued, Thru watched until the servant took the bag away. Another layer of mystery had been added to that surrounding this strange, grisly expedition.

The fires burned down eventually. Not a scrap of old Disha or the other mor survived. There was nothing to be buried. Their bones had been tossed into the flames, except for the arm bones of poor Disha.

Thru waited until dark, then crept down carefully into the backyards of the houses at the base of the hill. The men, who had eaten their fill, had gathered around a small group who had removed their helmets to reveal the gold and red painted scalps of the priesthood of the Great God. The men knelt and began their evening prayers. To Thru it was an incongruous sight, these savage brutes who had just eaten two of his people, kneeling and offering prayers to a deity. With their droning in his ears, he made his way carefully along the back of the village.

In one house he found some dried bushpod curd, which he pocketed, plus a small jar of cooking oil and some dried beans. In another house he found a trove of bushpod cakes, which he wrapped in cloth and tied to his belt. Then he went on.

He reached the end of the row of houses. Across the street he could see into a larger house that was being used by several men for a billet for the night. They had unrolled blankets and made themselves comfortable on the fine pillows and mattresses of the mots, brought down from the upstairs rooms. Thru heard the men chattering with each other and understood some of what he heard. The men were in a cheerful mood. They would ride on the next day, wherever their great leader wanted. They would kill whoever he wanted them to kill. They were quite content.

Thru slipped across the street, a swift invisible shadow, skirting the house inside which the men were congratulating themselves on a good day's work. Eventually he found the house with the other captives. They were confined in the windowless cellar, and there were a dozen men in the rooms above. He knew why the captives were being held; he'd heard the men discussing whether the mots were to be eaten every day, as treats. The hot, sizzling flesh was tasty to these men, who had otherwise nothing but biscuit to look forward to.

He could do nothing for the captives, so Thru crept on. He studied the horses and then the place where the huge leader was sleeping, one of the largest houses in the village, with several guards standing at the door and in the front yard, armed and awake.

At last Thru withdrew into the hills, ate some bushpod curd, chewing slowly because it was very tough, and then curled up to sleep in the base of an old oak tree. He woke at dawn, ate some bushpod cakes, then drank from a spring not far from the tree.

In the village the men were stirring. A fire was lit and food prepared, and within an hour the men were in the saddle and riding out. Above them, in the hills, Thru followed.

Eight days later, a much thinner Thru Gillo climbed a rocky trail that brought him over the summit of Garspike Ridge. Far below to the south, the river churned through a deep gorge and then flung itself over the spectacular Angel Falls, dropping five hundred feet into the deep, dark pool at the foot of the Garspike.

The riders had come this way. The mark of their passage was clear enough, even down to the scattered horse dung.

Up ahead, miles away, he heard the wolves howling again. The packs were concerned about the column of men riding through their territories. Thru sympathized. To the wolves, men and horses were both alien creatures, never seen before.

Their howling was fortunate for Thru, for he had fallen far behind the horsemen. The wolves had become a vital link, keeping him in touch with the progress of the column. Of course, the horsemen were also moving more slowly than they had in the beginning of this mad march into the mountains. They'd left the road behind days before, and all vestiges of civilization had soon disappeared.

Thru's boots had worn out even before then, but by fantastic luck he'd found a pair of replacements in one of the last villages in the upper valley. Someone's spare pair, probably worn only to prayers at the fane. They'd fit him well, too, which was fortunate, for they were immediately pressed into service for twenty miles that day.

The men showed no inclination to stop. Eastward they hewed, keeping to the valley of the Dristen and then to the most eastward-trending stream in the high country. Without roads or paths, they pressed on up the game trails made by elk and deer over thousands of years, up to the alpine meadows where the animals browsed in the summer. The horses had slowed to a walk, with rests several times a day for feed and water. Still, they'd outpaced Thru after the first few days. His respect for the abilities of men on horseback had grown. Over journeys of many days, they had a clear advantage over mots on foot.

The wolves ceased calling. Thru stopped, ears straining against the quiet sigh of the breeze through the pines. To the south rose the vast mass of one of the peaks of the Drakensberg mountains, with shoulders covered in snow far above. To the north, beyond the hill, he knew there was another, and directly east, just visible above the next hill, loomed the white crest of Iggipatnapa, the second mightiest of all the Drakensbergs. With its sharp spire thrusting forth from the central mass, it was well-known all over the Land, immortalized in countless paintings.

What were these men doing? Were they mad, or simply ignorant? They were riding deep into the central Drakensbergs, dangerous country, not only because of the occasional brown bears but also of bands of pyluk, the green-skinned lizard-men of the east, armed with long wooden spears and throwing sticks.

The trail wasn't hard to follow. The horses had churned up the soft areas. Thru kept up his slow but steady pace.

Earlier that day, he'd passed the ruins of an old mot hunting chalet, abandoned long before. Only the stone walls remained, the wood having long since rotted. An ancient haw tree had grown inside and now thrust gnarled limbs above the ruins.

Such places had been abandoned because of the danger of pyluk, which had grown steadily in the Drakensbergs over the last few centuries.

The men were numerous enough to overawe any band they might meet, but the pyluk would hunt them from concealment. A man and a horse represented so much meat that pyluk could not ignore them. Then, once they'd been targeted, the long wooden spears would flash forth, men would topple, horses would go down, and pyluk would prepare for the feast. Slowly the men would dwindle, picked off from the shadows day by day. In the end, none would ever see the lowlands again. Thru was sure.

Yet he followed, intent on trying to rescue the captives, if it was possible.

Again, the wolves howled, distant and faint, over the next hill. Thru went on, hefting his bow over his shoulder, peering around him carefully, ears pricked, nose keen.

And then he heard it for the first time, a heavy kind of throbbing, the beating of drums. He paused and listened carefully. It was distant but quite clear. The wolves continued to howl for a while, then quietened. The drums continued.

The drums continued to throb, hour after hour, while Thru pushed forward, moving very cautiously. Any pyluk in the region would be drawn by the noise. He didn't want to stumble over a band of the green-skinned spear throwers in the thickets. Accordingly, he paused frequently to crouch and listen. As he sank into a state approaching meditation, his sense of hearing grew so acute he could hear bees at work on the clover in a nearby meadow and water splashing over stones in the stream running along the bottom of the valley.

After listening, he spent several more minutes studying the ground ahead and around him, looking for the slightest thing that might be out of place. Only when he was certain that he was alone did he continue.

When the sun slid behind the western hills, he was moving up a trail onto the lower slopes of Mount Iggipatnapa. The broadleaf trees had given way to stands of pine and spruce. He emerged onto a high meadow and surprised a small herd of deer that had been standing silently in the shadows. Disappointed, he watched them bound away, white tails bobbing in the orange evening light. Since he was down to the last day or so's worth of bushcurd in his pack, one of these deer would have been very helpful. But their tails disappeared into the trees on the far side of the meadow, and he was left alone.

The drums throbbed on. He crossed the meadow, pulled some boughs down to make a shelter, and prepared himself for sleep. First he broke in half one of the pieces of bushcurd and chewed it slowly, letting the creamy flavor fill his mouth. The taste brought back memories of his mother's bushcurd pie, one of Ual's most wonderful confections. The scrap of curd barely dented his hunger, but he restrained himself from gobbling the rest.