Mistress of the Catacombs (34 page)

"What if they don't, Cashel?" Tilphosa said. "Come out and see us, I mean."

Cashel shrugged. "Then we keep going, like we've been doing anyhow," he said. "It doesn't look to me that they'd be able to give us anything we can't get for ourselves. They don't cook their food, even, that I can see."

Tilphosa smiled cautiously "I'd like a roof if it rains," she said. "But sky's clear and I don't think those huts would be much shelter. They're just dead leaves sewn to a frame of a few sticks."

"I've seen bird nests that were built better," Cashel agreed. Squirrels made that sort of ragged pile, of course. He started to grin at the notion of a village of big squirrels... and then sobered, because he couldn't be sure that wasn't just what he'd seen.

He chuckled.

"Cashel?" the girl asked.

"I don't guess it was squirrels that made the huts after all," he said. "A squirrel couldn't keep quiet the way the folks around here're doing."

Tilphosa gave him a puzzled look, but she didn't try to follow through on the thought.

Most of the trees ahead were willows the way Cashel had said, but the one in the center of the line had darker foliage than a willow's pale green. It was huge, its branches spreading to cover as much ground as the village they'd just left. The branches dipped close to the ground like the necks of cattle drinking; from some of them hung huge pods.

"Cashel, there's a man," said Tilphosa, pointing with her left hand. Then, her voice rising, she said, "Cashel, he's caught! Cashel, it's—"

"Right!" said Cashel, but he didn't say it loud because he was already moving and concentrating on what he was going to do next. His staff was crosswise at mid-chest, slightly advanced.

The strange tree had small, rounded leaves, more like an olive's than what belonged on a tree as big as this one. The pods hanging to the ground from the tips of many limbs were bigger than those of any locust or catalpa, though.

"Almost big enough to hold a man," Cashel had thought when he first saw them; but he was wrong about the "almost" because he hadn't appreciated quite how stunted the residents of this region were.

Most of the pods were closed and brown. A still-open one off to the right side was the same dark green as the foliage. Cashel could see from the ribbed interior that it was really just a giant leaf, not a seedpod as he'd thought.

A child-sized man, naked and almost hairless, stood as the leaf slowly closed around him. His skin was the color of polished bronze; his eyes glinted like those of a rabbit Cashel had once come upon in the jaws of a black rat snake.

A heavy odor, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, hung in the air. Cashel sneezed as he stepped cautiously closer to the victim, ready to dodge if a limb slashed down at him. He heard leaves rustle or maybe something rustling in the leaves, but the tree didn't move.

Though the little man's eyes no longer focused, a blood vessel throbbed in his throat. The leaf continued to fold, closing from his feet upward. Its deeply serrated edges meshed like the fangs of a sea wolf.

It was obviously tough. Cashel's crude knife might cut the pod while it was still green and flexible, but not, he thought, without carving the victim as well.

He paused, letting the range of his senses expand beyond the silent man. Because of the way the branches curved down as they spread from the trunk, he had the feeling of being in a dimly-lit vault. He judged the thickness of the limb which kinked where the pod attached, then raised the quarterstaff over his right shoulder.

He punched the staff forward with all his weight behind the blow. If it'd been an oak—or worse, a dogwood—even Cashel's strength could have done no more than bruise the bark. This tree, though, had brittle wood like a pear's; it shattered at the impact of iron-shod hickory.

The tip and half-engulfed victim fell to the ground; the stump of broken branch sprang upward. From the low shrubbery nearby came a many-throated keening like the wind blowing across chimney pots.

Cashel bent and grabbed the little fellow by the shoulder with his left hand. That hand had been leading on the staff and was now in a state of prickly near-numbness. The pod was unfolding the way a cut intestine gapes as its own muscular walls pull it apart. When Cashel threw the man away from the tree, the pod and the scrap of attached branch fell off him.

Cashel scrambled out. Tilphosa had come toward him, but she'd carefully stayed beyond the tree's possible reach where she wouldn't get in Cashel's way. She faced sideways, keeping Cashel in the corner of one eye while the other scanned the bushes around them.

The rescued victim sucked in deep, gasping breaths as though he'd been under water during the time the leaf wrapped him. He blinked; awareness started to return to his eyes.

"I'll take care of him!" Tilphosa said, kneeling at the fellow's side. She lifted his head with the hand that didn't hold her dagger.

Cashel straightened and surveyed their surroundings for the first time since he'd seen the man being eaten. The limbs of the strange tree were drawing up like the petals of a lotus at nightfall. The odor he'd noticed when he ran close had dissipated and remained only in his memory.

He looked at the stump of the branch; it leaked dark sap. On the ground, the unfolded leaf was crinkling like leather dried near a flame. The bark of the attached bit of limb had already sloughed away.

From a line of viburnum and lilac bushes that couldn't possibly have hidden them, people of the same stunted race as the victim rose into plain view. There were nude, both males and females, the latter often holding babies no bigger than six-week puppies. There were no weapons or tools of any sort in their raised hands as they came toward Cashel and Tilphosa.

Cashel slid his hands apart on the staff as he faced the newcomers. There were a lot of them. If they all came from the village just to the west, then they must crowd more than a handful of themselves into each hut.

"Great lord and lady!" cried an age-wrinkled male. "We Helpers greet you! Welcome to the Land!"

"Welcome to the Land!" chorused all his fellows like frogs in the springtime. Cashel remained tense for a moment, but even he relaxed when the whole mob threw itself down on the ground before him and the girl.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sharina stood beside the four-arched fighting tower fixed to the quinquireme's deck between Captain Ceius and the steersmen in the stern and the mast amidships. Ordinarily the wooden tower—painted to look like stone—would've been struck until The King of the Isles prepared to go into action. Tenoctris sheltered within it now, working incantations that the sailors preferred not to see.

Waist-high sailcloth curtains covered the lower half of the archways, concealing the seated wizard while allowing her light and air. Sharina was ready to hand Tenoctris anything she called for, though as yet she might as well have stayed in Valles. Occasionally wizardlight dusted the sunlight red or blue as Tenoctris chanted, but those escapes remained faint enough that the crewmen on deck could pretend not to notice.

The captain spoke to the flutist seated on a perch built into the sternpost. That man lowered the instrument on which he'd been blowing time; at a nod from the captain, a petty officer blew an attention signal on his straight bronze horn.

"Cease rowing!" said Ceius. "Shake out the sail!"

Officers on deck and in the crowded hold beneath relayed the orders in a chorus, generally with the added obscenities that Sharina had learned to expect when somebody was directing soldiers or sailors. The difference between the methods of junior officers and of muleteers, so far as she could tell, was that the former didn't use whips—at least in the royal forces.

While deck crewmen grabbed ropes to unfurl the sail to catch the freshening breeze, the oarsmen released from duty came boiling up from their benches in the hold through the open beams that supported the deck and allowed ventilation below. The first of them, squirming like a snake hunting voles, was King Carus himself. He sprang to the deck beside Sharina.

Captain Ceius stepped forward in greeting, but Carus waved him back. "Carry on, Ceius!" he said. "You've got matters under control."

Petty officers were dipping cups of wine mixed with two parts water from great jars in the bow and stern. Their strikers held waxed rosters to check off the name of each man served. Military personnel didn't have to be scholars, but Sharina had been surprised to learn that even the lowest-ranking officers were able to read at least names or passwords scratched on a potsherd.

Carus winked at Sharina, then took his place in the line forming for the drinks. The men ahead of him immediately scattered in surprise.

"Get back as you were!" Carus roared, speaking so that the ship's whole crew could hear him. "When I'm acting as your commander, I expect you to jump into the sea if that's what I order you. But while I'm pulling an oar, by the Shepherd! I expect to be treated as an oarsman. Does anybody doubt me?"

He raised his big hands, his palms gleaming with the resin he'd dusted on them before gripping the oarloom. Nitker and his three aides in the bow, all noblemen, stared at the king in amazement as did several of the nearby Blood Eagles. The bodyguards were recruited from the same class as the aides, though they were generally younger sons and of impoverished houses.

The sailors who'd been in line ahead of Carus drank quickly and stepped away, watching the king sidelong. Carus took the cup offered him—one of four, each chained to a different jar handle—and held it as an officer dipped it full. The striker holding the roster looked at the king in terror and bleated, "But chief! He's not on the list!"

"As commander," Carus said, "I'm directing that you make an exception in my case."

Laughing in loud good humor, he emptied the cup without lowering it and stepped away, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The next man in line dropped the cup against the jar with clang of thin bronze on thick ceramic, then hid his blush as best he could.

Carus grinned at Sharina, rubbing his palms together. "I do it to show that I'm willing to," he said in a low voice. He nodded toward Nitker and the aides, one of whom still stared as if transfixed. "I won't order them to do manual labor unless I need to, but I want them all to realize that I don't think any man's too good for any job. Some of my nobles may feel otherwise, but they won't dare say so now."

His grin spread even broader. He added, "But I also like to row, now and again. It's even better than fencing practice for using every muscle and letting your mind rest."

He sighed, no longer buoyant. "Which I need now even more than most times," he said.

"Have you been able to sleep any?" Sharina asked quietly. There was no real privacy on a 200-foot vessel carrying four hundred men, but the very numbers created a background of noise that made it unlikely that they'd be easily overheard.

Carus shrugged. "No more than usual," he said, which meant scarcely at all. "We'll solve the problem soon, I expect."

Sharina followed the line of the king's gaze out over the sea, a sheet of pale green marked as far as she could see with ships and the white wakes foaming behind them. Most vessels had their mainsail set, though a few were proceeding under one bank of oarsmen and the pull of the small triangular boatsail set from their jib. The sky was clear except for a scatter of tiny clouds on the horizon ahead.

Carus crooked a finger toward the sky. "Clouds like that usually mean land," he said. "They're over the Dandmere Reefs, I'd guess. That was what we called them in my day, anyhow."

He smiled wryly. "I never claimed to be a sailor," he said, "but at the end I was spending half my time on a ship. Some of it stuck, I suppose."

"I suspect Ilna's friend Chalcus knows something about using a sword, even though he is a sailor," Sharina said straight-faced.

The king's expression froze; then he realized she was joking. He laughed with the suddenness of a thunderclap, drawing the eyes of everyone aboard.

"Oh, aye, I think Chalcus does indeed know swords," Carus wheezed. "I'd say I wonder how he's getting on—and I do—but I don't worry, you see, the way I'd worry if I cared about any of those who might try to get in his way."

He eyed the fleet again. "We're scattered," he said. "That'd be dangerous if the Confederacy had a fleet, but we're better off with room between us in a storm and that's a greater risk."

Sharina looked at the sky and frowned.

"No, not a great risk," Carus said with a smile. "No, for now I'd say things were as much in proper order as any operation can be."

He rubbed his temples; as he did so, his face went still again. Even a man with Carus' spiritual strength and Garric's youthful body needed more sleep than he was getting.

The interior of the fighting tower glittered azure. Sharina winced, hoping the king hadn't noticed it.

He shrugged. "I didn't have a wizard with me the last time I walked a ship's deck," he said with a grin that softened with use. "That was when the Duke of Yole's wizard drowned me along with every man and ship in the royal fleet. I may have mixed feelings about what our friend Tenoctris is doing; but not very mixed, I assure you."

Two of the quinquereme's five banks of oarsmen had been rowing her. Those men, Carus among them, had been the first released from the benches. Now they dropped back into the hold through planks removed fore and aft, while the oarsmen who hadn't been working came up around the side vents in turn. The oarsmen stayed below most of the time they were aboard ship: there simply wasn't enough room on deck to hold them all.

Sharina looked into the eyes that had been her brother's and said, "Your highness? Do you... that is, are you glad to be—as you said, walking a deck again?"

Carus met her gaze. He smiled, but this time his expression had the terrible majesty of lightning leaping between cloud banks.

"Will I be sorry to give up the flesh again, girl, when Garric comes back?" he said. "For that's what you mean, is it not?"

She nodded and swallowed. Her fists were clenched and her chest tight with fear of the answer.

"Girl," the king said. "I've killed men because I was angry, and there've been times when my blood was up and I killed for no better reason than that I had an excuse and someone was in reach of my sword. But my worst enemy never called me a thief."

He pinched the skin of his biceps with the opposite thumb and forefinger. "I've borrowed this from Garric," Carus said softly. "I'll give it back to him the first chance I have. It doesn't matter whether I want to or not, girl. It's my duty, and I'll do it regardless."

"I'm sorry," Sharina whispered. "I shouldn't have...."

Carus laughed cheerfully again. "Do you think you need to apologize for worrying about your brother?" he asked. "Not to me you don't, Sharina!"

He sobered. "Because I'm worried about him too," he added. "And even more worried about what Ilna may be facing."