Starship Home (29 page)

The first light before dawn was bleeding through the trees when the Don’s party, weary from travelling all night, left the plain behind and entered open wooded country. There was some safety in that, for they were not as exposed to view as they were on the flat, treeless expanse of the plain, but the Trolls in the party knew that constant vigilance was still required. They stopped to break their fast with strips of sun-dried beef, flat way-bread and water from their closely-woven canvas water bags, the last of which they shared with their horses. Then they pressed on, hoping that the open grassland was now behind them.

Their hope was in vain, for within half an hour they found themselves at the further edge of the wooded country and facing more grassland, a strip of about 100 yards lying between them and denser forest. The sun was above the horizon now, so they would be forced either to wait in hiding till nightfall, or cross the open space in full view of any Sullivans who might be abroad. They began to debate their choice, but the Don swiftly put an end to the discussion. ‘We’re out of water. We must cross now.’ Crawling to the edge of the woodland, he scanned the terrain in both directions with an ancient pair of binoculars, then turned. ‘Seems clear,’ he said. ‘Rocky, you scout across, and take Maze, Zoe and Harold with you.’

Meg was instantly opposed. ‘You’re sending the young ones first?’

‘Safer that way,’ the Don explained. ‘We’ll get them positioned on the other side, then the rest of us’ll bring the horses across. That’s when we’re likely to be spotted.’

‘Maybe if I went with the kids to look after them?’ said Zachary.

The four “kids” looked at him with utmost scorn and Rocky eased his sword in its sheath and said ‘Call me a kid again and we’ll be meeting on the field of honor when we get home.’

‘You’ll stay with us,’ the Don said to Zachary, and hand-signalled Rocky to go.

Rocky dropped to his belly and started to tiger crawl across the open space, and then on a count of three, Don signalled Maze to follow him. ‘Don’t bunch up, stay ten yards apart,’ he said and then after a count of five, he signalled Zoe, then after a count of three Harold, to follow. By this time Rocky was already halfway across the strip of grassland, scarcely visible. Maze was totally invisible, a Forester child who had spent her life blending into whatever terrain she found herself. Zoe could be seen, but was getting the hang of things fast, imitating Maze and Rocky. And Harold had his butt in the air. All they could see of him was his butt bobbing along above the grass as if in search of its long-lost owner. ‘That boy could end up with a Sullivan arrow where it really hurts,’ muttered the Don, ‘how we’re ever going to turn him into a warrior, I’ll never know.’

‘You never will,’ said Meg, suddenly feeling a strange loyalty to Harold whom she normally saw as the bane of her existence, ‘you’d be better off using his brain.’

The Don nodded and filed the suggestion away in his mind as being a useful one. Father John had a brain and that came in useful. Perhaps Harold could grow up to be his adviser on such arcane skills as arithmetic and spelling. As the Don watched, Rocky made it safely to the other side of the stretch of grassland, and soon Maze was there alongside him at the forest’s edge. Then Zoe reached them, but Harold’s butt had stopped its bobbing progress across the open ground and was just sticking up like a strange stone, 20 yards short of the far tree line.

‘Saints and angels, what’s the boy think he’s doing?’ muttered the Don.

‘He’s found something interesting,’ replied Meg.

‘He what?’

‘One day I took his class on an excursion. He found something interesting and went missing for an hour. I thought he’d been kidnapped.’

Harold’s butt began to bob again and soon he materialized from beneath it and joined the other three, standing in cover at the edge of the forest. Zoe turned on him. ‘Did you go to sleep out there or what?’

‘There was some very interesting spoor out there. I thought it might be lion.’

‘You were looking at lion poo?’

‘I wrapped a bit in my handkerchief to show the Don. You want to see it?’

‘You wrapped a lion turd in your handkerchief? Gross!’

‘It’s a clean handkerchief, there’s nothing there that’d spoil the specimen,’ Harold said.

‘Don’t speak to me ever again. I know what you’ve got in your pocket,’ said Zoe, and then screamed as four Sullivans rose out of the undergrowth behind them and each grabbed one of the four of them. At this point, things became rather confused.

The Don, Ulf, Meg and Zachary, on seeing what was happening, started running the salt-laden horses across the open ground toward what had suddenly turned into a melee. As they ran for the far side, a certain amount of mayhem was taking place there. Rocky, on being grabbed, had stamped on the foot of his assailant, driven an elbow back into his gut, winding him, and then turned, stiff-armed him to the side of his head, kneed him in the groin and then, when the Sullivan doubled up, driven his knee into his face. The Sullivan had then dropped like a stone and lain unconscious at Rocky’s feet. Rocky had then turned his attention to what else was going on, in case there was some further honor to be had.

Maze, Forest child that she was, was handling her own Sullivan in her own way. The moment he had grabbed her, she had twisted and slipped from his grasp, leapt to grasp an overhanging tree branch, swung to gain momentum and then launched herself feet-first at his chest, knocking him to the ground. By the time Rocky turned she was dancing on the Sullivan’s chest, delivering kicks to all parts of his anatomy, particularly the tender parts. To Rocky’s mind, she seemed to have things satisfactorily under control, so he turned his attention to Zoe and Harold.

Zoe was struggling with her Sullivan assailant, while pouring out a litany of abuse along the lines of ‘Yuk! You smell like a wet dog! You stink! I’m going to throw up!’ to which the Sullivan was saying, ‘You won’t say that when you’re my third wife’, a reply which drove Zoe into such a fury that she broke free of him, drew her Slarnstaff from her belt and, wielding it like a baseball bat, laid him out with it. This was about the same moment that Rocky had finished with his own Sullivan and was looking to help the others. The only other that needed helping was Harold, who was in the firm grip of the fourth Sullivan, who was holding a wicked-looking knife to his throat. ‘Throw down weapons or boy dies,’ said the Sullivan.

‘No deal,’ said Rocky.

‘
No deal, what do you mean no deal?’
croaked Harold. ‘Negotiate!’

‘Trolls don’t negotiate,’ said Rocky, as if stating yet another immutable law of the universe, ‘but if he kills you, you have my promise he’ll be dead in seconds.’

‘If that’s supposed to make me feel better, it doesn’t do the trick,’ said Harold.

‘Boy dies,’ said the Sullivan, who was clearly a man of his word, but before his knife hand could move, Zoe raised her Slarnstaff and pressed a button. The effect was instantaneous and dramatic. Harold and the Sullivan both dropped like logs falling off the back of a truck. One moment standing, the next moment flat on their backs unconscious.

Zoe had acted from instinct, and now she was appalled at what she had done. She dropped the Slarnstaff and ran to Harold, knelt and started slapping his cheeks. ‘Harold, Harold, are you all right!’

‘How’d that happen?’ said a bewildered Rocky, not immediately associating what had happened with the strange object Zoe had been holding when Harold and the Sullivan suddenly went unconscious.

Zoe was now feeling Harold’s throat for a pulse. ‘He’s alive!’ she said, her voice charged with relief.

Rocky pointed at the unconscious Sullivan. ‘What about him? Alive too?’

Zoe did a cursory check. ‘Yes. Breathing.’

‘We can easily fix that,’ said Rocky, drawing his sword, moving toward the unconscious Sullivan, as with a thud of hooves, the Don, Ulf, Meg and Zachary ran the horses in under the trees.

The Don surveyed the scene and then looked at Rocky. ‘Good work.’

Rocky shrugged. ‘One Troll against four Sullivans. The poor devils were outnumbered.’

‘I beat my own,’ said Maze, indignantly.

‘Me too!’ said an equally indignant Zoe.

‘The secret of leadership,’ said Rocky, ‘is to delegate. Now before you arrived I was just about to kill the prisoners, so I’d better get on with it.’

‘You kill prisoners?’ exclaimed Meg.

‘We can’t take them with us,’ said the Don, reasonably, ‘and if we leave them alive, then they’ll follow us, or alert the rest of the Horde.’

‘You kill unconscious prisoners I’ll never speak to you again in my life!’ said Meg, and then added what seemed to her to be the clinching argument, ‘my father was a Brigadier and he says it’s against the Geneva Convention.’

‘I guess these Geneva people never met Sullivans,’ said the Don, ‘but since you insist, okay, just this once. Let’s go.’

And with that, Ulf threw the still-unconscious Harold over the back of one of the horses and they moved on into the forest. Harold had dropped his Slarnstaff and Zoe now picked it up, thinking it was hers. A moment or so later the party was swallowed up in the darkness beneath the trees, leaving Zoe’s abandoned Slarnstaff lying in the grass.

Half an hour later, a mounted party of Sullivans, riding at the walk, filtered out of the open woodland, and proceeded to cross the open grassland, their eyes on the ground in front of them. What they were looking at were the distinctive marks of iron-shod hooves. The Sullivans were tracking. Coming to the edge of the forest, they reined in briefly at the sight of the four unconscious Sullivans. The Sullivans in general had no truck with failure, and in the eyes of the tracking party, these four had failed in whatever they had tried to accomplish. If any question arose in the minds behind the blank faces, it was only:
why still alive? Mysterious!
Leaving their comrades to lie unconscious where they fell, the tracking party rode on into the forest.

Up ahead, and half an hour later, the Don’s party began hearing the distinctive yelping sounds of a Sullivan war party emanating from the depths of the forest behind him. Rocky was delighted. ‘Sullivans!’ he told Zoe, who was walking beside him. ‘We’re being tracked. Maybe we’ll have to turn and fight.’

Zachary turned, continuing to lead his salt-laden horse. ‘Yeah and it’s a big forest, so maybe they won’t find us.’

Ulf put him straight on that idea. ‘Sullivans are part horse, part hound,’ he said. ‘If they track you, then they find you.’

‘Gee Ulf, thanks a million, I was just starting to think I might survive another few hours.’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘Yeah. It’s a joke.’

Behind them, the Sullivan trackers knew they were closing on their prey. The hoof marks were fresher, as was the horse dung. They urged their horses into a swifter gait.

Zachary put on some pace until he was walking alongside the Don. ‘Just for argument’s sake,’ he said, ‘if these Sullivans catch up with us, what happens next?’

‘We fight. If there’s not too many of them we win.’

‘And if there’s too many?’

The Don smiled a wintry smile. ‘Then today might be a very good day to die.’

‘You want to explain that?’

‘The females become the wives of whoever takes them. Males are castrated and sold as slaves.’

If Zachary had not been walking, he would have crossed his legs. ‘And that’s it?’

‘Sometimes they crucify their captives. That can take two, three days before you die.’ He paused. ‘I’ll say this for them though, they breed good horses.’ He slapped his horse’s flank. ‘This horse is Sullivan-bred.’

‘You trade with them?’

‘Once a year, at Showtruce time.’ The yelping was growing near and he looked back. ‘They’ll catch up any time now.’

‘Shouldn’t we be hiding?’ asked Zachary.

‘They’d smell us,’ said the Don and then there was light ahead, the forest was petering out, and within moments they had left the cover of the trees and were on a road which they recognized from their journey out. The Don hand-signalled their direction and they turned their horses’ heads for home, which was when, with ear-splitting yelps, the war party of Sullivans burst from the forest only 400 yards behind them.

Zachary barely had time to think
enslavement, castration, crucifixion
when, on their own volition, his hands lifted his Slarnstaff, aimed it, and pressed a button at random. It was the leading Sullivan’s lucky day, for the button that Zachary pressed set the Slarnstaff to stun rather than flame or kill. The Don saw it happen, and knew once more that he was looking at a weapon which could change the course of history. His insight was instantly confirmed when Meg and Zoe limbered their Slarnstaffs and took out several more of the charging Sullivans. The puzzling thing to Zachary’s mind was that none of this stopped the Sullivans’ mad charge. The falling horses certainly added a touch of chaos to what was happening, but the Sullivans did not seem to be in the least discouraged by the sight of their fellow warriors falling senseless from the saddle.

Ulf growled, and drew his sword. ‘Whatever it is they’re doing lacks honor, my lord,’ he said then crossed himself and prepared to die fighting.

‘Quite correct Ulf,’ said the Don, ‘but you must admit it’s very interesting.’ And he and Rocky drew their swords and stepped forward to meet the charging Sullivans.

By this time the Slarnstaffs had wreaked havoc among the ranks of the Sullivans, but they came on, dividing into two streams to by-pass the falling men and horses, and then turning to ride back toward the Don’s party. As they turned, there was a thunder of hooves from behind them and cries of ‘Troll Turf!’ and ‘Walk tall!’, and a wave of mounted Trolls, led by Father John wielding a war hammer (for in the manner of ancient times he was sworn to shed no blood) came round a bend in the road and crashed into the Sullivan war party.

As the fighting began, Father John kept on riding to the Don’s side, where he dismounted. ‘Looters!’ he gasped, ‘at the Iron Castle!’

The Don leapt into the saddle that Father John had just vacated. ‘Guide them back while we deal with this scum!’ he shouted and kneed the horse forward, shouting ‘Troll turf!’ as he charged the Sullivans, with Ulf and Rocky, not to be denied their part in the skirmish, running behind. Father John took the reins of the Don’s salt-laden horse, and led the way past the fighting, heading for the starship and home.