The Ships of Merior (71 page)

Over the cooling carcasses of dead beasts, Pesquil dispatched his trackers. They rode out with dogs in tight, guarded teams, and ran circles over false trails.

‘Barbarians dragged the ground with a fresh deer hide, or a fox pelt,’ he reported, dry as the parched rocks that bristled the landscape, and wholly unsurprised. This is the work of Red-beard’s scouts.’ He hawked phlegm from a corner of his mouth. ‘No use to hunt them. They know how to choose easy targets.’

His hair a gilt beacon against hills feathered with browned grasses, and his hands at ease on his destrier’s reins, Prince Lysaer listened without censure, even as Pesquil spat again.

‘My headhunters are better spent staging false raids to keep our own sentries alert!’ His eyes like jet beads in
crimped leather and his jawline grizzled in pepper and salt stubble, the headhunter captain finished in disgust. ‘These raids aren’t staged to kill, but to delay us. They could succeed. Storms and cold won’t wait while we flounder.’

Between prince and captain, the frustration crackled, that the officers from Avenor had been trained to counter just such petty harassment.

‘The garrison commanders must come to us, asking,’ Lysaer replied in the steel calm he wielded these days like a weapon. Their captains must be willing, or their people won’t give their heart for us. Later, you know that could get them well killed.’

Pesquil returned a sour grunt. ‘You won’t let me rattle their nerves into line, well, they’re going to have to get bloodied. Nothing for it. Pedigree pride hates to bend.’ He shook his head, raked a lank fall of hair from his temples, then crammed on his conical helm. ‘Fools. It’s their greenest young boys will get buried for then blunders.’

Forced on short rations, men learned to set a sharper edge on their vigilance. The change earned small respite, too late. In one chilling move, the barbarian raiders adjusted their tactics to compensate. Through the heavy dawn mist, leather-clad figures were sighted while stealing away from the picket lines. Men rousted half-clothed from their blankets seized horses and swords, and gave chase to find themselves lured into the deep brush and surrounded, then picked off at whim by hidden archers.

A day was lost to rage and panic, and a second to rites for the fallen.

The fact that the town garrisons had been singled out confirmed Pesquil’s theory of planned and leisurely scoutwork.

‘No mistake, the ground and the victims were chosen.’ The headhunter captain’s tactless summary assigned heavy blame on the pedigree captains packed into
Lysaer’s field tent. ‘We’ve rid the ranks of some useless brash fools. Maybe now your high-bred officers won’t howl so loudly if my men ride under cover with their patrols.’

‘They’ll be welcome, but the lesson’s understood,’ assured the captain from Narms who had suffered the most humiliating losses. ‘Next time, no man of mine will rush to react in hot haste.’

‘No, they won’t,’ Pesquil answered, inimical. ‘Red-beard’s Earl Steiven’s own son, and clansmen don’t replay their tricks twice.’

His words were borne out before noontide when the next ranks to die tumbled into a pit trap sunk into the clay of the roadbed. The snare had been dug through the night, over a span where wagons had rolled scatheless at sundown. The location had been selected for exhaustive inconvenience, on a banked causeway over a gully. The ditches were too steep for wagons, laced with cracks and sharp shale to lame even unburdened horses. Where the terrain offered safe crossing, if a headhunter scout was not at hand to warn of spring-traps and nooses, men died. The lucky were cut down choking, but still alive. The less fortunate broke their necks, or thrashed in screaming agony, ripped on stakes and disembowelled. A courier sent from the head of the column drew rein in a sliding sting of gravel to inform that more snares had been sprung up the road. The way to Perlorn was cut off, supply wagons stopped until work crews could fill in the pits.

Scouts were doubled; then doubled again, and the empty road itself set under watch. The barbarians struck like wraiths and vanished into the summer broom. Outriders who were careless died beyond sight of their fellows, or were killed when their dart-shot mounts spooked and bolted, jerked neck-broken from their saddles by thin cords left strung through the scrub. The raids came at random. Ox teams were shot down with
arrows, or men, taken as they sought some thicket to relieve themselves. Harried like an elephant by hornet stings, the war host lumbered onward. The weather broke into rain again as the road wound and steepened and scrolled through the slab-faced bills that framed the upper range of the Skyshiels.

‘Ath, this can’t go on,’ wept a young recruit whose sergeant had died in his arms on a desolate, rocky stretch of road.

‘It can. It will. Damned clans’ll show you worse before Werpoint,’ cracked Pesquil, paused to water his brush-scarred gelding at a mountain spring between patrols. ‘A smart soldier toughens up and survives.’

But hungry men managed setbacks less smoothly. Rations were shortened again, as supplies became hard to replenish. Anger built as losses mounted. Time could ill be spared to mount a task force to scour the brush to rout out elusive bands of barbarians. To fire the grass and haze them off was no option in dry weather. A wrong change in the wind could as easily turn the conflagration and smoke back upon them to the ruin of the crawling ox wagons.

‘Remember, they’re Arithon’s allies,’ Lysaer said on night visits to bolster morale around the campfires. ‘If our war force fails to make Werpoint before the storms, we have lost good men for no cause. To lose heart and falter now will just abet the Shadow Master’s design.’

The prince’s exhortations might bind the men to fresh purpose, but no effort might cool the biting frustration as the war host lumbered into the high country, a month behind its set schedule.

Then the last summer heatwave shattered before a driving line of storms. Rain lashed and fell in wave upon wave of fierce cloudbursts. Water splashed in rungs off the uplands rock to pool in murky torrents and flood the low ground. The ravines swelled and boiled into white water fanged with grey rock, treacherous to ford, and at >
times impossible for the draught teams. The wagons were lightened, the food, the tents, the supplies drawn across on strung ropes, then the carts laboriously lashed together and planked over as makeshift bridges. More days were lost, while armour and weapons rusted and the spirits of the men corroded to depression and gloom.

Then the storms cleared before a sweeping wave of cold. Huddled in the frost stiffened folds of their blankets, men slept as they could, or shivered on watch under silverpoint, glittering starlight. Winds off the Skyshiels were the cause of early frost, but here fell the first warning, in the breath of fickle gusts that would build and brew up the winter storms.

‘The howl of wolf packs would be more welcome,’ Lord Commander Diegan said to Lysaer when a wayward blast through their pavilion extinguished the lamps yet again. ‘Fiends plague the hindmost, we’re scarcely past halfway to Perlorn!’

The worst of the route lay ahead, in Pesquil’s relentless opinion.

Midmorning showed them the ravine through Valley-gap, and a road traced with thin ruts over scattered rock and moraine, between stony embankments grizzled with stunted stands of trees. Higher, the escarpments broke into crags littered about the knees with trunks like slivered bone where tapestried stands of black fir lay tent through by debris from past slides.

Under the gliding sail of hawks, Pesquil regarded the saw-toothed rimwalls, holed by black caves and peppered with crannies for ambush. ‘Calves to the slaughter,’ he murmured to his prince. ‘You want to be quit of your dandybred captains? Let them all pass this gap decked out in their pretty blazoned surcoats.’ His bearded lips split into a cough, contempt choked just short of laughter.

Lysaer looked aside, his eyes flat enamel while his horse pawed the gravel underneath him. ‘They will not
dress plainly. My advice was ignored. Our troops from Avenor, and Harradene’s veterans, and your headhunters had best jump to compensate. My charge to all divisions who are wise to clan ways is to shoulder responsibility for this war host and get them through Valleygap safely.’

‘As well hand young Red-beard your royal life on a salver,’ Pesquil said, and spat, while cold gusts tapped the lacing against the scratched steel of his bracers.

‘My life rests in your hands, first, Captain Mayor.’ Lysaer s’Ilessid straightened before his officer’s surly mockery. Whetted to an icy, royal tone of command, he added, ‘If Jieret Red-beard would lay traps to ruin good men, your designated task is to forestall him. For I shall ride with our weakest link, the garrison companies out of Narms.’

Pesquil uttered a volley of bitten oaths. While rude words slapped back in echoes off the forbidding ramparts of the rock, he glowered down the swale, mindful that his prince was no fool. All the same, the task ahead made his nerves crawl. A made haven for barbarians, perfect eyrie for spring-traps and stone falls, the scarps that notched the way promised dire trouble and murder, Irked to his bones, Pesquil reined round his scarred gelding and spurred off to issue harsh orders.

Grouped into tight, defensive phalanxes, the war host paused in its tracks. Neither man nor beast would enter the defile until Valleygap’s heights were made safe. For that, Captain Mayor Pesquil dispatched his best trackers and scouts to scour the rimrocks on either side. The paired groups of two hundred advanced up the slope in fanned formation, three to lead each foray team, then a back-up band of six to a dozen trailing, to move in support if enemies were flushed, or point men ran into snares.

The footing across the Skyshiel ridges was a fiendish
mix of slate and black shale that splintered under boot soles and shot spinning, chinking fragments downslope. These sliced through the greenery and caused furtive rustles. Men would spin, hands gripped to their weapons, while the rattle of every descending ricochet slapped taut nerves to razor response. Stealth of any sort was impossible. The scout who eased his vigilance on presumption such disturbances were harmless would be the one downed first by covert archers.

The sun blazed down like a scourge, bit glare off the rock faces and dazzled from every sluiced spring and puddle. Assaulted at each turn by the surfeit of light, the eyes struggled and ached to compensate; to unriddle the deep shadows blanketing the defiles and fir groves. Anything motionless could hide there, unseen. The summit ridges were exposed to the rake of the wind, scoured clean by the snow and weather, then chiselled to split edges by frost. To stand upright was to offer a target outlined in sky; to crawl or worm forward became torturous misery, over shale points that shredded the hands and the knees bloody, or through the low furze that stabbed prickles through mail and clothing.

The terrain was of a stamp to make a man’s spine crawl in constant, uneasy shivers. Against a savage beauty that presented an unrelenting danger, the veteran teams searched through the caves and the crannies to smoke out any clansmen poised for ambush, or to disarm death traps set above the road. They advanced with their teeth clamped in silent prayer and fretted their nerves into knots.

Barbarians would be ensconced and waiting to kill, not a scout among them ever questioned. The unnatural creatures were fiends at covert murder and Valleygap’s vicious, untrustworthy gullies presented opportunities too perfect to pass up.

Hours passed. Sweating out wary impatience on the road at the horns of the gap, Pesquil received his reports.
Nothing, and nothing; the rocks stayed empty of sign. He paced. He loosened his gelding’s girth, then tightened his bracers and swore. Perched on the tarps of a wagon nearby, a long-faced captain from Anglefen twisted his mustachio and questioned the Captain Mayor’s agitation.

The headhunter commander spun on his heel, his face a contorted, black scowl. ‘Ath! Those rocks are rotten with bolt-holes. Clansmen lurk up there bent purely on massacre. I’ll stake my life on the certainty.’

‘Obsession, more like,’ groused a drover, but softly; the Captain Mayor’s temper was respected.

Another hour passed, uneventful. Troops made to wait in formation under the blasting noon heat became irritable, then restless. Their sergeants sent increasing requests down the line, urging the decision to resume march.

‘Nobody moves!’ Pesquil cracked to Lord Diegan. ‘Are they deaf? When the road’s safe, I told them. Only then. Let them fret and rejoice to stay breathing!’ To the paired scouts who hovered at his elbow for fresh orders, he said, ‘You, take the north ridge; you, the south. Go topside and slow the teams down. I don’t want anybody getting slack and complacent.’

A derisive hoot erupted from the garrison columns. Another voice carped on the Captain Mayor’s dwindling courage, to stall and delay, when Valleygap’s crags were so obviously untenanted.

Pesquil stood his ground and ignored all the remarks, his black eyes stark as bog water and the sinews in his jaw cable-tight.

Minutes later, the prince drew rein at his shoulder.

From astride, dewed with sweat beneath the shadow of his visor, Lysaer regarded the headhunter captain’s corked back, fiery unease. ‘You’re worried,’ he said in careful inquiry.

Pesquil snapped off a nod. ‘I don’t like this. Not one
bit. I’d sleep better under rockfalls and log traps. My trackers say they have yet to find so much as a wretched bent fern.’

‘What do your hunches suggest?’ Lysaer tipped off his helm and shut his eyes as a breath of fir-scented wind ruffled the stuck ends of his hair.

‘My hunches? They’re screaming.’ Pesquil scanned the slow circle of a carrion bird above the cliffs, then cracked the knuckles of his sword hand in deliberate succession. ‘We’re not the cats in this game, your royal Grace. Count on my instinct, we’re the mice.’

Lent no sign upon which to hang reason, after the next hour, he relented. His trackers could descend from the summits in stages, to quarter the slopes to the valley floor. Hard on the heels of his directive came report of twenty-six fatalities from the north face.