Vault of the Ages (6 page)

Carl let go the handle, and it whined eerily to silence as the light died. Then he cranked again, holding the beam like a pointed spear, and urged his horse forward. As he advanced, he threw back his head and howled like a wild dog.

A single noise of terror broke from the warriors, splitting the patrol into a crazed scramble of hoofs and bodies scattered in all directions. In moments, the men were lost to sight and sound.

Carl sat for a minute, not daring to believe, and then he began to laugh.

By dawn, the boys had come most of the way. Carl’s flashlight trick would hardly work in the daytime, so as the first dull gray of morning stole into the sky, they dismounted, rubbed down their
weary horses, and rolled up in blankets to sleep for a while. But the sun was not far over the horizon before they were on the trail again.

“We’ll be back just about in time for the chores,” grumbled Owl, but the eyes twinkled in his round face.

Tom ran a hand through his fiery hair. “It seems as if we left an age ago,” he said, with a puzzled note in his voice. “We’ve seen and done and learned so much—I hardly know what to believe any longer.” He glanced at Carl. “Tell me, is everything false that they taught us? Are there really no devils or magic or Doom?”

“I don’t know,” said Carl soberly. “I suppose the old stories are true enough as far as they go—only they don’t go far enough, and it’s up to us to find the whole truth. The Doctors, who claim to have kept as much of the old wisdom as is good for men to know, don’t want us to do that; but I think that between the need of the Dalesmen for help against the Lann and this proof in my saddlebag, we can convince the people otherwise.” He yawned and stretched his stiffened muscles. “It’ll be good to reach your father’s place. I could use a hot breakfast!”

They followed the woodland trail through the cool rustling green, and John’s sons spied the landmarks with eager eyes. It was Tom who first sniffed the air and turned back a worried face. “Do you smell smoke?” he asked.

In a short while Carl and Owl sensed it too, the thin bitter reek and a light bluish haze in the air. They clucked to their horses and broke into a weary trot, straining homeward.

Out of the woods, over a rise of ground, and then the dear, broad fields of home—

The farm was burnt.

They sat for a long time, stunned, only slowly grasping the ruin which was here. The outbuildings were smoking heaps from which charred rafters stuck up like fingers pointing at an empty heaven. The house was still burning here and there. Little flames wavered over fallen beams and blowing ash. Smoke stained the cloudless sky, black and ugly, and there was a terrible silence everywhere.

“Father.” It was a whimper in Owl’s throat. “Mother.”

“Come
on!”
Tom took the lead, whipping his horse ruthlessly to a gallop. The others followed, sobbing without shame.

Carl, less grief stricken than the brothers, rode about the yard scanning it for signs. The ground was trampled by many hoofs, the pens were broken open and a trail went through the grain fields
toward the east. “The Lann,” he said thinly. “A party of Lann warriors came and burned the place and drove off the stock to feed their army.”

Tom and Owl, white-faced, were poking through the smoldering, flickering wreck of the house. They looked up as Carl approached. “No bodies,” said Tom. “We haven’t found any dead.”

“No—” Carl went over to the shed. It had not burned so thoroughly as the rest, and he could see tools lying in the blackened wood. But no sign of the wagon which every farm owned…

“Be glad,” he said, forcing a smile. “See, the wagon’s gone, and there are no dead here. That means your people fled before the enemy came. They should be on their way to Dalestown now.”

Owl let out a whoop, and Tom managed to laugh. It could have been worse. They dared not think how much worse.

“Unless the Lann took them captive” Tom worried.

“No. Why should invaders bother with prisoners?” Carl looked anxiously about the horizon. An evil black smudge to the west showed that another place had also been sacked. “But the Lann did this only lately, last night I suppose. That means they’re still hereabouts. We’d better get moving!”

There was little cover in the cleared farm lands. The boys went slowly down a rutted, dusty road, scanning the land nervously for signs of the enemy. Now and again they passed another gutted place where bodies sprawled in the fields and masterless animals ran loose—but nowhere a living human, in all the wasted marches.

They had eaten their last supplies, and hunger gnawed at them. Carl’s bow brought down a strayed pig, but he would only let them cut a few pieces of meat from it to eat uncooked. A fire could draw enemy attention. They chewed on raw pork and plodded gloomily forward.

Their direction was southwest, toward the great forest which bordered the Dalesmen’s territory. That would be safer to travel through until the last dash across open country to Dalestown, and Carl reasoned that the fleeing border dwellers would have taken the same route. In midafternoon, the boys were glad of their decision. They saw a column of dust far down the road and hastened to a clump of trees. Hiding in the thicket, they saw a troop of Lann warriors riding past.

The stocky men sat their shaggy mounts as if they were part of the animals. Helmets blinked in the sunlight. The polished leather of
shields and breastplates gleamed over jagged, fierce-colored paint. Long roweled spurs hung at the heels of fur-trimmed boots. Lances rose and fell in the rhythm of motion. Cloaks and red banners flapped against the green and brown of earth. The harsh, tanned faces were dark with beard and braided hair, eyes roved restlessly, and teeth flashed white at some jest. Spread over the plain, businesslike, warrior harness was barbaric finery—not only the men’s own earrings and bracelets—but plunder from Dale homes, necklaces draped around hairy throats, jeweled rings flashing on sinewy fingers, silken cloth blowing from shoulders and waists.

They rode past, and the noise of them—clash and jingle of iron, squeaking of leather, thud of hoofs, hard, barking laughter—faded into the hot summer stillness. Carl, Tom, and Owl looked at each other with dismay. They saw too plainly that the Lann
had
struck through this part of the border; that the gathered farmers, if they had even had time to assemble, had been routed by their attack; and that a host was readying itself to fall on Dalestown. Time was shorter than even Chief Ralph had thought—desperately, terribly short. The vision of defeat and slavery was ghastly before Carl’s eyes.

T
HE SUN
was lowering again when the boys came to the western edge of the farm lands and entered the woods. Their horses slogged along in headdrooping weariness and they themselves felt aching bones and sandy eyelids. But need drove them, a need of a hiding place from the ranging Lann and a need, still greater and more bitter, to know what had happened to their people.

Carl threw one last glance behind him. The Dales rolled green and still and beautiful away to the east, and the quiet evening air was full of sunset and the sleepy twitter of birds. No other human was in sight. Oh, it was a broad and fair land, and he knew what sort of hunger was in the Lann for such a home. But by all the gods, he thought with an anger dulled by his tiredness, it was the Dalesmen’s home first!

The road had narrowed to a single track, and once under the trees it became a grassy lane where the hoofs were muffled and rabbits fled startled before the riders. They passed a charcoal burner’s lonely hut, abandoned now in the face of the Lann. “That’s the last dwelling,” said Tom, his voice flat and empty. “After this, there’s only the wilderness.”

A little way beyond, the trail petered out altogether and there was nothing. But here another pathway ran into the first, and Carl bent low over it, straining his eyes in the twilight.

“Look!” he cried. “Look here—spoor of travelers!”

They saw it then: fresh wheel tracks and hoof prints, broken twigs, and a trampled way plunging into the forest. Owl let out a faint yip. “It may be our own folks!” he chattered. “They could’ve come by the road past Harry’s instead of the one we took—it’d lead them here—Come on, fellows! Come
on!”

The dusk rose between the high trunks like mist, and, winding around the trees, it was hard to follow even the plain wagon trail over the hilly ground. Carl’s pony gasped under him, and he patted the bowed neck. “Easy, old man, easy,” he whispered. “It can’t be far now. A loaded wagon can’t travel fast through this stuff.”

“Look! Up ahead!” Tom pointed a shadowy arm through the deepening twilight. A ruddy spark danced waveringly beyond a tinkle of stream. “A campfire!”

Too tired to think whether those might be Lann who had made it, the boys forded the brook and scrambled with their mounts up the farther bank. Yes, yes … a small fire, picking out the shapes of two wagons and tethered animals… a man leaning on his spear…

“Who’s that?” The voice rolled forth, weary and shaken. “Halt or we shoot!”

“Father!” yelled Owl joyfully. He sprang from his horse and ran toward the sentry. Tom plunged after him, and Carl was not far behind. When the Chief’s son arrived, John the farmer was embracing his boys and crying praises to all the gods, while their mother wept her joy. In the ruins of their world, they still had each other!

The dim red flicker of light picked out other faces, an old man, his son with wife and baby, and a young woman. They must have joined forces as they escaped. There were four brawny oxen to pull the wagons, a string of horses, and a couple of dogs, all resting under the trees. The wagons were piled high with family goods, and Carl frowned even as his hand was being shaken. What was the use of dragging all that through heartbreaking miles of forest when it slowed travel and invited raiders?

Well. … He remembered what his father had once said: “People are people, you can’t change them much and a Chief has to take them as they are. Never forget that it’s their will which keeps him Chief.”

He wondered with a sick fear what had happened to his father in these last long days. Were the Lann already at Dalestown?

Carl eased himself to the cool, damp earth, looked into the sputtering flames, and listened drowsily to John’s account of what had come to pass. Even if the story was grim, it was good to sprawl again and rest.

Scouts had brought word the very day the boys had left John’s homestead, that the Lann vanguard was emerging from the woods near by and gathering itself in the fields. The war-word had gone on hurried feet from house to lonely house, but it had taken more than a day to assemble the men, and they met the enemy weary from a night’s hard traveling.

“They scattered us,” said John somberly. “Their horsemen outflanked our pikemen and struck us from the side and behind. We fought long and hard. Many died in their tracks, but the others broke us up into little knots of men and finally we ran. The Lann hunted us down. They hunted us like dogs harrying a rabbit. Only nightfall saved us, and we streamed home knowing we were beaten. The Lann ranged about, plundering wherever they came, but that may have been a good thing. It held them up long enough for us to flee.”

If the northern fanners had gone to Dalestown in the first place, joined themselves to a large army under a leader who knew something of warcraft… Carl clamped his mouth shut on the words that he knew were too late.

“There are many families retreating like us through the woods,” said the young man, Torol. “It’s slow going, but I don’t think the Lann will bother chasing us. They’ve richer booty at hand—our homes.” He spat. His wife started to cry, softly and hopelessly, and he put an arm about her shoulder and murmured what empty comfort he could.

Carl reflected that the business of sacking the northern marches would keep the invaders occupied for a while. Then they would also have to assemble their entire army—a part of which had fought here. And, while they seemed to have a cavalry such as none of the southern tribes had ever dreamed of, the bulk of their host must be footmen just as it was in the Dales. So all in all, he thought Ralph would have a few days’ grace yet before the hammer blow fell.

Nevertheless, he wanted to get home and join his father as soon as possible. He groaned at the thought of creaking through brush and hills with these overloaded oxcarts, and thought for a moment of leaving the group and pushing on alone. But no—his eyes went to the tired, dusty faces of Tom and Owl—those two had followed
him, stood by him like true comrades in the face of the unknown powers of the City. Now they were with their folk, and the little caravan would need every hunter it could get to keep itself fed on the way. “The Chief,” Ralph had said, “is the first servant of the tribe.”

Carl shook his head, sighing, and spread a blanket roll for sleep. He would let John’s sons tell about the expedition to the witch-folk. Just now, he wanted only to rest.

The following day grew into a slow nightmare of travel. For all the straining and grunting of oxen, and even the horses hitched on in especially difficult places, the wagons made no speed. They were snared in brush and saplings, stuck in the muddy banks of streams, dangerously tipped in the wild swoop of hillsides and gullies. Men had to push from behind, chop a path in front, guide the stubborn beasts along rugged slopes, cursing and sweating and always listening for the war whoop of the Lann. Near evening, Carl shuddered with relief when John asked him to go hunting.

The boy took bow and arrows, a light spear, and a rawhide lariat, and slipped quietly into the tangled woods. His aching shoulders straightened as he moved away from the creaking wagons, and he sniffed the rich green life about him with a new delight. Summer, leaves rustling and breaking the light into golden flecks, a glimpse of blue sky amid cool shadows, a king snake sunning itself on a moss-grown log, a pheasant rising on alarmed wings before he could shoot, like a rainbowed lightning flash—oh, it was good to be alive, alive and free in the young summer! Carl whistled to himself until he was out of earshot of the caravan, then he grew still and his flitting brown form mingled with the shade. He had some work to do.