Black Jade (34 page)

'Oh, Lord!' he moaned to me. 'I told you! I told you!'

'Mount!' I shouted at him as I dropped my bow.

The screaming of the three stricken archers had alerted Harwell and his men. This large 'knight,' whose gray hair flowed out from beneath a conical helm, turned about and pointed at us as he cried out, 'We're under attack!'

Four of his mercenaries immediately covered themselves with their shields but the men working on the mantelets were slower to take up theirs. One of these Atara killed with an arrow through the throat; Tarmond, at the same moment, loosed an arrow that buried itself in the remaining archer's chest.

While Tarmond continued firing arrows at them, Maram, Atara and I mounted our horses and we charged down the gentle slope through the trees upon our enemy.

Harwell had the presence of mind to form up his mercenaries in front of the wagon, so that it might protect their backs and provide cover against arrows being loosed from the longhouse behind it. They stood in a line of ten men, locking shields as they faced us. As we pounded closer, I caught a whiff of terror tainting the air. The mercanaries' eyes were wide with astonishment: they had no spears with which to withstand a charge of mounted knights. They must have been utterly mystified by Atara, with her white blindfold and her great Sarni bow, firing off arrows as she bounded down the slope straight toward them.

'Aieeuuuu!'

A terrible cry suddenly split the air; it was something like the roar of a whirlwind and a tiger's scream. And then Kane, like a tiger, like a veritable whirlwind of steel and death, burst from around the side of the wagon and fell upon the mercenaries' rear. He chopped two of them apart with his sword almost before they realized that they were under assault by this new and maddened enemy. This proved too much for Harwell's remaining men. All at once they broke, running off in different directions toward the woods.

This made it all the easier to kill them. Atara fired an arrow at point black range with such force that it pierced a mercenary's mouth and drove straight through the back of his head. While Kane set to work with his sword and Maram ran down another man, putting his lance through his back, I drove my lance at a great, red-bearded mercenary. He was quick enough to get his shield up; my lance point struck into the painted wood and then snapped as the mercenary threw down his shield. I drew my sword then. The mercenary tried to meet my attack with his sword, but like the rest of his companions, he was of little prowess and could not stand against a real knight. I swung Alkaladur, and my shining sword cleaved through his poor armor, and through flesh and bone. Then I killed two other mercenaries nearby with a coldness like unto that of an executioner. I hated this mechanical butchery almost even more than the maddened fury I bore inside toward Morjin.

Soon the battle was over. I turned to see Maram, leaning over the side of his horse, pull his lance from the neck of the dead Harwell. Maram's face had fallen a ghastly gray, but it seemed that he had taken no wound. Neither, I was overjoyed to see, had Atara. She climbed down from her roan mare and began retrieving arrows buried in the bodies of the three men she had killed.

'... six, seven, eight,' I heard Kane muttering as he stood over a dead mercenary counting the bodies of our enemies. 'Nine, ten, eleven - all here. Did you take out your four archers?'

'Yes,' I told him. 'And you?'

'Indeed - it was as Atara said: there were four of them, spread out. Their attention was on the house, and they didn't notice me coming out of the trees.'

He patted the hilt of his dagger; I hated the smile that broke upon his savage face.After that, Tarmond walked down the hill toward us as the doors of the longhouse opened and the villagers of Gladwater began pouring out.

Tarmond, I saw, clutched at his bloody shoulder, from which the broken shaft of an arrow protruded. He said to me, 'The fourth archer shot me just as I shot at him.'

His deeds, no less ours, were the wonder of the villagers, who gathered around us. There were twenty-five of them: mothers and grandmothers, children dressed in poor woolens and a few bent old men. For a while, we traded stories with them. The only man of fighting age was a broad-shouldered woodsman, who had a thick beard and shaggy dark hair. From between a gap in his reddened teeth, he spat a stream of an evil-looking liquid. He was dressed all in green. Tarmond presented him as Berkuar. As this rough, rude-looking man took in Tarmond's wound, he said to him, 'That was some fine arrow-work I saw today, old friend.'

He turned toward me and my companions and added, 'You used the sword and the lance well, I suppose; I am mostly unfamiliar with those weapons. We of the forest rely on these.'

So saying, he held up his longbow, and he touched the sheath of his long knife.

'The Crucifiers, too, bear swords,' he said, staring at me. He stepped forward and poked a dirt-stained finger into the opening of my cloak where my mail showed through. 'And armor, as well though nothing so fine as this steel. You say you are knights bound for the Red Desert?'

We told him the same story that we had prepared for Tarmond, and he told us his. Berkuar, it turned out, was one of the Keepers of the Forest, or the Greens, as they were called. He had come to Gladwater to test a young man named Taddeum for recruitment into his society. But one of Taddeum's rivals, Grimshaw, had betrayed them, calling Harwell and the mercenaries down upon Gladwater. In the battle that had ensued, Harwell's mercenaries had slain nearly every fighting man in Gladwater - and many others - and threatened to burn down the entire village as punishment for sheltering Berkuar. We had come along just in time to witness the survivors' last stand inside the longhouse.

'It's a terrible choice we had,' a middling-old woman named Rayna told us. 'Fire or the cross. Of course, sometimes the Crucifiers put you on the wood and then set it on fire anyway. I was ready to slit my daughter's and grandson's throats, and my own as well.'

Here she wrapped her arm around the shoulders of a young woman giving suck to a newborn as she showed us the dagger strapped to her belt.

And then she told us, 'We owe you our lives, and we would make a feast for you, if we could. But there is no time. What happened here will be reported, and then the Crucifiers will come here by the score - perhaps even the Red Priest called Vogard or Arch Yatin himself. We have time to bury our dead, perhaps, but then we'll all have to take to the forest.'

It pained me to think of these poor people hiding among the trees, and living wild and hunted. But it seemed that there was no help for it. Rayna, for one, however, had no pity for herself -only an immense gratitude to be still alive. As she put it, she was an Acadian, one of a tough and resourceful people who had thrived off the bounty of the forest for thousands of years and who would survive for many thousands more.

One of those who
hadn't
survived, though, was the riverman, Gorson. He had died, it seemed, defending his boats from the Crucifiers. It turned out that the flatboat he used in secret to ferry his countrymen across the Tir was unharmed. Tarmond told us that we should take it as our reward, if we could manage to work it ourselves.

'I would come with you, if I could,' he told us. Then he gripped his wounded arm. 'But an arrow-shot old man is no companion for a band of pilgrims such as yourselves. And my place is with my people.'

As he spoke, Liljana and Master Juwain. with Estrella and Daj came down the hill trailing their mounts and our packhorses. Master Juwain was of a mind to help the five villagers wounded in the battle, and Tarmond most especially. But these hard people of Gladwater preferred to tend to their own,

'I could heal them quickly,' Master Juwain said to me in a low voice as he took me aside. '
If
I could use my gelstei. If I can't, I suppose they'll have to draw arrows and stitch themselves. I'm afraid they've had too much practice at this for a long time.'

As we made ready to go down through the ravaged village to the river, Tarmond spoke a few low words to Berkuar. Then he told us, 'The woods beyond the Tir are thick, with only a few paths through them. And thirty miles from here, you'll come to another river, the Iskand. Berkuar is willing to show you the way through the woods and a ford across the Iskand. if you're willing to let him.'

The rest of us were more than willing to accept this woodsman as our guide, but Kane scowled at Berkuar, and took me by the arm as he pulled me away from the others. And he snarled at me: 'Trust this dirty stranger to lead us true? No, I say! What if Berkuar was in league with the Crucifiers? These Acadians are quick to betray their own, eh? What if their attack was staged solely to lure us to the rescue?'

I looked at Kane as if he might have been maddened by bad drink. 'Does that seem likely, or even possible? That Berkuar tricked the Crucifiers, as well as us? And why should Berkuar have thought that we would help the villagers?'

I looked over at Berkuar, standing like a bear next to Tarmond. He seemed almost as suspicious of us as Kane was of him.

'I don't know!' Kane snarled. 'So, he is
willing
to guide us through Acadu. But guide us
where,
eh? Maybe into a trap, where his confederates will capture us and torture out of us all that we know.'

I told him that if Berkuar was our enemy and had wanted to trap us, he had only to lead Harwell and the mercenaries against us in the wild land across the river. And then I clapped him on the shoulder and added, 'You've grown too suspicious, my friend. I think you've let the evil of these woods get to you.'

Then I walked back over to the others and said to Berkuar, 'We've taken counsel and would be honored if you would guide us.'

I bowed to him, but he seemed to have no knowledge of this gesture - or indeed, of manners of any sort. He spat again on the ground and said, 'Let's be off then. There's no time to lose.'

We said goodbye to Tarmond and the other villagers, then turned to follow Berkuar around the longhouse. We passed through the band of trees, where four archers lay with their throats slit open like gaping red mouths. The short walk through Gladwater's streets revealed other grisly sights. The dead were everywhere, in front of neat, wooden houses and blocking our way down the streets. We could not step carefully enough to avoid them. My boots, I saw were soon stained a reddish-brown from tramping through the bloodied mud.

We found Gorson's boats tied to a dock jutting out into the river. The flatboat he had used for ferrying was a huge construction, more like a raft with low rails than a true boat. It was hard getting the horses aboard it, especially Altaru, for he had experience at being floated on top of water, and he hated being so shipped. As I pulled him on board, he drove his hoof into the boat's deck with such force that it seemed he might stave it to splinters. But the boat was sturdy enough to bear up even in a raging river. After we urged on the other horses and ourselves as well, we cast off and let the current take us out into the Tir. Kane and I, with Maram and Berkuar, pushed the boat cross-current with the aid of long poles that we stuck down into the river. It seemed a clumsy means of navigation, but it sufficed to take us across to the other bank.

As promised, the forest here was thicker than in the part of Acadu that we had so far crossed. Few people, it seemed, lived nearby to burn out the undergrowth, which grew in low walls of bracken, buttonbush and other shrubs. It would have been difficult to force our way through such a tangle. We were fortunate, I thought, to have a guide who led us onto a path through the woods running almost due west.

We did not travel very far that day, for it was growing late, and we were all weary. We set to making camp in a clearing where there was a stream and good grass for the horses. Berkuar seemed amused at Kane's insistence that we fortify our camp with the usual fence of deadwood and logs. He did not say why. He was not a talkative man or a particularly friendly one. But he joined in the work at day's end willingly enough, gathering wood for our fire and then helping Liljana prepare our dinner. This was an enormous ham that one of the villagers had given us. As Liljana turned it on a spit, fat dripped down into the fire and popped and crackled. The sweet-salt smell of roasting meat made my mouth water.

After dinner, when Kane was apportioning hours for the night's watches, Berkuar brought out a bag of reddish-brown nuts and offered one to Maram, who would stand the first watch. When Maram asked what they were, Berkuar replied, 'We call them barbark nuts. You hold them in your mouth, beneath the tongue, and they give you wakefulness as well as strength.'

So saying, Berkuar loosed a stream of red spittle at the fire where it caused the flames to smoke and writhe as it hissed away into vapor.

Maram looked doubtfully at the hard, shiny nut in Berkuar's dirt-stained hand. 'Does it, ah, gladden the spirit as well? Like brandy?'

'It does - but without the stupor. And it makes a man as strong in the loins as a bull.'

'Give me one, then!' Maram said, snatching the nut from Berkuar's hand. He opened his mouth and made ready to pop it inside.

'Hold!' Master Juwain said. He sat across the fire between Liljana and Estrella. 'Remember your vow!'

'My vow was to forsake brandy and beer.'

'In spirit, it was to forsake all intoxicants. And what do we know about these barbark nuts, anyway? I've never heard of such before.'

Berkuar's teeth shone red as he grimaced at Master Juwain. Another man might have patiently described the classification of the barbark nut with other botanicals, and its harvesting and preparation - or explained that its use among the Acadians had a long and honored history. But that was not Berkuar's way. He reached into his leather bag and cast a handful of nuts down into the dirt. He said, 'Chew them or not, as you wish.'

Then he picked up a waterskin and stalked off down to the stream.

'A strange man,' Master Juwain said, coming over to examine the nuts. 'I hope this barbark, whatever it is, hasn't addled his wits.'