Servant of the Dragon (17 page)

"Oh," Ilna said. She smiled; the big soldier smiled back. "I only saw the uniform," she said.

"That's why I wore it," said Garric as he put his arms around her and hugged her to his armored chest.

* * *

"Even Tadai didn't recognize me," Garric said, shaking his head. "I wouldn't have been able to get out of the palace if I hadn't changed into this. Everybody has something they need to tell Prince Garric."

"Everybody wants a piece of the king,
" Carus agreed.
"That's one of the reasons I spent so much time fighting... until the fish got all the pieces there were of me.
"

He bellowed with laughter in Garric's mind. Garric smiled in response. Willingness to laugh at death wasn't the only virtue there was in the world, but it was a good virtue for a king to have; and it was a virtue that Garric would never lack while he had the spirit of his ancestor with him.

"Would you introduce me to your friend, Ilna?" Garric said as he stepped back. He knew he was trembling a little, as though he were riding a mettlesome horse which wanted to take the bit in its teeth.

Carus, who'd been the foremost man-of-war of his day, was always close when Garric wore armor or handled a sword. When Garric donned his panoply there was a constant struggle to keep the ancient king from clothing himself in Garric's flesh while Garric watched as a spectator through his own eyes.

"I'm Merota," the girl said.
How old was she, anyway? The play of emotions across her clear face could be anywhere from eight years old to twelve.
"And I know who you are: you're Prince Garric, and you're Ilna's friend."

"I wonder about the first one sometimes," Garric said with a wry smile. "But not the other."

The second trireme was sliding down the ways. Warships were flimsy, hard to preserve and absurdly expensive to build and crew; but they were lovely things in the water, all curves and sleekness.

He looked at Ilna. "I won't waste my breath trying to change your mind," he said. "About this or about anything else. But I'll miss you when you're gone."

Ilna shrugged with more tenderness than she usually showed. "The world goes its way, whatever people wish it did instead," she said. "Maybe there's another world where the rules are different. Though...."

She gave Garric a smile that was either sad or as cruel as a gut-hook. With Ilna you could never be sure, and either one was a good bet. "I don't suppose I'd really want to change with anybody, even the Ilna in that other world if there was one. But sometimes I wonder what it might be like."

The second trireme splashed into the pool. The crews began carrying their ropes and pulleys back to the hooks where they hung under cover for the next use. Some of the men were already trooping aboard the first-launched of the vessels.

"The crews were part of the revolt under Admiral Nitker while the queen was in power," Garric said, contemplating the oarsmen with grim concern. "That isn't anything against them on its face—Lord Royhas and the rest of us revolted as well, or near enough. But the morale of the survivors is terrible since Nitker got most of their fellows slaughtered, and I wouldn't say they were the most loyal subjects of the new government either."

His lips grinned; his mind did not. Nor did Ilna, watching him.

"I wish the cross-training of the new phalanx as oarsmen had gone fast enough that I could give you a hundred of them for crews," Garric said, "but for now I think using the remnants of the old fleet is probably the better choice."

Ilna sniffed. "We use the materials we have at hand," she said. "It's usually been enough."

The coldness of her usual expression gave way to a smile. "For both of us, Garric."

To his surprise, she stepped forward and hugged him as he'd hugged her when he arrived. Then she broke away and, shouldering her rolled cloak, held her free hand out to Merota. "Come along, girl," she said. "It's time to board."

Her back as straight as a spearshaft, Ilna strode away from Garric without a look behind. He watched her moving down the narrow central deck between the oarsmen on the outer bank. Baggage filled the hollow of the hull where the rest of the crew would normally man two more ranks of benches.

When Ilna and Lord Tadai's niece reached the far bow where a catapult would have been mounted if the vessel were going to war, they turned. Garric waved his helmet. Merota waved back with her scarf.

And after a long moment, Ilna waved as well.

* * *

Sharina had thought she could reach the settlement by walking around the shoreline of the bay, but the tide was in. She had either to struggle through mud in waist-high salt water or to climb up on the low overhang and battle vegetation luxuriating in the unstinted sunlight from the open seaside.

It had taken her over an hour to get a hundred yards beyond the edge of the beach where the bird had dropped her, and part of that way she'd hacked with the Pewle knife. Then she ran into the bamboo.

Sharina paused, panting. She was almost ready to cry from fatigue. The bird's grip had left her bruised, cramped and cold. The trek thus far had been difficult, and she knew from past experience with bamboo that she had no more chance of forcing her way through a stand of this magnitude than she could have bored through rock.

The horn continued its long, hooting calls. Sharina knew where the settlement was, but the sound echoed from the opposite headland to reach her. If she hadn't seen the huts and palisade from the air, she'd have turned in the wrong direction to reach the settlement.

Though of course she wasn't making much headway in the right direction.

She entered the forest, skirting the bamboo. To her surprise, she found that it was easier to walk among the trees than it had been along the shoreline where the vegetation wove densely among itself.

Sharina didn't recognize any of the trees by species, but they seemed ordinary enough hardwoods. Vines swathed many of them, but there was less undergrowth than she'd have expected in the woods back home. The bamboo was a light green mass thrusting into the blacks and darker greens of the great trees, but so long as she kept outside of that she made good progress.

She smiled again. Not that it was progress in the direction she'd wanted to go.

A trail wound its way along the northern edge of the bamboo thicket. Sharina hesitated only an instant before turning onto it. This wasn't merely a track worn through the forest by the hooves of wild hogs, though it might have started that way. Axes had improved the passage. Saplings lay beside their hacked-off stumps, and in one place they'd cut through the trunk of fallen tree so that the path could continue without diversion.

Sharina now heard only the lowest notes of the horn. It had no direction at all. With the sun out of sight above the canopy, she wasn't sure where she was going. The path must lead to the settlement, though—unless it led away.

There were animals in the foliage, because sometimes she found piled droppings that were too large for birds—or at least birds of a size to fly within the tight confines of this forest. The chirps and hooting from above her could have anything—birds or squirrels or lizards, and perhaps some other creatures still. Maybe fish climbed trees in this place.

Sharina touched the hilt of her Pewle knife. She didn't expect to meet anything in the forest as dangerous as she could be herself. Not until she reached the settlement, at least. The folk there might be nervous about a stranger, even a lone woman, but Sharina didn't see any choice but to join them.

Perhaps they could tell her where she was. It wasn't likely that they could tell her how to get back home, though.

Sharina rounded an oak which so dwarfed all those nearby that its spreading limbs had opened a clearing at ground level. Another path joined the one she was following. Three women chattering in friendly nervousness were coming down it. They stopped wide-eyed.

Sharina turned her hands out to her sides. "Hello?" she said. Her voice was friendly, but it caught in the middle of the short word.

The women screamed and ran, dropping some of their tools and equipment. The path wasn't straight. They vanished up it, their voices fading almost as quickly in the vegetation as sight of them did.

Sharina swallowed. She hadn't expected
that
. Had they seen the knife? Even if they had, she'd been careful to keep her hands away from the hilt. Nobody could have taken her greeting as hostile unless they were already badly frightened.

She looked at one of the fallen tools. It was a digger made from a length of stout sapling with a flint blade lashed by withies into the split end. Another of the women had dropped a basket of bark cloth. It held bamboo shoots, severed by a tool with a serrated edge. One of the women had a chopper thrust through her sash, a section of gnarled root to which shark teeth had been cemented.

Sharina continued up the path. She wanted to run, but that would look as though she were chasing them. Were they afraid of the bird that brought her here? Or was there something more that she didn't know about?

That she didn't know about
yet
.

The horn calls had stopped. Sharina walked on, keeping her hand away from her knife by conscious effort.

The ground gradually rose and became rockier underfoot. The forest changed slightly; there were conifers among the hardwoods, though again no varieties that Sharina could name precisely.

She came out into an area cleared by ringing the bark of the trees. The trunks still stood, but the leafless branches let through enough sunlight to sprout the barley planted among the sprawling roots. Swathes of bark hung from the dead gray boles like the hair of corpses.

The palisaded community was on the high ground beyond. Picking her way among the dead trees, Sharina made her way toward the gateway.

The grain-plots hadn't been plowed: the soil was too stony and root-laced for that. The farmers had planted kernals in individual holes prodded into the earth with a pointed stick. The barley didn't look healthy to Sharina, but she might be wrong in estimating that the season here was late summer. All she knew for sure was that the great bird had taken her a very long way from her world and her friends.

Everything had a raw look. The trees hadn't been dead for even a year. The bare soil was orangish and unhealthy, gullied by recent rains.

The trees nearest the settlement had been cut down for use, leaving ragged stumps. For the most part, though, the wood was being wasted in a fashion that Sharina found as shocking as she would a human sacrifice.

Did they practice human sacrifice here?

Somebody must have been watching from between the logs of the palisade, because a warning cry sounded moments after Sharina came out of the uncut forest. She heard a babble of voices but she couldn't make out the words. She wasn't even sure they were speaking a familiar language, though the rhythms seemed normal enough.

A shark's head was impaled as a standard on the peak of the timber gateway. It was the real thing and badly preserved. Sharina was approaching from downwind. Her nose wrinkled, but the heavy effluvium of the dead fish wasn't really worse than the sourness of human waste coming more generally from the settlement.

Three men wearing full armor stepped into the gateway, filling it with their great bull-hide shields. Each wore a bronze helmet with a plume, eagle feathers dyed red for the men on either side and a spray of peacock tail-feathers for the man in the center. They were barefoot but bronze greaves covered their shins; those of the man in the center were molded with demon heads. The metal had been recently polished, so sunlight winked from it.

They lowered their bronze spearheads and began advancing on Sharina. The man in the center took longer strides than the other two and drew slightly ahead.

More people came out of the palisade behind the warriors. Some of the men had crude bows, but most carried sticks or tools—stone-headed axes and hoes, dibbles, and even threshing flails. The women had stone knives or held rocks to throw. There were a dozen children in a crowd that totalled about eighty. They were a hundred yards away from Sharina, beyond range of a flung rock and probably even bows of that quality; but they were coming closer.

Sharina stopped and raised her right hand, palm forward. "I'm a stranger who would be your friend," she called in a clear voice. "You needn't be afraid!"

Why
were
they afraid? She was a lone woman.

The group—the mob—coming toward her was dressed mostly in coarse bark cloth, but some of the folk wore furs and there were a number of garments made from more finished textiles. The cloak of the leading warrior was of excellent wool but dyed a muddy russet color.

One of the women Sharina had seen on the path raised her shark-tooth chopper. "Dragonspawn!" she shrieked in a thick accent.

The woman behind her, the one who'd lost the basket of bamboo shoots, threw a rock. It bounced back from a dead trunk and almost hit a warrior, anonymous in a helmet whose flaring cheek panels left only a T-shaped slot for him to see and breathe through.

The three warriors clashed their spear-blades against their mottled shields and called a muffled warcry. They raised the spears overarm and began to stump forward, shouting each time their left feet hit the ground.

The rest of the community followed, spreading to either side. Stones flew and a number of arrows wobbled in Sharina's direction. There was a mixed bellow of, "Kill!' and "Die!" and especially, "Dragonspawn!"

Sharina turned and ran, making for the track the settlers had cut. Plunging into the forest proper would be suicide, an invitation to anyone following to find her gripped in brambles or facing another wall of impenetrable bamboo.

She glanced over her shoulder. They were pursuing, all of them, emboldened by their own numbers and the fact their prey was fleeing. The unencumbered civilians left the warriors behind.

"Dragonspawn!"

They'd connected her with the great reptilian bird, of that there was no question. Was there more to the settlers' fear?

Sharina ran with the long-limbed grace that had been hers since early childhood. No one in the borough could chase her down if she got a bit of a lead, not even her brother. Certainly none of the stocky, dirty folk pursuing her now.

But she didn't know how far they'd follow. And though the settlement had been a poor hope for helping Sharina to get home, it was the only hope she had.

Branches whipped her. At every pumping stroke of her arms, her fingertips brushed the black horn hilt of the Pewle knife. If they did catch her—outrun her, trap her, circle her while she slept, as at some time she'd have to sleep... if they did, they'd learn that the business wasn't over yet.