The Shadow Isle (38 page)

Salamander turned to Sharak and spoke to him in the Horsekin tongue, eking out his small knowledge of the language with gestures. The boy nodded, then wiped his face on the sleeve of his good arm.

“Interesting,” Salamander said. “He knows some Deverrian.”

“A few words here and there,” Gerran said. “Like he’d just started learning it or suchlike.”

“In preparation for an invasion, I wonder?” Salamander raised both eyebrows high. “Or to handle slaves at least. Not a good omen, Gerro.”

“Ye gods!” Gerran felt suddenly cold. “I’d not thought of that.”

“Thinking isn’t your duty in life, though ’tis mine. Later, with your permission, I’ll want to question this lad.”

“Permission granted, of course.”

Raddyn made a sling out of a square of linen, settled the arm in, and tied the ends behind Sharak’s neck.

“He’s a brave lad,” Raddyn said to Gerran. “Most men would have screamed all the way through. One yelp—not bad, not bad.” He fixed Gerran with a grim look. “And now what about you, my lord? Let’s look at that shoulder.”

Salamander insisted, the chirurgeon swore at him, and Gerran reluctantly agreed. Taking off his padding and shirt set the shoulder throbbing, even with Salamander to help him. Raddyn looked, poked, and grunted. He turned around, surveyed the various objects on the wagon bed, and picked up a pottery stoup.

“This might sting a bit, but I’ve got to get some of the old blood off.” He slopped some of the liquid in the stoup onto the wound. “It’s mead.”

Fire exploded in Gerran’s shoulder, or so it seemed to him. For a moment he could barely breathe.

“I don’t like the way it’s swelling,” Raddyn said. “Sleep on your stomach tonight. Huh, maybe I should have stitched it after all.”

“A bit late now!” Salamander snapped. “Perhaps you should take a bit more care with uncommon wounds like this?”

“Listen, you, I’ve got dying men here to tend.” Raddyn set filthy hands on his hips. “I don’t have the patience to listen to insults from the likes of you.”

Salamander started to speak, then merely shrugged. The chirurgeon turned on his heel and stalked off among the wagons.

“Let’s go,” Gerran said. “I’ll put on the shirt once we’re away from here.”

Sharak followed them meekly as they walked off. Since he himself would have been running off into the dark to escape, Gerran began to think of the lad as contemptible, but he reminded himself that the Horsekin saw such things differently. Besides, considering that Sharak was injured, exhausted, and no doubt hungry, his lack of the will to escape made sense.

At a decent distance from the chirurgeon’s wagon, they stopped, and Gerran knelt to let Salamander get the shirt on over his head. Getting his left arm into the sleeve took an effort of will.

“I have my doubts about that chirurgeon,” Salamander said, “deep and serious doubts.”

“Why?” Gerran stood up with the shirt on at last.

“You know, that’s a good question. He certainly seemed to do a decent job on your prisoner here.” Salamander nodded in Sharak’s direction. “It’s because of Neb’s low opinion of him, I suppose.”

“Neb? How would a scribe know the difference twixt one chirurgeon or another?”

Salamander hesitated, then shrugged. “Another good question. Let’s get back to your tent. I’m hungry enough to eat a wolf, pelt and all.”

Gerran led his prisoner—he refused to think of him as a slave— back to the campfire Clae had built near his tent. Nicedd sat cross-legged at some distance from the fire. A red-haired woman in a gray dress dappled rust-brown with dried blood sat nearby, nursing a baby, while a young daughter watched with hopeless eyes. An older lass, red-haired like her mother, knelt behind her and stared at the ground. The number of Gerran’s dependents had just grown considerably, he realized, thanks to Salamander, who, he supposed, was a dependent of his as well, at least for the duration of this campaign.

“Clae?” Gerran said. “Have the woman and her children been fed?”

“Not yet, my lord,” Clae said. “But I got rations for them and the prisoner, too.”

The woman looked up at him, then away. She must have been pretty once, Gerran realized, with her long red hair and green eyes, but now gray streaked the hair, she was missing half her teeth, her face was so thin that her bones looked sharp under her skin, and her despair hung around her like some foul perfume.

“My thanks, my lord,” she whispered. “For your protection.”

“You’re welcome.” Gerran made this banal remark only because he could think of nothing else.

“We’ll ride back to his wife soon,” Salamander said, “and she’ll have a place for you and your children.” He glanced at Gerran. “Her name’s Canna.”

“Ah. Well and good, then.” Gerran pointed at Sharak. “Does looking at him trouble you?”

“It doesn’t,” Canna said. “No more than aught else.”

Still, with gestures Gerran made Sharak sit farther away. The Horsekin took a place next to Nicedd, who patted his silver dagger in a meaningful way and glared at the lad.

“No trouble out of you,” Nicedd said with a growl in his voice. “Or else.”

Sharak flinched, then lowered his head in a gesture of submission.

“Here, Clae,” Gerran said, “bring out those rations, will you?”

They all made a drab meal of flatbread, salt beef, and cheese around the small campfire. All around them the normal life of a military camp rippled like water—men coming and going, some exulting over their victory, some mourning dead friends, some swearing in pain, others laughing over their ration of ale. In the Falcon’s tiny sector, no one spoke, not even Salamander, until they’d finished eating. Canna’s baby fussed and whined, even when she laid her own food aside to nurse him.

“Do you have any milk?” Salamander asked.

“Precious little, my lord.” Her voice had all the life of dead leaves rustling on an autumn branch. “Truly, I’m not surprised.”

“Me, either, but I’m not a lord. I’ve got a clean rag if you want to make a sop for him to have some water.”

“I would, and my thanks.”

Salamander got up, rummaged in his saddlebags, which Clae had laid nearby, and brought out a rag and a cup. He sent Clae off to fill the cup with fresh water and handed Canna the rag as he sat back down. Gerran was honestly surprised that the gerthddyn would know so much about women’s matters. The surprise reminded him of a painfully unanswered question.

“Tell me somewhat, Canna,” Gerran said, “if you can. Why were the bastard scum killing their women prisoners?”

“So we couldn’t be saved, my lord. They taunted us, like, saying that they were going to show you all that coming after us would do no good. We could be slaves or we could be dead, but they wouldn’t let us be rescued.”

Salamander swore under his breath, while Nicedd did the same, but loudly.

“So,” Gerran said. “They want to raid and not have us chase after, do they? Wanting and having are two different things, or so I always heard.”

Clae came trotting back with the cup of water. He sat and held it for Canna, so she could dip the sop into the water and allow the baby to suck enough to calm his thirst. Salamander, who’d finished eating by then, got up and went to kneel in front of Sharak. The Horsekin lad shrank back and raised his good arm as if to parry a blow.

“Before you start,” Gerran said to Salamander, “can you please tell him that he doesn’t have to act like a dog? He thinks he’s a slave. I don’t.”

“I’ll try,” Salamander said, “but I suspect you’ll have to wait till Grallezar or Pir can do the translating for that. I only know some basic words. It’s going to be a very peculiar idea for his Horsekin mind to understand.”

For some while Salamander and Sharak talked back and forth in a jumbled mix of Deverrian and the Horsekin language. Gerran soon gave up trying to follow the conversation. Once they’d finished, Salamander gave him the gist of it.

“It’s as I thought,” the gerthddyn said. “The priestesses firmly believe that Alshandra’s still alive. They tell that to the faithful, who, I assume, believe them even though no one but the holy ladies can see her. She appeared to them in the sky now and then and gave them instructions to pass on to the common believers.”

“Huh! Like those messages Great Bel sends to the priests, I’ll wager, the ones that always say what the priests want to hear.”

“You’d win that wager handily, no doubt.”

“What does he think about the way they’re threatening to kill the women they take?”

Salamander spoke briefly to Sharak, whose eyes filled with tears. He murmured a few words.

“It sickened him,” Salamander said. “That’s why he ran from the battle.”

“Was he ordered to kill some of them?”

Again Salamander spoke to the lad. Sharak nodded his head in miserable agreement and murmured a few more words.

“That’s why he ran,” Salamander repeated. “The Keeper giving the orders followed and got one good cut on him. That’s who broke his hand.”

“Ah. Tell him he’s a good man.”

Salamander did so. Sharak tried to smile, then merely stared at the ground.

“I suspect that a good many of the loyal Alshandrites would be furious at the idea of killing the helpless,” Salamander said to Gerran, “but I’m as certain as snow in winter that the rakzanir don’t give a fistful of horseshit if they are or not.”

“No doubt. What about the rest of the army?”

“The only Horsekin numbers I know are those from one to six and for some reason, fourteen, so I have no idea of how big it is. Huge, according to him, and very far off to the north. He told me they marched for weeks to get here. This was a scouting force, mostly, though they had orders to burn and raid where they could.”

“I see. Well, when we get back to the Red Wolf dun, Lady Grallezar should be able to get more out of him.”

“True spoken. I cannot imagine anyone refusing to answer Grallezar when she’s in a questioning mood, as it were.”

“No more can I. Very well, I’m going to go tell Prince Dar what we know.” Gerran turned to Clae. “Let Canna and her children have my tent when she wants to sleep.”

When Gerran started to get up, his head swam from the sudden pain in his shoulder. He shifted his weight to the other side, got to a kneel, then allowed Salamander to help him up the rest of the way.

“I’ll just come with you,” Salamander said. “I want to talk with the prince myself.”

By then, those men who weren’t on watch had rolled themselves up in their blankets and gone to sleep. Campfires were burning themselves out, casting a glow like sunset among deep shadows. On the ground by the supply wagons rescued women sat huddled together, weeping or silently rocking back and forth like terrified children. Most had infants clinging to them.

“Canna had a younger son,” Salamander said abruptly. “Besides the one whose burnt bones I found, that is.”

“And?” Gerran said. “I assume he’s dead.”

“He is. They tried to geld him, but the chirurgeon did a ghastly bad job of it. The lad’s balls hadn’t come down yet, of course, since he was so young. When the chirurgeon tried to get at them to cut them, he pierced the lad’s guts. A long loop was hanging out, Canna told me, and of course he bled horribly. The chirurgeon swore and stamped, but there was naught he could do. He was going to slit the lad’s throat, but the priestess insisted that Canna be allowed to hold him till he died.”

Gerran briefly felt like vomiting. “I can’t even think of an oath foul enough for that,” he said instead.

“Me, either. I’m truly grateful that you’ll take her in.”

Gerran made a noncommittal noise. He was beginning to realize, he felt, what lordship truly meant, but not in a way that he could put into words.

Prince Dar and Calonderiel listened carefully to what little Gerran and Salamander had learned from Sharak. A little, as Dar remarked, was better than naught.

“Just so,” Salamander said. “Cal, I have a question for you. There must have been two lots of Deverry people in the camp. The slave women we know about. But there had to be others, ones that worshiped Alshandra, and they doubtless came willingly when the Horsekin appeared. Some of them would be branded on their face from last summer’s arrests.”

“That’s odd,” Cal said. “I’ve no idea what happened to them. Dar, did anyone report to you?”

“No one,” Dar said. “Some of the Deverry men might know.”

“I’ll ask around,” Salamander said. “For now, though, I think I’d best escort Gerran here back to his camp. Gerro, you look like you’re going to fall over.”

“It’s just a—” Gerran said. “Well, mayhap it’s not just a bruise. Ye gods, that chirurgeon! I swear he made it hurt worse.”

“I didn’t like the look of him myself,” Salamander said. “Well, we’ll be heading back to Cengarn on the morrow.”

On the morrow morning Gwerbret Ridvar reprovisioned the fortguard and left twenty more men to reinforce it as well. The rest of the warbands assembled out in the road, while the two princes and the gwerbret stood beside their horses and conferred. Gerran and Mirryn led their horses up to the princes, while their men trailed after them out of habit. Gerran noticed that Canna, the baby, and her younger daughter were riding Salamander’s horse, while Salamander walked, leading it.

When Gerran started to kneel, the Deverry prince waved him up.

“A question, Lord Gerran?” Voran said.

“Just that, Your Highness,” Gerran said. “I’m still wondering if we should chase the Horsekin right now, while they’re at hand. They’ve fled north, but I’ll wager they leave a trail we can follow.”

“And I still counsel against it,” Prince Daralanteriel said. “Who knows if your prisoner told us the whole truth? For that matter, who knows how well he and Salamander understood each other? It’s likely there’s a second scout force holed up somewhere near at hand. This lot was a long way from home to be traveling on their own.”

“Now that’s true spoken, Your Highness,” Gerran said. “But what if they’re heading for the Boar dun? They can be reprovisioned there at the very least.”

“That’s a very good point, Falcon,” Voran put in.

“The decision’s the gwerbret’s to make, of course.” Dar made a show of addressing this comment to Gerran alone. “It’s his rhan, after all.”