Killer Plants Of Binaark rb-33 Page 12
Blade quickly exchanged his own metal amulet for the wooden one. Then he put the lantern on the end of the spear and thrust it upward into the thatching of the roof. The dry vegetation caught fire so furiously that it seemed to explode, and Blade had to shield his face with his arms for a moment. The intensity of the fire was encouraging. It made it far more likely that the bodies on the floor would be completely unrecognizable, as long as nobody got inside before the roof collapsed.
Over the crackle and hiss of the flames Blade could now hear voices outside. There were a good many of them, all angry. It sounded as if his own men were coming up from the camp. Time to be on his way. It would be embarrassing to be recognized by his own men while escaping. It would be still worse to be shot down by one of his own archers who’d mistaken him for one of Curim’s assassins.
Blade threw open the shutter, looked out, saw nobody close enough to recognize him, then put his hands on the window sill and vaulted out. Lorma followed him and stayed close at his heels as they both headed off into the cover of the darkness as fast as they could run.
They slowed down after a hundred yards, deep inside the trees. Blade picked Lorma up in his arms and carried her as they circled around the camp toward the corral. There were a few killer plants around here, and Blade could protect Lorma more easily if he was carrying her. Although she was fairly cooperative once she understood what was going on, Blade was glad when he could put her down. Eighty-five pounds of cat wasn’t the easiest thing for even the strongest man to carry in his arms through a pitch-black forest.
Blade and Lorma came out onto open ground near the rolgha corral. The rolghas were whinnying and snorting skittishly, except for the few kept saddled, bridled, and tethered to the outside railing. Having them ready was Blade’s own idea. For emergencies, he’d said. He hadn’t lied either. His own escape to Elstan was certainly an emergency.
The blazing hut was now lighting up its whole end of the camp, but it was still very dark by the corral and Blade would not be recognized, even if anyone saw him. Anyway, all the corral sentries and grooms seemed to have run off to fight the fire, and Blade was certain they wouldn’t be of any assistance. The fire was going too well.
When the fire did burn itself out, there would be nothing but corpses burned beyond recognition lying in the ashes. Two of them would have the melted remains of officer’s amulets. On or around one of them would be recognizable pieces of Lord Blade’s armor and weapons. That was another advantage of being in a primitive Dimensions. Without scientific methods of detection, the Jaghdi wouldn’t be able to tell that Blade’s armor had merely been piled on top of the corpse.
So far Blade’s plan to cover his escape was working perfectly. Now to finish the job. He ran toward the corral, keeping low, Lorma running behind him. As he reached the tethered rolghas another hut suddenly spewed up flame from its roof. Sparks from the first hut must have drifted over and caught. The neighing and restless movement from inside the corral increased. Blade remembered that rolghas were deathly afraid of fire. An unsaddled, unbridled rolgha could become completely uncontrollable at the unexpected flare of a torch.
Fortunately the tethered rolghas were still calm enough to let Blade mount one. He gripped the reins in one hand, drew his sword with the other, cut the tether, and whistled to Lorma. She jumped up behind him as she’d been trained to do. Her foreclaws dug into the saddle, while her hind legs, their claws retracted, braced her on the rolgha’s rump.
A third hut was now on fire, and Blade remembered how dry and brittle the jungle foliage seemed. There hadn’t been rain around here for most of the summer. If the Jaghdi didn’t get the fires in the camp under control fairly soon, they might find themselves in the middle of a forest fire.
The light from the fire still hadn’t reached the corral. Blade knew he had time to do one more thing to confuse his trail completely. He rode over to the corral gate and his sword came down. The heavy leather thong holding the gate shut dropped to the ground. Then he leaned out of the saddle, dragged the gate open as fast as he could, and clapped spurs to his rolgha.
It jumped forward at a pace that nearly unseated Lorma, who let out an indignant squall. She held on, and in a minute all they could see of the camp was the fires. Before it vanished, however, they saw the first rolghas pushing their way out the open gate and galloping away from the fires. It would be morning before anyone in the camp could mount and ride in pursuit, even if he thought there was something to pursue.
Blade reined his rolgha back to a trot and settled down to guide it through the next few miles of the forest of Binaark.
Queen Tressana looked down from her saddle at Efroin of the Red Band. He looked back up at her, his black eyes as steady as her blue ones.
«So both Blade and Curim are dead?» Her voice was flat, hiding her anger. The disaster to the scouting party hadn’t been Efroin’s fault. He was showing real courage in bringing the bad news to her. Nothing would be mended by frightening him with a royal rage.
«If they are not, only the gods will be able to find them,» said Efroin bluntly. «We found the amulets and armor of both men in the ashes of the hut. They must have killed each other.»
«I hope Blade was dead before the fire reached him,» said Tressana softly. For a moment she no longer saw Efroin, or anything else. Although Curim had been charming and virile for all his hot temper, after his attempt at murder he deserved exactly the fate that overtook him. Blade was something else. His death was a loss not just to her, but to Jaghd and everything she wanted to see done.
However, there was at least one thing she could do to make up part of the loss. «Efroin, you’ve served me long and well. The men will trust you, and I think you could even stay on good terms with Jollya. Would you like to be captain of the Men’s Guard?»
«I will have to ask you a question before answering, Your Grace.»
Tressana’s eyebrows rose. «Are you bargaining with me?»
Efroin smiled. «No. Only scouting out the land, as any good captain should do in war.» He lowered his voice so that only the queen could hear him. «What will my duties be?»
Now she understood. Efroin had a wife and four children, and was said to be unreasonably fond of all of them. He would not particularly care to be her bedmate as well as her champion. A pity, in a way. Efroin was the sort of honest man who often made the best lover, if you were lucky enough to find one. Had she used up her luck in that matter when the gods sent her Richard Blade? Probably. Certainly Efroin would not be good company in bed if his heart wasn’t in pleasuring her.
«I need a man for war, Efroin. You can give all your attention to your men.»
«Thank you, Your Grace. Then I will lead the Men’s Guard. Jollya will lead the women still?»
«I have no one else.»
He sighed. «The gods send burdens as they will, and men bear them as they must. I will do my best. Do I have your leave to go?»
«Yes.»
He turned, and Tressana spurred her rolgha away. She would need men for her bed as well as for the war. But she did not need them so badly that she would turn a good fighting man into a poor lover. A new party of scouts would have to be sent out to the forest, and that would give her plenty of time to pick and test the men before the army had to march.
She pulled off her hat and let the wind blow her hair out behind her as she spurred the rolgha up to a gallop.
Chapter 15
Blade dismounted as soon as he felt he’d gone too far to be tracked in the morning. He unpacked the supplies in the saddlebags, made a pack of them, then slapped the rolgha on the rump. As it trotted off into the night Blade used his sword to cut a branch for a walking stick. Then he found himself a convenient tree and sat down with his back to it and his sword across his knees to sleep until morning. He knew that the amulets worked, but he’d still rather not trust his life to them for the first time on a particularly dark night. There was also Lorma. Blade suspected Jollya would be able to forgive his joining
the Elstani, but never his letting something happen to the cat.
The dawn of a clear day came early. Blade scratched his insect bites, woke up Lorma, picked up his stick, and marched off into the forest of Binaark. Before he’d covered a mile he’d passed straight through the creepers of a small rogue without being attacked. After that happened a few times he found himself whistling as he walked along. It was exhilarating to come back into the forest and thumb his nose at the killer plants.
He was still careful not to let the amulet make him feel he was on a hike on the Yorkshire moors. There were snakes and insects, there was food to be rationed, and there was always Lorma to warn away from even the smaller plants. He also discovered that the amulet didn’t let him go through one of the mile-wide groves. They were so thickly grown that even if the creepers didn’t attack him it was impossible to get through without hacking his way foot by foot. It was better to walk around, rather than take the edge off his sword when he might need it as a weapon on the other side of the forest. It would take more than the synthetic beetle-gland scent to deal with the groves. They would last until someone in this Dimension invented dynamite or something equally potent.
The amulet also didn’t completely suppress the attack reflex in the largest plants, if you waited too long or struggled too hard. The plant would somehow slowly sense that you weren’t behaving like a beetle even if you smelled like one. You ought to be investigated, and the only way the plants had of investigating anything was to send out the creepers and the killpods.
Such an investigation took place so slowly that an active man with a sharp sword could easily defend himself for hours. It still wasn’t pleasant, with the smell from the pods, the acid dripping, and those barbed six-inch fangs. After surviving one investigation only by laying about him with his sword, Blade concluded it was an experience to be avoided. He also knew that it proved that the plants were even farther outside the known limits of science than he’d suspected before. He would have given a lot to be able to take a seedling or even a few seeds back to Home Dimension with him.
In spite of the amulet’s limitations, it did speed Blade’s progress enormously. He covered in four days the distance it had taken him twelve days to cover the first time. He still didn’t travel by night, to avoid blundering into groves or getting Lorma in trouble, but otherwise he was able to tramp along steadily, twelve and fourteen hours a day. The streams were low and the game animals were lean, but with a canteen and a bow he was able to keep both himself and Lorma from going without food.
There was no doubt about it: the Keepers of Jaghd had solved this Dimension’s centuries-old problem of the killer plants. The Jaghdi army might have more problems and take longer getting through the forest than they’d expected, but they would get through. It was more important than ever for Blade to get through to Elstan and do whatever he could to defeat Tressana’s plan to make herself empress of the world over a pile of Elstani corpses.
And afterward? When and if there was peace between the two countries, Blade suspected that the next step would be to build a road through the forest. A few hundred men with axes could keep the seedlings and the rogues under control. The road could go around the groves until someone came up with a way of destroying them. Then trade and travel between Elstan and Jaghd would go on all the year round, regardless of low water on the Adrim or snow in the mountain passes. After a few generations the two countries would be united more thoroughly than they ever would be if Tressana won. Then there would be nothing to stop the return of civilization to this Dimension.
No, that wasn’t quite true. The people in this Dimension had wrecked one civilization by war. It was always hard to tell if people would learn from their mistakes or simply repeat them. There would also be a price to pay for civilization. Blade could imagine the scene a few centuries from now, when a six-lane highway ran along the path he was following now. On either side of it neat suburban lawns would have replaced the ferns and fungi, and the killer plants would be kept in greenhouses for decoration. No doubt some of the people in those houses would be yearning for «the good old days» of primitive living and the wild forest of Binaark. They should just try walking through it!
Blade was never sure when he crossed out of the no-man’s-land of the forest into Elstan. He did know when he first met the Elstani themselves.
Blade mopped the sweat off his forehead with a fern leaf and hoped that the thicket ahead didn’t hide a rogue. He didn’t really want to take the time to go around it, not after nearly a day without water. Lorma’s tongue was already hanging out, and Blade felt as if his legs were turning to lead. The heavy scent of a stand of flowering trees nearby was cloying, almost nauseating.
The rustle of leaves alerted him too late. Suddenly a long rope with something on the end was flying toward him. Then it wrapped itself around his legs as tightly as a plant’s creepers, and a sharp hook was digging into his pack. Somebody jerked hard on the rope, Lorma snarled, and Blade sprawled on the ground. His sword was caught under him, and he rolled to free it. Before he could draw, Lorma snarled again, and four men pushed their way out of the thicket.
Blade froze with his hand inches short of his sword. He recognized the men as EIstani. They were all short, none of them taller than about five feet six, and well muscled. Their round heads were shaved nearly bald, but all had mustaches on their broad dark faces. They wore heavy cloth trousers and shirts, with knee-high leather boots and elbow-length gloves in spite of the heat. Two of them were carrying crossbows, loaded, cocked, and aimed roughly at Blade’s stomach. The other two were holding the rope, but as they came into the open they dropped it and drew double-edged short swords.
Lorma snarled again and Blade heard her paws scrabbling as she broke into a run. One of the archers let fly with his crossbow, but to his relief Blade heard nothing but the whuk of the bolt hitting a tree. He knew Lorma wasn’t running because she was afraid, but because she’d received no orders to either stop or attack. She’d trail Blade and the EIstani until she did get his orders or could figure out for herself what was going on. Meanwhile she’d be safe from those crossbows-and Blade realized that she’d forced one of the archers to disarm himself. If he moved fast enough…
Before he could finish the thought three more archers stepped out of another patch of forest. Blade would have sworn that nothing larger than Lorma could have been hiding there without his seeing it. He wondered if he’d had his mind too much somewhere else, and hoped it wouldn’t be fatal. From the grim, implacable expressions on the seven faces around him, it was hard to be optimistic. Blade had seldom seen men who looked less willing to listen, in a situation when talking his way out was probably his only hope.
Slowly he sat up, keeping his hands not only in plain sight but well clear of his body. Instead of trying to unwind the rope from his legs, he looked from one face to another as he spoke.
«I am Richard Blade, a warrior of England. I have been in the service of the Jaghdi, as you-you can see from my clothing and weapons. Jaghd is planning a great war to conquer Elstan. I did not believe in that war, so I have left Jaghd and come to warn Elstan.»
Several of the men laughed and one said, «Even if that is true, it will not save your life. We know about Tressana’s war. Do you think it could be kept a secret, that an army gathers on the Adrim?»
«No. But the army on the Adrim is not the greatest danger. Another army is gathering, to march through the forest of Binaark and-«
Several of the men laughed again, but others cursed. Blade knew the idea must sound as incredible to them as it had to him the first time, and struggled to find words. He cautiously raised his hand to point at the amulet around his neck. «This makes it possible to march through the forest. The Keepers of Jaghd have learned how to fight the killer plants, so now an army-«
That was the end of Blade’s speech, and nearly the end of Blade himself. One of the archers suddenly snapped his crossbow up and shot. He wasn’t faster than one of the swordsmen, howeve
r. The man’s sword flickered out like a striking snake, the point knocking the crossbow up and to one side. A bolt that would have drilled Blade’s skull only tore a gash in his right ear. Then in a blur of motion the swordsman knocked the crossbow out of his comrade’s hand, kicked the man’s legs out from under him, and knelt on his chest with the sword point at his throat.
«I know your pride, Fador’n. I will not call this unlawful, if you lay down your bow for this Cutting.»
«Yes, Daimarz.»
The man called Daimarz let the other up and turned to Blade. Blade noticed that Daimarz had an ax-shaped badge worked in copper wire on both gloves, and the same ax shape tattooed on his forehead. «Richard Blade, as you call yourself, we can see that you are of Jaghd. As for the rest, you have won yourself a little more life, at least. We will finish this Cutting, then take you to the Masters. If you are telling the truth, it will at least win you the good Stone Death.» He sheathed his sword. «Will you swear not to try to escape? Or else you may find yourself wishing for any death before the Cutting is over.»
«I will swear that, if you will swear something in return.»
«Why should we bargain with you, Jaghd?»
«Who spoke of bargaining? I only wish to know that I am dealing with men who know what an oath is. Otherwise, what do I have to gain by swearing one myself and making things easier for you?»
«There is sense in that,» said Daimarz, rubbing the tattoo on his forehead. «Very well, what shall we swear?»
«That unless the cat Lorma attacks one of your men, you will do nothing against her.»
Several of the men laughed at that, but Daimarz raised a hand. «No. The gray cats of Jaghd seem to have more than a beast’s sense. You will order her not to strike at us?»
«If I see her, yes.»