“Sah!”
The corporal in charge of the squad he’d borrowed from Galveston’s garrison commander gave a crackling stamp-and-salute; Eric King returned the gesture. The noncom and his squad were natives, too, stalwart muscular men, dark brown of skin, with kinky hair and broad features. They’d been recruited from the farming and fishing tribes who were spread thinly over the central Texas coast, it being policy to raise local levies where possible, since they were always cheaper and often hardier than imported regulars.
But Imperial discipline puts down deep roots, King thought, as the man wheeled off to supervise his squad; they struck the tents and folded them for pack-saddle carriage with practiced efficiency.
An ox wagon had brought the gear this far from the steamboat; two tents, a large and a small-military issue-and a fair pile of boxed weapons, ammunition, equipment, and supplies-the latter including brandy from France-outre-mer, distilled in the hills near Algiers, and whiskey from New Zealand. Robre Hunter had raised his brows and smacked his lips over a small sample of each, and King made a mental note to advise Banerjii to keep some in stock. Being teetotal as well as a vegetarian, it probably hadn’t occurred to the Bengali that booze came in different qualities and prices.
The native guide looked at the pile of equipment. “Lord o’ Sky!” he said. “If you Empire men take this much on a hunting trip, what do you drag along on a war-party?”
“Considerably less,” King said dryly, remembering fireless bivouacs in the Border hills, rolled in his cloak against blowing snow and gnawing a piece of stale chapatti while everyone listened for Pathan raiders creeping up on their bellies under cover of the storm.
“I’m hunting for pleasure and I’m not in a hurry. Why not be comfortable as possible? When we of the Angrezi Raj fight, all we care about is winning.”
Robre nodded slowly. “Makes sense,” he said. “Let’s get on about it, then.”
The Imperials had camped in the pasture of an outlying farm owned by the Jefe of the Alligators, a few acres of tall grass drying toward autumn surrounded by oak and hickory and magnolias and trees he couldn’t identify. It had a deep stillness, broken by the whicker of horses and the trilling of unfamiliar birds, and the smells were of sere grass and wet leaves and dew on dust. King smiled in sheer pleasure as he stood with hands on hips looking about him; an owl flew past him, out late or early, with a cry like who-cooks-for-you.
“What’s that called?” he asked Robre.
The native guide blinked at him in astonishment. “You don’t have ’em? That’s a barred owl-come out in daylight more ’n most of their kind.”
“That’s the point of traveling,” he said. “To see things you haven’t got at home. Now, to business.”
He sat in a folding canvas chair, Ranjit Singh on one side and Robre on the other. A table before him bore a register book, pen, ink bottle, and a pile of little leather bags cinched tight with thongs around their store of Imperial silver rupees. The natives here, he’d noticed, were fascinated and impressed by writing; very conveniently, they were also quite familiar with the concept of coined money as a store of value. Stamped silver came up in trade from the city-states farther south, although the Seven Tribes minted none themselves. He’d been in places where everything was pure barter, and the simplest transaction took forever.
“Step up,” he said, in the local tongue, then sighed as they crowded around, yelling; the concept of standing quietly in line was not part of the local worldview.
About two dozen men had applied for the eight wrangler-muleteer-guard-roustabout positions; Robre knew some of them personally, and most by reputation. In fact, two slunk off immediately when they saw his face. Most were young, given leave by their fathers in this slack part of the farming year and eager for the rare chance to earn hard money.
Robre put them through their paces, checking their mules’ and horses’ backs for sores and their tack for cracked leather, watching them pack and unpack a load, follow a track, shoot at a mark, run and jump and wrestle.
King had Ranjit Singh handle the hand-to-hand testing. It was a good way to teach these wild natives a little respect, and none of them lasted more than a minute before finding themselves immobilized and slammed to the ground. The local style was catch-as-catch-can, the men strong and quick and active, quite oblivious of pain, but utterly unsophisticated. He wasn’t surprised; it was often that way, with warrior groups like this. They put so much into their weapons that they neglected unarmed combat, and the style the Imperial military used drew on ancient Asian traditions.
The Sikh rose grinning from the wheezing, groaning body of the last, dusted his hands, beat dirt and bits of grass and weed off his trousers; sweat glistened on his thick hairy torso, where iron muscle rippled in bands and curves.
“Not bad,” he said jovially. “For a man who knows nothing.”
The Sikh said it in Hindi, which took the sting out, although the object of it could probably guess the meaning of the words as he sat up and rotated a wrenched shoulder; the other candidates laughed at his discomfort. He was older than most of them-in his thirties, a tall rawboned swarthy man.
“All right,” the local said to the Sikh as he rose and rubbed his bruises. “You got some fancy wrasslin’ there-’n’ you’re strong as a bear with a toothache ’n’ twice as mean. Now, Jefe,” he went on to King, “who’s going to be your trail-boss on this trip?”
“I’m in command,” King said. “After me, my man Ranjit Singh here; after him, Robre sunna Jowan. Any problems with that-” He glanced down at the register. “-Haahld sunna Jubal?”
“You bet there is, by God. Robre is a good man of his hands ’n’ a fine hunter, no dispute. But it’s not fitting he should be trail-boss over older men, him so young ’n’ not having wife nor child nor land of his own and all.”
The rest stood silent; one or two seemed to agree. Robre flushed, but King put out a hand to restrain him. “In that case, you’re free to go,” he said cheerfully.
The face of the native standing before him turned darker. “That’s a mighty high-top way to speak, stranger, considering you’re far from home ’n’ alone here. Who’d you think you are?”
King rose, still smiling slightly, but the other man took a step back. “I know I’m an officer of the Empire,” he said calmly. “Which means that I’m an automatic majority wherever I go.” He gestured to the moneybags. “If you take my silver, you take my orders. If you won’t, get out.”
His body stayed loose, but his hands were tinglingly aware of the position of saber and pistol and knife. He’d met men like these before, from peoples whose ways demanded that a man be prickly and quick to take offense and forever ready to fight. You had to begin as you meant to go on, and be ready to back it up, like the head wolf in a pack. The air crackled between them, and the native’s eyes shifted slightly.
Just then the drumming sound of hooves turned heads. A ridden horse, a remount and a mule, all sweating a bit. And the rider…
Well, well, it’s the little redhead, King thought. He’d gotten most of her story out of Robre, and felt a certain sympathy-it was a hard world, and harder still for an orphan. Well, well, not so little, either.
In sunlight and flushed with exertion she looked even better than the other night’s tantalizing glimpse. She kicked a leg over the pommel of her saddle and slid to the ground, bosom heaving interestingly under the coarse cotton shift as she came toward him with her dog panting at her heel.
“Heya, Empire-Jefe King,” she said bluntly.
“Hello, miss,” he answered, amused. I am an Imperial chieftain, I suppose.
“Hear you’re hiring,” she said. “I want work.” At a snicker from the crowd of clansmen, she turned around and glared. “And not as no bedwarmer, either!” Turning back to King, “I can carry my load, ’n’ I know the eastern woods. Hunted east of the Three Forks since I was a girl, ’n’ with my pa east of the Black River twice.”
Beside King, Robre stirred, surprise on his face. Evidently that’s some claim; but she’s not lying, I’d think. Intriguing!
Haahld sunna Jubal snorted. “You got to be a fightin’ man for this trip, missie, able to carry a man’s load. Want me to test your wrasslin’?” The clansman roared with laughter.
Sonjuh’s face flushed red, and her foot moved in a blur while Haahld sunna Jubal was still holding his sides and hooting. There was a meaty thump as the toe of the girl’s boot slammed into the native’s groin.
King’s lips quirked upward; he thought he’d have been better prepared than the luckless Haahld, but then he’d stopped thinking of women as necessarily helpless when he was an ensign leading a patrol to break up a brawl in a military brothel in Peshawar Town. An Afghan tart crouching under a table had nearly cut his hamstrings with a straight-razor, and he’d never forgotten the raw terror of the moment.
The haw-hawing laughter turned into a strangled shriek of pain as the man doubled over and fell to the ground, clutching himself and turning brick red. Ouch. That hard a kick in the testicles was no joke-something might have been ruptured; the girl’s long legs were slender, but muscled like a temple acrobat’s from running and riding and tree-climbing. Now, there’s native talent, he thought, grinning and wincing slightly.
She stood back in the sudden silence, then seemed to lose a little of her bristling aura as most of the company guffawed and slapped their thighs; even Robre, who seemed like a sobersided young man, grinned openly.
Haahld was puking helplessly now, and moaning. Someone threw a bucket of water over him, which seemed to give him a little strength, and he crawled away to haul himself upright along a tree trunk, still nursing his crotch with one hand. He got a good deal of witty medical advice about poultices from the crowd, although a few of the older and more respectable looked shocked and disapproving.
“Well, miss, generally if I want to kick a man in the groin, I handle it myself rather than hiring it done,” King said, smiling. “Although I concede that was good work of its kind. What else can you do?”
“Ride. Rope. Run like a deer. Handle a pack mule. Track meat-game or big cat-or a man-through brush country; we lived aside in deep woods. I’m a pretty good shot, too.”
She turned, unslung the crossbow from her saddle and fired it at the target eighty yards away. The snap of the string and the thunk of the bolt striking the magnolia came almost instantly, and the octagonal steel head sank deep into the midriff of the human figure chalked out on the bark. King raised a brow, impressed despite himself, and at the speed with which she reloaded. Then she slid the tomahawk from where it rested across the small of her back and threw; that went home in the center of the X they’d carved in a dead pine twenty paces away. Haahld winced away-he’d used that trunk to regain his feet-and fell again.
“Your man Robre there can look at my beasts,” she said. “Sound backs ’n’ feet, ’n’ kept proper.”
“Well and good,” King said calmly, as Robre did just that, picking up hooves to check their shoeing and seeing that no bare gall-marks or sores hid beneath the tack.
King continued: “But why do you want to go on a dangerous expedition?”
“You’re going into the east woods,” she said. “Mebbe as far as the Black River, naw? I can’t go that far by my own self; too dangerous.”
King frowned; he’d heard of her obsession. “I’m not taking a…what’s your term? War party? I’m going to hunt, not fight.”
For the first time Sonjuh smiled, although it wasn’t a particularly pleasant expression: “Mebbe not, but that won’t be much of a never mind to the swamp-devils. If your trail-boss there-” She used her chin to indicate Robre. “-has told you it’s unlikely, he’s a mite too cheerful about the prospect, to my way of thinking.”
“Well then, miss: can you cook?”
She flushed again, and opened her mouth, then closed it. When she spoke, it was with tight calm. “I’m not looking to hire on as kitchen help, Empire-Jefe.”
“When I’m in the field, usually my man Ranjit does for both of us,” King said. “But I need him for other work now. You can carry our provisions on your mule and do our cooking and Robre’s; same daily rate for your work and your animals as the rest. Take it or leave it.”
Their eyes locked, and after a long moment she nodded. And you can control your temper somewhat, my red-haired forest nymph, he thought, inclining his head slightly. He wasn’t going to take a complete berserker along, no matter how attractive and exotic. Stalking the wild Sonjuh will add a little spice to our expedition, eh, what?
One of the pieces of advice his father had given him when he got his commission was that excitable women were wearing, but often worth the trouble.
A shout brought their heads around. Haahld had recovered enough to pull Sonjuh’s tomahawk out of the dead pine. He’d also recovered enough to start shrieking again, a torrent of curses and threats. His first throw was erratic but vigorous; not only Sonjuh but also half a dozen others went flat as it pinwheeled by. The handle struck a mule on the rump, and the beast flung both heels back and plunged across the meadow braying indignantly, knocking Robre down and nearly stepping on him. Haahld wrenched at another throwing-ax stuck in the tree, froth in his beard; several men shouted, and Sonjuh did a rapid leopard-crawl toward her crossbow.
King wasted no time. His Khyber knife was slung at the back of his belt with its hilt to the right. He drew it, and threw with a hard whipping overarm motion; like many who’d served on the North West Frontier, he’d spent some time learning how to handle the versatile Pathan weapon.
His had a hilt fringed with tiny silver bells, but the business part was eighteen inches of pure murder, a thick-backed single-edged blade tapering to a vicious point, like an elongated meat-chopper from the kitchens of Hell. It turned four times, flashing in the bright morning sun, then pinned Haahld’s arm to the stump like a nail, standing quivering with his blood running down the wood. The silver bells chimed…
Another silence, and Haahld’s eyes turned up in his head; his fall tore the chora- knife out of the wood, and the thump of his body on the ground was clearly audible.
“Somebody see to him,” King said. “And to that mule.”
Sonjuh was staring at him, in a way that made him stroke his mustache with the knuckle of his right hand in a quick sleek gesture; Robre was giving him a considering look, evidently reconsidering first impressions. Knife-throwing was more of a circus trick than a real fighting technique, but there were occasions when it was impressive, without a doubt.
“No trouble with your local laws?” King asked, sotto voce.
Robre shook his head. “ Naw. Haahld fell on his own doings.” A grin. “Couldn’t hardly do anything right, after that she-fiend hoofed him in the jewels. He’d been beat by a woman-’n’ beatin’ her back would just make him look mean as well as weak.”
“Well, their customs have the charm of the direct and simple,” King muttered to himself, in Hindi.
Sonjuh had gone to investigate his supplies after she retrieved her tomahawk and beasts, unpacking her mule beside the boxes and sacks. She returned leading her riding horse.
“Four o’ them ru pees,” she said, holding out a hand. “The stuff you need, I can get it in Dannulsford ’n’ be back in about an hour.”
King blinked in mild surprise; he’d left purchasing trail supplies to Robre, who seemed unlikely to miss anything important. When he said so, Sonjuh snorted.
“You’ve got enough cornmeal ’n’ taters ’n’ bacon and such,” she said contemptuously. “Plain to see a man laid it in. Men don’t live like people on their ownesome; they live like bears with a cookfire. If I’m going to cook, I’m going to do it right-I have to eat it, too, don’t I?”
King handed her the money and stood shaking his head bemusedly as she galloped off. Her dog sat near the pile of supplies she’d set him to guard, giving a warning growl if anyone approached them too closely.
“Hoo,” Robre said, looking south down the pathway that led to the Alligator Jefe’s steading. “Taking Sonjuh Head-on-Fire with us…ought to make the trip right interesting, Jefe King.”
“My thought exactly,” King said, and laughed.
“What’s that?” King asked, waving a hand to indicate the loud tock-tock-tock sound that echoed through the open forest of oak and hickory.
Robre’s brows rose; the Imperial was astonishingly ignorant of common things, for a man who was a better-than-good woodsman and tracker.
“That’s a peckerwood, Jefe,” he said. “A bird, sort of ’bout the size of a crow, with a red head ’n’ white under the wings. Makes that sound by knocking holes in trees, looking for bugs to eat. The call’s something like-”
The hard tocsin of the woodpecker’s beak stopped and gave way to a sharp, raucous keek-keek-keek.
“-like that.”
The fact that he’d fallen into the habit of calling the Imperial Jefe — technically the word for a clan chief, but often used informally for any important man-rather surprised him. Everyone else in the hunting party did, too, even Sonjuh, whose new gift-name of Head-on-Fire had stuck for good reason.
The men-at-arms from the coast obeyed like well-trained hunting dogs, of course, but they didn’t count; although they’d fought hard in recent wars against his people and the Mehk, legend said they were descendants of those who’d been slaves to the Seven Tribes in the olden times.
No, it was something in the man himself that did it. Thinking back, Robre appreciated how shrewd it had been to let Ranjit Singh be the one who tested the hand-to-hand skills of the men. Singh had beaten them all easily-Robre suspected he would have lost himself, and had been picking up tips on his wrasslin’ style since. That had let King’s follower start out with the prestige of one who was a hard man for certain-sure. Then he’d shown himself to be fair, as well, good-humored, a dab hand at anything to do with horses, as ready to pitch in to help with a difficult job as he was to thump a man who back-talked him.
Which in turn made his unservile deference to King’s leadership easy to copy.
Fact of the matter is, King’s unnatural good at getting people to do what he wants, Robre mused.
Most of all, the Imperial officer simply assumed that he was a lord wherever he went, one of the lords of humankind. Not with blows and curses and arrogance, which would only have aroused furious-murderous-resentment among proud clansmen, but with a quietly unshakable certainty that went right down to the bone. It set Robre’s teeth a little on edge, though he couldn’t put his finger on anything specific.
King stopped and looked around, his double-barreled hunting rifle in the crook of his left arm; Robre had his bow in hand, and a short broad-bladed spear with a bar across the shaft below the head slung over his back.
“Pretty country,” the Imperial said. “Not many farms these past two days, though. Not since that…what’s your word for it?”
“Station,” Robre said; that was the term for several families living close for defense, surrounded by a palisade. “No, not this far east. Too close to the Black River, ’n’ the swamp-devils.”
“Are there many of them?”
“Thicker ’n lice, down in the Big Thicket swamps. They hunt each other mostly, every little band against its neighbors, but every now ’n’ then some try crossing the river for man’s-flesh and plunder. More lately, what with more of our folk settling in the woods ’n’ making ax-claims.”
They’d been on the trail for a week and a half, counting from the morning they took the ferry across the Three Forks at Dannulsford, traveling without any particular hurry. Once past the bottomland swamps, too prone to flooding to have much permanent population, they’d traveled for two days through country where as much as a quarter of the land was cleared. Those new-won farms had petered out to an occasional outpost, then to land visited only for hunting and seasonal grazing, claimed by no clan. It rolled gently, rising now and then to something you might call a low hill, or sinking more and more often into swamp and marsh.
This particular stretch was dry and sandy, sun-dappled between tall wide-spaced trees, oak and hickory and tall sweet-scented pines; the lower ground was patched with a layer of sassafras-bright scarlet now-dogwood, and hophornbeam. The leaves of the oaks had turned a soft yellow brown where they weren’t flaming red, and the hickories had a mellower golden tint; the leaf-litter was already heavy, rustling about their feet. To the east and south the woods grew denser, with water-loving types like tupelo and persimmon and live oak; that was laced together with wild grapevines and kudzu.
It was thick with birds now, as well, parakeets eating acorns off the trees, grouse and wild turkey on the ground, and squirrels rustling through the undergrowth after the nuts. And not only birds…
“Ah!” King exclaimed softly, going down on one knee.
A wetter patch of ground showed where he parted the spicebush. In it was the mark of a narrow cloven hoof, driven deep. The tips of each mark were too rounded and the impression too square overall for a deer…
“Wild boar?” the Imperial asked softly.
“Don’t know what a boar is,” Robre said equally quietly; they often had to hunt for a word like that, though the Imperial had become fluent enough at the tongue of the clans, if thickly and weirdly accented. “Wild pig, right enough.”
He cast forward, following the trail and gauging the weight and length of stride. “Big un, too. My weight ’n’ half again. Might be a bull-pig with a sounder”-group of females and their young-“if one of the sows is in season.” Wild pigs bred year-round in this mild climate.
“Let’s go look, then,” King said with a grin, wrapping a loop of his rifle’s sling around his left elbow and pulling it taut; that gave him a firm three-point brace when the weapon was against his shoulder. “We could use some fresh pork.”
Robre made a note of the trick with the sling; he’d been getting a thorough rundown on Imperial firearms and how to use them. He also noted that King wasn’t the least bit bothered by the thought of going into thick bush after tricky, dangerous game. The clansman put an arrow to the knock of his recurved bow, a hunting broadhead with four razor-sharp blades to the pyramid-shaped iron head.
Damn, but I can’t help but like this buckaroo, Robre thought. Toplofty or no. Aloud, he said, “You’ve hunted them before?”
“Boar? Yes. But in India we take them on horseback, with lances,” King said casually, and Robre blinked at the thought.
“Well, mebbe yours are a might different. Ours here, they’ll mostly run, ’less you get between a sow ’n’ her young uns. Or a boar that’s breeding, he’ll charge you often as not ’cause he feels like killing something. Or sometimes they’ll fight out of pure cussedness.”
They followed the trail downhill, one to either side, walking at a slow steady pace with as little noise as possible; they kept trees between themselves and their goals as much as possible, and the wind was in their faces, giving no warning to any sensitive noses ahead.
Sonjuh was panting a little, trotting through an opening in the woods with the twenty-five-pound weight of the wild turkey on her back; she’d cleaned it and cut off the head-and removed her crossbow bolt-before throwing it over one shoulder and holding it by the feet as she headed back to camp, but it was a big cock-bird fat with feeding on fall nuts and acorns. It would make a pleasant change from dried provisions, now that the remaining venison from two days back was gone off, even if it would also be a chore to pluck it. But get the feathers off, rub a little chipotle on it, and roast it over a slow hickory fire with a few handfuls of mesquite pods thrown on the coals now and then-she’d bought a sack in Dannulsford-and stuffed with some corn bread, the pecans and mushrooms she’d gathered…
No better eating than a fat fall turkey cooked that way Her mouth watered. Then her gorge rose; sometimes just thinking of the word eating was enough to bring back the screams and the blood… For a long moment she halted and pressed a hand to her eyes, fighting for control. Slasher’s low warning growl brought her back to the light of day; he’d been trotting along, utterly content with the live-for-the-moment happiness of a dog out in the woods with his master, and wouldn’t make that noise for anything but a present threat.
Now he crouched and bristled, his nose pointing like an arrow to some chest-high underbrush. The girl lowered the gutted bird to the rustling leaves and squatted in cover, bringing her crossbow around. A chill struck at her gut-could it be swamp-devils? This was farther west than her father’s steading had been, but it was possible No. The bushes were moving, but in a random way; swamp-devils would be more cautious. Animals, then, but ones confident enough not to care if they were heard. That ruled out deer. Wild cattle or woods-bison would be visible, so Wind blew toward her, mild and cool. The dog’s nostrils flared, and hers caught a familiar scent, gamy and rank.
Oh, jeroo, she thought, trying to make out numbers and directions. At least a dozen, counting yearlings; there were glimpses of black bristly hide through the shrubs, and the ground was too begrown for a human to run fast or straight. A sounder of wild pig would go through it easy as snakes, and they were nearly as fast as a horse in a rush. She’d walked right into their midst in a brown study. Stupid, stupid. This could be more lively than I’d like. It all depended on which way they ran-it was a toss-up whether they’d flee or attack if they scented a human.
The ground rose to the south, and the underbrush opened out under tall hardwoods. She came to her feet and began to walk, placing her feet carefully and trying to look in all directions at once. If she was very lucky, none of them would be in her way.
Luck ran out. A low-slung form burst out of the reddish-yellow sassafras where it had been feeding on the seeds, squealing in panic; from its size, a four-month spring-born piglet. By pure reflex, Slasher spun in place and snapped, taking a nip out of the young pig’s rump and lending a note of agony to its cries.
“Oh, shee-yit on faahr!”
Sonjuh was up and running when the piglet’s squeals were joined by others, deeper and full of rage. She risked a look behind her and wished she hadn’t; the young pig’s momma was coming for her with legs churning in a blur of motion, big wicked head down, little eyes glinting and tusks wet and sharp-what woodsmen called a land-pike. It weighed more than she did, a long low-slung shape of bone and gristle tipped with knives, and well used to killing-wild pig ate anything they could catch from acorns and earthworms to deer and stray children, and even a cougar would hesitate to take on a full-grown adult. If this one caught her, they’d all feast this morning and crunch her bones for the marrow.
Slasher spun and charged the pig, mouth wide open and his growl ratcheting up into a roaring snarl-howl. Sonjuh spun, too, forced herself to steadiness, took stance, whipped the crossbow up to her shoulder. The fighting-dog was dancing around the wild pig, feinting, leaping back and rearing on his hind legs to dodge a slash that would have laid his belly open, then dashing in to snap at the hindquarters. The sow kept those down, pivoting and whipping her short tusks in deadly arcs. The girl brought the business end of the weapon down, sighting over tailfeather and bolt-head, then squeezed the trigger.
Twunk!
The hickory thumped her shoulder through the shift. A blur nearly too fast to see, the bolt hit the sow behind her shoulder, sinking almost to the stiff leather fletching. The animal screamed in pain, spinning again as it tried to reach the thing that hurt it, and the sound went out in a fine spray of blood from its muzzle. A lung-shot, fatal in minutes if not instantly.
Sonjuh didn’t wait to see. She was running again instantly, slinging the weapon as she went, dodging and jinking through the underbrush, shouting: “Slasher! Follow!” over her shoulder.
More squeals followed her, and some of them-another glance over her shoulder showed what was coming. A boar, full-grown. No, two of them-they must have been getting ready to fight for the females, just when she came along. Coyote had sent her luck, his kind; or maybe Olsatyn: Lord o’ Sky must be asleep, or out hunting, or sporting with his wives, because he certainly wasn’t listening to her prayers.
Now both the boars were after her, with the instinct of their kind to mob a threat added to the mindless belligerence of rutting season. Both of them were huge, night-black except for the grizzled color of the bristles that thickened to manes on their skulls and the massive shoulders, better than twice a big man’s weight, their short straight tails held up like banners. Long white tusks curled up and back on either side of their glistening snouts, sharp-pointed ivory daggers that could rip open a horse or bear, much less a human. They fanned out as they came, throwing up leaves and bits of bush in their speed, with all the grown females hot on their heels. Wet open mouths showed teeth and red gullets, let out hoarse rending screams of rage.
Breath burned dry in her throat, and her long legs flashed as she waited for the savage pain of a tusk knocking her down. There was a big oak ahead of her though, ten feet to the lowest branch — and two men coming out from behind hickories to either side.
“Run, you idjeets!” she screamed and went up the tree’s root-bole at a full-tilt run without breaking stride, the bark blessedly rough under fingers and the soft flexible leather of her moccasin-boots’ soles.
She leapt off that sideways, hands slapping down on the thick branch, her feet coming up as she hugged it like a lover with arms and legs both. A black missile flew through the air below her, and a bone dagger flashed inches below her back. With a convulsive effort she threw a knee over the limb and swung herself up and stood with an arm around the main trunk, panting and shuddering and on the edge of nausea as blood beat in her ears.
Eric King saw the red hair flying as Sonjuh Head-on-Fire cleared a bush with a raking stride and hit the ground in a blur of motion, head down and fists pumping as she ran-much like a deer, as she’d claimed, light on her feet and very quick.
“Run, you idjeets!” she screamed, as she went through the space between him and Hunter Robre, with her dog on her heels.
The boars were on her heels as well, far too close to shoot as they burst out of the undergrowth. King flung himself to one side with a yell, and heard Robre doing likewise. He landed on his back with a jarring thud, and the right barrel of the double rifle went off with a crack like thunder in his ear.
“Dammit,” he wheezed as he came back up on one knee. Then he shouted “Krishna!”
Something shot out of the yellow-red underscrub at him like a cannonball, and he snapped the weapon up to his shoulder. Instinct and training brought the sights between a pair of furious red-glinting piggy eyes barely ten feet away, and the recoil punished his shoulder.
Crack!
It was a sow; less dangerous than the boars, but only in an academic fashion seeing as it was nearly on top of him. The heavy. 477 slug blasted its way through the thick skull and the brain beneath it; the wild pig nosed into the leaf-mold and dropped at his feet, dead although its little sharp hooves were still kicking. King came back to his feet and broke open the action of the rifle, shaking out the spent brass and pulling two more long fat cartridges from the bandolier across his chest. As he snapped it shut, he saw a flickering montage: another sow dragging herself back into the bushes with her hind legs limp and one of Robre’s arrows through her spine; a boar landing again after a leap that had nearly caught Sonjuh, landing with an agility unbelievable in so gross a beast; the girl’s staring face in the tree; beyond that Slasher and the other boar whirling in a snapping, snarling, stabbing dance that cast up a fog of yellow leaves and acorns from the forest floor; Robre whipping out another arrow from his quiver and nocking it, drawing the shaft to his ear.
Then both men had more than enough to engage their attention, as the rest of the sounder boiled out of the brush and attacked with the reckless omnivore aggression that men and swine shared. It was a big group, in these man-empty woods so rich in their kinds of food, and not much afraid of humankind. King shot twice more before he had to use the empty double rifle to defend himself from a pig that seized it in her mouth, wrenching it away and then running off into the woods in panic flight. The rest of the sounder followed, less the dead.
Except for the boars.
King felt a profound wish for his rifle-loaded and in his hands, not lying uselessly a dozen paces off. Time seemed to slow like honey. Not far off a boar stood alone, the gouge of a bullet wound bleeding freely down one dusty-black flank, and an arrow standing out of a ham, making abortive stabs to either side with its tusks and panting like a steam engine in a Bihari coal mine. The other backed off from where Slasher held a natural fort behind a thick fallen log, turning just in time to take Robre’s arrow in the armor-thick hide and bone around its shoulders rather than the vulnerable flank. It staggered and then charged, and Robre ripped free the spear slung across his back by the simple expedient of snapping the rawhide thongs that bound it by main strength. He brought it around, dropping to one knee and thrusting the blade of the spearhead out to receive the living missile that hurtled toward him, mud and leaves spraying out behind it.
King had his own boar, and nothing but the Khyber knife in his hand. Its charge was slowed a little-a very little-by the arrow wound, and it came silently save for the bellows-panting of near exhaustion. The Imperial tensed himself to leap aside and then in-not much of a chance, because he was weary, too, and the sidewise strike of the boar’s head would be swifter than a hooded cobra.
“Kuch dar nahin hai!” he shouted, the ancient motto of his house. There is no such thing as fear!
A wolf-gray streak came from behind the boar, soaring over the litter of the forest floor, from shadow into light. Slasher’s jaws clamped down like a mechanical grab edged with ripping fangs on the beast’s hock just before it would have cannoned into the human. Snapping-swift it spun and tried to gash the dog, but the same motion flung Slasher around like a spinning top. King leapt as well, onto the boar. It was like landing on top of a living boulder, one that heaved beneath him with terrifying strength and ferocity, battering him about like a pea in a can. He reversed the chora — knife and slammed it into the thrashing mass beneath him, hanging on to the hilt like grim death with one hand and a handful of bristly mane with the other, working the blade back and forth between the boar’s ribs. It was dying, blood spraying out of nose and mouth, but it could still kill him. He twisted his legs about it and put forth all the strength that was in him.
Hands came into his field of vision, long slender hands, well shaped but with dirt beneath the fingernails and ground into the knuckles, holding a crossbow. The string released, and the bolt blossomed from the base of the boar’s skull. It shuddered, hammered the ground with its head, and died. King rose from the limp body.
Sonjuh was watching him, head tilted slightly to one side. “Why’d you jump in, when Slasher had him by the leg?” she said quietly. “You could’ve gone for your gun.”
King shook his head, suddenly aware of how glorious the young morning sunlight was. “He’d have killed the dog,” he said.
They were close. Suddenly the clan-girl was in his arms, and their lips met. The moment went on…
…until Robre cleared his throat. Sonjuh jumped back, two spots of red in her cheeks. King straightened, suddenly conscious that he’d lost his turban. The Bear Creek man was leaning on his spear beside the body of the other boar, scowling and brushing at a trickle of blood from his nostrils.
Eric King laughed, smoothing back his mustache with the knuckle of his right hand. “Looks like we’re having pork tonight,” he said gaily.
“I left a turkey just back there,” Sonjuh blurted, and ran off after it.
’N’ when the snow-winds lifted
Then summer came again;
Three summers of snow ’n’ ice
Then the warmth once more;
Olsatyn, he cursed ’n’ fled
No more he held the Sun enslaved
Black hammer that broke the Sun,
Broke on the sword of Lord o’ Sky;
He called the tribes out!
Out from where they sheltered
Blessed them for staying clean
Not eating of man’s-flesh,
When hunger was bitter;
Gave them His blessing
Gave seed corn ’n’ stock
Set the bounds ’n’ the bans
Named clan ’n’ tribe ’n’ law;
But those others who’d fallen
Who’d eaten of man’s-flesh;
Them did God curse forever
Lord o’ Sky gave us their lands;
With steel ’n’ fire we drove them out
Drove the devils east into the swamps
Festering land of evildoers
Eric King leaned back in his canvas chair and gnawed the last of the savory meat from a rib as he listened-one of the yearling piglets, to be precise, slathered with a fiery-hot tomato-based sauce full of garlic and peppers before grilling. Sonjuh dawtra Pehte had outdone herself, from the stuffed turkey to the pudding of cornmeal, molasses, and spices.
Hunter Robre sat on a log on the other side of the fire, his fingers moving on an instrument he called a gittah — surprisingly like the sitar in both form and name-as he half sang, half chanted his people’s creation-myth. The flickering of the low fire showed a ring of rapt bearded faces. And one beardless one, her chin propped in a palm and the other scratching in the ruff of the great gray dog lying beside her, the firelight bringing out the ruddy color of her hair as she puffed meditatively on a corncob pipe.
A huge crimson oak stood over the campsite, and its leaves took fire as well from the yellow flames, shifting in a maze of scarlet and gold amid the rising column of sparks. The stars above were bright and many, if you let your eyes recover from the fire glow a little. The air had turned soft and a little cool, with wisps of mist drifting over the little stream to the south; it smelled pleasantly of cooking and hickory smoke and horses. Somewhere a beast squalled in the distance, and an owl hooted.
King tossed the bone into the coals as Robre finished. Well, that’s another, he thought. I’ve heard worse. I’ve definitely heard sillier ones.
Every folk he knew of had some sort of legend attached to the Fall; even the Empire had Kipling’s great Exodus Cantos, about St. Disraeli and the evacuation that had taken his own ancestors from England to India. He smiled wryly to himself. Kipling had made it all sound very heroic, but the Kings had a tradition of scholarship as well as Imperial service, and lived near refounded Oxford. From what he’d read in sources of the time, it had been more of a panic flight, teetering on the brink of chaos, with only the genius of Disraeli and Salisbury and the others to make it possible at all. A lucky few had made it out to India and the Cape and Australia before the final collapse; the other nine-tenths of the population had stayed perforce, and starved, and died.
Robre’s version of his people’s origins made the founders of the Seven Tribes a host of saintly warriors, when they’d probably been a handful of scruffy but successful bandits; the great battles against the “devils” were probably bloody little skirmishes with a few hundred, or perhaps a few score, on each side.
Still, the epic had a certain barbaric vigor; much like the people who had made it. They’d certainly done well over the past few generations, pushing their borders back on all sides…from what Banerjii and the garrison commander at Galveston had told him.
“Heya, Jefe,” one of the clansmen said. “Tell us some more ’bout the Empire.”
He did; a rousing tale of raid and counter-raid along the North West Frontier courtesy of the great Poet Laureate, and described the mountains in his own home province, Kashmir. They were even more eager for stories of the great cities and oceangoing steamships, locomotives and flying machines, but those they took as fables, more so than their own tales of haunts and witches and Old Man Coyote, evidently some sort of minor godlet-trickster. Their own bogies frightened them, but foreign marvels were merely entertainment.
Although I think Miss Head-on-Fire believes me somewhat, because she wants to, King thought, conscious of her shining eyes. And you, as well, Robre Hunter, because you’re no fool and can listen and add two and two.
The clansman had noted the direction of Sonjuh’s eyes, as well, and was half-scowling. Jealous? King thought. The big clansman hadn’t shown much interest in the girl himself…but a man often didn’t discover he wanted a woman until she turned to another, and that was as true among natives as among the sahib-log, as natural in a nighted forest about an open fire as in the blazing jeweled halls of the Palace of the Lion Throne in Delhi.
King smiled again, and had one of the kegs of New Zealand whiskey brought and set out on a stump near one of the other cooking fires. It was a bit of a waste, being finest Dunedin single-malt, but such gestures never hurt; and what was the point of being wealthy if you couldn’t indulge yourself now and then? The local hirelings clustered about it eagerly; it was enough like their own raw corn-liquor to be familiar, and enough better that they recognized the difference. Robre brought three mugs over to where King sat and Sonjuh sprawled beside her villainous-looking guardian. He handed one to the girl-for a barbarian, his manners were almost courtly, in a rough-hewn way-and one to King.
“Sounds like a place worth seeing, your Empire,” the clansman said.
“It’s not a place, it’s a world,” King replied.
“Jeroo,” Sonjuh said with a sigh. “Seems the world’s a bigger place than we thought. Went to San Antwoin oncet with Pa, ’n’ that was a wonder-stone walls, ’n’ twice a hand of thousands within ’em. Sounds like that’s no more than Dannulsford Fair next to your home, Empire-Jefe. But I’d like to see it.”
King thought of her alone and bewildered and friendless on the docks of Bombay, or worse, Capetown, and winced slightly. Furthermore, she was just crazy enough to try getting passage on some tramp windjammer out of Galveston. She’d be a sensation at court if some wild chance took her that far, but that was no fate for a human being.
“That…that really wouldn’t be a very good idea, my dear,” he said. “A foreign land is more dangerous than these forests.”
Robre nodded. “Bare is your back without clan to guard it,” he said, with the air of someone quoting a proverb, which he probably was. “Cold is a heart among strangers.”
The redhead pouted slightly, and he went on a little hastily: “They’ll be a lot of sore heads tomorrow, if you were thinkin’ of moving on, Jefe.”
His nod took in the rowdy scene around the keg. Not everyone was there, of course; Ranjit Singh and the garrison troopers were standing picket tonight by turns. King might have trusted that duty to Robre, if none of the others, but the Sikh wouldn’t hear of anyone not in the Queen-Empress’s service doing guard duty.
“I was thinking of moving on,” King said, taking a little more of the whiskey and sighing satisfaction. The transplanted Scots of the South Island’s bleak Antarctic-facing shores had kept their ancestors’ skills alive. “I want a crack at those tigers before I go. But we can’t take the full caravan with us there.”
“No, true enough,” Robre said. “Not enough fodder for that many horses, either. And”-he flicked his eyes to Sonjuh-“that’s mighty close to the Black River. Swamp-devils prowl there.”
“Hmmm,” King said, stroking his mustache. “How much of a problem are they likely to be?”
“Not so bad, if you’re careful,” Robre said. “Mostly they live farther south ’n’ east, down in the Big Thicket country ’n’ the Sabyn river swamps. You mostly won’t see more ’n three, four of ’em together, grown bucks, that is, for all that there’s a lot of them down there. Also they’re short of real weapons, not hardly; they hate each other poison-bad, ’n’ who’d trade with them?”
King nodded. That was the common way of things, with those who’d kept up the cannibal ways that brought their ancestors through the terrible years of hunger and death after the Fall. When men hunted each other to eat, there could be no trust, and trust was what let even the wildest men work together. Usually man-eaters had no groupings larger than an extended family, and often they barely retained the use of speech and fire. Human beings were not meant to live like that; only the hammer from the skies and the planetwide die-off could have warped so many of the survivors so bitterly.
Sonjuh stirred. “There was twenty in the gang that hit our place,” she said. “Pa ’n’ me ’n’ the others, we killed four-they caught us by surprise. The posse got most of the rest, but a few escaped. ’N’ they all had iron.”
Of course, they can change, King thought. A lot of the European savages are organized enough to be dangerous. Not to mention the Russians, who are deadly dangerous.
Robre shook his head. “That was a freak, Head-on-Fire. There’s not been a raid that size in…well, not since Fast-Foot Jowan ’n’ his sons were killed, what, three years ago?”
“And the Kinnuh fam’ly, four before that. Before that, never, just bushwhacking by ones or twos. I tell you, they’re learning, ’n’ have been for years. If they ever learn to make big war parties-”
“Mebbe,” Robre said dubiously. He turned his head back to King. “We needn’t take more ’n four, five altogether,” he said. “More ’n’ you’re not likely to see the big cats. I went in alone, myself ’n’ never saw sign of the swamp-devils ’tall.”
“Four, then,” King said. “Ranjit Singh I’ll leave here to run the camp; he’ll complain, but someone has to do it. You, of course, and me, and two of the garrison soldiers with their rifles just in case-”
“And me!” Sonjuh said, rising. Robre began to say something; King cut him off with a negligent gesture. The redhead went on: “I won’t do anything hog-wild, I swear it by God. But you’ve seen I can take care of myself ’n’ carry my load. ’N’ if you do run into swamp-devils…this is what I came for!”
King thought for a long moment, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair. “All right, then, true enough. I don’t expect we’ll be gone more than four or five days-I can’t spend much more time than that anyway, my furlough is long but not indefinite. And you will not go haring off on your own. Understood?”
“I swear it, Empire-Jefe,” she said.
Robre sighed. “You’re the man payin’ for this,” he said unwillingly. “’N’ she’s right, Coyote nip her, she is as good a hunter as anyone on this trail but you ’n’ me.”
“Excellent,” King said. “Well, time to-”
“I’m for a walk,” Sonjuh said. She had relaxed from her cat-tense quiver, and smiled as she looked at him. “Care to walk along with me for a spell, Empire-Jefe?”
King smiled back; Robre gave a disapproving grunt and stalked away. Sonjuh tossed her head. “It’s our law, an unwed girl can walk out with a man if she pleases,” she said. “’N’ if her Pa ’n’ brothers don’t object.”
“What if her pa and brothers do object?” King asked, when they’d strolled far enough to be out of easy sight and hearing of the campfires.
Sonjuh looked up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “Why, they warn him off,” she said slyly. “Then beat ’n’ stomp him if he doesn’t listen.”
Good thing you’re an orphan, King thought but carefully did not say aloud, as he slid an arm around her supple waist. The girl leaned toward him, her head on his shoulder, smelling pleasantly of wood smoke and feminine flesh.
Some time later, Sonjuh gave a moan and pushed herself up on her elbows, looking down to where he kneeled between her legs, a dazed expression on her face.
“Jeroo!” she panted. “Corn Lady be my witness, I didn’t think there was so many ways of sporting!”
King grinned at her. “Benefits of a civilized education,” he said.
He’d been given an illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra at twelve, and had never had much trouble finding someone to practice with; when you were young, handsome, well spoken, athletic, rich, and the eldest son of a zamindar, you didn’t. From Sonjuh’s surprise and artless enthusiasm, he gathered that the native men here went at things like a bull elephant in musth.
“But I’ve been having more fun than you,” she said, and laughed. “And looks like you’re ready for some.”
His grin went wider, and he put a hand under each of her thighs, lifting them up and back.
She chuckled lazily: “Remember what I said about walkin’ out?” He nodded, reaching for the pocket of his uniform jacket; the girl had tossed it when she ripped it off his back. “Well,” she went on, “if the man gets her with child, then her Pa ’n’ brothers-’n’ the rest of the clan, too-see to it he takes her to wife. Just so you’d know, Empire-Jefe.”
“Behold another wonder of civilization,” he said, busy with fingers and teeth on one of the foil packets; being an optimist and no more modest than most young men, he’d slipped half a dozen into his pocket earlier that evening. “Vulcanized rubber.”
Sonjuh stared for a moment, then burst into a peal of laughter. “Looks like it’s wearin’ a rain-cloak!”
King growled and seized a shin under each arm V: THE PEOPLE OF THE BLACK GOD
Hunter Robre spread his hands. “I can’t make the cats come where they don’t have a mind to,” he said reasonably, then slapped at a late-season mosquito. Dawn had brought the last of them out, to feed before full sunlight.
The blind where they’d been waiting all night was woven of swamp-reeds, on a hillock of drier ground. The wild-cow yearling they’d staked out was beginning to smell pretty high, and all their night had gotten them was the sight of a couple of cougars sniffing around, and two red wolves who’d had to be shooed off. Forest stood at their back beyond the swamp, tupelo and live oak and cypress knotted into an impenetrable wall by brush and vines, the trees towering a hundred feet and more overhead. Even on a cool autumn morning the smell was heavy and rank, somehow less cleanly than the forests where he spent most of his time. Wisps of mist drifted over the surface of the Black River where it rolled sluggish before them; the other bank was higher than this, and thick with giant pine higher than ship’s masts.
“No, you can’t,” Eric King said, infuriatingly reasonable. He sighed. “I don’t expect that tigers of any sort are too numerous here, although it’s perfect country for them.”
“They aren’t common,” Robre agreed. “Weren’t never seen until my pa’s time, when he was my age.” Then he puzzled at the way the Imperial had said it. “Why shouldn’t there be more tigers here, if it’s such good tiger-country? And how would you know?”
King pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket-that cloth coat had a hunting shirt beat all hollow, and Robre had decided to have a seamstress run him up one-and offered one to his guide. Robre accepted; they were tastier than a pipe, and a lot less messy than a chaw. For a moment they puffed in silence, blowing plumes of smoke at lingering mosquitoes: it didn’t matter now if the scent warned off game.
“There weren’t any tigers here before the Fall-before the time when Olsaytn stole the Sun, you’d say.”
Robre’s brows went up. Odd, he thought. When he thought of the Before Time, it was simply as very long ago, the time of the songs and the heroes; certainly before his grandsire’s grandsire’s time. The Imperial seemed to think of it more as a set date, as if it were something that had happened in his own lifetime. Odd way to think. Mebbe it’s all that writing they do.
“Why not?” Robre said. “Plenty of beasts a tiger can tackle that a cougar or wolf can’t. What were those fancy words you used last night… ecological niche?”
King shrugged. “I don’t know. There just weren’t, or so our books say. Why are there elephants in India, and not here? Nobody knows.”
Robre grunted noncommittally; he wasn’t quite sure if he believed in elephants yet.
King went on: “No lions either. When the fall came, they-the ancestors of the ones you’ve got now-probably escaped from circuses, or zoos.”
They thrashed out the meaning of those words. Robre rubbed his chin, feeling stubble gone almost silky and reminding himself to shave soon. “Wouldn’t folks have eaten them?” he said.
“They probably did eat the elephants in the menageries.” King grinned. “But a few predators would have been turned loose before people realized how bad things were going to get. Then, in the chaos, when every man’s hand was against every other’s…well, hungry tigers used to being around people, they’d be good at picking off stragglers, wouldn’t they? And most of the dying happened fast; by the third or fourth year, people were scarce again in these lands, very scarce. Other things-game and feral livestock that survived in out-of-the-way corners, or country farther south-bred back faster than humans, spreading over the empty lands as the vegetation recovered, and so gave the big cats plenty to hunt. They breed quickly themselves, so even a few pairs could produce a lot of offspring. Eventually they’ll fill all the land humans haven’t taken over again, but that will need another century or two.”
Robre nodded. It made sense in a twisty sort of way, like most of what King said when he wasn’t doing an obvious leg-pull. It still made his head itch on the inside…
“And because they’re descended from so few, they’ll have a lot of mutants…freaks, that is, due to inbreeding. Like the black-with-yellow-stripes you shot…What’s that, by the way?” King said casually, pointing with the hand that held the cigarette.
“What’s what?”
Robre turned and looked upstream, across the Black River. Then his eyes grew very wide, and he whipped the cigarette out of his mouth, crushed it out, did the same with King’s. The Imperial froze as Robre laid a hand across his mouth, and they crouched watching through the slits in their blind.
The light was growing now, and the mist on the river to the north was lifting. What had showed as mere hints of shape turned hard and definite. A canoe, a big cypress log hollowed out and pointed at both ends, big enough for ten men to kneel and drive their paddles into the mirror-calm surface of the morning river. Beside him King leveled his binoculars and swore, swore very softly in a language Robre didn’t understand. He did understand the sentiment, especially since it was the first time the Imperial had seen the swamp-devils. Robre’s own eyes went wide as a second canoe followed the first, then a third…more and more, until a full ten were in view, the foremost nearly level with them.
He put out a hand, and after a moment King passed him the binoculars. He’d learned to use them well-another thing he’d save to buy from Banerjii, if he could-and his thumb brought the image sharp and clear.
It is swamp-devils, he thought helplessly. But it can’t be. Not that many together!
There was no mistaking them, though. The sloping foreheads and absent chins, faces hideously scarred that grew only sparse bristly beards, huge broad noses, narrow little eyes beetling under heavy brows. The build was unmistakable, too, heavy shoulders and long thick arms, broad feet.
“I thought they were men,” King whispered, shaken.
“They were, or leastways their fore-folks were, when we drove ’em into the east.”
Swamp-devils right enough, but only a few carried the clubs of ashwood with rocks lashed into a split end that were the commonest tool-weapon of the cannibals. Nearly all the rest had spears with broad iron heads, black bows with quivers of arrows, knives and tomahawks at their belts. They couldn’t have gotten all that in raids on his folk and the Kaijan settlements east beyond the Sabyn.
After an eternity, the last of the canoes passed-a full hundred swamp-devil bucks, in plain sight of each other and without a fight breaking out. They kept silence as well, paddling swiftly along the eastern bank, occasionally scanning the western shore. He could feel the weight of their stares, and froze into a rabbit’s immobility until the last one pulled out of sight.
“Lord o’ Sky!” he gasped. “Lord o’ Sky!”
“Well,” King said whimsically. “I gather that this means trying for tiger on the east bank of the river is definitely out.”
Sonjuh dawtra Pehte hummed tunelessly to herself as she stirred the ham and disks of potato in the frying pan-small children had been known to cry when she sang, but she liked the sound, which was what mattered. The morning was bright, and cool by the standards she was used to; the smell of the frying food mingled pleasantly with the damp dawn forest. Birds were calling, in a chorus of clucks and cheeps and Jeroo, I’m actually happy, she thought. That brought a tang of guilt, but only slightly-the Lord o’ Sky had heard her oath, and she intended to keep it or die trying. The Father-God wouldn’t care whether or not she regretted the dying. Of course, E’rc doesn’t plan on staying. That brought a stab, and he’d never hidden it, either…
Running feet sounded through the woods. Slasher woke and pointed his nose in their direction. Sonjuh caught them a few seconds later; she’d already set the food aside and reached for her crossbow. The two coastlander men-at-arms in Imperial service dropped their camp chores-armfuls of wood in one case, fodder gathered for their single pack mule in the other-and went for their rifles. They moved quickly to kneel behind cover on either side of the camp, looking outward in either direction as they worked the actions of their weapons and loaded a cartridge. Even then, she had an instant to notice that. Her people had never had much use for the coastmen, but these were very smooth; evidently they’d learned a lot, in the twenty years or so since the Imperial ships arrived to build their fort on Galveston Island.
She relaxed a bit as it became clear that it was Robre and Eric King loping back to the little forward camp. Not much, because she could see their faces.
“Swamp-devils?” she said.
“More ’n I’ve ever seen in one place,” Robre said grimly.
She turned and kicked moist dirt over the fire, stamping quickly to put it out before it could smoke much.
Robre nodded, and gave a concise description of the canoes they’d seen. “You were right, Head-on-Fire. ’Fore God the Father, there were a hundred of ’em if there were one. What’s happening? ”
“Whatever it is, it’s not good,” Sonjuh said, her voice stark. Jeroo, there goes being happy, all of a sudden. She didn’t feel bad, though. Alert, the blood pumping in her ears, everything feeling ready to go. Pa, Ma, sisters-soon you can rest easy, stop comin’ to me in dreams.
Eric had spread a map out on the ground; she craned forward to look at it. The written names were nothing to her or Robre, but the bird’s-eye view of the land was easy enough to grasp, and they’d both learned how to use them.
“We’re here,” Eric said, tapping their location-not far from the west bank of the Black River. “As I understand it, the…swamp-devils…live mostly here.” His finger moved down to a patch of stylized reeds and trees.
“The most of ’em,” Robre confirmed. “But you’ll find little bands all through-” His hand swept upward, north and east. “Then they sort of thin out, there’s big patches of empty country, ’n’ then Cherokee ’n’ Zarki; I don’t know much about them-nobody does. Then east beyond the Sabyn, you get the Kaijun; sort of backwards, from what I hear, but clean.”
“Well, what we just saw was a large group of them moving from north to south, where most of them are. I’d say it was in the nature of a gathering, wouldn’t you?”
The two natives looked at each other. “Jeroo,” Sonjuh whispered, past a throat gone thick. “If the devils is gathering, then our folk have to know-raids, big raids.”
“Raids with hundreds of ’em,” Robre said. “Lord o’ Sky, that’s not a raid, that’s a war, like with the Kumanch or even the Mehk-but they don’t kill everyone ’n’ eat the bodies.”
“A pukka war,” Eric said. When Sonjuh gave him a puzzled look, he went on: “A real war, a big war, a proper war.”
Robre put up a hand. “Wait a heartbeat,” he said. “What are we going to tell our folks?”
Sonjuh felt a flash of anger. “That the swamp-devils-”
“That the swamp-devils use canoes? That we saw a big bunch of ’em?” Robre shook his head. “What’s Jefe Carul of your Alligators, or Jefe Bilbowb of us Bear Creek folk-never mind clans farther west or south-going to say?”
“Ahhh,” Eric King said, and Sonjuh closed her mouth.
If they both thought that, there was probably something to it. She reached for her pipe-it always helped her to think-then made her hand rest on her tomahawk instead.
“We need to learn more,” she said, shifting on her hams.
“We do that, ’n’ nothing else,” Robre said, giving her a respectful glance; Sonjuh warmed a little to him for that.
“So,” King said. “Who goes, and who goes back to give a warning.”
The girl furrowed her brows. “Well, no sense in me going back-Mad Sonjuh Head-on-Fire, dawtra Stinking, Friendless Pehte.” Robre had the grace to blush. “Everyone knows I’ve a wasp-nest betwixt my ears about the swamp-devils. Wouldn’t listen.”
“Nor to an outlander like myself,” King said thoughtfully. “Robre would be the best, then; he has quite a reputation.”
Robre flushed more darkly under his outdoorsman’s tan, his blue eyes volcanic against it. “Run out on my friends? And I’m the best woodsman, meaning no offense. You’ll need me.”
The three looked at each other. They had less than sixty years between them, and when Sonjuh gave a savage grin the two men answered the expression with ones of their own, just as reckless.
“I’ll send the two privates…the men-at-arms…back to Ranjit Singh at the main camp,” King said. “And as for us, we’ll go see what the hell is brewing.”
“What hell indeed, Jefe,” Robre said somberly, his smile dying. “Hell indeed.”
The telescopic sight brought the canoe closer than Eric King would have wanted, on aesthetic grounds; and while there was no disputing their usefulness, he generally considered scope sights unsporting. But this isn’t a game, he thought, as he kept the cross-hairs firmly on the lead man…or man-thing…in the vessel. The three swamp-devils were as hideous as the ones he’d seen before; even knowing what inbreeding, intense selection and genetic drift could do, it was hard to believe that their ancestors had been men.
More like a cross between a giant rat and a baboon, he thought.
They had their wits about them, though; they came down from the north three-quarters of the way toward the western shore, beyond easy bowshot from the east and where it would be simple to run the cypress-log dugout into a creek and disappear. All three kept their eyes moving, and they had bows and quivers or short iron-headed spears to hand. He closed his mind on a bubble of worry, and switched his viewpoint southward. A little hook of land stood fifty yards out in the Black River, covered in reeds and dense vine-begrown brush. At the water’s edge lay a deer-a yearling buck, with a broken arrow behind its right shoulder, still stirring and trying to rise. He nodded approval; that had been a very good touch. The westering sun was touching the tops of the trees behind them, throwing long shadow out over the water. It would dazzle eyes trying to look into the deep jungle-like growth along the riverbank proper, under the heavy foliage of the tupelos and sweet gums.
His lips curled in a satisfied snarl as the swamp-devils froze, their paddles poised and dripping water that looked almost red in the sunset-light. His finger touched delicately against the trigger, hearing the first click as it set, leaving only a feather-light pressure to fire. Still, that would be noisy.
The savages turned their canoe toward the mud, gobbling satisfaction at the sight of so much meat ready-caught; they’d assume the deer had run far with the shaft in it, losing whoever shot it. They drove the dugout ashore and the first two hopped out, grabbing the sides and pushing it farther into the soft reed-laced dirt.
Yes, shooting would be far too likely to attract unwelcome attention. He turned his head and nodded fractionally to Sonjuh. The girl let her breath out in a controlled hiss and squeezed the trigger of her own weapon. The deep tunngg of the crossbow’s release still brought the first swamp-devil’s head up; he was just opening his mouth to cry out when the quarrel took him below the breastbone, and he fell thrashing to the ground. At the same instant Slasher came out of the tall grass before them and charged baying, belly low to the ground as he tore forward. King and the native girl charged, as well, on the dog’s heels, tulwar and Khyber knife in his hands, bowie and tomahawk in hers.
The second swamp-devil let out a horrified screech, turning back and snatching for his spear, almost turning in time for the point to be of use. Then Slasher was upon him, and he was rolling on the ground screaming and trying to keep those fangs from his face and throat. The third was quicker-witted, or perhaps had just a second longer. He lifted his bow, and was drawing on the ambushers when an eruption of water and mud behind the canoe distracted him. Snake-swift he threw the bow aside and pulled out his tomahawk, half rising to meet Robre’s onslaught. The two struck, and fell into the mud at the edge of the water with a tremendous splash.
King accounted himself an excellent runner, but Sonjuh drew ahead of him, her feet light on the soft ground that sucked at his boots. I’m eighty pounds heavier, that’s all, he thought. Slasher’s teeth were an inch from the screaming swamp-devil’s face when she scooped up the spear he hadn’t had time to use, thrust it under his ribs, then turned and threw it three paces into the back of the last. Robre wrenched himself free of the slackening grip and chopped twice with his tomahawk.
“I’d have had him in a second,” he grumbled. “But thanks.”
“Then he wouldn’t have counted,” Sonjuh said, flashing him a smile. She bent, grabbed a handful of the man’s filthy, matted hair and cut a circle through the scalp before wrenching the bloody trophy free.
King swallowed. Oh, well, she is a native, he thought, and pulled the spear out of the swamp-devil’s back instead of speaking. He washed it in the stream, then peered at the head. The light was uncertain, but he could see that the edge of the weapon was ragged, although wickedly sharp. Uneven forging, he thought. That happened if you didn’t keep the temperature even enough. An amateur did it. Not at all like the work of the Seven Tribes, whose smiths were excellent in their primitive way. But the long-hafted hatchet still in the savage’s belt was very well made, and the knife likewise. He frowned; according to what he’d been told, the eastern savages had no knowledge of ironworking themselves, but…
“Is there much iron ore in these woods?” he asked.
“Plenty,” Robre said, wading back ashore after washing the mud and blood off in the river. “Bog-iron, grows in lumps in the swamps. That’s one reason our Seven Tribes folks have been pushing across the Three Forks into the forest country-charcoal and ore. Iron from the Cherokee and Mehk costs.”
“Well, I think someone has been teaching your swamp-devils how to smelt for themselves,” King said grimly. “And how to work it.”
Robre snorted. “Be a good trick, to keep ’em from eating their teachers.”
Sonjuh shook her head. “No, it makes sense, Hunter-man. Like their gathering in big bands. They’re changing, ’n’ not for the better.”
Well, technically, it is for the better, King thought. They’re starting to live a little more like human beings and a little less like mad beasts. The problem is that men are more dangerous than beasts. And they’re still a lot closer to vicious mad beasts than to real human beings, like my friends here.
“What’s this?” Robre said. “Never seen anything quite like it.”
He pulled something from the ear of the savage who’d been rear paddle-steersman-in the canoe. King took it, looked, and felt sweat break out on his brow; his stomach clenched, and a feeling of liquid coldness stole lower in his guts.
It was a piece of silver jewelry, shaped to the likeness of a peacock’s tail. The two natives gaped at him; like any high-caste member of the sahib-log, he was not a man given to quick emotions, or to showing those he did have. The way his soul stood naked on his face for an instant astonished them.
“You seen that before?” Robre asked sharply.
“It’s Russian,” he said softly, after a moment to bring himself back to self-mastery. “It’s the sign of initiation into the cult of Tchernobog-the Black God. The Peacock Angel is one of His other names. Yes, I’ve seen this before.”
The Czar in Samarkand had always been among the Empire’s worst enemies. Partly that was a rivalry that went back before the Fall-St. Disraeli had spent much of his earlier life frustrating Russian designs on the Old Empire’s territories, or so the records said. Most of the rivalries were Post-Fall, though, after the Russian refugees in Central Asia had made contact with the descendants of the British Exodus in India. There had been some direct conflict, though not much: the Himalayas lay between, and the uninhabited wastelands of Tibet, and the all-too-inhabited hill country of Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush. Fighting through a hostile Afghanistan was like trying to bite an enemy when you had to chew your way through a wasp’s nest first. The Afghans hated the Angrezi Raj only somewhat less than they loathed the Russki.
“They’re enemies of ours,” King said. “Man-eaters.”
“Like the swamp-devils ’n’ us?” Robre asked.
“Not very. During the Fall…It’s a long story. They ate their subjects, not their own people, mostly; afterwards they kept it up as part of their new religion, making human sacrifices to their Black God, and then eating the bodies as a…rite that bound them together. Their nobles and rulers, at least. But they like to spread their cult, when they can. I can see how it would change your swamp-devils, too-it would give them a way to work together.”
Robre made a disgusted sound, and Sonjuh swore softly before she said, “Like I said. We’ve got to get more scout-knowledge about this.”
“So we do,” Robre said grimly.
“So we do indeed,” King added in the same tone. “For the Empire, as well.”
His mind drew a map. The center of Russian power was in Central Asia, between Samarkand where the Czar had his seat, and Bokhara, the religious capital, where the High Priests of Tchernobog were centered. Theoretically the Czar claimed much of European Russia, but it was still mainly wasteland, thinly populated by tribes whom he tried to reclaim with missionaries and Cossack outposts.
Still, they could get out through the Baltic and the Black Sea, King thought. There were Imperial bases in the lands facing reclaimed and recivilized Britain, but they were little more than trading posts and bases for explorers and traders and missionaries of the Established Church. The interior…he’d just come from there, and parts of it were almost as bad as this.
Yes, they could slip small groups out-pretend to be something else, Brazilians or whatever-travel by ship… But why spend the energy to interfere in this barbarous wasteland? What difference could it make to the contending Powers?
Well, the area is theoretically part of the Empire, he thought, with the part of his mind trained at Sandhurst, the Imperial military academy in the Himalayan foothills. It’s naturally rich, has plenty of unexploited resources, and it could become populous. When we finally get around to developing it, we’ll probably rely on the Seven Tribes-make them an autonomous federation, and give them backing.
That was one of the standard methods, far cheaper and more productive than outright conquest, if you could find suitable natives.
If the Czar can weaken them and strengthen their enemies-and Krishna, we’ll never give the swamp-devils anything but the receiving end of a punitive expedition-it’ll make this region less of a source of strength to the Empire. Which means, he realized dismally, that this ceases to be an adventure that I could back out of, and becomes a duty that has to be seen through to the end. Oh, well.
“Let’s go,” he said aloud.
Robre Hunter hopped out of the canoe. Slasher disappeared into the blackness ahead, silent as a ghost; Sonjuh followed him, nearly as quiet. King and he pushed together, running the dugout into the soft mud under an overhang; the current had cut into a bluff, exposing the root-ball of a big live oak tree and making what was almost a cave. They arranged bushes and reeds to hide the vessel and waited until Sonjuh returned. It was very dark here, with the rustling leaf-canopy above cutting out most of the starlight, and the moon wouldn’t be up for a while. The smell of silt-heavy water and decay was strong, but he found himself sniffing deeply to catch the unmistakable man-eater stink.
Now, don’t get yourself worked up into a lather, he told himself sternly. No more dangerous than those there wild pigs.
Although there was something about the prospect of being eaten by things that walked on two legs and could talk that made his scrotum draw itself up the way no pack of wolves or wild dogs or stalking big cat could do. He was relieved when Sonjuh stuck her head over the tangle of roots and gave a slight hiss.
The Imperial made a stirrup of his hands to boost Robre up, and a flash of a grin with it; the unexpected resentment he had felt over her walking out with the Imperial faded a little more. There was a faint path on the natural levee above, more of a deer-track than anything else. Traveling on a beaten way was dangerous, but it saved time-and the noise you made in the underbrush was dangerous, too, in hostile country. He took the lead, with King in the middle and Sonjuh on rear guard; Slasher was weaving in and out ahead of them, dropping back for contact with his mistress every now and then.
Even then, he felt a tinge of envy toward Sonjuh for the well-trained beast. Quite a girl in every damn way, he thought, then, Keep your mind on business, idjeet.
Eyes were little good in dark this deep. He kept his ears working as he walked, nose, the feeling you got from air on your skin. Once he held up a clenched fist, and the others paused. Slasher had his nose pointed in the same direction, quivering. They went to their bellies in the trailside growth, eeling their way along, until the glimmer of firelight came through. More cautious still, moving with infinite care, he came closer and parted a final screen of tall grass with his fingers, making just enough space to see out.
Oh, shee-it on faahr, he thought.
There were the canoes they’d seen, and as many again, drawn up on the beach. A campfire burned higher, and something seethed in a big iron pot hung; knowing swamp-devils, his stomach twisted at what might be cooking, from the pork-smell of it. Every troop or family of them had one such pot, heirloom and symbol…A clump of them sat around the fire, at least half a dozen, reaching in to pull gobbets out or dip up hot broth in wooden ladle-spoons, talking in their gobbling, grunting tongue, snarling and snapping at each other occasionally. One sank his teeth into another’s ear, hanging on until three or four of the others kicked him loose.
King came up beside him, whispered in his ear: “We could make our retreat a little safer, don’t you think? I wouldn’t like to come running back and meet those chappies.” He went on for a few soft sentences.
“Good idea, Jefe,” Robre said; it was a risk, but it would give them an added margin of safety on their return if it worked. If it didn’t and the sentries were able to rouse their fellows deeper in the woods, the three of them could just high-tail it.
He drew an arrow from his quiver, stuck its point in the earth, drew more and set them ready to hand. Sonjuh settled in behind branches, down on belly and elbows-that was one advantage of a crossbow, you could shoot it lying down. When-if-he came back from this trip, he’d have an Imperial rifle that could do that and more besides. Still, the bow had some advantages. King turned to take rear guard, with the firepower of his rifle.
I’d have done the same in his place, Robre thought. But I’d have argued about it. The Imperial was a good man in a tight place, and not the least shy-no doubt about it. But he was disturbingly…cold-blooded, that’s the word. Though not too cold-blooded to attract the attentions of a very attractive girl He thrust everything from his mind save the bow as he came erect. It was a hundred long paces from here to the fire, a long shot in the night. The sinew and horn and wood of the Kumanch weapon creaked as he drew, a full 120 pounds of draw. Back to the angle of the jaw, sighting over the arrowhead and then up…he loosed, and the string snapped against the black buffalo-hide bracer on his left wrist.
One of the grisly figures around the fire looked up suddenly, perhaps alerted by the whisper of cloven air; half-animal they might be, but the savages were survivors of generation upon generation of survivors in a game where losers went into the stewpot. He began to spring erect, but that merely put the arrow through his gut rather than into his chest. With a muffled howl he dropped backwards into the flames and lay there, screeching and sprattling, the iron pot falling on him and its contents gushing out to three-quarters smother the fire. His second shot was on its way before the first hit, and the third three seconds after that, and then he was firing as steadily as a machine. Sonjuh fired her crossbow-and then had to take a third of a minute to reload it, bracing her foot in the stirrup at its head and hauling back on the jointed, curved lever that bent the heavy bow and forced the thick string into the catch.
By that time his quiver was about empty. The cannibals had churned about for a moment, eyes blinded by the fire they’d been grouped around, until more of them fell. Then they turned and ran howling at the woods from where the deadly shafts came; Robre answered, firing smooth and quick, oblivious of the shafts that were whickering around him from the swamp-devil’s bows. One had a better idea; he turned and ran yelling up the trail that led away from the riverbank. Robre drew, drew until his arms and chest felt as if the muscle would rip loose from the bone. He loosed, watched-and four seconds later that last shaft dropped out of the night into the fleeing cannibal’s back, sending him pitching forward limp at the edge of sight.
“Let’s go,” King said, his voice stark. He slapped Robre on the shoulder as he passed. “Well done, man. Well shot indeed.”
Sonjuh touched his arm, as well. “Better ’n well. That shot was three hundred paces, in the night-it’ll be told around the fires for a hundred year ’n’ more.”
“If anyone gets back to tell,” he mumbled, embarrassed.
The men spent a few hectic minutes pushing the dugouts into the current, sending them on their long journey down to the Gulf-the Black River reached the sea to the northeast of Galveston Bay. The log canoes were heavy, but none of them so heavy two strong men couldn’t shift them; they glided away silently into the darkness, turning slowly as they glided empty into the night. While they worked Sonjuh went from one body to the next with her tomahawk and knife in hand, recovering Robre’s arrows and making sure the enemy dead were unlikely to twitch. King looked up and winced slightly; the clansman blinked in surprise. The only good swamp-devil was a dead one…and for that matter, even if they deserved a favor you weren’t doing a man one leaving him with an arrow through the gut and burns over half his body.
“Let’s leave one canoe,” Robre gasped, as they finished their work. “We might be coming back faster than we go-rather not have to dog-leg a half a mile north, if that’s so.”
King nodded. “And now, let’s see what’s going on.”
Ten, Sonjuh dawtra Pehte thought exultantly as she eeled forward on her belly. Ten scalps! Ma, you can rest quiet. Mahlu, Mahjani, Bittilu, soon you can rest, my sisters.
It was not quite so dark as it had been earlier, with the moon huge on the northeastern horizon, hanging over the swamp-forest ahead. The land sloped down here, away from the section of natural levee along the river behind them. It grew thicker and ranker, laced with impenetrable vine and thicket along the trail, then opened out into cypress-swamp, glowing ghostly as the lights of many fires on islets and mounds in the muddy shallow water filtered through the thick curtains of Spanish moss. They stopped there, at the border where the trail opened out, and stared.
“Shiva Bhuteswara,” King muttered, in the odd other language he sometimes fell into. “Shiva, Lord of Goblins.”
They pullulated over the swamp, squatting in mud and on beaten-down reeds, swarming, erupting in screaming throat-rending fights that ended when others appointed to the task clubbed them down again. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. On the patches of higher ground crude altars of logs stood, with figures strapped across them-swamp-devils, and others that looked like normal men and women. Those were mostly hundreds of yards away, and she was thankful for it. What she could see brought memories back and the taste of vomit at the base of her throat. In the center stood an altar taller than the others, built on a platform of cypress logs. Standing upon it was a figure in black, silhouetted against a roaring fire. He raised his arms and silence fell, save for the screams-then a chanting, discordant at first, growing into unison.
“Tchernobog! Tchernobog! Tchernobog!”
Drums joined it, war-drums of human hide stretched over bone, thuttering to the beat of calloused palms. The beat walked in her blood, shivered in her tight-clenched teeth.
“What does that mean?” Robre asked.
“Tchernobog,” King whispered back. “Black God. Peacock Angel; the Eater of Worlds. That’s the one who taught them.” He hesitated, looked at both of them. “If I kill him, there’s a chance they’ll be demoralized and run. On the other hand, there’s a chance they’ll come straight for us. At the very least, they’ll be short of leadership beyond the kill-and-eat level. Shall I?”
Robre nodded. Sonjuh did, as well. “He’s the cause of our hurts,” she said. “Kill him!”
King nodded in the gloom, the shadow of his turban making his outline monstrous. He unslung the heavy double rifle, lay behind a fallen log, waited a long second. A silence seemed to fall about him, drinking in sound. He could be more still than any man she’d ever met, and it was a bit disconcerting-like his habit of crossing his legs in an impossible-looking position and doing what he called meditating.
Now there was a slight, almost imperceptible hiss of exhaling breath, and his finger stroked the trigger.
Crack. The sound was thunder-loud, and she’d never seen the weapon fired at night. The great bottle-shaped blade of red-orange fire almost blinded her, and left her eyes smarting and watering. She looked away to get her night vision back, blinking rapidly. The foreigner who’d taught the wild men how to act together-the Russki — was staggering in a circle. At six hundred paces, Eric’s weapon had torn an arm off at the shoulder; the swamp-devils were throwing themselves flat in terror, their voices a chorus of shrieking like evil ghosts.
Crack. The distant figure fell.
“Dead as mutton,” King said. “And now, let’s go.”
Scarred chinless faces were turning their way now, the huge goblin eyes staring. The moonlight would be enough for them; legend said that they saw better by night than true men did. Sonjuh came to her feet and ran, with Slasher trotting at her heel. Behind her the sound of the others’ feet came, and behind them more of the squealing, shrieking horde. There must be hundreds of hundreds of them…
The gun roared again, and again. Below it she could hear Robre’s bow snapping; they must be discouraging the foremost pursuers. Sonjuh kept her head down and ran, the cool wet air of the riverbottom night was good for it. She blinked in surprise as the riverside came into sight, moonlight making a long rippling highway on it. There was no time to waste; she tossed her crossbow into the last of the big dugouts and dug her heels into the mud, putting her back to the wood and pushing.
Nothing happened, nothing save that stars and glimmers danced across her vision as she strained. It did give her a good look at what was going on behind. Eric came out first, panting so that she could hear him across fifty paces, turned, knelt, breaking open his weapon and reloading. Behind him Robre came, turned, drew, shot, drew, shot-incredibly graceful and swift for so large a man. Sonjuh abandoned her efforts at the canoe, scurried over the sand, grabbed the quivers of the dead swamp-devils, pitched them into the canoe, went back to shoving. Was that a slight movement, a sucking sound in the mud? Her feet churned through slickness.
“Lord o’ Sky burn you, you stupid log, move!” she shrieked in frustration; her own sweat was stinging her chewed lips like fire.
Another crack-crack as Eric fired his rifle. Two cannibals almost to spearcast of Robre pitched backwards, one with most of the top of his head disappearing in a spray of blood that looked black in the moonlight. Robre came pelting back past the Imperial, threw his bow into the canoe, bent to put his shoulder beside hers.
A spray of swamp-devils came out of the trailhead into the open, howling like wolves with every step, their tomahawks and knives glittering like cold silver fire in moonlight and starlight. Eric had slung his rifle; now he drew the revolver from his side. He stood erect, shoulder turned to his enemies, his feet at right angles to each other and his left hand tucked into the small of his back, weapon extended. It seemed a curiously formal pose…
Crack. Much lighter than the boom of the hunting rifle; more like a spiteful snap, with a dagger of red flame in the night. The foremost swamp-devil stopped as if he’d run into an invisible wall, arms flying out to right and left, weapons turning and glinting as they flew, then collapsed; the next tripped over him and never rose. The Imperial’s long arm moved, leisurely and sure, and the pistol snapped. Again and again, six times, and there were six bodies lying still or writhing on the sandy mud. The seventh came leaping over the pile of them, screeching and swinging a mace of polished rock lashed to a handle with human tendons. Eric’s sword flashed out, a clean burnished-steel blur in the moonlight, cut again backhand. The cannibal staggered, gaping at a forearm severed and spouting blood in pulsing-fountain spurts, then collapsed as his guts spilled out through his rent belly. An eighth lay silent as Slasher rose from his body, jaws wet. The Imperial turned and ran.
The canoe was moving, finally moving. King was nearly to them; Slasher soared by him, hit the ground and leapt again, flashing over the two clansfolks’ heads like a gray arrow. Dark figures moved behind King’s back, more of the swamp-devils come from their sabbat, loosing as they ran in a chorus of wolf-howls, pig-squeals, catamount screeches. Black arrows began to flicker past Sonjuh in a whispering hiss of cloven air, invisible until they were almost there; some of them went thunk into the canoe and stood quivering with a malignant hum like evil bees.
The heavy craft was in the water now, river up to her knees, then her thighs, soaking into her leggings and chill against flesh heated by running and the pounding of her heart. She rolled over the side; Robre was pushing hard, his greater height letting him wade out. Sonjuh stuck her head up enough to see over the upcurved stern-end of the dugout, and saw Eric splash into the water at speed, lunging forward to grasp the wood. She also saw more arrows heading toward her like streaming horizontal rain, and ducked down again. King landed atop her, driving the breath out of her with an oof! and grinding her back into the inch or two of water that swilled around in the middle of the hollowed-out cypress log.
The man gave a sharp cry and then spoke fast in that other, utterly unfamiliar language he had-she could tell the difference when he was speaking the one that sounded almost-but-not-quite like Seven Tribes talk. From the sound of it, he was swearing with venomous sincerity. Robre was in the hull now, digging his paddle into the water and looking back to find out why King wasn’t.
Sonjuh had a good idea why, even if it was a little too dark to be sure. She wiggled out from under King and felt down along his legs.
“Arrow,” she said-more were falling into the water about them. “Nearly through the calf slantwise-missed the bone-head’s just under the skin here.”
“Push it through and break it off,” Eric King wheezed. At her hesitation-“ Do it, there’s no time!”
She drew her tomahawk, drew a deep breath, as well, and hammered the arrow through with the flat of the hatchet against the nock. The long body beside hers went rigid for an instant, with a snarling exhalation, his hands clamping on the wood. She used the sharp edge of the weapon to cut the shaft off to stubs on either side, moving his leg so that wood rested on wood for a quick strong flick of the hatchet-blade.
“Give me a hand,” he said tightly; she helped him to a sitting position, and he seized a paddle and set to work.
So did she, in the more conventional kneeling manner; the canoe was long and heavy, made for ten or fifteen men. They managed to drive it out past midpoint, and the rain of arrows ceased. Glancing over her shoulder, Sonjuh gave a harsh chuckle at the screams of rage, as hundreds of the swamp-devils poured onto the riverbank and found their canoes gone.
“That-won’t-hold-’em-long,” Robre panted between strokes. “They’ll-have-more-close by.”
“Or swim, or use logs and rafts,” Sonjuh said unhappily.
We are screwed up, she thought.
Oh, the wound wasn’t all that serious-unless it mortified, which was always a danger and doubly so with something a swamp-devil had handled. It wasn’t even bleeding seriously; arrow wounds often didn’t, while the shaft was plugging them up. But with his leg injured, there was no way the Imperial could run, or fight beyond sitting and shooting. King reached for his rifle, fired again, reloaded and fired before he put it down and resumed paddling. “That’ll keep them cautious for a bit,” he said.
There was no energy to spare for a while after that; paddling went easier once they had reached the ebb-water on the other shore, driving northward to the little semi-islet they’d left. Robre hopped overboard and took a line over his shoulder, hauling them into a tongue of water, halting when the canoe touched bottom. Instead of trying to haul it out solo, he tied off a leather painter to a nearby dead cypress root. Meanwhile Sonjuh got their weapons in order and helped the wounded man out. He hobbled upward, supporting his weight on her shoulder; their supplies were undisturbed, and when she let him down next to them he immediately broke out a box of shells and refilled bandolier and pistol. Then he took out a notebook, made quick notes, tore out the sheet of paper and folded it. Robre squatted nearby, replacing scavenged enemy arrows with shafts from his own bundles.
“All right,” King said, looking from one to the other. He closed the notebook; when he spoke, his voice had more of the hard, clipped tone than it had shown in a while. “What you’ve got to do is get this to Banerjii back at Donnulsford. He’ll see that the garrison commander in Galveston gets it. And you have to warn your own people on the way-?”
“Wait just one damn minute,” Sonjuh said hotly. “You expect me to leave you here?”
“Well, yes, of course,” he said, peering at her in the moonlight. He smiled. “My dear, do think-”
She restrained herself from slapping him with a visible effort. “What’re you thinking of me, that I’d take up with a man ’n’ walk off from him when he’s hurt, like some town trull?”
King winced, since he’d obviously been thinking something like that. He went on more gently: “Sonjuh, remember how many of them there were. The only thing that they could have gathered in numbers like that for was war. They’re going to come swarming over the border and hit your people’s frontier settlements like Indra’s lightning-like Olsaytn’s hammer. They might not even stop at the Three Forks River. Your people have to be warned.”
Sonjuh opened her mouth, then closed it, then brightened. “Robre can do that. I’ll stay to keep you safe-we can hide you-”
Robre shook his head. “Empire man, I swore to guide ’n’ help you, not leave you for the swamp-devils to eat, ’n’ that’s a fact.”
King’s face went grimmer. “I might have expected more logic, even from a native,” he said.
Sonjuh felt herself flushing with anger again-she’d guessed what that word meant-but Robre surprised her by laughing.
“No, Jefe, you’re not going to argue me into leaving you, ’n’ you’re not going to anger me into it, either. I figure we’ll stock the canoe, then try ’n’ get you down past the swamp-devils. Your folk hold the coast, no?”
King gaped at him. Sonjuh unwillingly admitted to herself that there was some sense in that, cold-blooded though it was. Fighting their way for days downriver, through hordes of the cannibals, with only three warriors and one of them wounded, in a canoe too big and heavy for them to handle well “We hold Galveston, and we patrol the coast to either side…lightly and infrequently,” King said. “Talk sense, man!”
“You do the talkin’,” Robre said cheerfully; his face was grim. “I’ll get busy on loading the canoe.”
King was swearing again when Sonjuh put her hand across his mouth for silence. Slasher was on his feet again, bristling, fangs showing in a silent snarl, his nose pointed landward whence came the wind. The humans froze, peering about, and then Robre quietly put the box of supplies down and stepped backward to dry land to reach for where his bow leaned against another.
“Down!” she called.
They all flattened themselves. Arrows whipped by at chest-height above them, and a howling broke free from the woods to the eastward. More screeches answered it, out on the river; Sonjuh looked that way, and saw canoes boiling out from the bluff there, paddles stabbing into the water.
A rhythmic cry rose from the crews, near enough to her tongue that she could understand the words: “Meat! Eat! Meat! Eat!”
“Watch the land!” King shouted, rolling behind a couple of sacks of cornmeal and aiming his rifle riverward. Crack…crack, and a canoe went over as a rower sprang up in the final convulsion of death.
Howls came from landward. Sonjuh prepared her crossbow with hands that would have shaken, if she had permitted it. They must have sent runners up the bank and then over, she thought. And had more canoes there…too smart, for swamp-devils. They’ve been learning, damn them!
The cry from the woods turned into a chant: “ MEAT! EAT! ”
“I was never so glad to hear good old-fashioned Imperial volley-fire… ai! ”
The last was a brief involuntary exclamation as Ranjit’s thick-fingered right hand pulled the arrow-stub free with one long surging draw. His left poured the disinfectant, and King felt it through the wound and in streaks up the nerves of his leg, into his groin and belly. It was far from the worst pain he’d ever experienced, but it was certainly among the top five in an adventurous life. To deal with it as the Sikh’s experienced fingers tied on the field dressing, he looked past Sonjuh’s anxious face where she knelt holding his leg for the bandage and to the eastern shore where the sun rose over tall forest, across a river like molten metal wisped with mist. Were hating black eyes looking at him? Probably, he thought. We only killed a dozen or two of them- it was hard to tell how many bodies had gone into the water, especially since a patrol of alligators had gone by, picking up snacks- and there were thousands over there. I’d be surprised if they aren’t crossing north and south of here already. Dismally determined types.
The clansmen and soldiers were grouped around the islet, less three dead and several wounded. The stink of the cannibals’ corpses was strong, stronger than the newly dead usually were; flights of ravens and great-winged buzzards waited, on the wing or perched in trees nearby.
“How did you get here so fast, on foot?” King went on.
Ranjit Singh grinned whitely in his black beard. “I mounted us all on the pack animals, huzoor,” he said. “By turns; each man on foot to hold onto a strap while he ran. So we made good time.”
King nodded; that had been clever. The trick had been used before; sometimes cavalry brought infantry forward so during an attack, with a foot soldier clinging to a stirrup while the horse trotted.
“Did you hear?” he called over to Robre, who was sitting in a circle with his fellow tribesmen, amid fast speech and gestures.
“Yup,” Robre said, turning to face the Imperial. “Figure you’re planning on leaving us now?”
“To get help,” he said, and at Robre’s dubious look, “We have several vessels at Galveston, and this river is navigable to the coast. It’ll take me some time to get there, with Ranjit and the garrison soldiers. Your people need to be warned.”
“Am I comin’ with you?” Sonjuh asked quietly.
“My dear-” Eric winced slightly at the hurt in her eyes. “My dear, we should each go to our own people now. Believe me, it’s best.”
She nodded quietly and picked up her pack, rising and turning away. He winced again, for himself, and then shrugged. Well, I’ll be over it by the time we make the coast. If we make the coast. Six guns was not much to run that river of darkness.
“Let’s go,” he said briskly.
Robre Hunter rose up from behind the overturned oxcart and loosed once more. The fresh wound in his left arm weakened the draw, but the target was only thirty feet away-and the swamp-devil went down coughing out blood, with the arrowhead through the upper part of his right lung. The others wavered and fell back a little; they were the outer wave of the onrushing cannibal flood, a scouting party. The clansman looked behind him; the last of the settlers they’d warned were out of the road through the woods, and probably across the cornfield. He worked a dry mouth, hawked, spat, suddenly conscious.
“Let’s go!” he called.
Slasher came out of the brush on the left side of the trail, licking wet jaws. Sonjuh came from the right, her bright hair hidden by an improvised bandage with a little blood leaking through it, almost like a wife’s headscarf.
Robre looked back down the road; there were swamp-devil bodies scattered along it, and two of the men who’d come back from the Black River with them. It galled him to leave the dead men for the enemy to eat, but there was nothing that could be done-it was a miracle so many of the settlers had gotten away. Pillars of smoke smudged the horizon, from burning cabins and hayricks and barns, filling the air with the filthy smell of things that should not burn, but far fewer of his people were dead in them than might have been.
Sonjuh flashed him a brief smile. Ten miles of grit and bottom that girl has and no mistake, the hunter thought admiringly. Aloud, he went on: “Let’s run.”
They turned and trotted out of the woods. The fields beyond still had occasional oak and hickory stumps in them-this was ax-claim land-but mostly they were full of cornstalks, tall and dryly rustling. The rutted path through them showed the twelve-foot logs of the station stockade; it was littered with goods refugees had dropped…and the narrow gate was closed.
A howling broke out behind them, far closer than he liked; the swamp-devils had found the bodies of their scouting party.
“Made your tally of scalps yet?” he gasped to the girl running beside him, bow pumping in his hand as he bounded ahead. She kept pace easily, despite his longer stride.
“I have,” she said. “Doesn’t seem so important, no more.”
Well, that’s different, he thought.
The howls behind them grew louder; the two clansfolk gave each other a glance and stepped up the pace, almost sprinting. Normally a half-mile wouldn’t be anything much, but they’d been running and fighting for near a week now, and even their iron fund of endurance was running low. Slasher panted, as well, tongue unreeled, his gray fur matted with blood; some of it was his, and he limped a little.
“No use telling them to open the gate,” Robre grunted, as an arrow went whissst-thunk! into the red mud behind him. “We’ll have to go over. You first.”
“Won’t hear me complaining,” Sonjuh gasped.
Robre looked over his shoulder. The swamp-devils had hesitated a little; the sun was shining directly into their eyes as they pursued, and they weren’t enthusiastic about coming into the open in daylight anyway. But they were coming on now, not graceful on their short powerful legs, but as enduring as one of the Imperials’ steam engines. At the sight of two enemies on foot, their screeching ran up the scale to the blood-trill, and even now the hair along Robre’s spine tried to stand up.
“Lord o’ Sky with us!” he shouted, and made a final burst of speed.
More arrows were whickering past him now, on to thud into the dry oak timbers of the palisade; luckily the marks-manship wasn’t good, with the sun in their eyes and shooting while they ran. Breath panted hard and dry through a parched throat, and his muscles were one huge ache. He threw his bow up over the palisade-it was lined with cheering spectators-and bent, making a stirrup of his hands. Sonjuh covered the last ten yards in her old bounding deer-run, then leapt high for the last; her foot came down into his hands, and he flung her upward with all the strength that was in him. She soared, clapped hands around the pointed end of a log, and eager hands dragged her over it. Slasher whined as Robre’s hands clamped on his fur ruff and a handful at the base of his tail, and he made a halfhearted snap. The man ignored it, swung him around in two huge circles and flung him upward likewise; he did bite a couple of the people who pulled him over. Then a rope dangled down for the man. He jumped, caught it three feet above his head-height and swarmed up; the wound in his left arm betrayed him, and he would have fallen at the last if Sonjuh had not leaned far over and grabbed the back of his hunting shirt.
He gasped for a moment as he lay on the fighting platform inside the little log fort that made up the Station; three families lived here usually, but now it was crowded with refugees, their faces peering upward awestruck at him.
“Get those idjeets under cover!” he shouted; a few arrows were already arching over the walls to land in the mud-and-dung surface of the courtyard.
Winded, he still forced himself back erect, took his bow, looked to right and left. The swamp-men were pouring out of the woods, a black insect tide in the lurid light of the sunset. Some stopped to prance and flaunt bits of loot at the defenders-a woman’s bloodstained dress, the hacked-off, gnawed arm of a child. Others were cutting pine trees, bringing them forward, trimming off branches to use them as scaling-ladders.
“What are you waiting for?” he bellowed, to the men-and a few women-who crowded the fighting platform. “We’ll need torches up here, water, more arrows. Move!”
The horde poured forward. A sleetstorm of arrows, crossbow bolts, and buckshot met it; the howling figures pressed on, and a counterstream of black arrows hissed upward
There had been fighting all along the Three Forks River, fierce fighting before the walls of Dannulsford. The tents and brush shelters of refugees clustered thickly all about it, and the eastern horizon was still hazy with the burning cornfields, and the air heavy with the smell of it. More tents sprawled to the west, where fresh war parties of wild young fighting-men from all the clans poured in each day-the war-arrow had been sent throughout the lands of the Seven Tribes, by relays of fast riders. Other aid poured in as well, wagons filled with shelled corn, hams, bacon, wheat, jerked beef, cloth, and whiskey. By the western gate the skulls of bear, bison, wild cow, cougar, plains-lion, and wolf stood high beside the alligator, the standards of many a clan Jefe. No heads on poles were there now, but many were being set up along the river-hanging in bunches rather than impaled singly, to save work. Canoes and ferries went back and forth without cease. Noise brawled surflike through the stink and crowding, voices, shouts, songs, war whoops, the neighing of horses and bellowing of oxen; the wind was out of the west, cool, dry, and dusty.
And in the middle of the stream floated a steamboat; not the little wooden stern-wheeler of a few weeks ago, but a steel-hulled gunboat, likewise shallow-draft but bristling with Gatling guns behind shields, an arc-powered searchlight, and a rocket launcher. The Empire’s flag floated over the bridge, and the bosun’s pipes twittered as the chiefs left. Or most of them-one young war-chief, newly come to fame as a leader, stayed for a moment. Beside him stood a young woman in the garb of a male woods-runner; she clung to his hand with a half-defiant air, and her dog bristled when crewmen came too close. The captain of the craft and the colonel who commanded the Empire’s garrison in Galveston had discreetly withdrawn, as well.
“Yi-ah,” Robre Devil-Killer said. “We heard how this-” He gestured about at the Imperial warcraft, which rather incongruously bore the tile Queen-Empress Victoria II in gilt on its black bows. “-turned ’em back when it steamed up the Black River. We might have lost all the east-bank settlements, without that. The ones who got across ’fore you came back weren’t enough to do that, or cross the river and take Dannulsford.”
“Glad the Empire could help,” Eric King said sincerely.
He was in uniform again, his turban freshly wrapped, although he also carried a stick and limped heavily. He looked at their linked hands, smiled, and murmured, “Bless you, my children,” in Hindi.
“What was that?”
“Just that I’m glad to have met you. Met you both,” he said. “In India, it’s customary to give gifts to friends on their wedding. I understand that’s in order?”
He called, and Ranjit Singh came up with a long rosewood chest strapped with brass and opened it. A double-barreled hunting rifle lay within.
Robre nodded, grinning as he took the weapon and broke the action open with competent hands; he’d received the single-shot weapon as pay from Banerjii, but this new treasure was pure delight. Sonjuh smiled at last, as well.
“Well,” King went on, “for the bride, I could have given a cradle…or a spinning wheel…” The smile on the girl’s face was turning to a frown. “But since it looks like you’ll be having other work to do first-”
Another case-this held a lighter weapon, the cavalry-carbine version of the Martini-Metford rifle. She mumbled thanks, blushing a little, then laughed out loud as King solemnly presented Slasher with a meaty ham-bone; the dog looked up at his mistress for permission, then graciously accepted it.
The Imperial and the clansman shook hands, hands equally callused by rein and rope, sword-hilt and tomahawk.
“Good-bye, and good luck in your war,” King went on. “I hope you exterminate the brutes.”
“So do I, Jefe,” Robre said. “But I doubt it. They’re a mighty lot of ’em, the swamps are big, ’n’ they can fight. Fight even harder in their home-runs, I suppose.”
“In the end, you’ll beat them,” King said. “You’re more civilized, and the civilized always win in the end, barring something like the Fall.”
Robre looked around at the gunboat, frowning slightly at a thought. “Could be you’re right,” he said. “Time will tell.”
The slight frown was still on his face when he stood on the bank and watched the smooth passage of the Queen-Empress Victoria II downstream. Then he turned to the girl beside him and met her smile with his own.