Demontech: Onslaught (35 page)

Spinner walked quickly through the battlefield, scanning the ground for anything usable, trying to avoid looking at the bodies. He couldn’t remember ever seeing the aftermath of a battle where all the corpses were so abused and the armor so battered. The few peaked helmets scattered about were badly dented or chopped open. The chain mail still borne by some of the bodies was chopped and rent until it was useless. No weapons had been left about, not even arrows. “That tells you what kind of enemy we have,” he said, half in answer to Haft, half in explanation to himself. He uncocked his crossbow; there was no threat there, no one but the dead.

The Golden Girl grew more and more angry as she flitted about the clearing from one corpse to another, trying to find a usable garment. Sunlight sparkling on the gold coins of her costume, she looked like a houri come to take fallen warriors to paradise. She picked up a piece of cloth that lay on a corpse. “Look at this,” she snorted. “If I took enough scraps like these, I could sew them together and
make
clothing, but I’d never be able to wash out the blood.
Pfagh.
” She threw down the rag and stomped off.

The winners of the battle had taken everything that could be used. If they suffered any casualties, they had removed them as well.

“Who did this?” Alyline shouted angrily. Haft ignored her; only warriors belonged in a place like that—to mourn the dead, to foresee their own fate.

Spinner glanced at her. He didn’t answer, though he thought he knew. Then he saw something that proved it. “Look at this,” he said as he bent to pick up a rectangular piece of metal still attached to a scrap of red leather.

Haft joined him, took the piece of metal and turned it over in his hands, examining it from all sides, seeing the stain of dried blood on it. “Jokapcul,” he said. He looked around at the bodies, then back at the metal-and-leather scrap. “At least the poor buggers did some damage of their own.”

Spinner looked toward the trees to their south. “I wonder where they went after this fight?” he said, almost to himself. Then he shook himself and said briskly, “Let’s look around,” and strode to the trees. He turned to the right inside the trees and started walking around the clearing, examining the ground. Haft followed quickly for a few paces to catch up, then walked a few paces to Spinner’s left, also looking down.

“Here,” Haft said, and pointed to the ground when they’d made a quarter circuit. He went slowly deeper into the woods.

Spinner joined him and looked at what he saw; the ground was trampled by the hooves of many horses.

“See where they came from,” Spinner said. Haft grunted and moved farther from the clearing. Spinner went toward the clearing and circled it for a short distance before stopping to wait for Haft.

“They came from almost due west,” Haft said when he joined Spinner, who nodded and pointed at the ground. Not much grew there, under the trees; it was mostly bare earth. But here and there they saw a crushed flower, a broken twig, an indentation in the ground. It was where soldiers had lain in ambush.

“Two score,” Spinner said.

“That agrees with the horse tracks I saw,” Haft said.

They continued their circuit. Halfway around they found the trail the horsemen took when they left the clearing; they had headed east, toward the highway. They walked a little farther around and found the tracks of the soldiers who were killed. Spinner and Haft followed them a hundred paces into the forest before turning back and following them all the way into the open. The tracks told the beginning of the story. The rose-emblem Zobran warders, about twenty of them, marched more or less parallel to the highway, in a column of twos. They were all in the clearing before the ambushers made their move. That was the story the tracks told. The bodies told the rest of the tale. Arrows rained onto the exposed men, and many of them probably fell before they even knew they were being attacked. More fell from arrows while they were trying to deploy from a marching formation to a fighting one. Not many were still standing when the attackers forayed from the trees and overran them.

Alyline waited for them at the south edge of the clearing. She stood in shadows; no sunlight danced on her garments. With her shoulders slumped, she looked shrunken. Instead of a heavenly body come to escort fallen warriors to the next world, she seemed lost, an abandoned plaything. When they got close they saw her eyes were red and puffy from crying.

“What manner of man does this to the dead?” she demanded. “Why would anyone treat the dead like this?”

“The Jokapcul are a warrior race,” Spinner said. “They believe the rest of us are beneath contempt. That’s how they treat their enemies.” He put an arm around her and she sank into his embrace. He stroked her hair and made comforting noises at her for a moment, then said, “Let’s leave here. We’ll feel better once we’re away.”

“But what are we going to do about the bodies?”

“Nothing,” Haft snapped, anger in his voice. “We can’t do anything about them. There are too many bodies.” He stalked into the forest.

Spinner held onto the Golden Girl a moment longer, then she moved out of his arms and followed Haft. Spinner brought up the rear.

Fletcher and the other women were just where they should have been. Doli was visibly relieved to see them—or at least relieved to see Spinner. Zweepee was withdrawn and Fletcher somber. He pointed at the ground a few paces away—at the tracks of many horses coming from the northwest.

Haft walked over to examine them. “Jokapcul,” he said. “It’s the same shoeing pattern. But that was three days ago.” He dipped his head in the direction of the small clearing. “These are from yesterday, early enough in the day that we can find their campsite if we follow them back a short way.” The tracks continued to the southeast. “They must have heard the refugees on the highway and decided to follow it.”

“Do you think they want to go somewhere east of the highway?” Spinner asked.

“Maybe. Or maybe they want to go to the end of the highway.” He didn’t have to add that the port of Zobra City was at the end of the highway.

Spinner looked southeast, where the Jokapcul trail went. “That’s not the direction we’re going,” he said after thinking for a moment. “We’re going straight south; we won’t come upon them.” He mounted the stallion and led off to the south. The others knew as well as Spinner did that if two parties of Jokapcul had gone through there in three days, it was likely more bands were also around. Spinner didn’t lash his staff under his thigh for riding, he carried it across the pommel of his saddle, and his crossbow was in his hands. Haft and Fletcher held their weapons ready as well.

At midday they began to hear sounds far ahead of them. At first the sounds were muffled, so they weren’t sure if their source was directly ahead or off at some tangent; they couldn’t tell whether the occasional dimly heard clash of steel against steel, the occasional voice raised in shout, was in their path, where it might have an effect on them.

“No horses have been by here,” Spinner said when the tension had grown enough that he felt he had to say something to ease it.

“No footmen either,” Haft added. Of course they understood that just because they hadn’t crossed the path of soldiers didn’t mean nobody was ahead of them; they could be headed straight into an ambush or toward someone else’s battle.

Fletcher started riding with an arrow nocked. Alyline rode with her reins held in one hand. Zweepee rode behind her husband and held tightly to him. Doli rode almost touching Spinner. After a time they heard no more phantom noises in the distance, but no one’s vigilance relaxed. Near the end of the afternoon, an unnatural silence took up residence, one that was almost tangible. Haft guided his mare alongside Spinner. “There was a battle near here,” he said quietly, so the others couldn’t hear.

Spinner nodded. “It’s too quiet.” But there were no bodies about, no vultures. So where had the battle been? Perhaps they were passing close by. But if they were, why couldn’t they smell it? Or hear the moans of the wounded? Perhaps it was a bigger battle and they simply hadn’t reached it yet. Neither man wanted to think of a larger battle.

They rode on for a short while longer, then Spinner heard the bubbling of a brook ahead of them and reined in. “Better to reach the battlefield in the morning,” he said so only Haft could hear. Haft nodded. In a voice only loud enough to carry to his small group, Spinner said to the others, “There’s running water ahead of us. We’ll camp next to it.”

When they had the horses unsaddled, he said, “There may be soldiers not far off. We must be quiet. The fire goes out as soon as dinner is cooked. There will be no fire through the night; we don’t want to show ourselves to anyone.”

There was no discussion, no one gasped in surprise, no one argued; it was what they all suspected. They set about quietly preparing the evening meal.

They still had a haunch of deer. Spinner and Fletcher sliced it into thin pieces that would cook quickly. The women went to the brook to wash the tubers Zweepee found and to get water for tea. Haft made the cook fire. Fire making was a chore the women normally did, while the men prepared whatever game they had for the evening’s meal. But fires give smoke, and they didn’t want to give away their presence. But Haft could make fire in the Ewsarcan way, so it burned very hot and gave off little smoke. The strips of venison were ready to be spitted by the time the fire was going. The tubers went directly into the fire and weren’t completely cooked by the time the party began to eat, but nobody complained.

The brook was the first water they’d found that was more than a rivulet. “I have to bathe myself and my clothes,” Alyline announced as soon as they finished with their dinner.

“We all do,” Spinner said.

“Shall we take turns, or bathe all at once?” Haft asked in as innocent a voice as he could. He risked a quick, lowered-eyelid glance at the women as he did.

“The men stand guard while the women bathe,” Spinner said without a smile. “Then one man bathes while the other two stand watch.”

Fletcher nodded.

Spinner stationed Fletcher in the forest behind their campsite to guard against anyone coming from their rear. He and Haft crossed the brook to guard from the front.

Spinner led Haft thirty paces upstream and thirty more into the trees. “This is a good place,” he said.

Haft looked back; he couldn’t see the brook from there. “We’re too deep, we should be closer to the brook.”

“Why?”

“Because—Because someone might come along the brook and we won’t be able to see them from here.”

Spinner chuckled. “And you can’t watch the women bathe from here either.”

Haft flushed.

“If you can’t see, then you have to listen harder. You’ll be able to hear if any horsemen come along the brook. And if you don’t hear them in time, the women’s screams will let you know of their coming.” He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and squeezed. “I haven’t seen a naked woman for as long as you. We can wait until better circumstances.”

“What about that night at the inn?” Haft accused.

Now Spinner flushed. “Well . . . that was different,” he said weakly. And it didn’t change the fact that they had to allow the women their privacy. He went back to the stream and down it the same distance below the campsite before heading into the trees.

The Golden Girl removed the girdle before entering the water, where she completely submerged herself. When she emerged, she quickly stripped off her soaked clothing and put it on a flat rock by the side of the brook. She scrubbed her skin with sand from the bed of the brook, then pounded her clothes on the rock. Zweepee did the same, and the two women shared the flat rock. They scrubbed each other’s backs. They didn’t shout or speak much above a whisper but otherwise they splashed and played like children, enjoying themselves as they cleaned.

Doli went primly apart from the other two before stepping into the water. She didn’t stand up to remove her wet clothes, but stayed down, submerged to her shoulders, and tried to remain covered by the water when she tossed her clothes onto a rock half in and half out of the brook on its far side. She moved gently hither and yon, letting the rushing water carry off the trail dirt from her skin. Then she rubbed herself all over with the palms of her hands without using sand. When she finally stood and stepped out of the brook, she was a couple of paces from the rock where her clothes lay—very near where Spinner had left the brook’s side to enter the forest. She glanced quickly upstream, and when she saw neither Alyline nor Zweepee looking her way, took a few tentative steps under the trees, water dripping off her bare skin. She peered intently into the shadows but saw no sign of Spinner, not even his footprints. She gnawed on her lower lip. The still air made her shiver.

“Spinner,” she called out softly. “Spinner,” she called again when the forest gave her no answer. She crouched and wrapped her arms around her chest, with her hands on her shoulders. She felt horribly exposed even though she was certain no one could see her. A tree dweller’s sudden chittering startled her. She imagined Jokapcul soldiers or slavers to be hidden where she couldn’t see them, spying on her, ready to lunge forward and take her. She wondered if they had silently come upon Spinner and slain him.

“Spinner?” she said tentatively. When still no answer came, she stepped back a pace, then another pace and another, and only stopped retreating when her feet were in the water. She looked upstream; the other women still didn’t seem to be looking in her direction. She thought they must be paying her little enough attention that they didn’t know what she had just done. She nibbled on her lip for a moment, then stood erect. The sun still shined and its rays brought a warmth that removed the gloom and cold she had felt under the trees.

Feeling better, she turned to clean her clothes. At all times, whether she knelt next to or hunched over the rock, she posed herself artfully. She knew she had a good body, a body men liked to look at. Perhaps Spinner was where he could see her at her laundry. If he was, she wanted him to see her as comely, not as a washerwoman. Hoping that he was looking, she worked at cleaning her blouse and skirt until Zweepee’s voice came to her over the water: