WindBeliever (14 page)

There were nods of grim agreement and the men began to move toward the roadway where man-powered carts stood ready to roll. Tired, soot-blackened faces turned away from the enemy they had been fighting and tucked tail to run away, their foe hot on their heels. Not a man there did not feel the shame of losing or the injustice of a long day’s work for naught.

Conar, furious with the outcome, not one to give up easily, squinted in thought. He knew a way to demolish the enemy and he wondered that no one else had thought of it before now. He reached out a filthy hand to the man trudging alongside side him and gasped, drawing his hand back with a yip of pain. He looked down at his palm and found his hand blistered, the flesh WINDBELIEVER

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bubbled up and raw around the edges.

“Didn’t even feel it when it happened, did you, son?” the old man Conar had reached out to asked in a loud voice.

“I feel it now,” Conar snarled.

“Did you want something or was you just trying to get a little sympathy from me?”

Conar’s gaze leapt to the old man’s face and he saw a toothless grin shining wetly at him from the man’s thin lips. He shook his head.

“Would you feel sorry for me if I moaned a little, Grandfather?”

“Nope,” came the chuckling reply.

“I didn’t think so,” Conar smiled. “Do you know if there are explosives at the Palace?”

“Might be at the quarry,” another man beside them answered. “They use it to break up the rocks.”

“The quarry,” Conar whispered, his dirty face lighting up. He took a few steps over to the man who had spoken. “Who would we see to get some of the explosives up here?”

The man shrugged his chin toward Alexi, who was about ten yards ahead of them.

“Romanovitch is the foreman there. Ask him.”

Conar nodded and loped quickly toward the tall, husky man who was walking with shoulders hunched forward in fatigue and head down.

“Romanovitch!”

Alexi turned and saw who was calling him. He plodded to a stop and waited. He stood where he was until the Serenian reached him, surprised when a strong, steady hand reached out to grip his shoulder. He didn’t miss the grimace of pain that crossed the young man’s face as his flesh touched Alexi’s coarse shirt. “Better get your hands looked at, milord,” he said wearily.

Conar tossed his head in negation. “Are there explosives at the quarry strong enough to put a good-sized dent in the earth?” he asked.

“Explosives?” Alexi questioned. “I don’t see .....”

Conar’s grip on the man’s shoulder increased although the pressure caused him to groan beneath his breath and clench his teeth tightly together. He spoke through the constriction of his teeth.

“If we set charges in the clearing just at the edge of the village, we might be able to blow the damned fire out. In Chrystallus they call it a backfire. The force of the explosion can extinguish the fire or at least contain what’s already there so it won’t cross the fire break. We might be able to make a fuel-free zone the fire can’t cross. If nothing else, the explosion will clear the vegetation.”

Alexi’s brows drew together. “Will it work?”

Conar shook his head. “I don’t know, but what other choice do we have? It’s at least worth a try!”

For just a fraction of a second Alexi’s eyes roamed over the smoke-dusted face of the man standing before him and then he turned, seeking out one of the men milling about around them.

“Petrov! Take three men with you and get your asses over to the quarry! Bring back two cart loads of explosives! And be careful about it!”

“If those villagers aren’t already evacuated from the village, we’ll be cutting it close,” Conar warned. “We have to get them to safety before we can dig a deep enough trench to lay the explosives.

“I pray to God they are all gone,” Alexi answered.

“So do I, my friend,” Conar agreed. “So do I.” He tapped Alexi on the arm with the back of WINDBELIEVER

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his hand and started forward.

“Prince Conar?” Alexi called, wondering why the man frowned so fiercely at the call of his name when he had shown a moment’s camaraderie only a minute before.

“My name is Conar. Just Conar. I don’t like being called nothing BUT that!”

Alexi’s slow smile was infectious and he found the Serenian’s answering one, despite its own fatigue and worry, reassuring.

“If I was hiring for the quarry, Conar,” Alexi said, stressing this man’s name, “I wouldn’t hesitate hiring you.”

Conar laughed. “If I was looking for work, Alexi, I wouldn’t take a job in a quarry even if my life depended on it!”

Alexi threw back his head and laughed, his rich baritone bellow causing the other men to smile wearily. When he lowered his head, his face shone with admiration. “Too much like hard work, milord?” he asked in a teasing voice.

Conar nodded. “We aristocrats supervise. We don’t break our backs digging around in rock fields, my good fellow!”

“Well, excuse me!” Alexi chuckled. “I didn’t know we had an aristocrat walking alongside us.”

It was the highest compliment the man could have paid Conar and the Serenian recognized it for what it was--an extended hand of friendship.

“My dear man,” Conar scoffed in his most bored voice, “you not only have aristocracy walking alongside you, you have one tired son-of-bitch who desperately wishes he was sitting in a drawing room sipping cool wine with a hot woman on his lap!”

Alexi shook his head. “I don’t believe that. Unless I miss my guess about you, milord Conar, you are in your element here with us.”

A tired grin twitched at Conar’s lips. “It’s better than counting leaves.”

The village was in chaos when the men arrived. Most of the forty some-odd inhabitants had already fled to the Palace, taking along what few belongings they could carry. Soldiers from both the militia and the palace guard were frantically loading what pieces of furniture and cookware they could haphazardly pile into the carts circled about the village common yard. Women rushed hither and yon, rounding up children, chickens, pigs, whatever else they could to take with them.

The sounds of voices shouting in various stages of dismay, alarm and frustration drowned out the creaking of wagon wheels as carts pulled away from the village.

Catherine stood off to one side, watching her older brother helping to stack an old woman’s brass bed frame into one of the carts. She smiled as the aged hag admonished Peter to “watch out for that bed, boy! I was born in that bed and so was my sixteen brats!”

The Tzarina was still inside one of the village huts, giving support and what little comfort she could to the woman who lay screaming in the last pangs of childbirth. The sound made Catherine blanch now and again and she turned away, searching for something to do. She was brought up short by the sight of Conar McGregor, nearly filthy beyond recognition, striding confidently into the village square. He was laughing with Alexi Romanovitch, the two seeming as though long-lost bosom buddies as they surveyed the turmoil around them. She felt the Serenian’s gaze pass over her, snap back to linger for a moment, but when she looked closely at his soot-smeared face, she found him staring intently at the hut where the screaming woman was piercing the air with her cries.

“I ain’t never seen a man who didn’t lose his color when a woman starts to moaning and WINDBELIEVER

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groaning on the birthing bed,” the old woman who had been nagging Peter said as she walked up to Catherine. “That one might be as handsome as a fine fellow can be, but he’s afeared of the sound of that baby coming!” She chuckled, gasped and coughed, her spasmodic cackles wet and explosive.

Catherine could not help but wonder at the odd look that had suddenly formed on Conar McGregor’s face. Even from where she stood watching him, she could see the effect the woman’s screaming was having on him. She could have sworn he was trembling, his eyes bleak and wounded as he stood there listening. She watched him wipe a shaking hand across his dirty face then reach up to tug at the smoke-darkened thickness of his golden hair. She watched him close his eyes and shudder as a particularly loud burst of agony ripped from the hut.

“It’s a’bothering him something fierce, ain’t it, lady?” the old woman said in a quiet voice.

“That boy’s got experience of such, I’d say.”

Catherine looked down at her. “He’s never been married,” she answered, believing it, since that was what she had been told.

The old woman shook her head. “He don’t need to have been married, girl, to have got a woman’s belly fat with child.” She nudged her wrinkled chin toward Conar. “Look at him, dearie! Ain’t too many women I’d think that ever turned their backs on him unless it was for him to have at her that way!” Her leering giggle made Catherine blush to the roots of her hair. “If’n I had him in my bed, I’d give him a sore cock, I would!”

“Cat!”

Turning at the sound of her elder brother’s voice, Catherine walked gratefully away from the old woman’s merry chuckles at her discomfort and hurried to her brother.

“What can I do, Petya?” she asked.

“We’re going to have to move that woman in there,” he answered. “They’re going to try to blow out the fire with explosives and she sure as hell doesn’t need to be anywhere near that. Go in and tell Mother we’ve got to get her and the woman out of here.”

“Explosives?” Catherine echoed. “Whose bright idea was ....?” she stopped and looked toward Conar. She saw him pointing to the ground, watched Alexi nodding in agreement. Well, she thought with a grudging admission, it might work. “How will we transport her?” she asked.

“In one of the carts,” her brother answered gruffly.

Catherine turned to see Conar standing close enough to her for her to see the grim expression in his eyes. She watched him stride toward the hut, giving orders as he went.

“Pad one of those carts with all the blankets you can get hold of. Hitch up the most gentle and sure-footed mare you can find and put a jug or two of water in the cart.” He glanced down at Catherine. “You got laudanum in that bag of yours, girl?” At her nod, he nodded, as well. “Make sure you have it ready for her.”

“Rudolf!” the Tzaravitch Peter yelled to one of the palace guards. “Do what the Prince ordered! Get some blankets!”

Catherine stood there in the dust of the village common yard, smoke swirling in the air around her, the firestorm blazing away just up the hill and watched as Conar McGregor disappeared into the mean hovel where the woman’s trilling agony was humming in the air.

When he walked out in a moment or two, the arching woman in his arms, the dark stain of the woman’s birth water flowing freely down his breeches, she couldn’t stop her mouth from sagging open as he gently laid the women in the cart and then bent over to kiss her dirty forehead.

“It’s going to be a boy,” she heard Conar tell the moaning woman. “What are you going to WINDBELIEVER

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name him, sweeting?”

Despite her advanced agony and fear, the village woman forced a tremulous smile to her lips.

“A boy?” At Conar’s nod, the woman nodded as though in agreement.

“What be your name, Your Grace?” she asked in a gasping voice.

Catherine saw him smile. “Conar.”

The woman nodded. “He’ll be named so, Your Grace.”

It might have been the smoke. It might have been sweat, it might even have been a piece of airborne ash drifting in the rushing wind, but Catherine didn’t think so. The moisture that came into Conar McGregor’s deep blue eyes could have been nothing else but tears.

“I’d like that, sweeting,” he said in a soft, gentle voice. He stroked the woman’s limp hair back from her forehead and smiled down gently into her flushed face. “I would really like that.”

Once more in bent forward and kissed the woman, playfully tweaked her nose, and winked.

From her place inside the cart, staring up at the Serenian’s tired face, Charlotte Steffenovitch, the Tzarina of the Outer Kingdom, found her breath caught in her throat, her heart pounding as madly as though she were an untried, green girl. When those alien blue eyes lifted to her own, smiled sadly, and then moved on, the Tzarina thought she had never seen such an agonized hurt in a man’s face before. There was such desperate longing and aching need written there that Charlotte trembled from the force of emotions which were crossing his saddened face.

“Are you all right, son?” she found herself asking.

Conar shrugged. “Nothing that a long bath and a good meal, finished off with a slow and leisurely re-count of the scallops, wouldn’t cure.”

Charlotte had no idea what he was talking about. Scallops? Had someone served him scallops? Did he not get enough? She shook her head, watching him walk away from the cart as the mare gently eased them forward. “I’ll make sure he has scallops for supper this very eve!”

she promised herself.

“I won’t go without him!”

Heads turned toward the nearly-hysterical voice and narrowed with sympathy.

A little boy of about seven was tugging fiercely against his mother pull. His strident voice carried above the din of the evacuation as did his mother’s pleas for reasonableness from her child.

“He’ll be all right, Niki! He’s an animal. He’s use to fending for himself!”

“I won’t go without him!” The boy strained, digging his little feet into the sand as he tried to pull free of his mother’s grasp. “Maxi! Maxi, come back!”

Conar also heard the child and turned, frowning as he saw the mother jerking hard on the little boy’s thin arm. A muscle ground in his jaw as the boy’s mother bent down to smack the child soundly on his squirming rump.

“The explosives are here, Conar,” Alexi said, momentarily taking Conar’s attention from the mother and child.

“Are the trenches dug where I showed you?” Conar asked, his attention swinging back to the struggling family.

“Just as you wanted. Do we go ahead and place them?”

Conar nodded. Alexi shook his head in annoyance, seeing where his companion was looking.