The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (29 page)

       
"Draven, help me!
What's going on? Who are these people? What's happened?"

       
But Draven walked on.

       
"Draven!"

       
The pirate turned, gave
a parting wave, and called:

       
"Sorry, can't stay!
Busy, you know!"

       
And he disappeared from
sight amidst a crowd of soldiers. Togura tried to follow, but was restrained.
He was forced into a tent - which was empty - and left there. While he waited
to be moved yet again, he tried to make sense of his meeting with Draven. The
pirate was happy, cheerful, free, and evidently doing well for himself. So were
all these people pirates? They couldn't be pirates, otherwise they'd know
Galish. Foreign pirates, from the distant island of Ork, perhaps? What did he
know of Ork? He knew, in a word, nothing.

       
Scattering rain was
falling on the tent. Through the tent fly, Togura could see the legs of a
soldier standing guard outside. The soldier was singing softly to himself; he
swayed from time to time, giving Togura the impression he was drunk. Togura was
hungry. And thirsty. He could have done with something to eat. Even, at a
pinch, a bit of salt beef. As time went by, he started to get quite nostalgic about
salt beef. He stuck his head out of the tent fly.

       
"Hey," he
said. "I have to - "

       
He ducked back inside
swiftly, as the guard tried to clout him with the butt of a spear. Well, so
much for that. Now what? With a bit of stick, Togura dug a little hole that he
could piss in and bog in. Digging, he found a worm, which he ate. A little
water dripping through a hole in the roof of the tent allowed him to moisten
his mouth.

       
Now what?

       
Now nothing.

       
Togura waited, while
rain washed the day away. When it was dark, he saw a fire burning outside; half
a dozen soldiers were sitting round the fire, talking. This was enough to make
him forget all thoughts of escaping. He was tired; he wanted to sleep. He laid
himself down in the dirt, and, by now inured to the cold and the damp, he
slept.

       
Togura had odd dreams,
in which thunder brawled with earthquake. When he woke, the night was just
about to capitulate to the dawn; the ground underfoot was shaking, and a dull,
thunderous roar dominated the background. What on earth was going on?

       
His mouth was dry. He
was parched, and more hungry than ever. He was most relieved when a surly
soldier entered the tent and handed him a bowl of mash made from bran, turnips
and water. He was used to such a lean diet by now that it quite satisfied his
hunger; it also helped slake his thirst, though he could have done with a
proper drink. He would also have preferred the mash to have been hot rather
than cold.

       
Much, much later, the
soldier returned and ordered him to his feet with a gesture. Then, with another
gesture, ordered him to follow. More tents had gone up all around, cutting off
the view in all directions. Togura, longing to satisfy his curiosity, was
irritated. What he wanted most of all was to find someone who spoke Galish.

       
"Draven?" said
Togura.

       
The soldier ignored his
query, perhaps not understanding it. He pushed Togura into a tent which was
filled with the smells of food, of drink, of pipe tobacco, of opium. Half a
dozen men were inside, singing, making a terrible drunken charivari. Razorblade
laughter broke out as he entered. One man pinched his cheeks, one pawed his
buttocks. One kissed him, then pushed him to another, who grabbed him, and rammed
his own finger into Togura's mouth. Togura, shocked, disgusted, frightened,
felt sick. He did not dare to bite. He was released, and shoved into the centre
of the tent. Commanded by a gesture, he sat.

       
The men started to roll
dice. Their noise died down; gambling made them serious. Togura, appalled,
suspected that he was going to lose his virginity - but not in the way he had
intended. He knew that he should have tried to escape in the forest. Or should
have tried to escape the night before. He swore to himself that he would take
his very next chance of escape. But by that time -

       
One of the men giggled.

       
The world wavered.

       
"Sharskar?"
asked Togura.

       
He did not understand
himself.

       
"Day?" he
said, seeing Day Suet in front of him.

       
She took him in her arms
and kissed him.

       
"Oh, Day," he
said. "Oh help me."

       
He breathed in. The air
tasted of marzipan. Day Suet disappeared. Togura shivered, and rubbed his eyes.

       
What had happened?

       
In the tent, there was a
dead man at his feet. He had been knifed. Two men broke off fighting; they had
been trying to strangle each other. One was sitting in a daze; another was
vomiting. One was screaming, and no wonder, for he had just clawed his eyes
out.

       
"What's
happening?" screamed Togura, in a mixture of terror and frustration.

       
He blundered to the door
of the tent and exited. One of the men pursued him, and grabbed him. Then the
outline of the world stumbled. The sun became five suns, which blinked green
then purple. The clouds rolled acrsos the sky with terrifying speeds, shaping
themselves into the form of a dragon.

       
Then the world snapped
back into its usual focus. Togura found himself sitting in the mud. He got up
and staggered off. A soldier pursued him. Togura turned and smashed him in the
face with a bunch of fives, cutting his knuckles against teeth. The soldier
went down.

       
Through a gap between
two tents, Togura saw a riderless horse, fully equipped with saddle, harness
and saddle bags. He sprinted for the horse, mounted up, and was off in an
instant. Taking the line of least resistance, he rode hell for leather, seeking
to get out and away as fast as possible.

       
When the horse, lathered
and exhausted, refused to gallop any further, Togura started to calm down.
Looking around, he realised his flight had taken him south of the army, the
castle and the ruins of the town. Near at hand was a battered, badly maintained
stone-paved highway, which must surely be the salt road, if it was anything at
all.

       
Looming Forest lay to
the north. That way was home, shelter, safety. But an entire army lay between
him and the forest.

       
"South, then,"
muttered Togura.

       
He was still very badly
frightened. He could not, for the life of him, work out what had happened back
there. Why had he imagined that he had seen Day Suet? Why had a man gouged out
his own eyes? Why had he seen those terrifying hallucinations - five suns in
the sky, and the clouds breeding themselves into a dragon? How had the horse
lost its rider?

       
"Get out,"
said Togura, "while you're still alive."

       
It was good advice. He
took it.

       
The horse, urged on by
his knees, advanced down the Salt Road at a steady trot, thus advancing Togura
on what, obviously, was going to be a new adventure.

       
"A pox on
adventures," said Togura. "A pox on all the world."

       
He said it, and meant
it.

       
Later, he realised it
was getting dark. And, moreover, he realised that the mountain on the left-hand
side of the road, which had been getting nearer and nearer all the time, was,
in all probability, the mountain of Maf, where the dragon Zenphos had his lair.

       
"A pox on dragons,
too," said Togura.

   
    
He spoke bravely, but
he was very much afraid, for Zenphos was a true dragon, strong, ferocious,
air-worthy and ravenous in appetite. While sea dragons were virtually harmelss
if handled properly, a true dragon like Zenphos was the stuff that nightmares
were made of; even the wizard of Drum acknoweldged that much.

       
It was going to be,
obviously, an uncomfortable night.

Chapter 25

       
The dragon Zenphos, lord
of the mountain of Maf, made no move against Togura Poulaan. This was scarcely
surprising, as the said dragon was dead and rotting, having been killed at the
end of winter. Togura, nevertheless, went in fear of it, for he had no way to
know of its demise.

       
As Togura made his days
down the Salt Road, Maf, guarding the road behind him, was demoted from
mountain to hill, then to a wart; as the flesh of his horse grew thinner, a
range of mountains steadily escalated the southern horizon. Behind him, Maf was
whittled away to nothing.

       
Another day brought
another evening. Togura hobbled the horse and rummaged some food from a saddle
bag - some hard yellow cheese and some pemmican. Many leagues north, he had
thrown away some appalling, stinking stuff which reminded him of rotten milk;
now, with his rations bottoming out to nothing, he was beginning to regret his
fastidiousness.

       
Togura chose the tree he
was going to sleep under, and named it home. The name failed to convince him.
As the last sunlight was fawning on the horizon, he kindled a fire with another
man's tinder box, part of the loot from the saddle bags. The horizons swallowed
the last reminders of the sun.

       
"Firelight, burning
bright, keep the sun alive tonight," chanted Togura.

       
The little incantation
was an old, old children's rhyme from Sung, his true home and homeland. Togura
fell asleep by the fire, and dreamt of children's songs, of children's jokes,
and of a voice which might, perhaps, have been the voice of his mother.

       
When he woke, it was
still dark. What had roused him from his sleep? There was a contingent of
horsemen on the road, going south. They were passing by so close to where he
lay that he could almost have reached out and touched them. He heard the
clotter-clopper of iron-shod hooves, the painful wheezing of a rider with asthma
or bronchitis, the fluid-filled cough of a man who then hawked and spat, and a
strange scraping sound which he could not identify. He saw the silhouettes of
men, of horses, of lances.

       
One, riding past Togura,
suddenly cried out. With a certain amount of noise and cursing, the whole
convoy reined in and halted. Togura smelt men, many days unwashed, and horses.
Could they smell him? They would smell his fire! It was long dead, but there
had been no rain to kill the lingering odours of ash and smoke. Togura, not
daring to move, stared at the shroud-dark outline of the man who had called the
convoy to a halt.

       
The man jumped down from
his horse. His boots slurred over the ground. He was walking shuffle-foot,
sliding his feet from step to step so he would get warning of a hole or a
ditch. He found the remains of the fire, the cold ash mortuary, and kicked it
apart. A scattering of ashes sifted through the night. Togura lay rigid, as
silent as his bones.

       
The man spoke in his
foreign language, then took another step forward. He trod on Togura's hair.
Then, finding Togura's head with his boot, he kicked it experimentally. Then
cried out aloud, for, concentrating on what was under his feet, he had walked
into a spiked branch. Swearing to himself, he backed off.

       
From the head of the
convoy came an imperative shout. Togura's unwitting assailant mounted up, and
the convoy moved on. The last of the horses was dragging a bundle of some kind
which scraped over the road. Togura guessed it was a sledge, possibly heavily
loaded. He got to his hands and knees, momentarily considering pursuing the
sledge and trying to scuffle off some equipment, then thought better of it.

       
The sky slowly lightened
to sunrise. Togura hunted the bogland round about for his hobbled horse, and
found it grazing by a lochan a hundred paces from the road. If it had neighed
when the convoy had been passing, the men would probably have mounted a search
for it. He had been fearfully lucky.

       
Togura was just about to
lead the horse back to the road when he heard the sound of hoofbeats coming
from the south. Leaving the horse down by the water's edge, he gained a small
rise and watched the road. Four cavalrymen were riding north along the Salt
Road at a steady trot.

       
As they went past,
Togura came to a decision. He would abandon the road. He did not want to chance
another meeting with soldiers who might celebrate his physical beauty - such as
it was - by raping him, or who might kill him out of hand as a horse thief.
Ignoring the road, which ran south, he would make for the south-east, and find
his own path across the mountains.