Tags
adventure, adventurer, Barbarian, dark ages, Medieval, middle ages, Sophie, Sword, The Fair, warrior woman
V
For two more days, Sophie and her Dad existed in a bubble, just the two of them, a portable two-person village in a city of twenty thousand or more. The only people they knew were Sir Bodon Watt, who probably spent all his time at palaces, and little Marthen, who probably spent all his time guarding his bags of money and checking his books, and a few traveling merchants who were staying at the inn. One, a genial fellow who must have been handsome just a few years ago, taught Sophie how to play chess, after determining that she wasn’t receptive to his cautious advances.
Meanwhile the rain came in and stayed. On the second evening, the sun suddenly escaped and lit on fire the trees on the hill over the River Lesh, and they remembered that it was the last day of September.
Sophie and her Dad were getting to know each other even better than they already did, and it was mostly okay. They saw each other naked, and quickly covered up. They learned each other’s snores and night murmurs. Dad had little frights in the night, from which he would sometimes wake and sigh and lie quietly. Sophie already knew that he slurped his soup and didn’t have a problem about belching or farting out loud, but she noticed that he was actually somewhat dainty about eating. He cleaned his plate, and also cleaned every corner of his lips with the table cloth (as was the custom also among the well-born of Merrivan). She wondered: if she one day mixed some leaves or rocks or clumps of dirt into his stew, would he eat them just out of habit?
But they also smiled at each other in the morning. Dad always had a good word for Sophie, and she, of a slightly grumpier disposition, usually had a kind word for him. She washed her face and hands several times a day, and he began to adopt the habit too. She got him to wash his spare clothes—they each had a spare of everything, and that was all—and she used a little of her one gold piece to buy each of them a hat.
She had night frights too, but they weren’t exactly dreams. It happened again and again: she was running through the tall grasses, carrying a branch of an apple tree, singing a children’s song, and then she jumped off a cliff and landed in a pool of cool water, and as she swam to shore the old preacher from the village helped her out of the pond while asking her whether she’d seen the meteor shower. Then she woke up, in the dark, with the feeling of someone standing very near. She would gather her strength and fight off her fear and sit up suddenly. The darkness was empty and sullen.
On the third morning since their enlistment, Sophie and her Dad got up, had a little breakfast downstairs, gathered their horses and headed for the Halls. There in the great square of Merrivan, the army was gathering to move. It seemed like the biggest army that had ever been assembled—indeed it numbered over ten thousand, as much aid had come from the cities of the coast, who felt a threat to their own peoples. But no one seemed to be in charge. Sophie and Dad found the entrances to the Halls closed to them, and waited all morning before they caught sight of Sir Bodon and Marthen walking together.
“Thank goodness you made it,” said Sir Bodon running up to them. “Oh, we’re saved. I was so worried. Marthen, can you make sure they get provisions? Thank the Goddess,” he said to himself, repeating it as he hurried off.
“You’d think we’d saved the whole army,” said Sophie.
“Sir Bodon thinks highly of you,” Marthen explained. “And not so much of the other scouts. He instructed me to keep an eye on you during the campaign. Maybe he thinks you’ll protect me, maybe he thinks I’ll keep you from being contaminated.”
“Con-what-inated?”
“As I said, he thinks not highly of the other scouts.”
“What do you think, Squire Marthen?” asked Dad.
“I would tend to agree with him,” said Marthen. “I haven’t seen you in action, but you clearly have your feet on the ground, Squire John. I’d be very surprised if you weren’t a good scout. You were a soldier in your youth?”
“I was, at Faratak with King Lothar against the Enkan, and I don’t have too many fond memories.”
“No,” said Marthen. “You wouldn’t. You were a soldier all right.”
The army moved forward on a blustery fall day, with the fields and woods drying out after a drenching rain in the night. The scouts went forward ahead of the army, of course, and many of them wandered off and found their way back to Merrivan and the arms of their girlfriends. Others simply vanished. Sophie and her dad, of course, did not have girlfriends and did not vanish. It was a ride in the country for them. They went up the Lesh until it branched, then bent northeast and went straight up the right bank of the Vara River, the course that the army itself pursued behind them. In the evening, Sophie shot a pheasant—indeed it would have been hard to shoot and not hit a pheasant—and her dad cooked it up over a small and smokeless fire.
Marthen rode up noisily while they were eating. “Doing well, I see,” he observed.
“Don’t let him tell you he’s an old woodsman,” said Sophie. “He’s a farmer all his life. I did the hunting, he did the cooking.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Marthen. He stood looking at Sophie’s dad, at Sophie, at their horses, at the fire’s smokeless embers, at the remains of the pheasant. “Nothing to report?” he asked at last.
“Just pheasant,” said Dad. “If they were armed, you’d be in trouble, but as you can see they are not.”
“Then I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “Funny. I thought there were two dozen out, and you’re the only two I’ve found since noon.”
“Funny, isn’t it,” said Dad. “But don’t you worry. The rest can scout where they want, if there’s enemy near you’ll hear it from us.”
“That’s what I expect will happen,” said Marthen. “You know the course?”
“On up the river, headed for Enzun,” said Dad.
“Let you know if we see any Kug or Mad King Olk of Frunga,” said Sophie. “What if we see them both together?”
“Well, if they’re going at it, please don’t stop them,” said Marthen. “I love you guys. See you tomorrow night.”
They slept the night huddled in blankets under the stars and Sophie woke with a smile on her face just as light was coming into the sky. She got up, got the big pan and went to pee, and came back with water from a nearby stream for tea. By then her Dad was up, poking life into the fire and grunting under his breath about his aches and pains. He smiled at her, then he went off to the stream, and when he came back he was cleaner and somewhat shaven.
They rode on by the time the sun was well up, along the lightly wooded east slope of the Vara’s gentle valley. There had been villages once in Enzun, but the decline of order imposed from the south had already dropped the farms in the province below the survival line over the past few decades. They came down at noon to what had once obviously been a road; now it was still a discernable two-track trail, though trees had grown up in between the tracks. They looked both ways warily, as if great war carriages might roll down on them. If any war carriages were to come rolling along this road, they would need awfully high ground clearance. The way was quiet and had been these twenty years or more.
For a couple of hours after noon they rode north along this track, sometimes diving into forest of pine and birch and maple, other times slicing across fields full of big boulders or meadows of flowers above their heads. Twice the road came close enough to the river that its swampy environs had been filled with rubble; there the sand of the road had long since washed away, but the big chunks of broken rock were still there. The horses preferred to walk in the water.
By mid afternoon the day was cooling as a wind from the northwest brought up ominous clouds. They stopped for a bit of leftover pheasant.
“So how is Marthen ever going to catch up to us?” asked Sophie.
“We’ll go on up to that high point,” said Dad, pointing to a jagged, conical hill ahead of them to the right, northeast. It was covered up to its top with pines, but a cap of open rock was just visible, as was a long cliff red in the westering sun. The peak was possibly five hundred feet above them. “That should afford us a fine view. Then we’ll ride back down the road till sunset, the way we came.”
“We’ll go up to the high point?”
“Well, one of us has to stay here, obviously, the horses aren’t going to climb that. Listen, daughter, you know with my bad back—!”
“I know,” said Sophie. “I don’t need you slowing me down.”
“I will never do that,” said Dad. “Now be careful, I don’t want to have to come get you in case of broken leg.”
Sophie plunged into the pines, and soon she was going up steeply in a dense wood with little undergrowth. She climbed into a band of big rocks, and here she had to slog upwards through some thickets where the soil was too thin for tall pines. A net of short evergreens, somewhere between dwarf fir and giant juniper, blocked her completely at a steep spot. She gathered her breath, hurled herself at the greenery, and burst through, finding herself now at the bottom of a steep rock face. This she scrambled up, and a few more like it, and she stood on the small skull cap of open rock atop the hill.
She found a boulder and climbed up it to look around. She thought there might be, in some quarter of the view, a big old camp full of big old Frungans, about a hundred thousand of them. But no, there was only a breathtaking blue and white expanse, with a fleet of tall clouds bringing storm to come, and below it a shade-speckled green expanse, and in the boundary, a jagged range of mountains over the half circle from west to north to east, and to the south a misty distance of the flat lands back beyond Merrivan. To the north and northwest stood nearby mountains, old and worn but much taller than this hill, rocky at the top and in long ravines down their sides. Everywhere there were trees. Sophie didn’t think she had seen so many trees in her life. They reached for the sun and swayed with the wind, row upon row, up ridge upon ridge.
She looked back toward where her father waited with the horses, back south down the valley, and she could see no sign of Dad or of the King’s Army. Chastened, she turned to study the north again: up this stream bed, over that ledge, down that gully, back over that patch of evergreen. There! Wait, no—wait, yes, smoke there! She studied the scene and under her blue eyes it came clear: a few sources of smoke, a rider passing a gap among tree and boulder, things moving behind a screen of trees by a pond, more smoke there and there. She couldn’t make out where they were exactly, nor did she have any idea who they were, but as she became sure that they really were, the hair stood up on her neck. The more she looked, the more she saw; that patch of woods was crawling with them. She backed off the summit, lowered herself quietly down the rock faces and stood at the top of the dense thicket of evergreen.
Sophie’s ears were full of the wind, of the high birds crying, of the trees rustling and nudging, and now she heard another sound, quite nearby. She looked down and there was an a feather on the end of a stick that stuck up out of the shrubbery. She bent to pick it up, and found it was an arrow. She heard the whistling noise again, and without another thought she pitched herself into the brush below. She landed in rotten logs below and rolled, bouncing off boles until she caught herself by slamming into a boulder.
She got up, winced a little, then looked back up in silence. Nothing. She turned and hurried on down the hill as carefully and quietly as she could. When she got to the stream at the bottom of the slope, she found she was still holding the arrow. It was sleek and narrow, and its wood looked oiled. Its head was of bone, carven into a twisted point with spiraled flutings.
She jumped the stream and ran through the patch of maples on the other side and out into the meadow by the old road. Dad was chewing grass and conferring in whispers with the horses, who were also chewing grass.
“Dad,” she said, “what do you think of this?”
“Oh, great,” he said, “it’s the Kug. They carve their arrowheads out of bone, and they carve them so they’ll whistle slightly as they fly. Well, it’s an old trick among all those tribes. Supposedly it sounds like a ghost crying out or something.”
“I don’t recall that it did,” she said. “It was more like when you blow through a grass blade.”
“Uh, Sophie dear, where did you find this?”
“Someone shot it at me. I was coming down. There’s a big camp away north, just to the right of that mountain. I saw tons of little smokes, and some horses and people.”
“Not moose and bears?”
“Dad.”
“Sorry, girl. Which way did you say?”
“There,” she pointed, “straight over this hill and down the other side. They’re camped under trees but they’re not so careful about smoke.”
“Hmm,” said Dad. “Kug are careful about smoke. Frungans aren’t so careful. Well, we might just have two armies here. Let’s hope the King and his fancy folk are smart enough to figure out how to get them to fight each other. Any sign of our employers?”
“Not so much,” said Sophie.
“Well, that’s good. That means King Olk might just go up against the Kug first.” He climbed up on his horse and looked back down at her. “Well, you coming? We have to report to Marthen. Don’t you know there’s Kug archers on this mountain?”
So they retraced their path from the lookout hill. It was already well into October’s short late afternoon when they turned south, and they managed to get in a couple of hours’ ride before night fell so completely that they could barely see their hands in front of their faces. The wind had picked up, and there were no stars.
“We should have stopped earlier,” said Dad as soon as he hopped down. “Let’s get the tent up fast.”
They picked a spot twenty yards off the track, under a low-bent old willow, its unkempt and browning leaves still offering some concealment, and hurried to put up the little tent that Marthen had given them. The rain was falling before they were done, confusing their labors as they tried to hurry too much, but presently they sat, in utter blackness, not too wet and mostly sheltered. Their horses stood outside, sheltered only by the tree.
“Well, here we are,” he said, just as she said, “I hope the Kug haven’t followed us all that way.” He said, “I hope the Kug get their gosh darn heads soaked,” just as she said, “We expect to sleep in this?”
They laughed. “I guess so,” said Dad.
“You’re a peach, Dad, you know that.”
“You too, my dear.”
Dad lay out, as best he could, his head just at the opening of the tent. Sophie lay down too, the opposite way, her feet curled next to his face. “I can sleep like this if you can,” she said, her face up against the canvas.
“Meant to offer you some wine,” he said. “Help you sleep.”
“Too much trouble,” she replied. Instead, they lay, trying not to say any more, as the rain pelted down outside. Soon the canvas had saturated to the point that moisture started rolling down the inside of the slanted sides. The tent’s dirt floor became muddy. There were steady drips here and there. The wind in the trees sounded enough to blow the whole thing off into the Vara River. She knew she would never sleep. Of course the next thing she knew, she was waking from dreams of running to the bright shock of a nearby lightning strike. They looked at each other, from opposite ends of a soaked tent, but said nothing. Of course, after that, she could never sleep the rest of the night. The next thing after that, the sun was peeking in the tent flap.
They struggled out and stood blinking and stretching. It was late already, or so it seemed to them. “It must be, it must be, oh, half an hour past dawn,” said Dad.
“I’m not as soaked as I thought I’d be,” said Sophie. “I’m wicked sore though.”
“Get back to me on that when you’re fifty,” said Dad. “I’m gonna go get water. And get rid of some,” he added, picking up his canteen and heading out from under the willow.
She looked at the tent. It was drenched. But inside, it really was drier: the slanted sides had channeled most of the water off. She slapped Horseradish, saying, “Hey old boy. Hey Daisy,” she said, patting her dad’s horse. They gave her patient looks. She found her pack, lying under her saddle on the ground, and it was dry. When Dad got back, she had peed and she was in her dry clothes.
“Good idea that,” he said. He found that his other clothes were a little damp, but still an improvement, and he excused himself to change on the other side of Daisy.
“Fire?” she asked. “Tea?”
“Let’s not chance it,” he said. “Come on. We got some jerky and a couple apples. Let’s put some more miles behind us.”
They followed the track back south for an hour, then where it sank into mire they climbed back up onto the ridge that overlooked the river, and in a couple more hours they spotted what could only be an army on the move, down in the valley beside them.
“Friendly?” asked Sophie.
“If not,” said Dad, “then the King has more problems than we ever thought.”
But it was indeed King John’s army, and when the leading company of knights was still a mile or more ahead, Marthen and Sir Bodon met them riding.
“You have news,” said Marthen.
“We do,” said Dad. “We sighted at least one, maybe both your enemies.”
“Explain, Squire John.”
Dad turned to Sophie. She offered Sir Bodon the arrow. “There’s a big hill, or a little mountain, what, three hours north from here? Mostly up this track that follows the river. I climbed it to get a look around, yesterday afternoon, and I saw men and horses moving, and signs of fire. Then someone shot this at me, and I heard another fly by, up on the mountain top.”
“That’s a Kug arrow,” said Dad. “Look at the arrowhead.”
“Do I know how to pick them?” asked Sir Bodon. “I know how to pick scouts, I really do. I’ve never seen an arrow like this, but I’ve heard the stories.”
“I’ve seen them,” said Dad.
“Well, it’s not a Frungan arrow, that’s for sure, they make them a lot like ours. So there are Kug up the valley: that’s news, and not good news either. But—?”
“The camp,” said Dad, “we don’t, I mean, I don’t think the camp Sophie described to me would be a Kug camp. For one thing, she said she saw smoke and campfires. Kug are wary about that type of thing.”
“You know this from your army service?” asked Sir Bodon.
“Sure, and scouting—oh, twenty years ago or so, maybe it was fifteen, Lord Edgar’s dad got concerned about Kug raiding across the Muddy, so we went and played cat and mouse with about a hundred of them for a month. A thousand of us, we were the cat. Never caught the mouse.”
“But those others,” said Sophie, “there were just tons of them. They were under trees but I could tell there were a lot.”
“Anything from the other scouts?” asked Dad with a wry look.
“Oddly, no,” said Marthen. “And we haven’t lost them all, just some. The others all go out and come back and it’s all clear sailing.”
“We’re not making this up,” said Sophie. “I really did—!”
“Oh, I know,” said Sir Bodon. “You don’t need to convince us. I may have a time convincing Prince Sylvester and the King’s generals, they like to believe what they like to believe.”
“What do you need us to do?” asked Dad.
“Sorry to say this,” said Sir Bodon, “but we mostly need you to go back out in front of us and keep an eye out. Just stay an hour ahead of the army.”
“Are you headed on up Vara?” asked Dad.
“Seems like it,” said Sir Bodon. “Tell you what the King will definitely like about your report. You tell us King Olk is up the river a ways. King’s men want him to be there. They just don’t want the Kug too.” He looked at the arrow. “This can’t hurt, of course.”
“But others like it could,” said Marthen, “so be careful.”
“Thanks,” said Sophie.
“Well, I think the world of you guys,” said Sir Bodon. “Let’s just hope the King’s Men don’t need an ambush to come to the same view.”
By then the forward companies were catching up, and the knights of the vanguard instinctively gathered around Sir Bodon. Sophie and her dad made a short farewell and headed back up the river, just as an impromptu council of war was developing. “I want to be miles away from that,” said Dad, once they were out of earshot. “Lots of fools asking fool questions and not listening to the answers.”
“Back there?”
“Yes, back there.” They rode on along the east bank of the Vara, then took to a deer track toward the east side of the valley.
“Dad, does the King have any sense whatsoever?” asked Sophie when they were under the trees.
“Sophie, what did I say? Most folk don’t have the wit to wipe their butts. I liked Old King John as well as anyone, but let’s face it, I don’t see that kings’ sons are any smarter than anyone else you’d meet. Maybe the opposite.”
“Trouble is,” said Sophie, “there’s lots of folk that will—!”
“Lots of folk going to get killed, lose their farms, lose their families. Yep. Let’s get a move on, shall we? I want to be well away by nightfall.”
They rode north and northeast again, keeping under the trees in the river valley, and by the time darkness settled in they were camped just up the ridge side in a grove of overgrown holly. Sophie went about and cut what seeding grasses she could find in the valley without stepping out in the open too much, trying to find something nourishing for the horses. When she got back, under the starlight and the light of the lingering early crescent moon, her dad handed her dinner: a hunk of cheese and some jerky. Below them, the Merrivan camp on the east side of the Vara River was only noticeable from a few fires and a low din. Sophie and her dad lit no fire, and with a starry night overhead, they didn’t worry about the tent: they fell asleep in their clothes, huddled together under a blanket, while their horses stood around them in the midst of the thicket.
When they woke up and looked out on the cold, frosted and misty valley, there were not one but two armies in sight.