War In Tethys

18

Eight days after Zaranda's party came to Tweyar, a bandit gang made good on the prediction uttered by Os-bard's wife.

They struck in the early afternoon. Their intent was to catch the villagers logy with lunch, the traditional Tethyrian noontime siesta, and work beneath the warm sun, then to ride down as many as they could and burn the village, with such other merriment as presented it-self. They wanted to provide a striking object lesson for any other village brash enough to try hiring outside pro-tection or organizing a self-defense force.

A score of ragged riders, strung out in crescent for-mation, found a bare handful of farmers in the fields, and these not far out. The villagers began running as soon as the bandits began cutting like a scythe across the just-planted fields. The riders had no chance of reaching them before they scuttled within the shelter of stout walls of sun-cured mud brick.

"Don't worry!" the chief bandit, a lean, sunburned desperado who wore his blond hair in a scalplock, called to his men. "They'll be eager enough to come out when we pile brush against the walls of their hovels and com-mence to roast them!"

For good measure several short-bow-armed bandits sent arrows after the scurrying villagers. But the raiders were not true horse archers, skilled in the ex-traordinarily difficult feat of aiming and hitting a tar-get from the back of a moving mount; that took even more training than learning to draw and accurately shoot a longbow, and any adventure-minded boy or girl of the Dales could tell you that took five years' hard work. They were just horsemen who happened to have bows. They didn't hit anything.

Hooting and brandishing their weapons, the ma-rauders rode through the streets of Tweyar. The field-workers had made good their escape; the bandits had the narrow dirt lanes to themselves.

Unmolested, laughing and catcalling, they followed their leader to the well-trodden dirt of the little common before the vil-lage hetman's house.

"Ho, Osbard," the bandit chieftain called, "why so coy? Have you some reason to hide your face from old friends?"

Vander Stillhawk rose up from concealment behind the parapet of Osbard's roof and shot the bandit leader through the throat.

As he fell to lie kicking in the khaki dust, Balmeric's crossbowmen, likewise hidden on the village's flat roofs, peppered the raiders with quarrels. Farlorn and Zaranda plied longbows from the houses next to Osbard's.

The bandits wheeled their mounts and fled, leaving seven more of their number unhorsed behind. Two of these lay unmoving where they dropped. The others scrambled up and, clutching at the missiles sticking in them, tried to scramble after their fellows.

The village doors burst open and the village volun-teers rushed forth, waving clubs and hoes and shovels and makeshift spears. Screeching with anger pent-up over years of helplessness, they fell upon the injured bandits, bludgeoning, hacking, stabbing.

Zaranda stood up, letting her longbow hang by her side. She was an indifferent archer at best, and had only taken up a bow to add weight to the initial ambush volley. Stillhawk and the half-elven bard kept up their fire, emptying three more saddles before the bandits es-caped into dust and distance. The mercenary crossbow-men set their weapons aside to simply watch.

Out on the common, blood flowed.

Fire leapt in the cleared common before Osbard's house. Hand in hand, villagers and several mercenaries danced around it to the merry tune of Farlorn's yarting, considerably the worse for drink.

Balmeric reeled over to where Zaranda leaned against the front of the hetman's house, a clay mug of the tasty local beer in hand. "Dogs," he said without heat. "D'you know, Zaranda, they actually think they won today?"

"They'd better," Zaranda said. "It's why I let them finish off the bandits you and your men unhorsed."

The mercenary leader's long flexible face warped it-self into a scowl. "Why would you want to encourage these rabble to pump themselves up and rob us of glory?"

"So they'll quit being rabble as soon as possible," Zaranda said. "They needed to taste victory, or they'd never have faith in what we're teaching them—and more to the point, in themselves."

"But it was our bows that won the day!" Balmeric protested.

"They don't know that," Zaranda said, nodding at the celebrating villagers. "Nor do I want them to.

Please don't remind them—and encourage your men not to, either."

The mercenary grumbled and looked toward the ground. Zaranda stared hard at him until, as if com-pelled by her will, he raised his head to meet her gaze.

"Are you so hard-pressed for glory that you insist on claiming credit for winning a back-country skirmish? Bear with me, Balmeric; do as I ask, and I will guarantee you all the glory you could hope for.

Or—" she took a swallow of her beer "—at least an interesting death."

For a moment he goggled at her. Then he laughed and slapped her on the arm. "That's the most any com-mander can truly promise, though few are so candid, I'm bound. Very well, Zaranda Star, you shall have it your way!"

He raised his own leathern jack. "To glory or an in-teresting death!"

"Glory or death," Zaranda echoed. She bumped her mug against his jack and both drank. Then he slipped off to have quiet words with his men.

Alone for the moment, Zaranda surveyed the scene. From his favorite chair, Osbard observed the dance. He looked careworn and somewhat sour. Near him Shield of Innocence sat cross-legged upon the ground, clawed hands upon thighs like a great idol, ugly yet majestic, sloped brow garlanded with a wreath of wildflowers woven for him by the village maidens.

On the hetman's other side, Farlorn perched on an upended nail keg, his yarting across his knee, and Osbard's eldest daughter, Fiora—a young woman, brown hair bobbed short in the fashion affected by the female volunteers, and who was fortunate enough to have in-herited neither looks nor disposition from either par-ent—draped over his shoulder. Not far away, Chen sat with her hands clasped around her knees, gazing fixedly at the bard. She had rebuffed all attempts at gallantry by the local youths; fortunately they seemed to have taken the message without invoking her wild powers, and now left her alone.

At the moment she seemed altogether absorbed by the handsome half-elf. Under Zaranda's tutelage she had bloomed into a handsome young woman herself, though coltish still with adolescence, and she had grown less self-absorbed and obsessive in her pursuit of magic—if only because Zaranda had refused to teach her if she didn't. For his part Farlorn had begun deal-ing with her in terms of good-natured banter rather than his earlier disdain.

Now Zaranda felt a stab of jealousy, and wondered why. Does it matter that much to be the exclusive focus of Chen's attention? Or do I feel old flames rekindling?

Undeniably Farlorn was handsome. Undeniably she was lonely. She had good reasons for refusing to con-sider resumption of their liaison ... or so she had been telling herself. Now, seeing his face roguish and alive in the light of the fire and an appreciative audience, she wondered if that were true.

The village girl meant nothing to him. There had been plenty such, and would be more; and Zaranda had never been the possessive type. But Chenowyn—grace-less, untutored, redheaded, still half-civilized, and prone to seem half-human—had yet some quality to her that would make it hard for even Farlorn to treat her as just another dalliance.

Zaranda looked round the rest of the firelit circle. The face she sought wasn't there. No surprise.

It had been Stillhawk who began sending children, too young to train but old enough not to need adult supervi-sion, some distance from the village as lookouts. One such had spotted the marauders' approach that day, flashing a quick warning back to Tweyar with sunlight reflected in a little mirror—a trick Zaranda had picked up in the Tuigan campaign, where rapid communication was cru-cial to coping with the fast-moving nomads.

As a hero of the day's epic engagement—for the peo-ple of Tweyar realized they hadn't won unaided—Stillhawk had sat through the feast laid out by the villagers. But when the dancing and drinking began in earnest, he had slipped off into the night, uncomfort-able with such activities and the nearness of so many people.

Ah, well, Zaranda told herself, you didn't really want to see him anyway. For a moment she had felt that what she wanted was to sit and talk, but that wasn't it. While the bond between her and the mute ranger was strong, it was the blood-forged bond of comrades-at-arms; they were too close to brother and sister for any-thing else.

"I feel old," Zaranda told the night. And she turned and went off to her hut alone.

One bandit, shot from his horse by Farlorn in a field outside the village, had survived. Once bandaged, he put on a show of defiance, announcing he would never betray his fellows, who would soon enough come and rescue him.

His bravado lasted only as long as it took Shield of Innocence to wrap a great hand in the front of his jerkin and hoist him into the air. Whether or not the bandit was a votary of evil, he was human, with an

in-stinctive fear of orcs. Especially huge and ferocious-looking orcs.

Which is to say, he rolled over like a Calimport roach.

Two nights after the victory celebration, Zaranda mounted four mercenaries and half the village troops on erstwhile bandit horses and rode forth, leaving Farlorn and Balmeric in charge of the village defenses. In the heart of night, long after moonset, they came upon the bandits' camp near the riverbank. They left the horses in the charge of a female recruit and stole for-ward to surround the sleeping camp.

Stillhawk and a young villager named Hugh, who was skilled at hunting and reasonably stealthy, dis-patched a pair of sentries. Then, half an hour before sunrise, the party stormed the encampment. The first bandits to struggle to wakefulness were sent back to sleep by Zaranda's magic. The few who insisted on showing fight were quickly dispatched, the bulk of the outlaws sensibly surrendering after seeing Shield of In-nocence decapitate their doughtiest fighter with his sword-scissors trick.

As simply as that, the Tweyar Self-Defense Force had won its second victory, without cost to itself.

Most of the captive bandits readily accepted parole, agreeing to quit the territory, stripped of arms and valu-ables but carrying such food as the gang had stocked with them lest, starving, they should be faced with little choice but to return to marauding. The condition was that, were they ever caught again, they would be killed out of hand. The villagers accepted the bargain with an alacrity that surprised Zaranda; apparently the fury of their bloodletting the other day, and the task of cleaning up the grisly aftermath, had left them abashed, with diminished appetite for slaughter.

They were wary when three bandits volunteered to join Zaranda's company. No one in Tweyar could iden-tify any of the three as having committed any atroci-ties, though, and once Shield of Innocence had described to the erstwhile bandits in terms leaving nothing to the imagination the fate that would befall them should they attempt treachery, even Osbard was reassured. No one, Zaranda Star included, could read-ily imagine anyone voluntarily running afoul of the monstrous orc. Stern and instant punishment for wrongdoing was very much a part of his god's creed.

With renewed enthusiasm, the volunteers returned to their drill. Zaranda took pains to remind her exuber-ant troops that they would be extremely lucky ever to gain a third victory at such little cost to themselves as the first two. She could only hope they heard.

The month of Kythorn was preparing to give way to Flamerule when Zaranda and Goldie wended their way toward Tweyar along a trail through the riverside trees. It was a stereotypically beautiful Tethyrian summer evening. A faint pink glow dying in the west was all that was left of day. The air was like perfumed velvet. The sunset swallows yielded to nighthawks, and fireflies winked at one another through the gathering dark. Thin bat cries pierced the murmur of wind in leaves.

They had each had a fulfilling day, though in strik-ingly different terms. The mare was rhapsodizing over the virtues of the stallions in the pastures where she had passed her day. At last Zaranda shook her head.

"Wouldn't you like to look for a mate such as your-self?" she asked.

"You mean magical? Ha!" She tossed her head and snorted. "I go for the strong, silent type. Dumb all around—that's how I like 'em."

"But how can you bear to couple with others of your own kind who can't talk?"

Goldie turned her head to give her the eye. "Think what you're saying, Randi," she said. "How can you stand to couple with members of your species who can?"

Zaranda sighed, and rode the rest of the way in thoughtful silence.

It was all but full dark when they arrived back in Tweyar. "Looks deserted," Goldie observed.

"In the weeks we've been here, you might've noticed a tendency for country folk to turn in early."

"Where are our people, though?"

"Dining with the locals? It's been known to happen."

The mare's reply was a snort.

At the village stable Zaranda rubbed the mare down, brushed her, and left her with her face happily stuck in a trough of grain. She still saw no sign of human pres-ence. Preoccupied with turning the day's events over in her mind, she paid no especial heed.

When she entered the hut she shared with Chenowyn, it was full dark inside. But she immediately noticed the smell of indifferently washed bodies. Keep-ing her hand studiously away from Crackletongue's hilt, she shut the door behind her.

Lantern-glow expanded, pressing gloom back into the corners. Osbard and two village elders sat in chairs with blankets covering their laps, looking grim, which told her little; that was their accustomed expression. Ernico and his friend and fellow trainee Rudigar were there as well. Their faces were flushed. They would not meet her eyes.

"Good evening," she told them gravely. "Should I have knocked?"

"Where have you passed this day, Zaranda Star?" Osbard asked gravely.

"At the village of Pansemil, upriver."

The elders exchanged baleful looks. The youths shuf-fled feet. "And what errand took you there?" asked Storric, a stout, bearded man. Owner and operator of Tweyar's water-powered mill, he was father to Bord.

"I was discussing with them the possibility of train-ing them in the use of arms, as I'm training you."

A hiss of intaken breath. Osbard glanced right and left at his fellows, then back at her.

"So you stand convicted of your treachery," he said, "by your own mouth."

From under the blanket, he produced a cocked and loaded crossbow and aimed it at Zaranda's heart.