A Wizard in Chaos

CHAPTER 6

The boots burst out of the underbrush, bellowing like bulls spotting a trespasser. They must have been watching the caravan, because they didn’t seem at all surprised to see the mules drawn up in a circle and the drivers spaced around them evenly, bucklers on their arms and arrows on their bowstrings. The first flight took out eight boots. The other twelve roared even louder and kept on coming.

They were too close for a second flight of arrows. The drivers dropped their bows and pulled out short swords, axes, or iron-banded quarterstaves.

“Treachery!” Ralke shouted. “They wear the livery of the Boss of Loutre! We’re betrayed!”

“Don’t be too quick to blame the boss,” Gar snapped, then thrust at a boot. The man twisted aside, but so did Gar’s sword, slicing through the cloth just below his breastplate and leaving a line of blood. The man howled in shock and swung with his battleaxe..

Gar sidestepped, bringing up his buckler to turn the axe’s edge, but three boots had converged on him, and he had to duck to avoid the spearpoint aimed at his head. The edge seared fire across the back of his neck. He bellowed with the pain and dropped down to a crouch. The boots, thinking he had fallen, all jammed in with a cry of victory. Gar stabbed upward, catching one man in the shoulder, then yanked the sword out as he shot to his feet, catching a second attacker on the side of the head with his shield.

But the third drove in from the front, howling in anger. His spearpoint jammed on Gar’s chain mail, but a stab of pain told him the tip had scored a rib. He thrust at the man’s face. The boot leaped back with a scream, an inch away from the sword’s tip—and fell, his feet tangled with his fallen mate’s legs. Gar kicked him on the helmet and stepped over the dazed man to meet two more boots running toward him.

One spear stabbed low, the other stabbed high. Gar caught the one on his sword blade and the other on his buckler. The high-stabber reversed his spear like a quarterstaff and drove the butt into Gar’s belly. Gar fell to his knees, gagging but managing to lift his buckler to fend off another stab. The other man gave a shout of victory as he thrust, a shout that turned to a gurgle as an arrow pierced his throat. His eyes bulged; he fell.

Three drivers came running up to dispatch the other spearman, one of the first attackers who was struggling to his feet. But Gar was scuttling forward on his knees, managing to wheeze, “Save who you can!” and breaking off the tip of the arrow, then yanking the shaft out of the fallen man’s neck. Blood spurted—the honed edge of the arrowhead had severed the carotid artery—but Gar pressed his thumb and forefinger over entrance and exit wounds, choking out, “He’s lucky—it only struck muscle!” as he reached with his mind frantically to knit cell to cell, holding back the rush of blood while the artery wall healed and grew firm again.

The drivers stared at him, amazed by such mercy, then turned away to bandage the few enemies who still had a chance—and, of course, their own.

Satisfied that the man would live, Gar snatched the fellow’s belt off, flipped its owner over, and bound his hands. Then he looked up to see Ralke staring down at him. “I have to have at least one of them alive,” Gar said by way of explanation. “More if I can.”

“Well, you’ve succeeded in that, and in saving us all,” Ralke told him. “Three of them came for you, and that left two of my drivers free to help their mates. They knocked over two boots, and the four of them helped four more, and … Well, you drew so much of their attack that my men finished them off easily. Only one of our drivers is down with a spearhead in his thigh. The others are bleeding, but they can walk.”

“Let me see the man with the spear wound.” Gar scrambled to his feet. “While I’m bandaging him, tie up the others and find me their sergeant, if he’s still alive.”

“The brute?” Ralke grinned. “Oh, he’s alive, all right. He came for me, but he wasn’t a trained swordsman. He’ll live, worse luck.”

“Then I need to talk with him. But first, the driver.”

It took Gar ten minutes to make sure the driver was all right. By luck, the spearhead had missed both arteries and veins, and Gar was able to start the flesh healing as he poured on brandy and bandaged the wound. Then he turned to the sergeant. He knelt beside the man, whose teeth were gritted against the pain of the wound in his shoulder. Gar lifted his head and shoulders, none too gently, and listened with his mind as he demanded, “Why did your boss send you to steal our goods?”

“Because he wanted them,” the man grunted, but the face that flashed through his mind wasn’t the boss’s.

Gar shook him, and the sergeant cried out in pain. “You’re so used to lying that it’s become a habit with you,” Gar told him. “Think! You have nothing to gain by telling a falsehood, and I’ll know if you do! It was Torgi the Translator who sent you after us! Is he that spiteful a man?”

At last fear showed on the sergeant’s face. “How did you know that?”

“It was there in your face for those who know how to read the eyes,” Gar told him, “and I can guess his reason, but I want to hear it from you. Tell! Was it only spite, or did he want the money?” Superstition shadowed the man’s eyes.

Gar decided to nudge him. “Your name is Hannok, and you haven’t told me that. That, too, is clear to see for those who know how to read faces.”

The sergeant who didn’t shrink from a sword or a mace now paled with fear of unknown powers. “He wanted the other part-in-twenty.”

“Was that his only reason, though? How much did he pay you?”

“Twelve silver marks,” the sergeant admitted. “That was the other half of the amount Torgi’s lie hid.” Ralke, too, was eyeing Gar with something like fear.

“So it wasn’t greed alone,” Gar, inferred. “He has a little power, and doesn’t want anyone infringing on it.”

“He could also be afraid that we’d reveal his treachery to his boss,” Ralke said heavily.

“A good guess. My advice, Master Ralke, is for us to quit this domain and do it quickly, for we have an enemy here who won’t rest until he sees us dead. That was what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it, Hannok?”

“It was,” the sergeant admitted.

“Even leaving may not do,” Ralke said, frowning. “Tell me, Brute Hannok, is Torgi’s post only that of translator? Surely there isn’t enough work for him in that function alone.”

“He’s the boss’s steward,” Hannok growled. “And every boss has a steward,” Ralke said heavily. “If they take up Torgi’s cause, we’ll be lost.”

“They don’t dare,” Gar told him, “for his cause is that of betraying his lord. Any steward caught aiding him will be dismissed from his post at the least, hanged at the worst. They’d do better condemning Torgi, and I don’t doubt they will, if his perfidy becomes known.”

“Which is all the more reason why he has to kill us.” Ralke nodded. “Yes, I see. But we can’t go back and tell the Boss of Loutre, for Torgi will have assassins waiting, and it won’t do any good to swear secrecy, for Torgi won’t believe us.”

Gar frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Because anyone that close to a boss is too deeply enmeshed in intrigue to be able to believe anybody’s oath.”

Gar saw a chance to apply a little more pressure. “But if none of the boots come back, Torgi might assume we’ve all killed each other.”

“Six of us got away!” Hannok blurted. “They were hidden on the hillside, and I didn’t give them the signal to join in!”

Ralke didn’t need to be a telepath to see through that one. “Nonsense! When your first six fell, you would have called in the rest.”

“I’ll pay you!” Hannok declared. “The whole twelve marks will be yours if you let us live! Come, you’re a merchant—why’re you doing this, if not for money?”

“We’d like to keep our lives, too,” Gar reminded him. “Money isn’t much use to dead men.”

“On the other hand,” Ralke said, “if you gave us the money and your oath to say we’re dead, we could let you all go.”

“Done!”

“Master Ralke!” Gar cried. “You’re not thinking of…”

“But I am,” Ralke said. “As Brute Hannok has said, I do this for money, and I’m used to taking risks. If he swears we’re dead, the chance of Torgi learning otherwise is small enough to be worth taking.”

“Well, you pay me to fight your enemies,” Gar said, scowling, “and I’ve given you the best advice I can. If you choose to ignore it, I can’t stop you.”

“You’ve a bargain, Brute Hannok.” Ralke reached down.

Hannok clasped his hand and used it to pull himself to his feet. “You won’t be sorry for this, merchant.” He reached inside his tunic. Gar swung up a hand, ready to strike, but Hannok only pulled out a purse. He set it in Ralke’s hand. “Count it—but if you don’t mind, I’ll set my men to making litters while you do.”

It took the boots much longer to cut poles and stretch cloaks over them than it took Ralke to count the silver. The boots loaded their wounded mates, and the one dead one, onto the litters and turned away up the hillside.

“I’ll remember you for your mercy, sir,” Hannok promised him.

“Don’t,” Ralke requested. “Forget me, brute. Completely. Please.”

The brute grinned and raised a hand in salute. Then he turned away and led his men back along the road.

“Mount!” Ralke cried, and the drivers who could still ride swung up onto their mules. Litters between them carried the two wounded.

As they rode off, Gar asked, “You don’t really think Hannok will tell Torgi we’re dead, do you?”

“Of course not,” Ralke said. “We killed one of his men and wounded most of the others, including him. He’ll want revenge, and will be back leading a larger force. But he won’t find us.”

Gar frowned. “How will you stop him?”

“Because I know the country almost as well as any of his boots,” Ralke said, “and better, in terms of finding bolt-holes. There’s a cave not far off where we can hide our goods and a few of the drivers to guard them.”

“Why not all of us?”

“Because it’s not that big, and because we could never keep that many mules quiet long enough for the boots to march by.”

“Then where will we hide?” Gar asked. “There’s a peasant village not far from here,” Ralke told him. “We can hide among them easily enough.”

“But they’ll be risking their lives!”

“Not really,” Ralke told him, “and the poor folk will do anything for a few coppers. I should know—I was born one of them, and so were all my men. But there’s the other reason, too.”

“Which is?”

“A chance to strike back at the boots and the boss in some small way.” Ralke flashed him a grin. “Oh, they’ll help us, right enough.”

Gar could scarcely tell where the fields left off and the village began. The only clue was a large circle of bare, beaten earth with the smoldering remains of a communal fire in its center. Around it stood a ring of low, moldering haystacks—or at least, that was what Gar took them for at first. But when Ralke said, “Here’s our hiding place,”—Gar looked more closely and saw holes in each haystack, pointing toward the central fire. These were actually shelters where people lived!

Ralke held up a hand to halt the caravan—only twenty barebacked donkeys now, with ten riders and two wounded men on litters. Then he called out, “Headman Bilar! It’s Ralke who calls!”

A head popped out of one of the guts, almost as unkempt as the thatch above it. Then a body followed it, and Gar had to throttle back a gasp of dismay. The man was old, ancient, bald on top with a fringe of long hair stringy with dirt and snarled from never knowing a comb. It straggled into his beard and down his back, not that Gar could tell where beard left off and hair began, for both were light gray. All he wore was a sort of sack made of coarse brown cloth, faded to tan but darkened by dirt. His arms and legs were scrawny and scarred here and there from work accidents, and his feet were bare, the soles toughened almost to horn—but he was alive, Gar realized. He wondered how many of his generation could have said the same.

The oldster came up to Ralke and said, “Greet ye, merchant!”

“And I greet you.” Ralke held up a palm. “How go the crops, gaffer?”

“They’m still stand, sair, thank ‘ee. No war this year yet.”

“And the rain has been good.” Ralke nodded. “Where’s Bilar?”

“He’m in t’ fields, sair. Will ‘ee have us call ‘im in?”

“I think so,” Ralke said slowly.

The gaffer turned and gestured. Several other heads had poked out of doorways, now that the old man had shown them it was safe. One of them nodded and shot away running—a boy of six or seven, Gar decided, wearing only a loincloth.

The women began to come out, with children clinging to their skirts. They wore their hair shoulder length or longer, tousled and snarled, mostly of varying shades of brown with here and there a blonde or redhead. A few were slender and had no wrinkles in their faces or arms—presumably young. Most of them had thickened with maturity and childbearing, though, and even those whose hair hadn’t begun to gray already had nets of wrinkles on their faces. The gray-heads, many of whom were balding, also had wrinkled skin on arms and hands—and presumably legs, though there was little of them to be seen. They wore the same sacklike garment as the old man, except for the ones who had babes in arms, beginning to nurse again now that the alarm was past. These women wore the sacklike garment cut in two, so that they could lift the waist of the “blouse” to expose a nipple for the baby.

Gar felt not the slightest stirring of desire. What repelled him most wasn’t the lack of grooming nor the dowdiness of their clothes, but he air of resignation and defeat they all wore. The whole village seemed immersed in sadness.

Several old men hobbled out on canes to sit by the doorways in the sunshine. Only the one Ralke had called “gaffer” was fit enough to walk unaided.

Gar noticed that there were far fewer old men than old women.

“Sit ‘ee down, sair,” the gaffer said to Ralke. The merchant complied, and Gar sat with him. “If ‘ee has aught to sell, though,” the gaffer said, “I’m afeard we have nowt to buy with.”

“It’s always so, gaffer. We’ll give you what little news we have for free.”

“Thank ‘ee, sair, thank ‘ee!” The gaffer beckoned, and all the people came crowding around. Even the old men hauled themselves to their feet and tottered over to hear Ralke begin the news.

Gar quickly became lost. It seemed to be only a list of which boss was fighting which, and what bully had raided what other boss’s bully’s border. It was relieved by the occasional account of a bully who had been hanged for betraying his lord, and the odd boss who had been killed on the battlefield, losing his domain completely to his enemy. Ralke added in reports of good crops, and reports of droughts which were fortunately distant.

The villagers hung on his every word, for even though all the stories were drily variations on a common theme, they were news of the world beyond the boundaries of their bully’s fields.

Finally there was a shout, and they looked up to see a middle-aged man wearing only a loincloth come trotting in behind the boy. The crowd pulled back, and the headman stepped up to Ralke, who stood to greet him. Breathing hard, the headman nodded and said, “Greet you, merchant.”

“Greet you, headman.” Ralke grinned. “It has been a long year, but not a bad one, from what your villagers tell me.”

“Not bad at all,” Bilar said, more with relief than with satisfaction. “The crops were good, and the bully left us enough flax to make new clothes. He even sent us meat once a month, and only took three girls for his bed.”

“A good year indeed,” Ralke said, with a very forced smile.

“That doesn’t mean we have anything to buy with, though.”

“But we do,” Ralke said.

Murmurs of wonder went through the camp. “We ask a night’s food and lodging of you,” Ralke explained. “I’ll pay two copper coins for each man.”

Bilar frowned. “How’s this, merchant? Every other year you come, you and your men camp in the village common!”

“Yes, but every other year, we haven’t had boots chasing us.”

A whirlwind of hubbub and speculation caught up all the villagers, filled with fear and protest. Bilar’s frown deepened. “The boss would hang us all for traitors!”

“The boss doesn’t know about it,” Ralke told him. “His steward has sent the soldiers out to hunt us down. We beat them off once, but they’ll come again.”

“The steward would be a bad enemy, too.” But Bilar seemed relieved. He glanced up at Gar and said, “We could say you forced us.”

“You could,” Ralke agreed.

“How would we hide you? Where would another dozen men have come from?”

“My men will strip down to loincloths and go out into the fields. They’ll lash sticks together to form sleds, and harness the mules to draw them for haywains—you are haying, aren’t you?”

Bilar nodded, a gleam in his eye. “Then come nightfall, we bury ‘em under the hay, yes?” He jabbed a thumb at Gar. “Take a heap o’ hay to cover him!”

“It would,” Ralke agreed. “He and I would both stay in your houses. I’ll wear a tunic—you must have one or two waiting to be mended. Gar will lie against the wall, and you can cover him with straw and rags, to pretend he’s a bed.”

“Might work,” Bilar said, “and if they find him, we can always say we feared to anger him.” He looked up and down Gar’s great length and said, “Even boots’d believe that.”

“I’d believe it, too,” Gar said. “Sometimes I even scare myself.”

Bilar threw back his head and laughed. Then he said, “I’ll ask.” He turned back to beckon his people around him. Excited, they came, crowding into a huddle, and a torrent of talk poured forth. The other grown men came running in from the field and joined the huddle. Furious argument erupted.

Ralke leaned back, arms folded. “They’ll come to it eventually,” he said.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve left a few coppers among them, is it?” Gar asked.

Ralke looked up, startled, then nodded slowly, his face a mask. “As I told you—I was born and grew up in a village like this.”

“How’d you get out?”

“There’s only one way for a man—as a boot or a soldier. I was lucky enough for a mercenary company to come along.”

Gar nodded. “And for a woman?”

“A boss’s bed,” Ralke said, “then a bully’s. After that, she can stay and go among his boots, if she wishes, and make a job of it. If she’s lucky, she might get a chance to follow a mercenary company to a town.”

Gar began to realize that the mercenary companies were the bright hope of the young here—a bright hope that usually ended with death in combat, or with being worn out in prostitution. “Master Ralke, I was wondering … the gaffer who greeted us, how old is he?”

“Forty,” Ralke said, watching Gar’s face closely. “Bilar is thirty.”

Gar’s face stayed imperturbable, no matter what he was feeling. “I was afraid of that.”

The huddle broke up, and Headman Bilar came back to them. “We’ll do it. Where’s your copper, merchant?”

Gar found he could almost hope Ralke was broke.

Cort led Dirk to the front of the room and turned to face the tables that had somehow become emptied of civilians and filled with soldiers. He took a deep breath, then bellowed, “Atten-shun!”

The clatter of overturned benches was drowned out by the double stamping of fifty pairs of boots. Into the sudden silence Cort said, “Men, let me introduce you to Sergeant Dirk Dulaine.” He paused, bracing his feet against the room’s odd tendency to sway, then went on, finding he had to be very careful to speak clearly. “He’s joining the Blue Company. When we get back to headquarters, I expect the captain will want to give him a platoon of his own. Any one of you might be in it.”

The soldiers stood like statues, eyes straight to the front, but Cort could fairly hear their brains clicking as the point worked its way home. No soldier wanted to have a sergeant with a grudge against him; therefore, it behooved them all to be very hospitable to the new arrival.

“At ease!” Cort barked, and the room resounded with another stamp as the men set their feet eighteen inches apart and slapped their hands together behind their backs. Cort turned to Dirk.

“Care to have a word with the men, Sergeant Dulaine?”

“Yeah.” Dirk grinned like a shark and stepped forward into the tension generated by forty-three hostile gazes, most of the men wondering what the hell he was doing walking in as a sergeant when all of them had been working their way up from private for a year or more.

The other three knew the answer. They’d been in the alley facing the citizen’s committee.

“I’ll be taking the watch tonight, so your poor overworked lieutenant can get some shut-eye while the master sergeant’s out trying to keep your mates from stepping into the mud too deep.” Dirk grinned around at them. “Anyone got a problem with that?”

“Yeah,” a voice called. “I got a problem with that.”

Dirk turned to look—then looked up, and up and up, until he finally found the grinning face on top of all the muscle.