The Road to the Great Eastern Sea 1
The Road to the Great Eastern Sea
J. Comer
Tracking
He woke and Hilojat was gone. He waited, still, for footsteps, for a figure to show near their fire, but there was nothing. Longer he listened, but no sounds, nothing to indicate that there were others in the world, on Pendleton’s World. The manhorses stirred, perhaps sensing him awake. It was secondnight, cloudy, deeply dark, and rainy season begun, as dark as the Nearside ever got.
At last he rose, poked the fire, and Charthat The’armat, Charthat Thermatson, onetime monk of Vokhekhe, now just a traveler on the road to the great Eastern Sea, set about investigating the campsite. There were no footprints in the leaf litter, but the deep tracks of their two manhorses, Fathf and Fasolchom, (“Smiler” and “Sad-Eyes”) showed clear even through the good sluicing that the rain had given them. Where was Hilojat? They camped on a flat above the trail across the Ferchus, mountains which rose four km above the Nurro floor, high enough to be cold in the deep of the rains, camped above a stream, but near no cliff or deadly pit: he had looked over this site before they stopped and pitched a fly against the rain.
He looked through the possessions of his partner. Hilojat, when he left, if he had left, had left his extra clothes, his rats-and-dragons board, rosary? The huge sack of food which they carried for the manhorses was there, as was-
He held Hilojat’s copy of the Charen, hand-written by a scribe in Favashar and block-printed with the whirling sacred symbols of the faVashala religion that his partner held dear.
Hilojat had not left, and this eased Charthat somewhat.
He had been taken.
This did not ease Charthat at all. He fed the manhorses, boiled some tea, made waybread, ate. He thought. Who’d take a traveling doctor-if they so much as knew what he was? They had posted watches, and had Hilojat dozed? And been...
What?
He was afraid, unreasonably, childishly.
He called the manhorses, seasoned females, to him, shoulder-saddled Smiler and loaded Sad-Eyes with the remaining food and camp gear. (The forest wasn’t thick enough or the trail sufficiently steep for a back-saddle on the beasts.)
He tucked the Charen, a hand-sized codex, into the woolen coat he wore atop tunic and trousers in the mountain chill, and mounted the manhorse. At a clucked command, they set off down to the mountain trail-road, impassable for wheels in such weather.
An eagle-owl dipped, soared on the dawn winds.
There was a village a day’s ride ahead, and he could find out...
Something.
***
He rode. The three-and-a-half meter manhorses covered ground smoothly, even steep slopes, and he knew them well by this point.
Charthat cast into his memories to find out what had happened. The exhausted sleep he’d wakened from yielded nothing save pointless dreams. They had ridden up, from a town called Nadashar, where they had spent....well. They’d spent the secondday and part of first night, perhaps forty-eight hours in all. Two sleeping periods, then, as they waited in taverns and questioned hunters in temple halls, seeking the way over the mountains, and a guide (which they hadn’t found). There had been the long hours drinking rice beer with a tradesman, the laughing Rhuthuok waitress with her sly eyes, the-
The fight.
He saw it in his mind’s eye. Two men with knives, then one fallen and the other bleeding heavily. He had run for Hilojat’s medical kit, the drinkers and a Rhuthuok pot-boy watching wide-eyed as Hilojat cauterized and stitched the wounds, applied rice liquor to disinfect them, sewed muscles and skin back together. Had they no doctor, in Nadashar, or simply none who’d treat the Rhuthuok, whom the faNurro disdained as savages? He didn’t know.
What did that have to do with anything? HAd the man died, the badly hurt one? Had his kin followed Hilojat onto this mountain trail for revenge? Why? Wouldn’t they want to slay the other knifeman, who’d been a faNurro farmer with too much rice-beer in his gullet? Why kidnap the doctor? Why not just kill him? And his sleeping partner?
He didn’t know.
Or had they....kidnaped Hilojat to make him do something? Kidnappings for sex were not as common in real life as in stories, but the slave trade was very real. Did they hope to sell a doctor of the Shi’akhat school as a slave? Where? Or was there some isolated, benighted frontier village which needed a doctor badly? And had refused the medical missionaries who came this way some time?
He didn’t know that either.
***
He came to the village as slow dawn lightened the cloudy sky across a narrow foggy vista of terraces and walls. Walls circled the settlement and its houses were long boxes of wood, not the domed adobe of the Nurro floor’s provinces. He signed to men who had seen him ere he neared the gate, men with homemade bows and spears, men dark-skinned, bandy-legged and squat. They replied in a mess of popping and clicking noises inter-gobbled with slurred and bent vowels. He could make no sense of it at all. He thought that it might be one of the Rhuthuok dialects, but he couldn’t speak them.
What would they see, he wondered, if they looked at him? A man, smaller than most, his face shaved roughly, a growth of hair on his scalp. He was a lighter brown than the Rhuthuok were, the color of wheat, perhaps, and had the live, black eyes of the faNurro. He wore a coat of indigo wool, stitched with a rather non-sectarian design of knotwork, and breeches of wool, all soaked through, and boots of apeskin. On his manhorse-skin belt hung a sword, a dagger and a purse of leather with a bone clasp. His hat was straw, but he wore an arming cap beneath it and had packed his armor coat away since they’d not intended battle. His manhorses were stout long-legged striders, bred at the monastery stable, their manes black and cropped neatly; both were females who wore packs and pubic aprons and strong walking sandals.
He motioned that he wanted food, drink, a place to sleep. The men nodded, looked at his mounts and his arms and waved him inside.
He saw straw bundles of bean curd under eaves, grip clucking and running to and fro as they saw the stranger, lean dogs yapping. Dawn, and save for the guards few were out. A guard, or so he thought, led him to a larger house than the rest. Hams lay in tubs of salt on the long porch. He was motioned inside, his manhorses taken to a stable or barn. (Did the Rhuthuok ride? He realized that he knew very little about them.) He shook his head, went to tend to the mounts. The stable was a shed for woolbeasts, and he saw the manhorses fed and given bedding of branches and cornstalks, with the woolbeasts for warmth inside thick wooden walls.
Rhuthuok crowded round a fire, smoking and jabbering. They saw him and several crowded round him, trying out pieces of Farash, Fayesh, and the dialects, he thought, of the South. He kept up as best he could, but he could make, honestly, little sense out of it all. He was never able, later to quote the dialogue, as confusing as it had been, but he knew that some things had been made clear.
He was brought water to wash, and hung his soaked clothes while wearing his old monk’s robe. Eventually the fire-heat dried them.
They none of them could speak Farash intelligibly.
There was a woman who could talk, but she was away, somewhere, somewhere higher up. The village was called Qot!an Tameru’ash, a name he couldn’t translate or pronounce, unfamiliar as he was with the Rhuthuok popped T.
He tried to make clear to them, using a mix of three languages, that he was traveling with another man who had been....well, who was gone. He wasn’t sure that they understood. They asked for t!arut! (popping the Ts) over and over. When he did not understand, they showed him: it was salt. He had a small sack, and he could spare none of it on a dangerous trek, but he divided it with the woman who fed him, and she gave him a long sash of handwoven cloth in return.
There was a village of (he wasn’t sure) shooters or hunters. It was some ways up the mountain, on a flat near a saddle.
They had maize beer, which they shared with him, and more beer. There was gruel and potatoes involved at some point, laced with some meat, rabbit-deer, he thought. At some point he was invited to a sleeping alcove, and took the offer, sleeping, thankfully, alone.
He woke in cold day to the noise of chattering, smell of wood and tobacco smoke. The folk of the village were smoking....tobacco mixed with poppy, he thought. Again, he was fed, and saw his mounts foddered, as cold rain poured down outside, miserable weather for traveling. Miserable weather for a war, he thought.
That was why they were going this way. Hilojat had been sure that border guards at the Pass (well, at any of the passes; the Ferchus were a huge dissected, fissured wall of interlocking mesas and canyons and flats), would search them, detain him for his credentials, for the mission that they pursued. Therefore this mad dash over chilly, rainy mountains inhabited by charming primitive tribes.
He sat outside for a long while, hoping that the rain would stop before he grew ill from the cold. It didn’t stop. Two houses in the village were cordoned off by straw rope. None entered or left. Why? Coming back in he saw prayer sticks erected where sunlight came in though a roof louver. One Rhuthuok was speaking to them, saying he knew not what. When she saw him, she nodded, went on with her prayers.
He tried, again, talking to people, amidst smoking, listening to conversations in the impossible Rhuthuok language, being offered potatoes. The village was up there, up the mountain, over a saddle in high country.
Had men come through, travelers, with a man, so tall, who wore a beard? A man wearing a coat, like his, Charthat’s, and carrying a sack of doctor’s tools?
They went up, the people said, up, up, the men went up, hunters, hunting men.
Hunting....men.
In the high country, they said.
He had thought that he was in high country. Firstday wound on, grew warmer. The rain slackened off to a fitful drizzle, and he decided to chance the mountain, Mihuma as the locals called it, as well as he could tell. He back-saddled Smiler, and loaded Sad-eyes with the pack, and he gave the head woman of the village, who wore a necklace of round brass pieces and stones, some strings of moneybeads. No price had been stated for the hospitality he’d gotten. An underling, male, bowed and took them.
Charthat strapped the long sash round his coat, which might keep him warm.
Charthat shrugged and rode off, up the Mihuma. He had been given directions but the trails were madly diverse, fork after fork after fork in the slanting, switchbacking mesa country. He frequently dismounted if he thought he saw some sign of humans passing. At one stop there was a sign on a tree, a sign of camping, maybe. At another stop he saw a print that he thought was Hilojat’s, but was too muddied. He ended up at canyons he couldn’t cross, sloped that, even backsaddled, the beasts couldn’t climb, and springs; he hit on the idea of climbing as high as he could to look for smoke. They had to have fire, didn’t they?
He took the manhorses up a long sloping mesa-top flat, up to where trees thinned and he could see a ways. He peered across the complex landscape of the Mihuma, standing atop a boulder pile.
And, in the cloudy sky, Butros hid the Sun.
“Fuck a poxed meatape!”
He swore, hesitantly, even though no one was there to hear him but the manhorses, and these two weren’t too bad about repeating their masters’ words. (Some manhorses were as bad as a toddler.) He made to climb down on Smiler, but then-
Against bright sky, un-eclipsed sky, hadn’t he seen a thread of smoke?
And below it, in eclipsed dark, he saw a small rectangle: a fire lit door.
That was the hunter’s village.
The Hunters’ Village. It had to be.
He smiled, led the manhorses round to the trail, and was off. The trails were snaky and he lost sight of the village at once, but he cast into his mind for what he had heard over the years: ways to track people or beasts in the wilderness. He frequently dismounted if he thought he saw some sign of humans passing. At one stop there was a sign on a tree, a sign of camping, maybe. At another stop he saw a print that he thought was Hilojat’s, but was too muddied.
The dark of the noon eclipse was eased a bit by Toner, which was full, and Glebe, which was in gibbous; he managed to coax the manhorses along trails which switchbacked up, and up, through waterfalls where they all drank, past tangled stands of juniper and bavath, shrunk to krummholz in the mountain cold and wind. Once he surprised a rabbit-moose, and the ears of the bull flopped as it bellowed and lumbered off across a slope. This was a hunters’ trail, maybe: he saw animal tracks where mud gathered, signs of the claws and scat of dog-bears. (The size and teeth of dog-bears made them dangerous and their lack of fear of humans made them very dangerous.)
Beneath a thick sheltering bavath, the gum scent of the leaves rising in the moist air, he saw a mess of mens’ moccasin and sandal prints. One was-
He held his foot, in its boot, next to it. It was a hobnailed boot of good apeskin, he was sure. It was Hilojat’s. He knew.
Secondday began, the eclipse ending, and steam rising from cold woods till they were good and fogged in. He came onto the Hunters’ Village, and an arrow clacked into a stone next to him. He cried out in Farash, “Hey, stop! I’m a friend!”
He hoped. He came closer. They didn’t shoot. There was a log palisade covered in huge scratches, scratches no cat had made, not even a marsh-lion.
They spoke in Rhuthuok to him, and he replied in Farash. Eventually he heard a voice, higher: a woman?
“You fu(smack)unan?”
He replied, “Huh?”
“You fa-Nurro?” It was a woman.
“Eh, yes. I am a faNurro. My name is Charthat Thermatson.”
He didn’t know what they would want, or need, or like, or hate. Could he offer trade goods? What did he have?
His faith, his skill on the battlefield, and...
He was an engineer. Never forget. He was the monk who had found the windbox.
Give me my lover back and I will make you a pump?
Hand him over and I will preach at you?
Hand him over, or I will-
“You come. Come now.” He could see a woman’s face, Rhuthuok-dark, wrapped in layers of woolens, her mouth open, her teeth in bad shape.
He came forward to the gate.
Dark faces, wind- and sun-burned, wrinkled, aged faces on children’s bodies, thick, short-legged, tattoos, leather, fur. Charthat walked into a small close-set settlement on a steep mountain flat. Houses jostled against each other and the woman translator was keeping up-
“We go headman house. You know house? Headman house man? You go?”
Others spoke words or phrases of Farash at him, but he caught very little of it with the Rhuthuok tendency to pop and click their consonants and slur and bend their vowels. (Vokherkhe had an ongoing project to record the Rhuthuok language and to translate the e’oscharelth into it, but it was slow and bitter going, and missionaries had had very little success). He dismounted and led his mounts as the villagers gawked at the huge beasts with fear and children screamed and ran inside, leaving toys. Had they never seen a manhorse before? Weren’t the Rhuthuok.....there had been lectures in anthropology and history at the monastery and sometimes he had listened. Professor Veyash had talked about the Rhuthuok. And Charthat opened his memory.
They lived in bands divided into “Days” and “nights”, and hunted and fished...some had taken up agriculture. They traded furs and meat, wild herbs and medicines, sold their baskets for iron tools and for liquor. Their rights were respected, given that they occupied salt-swamps and mountain crags that the faNurro did not want, and that some of them were still held as slaves. Over the years the monastery had bought a few, including the scholar Vellalt. They-
He was taken, in the secondday foggy drizzle, to a house longer and larger than most, posts outside decorated with the skulls of dog-bears. He had heard of the dog-bear sacrifice...Then they took his beasts and the translator said, “They take them, they them hide, hide them, make safe, safe, yes? Make food, they eat? Eat them?”
“Huh? Yes, please, if you can, good Ghir, give them a stall in the...” He saw nothing that resembled a stable. “Take them somewhere that they can lie down?” He motioned sleep. “Bedding for them, and food?” He followed them to a shed, smelling of furs and pine boughs, where there was space at least for the beasts to lie down and rest. “Smiler, Sad-Eyes, stay here? Stay here.”
The great manhorses nodded with faces twice the size of his.
“Here, can you bring bedding? Something for them to lie on? And food?”
She seemed confused as to what manhorses ate. “They eat?” Translation, her conferring with the others. “What they eat? Like men eat?”
“They can eat corn, potatoes, oats, fruit. Not meat, not often.” Meat was fed to manhorses only before battle. “Okay? Can you do that?” Dhai-dammit, he was becoming nearly as incoherent as this translator.
“They eat. Okay? We go house headman house.”
He agreed. The manhorses went into the long shed and a boy brought bedding. Into the headman’s house, then, and to conversation which was too repetitive, complicated, and irritating, because of the scrambled-eggs grammar of the translator and Charthat’s total ignorance of Rhuthuok, for him to remember in full or set down in writing.
The headman was actually a woman, a Rhuthuok spiritual leader, since the headman, who hunted, was across the mountain and at war. She wore a long wool gown and a necklace of round beads.
War?
There was a war against great ones, huge creatures, huhuhuma. Was the religious struggle being waged even here? He hadn’t seen Alegani or Churgani army camps in a hundred klicks, and they were far, at least, from that border.
But the Baligani border was a reasonable distance across a huge valley of farms and pastures and small, pale lakes milky with glacier flour, at the eastern base of this mountain wall. Were the Baligani entering the war on the side of...whom? Against Churgan? Did they want to invade and overthrow the Protectorate? Against the Alegani? Had the sun-worshippers split and were they fighting each other? There were too many unknowns.
War, then. He was guised as a warrior. So a warrior he would be. He told them that he was a warrior (which was true as far as it went, since khus also meant priest), and that he could fight for them against the huge enemy, the huhu-things. Had they seen Hilojat?
He was certain that they had. Through the translator, he found that hunters had come through the village with a fu(smack)nan, and that he had been a healer. It had to be him. Had he been kidnaped? Agreed to go with them? Why?
Charthat didn’t know.
The long secondday led to heavier rain and to children being called in to be wiped down and have their soaked clothes taken to let them warm by a fire in a square pit. Round the fire on wooden floor sat the Rhuthuok in their wools and furs, their necklaces a-jingle, their squat bodies smelling of smoke and unwashed skin. Charthat had smelled worse, himself, and joined them. Pots of clay steamed over the coals and he was offered soup of some stringy game animal and potatoes and oca. He ate, with great relish, and when the meal was done joined the tribeswomen and men in smoking, the pipe passed from hand to hand round the group, children shrieking and playing and eventually taken to a loft and tucked into bed.
The confusing conversation ended when the woman translator was hauled giggling off to some other house, by a man whom it seemed she knew well, very well.
He was shown a bed, as the thirty hours of secondday drew to a close, and took it, sword by his side. He woke and there was hot soup. He managed a bowl of tea with the leaves he carried in his pack, and shared: the Rhuthuok knew what tea was. Men were assembling, men and a few womenfolk, with spears, dogs and bows. The translator explained that they were going up, up to get the chieftain back, the headman. He had fought the huhu, the soldiers, the huge enemy, and fallen. Charthat agreed to go with them. The translator shook her head no, when asked if she would go. Charthat had tried to learn at least a few words, but Rhuthuok is a complex language; he had made little headway. She gave him a sack; he opened it and it was full of parched corn.
The war party set out at dusk with Ngobi’s fires lighting the sky and the half-disc of Butros visible, through a light haze of clouds. Charthat’s manhorses weren’t useful, here, and the chief hunter told him not to bring them. He thought for a moment and realized that unless all of the group had manhorses, at least as pack animals, then they were huge targets and prevented some kinds of tactics entirely. Of course, how these hunters would defeat an enemy army, he didn’t know, but he wanted Hilojat back.
They marched for hours in the cold evening and fog, soaked quickly and squelching in mud. Charthat reminded himself to thank a missionary the next time he saw one. This wasn’t easy and he hadn’t even started preaching yet.
Several times, scouts who had gone ahead returned to speak. They told the chief....he didn’t know what. When the group went over a ridge, Charthat looked ahead for the sign of an enemy camp: smoke. The sky was clear and blue under Butros’ gibbous face. He saw nothing. Nothing at all.
He tried asking how near to them the enemy were. He was told soon, very soon, they would find the headman. Soon! He saw no sign of this.
They marched on, wearily. At two points they stopped to smoke. The men ate parched corn from their packs. Charthat ate some from his own. They marched on while Charthat tried to picture all this on a map in his head. Failing that, he tried at least to memorize the route so that someone, sometime, could return here for a science mission. The missionaries....a medical mission might work here, even with the language barriers. He filed the thought in his head.
They wound down a small ghyll and found the headman in a rock shelter with two other men. One a hunter, a Rhuthuok, and the other was Hilojat Shazhatson, Charthat’s partner.
Charthat called to him, and, unbelieving, Hilojat turned, came to him.
Charthat said, “Hilojat, where, why did you leave?”
Hilojat said, “Charthat, we need to leave. We’re in great danger here.”
“Huh?”, said Charthat.
***
Hilojat understood less of Rhuthuok than Charthat did, and the headman was wounded, and so the whole affair went slowly, especially the insistence of the doctor that his patient be carried on a litter, of which the hunters had never heard. After trying over and over to explain it through motions of their hands, which made the hunters laugh, and telling the hunters not to carry the headman over their shoulders, not while he had a great, gaping belly wound, the two set out to cut bamboo and make the litter themselves.
They had located a stand near a creek, a stand of hardy mountain cane barely twice Charthat’s height, when the giants attacked.
Immense shapes, two meters tall at the shoulder, on four legs, four meters tall on two, they came out of a covert of pines and laid into the two adventurers with clubs. Charthat had the moment to see the silhouetted shapes and think, giants!, and be amazed, but when Butros’ light struck their faces, he realized what they faced.
Wild manhorses. This was where the story of the huhu came from. Manhorses had escaped and bred in some high valley, their numbers growing until they pushed out into the Mihuma, the-
The mountain of the giants. Huma must mean giant, or manhorse, and Mihuma was the land of the giants. Well, that explained a place name, he supposed. Now to-
The huge club fell. There were four of them. Hilojat was wounded, staggering, from a glancing blow. Charthat drew his sword, slashed at one huge warrior. These are not seasoned fighters, not soldiers.. They would be little more than wild animals. Wound them and see if they fled?
He jabbed at a huge hand, holding a club, knowing he could not parry the giant weapon’s blow. He missed. The giant’s swing was easy to predict, to counter. So he feinted, jabbed hard at a knee. Blood flowed black in the blue night.
The giants did not flee. He jumped in front of Hilojat, chopped at the arm of the manhorse attacking him, cut into the naked beast’s flesh, dodged two blows which came at once. Again, whirl round and strike at the knee. The beast roared, octaves deeper than a human. He slashed, trying for a tendon. The great body fell, thudded, screamed like a human.
The second of the giant warriors attacked and Charthat saw huge breasts. Breasts? The wild manhorse was a woman. Huh? She thrust her club at him and he dodged, slashed at her wrist. He kept between trees, guarded Hilojat, who clearly was in great pain. The immense clubs were less use in close quarters. She smashed down at him, and he countered, cut her in the face as she leaned close, grazed him with the club. He stumbled. Feared death.
Arrows sprouted from her face.
He sat down hard, and arrows missed him, struck her in the chest and neck. She screamed and smashed a tree with her club, but the club could not reach the archers. Dazed, Charthast looked to where the arrows were coming from: The Rhuthuok hunters stood under a heavy tree on a rock slope, and fired down onto the giants. When one took an arrow in the neck and blood poured out, the huge creatures fled.
Charthat was grateful.
The Rhuthuok helped the two of them back in the rain to the rockshelter, darkness deep enough to make it very hard to do anything. They kindled a small fire as hail came down mixed with the rain. They then set about giving everyone medical help.
This turned out to be a bit like the novices’ game of loading the marsh-lion, the garip and the fruit into the canoe. The wounded man had to be healed, then the man who helped him, then the headman. Eventually they curled up in their woolen cloaks and slept. It was a cold, miserable night even though the cliff face kept off some of the hail and they improvised a shelter of branches. Charthat knew that there would be no way of moving till dawn.
The nights on Pendleton’s World are sixty hours long. Even at the midnight transit there was almost no light from Butros’ World through the clouds. The Rhuthuok smoked, or simply waited. Charthat’s roving mind led him to catalog the places they’d been, and to wonder how many people lived up here, or knew about this place at all.
He slept for a while.
A long time later the dawn came. The journey back to the Hunters’ Village was slow and painful, the headman being carried on a litter of branches, and Hilojat being able to walk only so far ere he had to rest. They had eaten nothing save the parched corn for seventy hours once they returned to the village.
When they did get back, Charthat ate and collapsed onto his bed. At one point during the hours of dawn he knew that Hilojat was next to him, and then slept again.
Hilojat told him when they both woke that the headman of the Hunters’ Village, the Qot!an Mamamakhash, was alive, and that Hilojat looked for the man to make a full recovery. This had to be good news.
They woke and talked with the villagers through the translator.
The Rhuthuok wanted to apologize, but they hadn’t had a choice. Two houses in the lower village were sick with the fire-fever, and they’d sought a doctor. When he arrived, the situation had grown worse. Hilojat had told them to leave food and water outside the doors but not to go inside, and had shouted instructions through the door to the fevered ones. He wasn’t happy about the extended house call but he had had little choice against armed men without Charthat’s help. They had told him that the headman of the Hunters was wounded, and he had agreed to come, but then...this.
The Rhuthuok apologized. Charthat asked them questions. They didn’t want a missionary, but did they want a doctor?
They would feed one, and give her (him?) a house. Yes. Charthat told them that he had to talk to his headman, Shandokar, and that no one who came would ask them to give up their own beliefs (if they did not convert because they wished it fervently, then their conversion was of no value, was it?) But they must not harm the one who was sent, or great harm would come to them. Charthat gathered, from the responses to the translator’s words, that they thought that harming the doctor meant that the people that he healed would become wounded again.
This belief he did not discourage.
They were laden down with furs and medicinal herbs of several sorts, as well as new clothes. Through the translator, they asked for a guide to the eastern sea. A hunter offered to take them, and loaded his pack; the trails would be steep.
They left when the rain stopped. Down to the Qot!an Tameru’ash they walked in the end of secondday, having waited for the headman to recover, but still in a hurry. (They had come to quarrel, but Charthat had realized that it was easier to move Butros than to ask Hilojat Shazhatson to break his Shi’akhat oath, and he had given way).
They saw the smoke and knew something was wrong, badly wrong. Charthat steered the beasts off the trail onto a slope, and came up to within bowshot of the forest’s edge, where oca vines were trampled in gardens- a sin to be mentioned in confession, he recalled from seminary classes. He saw the village smoking behind breached walls. Bodies?
He saw none from this distance.
He crawled back to Hilojat, told him the details. Even a sworn doctor realized that there were safer places than a warzone. “Who is it? Who is attacking them?”, said Hilojat.
“Well, we can rule out some things, I think,” said Charthat, with manhorses squatting by them. “It’s not the giants, since they wouldn’t attack and burn the place, I don’t think. It might be the Alegani army, but why? These tribespeople have done nothing to them.”
“Well, some rival tribe, perhaps? Don’t they fight wars all the time?”
Charthat replied, “It might be, I think. But look.” They went back, and looked, the light fading slowly, slowly, as Pendleton’s 140-hour day entered its ten-hour dusk. “Do you see manhorses?”
“That’s a manhorse on patrol.” Ridde n by a man in armor. “Those aren’t Rhuthuok tribesmen. The faNurro did this.
Charthat said, “What do we do here? Which side are we on? We’re not Rhuthuok; we don’t even speak the language.”
“We aren’t,” replied Hilojat. “Why don’t we tell them the truth?”
“Huh?” said the monk-champion to his partner.
“Why don’t we tell them that we’re a doctor and a priest and are traveling?”
“Why would we do that?”
Hilojat patiently answered, “Because, if any of the....whoever they are, are hurt, we can tend them, and gain their trust. And find out what is going on?”
Charthat said, “Well, that is a good idea.”
So they did it. They rode down, and found the village’s inhabitants rounded up and tied hand and foot by a troop of Alegani militia. The leader, one Khus Achelag, told them what had happened. “These slaves, see, two of’em, a pot boy and a waitress, from the tavern down in ol’ Nadashar, they ran off, took money beads and weapons. So me, and the boys, here, we got the militia together, an’ we rode on up, and, well, we got ’em back with interest.”
In the improvised slave pen, he saw the tavern girl and the pot boy, bound, and looking as if they’d been beaten within an inch of their lives.
“So do you need a doctor? My partner here, he’s one,” said Charthat, indicating Hilojat’s bag of medical equipment.
“Yeah,” the so-called Khus said. “Two o’the boys, they got it pretty bad, see? An’ we don’t have a doctor with us, since Nadashar doesn’t have one, just one who comes through every couple’a days,” the man went on, indicating the 140-hour Pendleton’s day.
Hilojat looked over the wounded men. One he could simply sew up and remove the arrow points; this he did, with Charthat as improvised scrub nurse. He gave the man a draft of poppy and bedded him down in what had been the headman’s house. The other one was a mere boy, fifteen or so, and Achelag showed fear at his case, trying to hide how he felt.
Hilojat laid the boy on a long bench, stripped off the young man’s cap, and began surveying the damage which the soldiers had incompetently bandaged during the battle. Charthat could hear him talking to himself. “Skull broken, fragments driven in, cut and saw...” He administered no poppy, since the lad was sleeping already, from the hurt to his head. “Hot water, then,” he said a soldier who was, by the Khus’ order, serving him.
“Good Achelag, we might share a cup of wine?”, Charthat said to distract the worried Khus. “I notice a resemblance in the boy’s face?”
“Aye,” said the leader, drinking, “he’s my third. First wife had none, so I took a second. Wouldn’t let me go without him; when we did, he stole his own manhorse and followed.” Hilojat waited for water to warm, and whetted a razor the meanwhile.
“He’s brave, eh?” Charthat knew, perhaps, how to talk to people. It was all part of the training of the monk. If he couldn’t talk to people, get them to listen, then what was the point?
“Brave and more than a little rash,” said the father. “When he was seven, he-“ and was off into a story that Charthat listened to with one ear while nodding and keeping careful eyes on the other warriors. Two watched the slave pen and others paid attention to nothing but a game of dice. One patrolled the heights above the village on a manhorse. Charthat caught a small gesture from Hilojat as he shaved the boy’s scalp and cleaned it.
Back off. The onetime monk took the hint and used the Khus Achelag’s loquaciousness to move him slowly, a step here, a step there, while the man talked and Charthat made approving noises, laughed at the right places.
Hilojat sent his assistant to fetch more water, and then, when the man was setting the pot to boil, said “Set your arms down, Khus Achelag.”
“-and he was in there, with her, and she....what?” The man wasn’t listening.
Hilojat repeated himself. The doctor’s voice was soft but it carried. “Charthat, bind him.” Charthat did so, and held his dagger to the man. Hilojat held a scalpel to the neck of the semiconscious boy.
“Now. Khus. Order the guards to do the same.” Charthat motioned the Khus closer to Hilojat, and to his son. “Order them, Khus.”
“Never. You baboon-fucking shit-eater! Why are you doing this? To rob me? Suck a man tiger’s cock!”
“No. We don’t intend robbery. No,” Charthat said quietly. “But murder we could do. And have. Order them.”
The Khus Achelag ordered the guards to lay their arms down. Then Charthat plucked a knife from the Khus’ belt with his free hand, still standing, as if watching the operation, and tossed it into the slave pen. It stuck in the mud.
The boy who’d been aiding Hilojat came back to the porch of the house. “Doctor! What are you doing?”
The noise caught the attention of the soldiers, whose game went unfinished. The Khus called for them to rescue him, and Charthat made a cut on the man’s neck. “Back off!” shouted Charthat. “Or I’ll see how deep this knife can cut!”
“Release our lord!” said one warrior. “Robbers, you’ll steal your death from us and no more.”
“Lay arms down,” Charthat said. “Lay them down by me.”
“Never, on our lives!”, said the brave man. Charthat pointed, with his free hand, to Hilojat holding the boy hostage.
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