More thunder. And another tree gone, split apart, half of it crashing across the road. Maorgan muscled his caцpa around, came trotting past Shadith, heading for Danor and the pack string.
Shadith used her mindtouch to soothe the terrified caцpa as a surge of wind tore through the trees, followed a second later by hard, cold lines of rain that hammered into her. “Good, good, you’re doing good, little Sokli. Turn round, I know, rain in the face is no fun, it’s just a little while till we get back with the others.”
The spare moss ponies and the packers were fighting the leadlines, kicking, rearing, bouncing about on stiff legs, snapping out with bared teeth, squealing, eyes rolling, all of them in a blind panic, struggling to escape, to run until they dropped while Danor and Maorgan struggled with equal urgency to keep the lines from breaking and the ponies in a compact huddle.
And the rain beat down.
And the wind blew.
Thunder rumbled.
Lightning danced around them.
Shadith opened herself to the ponies, breathed soothing things at them, calm, quiet, sense of full belly and sun warmth. One of the caцpas shook his shaggy head, snorted, and stopped his struggles.
That was the break. The others began to settle also. Sudden pain seared along the top of her shoulder, the sound of the shot lost in the storm noise.
Sokli squealed, shuddered, dropped as a bullet hit him under the jaw and burst through his neck in a spray of blood and flesh.
Shadith flung herself down, hit the ground rolling, was up on her knees sheltering behind the caцpa’s body, stunner out. She probed the windy darkness under the trees, felt the burn of a life-fire, zapped it with the stunner, and kept hunting for the others as more bullets slammed into Sokli’s body or went past her, aimed at the others.
Ahead. Two of them. Each side of the road. Gotcha! One down. Two. Other side. Gotcha! Last one… kat’kri! Must be sheltering behind a trunk thick enough… youch! Minging bastard… Bleeding from a crease dug into hair and skin just above her ear, she flung herself over the caцpa’s back legs, crawled round his hindquarters, and hunkered down as she scanned again for the shooter.
He started moving, darting for another tree so he could get a better angle on her.
She smiled, tracked him a beat, and zapped him.
Another scan confirmed he was the last. She got to her feet. Five of the moss ponies were down, one still alive but bleeding copiously from a shattered leg, screaming piteously. The others had run off. Danor was sitting up, cursing a steady stream, pressing his fist against a wound in his shoulder. Maorgan was sprawled on the road, facedown in a pothole that was filling with water.
Shadith swore and ran to him, the jar of her feet on the pavement sending pain shooting through her head. She knelt beside him, lifted his face from the water, sighed with relief as he coughed, then vomited water and bile over her knees. There was a hole in his arm, nothing serious, and a wound on his head, deep enough to show the white of bone, not a superficial crease like hers. It was hard to tell in the rain and dark, but what she read of his body signs told her he was in shock and in serious trouble. And there was nothing she could do except keep him from drowning.
Blinking rain out of her eyes, she left him lying face up and hurried to Danor who was close to passing out, hanging on with grim determination not to bleed to death. She sliced off one of his sleeves, folded it into a pad, then cut a strip of cloth from his shirt to bind the pad in place over the wound. “Danor, if you can shift yourself, get under the trees and out of the rain. I don’t want you getting pneumonia.”
“You kill them?”
“No. They’re just stunned. Be out for around half an hour. I’ll have to do something about that in a few minutes, but I want to get canvas up first, get the two of you into some kind of shelter.”
“How many and where are they?”
“Four. Two on each side of the road, all of them ahead of us.”
Her mouth set in a grim line, tears mixing with rain on her face, she cut the throat of the suffering packer, then checked to see what was left of their supplies.
The missing moss ponies were two of the packers and the three spare mounts. She felt almost a traitor when she felt a surge of joy that Brйou was one of them. Fortunately, what they’d lost to the runaways was mostly feed grain and some tools. The rest of their gear was on the dead packers.
The wet had made the ropes swell and the sheepshanks wouldn’t pull free; by the time she got the tent pack loose and hauled it into the semishelter of one of the trees, Danor was gone. She swore softly, having a very good idea what notion he’d got in his head. She opened the pack and started trying to raise the tent without getting it soaked inside as well as out.
She dragged Maorgan inside, stripped and wiped him dry, wrapped him in a blanket, then went hunting for Danor.
The first chorek was a burly man, short, a greasy beard covering most of his face, his clothes filthy enough to stand on their own if he’d ever taken them off. He was also very dead, a black dart in the center of one bulging eye.
She found Danor sprawled beside the last dead chorek, the darter clutched in his good hand. “Gods! What am I going to do with you?”
He didn’t answer, being too busy dying…
Working carefully so she wouldn’t dislodge the filthy, sodden bandage, she got him draped over one shoulder, powered herself onto her feet, and staggered back to the tent.
With the two unconscious men wrapped in blankets, their wounds coated with antiseptic and bandaged with sterile pads from her medkit, she stripped off her saturated clothing, hung it over branch stubs, hauled the rest of the packs inside the tent, set up a throway heat pac and hung a glow bulb from one of the tent poles. Aching with weariness, the crease on her shoulder sorer than a rotten tooth despite the plasskin she’d sprayed on it, the pain from the crease on her head beyond description, she swallowed a painpill from her personal pharmacopoeia, pulled the last blanket about her, and sat a moment gathering strength before she even tried to think of what else she should do.
The rain pounded down on the canvas, a soothing steady beat, the heat eddied from the throway, seeping into her muscles and bones. Sitting up was too much trouble, she shifted position, shifted again, curled up beside Maorgan, closed burning eyes for just a moment…
4
Marrin Ola jumped, caught the leather ball as it flew out of bounds, sent it looping back to Glois and the others playing on the bare patch of ground out beyond the blai.
He squatted outside the line drawn in the dirt and watched the game progress with flurries of activity as the ball was kicked and butted from end to end of the field, flying a few times through vertical loops barely wide enough to let it pass through, watched shouting arguments between the two sides, two Fior boys bracing nose to nose, chest to chest until Utelel teased them out of their fury, watched a couple of players go stalking off when they were called on fouls.
He muttered a few field notes into the Ridaar remote, but didn’t bother with a detailed description. It was a game so typical of prepubescent youngsters in dozens of the cultures he’d studied that he could have recited the rules without even asking the boys. Besides, that wasn’t what he was here for.
As the game broke up, he beckoned to Glois and Utelel.
They came over and squatted in front of him, smeared with dust and sweat, scruffy and grinning.
“Back home on Picabral when I was your age, my cousins and me, we knew everything that was happening round home. I figure you two’re about the same.”
Utelel pursed his wide mouth, opened his eyes wide and managed to look as innocent as the yellow flower dropping over one ear.
Glois turned wary. “Maybe so,” he said. “Why?”