“Of course, that is your right, Count Martuhn.” The black-cloaked nobleman proffered the document.
Martuhn broke the seals and read. The warrant was cold, impersonal and brief. It simply empowered any officer of the duchy to seize the boys by any means necessary and to convey them to the duke. However, there was one thing wrong with it, and Martuhn grasped at this single straw. “Baron Hahrvee, I would be bound to honor this warrant, save for one detail.” “And what, pray tell, is that, sir?” demanded the short, thickset, powerful-looking man.
“It is not signed by his grace,” answered Martuhn. “Now, by my stallion’s balls, sir,” swore the baron hotly. “Yon’s a legal document, drawn up by the clerk of the Court of Pahdookahport and signed by the Honorable Baron Yzik, judge of that court. Baron Yzik is also his grace’s deputy and voice in Pahdookahport, just as you are—so far—in Two-cityport.” Martuhn shook his head, knowing that his very words were damning him, but desperate to buy time, no matter the cost. “Not good enough. Baron Hahrvee. Baron Yzik, whatever else he may be or not be, is my inferior in rank, and I cannot be legally bound by his decrees or warrants. Present me a warrant signed by his grace and we’ll go further into the matter.” The officer shook back his shock of black hair, grinned and relaxed a bit. “I had hoped that your answer to this warrant would be something similar to what you just said. Count Martuhn. I, and some others at Pirates’ Folly, are deriving a measure of true amusement and no little satisfaction in watching you destroy yourself in the eyes of his grace.
“We all saw you rise above your betters, too fast and too far. Your imminent fall will be interesting to observe.
“You well know how his grace deals with rebels. I just hope that I am on hand to view your execution, Count Martuhn.”
Redonning his plumed helmet, the baron spun on his heel and, with a jingling of spur chains and a clanking of his saber scabbard, stalked out to his waiting horse.
A week later, the duke himself arrived before the citadel with a full brigade of his army and a siege train.
13
Even before the last clumps of snow had melted from under the shrubs and around the rocks, Stehfahnah had begun to exercise herself, the mare and the ass—toning and toughening muscles, perparing for the long trek ahead. She pulled the nails and removed the shoes from both of them, carefully trimmed and filed down the winter growth of hoof, then reshod them as best she could. Some of the poorer clans rode their mounts unshod or, in rocky country, wearing close-fitting ‘horse boots’ of rawhide and leather; but Clan Steevuhnz was one of the larger, wealthier clans, and the girl had seen horses shod since she had been a toddler and knew well all the intricacies of that art.
The nights she spent in constructing two travoises—a set of two long trailing poles of hardwood with a net of woven strips of rawhide between, one of customary size for the mare to draw and a smaller one for the ass; for, in addition to her weapons, equipment and supplies for her journey, she intended to bear away with her all the furs and hides, all the metal tools and every single one of the steel traps with their chains. No single tiny scrap of metal went to waste among the thrifty Horseclans, and the girl could already picture the delight on the face of Dan Ohshai of Steevuhnz when he saw and hefted the weight of the cluster of traps she would bear into camp. She fashioned two more water skins, larger than those she had inherited from the man, sewing the seams as tightly as she could with wet sinew—which would shrink as it dried— then smearing all surfaces, inside and out, with a compound of beeswax and pine resin. She had to make sure they would last, for it was sometimes far between springs or watercourses on the vast stretches of the prairie.
She dug a long, narrow pit in the clearing, constructed a rack of green wood with forked posts to hold it, then built a low, smoky fire and began the curing of strips of flesh from the carcass of a lean springtime deer and fillets of fish brought ashore by the three otters.
At long last, as the flowers began to drop off the dogwoods along the riverbank, Stehfahnah led out mare and ass, saddled them and lashed the pole ends of the loaded travoises in place. As a parting gift for the otters who had done so much for her, she left the carcass of a small-horn buck anchored in fairly deep water near the underwater entrance to the den of the mustelids to make it difficult for other predators to rob her friends. She had taken only the needle-tipped, six-inch horns and the liver, which she munched raw as she rode west toward Sacred Sun’s resting place.
Despite her lack of a saber or any armor worthy of the name, Stehfahnah considered herself well enough armed to deal with any contingency. Over the winter, she had strengthened the wooden dirtman bow of the man with strips from the long, thick horns of the shaggy-bull she had taken on the night the man had captured her. Carefully, patiently, she had carved and smoothed the edges of the hern strips, affixed them with fish glue and tightly bound them with fresh deer sinew. The result was, while not a true Horseclans horn-bow, considerably better than the bow had been to start with. She also had a deerhide, water-repellent case for the bow and two others to hold the thirty-two arrows she had made, fletched and tipped with fire-hardened bone.
She had shortened the shafts of her pair of horn-tipped spears and balanced them for darts, then made a case for them and for the throwing stick. The man’s belt axe she had fitted with a longer shaft, and it now hung in its rawhide case at the mare’s withers. The handsome silver-mounted dirk with its S monogram was at her belt, as were a couple of other knives from the cabin in the woods. She had considered reshafting the steel spear as well, to make it longer and more like a horseman’s lance. But with no time to properly cure the wood, even if she could find an un-flawed sapling of the proper species, size and length, she had wisely reconsidered.
Horseclans-fashion, her long hair had been braided and the two thick braids lapped over the crown of her head, secured in place with thorns and some thin slivers of bone. Atop her coiffure, she wore the only piece of armor the man had owned—a plain steel helmet, lacking both nape and face guards, pitted with age and lack of care, dented here and there and with only a backed-off stub of metal where the spike should have been.
Aside from the hide-and-horn bracer on her left arm, the girl’s only body protection was a double-thick deerhide jerkin, into which she had quilted strips of horn and antler and, over the most vulnerable areas, the few odd strips of metal from the kit the man had kept to repair his traps. Through all of the first day of travel, the mare had incessantly mindspoken complaints to Stehfahnah about the weight of the load she must bear and draw. Meanwhile the patient little ass trotted along at the end of his lead rope, having to take two steps to the mare’s one, and bearing a proportionately heavier load without pause or complaint.
The petulant equine was even more indignant when, at that night’s camp, Stehfahnah hobbled and picketed her, while only picketing the friendly, good-natured ass.
“Horse sister,” the exasperated girl finally told her, “when we reach the camp of my clan, you will be unsaddled and may then run to the high plains, to be eaten alive by wolves, for all I care. But for now, you are the only one big enough for me to ride, and for your size and strength you are far less burdened than is sweet Brother Long-Ears. You are staked and hobbled for the very good reason that, despite the fact that I kept you alive all winter and have delivered you up out of bondage to a dirtman, I simply do not trust you not to run away in the night and leave me afoot. If you don’t stop your complaining, I’ll give you no grain this night.”