Pirvan squinted against the westering sun and looked downhill. The trees grew tall enough to hide much, even on this slope, so it took him a while to spy the trails of chimney smoke from well beyond the last visible bend.
“Village ahead,” he said to Haimya and Epron. “It’s downhill, so we can surely reach it with time to spare before dark. But can we trust it to be friendly?”
Epron nodded. “The oldest question I know, for the captain of a marching column. How far to push the men? For if the village is friendly to Waydol, we might be safe only if we go farther than might be well for the men.”
Pirvan had not and would not defer to Epron’s opinion so much so that the men questioned who led the column. But he could not deny that he had never before led two hundred men in battle, and Epron had led that many more times than he had fingers (of which he lacked two, thanks to a sword wound to his left hand).
“Very well. We’ll march as close to level ground as we can, make camp, post guards, then scout out the village. Once we’re out of the forest, we should think of striking out across country, well away from settlements.”
“We’re supposed to learn how the people are disposed toward Istar, Waydol, Karthay, and, for all I know, the Irda and the ice barbarians,” Haimya said. “Of course, if that was so important, they might have sent two men marching and the rest could have gone by sea.”
“There’s truth in that,” Epron said. “I do not call your friend Jemar-”
“Let us not discuss Jemar while the men are passing by,” Haimya put in. “Moreover, let us remember that he is on the sea with Istar’s fleet, which cannot touch us the moment the water is too shallow for their keels.”
Pirvan wanted to point out that Jemar was, in turn, safe from Aurhinius, the moment the water reached the depth of a horse’s belly. But he knew that weary bickering could too easily turn into sharp quarrels.
* * * * *
In the end, there was no need to pass the village too closely. A narrower trail forked off from the main one well before the village, and scouts sent down it reported that it reached open country well clear of other villages.
The trail led, however, through what was almost another village of charcoal burners, who had their furnaces set up in a score of different clearings along the next day’s march. By now, Pirvan looked like anything but a knight, and indeed the column could be recognized as soldiers only by their being armed and keeping in some sort of order.
“Hunh,” one of the burners said, wiping her (at least Pirvan thought it was a woman) hands on a leather apron as black as tar and cracked like ice in the spring thaw. “You fellows will never do Waydol’s business for him, even if you don’t fall down afore you gets to his gate.”
Pirvan shrugged. “Who says we’re going to do anything at his gate besides knock? What we do then-it’s up to him and how he replies.”
“You’re not one to call him enemy, then?”
“Not unless he misnames us that first, and even then we’ll try not to fight him harder than needed to force a parley.”
The charcoal burner-definitely a woman, for all that she was not much shorter than Grimsoar One-Eye-seized Pirvan in a dusty, malodorous embrace. “Gods be with you, then. But be wary. There’s plenty of folk out for the bounty on Waydol, and you may be fighting your way through them before you’re done marching.”
So it went much of the day, with Pirvan and Haimya feigning every sort of opinion about Waydol, to draw out the charcoal burners and their kin. By the end of the day, it was plain that, at least among the charcoal burners, Waydol was considered no great enemy, sometimes a friend, and very surely one who made Istar the Mighty angry, so could not possibly be all bad, even if he was a minotaur!
It was harder to tell what the village on the main road thought, for the charcoal burners and the villagers were not the best of friends. The woods-dwellers suspected the villagers of kissing Istar’s hand (or other parts) simply because they were the sort of folk who would do that sort of thing. But as to details, they could give none, and after a while Pirvan gave up asking.
“It’s not marvelous that we don’t get along with nonhumans when two human settlements so close can’t make peace,” Epron said as the last soldier filed past the last clearing.
“It may not be a surprise, but something doesn’t have to be an ambush to be deadly,” Haimya said. She looked long and hard at Epron, and Pirvan remembered that Epron not only had solely humans in his band but also had not urged recruiting any other races. Not that there were that many such in Karthay, but one could wonder.
Except that in this matter, wondering led nowhere but to sleepless nights that Pirvan could not afford, if he was to keep putting one foot in front of another until they knocked on Waydol’s door.
* * * * *
Haimya thought for some time afterward that perhaps she had spoken an ill-luck word, in mentioning ambushes. For they encountered one not two hours past the forest of the charcoal burners. Blessed with greater strength or skill, the attack might have cost the marching column heavily.
As it was, the villagers who laid the ambush on the trail could not make up their minds which side of the trail they ought to take. So they were still darting back and forth across the road and sometimes standing to argue in the middle of it, when Pirvan’s scouts came within sight of them.
The scouts saw without being seen, slipping into the woods at once and creeping forward until they could count the enemy’s strength and positions. Then their messengers scurried back to Pirvan, who promptly halted the column while he listened to the reports.
Birak Epron thought that on the left at least the woods were thin enough that a small party might slip secretly behind the villagers and turn the tables on them. He even volunteered to lead it himself, but Pirvan thought he had more of an eye on a feat to impress Rubina than on sound tactics.
The Black Robe had been faithful to Epron, as far as Pirvan knew, but he also knew that Epron would always doubt, always be seeking some new way of making himself stand taller in the lady’s eyes. His remarks about not letting her turn him from his duty were much more than wind, but something less than the whole truth. Fortunately, his men seemed tolerant-as yet.
“Send your best sergeant, with ten or a dozen picked men,” Pirvan told the mercenary. “None among us doubt your courage. None among us could do your work, if you were to be slain in a skirmish against foes not worthy of your steel.”
Epron looked dubious. “Good sergeants do not grow on tarberry bushes either,” he said. “Nor have I kept faith with my men all these years by sending others to do what I would not.”
“All these years, you have not been so badly needed.” Weariness brought to Pirvan’s mind the notion that perhaps Birak Epron wanted a war between Istar and Karthay, which would surely fatten the purses of sell-swords from every land.
And leave a trail of burned towns, weeping widows and orphans, young men dead or crippled in their prime, and much else not beloved of the gods.
He kept the insult off his lips. “Epron, choose. I do not think the folk ahead are finished warriors, but they are not asleep or drunk, that we can wait forever to strike.”
Epron shrugged. “Have it as you will, Sir Knight.”
Epron’s sergeant and ten men swiftly vanished. Other men vanished into the woods on the other side of the road. Their task was to cover the retreat of the main body, if by some ill chance the ambush forced one.
The rest of the column was to simply march down the trail, like a worm dangled in a fishpond, to bait the ambushers into striking. Pirvan prayed briefly to Kiri-Jolith that the fish would not be unexpectedly large and hungry, then took his place at the head of the column.
Pirvan’s guesses as to the strength and skills of the enemy were not far off the mark. They were hardly more than fifty, and of all places to strike, they chose one where broad, deep ditches ran along both sides of the trail.