Miraculously, the other elephant came plodding out of the river onto the north bank, just downstream of the siege-engine emplacement. Milo tried to mindspeak the animal,… and was surprised when he succeeded.
After a short period of wordless mental soothing, he asked, “What are you called, sister?”
“You not … of my kind,” It was half statement, half question.
Milo had had other experiences with animals that had never been mindspoken, and these guided him. Beckoning a couple of Horseclan mindspeakers, he gingerly approached the huge, dripping, mud-slimed beast. There was no longer a battle to require his supervision. The attackers were in full retreat before the fire … those who could walk, run, or hobble; the rest were roasting on the bridge or drowning in the river.
When the elephant saw them, she quickly rolled her trunk out of harm’s way, confused thoughts of battle-training flooding the surface of her mind.
It was obvious that the headplates partially obscured her vision, so Milo took pains to stand where she could clearly see him, motioning the others to do the same. “Sister, we do not wish to hurt you. Why do you wish to hurt us?”
He commenced the soothing again, this time joined by the two clansmen. Gradually, the trunk uncurled, then sought one of the sideplates and gently tugged at it. Her mindspeak was plaintive. “Hurt. Take off?”
Endeavoring to exude far more confidence than he felt, Milo paced deliberately to the cow’s side and began unbuckling the indicated plate. He started as he felt the finger-like appendage at the end of her trunk touch him, but its touch proved tender as a caress, wandering over his body, front and back, head to toe. He was straining to reach the topmost buckles when the trunk closed about his waist and lifted him high enough to reach them.
Seeing this cooperation, the two clansmen came up and began to help. A half hour saw the cow stripped of a quarter-ton of plate and thick mail. Milo was at first appalled at her condition—she seemed bare skin and bones, her ribs clearly evident—and then he recalled that long, long supply line winding through forageless countryside and constantly menaced by his raiders; Zastros was having enough trouble feeding his men, not to mention his animals.
He turned to one of his clansmen. “Rahdjuh, ride to the castra and tell them to get any horses away from my pavilion. Captain Portos says our sister’s kind afright horses; I’m willing to take his word on the matter. Then ride on to the quartermaster and tell Sub-Strahteegos Rahmos to send a wagonload of his best hay and five or six bushels of cabbages to my pavilion immediately. Understand?”
“Yes, God-Milo.” The clansman took off at a dead run toward the picket line.
Milo turned back to the cow and rubbed a hand down the rough, wrinkled trunk. She brought the trunk up, resting its end on his shoulder. “Sister, I wish to help you. I know that you need food, much food.”
She again responded with the plaintive mindspeak. “Hungry … hungry many days. Good two-legs brother will give food?”
Milo beckoned the clansman to him and placed his arm across the smaller man’s shoulders. “Sister, this is my brother, and he is good. He will take you to much food.” He projected a mental picture of bales of fragrant hay and baskets of green-and-white cabbages.
The young clansman stood still while she subjected him to the same examination earlier afforded Milo, but he gasped when she suddenly grasped his torso, lifted him high off the ground, and sat him straddling the thick neck just behind the massive head. “Which way food?” she demanded.
Milo chuckled at the expression on the clansman’s face. “Well, Gil, have you ever bestrode a bigger mount?”
Gil relaxed, grinned, and shook his head. “No, God-‘ Milo, nor has any other Horseclansman, I think. She… and I… we are to go now to your pavilion?”
“Yes, Gil, and since she has accepted you, you are now her brother … and her keeper.” He glanced at the blazon on the young man’s cuirass, the broken saber, and ferret head that proclaimed him a scion of Clan Djohnz. “Tell Chief Tchahrlee that you now have no other duties but to care for our sister here. Now, take her to the food; those bastards over there have been starving her.”
The night after the abortive assault, a score of biremes crept upriver, their oars muffled. Avoiding the larger camp of Zastros, they staged four almost simultaneous attacks on as many camps, while a force of swampers struck the easternmost camp and a strong contingent of mounted irregulars brought fire and sword to the rear areas. The swampers, unaccustomed to fighting in the open, took heavy losses, but the casualties of the pirates and the mountaineers were minimal. The swampers did not attack again, but the reavers and the mountainmen did, three more nights in a row, never striking the same camps.
The scattered encampments began to move closer, one to the next, until most of the still-tremendous force was concentrated in the low, swampy area just south of the bridge. And, of course, the fevers ran rampant.
Supplies were dropping perilously low, for few trains were intact when they arrived … if they arrived. And they all told tales of running fights and ambuscades, of roadsides littered with skeletons and rotting flesh and charred wagons. So High King Zastros sent south an order for a huge train; to guard the train, he dispatched four squadrons of cavalry. What remained of the train eventually trickled in; the last they had seen of the five thousand cavalry; the horsemen were splitting into small groups and heading for home.
12
Lillian Landor opened her dark-blue eyes and stretched her white arms luxuriously, then swung her shapely legs over the edge of the low couch and sat up. On the other side of the couch, High King Zastros lay like a log, only the movement, of his chest denoting that there was life in the hairy body.
The black-haired woman made use of the silver chamberpot, then padded across the thickly carpeted floor of the lamplit, silk-walled room. Taking a position in the middle of the room where the ceiling was higher, she went through ten minutes of intricate exercises to loosen long unused muscles.
God! she thought. God, it’s good to be back in a youthful, limber body, again.
She looked with loathing upon the body of Zastros, deep in drugged slumber on the couch. Its every major bone and joint must have been broken or sprained seriously at least once in his lifetime, not to mention the countless scars of cuts, slashes, stabs, and thrusts; occupancy of such a body, especially in rainy weather, was endless, dull agony.
Perspiring lightly from her exertions, she went to the washstand, filled the basin, and began to sponge her resilient, alabaster skin, while regarding her heart-shaped face in a mirror of polished steel. Briefly closing her eyes, she tried to recall what her own face—the face of the body in which she had been born seven hundred years before—had looked like.
Nodding, she murmured to herself, “It was dark-haired too … I think. Christ, it’s so damned hard to remember when you’ve had a couple of dozen bodies since then … no, more than that, thirty, anyway, maybe more. Sometimes I feel like a goddamned vampire. If we could only take one of those mutants apart, find out what causative factors are responsible for their regeneration. If I could think of a way to get my hands on this Milo … hmmm.”
Musing, she drew a robe over her bare skin and passed into the outer room to kneel before one of a pair of “ornamental” chests. Placing both her delicate hands atop the lid, she spread her fingers and pressed their tips upon eight metal studs in an intricate sequence.
Earlier that evening, a small boat had grounded at a well-hidden spot on the south bank and a heavily cloaked man had stepped ashore, mounted a waiting horse and spurred off into the darkness.