A handful, including Wuerek, turned toward him, followed by another group.
As he led the retreat, Nylan kept looking over his shoulder as yet another three armsmen pushed their mounts to rejoin the retreating Lornians he and Ayrlyn led back toward Syskar. His head throbbed; his fingers ached; and both forearms were a welter of cuts and scrapes, none deep, but all blood-streaked.
“We could have made another pass,” said Drossa from behind Tonsar, his raspy voice carrying above the clop of hoofs. “We had ’em.”
“How many of us would a last pass have killed?” asked Ayrlyn, rubbing her forehead. “We lost too many anyway.”
Nylan stood in the saddle and looked back toward Jirec, where the dust still swirled as the Cyadoran force rode toward the still-burning cookfires. He made a count of their force, but it took several attempts because his vision flickered with the headache. Nineteen, besides the two of them and Tonsar. He’d only seen six to eight Lornians fall. Maybe a few of the missing armsmen would find their way back to Syskar. Maybe not.
“We lost eight-maybe as many as twelve,” Nylan said as he returned his concentration to the road ahead, inadvertently massaging his forehead. “How many did they lose?”
“Forty-twoscore, I’d guess,” Ayrlyn said. “Could be more.”
“Twoscore,” said Tonsar with a laugh. “Not even ser Fornal has taken that many with all his men.”
Nylan almost winced. That wouldn’t set all that well with the touchy regent, although he was sure Fornal would dismiss the results because they arose from dishonesty and deceit.
His head ached, and his vision strobed, as if flicked with the reflections from the damned Cyadoran shields, but he managed to keep riding. In most ways, they’d barely started their campaign against the Cyadorans, and he was wondering how much longer he could keep it up.
“As long as we have to,” said Ayrlyn quietly.
Nylan still wondered.
LXXVII
In the hot night that baked Syskar, Nylan lay back on the lumpy straw-filled mattress, rubbing his temples, and trying to massage away the headache that still hammered through his skull.
“Ooooo…” Weryl turned on his own small pallet, and Nylan could sense his discomfort with the heat-or was Weryl picking up what they felt?
“We can’t do that again,” Nylan repeated to himself in a low voice. He almost grinned as he looked at Sylenia’s empty pallet, but he also hoped that she wouldn’t regret giving herself to Tonsar-or get left with a child.
“You’ve said that three times,” Ayrlyn whispered. “We did what we could. We lost nine out of thirty-five. We destroyed four, five times that number.”
“They have a lot more troops. Overall, I figure that we’ve lost a score and a half in less than four eight-days. The Cyadorans have lost at least score seven, could be score nine, but they started out with something like score twenty, and they can probably get reinforcements more easily.”
“I wonder. Fornal brought back almost a score of raw trainees for us.”
“Great. Back to the basic drills.”
“Tonsar can do some of that.”
Nylan shrugged, then asked, “Now what? What other trick can we pull out of subspace or the low-tech equivalent?” He shook his head. “Not gunpowder…we don’t have the industry…or the chemistry to refine the raw materials. At least, I don’t.”
“How about incendiary grenades or something like that?” asked Ayrlyn. “Couldn’t we figure a way to lob or fire them into their bases?”
“That might work, but what burns in this society?” mused Nylan. “Oils, pitch, but I haven’t seen any around here…grease, tallow, I suppose.”
“Coal gases?” asked the redhead.
“How do you get them? If I could figure out a way to heat coal in an airtight oven-that’s destructive distillation, but that takes too much technology. I might be able to make the gas, but how could I store it or transport it? That leaves natural stuff-like pitch or asphalt, but you asked Fornal and Huruc about that, didn’t you?”
“There’s an asphalt lake somewhere in Cyador, according to rumor, and some in eastern Candar,” Ayrlyn said. “None around here.”
“That leaves me where I started, with a crude distillery. I asked Sias about what people fermented around here. He stammered for a while, but it’s the same as anywhere-stuff with high sugar content-fruits, berries, grapes, and, around here, there’s a tuber-they call it fat grass-”
“Oh…was that what they were digging up?” Ayrlyn made a face. “Tonsar insisted I chew a little of it. It tastes like glue laced with solvents.”
“You got it-it’s more starch than sugar, but there’s a lot of it.” Nylan sighed. “Ferment and distill it. Maybe mix a little wax with it…I don’t know. And we still have the delivery problem. They used to shoot flaming arrows at things, I read somewhere, but that wouldn’t work against someone as disciplined as the Cyadorans. They’d have a fire brigade out before the second arrow hit.”
“Incendiary grenades,” Ayrlyn repeated, a touch of asperity in her voice. “Alcohol in glass bottles. I could build a catapult.”
“Could you get it to throw something far enough? I thought catapults were big heavy things that it took teams of horses to drag into place.”
She smiled. “What about one portable enough to break down and reassemble in moments? We could sneak up at night and drop in a dozen incendiary packages and scoot off.”
“Ooooo…” Weryl turned on his pallet.
Nylan reached out and patted his back gently, then looked through the darkness at Ayrlyn. “Can you?”
“I can try.”
The smith tried to repress a frown.
“I can,” snapped Ayrlyn.
“Sorry…I was thinking about something else. This honor bit. We’re better off avoiding combat, stretching them out, destroying equipment and supplies. Half the armsmen-not to mention Fornal-think that’s cowardly. So we’ll probably have to keep raiding some, and try to avoid big detachments of Cyadorans.” The smith snorted. “Of course, they’ll be trying to avoid sending out small groups. Before long, if Fornal’s right, about half the holders in Lornth will want to chop us into little pieces for being cowardly.”
“The faster we start destroying Cyadoran material and supplies, the more time we get.”
“Oh, because they aren’t as likely to come running after us if they’re on the defensive?”
“Right. Also, the locals will understand that we’re doing something.” Ayrlyn was the one who frowned. “What if the Cyadorans start really reinforcing the mines?”
“That won’t happen right away. First, no commander who supposedly has superior forces wants to go running home to Daddy immediately. At least, I’ve never met one-here or in the U.F.F. And second-”
“No one who’s not there is going to believe him immediately?”
“Exactly.”
“But when they do…what do we do?”
“We dig up something else cowardly,” Nylan said. “Assuming Fornal doesn’t insist on waging war in the traditional-and sure to lose-manner.”
“Each time we bring in something new, he’ll have more difficulty accepting it,” predicted Ayrlyn.
“You have that right…and how.” Nylan shifted his weight on the lumpy mattress again, rolling into Ayrlyn.
“Careful there.”
“Sorry.”
“Pleasant dreams.”
In the darkness, the smith shrugged. “I don’t know. I keep dreaming about trees.”
“You, too? Still?”
“I take it that trees also infest your dreams?”
“They aren’t dreams, exactly,” Ayrlyn said slowly. “They don’t feel like dreams. It’s more like I’m seeing something in a new way.”
“A new way? That has to mean something.”
“It has already,” she pointed out, half-yawning. “It’s helped with Nesslek and the healing. Maybe there’s something else about the trees that will help.”
“Trees are going to solve our problem?” The smith shook his head. “Hardly. I just wish I knew what it meant.” He shifted his weight, more gently, and squeezed her shoulder.