“Dismount,” he ordered, “and take only what you must have from your saddlebags. We leave the beasts here. One at a time now, over that rise to the river.” He moved off first, leading his own mount.
Jason was too foggy from exhaustion and pain to realize what was happening. When he finally pulled his mount forward, he was surprised to see a knot of men on the riverbank with not a single inorope in sight.
“Do you have everything you want?” Temuchin asked, taking Jason’s bridle and pulling the morope close to the bank. As Jason nodded, he whipped the bowie knife across in a wicked, backhand slash that cut the creature’s throat and almost severed its head from its body. He moved quickly to avoid the pulsing gout of blood, then put his foot
against the swaying animal and pushed it sideways into the river. The swift current carried it quickly from sight.
“The machine cannot lift a tnorope up the cliff,” Temuchin said. “And we do not want their bodies near the landing spot or the place will be known and soldiers will wait there. We walk.” He looked at Jason’s wounded leg. “You can walk, can’t you?”
“Great,” Jason said. “Never felt better. A little hike after a couple of nights without sleep and a thousand-kilometer ride is just what I need. Here we go.” He walked off as swiftly as he could, trying not to limp. “We’ll get this gunpowder back and I’ll show you just how to use it,” he reminded, just in case the warlord had forgotten.
It was not a very nice walk. They did not stop, but instead, to relieve each other, passed the barrels from one to another without halting. At least Jason and the other three walking wounded missed this assignment. Trudging uphill on the slippery grass was not easy. Jason’s leg was a pillar of pain that bled a steady trickle of blood down into his boot top. He kept falling behind, and the march was endless. All of the others had passed him and, at one point, they were out of sight over a ridge ahead. He wiped the rain and sweat from his eyes and limped on, trying to follow their vague path in the tall grass, which was already straightening up and blurring the signs. Temuchin appeared on the hilltop above and looked back at him, fingering his sword hilt, and Jason put on a lung-destroying burst of speed. If he faltered, he would join the moropes.
An indeterminate period of time later, it came as a complete shock when he stumbled into the small group of men sitting on the grass, their backs to a familiar tower of rock.
“Temuchin has gone,” Ahankk said. “You will go next. Each of the first ten men on the rope will carry up a barrel of this gunpowder.”
“That’s a great idea,” Jason said collapsing inertly onto the soggy grass. It was an unconscionably long time before he could even struggle to a sitting position to do what he could to fix his crude bandages. One of the men carried over a barrel of gunpowder that had been secured in a harness of leather straps, with a loop to go around Jason’s neck. The rope came down soon after this and he allowed himself to be strapped into it. This time the possibility of falling did not trouble him in the slightest. He rested his head on the gunpowder and fell asleep as soon as the lift began, nor did he awake until they pulled him to the clifftop and his forehead banged against the rock. Fresh moropes were waiting and he was permitted to return alone to the camp, without the gunpowder. He allowed the animal to go at its slowest pace so
that the ride was not unbearable, but when he reached his own camach, he found that he did not possess the strength to dismount.
“Meta,” he croaked. “Help a wounded veteran of the wars.” He swayed when she poked her head out of the flap, then let go. She caught him before he hit the ground and carried him in her arms into the tent. It was a pleasant experience.
“You should eat something,” Meta said sternly. “You have had enough to drink.”
“Nonsense,” he said, sipping from the iron cup and smacking his lips. “I don’t have tired blood, I have no blood. The medikit said that I was partially exsanguinated and gave me a stiff iron injection to make up for it. Besides, I’m too tired to eat.”
“The readings also said that you needed a transfusion.”
“A little hard to do that here. I’ll drink plenty of water and have goat’s liver for dinner every night.”
“Open!” someone shouted, pulling at the laced and knotted entrance flap of the cainach. “I speak with the voice of Temuchin.”
Meta put the medikit under a fur and went to the entrance. Crif, who had been fanning the fire, picked up a lance and balanced it in his hand. A soldier poked his head in.
“You will come to Temuchin now.”
“I come at once, tell him that.”
The soldier started to argue, but Meta twisted his nose and pushed him back through the opening. She laced it shut again.
“You cannot go,” she said.
“I have no choice. We’ve sutured the wounds by hand with gut, that’s acceptable, and the antibiotics are not detectable. The iron is a!ready seeping into my bone marrow.”
“That is not what I meant,” Meta said angrily.
“I know what you meant, but there is very little we can do about it.” He pulled out the medikit and twisted the control dial. “Pain killer in the leg so I can walk on it, and a nice big shot of stimulant. I’m taking years off my life with this drug addiction, and I hope someone appreciates it.”
When he stood up, Meta grabbed him by the arms. “No, you cannot,” she said.
He used a gentler warfare, taking her face in his hands and kissing her. Grif snorted with contempt and turned back to his fire. Her hands relaxed.
“Jason,” she said haltingly. “I don’t like this. There is nothing I can do to help.”
“There’s plenty, but not at this moment. Just hold the fort for a while longer. I’m going to show Temuchin how to make his big bang, and then we’re going to get out of here, back to the ship. I’ll tell him I am going to bring the Pyrran tribe in, which is just what I intend to do. Along with some other things. The wheels are turning and plans are being made, and there is a new day coming soon to Felicity.” The drugs were making him light-headed and elated, and he believed every word he said. Meta, who had spent too long a time bent over a dung fire in this frozen campsite, was not quite so enthusiastic. But she let him go. Duty comes first, that is a lesson every Pyrran learns in the nursery.
Temuchin was waiting, showing no sign of the strain of the past days, pointing to the barrels of gunpowder on the floor of his camach.
“Make it explode,” he commanded.
“Not in here and not all at once, unless you are planning a mass suicide. What I need is some sort of container that I can seal, and not too big a one either.”
“Speak your needs. What you must have will be brought in here.”
The warlord obviously wanted his explosive experiments classified Top Secret, which was all right with Jason. The camach was warm and relatively comfortable, with food and drink close at hand. He sank into the furs and worried a baked goat’s leg until his materials had been assembled; then, after wiping his hands on his jacket, he set to work.
A number of clay pots had been assembled and Jason chose the smallest one, little more than a cup in size. Then he worked out the plug from one of the barrels and carefully shook some of the gunpowder out onto a sheet of leather. The grains were not very uniform, but he doubted if this would affect the speed of burning very much. This stuff had certainly worked well enough in the muskets. Using a scoop formed of stiff leather, he carefully loaded the pot until it was half full. A trimmed piece of chamois fitted on top of the granules and he tamped it down gently with the rounded end of a worn thighbone. Temuchin stood behind him watching every step of the process closely. Jason explained.
“The granules should be close together for even burning, for smooth burning makes the best banging. Or so I have been told by the men in the tribe who know about this sort of thing. This is all as new to me as it is to you. Then the leather goes in to hold the gunpowder in place and to act as a waterproof shield.” Jason had ready a mixture of water, dirt from the camach floor and crumbled dung. This made a damp, claylike substance that he now pushed into the pot to seal it. He patted it smooth and pointed.