When informed of the coming nuptials, the younger Ahrmehnee warriors immediately embarked on a full-scale hunt for game. Thoheeks Hwahltuh Sanderz-Vawn and his bored clansmen joined in with a will, as did most of the civilian nobles and such Freefighters as attended them. But Milo doubted they would bag much, the winter having been both long and hard and the environs of the stahn much disturbed through movements of large bodies of troops and endless foragings. Therefore, he contributed a score of the herd of cattle he had had driven up from the lowlands, several hogsheads of wheaten flour, and ten full pipes of wine, plus many sacks of cornmeal and beans, dried fruits and vegetables, casks of cheeses and honey and salt, as well as barrel on barrel of that Confederation Army staple, shredded cabbage pickled with turnip and radish slices and garlic.
On the day before the festivities, Zehpoor called Pehroosz to her. Showing her some dried tubers, the older woman sketched the appearance of the plant whose roots they were and told Pehroosz the growing conditions favored by the plant. Then she gave Pehroosz a small wickerwork basket and a broad-bladed digging knife and sent her off into the wooded hills.
And after the girl was safely out of sight, Zehpoor surrendered to her tears. She had come to love the patient and cheerful, albeit sad-eyed, Pehroosz, and now she anguished at the terror the child would suffer this day. But she consoled herself: terror there would assuredly be, but no harm to Pehroosz, and much lasting good would come of that brief terror; and, besides, it was the Lady’s will.
“It will do you good!” the High Lord had firmly stated, when he had ordered Senior Strahteegos Hahfos Djohnz to take part in at least the last day of the hunting. “You work too hard, Hahfos, and for too long at a time.”
Hahfos thought it an example of the pot defaming the kettle, since there was seldom a night when the High Lord’s pavilion wasn’t brightly lit until well after the midnight hour. But when the High Lord finally lost patience and framed it as an order, Hahfos gave up and set about preparations.
Unlike the civilian noblemen, Hahfos had never been able to afford to maintain two or three horses. His destrier was a fine, well-trained warhorse, but a hunter he was not, so the officer rode up to the village and borrowed a shaggy, bony, piebald pony. He set out early in the day in company with a half-dozen middle-aged Ahrmehnee who thought they had seen signs of wild pigs within easy ride of the main village.
By midafternoon, the men were still sending their big hounds fanning out widely and vainly. But though they had flushed nary a porker, a shrewd cast of barbed dart had netted Hahfos a large, solitary stag. After his hunting companions had exclaimed over the size of the creature and the length and trickiness of the cast and had Hahfos red-faced in embarrassment at their blunt, jovial compliments, they all joined to speedily gut and bleed and clean the trophy and lash it across the back of the piebald gelding.
He rode the straining, overburdened little horse only until he was out of sight of his hosts, then dismounted and began to backtrail the earlier course at a brisk walk. While the pony sucked up water from an icy streamlet, Hahfos stood just downstream in the narrow, twisting defile and, with a wetted neckcloth, did what he could to remove dried sweat and deer’s blood from his skin and clothing. It was then that the scream smote his ears, bouncing from wall to wall of the tiny vale, startling the drinking pony, who threw up his outsize head, snorting through wide-flared nostrils, though he was too tired and heavy-laden to bolt.
The women in the Taishyuhn villages had been fa a whirl of activity since the announcement of the nahkhahrah’s wedding date. Bread ovens glowed around the clock, while the flesh of butchered cattle, game and fowl needed immediate attention lest it begin to spoil. The hoards of charcoal were quickly exhausted, so a steady supply of wood was vital and the sound of the axe was almost constant in every village. No pair of hands could stay idle in such surroundings, nor had Pehroosz’s. But the work was repetitious and she had been more than glad when Mother Zehpoor had sent her out of the village on her errand.
But a location of the sort described by the wise woman proved difficult to find, and her pony, too small and fine-boned to be taken for hunting, was frisky to the point of fractiousness; so that, when finally she chanced across a likely-looking spot, she was worn out with battling the strong-willed little horse.
She dismounted and tightly tied the reins to the trunk of a young maple, then took her basket and knife and proceeded to where a few mossy stones projected barely above the surface of an almost-circular deposit of deep loam, knelt and began to dig at the bases of a clump of the plants drawn by Mother Zehpoor.
When she had shaken the dark earth from the fleshy, finger-sized roots and put them in her basket, she probed the disturbed soil to be certain she had missed none of the tubers, since there appeared to be no more of the plants in the small area. But her knife sank only a bare inch into the loam when it was halted … and by something which did not feel like a stone or a tree root.
Wondering, she cleared away the shallow deposit to expose a dull, grayish surface, obviously metal, but unrusted and unlike any metal she ever had seen. Shoving aside the basket, she widened the excavation until she had the object free of dirt and roots. Then she squatted back on her heels and studied her discovery.
It was surely man-made; its even surfaces and sharp-angled corners were evidence of that fact Pehroosz still could not identify the metal, for all that her mother’s sister’s husband had been the village smith and Pehroosz had had some little exposure to the sight of iron, various kinds of steel, brass, bronze, copper and even gold, silver and that mixture of the two called Ehleen-metal. Though this artifact bore a vague resemblance to silver, especially where her knife had cut through the dirt and oxidation, she was certain that it was not.
In size, it was about four spans of her hand across in either direction and half that in thickness. A couple of lines of what looked like some kind of lettering—though not in the Ahrmehnee language, Pehroosz knew, since she could write her name—were stamped across one side of the object, and another side sported what looked like a handle.
Leaning forward, Pehroosz sought to lift the artifact by that handle … and almost tumbled atop it. After long, hard effort, she at last managed to drag the weighty thing onto level ground. It seemed incredible that so small an item could be so heavy.
On the side which had rested on the bottom of the hole, she found yet another curiosity—a perfect circle of verdigris which, when carved away by her knife, revealed a disc of pitted bronze with a jagged slit, so narrow that her fingernail could barely enter it, centered in a round depression. Above this circle, a hair-fine seam ran from edge to edge across the face of the oddity. It was then that she concluded that she had found a chest of some kind, rather than simply a piece of old metal.
She decided to see if she could pry it open with her knife, but first arose to walk down to where she had tied her pony. The exertions had left her thirsty and a water bottle was tied onto the saddle. But her exertions had done more; the noise had awakened a nearby sleeper and, once awake, this sleeper was hungry, ravenously hungry.
Hahfos had left his fine, well-balanced darts with the Ahrmehnee hunters, but his wide-bladed boarspear was lashed to the pony’s saddle. It was his only real weapon, since he had seen no need to burden himself with sword or dirk, replacing them with more practical saw-backed hanger and skinning knife. As a second terrified scream came hard on the heels of the first, this time blended with the scream of a pony or horse as well, he quieted his own mount enough to cast loose the lashings of the deer carcass. Throwing himself into the saddle, he drummed his heels on the little mount’s barrel.