A spearman came hurrying towards them and Kheda recognised the stooped hunter by his twisted back. He grinned widely, waving a bloody blue wing. Kheda smiled back at the same time as pointing urgently in the direction of the tree-dwellers' valley with his sword. The spearman nodded with ready understanding and tossed the bird's wing at Naldeth before using his fingers and mouth somehow to send a piercing whistle through the forest. Similar signals answered him and Kheda's immediate fears receded as the fighting force re-formed. The savages were scooping up handfuls of leaf mould to smear on their arms and legs. Now their skins merged into the forest floor with its dappling of sun and shadow.
'What am I supposed to do with this?' Naldeth turned the bird's wing over, perplexed.
'I don't know.' Kheda ground dirt into his grubby tunic. His trousers couldn't be more soiled.
Risala was doing the same. 'Better not throw it away. We don't want to insult anyone.'
'I'm not about to stick the feathers in my hair.' Naldeth's attempt at a jest was half-hearted.
'Come on.' Kheda dismissed the irrelevance, turning all
his attention to the trees ahead. He caught glimpses of heads, a back, an arm holding a spear aloft to better negotiate a patch of tortuous undergrowth. The village spearmen were moving faster through the dappled grey trees than they had raced over the grassy plains.
They don't need me to tell them we need every advantage of speed and surprise to stand a chance against the tree dwellers.
Kheda looked over his shoulder at Naldeth. 'As soon as you see their wizard, do whatever you can to stifle his magic or kill him outright.' He noticed that the wizard's face was a tense mask of determination and discomfort. 'Is your leg—'
Naldeth cut him off with a gesture. 'I'll manage.'
'I'll stay close to him.' Risala spared Kheda a brief smile before focusing intently on the forest ahead. She held her bow and quiver close to her body. 'I'll put a shaft into that wizard if I get the chance. The ones we fought with Dev were as vulnerable to an arrow in the belly as anyone else.'
'I remember.' Kheda didn't waste any more time on talk, pushing on over the undulating ground as fast as he felt Naldeth could manage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Naldeth's best speed was still barely sufficient to keep them from dropping behind the wild men. The village warriors were increasingly avid to join this new battle. Trying to find the sun whenever the meagre canopy of nut-tree branches grew thin over stretches of rocky earth, Kheda judged they were heading very nearly due west. He did his best to gauge their progress through the unfamiliar terrain but was still taken by surprise when the ground rose up and he saw the spearmen slipping over the crest of high ground that marked the eastern side of the tree-dwellers' dry valley. As they crouched to avoid being skylined, the tall trees with their dense, dark leaves barred their way down the slope, obscuring their view of the western bank.
Does this dry stream bed mark some boundary between the cave dwellers behind us and these people who owe fealty to the cloaked wizard and his black dragon?
Kheda looked northwards upstream and then down and saw the scarred spearman and the stooped hunter doing the same. Their eyes met and they nodded agreement. The warlord turned to Risala and Naldeth as the scarred spearman gave brisk orders to the village warriors.
'We'll make for that.' Kheda pointed upstream to a break in the tall buttressed trees. As they drew closer, he saw that some calamity had ripped through the forest, tossing the mighty trunks down the slope like twigs to leave a broad swathe of broken ground running down to the dry stream bed.
The village warriors gathered in the shade of the forest edging the destruction. On the western bank the tree-dwellers' broad fire pit smoked untended. The dry stream bed was entirely devoid of life. So was the sky. The scarred spearman slid beside Kheda and pointed to movement up among the platforms and shelters that clung to the trees on the far side of the stream and in the shadows around the thick boles.
'Where's their wizard?' Kheda asked Naldeth, not taking his eyes off the settlement. 'Where's that black beast of a dragon?'
'They got wind of our approach.' Risala shrugged that off. 'Do you think any of them will be circling around to attack us from behind?'
Kheda glanced over his shoulder to see the stooped hunter turning a reassuring number of spearmen and a few archers to look for just such a threat. Then he was startled by raucous shouts from their wild allies. A group of village spearmen advanced to stand at the top of the bare, broken slope, waving their spears and yelling defiance. The rest waited hidden, braced and ready. The scarred spearman grinned at Kheda.
Naldeth frowned. 'Those tree dwellers would be fools to launch any assault up this slope.'
'And our spearmen can't run into battle from here.' Risala was equally puzzled. 'They'll exhaust themselves crossing the stream bed before they get there.'
'I've no idea what they're thinking.' Kheda gave voice to his frustration. 'How am I supposed to be a warlord when I can't even talk to the men I'm sending into battle?'
'Don't worry.' The mage stared intently across the narrow valley. 'This is my battle.'
Risala carefully drew a white-fletched arrow from her quiver. 'Where is he?'
Fresh shouts from the village spearmen drowned out
her words. Their tone turned from hostile to mocking. Some among the tree dwellers weren't proof against such taunting. A handful advanced from the darkness beneath the mighty trunks to wave their own spears and yell scathing retorts. This simply spurred the wild men on the ridge to new derision. A flash of colour startled Kheda, then another. The village wild men were hurling the wings they had hacked from the murderous birds down the slope, to lie dulled with dust on the dry stream bed's margin.
'What does that signify?' Risala was mystified.
Kheda slowly shook his head. 'They don't like it. Look.'
More tree dwellers advanced into the open, adding their angry shouts to the commotion echoing back and forth across the dry valley. Those village warriors armed with bows launched a storm of salvaged arrows into the sky. Tree dwellers looked up vacantly, wondering what the hissing rain might be.
'So they did understand me,' Kheda said with bitter relief.
Most of the tree dwellers had the wit to scurry backwards for the shelter of the trees. Those too slow fell screaming with wounds to arms and legs. A few thrashed in agony in the sandy stream bed as shafts driven deep into their bodies or faces were the death of them. The village spearmen roared, exultant, and the newly fledged archers launched a second flight of arrows. This time a cloud of dust sprang up from the dry stream bed to stop the missiles, weighing them down with dirt that matted their tousled fletching.
'Where is he?' Naldeth scoured the far bank for the wizard in the beaded cloak.
'Is the dragon anywhere close?' Risala was searching the rocks and shadows.
Kheda took an envenomed arrow and carefully nocked it on his bowstring.
'Leave their wizard to me.' Naldeth's bloodshot eyes were calm as he gazed over the valley.
'They are coming out to fight.' Risala readied her own bow as the clouds of sand in the stream bed subsided to show the tree dwellers rapidly advancing, shaking their spears and shouting with new boldness. The wild bowmen launched another cascade of arrows, thinner this time. Too many had already emptied their quivers. A curtain of dust swirled up just ahead of the advancing tree dwellers and the arrows slid down it, their threat blunted. By contrast, the tree-dwellers' slingstones shot straight and true through the haze and struck several village spearmen, prompting cries of pain.
'Naldeth?' Unable to see who had been wounded, Kheda tried in vain to pick out any obvious leader among the advancing enemy. 'The wizard?'