Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy's Wild (5 page)

“Why would they?” Jasper asked upon being freed. He sat back on his heels and smoothed his robes over his knees.

Ilbei started to answer, but the expectant look on Jasper’s face suggested that whatever the answer was, it should be obvious. It wasn’t, but Ilbei didn’t care what it was. He was sure it would be ridiculous, so instead he set himself to teaching Jasper how to pitch the tent, hoping that somehow the process would stick.

An hour later, the platoon, minus two sentries, sat around the fire devouring the evening’s meal. For a time, all that could be heard was the
tink-tink
of tin spoons and steel knives on the metal trays, the men and women ravenous as a locust swarm.

Not long after, wineskins were passed around, and a soldier from Corporal Trapfast’s squad, a young woman whose name Ilbei had only recently learned was Auria, began to sing. She was accompanied on a fiddle by another woman, who Ilbei had also recently learned was the singer’s sister, Decia. The song was a melancholy one, a story of a garden and long-dead mother’s house. Mournful as it was, Auria’s voice was beautiful. The longing notes and homesick lyrics lay upon Ilbei like the gray clouds of a rainy day, the sort where one can sit on a porch and watch out across the landscape as silvery drops stir up the sweetest scents, wet soil and peat. Home smells.

The boys back home used to call him Hound Dog for his sense of smell, and it was true he had a gift, albeit a reluctant and temperamental one. He could smell a polecat over a mile away, where most folks needed to be within at least a few hundred spans. He could smell ants the moment they crawled into a room. The first time he’d announced that, all the boys had laughed—until he led them straight to a line of the insects just forming through a crack in the floor. They figured Ilbei had set to fool them with that, however, claiming he’d known the ants were there all along. To prove it, they’d blindfolded him and taken him out into the woods. “Find us some ants now,” they challenged.

So he did. He led them to six colonies within a hundred paces of where they stood and told them that somewhere on the other side of a fennel patch there was a blackberry cluster and beyond it a big termite mound.

Several of them tried to find where Ilbei was peeking through his blindfold—which they couldn’t, as he wasn’t—then they ran off together to verify the termite mound was there. Which it was. And thus he was dubbed Hound Dog, and he bore that brand for nearly twenty years. Until his young wife died.

The song ended, but Ilbei stared into the fire, thinking back over all the decades since that time. He couldn’t quite shape her young, pretty face anymore, but he could feel how pretty she had been inside. Such stark contrast to that potameide. It was the difference of a moment and a century.

“Decia, you’re sucking the light right outta Luria with that depressing shite,” someone called from the other side of the fire. “Like enough we’ll be feeling sorry for our feet come end of the week. Save that sap for the blisters we’ll get climbing up and down these hills.”

“Yeah,” someone else said. “Play something merry.”

The two sisters turned to each other and shared a brief exchange, and soon the fiddle was set ablaze nearly as bright as the fire itself, sparks of music rising up out of the forest into the black river of the night, which flowed around the treetops like salted ink. A few of the lads were struck to dance by the song as others tried to accompany it, and soon after the woods were filled with the howling, off-key bawdiness of their revelry.

Ilbei, less inclined to song than the rest, having been disinclined to wine that night, sat on his log, tapping his toe and measuring with a practiced eye all that he could glean about the men and women of his company. And it was as he made his mental notes that he heard the sentry’s shrill whistle, coming from down by the river.

The whistle came again, the note rising high and short, followed by a longer warbling one, signaling that a lone boat approached from downstream. Ilbei called for Kaige, Meggins and a young soldier sitting nearby stringing a bow. “Come,” was all he said, and the four of them ran toward the river.

They found the sentry crouched in a low fork of an alder. He pointed at orange spots of light issuing from lanterns that hung at the stem and stern of a riverboat. The oars dipping in the water splashed audibly, an even sequence of splash and silence, stroke after stroke.

The light of the moon, pink Luria above, was little use in a fight here, given the forest overhang, but since the boat made no attempts to conceal its approach, Ilbei allowed himself to be somewhat at ease. “Run fer camp if they make any move, Meggins,” Ilbei said in a low voice. “But I expect these here are harmless enough.”

They waited patiently, the man with the bow jumping down from his place in the tree and moving back to a tree a little farther up the bank, where he sank into the shadows and was gone from sight. Eventually the longboat came close enough that its lamps revealed its crew: twelve men at the oars, a coxswain at the back and one man in the center, astride a horse so black that for a time it looked as if the rider were levitating a span and a half above the deck.

“Run fer a torch,” Ilbei ordered, and Meggins was off like a rabbit. By the time the boat was drawing parallel to Ilbei’s position on the bank, Meggins was back, his breathing hardly up despite the sprint.

“Hallo,” Ilbei called. “A fine night fer a row then, is it?”

“Sergeant Spadebreaker, I presume?” came the reply from the mounted man.

Ilbei took the torch from Meggins and held it aloft, squinting in the light. He saw in it that the man was an officer, a major by the crossed lances on his sleeves, though a young one by the lack of lines upon his face. There was a cleanliness to him that bespoke wealth, and a rigidity of spine that promised noble blood. Ilbei had seen enough of them in his time. A black cloak was fastened by a golden clasp at his throat, the rich fabric draped like a sable waterfall, flowing off him and cascading over his horse’s flanks and rump. “Right, sar. That’ll be me.”

“I am Lord Cavendis, major in Her Majesty’s Eleventh Cavalry. I am now in command of this expedition.”

The helmsman tossed Ilbei a mooring line, which he caught reflexively in his free hand. He pushed the torch out over the water, amplifying its light by the reflection. He passed the line off to Kaige, continuing to stare up at the officer as the burly soldier hauled the vessel to shore. The coxswain threw another line to Meggins, who did as Kaige had done, and soon the boat was moored and joined to the bank by a stretch of sturdy plank pushed out by the crew. The young Lord Cavendis, upon his black horse, eschewed such conventions. Rather than clatter down the ramp, he chose to leap free of the vessel in a great bound of equestrian finesse that left the oarsmen groping the gunwales lest they be dumped out by the recoil of the boat. It was a large boat, but not that large.

Ilbei kept his thoughts on the display to himself and instead pointed the smooth-faced officer toward the bawdy songs being sung several hundred paces through the trees. “Camp’d be that way, sar,” he said. “We’ll see to yer gear, and to yer men. Get y’all fed up good.”

“They’ve provisions enough to get them back to the garrison at Twee. Just get my things.”

“Twee, sar? Have ya been rowin up so far as that?”

“Spadebreaker, let us get off on a good foot, shall we?”

“I should like that just fine, sar,” Ilbei said.

“Good news, then. So we’ll start by you not questioning me as if we were long-lost chums.”

“Right, sar. I just thought yer boys might like a hot meal afore headin back, fer to see to their strength and all. There’s more fish cooked up there than our boys can eat, and more than a few spits of fine, greasy quail too. They’re everywhere out here.”

“And there goes our good footing already, Sergeant. But then, what should I have expected from the man who’s been knocked back down to strip sergeant how many times now? Eleven? Or was it twelve?”

Actually it was only six times, and all six for insubordination—all six incited by baby-faced lordlings blowing out bad orders on breath that stank of mother’s milk as the ink on their commissions dried—but Ilbei wasn’t going to tell him that either. “Right, sar. My apologies, sar. Shall I cut em loose now or give em long enough to clear their bowels if’n they need to?”

It was a bit of good fortune for Ilbei that the officer’s eyes were not crossbows, for that might have been the end of him on the spot. But rather than rebuke Ilbei, the young lord turned back and gave the order himself. “Hand over my gear and off with you. If I get word that you were longer back than two days, I’ll have your pay docked the missing time, all of you.”

Ilbei’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but he kept his head low enough that shadows concealed it. The men on the boat made similar angles of their own faces, but they saw well enough to hand off the major’s crates and to catch the ropes that Meggins and Kaige tossed back to them. Understanding flashed between them as Meggins shot the coxswain an apologetic glance, but that was all.

When the boat had slipped back into the main channel, Ilbei turned back toward camp. “This way, sar,” he said, wondering privately why nobody in Hast had told him there was an officer coming up from South Mark. General Hanswicket’s last words on the problem of the highway robberies had simply been: “See to it, Spadebreaker. Make it go away.”

Meggins had apparently been having the same thoughts, and he asked about it as they were heading for their tents. “Why didn’t anybody say they were sending an officer from Twee?” His breath blew misty in the chill night air, the plume of it turned pale pink by the moonlight. Ilbei hissed at him to keep his voice down. The man shrugged in the shadows. “I’m just asking, is all,” he said, his voice lower but still audible enough to make Ilbei uncomfortable. “I thought we was just after bandits. What do we need a Twee major for? A cavalryman, no less?”

“Our job is to do what we’re told and not ask questions,” Ilbei said. “If’n blokes like us get to needin whys and wherefores every time a command comes down, the whole army’d lock up and fall in on itself.”

“South Mark officers got no call in Valenride.”

“Them two silver lances on his lapels says different, so just mind yer yap and do as you’re told.”

“Of course I will. But I don’t see why this mission needs some damned major come along. ‘Specially one fresh off his mother’s dugs.”

“Listen up, son. I reckon I done waxed his back as it is, and there ain’t no room fer sass from the likes of you. So stow that bile and keep to what they pay ya fer, which ain’t fer thinkin. Hear?”

“I hear.”

“I hear,
Sergeant
,” Ilbei said.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Meggins said. He turned and went off to find his dreams.

Ilbei would have found his own dreams if he could, but the day’s events prevented him from sleeping straight away. Ilbei was a man of order. He didn’t like chaos, and he didn’t like surprise. This mission was supposed to be simple: get to the hills, ask a few questions, track down the bad guys, and bring them in. In, out, easy. He figured a short skirmish was the worst there would be. And yet, here he was, his boot socks hanging above him, drying from his encounter with a potameide—he’d never even heard of a damned
potameide
before today—and now they had a nobleman from Twee taking over before they’d even had breakfast on dry land. So much for simplicity. By the time Ilbei finally fell asleep, he’d concluded that the two of them, the river nymph and the major, counted up to bad luck.

Chapter 5

I
t turned out that “bad luck” was not an entirely accurate description of Major Cavendis, which, in its particulars, came as something of a surprise to Ilbei. On the third day of marching, as the foothills grew steep enough that they might be deemed mountainous, the platoon arrived at Cedar Wood. It was the closest of the mining camps that made up Three Tents and hardly more than a cluster of plank buildings and log cabins. And it was on that first evening in Cedar Wood that Ilbei discovered that Major Cavendis—the very young and very noble Major Cavendis—had quite a gift for cards.

Miners, like sailors and soldiers, were famously fond of games of chance, and premier among them was
ruffs
. Ruffs was a game of luck and bluffing, and the better a man was at bluffing, the better his luck turned out to be. For the most part, the game was simple. The deck was made up of sixty-five cards with five suits of thirteen cards each, the suits being: orcs, elves, harpies, dwarves and men.

When Ilbei was a boy, he’d played it with the other mining camp kids. Unlike their parents, the boys usually played for acorns or trinkets, learning the skills required to one day compete with the adults. However, there had been one especially memorable game, very high-stakes in the minds of boys, in which he and his mates wagered real money against a peek in on Gervon Gravelstack’s sister when she was having a bath. Ilbei, a natural at the game, had won that pot gleefully. In payment, he was shown the location of a knothole in the Gravelstack family abode, done so on the promise that he would never tell another living soul.

Oh, such a victory that had been! And as adolescent Ilbei settled in for a second night enjoying the profits of his fine play, old man Gravelstack caught him looking in. Seldom had Ilbei encountered such rage as that, and the broad-backed miner beat poor Ilbei black and blue, so badly he lost a tooth, a permanent one, which had to be replaced in gold—gold that his own father took out of him in toil that went far beyond the value of Ilbei’s original bet. Despite the net loss, however, Ilbei never regretted his win, and his skills at ruffs had only improved in the century since. But ruffs was a commoners’ game. It was a game for blanks and ruffians. Firstly, because a player with magic most likely had telepathy, and where there were telepaths, poker-style games were fraught with cheating of the worst kind; and secondly, where there was ruffs, there was fighting. The game got its name from the tacit understanding that it sometimes became violent, and as far as anyone could tell, it had always been that way. Which is why the arrival of Major Cavendis asking for a game caught Ilbei entirely off guard.