Jane Carver of Waar (7 page)

Right. For about half a big moon, things had been getting tenser and tenser in the camp. Even Sai felt it. It was like somebody was winding a guitar string too tight. Any minute something was going to pop, you just didn’t know exactly when. There were high level councils around the men’s fire most nights, with the big chief and all his captains arguing long into the Fourth Crossing. Queenie and Kitten talked in hushed tones with the other females. One-Eye was crankier than ever, and more than once caught Kitten and Handsome meeting in secret and making like the last act of
Romeo and Juliet
. I thought he was going to kill poor Handsome, but though he whaled the tar out of him he was careful not to do any serious damage, though it sure looked like he wanted to.

Every day, raiding parties returned to camp with severed heads of Aarurrh stuck on the points of their spears. When they passed, the women howled and snarled like a wolf pack. Queenie would grin and point. “See how ugly? Disgusting. Barahir thieves. Poach our meat-birds. We make pay, hin? Ugly dung eaters.”

I guess you had to be an Aarurrh to see it. The junk jewelry they wove into their dreads was a little different, but other than that they looked just like the guys from Queenie’s tribe to me.

Ugly or not, our tribe, I mean Queenie’s tribe, the Hirrarah, had a major beef with these guys, the Barahir, and things were heating up big time. Everywhere we went in the camp I could pick out that name, “Barahir” from all the usual Aarurrh cat yowling. I noticed a lot of spear sharpening going on too. Defenses around the camp were doubled, and Queenie and Kitten were going to funerals for young Hirrarah warriors almost every night. Sai and I watched it all and started getting excited. War means chaos, and chaos is good for opportunities. Of course, when it came, it didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted it to, but that’s chaos for you.

***

It all started as just another day of hunting and gathering. Sai and I were out with Queenie’s work party about a half mile from the ravine, digging the black tubers, and also picking little sapphire-blue weeds which were in season. If you dried and crushed them, they made a sour, orange-rindy type seasoning. A hunting party had passed us on our way up to the plains, and rode off east at first light.

Sai was finally pulling his weight, and actually seemed to be getting used to the life, or at least not actively hating it. He was even interacting with Kitten a little. Not that he pretended to like her petting on him, but at least now he’d get pissed and wipe off the make-up she put on him instead of just sitting there like a lump. Kitten thought this was cute, and called him “bad baby.” Poor guy just couldn’t win.

We had armed guards with us these days. They’d been coming out ever since things got tense with the Barahir. They were supposed to be keeping an eye out, but mostly they talked to the girls. That little breach of duty almost got us all killed.

Less than a mile away a huge herd of those big birds, which Sai called krae, wild cousins of the big-headed bastards that had pulled his coach, were grazing in the blue grass. That was pretty common. The krae were a prime source of meat for the tribe and hunters went out every few days to bring down a dozen or so. They weren’t dangerous if you kept your distance and didn’t provoke them. They looked like crazed carnivores, but they were really more like cows. They used those big snapping turtle beaks to steam-shovel up the same tubers we were digging for. We ignored them. Most of the time they ignored us. Not today.

I had just filled my first sack of tubers when I heard a rumble. The guards looked up from their flirting. The heads of the slaves and the women came up like prairie dogs. The krae were stampeding right for us. My heart jumped like a frog in a bread box. A big, gray wave of huge, shaggy birds a mile wide was about to crash down and drown us.

The krae are fast. Real fast. The tribe’s hunters almost never try to cut them down them on the fly. They get most of their kills sneaking up on them and using their bolos to bring them down, or trapping them in blind canyons and spearing them like fish in a barrel. In a straight race the birds win every time. We were in big trouble.

The guards, those brain-dead, bootie-blinded bone-heads, shouted a command—about two minutes too late—but we were already running, the Aarurrh girls screaming, the older, wiser women saving their breath.

Some of the slaves got left behind in the confusion, pumping away on their scrawny legs without a chance in hell. I would have revealed my leaping ability right then and there, but Queenie, the sweetheart, slung me up on her back and we raced for the ravine trailhead. I looked over and saw Kitten scoop up Sai and tuck him under her arm like a running back with the pigskin. Whew!

The birds were gaining. They’d been at a full run when we noticed them, a half mile away, and by the time we’d all got up to speed, the gap was closed by half, and the ravine didn’t seem any closer. I looked back, just in time to see a slave go down under the tide, claws wider than he was crushing him to the ground and ripping giant divots out of his back. I could make out individual feathers on the big bastards now, and the red of their wild eyes.

Then a glint made me look beyond them. I squinted into the huge cloud of dust those big chicken feet were kicking up and saw something back there that wasn’t a bird—a spear head, a spangle of jewelry, the silhouettes of broad shoulders and dreadlocks.

“Hur-Hranan! Look! There are Aarurrh back there! Behind the krae!”

Queenie shot a look back and growled low in her throat. She barked to the guards. “Barahir!”

They looked back too.

The ravine was only a hundred yards away now, but the krae were only fifty. The guards were dropping back and urging us ahead. Queenie was doing the same, shoving the other females ahead of her. I broke out in a cold sweat. It’s fine to play the noble den mother, but not when you’ve got a passenger. The first girls were sweeping into the hairpin turn of the steep trail down to the floor of the ravine. The trail hugs the cliff pretty tight in some places. The Aarurrh don’t usually go down it more than two abreast. The girls were taking it full tilt three and four at a time.

The first krae were twenty feet away when we all suddenly realized that they weren’t going to stop! Whatever the Aarurrh behind them had scared them with, it was enough to do a total lemming trip on them. Forget gravity. Forget flightless wings. The krae herd was about to become a mindless krae avalanche.

Queenie wheeled down into the trail as the first of the krae hit the edge and did the old Wile E. Coyote step into thin air. A dozen more were right behind them. The air was filled with squawking screeching plummeting bodies. Looking back I saw our four guards bulldozed off the cliff by a tidal wave of unstoppable bird-flesh. Ahead of us, down the trail, krae were bouncing off the path between sprinting Aarurrh girls.

We were actually lucky that the damn things ran so fast, because momentum arced most of them over the narrow trail and straight into the ravine. It was like riding behind a solid, feathered waterfall. Unfortunately, a lot of the birdbrained things tripped at the edge. It reminded me of that Indiana Jones movie where the temple collapses and big chunks of stone drop all around the hero, only with giant birds. Far down the path an Aarurrh mama was punched off the trail like an eight ball getting knocked into a corner pocket. Right in front of us a young Aarurrh girl got clobbered on the hindquarters and went down all splay-legged and half off the trail.

Queenie, the idiot, stopped to help her up. Krae were hitting like depth charges all around us. One grazed Queenie’s shoulder, and mine. Queenie didn’t flinch. She got the poor girl’s hind legs back on the trail and had her halfway to her feet when we heard a roaring behind us.

A Barahir warrior, some crazed berserker who couldn’t wait for the rain of krae to stop, charged down on us in full, four-legged gallop mode, two swords held high. Queenie shoved the wounded girl down the trail and tried to follow, but Two-Swords was on us way too fast. One sword slashed Queenie low on the left back leg. The other would have took my head off, except I ducked.

Queenie went down, howling. I got thrown clear and crashed into some low scrub. Good old low gravity. I hopped up, unhurt except for a few scrapes, and looked around. Two-Swords was raising his blades for the killing blow.

If I’d thought about it, I’d have remembered that Queenie was my enemy and I was her slave. After all that “good girl” and “bad girl” stuff I should have been happy to see her buy the farm. I wasn’t. I still liked her. So I didn’t think at all.

My hand grabbed a rock. My legs sprang. I landed right between Two-Swords’ shoulder blades and swung with the rock. I put it inside his skull easier than breaking an egg. Two-Swords dropped, his head a concave half-moon, red and wet. My hand was drenched in blood. I’d killed a guy. Another one. I wanted to call a time out and wash myself before I puked.

I looked up. Queenie was staring, amazed. She’d seen my leap, and probably had a better idea than I did what it took to crush an Aarurrh’s skull. I shrugged, still dazed.

No time for interrogation though. A full company of Barahir was barreling down at us. Queenie snatched me up again and we galloped down the trail. Queenie cried out in pain from her slashed leg every time we leaped the body of a dying krae or dead Aarurrh girl.

Before us, down in the ravine, I saw that the alarm had been raised, but maybe not soon enough. Our boys were still scrambling into their harnesses and galloping up to form a ragged line of defense, snatching up swords and spears as they came. But the double line of Baharir charging behind us was like a railroad spike shot from a bazooka. Nothing short of a steel wall was going to stop it. Ours was barely under construction.

The front line parted as we roared through, then closed up again behind us, but it wasn’t enough. Not even close. I could hear the smack of flesh on flesh as the two fronts met. It sounded like the Packers and the Jets coming together after the snap, except with a car wreck mixed in.

Queenie pulled up near Kitten and a cluster of other Hirrarah women and started to herd them further into the camp. Hirrarah men raced past us toward the front, which had crumbled almost instantly. The Barahir had plowed through the center and done end-run plays around the edges. Now they were fanning through the camp, swiping at anything that moved, kicking over cooking tripods, and starting fires in a dozen places. And as if that wasn’t enough chaos, maimed, terrified krae were running around like panicked, half-ton chickens, crashing into tents and clawing good guys, bad guys, everybody.

Snatching up a spear somebody had left behind, Queenie led her flock through the camp and into a narrow arroyo in the ravine wall. It was a tight squeeze at the mouth; we had to go in single file, but further in it opened up like a wine bottle. There was hardly any room for us. The place was already sardine tight with Hirrarah gals and kids. This was a planned safe hole for the women-folk, the most easily defended place in the ravine. Only problem was, it wasn’t defended. Whatever males were supposed to hold the entrance weren’t there. It was pretty obvious they were either dead or real busy right about now.

Queenie grunted, then whistled up a few of the heftiest gals to back her up. She planted herself dead center in the arroyo’s tiny opening, spear at parade rest.

I was ready to help out. My blood was up. I generally try to avoid fights, not because I don’t like them, more because I find it kind of hard to stop once I get going. Queenie had other ideas. She nodded up to the peak of a nearby teepee, and mimed me jumping up there for a look around. “Up.”

I tried to look like I didn’t know what she meant, but it was no good. She’d seen me brain Two-Swords at the end of a fifteen-foot jump. The cat was out of the bag. She smirked and raised a sly eyebrow at me.

I shrugged, sheepish, and leaped to the top of the tent like a cat jumping onto a fence post. Queenie was right. It was a good vantage point. I had a clear view of almost the whole camp.

Man, what a mess.

There was one good thing. Our guys had finally gotten themselves together. It wasn’t looking like quite the massacre it had when it started, but even now it wasn’t pretty. The damn krae were still running around, some on fire, and the tent fires were spreading. The fighting was all over the camp. There was no front anymore, just a bunch of isolated ass-kickings and bloodlettings wherever there was room to swing a sword.

Recon training took over. I was assessing threats and preparing contingencies just like Captain MacPherson had taught me. The nearest fight was four tents away, a swirling mosh pit of snarling, slashing Aarurrh and flashing steel. It took me a second to sort out the two sides, and another to recognize One-Eye and Handsome in the thick of the scrum. It was One-Eye’s squad, fighting a gang of Barahir and separated from any other action by at least fifty yards and any number of tents. It looked like they’d stopped to rescue a downed Hirrarah gal from some Barahir and got caught up in a scrape they couldn’t disengage from.

One-Eye, like the coward I’d always figured him to be, was leading from the rear, shouting insults and encouragement from behind his men and waving his sword around a lot, while Handsome was fighting like a demon at the front. As I watched, he ran through two all by himself with a desperate double-sword lunge, and he paid for it. He’d left himself wide open. He parried a slash at his gut, but took a slobberknocker crack on the temple from the butt of a spear. He screamed and wheeled, doing the boxers’ rubber-leg dance on his hind legs, then fell back, crashing heavily on his flank.

His pals closed up the gap like good soldiers, and pressed the advantage he’d created. The bad guys were starting to retreat. One-Eye cheered his men on, but I saw him shoot a glance down at Handsome, still in dreamland beside him, then look over his shoulder. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Something was brewing behind One-Eye’s one eye and he didn’t wait long to act on it. He bent his middle arms/legs to kneel by Handsome like he was going to check his wounds. It was perfect. Nobody around, all his men looking the other way, fighting for their lives. It would look like Handsome had died in battle. One-Eye pulled his hunting knife from its sheath.