The Thunder King (Bell Mountain) (20 page)

Jack couldn’t think of much to say. Even if Helki had been wrong to make them stay behind in Gilmy, that didn’t make it right for them to go skipping off by themselves into a country full of enemies.

It was one thing to go to Bell Mountain because you had to go, it was God’s will. God had sent them to Old Obann, too, to find the scrolls; and for that adventure they’d had Martis with them. Now they were out here with no Martis and no word from God, out on their own because they thought it was too dull in Gilmy. It didn’t feel right.

“Will you cheer up!” Ellayne said.

Wytt, standing on Ham’s shoulders, chattered at her, wanting to know when White-face would be joining them. That was his name for Martis.

“He’ll come when he can, Wytt,” she said. Somehow the little hairy man understood every word she or Jack spoke to him, although he could never learn to speak a single word of any human language. And since they came down from Bell Mountain, she and Jack could understand him. “You just keep your nose in the air to sniff out trouble.”

“Like there’s any place to hide, if trouble comes!” Jack said.

“There’s a couple of trees up ahead,” said Ellayne. “You can climb one and see if you can spot the army. It’ll give you something to do besides complaining all the time.”

He grumbled under his breath, but not so she could hear him.

Martis worked all day with the men of Gilmy, digging the moat around the town. When he came home, the children weren’t there.

At first he thought they must be playing somewhere nearby. He stood in the doorway and called them. “Jack! Layne! Come home for supper!”

When they didn’t answer, he went to the neighborhood stable to see to his horse, Dulayl; and when he discovered that Ham was gone, he realized that the children were gone, too.

He should have expected it. They wanted to be with the army; they didn’t want to stay in Gilmy. “Didn’t want to” was putting it too mildly, he thought. They hated being left behind—especially Ellayne.

All thought of supper banished from his mind, he saddled Dulayl and trotted to the bend in the river where the town’s boats were moored.

“Have two children been here today to take a boat across the river?”

“’Course not!” said the man who minded the boats. “Those two grandkids of yours don’t own a boat, and I wouldn’t let them have anybody else’s.”

“Thank you!”

Martis stopped at the house to collect his traveling gear and weapons, and snatch a bite to eat. Jack and Ellayne must have run off into the west, hoping to meet the army when it crossed the river—as it must do, soon, if Helki was going to Obann.

His heart was sick. Even if all the servants of the Temple had been chased back into the city—and that was by no means certain—the children would not be much better off if they were captured by the Heathen. Some of those nations practiced human sacrifice, and all of them took slaves.

As he spurred out of Gilmy, hoping to pick up the children’s trail before night fell, he couldn’t help reflecting on the ironies of life. Once upon a time he’d set out from Obann, traveling east, to capture these same two children for Lord Reesh—or kill them, if that was the only way to stop them from ringing King Ozias’ bell. Now he was traveling west, back toward Obann, to save them if he could.

“Or else die trying,” he vowed to himself.

Ryons continued to wander due west, not knowing when he ought to turn north. He prayed for guidance, but no guidance came.

From time to time he would hear the great, musical bellow from afar; and when it came, Cavall would prick up his ears and trot nervously, whining and trying to speak.

“I do wish you could talk!” Ryons said. To him the idea of a dog talking was not so strange: among the Wallekki there were stories of horses and hunting falcons that could speak. “We’ve been hearing that noise for days now. This country must be full of giant animals calling to each other. Why haven’t we seen one?”

Cavall barked. The sound of the bellow died away. Blackbirds, who had stopped, resumed their song. Insects chirped and buzzed. Cavall relaxed his ears and sat down. He looked disappointed.

“Hey!” said Ryons. “Do you know what I just thought? What if it’s not a lot of great big animals, but only one of them—following us, but never coming close enough so we could see it? What if God sent it to keep the death-dogs away from us?”

It was a comforting thought—too bad there was no way to know if it was true. But hadn’t that first bellow driven off the death-dog? And hadn’t God promised to protect him? Certainly—Ryons remembered Jandra saying so.

“We’re not alone out here, after all,” he said to Cavall. “There might be all kinds of terrible beasts in this country, but they’re staying out of our way. If only we could find some people!”

They resumed their journey, now slanting a little bit into the north. No one had ever taught Ryons about maps. The Wallekki didn’t make maps; they just remembered where things were and how to get there. But there was no one in Obann who could have given him a map of the Southern Wilds. Beyond a certain point, no one ever went there. Whatever countries lay any distance south of Obann, no one knew.

The truth was that in trekking west Ryons had, without noticing it, veered too far to the south. Now he was correcting for it, but the lost miles would not be easily made up. He didn’t know that. All he knew was that he was lost, and that without Cavall to hunt game and find water for them, he would have died.

Helki’s army passed the ruins of Old Obann without encountering a single enemy. That the enemy was watching him, he had no doubt; but no troops had been sent to challenge him.

“Quite a heap, isn’t it?” he said to Obst, pointing to the ancient ruins. “Makes you wonder how such a great city could come to that. And I wonder if the same thing will happen to Obann on the north bank of the river.”

A low, brown, sprawling mountain—that’s what the ruins looked like, from the high ground traversed by the army: but a mountain broken, shattered into piled rubble.

“It was the seat of Obann’s Empire—the ancient city, where the first great Temple stood: Ozias’ city,” Obst said. “But it wasn’t human hands that pulled it down. It was the wrath of God. He pronounced judgment against the Empire, and in the blink of an eye, all of Obann’s great cities were destroyed. How, the Commentaries do not say.”

“I’ve been to a few of those cities,” Helki said. “You see some funny things there.” He meant tunnels full of human bones, slabs of stone as broad and smooth as frozen ponds, and iron staircases that went nowhere: things like that. “But the Little People like it there.”

“It was prophesied of old that the hairy ones would live and dance their dances there,” said Obst.

The army marched by Obann fast, with scouts thrown out in all directions. Their reports were all the same: the Heathen sat in siege against Obann, every man of them.

“Wonder where they think we’re going,” Helki said to Chief Spider.

“They don’t care where we’re going. They’ll deal with us later, after they’ve sacked the city,” said the old Abnak. He sighed. “I left my hills to be a part of that! The sack of Obann would have made every man famous who fought there: something for your children’s children to sing songs about. And now I’ve come this close, and I can’t even see the place.” They were too far off to see the new city as anything but a blur on the far side of the river.

A lone Wallekki rider lifted his voice in song, with a few of his comrades joining in for the chorus. Neither Helki nor Spider understood the language, but they caught the sentiment.

“A song of glory that might have been,” said Spider, “but wasn’t. The Wallekki have many dreary songs like that.”

“So what do the Abnaks sing about?” asked Helki.

A grin split the old chief’s tattooed face.

“Women!”

Jack and Ellayne followed the river from a safe distance, traveling in a leisurely way by day and camping by night, with Wytt to watch out for them. They soon used up the rations they’d packed in Gilmy. Jack had his slingshot, but in three days he’d had no luck with it. Wytt found them roots that they could eat, and nuts; and they were lucky enough, the third day, to happen on a pear tree that still bore some fruit. But most of the pears had fallen to the ground and gone bad.

“If you’re going to miss every time you shoot at a rabbit or a bird, you might as well let me try it,” Ellayne said.

“Why not? But you won’t do any better.”

They had a whole afternoon yet to travel, and it looked like rain. All we need, Jack thought: a lot of cusset rain.

“Where’s Martis?” Ellayne groused. “He should have caught up to us by now.”

“Unless something happened to him,” Jack said.

“Don’t!” It was beginning to dawn on Ellayne that something bad could indeed happen to Martis; and it would be her fault. She was ashamed to say so to Jack, but she missed Martis and now she worried about him. “Don’t say that. Martis knows what he’s doing. He can take care of himself.”

They traveled on. The only one who didn’t seem to mind was Ham; but of course he could eat grass. The children couldn’t—nor did they share Wytt’s taste for worms and insects. It’d serve us right if we wound up eating bugs, Jack thought. But he supposed Ellayne already felt bad enough without him riding her.

He was daydreaming about Lintum Forest when Wytt suddenly jumped off Ham’s back and screeched.

“Oh, burn it! Someone’s coming!” Jack said.

“Someone who?” Ellayne cried; but Wytt didn’t know. He chattered at them to hide, then darted into a thicket of thorny box-bush where only an Omah or a rat could go.

The land was flat. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.

Three men approached from the west, taking long strides that the children and the donkey couldn’t hope to match. There was nothing to do but stand and wait for them.

They were tall men, bare-chested, with long leather leggings and dark hair piled up on their heads and held in place with bird bones. They called out to the children in a foreign language and brandished long curved knives at them, obviously warning them not to try to run away.

“Burn it!” Jack said. “I don’t like the look of them!”

“It’s all my fault!” said Ellayne. “I didn’t mean for this to happen!”

Once Jack would have said, “You’re burned right it’s your fault!” Now he gripped her hand and said, “Easy does it! Maybe they won’t hurt us. Try to act friendly.”

He wrung out a smile and waved to the men, feeling sick to his stomach. The strangers slowed a little, confident now that their prey could not escape. Jack heard them speaking to one another, and didn’t understand a word of it.

The men walked around them in a tight circle, looking them over, pointing at them, conversing unintelligibly. Jack wondered where Wytt was, and hoped he wouldn’t show himself.

“Do any of you speak our language?” he asked.

One of the tall men stopped in front of him. “I do, little bit,” he said. “What you do here with pack donkey? You spies, maybe.”

“Spies? We’re lost!” Jack said. “We’re just trying to get home, my brother and me. We can’t find our way.”