The Marcher Lord (Over Guard) (37 page)

But
we’re all Christians,
Ian thought as he kept himself sitting up straight, though inwardly he felt more than a few things slouching uncomfortably. He wondered at just how little it was worth to be one then.

*              *              *              *

“Won’t get any hunting in today,” Kieran said, back near the camp and the brisa after the service had adjourned.

“Afraid not,” Brodie answered, “though I’m not sure I would have had the heart to after all that murder that just went on. Did you hear yourself on that hymn? It was
—” laughing, he skipped away from Kieran, who made the motions of pursuing him.

“Can’t wait until we do,” Rory said. He sat along one rock, his gun and cleaning kit out.
“And something besides long buffalo, something harder.”

“Some four horn, hopefully,” Ian said, quietly.

“Hopefully,” Kieran said, “you think you can handle shooting something like that, Kanters?”

Ian looked over at him. “Do you think you will?”

“Of course,” Kieran scoffed.

“Good,” Ian said, “
because I’ve been shooting better than you so far, so it shouldn’t be all that difficult.”

“Oh ho,” Brodie laughed. “I suppose we’ll have to see, and actually have a paying wager.”

“I can’t wait to shoot at something covered in bone like that,” Rory said. “It will have to be a great shot, but I’ll be able to do it. We just have to find them.”

“Yes,” Kieran said, “then we just have to tie one to
Kanters’ gun so that he can hit one, too.”

Ian smiled faintly. “That’s amusing.” It was hard to leave it at that.
But he could see nothing good that could come of it.

Kieran laughed, in his way. It certainly wasn’t Ian’s favorite laugh to hear.

But Brodie was already going on about something else, and soon thereafter they left. Ian had been in the process of making it look as though he was doing something in his yeoman, but finding nothing else exceptionally interesting to do, he decided it would be good if he looked over some scripture since it was Sunday. Skimming, he was vaguely aware of some of the others moving about, Rory across from him still working on his rifle.

He fell
toward the beginning of Exodus, as he frequently did, when God first appeared to Moses and tasked him with freeing His people. Moses was protesting, saying that he was not eloquent but slow of speech and tongue. The Lord answered with a question, about who had made man’s mouth—Ian had usually glanced over that, but it suddenly struck him as such an exceptionally effective answer, and so true that—

A bit of color caught his
eye, and he looked up. Elizabeth Wester was walking a little ways off, at the edge of camp with her reader in hand, but she didn’t look as though she was in the mood for reading either.

Stumbling to his feet that had
fallen asleep, Ian hurried after her.

“Good morning, Private
Kanters,” she acknowledged, trying to smile a little.

“Good morning, milady,” he said. “Did you enjoy the captain’s service?”

“It was fine.”

“Ah,” he said, “did you come to any particular ideas from it?”

“No,” Elizabeth looked at him. “Will you be bent on following me, private?”

“Escorting I think is the better word,”
Ian tried smiling, but let it fade when there was a lack of encouraging expression from her. “It is yours to decide, milady. I will go or remain, whichever serves your pleasure best.”

“I am only going to be reading,” Elizabeth said, “I wouldn’t wish to bore you.”

Ian nodded, taking the hint. “We should know though where you and your family are. Have you seen your sister?”

Her face changed. “Who would care?”

Ian stopped and let her continue on. He watched her go distractedly for a moment, vaguely noting which direction she was headed, vaguely noting her. It was difficult to say what she might be so angry at—an argument?

Making a gradual loop back to where he
had started, he found Rory much as he left him. Though it seemed like Rory’s gun was in an even worse state of disassembly every time Ian looked. Ian watched him for a few minutes, deciding that his second looked as though he knew his Allen rifle better than Ian, at least for the time being. Rory’s hands moved with an unhurried surety, his eyes carefully turning each piece he handled over and over with rapt attention.

Corporal Hanley
walked toward them.

“We need to get the company back together here,” Ellis said, distractedly. “Corporal Wesshire left a bit ago down that way, would one of you fetch him?”

Ian didn’t even need to glance down at Rory and the present deconstruction of his second man’s best friend. “I’ll go.”

Ellis nodded his thanks, and Ian started off the way that
Wesshire had gone. It was mostly parallel to the Mombosso, arcing just a little to the south so that the river and its rocks gradually fell away from him. There were more sharply contained hills, and upon climbing the third or so and having a good view of the vicinity, Ian was a bit surprised to find that he couldn’t see signs of anyone. Going by his lack of anything besides a general direction, he might have had cause for concern, but he reasoned that the terrain was plenty open enough. He would find sight of Wesshire.

With his hands in his pockets, Ian kept to an easy walk. Ellis had seemed harried, and the captain no doubt wanted them all back together—probably to get ready to break camp and leave in a few hours, but
Ian thought they had plenty of time. And so he thought a great deal as he went along, about the week they would have beyond the river, about the captain’s church service, and how exactly he would have wanted Christians like Kieran and Brodie to respond to it. None of the starts of conclusions he came to were happy ones, but his mood remained mostly apathetic. He was tired of being upset over it and just tired of it in general.

His eyes continued to scan the grassland and nearby river area as he thought, something he thought he was rather good at, even when entrenched in other thoughts. He watched just as much for Corporal Wesshire as he did
for any potential wildlife. Thoughts of red lions, and whether they would actually get to see any of them on this excursion, were just going through his mind when he came over a smaller hill that gave way to a slight valley beneath, which in turn rose back up to meet the Mombosso to the north. Almost immediately after noticing this, he caught sight of Bevish red. Adjusting his course slightly, he looked a little closer and saw that Corporal Wesshire seemed to be at a small stream that ran off from the Mombosso river. And after that he noticed the bits of mixed blue of a noble daughter’s dress, topped with red.

This was
made him pause for a moment, watching the moderately distant colors and wondering if he was seeing things. By the time he remembered that he could use yeoman to verify it, he realized that there was no reason why he should be seeing things. It was far more plausible that it was merely Corporal Wesshire along with Madeline Wester, as unfathomable as that had previously been to Ian.

“What is he doing?”
Ian asked himself as he started down the rise toward them.

It made Ian angry to think of how prone the corporal evidently was to taking the margrave’s daughters off alone. In another setting
, he might have worried about kidnapping when a lady was escorted by herself, but there was nowhere to go out here that the rest of the company wouldn’t be able to run them down. And of course, Maddy was as safe with Corporal Wesshire from external threats as she would be with any other person, but it was still bad form. He would never let any of his daughters go off alone in the wilderness with any soldier.

It took a few minutes for
Ian to near them, and as he approached he saw that Maddy was wading in the shallow stream, Corporal Wesshire sitting on the ground beside it. He had turned more than once since Ian had first seen him, probably having previously spotted Ian some ways off.

“They’re so slippery
—” Maddy was saying, her face roving over the water. “But I suppose they wouldn’t be able to stay away from the birds if they weren’t.”

Corporal Wesshire said something that Ian
didn’t catch.

“That’s
all right,” Maddy said, “I think I can get this one—it’s really long looking. I do this sort of thing all the time on Gower, though we don’t have any valuable animals like this. There isn’t much interesting water life at our home, mostly just boring algae and latch plants. Here I go—are you ready?”

“Of course,” Ian heard Arran say. “And it will be just in time for Private
Kanters to witness.”

“Wait
—” Maddy said, her eyes up in the air as she moved her hands beneath the water that Ian could now see came maybe halfway up her calves.

“Just in time for what?”
Ian asked politely as he came alongside Corporal Wesshire, who only smiled a little.

Maddy made a sudden surprised noi
se, and half-fell, half-lunged forward through the water, even into the bottom of her dress. As Ian watched though, she recovered herself, pulling back from the water something that didn’t easily want to be pulled. Gradually, after a couple seconds of that, more and more of the thing was eased from the water, until it suddenly gave with a small plopping sound beneath the water.

“Ha!” Maddy said, holding it up with an expression
that was full of glowing. “That’s the biggest one yet.”

“It is indeed,”
Corporal Wesshire said, “but that can be deceptive. It is only the contents that matter.”

Splashing out of the water, Maddy brought the animal—or at least Ian assumed it was an animal—to the shore and laid it out on the grass, where it weakly lay twitching and moving. Getting a little closer and squatting down, he saw that it didn’t appear that much different up close. It was a smooth
, dark brown color, with no definite shape but a length of maybe two feet divided haphazardly into several pod-like appendages.

As he watched, the daughter of the
nobleman reached into an apparent opening on one of its thicker limbs, moving her hands around before grasping something. Her eyes were focused hard on the thing, and her mouth open a little as she worked, but another second and she pulled back hard. To Ian’s surprise she nearly pulled the creature inside out. Its inside skin was a much lighter tan than the outside. Having pulled most of it outside of itself, the small, hand-sized item she had it by became visible.

“Will it die?”
Ian asked.

“Of course not,” Maddy
calmly said as she took a small metal worker and applied it at the tight crevice of the object, “all this skin and material isn’t alive. The muscle just grows it. We’ll put it back. There,” she whispered, “I have it.”

The worker she turned made a
slight snapping sound as the membrane lining the muscle came apart. Gingerly working it the rest of the way, she turned the enclosure over. Ian saw the sunlight catch something small that rolled in her hand.

Letting the muscle go, she stood up as it collapsed and slowly began to pull back inside itself. Maddy had a smug look as she surveyed them and walked over to
Wesshire.

“Well?” she asked,
opening her hand in front of him.

Ian stepped closer and saw a small pearl on
her palm. Only it wasn’t white or creamy like the pearls he’d seen in Wilome, but bright orange, in a way that caught and held the sunlight. Upon a more careful look, he saw that the orange coloring ran through just one small bit of a side and through the middle, the rest being covered by a duller blue.

“What is it?” Ian asked.

“Um,” Maddy paused, thinking, “a Sheyl-nah—tas?”

“Tos,”
Arran corrected.

“A Sheyl-nah-tos,” Maddy said more confidently.
“That’s what the Chax call them. But the Dervish traders call them fire pearls. See?” She reached for a cloth beside Corporal Wesshire. Unfolding it revealed maybe a half dozen other small pearls. “The muscles eat tiny plants in the river water, but when pieces of rock get stuck in them, they get coated and slowly turn into pearls. Most of them don’t form right, like these.” She pointed to four of the pearls, which were a dull gray color and pebble sized. “How much are these worth?’

“
Ten shillings,” Corporal Wesshire said, “if sold correctly.”

“Right, not very much,” Madeline said.

Who is she talking to?
Ian wondered.

“But these ones are real pearls,” Maddy indicated the other two pearls on the cloth, “they’re just not all the way done yet. See?
The orange has barely started inside, but these are still valuable. You didn’t say how much for these.”

“That is because it is very difficult to say,”
Wesshire said, picking one up and rolling it between his fingers. “It would all be determined on the various factors of each specimen’s quality. And that can only be determined with special equipment.”