The Southern Trail (Book 4) (16 page)

“Guards,” Argen peremptorily took command of the situation from Varsen, “Tie him up and keep him separate from the others under guard.  We’ll deal with him at a later time.”

The sergeant led Marco away, and had him tied, then sat down at a distance from the other members of the army column. Marco sat down where directed, and stared at the nearby fires of the army camp.

Ten minutes later Marco noticed a group of men approaching his location.  As they drew closer he recognized that there were a score of men, a mixture of the soldiers he had marched with, and those he had known before.

“Hearst, what are you doing?” he asked, convinced that trouble was about to break out.

“We heard that there was a setup, and you’re under arrest, Marco.  That’s not right.  You’ve done more than any man in this column to keep men alive and safe,” the sergeant answered.  “We’re here to set you free.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Marco rose to his feet as the two men standing guard over him looked on nervously.  “I can take care of this situation if I have to, but I don’t think anything’s likely to be needed,” he told them.  He rose to his hobbled feet and hopped forward to where his rescuers were gathered.

“I imagine these fine guards will be willing to cut my bonds to demonstrate that they mean me no harm,” he looked significantly at one of his guards.

“Absolutely,” the man instantly said, not even looking at his partner before he pulled a knife out and knelt by Marco’s feet to cut the ropes.  When the guard stood, Marco extended his hands, and the guard sliced his knife through the ropes there as well.  In the process though, his knife slipped and sliced across the bottom of Marco’s hand, drawing blood, and making Marco whip his hand up in surprise and momentarily shake it.

“My apologies, sir,” the guard said sincerely, stepping back and looking fearfully at the surrounding soldiers.

“There now,” Marco said to the semicircle of his supporters.  “No harm will come my way.  If it does, I’ll call upon you, I promise.  Now go back to your camp and get a good night’s rest.”

“You promise us that you’ll call if you need help?” asked one of the men who he had shared his water with.

“I promise,” Marco said convincingly, and he watched the milling group turn to return to their camp.

“You could be a free man now.  You’ve probably got enough friends to take control of this group.  Even the Duchess Rhen is a friend of yours, I’ve heard.  Why did you send them away?” one of the guards asked curiously.

“I have a feeling everything will turn out alright if I just wait,” Marco answered.  “There’s no reason for us to fight among ourselves, is there?  We all saw enough fighting up in Athens, didn’t we?” he asked.

The guards nodded in agreement, and Marco went back to sit alone.  He hoped he was right in his explanation to the guards.  He had felt tempted to allow his friends to raise a rebellion; it would have been easy enough.  Varsen and Argen were not popular men, even among the soldiers that remained loyal to them.

But Iasco had sent him on his journey towards Foulata, and he felt compelled to try to accomplish his mission.  He had no idea what would happen when he arrived in the capital city of the king of the Docleateans, the great grandfather of the kind and sweet Princess Ellersbine, but he would have faith in Iasco’s plan, and do what was needed to make the journey there.  He felt tested in the extreme by the challenges that had arisen on his trip, and prayed that he would not have to make any further fateful decisions for a while.  Each choice left him second-guessing himself over whether his last decision had been the right choice or not.

In his troubled state of mind he fell asleep in the warm mountain air, and didn’t awaken until morning time, when he heard the guard shift changing.

“Be good to him.  He saved us a lot of trouble last night,” Marco heard the departing shift inform the arriving guards.

“How’s your hand?” the guard came over to see Marco.

“What in blazes happened?” the man asked as he stood over Marco and looked down at him.

Marco looked up at the man, then followed his gaze back downward, and saw that the man was staring at Marco’s right hand.  And the reason, he saw, was that where the sword blade had nicked him while it cut through his rope handcuffs, it had also shaved away a patch of skin on the bottom of the inside of his palm.  The result was the revelation of a gleaming golden area of flesh, the true color of his golden hand.

Marco looked up at the man.  “It’s a rash, maybe,” he said.  “There may be different diseases here in the mountains.”

“If you say so,” the guard agreed, and then walked away.

Marco and his guards walked out a wide distance ahead of the rest of the column that morning, and as they traveled south, Marco noticed that the vegetation around them was slowly growing more lush.  They passed over a stream of running water in one shallow valley, and at midday they passed over another.  Two streams in a short distance was a welcome change for the column, and the next day Marco realized that the trees were considerably taller and the undergrowth was healthy beneath them, while the soil was darker and moister in appearance. 

As he had earlier in the journey, Marco found that his wandering attention came to focus on varieties of plants and insects that he knew had value in certain alchemical formulae, and he harvested a few from time to time.  The memories of practicing alchemy faintly resonated in his mind, and he wondered if he would ever again have time to spend in a shop, working at concoctions and potions and powders.

That afternoon, as the sun approached the western mountains, they crossed over a ridge and found a large lake spread out in a wide valley before them.

“Does it look familiar?” one of his guards asked.

“No,” Marco said simply.  “Does it look familiar to you?”

“I’m not the one who’s from Rurita, so it wouldn’t look familiar to me, would it?” the guard asked sarcastically.

“Oh,” Marco murmured.  He’d forgotten that the false identity that Iasco had imposed on him had claimed ancestry in Rurita.  “I don’t recognize this area,” he said lamely.

“Well, this is High Valley Lake,” the guard explained as they descended towards the body of water.   “And the day after tomorrow we’re going to go through the ruins of old Rurita City, where Colonel Varsen seems eager to reach.”

The conversation ended, and they all gladly walked down the path, pleased to let gravity make the journey at the end of the day less punishing than the past several days had been.  They camped down by the lakeside, and for the first time in days, saw other people.  Several small farms were located in the valley, and they marched through a tiny village before they set up camp for the night in a field.

Marco was confined that night further down the road from the rest of the army column, still untied, as he had been since his first night in captivity.  The air once again had moisture in it, unlike the dry air they had marched through for much of their journey in the desert and in the mountains, and he felt comfortable.

There were noises in the forest around them that night.  At first Marco thought they were simply the sounds of forest animals, but as the sounds lasted and shifted, he came to the conclusion that they were people, people who had some reason to be stealthy as they wordlessly moved through the dark forest.

When the moon rose at midnight, the forest grew brighter, and there were no further sounds among the trees, letting Marco sleep comfortably, without interruption, on the light blanket his guards had given him.

The next morning the whole column rose and began walking again.  They skirted around the south end of the lake, and forded a small river, then began to climb the mountains out of the valley.  The trees in the mountains to the southeast of the lake were evergreens, covering the side of the mountain in a dense, dark blanket of foliage.  The road seemed darker among the pines, and Marco thought it was strange that there were no other travelers on the road as they passed through the region.  He mentioned his surprise to his guards.

“The folks of Rurita don’t take kindly to seeing our uniforms.  Even one hundred and fifty years after we conquered them they still hold a grudge,” the guard answered.  “But you knew that better than me.”

They reached the top of the first ridge that faced the lake in early afternoon, and stopped to have a late lunch, and to rest their weary legs.  Marco was given a slice of coarse, dry bread, while he and his guards waited ahead of the others in their semi-isolated location ahead of the main body of troops.  The guards that were with him were growing sleepy, Marco could tell as he sat against a tree trunk and watched the guards’ chin drop onto their chests.  He was feeling the same drowsiness himself, and he let his eyes close as he waited for the orders to come forward to resume the march.

What he heard instead was a sudden eruption of screams and shouts.  He opened his eyes just in time to see the heads of his guards jerk upward, their eyes also open and turned backwards towards the rest of the column.

“Go on,” Marco urged them.  “Let’s get back there and see what the trouble is.”

He stood up and joined his two guards in running towards the closest portion of the column.  As they approached it, they observed that a constant stream of arrows was hitting the members of the column from their flank.  The soldiers appeared to have been no more alert than Marco and his guards after the noon meal, and several were sprawled on the ground with arrows protruding from their unmoving bodies.

Marco raised his right hand and thought of the sword that had been taken from him, the marvelous weapon that Ophiuchus had crafted for him.  “Come to me!” he called out, and he felt a thrill of energy run through his hand, a confirmation that the weapon was flying towards him.

There was a flash of a beam of sunlight glinting off the flying blade in front of him, and then the hilt jammed itself against his hand, and Marco was once again armed and ready to fight.

Chapter 13

“Come with me!” Marco instructed his two guards, and they immediately followed as he veered off to the right, leaving the narrow road and crashing through low-hanging, needle-laden pine boughs.  Marco shut his eyes as he ran through the branches, then opened them and looked around.  There was a line of archers – not many – but enough to inflict harm upon the unprepared men of Docleatae.

Marco’s two guards crashed through the foliage behind him and stopped next to him.

“We’ll charge at them, and make a lot of noise when we get close, so the rest of the column will know where to head,” he told the two men.

Just then one of the horses that had been pulling the carriage cried out in pain, and moments later, the second horse also screamed.  The men with the bows calmly stood up, then retreated into the gloom of the forest that dropped away behind them.

“Should we go after them?” one of Marco’s guards asked him.

The sounds of horses screaming and thrashing had stopped, but men were moaning in pain back along the road.

“No, we better go see how our folks are doing,” Marco decided, considering the prospect of running into the attackers in an ambush.  He pressed his sword through his belt to hold it in place, then walked with the other two back to the road.   They turned and rejoined the soldiers who were crouched down and peering cautiously into the forest.

“They’re gone, the attack’s over,” one of Marco’s escorts shouted to the rest of the men.  Marco left the two guards to walk over to where a group of men were near the carriage.

Several men were lying on the ground near there, dead or injured, and both the horses were dead as well.  Marco was relieved to see that Captain Fyld had taken charge of the active soldiers in the area, having crews move the injured to one area, while the dead were being laid aside in another.

Just as Marco arrived, the carriage door cautiously inched open.

“Is the attack over?” Colonel Varsen asked as he poked his head out of the vehicle.  “Have we successfully won the battle?”

“The skirmish is at an end,” Captain Fyld reported.

Varsen swung the door open and stepped down, followed by Count Argen.  After a moment’s hesitation, Princess Ellersbine and Rhen stepped down as well.

“Well, are they all dead?  Have we killed all the animals that attacked?” Varsen asked.

“No sir, they withdrew before we could organize a counter attack,” Fyld reported.

“The horses!”  Argen called out.  “They’ve killed the horses!  How are we going to move the carriage?”  he asked.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to rely on the carriage any further, my lord,” Fyld said stolidly.

“That’s preposterous!” Argen called out.  “You’ll have to do something,” he turned to Varsen to insist.

Marco studied the two women.  Neither looked frightened, but they appeared disturbed by the evidence of death around them.

“That man!  What’s he doing with that sword?” Argen shrieked in anger, and Marco swiveled to see that Argen was pointing at him.

“I came to see if the camp needed any help,” Marco said quietly.  He pulled his sword out from his belt, then walked over to Fyld and surrendered it to the officer, who took it reluctantly.

“Captain, get the men lined up and marching immediately.  Let us leave this terrible place,” Varsen ordered.

“Begging your pardon sir, but we’ve got newly injured men and dead men, as well as your carriage to dispose of,” Fyld replied.  “I’d recommend that we put pickets out around this spot and spend the night here, so that we can tend to the injured or prepare stretchers to carry the worst-wounded, and we can bury our dead and unload the luggage from the carriage.”

Varsen looked at him in exasperation.  “Oh very well,” he answered after a delay.

“Are you going to coddle these men?” Argen expressed is disgust with the decision.  “They’re the ones who lost control of Athens, and now they can’t even fight off a group of rustic criminals.  It’s your command, I suppose.

“And that criminal,” he pointed at Marco, “is standing right here in the princess’s company as free and easy as if he belonged!”