The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) Page 11

  A small group of twenty or so tawny-coated tule elk grazed on a ridge of open land covered in tall grass just turning from green to yellow. They threw up their heads and moved slowly away as they caught the humans’ scent. The herd were mostly spike bulls, young males without the antlers and heavy dark throat-ruff of grown herd-lords. The females would be dropping their calves about now. They liked privacy for that, though normally they were very social.

  The three Rangers bent low to avoid being silhouetted against the sky as they went over the ridge and took a knee when they were below the crest to look down the slope. It had been a bit wetter than average this last winter, and the waist-high grass was still heavily starred with silène, the tall stalks bearing flowers white and purple and pink, and with crimson poppy and yellow mariposa-lily. There was a strong minty aroma as they knelt, from the crushed leaves of a patch of low-growing herbs that the ancients had called Yerba Buena and Rangers knew as athelas.

  Malfind leaned his spear against his shoulder and spoke with his hands to avoid spooking the elk further: all Dúnedain learned Sign in their earliest childhood along with the Common and Noble Tongues. Hiril Eilir, their co-founder, had been deaf since birth, but it was extremely useful for everyone.

  Take one? Malfind asked, flicking his eyes towards the herd.

  Faramir thought for a moment. The fresh-grilled liver and kidney were the hunter’s right, and always tempting because they tasted so marvelous right out of the beast with nothing but a little salt, but . . .

  No. We don’t know if they need that much fresh meat at the Wood and it’s the wrong season for salting down.

  Ranger law was strict that you ate what you killed, and frowned on wasting horn, hide, bone or anything else useful about the animal unless you really had no choice, that Oromë the Lord of the Trees not be angered. Their supple, durable belts and jerkins and most of their boots were brain-tanned, for instance, and their bows needed sinew and horn and glue. Anything left over could always go for compost and then onto a kitchen-garden.

  Morfind nodded. Anyway, one of those bulls will dress out at fifty pounds for each of us, not counting the hide. Do you want to pack that for hours, brother, and without carrying frames? It’ll be dark before we get back, especially if we have to take time for a stalk, and then draining and gralloching and skinning it.

  That’s a fact, her brother admitted. It would take time since they know we’re here already.

  Let’s go, Faramir concluded. Malfind, you’re point.

  They were within the Stath’s regularly patrolled territory, but rather far south; Eryn Muir was only about an easy day’s stroll from the ancient bridge, much less if you really pushed it. It wasn’t absolutely impossible that a lone Eater might sneak across to try for a Ranger; eating the heart and bringing the head home would be strong magic and enormous status. They trotted across the savanna at a swinging pace. It was scattered with small round-topped oaks, and cinnamon bush with its pungent bay-scented leaves.

  Then they took a path that cut through thick madrone chapparal. The twisted limbs were joined by coyote bush, with young golden-fleece standing like green plumes. They took care to avoid the poison oak, and the orange flowers of the sticky Monkeybush. You needed good eyes or a guide to realize it was a path, more an amending of naturally weak spots in the barrier of hard-leafed spindly scrub than a roadway, with an occasional inconspicuous mark in the Tengwar runes.

  Then into a steep ravine, through tanbark oak with its serrated leaves, sweet-scented blueblossom and chamise with bunches of stiff white blooms, then dense Douglas fir and hemlock standing tall and thick and meeting in a canopy of scented green above. The air grew cooler and damper and smelled of wet earth, and the undergrowth was thick with moss and fern. Water trickled and tinkled.

  They’d walked in silence among the chuck and birr and buzz of insects and birds, in a row each three yards from the next; Faramir was bringing up the rear, halting occasionally to glance behind them. Even their footfalls made little sound. The soles of their boots were complex constructions, tough but supple leather with a bottom layer of the increasingly hard-to-find tire-tread. That was much more expensive than conventional hobnails . . . but they also gave better traction and were much quieter. Stath Ingolf had finder’s claims on several large warehouses where their explorers had found vast numbers that had been stored away from sun and weather since the old world fell, still on their shipping pallets in buildings that were shapeless mounds of honeysuckle from the outside.

  Farther down the ravine were young redwoods, or at least young by comparison to the millennia-old giants of Eryn Muir that was their destination, trees that had been ancient in human terms when the first Hispano explorers arrived in this land. This canyon here had probably been logged a century or more before the Change, which you could see because the trees stood in rough circles where saplings had sprouted from around the long-vanished stumps. Young redwoods, the ones less than a hundred years old, put on better than a yard of height per year on a favorable site. These didn’t have the overwhelming mass of their elders, not yet, much less of their cousins in the Sierras, but while only a few were two hundred feet high many were respectably close to it. The ground beneath was open, thickly coated with their brown dropped needles and too shady for much other growth.

  A stream ran down the ravine, still fresh with the spring and running quickly over brown stones, making a low chuckling music. They slid down beside it, sometimes jumping from rock to rock, and once down a sort of steep ladder carved beside the foaming jumps of a cataract-waterfall. The flow of the white water wasn’t very large, since the stream was only a few feet across, but it was refreshing in the still air of the canyon and comely enough that you half-expected to see a water-sprite tumbling in it. At the bottom Malfind leapt down and trotted half a dozen paces on to shed momentum along the shore of a small pond, prodding with the butt of his spear at muddy dirt and watching where he placed his feet.

  Then he stopped, stiffened and thrust the weapon up. Faramir felt a cold prickle in his gut as he saw it. That was Battle Sign; it meant hostile tracks.

  “Overwatch,” he said quietly to Morfind, who’d stiffened as well; then he joined her brother.

  The black-haired Ranger went down on one knee and put a little draw on her bow, ready to snap-shoot as her eyes scanned the undergrowth. They’d been walking for about an hour, and the shade was dense here—the sun was far enough past noon to be partially blocked by the ridgeline to the west, but they’d have been back to base before the full night came and the stars came out in the east. The prickle between Faramir’s shoulder blades grew worse as he squatted where the butt of Malfind’s weapon pointed. Nobody hostile should be around here, not this close to the Ranger station in the Wood where his folk dwelt.

  Malfind was an indifferent-good archer by Dúnedain standards, but a fine spearman. Wordlessly he took the scabbard off the head of his spear and tucked it into his belt; it was normally worn on to keep the edges from glinting if they caught sunlight. Then he slid the round shield off his back and took it in his left hand by the central grip beneath the boss, before he faced in the opposite direction from his sister, weapon poised for the quick underarm gutting thrust.

  The sharp edges did glint, a very little, though the rest of the steel was a bonderized gray. It was about nine inches long, starting out as broad as a man’s palm and tapering to a vicious point; the spearshaft was seven feet of seasoned brown-gray ashwood, thick as a quarterstaff, with a foot of stainless-steel wire wound around below the head and a similar length of butt-cap at the other end. A strong man with long arms could reach twelve paces with a single darting lunge.

  Faramir opened his eyes and his mind and looked at the tracks; then he closed his eyes, thought, opened them again and repeated the process for several seconds. They called the technique Kim’s game in his folk’s schools, and he’d always been rather good at it besides liking the book it came from. That way he could call back and move the imag
es like cutouts in his head, like multiple drawings, without needing to keep staring down at them. A good deal of Dúnedain training had come from Lady Astrid’s consort Lord Alleyne, and Lady Eilir’s, Lord Hordle. As youths they’d both joined an esoteric warrior brotherhood over the eastern sea just before the Change, known for some reason as the SAS.

  The tracks were of bare feet. They were broad across the ball, and you could draw a straight line from the tip of the big toe of one particularly good print through the middle of the heel at the rear. There were distinct gaps between all the toes, with even the little toe turned noticeably outward. As if the foot were a hand, with the fingers splayed. Those were the marks of someone who had never worn shoes for any length of time; if you’d gone shod from childhood your foot was narrower and the toes all pointed ahead, or even inwards if the shoes were bad.

  “Yrch,” he said softly, rising. “Eaters. At least a dozen just here.”

  Individual bare feet were as distinctive as palm-prints, and as easy to tell apart. That there were so many meant . . .

  “Moving fast and taking chances to do it.”

  The others didn’t look around, but he could feel a subliminal crackle. That sort of enemy raid hadn’t happened since the very early years of Stath Ingolf. There weren’t any Eater bands left north of the Bay and hadn’t been since before they reached their teens. That meant a war-party from south of the Glorannon, and that was very bad . . . and hadn’t happened in many years either.

  He blinked again and the images were summoned back; the mark of the right foot was twisted in a bit from that of the left, pigeon-toed but only with one foot. An old injury that had healed not-quite-right, sufficient to affect the man’s stride just a little. Not many who ran with the Eater bands down around the Bay lived through an injury that needed time and help to heal. Not in the grisly game of stalking and hunting and dreadful feasting that made up their lives. One who did would be very tough and very cunning, and probably a leader whose followers feared losing his wits and ferocity more than they did the effort of keeping him alive until he was strong again.

  “I make it less than an hour since they passed,” he said very softly.

  The edges of the footprints had just begun to blur a little, soft soil flowing, water seeping into the bottoms.

  His voice was gently soft but not a whisper—the sibilants of a whisper carried, if not the meaning of the words. A quiet tone died closer to the source.

  “Cousin?” he asked.

  “About the same,” Malfind replied, concurring.

  He didn’t turn his head towards Faramir, or stop its slow tracking across a hundred and eighty degrees of forest. When the track was made said absolutely nothing about where the yrch had gone. They could have left it deliberately as a trap and be hiding half a bowshot from here ready to ambush anyone following them.

  “Farther down, Morfind,” he said. “Sweep for signs. I think there may be other bunches.”

  Moving through brush in hostile country you split a party of more than ten or a dozen up into a number of small columns moving in parallel whenever you could. That put them close enough to support each other but far enough apart that your group’s progress didn’t turn into an inchworm crawl and become utterly obvious to anyone looking or listening. At least Dúnedain did, and he was willing to bet whoever had made these tracks did as well. A dozen Eaters was either too many to try and cross Ranger-patrolled country, or too few. Any others would have to cross the little stream too, and the soft ground was where they’d leave evidence.

  “Malfind, take my back. Morfind, across.”

  She took two strides, leapt, and landed on the other side of the pond near where the rapid fell into it. Faramir walked quickly along his side as she paralleled him, and Malfind walked behind him a little farther with his attention on their surroundings. Morfind was walking a little bent over; Faramir looked up occasionally to scan behind her, and kept his bow ready.

  “Here,” she said, in the same soft tones they’d all been using.

  They didn’t want to face each other for Sign, not when the brush might spew howling cannibals at them any instant. He knew this ground intimately, but suddenly it felt strange and alien, like a dream of Mirkwood.

  “Not yrch, but not ours,” Morfind amplified.

  “Overwatch,” he said again, and she turned to face the woods.

  Faramir trotted to the spot opposite her, went down on a knee and looked at the ground again. There were no tracks in the soft dirt, but someone had scratched and furrowed the ground with a branch and then used it to drag leaves and litter over the spot. He gently brushed some of the dead vegetation aside with a finger, and the pattern of water in the scratches became more obvious.

  “Covered their tracks,” he said.

  He might have missed it altogether if his cousin hadn’t made him examine this spot with extra care, and the stroke with the brush had destroyed detail anyway.

  “Malfind, follow.”

  He jumped the stream himself; it would only be knee-deep, but there was no point getting your boots and socks wet if you didn’t have to. Where Morfind had been looking were scuff-marks a little farther from the bank—tracks, but nothing specific, where the ground was dry and covered in dead needles. Conifer forest made for bad tracking ground. That and the shelter of the canyon walls from viewers at a distance were probably why the yrch had taken this route.

  A little bit closer to the water was a fern just in the right position to sway aside when a shin brushed it and then sway back quickly to hide the resulting footprint. He used the tip of his bow to move it, and beneath was the mark of a boot or shoe. Not any form of footwear he was familiar with, not even the shapeless home-made ones local farmer-settlers often used. It was canoe-shaped, but broader at the front as if the toe of the shoe were upturned. And deep, either a heavy man or one carrying a full load. Armor, perhaps.

  “Two parties, traveling southeast about a hundred yards apart, say thirty all told, maybe as many as fifty,” he said. “One Eaters, one some sort of foreigner and Eaters. No Haida moccasins that I can see, but there might be some of them as well, they’re supposed to be good woodsmen.”

  “Foreigners? And the Eaters didn’t eat them?” Morfind said.

  “Good point,” her brother said. “That means something odd. Something bad.”

  Faramir’s hand went to the signal horn hung at his belt, a bull bison’s horn carven with the story of the Three Hunters In Rohan and with a mouthpiece and reed, the raw material imported from the far-off high plains beyond the mountains. Unfortunately they were still far too distant from the nearest point they could be sure Dúnedain were listening.

  “The report said there was only one shipload of Japanese to start with,” he said. “So the only foreigners who could possibly be around here I can think of are the ones who killed the High King.”

  He was surprised for a moment at the way his lips curled back from his teeth and flood of hot lust behind it. They said revenge was a dish best served cold, but right now it didn’t feel that way. Hot and steaming seemed more attractive.

  “Especially if they’re keeping company with Eaters.”

  “But they all died or were . . . oh,” Malfind said.

  Faramir nodded. “They were all killed or captured that we knew of. I’m point.”

  He was the best tracker.

  “Malfind, you behind me.”

  He wanted that spear nearby if he suddenly ran into anything hostile within arm’s reach.

  “Morfind on rear.”

  She was the best archer of the three of them, particularly at quick instinctive shots.

  “Helms on.”

  They all reached over their shoulders and put on the light open-faced sallets Dúnedain wore for scouting work when there was a real risk of a fight, simple ridged pots with enough of a flare that they protected the neck but blocked neither sight nor hearing, covered in the same mottled cloth as their cloaks. He worked his with a hand to set it prop
erly and buckled the strap under the chin; the feel of the internal felt pads clamping around the crown, brow, sides and back of his head made him swallow a bit.

  “Gwaem,” he said. “Go!” and led off at a swinging lope.

  Now that he knew he was following a band, it was much easier, easier than following a running deer though not nearly as obvious as a sounder of boar. He didn’t try to look for specific sign every moment, just for an impression of dislocation, a wrongness in the overall feeling of the woods, and every score or so of paces something stood out from the background. A twig broken, a branch bent, ground-cover crushed down, a human hair caught in bark.

  With only three Rangers it was a hideous risk to pursue such a large yrch band—not to mention the foreigners, the reports had said they were much better armed and organized than either Eaters or even Haida. Leaving an ambush party behind you was one of the standard tactics of a pursuit, and the only way to completely avoid it was to travel so slowly that you couldn’t keep up with the people you were chasing.

  They simply didn’t have any choice, though. From the angle that the tracks had cut the path he didn’t think they were headed directly for the Eryn Muir. They were probably trying to reach the water of the inner Bay where they’d hidden boats. Aluminum canoes lasted like the hills and some Eaters were skilled watermen with them.

  Why they were doing this was a complete mystery right now. But that path might well take the yrch across hunters or foraging parties . . . which might be a few children gathering herbs and mushrooms with only the sort of guard needed to make sure no bear or tiger got ideas, or a school party being taught plants and terrain and wildlife. He had absolutely no doubt what the yrch would do then, whatever their other motives were. And evidently the enemy from over the sea were a hard and cruel tribe as well. There might be Haida pirates with them both, and the northern raiders were slave-takers though not maneaters.