After I got my pack, we left Galway Town, bypassing the inn and the main street, slipping along behind outbuildings and stone fences. The chances were that someone had gone to the village constables by now, and that they'd sent someone, or soon would, riding up the ridge to the fortress with the news that three soldiers had been killed. They might take their time about it, but not so much that they'd get in trouble with the count. And the count's people could find out at the inn that I was traveling east.
Unless the innkeeper and the two chapmen kept it to themselves. But others had probably overheard us talking.
The count was almost sure to send mounted men after us, but it wouldn't do him much good in the dark. I wondered what kind of troops he had up there, and how hard they'd work to catch us. The one I'd killed hadn't been a Connemaran, but was he the odd exception, or were most of them mercenaries?
I'd thought of taking Finnigan's two nags—the farmer boy could ride one and Jamila and I the other—but I wouldn't pay back Finnigan's kindness that way. I have to admit thinking, though, what it'd be like to have her riding behind me with her arms around my waist and her front against my back, men's clothes or not. I'd crossed myself against any more thoughts like that.
Once out of town, we traveled on the road to start with, at a trot. Glynn—his given name was Paddy—ran like a plowhorse: thud thud thud. Not that he was necessarily clumsy, or incurably clumsy; he just wasn't used to running. I suspected he'd tire out pretty easily at it, though he could probably walk all night if he had to.
On the other hand, Jamila loped like a wolf. I don't think I'd ever seen a grown woman run before, more than a few steps. I'd never seen a grown woman who could throw a knife before, either. Not and take someone between the shoulder blades at five or six meters. And to the hilt!
About two kilometers above town, we slowed to a walk. The road was climbing fairly steadily now, and Paddy had fallen behind, staggering and wheezing like a wind-broken horse. Carrying a pack like I was, I was feeling that way myself a bit, but Jamila didn't seem to be having any trouble at all. Which irritated me for some stupid reason.
After Paddy'd gotten his breath back some, I led off up the ridge, not running, but at a hard, driving charge. The moon hadn't risen yet, but the night was clear. Livestock had long since browsed out all the undergrowth, and the trees were scattered enough that we could see as well as we needed to. I kept expecting Jamila to ask me why we'd left the road, but she didn't say a word, so when we got to the top and stopped for a breather, I volunteered it. "They should be riding out of town after us about now," I said, "but they'll stay on the road."
Paddy was still sucking wind from the fast uphill climb, and his only answer was a weary nod. Jamila didn't even do that; she seemed to be listening to something. I listened too. For half a minute I didn't hear it, and then I did—hounds! I should have known.
"Let's go," I said, and started trotting again along the ridge crest. We'd head downhill of course, but not yet. I didn't want to cross the road until we were well beyond, and out of sight of, where we'd left it. Then we'd cross it and probably go on to the river. Hopefully something would come to me, or to Jamila, before we got there, about what to do next.
Running wasn't bad on the crest, with nothing but cropped down grass between the trees. When I was ready to start downhill, I glanced back. Paddy was with me, but not Jamila. I stopped but still didn't see a sign of her. "Jamila!" I called softly, and got no answer. I could still hear the hounds, though, and took off angling down the ridge side. I had no idea at all where she was or what she was doing, but this was no time to go hunting for her.
We pounded along pretty good, running downhill, and in Paddy's case it really was pounding! Stealth didn't come naturally to him, and he hadn't picked it up. As we crossed the road, I shot a glance both ways and saw nothing. We had to be close to two kilometers beyond where we'd left it.
The far side of the river was in heavy timber. On our side there was open pasture between the road and river, except for an irregular band of big old trees near the bank. When I came to them, I stopped and looked back again, hoping to see Jamila following, maybe at a little distance. There wasn't a sign of her, nor of the dogs yet, just a group of cattle lying in the grass farther up the narrow valley, probably chewing their cuds.
We went to the river's edge. The river was about twenty meters wide, the current strong and looking smooth enough that it was probably fairly deep. The bank was a meter or so high, and I slid down it into the water. It came up to my ass, even there at the edge.
"Oh, Mister Luis!" Paddy said. "Oi can hardly swim at all! Oi'll never make it across!"
"We're not crossing," I told him. "We're going to wade along the bank. Now get down here."
He did, and I led off wading upstream, bucking the current. The dogs were hot on our trail. I could pretty much guess what the searchers would do when they reached the river. Assuming they had men and dogs enough. They'd split up, half of them crossing. Then, on each side, half would go upstream and half down, the dogs sniffing for where we came out of the water. They'd see us of course, if we were wading, and if that happened, our chances were somewhere between zero and none.
What we needed was luck. Like finding some beaver stumps, which in a river like this would mean bank beavers. Their lodge would be dug up under the bank, with an underwater entry I might be able to find. Chances were good that I could fit through, and Paddy too, probably, if I could get him to try. A husky twenty-five-kilo beaver takes a pretty large tunnel, and they'd have dug it big enough to pull branches through with them for rations.
Of course, if the lodge was occupied, we might get in serious trouble. I wasn't sure how beaver would react to intruders, and we wouldn't be able to see anything.
We didn't find any beaver stumps though. What we found, here and there, were boulders in the river, and after wading a ways, we came to a big rock that stuck up a meter above the water, about a meter and a half from the bank. The water was up to my short ribs. "This is it," I told Paddy, and explained to him that when the dogs and soldiers came, we'd keep the rock between us and them so they couldn't see us.
"What if they come along both sides of the river at the same time?"
"Won't happen," I told him. "But if it does, then we hunker down as low as we can, close against the bank, and hope they don't see us. Dark as it is, our chances ought to be pretty good."
Then was when the dogs reached the river. And of course lost our trail. Their baying broke down to a yammer of yips and barking, and no doubt some whining we couldn't hear from where we were, while they cast about sniffing the ground. Maybe we'll get really lucky, I thought. Maybe the troops'll decide to heck with it and go home.
But I didn't really imagine they would, and they didn't. Before long we could hear an occasional bark as hounds came along the bank on our side, and we moved to put the rock between us and them. We could hear voices, too, calling in Merkan, which meant that at least one of them was a mercenary. We could also hear them coming along the far side, not far behind. I muttered to Paddy to keep low, then pushing him ahead of me, started back around the rock to the bank side.
Between boulder and bank, with the sound of rushing in my ears and my head barely above water, I glanced up. There, at the top of the bank and little more than two meters from me, was the lead hound, big, and looking right at me. I stopped dead where I was, and I'd almost swear we locked eyes for what seemed like half a minute.
We couldn't have though, because instead of sounding, or jumping in after me, he put his nose back to the ground and moved on. And the half minute probably wasn't longer than four or five heartbeats, I suppose. I'm sure he saw me, and just didn't know what I was, there in the dark. Maybe he thought I was a muskrat. In my almost twenty-one years, I'd only been that scared before maybe two or three times.
More hounds passed, and after a minute, men. I heard their voices, and a horse snort. Then they were gone, on up the river, a group on each side. Pretty soon all I could hear of them was the louder barks, and these picked up for a little on our side, as if the dogs had run across a trail that distracted them. Maybe a bear, I thought. Then I heard calls from the other side. Soon after that I heard a horse come back by, and then another, with no one saying anything. They sounded as if they were cantering. The dogs came trailing after them, hardly making any noise at all. I had no idea what was going on. We stayed where we were for a couple of minutes longer. And it's a good thing we did, because the next thing I knew, more men and dogs came along on our side, headed back downstream, the men swearing in what was probably the local language—not Merkan anyway. I decided it was the group from the far side, and they'd crossed over.
After they'd passed, it got quiet. Pretty soon I started wading upstream again, Paddy following, neither of us saying anything. I felt mean and ugly; everything in my pack was soaked and heavy—tinder, map, all of it. The map was linen, rolled up in oilcloth to protect it from rain, but that wouldn't mean a damn thing in the river. And I didn't know whether the ink was a kind that set when it dried, or whether I'd end up with a gray and pink blur. And while I remembered the approximate route, more or less, I wouldn't remember many of the place names, or the rivers and roads or what they were called, or where I was supposed to make turns.
We were passing along a stretch where the bank was almost sheer, a rock outcrop, when I stumbled on something. Something beneath the water, that gave. For whatever reason, I bent to see what it was. What I raised was a dead man in a hauberk. I had no idea what had killed him, but he seemed fresh, not long dead. We waded upstream another hundred meters till we came to a creek that entered it from our side of the river. We waded up the creek then, out into open pasture. The water was mostly only knee deep, and we moved in a crouch, my gaze aimed down the valley toward where the troopers ought to be. Pretty soon the creek crossed the road, and I paused to straighten.
"Well done."
I stiffened at the words, even as I realized that the voice was Jamila's. She was in the creek just ahead of us, in the darker darkness beneath a tree.
"Where in the name of Blessed Jesus did you go?" I demanded. That was the first time I realized I was mad at her for disappearing.
"Up a tree till they passed on by me. I grabbed a branch and pulled myself up. Climbed high enough that they wouldn't wind me," She said it as matter-of-factly as if she were talking about the weather. "As soon as they went by, I climbed down. Then I went on past where they turned down the ridge, angled down myself, and hid near the cows."
I began to get the picture. "And I suppose you've got a sling."
She grinned. "And some two-ounce lead slugs."
Paddy sounded awed. "And you hit them in the dark?"
"No problem," she said. "There were only two of them, and I wasn't more than about twenty meters away when I let fly. What little breeze there was came from across the river, and the hounds weren't seeing anything farther away than their noses. Then, when the others had crossed the river and headed back downstream, I went down to the water, jumped in, waded upstream and followed this creek. Just the way I knew you would."
So the first two horses I'd heard going back downstream hadn't had riders anymore. I joined Paddy in awe. I don't know which impressed me more: how damned-fool reckless she'd been, or that somehow she'd gotten away with it.
"The first one fell in the water," she went on, "and I don't think the other knew what had happened. He rode over to the first one's horse and I let fly at him. He fell in too."
At twenty meters in the dark. And they'd worn helmets! Yet she'd hit them so it laid them out. In the face or the back of the neck, probably—someplace where they wouldn't have yelled, just dropped.
If even one hound had been ranging around to the side, the whole pack would have been on her.
"Luis."
I never heard her say it. Or rather, I did but it didn't register right away. I was thinking that even though it had worked out, the odds had been so poor....
"Luis!"
I came out of my fuddle enough to notice her eyes on me. She looked amused. "Ma'am," I said, "excuse me but you are crazy!"
She laughed. "No, I'm just very, very good."
"That too."
"Let's stay with the creek all the way to its head," she went on. "We can go east from there."
"That's what I intended to do." Suddenly I was angry. Who does she think she's ordering around? I asked myself as we waded. Sure she'd done well, unbelievably well, but I'd done pretty damn well too. Someone had had to head for the river and leave a trail for the hounds to follow. And someone had had to take care of Paddy.
I'd hardly thought it when Jamila looked back over her shoulder. "You've been honest-to-God wonderful tonight, Luis," she said. "I was really impressed with how you took charge of things. They'd probably have murdered Paddy, back at the inn."
I stopped. Paddy walked into me from behind. "And you did better than wonderful," I told her. "Paddy and I escaped them, but you gave them casualties. What's bothering me is—Hell, I don't know what's bothering me. I'll tell you, though: I can't see how you got away with it. Killing those two soldiers."
She laughed. "I'm lucky, Luis. I'm smart, I'm fast, and I'm very skilled. I had the best teacher in the world. But most of all, I'm lucky."
It could have been me talking; that's how I thought of myself.
We kept wading till the creek was hardly even a brook, less than a meter wide, gurgling down a ravine through dense forest. From there we pushed on over the ridge and headed northeast across hills. We hiked for more than an hour, slowly, hands in front of us to keep from walking into trees and to protect our faces from brush and branches in the dark. For these woods had been neither logged nor grazed. The moon came up—not much more than a half-moon tonight, but it made the going easier—for Jamila and me. Paddy was limping from sore feet, without complaining. My clothes had only half-dried on my body, and in spite of the hard hiking, they were cold against my skin.
Jamila had been leading. On a rocky overlook she stopped, and scanned the narrow, forested valley below us on our left. "No sign of anyone around here," she said. "No smell of smoke or livestock, no sign of axe." She turned to me. "Let's go down and build a fire. We can rest and dry our stuff."
It seemed like a good idea. We sure didn't want Paddy crippled up with blisters any worse than he already was. We stopped in the bottom of a cove in the ridge, and Jamila built the fire; her pack and tinder were dry. I cut a drying pole and tied it between two stout saplings, using clematis for cord, and Paddy and I hung our shirts up to dry, plus his shoes and Jamila's and my boots. He and I kept our breeches on out of modesty. Jamila had a dry shirt in her pack, and went off a ways to change into it. All she showed us bare were feet. Next I lashed up another drying pole and hung up most of the stuff from my pack, plus the pack itself.
Including the map. I'd have to wait a few hours, till daylight, to see what damage it had taken.
Jamila added green leafy twigs to the fire for smoke, and sat hunkered down across it from me, watching the flames. She was a really good-looking lady, and in spite of myself I wondered what her body looked like inside those black clothes. Paddy lay down on the ground with his bare back to the fire, and either went to sleep or seemed to. Jamila looked up at me. I couldn't guess what she was thinking about, but I could wonder.
After a minute or so, she said, "Good night, Luis," quietly, and lay down herself. The moon was halfway around to the south; the first dawnlight would be on us before too long. I stayed awake a little longer—long enough to turn the stuff on the drying poles. Then I freshened up the fire a bit, knelt for a minute or two of prayer, and lay down. It must have taken all of a minute before I was asleep.