Robert Adams - Trumpets of War

“Of course I don’t fear Sunshine, my sister,” he assured her. “If life should leave me, for whatever reason, Sunshine has my permission to eat my husk, too; better her than a horde of little sharp-toothed beasts or a bushel of slimy, shiny worms. Furthermore, I am certain that this late Yohnutos must have felt just that same way, too.”

After a while, he tossed the brushes onto the pile of gear on the bank, then slid from off the elephant and waded a few yards upstream to where the water formed another pool as deep as that in which she lay.

“I am done with you, Sunshine. Stay there and enjoy the water while I wash myself, then we will go back to camp. Perhaps the stores train arrived while we were away.”

Sunshine did not answerhim, she just rumbled another groan of pure pleasure from the cooling, soothing water gurgling around her. Idly, she filled her trunk and then sprayed the fluid onto those expanses of her body not submerged.

Once he had bathed and dressed, his clothes still damp from their washing, the pachyderm grudgingly quitted her pool and assisted him in resaddling her and hanging the equipment back in place. Then he guided her back to the upstream pool, on a bank of which he had discovered a dense growth of the plant called fen cabbage, much relished by the elephant. It was while she was using her trunk to tear out the plants, roots and all, and stuff them into her mouth that she once more mindspoke him.

“Gil-my-brother, there is a man lying in the tall grass just above the other bank. He has one of the long, hollow things thatthrows tiny arrows and it is pointed at your face. When I hear him take his deeper breath and propel that arrow, I will spray him with a trunkful of water and you must then attack him before he can set himself to take another breath. Sunshine has heard of these tiny arrows; the brother of one of her sisters ceased to live after being only scratched by one.”

Across the stream, motionless in the thick grass, his deadly blowpipe extended before him, Benee moved his left arm ever so slowly, gradually raising the pipe, meticulously adjusting the aim of the tricky weapon. Although hardly more than a child by the standards of most inland folk, among his own people—the fen dwellers of the coasts, called swampers by Merikan speakers andbaltohtheesee by Ehleenoee when not being called by cruder, more obscene names—Benee was both a hunter of long standing and a well-proven warrior, having taken the spears from off no less than three inlander warriors and the head off one of those men. This latest victim did not have a spear, but he did have a head to add to Benee’s collection that hung in the rafters of a certain stilt-supported hut deep in the salt fens.

True, he and all of the others had received word from the Men of the Sea Islands that the great inland war was now done and that they now were no longer to slay alien warriors along the edges of the fens. But Benee and all of the others of his kind had silently, grimly laughed at the words, for war or no war there never had been a time in living memory or legend when his folk had ceased to slay any who chose to encroach too closely to the peripheries of the salt swamps. All inlander folk were the enemies of the fen folk, this had always been so and would ever be so, and it was the duty, the right, the privilege and the joy of Benee and every other man of the fens to kill every inlander that happened to stray within range of his blowpipe.

The long tube aligned to his utter satisfaction now, Benee drew in a deep, deep breath, for the range was a few yards farther than he would have preferred, but the best he had been able to accomplish in the particular circumstances. He drew the air in through his nostrils, for his lips already were pressed to the mouthpiece of the pipe, the fluffy down of the deadly dart only a couple of centimeters beyond his mouth.

But a split second before he released the powerful puff that would send the envenomed dart sailing at the unprotected flesh of Benee’s chosen victim, a vast quantity of icy-cold brook water inundated him with some force, spoiling his careful aim so thoroughly that the dart buried itself deep in the muddy mire from which the huge singular beast had been tearing up and eating plants. And even as he dashed the water from his eyes, Benee knew that despite his caution in the stalk, he must have been observed, for his intended victim had waded or swum the width of the pool and was now clambering up the near bank, a long, wide-bladed dirk shining like silver in his right fist.

The swamp killer was wrong. Even at a distance of less than thirty feet, Gil Djohnz did not see the small, slight man—his body, limbs and head all streaks and daubs of mud, with dead leaves, clumps of grass and other vegetable trash stuck to it here and there—until he stood up from his place of ambush and drew a brace of single-edged knives from sheaths fastened to his skinny shanks.

Benee figured that his death would be quick in the coming, now, for not only was the inlander bigger and stronger-looking than was he, with a two-edged weapon that was obviously made and balanced for fighting, but surely the inlander must often have actually fought breast to breast, man against man, something that Benee never had done—fenfolk fought thus only as a last resort, as in this instance, when cornered, otherwise doing all of their man-killing from a distance with fiendish traps or with the poisoned darts from their blowpipes, the knives they carried being tools rather than weapons.

Gil knew fen-men of old, numerous families of the unsavory breed having inhabited the fens to the north and east and south of Ehlai before the cooperative efforts of the Ehleenoee and the Kindred had rooted them out, killed them or driven them farther south and north to pose an ever-present threat to other peoples. He knew that deadly as they all assuredly were at short distances with their pipes and poisoned darts, at ranges beyond the reach of their pipes they were craven, and without those pipes they posed about as much real danger to any determined fighter as so many swamp rabbits.

Nonetheless, he was a normally cautious man, so he stopped before having come within actual striking distance of the stripling-sized, mud-daubed would-be ambusher, took a renewed grip on the wire-wound hilt of his Horseclans dirk and began a slow, crouching, bent-kneed advance on the balls of his feet. He held the dirk firmly and low, with the point higher than the pommel, ready to either slash or thrust or stab as an opportunity presented itself; a hurried glance had not shown him a fallen branch or anything else that might serve him as an auxiliary weapon, so he held the empty hand out, a little below the level of his eyes, wrist, elbow and fingers all slightly flexed.

Benee slashed at the flat belly of the inlander with his pointless skinning knife. His razor-edged steel missed its mark, but the equally sharp blade of the inlander’s big dirk did not; it opened the skinny left forearm to the bone in a slash that curved from wrist to elbow. Bright red blood gushed up all along the terrible wound and began to wash the clots of drying mud from off the skin, and in his agony Benee did not even feel the worn hilt of the skinning knife slip from his weakening, now-nerveless grasp.

“Little snake’s only got one fang left now.” Gil grunted to himself in satisfaction. “Wonder why this breed never learned to fight face to face, like normal men?”

His mud-caked features distorted, the swamper screamed once and threw himself at Gil, the big hunting knife extended before him like a spear. It was absurdly simple for an experienced warrior: the Horseclansman swiveled his body obliquely to the left, took his opponent’s right wrist in a crushing grip and allowed a portion of the skinny man’s own momentum to drive his near-fleshless body onto the leaf-shaped blade of the dripping dirk.