David Weber: March to the Sea - Empire of Man Book II

"I wish the mahouts were here," Berntsen said as he hacked at a ligament.

"Why?" Cathcart asked. The corporal wiped at his face with the shoulder of his uniform. Everything else was coated in blood.

"They used to do this."

The company had halted in the open area created by the burrowing beasts and set up defenses. With this much meat around, scavengers were bound to come swarming in, but the unit could go no further. The casualties had been brutal ... again.

The friendly Nepalese, Dokkum, who'd taught them all about mountains, would never see New Tibet again. Ima Hooker would never make another joke about her name. Kameswaran and Cramer, Liszez and Eijken, the list went on and on.

"Tell you one thing," Cathcart said. "Rogo was right the first time. These motherfuckers are bad news."

"Yeah," the private admitted, pulling on the heavy skin of the dead beast. "He was right all along."

"You were right back on the plateau, Roger," Pahner said, shaking his head over the casualties laid out inside the perimeter. "These are not packbeasts."

"Like the difference between buffaloes," Roger repeated wearily.

He'd just finished sewing up Patty's wounds, using the kit the mahouts had left and a general antibiotic provided by Doc Dobrescu. He'd been forced to do the work himself, because no one else could get near the grumpy beast.

"Cape and water, you mean?" Dobrescu asked, walking up and sitting down on a splintered tree trunk.

"You were saying something about them just before it all fell into the crapper," Pahner said. "I'd never heard of them before."

"You're not from Earth," Roger pointed out. "Of course, most people on Earth never heard of them, either."

"They have in Africa," Dobrescu said with a bitterly ironic chuckle.

"So what are they?" Pahner asked, sitting down himself.

"They're a ton of mean is what they are," Roger said. "You go out after buffalo, and you take your life in your hand. If they scent you, they'll swing around behind and sneak up on you. Before you know it, you're dead."

"I thought buffaloes ate grass."

"That doesn't mean they're friendly," Roger told the captain tiredly. " 'Herbivore' doesn't automatically equate to 'cowardly.' " He gestured at the mounded bodies of the flar-ke. "Capetoads," he snorted.

"What?" Pahner asked. There were a million things to do, but at the moment they were getting done. He was, for once, going to just let the camp run.

"They look like horned toads, but they're nasty as Cape buffalo." Roger shrugged. "Capetoads."

"Works for me," Pahner agreed. He sniffed at the smells coming from the cooking area. "And it appears that we're about to find out what they taste like."

"One guess," Dobrescu said, with a grunt of effort as he shoved himself to his feet.

As it turned out, they tasted very much like chicken.

"Now that's something you don't see every day," Julian said tiredly.

"I guess you do around here," Despreaux replied.

The beast looked like nothing so much as a bipedal dinosaur. A large bipedal dinosaur, with short forelimbs and extremely atrophied mid limbs ... and a rider.

"Cool," Kyrou said. "Horse-ostriches."

The rider reined in in front of the company, said something in a loud voice, and raised a hand for them to stop. The reins, which led to a bridle arrangement much like that for a horse, were held with the false-hands, leaving the upper hands available for things like imperious gestures ... or weapons, and Kosutic walked forward, holding up her own open hands.

"Ms. O'Casey to the front, please," she called over the company frequency. "I can't get a bit of what this guy is saying."

"On my way," the academic's voice replied, and Kosutic returned her attention to the mounted Mardukan. He was clearly a guardsman of some sort, for he was heavily armed and armored. Not that the arms and armor bore any resemblance at all to the equipment in common use on the far side of the mountains. He also looked like a tough customer who wasn't entirely pleased to see them, and the sergeant major clasped her hands before her in the nearest approximation to a Mardukan gesture of polite greeting a human's mere two arms could achieve.

"Our interpreter is on her way," the Marine said pleasantly in the trade tongue commonly used throughout the Hadur. There was no way in the world that the local was going to understand her, of course, but she hoped the tone and body language would get through, at least.

It seemed to work, for the guardsman gave her a Mardukan nod, lowered his raised hand, and settled back to wait. He still didn't seem overjoyed by her company, but his own body language indicated that he was willing to be patient ... up to a point, at least.

The sergeant major took advantage of the delay to study her surroundings. She rather suspected that the locals had known they were coming at least a little in advance, for the mounted soldier had intercepted them just as they emerged from the dense tree cover higher up the mountain on the edge of their destination's cultivated fields.

The peasants tending those fields had looked up at the commotion, turning from their drudgery for a bit of distraction. They wore dark colored robes that covered them from head to foot. The rough, dark cloth was wet in patches, and as they stopped, several unstoppered water bags and wet themselves down. It was obvious how the locals dealt with the, for humans, pleasant dryness of the plateau.

The plants they were tending were thoroughly unfamiliar, however-some sort of low climbers, staked up on pole-and-string arbors. They were also in flower, and the heavy scent of the millions of flowers drifted across the company like a blanket.

In addition to their odd dress and plants, the locals had the first beasts of burden-other than flar-ta-the humans had seen in their entire time on Marduk. The elephant-sized packbeasts were unsuited to any sort of agricultural use, but some of the local peasants were plowing one of the nearby fields, and instead of the teams of natives which would have been pulling the plows on the far side of the mountains, they were using low, six-limbed beasts clearly related-distantly, at least-to the "horse-ostrich" ridden by the guard.

Kosutic looked away from the natives as Eleanora O'Casey walked up beside her and gave the local a closed-mouth smile and a double hand clap of greeting. The march had toughened the prince's chief of staff to a degree the little academic would have thought flatly impossible before she'd hit Marduk, and she'd become thin and wiry as a gnarly root, with knotlike muscles rippling up and down her forearms.

"We are travelers passing through your land," she said, using the same trade tongue Kosutic had used. "We wish to trade for supplies."

She knew the local wouldn't understand a word, but that was fine. The original, extremely limited Mardukan language kernel in the linguistics program she'd loaded into her toot had acquired a far wider database during their travels. It was much more capable than it had been, and if she could only get him to talk to her a bit, it would quickly begin finding points of commonality.

The guardsman gobbled back at her. His tone was stern, almost truculent, but the words still didn't mean a thing, and she concentrated on looking inoffensive as she nodded to encourage him to continue speaking while she studied him. His primary weapon was a long, slim lance, five or six meters long, with a wicked four-bladed head. The lance's point was oddly elongated, and the chief of staff finally decided that was probably to help it pierce the tough armor of the capetoads. It made sense. The giant herbivores were undoubtedly a major pest in the area.