Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

The next morning, Bassin’s mount went lame, and he got separated from us.

For the rest of the ride, we escaped rain and snow. That meant we only got water because my duckbill had a nose for it, detoured frequently, and dug out subsurface springs and puddles with her blunt-clawed forelimbs. She had a hint of strawberry in her bristly mane, so I called her Rosy.

At sunrise on day five in the saddle, the main body halted, then fanned out in a line. Trailing as usual, we caught up at a walk.

The only sound and movement in the chill dawn was the ting of duckbill bridle hardware as the huge animals shook their heads, and their snorts of steaming breath. Riders and mounts stared at the scene before them.

The cavalry was drawn back a yard from the top edge of an escarpment that stretched north and south for miles, in the form of a ten-foot rock cliff. The escarpment divided the continent’s high prairie from its coastal plain. It also demarcated the obviously undefended border between the Plains Clans and the Fisheaters.

Below the short cliff, the land beyond sloped away into a shallow, green basin that stretched to the horizon. Through the basin’s center a broad river curved, silver in the sun. Forested arcs split meadows in the river flood plain, and sunlight glinted off flocks of something that wheeled above the water.

My jaw dropped, but not at the natural beauty of the Headwaters of the River Marin.

Strewn across the valley like spilled candy were round multicolored cone-topped tents. Hundreds were red, more indigo, many violet. Between the yurts and the river rose hundreds more tents, multi-peaked like sailing ships, striped in yellow or garnet, and hung at their centerpoles with pennants that twisted in the breeze like rainbow pythons. Beyond the peaked tents, on the river, two hundred wooden ships rocked at anchor under scimitar-shaped sails.

Beside me, Jude stared at the vast encampment and whistled. “Now that is what I call bump!”

Down the line, Yulen turned in his saddle and spoke to a cavalryman whose beard was barely more than blond fuzz, and whose armor was as elegant as Blackbeard’s. “First Great Fair, boy?”

The youngster nodded, then swallowed.

“Your father says you keep with me.” Yulen pointed below. “For one month each year, that’s the biggest city on Bren down there. With more wickedness than all the janga dens of Marinus.”

I turned and stared at Jude, then stared back across the thousand miles of arid barrens we had just crossed, slashed by frigid winds, patrolled by man-eating monsters, ruled by dinosaur-riding cutthroats. But Yulen thought the pretty scene below held worse peril for a young man. My promise to Munchkin, to protect Jude, seemed more tenuous than ever.

Yulen said to his young student, “If you met a Fisheater yesterday, what would you have done?”

The boy patted one of his pistols, and grinned. “If you see a snake and a Marini, kill the snake last.”

Yulen wagged a finger. “But at the Fair, you nod, and raise an empty palm, and greet him, ‘Peace of the Fair to you.’ He’ll do the same.”

The boy frowned. “Tassini, too?”

Yulen clapped the boy’s shoulder, then smiled. “Don’t worry. If you see either of ’em after the Fair, you still shoot ’em.”

Blackbeard drew his sword, circled it above his head, and looked left and right at his troops. He grinned. “A Stone for any man who bathes in the Marin before me!”

Then he bellowed, spurred his pinto, and I watched four tons of dinosaur lurch forward and try to fly.

TWENTY-SIX

BLACKBEARD’S DUCKBILL STALLION hit the broken scree apron at the cliff base like a snowboarder off a stair rail, rolled on its rear haunch, and came up galloping downhill like there was free beer at the bottom.

Down the line came more bellows and whoops. Duckbills and riders Niagara’d over the escarpment. Our minder dropped our lead and spurred his mount over the edge.

The ground shook as three million pounds of dinosaurs stampeded.

Rosy raised her head, scenting the river — more water than she had drunk since spring. I tugged back her reins and looked north and south. “Easy. There’s got to be another way down this—”

Rosy launched herself into space.

“Crap.” I leaned forward and clutched the down on her neck like a life preserver.

Rosy feathered a three-point landing on hind claws and tail, then trotted downslope. Ord and Jude, pale but in their saddles, trailed us by ten yards.

Upslope I heard rocks slide, then “Holy moly!” echoed off the cliff, over and over. Behind us, Howard’s duckbill trotted toward us, with his rider crooked in the saddle.

Ahead of us, our captors raced down toward the river, shaking the ground and spraying turf clods.

Our minder waited below, two pistols drawn and trained on us, until the rumble died. Then all four of us reattached our mounts to his lead rope, and he led us forward at a walk.

Twenty minutes later, we reached the Fair’s edge farthest from the river, where the Casuni and the other Plains Clans pitched their yurts.

The breeze carried the alcoholic tang of whatever passed for booze here, and of urine and vomit. We rode paths where the meadow grass had been beaten to mud and was strewn with horn flagons that would be missed when their owners sobered up. The paths wound between round hide tents from which buzzed snores, moans, and human flatulence.

Jude said, “Must’ve been a rager last night.”

For ten minutes, we snaked among yurts. Here and there Casunis peeked out from behind tent flaps at us, bloodshot eyes screwed narrow against the sunshine.

We crossed to the yurt city’s opposite edge, then continued a half mile across open meadow. There, our captors’ hobbled duckbills grazed a meadow already chewed to stubble by earlier arrivals. The saddles, bridles and other tack, our gear, and the hide bags the cavalry had kept close at nights, lay in piles at the meadow’s edge, guarded by a half dozen of Blackbeard’s finest. Sergeant Yulen had been left in charge.

Yulen motioned us four off our mounts with a drawn pistol. The other guards cut our wrist bonds but replaced them with sprint-proof rope hobbles around our ankles.

The guards unsaddled our duckbills, then set them to graze with the others.

Yulen lined us four up, then paced in front of us, hands behind his back, armor clanking. “First you clean that tack until it shines. Then you clean it again, till it shines to my standards. Then you’ll clean Stones.” He looked us up and down, shook his head, then sighed. “Why does God test me with the pathetic likes of you?”

I whispered to Ord, “Do all Sergeants go to the same acting school?”

Four hours of tack cleaning, and re-cleaning, piled upon four days’ riding, left us dragging ass enough that Yulen cut us a break. Four women, the first we had seen, walked out from the encampment and brought us flatbread, skins of water, and pale blue fruit that tasted like limburger peaches.

Well, I’m pretty sure they were women. Each stood a head shorter than the scrawniest Casuni cavalryman, smelled better, and whispered constantly to the others. But indigo robes draped them head-to-ankle, and the eyes that peeked above their face scarves were kept downcast.

I sat on a rock, chewed a blue peach, and asked Howard, “What do you make of this?”

He peered into the half-moon he had bitten out of his peach. “Dicotyledonous Angiosperm.”

“I mean this Fair.”

He cocked his head. “There must be a quarter million people jammed in here. The ships and peaked tents don’t belong to the Plains nomads who brought us here. I’d guess once a year the Plains Clans and the ‘Fisheaters’ call a truce, and trade. Obviously, it’s become a festival.”