M McNally - The Sable City

“And here I thought I was having a rough trip.”

The single strap back at the haunches was holding a makeshift compress of sorts in place, obviously against a long wound. There were also two holes high on the horse’s ribs, plugged with large wads of blood-soaked cloth. The horse looked to have been washed somewhere before it was bandaged, for there was only a little caked blood trickled into the white hair below each wound.

The apple swallowed, the horse leaned its head heavily against Tilda‘s side. It gave a snort, and she scratched it between the ears.

Tilda turned her head to look back at the main trail she and the Captain had been following, from where they had seen the horse out on a branching path. To Tilda’s surprise the mare and pony were now alone, heads bowed as Block had dismounted and probably wrapped their reins around a dagger he’d jammed into the ground. Given the dwarf’s height and that of the tall grass all around, Tilda had no idea where he had gone after that.

“Captain?” she called, once quietly then again louder, for the horse beside her no longer seemed uneasy. Only exhausted.

“Off your starboard prow,” the gravelly voice of the old dwarf came from the grass ahead and to the right. He had gotten completely around Tilda without her ever noticing, but she had been focused rather intently on willing the big charger not to kill her. She had also totally forgotten how cold she was, but now she wanted to put her gloves back on.

Captain Block appeared on the side path back behind the horse, dressed identically to Tilda in warm, bulky garments and a far shorter half cloak that likewise fell to a triangular point in the front and back, with the unused sleeves hanging for now on the inside. His long salt-and-pepper braid emerged from a hole poked in the back of a knit watch cap, while Tilda’s jet black braid was coiled in the deep hood of her cloak.

“There is a pool a bow-shot back by that single tree,” Block pointed. “The shoddy horse doctoring was done there. Come hence.”

With that, the dwarf was back into the grass with only the top of his black cap visible, moving off like a distant orca whale on the sea.

Tilda patted the horse again and edged around its unwounded side, though she did stop to look over its back more closely at the bandaging on its right haunch. She then hurried after the Captain, slipping her gloves back on along the way. The horse turned to watch her go.

She followed the Captain’s course through the grass to the indicated tree, a tall lone pine inexplicable enough to have been planted here long ago as some sort of marker. Probably marking the watering hole, Tilda surmised, for the low boughs did indeed spread above a shallow pool of clear water in a little damp clearing that stretched only a few paces from side to side.

Block had stopped at the edge of the clearing and he raised a hand for Tilda to do likewise. Both looked around at the ground, Tilda over the dwarf’s broad shoulder. At the pool’s edge were scattered bloodied rags, and nearby was a pile of equipment with a great saddle of rich brown leather most notable.

“Check the packs,” Block said. “Don’t trod the tracks.” He probably had not intended for that to rhyme, for in three months of traveling together Tilda had not once noted any poetical bent to the stooped old dwarf. He moved off to walk the perimeter of the clearing while Tilda made her way over to the equipment pile, mindful of both hoof and foot prints plainly visible on the damp ground.

Tilda had been combing through an awful lot of cast-off debris for the last three days. That was the length of time during which she and the Captain had been on this particular leg of their journey, moving due south from the manor village of a minor Codian noble called the Baron Nyham. The baron was not presently in residence there, as two days before the Miilarkians arrived he had gone south at the head of an armed band of some seven-hundred men. All were bound for the town of the Duke above Nyham with whom, as the local expression went, the baron had serious beef. Something about money, or a perceived insult, or somebody’s sister. The tavern talk had been unclear.

Whatever the cause, the motley assortment of men Nyham had gathered to redress his grievance upon his rightful lord had proven on the march to be an ill-disciplined set. Their route had been easy for the Miilarkians to follow, as while it kept to a typically thin path in the Orstavian grass their passage had trod it into a wider way littered with refuse that someone had thought would be a good idea to bring along when the march began, only to drop miles and even days later. There had been cookware, bedrolls, blankets, spare shoes, extra packs and clothes, and every time Captain Block had spied any of this garbage alongside the trail he had ordered Tilda off her mare to look it over. Block would canter on ahead with both horses, leaving Tilda to jog until she caught up. Every time. This exercise served no purpose that Tilda could divine other than to keep the Captain mildly amused, which was why she had not reported the discovery of one silver coin, a Codian Swan, in the bottom of a pack. The coin was in her pocket and Tilda periodically held it in a closed hand when the Captain was trying her. She liked the weight of it in her fist.

Tilda took a bit more time to inventory the saddle and other left-behinds in the clearing, including the torn half of a very prettily-embroidered horse blanket with a pattern of sparrows in flight along the border. She had finished and was looking at the ground by the time Block made one circuit of the clearing and asked her a question. His earlier words had all been in Codian, but this was in Trade: Shto zinat? What do you know?

“The fresh prints are the charger and one person, a man by the size. They are atop a great mess of tracks from a day or two ago. The reins and rigging are all here, stripped and dropped, and the saddle is for fighting, not riding.”

“Mounted for a lance?”

“Yes. It has ties for saddlebags but there are none here, though there is loose gear that came this far in them. Tack hammer, extra buckles and stirrups. Nothing someone would need once they went to foot. But first he tore up the pretty kit to scrub and bind up the horse. The other half of this blanket is on its haunches now. There are round rust marks like it was worn under barding.”

Tilda glanced over toward the white horse, which had lost interest in her and moved off to stand closer to the mare and pony.

“What else about the footprints?”

Tilda frowned at her Captain, his heavy dwarven features expectant and his thick, dark eyebrows together. She looked down at the nearest clear mark for a moment, then put her own foot down beside it. Her riding boots had a pointed toe to slip easily into and out of stirrups.

“Rounded toes, from a shoe or sandal.” Tilda looked back up at the Captain. “The man who rode the horse here was not the knight to whom it belonged.”

Block gave a soft grunt of grudging approval, which Tilda had learned was the extreme upper limit to his expressions of praise. The nicest thing he had said to Tilda in three months was that she might have a bit of brain in her head. Along with the rocks and shiny bits of ribbon.

“We were wrong,” Block said, throwing Tilda completely.

“ Tizalk?”

Captain Block rumbled a low growl in his cavernous chest and glared off to the south, down the way they had been going these last three days toward the faint smudge of distant mountains on the horizon.

“We thought to overtake the slow marchers well before they reached Duke Gratchik’s town. Before any battle might be fought. But we did not consider that the Duke might hit Nyham first, at the edge of his lands, only half a day distant from here.”