#64 - Big Sister

“We’ll have the boots on the horses in less than breakfast time,” the Captain said to Ahrimaz who walked jittery fingers over the map, away from Champ de Navet to the muddy track that led all along the edge of the Great Mire to Riga.  His fingers kept stopping and tapping at two fords.  In this world they were named by the locals, Up Ford and Down Ford, though there was no evidence of any kind of village at either place.  It was a choke spot for the Cylak herds both north and south and every year, joking, they swore that their aurochs trampled it wider.

“Boots.  On horses and deer.”

“Ankle wraps on the deer so the ice doesn’t cut them up when they break through the crust on the road verge.  Ice crampons laced to the horse’s shoes.”

Ahrimaz just shook his head.  “Let’s go then.”

The Captain nodded and then left him sitting, the map spread on a box in a barn that was three quarters full of turnips, his coat puddled around him.  Fingers walking up and back between the two fords.  Up and back.  “We’ll get there,” he muttered to himself.  Limyé sat nearby, rolling bandages with Etienne.  He looked up at Ahrimaz, then back down at his hands.  Clearly listening.

“It’s too scorching drowning close!”  Ahrimaz snapped, then froze as Pel carried in an arms box and set it on the rammed earth floor next to him.  An arms box branded with the Hand of the People symbol in it; so close to the burn on his own chest, but with no sign of the Flamen anywhere, only the raised Hand in the square ivy wreath.  “No, no, dear Gods and Scorching demons, Pel!  You can’t trust me with my own weapons!”  He swallowed, raised his hands.  “You saw how I was with that charming antique Teel lent me!  No!”

“You are going to need more than just armour and a piss-load of soldiers to save your friends.  I don’t want you to go anywhere near a fight unarmed.  You’d do something stupid like rushing in bare hands!”

“No. No. That’s why I brought all you lot along.  I’m not a proper warrior any longer.  I don’t revel in bathing in the blood of my enemies!”

“This is a good sign,” Limyé said, from where he sat.  “At one point you needed blood or pain or both to feel real.  Now you are rejecting them.”

Ahrimaz nodded abruptly.  “Pel…”  he slapped a hand on the empty scabbard at his belt.  “I’m certain I won’t do anything stupid.”

Pelahir stared at him for a long, long moment before he nodded abruptly, pulled out his pocket watch and checked it before tucking it back into his vest pocket.  “You do that.  I’m going to be at your back, you realize.  And you won’t want a diplomatic incident like involving me in a fight that will get my Doe angry now, would you?”

Ahrimaz snorted.  “Don’t you try and make me laugh, you dirty Cylak bastard.  In this world your Doe could probably stomp me into red slush!”

“Yes, she and her doe could probably resurrect you and do it a second time, too.”

“Spare me.”

The squire whistled from the door and half a dozen men pushed it open against the crust of ice trying to lock it shut.  Teel snapped his book shut where he sat, tucked it away in his own great coat and helped the healers close up their portable hospital, snapping the locks down with hard ‘cracks’.  “You’ve overdone the bandages, M’sieur Limyé,” he said and Physician Etienne, the younger of the two, smothered a laugh.

“You’ve not been in a battle before, Raconteur?”

“No, how did you know?”

“There’s never such a thing as too many bandages.”

**

The bandits slid down the hill on the slick leather of their coats, digging their heels in, carefully climbing to their feet.  The wind blew into their faces oddly enough.  Not typical for the land by the Mire.  It was growing colder and the mud had frozen hard enough that their boots couldn’t cut heel holes in them with stomping.

“We kin slide fer a ways, boss, but nohow we’re going to get to Downford in less n’ two days.”

“An’ we kin settle in at Upford and jus wait fer ‘em to come tah us then.”

“Ay.”

“Upford it is then.  Set to, boys and gals!”

**

Jagunjagun stomped his new mukluks, felt the chain maille on the soles cut through the ice and give him grip.  “I approve!” he rumbled and Didara, looking almost dainty, minced out onto the road after him.

The Cylak were all on their deer and laughing as they took in the hugely modified deer boots that they’d made into elephant boots.  Didara threw her head up, in the rain, and trumpeted.  “I’m funny!!!!!  Look at me dance!!!”

Their escort threw their hands over their ears and their deer shied as Jagunjagun joined her and they raised one forefoot before smashing it down through the ice.

One of the Cylak calmed his deer and actually rumbled disapproval at them.  “Danger, here, not dance, not sing.”

The two elephants calmed and swung to look at him.  “Apologize to you, we do.” They cast an amused look at each other and up at Ologbon on Jagunjagun’s neck as their escort began a careful march.  “I want to get to this Innéthel and rest for a while!”

“Then let us go, my big sister,” he said and they swung out on the ice, carefully behind the track left by the deer.

Life Imitating Art

 Didara approves though she thinks they aren't bright enough.  Jagunjagun wants black with studs.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-elephant-jumpers-villagers-knit-protect-near-freezing-temperatures-weather-mathura-a7535101.html?cmpid=facebook-post

#63 - Another Word for Hardened Water

“We should have stayed in that little village,” Didara complained swaying back and forth, her trunk curling up and down.  Her be-jewelled tusks were now wound with bright yarn, which she thought was a bad compromise but she didn’t want her carved tusks to crack in the wildly swinging temperatures.

Jagunjagun leaned up against her and swayed with her, Ologbon lying on her back and neck with a feather quilt over him, looking like a blue and white checked bump on her boiled woolen coat.

“This weather is making me vastly less curious! I’m almost not interested in yet another type of water in a hardened state!”

“It will be all right, Didara!”  We’ll get to this Innéth place and the stag people say they have big indoor spaces for their horses that are heated!”

“And their horses won’t go crazy when they see us?  It took days of training before these animals stopped jittering and they aren’t even really horses.  Deer and a couple of horses and mules and the mules are suspicious.”

Jagunjagun pressed harder against her as she complained.  There wasn’t much wind and the shelter seemed safe enough but the ribs creaked and complained as the ice… another word for hard water – built up on the outside.

It was another Cylak shelter spot, opened up out of season as the rain began, a short day away from that village they called Mud.  The land had flattened out and there were no nice hollows or old quarries to be half the shelter and have chimneys and latrines.  Though this one was normally a rounded bump on flat land they’d not sealed it down tight like the first.

Jagunjagun could see out through the bare trees and in the setting sun the branches were black.  It was just rain falling but when it landed it hardened and hardened enough to become instantly slick and tremendously dangerous for both the elephants and for everyone else too.  They’d opened the shelter with the rain falling and the ice growing and Didara had nearly fallen, straining her forefeet.

The pattering sound was soothing though and it was warmer in the covered space.  But her feet hurt and the ice just kept getting thicker and they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  They’d hoped to find the military road that led to White because the path they were on was become a muddy little track that had washes of freezing muck overflowing it here and there.

Jagunjagun didn’t flinch when an explosive ‘bang’ echoed.  They’d gotten used to the bursting tree limbs over the past few hours.

“Everything’s grey and dirty and cold and sometimes freezing and cutting my feet and it’s all black and nothing pretty, nothing to rest my eyes on,” she complained, lifting first one forefoot, then the other.

“Little mother,” Ologbon said from his nest on her neck.  “What if you raise your feet and rest them one at a time, let me rub some warming cream into them and wrap them up in wool?”

“You have something?” Her trunk curled up and patted him.  “Bless you, iti-igi, bless you.”

“It’s a rug from the city Queen.  I’ll get it mucky but I’m sure it will be washable.”

“Tuck my coat under my belly and I’ll lie down,” Jagunjagun said.  “It will warm me up, while you do that.”

“All right.  Why don’t you move around so that you don’t lie down in that stream of water?”

The floor of the shelter was hardly a dry space.  Everyone was muddied, the deer and the horses to their bellies, even after grooming.

“I don’t know why I’m so cranky,” Didara said.  “This place makes me afraid and unhappy for some reason."

“It’s probably the weather.”

**

“Hey, boss, we can’t get to them while she rain like this.”  The bandits were wrapped up tight like balls of wool, hunkered together with a slicker blanket thrown over them all, the weight of the ice building up.  Occasionally they'd stretch and groan and shuffle around so that the outside got to the warmer middle and the ice would crack and slide off.

“They can’t move neither.  Not to worry none, Saikrie.  Nobody knows we here t’all out of the swamp.”

“I wonder if them monsters is as good eatin’ as deer?” His question had them suddenly hungry, drooling at the thought of fresh venison rather than more gator, or another frog stew.

“Donno, Saik.  Guess we’s about to find out, after we strip off them shinies.  When we kin move again.”  The way the rain'd settled in it could be a couple of days.

“Yes, boss.”

#62 - Gun Lint

Ahrimaz actually hunched in the saddle in a way that would have had the Old Monster clouting him off the horse.  He folded the collar of his great coat up over his neck and the back of his head, buttoning it one handed.  “I don’t know,” he snapped at the gunsmith.  Ahrno.  That’s his name.  “Look, Ahrno, you’ve asked me half a dozen times and I don’t know any more precisely than that. I mostly used the stuff.  You soak cotton lint, the fluff before it’s woven, in sulfuric acid and nitric acid.  You keep it cold while its soaking or it’ll go bad.  You keep it cold and you’ll get the same reaction every time.  Let it dry in the sun.  You’ll get something that you daren’t put in these old muzzle loaders without blowing them to scorching flinders and taking someone’s hand or head off.”

“But…”

“Five grains of treated cotton will give you an explosion that puts thirty grains of black gunpowder to shame, however innocent it looks.  Thirty grains of gunpowder will crack a granite rock.  Five grains of gun cotton will blow it to gravel.”

Ahrno went pale as far as Ahrimaz could see since he had a knitted muffler up over his face.  “It would be best to invoke the God like that in the depth of winter where the Goddess controls the burn.”

“That’s a good way of putting it.”  Perhaps that’s one reason the Old Monster line suppressed Liryen’s worship.  She controls the God and they couldn’t stand that thought, even though it seems that He controls her in turn.  They are equals in this world.

The bicoloured mare’s astonishing gait was as easy to ride as a hobby horse and they were all gaited like her, except the stags… Pel had laughed and laughed and told him the ‘stags’ were actually does since they kept their antlers longer, all the way to late winter.  The does ploughed through the drifts like automata, but they devoured the bales of lichen everybody carried like snow melting in sunshine.  The horses inhaled grain and sweetfeed as fast as the deer, who sneaked as much of the sweetfeed as they could.  At least they could carry enough to take them through this cold quickly.  Every other day they’d hit another village and slept warm.  It made an immense difference.

In the Empire those villages had all been consolidated  into more distant and larger towns and this kind of winter military action wouldn’t have worked well at all.

The gunsmith urged his horse up to ride next to the Captain, riding reinless to stab urgent fingers at his book and make wild waving gestures.

Ahrimaz grunted and sank deeper into his coat.  He felt like he should be uncomfortable, the coat and the armour and the weapons shouldn’t fit him perfectly even though he and the other Ahrimaz were nearly identical in so many ways.  I’m not him. He’s a good man.  I’m not.  I was taught to be a monster.  I don’t deserve to be comfortable. I don’t deserve the animals…  Heylia, on the back of his saddle bunted her head into the back of his and he could feel her purr as she clung to the leather pads on his shoulders.

The dogs ran at his horse’s heels, all goofy lolling tongues and galumphing joy at going.  It didn’t seem to matter where as long as it was with him.

The great coat actually had a tuck-flap to cut the wind around his boots and he was warm enough from the exercise.  Not a bad way to travel, if one must, in the winter.

The gunsmith was making more interesting waving motions with his arms as he babbled at the Captain who kept looking back at him.  Gun-cotton.  So simple.  So innocent.  So deadly.

Pel dropped back, his st---doe grumbling as she stepped onto the plowed road.  “We’ll make Champ de Navet while it’s still light.  If the weather holds we’ll make it to the Mire in less than two days.”

Ahrimaz nodded shortly.  “Good.  I have this horrid feeling we’re cutting it too close as it is.”

“We don’t know that.  We’ll do our best.  And we are going to save your friend.  You are going to save your friend.”

“Won’t I be flouting the will of the Gods if I do?  I mean in the other world this happened more than a year ago and I couldn’t save her then.”

“Perhaps that’s one of the reasons you got swapped when you did.”

Ahrimaz nearly stopped the mare in the road, staring at Pelahir.  “You really think so?”

“I have no clue.  It’s a guess.  What with free will and so forth how can anyone guess the minds of the Gods?”

Ahrimaz found himself looking up at the clouds that had relentlessly covered the sky like a threatening dark gray blanket for days and sniffed at the sudden wind.  Pel turned his face up too.  “Stag Lord’s left nut.  It’s going to snow, or…”  He put his hand on his doe’s shoulder.  “Rain.  Frost rain it smells like.”

“Scorch.  Scorching anus of God.”