The Glass Bridge (Bell Mountain #7) Page 10

  “Because we are sworn to serve God, but we don’t know how we are to serve Him unless our teacher tells us.” Shaffur scowled, but suddenly his scowl gave way to a smile. “We would all be dead men many times over, had God not saved us. Better to pile up stones for God, than to be buried under stones by the Thunder King.”

  Gurun came up alongside Ryons while the men were working.

  “This is from the Scriptures,” she said. “When Osper led the Tribes of the Law across the great river, to the land that God gave them so they could live in peace, he had them pile stones beside the riverbank so that, when they saw it, they would remember what God did for them.”

  Ryons looked up at her, but did not speak. There was something solemn about this labor. The men performed it very quietly.

  At last, toward the end of the afternoon, Obst said the pile was big enough and assembled the army before it. He raised his hands in blessing.

  “Let us pray,” he said. “O Father, may these stones be a witness, for all ages to come, that we came here and proclaimed your name in Heathen country, in obedience to your will. And let this be a Heathen land no more.”

  He lowered his hands. “Sing aloud, you people of the Lord! For you will be the first to praise God in this land—but not the last.”

  The warriors sang their anthem, in all their different languages: “His mercy endureth forever!” Around them in all directions stretched a grassy plain with no sign of human habitation, but now it seemed less empty than before. Ryons felt a prickle up and down his spine. His ancestor, King Ozias, seemed to be there, somewhere—as if you could see him, if only you knew where to look.

  Around Gurun stood her little bodyguard of Blays, all eighteen of them, brandishing short spears and whirling slings above their heads. Around Ryons, on horseback, sang his fifty Ghols. Many times in the past had Ghols raided the Blays’ country for slaves and booty. Now they stood together. Shingis, the chief of the Blays, exchanged grins with Chagadai, the captain of the Ghols.

  They sang until the sun set, and then they pitched their camp.

  “What do we do next?” Ryons asked Obst.

  “We go a little farther,” the old man said. Beyond that, who could say? All the way out to the Thunder King’s castle at Kara Karram, maybe. “But how many of us will have to go that far,” he said, “I can’t imagine.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Ysbott Shows His Temper

  A special messenger, the fastest rider left in Ninneburky, carried Vannett’s letters to Obann. But before he could arrive, another messenger came down to the city from the north: one of Baron Hennen’s most trusted aides, in search of Gallgoid. Even with Hennen’s instructions, it took the young man all day to find the chief of spies. And such were Gallgoid’s precautions, that the messenger didn’t know his real name and didn’t know he was a spy. Gallgoid thanked him and dismissed him, and only opened the letter when he was alone again. It was in a cipher known only to the general and the spy, and this is what it said.

  “Hennen to Gallgoid, greetings—

  “I’ve not yet met with Chutt, who is a day’s march away in Market City, but already I smell treason. Depend on it, that it’s Chutt’s desire to restore the Oligarchy and make himself master of the city. There can be no other reason for the great number of troops he has mustered to himself, far more than he needs to pacify the north. If it comes to fighting, my two thousand spears will be insufficient.”

  Chutt had recruited all the Heathen he could find, remnants of the Thunder King’s host that had fled into the north, Hennen wrote.

  “You know the man better than I do, but he has an evil reputation. He is said to be a coward, but I think the numbers he has behind him now will make him bold.

  “To turn back to the city before I have secured his oath would be a disservice to my king. I will press on and see what I can do. In the meantime it must be your task to prepare the city for defense. Do whatever you can. I’ll return as soon as possible, God willing. Hennen.”

  Gallgoid folded the letter and tucked it into a secret compartment in his belt. Lord Reesh, he well recalled, despised Chutt as the weakest of the High Council, a man thoroughly unreliable, who’d acquired his position by flattery. “One of these days, I’ll have you poison him,” Reesh used to say, but he’d never gotten around to it. And when the Thunder King’s army came, Lord Chutt ran away—the only member of the High Council besides Lord Reesh, who did not die in defense of the city.

  Hennen had left another two thousand men behind him in Obann to defend it and deal with unexpected needs. The rest were scattered all over the country on both sides of the river in twenty-man patrols. There were still Heathen freebooters for them to hunt down and local militia for them to train.

  “There’s no one here who understands military matters—including me,” Gallgoid mused. In Hennen’s absence, the highest authority in the city was the mayor, a wool merchant named Istrigg. “So we have two thousand men,” thought Gallgoid, “but no one who will know how to use them properly.” The deputy commander left in charge by Hennen was a mere legate not yet forty years old. King Thunder’s invasion had badly mauled the armed force of Obann, and the losses had yet to be made good.

  With misgivings he could not easily dismiss, Gallgoid sent for the legate.

  Helki roamed the foothills south of the Golden Pass and so learned that the First Prester had gone across the mountains with the Abnaks. A lone trapper told him so.

  “News travels fast in these parts,” said the trapper, one of the few Obannese who’d lived in the hills all his life. He had a wife in one of the new settlements, he said. “Now most of the Abnaks who live here are itching to go east and join the war. But it’ll go hard with the rest of the folk, if they’re not here when winter comes. A lot of the people will starve without them.” It was the Abnak hunters who kept the settlers fed.

  “I reckon Lord Orth didn’t dare say he wouldn’t go,” Helki said.

  “Oh, they say he went of his own accord, because they asked him.” The trapper shook his head. “If he thinks he’s going to make the Abnaks get religion, he’s in for a disappointment. There never was much religion around here, even before the Abnaks came. Most of us have never even seen a chamber house, let alone been in one.”

  “Times are changing,” Helki said.

  He decided he ought to talk to Hlah again. Hlah could tell him more than this trapper. It would mean another few days away from Ryons’ army, but this was news that Obst and the chieftains needed to know.

  Helki wondered what had made Orth go with the Abnaks. Well, the First Prester was an unusual man, not quite like anybody else. You’d never be able to guess his reasons for it, Helki thought. They were bound to be surprising.

  With his militiamen behind him, and now some sixty less-than-happy gold seekers in tow, Roshay Bault led the way up the Thunder King’s road. He’d come that way once before, albeit not all the way up to the Golden Pass. He didn’t know his daughter and his adopted son were only a day’s march behind him, with tidings that would startle him.

  Martis drove them hard, but not too hard. These were youngsters who’d already walked more miles than most Obannese men would walk in all their lives. They could almost keep up with grown men, and could keep going for a lot longer than some adults he knew. Even so, he didn’t want to overtax them.

  “Your father has picked up a little speed, now that he’s struck the road,” he told Ellayne. “It’s all uphill from here. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather ride than walk? Dulayl has carried you and Jack before.”

  “Not yet, thanks!” Ellayne said.

  Fnaa was riding the spare horse. He kept teasing Trout to try it, but Trout only said, “An Abnak on a horse is like a beaver up a tree.”

  Jack was enjoying the trip. It was like old times, only without the fear of being captured by outlaws. “I guess the baron might as well let us go all the way up the mountain with him,” he said. “I can’t see him sending us back the way we came.�
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  “Easy to enjoy a long walk when the weather’s good,” Trout said. “But it’s going to rain soon, no more than two days from now—and then see how you like it.”

  “Rain? There’s not a cloud in the sky!” Ellayne said. “How do you know it’s going to rain?”

  Trout shrugged. “I know,” he said.

  Ysbott’s men were exhausted, almost too worn-out to ravish their eyes with the gold. But they were at the top of the pass before anyone else, and as one of them said, that had to count for something.

  “Look at it!” said Hrapp the cobbler, whose whole business, shop and all, might have been sold for two gold pieces. “I never knew there was so much gold in all the world.”

  “It’d take a thousand men and a thousand carts to carry it,” panted Gwawl.

  Ysbott, who hadn’t spent his life puttering around a small town and barely stretching his legs, didn’t share their fatigue. But at the moment he was stunned by the vastness of the treasure. It was as if the sun itself had fallen out of the sky and landed on the pass. How many gold coins could be minted out of just one of those big sheets of gold? Enough to fill a hefty strongbox! Enough to make him rich for all his days. But could ten men even carry one?

  “Let’s see how hard it is for us to lift one of those sheets and carry it,” he said.

  Two or three men actually groaned. All they wanted was to sit and let their sweat dry.

  “Get up, you lazy dogs! A little hard work won’t do you any harm.” Not that Ysbott had ever done an honest day’s work in his life. But Hrapp knew him well enough to stand up right away, and the others soon followed.

  “Let’s find a loose one and see if we can shift it.”

  He soon discovered that a lot of the big pieces shifted all by themselves as soon as you tried to approach them. It was a tricky business, trying to maneuver among that jumble of timbers and gold sheets. They were like jaws waiting to snap shut on your shins.

  “How about this one, Tobb?”

  It was a loose sheet, not attached to anything else, lying at an angle upon a mass of broken beams. Ysbott, Hrapp, and Gwawl grabbed it by one end and tried to drag it clear. It slid easily enough: indeed, it suddenly slid down and almost took their fingers off. With just a little more labor they had it free from the pile.

  It was as long as Ysbott was tall, but not so wide as his outstretched arms. It was beaten thin, as thin as birchbark, with its edges twisted and crumpled this way and that, and many dents in it.

  “Everyone get a grip, and see if we can lift it,” Ysbott said. “It looks like this must have been nailed to the wood as a covering. See, there’s a rusty nail still in it.”

  At his count of three they raised it from the ground. It was heavy, but not too heavy, not at all. Four or five men ought to be able to carry it. He put a man at each corner and they carried it some yards away, then put it down.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” he said.

  “But there must be hundreds of them!” a man said.

  “I don’t fancy having to lug these through the woods,” said Gwawl. Ysbott shoved him backward to the ground; he landed hard.

  “I won’t stand for any more complaining,” he said. “You’ll do as I say, or else. Give these lads some good advice, Hrapp.”

  “Better do as he says, men.” The cobbler made a valiant effort not to stutter. “Tobb’s got a temper.”

  But one thing Ysbott didn’t have yet was a plan, and that was not good for his temper.

  CHAPTER 18

  How Someone Crossed the Bridge

  So Ellayne and Jack were off again, as if they were already all grown up, and here sat Enith, left behind, with no one to talk to or play with.

  What was the secret of those two? Enith had collected tantalizing bits of it from other children. Everyone in Ninneburky knew that Jack and Ellayne had run away from home two years ago and were gone for months and months, no one knew where. They ran away to Obann once, too, and the baron gnashed his teeth but didn’t do anything about it. No one knew why those two seemed to be such privileged characters. People said they were King Ryons’ friends. How could that have happened? And who was that boy, Fnaa, who came out of nowhere with a big, fierce Abnak at his side?

  “I know you miss your friends, Enith,” said the baroness, “but they’ll be back before too long. I miss them, too. So maybe you and I can keep each other company.”

  “I’d like that, Baroness!” Enith answered. “I wonder—would you mind reading me the rest of a story in that book about Abombalbap? Ellayne never finished it.”

  Vannett involuntarily made a face, and Enith remembered Ellayne saying that her mother didn’t altogether approve of those stories. But the baroness surprised her by saying, “All right. Go get us a couple of honey-cakes from the kitchen, and I’ll fetch the book.”

  They settled down in the parlor. Vannett opened the big book—it barely fit on her lap—to where Ellayne had left the leather bookmark, and began to read.

  “So there sat Abombalbap, and he saw the princess praying in the crystal castle and wiping tears from her eyes; but he knew of no way that he might deliver her, where all those other knights had failed.

  “And in the morning came walking up to that place a common churl, little more than a boy, with no shoes on his feet and a smudge of dirt on his cheek. And the boy said, Sir Knight, who is that poor lady yonder, who prays and makes such tearful cry? Abombalbap said, She is a prisoner by means of enchantment in that crystal castle, and no knight, be he ever so hardy, is able to deliver her. Many a knight has essayed the adventure, only to fall into the pit because the glass bridge shatters when he dares set foot on it; and then, by a magician’s evil art, the bridge is made whole again. May God defend me, but I have found no means that I might cross that bridge without being cast into the abyss with all the others.

  “But the boy said, I will cross the bridge, if God wills it. Do you please pray for me, Sir Knight.

  “As the Lord lives, cried Abombalbap, you must not! For even the life of a slave is precious in His sight. But the boy paid him no heed; and Abombalbap rose up to lay hands on him and hold him back, but before he could reach him, the lad stepped onto the bridge.

  “And even as Abombalbap prayed for him, for there was nothing else he could do, the boy walked straight across the bridge. With every step he took, the bridge of glass became a sturdy bridge of wood, and the boy passed over the abyss and reached the castle. And when he came to the castle, he went in, and the damsel seeing him rose from her knees. The boy came to her and took her hand and led her out of the castle, which, when they had passed through all the doors and were come outside again, shimmered like snow struck by the noonday sun, and in the twinkling of an eye, dissolved into the air and was no more. And the boy led the lady safely across the wooden bridge.

  “Abombalbap cried, God be praised for this miracle! But the lady made a graceful curtsy to the boy and thanked him. As you are the man who has delivered me, said she, when all those strong knights failed, my father shall give you my hand in marriage, and you shall be his son afterwards, a prince, and rule his kingdom after him.

  “And Abombalbap did homage to the both of them and mounted on his horse and went his way. And it became known all throughout the land that, at the very moment that the young man and the princess crossed the bridge, the magician in his tower gave a great cry and threw himself from the highest balcony and was dashed against the earth and so died. And the country was freed from his sorceries forever.”

  Vannett closed the book.

  “My father told me that story when I was a little girl,” she said. “It always rather scared me, but I hope you enjoyed it.”

  “Oh, yes—I did!” said Enith.

  Word came quickly to Lintum Forest that Abnaks had abducted the First Prester to bring him into their war against the Thunder King. But it was also said that he’d gone willingly. The chiefs that had been left behind at Carbonek called a council.

  “This is a fi
ne bunch of worms in the stew meat, and no mistake,” said Tughrul Lomak, of the Dahai. With Obst absent, they all had to speak in Tribe-talk. “Our king has marched into the enemy’s country; this First Prester has gone across the mountains—and here we are, growing moss on our backs. What use are we to anyone?”

  “If Abnaks meant to harm the First Prester, they would have just scalped him on the spot. They wouldn’t have taken him home with them,” Chief Buzzard said. “You know why we stay here, Tughrul. If something happens here or at Silvertown or anywhere else, there’s only us to deal with it. We defend the king’s people while he’s gone.”

  “What—with half an army?” Tughrul said.

  “What do you want to do, Tughrul?” said Zekelesh, chief of the Fazzan.

  “No one will praise us for staying here while Lord Orth dies in Abnak country. We ought to go and bring him back. And then I’d like to help the Abnaks with their war! There are yet two thousand of us. We might be able to achieve something.”