irregular shallow depressions and the deeper ruts made by wagon wheels. But he could hear no engines, no horses, and no padding feet out in the night. Only the wind in the pines and the creaking echoes of the cicadas filled the mountain forest.
His new boots pinched his toes and his heels and stabbed at his arches. They were, without question, the most hateful boots in the entire world. They hadn’t seemed nearly so bad when he paid for them six hours ago in Khemisset.
One day I’m going to write a book about this case, about how I ended up walking across the entire country, alone, destroying my aching feet, to find an old woman with a lightning rod in her hand. I’ll have to make it sound funnier, though.
After an hour on the road to Arafez, he was convinced that he would see no one until he reached the city. There were no houses either near the road or farther out in the woods, and not a flicker of firelight to be seen. The forest walled him in with towering alders and elms that reached across the road to each other far overhead, obscuring the clouds and any hope of starlight. The droning of the cicadas rose and fell as though the forest itself was breathing, loudly, through its mouth. Little else seemed to be awake or even alive. The occasional rustle in the bushes or distant crack of a breaking branch always came suddenly in the quiet.
A low whistle drew his eyes sharply to the right.
Syfax paused. The whistle was too steady and too subtle to be a bird, too solitary and too near to be a monkey. He peered into the shadows on all sides and saw nothing, heard nothing. Instinct drew his hand back to his hip, but it found only an empty holster. Reaching down farther, he yanked his hunting knife out of his boot and then nudged his horse to continue down the middle of the road.
The men stepped out of the leafy shadows calmly and casually, one of them mostly concerned with brushing the dirt off his knees. All of them wore dark scarves wrapped across their mouths and noses. Seeing no guns or blades in their hands, Syfax grinned as he reined up and rested his knife on the pommel of his saddle. “Can I help you fellas?”
One of them, as nondescript as any other, answered in a soft, almost reluctant voice. “Your money, all you have. Jewelry, watch, knife. Anything and everything, on the ground, right now. The horse, too. We don’t want to hurt you. Just leave it all right there, and go.”
“Hey!” A second one leaned toward the first. “He doesn’t even have a saddle bag!” And he made a jerk of his head back toward the woods, and then glanced at the others and repeated the gesture.
“No, wait.” The first one extended an open hand toward Syfax. “Please, anything you have. We just need some food. Please?”
“Who are you guys?” Syfax tried to catch a bit more detail of them in the shadows, something about their hair or clothes, anything at all. Too dark, but who cares? These poor idiots have no idea what they’re doing. “Help me out here. Are you beggars or bandits? I can’t tell.”
“We’re just travelers,” the second one said, fading back just a little more into the darkness. “We’re just trying to get to the border.”
“Don’t tell him anything!” A third one threw his arms up in the air. “How stupid are you? No one’s supposed to know!”
“Why?” The major kept his eyes darting among them, waiting for the first attack, but most of the nine men stayed at least four or five yards away, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground. The first one’s calm, the second one’s scared, and the third one’s angry. The rest just look tired. “Who are you running from? The law?”
“He’s a damned Redcoat!” Scared Man hissed, slinking even farther away. “Look at the coat. He’s the law.”
Calm Man edged forward a bit to look at him. “You’re a marshal?”
“Major Syfax Zidane.”
“Oh, that’s just perfect!” Angry Man kicked a stone across the road and shoved the fellow beside him. “A Redcoat!”
“Where’s your partner?” Scared Man’s voice shook as his footsteps drifted into the brush beside the road. “Marshals always go in twos. Where is she? Where’s the other one?”
“I’m alone.” Syfax slowly opened his coat. “No gun. And I don’t wanna hurt any of you guys, unless you do something stupid. I’m just riding through.”
“Don’t you believe it.” Angry Man grabbed Calm Man’s arm. “He’s one of them. He works for them. He’ll have the police on us in no time if we let him go!”
A general mumbling broke out among them as the men expressed their varying levels of discomfort with being anywhere near an officer of the law. Some of them stepped away, but most just shuffled and wavered in place and looked to Calm Man for a decision. He glanced around himself and cleared his throat. “You really don’t have any money? Nothing at all?”
“Sorry. Spent it all on this horse, and I need her to get to Arafez. You’re not eating her.”
Calm Man hesitated, glancing back toward the darkness where Scared Man had vanished. “Then I guess we’re going to have to tie you up. We can’t let you go and tell the police about us. We’ll leave you in the road so someone will find you tomorrow after we’re gone. You’ll be all right.” He cleared his throat and motioned at the others. “Go on, tie him up.”
For a moment, none of them moved. Then Angry Man stepped forward and the others began moving, arms raised to grab the marshal. Syfax paused, wondering what clever thing he might say to stop this before it started. They were obviously divided, nervous, unwilling, inexperienced. But they were shuffling forward and some of them had rocks in their hands.
A good marshal would know what to say to play them against each other, to get information from them, to control the situation. And as he groped for an idea, Syfax suddenly realized: This is why I’m stuck at major. This is why the marshals don’t know what to do with me. I’m not a good marshal.
He frowned as his ego swirled downward, but the dark moment brought yet another revelation into focus, and he grinned.
But I am a good soldier.
Syfax rolled out of the saddle and brought his fist down on the closest head. He grabbed the stunned man’s shirt and hurled him into the two men on the right. With his knife held blade down in his right hand, Syfax bulled into the closing knot of men and rocks and sticks. There was a brief second of fear, a cold panic in the back of his mind as he felt, really felt, that he was hopelessly outnumbered and utterly alone. But it was only a second. A hot wave of wild rage roared up his spine and down his arms, and he smashed his knife-hand into face after face. The rocks and sticks wailed on his back and legs, and bony hands bit into his arms, but Syfax just kept lunging back and forth, left and right, throwing men off balance all around as he went on shattering noses, splitting lips, and knocking out teeth. And with almost every blow, the blade of his knife sliced a shallow cut across a brow here and a cheek there.
Within half a minute, every bandit’s face was painted in blood and a broken chorus of frightened wails rose over the marshal’s roaring battle cries and the panicked whinnies of the horse in their midst.
“Oh God, my eye! My eye!”
“My nose! I can’t breathe!”
“I’m bleeding! I’m bleeding!”
Syfax shoved the last man down to the ground and surveyed his handiwork. Nine men sitting with hands pressed to their faces, or crawling away from the road, or staggering into the woods. He waited a moment to catch his own breath and wipe his knife clean on a nearby bandit’s shirt, and then Syfax said, “Oh, shut up, you big babies. You’re all fine. They’re just little cuts. No one’s dying, no one’s lost any eyes. And no one’s head is sliced open. Just settle down.”
It took a few moments for the moaning and hyperventilating to subside as the men calmed down enough to inspect the wounds on each other’s faces and pronounce them all superficial.
“Yeah, that’s a little trick I picked up from a gal in Carthage. You cut up the face and everybody panics. You can’t see how bad you’re hurt, and lots of blood in your eyes.” He exhaled and sheathed his knife, suddenly feeling much less pleased with himself. Stupid dirty trick.
To his left, one of the men was sobbing and muttering over and over, “I thought I was going to die, I thought I was going to die.”
“Come on, guys, no one’s dying. You’re all gonna be fine, and hopefully a little wiser in how you go about fund
