Hear those trumpetings? No metal horn ever voiced such music. Hear the thunder of their feet? Tigers cower before these soldiers. Their faces are painted a score of colors and their tusks made longer and sharper by steel blades; each bears a painted wooden castle manned by half a dozen archers.
No wonder there are so many chess stories!
STRAW
Y
es, I remember killing my first man very well; I was just seventeen. A flock of snow geese flew under us that day about noon. I remember looking over the side of the basket and seeing them, and thinking that they looked like a pike head. That was an omen, of course, but I did not pay any attention.
It was clear, fall weather—a trifle chilly. I remember that. It must have been about the midpart of October. Good weather for the balloon. Clow would reach up every quarter hour or so with a few double handfuls of straw for the brazier, and that was all it required. We cruised, usually, at about twice the height of a steeple.
You have never been in one? Well, that shows how things have changed. Before the Fire-wights came, there was hardly any fighting at all, and free swords had to travel all over the continent looking for what there was. A balloon was better than walking, believe me. Miles—he was our captain in those days—said that where there were three soldiers together, one was certain to put a shaft through a balloon; it was too big a target to resist, and that would show you where the armies were.
No, we would not have been killed. You would have had to slit the thing wide open before it would fall fast, and a little hole like the business end of a pike would make would just barely let you know it was there. The baskets do not swing either, as people think. Why should they? They feel no wind—they are traveling with it. A man just seems to hang there, when he is up in one of them, and the world turns under him. He can hear everything—pigs and chickens, and the squeak the windlass makes drawing water from a well.
“Good flying weather,” Clow said to me.
I nodded. Solemnly, I suppose.
“All the lift you want, in weather like this. The colder it is, the better she pulls. The heat from the fire doesn’t like the chill, and tries to escape from it. That’s what they say.”
Blond Bracata spit over the side. “Nothing in our bellies,” she said, “that’s what makes it lift. If we don’t eat today you won’t have to light the fire tomorrow—I’ll take us up myself.”
She was taller than any of us except Miles, and the heaviest of us all, but Miles would not allow for size when the food was passed out, so I suppose she was the hungriest too.
Derek said, “We should have stretched one of that last bunch over the fire. That would have fetched a pot of stew, at the least.”
Miles shook his head. “There were too many.”
“They would have run like rabbits.”
“And if they hadn’t?”
“They had no armor.”
Unexpectantly, Bracata came in for the captain. “They had twenty-two men, and fourteen women. I counted them.”
“The women wouldn’t fight.”
“I used to be one of them. I would have fought.”
Clow’s soft voice added: “Nearly any woman will fight if she can get behind you.”
Bracata stared at him, not sure whether he was supporting her or not. She had her mitts on—she was as good with them as anyone I have ever seen—and I remember that I thought for an instant that she would go for Clow right there in the basket. We were packed in like fledglings in the nest, and fighting, it would have taken at least three of us to throw her out—by which time she would have killed us all, I suppose. But she was afraid of Clow. I found out why later. She respected Miles, I think, for his judgment and courage, without being afraid of him. She did not care much for Derek either way, and of course I was hardly there at all as far as she was concerned. But she was just a little frightened by Clow.
Clow was the only one I was not frightened by—but that is another story too.
“Give it more straw,” Miles said.
“We’re nearly out.”
“We can’t land in this forest.”
Clow shook his head and added straw to the fire in the brazier—about half as much as he usually did. We were sinking toward what looked like a red and gold carpet.
“We got straw out of them anyway,” I said, just to let the others know I was there.
“You can always get straw,” Clow told me. He had drawn a throwing spike and was feigning to clean his nails with it. “Even from swineherds, who you’d think wouldn’t have it. They’ll get it to be rid of us.”
“Bracata’s right,” Miles said. He gave the impression that he had not heard Clow and me. “We have to have food today.”
Derek snorted. “What if there are twenty?”
“We stretch one over the fire. Isn’t that what you suggested? And if it takes fighting, we fight. But we have to eat today.” He looked at me. “What did I tell you when you joined us, Jerr? High pay or nothing? This is the nothing. Want to quit?”
I said, “Not if you don’t want me to.”
Clow was scraping the last of the straw from the bag. It was hardly a handful. As he threw it in the brazier Bracata asked, “Are we going to set down in the trees?”
