and banged the center down hard against his knee. It bent but did not break. Well, seasoned wood.
“I’ll take him!” Jason shouted, running to the fight. He was an instaul late because the quarterstaff landed square on the swordsman’s arm, snapping the bones and sending the man’s weapon flying. Jason took his place and swung the shovel at the lowlander’s ankles.
The man quickly spun the end of his staff down to counter the blow, and when the weapons crashed together, Jason used the force of impact to reverse his direction of motion, bringing the handle end of the shovel around toward the lowlander’s neck. The man parried this blow in time as well, but in doing so he had to step aside, away from the wall, and this was all that was needed.
Ahankk, who had come in with Jason, swung the flat of his ax against the man’s skull and he dropped, unconscious, to the floor. Jason threw away the shovel and picked up the fallen quarterstaff. It was a good two meters long, made of tough and flexible wood bound about with iron rings.
“What is that?” Temuchin asked. He had watched the end of the brief battle.
“A quarterstaff. A simple but effective weapon.”
“And you know how to use it? You told me you knew nothing about the lowlands.” His face was expressionless as he talked, but there was a glow like an inner Fire in his eyes. Jason realized that he had better make the explanation good or he would join the rest of the corpses.
“I still know nothing about the lowlands. But I learned to handle this weapon when I was a child. Everyone in my… tribe uses them.” He did not bother to add that the tribe he was talking about was not the Pyrrans, but the agrarian community on Porgorstorsaand, far across the galaxy, where he had grown up. With rigid class and social distinctions, the only real weapons were borne by the soldiers and the aristocracy. But you can’t deny a man a stick when he lives in a forest, so quarterstaffs were in common use, and at one time Jason had been proficient in the use of this uncomplicated yet decisive weapon.
Temuchin turned away, satisfied for the moment, while Jason spun the staff experimentally. It was nicely weighted.
The nomads were efficiently looting the building, which appeared to be a farm of some kind. The livestock were kept under the same roof and all of the animals had been butchered when the soldiers had broken in. When Temuchin said kill, he meant kill. Jason looked at the carnage but would permit himself no change of expression, even when one of the men, looking for booty, turned over a wooden chest. There was a baby behind it, perhaps thrust there at the last minute by one of the women now dead upon the floor, and the soldier skewered it unemotionally with a quick stab of his sword.
“Bind that one and bring him,” Temuchin ordered, brushing the dirt from a piece of cooked meat that had been knocked to the floor in the attack, then taking a bite from it.
Swift, tight turns of leather secured his wrists behind his back; then the prisoner was propped against the wall. When three buckets of water dashed into his face had failed to bring him around, Temuchin heated the tip of his dagger blade in a burning candle and pressed it into the soft flesh of the man’s arm. He moaned and triecL to pull away, then opened his eyes, which swam blearily with the aftereffects of the blow.
“Do you speak the in-between tongue?” Temuchin asked. When the man answered something incomprehensible, the warlord struck him, carefully, on the purple and enflamed wound made by the earlier blow. The farmer screamed and tried to get away, but still answered in the same unknown language.
“The fool cannot speak,” Temuchin said.
“Let me,” one of his officers said, stepping forward. “What he talks is not unlike the tongue of the hill-serpent clan in the far east near the sea.”
Communication was established. With laborious rephrasings and repeatings, the message was communicated to the farmer that he would be killed if he did not help them. No promises were made for what would happen if he did, but the lowlander was not in the best of bargaining positions. He quickly agreed.
“Tell him we wish to go to the place of the soldiers,” Temuchin said, and their prisoner bobbed his head in quick agreement. Understandable. A peasant in a primitive economy has little love for the taxcollecting, oppressing soldiers. He babbled in his hurry to convey information. The translator interpreted his words.
“He says that there are many soldiers there, two hands, perhaps five hands of them. They are armed and the place is strong. They have something else, some kind of weapons, but I cannot make out what the creature is talking about.”
“Five hands of men,” Temuchin said, smiling and looking out of the corners of his eyes. “I am frightened.”
The nomads nearby hooted with laughter and struck each other on the back, then hurried to tell the others. Jason did not think it a great witticism, but he could find no fault with the men’s morale.
A sudden silence passed over them as two of the soldiers slowly approached, supporting and half dragging one of their comrades. The man hopped on one leg, fighting to keep the other foot clear of the ground, and when he raised his pain-twisted face to Temuchin, Jason recognized him as the one injured in the battle with the quarterstaffwielding peasant.
“What has happened?” Temuchin asked, all traces of laughter gone from his voice.
“My leg…” the man, a minor chieftain, answered hoarsely.
“Let me see,” the warlord ordered, and the soldier’s boot was quickly cut open.
The man’s knee had been shattered brutally, the kneecap fractured so badly that pieces of white bone had penetrated the skin. Slow trickles of blood seeped from the wound. The soldier must be suffering incredible pain, yet he made no outcry. Jason knew that it would take skilled surgery and bone replacement to enable the man to walk again, and wondered what his fate would be on this barbarian world. He found out quickly.
“You cannot walk, you cannot ride, you cannot be a soldier,” Ternuchin said.
“I know that,” the man said, straightening and throwing off the hands of the men who helped him. “But if I am to die, I wish to die in combat and be buried with my thumbs. I cannot hold a sword to fight the demons in the underworld if I have no thumbs.”
“That is the way it will be,” Temuchin said, drawing his sword. “You have been a good soldier and a good friend and I wish you success in your battles to come. I will fight you myself for it is an honor to be sent below by a warlord.”
The battle was no ritual, and the wounded man did well despite his injured leg. But Temuchin fought so that the other had to turn toward his wounded side, but he could not, so a quick thrust caught him under the ribs and he died.
“There was another wounded man,” Temuchin said, still holding his bloody sword. The soldier with the broken arm stepped forward, the arm in a sling.
“The arm will get better,” he said. “The skin did not break. I can fight and ride, though I cannot shoot a bow.”
Temuchin hesitated a moment before he answered. ‘We need every man that we have. Do those things and you will return with us to the camp. We will ride as soon as this man is buried.” He turned to Jason.
“Ride in front with me,” he ordered, “and do not make any stupid noise.” He apparently did not think much of Jason’s soldiering ability, and Jason did not feel like correcting him. “This place of the soldiers is what we are looking for. The stoat clan has raided this country in the past, but with no more than two or three men at a time as to send more moropes down is dangerous. They avoid the soldiers and attack these farms. But they have fought the soldiers and it is from them that I learned of the gunpowder. They killed one soldier and took his gunpowder, but when I put fire to it, it merely burned. Yet the stoats swear that it blew up, and others have said the same and I do not doubt them. We will capture the gunpowder and you will make it blow up.”
“Take me to it,” Jason said, “and I’ll show you how it’s done.”
They blundered through the forest until well after midnight before their prisoner tearfully admitted that he had lost his way in the darkness. Temuchin beat him until he’howled with pain then, reluctantly, ordered the men to rest until morning. The rain had begun again and they sought what comfort they could find under the dripping trees.
Jason had a bad taste in his mouth. It wasn’t the dung-cooked food this time or the filthy acha4lz, but the massacre at the farm. Get close to the trees and you don’t see the forest. He had been living with the nomads, living like a nomad, and had become part of their culture. They were interesting people and, since moving to Temuchin’s camp, he had found them a warm, if not exactly the galaxy’s most humorous, people, and at least it was possible to get along with them. They were honest in their own way and respected their own code of laws.
