our eyes.”
Shocked, Beramun swallowed hard. She had liked the brave young hunter. She couldn’t believe Paharo was gone.
As they stared into the flames, loss evident on every face, she walked around the fire to kneel beside Huru. The foundry master was weeping soundlessly, tears streaming down his dark, lined cheeks.
She rested her hand on his. “Your son was a good man.”
Huru closed his eyes, grateful for her words. She looked across the leaping flames to Amero. “You still need to know what’s going on over there. I’m a strong swimmer. I’ll go.”
Amero shook his head. “You just got back. Rest. Someone else can do it. I may go myself.”
“Don’t be stupid! You’re needed here.”
Amero’s voice grew loud. “I won’t let you throw your life away!”
“You let Paharo.”
Wood crackled in the fire, sounding unusually loud in the stillness following her words.
Beramun tied her hair back with a thong and asked for a hank of rope. Tepa went off into the darkness and returned with a coil of braided vines, recovered from the ruined bridge. Beramun tied it firmly under her arms. Carrying the rest of the rope over her shoulder, she strode away from the camp. Amero, Huru, and several others trailed behind.
The sound of the river’s rushing water covered the noise of their footfalls on the gravelly shore, but with the raiders only thirty or forty paces away on the opposite bank, the little group did no talking.
Beramun knelt and, by gestures, indicated what she intended to do. Amero clasped her hands in his, pleading with his eyes. She pulled free.
The villagers held one end of the rope as Beramun slipped into the water. The current pulled the line taut as the people on shore played it out. She swam a third of the way across, then dove.
Amero, hands clenched tightly into fists, watched Beramun surface in shallow water by the west bank. She waved once, then skulked down the beach, the rope still securely tied around her waist.
Suddenly, two horsemen rode into sight behind Beramun. Amero and the others dropped on their bellies.
Beramun was brought up short when they stopped paying out the rope. Looking back, she saw the riders. She crept back into shallow water and submerged. The mounted men passed without noticing her.
When they were gone, she crawled on her belly through the grass to higher ground. From this vantage point she could see behind the dense wall of fruit tree saplings. She stayed only a moment, then returned to the river.
Before she could slip away, however, a pair of shaggy gray yevi appeared, their eyes reflecting Lutar’s red light. One sprang into the water and seized the floating rope in his jaws. The other flung itself on Beramun. It hit her squarely between the shoulders, and she disappeared with a loud splash.
“Pull!” Amero hissed.
The villagers hauled frantically on the rope, hand over hand. There was a tremendous drag on the line, and even with eight pulling, they could scarcely get the rope in. Halfway across the river, the calm water erupted. In the poor light it was impossible to tell who was in trouble, Beramun or the yevi.
Since the noise was sure to rouse the raiders, Amero abandoned all pretense of stealth and shouted for help. More villagers came running down the hill and took hold of the rope. With the extra help, they dragged it in.
Knife drawn, Amero waded out to assist Beramun. A limp and lifeless body surfaced a few paces away. Those on shore desperately demanded to know whether it was Beramun.
Amero’s questing hand found sodden gray fur. The floating corpse was a drowned yevi.
He turned and thrashed toward shore, shouting, “It’s not her! Pull! Pull!”
The villagers obeyed with a will. The second yevi, thoroughly entangled in the vine rope and likewise drowned, glided to the bank at their feet. Of Beramun, there was no sign.
Several dozen mounted raiders, fully armed, galloped down the opposite shore and hurled short spears. The missiles hissed into the shallows and thumped into the sand. Dropping the line, Amero and villagers had to retreat.
Back at camp, everyone was dumbfounded to find Beramun drying herself by the fire. They rushed forward, clapping her on the back and laughing with relief.
“What happened?” Amero asked. “How did you escape?”
She wrung more water from her long black hair. “Simple,” she said. “I figured yevi were like wolves — they can swim, but only on the surface. So I dove, untied myself, and snared them in the rope. As long as your people kept the rope taut, the beasts couldn’t untangle themselves.” She shrugged. “Once free, I swam upstream to get away and came ashore.”
The villagers laughed and cheered. Giddy with relief, Amero took her in his arms and embraced her like a comrade.
“You’re graying my hairs, you know,” he said.
“Oh? And who grayed them before me?” Her gentle gibe inspired more laughter from the delighted villagers.
Jenla brought Beramun a mug of hot broth. As she sipped it, she reported what she’d seen on the other side of the river.
“They’re building rafts,” Beramun said. “Big ones. I saw slave gangs lashing whole trees together behind the hedge.”
“I knew it!” Amero smote his palm with his fist.
“Can we stop them?” asked Huru.
“I don’t know,” Amero replied. “We must meet them at the water’s edge, wherever they land. If they get their horses ashore, we’re in big trouble.”
He increased the number of sentinels patrolling the eastern shore and ordered bonfires lighted at half-league intervals all the way down to the lake.
Beramun’s news sent a chill through Yala-tene. The quiet interlude had lulled many into thinking the raiders might give up and go away. The rafts made it clear the fight was far from over.
To renew his people’s confidence, Amero designed new defenses for the eastern shore of the lake. A fence of sharpened stakes was erected, and broken mussel shells were poured on the banks to cut horses’ hooves. Villagers stripped the valley and eastern passes of every thorn bush and movable boulder. These were piled up behind the stakes to further impede the enemy.
From the old bridge tower to the open lake, the shoreline was two leagues long. Amero knew they didn’t have enough stones and stakes to fill the whole distance, so he left gaps in places suitable for the villagers to defend — hills, gullies, and other natural strong points — mainly near the old bridge. Using shovels made from Duranix’s cast-off bronze scales, they deepened the gullies and piled the dirt on the hills to make them steeper.
Montu the cooper came down from the village once the last gap in the wall had been closed. Because Montu was a skilled woodworker, Amero asked him to estimate how long it would take Zannian to produce enough rafts to ferry his warband across the river.
“At twenty men or ten horses per raft, it would take fifty rafts to carry a thousand warriors,” Montu said. “Working night and day, they might make ten rafts a day.”
It had been six days since Beramun’s daring swim across the river. Six days — perhaps sixty rafts.
Everyone expected the raiders to come that night or by dawn the next day. All were surprised when the raiders began dragging their rafts to the river in the middle of the afternoon, the same day Montu made his estimate.
Horns bleated and bronze scales chimed in the villagers’ camp. Lookouts high atop the eastern cliffs raised the alarm for those inside the wall. People ran to their assigned places, took up whatever weapons they had, and waited.
The village militia formed into two bands, one to defend the crossing by the old bridge and another to hold the bank halfway up the river to the lake. Amero gave command of the bridge group to Huru. He led the latter himself, two hundred eighty strong, to a point directly west of the village.
