“Your guess—huh!” the other snorted. “You’re just repeating what Captain Pan-em said before he sent us backtracking. ‘Follow their trail backward,’ he said, ‘and you’ll probably find the lad’s father—or some friends of his at least—butchered!’ he said.”
“Well, and he was right, wasn’t he?” the leading soldier snapped. “We did find something, didn’t we? Those Arabban carcasses chewed up by lions, and the remains of those two slaves. A funny thing, that. What d’you suppose happened there ?”
“Damned if I know. But since then there’s been nothing and we’re getting mighty close to the river. I can smell it.”
They came to a halt and Khai heard a saluki bark in the near-distance. “Here comes Khon-arl and Taphan,” said the man at the front.
“About time, too,” remarked the other. “It’s their turn to carry the boy. Here, let’s put him down for a minute. My hands are a mass of blisters.”
A moment later Khai felt his stretcher lowered to the forest’s floor. The ground took shape beneath his body and gave it weight. Then he heard the soldiers move off a few paces through the undergrowth. “Here!” one of them yelled. “We’re this way! Did you find anything?”
“Found the damn river, that’s all!” came an answering cry from not too far away. “The dog must be crazy—took us right to the water’s edge, he did. Seems to have his nose full of scents—birds, snakes, buffalo—anything but men! Crocodiles, too, I reckon. Why, if we’d let him, I’m sure he’d have gone for a swim!”
Now there came the sound of twigs and branches snapping and the swish of foliage shoved aside. Khai’s stretcher-bearers moved toward these new sounds and one of them called: “What are you doing there?”
“The dog’s in a bush now!” came the answer. “I reckon he’s just playing around. He’s putting us on, that’s what. Needs a good kick in the arse!”
Khai rolled off his stretcher and got to his feet. His knife was still in his belt and his bow and quiver lay where one of the soldiers had thrown them. Bending low, he snatched up his weapons and crept into the shadowy undergrowth. Keeping as quiet as he could and taking care not to step on any twigs, he stole away between bushes and shrubs and put distance between himself and the soldiers.
His head ached horribly and he felt stiff and hungry, but clear in his mind’s eyes he could see his new escape route. It lay across the river, through the forest belt to the savannah, then south down the edge of the grasslands into Nubia. The distance was half as far again as his first choice but the going should be easier and the land very sparsely populated. Better still, there’d be no chance of any dog following his scent across the river! As to how he would make the crossing: that would not be easy, but it would not be impossible. For one thing, the night was on his side and already the shadows were lengthening.
He was running now and the voices of the soldiers were rapidly receding. For a hundred, two hundred yards he ran through twilit underbrush, then turned through a sharp right angle and headed for the river. It all depended upon how accurately the saluki had retraced his steps. His scent could in no way have been fresh, and the way the soldiers had talked their tracker-dog was hardly dependable.
A few minutes later, coming out of the trees onto the grass of the riverbank, Khai’s heart gave a great leap. The soldiers had been wrong about the dog! Less than one hundred yards upriver, he could see a nest of tiny islands which he recognized immediately. This was where Mhyna had put him ashore from her barge. Without pause, he moved through the willows and shrubs of the riverbank toward the nest of islands, and as he ran so there came to his ears a sudden uproar from the forest on his left flank.
His absence had been discovered. Now he heard the high-pitched barking of the frenzied saluki, and the steady cursing of the soldiers as they plunged after the dog along Khai’s new trail.
The sun was low on the western horizon as Khai drew level with the tiny islands and made a clean dive into the water. In another moment, he was swimming for the southern point of the nearest island, and a few seconds later he had let the slow current drift him down behind the island and out of sight. Beyond this first small clump of reeds and water-lapped bushes, only a dozen or so yards away, lay the papyrus- and willow-grown sandbar of silt and boggy soil where Mhyna had grounded her barge to set him ashore. There, in the reeds, Khai remembered seeing a pair of waterlogged fishermen’s boats. Using one of these, he would attempt to cross the river … tonight, if that were at all possible.
As the whining of the tracker-dog and the shouts of his handlers came closer along the riverbank, which was now separated from the fugitive by some twenty-five yards of fairly shallow water, so Khai swam through thickly-clumped reed stems until he found one of the two derelict boats lying low in the water. Making as little noise as possible, he pulled himself up onto the boat and stretched out in the damp hollow formed of its reed hull.
There, totally invisible from the riverbank, he lay low and watched through a curtain of foliage as the sun touched the treetops of the western bank. The crocodiles would be in the river now, but they would be sluggish with the cool of evening. He shuddered as he pictured the scaly brutes in his mind: their gaping jaws and voracious appetites. And still dwelling on visions of silently gliding monsters in the dark water, he started violently as close by a human voice said:
“What was that, Gon? That splashing, like a swimmer.…” “Shh!” a second voice cautioned. “It was a swimmer, Athom, you fool! A croc, I should think, what else? You want to tell him we’re here, invite him up onto the island? Or maybe I should stick my head out and take a peep at what he’s doing, eh?”
“Oh, very fun—” the first voice started to say, only to be cut off by: “Shh!” Quiet, you idiot! Listen—they’ve come back with that damn tracker of theirs!”
By this time Khai had traced the source of the voices to a clump of reeds on the island itself. They were Theraens by their accents, and they were obviously on the run—but from what? Khai was soon to find out.
There were two dogs whining on the riverbank now and a regular babble of voices that came drifting across to Khai where he lay barely afloat on the tiny derelict boat. He listened to the conversation and gradually began to understand what was going on. His own soldiers—those who had borne him through the forest all the way back to the river—had now joined up with a second party out of Phemor. The newcomers were tracking a pair of Theraen mercenaries who last night, after a long drinking session, had entered the house of a Phemor noblewoman and raped her. Typical of Theraens, when they were done with the woman, they had slit her throat; but her husband, coming home in the early hours, had seen them as they ran off. His description had been enough to start a manhunt which eventually led the soldiers to the river. Finally, their dog had tracked the Theraens to this spot on the riverbank.
Now there seemed to be something of an argument going on: “I tell you we’ve seen no Theraens,” one of Khai’s soldiers was saying. “That dog of yours must be as crazy as ours! I mean, what man in his right mind—even a damned Theraen—would swim out to those islands, with the river alive with crocs and all? And even if they are out there, who’s going to follow them? Not me—not tonight—that’s for sure.”
“Oh? And what do you suggest we do then?” asked an unknown voice. “There’ll be the devil to pay if we all troop back into town empty-handed. And how will you explain this boy you’ve lost? Do you suppose he could be the boy from Asorbes—” (Khai’s ears pricked up) “the one Pharaoh is looking for? You’ll be in for it if he is!”