Chapter 11
Sirbones stared at the clouds piling up on the northwestern horizon. Their tops were still foamy white, but lower they were shot with gray, and toward the bases some of them had turned black.
And was it just his imagination, or did he see flickers of lightning in the lower blackness? It would not be long before he could he sure, as the clouds seemed to have grown taller, closer, or both even in the little time since their appearance. Or was that, too, his imagination?
Sirbones turned to his companion, an Istaran priest of Majere, and said, "Has anyone tested those clouds to see if this is some magical storm conjured up to blow on us?"
The priest looked at Sirbones as he might have at a rip in a new robe. He was sweating, and his face was so round that Sirbones doubted that the other lived as simply as was expected of those who served Majere. "Why don't you do it yourself," the priest asked tersely, "if you've reason to fear?"
Sirbones smiled. "Mishakal seldom gives her servants serious weather magic, or even magic-detection spells," he said. "Healing demands too much strength. Majere allows one to cultivate the mind more widely, or so I have heard."
"Not widely enough to tell cloudbursts from chaos," the Istaran said. "At least not in this land. I've heard that it rains about every other day, except in the seasons when it rains every day. If you couldn't face that, why did you come?"
Clearly the Istaran had no fear that the god to whom he was sworn would condemn him for insulting another cleric. When younger, Sirbones might have envied the other how that freed his tongue. Age, however, had given discretion to Sirbones's tongue as well as aches to his bones. He smiled again and said, "Well, as long as the rain does not wash anyone away, it matters little whence it comes. I am too old to plunge into torrents and snatch people from their jaws."
The Istaran shrugged, uttered what was less than a word if more than a grunt, and walked away.
Left alone, Sirbones had a moment to look forward, at the slope up which the humans would soon be advancing. Fifty paces in front of him stood the vanguard, two bands of well-armed men.
The men on the left looked like a dozen brawlers abducted from the waterfront of Istar, but they had good swords and knives, sound helmets, and a double-bitted felling axe for every third man. Also, two of them had bows, and Sirbones doubted that he was the only man who wondered where they had come by those bows, if they knew how to use them, and where the arrows would go if they flew at all.
A dozen men and women from Red Elf held the post of honor on the right, as they well deserved to. Torvik himself led them. Sirbones would have been happier if Torvik himself had remained aboard ship. The young captain had not wholly recovered from his ordeal. But Torvik was adamant, resisting not only Sirbones's persuasion but Tarothin's blandishments and the next thing to a direct order from Sir Pirvan.
Oh, Sirbones thought. To be young enough to have that much strength to sacrifice in the name of honor! Two years' rest in his home temple had restored him as much as his years would allow. He feared that might not be enough to see him through to the end of this-battle? Quest? Expedition?
Before he could decide on a word, he noticed that a second, longer shadow had joined his. Then an unmistakable smell made his nostrils wrinkle of their own will.
"Can't stand the smell of honest work?" Fulvura said. She was doubtless trying to whisper, but a minotaur whispering could be heard in a blacksmith's forge chamber.
"Thinking of what we're about," Sirbones said politely.
"Finding out who wants both men and minotaurs dead," the minotaur said, not so quietly. She spoke Common well, although with a pronounced accent.
Heads turned in the vanguard. They, at a glare from Fulvura, turned back to look ahead to where the ground began to rise and tangles of brush, vines, and scrubby trees covered more of it. Even without magic, Sirbones suspected they would lose people to the serpents that brush undoubtedly hid.
"Then I'd best be well up toward the front," Sirbones said.
"I'll guard your back, if I may," Fulvura said. Sirbones looked at her, decided that the offer was serious, and knew that it could not be refused.
"I'm grateful," Sirbones said. "But don't turn your back on those Istaran bravos."
Fulvura snorted. She sounded remarkably like a bull about to charge.
"They had better watch theirs," she said, loudly enough for Sirbones to see Istarans flinch. He looked at her weaponry and decided that she could well be right.
She carried a bundle of three shatangs (minotaur throwing spears) across her back, and a double-edged battle-axe in her right hand. On a metal-studded leather belt she wore several katars (minotaur daggers), with blades of varying length and elaborately decorated hilts. She also wore spiked metal wrist guards on both arms, and a tunic of sharkskin sewn with steel disks. Sirbones suspected that the tunic alone weighed more than he did.
Altogether, he would wager that the humans would be glad Fulvura was with them, and their enemies would regret it. Any humans attempting treachery against the minotaurs would also regret it, if they lived long enough.
Drums rolled-at first only a few, then a dozen, then too many to count. A trumpet blared, but the bellowing of two hundred minotaurs drowned it out almost at once.
The ground seemed to shake as the minotaurs surged forward, toward the foot of the trail to the Green Mountain. The sun sparked fire from the weapons all of them carried, from the helmets a few of them wore, and from the great banners clustered at the head of the column.
Sir Darin Waydolsson hoped that the standard-bearers would not be so zealous in competing for the lead that they fell to fighting among themselves. This was not a contest in the arena; today no minotaur should make himself enemy to any other. He also knew that to ask this of minotaurs, one needed to be a god, not a mere Knight of Solamnia.
The standard-bearers did not come to blows. Axes and clabbards, the saw-edged minotaur broadswords, had widened the path enough to let the whole band of them strike the slope at once. There they halted, while warriors flowed forward to either side of them to take the lead.
More axes and clabbards danced in the warriors' hands, and at least one tessto. The great spiked club with a thong at its hilt was the one minotaur weapon even Darin had not been strong enough to learn well, and it seemed in any case more suitable for the arena than for the battlefield. But again, only gods could safely give a minotaur unasked-for advice about fighting.
Darin felt his wife slip her arm through his and rise on tiptoe to whisper in his ear: "The minotaurs seem a mob rather than a war band. Is this their way?"
Darin nodded. "They train mostly to fight in the arena," he told her, "where even melees take place on level ground, or ships' decks. Also, a minotaur is not at ease submitting to discipline in ways that give another authority over him.
"Much as I honor Waydol's memory, I always thought that was as important as any other reason he had for fleeing south. But do not judge too soon, or by the minotaurs you may have seen as slaves in Istar. The minotaurs do not call themselves the 'Destined Race' or the 'Chosen Ones' for their prowess at berry picking or lute playing!"
Rynthala's grip tightened almost painfully, and Darin remembered that she had never been to the Mighty City in her life, nor seen much of its settled lands except Tirabot Manor. Minotaur slaves were rare in Solamnia, and Sir Pirvan would no more have kept one than he would have made a human sacrifice of his wife or daughter.
"You can see Istar for yourself when this is done," he said. "I have some honor time coming to me."
"If we can trust the Istarans to be good hosts," Rynthala murmured. "But we go together there, too. Guard each other's backs again."