The Coalteca had been unloaded by the time the Lord and Lady emerged from their table of refreshment. Mara’s palanquin awaited beside Lord Chipino’s, and servants had commandeered a herd of pack beasts. These were lightweight, six-legged, and to Kevin’s eyes, resembled a cross between a camel and a llama, except for the ears, which were scaled and whorled like a lizard’s. Mara’s wardrobe chests and the tents, braziers, charcoal sacks, oil barrels, and stores and supplies for her army had all been strapped to strange, U-shaped racks that rode the creatures’ backs like saddles. The train was a very long one, noisy with the bleat of animals and the calls of swarthy-faced tenders who wore loose scarves at their throats. Drovers in baggy garments striped in garish colours prodded their charges into a straggling order of march; the human and cho-ja companies formed up more quickly, and ascent into the mountains began.
Kevin followed with the rest of Mara’s house servants. Distracted by a giggling child who rolled in the gutter by the roadside, he was startled by a splash of warm fluid.
He spun, discovered a white gobbet of saliva dripping from his shirt sleeve, and grimaced. ‘Damn it to hell,’ he said in Midkemian.
Lujan smiled broadly in commiseration. ‘Don’t stand too close to the querdidra,’ he called in caution. ‘They spit.’
Kevin flicked his hand, and shed a foaming mess on the pavement. It reeked unpleasantly, like rotted onions.
‘Evidently they don’t like your smell,’ the Force Commander finished, laughing.
Kevin eyed the offending pack beast, which was looking at him through violet, long-lashed eyes and curling its monkeylike lips. ‘Feeling’s mutual,’ he groused. And he wished it a painful attack of constipation, and thorns in all six of its padded feet. Dustari was going to be peachy, he groused to himself, when the querdidra that carried the supplies seemed to outnumber the soldiers.
The mountains changed drastically as they approached the passes. Forested slopes fell away, scoured by winds and driven sand to bare rock. The smells of sun-heated stone replaced those of greenery and soil, and the land became a vista of bleakness. The high country dropped sharply off into a broken series of buttes awash in vast oceans of sand. The sun burned in a sky pale green with drifts of airborne dust, and cooked the lands beneath to a shimmering curtain of heat waves. The rock itself seemed to smoulder, rough-grained, and textured red, black and ochre. The fires of its forming seemed very recent, and renewed each day with the sharp blaze of sunrise.
In contrast, the nights were chill, with dry gusts cutting through clothing like ice. It became no surprise that the drovers and native guides wore their neckerchiefs over their faces to protect them from wind-driven grit. Centuries of such weather had chiselled the rocks into odd formations resembling towers or stacks of crockery, or sometimes demonlike pillars that seemed to prop up the Kelewanese sky. Kevin and Mara both stared at such shapes in fascination, early on – but not after the first raid by desert men, which happened on the steep trail leading to the top of a pass.
Aware first of a blood curdling yell, and a disturbance in the line of pack beasts up ahead, Mara whipped aside the curtains of her palanquin. ‘What’s amiss?’
Lujan motioned for her to stay back, and then drew his sword. Mara peered around him and through the ranks of her honour guard saw small, broad-shouldered figures in dun-coloured robes leaping in a screeching charge from a cleft between the rocks. They grabbed the bridles of several querdidra and dragged them, bleating, off the road. Surefooted even on loose stone, the creatures bucked and shied as warriors in Xacatecas colours jumped downslope in pursuit.
Lujan shouted to his First Strike Leader and signalled broadly with his sword. Acoma warriors broke from the caravan line lower down, on a switchback curve below their position. Their sally was joined, then overtaken by a fast-rrioving strike force of cho-ja. Less sure than the insects, the humans fanned out in a wide ring to cut off the desert men, while the cho-ja under their Strike Leader slipped past them and cut in an arc across the path of the raiders’ descent.
‘Defer to Lord Chipino’s officers,’ Lujan commanded the Acoma. Then, as the Lord of the Xacatecas called something to Mara from his litter, the Lady touched her officer’s sleeve.
‘The Lord would have no live prisoners,’ she instructed.