The nose had been narrow and hooked, and the helm was not Juratu’s.
Kevin’s hands tautened over the crock, and water spilled, wetting his knuckles in a flood. He dared not cry out, or even run, lest he reveal that the hidden watcher had been seen. Sweating, more than a little shaky in the knees, Kevin turned his back on the spring. In imitation of a slave’s listless shuffle, he made his way step by nerve-racked step back to Mara’s caravan.
The skin between his shoulderblades itched, as if at any moment he expected the terrible stab of an arrow.
The dozen steps that separated him from Kenji and Mara’s litter seemed to take an eternity. Kevin forced his feet to walk sedately while his thoughts raced. The litter curtains were cracked open, with Mara on the verge of leaning out to address Kenji.
Fear shot like a bolt through Kevin’s nerves. He pinched the water crock in a death grip and inwardly willed the woman to lean back out of sight in the shadow of her litter.
Being Mara, she did not. She shoved the curtains wider, looked up at her Strike Leader, and opened her mouth to speak.
Feeling danger like a breaking wave at his back, Kevin acted. He tripped, hard, on a rock and flung the contents of his water crock over the Lady and her officer. He followed up this clumsiness by crashing full length into the litter.
His mistress’s cry of surprise and outrage became smothered under his chest as he forced her down and back, deep into the cushions, safe behind the protection of his body as he flipped the litter on its side, turning it into a breastwork.
His action came none too soon. Even as Kevin disentangled himself from the silk curtains, enemy arrows began to fall.
They sang out of air, smacking through dirt and armour with an evil flat sound like the blows of punitive hands. Kenji was first to fall. He went down screaming orders, while arrows hammered and hammered the underside slats of the spilled litter, raised now before Mara like a barricade.
‘It’s an ambush,’ Kevin snarled in her ear, while she beat with her fists to try to tear from his embrace. ‘Keep still.’
An arrow whapped through a cushion and rammed a groove through the dirt. Mara saw and instantly went still. She listened, stricken, to the shouting as those warriors left alive to heed their dying officer’s call to rally threw themselves in a heap on top of the litter, their bodies her living shield.
The situation was desperate. The arrows crashed down in a rain, and the flimsy underpinnings of the litter bounced and splintered with the impact. Kevin tried to see out and caught a raking slash across his shoulder. He cursed, ducked back, and in a rush peeled off his slave’s robe.
Two of the warriors nearest Mara were dying, wounded as they dived to her defence. Now the cold hiss of shafts was replaced by the rattle of swordplay as ambushers charged from the forest in a wave and engaged the tatters of her guard still left standing.
‘Quick,’ Kevin snapped. He held out his robe. ‘Bundle my Lady in this. Her fancy clothes make too clear a target.’ One of the bearers threw back a look of uncertainty.
‘Just do it!’ Kevin shouted. ‘Her honour is dust if she’s dead.’
More warriors charged from the cover of the wood. Mara’s few survivors closed in a ragged ring around the litter; they were too few, a pitiful dyke against an avalanche of foes. Kevin abandoned further argument, for a swordsman charged out of the melee with lowered blade to take him in the back. Kevin snatched up a fallen weapon, and snapped off a length of curtain that he wrapped around his arm to serve as shield; then he spun at bay and prepared to kill until he died.
At home on the Acoma estate, Ayaki scowled blackly at Nacoya. His face turned red and his fists clenched, and she and two slaves and a nurse all prepared for a warrior-sized tantrum.
‘I won’t wear that!’ Ayaki shouted. ‘It has orange, and that is the colour worn by Minwanabi.’
Nacoya regarded the garment at hand, a silk robe fastened with shell buttons that might, with imagination, be called orange. The real reason behind the argument was that Ayaki preferred to wear no robe at all in the heat and humidity of high summer. That he was too well born to charge about naked as a slave child through the hallways made no impression on nine-year-old priorities.
But Nacoya had years of experience at managing high-spirited Acoma children. She caught Ayaki’s stiff shoulders and gave him a shake. ‘Young warrior, you will wear the robes you are given, and deport yourself like the Lord you will be when you are grown. If you do less, you will spend the morning scrubbing dirty plates with the scullions.’