The soldiers made a display of relaxing. They removed their helms and shared refreshment from the bucket and dipper carried around by the water boy. They gathered in knots, and told jokes, and laughed as though nothing under the sky could be wrong; while behind them servants worked swiftly to unleash the covers from the wagons, and bundle the precious silk bales inside. Wiallo showed them where the rocks dipped into crevices. A third of the silk was quickly hidden out of sight and covered with brush, but room remained for no more. The servants redistributed what remained in the wagons, and spread the covers to hide the gaps. Then Keyoke shouted, and the soldiers formed up, and the caravan creaked forward once again. The company wound downward from the crest into a valley mantled and deep with late afternoon shadows.
The caravan reached the base of the hill, and the needra bawled as the drovers reined them in once again. Through the rising pall of their own dust, Keyoke squinted behind and saw a sky gone light with the gold of coming sunset; but the heights they had recently left were now marred with a cloud of dull grey. A moment later, a scout confirmed his foreboding over that patch of dirty sky.
‘It’s dust kicked up by marching soldiers. The Minwanabi tire of waiting,’ the runner reported breathlessly. ‘Perhaps they think we camp here.’
Keyoke pursed creased lips. He waved for Dakhati’s attention and called, ‘We’ll need to hurry.’ Then, feeling every mile his feet had travelled, the Force Commander watched his Strike Leader give orders. In an unusual moment of reflection, he wished for Papewaio’s intuitive presence. But Pape was dead, murdered by a Minwanabi assassin while defending Mara. Keyoke hoped he would accomplish as much. For he had no illusions: he knew that every warrior here would likely meet the Red God on the end of a Minwanabi weapon.
Masked from observation by the trees, the silk was unloaded, the needra unhitched. Then, with poles cut from the forest, the Acoma soldiers levered the wagons onto their sides, forming a barrier behind which twenty archers took cover. These men volunteered to stay behind and fight to the death, buying time for the rest of the company to make their way to Wiallo’s canyon. That such a haven might not exist, or that the ex-grey warrior could have mistaken its location, posed a possible disaster no one spoke of.
Sunlight left the valley early but held the heights in bright aspect like fingers dipped in gilt. The dust raised by the Minwanabi army deepened the gloom down below.
Keyoke ordered, ‘Let every man carry as much of the silk as he may.’ Wiallo returned a puzzled glance. Keyoke said, Those bolts can be better used to stop arrows, or build a bulwark against a charge. Now have the servants lead the needra, and guide us quickly to this canyon.’
Soldiers with silk bales piled on their shoulders marched between drovers and servants who whipped the balky needra over a ragged barrier of boulders. Darkness fell fast, and the footing was poor. The gutted remains of the caravan moved over teacherous terrain, pushing past branches that whipped and caught at armour, and over gullies that grabbed at the ankles. Several times men fell, though not one uttered an oath. In silence they arose and gathered up their dropped bundles, and pressed forward into brush-dense forest.
By moonrise the company reached a narrow defile in the trail. Here forest vines clutched at the trees as if they sought to strangle, and from their choking outgrowth thrust an upstanding promontory of rock on either side.
‘The canyon lies just ahead, perhaps three bowshots from that formation,’ Wiallo said.
Keyoke peered through the gloom and made out a boulder that bulked like an overhang above the path. He raised his hand, and the column behind came to a halt.
A bird called and fell silent; no way to determine whether the creature wore feathers or armour. Keyoke touched two of the nearest warriors and waved them forward. ‘Stand guard here. The moment you see any sign of pursuit, one of you send me word.’
The chosen men shed their bundles and assumed their posts without protest. Keyoke saluted their bravery and wished he had time to say more. But words could not lighten necessity: when the Minwanabi marched on their position, one man would race with the warning, and the other would die to provide his colleague enough of a lead to get through. Mara would be proud, the Force Commander’ thought sadly.
The company and its servants scrambled along the trail. They moved in the half-dark like men driven by demons. At a narrow V in the rocks, where each man needed to scramble on hands and knees and have his bundled goods passed through, and the needra had to be forced against their nature to jump downward, Keyoke waved Wiallo to his side. Above the bawling of frightened animals, he asked, ‘What chance you could make your way cross-country from here to our Lady?’
Wiallo shrugged in impassive Tsurani modesty, ‘I know this area as well as any man, Force Commander. But, in the dark, with Minwanabi soldiers coming from all sides? A shadow would need the gods’ favour to pass unseen.’