lay unconscious - an hour or perhaps a full day.' He closed his eyes, too spent to add more; and the strength of purpose that had sustained him drained away with the deliverance of his message. Lujan lowered his hands and settled the limp head on blood-marked blankets.
He made no protest as the healer hurried forward and began to tend the man.
Lujan completed his inner calculations. Knotted inside with concealed rage, he shouted loudly enough to wake the most sluggish of the sleeping servants. 'Break camp!'
To the worried presence of his subcommander he added,
'Assign a patrol and wagon to take this man to Lady Mara in the morning, and then detail half a company to see the rest of the wagons safely to our warehouses in Sulan-Qu at dawn.'
The officer saluted. 'Yes, Strike Leader.'
'The rest of us march now,' Lujan finished. He wasted no breath with elaboration; every second counted. For if the Minwanabi attacked Keyoke in the pass, there was only one place to make a stand. The bandits' canyon would be known to the scouts; but in the heat of ambush and battle, had any of them found the chance to mention its presence? Curse of Turakamu, Lujan thought. The silk could be lost already, and Keyoke might at this moment be a corpse staring sightless at stars. Only a fool would hold to hope, and only an even greater fool would risk another two companies . . .
yet Lujan could not conceive of any alternative but action.
For Lujan loved Mara with a devotion deeper than life: she had returned him to honour from the meaningless existence of a grey warrior. And the Force Commander Lujan had come to admire with the affection a son reserves for a father had become ensnared in a Minwanabi trap.
Keyoke had embraced the tattered soldiers from Lujan's band as if they had been born to Acoma green, and he had supported Lujan's promotion to First Strike Leader with a fair judgment few men maintained in old age. Keyoke was more than a commanding officer; he was a teacher with a rare talent for sharing, and for listening.
Looking southward with eyes flat as pebbles, Lujan raised his voice to his company. 'We march! And if we must steal every boat and barge in Sulan-Qu to make passage southward, we shall! By dawn I want to be on the river, and before another day passes, I want to be hunting dogs in the foothills of the Kyamakas!'
The forest was silent. Night birds did not cry, and the high, steep rim of the canyon cut off even the whisper of wind.
Except for a brief hour when the moon had crossed the narrow slice of sky overhead, the darkness was unrelenting.
Keyoke refused all pleas to unbank the fires, though the air was chill at this altitude and the lightly clothed servants shivered. Soldiers sought to snatch sleep in full armour on damp ground, while others stood at their posts, carefully listening.
Only unwelcome sounds reached their ears: the scrape of disturbed stones and the muffled grunts of effort as climbers tested canyon walls in the dark. The enemy had arrived, but the wait, most cruelly, did not end.
Keyoke remained by the barricade, his face impassive as old wood. Committed to battle in a place he had never seen in daylight, the Acoma Force Commander prayed that Wiallo's assessment had been accurate: that the cliffs above were too steep to descend. As it was, Keyoke could do little but detail sentries to follow the rattling falls of pebbles set off by men prowling the heights. Once his soldiers were gratified by a muffled cry and the thud of a fallen body. The corpse that lay sprawled in the canyon was raggedly dressed, but too well fed and kempt for a bandit; his weapons were first-quality and stamped with the maker's mark of an armourer well known in Szetac Province. No further proof was needed. That craftsman's trade supplied the Minwanabi, as his forebears had for several generations.
Keyoke squinted at stars and found them paling. Dawn was approaching, and soon the enemy would have light enough to try arrows. Keyoke knew that if the Minwanabi Force Commander, Irrilandi, opposed him, he would have archers in crannies in the rock against any counterattack one of Irrilandi's more predictable tendencies was always to be ready for a counteroffensive. Come daylight, his archers could fire blindly down into the ravine. Most bowshafts might fall harmlessly, but some might