In Which Tom And The Dumcruckles Head For The Hills

(continued from here)

And now for the plan. Of course I have been deliberately keeping it from you as I go along so that I may squeeze the dregs of drama from it. You may take your revenge any way you like, once we are together again.

Once it was fully dark, we slipped out of the courtyard by the watch-gate and skulked around the back to the fields. It felt oddly undressed to be ranging about outside the walls, after the trouble we had been taking to stay within them for these past weeks. There was no moon, and the scudding clouds curtseyed in and out before the stars. It was not at all convenient for traveling silently, but it was much more convenient for not being shot at -- our friends generally retreated to the foothills after dark, but on the few days that the moon was at its fullest, they gave the messengers a hard time of it in the night and managed once to lame a horse.

Katti is a little better than Timothy at divining presences, so we stopped every twenty minutes or so for her to let her mind run ahead. I had hoped that she would be able to sense our besiegers, so that we could pinpoint them and go more freely, but she said no: sometimes she could sense when a person was near, but not always, and in any case we were near, so there was no way to tell. She would have to "listen" for their horses, which would be much more accurate.

It had been a few years since I had been in the foothills for anything other than a picnic, but I found that even in the dark I could recognize paths and landmarks easily enough, and in any case Timothy had been up much more recently for the hunting, so he led the party. I was fairly certain that they would have settled on the campsite that the hunters use – you know the one. With the shelter of the rocks and the spring for fresh water, and those caves close by for ammunition and food storage, a dozen or two men could have a very comfortable few weeks. Most of our harvest had been brought into the manor granaries, but they could have their pickings of the winter crops, as well as anything that had been left unguarded in the farms.

We made it there in about an hour and a half, and I turned out to be quite right: Katti had picked up their horses, but we smelled the smoke from their fires at almost the same time. It was the logical place for them to camp, but it was also excellent fortune for us, since we know the terrain so well – especially the one small feature of it that I was fairly confident they wouldn’t know at all.

You remember? The caves go through two big chambers and into a small passage, and then they seem to stop. But if you are small enough of stature, you can ease through the passage and into another small chamber that opens into an entrance on the other side of the hill.

We scouted around for about an hour – or at least Timothy did. Katti sat motionless in the hidden cave and had it out with the Marshweathrian animals while I stood guard over her. It has always fascinated me to see her do it; her features seem stamped with the very look of a horse, or dog or cat as the case may be. This time she began to look quite harassed within only a few moments, which she said afterward was proof of how barbarian our attackers were: even their animals had little use for them and were so avid for someone to talk to that she was quickly overwhelmed. She will write to you herself about it – apparently it was quite a conversation.

By the time Timothy got back she had broken contact and was rubbing her forehead from the headache.

“It’s perfect,” Timothy said in a low murmur. “There are about twenty of them, and they’re all around one campfire telling ghost stories. Two-thirds of them have already been drinking, and all of them look as stupid as rocks. If their horses will play the game, we will have them calling for their mothers in no time at all.”

He shot an inquiring glance at his sister, who nodded wearily. “The horses will play. They’re bored spiritless here with no space and only scrub grass for pasture, although they’re treated well otherwise. The guard dog noticed you, but he’s rather touchy and they don’t respect him as much as dogs like, so he’s happy enough to wash his hands of them. He said you have a tread like an ox.”

Timothy, who had perked up when the dog was mentioned, looked disgusted. “It’s only because he acknowledged me, and I thought I didn’t have to go as carefully. He seemed quite nice.”

“Well, you can’t blame him for growing a bit cynical among this crowd. In any case you can hash it out with him later.”

She put her hands on the small of her back and stretched. “I’ll deal with the dog if you’ll do the horses. They’re all fairly simple so I think they’ll like you.”

Her brother dropped down next to her and knuckled her in the upper arm. “Snot,” he said.

“Snot yourself.”

They looked at me and nodded at the same time, and I nodded back and started through the passage into the other cave.

The two of them would be physically unprotected while they were in mental contact with the animals, but I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t worried about them. I was the one who would be in danger: first from the narrowing of the passage, which I wasn’t at all sure I hadn’t outgrown, then from the possibility of capture, if the men out front were more intelligent than I gave them credit for. But it was my own plan, and this was the only part of it I could do, and if I wanted any of the glory back at Dumcruckle I would have to face the gut-wringing here.

I have never thought of myself as being particularly claustrophobic, but then again I live in the country and have never been forced into particularly small spaces. The cave passage was a particularly small space indeed, and as I crept through it I was more uneasily conscious of the rock squeezing around me and the hill pressing down on me than I ever remember being when we did it as children. At its narrowest point, where you have to get down on your belly and crawl, I did get stuck, and I came very close to panic, because even if there hadn’t been twenty enemies who would be happy to capture or kill me if they’d known of my presence, I couldn’t imagine a way to get me out. I had a brief picture of my skeleton lying limply in the keyhole of rock, and then with sweat pouring down my face I willed myself to relax all my muscles and breathe out as far as I could. This gave me just the hair’s breadth of room that I needed, and I was able to wriggle free.

Well, once I had done that, there was no question of my ever going back that way, so the success of the venture became that much more imperative. I would rather have been taken and tortured than turn around and crawl back through the cave, and the realization turned out to be freeing, because when there is only one thing you can do, you do it – it is indecision that is the enemy of courage. So I went forward with much more assurance, although without making a sound that I could help, and in a few minutes I was in the rear of the two chambers.

First I crept forward in the darkness to peer quickly into the forward cave. I wasn’t going to strike a light until I knew it wouldn’t be seen. It was a barracks, and not a neat one: the bedrolls were rumpled and unkempt, and clothes were piled up against the walls like drifts of snow. The room was empty of men; I supposed they were still whiling away time with ghost stories and whisky. Sunset was now almost three hours ago, and if they’d been around that fire the whole time they would be getting bored. I wanted them in bed, but not too fast asleep – fighting men sleep like rocks as a rule, which would make them an indifferent audience to my plan.

Satisfied, I struck a light and fossicked around the rear of the two chambers. It was about one-third full with the various boxes and trappings that the men had either brought with them or taken from us. There was a barrel of apples that I couldn’t see them hauling all that way, so it must have come from our orchards – that sort of thing. They had less in the way of arrows than I had expected, which explained their not wasting them on Moss. I wished it had been possible to collect more of their spent arrows; we could have starved them out in that manner if not literally. But we couldn’t do it under fire, and we couldn’t have found them after dark, so it seemed this was the only way.

I prowled around the cave and marked out the best hiding-place for my purposes, and then set to work on my effects. There were a few fixed points high enough for me to string three or four wires, and on the wires I hung a couple of pieces of cloth that I had brought with me. With the aid of some black threads that I strung back to my hiding place, I could make quite a pretty show of floating white specters. My last task was a simple rope snare, with the loop arranged in front of the opening and the ends held in my hands.

Once this was done, I blew out the light, crawled behind a barrel next to the opening, a vantage point which offered me a six-inch view of the barracks room, and composed myself to wait.

(continued here)