The Crimson Shadow Page 9

  Oliver joined Luthien beside the horses, limping and grumbling as he approached.

  “Are you injured?” a concerned Luthien asked.

  “It is my shoe,” the halfling answered, and he held his shoe out for Luthien to see. It seemed intact, though quite dirty and quite wet, as if Oliver had just dipped his leg into the water.

  “The stain!” Oliver explained, pushing it higher, near to Luthien’s face. “When I crossed the roof of the merchant-type coach, I stepped in the blood of the dead cyclopian. Now I cannot get the blood off!”

  Luthien shrugged, not understanding.

  “I stole this shoe from the finest boarding school in Gascony,” Oliver huffed, “from the son of a friend of the king himself! Where am I to find another in this too wild land you call your home?”

  “There is nothing wrong with that one,” Luthien protested.

  “It is ruined!” Oliver retorted, and he crossed his arms over his chest, rocked back on one heel, his other foot tap-tapping, and pointedly looked away.

  Luthien did well not to laugh at his pouting companion.

  A few feet away, the downed cyclopian groaned and stirred.

  “If he wakes up, I will kick him in the eye,” Oliver announced evenly. “Twice.”

  Oliver snapped his glare up at Luthien, whose chest was now heaving with sobs of mirth. “And then I will write my name, my whole name, my very long whole name, across your ample buttocks,” the halfling promised.

  Luthien buried his face in Riverdancer’s shaggy neck.

  The ferry was well over a hundred yards out by then and nearing Diamondgate Isle, the halfway point. It seemed as if the friends had made their escape, and even pouting Oliver’s mood seemed to brighten.

  But then the guide rope jerked suddenly. Luthien and Oliver looked back to shore and saw cyclopians hanging from the high poles that held the ropes, hacking away on the rope with axes.

  “Hey, don’t you be doing that!” the captain of the ferry cried out, running back across the deck. Luthien was about to ask what problems might arise if the guide rope was cut down behind them when the rope fell free. The young man got his answer as the ferry immediately began to swing to the south, toward the rocks of the island, caught in the current of the channel.

  The captain ran back the other way, screaming orders to his single crewman. The man worked frantically on the crank, but the ferry could not be urged any faster. It continued at its snail pace and its deadly swing to the south.

  Luthien and Oliver grabbed hard to their saddles and tried to find some secure footing as the ferry bounced in. The boat scraped a few smaller rocks, narrowly missed one huge and sharp jag, and finally crashed into the rocks around a small and narrow inlet.

  Cargo tumbled off the side; the cyclopian, just starting to regain its footing, went flying away, smacking hard into the barnacle-covered stone, where it lay very still. One of the other passengers shared a similar fate, tumbling head over heels into the water, coming up gagging and screaming. Threadbare and Riverdancer held their ground stubbornly, though the pony lurched forward a bit, stepping onto Oliver’s unshod foot. The halfling quickly reconsidered his disdain over his dirty shoe and took it out of his pocket.

  More swells came in under them, grinding the ferry against the stone, splintering wood. Luthien dove to the deck and crawled across, grabbing hold of the fallen man and pulling him back up out of the water. The captain called for his crewman to crank, but then spat curses instead, realizing that with the other end of the guide rope unsecured, the ferry could not possibly escape the current.

  “Bring Riverdancer!” Luthien called to Oliver, understanding the problem. He scrambled to the back of the raft and took up the loose guide rope, then looked about, finally discerning which of the many stones would best hold the rope. He moved to the very edge and looped up the rope, readying his throw.

  A swell nearly sent him overboard, but Oliver grabbed him by the belt and held him steady. Luthien tossed the rope over the rock and pulled the loop as tight as he could. Oliver scrambled onto Riverdancer’s back and turned the horse around, and Luthien came up behind, tying off the rope onto the back of the saddle.

  Gently, the halfling eased the horse forward and the rope tightened, steadying the rocking ferry. Oliver kept the horse pressing forward, taking up any slack, as Luthien tied off the guide rope. Then they cut Riverdancer free and the cranking began anew, easing the ferry out of the inlet and back out from the rocks. A great cheer went up from the captain, his crewman, and the four other passengers.

  “I’ll get her into Diamondgate’s dock,” the captain said to Luthien, pointing to a wharf around the outcropping of rocks. “We’ll wait there for a ferry to come for us from the other side.”

  Luthien led the captain’s gaze back into the channel, where the other ferry, teeming with armed cyclopians, was now working its way into the channel.

  “All the way across,” the young Bedwyr said. “I beg.”

  The captain nodded, looked doubtfully to the makeshift guide rope, and moved back to the front of the ferry. He returned just a few moments later, though, shaking his head.

  “We have to stop,” he explained. “They’re flying a yellow flag on the Diamondgate dock.”

  “So?” put in Oliver, and he did not sound happy.

  “They have spotted dorsals in the other side of the channel,” Luthien explained to the halfling.

  “We cannot take her out there,” the captain added. He gave the pair a sincerely sympathetic look, then went back to the bow, leaving Luthien and Oliver to stare helplessly at each other and at the approaching boatload of cyclopians.

  When they reached the Diamondgate dock, Luthien and Oliver helped everyone to get off the ferry. Then the halfling handed the captain another sack of coins and moved back to his pony, showing no intention of leaving the boat.

  “We have to go on,” Luthien explained to the gawking man. They both looked out to the two hundred yards of choppy dark water separating them from Eriador’s mainland.

  “The flag only means that dorsals have been spotted this morning,” the captain said hopefully.

  “We know that the cyclopians are very real,” Luthien replied, and the captain nodded and backed away, signaling for his crewman to do likewise, surrendering his craft to Luthien and Oliver.

  Luthien took the crank and set off at once, looking more to the sides than straight ahead. Oliver remained in the stern watching the cyclopians and the curiously forlorn group they had just left at the dock. Their expressions, truly concerned, set off alarms in the normally unshakable halfling.

  “These dorsals,” Oliver asked, moving up to join Luthien, “are they very big?”

  Luthien nodded.

  “Bigger than your horse?”

  Luthien nodded.

  “Bigger than the ferry?”

  Luthien nodded.

  “Take me back to the dock,” Oliver announced. “I would fight the cyclopians.”

  Luthien didn’t bother to respond, just kept cranking and kept looking from side to side, expecting to see one of those towering and ominous black fins rise up at any moment.

  The cyclopians passed Diamondgate, dropping two brutes off as they passed. Oliver groaned, knowing that the cyclopians would inevitably try to cause mischief with the guide ropes once more. But the halfling’s fears soon turned to enjoyment. The ropes were suspended quite high over the Diamondgate docks, and the cyclopians had to build a makeshift tower to get anywhere near them. Worse, as soon as the ferry with its cyclopian load had moved out a safe distance, the captain of Luthien’s ferry, his crewman, and the other passengers—even the injured one Luthien had pulled from the cold water—set on the two cyclopians, pushing them and their tower over the edge of the wharf and into the dark water.

  At Oliver’s cheer, young Luthien turned and saw that spectacle and marked it well, though he had no idea then of how significant that little uprising might later prove.

  Oliver did a cartwheel,
leaped and spun with joy, and came down frozen in place, looking out to the north side, to the open channel and the tall fin—thrice his height, at least—that had come up through the dark waves.

  Luthien’s smile disappeared as he considered his friend’s sudden expression, then shifted his gaze to consider its source.

  The dorsal fin sent a high wake in its speeding path, dropped to half its height, then slipped ominously under the water altogether.

  Luthien, trying to remember all the advice his local fishermen had ever given to him, stopped the crank, even back-pulling it once to halt the ferry’s momentum.

  “Crank!” Oliver scolded, running forward, but Luthien grabbed him and held him steady and whispered for him to be quiet.

  They stood together as the water around them darkened and the ferry shifted slightly to the south, nearly snapping its guide rope, moved by the passage of the great whale as it brushed under them. When the whale emerged on the other side, Oliver glimpsed its full forty-foot length, its skin patched black and white. Ten tons of killer. The halfling would have fallen to the deck, his legs no longer able to support him, but Luthien held him steady.

  “Stay calm and still,” the young Bedwyr whispered. Luthien was counting on the cyclopians this time. They were beasts of mountain holes and surely knew little about the habits of dorsal whales.

  The long fin reappeared starboard of the craft, moving slowly then, as if the whale had not decided its next move.

  Luthien looked behind at the eagerly approaching cyclopians. He smiled and waved, pointing out the tall dorsal fin to them.

  As Luthien expected, the cyclopians spotted the great whale and went berserk. They began scrambling all about the deck of their ferry; the one on the crank began cranking backward, trying to reverse direction. A few of the brutes even climbed up to their guide rope.

  “Not such a bad idea,” Oliver remarked, looking at his own high rope.

  Luthien turned his gaze instead to their loyal mounts, and Oliver promptly apologized.

  Then Luthien looked back to the great whale, turning now, as he had expected. The cyclopians kept up their frenzy, disturbing the water, inadvertently calling the whale to them.

  When the behemoth’s course seemed determined, Luthien went back to the crank and began easing the ferry ahead slowly, so as not to attract the deadly whale’s attention.

  With typical cyclopian loyalty, the cyclopians chose one from their own ranks and threw the poor brute into the water ahead of the approaching whale, hoping that the behemoth would take the sacrifice and leave the rest of them alone.

  They didn’t understand the greedy nature of dorsal whales.

  The black-and-white behemoth slammed the side of the cyclopians’ ferry, then, with a flick of its powerful tail, heaved itself right across the flat deck, driving half of the pitifully small craft under water. Cyclopians flew everywhere, flailing and screaming. The dorsal slipped back under the water, but reappeared on the ferry’s other side. The whale’s head came right out of the water, a cyclopian in its great maw up to the waist, screaming and slapping futilely at the sea monster.

  The whale bit down and slid back under, and the severed top half of the one-eye bobbed in the reddening water.

  Half a cyclopian would not satisfy a dorsal whale, though. The beast’s great tail slapped the water, launching two cyclopians thirty feet into the air. They splashed back in and one was sent flying again; the other was bitten in half.

  The frenzy went on for agonizing minutes, and then, suddenly, the dorsal fin appeared again, cutting a fast wake to the north.

  “Luthien,” Oliver called ominously.

  Several hundred yards away, the whale breached, slamming back down into the water, using the jump to pivot about.

  “Luthien,” Oliver called again, and the young Bedwyr didn’t have to look north to know that the whale had found another target.

  Luthien realized at once that he could not make the mainland dock, fully fifty yards away. He jumped up from the crank and ran about, thinking, searching.

  “Luthien,” Oliver said again, frozen in place by the approaching specter of doom.

  Luthien ran to the stern of the ferry and called across the water to the shouting people of the Diamondgate dock: “Cut the rope!”

  At first, they didn’t seem to hear him, or at least, they seemed not to understand, but then Luthien called it again and pointed above himself at the guide rope. Immediately the captain signaled to his crewman, and the agile man put a large knife between his teeth and scrambled up the pole.

  Luthien went to stand beside Oliver, watching the whale’s approach.

  A hundred yards away. Eighty.

  Fifty yards away. Luthien heard Oliver muttering under his breath—praying, the young man realized.

  Suddenly, the ferry lurched to the side and began a hard swing. Luthien pulled Oliver over to their mounts. Both Riverdancer and Threadbare were standing nervously, nickering and stamping their hooves as if they understood their peril. Luthien quickly tied off the end of the loose rope so that the ferry could not slip down along its length.

  The dorsal fin angled accordingly, keeping the pursuit, closing.

  Thirty yards away. Oliver could see the whale’s black eye.

  The ferry was speeding along quite well by then, caught in the deceivingly swift currents, but the whale was faster still.

  Twenty yards away. Oliver was praying loudly.

  The ferry jolted, skidding off a rock, and when Oliver and Luthien managed to tear their stares from the whale, they realized that they were very near the rock coastline. They looked back just in time to see the dorsal fin veer away, stymied by the shallows.

  The companions’ relief was short-lived, though, for they were moving at a wild clip, much faster than when they had been cut free near to Diamondgate, and were coming up on a sheer cliff of jagged rock.

  CHAPTER 8

  A ROAD WELL TAKEN

  GET ON YOUR HORSE! Get on your horse!” Oliver cried as he mounted Threadbare, holding the reins hard to keep the nervous beast from stumbling.

  Luthien followed the command, not really knowing what Oliver had in mind, but with no better plan of his own. As soon as he was astride Riverdancer, he saw Oliver lining up the pony exactly opposite from where the ferry would likely hit, and then the young man began to catch on.

  “You must time the jump well!” the halfling called. The ferry lurched suddenly as it grazed across more rocks; the plank furthest aft broke apart and was left drifting in the speeding craft’s wake.

  “Jump?” Luthien cried back. The approaching wall of stone was only a few feet high, and Luthien held no doubts that Riverdancer could make the leap if they were on solid ground. But the bouncing raft could not be considered solid ground, and even worse, Luthien was not sure of what was on the other side of that wall. He knew what would happen if he did not make the jump, though, and so when Oliver kicked Threadbare into a short run across the ferry, Luthien and Riverdancer followed.

  Luthien buried his head in the horse’s shaggy mane, not daring to look as he lifted away, propelled by the momentum of the ferry. He heard the explosion of wood on the rocks behind him, knew an instant later that he had cleared the wall.

  He looked up as Riverdancer touched down in a short trot on a grassy knoll. Threadbare stood to the side, riderless and with a small cut on her foreleg. For a moment, Luthien feared that Oliver had toppled in the middle of the jump and had been slammed against the stones. Then he spotted the halfling lying in the wet grass and laughing wildly.

  Oliver hopped to his feet and scooped up his fallen hat. He looked back to Diamondgate and waved frantically, wanting those who had helped him to know that he and Luthien had survived.

  Luthien walked Riverdancer to the edge of the knoll and looked down at the smashed ferry. Twenty yards out, the fierce dorsal whale reappeared, circling the flotsam.

  “That was not so bad,” Oliver remarked.

  Luthien didn’t kno
w whether to jump down and punch the halfling, or to throw him into the air in victory. His blood was coursing mightily through his veins, his heart pumping strongly. He felt more alive than ever before, more sheer elation than any victory in the arena could ever have afforded him.

  But if Oliver spoke the truth, then what else might the young Bedwyr face beside the halfling? What worse?

  Despite his primal joy, a shudder ran along Luthien’s spine.

  “They are coming to congratulate our quick thinking,” Oliver said, drawing Luthien’s attention and leading his gaze north along the knoll, back toward the ferry docks on this side of the channel. Two dozen men were running at them, calling out and waving tools.

  “To congratulate?” Luthien asked.

  Oliver looked down to the smashed ferry. “You think they might want us to pay for that?”

  Luthien’s shrug sent the halfling running to his mount.

  He swung up into his saddle and bowed from a sitting position, sweeping his great hat low along the pony’s side. “I do so appreciate your applause,” he called to the approaching mob. “But now, I fear, the curtain is closed!”

  And off they ran, side by side, the foppish halfling swashbuckler on his ugly yellow pony and the son of Bedwyr on his glistening white stallion.

  The next few days proved quite uneventful for the weary companions. They traveled easily south through the Eriadoran farmlands, taking food and lodging where they found it. This was not too difficult, for the farmers of northern Eriador were a friendly folk, and more than willing to share a meal and a place in their barns in exchange for news of the outside world.

  Oliver always dominated the conversations on such occasions, telling Luthien and the farmers grand tales of his times in Gascony, telling of adventures far beyond the scope of the “minor inconveniences” he and Luthien had been through since the fight with the merchant wagon.

  Luthien listened to all the tales without reply, though he knew that Oliver was three parts bluster and one part truth (and allowing him that formula, Luthien figured, was being generous). The young man saw no harm in the halfling’s outrageous claims, and Oliver seemed to entertain the farmers well enough, though none of the farmers were able to provide any information about Ethan. Every morning, when Luthien and Oliver left a farm, they were seen off by an entire family, and sometimes neighbors as well, smiling and waving and calling out for their good fortunes.