Chapter 174 Close Encounter

Knowing it was an elephant, the death of Doggie Moulton — thrown down, yet not eaten — could at last be accounted for. With an elephant standing by, wolves and wild dogs dare not come near; the body had been under guard, all unawares.

But last night's one bellow had put the fear into Lower Moulton's farmhouses all over again.

What they had heard before was howling, moaning, and a grunting like pigs. Now this shrill brazen squalling — what manner of monster was that?

What they could not know: the elephant, a beast of high feeling as animals go, keeps talk in twenty-five distinct calls, and a voice that carries sixty leagues.

Several households made up their minds that very night — bundle up the family and move to Upper Moulton, a league on.

When the first thread of dawn lit the forest, the birds forgot all about the dreadful elephant and chirruped their way into morning lessons.

Lora rolled over and nearly rolled off the couch. Hadn't she fallen asleep against his shoulder? How had she come to be laid out on this two-foot cot?

Lucy heard the stir and came in bearing the water basin, with Ruth behind her carrying a bowl of pasta soup. Ruth smiled her into the day: "Did the young lady sleep well?"

"Mm — sleeping on a boat is like sleeping in the cradle when you're small. I was off before I knew it. Where's your lord?"

Ruth knew perfectly well which lord was meant, and answered a different question:

"Our young lord didn't sleep at all well. He sat up the whole night at the side of your couch — nothing would move him. The couch was too narrow, he said; you might roll off..."

Lora knew she was putting the best face on it for her master, and went red all the same:

"Who asked him to keep watch..."

Ruth pressed her lips together on a smile, flipped up the couch's plank — a storage chest below — and stowed the bedding away in it.

"You've lived all your life on a mountain. How is it you know your way round a boat so well?"

Lora had watched Ruth turn the sleeping couch back to a sitting couch in three moves and a flourish, then prop the wooden window-panel open beside it — the hands of somebody altogether at home aboard.

Ruth laughed. "Ever since my father poled this boat back to Little Penn Village, we've been ferrying goods between the banks off and on — how could I not know her? My father says the young lord's people are all men, thick-fingered and careless, so he picked out a few of us girls who scrub up decent and had us all taught our manners, for serving the young lord in time to come."

She answered it so open and easy that Lora, for once, found nothing to hand back.

When she had gone out, Lucy curled her lip:

"Lyle said it long ago: round our lord, even the mosquitoes are males. Fine dreaming on their side."

Lora had been in something of a gloom over it; this startled the laugh right out of her: "The male mosquitoes drink tree sap. It's only the females that come round people for blood."

A joke — but it set Lora's own worry ticking:

Even if Leon stayed no more than a baron, the court's custom allowed him one lawful wife — and mistresses past counting, so long as they were kept out of sight. A mistress has no standing in law at all: any child she bears is baseborn, handed to the lawful wife to raise, and she herself may never lie in the family ground.

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

As king — a man is less his own master still. Unless the queen runs to Mother's pattern: three babes in two years, pregnant or lying-in and never anything else.

Queen Adela, the one wife of King Alberic, held his palace sole — and even she bore him three sons and two daughters on end, and then three of the five died before their years were out.

But I simply cannot take a husband shared round with other women... oh, my aching head.

"Lucy — today you stay with the boat. The mountain is no place for you; I'll have all I can do to look after myself, never mind rescuing you." Lora buckled the hand-bow to her forearm in quick, practiced turns.

Lucy wasn't having it. She pointed at the men's clothes she had on: "Look at me, my lady — equipped, all of it! Norton gave me a hand-bow too. I can look after myself!"

To demonstrate, she raked up her sleeve — caught the trigger clean. Bang — one bolt stood quivering in the far cabin wall.

"My lady? What was that?"

Shawn's head came in at the window.

"Nothing, nothing! We were testing the trigger."

Lora laughed it off, then turned to the pole-axed Lucy:

"All right, all right — come along then. Only mind what you're about, and no more random shooting."

Mistress and maid went down the gangplank in the highest spirits. Lucy, afraid her young lady might run hungry on the road, had bundled up pickles and griddle-cakes, and carried them slung at her back like a girl off on the school's autumn outing.

Leon had changed into hunting dress today: the robe cut a hand shorter, a hide cuirass over it, bow and quiver and saber on his body — brisk as a new blade.

Liar. That was no man who'd sat a night through on a footstool.

"Old Whelan says there's a path, and we can go up on our own. Besides, the path itself may not show us anything — it's the out-of-the-way ground we want."

Lorne Chase had brought two men of his own; mountain scramblers born and bred, their kit was another thing entirely — a coil of hemp rope on one man's back, and bill-hooks made to the purpose for hacking vines.

Old Whelan was the gold-prospector they had dug out of Rawsford — a different trade from an alchemist, these: men whose whole craft is finding the gold and sinking the shafts. Such men are rare as white crows; Leon had turned up exactly one pair, Old Whelan and his son.

"All here? Then let's go."

Corin and his men were already ahead. Linn wasn't going up today — he and Armand were to spend these two days ranging round for pasture ground. Shawn and Norton fell in behind the young lady.

Harvest Home was past; the dry warmth of autumn walked under the tree-shade like a benediction.

A quarter-hour of climbing, and Lora's legs remembered how to be legs.

They were on the narrow path now, working upward; every man kept his eyes out for beasts — all but Old Whelan and his son, who tap-tap-tapped their little iron picks against stone and dirt, here and there and everywhere.

Lora gazed about her too, and told Lucy and Shawn to keep their ears out for water.

All at once the column halted, and Corin came back down the line:

"My lady — there's stream-water ahead. But it's off the path; we'd have to break right, in among the trees."

"For water — follow it up, work upstream. That's where the finds come easier," Old Whelan put in fast. It matched Lora's own thought to the hair. In the modern day, this very gold field had come to light because placer gold turned up in a deep-mountain stream.

But she gave the party its caution: "Water is where the beasts drink too. Corin — easy on."

At first light, Leon had already sent Lorne Chase's men after the elephants. Their charge was to shadow the herd and see whether the herd's salt place could be found.

On the way up they had caught the elephants' crying faintly off to the east — the herd, it seemed, was gone.

"Corin, if we could only meet one! Last night was too dark — I never got a proper look."

Nansen was walking at Corin's side. Up north there was nothing but grassland and gravel desert; these hills had got into his blood.

Yesterday Lyle had taught them to bind on leg-wraps against snakebite, and they had theorized themselves into every corner of it. Today, walking point, each man carried two long poles, on purpose to beat the grass and startle whatever snakes were in it.

"Why didn't you go off with the elephant men this morning, and spare us the hundredth telling?" Corin wanted his look too, mind — but a beast even tigers decline to quarrel with: maybe missing it was the better luck.

"I thought I heard them crying at first light, off a long way. A pity..."

Nansen was still murmuring it when Corin's arm shot out and barred him. Ahead lay the little stream, plink and plonk over its stones — and past the stream, a dip in the ground had pooled itself a water-hole.

An elephant was wallowing in that mud-hole, snug as a hog in summer. At the noise it heaved itself up — and there it stood, eye to little eye with Corin.

Brother — your whole family's gone east. Didn't you get the word?