That first minute was fierce. And after it, in the pause that came, Lee found that he was wounded; there was blood on the rock under his cheek, and his right hand and the rifle bolt were red.
"Ours or theirs."
The men below were moving up quickly, for they were fit and rested. Grumman nodded.
The eagle daemon uttered a harsh scream, and from below came in a thousand different voices the calls of a thousand birds: the too-whoo of owls, the alarm shriek of little sparrows, the liquid music of the nightingale. Sayan Kotor was calling them. And in answer they came, every bird in the forest, whether they had been gliding in the hunt on silent wings or roosting asleep; they came fluttering upward in their thousands through the tumbling air.
Then he hauled himself back into position, and even before hed set his eye to the sight, he took a bullet.
"Lee, I couldnt abide to be anywhere away from you for a single second," she whispered back.
"Russian," he said. "Theyre gonna come up all together and at a run. That would be hardest for us, so theyll do that."
They avoided the engine, though some were drawn into it and dashed to pieces by the slicing propellers. Most of the birds simply perched on the body of the zeppelin, and those that came next seized on to them, until they covered not only the whole body of the craft (now venting hydrogen through a thousand tiny claw holes) but the windows of the cabin too, and the struts and cables—every square inch of room had a bird, two birds, three or more, clinging to it.
Lee was anxious about Grumman, because the other man was pale and drawn and breathing hard.
"Good shooting," she whispered back, very close to his cheek. "Dont stop. Over by that black boulder—"
"How we doing?" he muttered.
"Not long now, Hester," he muttered, trying to hold still.
"We should have done a lot of things."
Lee and Grumman were six hundred yards above them, and not far from the entrance to the ravine. Once they reached it, they could hold the soldiers off as long as their ammunition held out; but they had only one rifle.
Then she vanished. But the pilot was still alive. His eyes became filmy and dull, and his reaching hand fell back with a limp thud against the throttle. He was alive but not alive; he was indifferent to everything.
"Still beautiful," he said. "Oh, Hester, yeah, the witch. She gave me..."
Nor did he stop firing.
The soldiers had halted and taken cover as well as they could. Lee could count them, and he did:
Poor Hester, she was lying now, not crouching tense and watchful as shed done all his adult life.
The men climbing the slope had fanned out and were moving more slowly, because they saw the problem as well as he did. They knew theyd have to capture the gulch, and they knew that one man with a rifle could hold them off for a long time. Behind them, to Lees surprise, the zeppelin was still laboring to rise. Maybe its buoyancy was going, or maybe the fuel was running low, but either way it hadnt taken off yet, and it gave him an idea.
"I will. But hell, I dont like taking lives, Hester."
"Did you count how many fell, Hester?"
It felt like an explosion in his left shoulder. For a few seconds he was dazed, and then he came to his senses, with his left arm numb and useless. There was a great deal of pain waiting to spring on him, but it hadnt raised the courage yet, and that thought gave him the strength to focus his mind on shooting again.
Creatures of the forest—squirrels, birds, wild boar—were fleeing with them, and a chorus of squealings, shriekings, alarm calls of every sort rose around them. The two travelers struggled on toward the edge of the tree line, which was not far ahead; and then they reached it, as wave after wave of heat rolled up at them from the roaring billows of flame that now soared fifty feet into the air. Trees blazed like torches; the sap in their veins boiled and split them asunder, the pitch in the conifers caught like naphtha, the twigs seemed to blossom with ferocious orange flowers all in a moment.
"What now, Hester?" he said.
"For a human being, nothing comes naturally," said Grumman. "We have to learn everything we do.
"Sure. Plumb ahead, Lee."
A movement below: he let go of the flower, sighted, fired. The movement died.
He was in the tent, safe, and Hester nibbled his chin. He was sweating. The shaman was sitting cross-legged, but a shiver passed over Lee as he saw that the eagle daemon was not there near him. Clearly this forest was a bad place, full of haunting phantasms.
The pilot was helpless. Under the weight of the birds the craft began to sink farther and farther down, and then another of those sudden cruel scarps appeared, shouldering up out of the night and of course quite invisible to the men inside the zeppelin, who were swinging their guns wildly and firing at random.
"Lee, this is my fault," she said.
"Well, that makes me feel better about doing this," said Lee, and took careful aim.
"You aint dreaming, Lee, youre seeing. If Ida known you was a seer, Ida cured you a long while back. Now, you cut it out, you hear?"
"As clearly as you saw what happened to the zeppelins during the night. Pack what you want to carry, and come away now."
"Depends. There was four of those zeppelins, and he destroyed three."
He rubbed her head with his thumb, and she shook her ears.
It was a hard struggle, but she tugged out the little scarlet flower with her strong teeth and laid it by his right hand. With a great effort he closed it in his fist and said, "Serafina Pekkala! Help me, I beg ..."
"No. Too busy ducking. Reload while you can, boy."
Hester was failing.
And then the fight began. Within a minute the crack of rifles, the whine of ricocheting bullets, the smash of pulverizing rock echoed and rang the length of the mountainside and along the hollow gulch behind. The smell of cordite, and the burning smell that came from the powdered rock where the bullets hit, were just variations on the smell of burning wood from the forest, until it seemed that the whole world was burning.
"Theyve seen us," he said.
"Ill watch this way," she said.
Another long silence. The pain nearby was losing its fear of him. It was like a pack of jackals, circling, sniffing, treading closer, and he knew they wouldnt leave him now till theyd eaten him bare.
Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.
"Hester, dont you go before I do," Lee whispered.
Another crack, and this time the bullet went deep somewhere inside, seeking out the center of his life. He thought: It wont find it there. Hesters my center. And he saw a blue flicker down below, and strained to bring the barrel over toil.
And Lee saw him mistily, one soldier of the Imperial Guard creeping away from his companys defeat.
He fired. There was only a small patch of blue to aim at, but he hit it. With a surprised cry the man fell back and died.
He looked, aimed, shot. The figure fell.
The osprey daemon Sayan K6tor awoke, and stretched her great wings above where Lee was sitting. Hester looked up and turned her head this way and that, looking at the mighty daemon with each golden eye hi turn, and a moment later the shaman himself came out of the tent.
He rolled down behind the rock and worked the bolt back and forth. It was hot, and the blood that had flowed freely over it from the scalp wound was drying and making the mechanism stiff. He spat on it carefully, and it loosened.
The zeppelin was descending fast, making for the slope directly below them. It was clear that the pursuers intended to capture them, not kill them, for a burst of gunfire just then would have finished both of them in a second. Instead, the pilot brought the airship skillfully to a hover just above the ground, at the highest point in the slope where he safely could, and from the cabin door a stream of blue-uniformed men jumped down, their wolf daemons beside them, and began to climb.
Fire, heat, flames ... Lee woke up again, his body as hot as if hed been lying in the desert sun.
And sure enough, the drone of the zeppelin soon became audible even over the sound of the flames and of their own labored breathing, for they were hurrying now, clambering upward over roots and rocks and fallen tree trunks and stopping only to gather breath. Sayan Kotor, flying high, swooped down to tell them how much progress they were making, and how far behind the flames were; though it wasnt long before they could see smoke above the trees behind them, and then a streaming banner of flame.
"We got one more zeppelin to think about before you start fretting about morals, Lee. Theres thirty, forty men with guns all coming for us. Imperial soldiers, whats more. Survival first, morals later."
"Because, Dr.Grumman, or John Parry, or whatever name you take up in whatever world you end up in, you be aware of this: I love that little child like a daughter. If Id had a child of my own, I couldnt love her more. And if you break that oath, whatever remains of me will pursue whatever remains of you, and youll spend the rest of eternity wishing you never existed. Thats how important that oath is."
And Lee sat and watched helplessly as the zeppelin flew on directly into a scarp of the mountains that rose up before them.
Lee looked around incredulously at the soaking vegetation and said, "How?"
Lee found it hard to pull the trigger. Everything was hard. He had to try three times, and finally he got it. The blue uniform tumbled away down the slope.
Lee saw the fireball and heard through the roar in his ears Hester saying, "Thats all of em, Lee."
"Not the big boulder, Lee," said Hester. "You caint see to the right from there, and they could rush us. Take the smaller one."
Lee rubbed his jaw. The most valuable things he owned were also the most portable—namely, the instruments from the balloon—so he retrieved them from the basket, stowed them carefully in a knapsack, and made sure his rifle was loaded and dry. He left the basket, the rigging, and the gasbag where they lay, tangled and twisted among the branches. From now on he was an aeronaut no more, unless by some miracle he escaped with his life and found enough money to buy another balloon. Now he had to move like an insect along the surface of the earth.
twenty-five. He had thirty bullets.
At the last moment Sayan Kotor screamed, and a thunder of wingbeats drowned even the roar of the engine as every bird took off and flew away. And the men in the cabin had four or five horrified seconds of knowledge before the zeppelin crashed and burst into flames.
"They have an engine that throws out a kind of naphtha blended with potash, which ignites when it touches water. The Imperial Navy developed it to use in their war with Nippon. If the forest is saturated, it will catch all the more quickly."
The shaman held out his hand, and Lee shook it. Then Grumman turned and made his way up the gulch, and Lee looked around for the best place to make his stand.
They all knew exactly what they must do. And they streamed toward the airship, the swiftest reaching it first, but none so swiftly as Sayan Kotor; the tiny wrens and finches, the darting swifts, the silent-winged owls—within a minute the craft was laden with them, their claws scrabbling for purchase on the oiled silk or puncturing it to gain a hold.
His daemon, gliding and circling above, tipped her wings and sped to the ravine on a billowing updraft. The men didnt pause, climbing on as quickly as they could, but Lee said, "Excuse me for asking this if its impertinent, but I never knew anyone whose daemon could do that except witches. But youre no witch. Was that something you learned to do, or did it come natural?"
"Makes no sense," she said. "Do it anyway."
The mountainside rose sheer and impassable ahead of them. There was only one route out of the trap they were in, and that was a narrow defile ahead, where a dry riverbed emerged from a fold in the cuffs.
He didnt finish, because another bullet found him. This time it smashed into his left leg, and before he could even blink, a third one clipped his head again, like a red-hot poker laid along his skull.
"I caint shoot a man in the back," Lee said.
Sayan Kotor is telling me that the ravine leads to a pass. If we get there before they see us, we could escape yet."
"You think I ever did what you told me? I took it because the witch—"
"No, its more than that," he said. "Its theirs or Lyras. I caint see how, but were connected to that child, and Im glad of it."
He propped the rifle on the dead and useless arm that had been so full of life a minute ago, and sighted with stolid concentration: one shot... two ... three, and each found its man.
And her beautiful gold-brown eyes were growing dull.
"Nothing big," she said. "A bullet clipped your scalp."
"Theyre after me, Mr. Scoresby," said Grumman, "not you. If you give me the rifle and surrender yourself, youll survive. Theyre disciplined troops. Youll be a prisoner of war."
And Lee felt whatever bird nature he was sharing respond with joy to the command of the eagle queen, and whatever humanness he had left felt the strangest of pleasures: that of offering eager obedience to a stronger power that was wholly right. And he wheeled and turned with the rest of the mighty flock, a hundred different species all turning as one in the magnetic will of the eagle, and saw against the silver cloud rack the hateful dark regularity of a zeppelin.
"Theres a man on the left about to shoot," said Hester, and as she spoke, a crack came from his rifle, and chips of stone flew off the boulder a foot from where she crouched. The bullet whined off into the gulch, but she didnt move a muscle.
Outside the tent there was still the endless drip-drip of wet leaves on the canvas, but the storm was over. Pale gray light seeped in, and Lee propped himself up to find Hester blinking beside him and the shaman wrapped in a blanket so deeply asleep he might have been dead, had not Sayan Kotor been perched asleep on a fallen branch outside.
"Aim straight," she said.
"Busy night," Lee remarked.
"Damn, these are men like me," he said.
"Hes the one," Hester breathed.
"I mean, have we discharged our duty?"
"I guess they want to catch us alive," Grumman replied, stripping a branch of its leaves so he could use it as a walking stick, "and theyre waiting to see where we leave the forest."
Lee ignored that and said, "Git moving. Make the gulch and Ill hold them off from the mouth while you find your way out the other end. I brought you this far, and I aint going to sit back and let em catch you now."
"Just tell me before you go," said Lee, "because I wont be easy till I know. What side Im fighting for I caint tell, and I dont greatly care. Just teH me this: What Im a-going to do now, is that going to help that little girl Lyra, or harm her?"
And the man creeping away and the six or seven others who were the only remnant of the Guard, and who hadnt dared come closer to the man holding the ravine, were engulfed by the fire that fell on them.
"Maybe so ..."
"You think the witch will come?"
And it was like receiving a sentence of death. Hester stumbled, even surefooted, firm-hearted Hester stumbled and faltered. Grumman leaned on the stick he carried and shaded his eyes to look back, and Lee turned to look too.
Crack: another man fell, and his daemon went out like a candle.
He said, or thought, "Those poor men didnt have to come to this, nor did we."
Lee pointed, and Grumman said, "My thoughts exactly, Mr. Scoresby."
"Aint you dreaming too, Hester?" he muttered.
His labors in the night had drained a lot of his energy. How far they could keep going was a question Lee didnt want to face; but when they were nearly at the entrance to the ravine, and actually on the edge of the dried riverbed, he heard a change in the sound of the zeppelin.
So he took aim with his last bullet at the zeppelin itself, still roaring and straining to rise with its one engine, and the bullet must have been red-hot, or maybe a burning brand from the forest below was wafted to the airship on an updraft; for the gas suddenly billowed into an orange fireball, and the envelope and the metal skeleton rose a little way and then tumbled down very slowly, gently, but full of a fiery death.
She said, "We held em off. We held out. Were a-helping Lyra."
Not a blade of grass, not a speck of green to rest on.
The pilot watched it rear up in the window, but nothing could interest him. Lee pushed back against the seat in horror, but nothing happened to stop it, and at the moment of impact he cried, "Hester!"
"The Skraeling. I told you to take his ring. Without that wed never be in this trouble."
"I wont forget."
And without the slightest transition he was floating in the air alongside the shamans daemon, Sayan Kotor the osprey. To be in the presence of another mans da;mon and away from his own affected Lee with a powerful throb of guilt and strange pleasure. They were gliding, as if he too were a bird, on the turbulent updrafts above the forest, and Lee looked around through the dark air, now suffused with a pallid glow from the full moon that occasionally glared through a brief rent in the cloud cover and made the treetops ring with silver.
Gasping, Lee and Grumman forced themselves up the steep slope of rocks and scree. Half the sky was obscured by smoke and heat shimmer, but high above there floated the squat shape of the one remaining zeppelin—too far away, Lee thought hopefully, to see them even through binoculars.
Then there was a long silence. Lee fumbled in his pocket and found some more bullets. As he reloaded, he felt something so rare his heart nearly failed; he felt Hesters face pressed to his own, and it was wet with tears.
She was right, of course, and as he sipped the scalding brew and smoked a cigar, with the daylight gradually growing stronger, he wondered what he would do if he were in charge of the one remaining zeppelin. Withdraw and wait for full daylight, no doubt, and fly high enough to scan the edge of the forest over a wide area, so he could see when Lee and Grumman broke cover.
"I understand. And you have my word."
"Its going to help her," said Grumman.
He adjusted his position and sighted along the old Winchester until he had the port engine mounting plumb hi view, and fired. The crack raised the soldiers heads as they climbed toward him, but a second later the engine suddenly roared and then just as suddenly seized and died. The zeppelin lurched over to one side. Lee could hear the other engine howling, but the airship was grounded now.
"And your oath. You wont forget what you swore to me?"
"Theres one man left," Hester muttered. "Hes a-making for the zeppelin."
"Sure she did. The flower."
The Specter was leaning over the pilot and pressing what would be its face to his. His daemon, a finch, fluttered and shrieked and tried to pull away, only to fall half-fainting on the instrument panel. The pilot turned his face to Lee and put out a hand, but Lee had no power of movement.
There was a roaring in Lees ears that had nothing to do with the conflagration in the forest below, or with the laboring drone of the zeppelin trying to rise again. It had to do with his childhood, and the Alamo. How often he and his companions had played that heroic battle, in the ruins of the old fort, taking turns to be Danes and French! His childhood was coming back to him, with a vengeance. He took out the Navajo ring of his mothers and laid it on the rock beside him. In the old Alamo games, Hester had often been a cougar or a wolf, and once or twice a rattlesnake, but mostly a mockingbird. Now— "Quit daydreaming and take a sight," she said. "This aint play, Lee."
"Damn, Lee, youre twitching like an aspen leaf. Whats the matter with you?" Hester grumbled, and flicked her long ears.
"Do you believe him? Grumman?"
Hester crept up close to his left shoulder.
"Why?"
"Sure she will. We should have called her before."
"The witch, Lee! You said the witch! Remember?"
They smelled the smoke before they heard the flames, because a breeze from the sea was lifting it inland. By the time they reached the edge of the trees they could hear the fire, a deep and greedy roar.
The eagle swooped down again, and the men climbed higher. Hester preferred to find her own way over the rocks, so Lee followed where she led, avoiding the loose stones and moving as swiftly as he could over the larger rocks, making all the time for the little gulch.
"Shame to die with one bullet left, though."
Her ears flicked slightly.
Lees boulder was soon scarred and pitted, and he felt the thud of the bullets as they hit it. Once he saw the fur on Hesters back ripple as the wind of a bullet passed over it, but she didnt budge.
The only sound apart from the drip of water was the normal forest birdsong. No engines in the sky, no enemy voices; so Lee thought it might be safe to light the fire, and after a struggle he got it going and brewed some coffee.
"You can see that, can you?"
"Theyre talking," she said. "I can hear, but I caint understand."
"A busy day to come. We must leave the forest at once, Mr. Scoresby. They are going to burn it."
"It aint a contractual thing. Its a moral thing."
The anguish in the mans eyes was wrenching. Something true and living was being drained from him, and his daemon fluttered weakly and called in a wild high call, but she was dying.
"Then thats all I need to know. Go well."
"Why didnt they do this last night?" said Lee. "They could have barbecued us in our sleep."
Crouched on the gray boulder, her ears flat along her back, she looked like a little stone herself, gray-brown and inconspicuous, except for her eyes. Hester was no beauty; she was about as plain and scrawny as a hare could be; but her eyes were marvelously colored, gold-hazel flecked with rays of deepest peat brown and forest green. And now those eyes were looking down at the last landscape theyd ever see: a barren slope of brutal tumbled rocks, and beyond it a forest on fire.
And woke.
Hester moved around to look.
She flicked her ears and said, "Dont remember no contract."
"In my breast pocket. Fetch it, Hester, I caint move."
"I had no strength left to bring the fourth one down" was all he said, and they moved quickly into the shelter of the gulch.
Then he became aware of the light by which he was seeing the shaman, because the fire was long out, and the darkness of the forest was profound. Some distant flicker picked out the tree trunks and the undersides of dripping leaves, and Lee knew at once what it was: his dream had been true, and a zeppelin pilot had flown into the hillside.
