Then he reached in and drew more oranges out and started throwing them to the other soldiers, until more than five dozen oranges had come out of that small sack. “Possible?” he asked.
He walked up to Jerome Handy, looked up at the big man, and said, “Do you think it possible that I could force you to your knees with one hand?”
Jerome’s eyes narrowed and his complexion flushed, and he said, “No, I don’t!” Erik cleared his throat, and when Jerome turned to look, Erik nodded once toward Sho Pi, who stood behind him. Jerome saw the other Isalani raise a questioning eyebrow; 52887_Shadow of a Dark.qxd 9/3/02 3:49 PM Page 296
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then he turned to Nakor and stared at him for a long moment. Lowering his voice, he said, “But maybe you could do it with two hands.”
Nakor glanced over at Sho Pi and grinned.
Turning away, he said, “Only need one.”
To the assembled company he said, “Take it on faith, you desperate men. This the Pantathians can do: they can end life as we know it on this world. No bird will sing to greet the dawn, and no insect will buzz from flower to flower. No seed will take root.
No child will cry for his mother’s breast, and no thing that crawls, walks, or flies will survive.”
A young man Erik didn’t know well, David Gefflin, said, “Why would they do such a mad thing?”
“Because they think this Dragon Lord, this Alma-Lodaka, is a goddess. A powerful being she was, but no goddess. Yet to these sick creatures, whom she created from snakes, she was. Their Mother-Goddess they call her. And they believe that to return her to this lifeless world will bring them into a state of grace with her, that she will make them first among all the new creatures she creates. So they believe and so they act. And this is why they must be opposed.”
“How can they do this?” asked Billy Goodwin.
“How we will not say,” answered Calis. “We will only say that the King and a few others know this secret. No others need know. All we need know is that it is our job to stop them.”
“How?” demanded Biggo. “You lost almost two thousand men, and from what you’ve said, their army is now twice the size of the one you faced.”
Calis looked around. “Because we don’t travel to Novindus to face this conquering army, Biggo. We travel to Novindus to join it.”
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Erik w
winced.
The roundhouse kick Nakor caught him with had been pulled, but it still stung.
“You still charge like a mad bull,” scolded the Isalani. His face was like wrinkled leather, but his eyes showed a youthful merriment. Sho Pi watched closely as his older countryman spun again, unexpectedly. Erik moved just in time to keep from getting kicked in the chest again, and snapped off a kick of his own, coming quickly back to a defensive position.
“Why!” shouted Nakor, scolding. “Why did you draw back?”
Erik blew out hard, sucking in air as perspiration poured from his face and body. Puffing, he said,
“Because . . . I would have been . . . off balance. That kick . . . was to get you to back off . . . not to hurt you. If I had followed up, you would have broken my neck.”
Nakor grinned, and once more Erik was struck by how this strange man, aboard their ship for less than a month now, had come to be so liked by everyone.
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He told outrageous stories, almost certainly all lies, and his habit of winning consistently at cards caused Erik to think him probably a cheat as well. But if a liar and cheat could said to be trusted, Nakor was.
Sho Pi came to stand next to Nakor. “It is wise to know when to regroup, just as it is wise to know when to press.” He bowed, and Erik returned the bow. At first, like the others, he had thought all the rituals strange, and had mocked them, but now, also like the others, he performed them without thought.
In fact, he now admitted to himself that the rituals helped keep him focused.
“Master—” began Sho Pi.
“I tell you again, boy, don’t call me master!”
The men laughed. Sho Pi had decided at some point during the week following Nakor’s arrival that Nakor was the master he had been sent to find. This had brought a consistent stream of denial from Nakor that was now in its third week. At least once in every conversation, Sho Pi called Nakor master and Nakor demanded he stop.
Sho Pi ignored the instruction. “I think we should show the men shi-to-ku.”
Nakor shook his head. “You show them. I’m tired. I’m going to go over there and eat an orange.”
Erik flexed his left shoulder, stiff from the blow to his chest. Sho Pi noticed. “That is bothering you?”
Erik nodded. “Caught me here,” he said, pointing to just below his right pectoral muscle, “but I can feel it all the way through to my neck and elbow. My shoulder is tightening.”
“Then come here,” said Sho Pi.
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hand, then laid his hands upon Erik’s shoulder. Erik’s eyes widened as he felt heat flowing from Sho Pi’s hands. The throbbing in his shoulder quickly diminished. As he knelt there, Erik said, “What are you doing?”
Sho Pi said, “In my homeland it is known as reiki.
There is healing energy in the body. It is what helps you recover from injuries and disease.”
As the heat loosened the bruised muscle, Erik said, “Can you teach me to do this?”
“It takes a great deal of time—” began Sho Pi.
“Ha!” shouted Nakor. Moving from the rail, he tossed a half-eaten orange over the side and said,
“More monastic mumbo-jumbo! Reiki is no ‘mystic meditation; there is no prayer. It’s a natural thing.
Anyone can do it!”
Sho Pi smiled slightly as Nakor waved him aside.
Standing over Erik, he said, “You want to do this?”
Erik said, “Yes.”
Nakor said, “Give me your right hand?”
Erik held it out, and Nakor turned it over, palm up. He closed his eyes and made some signs, then slapped Erik’s hand, hard. Erik felt his eyes water from the unexpected blow. “What did you do that for?” he demanded.
“Wakes up the energies. Now, hold your hand here.” Nakor moved Erik’s hand to his shoulder. Erik felt the same heat flowing from his own hand he had felt from Sho Pi’s. “Without prayer or meditation, it flows,” instructed Nakor. “It’s always on, so whatever you touch you will heal. Now I will show you what to touch.” To Sho Pi he said, “I can teach these men to use the power in two days, boy. None of your mystic nonsense. The temples claim this is magic, 52887_Shadow of a Dark.qxd 9/3/02 3:49 PM Page 300
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but it isn’t even a good trick. It’s just that most people are too stupid to know they have the power or how to use it.”
Sho Pi looked at Nakor and feigned a serious expression, but his eyes were amused. “Yes, Master.”
“And don’t call me master!” shouted Nakor.
He instructed the men to circle around and began talking about the body’s natural healing energies. Erik was fascinated. He thought back to those horses he had treated, the ones who should have gotten better but didn’t, and the ones that recovered from injuries against any reasonable expectation of success, and he wondered how much of it was their spirit.
“This energy is made of the stuff of life,” said Nakor. “I think you are not stupid men, but you are also men who do not care much for those things I find so fascinating, so I will not try to explain to you what I think this stuff of life is. Leave it to say that this en
ergy is everywhere, in all things living.”
Calis came up on deck and caught Nakor’s eyes.
Something passed between them as Nakor said, “All living things are connected.” Erik glanced back at where Roo sat, and noticed his friend had also caught the exchange.
Nakor went on to explain about how the body can heal itself, but that most people don’t know how to accept their own power. He demonstrated a few things the men needed to know to take full advantage of the reiki—where best to place their hands to achieve the desired effect, how to identify different types of injury and illness—but the energy seemed always to be there whenever they touched themselves or one another after Nakor had “awakened the power” in their hands.
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By midday all the men had been slapped on the hand and had spent hours practicing healing energies on one another. Nakor and Sho Pi had led them through a series of exercises designed to help them identify the sources of common problems and how to recognize the flow of energies in another’s body. At the midday meal the men were joking about this laying hand on one another, but they were also obviously impressed at the ability of this simple act to relieve aches and reduce swelling and generally make them feel better
After lunch, Erik and Roo were sent aloft, relieving sailors on the day watch so they could eat.
Securing a sail that the Captain had ordered reefed as the wind freshened, Roo said, “What do you think of all that?”
Erik said, “What Nakor said: it’s a useful tool. I don’t care a fig for what Sho Pi says about its being a mystic thing. It works; I’ll use it.” With a near-wist-ful note in his voice, he added, “I wish I had known about it when I was tending Greylock’s mare. It would have made her come back faster, I think.”
Roo said, “I think anything we know that can keep us healthy is good.”
Erik nodded. There was a grim reluctance among the men to consider the eventual end of their journey.
After Calis had announced his intention to take them to join this invading host, he had briefly outlined their mission.
They would land a small party on a beach below a cliff where ships did not normally pass. The thirty-six prisoners and fifty-eight survivors of the last campaign, with Foster, de Loungville, Nakor, and Calis, would climb this cliff face. Once atop the plateau, they would 52887_Shadow of a Dark.qxd 9/3/02 3:49 PM Page 302
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travel overland to meet some allies of Calis’s, then move to intercept the invaders at a city called Khaipur. Their mission was to discover what weakness, if any, existed in this host, and Calis and Nakor would be the ones likely to understand what that would be. But when it was discovered what that weakness might be, then it was every man’s duty to return to the City of the Serpent River with the information, to get back to Trenchard’s Revenge, and get the critical intelligence back to Prince Nicholas.
If they could contrive a way to balk the onslaught before the invaders could muster a host big enough to cross the waters and assault the Kingdom, all the better. But Calis drove home again and again the risk that hung over everyone. Erik remembered his last words on the subject: “No one will escape. This plague of invasion is but the first part of the destruction. Dark magic beyond your ability to comprehend will be unleashed in the end, and should you hide in the deepest cave in the farthest mountains of the Northlands, or in the remotest island on some distant sea, you will die. If we do not stop this host, we all will die.” He had looked from man to man. “That is the only choice, win or die.”
Now Erik understood why Robert de Loungville had needed “desperate men,” because for all intents and purposes they were about to stick their neck back in the noose. Erik absently fingered the one he still wore.
“Mercy!” said Roo, bringing Erik out of his revery.
“What?”
“Speak of a demon and he appears! Isn’t that Owen Greylock’s silver scalp I see over there on the foredeck of the Ranger?”
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Erik looked hard and saw the tiny figure on the nearby ship. “It could be. About the right size, and the hair has that silver streaking through it.”
“I wonder why we didn’t see him at the beach?”
Erik finished off tying a line. “Maybe he didn’t come ashore. Maybe he already knows the tasks at hand.”
Roo nodded. “In all of this there are still some things I don’t understand. Who was this Miranda woman, anyway? Every man I mention her to has met her, sometimes under different names. And Greylock was your friend, maybe, but if he’s on that ship, did he have something to do with our being captured?”
Erik shrugged. “If that is Greylock, we’ll find out when we get where we’re going. As for the rest, who cares? We’re here, and we have a job to do. Thinking about why isn’t going to change that.”
Roo looked exasperated. “You have too accepting a nature, my friend. When this is all done, if we survive, I plan on getting rich. There’s a merchant in Krondor with a homely daughter who he wants to marry off. I may be just the lad for her.”
Erik laughed. “You can be ambitious for both of us, Roo.”
They continued to work, and when Erik glanced over at the Ranger, the figure who might have been Owen was gone.
Weeks passed. They sailed through the Straits of Darkness without mishap, though the weather was difficult. For the first time Erik felt what it was like to be at risk aboard ship, hanging from rigging as weather buffeted him. The old hands joked that this was a mild 52887_Shadow of a Dark.qxd 9/3/02 3:49 PM Page 304
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passage for the time of year in the Straits, and wove stories of impossible conditions, with mile-high funnel clouds and waves the size of castles.
It took three days, and when they had passed through, Erik had nearly collapsed on his bunk, as had his companions. The experienced sailors could sleep through the storm on their off watch, but the former prisoners weren’t that blasé about it.
As life aboard the ship became more routine, the relationships between the men evolved. They would talk for days about the grim purpose behind their mission, then more days would go by without comment. Speculation would lead to dispute, followed by silent acknowledgment that each man, in his own way, was afraid.
Those former soldiers who came over from the Ranger to train with the prisoners were just as likely to give long narratives about the previous venture south as they were to remain silent. It depended upon the man and his mood.
Erik did discover one thing: Calis was nothing human, if the older soldiers were to be believed. Far more telling than Jadow’s and Jerome’s tales of his prodigious strength was one old soldier, a former corporal at Carse, who said that he had first met Calis twenty-four years previously, when the corporal had been a raw recruit, and Calis hadn’t aged a day since.
Roo was learning to curb his temper, if not entirely master it. He had gotten into several arguments, but only one had come to blows, and that had quickly been ended by Jerome Handy’s picking Roo up, carrying him up on deck, and threatening to drop him over the side. The crew laughed as Roo dangled over the water with Jerome gripping his ankles.
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Roo had been more embarrassed than angered by the incident, and when Erik had spoken to him about it afterward, he shrugged it off. He said something that had stuck with Erik ever since. He looked his boyhood friend in the eye and said, “Whatever happens, I have been afraid, Erik. I cried like a baby and peed in my pants when they took us to the gallows.
After that, what is there left to be afraid of?”
Erik enjoyed the sea, but he didn’t think he could live the sailor’s life. He long
ed for his forge and horses to tend. He knew that if he survived the coming battles, that would be his choice: a forge and maybe, someday, a wife and children.
He thought about Rosalyn and his mother, Milo and Ravensburg. He wondered how they were doing, and if they knew he was alive. Manfred might have mentioned it to a guard, who might have told someone in town. But there was certainly no one who cared enough about him or his family to ensure that his mother or Rosalyn knew. He had thoughts of Rosalyn, and found them strangely neutral. He loved her, but when he imagined a wife and children, Rosalyn wasn’t there. No one was.
Roo had already made up his mind he would return to Krondor and marry Helmut Grindle’s homely daughter. Every time he said that, Erik laughed.
As the days wore on, the men became more pro-ficient in every aspect of their training. The stories of the surviving men from the last mission and their example, their own grim determination to excel, spurred on the former prisoners to match their achievements. As well as they could aboard ship, they practiced their weapons, and on calmer days 52887_Shadow of a Dark.qxd 9/3/02 3:49 PM Page 306
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Calis worked with them on archery. The weapon of choice was a small bow used by the horsemen of the Eastland steppes, the Jeshandi. Calis had his own longbow stored in his cabin, but used the shorter weapon with ease. About half the men turned out to be good to excellent with the weapon. Roo was better than Erik, but neither youngster was among the first thirty bowmen. Those would be issued bows, Calis had said, but he wanted every man at least familiar enough with the weapon to have some chance of hitting a target.
That seemed to be the underlying pattern to the training. De Loungville and Foster would drill men with every weapon they might be forced to use, from long poll arms to daggers. Each man was marked down in a journal as to his strengths and weaknesses, but none was spared the hours of drills, even with the weapons for which he showed no aptitude. What had begun at the camp outside of Krondor continued aboard ship. Each day Erik spent a half watch using a sword, spear, or bow, a knife, mauler, or his fists, but always he was expected to improve.