Conflict of Interest: Part 9 By Zuiderzee (zuiderzee@yahoo.com) Women in Power for the wrong reasons. The continuing legend of Doctor Ustreed Hormgrud, Scholar of Law and Soldier of the Palatinate Continuing from part 8: Given a single day of respite in her rigorous training, Ustreed's lonely ride into the country has brought her into pursuit, battle and a life or death struggle with a superior force. Pitted against the marauding Gouccle raiding party, Ustreed's initial success turns quickly to desperation and a life or death struggle... ^ ^ ^ Waves of stomach-flopping, head-spinning, sweat-boiling nausea at least helped Ustreed realize she had a good chance of surviving. Early introduction into soldiering had taught her numerous disciplines such as how to overcome detrimental sensations such as inferiority, panic, pain and yes, even the urge to vomit. She needed it all now. Ustreed's throat hurt, the flesh bruised and remembering the feel of powerful Gouccle fingers clenched on her windpipe, trying to choke the life out of her even as he was dying of a mortal wound to the throat. She had cut his gullet wide open, hadn't she? Blackness came on again and her head which she didn't recall raising, fell back down with a ping on the hard ground. * Scraping footfalls sounded in her ears. Ustreed opened one blood-pasted eye to see the javelin-transfixed Gouccle stumble around in a fit of his own adrenaline as though drunk with it in his slow horror that he was going to breathe his last. Not quite resigned to his fate, the Gouccle panted and sighed and mumbled wetly, falling to his knees only to rise up again and continue wandering in circles. He seemed to take no notice of her, but came close enough on one circuit to blot out the sun on her face. Then the moved away, but Ustreed had drifted away once more. Her last conscious thought was of her sword.... * She came to again, her mouth tasting like a dirty coin. There was a strange man with his bloody hands resting on her upper chest. He was still breathing. His hands clutched and raked feebly on her breastplate as he murmured deleriously in his foreign tongue, sloppily as though her had a mouthful of syrup. Her bloodied, saw-backed hanger had slipped from her hand, but it was just within reach. She had to concentrate to get the fingers to clutch at the hilt. They reached and slipped, reached, slipped and slipped again, failing to close on the moist, tender leather that wrapped the grip of her most familiar weapon. Damn! It was so hard to think clearly! The combination of weakness and thin high-meadow air was making the solid ground heave like a raft on a lake. He's still alive--trying to kill me--have to fight-- Blackness--no, not as deep as before, maybe only a deep gray fell across her eyes and her heavy, heavy head rolled in hellish slumber. * Her helmet was still on, gripping her aching head like a horseshoe firmly nailed to an split, festering hoof. Horse. Horse? Yes, Ustreed thouhgt in the midst of her delerium, there was a horse. But her immediate concern was herself. She had fallen out of Trooper's saddle. No, not fallen. A man had pulled her out. Not just any man, a Gouccle. The Gouccles. That last one had really put up a fight. It was so hard to think! I am Doctor Ustreed Eluza Hormgrud--Scholar of the Zurinthal Ministry of Justice. Member of the Palatinate Guard. Assigned to the Crenish Army. I was--I still am--responding to a call to arms. More and more began to come back, but not everything, and even then, not in chronological order or by sheer relevance. Concentrate! An alarm was raised. Help will arrive. But it's also a cloudy day--the smoke from the signal tower may not be seen at all. The enemy had invaded. Little children bent on thievery, but still invasion. Incursions small or large demanded the most serious countermeasures. She had killed some-- Perhaps not all. They'd ultimately come close, close enough to smell their unwashed bodies and see the red in their eyes. And the woodgrain of their spears. There had been a spearman-- She had fallen on him, struggled on stony ground and bashed him a few times with her helmeted head while he had stuck his knife in her hip and then gashed her rump. There was blood. Ustreed closed her eyes and then opened them, staring up past the nose and brow guards of her helmet to see a cloudy sky. It had been morning when she came across this place and-- PAIN! And then more nausea. Having rolled onto the place where she'd been lacerated had helped stanch the bleeding, but the wound was deep--all the way to the bone and it needed binding. A deep groaning to her right told her at least one of the big Gouccles hadn't expired. She guessed this was the one with the javelin jutting from his body. The imbedded shaft of the weapon may well have arrested a quick bleed-out and brought on shock and delerium. She loosely remembered his blind wanderings and how close he'd come during his aimless orbit of the scene of battle. The one whose arterial blood was drying to a tight, stinking mask on her face had to be out of action. Then the sword was in her hand. She hadn't really recalled closing her hand around it; she had tried to for a long while and hadn't remembered giving up the effort. Preparing for the worst possible feeling, she tensed and fought her way to her knees, using the sword as a feeble oldster might use a cane to rise after a bad stumble. The blood drained from her head and her heartbeat forgot its cadence, but miraculously, she didn't collapse. She gave a heave as if to empty her stomach, but nothing came. At her feet was a mess of deep tracks--most made by human feet, either bare or in boots, and to a far lesser extent, the hooffprints of a large horse. Trooper! Trooper, owing to his hoof, hadn't wandered far, keeping clear of the warring humans as he went about on three legs, his two hind and the left foreleg, keeping the opposite hoof clear of the stony soil. The last Gouccle she'd fought with was stiff in death, his spear resting on the ground a pace away from his hand. A stupid urge to sit and then lie down and sleep teased her with its logic, but she banished it. On legs that felt like withering pond reeds, she dragged her feet in a sleepwalkers shuffle in the direction of the horse, seeing the horizon tilt--the alps slide left and right and the clouds tilt in the sky which seemed full of black dots like weird, oncoming fluttermice. She stumbled into the animal, working her way to his side, mindful to keep her feet out from under his. Trooper hobbled back. With her vision blurred and her dexterity addled, it would be impossible to dig the rock out of Trooper's hoof. Ustreed did the impossible. ^ ^ ^ A hearty, greedy swig from her wooden canteen helped put things into perspective. The cold, beech-tasting water hit the back of her parched throat and plunged into her stomach. She pulled off her helmet and doused her head with the balance, making holes in the red mask of Gouccle blood, but not washing it completely away. Like a drunk, she leaned against Trooper's side, wanting badly the seat of the saddle, but not wanting to risk putting more weight on his sore hoof, impacted stone or no. Strips of cloth now bound her hip where the knife had sunk. Her nicked backside was sore, not quite sore enough to forbid riding. With another iron dose of discipline, Ustreed mounted up on Trooper's back and sank into the saddle, slowly slipping her feet into the stirrups. Trooper didn't want to go uphill. Ustreed didn't make him. Instead, she turned away from the L-shaped remnant of wall, not knowing or caring if it marked the border or not. A cloud blundered through the pass, gray and cold and wet, shredding on the jagged mountainside and obscuring everything for a half an hour during which Ustreed wiped and sheathed her sword, took stock of her javelins and fixed in her mind the direction she'd come from. Brehn would have know where they were. Somehow his utter absence made everything easier to bear. Now, once again, there were trees, but they didn't look all that familiar. And no farmer's fields cut into the hillsides. Black dots once again swam in her vision, but they cleared once the boughs of the trees closed overhead in a canopy. Getting into the shade helped. Trooper stumbled a few times, the irregular walk forcing Ustreed to stay awake despite the urge to slump in the saddle like a fugitive after a wearying escape. Through eyes half open she saw the bare ground give way to grass. Water gurgled somewhere nearby. That would help. The blood on her face stank and the flies it drew began to nettle her eyes and nose to get at the caked-on gore. Gradually, Ustreed became aware of another presence with her on the hummock-green of the high meadow. She swung her head left, seeing nothing, only to swing it right and let out a gasp of surprise in spite of herself. It was another foreigner. Again, maybe not. Ustreed knew the political border here was tortuous. Maybe she was the hostile invader. Banking that this latest stranger similarly saw her as a young man and not a strapping maiden, Ustreed saluted with her sword, showing courtesy as well as her armed status. The gaunt stranger hadn't said a word. It was like having a weird rhyme to herself. Ustreed couldn't determine the gender of the stranger. Long, dark hair flowed down from the stranger's lowered head in thousands of gathered strands, but those strands were not matted and filthy like the hair of hermits and maroons, this almost seemed racial in nature; a trait. The skin tone was an odd gray like a pale tan that didn't turn out or that the light of a different time of day shone on him. Him. Could be a her. Wears a robe, has soft hands, a close gait of small steps. No facial hair. A slender neck. No appreciable bustline. "Who are you?" Ustreed asked, the words spilling from her mouth in careless pronouncement though it would have been wiser to remain quiet and evaluative for a while longer. Slowed by his injury, Trooper was walking so slowly now that the stranger who was picking his way-- HIS way? More and more, Ustreed had to concede this was a male, but certainly not any male of good character in the Palatinate. He was now picking his way along the uneven ground, parallel with Trooper at a distance of only 3 yards. Too close. No Gouccle. Nor any Cumexian. There were many peoples in Sury; it was an ancient land, filled with the graveyards of classic civilizations. This was just another uncouth orphan. "Who are you?!" Ustreed reigned Trooper a few paces away. The indigo-robed dandy cast a somber look back at Ustreed like a threatened informer wanting desperately to speak to someone in charge but fully aware there were sinister eyes and ears in the immediate vicinity. Ustreed had seen that look before in children of houses she had been obliged to search. Children torn between parental loyalty and telling the authorities about criminal activity inside the household had the terrible, torn look in their faces. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came. His hands rose as if to gesture, but then fell to his sides in futility as he walked on, keeping side by side with Trooper in an agonizingly slow race to the water's edge. "WHO ARE YOU?!" Ustreed shouted, causing the stranger to wince, but not to react otherwise. There was something familiar about the figure, but the impression was profoundly buried in her mind, too deep and dark and the her combat injuries were blurring the facts in her brain. This was someone important, she knew that. Given world enough and time, she would have recalled more, but she had neither. The stranger regarded her with a morose rage of frustration in his eyes which Hormgrud saw at last as the bizarre pink of a freshly- minted groat--called copper, but blended with much zinc--they looked impotent behind the dark strands of hair that fell across his face. This was not someone to be fought, necessarily, but wary of. He was a cursed figure, Ustreed knew; most every culture had a cursed character in their mythos. Silly, confused, religious stories cited them by the dozens--Ustreed had compiled a tome of ghost tales and had printed it not as an anthology of frightening tales, but as a treatise against ethnic myths. Despite the tedious foreword that spelled out her disbelief and disapproval of the material contained within, the much-copied book was taken as a collection of well-told horror stories. The publishing of that book had been a great stain on her reputation as a serious scholar. She had had to publicly denounce the reading and sharing of that particular book, citing verbatim the paragraphs contained in the ignored foreword. In terror, but not wanting to admit it to herself, Ustreed turned Trooper around as best she could, but the horse balked. All the while the stranger stood idly by, a strange, silent effigy in the broad daylight although it seemed he never should appear in the sunlit world. Ustreed looked down at that moment to see a scattering of tan sticks. No, not sticks, bones. Human bones. Bones of a small human being, picked clean of flesh and tangled among the weeds. Then Trooper went stallion-mad, defying his permanent condition as a gelding. With power and intensity Ustreed hadn't felt before, he bucked with the suddenness of a cricket avoiding an oncoming human foot and kept on whinnying and roaring until Ustreed was spilled into the knee-high grass. Then Trooper bolted and vanished with a screaming bellow through the trees, taking her javelins and canteen with him. Knocked on her back, Ustreed was grateful for her sword, but stayed low, edging back on her elbows in a supine crawl until she was hemmed in a spinney of young trees. She drew her hanger slowly from the scabbard, eyeing the place she would have ventured on her way to the mountain stream. She got to one knee and removed her helmet, cautious of the glint it might create while she kept her sword low and shaded. Trouble. Big, bad, trouble. Fifty shaggy ponies, large, but not with the lines and proportions of true horses struggled up the bank from the stream, their coats wet and clinging to their well-muscled frames as their Cumexian riders whipped them on with quirts and ugly-sounding encouragements. Dragged along with them was the potato-stealing Gouccle that had escaped her at the wall. He was a sorry, naked sight. His legs had been bitten, presumably by short-legged dogs and were dimpled with teeth-marks. Once they were all up onto level ground, they made for a nearby clearing where the boy was staked to the ground in the midst of three large trees. Snarling dogs of a breed Ustreed almost recognized from her policing days in Zurinthal were brought out on chain leashes. These were hideous, toad-mouthed, bow-legged, fuzz-haired killing dogs with out-jutting fangs, scarred hides, crocked tails and filled to bursting with obscene bloodlust. They were worth money to the right crowd, but the law said they were to be destroyed in the Palatinate and their breeders and owners imprisoned. They were bred for one purpose; to rip other animals and people to shreds. The ponies were tethered many yards back and the few dozen Cumexian bandits formed a crude ring where chants went up and money jingled loudly. The Gouccle boy was cowering at his stake, unable to free himself as the fighting dogs were brutally kept still until a signal was given. At this, the dogs were released and ran for the center, making directly for the Gouccle youth. The lengths of the tethers meant that one dog or perhaps two at the right angle to get at the boy, but not all three at once. Given no place to hide, the boy could run from the dog nearest to him, only to put himself within reach of another; each dog had enough tether to allow it to reach the center with a yard to spare. The cruel sport went on among snarls and barks, laughs and shouts and finally screams of a nature Ustreed had never imagined she could hear. Ultimately, the dogs had their prize and feasted on Gouccle while the Cumexians made a rough camp in a festive atmosphere. Pirates, Ustreed thought. Poul wasn't spreading rumors. They were here far sooner than she'd imagined. She'd seen bundles of rope and chain on every pony in the band. They were up to something and certainly near the lake. The effette stranger might have tried to warn her, but he'd let too much time pass, been too close. He seemed to be more on the side of the Cumexians than hers. And when Ustreed made her cautious creep for freedom, she met him again. Once more the freakish pink-copper eyes looked into hers with useless longing. His pleading face screwed up, trying to produce speech and his long, pale fingers fidgeted in confusing, meaningless gestures. This time, she was going to make him talk! 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