The Burning Bridge Read online

  Gilan felt the need to keep talking to the King, to give the King whatever detail he could about the loss of his daughter. “At first, we almost mistook her for a boy,” he said, remembering the moment when Evanlyn had walked into their camp. Duncan looked up, confusion on his face.

  “A boy?” he said. “With that mass of red hair?”

  Gilan shrugged. “She’d cut it short. Probably to conceal her appearance. The Celtic foothills are full of bandits and robbers at the moment, as well as Wargals.”

  Something was wrong, he sensed. He was bone-weary, aching for sleep, and his brain wasn’t functioning as it should. But the King had said something that wasn’t right. Something that…

  He shook his head, trying to clear it, and swayed on his feet, glad of Halt’s ready arm to steady him. Seeing the movement, Duncan was instantly apologetic.

  “Ranger Gilan,” he said, stepping forward and seizing his hand. “Forgive me. You’re exhausted and I’ve kept you here because of my own personal sorrow. Please, Halt, see that Gilan has food and rest.”

  “Blaze…” Gilan started to say, remembering his dust-covered, weary horse outside the tent. Halt replied gently.

  “It’s all right. I’ll look after Blaze.” He glanced at the King once more, nodding his head toward Gilan. “With Your Majesty’s permission?”

  Duncan waved the two of them out. “Yes, please, Halt. Look after your comrade. He’s served us well.”

  As the two Rangers left the tent, Duncan turned to his remaining advisers. “Now, gentlemen, let’s see if we can put some reason to this latest move by Morgarath.”

  Baron Thorn cast a quick glance at the others, seeking and gaining their assent to act as spokesman. “My lord,” he said awkwardly, “perhaps we should give you some time to come to terms with this news…” The other councillors all mumbled their agreement with the idea, but Duncan shook his head firmly.

  “I’m the King,” he said simply. “And for the King, private matters come last. Matters of the kingdom come first.”

  “It’s gone out!” said Horace, in an agony of disappointment.

  The three of them looked, desperately hoping that he was wrong, that their eyes were somehow deceiving them. But he was right. The fire under the left-hand pylon had died away to a small, glowing heap of embers.

  By contrast, the other side was well and truly alight, with the fire running fiercely up the tarred rope side rails to the massive cable supporting the right side of the bridge. Indeed, as they watched, one of the three ropes forming the cable burned through and the right-hand side of the bridge creaked alarmingly.

  “Maybe one side will be enough?” Evanlyn suggested hopefully, but Will shook his head in frustration, willing the second fire to flare up again.

  “The right-hand pylon is damaged, but it’s still usable,” he pointed out. “If the left-hand side survives, they can still get across to this side. And if they can do that, they might be able to repair the whole thing before we can get warning to King Duncan.”

  Resolutely, he hitched his bow over his shoulder and started across the bridge once more.

  “Where are you going?” Horace asked him, eyeing the structure with distrust. The bridge had taken a definite lean to one side now that part of the right-hand cable had burned through. As he put the question, the structure trembled again, settling a little farther toward the bottom of the abyss.

  Will paused, balanced on the bare beam that stretched across the gap.

  “I’ll have to relight it,” he said. He turned back and ran to the far side again. Horace felt queasy watching him move so quickly across that massive drop, with nothing but a narrow beam beneath him. Then he and Evanlyn watched in a fever of impatience as Will crouched by the embers. He began fanning them, then leaned down and blew on them until a small tongue of flame flickered inside the pile of unburned kindling.

  “He’s done it!” Evanlyn cried, then the triumph in her voice died as the flicker faded. Once again, Will leaned down and began to blow gently on the embers. Something else gave on the right-hand side cable and the bridge lurched, sinking farther to that side. For a moment, Will stopped to look up at the right-hand pylon and cable, still burning fiercely. Then he went back to the embers, fanning them with a new sense of urgency.

  “Come on! Come on!” Horace said over and over to himself, his hands clenching and unclenching as he watched his friend.

  Then Tug gave a quiet whinny.

  Both Horace and Evanlyn turned to look at the small horse. If it had been either of their own mounts, they wouldn’t have reacted. But they knew Tug was trained to remain silent, unless…

  Unless! Horace looked to where Will was crouched over the remains of the fire. Obviously, he hadn’t heard Tug’s warning. Evanlyn seized Horace’s arm and pointed.

  “Look!” she said, and he followed her pointing finger to the mouth of the tunnel, where a glimmer of light was showing. Someone was coming! Tug pawed the ground and whinnied again, a little louder this time, but Will, close to the noise of the burning right-hand cable, didn’t hear. Evanlyn came to a decision.

  “Stay here!” she told Horace, and started out across the wooden beam framework. She inched her way carefully, her heart in her mouth as the weakened bridge structure lurched and swayed. Below her was blackness, and, at the very bottom, the silver glimmer of the river that ran wildly through the base of the Fissure. She swayed, recovered, then went on. The planked section was only eight meters away now. Now five. Now three.

  The bridge swayed again and she hung there for an awful moment, arms spread to hold her balance, teetering over that horrific drop. Behind her, she heard Horace’s warning cry. Taking a deep breath, she lunged for the safety of the boardwalk, falling full length on the rough pine planks.

  Heart pounding with the reaction of her near miss, she came to her feet and raced across the rest of the bridge. As she drew closer, Will sensed her movement and looked up. Breathlessly, she pointed to the mouth of the tunnel.

  “They’re coming!” she cried. And now, the reflected glow of light from within the tunnel was revealed to be the flare of several burning torches as a small group of figures emerged. They paused at the tunnel mouth, pointing and shouting as they saw the flames reaching high above the bridge. She counted six of them, and from their shambling, clumsy gait, she recognized them as Wargals.

  The Wargals began to run toward the bridge. They were just over fifty meters away, but covering the ground quickly. And she knew there must be more behind them.

  “Let’s get out of here!” she said, grabbing at Will’s sleeve. But he shook her hand off, grim-faced. He was already scooping up his bow and quiver, slinging the quiver over his shoulder and checking that the bowstring was firmly anchored.

  “You get back!” he told her. “I’ll stay and hold them off.”

  Almost as he spoke, he nocked an arrow to the string and, barely seeming to aim, sent it hissing toward the lead Wargal. The arrow buried itself in the Wargal’s chest and it fell, crying out once, then lay silent.

  His companions halted in their tracks, seeing the arrow. They looked warily around them, trying to see where it had come from. Perhaps this was a trap, their primitive, single-track minds told them. As yet, they couldn’t see the small figure at the end of the bridge. And even as they looked, another three arrows came hissing out of the darkness. The steel heads of two of the arrows struck sparks as they smashed into the rocks. The third took one of the Wargals at the rear of the party in the lower arm. He cried out in pain and fell to his knees.

  The Wargals hesitated uncertainly. Seeing the light and smoke of the fire above the hill that separated their camp area from the bridge, they had come to investigate. Now unseen archers were firing at them. Coming to a decision, and with no one to order them forward, they retreated quickly to the shelter of the tunnel mouth.

  “They’re going back!” Evanlyn told Will. But he’d already seen the movement and he was on his knees again, trying to frantically
rebuild the fire.

  “We’ll have to reset the whole thing!” he muttered. Evanlyn dropped to her knees beside him and began shaping the half-burned strips and heavier pieces into a conical pyre.

  “You watch the Wargals!” she said. “I’ll look after this.”

  Will hesitated. After all, this was the fire she had set in the first place. He had a moment of doubt as he wondered if she’d done the job correctly. Then he looked up to the tunnel mouth, saw movement there once again and realized she was right. Grabbing his bow, he started to move toward the cover of some rocks nearby, but she stopped him.

  “Your knife!” she said. “Leave it with me.”

  He didn’t ask why. He slid the saxe from its scabbard and dropped it beside her. Then he moved to the rocks. The bridge groaned and trembled as the right-hand cable gave a little more. Silently, he cursed the caprice of wind that had fanned one fire and extinguished the other.

  Encouraged by the lack of arrows whistling around their ears in the past few minutes, the four remaining Wargals had emerged from the tunnel again and were moving cautiously forward. Without any real intelligent leadership, and with a false sense of their own superiority, they stayed grouped together, an easy target. Will fired three times, carefully aimed shots.

  Each one found its mark. The surviving Wargal looked at his fallen comrades, then lumbered into the cover of the rocks. Will sent another arrow skating off the granite directly above his head, to encourage him to stay where he was.

  He checked his quiver. There were sixteen arrows left. Not a lot if the Wargals had sent for reinforcements. He glanced at Evanlyn. She seemed to be maddeningly slow with her efforts to rebuild the fire. He wanted to yell at her to hurry, but realized he would only distract her and slow her down if he did. He looked back to the tunnel, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the bow.

  Four more figures emerged, running fast and fanning out so that they weren’t grouped together. Will brought the bow up, sighted quickly and released at the one farthest to the right. He let go a little cry of exasperation as the arrow flew behind the running figure. Then he was obscured by the rocks.

  Blessing the weeks and months of practice that Halt had insisted on, Will had another arrow out of the quiver and already nocked, without even looking at it. But the other three runners had gone to ground as well.

  Now one of them rose in the middle of the line and darted forward. Will’s snap shot cleaved the air above his head as he dived for cover. Then another was moving on the left, dropping into cover before Will could fire. His heart was beating rapidly as they made their quick rushes and he forced himself to breathe deeply and think calmly. The time to shoot would be in the last thirty meters, where there was less cover and where the arrows, with a shorter distance to cover, would be traveling faster and so be harder to dodge. Will’s heart hammered inside his ribs. He was remembering the last time—only a few weeks ago—when fear had made his shots go wide. His face hardened as he determined that it would not happen again.

  “Stay calm,” he told himself, trying to hear Halt’s voice saying the words. Another of the figures made a short rush and this time, as the firelight illuminated him more clearly, Will held his fire as his eyes confirmed what he had begun to suspect.

  The newcomers weren’t Wargals. They were Skandians.

  25

  GILAN SLEPT LIKE A LOG FOR SIX HOURS, TOTALLY EXHAUSTED, in the tent where Halt had taken him. Throughout that time, he didn’t stir once. His mind and body were shut down, drawing new strength from total rest.

  Then, after those six hours, his subconscious mind stirred and began to function, and he began to dream. He dreamt of Will and Horace and the girl Evanlyn. But the dream was wild and confused and he saw them as captives of the Wargals, tied together while the two robbers Bart and Carney stood by and laughed.

  Gilan rolled onto one side, muttering in his sleep. Halt, sitting nearby repairing the fletching on his arrows, glanced up. He saw that the young Ranger was still asleep and went back to his routine task. Gilan muttered again, then fell silent.

  In his dream, he saw the servant Evanlyn as the King had described her—with her hair long and uncropped, masses of it flowing down her back, thick and lustrous and red.

  And then he sat up, wide-awake.

  “My God!” he said to a startled Halt. “It’s not her!”

  Halt swore as he spilled the thick, viscous glue that he was using to attach the goose feather vanes to the arrow shaft. Gilan’s sudden movement had caught him by surprise. Now he mopped up the sticky liquid and turned with some irritation to his friend.

  “Could you give a bit of warning when you’re going to start shouting like that?” he said peevishly. But Gilan was already out of the camp bed and hauling on his breeches and shirt.

  “I’ve got to see the King!” he said urgently. Halt stood warily, not altogether sure that Gilan wasn’t sleepwalking. The young Ranger shoved past him, dashing out into the night, and tucking his shirt into his trousers as he went. Reluctantly, Halt followed him.

  There was a slight delay as they reached the King’s pavilion. The guard had changed several hours before and the new sentries didn’t know Gilan by sight. Halt smoothed things over, but not before Gilan had convinced him that it was vital for him to see King Duncan, even if it meant waking him from a well-deserved sleep.

  As it turned out, in spite of the late hour, the King wasn’t sleeping. He and his supreme army commander were discussing possible reasons for the raids into Celtica when Gilan, barefoot, rumple-haired and with several buttons still askew on his shirtfront, was allowed into the pavilion. Sir David looked up in alarm at the sight his son presented.

  “Gilan! What on earth are you doing here?” he demanded, but Gilan held up a hand to stop him.

  “Just a moment, Father,” he said. Then, he continued, facing the King, “Sir, when you described the maid Evanlyn earlier, did you say ‘red’ hair?”

  Sir David looked to Halt for an explanation. The older Ranger shrugged and Sir David turned back to his son, anger clearly showing on his face.

  “What difference does that make?” he began. But again Gilan cut him off, still addressing the King.

  “The girl who called herself Evanlyn was blond, sir,” he said simply. This time, it was King Duncan who held out a hand to silence his angry Battlemaster.

  “Blond?” he asked.

  “Blond, sir. She’d cut it short, as I said, but it was blond, like your own. And she had green eyes,” Gilan told him, watching Duncan carefully, and sensing the importance of what he was telling him. The King hesitated a moment, covering his face with one hand. Then he spoke, the hope growing in his voice.

  “And her build? Slight, was she? Small of stature?”

  Gilan nodded eagerly. “As I said, sir, for a moment, we could have taken her for a boy. She must have used her maid’s identity because she thought it was safer if she remained incognito.” Now he understood those slight hesitations in Evanlyn’s speech, and why she had a broader grasp of politics and strategy than most servants would be expected to have.

  Slowly, Halt and Sir David began to realize the import of what was being said. The King looked from Gilan to Halt to David, then back to Gilan again.

  “My daughter is alive,” he said quietly. There was a long silence. It was finally broken by Sir David.

  “Gilan, how far behind you were the two apprentices and the girl?”

  Gilan hesitated. “Possibly two days’ ride, Father,” he estimated, following his father to the map table and indicating the farthest point that he thought Will and the others might have reached by now. Sir David took instant charge, sending messengers running to rouse the commander of the cavalry wing and have him prepare a company of light cavalry to leave camp immediately.

  “We’ll send a company of the Fifth Lancers to bring them in, sir,” he told the King. “If they leave within the hour and ride through the night, they should make contact sometime around noon tomorrow
.”

  “I’ll guide them,” Gilan offered immediately, and his father nodded assent.

  “I’d hoped you’d say that.” He seized the King’s arm, smiling with genuine pleasure at the relief on the tall man’s face. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am for you, sir,” he said. The King looked at him, a little bemused. So recently, he had been privately mourning the loss of his beloved daughter Cassandra. Now, miraculously, she had been restored to life.

  “My daughter is safe,” he said, almost to himself.

  Evanlyn crouched over the pile of wood beside the bridge railing. From time to time, she heard the dull thrum of Will’s bow as he fired at the approaching enemy, but she forced herself not to look up, concentrating on the job in hand. She knew they had one last chance to get the fire going properly. If she got it wrong this time, it would mean disaster for the kingdom. So she carefully stacked and placed the wood, making sure there was sufficient air space between the pieces to allow a good draft. She had none of the shavings left to use for tinder this time, but only a few meters away, she had a perfect source of fire. The right-hand cable was still blazing fiercely.

  Satisfied that the wood was stacked properly, she took Will’s saxe and cut several one-meter lengths of tarred rope from the bridge railing—thinner lengths, not the massive cable itself. It would have been almost impossible to hack through that in time.

  Taking the rope lengths, she came to her feet and darted across the bridge to the blazing fire on the other side. It was a simple matter to get the lengths of tarred rope burning, then she ran back to her fire pile and draped the burning rope around the base, trailing it through the gaps she had left in the wood. The flames licked at her fingers as she pushed the rope in between pieces of wood. She bit her lip, ignoring the pain as she made sure the fire was burning freely.

  The tar-fed flames crackled at the wood, flickered, then took. She fanned them for a few seconds as they became established, until the lighter kindling strips were burning fiercely, then the heavier planks began to take fire as well. The handrail caught in several places and now tongues of flame were shooting up to the cable, beginning to lick at it, feeding on the tar, then running up to where it joined the wooden pylon structure.