Blade used a couple of those minutes to make a quick search of the nearest cottage. Between the villagers carrying off their valuables and the knights looting everything else, there wasn't much left. He did find half of an old blanket, a cracked bow with a still-sound bowstring, and a foot-long chunk of sausage which smelled fresh.
Outside again, he wrapped the dead monkey in the blanket and tied it up with the bowstring. Then he stuck the sausage in his belt, sheathed the knife, and started off down the trail at the mile-eating lope he'd learned from the warriors of Zunga.
Five minutes later, six knights rode in among the cottages. They were too far away for Blade to make out which side they were on, and they showed no signs of seeing him. By then he was far enough away that they probably took him for one more stray villager, not worth chasing down.
Chapter 5
Fields and orchards stretched out for miles around the village. Beyond them to the east lay a range of rugged wooded hills. Blade headed for these hills, which offered the best cover in sight.
By the time he reached them it was late afternoon. Several times he'd had to turn aside or hide to avoid being discovered by bands of roughly clad men and women. If they were all refugees from the village, most of its people must have escaped before the two bands of knights started fighting up and down its streets. Blade only hoped they would have homes to return to, instead of heaps of smoking ashes.
From halfway up the side of the first hill, Blade looked back to the village. The smoke from the burning houses now formed a dark pillar, miles high. On either side of the pillar, he saw the glint of sunlight on armor as the two bands of knights marched off. He saw one band heading almost straight toward him and decided to get farther into the hills before they arrived.
As he scrambled across the rocky, brush-grown slopes, he had time to bless the sandals Lord Leighton's new invention let him wear. His feet were tough as leather, but on this kind of ground even he couldn't move as fast as he wanted.
At sunset Blade sat under a tree and looked down at a winding pass through the hills as a party of the green-gloved knights passed. He counted about eighty of them. All were dust-coated and looked weary, some wore bloody bandages, and a few were riding double on lathered horses.
He also counted about thirty squires or servants, wearing boiled-leather jackets and light helmets. They guided pack horses carrying baggage, half a dozen women prisoners, and at least twenty of the feather-monkeys. Without the feather-monkeys, Blade might have wondered if he hadn't traveled into the past instead of into Dimension X. There was nothing else about the cavalcade that would have raised eyebrows in fourteenth-century Europe.
They stopped at a stream less than a hundred yards down the slope from Blade to water their horses. They also transferred some of the monkeys to a single packhorse. Then half a dozen knights with comparatively fresh mounts rode back toward the village, leading the horseload of monkeys. By the time this patrol or rear guard was out of sight, the main body was also on the march again. Blade waited until they were both gone, then slipped down the hill to the stream and drank. When he was no longer thirsty, he filled his canteen and scrambled back up the hill into the trees until the pass was a good mile away. The pass and the stream would naturally draw anyone on the move tonight. Blade wanted to sleep undisturbed, then worry about getting to know the people of this Dimension in the light of day.
He found a place where at least none of the rocks had sharp edges or points and made himself as comfortable as he could. He also made a mental note that one of the first new pieces of equipment for the next trip would be a sleeping bag or at least a sleeping pad. There was no good reason for losing sleep unnecessarily, no matter how tough you were.
After a couple of bites of the sausage, he decided that could also wait until daylight. The sausage seemed to be one of those preserved foods which never quite goes bad but never tastes very good either.
By now it was completely dark. He lay down again, curled up into a tight ball like a cat, and drifted off to sleep.
Blade woke once during the night, thinking he heard a distant clanging of weapons on armor. It faded so swiftly that he couldn't be sure. After listening briefly to a silence broken only by night birds and the breeze in the treetops, he went back to sleep. When he woke again, it was the dawn of a fine summer day.
The first thing he did was eat some more of the sausage. He was now hungry enough to ignore its taste, if not to actually enjoy it. The second thing was to examine the corpse of the feather-monkey.
This told him some things he hadn't known before, if not as much as he wanted to know. The feathers were definitely a natural growth, not a garment or a graft. They also showed signs of careful clipping and grooming. Otherwise there was nothing extraordinary about the creature. Its eyes were so large that it was probably at home in the darkness almost as much as in daylight. The forehead also looked higher than Blade remembered seeing in most primates, which hinted at a larger brain. That was no more than a possibility, however, and even if the brain was larger that didn't mean intelligence. He hadn't seen the monkeys do anything which couldn't be the result of very careful training. That didn't make them any less dangerous, since they were small targets, they moved fast, and with those poisoned daggers, they only had to reach you once.
Since the dead monkey was beginning to smell, Blade left it under a tree and walked downhill toward the pass. His first sight when he reached it was a dead horse, lying with its head in the stream and flies buzzing around its hindquarters. It showed no signs of any wounds. Blade only hoped it was dead from exhaustion rather than from a poisoned stab by one of the feather-monkeys. As he walked up the pass, he studied every bit of cover large enough to hide a man or even a monkey.
Before he'd gone half a mile, he came to an even less welcome sight. A naked woman lay sprawled on her back beside the trail. She'd died from having her throat cut, but she must have been already half-dead from mass rape before the knife went in. Blade picked her up and carried her into the trees where she could at least lie unseen. The ground was much too rocky for burying anyone with no tools but bare hands and a fighting knife.
He was even more watchful after he returned to the trail. He also wished he had a long-range weapon, perhaps the crossbow he'd mentioned to Lord Leighton. Of course nothing short of a machine gun would do justice to his feelings toward the gang rapists. But that would never be a practical weapon to take into Dimension X. It would be useless as soon as the ammunition ran out, and it would be far beyond local technology in most Dimensions.
Blade didn't worry about changing Dimensions by introducing new technology. He did that all the time, either to save his own skin or sometimes to solve a problem which had to be solved if the people of the Dimension were to survive. He did worry about getting rounded up and perhaps burned at the stake as a sorcerer, for bringing something so advanced the people would call it magic.
The pass and its trail zigzagged back and forth so much that he found himself covering at least four miles on foot for every mile he advanced in a straight line. He'd started early in the morning, but it was past noon before he reached the top of the pass. The trees and boulders on either side made it a perfect place for an ambush. Blade therefore approached cautiously, looking for a stream. It was a hot day and he looked forward to a long, cool drink of water, rather than sipping sparingly from his canteen.