Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [52]
Burek and Devlin both looked puzzled, but Jenits’s face lit. Arcolin gave him a quick nod. “I don’t expect we’ll run into a trailing force—though we might—but we should see evidence of their tree rigging. If we can get to the main trail across the ridge before they realize what we’re doing, we should be able to see how they get up and down, and estimate how far ahead they set up ambushes and the kinds of locations they pick. And then—”
“We can put our own archers up there,” Burek said. “And ambush them.”
“They’ll need practice shooting down at that angle,” Arcolin said, remembering what Cracolnya had always said about his cohort’s practice on rising and falling ground. “But yes. The thing is, we know nothing about rigging ropes in trees, not even what size rope.”
In the long summer afternoon, the cohort moved as Arcolin directed, encountering no brigands they could detect. Just as they crossed the main trail, Burek spotted a coil of rope tucked into the crotch of a tree. They looked up. At intervals along a nearly horizontal limb, loops of rope circled the limb, stained dark, unnoticeable to a casual glance. One end of the coil ran up the tree trunk, looking like a vine stem, to the base of a limb higher than the one that held the loops of rope.
“They climb the rope, pull it up, thread it through those loops … they must tie it off at the far end,” Burek said.
“Now we know they have trees ready to rig along the main trail,” Arcolin said. “So they can move their ambush site. We need to know how many, what kind of trees they use, how many sailors they have to climb them.”
“Our siege-assault specialists could climb it,” Devlin said, looking up.
“Later,” Arcolin said. “For now, we don’t want them to know we noticed this. We’ll go on over the ridge and look there.”
He wondered how many brigands were actually good at climbing trees and standing on ropes to shoot crossbows. The ones they’d just killed all wore conventional shoes or boots. He remembered the sailors aloft being barefoot, remembered asking someone about that. Boots were too slippery when they got wet, he’d been told. Bare feet callused by hard use and salt water clung to the ropes and spars.
They reached the crest of the ridge, and Arcolin looked back at the slope they were leaving, the furrow in the trees that showed where the main trail ran. He could not see the trail itself, but someone aloft in one of those trees could signal to a watcher here without being seen from below. A troop, no matter how quietly it moved, still made enough noise to cover the sound of a crossbow’s string … and a bolt fitted with a ribbon could be seen from here.
On the far side of the ridge, they moved cautiously through woods as the light slowly waned into twilight. Scouts reported a clearing ahead with rigged trees covering the opening.
“Looks like a camp—maybe for twenty, by the size of the jacks.”
“How recently were they there?”
“Hard to say, sir. Not yesterday, but within the last hand of days, most like. Fire-pit has bones in it, but there’s a pile of offal still downslope. It’s been dragged about by vermin but not consumed yet. They’re planning to come back this way sometime; we found a barrel of meal hidden in a brush pile.”
“We’ll camp here tonight,” Arcolin said. “They’re sure to notice us, but we can’t move far enough before dark to be out of their range, either. So they’ll attack, but our people will be up the trees, not theirs.”
“All night?” Burek asked, looking up at the trees.
“Better than theirs sneaking in and having the height on us,” Arcolin said. “Short watches, since there’s no way for anyone to rest up there.”
That, it turned out, was an error. The first climbers sent into the trees found fishing-net hammocks tied into the crotches of each rigged tree, water jugs with lines tied to their handles.
“They could stay up in the trees for days,” Burek said. “That explains how our scouts missed them.”
“That and not imagining such a thing,” Arcolin said. “Siniava’s people never did