The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [20]
Everything is fine, then! The departure of the feeling of danger was an almost physical pleasure; every muscle of his, previously tense, was now blessedly relaxing, and the world, once discolored by adrenalin, was regaining its natural colors. Climbing out of the pit under a saxaul tree that leaned almost to the ground, Haladdin easily shouldered the bag of gear and marched forward, looking closely at the ground – the slope was seriously dented by desert rats. Almost at the bottom he finally looked up and realized that something was wrong. Seriously wrong, to judge by the Orocuen's behavior: after standing for some time at the entrance to the left yurt, he then trudged to the next one without entering. Yes, trudged – for some reason the sergeant's step had lost its usual spring. Only a barely audible hum disturbed the unnatural quiet of the hollow, like tiny ripples on the oily surface of a swamp… Then he suddenly understood everything, recognizing it as the sound of a myriad of flies.
…Even in the sandy desert soil it takes more than a few minutes to dig a grave for ten people (four adults, six children); they had to hurry, but they had found only one spade and so had to share. Haladdin was about waist deep when Tzerlag walked up to him.
"Listen, you keep digging, I'll go walk around one more time and check on something."
"You think someone may have survived and is hiding out there?"
"Unlikely, seems they're all here. But over there there's blood on the sand."
"But weren't they all murdered right in the yurts?.."
"That's the point. Keep working, but look around once in a while. I'll whistle if I need you – one long, two short."
He heard the signal in no more than five minutes. The sergeant waved to him from a small dune near the path to the highway, then disappeared behind its crest. Following, Haladdin found the scout crouching before a dark round object; only when he was almost there did he realize that it was the head of a man buried in the sand up to his neck, and that the man appeared to still be alive. There was a clay bowl of water a few inches from his lips, just beyond reach.
"That's who put up a fight back there. Are we too late, doctor?"
"No, it's all right. See, he's still sweating, so it's only the second stage of dehydration, and he has no sunburns, thank the One."
"Yeah, they put him in the shade of the dune, precisely so that he'd take longer to die. By all signs he'd pissed them off mightily… Can I give him water?"
"At the second stage – yes, but only in small portions. But how did you know?.."
"To be honest, I was looking for a corpse."
With those words Tzerlag put his leather flask to the blackened and cracked lips of the buried man. The man shuddered and gulped down water, but his barely opening eyes remained clouded and lifeless.
"Wait up, fella, not so fast! Hear what the doc says: not all at once. All right, let's pull him out; the sand is loose here, so we don't need a spade… Got him?"
Shoving the sand back some, they grabbed the man by his underarms and: "One-two!"
pulled him out like a carrot from the garden patch. "Damn!" the Orocuen said with feeling, grabbing his scimitar; the rush of sand off the clothes of the rescued man revealed a green jacket of a Gondorian officer to their stunned gazes.
This, however, did not affect the rescue operations in the slightest, and in a dozen minutes the prisoner was, in Tzerlag's words, "ready to use." The cloudiness in his gray eyes gone, his gaze was now steady and slightly mocking. After a quick glance at his rescuers' uniforms, he fully appraised his situation and, much to their surprise, introduced himself in good, if accented, Orocuenish: "Baron Tangorn, lieutenant of the Ithilien regiment. To whom do I have the honor of speaking?"
For a man who had just miraculously escaped a tortuous death only to face it once again, the