The Marcher Lord (Over Guard) Read online

  “Yes,” Will said, “it’s them. And a strong line, too. Look, you can tell by how contained it is.”

  “What about all these trails that lead off the main line?” Ian asked, gesturing toward one of the haphazard, smaller lines that periodically stemmed off to their left.

  “Those are young males pursuing females,” Will answered. “Yes. It is a strong herd, I’m glad it won’t disappoint the lord. But excuse me. I must be near him now for instructions.” Will increased his pace and called back over his shoulder. “We must get off the line soon, or else the herd will spot us.”

  Ian looked at Rory who was some ways off, but Ian’s second had evidently heard Will and began to move off to the right of the line. Ian did the same and slowed his pace a little to keep even with the front. Scanning behind them and their left flank, Ian made use of the small break and took down a mouthful of water from his canteen. It wasn’t having run all this way, it was the heat. It crashed down in waves upon the top of his hat and everywhere that was exposed to the sun, radiating up from everywhere else.

  But that was why it was so exhilarating—sort of. Ian knew that right now he was actually doing this, doing something that not many people could or would ever. Ian increased his pace slightly with that thought.

  The dark line up ahead grew steadily more distinct and divisive. Ian was slowly able to pick out larger clusters with his naked eye, and then smaller groups. By the time he could comfortably watch individuals, the captain slowed their pace considerably and gave the order to keep low.

  Ian felt glad that Lord Wester had gone off to the same side of the track Ian had, which he hoped would increase his chances of getting to shoot for himself. And while, in many circumstances, the Allen rifle he carried was well and away superior to what the rest of the army was given, it also had a considerably slower reloading time. Being able to see the buffalo better now, Ian began to think that might be a considerable factor in this sort of hunt.

  “Extraordinary brutes,” Captain Marsden whispered when he had called for a halt, and Ian had caught up with his superiors and Will. “Better have the bays wide open for these beggars.”

  The margrave didn’t say anything as he unloaded and reloaded his rifle.

  “Extremely dangerous,” Will cautioned, his eyes hard on the herd, “easily up to one and a half tons, long buffalo claim more lives every year than any other animal. They are strongest in numbers and will defend each other.”

  “They’re prone to locking their horns and charging in lines,” Lord Wester said absently as he looked up toward the sun, “watch for that.”

  “Yes,” Will agreed, “and any animals, especially any bulls that are wounded, must be brought down immediately. Any buffalo that are shot will go after the hunter and will not stop until it is killed.”

  “Game little blinkers,” Captain Marsden said, wiping at his moustache.

  “I want at least one good bull trophy,” Lord Wester said, “two if it can be had.”

  “The bulls,” Will said, rising a little from the grass as the herd slowly plodded on, “are all around the core of the herd, which contains the females and young. The only difficulty is that the bulls move around much more, and are intermixed with younger males and the less healthy animals.”

  “Show me then to the best bull on this side,” Lord Wester said.

  “Yes,” Will said, “we can circle around to the left to spot one that is suitable. We must only be careful not to alert the herd too soon and not to get cut off from each other.”

  “The others won’t be able to cross the line,” Ian said, glancing over to where he could just make out the gap in the grass where Corporal Hanley and Rory had stopped. So much for keeping with his second.

  “Stow that talk, private,” Captain Marsden snapped.

  Ian did his bitter best to swallow that down, but fortunately no one was paying him any heed anyway.

  “We will trail behind you then,” Captain Marsden told Lord Wester, who nodded, “and cover your position after you have shot. May we fire after your privilege?”

  “Yes,” the margrave said, peering just above the grass. “Let us begin then.”

  Will softly clicked air through his teeth as he nodded, a thoroughly Chax trait that Ian had noticed him do before, an oddity among the Chax’s otherwise Ellosian demeanor.

  A moment later, Lord Wester started forward and to the left through the grass, going slow at first as Will kept beside him, but gaining speed until their movements were difficult to see from Ian’s vantage.

  “You’d best be feeling more capable than your custom, private,” Captain Marsden said as he took a quick swallow from his canteen and dropped and sealed his pack on the ground behind him.

  Doing the same to his own pack, Ian said, “I think I am, sir,” fairly honestly as he rocked forward a bit on his toes, feeling the withered grass on the ground softly biting into his hands and his heart softly exploding.

  The captain spared him one brief look. “Your mouth is certainly always up to task.” He glared over at the other side of the buffalo line, visibly wishing that he had someone else here. “Just keep to their right and shoot at anything that gets near the margrave. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ian said, his eyes on the herd’s ever-changing composition as he pulled his rifle off his pack. He quickly wondered what sort of difference the magnum choke would make on his Allen rifle.

  The captain didn’t say anything else but immediately sprung off to Ian’s far left, quickly making his way to shadow the margrave’s left flank. That was an appropriate enough plan, and while Ian didn’t necessarily like being handed the tamer position of the two—he being backed up to some extent by Corporal Hanley and Rory—especially once the surprise was exchanged and they were free to move at will. But all things considered, it was an incredible place to be given.

  Ian started off slow and straight, keeping as low as possible and concentrating on maintaining a good idea of Lord Wester and Will’s position. It was sort of a glaring oversight that was sighted now, that none the rangers had any non-visual means to track the margrave and Will. Ian would have to bring that up to—well, to someone. It would be doomed to rejection, or more likely the non-transference of due credit when implemented, if he voiced it to Captain Marsden.

  But that was a good deal of the reason why this was all so perfect, Ian thought. He increased speed upon catching movement in the grass farther ahead than he would’ve guessed. He literally probably had nowhere lower to sink in the captain’s opinion, except maybe a stockade. He had everything to gain now.

  Moving much faster now to catch up, he promised himself that nothing more than sunburn would touch the margrave. Praying rather ardently that he’d be given the providence to follow through on that—

  Ian instinctively hit the dirt when the nearest buffalo produced a sudden motion and spurt of whiny calls. Keeping very still, his eyes on the flurry of insects on the ground just underneath his face, Ian hoped that they hadn’t spotted him. He flustered at the thought that something could be happening near the margrave right now.

  Trying to reason that he could still use his ears and would surely hear if anything started after the margrave or Will, Ian waited a handful of heartbeats. A follow-up to the alarmed calls came from a few of the buffalo, but they seemed to be aimed more off to his right.

  Rolling a bit to the side, he checked his yeoman’s detection of the others, which was hard to see in the angle of the light. But he saw that Captain Marsden was still moving far off to his left and that Corporal Hanley and Rory had stopped just a little ahead of him.

  Risking it, Ian pulled his head up just high enough to discern bare generalities that the top of the grass between him and the herd allowed. This was good enough to confirm that there wasn’t anything immediately aware of him, and upon a little further propping, he deduced that some animals at the rear edge had caught a notion of Ellis and Rory. He couldn’t really see them in the location that his yeoman was
indicating, so that hopefully meant they had bunkered down enough following whatever notice the buffalo might have gotten of them.

  Taking another few seconds to confirm all this, he located the back of the margrave’s tan shirt. And Ian jumped after them in that direction.

  The herd’s motions were always incomprehensible, especially from their extremely limited vantage. Ian saw that the core of the herd was thickest and most bent on moving, being responsible for the main migration line. That left the rest of the herd, which constituted the incomprehensible part. A couple hundred ongoing dramas were what he decided it amounted to. That all of the long buffalo had the distinctive horn patterns, all joined together into one solid mounting of bone on each individual, made it trickier to try and sort out the males from the females. But the more he studied them, the more obvious the younger, kinetic bulls were from the older females and most especially the enormous mature bulls. Fortunately, the herd’s pace was slowing somewhat, and it seemed as though it would be a perpetual sort of slingshot as the core herd was always having to drag along the rest.

  The situation was favorable, and they were inching closer to the outer bits of the herd. Even as the next few minutes of crouched moving passed, the very rear stragglers grew nearer, and then one, and then another were alongside Ian and then between him and the other two rangers. This definitely didn’t put Ian at ease, but after a few moments of inspection, he concluded that they were just a pair of old females having trouble keeping up. He veered off even farther away from them, thinking that they wouldn’t hear him, or much of anything else with how loud they were panting. Hopefully, their peripheral vision wasn’t all that astute either.

  A sudden clap up ahead startled Ian, and he held still, the metal of his rifle sweaty against his hands as another flurry of sounds and disturbances followed. Pursing his lips, Ian raised himself a bit, then quickly came back down. He tried again for a little longer, enough to see a massive bull, pitch black with maturity and rippling with long-held success, come charging out from deeper inside the herd, and in the process banging against another couple of buffalo and producing that slapping sound of tough, taunt hide against hide. Ian didn’t immediately see the source of this outburst until the bull swung itself around again, creating a clearing around itself as the other buffalos gave him ample berth and hurried past.

  “That’s him,” Ian whispered as he lunged forward, sacrificing some of his cover for speed. He knew that was the bull the lord would be pursuing, more because that was the one Ian would shoot for than anything else.

  The other offending buffalo turned out to be large as well, but relatively naïve looking next to the older bull. Not that it was next to it. It was moving back and forth some ways off, its head never daring to turn from the older bull as it was jostled by the other exiting buffalos. As Ian watched, slowing a bit as he neared where Lord Wester and Will were slowly creeping toward it, the younger bull hesitantly lowered its head. As if not quite able to take that seriously, the older bull shook its head up in the air and lifted its front feet off the ground, letting them slam down into the dirt once, twice, three—

  Ian could feel the faint writhing of the ground in his knees as he finished priming on the cartridge he had loaded. Readying another and one more in his pockets, he followed his captain’s advice and opened up his Allen’s focusing bay wide open. It would severely limit his range and also his accuracy somewhat, but he’d need the power if he ever wanted to punch anything larger than a pinhole through that kind of hide or—

  It began so fast he nearly missed it. The dominant bull stopped his expressions of disapproval and lowered his head to the ground for the briefest moment like the other bull still patiently was. Then there was motion, mostly from the older bull, so much so that Ian winced as he also rose and sprinted forward.

  The collision occurred, tremendous dealings of mass and energy, the older bull nearly coming up over the younger one, and then came a desperate moment of wrangling, the older bull wrenching the other off to the side, pushing it away—

  And then it was over.

  But no, Ian thought as he reached a good position and dropped to one knee, his rifle tracking along the line of buffalos that would have seen him already if they weren’t still reacting to the confrontation, because the next one was already underway.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lord Wester rising and well into the midst of aiming. An angry jump-click came at Ian’s wrist to stay down—or something to that affect, it wasn’t one he’d memorized—no doubt very angrily from Captain Marsden.

  Then as Ian was busy aiming, a rousing crack echoed out over the plain from them, chasing after the sharp line of energy that stabbed at the largest bull.

  Circumstances as they were, it was a brilliant shot mildly confounded by the animal jerking at the last moment. The animal’s movement turned what would have been a classic field guide shot, right through the ribs that were just behind the front shoulders, into one that clipped the back of the bull’s shoulder bones. Ian got something of a good glimpse of the effect, and had to firmly affirm the margrave’s rifle as one of the most powerful he’d ever seen. Still, while the external view was impressive, it was obvious that the massive bone structure of the buffalo had considerably blunted the damage.

  Ian shouted something nondescript without planning to as he kept moving closer, keeping his rifle on the bull but watching as the herd reacted. There was suddenly a lot more noise, but even at that he heard the margrave snap his spent cartridge out from the receiver and as he reached for the next. Risking a moment, Ian glanced to his yeoman and checked the others’ positions. He grimaced, changing his aim as a chorus of bulls pinpointed where they were and made threatening calls at them. But he had to wait, just a little longer—

  The wounded bull had fallen to the ground, but somehow, incredibly, pulled itself to its feet, bellowing in pain and wrenching its head about.

  “Come on, come on,” Ian whispered, turning his rifle back to it, sighting down the barrel of what now seemed to be his rather timid-looking Allen, “I would trade a lot for a Brown Bess right about—”

  The bull, evidently catching sight of them, bellowed again with a more focused purpose, and put its head down as it turned and began to lop at them the best it could.

  “Please, God,” Ian said as he rose to his feet and instinctively angled to his right, before sense dictated he stop for the better shot. The bull gained speed toward the margrave, most of its head an impenetrable wall of horn that—

  A strategic crack and wrench of light shot out from the margrave that arched low and directly into the bull’s path, and the next moment it was finally collapsing to the dirt some short distance away.

  Ian turned, fortunately enough, because another, smaller bull was following after the downed bull from the right, and Ian instinctively shot along its shoulder line. In answer to his curiosity, Ian found that his Allen rifle’s volume and the timbre of its report were noticeably deeper with the magnum choke. Even with all that, however, the shot wasn’t ideal by any means, as the bull was moving fast enough that the shot ended up striking it through its haunches.

  “Man alive,” Ian said, frustrated at himself as he snapped out the cartridge and fumbled with sweaty hands at the next one waiting on his rifle rack. He forced himself to slow down as he nearly dropped it.

  People were shouting, and as he finished reloading and looked up, he saw Captain Marsden drop the bull Ian had wounded with an easy shot.

  The bulk of the herd was fleeing more to the north than directly away from them, but there seemed to be some difficulty somewhere as it wasn’t a fast or coherent exit. The herd had done a remarkable job in tightening together, however. Most of what Ian could see now was a tightly pressed wall of dark hides. That left the spattering of bulls, none of them really approaching the size of the margrave’s bull, but there were more than plenty to make up for that. Most of them half-trailed after the herd, half-watched their party.

  Ian
continued moving to his charge, the margrave having dropped to one knee in the grass while carefully watching the movements. Doing the same and attempting to sort out the potentially bolder bulls, Ian checked his yeoman to ensure that Corporal Hanley and Rory were coming this way. In his free time, Ian made his way just behind Lord Wester and toward Captain Marsden as fast as he could maintain watch of the volatile line of bulls as well.

  “Keep steady,” Captain Marsden was repeatedly calling in their direction as he reloaded.

  Ian didn’t really know what that meant in their present context, but he quickly closed the gap between them as a trio of spritely bulls made motions at the captain. As Ian joined his superior, his attention and rifle aimed squarely at the bulls, which mostly faltered and half-jogged in the general direction of the herd.

  Let them go, Ian thought, wishing now that they’d more clearly laid out just how many bulls they were going for. He would have thought a great deal more—as many as they could shoot, but now that they came to it, he realized the great danger in reloading in front of so many.

  “Watch the left,” the captain yelled to him as though he were angry, “I’ll have another in that bunch.”

  Ian didn’t have much reference to know just what bunch Captain Marsden was indicating until he had his rifle raised into a particularly thicker clump of mostly retreating bulls.

  Ian was shaking his head as he held his rifle roughly at the middle of the leftmost wing of bulls near them, his eyes trying to gauge all of the subtle movements. The prevailing consensus among the herd seemed to be retreat, right up until the captain’s rifle gave its searing crack.

  The yeeling caws of the buffalos suddenly changed in pitch and intensity, a good deal of them whirling and flipping their heads around from where they had been exiting. Even as he listened, Ian heard the difference in their tones, like an angry parliament rippling in protest.

  It came fast, the bulls surging at them in uneven bits, the situation completely changed. Suddenly there was coherence, an agreement in purpose as the row of bulls straight ahead of them charged at the captain and even into each other as they went. The little motions, the small jitters Ian had seen before abruptly made sense as they jostled their bodies close together, their horns, ungainly and independent only moments ago, now to his amazement were quickly locked together, forming an intricately solid barrier of thick and deadly bone that they lowered near the ground as they came. The makeshift ram ran imperfect in only a few small areas where instinct and design didn’t have time to straighten it out.