Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (версия книг TXT) 📗

Hal and Aboli sprawled together on the rocks and looked down. The horse rolled until it struck the bend in the pathway, where it came to rest in a slide of small stones, loose earth and dust. It lay with all four legs kicking weakly in the air. A resounding shout of triumph went up from the pursuing soldiers, whose cries rang along the cliffs and echoed through the gloomy depths of the dark gorge.

Hal crawled shakily to his feet, and quickly assessed their circumstances. Both he and Aboli still had their muskets slung over their shoulders and their swords in their scabbards. In addition they each had a pair of pistols, a small powder horn and a bag containing musket balls strapped around their waists. But they had lost all else.

Below them their pursuers had been given new heart by this reverse in their fortunes and were clamouring like a pack of hounds with the smell of the chase hot in their nostrils. They came scrambling upwards.

"Leave your pistols and musket," Aboli ordered. "Leave the powder horn and sword also, or their weight will wear you down."

Hal shook his head. "We will need them soon enough. Lead the way on." Aboli did not argue and went away at full stride. Hal stayed close behind him, forcing his injured leg to serve his purpose through the pain and the quivering weakness that spread slowly up his thigh.

Aboli reached back to hand him up over the more formidable steps in the pathway, but the incline became sharper as they laboured upwards and began to work round the sheer buttress of rock that formed one of the portals of the dark gorge. Now, at every pace forward, they were forced to step up onto the next level, as though they were on a staircase, and were skirting the sheer wall that dropped into the valley far below. The pursuers, though still close, were out of sight around the buttress.

"Are we sure this is the right path?" Hal gasped, as they stopped for a few seconds" rest on a broader step.

"Althuda is leaving sign for us still," Aboli assured him, and kicked over the cairn of three small pebbles balanced upon each other which had been erected prominently in the centre of the path. "And so are my grey horses." He smiled as he pointed out a pile of shining wet balls of dung a little further ahead. Then he cocked his head. "Listen!"

Now Hal could hear the voices of Schreuder's men. They were closer than they had been when last they had stopped. They sounded as though they were just round the corner of the buttress behind them. Hal looked at Aboli with dismay, and tried to balance on his good leg to conceal the weakness of the other. They could hear the clink of sword on rock and the clatter of loose stones underfoot. The soldiers" voices were so clear and loud that Hal could distinguish their words, and Schreuder's voice relentlessly urging his troops onwards.

"Now you will obey me, Gundwane!"said Aboli, and he leaned across and snatched Hal's musket. "You will go on at your best speed while I hold them here for a while." Hal was about to argue but Aboli looked hard into his eyes. "The longer you argue- the more danger you place me in," he said.

Hal nodded. "See you at the top of the gorge." He clasped Aboli's arm in a firm grip, then hobbled on alone. As the path turned into the main gorge, Hal looked back and saw that Aboli had taken shelter crouching in the bend of the path, and that he had laid the two muskets on the rock in front of him, close to his hand.

Hal turned the corner, looked up and saw the gorge open up above him like a great gloomy funnel. The sides were sheer rock walls and it was roofed over by trees with tall thin stems that reached up for the sunlight. They were draped and festooned with lichens. A small stream came leaping down, in a series of pools and waterfalls, and the path took to this stream bed and climbed up over water worn boulders. Hal dropped to his knees, plunged his face into the fir At pool and sucked up water, choking and coughing in his greed. As the water distended his belly he felt strength flow back into his swollen, throbbing leg.

From the other side of the buttress behind him there came the thud of a musket shot, then the thump of a ball striking flesh, followed immediately by the scream of a man thrown into the abyss, a scream that dwindled and faded as he fell away. It was cut off abruptly as he struck the rocks far below. Aboli had made certain of his first shot, and the pursuers would be thrown back in disarray. It would take them time to regroup and come on more cautiously, so he had won precious minutes for Hal.

Hal scrambled to his feet, and launched himself up the stream bed.

Each of the huge, smooth boulders tested his injured leg to its limit.

He grunted, groaned and dragged himself upward, listening at the same time for the sounds of fighting behind him, but he heard nothing more until he reached the next pool where he stopped in surprise.

Althuda had left the five grey horses tethered to a dead tree at the water's edge. When he looked beyond them to the next giant step in the stream bed, Hal knew why they had been abandoned here. They could no longer follow this dizzy path. The gorge was constricted into a narrow throat high above his head and his own courage faltered as he surveyed the perilous route that he had to follow. But there was no other way, for the gorge had turned into a trap from which there was no escape. While he wavered, he heard from far below another musket shot and a clamour of angry shouts.

"Aboli has taken another," he said aloud, and his own voice echoed weirdly from the high walls of the gorge. "Now both his muskets are empty and he will have to run." But Aboli had won this reprieve for him, and he dared not squander it. He drove himself at -the steep path, dragging his wounded leg over glassy, water-polished rock, which was slippery and treacherous with slimy green algae.

His heart pounding with exhaustion, and his fingernails ripped to the quick, he crawled the last few feet upwards and reached the ledge in the throat of the gorge. Here he dropped flat on his belly and looked back over the edge. He saw Aboli coming up, leaping from rock to rock without hesitation, a musket clutched in each hand, not even glancing down to judge his footing on the treacherous boulders.

Hal looked up at the sky through the narrow opening of the gorge high above his head, and saw that day was fading. It would be dark soon, and the tops of the trees were turning to gold in the last rays of sunlight.