Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (версия книг TXT) 📗
"I admire your resolve and your loyalty, Sabah," said Hal.
They waited in silence, hearing Zwaantie weeping with fear and indecision in the darkness. Then, after a long while, Althuda led her back to the fire, his arm around her shoulders, and they took their places in the circle.
"Zwaantie fears not for herself but for the baby," he said. "But she knows that our best chance will be with you, Sir Hal. We will come with you."
"I would have mourned if your decision had been different, Althuda." Hal smiled with genuine pleasure. "Together our chances are much increased. Now we must make our preparations and agree on the time when we will set out."
Sukeena came from the fire to sit beside Hal, and spoke out firmly. "Your leg will not be healed for at least another five days. I will not allow you to march upon it before then."
"When the Princess speaks," Aboli declared, in his deep voice, "only a foolish man does not listen."
During those last days Hal and Sukeena foraged for the herbs and plants that she would use for medicine and food. The last of the infection in Hal's wounds yielded to her treatment, while climbing and descending the steep and rugged slopes of the mountains rapidly strengthened his injured limb.
On the day before the journey was due to commence, the two stopped at midday to bathe and rest and make love in the soft grass beside the stream. This was a branch of the river that they had not visited on their previous forays, and while Hal lay surfeited with passion in the warm sunlight, Sukeena stood up naked and moved away up the rarine a short distance to ease herself.
Hal watched her squat behind a patch of low bush, lay back and closed his eyes, drifting lazily to the edge of sleep. He was roused by the familiar sound of Sukeena's sharp pointed digging stick pounding into the earth. A few minutes later she returned, still naked, but with a crumbling lump of yellow earth in her hand.
"Flower crystals! The first I have found in these mountains." She looked delighted with her discovery, and emptied some of the less valuable herbs from her basket to make place for the lumps of friable earth. "Part of these mountains must once have been volcanoes for the flower crystals are spewed up from the earth in the lava."
Hal watched her work, more interested in the way her naked body gleamed in the sunlight, like molten gold, and the way her small breasts changed shape as she wielded the stick vigorously, than in the crystalline lumps of yellow earth she was pr ising from the bank of the ravine.
"What do you use this earth for?" he asked, without rising from his grassy nest.
"It has many uses. It is a sovereign cure for headaches and colic. If I mix it with the juice of the verbena berry it will soothe palpitations of the heart and ease a woman's monthly courses..." She reeled off a list of the ailments that she could treat with it, but to Hal it did not seem to have any special virtue, and looked like any other clod of dry earth. The basket was so heavy by now that, on their return to camp, Hal had to take it from her.
That night while the band sat around the fire and held their final council before beginning the long journey east, Sukeena pounded the clods of earth in the crude stone mortar she had made and mixed the powder into a pot of water. She heated this over the fire, then came to sit beside Hal as he went over the order of march for the following day. He was allocating weapons and loads to the men. The weight and bulk of each load would be dictated by the age and strength of the man carrying it.
Suddenly Hal broke off and sniffed the air. "Sweet heaven and all the apostles!" he cried. "What have you in this pot, Sukeena?"
"I told you, Gundwane. "Tis the yellow flowers." She looked alarmed as he rushed back to her, picked her up in his arms, tossed her high in the air and caught her as she came down, skirts fluttering around her.
"Tis not any type of flower at all! I would know that smell in hell itself where it truly belongs!" He kissed her until she pushed his face away.
"Are you mad?" She laughed and gasped for breath.
"Mad with love for you!" he said, and turned her to face the men who had watched this display in amazement. "Lads, the Princess has created the miracle which will save us all!"
"You speak in riddles!" said Aboli.
"Yes!" the others cried. "Speak plain, Captain."
"I'll speak plain enough so even the slowest-witted of you sea-rats will understand my words." Hal laughed at their confusion. "Her pot is filled with brimstone! Magical yellow brimstone!"
It was Ned Tyler who understood first, for he was the master gunner. He also leaped to his feet, rushed to kneel over the pot and inhaled the fumes as though they were the smoke of an opium pipe.
"The captain's right, lads," he howled with glee. "It's brimstone sulphur, sure enough."
Sukeena led a party, headed by Aboli and Big Daniel, back to the ravine in which she had discovered the sulphur deposit, and they returned to camp staggering under their loads of the yellow earth, packed into baskets or sewn into sacks made of animal skins.
While Sukeena supervised the boiling and leaching of the sulphur crystals from the ore, one-eyed Johannes and Zwaantie tended the slow fires, banked with earth, in which the baulks of cedar wood were being gradually reduced to pure black nuggets of charcoal.
Hal and Sabah's band climbed the steep mountainside above the camp to reach the cliffs in which the multitudes of rock rabbits had their colonies. Sabah's men clung to the precipice like flies to the wall as they scraped away the amber coloured crystals of dried urine. The little animals defecated in communal middens, and while the round pellets of dung rolled away, the urine dribbled down and soaked the rock face. They discovered that, in some places, this coating was several feet thick.
