25. The First Day of Winter – Elsewhere.

The day was bright, cold and calm over Ergaph too. The vermin soldiers, tired of waiting out rain, sleet and wind in their barracks or suffering from them when on watch, welcomed that. They celebrated the coming of winter like a bunch of overgrown children, rolling and wrestling in the snow, playing snowballs, chasing each other and engaging in all sort of outdoor games and competitions. Blackear, Treestalker, and a dozen of others, who boasted decent skills with a bow, decided to have an archery contest, quickly making a few snow figures to replace usual straw targets on a wide clearing outside of the castle.

"Ha! Right on mark, from forty paces!" Treestalker's arrow pierced the center of the head of a snow form, which might have resembled an oversized mouse to a beast with active imagination.

"Not bad, for a greenhorn." Blackear smirked and measured out five more paces from the younger ferret's position. "Now watch me!"

She picked a shaft, took aim quickly, and let it fly. The whole head of the snow figure fell away.

"Yea, how about this?" At this moment, she spotted another small group, approaching their improvised archery range, and her good mood evaporated.

"Nice shooting, scorebeast." Captain Ulakhai, finally back on his paws, was carrying a taut recurve bow, slightly shorter than those used by average mustelid soldiers. "Mind if I join in?"

"A captain's wish is command to us," Blackear bowed. Ulakhai was known to the ranks as a harsh and aloof commander, who drove soldiers hard, and hid no small amount of spite under his calm attitude and smooth voice, so Blackear did not buy his unceremonious manner. But the day suddenly became bleaker to her not because of Ulakhai, but of the beasts who followed him – Ubel, and a couple of armored guards.

Soldiers watched, as Ulakhai counted whole sixty paces – and his were a bit longer than those of an average beast – from another misshapen snow figure, meant to represent an otter. Some, including Blackear, wished the captain to miss, but they found themselves sorely disappointed. The captain let loose six arrows, and all of them hit close to the center of the target's snow chest.

Ubel was counting steadily below his breath, and by the time Ulakhai emptied half of his quiver he was at seventy.

"A most excellent example of archery, captain. Your skills are truly worthy of your position."

Ulakhai's long tail flicked around once, betraying his ire, but his voice remained smooth and level:

"In the land of my ancestors, a true warrior is supposed to master the bow arts, alongside with those of sword and long spear or halberd. So I did. But bowmanship is not my strongest suit."

"Still, may I ask you to use it once more? Do you see that tree." Ubel pointed at a large birch at the edge of the clearing, maybe three hundred paces from them. "Let us assume, that this tree is an enemy standard, and the space around it is crowded with soldiers. Can your arrows reach them from here?"

Ulakhai's eyes narrowed, as he evaluated the distance. "I can easily lob an arrow this far, but hitting anything, even a tree, at such distance, depends on winds and fates, not on a beast's skill."

Ubel smiled thinly. "Then do not try to aim too much, just shoot as fast as possible."

The captain looked at him for a few seconds, but instead of objections reached for another arrow, and placed it on the bowstring, aiming high into the sky. Ubel counted again, as Ulakhai emptied the rest of his quiver, and when the last arrow went into the air, he got to thirty two.

"Shall we see where they fell?"

Maybe winds and fates favored Ulakhai today, for one arrow hit the birch's trunk, with others scattered within a dozen paces of the tree. But it only chipped off a bit of bark, without getting stuck in the frozen wood.

"Forgive me, great Seer, but can you tell me, what is the point of this? With only the force of its own weight, an arrow is not likely to pierce even something as poor, as simple quilted jacket or bark armor. And what sort of warriors crowd conveniently to let themselves be shot?" Despite obvious sarcasm, Ulakhai's voice remained impassive.

Ubel smiled with the corner of his lips, and answered, loud enough for the rest of the vermin, who went to check the results of Ulakhai's archery, to hear his words:

"Warriors? No. But woodlander peasants and tribesbeasts, who will rise to protect their country from a sudden invasion? How do you think they will fight, if not by crowding together, and trying to overwhelm us with sheer mass?"

"Interesting." The captain looked around, grasping Ubel's idea. "Your mind is quite strategic."

Ubel patted the bigger mustelid on the back. "Now you saw, what I, Ubel, tried to tell you. This method offers five times the range and twice the rate, with accuracy good enough for shooting thickly packed beasts. And the best thing is, inexperienced woodlander scum will panic under a thick rain of arrows from a range beyond their imagination."

Ulakhai did a quick calculation in his mind:

"With the number of good archers we have, our rain of arrows hardly will be thick. But to think of it, another advantage of shooting this way is that even mediocre archers can do that, and a mediocre archer can be trained in a reasonable amount of time. Do you want me…" his glance ran across the gathered archers, "or, should I say, us, to start with such training?"

"Of course." The white ferret smiled. "Rearrange our scores, if need be, group together those who show promise as bowbeasts. Do you not think, that "Ulakhai, Captain of Archers, the beast who won the most glory in the war for Southsward" sounds good?"

Ulakhai was not nearly good enough at concealing his emotions to fool Ubel. From the slight twitches of his tail, the glitter in his eyes, the nuances of his scent, it was clear, that this indeed sounded very good to Ulakhai. Of course, the sorcerer realized, that he is offering to the captain nothing else than a foundation for a personal power grab in the future. But by then it was not going to matter. And in the now Ulakhai's support – and a measure of respect – were going to matter quite a bit.

00000

There were intermittent clouds in the sky over the Southern Plateau. There were much more dangerous things in the sky as well. A big buzzard circled low over the plain, sharp and cruel golden eyes scanning the ground, where he spotted movement not so long ago. Yet snow-covered earth seemed empty now, nothing but bare black bushes sticking from under the thin snow carpet. Whatever creature was there, it already got away, or hid cleverly. Another disappointment.

When the silhouette of the big bird turned into a speck in the eastern sky, Belk the Warrior finally moved on all fours from under a snow-covered flat stone slab, where he and Myns were hiding.

"Looks like it's safe."

"Good thing you spotted that bird in time." Myns followed her husband. Travel made her grow leaner, but so far she bore hardships well, better than Belk ever expected.

That said, Belk knew that they had yet to face any truly serious hardship – crossing Mossflower proved to be little more than a stroll from one friend's dwelling to another, weather this far south remained mild, for the season, their backpacks still were full of food, and only now they met an actual danger. The squirrel warrior wondered if their good luck had something to do with the fact, that they were following a prophetic vision. He also wondered how long said luck is going to last now, when they entered lands, about which even denizens of the plateau's northern parts, who maintained friendly ties with creatures of Mossflower and knew what Redwall is, had almost no information besides scary rumors.

But he was hesitant to burden Myns with concerns that surfaced again in his mind, while they were hiding. So he just smiled:

"These weary old eyes are still good for something, don't you think?"

"I think that this dearest husband of mine sometimes brags by pretending to be humble. But I wonder, if that big raptor was indeed going to eat us?"

Belk sighed:

"Oh, trust me, it was. We're not in Mossflower, where birds of prey are civilized enough to hunt only mindless woodpigeons and the like, when they get a craving for meat, no, we're not in Mossflower anymore. And this short bow," he grunted with exertion, as he pushed on the weapon in question to unstrung it, "is too weak to slay a diving buzzard. Quickly enough to stop it from slaying us, that is."

"Please, enough talk about slaying." Myns was at peace with the fact that Belk's duty may involve taking lives and risking his own before they even married, but she knew her husband as a gentle beast, saddened by necessity of violence, and hearing him discuss such things in a business-like manner disturbed her. "We still have much to walk today, right?"

"Right." Belk looked around – the flat and barren plain extended in every direction, inhospitable even in summer, deadly for any traveler slow enough to exhaust his rations in winter. They needed to cross it fast.

But by evening Belk saw that this is not going to be easy. He knew of the great gorge that split the Southern Plateau, and plotted their path towards southwest, intending to bypass it. But either he failed to maintain the right direction, or the gorge was much longer than he imagined, for the bottomless abyss was now right before the squirrel pair, stretching from east to west, as far as eye could see.

And there was another, worse problem. Truly, to doubt one's luck was to chase it away.

The warrior put his paw on his wife's shoulder:

"Don't turn around, and don't panic. We're being watched, and by more than one beast."

00000

There was one creature in all the land, who didn't even notice the coming of winter – not that she missed snow beyond her window, it simply did not register in her mind as something worthy of any attention.

Violet Wildstripe largely secluded herself from her hares since the Gallopers left. She spent almost all of her waking time in the forge room of badger rulers, the rest in the Secret Chamber, leaving day-to-day affairs of her domain to Brigadier Greyfield. And the forge room was now used intensely for its original purpose – on many a day, half the mountain could hear clanging of a hammer, striking iron with ferocious intensity.

Yet sometimes putting in a vigorous effort was not enough. On this day Violet had to admit this, as she put away yet another freshly-tempered blade. Oh, it was a fine blade, by any measure, and it was going to serve some Long Patrol hare well. But one look at it, and she knew, that it still was short of what she needed.

Shoulders slumping in exhaustion, Violet walked to a polished silver mirror on the far side of the spacious room, away from grime of the forge. The soot-stained beast, with drawn, haunted face who looked back at her barely resembled the regal and elegant Badger Lady, whose beauty was famed on land and sea.

"Good that Aldwin is not here, he would berate me from dawn till dusk for running myself down like that," she thought, and that thought made her smile sadly. She briefly wondered, if the black-eared captain now looks any better himself, there, out in the cold wilderness. Other beasts in her place would be worried for Aldwin's life, but Violet knew with absolute certainty, that he will return.

And he will bring the heralds of doom with him.