Chapter Thirteen

Dawn broke over an encampment that was a shattered, smoldering ghost of what it had been the day before. The mill factory and Ostrok's overseer's tower were the only structures still standing on the site, and the stone tower carried a distinctly ravaged appearance due to its smashed third floor windows. The tavern and several of the other larger buildings still burned, sending columns of black, gray and white smoke drifting lazily skyward; one of them, a warehouse where the cut lumber was stored to await shipment, looked as if it might burn for days. The thick smell of woodsmoke hung over every corner of the mill, and was almost choking at times.

Another smell, decidedly less pleasant, mingled with the woody odor. More than four hundred searats had died here, and while some of those had had the decency to go down with the Scorpiontail, the corpses of over half the searat forces littered the site and shoreline once the battle was ended. They couldn't simply be left to rot where they were, since the woodlanders were using the mill factory as a makeshift hospital and could not reasonably be expected to share the site with so many decaying rat bodies. So a couple of the guard towers around the camp perimeter were chopped down rather than simply set afire where they stood, and their timber was used to make a seaside funeral pyre to dispose of the corpses. When the wood from the watchtowers proved insufficient for the mammoth task, the remaining dock was further dismantled and its planks added to the pyre. It was a huge undertaking, but with so many willing paws of soldier and slave alike, the job was done by sunrise.

But there were other dead to consider as well - over a score of the Gawtrybe, and several of the slaves who'd fallen in their struggle against their former captors. As for the otters, while some of them washed ashore along with the rats from the Scorpiontail and the dock, it quickly became obvious that others who'd been too close to that cataclysmic detonation would never be recovered. Captain Riveroll himself had yet to turn up, dead or alive. And of course Flusk's shrews had taken casualties as well, although they'd been spared the full brunt of the battle by the pirate ship's premature destruction.

There was no question of burning the goodbeast dead on the same pyre as the enemy, and there wasn't enough wood, time or musclepower to build a second one. Thus, a large common grave was dug in the sandy soil next to the overseer's tower; as the only structure that would remain standing after the warriors departed, it would serve as a suitable gravestone to commemorate the fallen fighters. Squirrel, otter, shrew and slave were laid shoulder to shoulder in the burial pit, and then the earth was solemnly and respectfully filled back in over the eternally sleeping warriors.

Saybrook was seen to visibly shudder in the predawn darkness. "Kinda reminds me of Salamandastron all over agin ... "

"This is what it was like, huh?" Matowick asked. He had not been at the battle for Salamandastron and had never witnessed any conflict which had claimed such a large number of Lord Urthblood's troops.

"Lord Urthfist and th' hares of th' Long Patrol claimed many more o' our lives than this seascum did," the otter captain replied. "But, yeah, it was kind o' like this. Never much cared fer th' notion o' common graves."

"Me neither," Matowick agreed. "But nothing to be done for it now. We'll have to be gone from here soon, and there was no way we could have borne them all back to Salamandastron. This was our only real choice."

Now, with the sun in the sky, the full measure could be taken of the ruin visited upon the searat installation. The destruction was nearly total, from the watchtowers to the various structures to the dock, now demolished to the point where no craft larger than a dinghy would ever find safe harbor there again. The tall masts of the Scorpiontail stuck up above the waves at an ungainly angle, but the rest of the devastated attack vessel lay beneath the whitecaps in its watery grave, a submerged hazard to any other ship that might dare to venture near.

Browder, out from the coastal cave where he'd spent the night, strolled through the smoking and smoldering ruins, nose wrinkling and eyes watering. "I say," he declared to nobeast in particular, "when you chaps decide to throw a party, you go all out, wot?"

While a few of the more skilled healerbeasts labored over the injured in the mill, most of the others settled down onto the sand to nap away the morning in the winter sunshine. They'd battled and worked straight through the night, and seen many of their comrades laid low, and most now tottered on the verge of mental and physical collapse. Some were asleep almost before they hit their mats and blankets.

Their rest, however, was fated to be a short one.

Before the sun was very high in the sky, a warning cry rose up from the stone overseer's tower. The squirrel stationed on lookout duty there used a long glass that Urthblood had supplied the Gawtrybe before leaving Salamandastron. That paw-held telescope enabled the sharp-eyed sentry to extend his vision well out toward the ocean horizon.

"Ship!" he yelled down to his slumbering companions. "Ship approachin'!"

Matowick was on his footpaws in an instant, pawing at his bleary eyes. "One of Tratton's?"

"Just a minute, Captain sir." The lookout peered through the long glass again, his concentration total. Matowick, with Saybrook and Flusk standing anxiously at his side, gazed up at the tower in tensed anticipation, counting every rapid heartbeat. It seemed to take forever for the squirrel above to confirm their fears. "Aye, sails of red, black and green, Tratton's official colors. Looks like another dreadnought, sirs."

Saybrook looked to Matowick. "Think these rats here were able t' send out word they was bein' attacked an' needed help?"

The Gawtrybe captain shook his head. "Not unless they've started using birds for spies and messengers, like Lord Urthblood does. And that doesn't seem likely, given all the gulls they eat. No, I think we're just the victims of fateful bad timing. We knew ships come and go at this port all the time. This must be the relief for the dreadnought we destroyed last night."

"Or else Tratton was plannin' on keepin' both here," Saybrook supposed, "since this mill was gonna be expanded an' all ... "

"Yeah, that's possible too. In which case, the timing may have worked to our favor, just barely. I would have hated trying to attack this compound last night with two dreadnoughts' worth of searats defending it."

"None o' which answers the question, wot're we gonna do now?" Flusk asked.

Matowick pursed his lips. "Normally I wouldn't think twice about standing our ground against them. With that dock rendered unusable, they'd have to send their troops ashore in smaller landing boats, and they'd be easy pickings. But we lost a lot of our own in last night's battle, and those of us who're left are dead on our paws. Plus, we've got injured to worry about. And the slaves too. They fought valiantly, but I don't know how they'd fare against a fresh rat regiment in a daytime battle, without the element of surprise on their side."

Saybrook glanced at some of the smoking ruins which still sent plumes of various shades up into the morning sky. "Reckon the element o' surprise is somethin' none of us'll have this time."

"Nay," Matowick concurred. "On such a clear day, this smoke will be visible halfway to the end of the world. If they've not seen it already, they soon will ... and then they'll know something is very, very wrong here." He called up to the lookout, "When do you estimate they'll be here?"

"Definitely by day's end, sir. Maybe by noon."

"They'll pour on th' speed once they realize there's been trouble," said Saybrook.

"Probably," agreed Matowick. "And if their archers are as good as the ones we faced last night, that alone could be enough to tip the odds in their favor."

"Too bad we can't jus' snap our paws an' make that one explode too," Flusk lamented.

"We don't even know what caused that to happen, or whether this second ship is carrying anything similar," said Matowick. "We can't count on lightning striking twice. So, do we stand and fight, or do we run?"

"If we bug out, what happens to th' wounded?" Flusk inquired. "Some of 'em are too bad off to be moved, an' they'd slow us down too much anyways."

"Mebbe we could move 'em back up inta th' woods?" Saybrook suggested. "Far 'nuff so that they're hid 'mongst th' trees. We could leave a few medics t' look after 'em, then the rest of us could make a show of headin' south along th' shore t' draw these rats away from 'em. They're not very likely t' go stickin' their ugly snouts inta th' forest if they see us makin' our getaway."

"A diversion, hm? But, if they didn't fall for it and stayed here to try to rebuild the mill, those we leave behind wouldn't stand a chance against them. And it's still winter. You're talking about leaving our injured friends in the middle of the woods with no shelter, no food to forage ... no, I can't see that ... "

"What about this, then?" Flusk slapped his paw against the hard stone of Ostrok's tower. "We've seen it's got its own well in th' cellar, an' t'would be easy t' defend. Why, station a dozen o' yer best archers up top, an' I bet they could hold off a horde fer a season ... "

"Y' might have somethin' there, Flusk matey," Saybrook said. "There's room aplenty inside fer th' worst o' th' wounded, an' these walls wouldn't be easily breached. Them rats couldn't climb up outside like our squirrels could. Th' door's th' weak spot, but we could always shore it up nice 'n' tight ... "

"It galls me to think of leaving any of my beasts behind," Matowick muttered. "So much could go wrong ... "

"Look out there, Matty." Saybrook pointed seaward. "Things've already gone wrong. An' those rats ain't gonna give us all season t' fiddle-faddle over what we're gonna do. We gotta decide, an' we gotta be quick about it!"

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Captain Rindosh had made a rare climb up to the Sharktail's crow's nest to appraise the situation for himself.

The low-ranking deckpaw rat currently on lookout duty shoved aside in the cramped platform to make room for his commander. Like Lutar, Rindosh was a lean and muscular fighting rat, who didn't think anything of scaling the rigging ropes when the smoke columns were sighted on the eastern horizon. Now, perched high above the Sharktail's deck atop the dreadnought's tallest mast, with the salty sea breeze rippling his fur and flapping his turquoise tunic in the clear morning sunshine, Rindosh stared hard through his long glass at the distant smoke marring the misty shoreline.

"Wotcha think it is, Cap'n?" the lookout ventured tremulously.

"It's trouble, that's what it is," Rindosh muttered, more to himself than to his lowly companion. "That's right where th' mill is, and that ain't no cookfire ner chimney smoke. Only a whole buncha buildings burnin' at once would put up somethin' we'd see this far from shore. That, or a big ship afire."

The lookout rat gulped. "Ye wager it might've been a slave revolt?" The Sharktail, being in the same grand attack class as the Scorpiontail, carried no slaves in order to avoid just such an eventuality, and the crews of these fearsome warships had come to take a jaundiced view of pirate raiders and camps which still relied heavily on slaves. Ever since the still-unexplained disappearance of one of Tratton's prized underwater iron vessels the summer before, the Searat King did not trust his more valuable craft to anybeasts but his own rats.

"Either that, or the idiots started fighting each other." Rindosh lowered his spyglass, mulling over the possible scenarios in his mind. It was not unheard of for there to be strife between the naval searats and those assigned to landbound detail, with each faction holding itself to be above the other. But never had such frictions and rivalries resulted in a calamity on the scale of what appeared to have happened here.

Rindosh scolwed, folding the long glass and replacing it in his belt. "No use speculatin' - we'll just hafta go find our fer ourselves what went on." He swung himself out of the crow's nest and clambered back down the rigging to the deck below. The first boson Gumbs and the first mate Bodor awaited him expectantly.

"Gumbs," he snapped, "get three rats at every oar down in th' rowing galley, an' tell 'em to put their flearidden backs into it! We ain't waitin' fer th' wind t' get us there! I wanna be at the mill dock by midday!"

"Aye, sir!" Gumbs saluted and rushed belowdecks to carry out his orders.

Rindosh turned to his first mate. "Bodor, put all soldier rats on high alert. An' put all archers an' slingers along the for'ard railing, fully armed. I don't know what we're gonna find when we reach port, but I wanna be ready fer anything!"

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The Gawtrybe worked furiously, collecting as many of their spent arrows as they could recover until their quivers were nearly full again. The shrews and otters, in the meantime, supervised the moving of the wounded from the mill factory to the overseer's tower. Matowick had decided upon a plan that would combine the strategies they'd discussed earlier. It would require a lot of work, some good timing, and a modicum of luck, but all three woodlander captains agreed it was the best choice.

The approaching searat ship was now clearly visible to the naked eye, her ominous sails of red and black and green fully billowed before the wind. The goodbeasts on land did have one advantage in their favor, and that was the smoke from the rat funeral pyre and smoldering tavern, which would help obscure their activities from any watchers out at sea. Matowick fully intended to make themselves very visible to this new ship of searats, but at the time of his choosing.

When the last patient was evacuated from the big mill, that building was set ablaze as well, adding its own voluminous column of smoke to the morning sky. The watching slaves broke into applause and cheered the sight.

The otter slave Kurdyla, who'd returned to some semblance of calm sanity now that his murderous berserker's rampage was finished, came up to Matowick. "'scuse me, sir, but yore th' officer in charge 'ere, right?"

"Yes, that's right." Matowick regarded the otter standing before him. The chains binding his paws had been severed, but there hadn't been any time to file the manacles off his wrists or ankles, and the way he wore those crude ornaments now made him look like a proud savage. He had reason to be proud; by Matowick's estimate, Kurdyla had crushed the life out of at least a dozen searats during the night's fighting, and that was before he'd gotten his paws around Ostrok. The big otter was surely nobeast Matowick would have wanted for an enemy. "How can I help you?"

"It's about th' slaves, sir," Kurdyla said. "Some of 'em are willin' fighters, as you saw last night, but a lot of 'em ain't. They got no place in any battle yore plannin', an' there ain't room fer 'em in the tower along with all the wounded. We gotta figger out what we're gonna do with 'em."

It was then that Matowick noticed Browder had come over with Kurdyla, and stood self-consciously shuffling his footpaws in the sand behind the otter. "Well, I don't know what to tell you, Kurdyla. I'll be taking our main force down along the coast in plain view of the searats, to try to draw them away from here, and if that strategy works, we could see some more heavy fighting before we get back to Salamandastron. If there's not enough room for them in the tower, maybe they can retreat back up into the forest until the rats are gone. It's either that, or come along with us."

This didn't seem to satisfy the otter. "Not meanin' to be difficult, sir, but most o' these slaves have lost seasons outta their lives to this fur-forsaken place, an' suffered hardship an' loss nobeast oughtta know. They ain't keen to be stickin' 'round here, an' just wanna be away as soon as may be."

"Then they join my troops. We won't ask them to fight, and we'll protect them as much as we can. But if those searats attack in force, I can't promise they'll be safe."

"This hare had another idea."

"Oh?" Matowick raised an eyebrow toward Browder. "And that is?"

"Redwall," Browder said.

"Redwall?"

Browder nodded. "After wot most o' these poor souls have been through, they need someplace like that. Their homes have been destroyed, friends an' family slain ... All they've got left is each other, an' their freedom. They're flippin' refugees in their own lands. Really no place else fer 'em to go, wot?"

"We're a long way from Redwall," Matowick said doubtfully. "Do any of them know how to get there?"

"I do," said Browder.

"You? Browder, aren't you the same hare who told me you stayed as far away from that Abbey as you could when you came down from the north, out of fear of the Long Patrols?"

"Yah, well, I'll jump that bloomin' hurdle when I get to it, wot? But these goodbeasts need a guide to get 'em to Redwall, and I'm th' hare for the job!"

Matowick shook his head. "I might need you to scout for us on the way back to Salamandastron. I can't spare you, Browder."

"Sure y' can!" Browder argued. "You've got those bally birds o' yours, an' jolly fine scouts they are too! Why, Altidor 'n' Klystra can do much, much better in that department than I could. Those bird chaps can fly from th' mountains to th' sea an' back again in the time it'd take us to break for tea 'n' crumpets, an' see more from up in th' sky than I could standin' on the shoulders of a hundred bally squirrels! An' they're fightin' creatures, too, able t' lend beak 'n' talon to any blinkin' brouhaha you find yourselves in. I'm no good in a fight, as you're only too quick t' remind me every bloomin' chance you get ... "

"Lord Urthblood didn't want any of you involved in the fighting," Matowick reminded him, "so that's not a very good argument. You, Altidor and Klystra are the only long-range scouts I have on this mission, and I don't want to lose any of you. We'll be hitting the sandy coastal plain on the way home, and us squirrels can't move on that ground the way you can."

"An' then what, wot? Either those rats are gonna attack you, or they're not. If they don't, you won't need me t'all, an' if they do, you won't need me to see 'em comin'. I'd be a fifth paw, only gettin' in the way ... "

Matowick was about to put the final quash on Browder's argument when Kurdyla entered the conversation once more. "Please, sir. My friends deserve this after all they've been through, and if this hare can take them to a better place, you've got to let 'im."

There was a pleading tone in the otter's voice, but also something in his eye that might have been dangerous. Matowick didn't think Kurdyla would grow violent if his request was denied, but after what he'd seen the otter do last night, he did not want to risk reawakening the bloodlust that he knew dwelt within this beast.

The Gawtrybe captain sighed. "If you're gonna be leaving, you'd best be off before that ship gets any closer. Captain Flusk will see to doling out some provisions for you from the supplies we took from the tavern. How many of the slaves will be going to Redwall?"

"'bout half, I reckon," Kurdyla answered. "Th' rest'll go with you down th' shoreline, in case you get another crack at those searats."

"And I gather you'll be with us too?" Matowick said to the otter.

Kurdyla actually seemed surprised by the squirrel's assumption. "Who, me? Naw, I'm goin' to Redwall with Browder. I'm no fighter."

"No .. no fighter?" Matowick sputtered. "What do you call what you did last night?"

"Oh, that?" Kurdyla dismissed it with the wave of his paw, his dangling bit of manacle chain clinking as he did so. "That weren't fightin'. Not real, solider-like fightin'. I was just angry."

Matowick stared after Kurdyla as he departed with Browder to make ready for their journey. "Remind me never to get you angry," the squirrel muttered.

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On the plateau of Salamandastron, King Grullon squawked and flapped and danced around in happy circles - a display of behavior most inappropriate for a bird of royalty.

"Creeaagh! Stripedog ratkiller! Crahawhaw! Rathouses burn, ratships sink, ratfighters die, die, die! Great day, great day!"

Urthblood stood on the mountaintop a short distance away, impassive as usual, watching the gull king's joyous whirling. The midmorning sun shone brightly down upon bare and deserted coastlands, and an ocean vista that was empty of searat sails. After the events of the previous night, the Badger Lord doubted they would remain that way for long.

"So, you are satisfied with this demonstration I arranged?"

"My gulls fly to me this morning, tell Grullon all they see. Fire, fire, and many many many dead rats! Thousand rats, all dead now, craawk!"

"I suspect the actual number was closer to five hundred," Urthblood casually corrected, "unless there was more than one dreadnought docked there, which my intelligence did not indicate. But it is certainly a good start, as I am sure you'll agree. Just imagine what we will be able to achieve when your forces are united with mine, Your Majesty. I will give you your thousand dead searats, and a thousand more if that is your desire. What say you?"

Grullon momentarily paused in his dance of triumph and looked at the badger. "Yah! You want hundred gulls, I give you hundred gulls. But Grullon think you kill searats just fine without any gulls at all."

"That mill was just one site of Tratton's, and we caught them totally by surprise. He has other installations up and down the coast from the Northlands to Southsward, and he controls islands that may be beyond our reach. His main seat of power is on Terramort, and he has many, many ships. And I do not think he will be taken unawares again so easily ... unless we are able to strike at him in some new way that he will not expect. That is why we need each other, Majesty."

Grullon nodded absently, still too elated by the news of this blow against his hated searat foes to fully absorb everything Urthblood was saying. "Yah, yah, yah. Grullon work with Lord Stripedog, together we kill many searats."

"Make no mistake, Your Majesty, if this turns into all out war - as it very well may - many of your gulls could die."

The seagull king digested this for half a moment, then shrugged his wings. "Many gulls die already, end up in searat bellies. Better to die fighting than die as dinner."

"A noble warrior's sentiment," Urthblood said in his most complimentary and placating tones. "Now, if you could possibly arrange to have your hundred gulls report to me by day's end, I would like to commence their training as soon as I may."