Blood on the Sedge-Mats

A hiss cut through the black willow canopy before the first javelin struck the lead canoe, and Rozsa Iron-Tooth wanted to know if the mud-shelf beneath her feet would hold her weight or swallow her whole fleet before her war-club met bone. The hull dragged against the shallow silt with a wet groaning sound. Two spans of brown water pooled over the submerged roots of the eastern bank, just as Menyhért had promised. Behind them, the middle channel choked on its hidden V-wedge of sharpened tamarack stakes, untouched and waiting in the stagnant gloom.

A second javelin hissed down from the twisted cypress knees on the right bank.

The sharpened gar-bone tip punched clean through the shoulder leather of her third paddler, pinning the man to the thwart with a wet thud. Blood spurted across the cedar ribbing, black and thick in the swamp shadow.

"Shields up!" Rozsa shouted, dropping low into the bilge muck. "Out of the boats! Drag them by the bow painters into the sedge!"

Shouts ripped across the still water. From the tangled cypress roots, three narrow dugout skiffs darted out into the shallows. The raiders of the Black Sedge cannibal clan wore armor fashioned from dried alligator scutes lashed with swamp-grass. Ash-smeared faces gleamed behind bone nose-plugs. In their hands, long throwing-spears bristled with venomous stingray barbs, blackened in charcoal fire.

Menyhért lay sprawled across the forward thwart, his bound hands tucked beneath his chin as a javelin splintered the gunwale two inches above his ears.

"I noted the tamarack stakes on the thwart, Warlady," Menyhért called out, his voice muffled by the damp cedar planks. "I neglected to mention the Black Sedge raiders rarely hunt without a welcoming party. A minor omission in the barter."

"Keep your head down or I will pin it to the thwart myself," Rozsa snarled.

She vaulted over the port gunwale. Her bare feet sank calf-deep into the cold silt of the shelf, but beneath the mud lay a thick, woven mat of living sedge roots, solid enough to bear a sprinting warrior. Her knapped basalt war-club came up in both hands, its heavy black stone head balanced and wicked.

Ahead, the first cannibal skiff grounded on the edge of the sedge-mat, two paces from where Csente wrestled the lead canoe's prow into the rushes. A cannibal warrior leaped onto the floating vegetation, raising a fire-hardened spear to pierce Csente's neck.

Rozsa met him before his heels found purchase.

She swung the basalt club in a tight rising arc. The stone smashed through the raider's ribs with a sound like snapping kindling, driving the breath from his chest and pitching his broken body into the scum. Another cannibal sprang from behind a cypress stump, swinging a stone-bladed cleaver at her collarbone. Rozsa ducked beneath the blade, pivoted on the slick moss, and drove her elbow into the man's throat. As he stumbled backward into the reeds, she drew her stingray-spine dagger with her left hand and drove the serrated barb upward under his chin.

He dropped into the shallows with a muffled gurgle, thrashing the duckweed into red foam.

"Form the line!" Csente roared from behind her, his basalt blade rising and falling as he and four coastal paddlers hauled the canoe's snout into the root-tangle. "Guard the thwarts!"

Javelins clattered against the raised sea-turtle shields of the second canoe. The coastal warriors held their ground on the mud-shelf, their heavier weight and thick hides turning the narrow bank into a wall of flint and bone.

Then a sharp crack echoed from the deeper water behind them.

Rozsa turned, her chest heaving as she wiped stinging sweat and brackish spray from her forehead.

A fourth cannibal skiff, longer and wider than the others, had slipped past the hanging willow branches from an upstream creek. It held six paddlers, driving hard toward the stern of Rozsa's lead canoe. If they breached the cedar hull from the deep side, the current would swamp the vessel before Csente could haul it onto the shelf, spilling their weapons and smoked rations into the deep mud.

Rozsa was thirty paces away on the floating sedge, blocked by cypress knees and churning swamp water.

In the bow of the lead canoe, Menyhért knelt upright on the thwart, his dark hair plastered against his forehead, watching the charging skiff with wide, assessing eyes.

"The pipes, Driftwood!" Rozsa bellowed over the clash of wood and bone. "Call the water, or I leave you to them!"

Menyhért did not scramble for cover. With a fluid, insolent shrug of his shoulders, he reached into his oiled sedge satchel and drew out a slender, yellowed crane-bone pipe. He brought the bone to his lips, closing his eyes against the swamp glare.

A piercing, warbling trill sliced through the din of battle.

It was not a song of sleep. The note rose sharp and harsh, vibrating at a pitch that set Rozsa's teeth aching in her jaw. The river surface ten paces from the lead canoe shivered, tiny droplets dancing into the air like boiling oil.

From the dark depths beneath the willow roots, shadows surged.

Two colossal alligator gars, each fifteen feet of armored green scale and broad duckbill jaws, broke the surface in a violent eruption of brown water. Their armored tails struck the water with the force of falling logs. Drawn by the frantic frequency of the bone pipe, the beasts lunged directly into the path of the advancing cannibal skiff.

The first gar slammed its snout into the skiff's cedar bow, splintering the forward ribs. The second beast rolled across the gunwale, its needle-sharp teeth snapping shut on a paddler's leg. The cannibal screamed as he was jerked into the churn. The skiff tipped sideways, spilling its crew and javelins into the churning foam.

Menyhért adjusted the angle of his fingers along the bone stops, dropping the pitch by a half-tone.

The two leviathans thrashed into a feeding frenzy, churning the brown water into crimson froth as the thrown cannibals fought toward the roots. The remaining raiders on the bank broke ranks, scrambling up the cypress trunks and vanishing into the tangled canopy like frightened marsh rats.

Silence fell over the black willow reach, thick and sudden, broken only by the heavy panting of the coastal warriors and the wet lapping of red water against the cypress hulls.

Menyhért lowered the crane-bone pipe from his mouth. He blew a drop of saliva from the embouchure, wiped the polished bone against his sodden sleeve, and slid it back into his satchel.

"A touch sour on the third stop," he remarked toward the empty canopy, shaking river mud from his tangled hair. "The humidity expands the marrow. Still, the gars have simple tastes. They rarely complain about the tuning."

Rozsa waded through the blood-streaked shallows, stepping over the carcass of a floating raider. Her otter tunic dripped with dark river silt and enemy gore. In her right hand, the basalt club rested against her thigh, the heavy stone intact.

She stopped beside the lead canoe. Her breath came in hot, measured drags, her gaze fixed on the captive.

Menyhért met her amber eyes without shrinking. His bound wrists rested easily on his knees, a mocking spark dancing in the dark centers of his pupils. Yet beneath his theatrical ease, the shallow hollow beneath his throat fluttered with a wild, racing pulse.

Rozsa reached up. Her fingers, slick with brackish water and dried blood, caught the hollow of his jaw, tilting his chin upward until his throat was bared to the gray canopy.

She had captured a weapon far more dangerous than knapped basalt or stingray poison.

"You knew the call for blood," she said, her voice dropping into a low, harsh murmur that did not reach the paddlers.

Menyhért leaned his weight lightly against the pressure of her palm, his lips curling into a crooked, defiant line. "The river knows hunger, Warlady. I merely point it toward the meal."

Rozsa wiped a smear of cannibal blood from her thumb across the hollow of his collarbone, leaving a dark, ritual streak against his pale skin. Her knuckles brushed his collarbone, lingering for a single beat against the heat radiating from his chest.

"We make camp at the next dry hummock," Rozsa commanded, stepping back as Csente dragged the last canoe into the clear channel ahead. "And you sleep within arm's reach of my blade."