Free Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen Page A

then he would utter a faint groan and make abortive motions with his powerful arms. Somehow it seemed wrong and discouraging to Rolf that a man healthy and strong, a successful leader, should have to put up with bad dreams.
    Rolf swept the landscape once more with his glasses. Here was something new, coming toward the Castle from the southwest, the general direction of the swamps. In a little while Rolf made out that it was a group of slaves or prisoners being marched along a road. First he had seen only the dust raised by their slow progress; now through the glasses he could see that they were men and women both, chained or roped together, perhaps fifteen of them. Now he could see the arm of a bronze-helmed guard rise and snap and fall back again. A long time later the faint pop of the whip came drifting across the intervening valley of the pass.
    He did not want to watch this and yet could not keep from watching. The prisoners’ faces became visible. More bewildered conscripts for the endless building…
    Rolf nearly dropped the glasses. He raised them again quickly, and with shaking fingers turned the knurled knob that Thomas had taught him to use for greatest clarity. Still the image wavered before him, until he remembered to rest his elbows once more in the sand.
    A little behind the other prisoners, and bound more lightly if at all, was a young girl who looked like Sarah. She was riding, mounted on a huge beast behind a soldier. She looked like Sarah all the more as they came slowly closer. If it was not some terrible trick of these demon-begotten glasses…Rolf kept trying to tell himself that it was only that.
    At last he woke Thomas. Thomas was instantly alert, but still just too late to see the girl as the Castle’s maw swallowed the last of the prisoners and their guard. The teeth of its portcullis snapped shut behind them.
    Thomas put down the glasses he had just raised. “Are you sure it was Sarah?”
    â€œYes.” Rolf stared at a double handful of sand and pebbles, into which he was digging his fingers until they hurt.
    â€œWell.” It seemed to Rolf that Thomas was taking the news with unnatural calm. “Did you recognize anyone else?”
    â€œNo. I don’t think any were people from our camp.”
    â€œSo. There might have been some word about Nils come into the swamp, and Sarah went out to try to make sure of it—whatever it was. And she just got picked up. Those things happen. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do about it, except to go on with what we’re doing now.” When Rolf nodded, he put a hand on Rolf’s shoulder for a moment, then turned away again against the rock. “I should sleep a little longer. Be sure and rouse me before the sun goes down.”
    But Thomas could scarcely have fallen asleep before Rolf was shaking him again. More people were approaching the Castle, and had popped suddenly into Rolf’s view, their earlier progress having been hidden from him by the rock he sheltered against. Not in chains did these folk come, but in great splendor, on a gaily-painted river barge descending the Dolles, escorted on each shore by a hundred mounted men.
    This time Thomas looked long before handing the glasses back to Rolf. “It’s the Satrap Chup, coming down from his own robber’s roost in the north. Ekuman’s son-in-law to be.”
    The barge tied up at the central landing-place. In the center of those who disembarked was a powerful-looking man in black trousers and cuirass trimmed with red, mounted on a magnificent riding-beast. And beside him on a white animal came riding a young girl with blonde hair of marvelous length; so fair was her skin, so beautiful her face, that Rolf wondered again, aloud, if the glasses might not add a shading of magic to the things they showed.
    â€œNo, no,” Thomas reassured him, dryly. “You’ll not have seen her before, because her habit is to stay in the Castle or