953. Chapter 953

After Captain Kate and the Hurricane

By

UCSBdad

Disclaimer: Not only do I not own Castle, but there never was a Castle episode called Captain Kate and the Hurricane, but you knew that. Rating: M Time: The 18th century.

The next day they arrived at the foot of the mountains. The slavers' trail turned there and headed south. L'Anie sent her scouts to follow their trail. In less than an hour, they returned and reported to L'Anie.

"They say there's a pass to the south and that the slavers took it. They say it looks like we won't have to deal with this snow you speak of. Too bad. I was hoping to see this snow. It sounds different."

Rick and Kate, who had seen snow, said nothing.

They marched south and found the pass. It was no more than a hundred yards wide and went through the mountains at a sharp angle. No one who wasn't right on top of it would have noticed the small pass.

Kate decided to camp for the night before going through the pass. When they woke the next morning, Kate swept the land behind them with her telescope. There was no sign at all of Umslopogass or his impi. Even the scouts were gone.

They began their trek though the pass after they had eaten. Kate was worried about feeding everyone as they no longer had game to hunt, but she pushed on. The pass remained quite narrow, sometimes closing to no more than ten or twelve yards across, but never getting more than a hundred yards wide.

Since the walls of the canyon they were in rose thousands of feet straight up, darkness came earlier than they expected. Luckily, they found a small pool of water where meltwater ran down from the snowcapped mountains above them. After dinner, Rick and Kate snuggled down under a blanket and slept.

At dawn they were up, and as usual, L'Anie sent her scouts out ahead. They had been marching for nearly an hour when one of the scouts came running back. He reported to L'Anie, who told Rick and Kate what they'd found.

"The pass narrows down ahead and there's some sort of a fortification ahead and signs of a fight."

Kate arranged her column so that they could see the scouts L'Anie had sent out and put all of her musket armed men in front of the column, followed by the Africans armed only with spears and swords. They arrived at the fort and found the scouts just looking around.

The pass had narrowed to perhaps a dozen yards and was blocked by a stone wall a good thirty feet high, with only a small wooden door giving access to whatever was beyond. The door had been torn off its hinges and had also been smashed in two. Rick, Kate, L'Anie and Ryan went forward to see what had happened.

Ryan inhaled deeply. "Gunpowder. I can smell it. That's what did the door in."

Kate nodded. "They used their muskets to keep the garrison from throwing spears at them while they put an explosive charge by the gate. Just like we did on the volcano island."

Castle walked over to the pile of rocks and pulled something from behind them. "They didn't keep all of the garrison from throwing spears." He held up a long spear. There was a long iron shank, ending in a barbed head. The shank was set into a wooden shaft of about four feet in length. "There's blood on this one." Rick said, turning it around in his hands. "Interesting design, though. The shank is of rather soft iron, as iron goes, so when it hits something, the shank bends and the enemy can't throw it back at you. Odd. I've seen something like this before. Somewhere."

"We should go through the doorway and see what's on the other side." L'Anie said.

On the other side were a dozen or so corpses. Rick, being a doctor, examined them. "Half were killed by musket balls, and most of the rest were killed by edged weapons, probably by bayonets. Except for one unlucky fellow whose skull was crushed, probably by the butt of a musket."

Rick walked over to Kate. "From what I've seen, I believe these men were killed in the last day or so. We're closer to the slavers now."

Ryan looked over the ruined fort. "The slavers don't know we're after them. They could've blocked up that little doorway with big stones, plenty of them about. Leave twenty men wi' muskets here and ye could hold off an army. The men in the fort would only have to fire in the general direction of an attacker to hit someone somewhere, while any attacker would have to hit a target no bigger than a man's head."

Kate shook her head. "Or maybe they don't care if someone's behind them. There could be a hundred passes like this one that we don't know about. And I'd keep my army together. Two hundred or so slavers with muskets isn't an invincible force. I hope to prove that."

Kate looked around her, then up at the canyon walls looming above them. "We'll camp here tonight. It'll be dark soon anyway and this'll be a good place to stop. We'll place sentries on the wall of the fort. Umslopogass and his impi may have gone and maybe they haven't. We'll post sentries further down the pass as well."

He came out of the shadows between two rocks, roaring his war cry and waving a short sword over his head. But all he could do was hobble towards Kate as he had a wounded leg.

"Don't kill him!" Kate screamed. "He's one of the garrison. We need to talk to him."

Kate drew her rapier and faced her would be attacker. The man smiled and said something, then hobbled at Kate. Before he reached her, a rock hit him in the leg and he collapsed.

Ryan smiled at his captain. "Back in Ireland when I was a lad, I had no sword nor musket, so I had to use what I could find."

El Tee had jumped on the man and knocked his sword away. Then he held him down. "What should we do with him, Captain?"

The wounded man yelled at El Tee and then turned to Kate and spat.

"By Jesus, Mary an' all the saints!" Cried Ryan. "I'm thinkin' he speaks Latin."

"Latin?" Castle said. "I learned the language at university, as all gentlemen do. It didn't sound like Latin to me."

Ryan smiled. "Oh, Dr. Castle, he won't be speaking Latin like they teach gentlemen to speak it at Trinity College, I'm thinkin'. His Latin is a rougher sort, such as would be spoken by a poor, itinerant Irish hedge priest."

L'Anie came close to the man." I think he has a few words of the local language as well. Perhaps between Ryan and myself we can talk to him."

They spoke for over an hour. At first the man yelled at them and waved his fists. But gradually he quieted down and began to speak. However, both Rick and Kate saw that all three were speaking very slowly and seemingly were repeating words over and over.

Finally, L'Anie and Ryan came to talk to Rick and Kate. "He says his name's Jillo Pabloe and he lives in a valley at the end of this pass. He says his people came here many hundreds of years ago, from the north. He said their ancestors fought a war against a god and lost. They fled south down a huge river and after centuries of wandering came here. They are ruled by a Queen called Calaptra."

"Cleopatra?" Rick said suddenly. "Are you sure he speaks Latin?"

Ryan nodded. "An odd form, but Latin no doubt. Why?"

"I think these people may be the descendants of the Roman Mark Antony and Queen Cleopatra's armies. Before the birth of Christ, they fought Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and lost. Roman emperors were considered divine, gods even. There are legends that after Mark Antony and Cleopatra's fleet was defeated at Actium, and Augustus landed in Egypt, most of Antony and Cleopatra's army surrendered to Augustus, but some fled down the Nile and vanished into Africa."

Kate shook her head and then looked at Jillo. "Rick that was seventeen hundred years ago, and he looks nothing like a Roman. He's African. Do you have any idea how far we are from Egypt?"

Castle smiled. "Most of the army would have been men, so they would have married African women. And I'm sure given seventeen hundred years you could get from here to Egypt and back if you had to. Besides, he speaks a form of Latin. And I remember reading about the spear we found. The Romans used them. They're called pila, the plural being pilum. They were designed to be thrown so that the relatively soft iron would bend when it struck something so your enemy couldn't throw it back at you."

Kate nodded. "It makes no difference where his ancestors are from, we need to catch the slavers, free the slaves they took, and get back to the Revenge. What can he tell us about the land ahead of us?"

"He says the end of the pass is about two miles ahead."

"I thinks that's a Roman mile, Captain. One thousand paces."

L'Anie nodded and continued. "There's a valley some twenty miles by twenty at the end of the pass, he says. There's a fair sized town there and then there are villages throughout the valley. Oh, and this is the only way in or out of the valley, unless you want to go over the mountains. Some of their people have tried it to see if it can be done. Most of them didn't make it."

Kate looked back at the fort. "We could block the pass here, but the fort is faced the wrong way. We don't have enough time or people to build a proper wall against the slavers."

"And they could just retreat into the valley where there is plenty to eat." Rick added. "We haven't got that much food with us."

Kate began to give orders. "We'll stay here tonight and head for the valley tomorrow. Send scouts to the end of the pass and have them keep an eye on the valley. If the slavers come this way, we need to know about it."

Kate had everyone up and moving before dawn. They arrived at the end of the pass just as the sun was beginning to shine. The first thing they saw were pillars of smoke from one end of the valley to the next.

"How many soldiers do the Romans have?" Kate asked L'Anie and Ryan who turned to Jillo for answers.

"Not many." L'Anie told her. "They've been attacked a few times in the last fifty years or so, but twenty troops at their fort can hold off and army until the rest of their soldiers arrive. They have no more than three hundred troops, and they're mostly a part time militia. Only seventy five people are full time soldiers. And even they aren't that well trained."

Kate cursed. "It looks like they've split up to attack the various villages and the town. We can attack them while they're looting and destroy them piecemeal."

"Beggin' yer pardon, Captain." Ryan said. "But Jillo 'ere said his people make the statues o' their gods an' their ancestors from gold. And most of them is in the capitol. I reckon most of the slavers will be there an' just small detachments'll be out in the villages."

"Do you have a suggestion, Ryan?"

He smiled. "I have a bit of experience in lootin' towns on land an' such that you, as a ship's captain may lack, Captain Beckett. The best time to hit a group like them slavers is when they're heading home, loaded down with loot, every man worrying about keepin' his share safe and prob'ly hung over to boot."

"So you suggest we sit here and do nothing while they loot the whole valley?" Captain Kate didn't like that idea at all. She was a woman of action.

"I'm suggestin' we fight smart, as we always do under you, Ma'am." Ryan turned to face the valley. "Look at that lovely little wood, not a half mile away. We could hide double our number in them woods. An' there where the road to the pass straightens out, why it's not twenty yards from the road to yon woods. A perfect spot for an ambush, if I sez so meself."