A Victory for Kregen (28 page)

“They go on! They go on!” roared Turko.

I switched the Krozair brand in a blur and chopped and sliced and thrust.

“Their cavalry, Turko?”

“Cannot maneuver for the shafts pinning them.”

“Tell me when they charge — if they charge.”

“The Hamalese have dismounted and are formed — the skirmishers run like rasts — our fellows are in among them now—”

A clansman dropped to a knee and brought two blades, a broadsword and a shortsword, up in a cross of glittering steel. That was a cunning and brave trick, for he sought to trap my blade in the neck of the cross and so wrench it free. With supple Krozair skill the longsword looped and hummed and the clansman fell back, silently.

Hangrol had over twice our force. We had to remain in cover and shoot and shoot. The Tenth Kerchuri did not entirely fill the width of the ravine where once a river had flowed. The Hakkodin spread out and the Chodku of archers shot with their comrades along the bushy heights each side. Turko kept up a ceaseless flow of reports and I swirled the Krozair longsword and, by the Light of Opaz, did not move a hairsbreadth!

The trumpeter of the Second Sword Watch on that day was Vardon the Cheeks. I said, “Bid Vardon stand ready.”

Turko yelled, and then said, “The Hamalese are formed, their shields are up. They advance. They charge!”

“And the ground between?”

“Cumbered with dead men and fugitives still running.”

“The cavalry?”

“They mill. It looks as though they will recover in a mur or so.”

“And the skirmishers and their mercenaries?”

“Some press on with the Hamalese. Some wait the outcome.”

Three clansmen came for that disembodied longsword together and now two of them swirled cloaks in a valiant effort to entrap that ghostly brand. I sliced and — without moving! — leaped away and so launched myself at them from the side. Quienyin’s powers flowed through my arms and fists and the Krozair brand slashed in a vivid bar of light.

“The distance left?”

“Five hundred paces, no more, and narrowing all the time,” Turko’s voice rasped. “But the bowmen bring them down.”

‘Tell Vardon the Cheeks to blow the Tenth Kerchuri Prepare.”

The silver notes ran out, swirling and skyrocketing in the air. And the clansmen drew back a space, panting, and their weapons glittered in the light of the slanting rays of the suns.

Two murs, three...

“Bid Vardon blow, Turko. Blow the Charge!”

“Quidang!”

And over the field and floating free and lilting with blood-quickening urgings, the Charge blew in ringing imperative.

As the clansmen came on again and the Krozair brand leaped and flashed I could imagine I saw the Tenth Kerchuri. I could see their pikes come down, down, pointing, their sharp steel heads a bristle of menace. The crimson shields would all slant together. Down would go the bronze-fitted helmets. The plumes would ruffle bravely. And then the brumbytes, formed, solid in their crimson and bronze, would charge. Blind to that sight, I could yet see it all, and hear and taste and smell the blood-thumping excitement of it.

Yet the clansmen would not leave off their attacks upon this eerie sword that floated in midair and chopped them as they charged.

“They meet!” yelled Turko. “By Morro the Muscle! You have created a veritable weapon in this phalanx, Dray!”

Very little can stand and survive in the path of a charging phalanx. We had proved that before. I had not really believed. But here, in what came to be known as the Battle of Ovalia, the pikes in their steel-crested fervor charged and overthrew the iron legions of Hamal. Raging, like a bursting dam that spills destruction in the path of its waters, the Tenth Kerchuri swept everything away before that intemperate onslaught.

And I did not see it!

Raw, green, they might be, these brumbytes wielding their pikes. But their helmets were down and their shields were slanted and their pikes went in and they rolled on and on and nothing could stand before them.

Silda was standing now, gripping her rapier. She had overcome the first tremor of horror when swords swirled with no visible hands to wield them. She stepped forward. I brought the longsword across in a vicious defending blow and smashed a clansman away.

“Stand clear, Silda!” I shouted.

“What?” Turko’s voice reached me, alarmed. “What’s that, Dray?”

“How goes the battle?”

“The Hakkodin are in among their cavalry and the cavalry do not like it — they run — they flee...

“Blow for the churgurs — blow for everything! General Advance!”

The General Advance rang out over the roar of the battle.

The Tenth would be rolling down the ravine like a tidal wave of destruction, and now the sword and shield men would rage from the bushes crowning the slopes and hit the bewildered enemy from both flanks. And, all the time, I knew, the archers and staff slingers would be loosing into the huddled masses.

Kapt Hangrol had been sucked into the thorn-ivy trap. And now he was paying the price.

Many clansmen littered the stone floor. Their blood ran greasily in the cracks between the flags. And still they sought to pass that disembodied sword and slay the Prince Majister of Vallia.

The next Clanner struck at the sword seeking by main force to beat it down. The enormous leverage exercised by the Krozair two-handed grip brought the sword in a neat curve around the clansman’s blade. The longsword twitched and the clansman’s broadsword struck it square. I felt the shock, like liquid fire, jolt all up my arms. By Zair! Slow — slow and weak...

With a spurt of passion I slashed the clansman away and swung to the next and his blade clashed down on mine. I felt the shock, shuddering through me, and I smashed back.

I knew what was happening. Deb-Lu-Quienyin was weakening. What he had accomplished already was a miracle. But his kharrna was not limitless. The fight raging in the stone chamber became fraught with its inevitable end.

With the sounds of a greater battle ringing in my ears, I faced defeat in this contemptible little fracas, and knew it to be by far the more important, the vital, of the two — for with Quienyin’s exhaustion the Krozair brand would fall, and Silda would hurl forward with her rapier blurring, and would die and then would die also my son Drak.

Still Quienyin upheld me. Still I continued to battle.

Turko yelled that the pikes rolled on like the millstones of the gods. The churgurs welted into the flanks of the foemen. Our irregulars were in there, smiting and dodging and smiting again.

Drooping now, the Krozair brand, drooping like a victim of the black lotus-flowers of Hodan-Set.

Useless my exerting all the bestial and savage power pent within me by civilization. I fought only through the wizardry of gladiomancy. With the slipping away of Quienyin’s powers so dropped away all the Krozair skill.

The longsword slashed and slashed again, and at every blow I could feel the lessening of force. The chamber blurred, the stones merging as though melting in some supernal heat. The stone flags of the floor pitched beneath me like the deck of a swifter. I knew I was grasping onto Shadow’s saddle with fists in which the knuckles ridged into skulls. Turko was yelling; but I did not hear him clearly, could see nothing in the world but the next opponent and do nothing in all Kregen but strike on.

Two clansmen battered their broadswords down on my sword, and the blade slithered. I strained of myself to bring it up, and could feel no life, no response, could feel only a deadly leaden lumpiness of total fatigue. A six-inch-long sliver of steel appeared from the floor. It was grasped in a fist. It drove smartly into the left-hand Clanner and a second, precisely similar steel blade, gripped in a fist of precisely the same nature, struck the right-hand clansman. Both fell away.

Two Pachaks raged into the fight. With them, glorious in their red and yellow, men of the Sword Watch drove on. But, ahead of them, the Pachak twins, Modo and Logu Fre-Da, smashed on in defense of the Wizard of Loh to whom they had given their nikobi in all honor.

Then I let out a harsh snort of sound, a breathy explosion that might in Cottmer’s Caverns be taken for a laugh.

“What?” said Turko somewhere a million miles away.

Nodgen and Hunch pranced into the stone chamber, and Nodgen’s spear was darkly stained, and Hunch’s bill bore the marks of hard blows given and taken.

The First Sword Watch did not waste time on the clansmen. And, to be truthful, those clanners had fought heroically against sorcery. Very few other hardy warriors would have stood, let alone fought so determinedly, against wizardry like this. The 1ESW cleared out the clansmen, and arrows brought down those who sought to flee. But these four, the Pachak twins and Nodgen and Hunch, ran across toward me.

Their mouths were opening and closing and their eyes were popping and they were giving every indication of extreme animation. My viewpoint changed, and I was looking at the ceiling, with these four faces ringing the perimeter of vision. So I knew they were caring for Quienyin, all unknowing that Jak the Sturr stared through the wizard’s eyes!

In the next instant I was staring at the polished leather of Shadow’s saddle, twisting, and Turko was hauling me up, and saying, “Dray! Dray! For the sweet sake of Opaz—”

“I am all right, Turko — now. Let me see the battle.”

“Your eyes—?”

“Perfectly all right now. I will explain. Are there any of our vollers in sight?”

“Not one. I trust they are all safe.” He looked at me with all his old quizzical mockery; but he’d been shaken up, all right, no mistake about that!

All along that ravine of death the dead lay. The Tenth had stormed on with their pikes level and left nothing living in their wake. The rest of our little army, our Eighth Army, pushed on and Kapt Hangrol’s forces fled.

“They won’t come araiding over the borders again in a hurry, Dray.”

“That is what I would like to think. By Vox! But it is a melancholy sight. Pull Jiktar Brad the Berry and his Hagli Bush Irregulars out and get them to tend the wounded. Brad will understand.”

“Aye, he will. We are light on medical services.”

A battery of krahnik-drawn varters went rumbling past. They had limbered up the ballistae in record time, and the krahniks, powerful, deep-chested, full of fire, hauled with a will. They were off to try to take up new positions and harry the rout. Their darts and rocks had wrought fearful execution in that blood-soaked ravine.

Well, the aftermath of a battle is always a messy business, and we had to make sure Hangrol kept running and did not stop to try to regroup. Our little cavalry force swept out in pursuit. The Tenth Kerchuri halted and I sent word to Kervax[9]Orlon Sangar telling him of my pride in his men and my congratulations. All the units involved had done well. There would be bobs[10]aplenty in the wake of the Battle of Ovalia...

In all decency I could not leave at once. Some reassurance could be allowed in that the Sword Watch and Quienyin’s comrades had burst in to the rescue. But I vowed I wanted to know what had gone wrong over in the Northeast. By Krun, yes!

A Kerchuri of the phalanx, when arrayed in the normal formation of twelve men to a file, spreads out to cover a frontage of approximately three hundred and seventy paces. Drill movements can expand or contract this front, of course, containing as it does four hundred thirty-two pikes in each rank. The Tenth had swept up the ravine like a steel broom.

Turko and I and a few others of my officers walked slowly along the ravine. Everywhere our men were tending the wounded and carrying off the dead to be decently interred according to the rites suggested by the atras, the little amulets, the slain wore. Some of us made the usual trite observations about life and death. The scene was somber; but I did not feel — then — the chill I knew would near overwhelm me at all this waste.

I bent and picked up a shield from the phalanx. Its five-ply wooden construction was still intact, leather faced, bronze bound. The carrying strap was cinched tight; but the battle grips were broken. On the strip across the top the colors and symbols and numbers proclaimed this shield to have belonged to the Paltork — the second in command to the Relianchun — of the Sixty-fifth Relianch of the Eleventh Jodhri.

In glowing yellow the stylized representation of the brumby, that long-horned, eight-legged, armored battering ram of destruction and an animal thought to be long extinct if not legendary, appeared on the face of the crimson shield. The brumby from which the brumbytes took their name was the symbol of the entire Phalanx Force. I put my finger alongside the painted symbol of the Tenth Kerchuri of the Fifth Phalanx, a Prychan grasping Thunderbolts, and I shook my head.

Yes, the Golden Prychan, the wrestlers inn, had yielded up the means to bring back Turko. But as I stared on this shield, I realized I did not know the name of the Paltork who had carried it into battle.

How could I? But this seemed to me wrong. I felt I should have known his name.

Tucked around the strap was a little cloth packet of cham. The Paltork no doubt chewed stoically as he marched forward; well, I fancied he would never return to claim his favorite chew.

The group of officers did not dwell overlong on that depressing scene. Having made sure that everything that could be done was being done, we trailed back to camp in a heavy silence. Of our voller force, nine returned. We had lost five. The flutduins had done well and had taken minimal casualties. As the returns came in I realized the thorn-ivy ambush had worked, and worked extraordinarily well. Our casualties were exceeding light.

I took Turko and Deft-Fingered Minch and one or two others, and left the Eighth Army under the command of Orlon Sangar, with orders to recoup and to clear the area, and flew direct for the northeast.

No one expressed any surprise or chagrin that I should be leaving. It was taking me some time to realize that emperors could behave in this peremptory way without causing comment. After all, every man knew the emperor’s concerns were wide, covering all of Vallia, and he was clearly needed elsewhere.