Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986 (10 page)

“Like this, Daia?”

“Like this, Wulf, like this again. Wulf, Wulf, in
beauty like this again, this again, like this again.”

Late, late at night, Wulf came back to the
clay-and-wattle bachelor home of Bhakrann and Cham and Zeoui and Tifan.
Bhakrann was still awake but said nothing, only pointed to a bed of hay under
the eaves. Wulf lay down but did not sleep for hours. He thought of the Cahena
until it seemed almost as though she lay beside him, said soft praise in his
ear.

At dawn they ate barley cake and drank goat’s
milk, and Wulf stepped out in the misty morning. He looked at the house’s
sun-browned mud walls and its strongly thatched roof and thought,
That’s
how my father’s house was made, of earth and thatch.

And he gazed along the sprawl of the street, where
merchants dickered with robed women and men in tunics, and he thought,
The
market town in
England
where I was a boy was like that.

Mud for his father’s house had been kneaded and
then spread like plaster upon a framework of upright poles with withes twisted
horizontally between them, with openings for a door and two windows curtained
with tanned leather.
Inside, the hearth where his mother
slung a spit and dangled a pot.
And there were pallet beds, woven cloths
spread over crammed coarse grass that was taken out and burned every summer and
replaced with fresh coarse grass. On the wall hung a wooden crucifix, with upon
it the tortured figure of Christ in another sort of wood, showing the scrapes
and fumbles of the knife that carved it.

The home farm was thought prosperous, with two
gaunt little horses and a cow and a calf, a penful of pigs behind the house.
Grain and hay grew in the fields around. It was a mile’s tramp on a ruined road
to the market town.

Nowhere near as big a town as Tiergal, but Wulf’s
neighbors had traded there, grain for cloth, pigs for calves, calves for pigs,
hens for clay dishes, baskets of berries for strings of beads.
A busy town at market time.
Once it had seemed to Wulf the
center of everything.

Girls had been there, with black hair and brown
and yellow, smiling at Wulf, giggling at him, nudging him. Merchants greeted
him as the sun of a good farmer and customer. And Father Thomas the priest, who
taught him his letters and said Wulf should be a priest, too, helped him off on
the long trudge to where stern, understanding Bishop Hadrian waited to say that
Wulf would do better as a soldier than as a priest.

Remembering, Wulf forgot the sword he wore. Again
he was the boy with a bag at his side and a staff in his hand, with a sheepskin
mantle and cross-garterings on his legs, starting away into the world. His
father and mother — did they still live, did they wonder what had become of
their son?

“You frown,” said Cham at his side. “What are you
thinking about?”

“Just a place I knew once,” said Wulf.
“A long way from here.”

“Want to walk out? I’ll show you things.”

They passed people working in their yards. Women
ground barley in hand mills or wove fabrics. The younger women were comely,
several even beautiful. Men whittled shafts for javelins. “There’s Wulf,” they
told each other. “He showed us how to whip the Moslems.”

Shops sold meal and fruits and cuts of meat,
necklaces of bright stones, and clothes. Wulf stopped to find a
zigzag-patterned tunic to fit him and paid for it with one of his few remaining
coins. Handsome children played everywhere, black-haired, brown-haired, one or
two red-haired. “Wulf, Wulf!” they shrilled at him.

Cham led him to a sturdy, smooth-shaven
metalworker in a leather apron, and Wulf ordered a coat of mail. The man’s name
was Jonas. He said he was a Greek, a Christian, and that just then he was busy
making javelin heads. He measured Wulf’s chest and shoulders with a knotted
cord. Jonas’s daughter watched from inside the shop. She had sun-bright hair
and a round face with a wide, happy mouth. Her body curved ripely. Her name was
Daphne.

At the edge of town, men practiced with javelins.
Their targets were outworn sandals, set upright. These men were highly accurate
at various ranges. They invited Wulf to try, but he knew he did not have their
skill and declined politely.

Boys herded goats and sheep and long-horned cattle
in pastures among the slopes and hollows. Axmen chopped down gnarled trees.
There were fields where reapers gathered grain into sheaves.

Many people wore patched or darned clothes, but
were clean. Wulf commented on that to Cham.

“We always wash,” said Cham. “There are two ponds
past those ridges. Men swim in one, women in the other — swim naked.”

“The women swim naked?” asked Wulf.

“I’ve often watched them,” said Cham with relish.

Djalout joined them, leaning on his polished
staff. Wulf asked him about religion in Tiergal. There were many beliefs, said
Djalout. Christians like Jonas, others who professed Judaism — though very few
could read and understand — and many who bowed to images of animal gods —
lions, wild boars, snakes.

“How about Khro?” asked Wulf, but Cham flinched
and Djalout shook his fine gray head.

“They say
it’s
bad luck
to say his name, and who am I to go against popular opinion?” said Djalout.
“Ask me about other gods of wisdom and love and war and such things — most
likely gods who were here from the first Imazighen.”

Wulf looked at great scrawls on houses, crescent
moons and coarse-toothed combs and, in one place, a huge spread-fingered hand.

“What about those designs?” he inquired. “Are they
some kind of writing?”

“If the Djerwa ever had writing, it’s been
forgotten,” said Djalout.

Wulf paid attention to men called doctors, caring
for the wounded brought back from the fight at the pass. These doctors chanted
spells and were diligent to keep their patients clean. They dosed against
fevers with pungent brews of herbs.

A chatter of voices in the street proclaimed that
the Cahena was there in her blue robe, attended by a single guardsman. The
people thronged to her and talked quietly, gently, not at all as they had cheered
her when she rode back from battle. Wulf and Djalout followed her.

Wulf saw her bend above a languid little child in
its mother’s arms. The Cahena’s hands touched it, stroked it, she said
something. The child laughed, stirred, was well again. An old woman hobbled up
on a staff. The Cahena put hands on the woman’s eyes and the woman shrilled
out, “I can see, I can see!” She flung her staff down and scuttled away,
stridently rejoicing.

“She heals her people,” said Djalout.

“Like a saint,” said Wulf.

“Or like a sorceress.”

Back at the house of Bhakrann and his friends, Wulf
was handed a leather pouch full of gold and silver Arabian coins.

“She sent it,” said Bhakrann. “Your share of what
we took from those reckless people the other day.”

Wulf took the purse gladly. “I must thank her.”

“Thank yourself,” Bhakrann bade him. “You won for
us. She’s ordering a home made for you, in a cave near hers.”

Wulf went to see it next morning. The cave was the
size of a big room. Two plump women busily swept its stone floor. At the rear,
a latticed screen set off a sleeping chamber. A small spring bubbled outside.
More women fetched in a wooden bed, cross-woven with tough vines, and quilts
for it. They smiled at Wulf. One, brown-haired and buxom, brushed against him
and smiled to show that it was no accident.

Outside, two men put up poles for a stable yard.
One was Susi, burly and short. The other, javelin-lean, was Gharna. They said
they were honored to serve him. As they talked, a warrior came to say that the
Cahena would give Wulf audience.

Wulf went to her home, along the passage to the council
room. Entering, he saw light through the rear curtain, and went there.

She met him inside. She wore nothing but a
gem-studded bracelet and two gold earrings. She was like the image of a
slender, round-breasted goddess in a secret temple. “Love me,” she whispered.
“Love me, Wulf.”
And sank down on the cushions.

Undressing hurriedly, he lay down with her and
thoroughly loved her. Afterward, they talked.

“If there should be a child —” Wulf started
to say.

“I know how to prevent that.”

They made love again, then dressed and went out
into the council room. Wulf heard her tell a guardsman to call Bhakrann.

Business followed. The Cahena put Bhakrann at the
head of a score of skilled scouts to ride eastward and spy on the Moslems. They
would be gone for many days. Meanwhile, the Cahena sent for her other
chieftains.

They rode in, Yaunis and Ketriazar and Daris. Wulf
and Djalout and Mallul attended the council. The seven sat in lamplight and drank
sweet wine brewed from dates. The Cahena told them to listen to Wulf’s plan of
battle.

He took charcoal and drew on the inside of a
tanned sheepskin, a diagram of a dismounted open-order formation, four deep,
like the teeth of a harrow. This, he lectured, would allow repeated flights of
javelins against a charge. He sketched in a strong second line, which he said
was cavalry to countercharge at the right moment. The chiefs asked questions.

“All this is new,” commented Daris gravely.

“Hardly new,” said Wulf. “Alexander’s phalanx and
Caesar’s legion had elements of it. But extra javelins are important.
Yes,
and one spear bigger than a javelin. Say twelve feet
long, on a heavy haft.”

Daris stared.
“What for?”

“When the enemy riders get close, plant those spears
and let the horses stab themselves on the points.”

“Good,” applauded Djalout, and the others seemed
convinced.

“I’ll train my men to form and
fight
like
that,” vowed Ketriazar.

“I’ll do likewise,” promised Daris. “Speaking of
javelins, why don’t we go hunting when we’re through talking here?”

The Cahena and the chiefs and Mallul and Wulf rode
on, along a great grassy slope of the mountain. Near a trickling stream they
chased a little herd of antelope. Ketriazar galloped to strike down a quarry.
Expertly the Cahena transfixed another. Supper that night was of grilled venison.
A choice cut went to Djalout, another to Jonas the smith.

“How many can we muster?” asked the Cahena as they
ate. “I can speak for six thousand Djerwa.”

“I’ll raise five thousand,” said Yaunis.

“Five thousand more,” volunteered Ketriazar.

“The
same,
give or take a
few,” said Daris.

“We’ll need more,” declared the Cahena. “Yaunis,
tomorrow I’ll go with you as far as your place, then on to Cirta. Lartius is
chief there. He’s said he’d raise every man in his coastal towns if we need
help. You come with me, Wulf.”

That evening, Wulf walked out with Djalout to
visit wounded warriors under the care of doctors. “Help nature heal,” Djalout
said, praising the treatment. “Nature heals better than science.”

They talked of the nature of the earth,
speculating on its great unknown reaches. Djalout remembered the raid of Okba
to the very western sea.

“He swore that, if the ocean did not stop him,
he’d carry the Moslem faith to lands beyond,” said Djalout, stroking his beard.
“I wonder if he knew how Ptolemy said the world was round, and if he believed
that there were lands and peoples in the west.”

“Are there?” asked Wulf.

“Someday someone will find out,” said Djalout,
“when they make a ship good enough to carry him.”

“In
Constantinople
, wise men said that the world was flat, and if you sailed
out far enough, you’d fall off.”

“No wise man knows everything,” said Djalout. “I
don’t, for one.”

At Jonas’s lamplit shop Wulf tried on the mailed
jacket he had ordered. It was of stout leather, with lengths of chain sewed to
the sleeves and overlapping iron plates on shoulders and chest. Daphne watched,
bright-haired, bright-eyed.

“Well made,” commented Djalout. “It will turn an
arrow or sword.”

Wulf bore the jacket to his cave. His horses
whinnied to him from the stable enclosure.

Next morning, he mounted his spotted horse to join
the Cahena and Yaunis. The Cahena joined four of her guards to the half dozen
of Yaunis’s escort. They followed a trampled trail down the northern slopes of
Arwa.

Some miles along, they went through a village
where people cheered them. Beyond, the slope became
a strew
of rocks. Scatterings of green grass grew here and there, and occasional hardy
trees. There were evidences of humanity, too, old humanity.
At
one point stood three battered stone columns, supporting nothing.
At
another, back from the road, a conical structure of masonry.

“That’s a tomb,” said Yaunis to Wulf.
“Maybe old Roman.
I think there’s something like writing on
it.”

More ruinous traces of building
after that.
At sundown they camped at a
spring with fringes of palms. Yaunis grimaced, as though he did not like the
place. Wulf saw scraps of white, scattered here and there on the sward. A
guardsman built a fire and began to cook a brass basinful of couscous and
smoked meat. Yaunis peered into the gloom.