Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986 (26 page)

A blow struck shatteringly on his face. He heard
the crunch of bone. He slammed to earth, and did not feel it come up to meet
him.

Consciousness came back to Wulf, laggingly,
uncertainly, as though it was not quite sure of the way. First he could hear
something, voices above him. Then he could feel, he ached and quivered. He
opened his eyes, and he had blurred vision. Bearded, turbaned men leaned above
him. One stooped and touched his face.

“Can you stand up?” asked the man, not unkindly.
“Our general wants to talk to you, if you can talk.”

Wulf spat out a mouthful of
blood.
“I can talk,” he managed. “Let’s
see if I can stand.”

He drew a deep breath. It hurt, but he judged that
he had no broken ribs. He managed to sit up. Hands were upon him, helping him
to rise. He stood with feet braced wide. His head throbbed like a gong. He drew
another breath, another.

“All right, take me to him,” he said.

One of them pointed the way. The others, five or
six, thronged around Wulf, their hands on the hilts of their crooked swords.
The evening sun beat down hotly. Corpses lay everywhere. Wulf took staggering
steps,
then
his legs grew steadier. He let himself be
escorted to where other men stood, fifteen or twenty.

To the front of that group stood
Hassan ibn an-Numan al Ghassani.
He
wore chain mail, with a checkered cloak over his shoulders. His turban was
green — of course he had been to
Mecca
— swathed around a steel-spiked helmet. His sword hung
sheathed at his side. His white beard had a fleck of blood at his left jaw.

Beyond Hassan and his companions, the land was
full of the victorious Moslems. Some seemed to be tending wounded men. Wulf
looked past Hassan. Mallul was there, his head swathed in a Moslem turban.
With Mallul stood Khalid.

“Your name is Wulf, they told me,” said Hassan, in
Arabic.

“I am Wulf the Saxon.”

Hassan stroked his beard. “Stand away from him.
You planned these battles and you fought in them, fought very well indeed.
You’re too brave to die.”

“Nobody’s too brave to die.”

“Are you thirsty?” asked Hassan. “Give him water.”

A listener thrust a skin bottle into Wulf’s hand.
Wulf drank eagerly. The water spread inside him, seemed to heal him a little.
His hand to his face felt half-dried blood. His nose was smashed flat.

“I admire bravery,” Hassan was saying. “You should
be one of us. You should be a true believer and strike those hard blows to the
glory of Allah.”

“I believe in nothing,” said Wulf.

Hassan frowned. “They told me you were a
Christian.”

“I was.”

“A Christian.”
Hassan shook his head slowly. “But there is no god but
Allah, the giver of mercies. See” — and he gestured. “The Cahena’s son has
accepted the true faith.”

“Mallul,” said Wulf. Mallul stood motionless.

“His new name is Abd-ar-Rahman,” said Hassan.
“Wulf, do not say, there are three. Repeat after me: There is no god but Allah,
and Mohammed is his prophet.”

“There is no god,” said Wulf, and drank water
again.

Hassan’s companions surged forward, muttering.
Hassan lifted a gaunt hand to quiet them.

“Perhaps you worshipped the Cahena,” said Hassan.
“But she’s dead. Her head was cut off. Show him.”

To one side lay something under a bunched cloak.
Wulf had not seen it before. An officer leaned down to twitch the cloak away.

There lay her severed head. The skin was ashy
pale, the eyes were closed. The hair tumbled, gleaming black. It was as though
she lay asleep, peaceful, trusting. Hassan looked, too.

“She must have been the most beautiful woman in
the world,” he said. “Like a houri in
Paradise
.”

“You’ll send her head to your caliph in
Damascus
, won’t you?” said Wulf. “He can thank his Allah that she’s
not a threat anymore. You found out her secrets, you tricked her people into
deserting her. Even then, you had to kill her because she wouldn’t run. The
only way to beat her was to kill her.”

Again the grouped men around Hassan snarled, but
Hassan did not snarl.

“That’s true, by Allah,” he told Wulf. “Cover her
head up again, you. She fought me, once I had to run for my life. She drove me
and took prisoner eighty of my companion train.”

“I was there when it happened,” said Wulf,
gathering strength from his rising fury. “You and your army ran like deer. I
helped capture your officers. We sold them back to you, two or three at a time
— sold them all except Khalid.” He gazed at Khalid. “Let Khalid fall on his
face and kiss the ground,” he said. “Her shadow is still on this ground.”

“In the name of Allah, let’s kill this prisoner,”
said one of the listeners.

“Wait,” said Hassan; and to Wulf, “Words like that
can condemn you to death.”

“All right, kill me.”

“
Don’t die an infidel
,”
Hassan almost pleaded. “Live among us in the true faith, be great among us. Say
after me: There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

“There is no god,” said Wulf again.

Hassan smiled. It was a wry smile. “What if we
kill you, then?”

“I’d be dead and out of your reach.”

“Unbelievers are cast into hell.”

“Agh!”
Wulf spat blood. “Don’t try to tempt me with heaven or
frighten me with hell. I’m tempted by nothing, I’m afraid of nothing, I believe
in nothing. I’m wounded. I don’t have so much as a knife.” His voice rose. “Let
your men kill me. If I had a sword or a club, not one of them would dare come
within my reach.”

“You’re as bold a speaker as I’ve ever heard,”
said Hassan, “and I think you’re a true speaker with what you said just now.
But you know they call me the Good Old Man, and I’m going to try to deserve
that. Where’s my physician?”

He beckoned to one of his officers.

“Take Wulf away and treat his wounds and bandage
them,” Hassan ordered. “If he can travel, give him a horse and set him free. He
couldn’t raise ten men to fight us now.”

“With ten men I’d fight you,” said Wulf.

Hassan looked at him with gentle eyes. “Go with
Allah,” he said. “Go with whatever god you want to worship, you whose life I’ve
spared.”

The physician came and took Wulf’s arm to lead him
away.

“Take your hands off of me, I can walk,” Wulf
snapped at him. And to Hassan he said, “Thank you for nothing. My life is
nothing.”

He walked away with the physician.

When old Wulf the Saxon finished his story of love
and war,
midnight
was long past, black and chill, in the camp of the Franks
outside the little
village
of
Tours
. The fire in Charles Martel’s tent had burned down to
pale-red coals. The great horse had settled in sleep. The big wine jug on the
table was nearly empty. Charles Martel stroked his mustache and gazed at Wulf.

“So you loved her,” he said.

“I did,” said Wulf. “Maybe there at the last, she
loved me again.”

“This Khalid,” said Charles Martel. “Did you ever
cross his path afterward?”

“Yes, he was leading some riders up a mountain
pass in
Granada
. I had men enough to surprise him and wipe him out.”

“Killed him, did you?” prompted Charles Martel.

“Khalid was easy to kill.”

“And that son of your Cahena, you said the Moslems
named him Abd-ar-Rahman. Is he their general here?”

“Abd-ar-Rahman’s not an uncommon name among
Moslems, but I’ve thought this one was once Mallul. I can’t be sure.”

Charles Martel poured the last of the wine into
their cups, and they drank.

“Anyway, you and a few followers got across those
straits somehow, and kept fighting,” said Charles Martel.

“Fighting,” growled Wulf. “Senseless. I’ve been
sick of it for years.”

“But I’m going to profit by what you’ve said about
fighting,” Charles Martel assured him. “If they want battle tomorrow, they’ll
get it. I’ll wake up my officers and give them orders. We’ll use your plan —
form a long line of big men with big lances in their hands, to break up a
cavalry charge. And behind that line, mounted men, for a countercharge
It’s
a simple-sounding thing, but it has to be explained,
the way you’ve explained it.”

“Yes,” said Wulf.

“We’ve had a long night of it,” said Charles
Martel. “We ought to get what rest we can. You may lie down here. Take some of
these cloaks and furs and make yourself up a bed.”

“Thanks, I will.”

“But one thing more.
You’ve been helpful beyond measure, and I’m indebted to
you. Tell me what I can do to repay you.”

“You said we’d fight them tomorrow,” Wulf reminded
him. “Fight at close quarters. Just put me up to the front, where the fighting
will be hottest.”

Charles Martel blinked at him. “Where the fighting
will be hottest? Look here, Wulf, where the fighting’s hottest will be hot, or
I miss my guess. That’s just the place where you could get yourself killed.”

Wulf set down his empty cup.

“I know,” he said.

Manly Wade Wellman was born in 1903 in
Angola
(
Africa
), the son of a physician, but came to the
United States
before entering school. He started selling fiction in
1927, contributing to a wide variety of pulps, his stories in
Weird Tales
being the best remembered from that era. His books included science fiction,
westerns,
many
novels for young adults, and works of
history and biography. Wellman also wrote for comic books, including
Captain
Marvel
and
The Spirit
. Wellman married fellow writer Frances
Garfield.

Wellman became friends with
Arkansas
folklorists, and for a time served as Assistant Director
of the WPA New York Folklore Project. After service in World War II, he moved
to
North Carolina
. In the 1950s Wellman’s best-known stories, a series
grounded in mountain folklore about a guitar-playing wanderer named John, began
appearing in
Weird Tales
and continued in
The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction
. These were collected as
Who
Fears the Devil?
(1963
),
a volume later revised
and expanded as
John the Balladeer
(1988).

Toward the end of his life Wellman wrote several
novels about John and about another series character from his pulp days,
amateur occult investigator John Thunstone. His last work,
Cahena
, a
historical novel with some fantastic elements, was published shortly after his
death in 1986.

Wellman’s short fiction was collected during his
lifetime in
Worse Things Waiting
(1973) and
Lonely Vigils
(1981). Another collection,
The Valley So Low
(1987), appeared posthumously.
Recently Night Shade Books has been reprinting this material and more in a
series projected to run to five volumes:

The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations
The Devil Is Not Mocked and Other Warnings
Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales
Sin’s Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances
(forthcoming)
Owls Hoot in the Daytime and Other Omens
(forthcoming)