Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986 (6 page)

They moved at a walk. Wulf was glad that the
horses seemed fairly fresh for what was coming. He touched the neck of his own
horse, and it made a rippling sound with its lips.

As the sun showed rosy promise above the height,
the Cahena halted them yet again. Wulf felt his heart race, as always before
action. There was light enough to show Bhakrann’s bearded face, tensely
scowling. The Cahena gazed, as though she had ridden out to see the dawn.
Behind her, a rider carried the red banner.

Time crawled. The sun’s rim crept dazzlingly into
view. Wulf saw the pass, a broad, dark jowly mouth. Bhakrann spat.

“All right, where are they?” he demanded
impatiently.

“Wait,” the Cahena said. “They want to be sure
what they’ll find.”

“We’re in plain sight as they come out, this
middle column anyway,” growled Bhakrann. “They’ll see us before we see them.”

“There they are,” said Wulf, and there they were.

Tiny figures
appeared,
a
scatter of them first, then more. They looked like little mounted chessmen with
fluttering robes. As they emerged, they moved off to left and right, with
disciplined rapidity. Wulf hoped that the Imazighen could act as purposefully.
More emerged, hundreds. They spread into a close-drawn line that looked to be
half a mile long.

“Look, a standard,” said Wulf. It was green on a
long staff.

“They’re going to charge,” said Bhakrann tensely.

“Let them,” said the Cahena, not at all tensely.

She poised a javelin as though she knew how to use
it. Mallul, behind her, also had a javelin at the ready.

The distant riders had formed their close line.
Wulf judged that there must be four hundred of them. From somewhere at their
center came a faint, tremulous note of music.

“That’s a signal trumpet,” said Wulf.

“They’ll charge before they’re all out on this
side,” said the Cahena. “Just as Wulf said. Mallul, ride back and get us ready
to retire in formation.”

Still other Moslems came into view behind the
line, forming groups.
Another faraway trumpet blast, a concerted
cry of voices.
The line moved forward at a well-controlled walk. Wulf
watched for tense moments. Above either side of the pass appeared dark dots,
dismounted men up there, those who had scouted the way. They wouldn’t get into
this fight.

The advancing riders quickened their pace to a
trot.

“Fall back!” called out the Cahena, and the order
was passed along. Wulf was now at the rear of the column. Riding, he watched
the developing pursuit. Another cry beat up in the morning air, an exultant cry
as of victory already won. He saw the wink of flourished blades. He urged his
horse to a trot and looked left, then right. The other Imazighen columns were
moving in.

“Our friends are charging!” he shouted his
loudest. “Fall into line and counterattack!”

Wild cries, everywhere. The right and left columns
of the Imazighen spread their fronts as they rode. From the approaching
Moslems, a massed
shout
. Wulf heard it:

“Ululululallahu akhbar!”

Back pealed a many-voiced response:

“There is also the Cahena!”

Bhakrann cantered past. “Let’s get them!” he
roared.

The far end of the central formation peeled out.
Here they came, the savage Imazighen horsemen, into a moving line of their own.
Wulf recognized gaunt Cham among them. They bent above tossing manes, their
shields up, their javelins lifted. He wheeled his trusty horse and rode
straight at the oncoming enemy.

A dozen leaps took him ahead of nearer companions.
“Come on!” Wulf yelled back as he galloped. Behind him drummed the hoofs.

He must make them come on. Here was the time in a
fight when you brought your men into it, hard and deadly. Then you were just
another warrior yourself, trying to kill, to keep from being killed.

The Moslem horses flew at Wulf, bigger with every
instant. To the front rushed a man on a bounding spotted horse with a tasseled
bridle.
A chief, anyway a champion, eager to be first to
fight.
First to fight could be first to fall, Wulf thought, like that
enemy scout just days ago.

He tried to judge everything at once. This was a
big man on a bigger horse than Wulf’s.
Black turban, black
beard, square shield, flashing blade.
As they drove together, Wulf kneed
his horse’s flank to veer right. They were close, close enough to strike.

Wulf felt the shock of a downsweeping blow on the
metal rim of his shield, heard the ring of his own mighty slash on the other’s
helmet. The Moslem crumpled and fell flat among scattered tufts of coarse,
thistly grass as Wulf reined clear of him.

“Yallah —”
someone screamed, and another foe rode at him.

Something purred past Wulf. A javelin smote the
charging Moslem’s belly. Wulf saw the look of blank amazement on the shaggy
face, saw the body fold in around the transfixing shaft, tumble to earth. He
didn’t know who had sped that javelin, whom to thank. He rode after the
countercharge.

It had scrambled around him and past. The air was
rent with shouts. He spared a glance to see the rear elements of the enemy
force swerving leftward to meet the rush of the Imazighen right column. Even as
they swerved, the other column swooped from the opposite side. The enemy had no
shields on their right arms to guard in that direction. Wulf saw a streaky
flight of javelins, saw men go down in swirls of garments. Then more
adversaries
here,
and he must fight them.

Horses danced around each other, men struck at
each other. The Imazighen were at stab-distance with their javelins. They rode
through enemy ranks that were ranks no more, that frayed, fell back to defend
themselves on three sides. Wulf chopped a turbaned man to earth. He saw the
Cahena, close at his left, her blue robe streaming like a banner.

A Moslem made his way toward her. She moved her
whole lithe body to launch a javelin. The man took it in his chest and toppled
backward as though yanked by a rope. A dozen Imazighen saw.

“There is also the Cahena!” they howled all
together, like a fierce declaration of faith.

She trampled over her fallen enemy. Wulf drummed
his horse’s flanks to speed up and join her. Another Moslem reined around in
front of them. Wulf saw his thicket of beard, the iron helmet-spike above his
turban. He hewed at Wulf, who caught the blade’s sweep with his shield and, at
close quarters, dashed the shield against the Moslem’s body,
then
drove his own point home. It
rattled,
it must be
rending its way through chain mail. The man floundered to earth as Wulf tore
his weapon free and got ahead of the Cahena to speed toward the main jumble of
battle.

Writhing, furious faces came at him, dropped away
as he struck,
were
replaced by other faces. He saw the
Cahena among a handful of her followers, facing a press of Moslems. He rode in,
with thrust and cut before anyone knew he was there. The Cahena’s men plied
javelins. Moments, and the enemies were cleared away.

Things had disorganized into swirls and knots of
combatants, but everywhere the Moslems fell back to the mouth of the pass.
Moslems attacked were never as deadly as Moslems attacking. Javelins stabbed
and were wrenched clear. Wulf took time to exult.

“Hai!”
blared
Bhakrann’s voice from somewhere near at hand. “Don’t
leave one of them alive!”

Others heard him, closed in savagely, striking,
trampling. The Moslems fled, those who could still flee, who had not fallen before
the murderous countercharge.

“Cahena!” a man bawled. “There is also the
Cahena!”

Almost as the yell rang out, the fight was over.
Into the pass scampered the defeated remnant. The field was strewn with bodies,
slackly dead or writhing with the pain of wounds.

And from all sides, a great clamor of triumph.
Wulf dabbed at his streaming face with his sleeve.

“Quick!” he thundered to those near him. “Hold
everyone back from the pass — we’ve beaten them!”

Half a dozen mounted men scurried to carry Wulf’s
orders. They’d begun to obey him, do what he said. Dismounting, he wondered how
long this fight had lasted.
Longer than it seemed, probably.
His horse breathed deeply. Sweat lathered its flanks. He told it that it was a
good horse, had borne him well,
had
helped him to
kill.

Chiefs scolded their warriors away from the pass.
Everyone shouted, exulted. No living enemies could be seen, only bodies. Men
were off their horses, picking up javelins or plundering.

“Don’t kill any wounded!” Wulf shouted. “There’s a
good reason for letting them live!”

“See that order is obeyed, Mallul,” he heard the
Cahena say.

Wulf raked off his helmet and let the wind stir
his soggy hair. Another horse came near. The rider touched Wulf’s shoulder. The
Cahena leaned above him, glowing with a smile, her eyes starlike under the
backflung veil. Her beauty, so close to him, was like a physical impact.

“We won, Cahena,” said Wulf, catching triumph from
her.

“You won, Wulf. It was your battle.”

“I killed only a few of all these,” he said.

“It was your battle,” she said again. “You planned
it. We had to beat them, and we did. We couldn’t have failed.”

He put on his helmet again. “Something can always
go wrong,” he said. “If that had happened —”

“If that had happened,” rumbled Bhakrann, riding
to join them, “we’d have felt that you’d tricked us into their hands.”

Reining in, he gazed at fallen bodies, at
riderless horses being caught. Wulf and he exchanged grins.

“If that had happened, several were ready to stick
you full of javelins,” Bhakrann said.

Wulf wiped more sweat. “Whose thought was that?”
he challenged.

“Mine,” said Bhakrann, grinning more broadly.

A warrior came cantering. He saluted with a bloody
javelin.

“Cahena, we found their commander’s body,” he
reported. “He’s wearing a gold-worked coat and a jewel-hilted sword. He had a
treasure of gold and silver in his saddlebags.”

“Bhakrann!” cried the Cahena. “Ride and get those
saddlebags, get any money they carried. Let the word go out, each man can take
a weapon, but whatever food the enemy has is to be gathered and shared out to
all of us. The money comes here to me.”

Bhakrann loped away with the messenger.

“Wulf,” said the Cahena above him, and he turned
to her. “That was Bhakrann’s thought, Wulf,” she said gently.
“About killing you.
It wasn’t mine.”

“Then you trusted me.”

Down came her slim hands. He put up his own big
ones and she took them and pressed them.

“Yes,” she said, more gently still. “I was told to
trust you.”

At the pass, chieftains still shouted their men
back from riding in. Several horsemen came to where Wulf and the Cahena waited,
bringing bags and parcels of bread and dates and raisins, strips of salted
meat,
skin
bags of water. The Cahena ordered these
things heaped together, with a guard beside them. She was joined by Yaunis and
Ketriazar and Daris, then by Bhakrann. They dismounted and conferred intently.

Wulf thrust his bloody sword into the earth and
wiped it with a rag tom from his cloak. Sheathing it, he stood with an arm
across his saddle, watching here and there.

“What’s to be done before we pull back?” the
Cahena asked him.

“Get word through the pass for them to come get
their wounded,” he said. “Let them have the burden of them.”

She studied him. “You think of the right things.”

A close-huddled knot of unhappy men approached on
foot, under guard. One guard sprawled to kiss the Cahena’s shadow.

“These are prisoners, Cahena,” he said, rising.
“Shall we kill them or keep them?”

She surveyed the prisoners. They were a score,
sullen and beaten.

“Neither one,” she replied. “They can carry a
message for us.”

One of the
group
shuffled
his feet and tried to readjust his turban, that must have been pulled off to
take his helmet. His striped gown was smeared with dirt, as though he had been
rolled on the ground. From his belt dangled an empty scabbard.

“Are you an officer?” the Cahena inquired.

“I led our first squadron into destruction,” he
replied dully, in passable Imazighen. “I’m Ayoub ibn Saud. I should have died.”

“But you’re alive. Go back and tell your general,
the one who sacked
Carthage
and sent you here to be slaughtered.”

“Hassan ibn an-Numan,” supplied Wulf from beside
her.

“You call him the good old man,” said the Cahena.
“If he’s a wise old man, he’ll pay attention to my words. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” said Ayoub ibn Saud wretchedly.

“Say that this is the word of the Cahena, who
rules here. As I defeated your advance party today, I’ll defeat him if he dares
come. Do you hear?”

“I hear.” Plainly, Ayoub ibn Saud did not like to
hear.

“He can have that country around
Carthage
,” she pronounced. “But here, the land is ours.” She
straightened her slim body. “There’s no room here for as much as the sole of
his foot. If he’d been here today, we’d have killed him.”

Her eyes stabbed at the captive like weapons.

“Your friends can come and gather up their wounded
and bury their dead. Now go, you and these others who are lucky to be alive.”

Ayoub ibn Saud gestured with a trembling hand.
“Kill me now,” he said. “I’d rather be dead than say that to Hassan ibn an-Numan.”

A silent moment, while the Cahena studied him.

“Then I’ll give you a letter to carry to him,” she
said at last. “Wulf, you write Arabic. Where can we get a pen and parchment?”

The things were found. Wulf spread the parchment
against his saddle and wrote the message as the Cahena had spoken it, then
rolled it up. The Cahena issued more orders.

“Give these prisoners one water bottle and some
bread,” she directed. “Start them for the pass on foot. But give the message
carrier a horse to make speed with.”

One of Yaunis’s men led up a brown horse. Ayoub
ibn Saud mounted it. Wulf handed him the letter. He rode away, his shoulders
sagging in his dirty striped gown.

“A javelin thrown from here would straighten his
back for him,” said Bhakrann to Wulf.

“Ride with him, Bhakrann,” commanded the Cahena at
once. “See that nobody stops those Moslems. Watch them all the way to the
pass.”

Bhakrann trotted after Ayoub ibn Saud. His
shoulders sagged, too, as though he disliked the assignment. The Cahena
smiled,
a touch of a smile. Her face was tawny golden in the
sun.

“Did I do well to order that, Wulf?” she asked.

She looked at him, almost like a child waiting for
praise.

“You did well,” he said. “We handled about a
thousand out here and killed and wounded a lot of them, but there are maybe
twice as many in the pass or on the far side. Let their wounded hamper them.
They won’t come prodding after us.

“What next?” she asked.

“You’ve already said that. Stop to water the
horses at that little stream, then on to where we left the baggage under guard.
Leave scouts here to observe, though I doubt we’ll be followed.”

“You’re confident,” Ketriazar half accused.
“You’ve been confident all along.”

“Only fools are confident all along,” said Wulf.

“Will they have mercy on their wounded?” asked
Yaunis. “They seem like a merciless breed to me.”

“Only to their enemies,” said Wulf. “They’ll carry
the wounded all the way back to
Carthage
.”

“We came out of it very well,” Yaunis spoke up.
“Their losses were heavy. They’ll plan a long time before they try us again.”

“Exactly,” said the Cahena. “Let’s start back.”

The chiefs rode away to do as
she said.
The Cahena smiled.

“I wonder if I’ll ever get used to you,” she said.

He met her gaze.

“Just because I killed that man who rode at
you —”

With that, she walked away to where two men were
bandaging a prone wounded comrade. She knelt
there,
she seemed to shimmer for a moment. She leaned above the wounded man, put her
hands on him,
spoke
something. Then she rose, and the
man rose, too. He smiled.

Tifan came, leading a spotted horse. “You should
have this extra one,” he said. “I saw you kill the man off of it.”

“Thanks,” said Wulf. He remembered the man and the
horse. “Tell me, does the Cahena heal wounds?”

“Yes, she does.”

On all sides, a happy chatter rose. Warriors
beamed at their spoils of swords or cloaks or helmets. Ketriazar bore the
enemy’s green battle flag. The wounded were helped astride captured horses, and
those who were most badly hurt were lashed to their saddles. Other horses
carried captured foodstuffs and water containers. The column moved westward at
a walk, the Cahena at the head.

“Ride with me, Wulf,” she called, and he joined
her.

“You must realize that you’ve done a great thing,”
she said. “Your head is as strong as your hand.”

“I killed a few,” he said again. “Maybe wounded
others.” He rode in silence for a moment. “We’ll have a bigger battle than this
one. They’ll come with ten times as many.”

“Then we’ll muster ten times as many ourselves,”
she said.

“And arm and feed them?”

“You
think,
four javelins
each. We’ll do it, if those invaders give us a little time. We make our own
javelins, make them well. But food — that’s a problem. It wasn’t easy to ration
this three thousand or so, even among good farms and orchards.”

The sun rose hot and high when they reached the
narrow stream and stopped to fill their water bottles and let the horses drink.
The captured food was shared out. The Cahena ate a scrap of white Moslem bread
and some dates.

“You don’t eat,” she said to Wulf. “You’re not
hungry.”

“Not so hungry that I can’t give my share to
someone hungrier, Lady Cahena.”

“Spoken like a chief,” she said. “Mallul, carry
the word that anyone who wishes to bathe may do so.”

Everybody, it seemed, wanted to bathe. Wulf staked
out his two horses, stripped, and waded in. The water was no deeper than his
waist. He wished for the soap he had known in
Constantinople
and
Carthage
, and made shift with grating handfuls of wet sand.
Bhakrann, also bathing, stared at Wulf’s great body.

“Very few of us your size,” he said. “You’re
muscled like a bull.”

Out of the water and dressed, the men mounted
again. They rode over land where they saw the hoofmarks of their earlier
advance. Wulf looked back to the distant heights where the pass was. He saw
tiny specks, probably riders left to see if the enemy would do anything. Men
laughed and joked in the columns. The Cahena rode to where a wounded man
slumped in his saddle. She spoke to him, touched him. He sat up straight as if
he was healed.

There was a halt to rest at
noon
. The Cahena sat quietly in the shade of her horse. She
beckoned Wulf and Bhakrann near.

“You two like each other,” she said.

“We almost fought at first, Cahena,” said
Bhakrann. “That’s a good way to begin, if it doesn’t get to a fight.”

“Now already, within hours, he’s not a stranger,”
she said. “You and Wulf will be brothers.”

“Cahena,” said Bhakrann, “I already think of him
as a brother.”

“Think of Bhakrann the same.” Her eyes stared from
Wulf to Bhakrann. “I call Bhakrann my son, Wulf.”

“Call me your son, Cahena,” he ventured.

She rose. “If the horses are rested, we’ll ride
again.”

At midafternoon they came to the larger stream,
where baggage camels and spare horses waited under guard. Messengers had ridden
ahead with news of the victory. Guards howled happy greetings.

As the Cahena dismounted among her chiefs, there
was a rush to kiss her shadow on the ground. Wulf expected her to make a
speech. But she said only that food for an early supper would be distributed
and that they would camp, to start home on the following day.

“There’ll be more fighting,” she said, in a voice
that carried over the listening warriors. “We’ll do our share of it.”

Bhakrann and Wulf rubbed down their horses well
and found them a patch of grass to crop. Then they made a small fire to boil
couscous and meat in a brass bowl. Bhakrann had secured a crockery flask of
strong, sharp wine. Near them, other messes ate and chattered. At last they sat
and stared at their fire. Night had brought a chill into the air.