Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986 (7 page)

“She said be brothers,” said Bhakrann. “Think of
each other as brothers.”

Bearded chin in hand, he stared. “Who was your
father? You had one, I suppose.”

“His name was Fyr,” said Wulf. “He was a farmer,
raised grain and cows and some pigs, had two or three horses.”

“Was he a good father?” Bhakrann asked.

“I think so. When the priest said I learned my
letters quickly, he sent me to learn to be a priest, too. But I became a
soldier.”

“Your wars — you learned in them. I took a moment
or two today to watch you cut those Moslems down. There’s strength in your
arm.”

“In yours, too, Bhakrann.
Now I’ve told you about my father, how about yours?”

“I don’t know who he was.”

Wulf stared into the savage, scarred face.
Bhakrann looked back with raw blue eyes.

“My mother never knew who he was, either. My
name’s Bhakrann, son of nobody.” His face drew into bitter lines. “Who dares
call me that? I’ll rip his tongue out.”

His big, brown hands clutched at the sword taken
from Okba across his lap. In his beard the flames woke a flash of red, like
blood grown old without being avenged.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, Bhakrann…”

“No, I’ll tell you,” Bhakrann said. “We’re to be
brothers. Listen, my birth was shameful.”

Another moment of heavy silence.

“How I was born is my heart’s shame, and it’s been
the calamity of some who reminded me.” Bhakrann grimaced. “Who wants to die?
All he needs to say is Bhakrann, son of nobody.”

The hands shifted on the sword sheath.

“It was like this.”
Pain in
Bhakrann’s voice.
“Fifty years ago, some of the Djerwa rode down from
Arwa with donkeys and camels loaded with dates and almonds and raisins, to
trade at the seashore for salt. They camped on that beach. That night a company
of sea-robbers landed and rushed the camp. Nobody knows what people they were,
only that they spoke foreign and had yellow hair.”

And Bhakrann’s gaze fell upon the tawny hair of
Wulf the Saxon.

“I wasn’t one of them,” said Wulf. “I wasn’t born
fifty years ago, and my father never went to sea.”

“Who knows who those sea-robbers were? They shouted
and flowed over the camp like a wave. The merchants
ran,
those who could. The robbers killed those they caught — all but one. She was a
girl.” The bearded, battered face clamped. “They didn’t kill her.”

Wulf said nothing.

“Isn’t that the way of conquered men with
conquered women?” said Bhakrann tightly. “They tore off her clothes and tied
her hands and feet to pegs in the sand. She lay helpless.”

In his beard again, the red sheen of the old
unavenged infamy.

“She endured them all night long, in terror and
pain. And when the rovers sailed away on the morning tide, the merchants came
back and found her pegged there — bleeding, fainting, bruised but still alive.
They brought her back with them.”

“Then she lived,” said Wulf.

“Yes, she lived.
In disgrace and
scorn.
She swelled up with a child bred on her by one or other of those
robbers.”

Bhakrann gestured with a clenched fist.

“Maybe it was bred by that whole band of them? She
was despised among her people. She lived by drudgery, to support herself and
her shameful son.”

Wulf waited for him to continue. He continued.

“I’m that son. Bhakrann’s my only name. How many
men with how many names have I killed and trampled under my feet?”

“Yes,” was all Wulf could say.

“The other children laughed and pointed at me and
called me son of nobody. I’d run and hide, until I got strong and fierce, and
struck back at them. When I was eight years old, I gouged an eye out of the
head of a mocker. When I was twelve and my mother dead, a grown man laughed and
called me son of nobody. I went for his throat, and when he drew his knife I
caught his hand and turned his own point to drive into him and he was dead.
That was the first of many I’ve killed, how many I don’t know — I’ve stopped
counting.”

“You’re a good fighter.”

“Yes, but
not a thinking fighter
like
you. Our tribes were at war then, before the Cahena joined us into
one people. When I was still a boy, I went to those wars. I never thought of
being killed, only of killing. When I was eighteen, I was thought the foremost
killer of the Djerwa. Then the first Moslems prowled in, while I was still
young. I was the chief of war parties. I fought whenever there was fighting to
do. I got wounded, but I was never killed. I did the killing.”

“Bhakrann,” said Wulf, “you didn’t have to tell me
this.”

“Maybe I did have to tell you. Maybe I had to
talk.”

“Isn’t there any joy in your heart, Bhakrann?”
Wulf half reached his hand out,
then
drew it back. “Do
you have a heart at all?”

“No god I ever heard of would dare look into my
heart,”
came
the slow reply. “But I have a heart.
There’s even tenderness in it.”

“Tenderness for what?”
Wulf asked him.

“For the Cahena.
She calls me her son. And she wants me to call you my
brother. Now, don’t you think I’ve talked enough for tonight?”

On the move at pale dawn,
munching scraps of barley cake as they rode.
There was little discipline to their formation. They
ambled in clumps and straggles, still loudly congratulating themselves and each
other on their victory. Camels blubbered complaints under their burdens. The
captured horses had mostly been appropriated by their captors, and many
riderless Imazighen horses were herded along. Wulf heard that they headed for
the Cahena’s town on
Mount
Arwa
.

The land looked rich, pleasant. Cattle and sheep
grazed on grassy stretches.
Here and there stood houses of
mud brick and thatch, with fruit orchards and grape arbors.
Streams
flowed, enough water for grateful horses. Wulf reined aside once to study a
closed structure of rough stones that rose to a cone. Zeoui said that it was an
ancient Imazighen tomb, of someone once important and now forgotten.

A messenger summoned Wulf to ride with the Cahena
and her chieftains.

They greeted him with noisy friendship, pockmarked
Ketriazar, lean, pale-eyed Daris, the more elegant Yaunis. Bhakrann came,
nodding cheerfully, as though he had never told his bitter tale of shameful
birth. The Cahena beckoned Wulf with her riding whip. “Tell us more of this
fighting you say we’ll do,” she said.

“Yesterday we defeated only a reconnaissance
force,” he reminded her. “Their main body will come, a great big main body.”

“We ate them up like a relish of pickles,” said
Ketriazar.

“We ate up the ones who got out to us, and we
outnumbered those,” said the Cahena, easy in her saddle.
“Wulf’s
plan.
I saw at once that it would succeed.”

“What would you have ordered?” asked Yaunis, and
she turned a dry smile upon him.

“Why tell you what I’d have ordered?” she said.
“Wulf had a good plan ready. I gave the orders, but they were Wulf’s orders.”

“Your decisions are always right, Cahena,” said
Yaunis.

“Which is why she is so great,” added Daris.

Wulf had listened. “What makes her great is that
her men hear her and obey her,” he said.

“Lucky, Wulf says,” the Cahena reminded them.
“Luck is everything. I’ve been lucky in having my orders obeyed ever since I
was a girl, fighting tribes that became allies, with Vandals and Romans and so
on.
And now with Moslems.”
Her eyes shone on Wulf.
“You think they’ll bring forty thousand against us.”

“Hassan ibn an-Numan had that many to take
Carthage
,” he said again. “Maybe he’ll have more now. It’ll be a
big army to bring into strange country, finding rations and keeping fit for
action.”

“And stopping to pray five times a day,”
contributed Yaunis.

“They’ve done that all the way from the far side
of
Egypt
,” went on Wulf. “They’ll come, as many of them as they can
manage.”

“We’ll start gathering our own men as soon as we
get to Tiergal,” said the Cahena.

“Tiergal,” Wulf repeated, and she laughed
musically.

“It’s nowhere as big as those old Roman towns on
the coast,” she said. “We Imazighen don’t build big towns. We do things simply
and try to do them well.”

Wulf gazed at a string of nearby riders, tousled,
sunburned,
bare
-armed. Their shocks of hair defied the
sun. They wore daggers and javelins and shields as though they could use any of
them, or all of them at once. Enough such men could win. But were there enough?

“We’ll find the men,” said the Cahena, as though
yet again she read his mind.

They passed a mud-walled house with a hedge of
prickly pear. A hoopoe fluttered close, speckle-bodied,
yellow
-crested.
More houses showed ahead. The Cahena ordered men to ride to each.

“Offer them money for what food they have,” she
directed. “Here, take these coins we captured.
Meat, grain,
fruit, anything.
If they won’t sell, say it’s for the Cahena.”

The messengers jogged away to door after door.

“What if the food isn’t given when they say it’s
for you?” Wulf asked the Cahena.

“I’m afraid it will be taken anyway. People
mustn’t refuse me.”

Past the little settlement they marched, and
bargained for food at houses beyond. The sun blazed high, then sank westward
toward the distant ridge. When it set in a red blur, they camped in a broad
hollow with grassy slopes and a swift stream at the bottom. Men unsaddled and
made preparations for supper.

Wulf found Bhakrann and Zeoui and Cham exulting
that an injured baggage camel had been slaughtered and was being cut up for
roasts over a score of fires. As they licked their lips, Mallul appeared.

“The Cahena asks that Wulf eat with her,” he said,
and Wulf followed him to the enclosure of javelin-propped robes. Inside, she
bent over a pot set on hot coals.

“You accepted my invitation,” she greeted Wulf.

“People mustn’t refuse you,” he said, giving her
back her own words.

She laughed, more merrily, perhaps, than the
half-impudent jest deserved. Mallul served the food into bowls. It was a stew
of mutton and green pods and couscous, seasoned with peppers. The Cahena poured
cups of wine. The three ate and drank. The Cahena studied Wulf thoughtfully.

“Forty thousand of them,” she said at last, putting
a spoon between her full lips.

“Hard-fighting veterans,” said Wulf.
“Ready to die in battle and go to their promised paradise.”

“So you said. But I asked you here to learn who
you are, what you are.” Eating, Wulf told her at greater length the story he had
told Bhakrann of his English boyhood, his studies of histories and languages,
his service with the Franks and the Byzantines.

“We’ve needed you,” she said, nodding her dark
head. “You’re learned and brave. Not all brave men are learned, not all learned
men are brave.”

“You flatter me, Lady Cahena.”

“I tell the truth about you. I had a vision of
you. I saw even the pattern of your tunic. I know what will happen.”

“That’s true, Wulf,” said Mallul.

“Wisdom sees the future by indications of the past
and present.”

“You’re a philosopher,” the Cahena half crooned.
She poured wine for them both and sipped from her cup as he sipped from his.

“You’re kind to entertain me,” he said.
“To talk to me.”

“We’ll talk again, another time.”

That was his leave to go. He rose and bowed, but
did not fall down to kiss her shadow that still showed in the sun’s last
redness.

“How big you are, Wulf,” she said. “We’ll make you
a coat of mail.”

“Thank you,” he said, reflecting that other women
had praised his stature, ever since he was an upstanding lad in
England
.

“Good night, Wulf.”

He went back to where Bhakrann and Zeoui and Cham
were finishing their camel meat. Yaunis was with them, eating more daintily.

“We’ll be fewer tomorrow,” said Bhakrann. “Yaunis
will lead his men off to the north at sunrise.”

“I hope to talk with you again, Wulf,” said
Yaunis, wiping his fingers on the leg of his boot. “After all, I’ve been to
Carthage
. I went to the theater and the circus. My people are the
Djerdilan. We have civilized traditions, we appreciate culture.”

“That’s meant for me and Cham and Zeoui, we’re
barbarous Djerwa,” drawled Bhakrann without rancor. “You can fight anyway,
Yaunis. We saw you fight this morning.”

“This morning,” Wulf echoed. It seemed long ago,
that slashing hurly-burly at the pass. But far longer ago seemed his flight
from
Carthage
. Had it been only four days back?
Five?

“Did the Cahena tell you anything?” Bhakrann was
asking.

Wulf reflected on certain things so carefully left
unsaid at supper. “She wants to gather forty thousand men against the invasion
that’s coming,” he decided to say.

“I’ll have maybe four thousand Djerdilans, all who
can sit a horse and throw a javelin,” said Yaunis, rising. “Good night, Wulf.
Come visit me among the Djerdilan.”

He walked away with an elegance that may have been
consciously assumed. Wulf and the others sat in the night, cool but
comfortable. At last they slept. At dawn, the column marched again.

They moved on one slope after another, past knotty
hummocks that, Wulf thought, could hide ambushes. Mounting rivers and crossing
valleys, they pointed toward remote heights. With Yaunis’s command gone, the
force was smaller and even less ordered. Men rode out of the ranks without
permission to javelin partridges and rabbits. One party returned with two deer.
Others raided fig and date groves, and the Cahena gave money to protesting
owners. Camp that night was among rugged hills, where horses and camels found
grass. There were several streams. Wulf and Bhakrann stripped to bathe in one.

“You’ve quite a few scars,” observed Bhakrann,
surveying Wulf’s brawny body.
“Nearly as many as I have, and
you aren’t as old.
What made that white mark on your shoulder?”

“An arrow, outside
Damascus
.”

“We don’t use those much — not grown men, anyway.”

Wulf pulled his tunic over his wet torso.
“You mean, children have arrows?”

“Oh, just to play with. I’ve seen little boys
shoot at butterflies — hit them, too.”

Mallul came to say that the Cahena would entertain
them both at supper. She was in her little stockade of cloaks, with Daris and
Ketriazar. The meal was a kettle of big snails, steamed in peppery oil. Again
the Cahena ate only sparingly. Putting snails into his mouth, Wulf remembered
how in
Constantinople
they were more appetizingly prepared.

The chieftains accepted war as inevitable, but
when the Cahena spoke of forty thousand to fight it, they scowled and counted
on their knobby fingers.

“That means women and children to tend the herds
and crops,” said Daris. “We’ll need every man who can mount a horse.”

“Wulf says the Moslems have better horses than we
do,” said the Cahena, half taunting the notion.

“Does he?” snapped Daris. “We ride
better
than any men on earth. Yaunis told me that the old
Romans used Imazighen cavalry, all the way up there across the sea.”

“Imazighen rode races in the Roman games,” added
Mallul. “Rode them and won them.”

“The Romans didn’t win wars with cavalry,” Wulf
said. “Their legions marched and fought on foot, and conquered everywhere. Even
in
England
, where I used to live.”

“How did they conquer?” inquired Ketriazar.

Wulf did his best to explain Roman military
organization, the hardy legions of five or six thousand men. He described a
legion’s division into centuries and the groupings of centuries into cohorts,
with efficient commanders. Taking a stick, he diagrammed a legion’s harrowlike
line of battle, with a second grouping of centuries to advance and relieve the
first. The others asked questions. Wulf found it hard to put into words the way
these units made themselves maneuverable, deploying or concentrating on
command.

“But these tactics have deteriorated,” he
lectured. “Legions are smaller these days, made up of poorer troops. They’ve
lost the old skill and
spirit,
they’ve been defeated
again and again. The Byzantines sometimes go back to an older method — the
Greek phalanx, hard to break but not really mobile. Yet phalanxes have defeated
the Moslems.”

“Old ways of fighting?”
Ketriazar sniffed.

“When old methods have been forgotten they become
new,” declared the Cahena, and again her word put an end to arguments. “Didn’t
the Romans ever win with cavalry, Wulf?”

“Sometimes.
A cavalry charge at the right moment can decide a battle’s
outcome.”

“How should we train ourselves now?” inquired
Daris.

“It’s hard to say at once,” Wulf felt obliged to
reply. “I’m trying to think over everything I’ve studied.”

“We don’t have time to think,” Daris said.

“We’ve days to think,” said the Cahena, “and
nobody had better talk before thinking.”

“Wulf thinks as well as fights,” added Bhakrann, sipping
wine. “You saw him handle them at the pass, right on the spot. I say he’ll do
it again, against more enemies.”

“Maybe,” granted Ketriazar.

They waited for the Cahena to speak. Wulf watched
their bearded faces and wondered if they dared look upon her with desire.