Sunbird (75 page)

^{At a level place he paused to rest, and the stump of his right arm ached cruelly in the cold. He ignored the pain, pushing it below the surface of his conscious mind, and he looked up the deep dark gut of the gorge.}

^{High above him on the cliff top, outlined against the pale blue of the noon sky was the foreshortened figure of a man. The figure stood very still, and the stillness was in itself menacing.}

^{Manatassi ate a little cold millet cake, and drank from the stream of icy clear water, before beginning the climb again. Now there were other figures. They appeared silently and unexpectedly at steep or easily defended places on the trail and they watched him.}

^{One of them stood atop a giant boulder, fully forty feet high, which all but blocked the gorge. He was a tall man, well muscled and heavily armed. Manatassi recognized him, the man had been a captain of one of his old regiments.}

^{Manatassi stopped below the boulder, and let the cloak fall back from his head, exposing his face, but the man did not recognize him, could not see his king in this ravaged face from which pain and hatred had stripped the flesh and which the whip and the club had remoulded.}

^{'Am I so altered?' Manatassi thought grimly. 'Will no man recognize me again?}

^{He and the man stared at each other for many seconds until Manatassi spoke.}

^{'I seek Zingala. the ironsmith.'}

^{He knew that even though Zingala had joined the outcasts, such a famous craftsman must still have many clients seek him out. He knew that alone and unarmed he would be allowed to pass on such business.}

^{The sentry upon the boulder turned his head slightly and pointed with his chin up the gorge, and Manatassi went on.}

^{There were narrow steps that climbed the black rock cliff beside the waterfall, and when Manatassi came out upon the summit there were armed and silent men waiting. They fell in behind and on each side of him as he strode out along the only path, through the thick forest which covered the crest of the mountain.}

^{The smoke of the furnaces guided Manatassi, and he came at last to a natural amphitheatre of rock, a bowl one hundred paces across, where
Zingala
worked his art with iron.}

^{The old master was at one of his furnaces, packing the ore into the belly of it, each lump carefully hand selected. His apprentices were gathered around respectfully, ready to add the layers of limestone and charcoal upon the ore.}

^{Zingala straightened up from his task and held aching back muscles as he watched the tall stranger and his escort come down into the bowl. There was something familiar in the man's walk, in the way he carried his shoulders, the tilt of his head, and Zingala frowned. He dropped his hands to his sides, and shuffled uncertainly as the man's features touched a deep memory. The stranger stopped before him and stared into Zingala's face - those eyes, yellow and fierce and compelling.}

^{Quickly he looked down at the stranger's feet and he saw the deep cleft between the toes. Zingala wailed and dropped onto his face upon the earth. He took one of Manatassi's deformed feet and placed it upon his own grey-frosted pate.}

^{'Command me,' he cried. 'Command me, Manatassi, the great black beast, the Thunder of the Heavens.'}

^{The others heard the name and they fell as though lightning had struck them down.}

^{'Command us,' they cried. 'Command us, black bull of a thousand cows.'}

^{Manatassi looked upon his band of outlaws as they grovelled about him, and he spoke softly but in a voice that cut to the heart of each of them.}

^{'There is but one command I give you, and that is - OBEY!'}

^{The furnace was shaped like the belly of a pregnant woman, and the entrance was slitted like her pudenda between spread thighs of moulded clay.}

^{To fertilize the smelting of ore, Zingala introduced the buck-horn nozzle of the bellows into the opening. The nozzle was shaped like a priapus, and the work was done in a strictly ritualistic sequence while the apprentices sang the birth chant, and
Zingala
sweated and laboured like a midwife in his leather apron, pumping away at the leather bellows.}

^{When at last the plug of clay was drawn and the molten metal ran in a fiery stream into the sand moulds there was a murmur of relief and congratulation from the watchers.}

^{Using an anvil of ironstone and a set of special hammers Zingala forged the lion's paw with its five massive iron claws and its pad of solid metal. He filed and dressed and polished it, then he reheated it and tempered it in the blood of a leopard and the fat of a hippopotamus.}

^{One of the skilled leather-workers built a socket of green elephant hide and shaped it to fit the stump of Manatassi's right arm. The iron claw was fixed securely into the leather socket and when it was strapped to Manatassi's stump it made a fearsome artificial limb.}

^{Khani, the paramount ruler of Vendi and foppish half-brother of Manatassi, was with his woman when the iron claw tore the top off his skull. The girl beneath him screamed and fainted with the shock of it.}

^{Sondala, the king of Buthelezi, had many subjects, a multitude of cattle, a little grazing-land and even less water to carry his people and his kine through a season of drought.}

^{He was a small wiry man, with quick nervous eyes and a ready smile. Of all the tribes along the great river his was the latest to come out of the north, and he was crushed between the powerful Vendi tribe on the one hand and those white-robed, long-bearded brown-skinned Dravs on the other. He was a desperate man, ready to listen with both ears to any proposition.}

^{He sat in the firelight and grinned and darted quick eyes at the gaunt godlike figure across the hut from him - this king with the ruined face, and bird's feet and clawed hand of iron.}

^{'You have twelve regiments, each of 2,000 men,' Manatassi told him. 'You have five flowerings of maidens each of 5,000. You have, at the latest count, 127,000 cattle, bulls, cows, calves and oxen.'}

^{Sondala grinned and wriggled uneasily, amazed at the accuracy of the Vendi king's intelligence.}

^{'Where will you find food and grass and drink for such a multitude?' Manatassi asked, and Sondala smiled and listened.}

^{'I will give you grazing, and land. I will give you a land rich with fruit and lush with grass, a land over which your people will march for ten generations without finding the limits of it.'}

^{'What do you want of me?' Sondala whispered at last, still grinning and blinking his eyes quickly.}

^{'I want your regiments to command. I want your spear in my hand. I want your shield to march beside me.'}

^{'If I refuse?' Sondala asked.}

^{'Then I will kill you,' said Manatassi. 'And take your regiments, and all five flowerings of your maidens, and all your 127,000 cattle, except for ten which I will sacrifice upon your grave as a mark of respect to your ghost.' Manatassi grinned then also, and it was such a terrible baring of teeth in that battered face that Sondala's own smile froze.}

^{'I am your dog,' he said hoarsely, and he knelt before Manatassi. 'Command me.'}

^{'There is but one command,' said Manatassi softly. 'And that command is, OBEY!'}

^{In the first year Manatassi made treaties with the Vingo, the Satassa and the Bey. He fought the Xhota in a single devastating battle, employing tactics so revolutionary and relentless that the Xhota king and his wives and courtiers and princes were taken twenty minutes after battle was joined. Instead of massacring the menfolk, and taking the women and cattle as was the custom, Manatassi had only the king and royal family strangled, then he assembled the defeated regiments, still intact and under their own commanders, and he made them swear their allegiance to him. They thundered it in massed voice that seemed to shake the leaves in the trees and rock the hills upon their foundations.}

^{In the second year, after the rains had passed, Manatassi marched westwards as far as that desert coast on which a cold green surf raged eternally. He fought four great battles, strangled four kings - treated with two others, and added almost
a
hundred thousand warriors to his regiments.}

^{Those close to the great black beast knew that he seldom slept. It seemed there was some driving force within him that denied him rest or pleasure. He ate food without tasting it, in the perfunctory manner in which a man might throw a log upon the fire merely to keep it burning. He never laughed, and smiled only when a task was performed to his satisfaction. He used women with a swift brutality that left them trembling and weeping, and he shared companionship with no man.}

^{Only once did his lieutenants see him show the emotions of a man. They stood upon the tall yellow dunes at the western limit of the land. Manatassi was apart from them draped in the leopard-skin of royalty and with the blue heron feathers of his head-dress fluttering in the cold breeze that came off the sea.}

^{Suddenly one of the war captains exclaimed aloud and pointed out across the green waters. From out of the banks of silver sea fret, looming like a ghost ship through the mist, sped one of the galleys of Opet. With her single square sail bellied by the trade winds, and her banks of oars beating rhythmically, she sped in silence towards the north on her long voyage of trade to Cadiz.}

^{Again a captain exclaimed, and they all looked towards the king. His face shone and dripped with sweat, and his jaws clenched and ground his teeth together with a sound like rock on rock. His eyes were burning mad as he watched the passage of the galley, and his body shook and shuddered with the strength of his hatred.}

^{The captain ran to aid him, thinking him stricken with sudden fever. He touched the king's arm.}

^{'High-born,' he started, and Manatassi turned upon him in raging madness and struck him down with the iron claw, ripping half his face away.}

^{'There,' he screamed, pointing with the claw at the disappearing galley. 'There is your enemy. Mark him well.'}

^{Each day brought its own excitements, its secret delights and ventures - and its happiness. It did not seem five years since she and Huy had become lovers, so swiftly had the years sped. Yet it was so, for the Festival of the Fruitful Earth was almost come around once more.}

^{Tanith laughed aloud at the memory of her seduction of Huy, and she made her plans to repeat the performance during the coming Festival. Beside her Aina mumbled a question, peering at her quizzically from the depths of her hood.}

^{'Why do you laugh, child?'}

^{'I laugh because I am happy, old mother.'}

^{'Oh, to be young once again. You do not know what it is like to grow old.' Aina began one of her monologues, and Tanith led her through the bustle of the harbour area, past the low taverns and the taunting street girls to where steps were cut into the stone jetty. She danced down the steps and leapt lightly to the deck of the small sailing craft moored to one of the iron rings in the jetty.}

^{Coming out of the tiny cabin, dressed in rough fisherman's clothes and with a scarf tied about his head. Huy was too late to help her aboard.}

^{'You are late.'}

^{'For your impertinence I shall punish you, just as soon as it is safe,' Tanith warned him.}

^{'I look forward to it,' Huy grinned, and helped old Aina over the gunwale, while Tanith ran forward to cast off the head lines.}