A Life for Kregen (3 page)

Truth to tell, in that hectic moment as we belted along, I wondered if we would have done better for Cleitar to let Old Superb float free, a ringing challenge to the power confronting us. But that way lay the hubris, the megalomania, the self-importance I detest so much. I had sworn, as I was called to be Emperor of Vallia, that I would do a good sound workmanlike job. Pride is for the vainglorious, in excess, and its unbounded license has caused great sorrow in two worlds.

And then we were among them and Cleitar’s hammer lifted dripping crimson, and so that answered that question.

At my back Korero the Shield bore a single targe, a small parade ornament, but with its yellow and scarlet traceries he fended a sweeping blow and lashed back with the blade gripped in his tail hand. Ferocious, Korero the Shield, a Kildoi whose four arms and handed tail both protect and devastate.

With a jolt and a crack we overbore the first line.

Chuliks sagged back — and when a Chulik sags he is either dead or dying.

The zorcas responded nobly as only those superb four-spindly-legged steeds can, all fire and spirit. Never meant for the charge, they flowed on and over in a fleetness of rhythm that bore us on and up. Like hunters at chase we cleared the first line and slammed into the second. But the Chuliks were ready, well-knowing the business of tackling a zorca-charge. Their weapons glittered. We sliced and drew our blades reeking in crimson as we leaped ahead. But the fray thickened and grew denser and Largo the Astorka was down, a spear through his throat. We yelled and swirled our blades and pressed on. But our progress slackened. The impetus of the charge dwindled.

The noise bellowed up, echoing in rolling confusion under the Gate of Voxyri. Volodu put three distinct dents into his massive silver trumpet, and each time burst out with genuine anguish at that desecration. But three Chuliks dropped as though the trumpet had been a poleaxe.

The third line of yellow-tuskers swayed, and men went down. But they held us. The zorcas drew back, pirouetting from a hedge of steel. Furiously I bellowed it out.

“Reform! Break out over the Bridge!”

We swung the zorcas about, their nimble hooves clicking on the cobbles where blood ran between the time-worn stones. The Chuliks back there were unlimbering crossbows, and this made me frown.

“Heads down!” I yelled and clapped in my heels and Snowy surged on, picking up speed, elegantly avoiding tumbled bodies.

The bolts would have had us but for the Gate. The trajectory intersected the masonry and the bolts chinked and tumbled like chicks disturbed in the nest. In the next mur we were out in the sunshine again and bearing down on the men from the two guarding fliers. It was all nip and tuck. Korero surged ahead, despite my yell, and his little yellow and red shield whipped up.

I urged Snowy to greater efforts. In a bunch we crashed out and the Chuliks rose to meet us.

Naghan Cwonin’s lance tip was a clotted red mass. He lowered that steel wedge of death and then he was hurled back off his saddle, trailing blood, yelling, a stux clear through him. The Chulik who had hurled that spear did not hurl another, for a streaking dagger crossed the narrowing space and chinked in most neatly over the brass-coiled rim of his corselet.

That Chulik bore a golden image of a grascent on his breast, suspended by golden chains around his neck. The dagger protruded above the golden image of the risslaca for a heart beat, and then the Chulik walked forward, as a dead man walks, blindly, walked forward three paces, four, and almost a fifth before he tumbled under the hooves of the zorcas.

The weapons flamed. The Suns beat down. The dust lifted. And the blood spurted.

The pandemonium was, for a brief moment, akin to the last dying scenes in a sinking ship where the crew panic. Blades clashed. Korero’s shield split asunder and he used the half in his hand to dash a Chulik away. But another leaped for him, his yellow tusks dripping, and my clanxer only just swept down in time in a precision-controlled arc that kissed death across a corded neck.

“My thanks, majister—”

“There’s another devil, Korero—”

“Your back, Nath!”

“On, on!”

The shouts racketed as we forced our way on. And then we were through. Before us stretched the Bridge of Voxyri, and the open plain with the distant lines of men coming on swiftly. We could have ridden on. We might simply have nudged the zorcas to a further effort and ridden away.

But, as one man — as one man — we turned.

We turned back, raging, and tore once again into those murderous Chuliks and their yellow tusks and their ferocious military skills.

The mellow stone of the Bridge and the Gate, the coolness of blue shadows and the piercing brilliance of the suns light, the clatter of hooves, a distinctive, brittle, rousing sound, the pants of men in combat and the yells of the wounded, the stink of rawly spilled blood — yes, yes, it struck responsive chords in me. But until we were done with scenes of this ugliness Vallia would never be the peaceful country we all intended her to be.

Well — Nath Nazabhan and a few others might question that assumption — but it was what I intended.

The Chuliks saw their attack had failed. They had killed or wounded a number of us, and they had lost more men than they liked. With that quick appraisal of the situation that had earned them as much contempt — in this case misguided contempt — in the past as praise, they took their airboats aloft. The fliers lifted off, swiftly rising and turning to head toward the north.

North.

That made a kind of sense, although they might have been expected to head for the southwest, where no one seemed to know what was happening. Equally, they might have gone southeast, for the situation there was confused. The truth was they might have headed anywhere in Vallia, for we were ringed.

And, even so, this northward flight might be a mere subterfuge.

We were plagued by the lack of airboats. All the vollers had been confiscated by the victors, and we, late into the fray, had to make do with what sorry remnants we could scrape up. As for aerial patrols, they were carried out by a skeleton force that had no chance to halt any determined aerial attack.

Before the troops from the Drinnik reached us we were off our mounts and tending our wounded.

Those who had already started on their last journey to the Ice Floes of Sicce were Naghan Cwonin, Largo the Astorka, Nath the Flute, Aidan Narfolar ti Therduim, Roban Vander and Nath the Mak, sometimes known as Nath the Waso.

We had another five with wounds, great or small, from which only one, Larghos Shinuim the Fortroi subsequently joined his comrades among the ice floes.

So we were cut down by a half.

Nath’s face bore a grave look that I saw was compounded as much of worry as of grief and anger.

I attempted to rouse him.

“You, it was, Nath, who told me that all men must die in their time. Praise Opaz for those who survived.”

“Wounded or slain,” he said. “A half of us. Some will rally, of course. But it is not good enough.”

I was not sure what he meant; but in the nature of the circumstances as the first of the men from the Drinnik reached us, I forbore to inquire. Had I done so I know now he would have given me no answer, or would have evaded the issue. What was planted in his mind then was subsequently made plain. And, I may add, to my own personal pleasure and profound gratitude to my comrades.

Looking up from the sprawled body of Nath the Flute, Dorgo the Clis contorted his scarred face into a grimace of anger. He was cut up by Nath’s death, seeing they had been friends from boyhood, and however much of death a man sees in his life, the passing of a friend carries a heavier weight.

“Here they come,” growled Dorgo, “making a right hullabaloo and late, too damned late, by Aduim’s Belly.”

“They ran as fast as they could, Dorgo,” said Magin, who philosophically bound up a spear wound in his arm. His son, who had been unable to find the excitement he craved in his native Vallia and had gone to be a paktun, would have found all the nerve-tinglers he wanted now, in Vallia. And we could do with all those brave sprightly young men who had left sea-faring, trading Vallia to be mercenary swods overseas.

The men from the Drinnik came up, puffing a little, for they had run fast, as Magin said. They were Hakkodin, axe and halberd men who flanked the regimented files of the Phalanx, and they were raging that they were too late.

At their head came Barty Vessler, his shining, red, smooth, polished face a scarlet glow. No overemphasis can possibly convey the gorgeous color of Barty’s face in these moments. He was infectiously impetuous as usual, and spluttering with mingled joy and rage.

“Jak,” he bellowed. “Dray, I mean, majister! You might have been killed. Oh, my aching ribs. Oh for a zorca!”

Everyone laughed. There was no stopping that unleashing of pent-up emotion.

Gravely, I regarded him; gravely, for I was the only one not to laugh. Mean, tight-lipped, yes, if you will. But I looked with great favor on this young man, Barty Vessler, for all his incautious ways and feckless moments. And I knew well enough that if he’d had his zorca between his knees he’d have come bolting in from the rear upon the Chuliks and, for almost a certainty, got himself chopped for his chivalric notions.

His brown Vallian hair flopped wildly as he gesticulated. Young and filled with notions of honor, Barty Vessler, the Strom of Calimbrev, yet a fellow who saw the way that honor led him and unflinchingly followed it even if it led through Cottmer’s Caverns.

Bells started up a-ringing and citizens came flocking down. The uproar was worse than the fight. I glanced at Nath and Barty and jerked my head. Volodu picked up the little sign and immediately slapped that silver trumpet to his lips.

Volodu the Lungs blew the Clear.

Well, the citizens wouldn’t know the calls blown by the Phalanx, of course. But the silver notes cleared a way and having sorted out both the quick and the dead, and seen to the wounded, we trotted our zorcas on into the city. Barty took a spare mount and came with us, for he was of that choice band, without a single doubt.

Barty rode with Nath, and scraps of their conversation reached me. Barty was saying: “...quite agree with you, Nath. It just is not good enough.”

And Nath, gravely, answering: “Time something positive was done about it, and done quick, by Vox.”

They were up to some deviltry, I fancied, and left them to it. I needed a drink of tea, and that was doing something positive, and the quicker the sooner. So we trotted through ruined Vondium the Proud, and the people gave us a cheer as we passed, and so we crossed the wide kyro before the imperial palace, and passed through the gates where the guards slapped their three-grained staffs across, most smartly, and we let the hostlers take the zorcas in an inner court where purple flowers hung down in a scented profusion. The zorcas had done well, and we patted them affectionately as they were led off.

“Let us meet in the Sapphire Reception Room,” I called to them as they prepared to trudge off to their quarters. “That is informal enough and yet formal for what we must decide.”

I met their puzzled looks with a benign disregard that made them all the more curious.

Barty and Nath exchanged quick, puzzled looks.

But I shouldered off and into the inner apartments of the palace, looking for a rapid bath to wash off the muck and blood, and then for the tea and a repast that would keep the leems of hunger at bay for a bur or so. It was still too early for wine.

The Sapphire Reception Room and most of the wing which housed that informal chamber for semi-formal gatherings had been spared the fire that had gutted a very great deal of the old palace. Yantong had rebuilt much; but the place sagged as though tired, towers and spires toppled inwards and walls slaked along the entrenchments, so that the skyline that had once lifted so arrogantly now looked like a haphazard collection of tooth-stumped jaws. The imperial palace of Vondium looked rather like a tent with the central pole chopped down. Some essential work still went on so as to house conveniently the people involved in the type of government I intended — if that is not too strong a word for the still bumbling ideas I entertained on running the country — and carpenters and masons and brickies gave a pleasing air of busy activity. No one was slave. The reverberations of that stringent policy to which, despite all opposition, I clung, had made, was making, and would continue to make life unpleasant in silly and petty ways as much as large and ponderable fashions.

A party brought in the uniforms and equipment of the dead Chuliks. They had taken their wounded with them. As I say, Chuliks are fighting men.

Giving instructions for the lot to be dumped in the Sapphire Reception Room and for tea in immense quantities to be prepared, I carried on into the small suite we had managed to make habitable. The rooms were not large; but they possessed walls and ceilings, and the water still ran, pumped up by windmills hastily erected on the roof. If you looked out of the north window you saw the charred stump of the old Wersting Tower where they used to keep kenneled those fearsome hunting animals. Already green growing shoots clambered across the blackened crevices and specks of brilliant color lightened with blooms the sere gauntness of the wrack.

Delia was not to be found in the outer rooms, and her handmaidens told me she was in the bedroom. Like me, Delia kept only a very few personal servants, and if I do not mention them overmuch it is because they were so good that they had become a part of our life. Fiona and Rosala tended Delia, and they were girls formed for the delight of the gods, smiling, bright of eye, brilliant of lip, with natures that decked the world in sunshine. No obstacle would be placed in their path when, as is the way of the world, they would wish to marry the young men of their choice. The same openness applied to Emder, a quiet-spoken, gentle, dextrous and extraordinarily competent man who looked after most of my material wants. If you wish to call him a valet, the description matches perhaps half of his duties. He was a treasure and I valued him as a friend.