A Life for Kregen (30 page)

The three Phalanxes had been arranged with the First on the right of the line and the Second on their left and half of the Third, the Fifth Kerchuri, on the left of the line. The Sixth Kerchuri stood fast in reserve to the rear. All the emotion of two worlds concentrated down for me in that impact. I was aware of the flanks surging on and of churgur infantry and spearmen clashing on the wings. I was aware of the ceaseless flights of arrows. I was aware of the cavalry fights taking place all over the plain. But the impact, nearer and nearer, took my attention and I could not tear my eyes away from that enormous collision.

Irresistible and immovable objects? No, by Krun, not quite. For the Phalanx had been bested before by the clansmen, and the clansmen knew nothing of defeat. The impact, when it came, racketed such noise, such clamor, such soul-searing horror, that I felt the salt taste of blood on my lips.

That was where I should be, down there, in the front rank of the files with the faxuls, down there, wielding my pike against that onrushing host. And I sat my nikvove and watched and could only judge the time to send forward the Sixth Kerchuri and order in the churgurs and the spearmen. The Hakkodin were slashing and slicing away, the front swayed, locked, striking in insane fury. Incredible, the ferocity of the charge and sublime, insane, the solidity it met.

The Second swayed.

The Second Phalanx swayed and its front crumbled.

I saw the yellow and red flags go down.

Voves began to pour through a narrow gap that rapidly widened. At my instant order Volodu blew Sixth Kerchuri; but Nath was before me and I saw the Sixth moving up, solid and dense in their masses, the crimson and bronze shouldering forward to plug the gap. The Second recovered. The officers down there were raging and bellowing and the files reformed and the pikes came down again, all in line. But the lines were thinner, now.

The confusion down there tantalized me. The voves recoiled and came on again. The Phalanx held. I saw the rear markers going up, the Bratchlins urging the men on. I saw the swaying movement as though the very sea itself sought to pour on and over a line of rocks. And the zorcamen were in among the voves now, prancing around on their nimble steeds, striking and sliding return blows. The state of flux might continue, or it might break on an instant.

Zankov flung his infantry in, before they had time to decide if the day was lost or won, hurling them on intemperately to support the charge, to get in among the Phalanx. Our own infantry moved to mask the flanks, channeling the attack onto the melee. The Hakkodin now had fresh targets for their axes and halberds and two-handed swords.

This was the crucial moment.

Even when he fights in the melee a clansman is an opponent greatly to be feared. Even when he does not hurl forward in the charge, he is a fighting man of enormous power. The slogging match had begun.

At that instant a troop of zorca riders flew up the long slope to my left side, riding hard, and I saw they were girls, Jikai Vuvushis.

Some of the Emperor’s Sword Watch angled out to halt them; but I saw the leader, drooping in the saddle, saw the arrow in her shoulder.

“Let her through!” I bellowed.

Jilian hauled her lathered zorca up before me. Her pale face was so white I fancied she had no blood left at all, and knew that was not so, as the blood stained around the ugly shaft in her shoulder. She tried to smile and the pain gripped her.

“I am sorry to see you in such case, Jilian.” I spoke with anger. “I had thought you in the reserve where—”

“Where you ordered my girls, aye, Jak, I know. But I have had another zhantil to saddle. My regiment is in the reserve and will go forward with the victory.” She swayed and I leaned down from the nikvove and got a hand under her armpit. “But there is no time. You must fly—” Her gaze flicked to the reserve troop of flutduins who waited beside Karidge’s Brigade, in the reserve, under my hand. Her girls were there, brilliant and chattering, and every eye fixed on that titanic fight going on along the face of the ridge. I looked there, alert for any change; but the slogging match continued and the Phalanx had not moved and the clansmen had not retired. Men were dying down there, dying by the hundred.

“The empress . . .” Jilian swayed and I was off the nikvove and hauled her off her zorca, and held her, looking down, and my face must have appeared like a chunk of granite.

“What of the empress?”

Jilian caught her breath. And I saw she bore an axe wound in her side, gashing and horrible, exposing pink and white ribs.

“That is nothing, Jak. The empress needs assistance — the Sakkora Stones—”

“I know it.” I placed her down, gently, for she was a great spirit, and bellowed at my company of brilliant aides. “Send to Seg Segutorio, the Kov of Falinur, commanding the vaward. My compliments. He is now commanding the army.” I was running toward the flutduins as I shouted, and each one of the great birds ruffled his feathers, as though asking me to pick him. “Tell the Kov to send in the reserve the moment the line wavers. Not before, not afterwards. He will know.”

Then I was hauling the flutduin Jiktar off his bird and mounting up, disdaining the straps of the clerketer. Everyone was yelling. Shouts of consternation broke from the Emperor’s Sword Watch. The flutduin troop gaped. I cracked the bird and he rose at once, his wings wide and gorgeous and of immense power. Together we rose into the air.

Below us a tremendous battle raged. Thousands of men were locked in hand-to-hand combat. I barely saw the red horror of it, barely heard the screeching din.

Over the clangor, over the blood, over the agony and death below I flew. I left the battle in the culminating moments of victory and defeat. Headlong, caring for one person and one person only in all of Kregen, I flew like a maniac across the gory battlefield of Kochwold.

Delia...

Chapter Twenty-one

A Life for Vallia

Desertion. Infamous conduct. Lack of moral fiber in the face of the enemy. Lack of judgment of issues. Nothing of that mattered. Vallia did not matter, nor Kregen itself.

Only Delia mattered.

I knew the Sakkora Stones.

Like the Kharoi Stones of my island of Hyr Khor in distant Djanduin, it had been raised by the Sunset People who had lived on Kregen before the Star Lords had brought diffs to that beautiful planet to make it the wild and terrible world it is today. Ruined, tumbled into moldering stones, mysterious, unforgettable, the buildings of the Sunset People yet lived in legend and song.

Over the battlefield I flew and mirvols attacked me and I shot and slew them and their riders, and with the long whippy aerial sword strapped to the saddle fought off those who would have stopped me. In a straight line across the front I flew. The Sakkora Stones had been figured into our calculations in picking this site for the battle, and had been reckoned as not having any influence, one way or the other. They stood some ulm or so in rear of the position taken up by Zankov and we expected them to be used as a field hospital or supply dump. They lifted from the moorland, quite plainly, fallen columns, walls and roofs marking a once-vast star-shaped structure whose function remained obscure. As on Earth today, when an archaeologist is faced with an artifact whose manner of use he does not know will say it is a cult object or a ritual object, so we said the Sakkora Stones were a cult object.

Over the rear echelons of Zankov’s army I flew and alighted in the grove of drooping trees gaining nourishment from some underground stream in this desolate moorland country. The flutduin immediately lifted off with a massive beat of his pinions and a wicked toss of his head. Magnificent saddle birds, flutduins. He was off back to his master.

I looked about, sternly and yet filled with terror. What in blue blazes Delia had been up to, how Jilian was involved, I did not know. But, by Vox, I would find out!

All the detritus, human, animal and material, in rear of a great army in conflict, lay scattered about. The trees afforded a slight amount of cover and men and animals moved to and fro, with a steady stream of wounded coming back. A party of spearmen, second-line troops no doubt assigned to guard the baggage train, approached the wood to question me. It were better — and more decent — not to relate what happened to them. I did not deign to don one of their uniforms as a disguise. I ran toward the nearest abutment of the Stones.

Anything could be happening in there. Jilian had been in no case to be specific. If she did not die I would be in her debt — if Delia lived. Whether or not I lived seemed to me of scant importance then, which is a strange attitude for me, Dray Prescot, to take, by Zair!

As I ran on with the blood thumping around my body it felt as though that very blood fought against constrictions in my veins. I’d been living very high and mighty, just lately, very high on the vosk, and, now...! This was more like the old Dray Prescot, rushing headlong into danger with a naked sword in his fist. Rushing, like the veritable onker I am, headlong into danger that forethought would avoid. But, then, that is me, Dray Prescot, prince of onkers.

The clansmen started up from their fire on which grilling ponsho smelled sweet. There were four of them and they were not skulkers, each being wounded. They saw my scarlet and gold flummery of dress and they did not hesitate. Out whipped their broadswords and they charged.

Well, it was a merry little ding-dong; but I was frantic with worry and in no mood for a long exchange of handstrokes. The drexer snapped back into the scabbard. The next instant the Krozair longsword flamed. They were skilled clansmen, enormously powerful warriors; but they were not fighting for the life of Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains.

As the last of them sank down, he gasped out: “You fight like a clansman, Vallian.”

“Believe it, Clanner,” I said, hurdling him and rushing on into the gloom of the stones. “By the Black Chunkrah, believe it!”

Something caught in his eyes as he died.

Headstrong, headlong, and utterly foolish, Dray Prescot. I should have paused to snatch up a clansman’s russets and cover my insolent scarlet and gold. But there was no time, no time... Through the gloomy aisles of the leaning columns I raced. And I began to catch a glimpse of the truth. This place had been used as a headquarters. That would have made no difference to us. And what had been wrought here had been wrought with cunning and stealth and high courage. Running on I passed dead clansmen, dead mercenaries of various races of diffs. And, also, I passed dead bodies of Jikai Vuvushis, Battle Maidens. They looked pitiful and twisted in their fighting leathers of russet or black. And on their supple bodies, so lax and ghastly now in the final sleep, the badges of the Sisters of the Rose glowed in mockery.

This was the kind of operation I, the stupid, proud, so inordinately presumptuous Emperor of Vallia, should have mounted. I had not. I had staked all on the impregnability of the Phalanx, the prowess of the warriors of the army and the new Filbarrka zorcamen. I prowled on, understanding what had passed here, and knowing that I would find the answers I sought when I came at last to the operations room of this headquarters and discovered what had chanced between Delia and her Battle Maidens, and Zankov, the slayer of her father.

Entwined clumps of purple-flowered Blooms depended from the shattered columns. Here and there the orange cones of Hyr-flicks congealed spots of deadly color. Their green tendrils snaked this way and that, seeking prey, snatching up the tikos of the cracked masonry, snaring any animal of reasonable size unwary enough to venture here. A Rapa had been caught and engulfed; only his beaked face glared sightlessly from a distended orange cone, and soon that would be gone, digested along with the rest of him.

Many of the Hyr-flicks, gigantic cousins of the flick-flicks that graced the windowsills of Kregen homes, had been slashed through. And yet still their tendrils writhed.

“Sink me!” I burst out as I ran on. “That Delia has put her head into a mighty unsavory pest hole, by Zair!”

The Krozair brand carved me a slimy way through and I understood this way was what could be called the rear entrance. Those four clansmen, hunkering wounded over their roasting ponsho, had been all unwitting of the drama enacted here. They had been of a clan I did not know. But I would know them hereafter, and Hap Loder would be advised.

Thinking sour thoughts like that led me on, as I ran, to a single scarlet speculation of the fate of the battle. The front would still be in flux, for the sounds of combat reached here as a muted hum, as of bees on a sunny summer afternoon, without the devil-boom of gunnery. The Hakkodin would be fully in action, the sword and shield men attempting to smash forward, the reserves being used — I must trust Seg. He must judge the time when to send in the reserves, when to commit our nikvove cavalry. But I pushed on without a pause, for ahead of me in the half-light of the aisled and gloomy Stones a radiance like the eye of the setting Zim, the red sun of Antares, drew me on.

There were diffs there, I remember, men in armor and brandishing weapons, and the manner of their going is something I do not clearly recall. I can still feel the hot wet drops of blood falling from my longsword onto my fists.

I must, I realize, have looked a monstrous sight. I had fathomed out, or thought I had, what had passed here. Delia and her Battle Maidens had struck, and kept their doings close, and somewhere up past that blood-red radiance which vanished from sight ever and anon as I twisted through the labyrinth of columns, up there — yes — Delia? Where was she, what was she doing now? Where her Jikai Vuvushis?

The Sakkora Stones spread over an extensive area, more than I realized; but through smothering vegetation I neared the operations room at the forward edge of the Stones — and Zankov. The battle raged apace, and knowledge of what reserves he could muster would have mightily interested me only a very short time earlier. Now — only reaching Delia obsessed me.

Soon I reached a part of the Stones where recent work had provided roof coverings, imported wooden beams with straw laid across making impromptu roofs. In one chamber a pile of dead lay sprawled in the attitudes of frozen battle. Diffs of various races including Katakis, Jikai Vuvushis at whom I looked with a mingling of quick and useless sympathy and a live and vibrant dread, and clansmen. I passed on and now the sounds of voices raised in anger reached me from beyond a curtaining wall of vegetation. I quickened my steps. I realized with a shock my hands were trembling on the hilt of the Krozair longsword.