Diamond Warriors (60 page)

'So,' Kane growled out, staring up into the sky.

In Argattha, Kane had destroyed the six dragon eggs that we had found in Morjin's chambers. But Daj, I remembered, had warned us that Morjin kept seven eggs as an assurance that the dragon who had laid them would do as he commanded.

'Morjin must have hatched Angraboda's seventh egg,' Maram said, sweating. And raised Yormungand, he added, on human flesh and an inhuman hate of Morjin's enemies.

'Yormungand wants revenge for his mother's death,' he told me. He glanced down at my sword, which I had struck through one of Angraboda's weakened scales into her heart. 'Yormungand is looking for you, too, Val.'

Just then the dragon reached a space in the air above our lines. He opened his jaws to reveal rows of great pointed teeth, nearly a foot long. Then he coughed out a stream of a reddish liquid called
relb.
This thick, sticky substance burst into fire as it touched the air, and rained down upon the men of Lord Tomavar's third battalion. Most got their shields up quickly, and so protected themselves from the worst of the dragon fire. But at least ten of them screamed out as if they had been drenched in boiling oil.

'Yormungand,' Kane said to me, 'is looking for much more than
revenge,
Val. Dragons
like
to kill.'

Then Yormungand suddenly dove down toward the ground with a thunderous beating of its wings. It fell on top of Lord Tomavar's third battalion with a crash that crushed men screaming to the earth. Other men tried to put their spears or swords into Yormungand, but their weapons broke against the dragon's rock-hard scales. Then Yormungand savaged about, up and down the lines, snapping his jaws and crushing men's heads between his teeth, pulping their faces with the knotted tip of his tail, stamping them and tearing at them with his claws - and breathing out a fire hot enough to melt steel.

'Maram!' I cried out. 'You will not fight
men
with fire - but you must fight fire with fire!'

Maram had already taken out his great red gelstei. But with the Guardians and other knights packed so closely about us, he had no clear line along which he might direct its flame at the dragon without also burning up our knights.

'There!' I cried out again. I pointed behind us at the little hill upon which Kane and I had stood talking the night before. 'You must go up there! You must stand and fight!'

'But the dragon will see me!' Maram cried out.

'He will see you in any case, once you loose your stone's fire.'

'Then maybe I shouldn't! I never want to burn anything, ever again!'

At that moment, Yormungand sprang off the ground and left a refuse of crushed and bloody bodies. He took to the air, even as hundreds of arrows loosed by our archers broke against his scales. With a great roar, he flew straight toward my knights and me. His golden eyes seemed to sear open the air. Then he dipped down his head and spat out a stream of flame that fell upon Sar Elkaru Barshan. Sar Elkaru cried out in agony as the burning relb spilled over his small shield and melted his face. I was not the only knight in my army to sport white plumes upon my helm. I noted that the white crane of the Barshans might look very much like the Elahads' silver swan, especially to a young dragon not familiar with the insignia of the Valari.

Then the dragon flew along my column of knights, closer to Maram and me.

'Go!' I said again, pointing at the hill. 'It is your time, Maram.'

Maram, sitting on his horse next to me, hesitated as he gazed up at the rapidly approaching dragon. He cried out, 'Why? Why must I always do precisely what I don't
want
to do?'

He gripped his firestone in his sweating hands with such force that I feared he might bruise his own flesh. Then, with a great sigh, he raised up the gelstei. The crystal caught the rays of the sun; it flared to a deep and angry red, and a bolt of crimson fire streaked out of its point. This flame shot up through the air and scored the dragon's bulging underbelly. It must have burned the dragon, if not pierced his scales altogether, for Yormungand let loose a great and hideous roar. I waited to see if Yormungand would now try to fall against Maram - and me. But Yormungand suddenly dipped down his wing, and veered off toward the right, back toward Morjm's army and the rocks of the Detheshaloon.

'He will return!' Kane called out to Maram. 'You've wounded him, I think, but like his mother, he will return.'

Maram sighed again as he looked at me. I felt his essential fear give way to an immensely greater love of life. He couldn't keep the tears from flowing his eyes, and neither could I.

'Farewell, Val,' he said to me. He tucked his firestone beneath his left arm as he held out his right hand to clasp mine. 'As long as I remain near you, I'll draw that damn dragon, won't I?' Likewise, he bade Kane goodbye and clasped his hand, too.

'Whatever happens,' Maram told him, 'stay by Val's side.' He swallowed, twice, hard, and adjusted his helmet. He sat up straight on his horse, looking out at Lord Avijan and Sar Shivalad and all the Guardians watching him. And then he drew in a huge breath of air and bellowed out: 'All right! I'll go! And let that dragon beware! King Valamesh is right: in all the world, there is only one Maram Marshayk!'

So saying, he wheeled his horse about and galloped off toward the little hill above the river. Soon - and ever after - it would be known as the Hill of Fire.

A great clashing of spears against shields and men screaming alerted me that the lines of my army had finally come up against our enemy. There would be much more to this battle than fighting one dragon, no matter how deadly or terrible. At first, up and down the field for miles, my warriors engaged Morjin's men carefully, and almost delicately, for it is no simple thing to go up against a phalanx. My javelin men kept corning forward through the loose Valari formations with fresh spears, and hurling them at our enemy. The javelins' long, soft, iron heads embedded themselves in wood, and since they would bend before breaking, they could not easily be ripped free. Soon the shields of the soldiers in our enemy's front ranks grew so heavy and cumbersome with javelins sticking out of them that they had to be cast down. Then the warriors in the front rank of Lord Tomavar's and Lord Tanu's battalions - and those of Kaash, Waas and Athar farther down the lines - went to work with their tharams and long spears, probing with great precision, stabbing them into our enemy's faces or the weak points in their armor. It was a long, brutal business, for even as we Valari struck down one rank of our enemy, another moved forward to take its place; With men packed twenty ranks deep, I feared it would take hours to tear open our enemy's phalanxes. Only then would my warriors rush into the great holes in the wall of metal before them with their kalamas. But once these long swords began flashing in the sun, the Red Dragon's soldiers would fall like hacked barley stalks and begin fleeing in panic - so it had always been, and so I hoped it would now be.

There were so many thousands, however, to cut down. And my men were too few, and I could feel them tiring beneath their weight of diamond and steel with every stab of their spears and chop of their tharams. I wondered how things went on our flanks, for the fog of battle had now closed in, and I could not see the Sarni warriors far out on the steppe to the east and west. How fared King Mohan in his charge against the Ikurians? Did he and his knights hold their own against the fierce horsemen of Sakai and keep Morjin from extending his lines so as to flank us? Did King Hadaru and
his
knights succeed in this task, on our west wing? It was hell, I thought, not knowing. And worse dreading the dragon's return and having to imagine what other nightmares Morjin might unleash upon us. And worst of all, being compelled to ride forward into the center of the field to rescue Bemossed before all was lost.

I led my knights to that place where Lord Tomavar's first battalion faced the joint in the Sakayan and Hesperuk lines. Just to the west of Lord Tomavar's warriors, Ymiru's five hundred Ymaniri had gone to work trying to batter down the Hesperuk phalanx. I could not tell who fought more fiercely: the eight-foot tall Frost Giants, with their marvelous keshet armor and their fearsome borkors dripping blood and brains, or my own Meshians, now forcing cracks in the Hesperuk and Sakayan lines with all the fury of their slashing kalamas.

'They will break!' I called to Lord Avijan. 'Our enemy must soon break!'

'Let us hope that we don't break first!' he called back to me. To the west, I saw, the Hesperuk phalanx had now moved forward, pressing back the lines of Eannans, Alonians and Thalunes. Farther in that direction across the corpse-strewn steppe. King Waray's Taroners fought desperately against the end third of the Hesperuk Phalanx - and their elephants. These strange, savage beasts nearly struck a panic into my men. Valari warriors - and those of Alonia and Eanna - up and down the field, struggled to effect Kane's counsel on how to contend with this new terror. Closer to us, in the lines of our enemy ahead of my massed knights, the Hesperuks fought to bear five more mountains of gray, raging flesh against Lord Tomavar's men. Lord Tomavar sent forward archers shooting arrows at the elephants' drivers, even as his javelin men hurled volleys of spears at the elephants' vulnerable bellies and eyes. A few brave warriors rushed in close to the elephants to slash through the trunks with their kalamas. But the maddened elephants had stratagems of their own. They raged about the field, trumpeting ferociously, grabbing up men with their trunks and then dashing them to the ground, knocking them over and stamping them to a bloody mess. One elephant - a great bull - rammed his sharpened tusk straight through Sar Nolwan's neck, and so died Makarshan of Ki as well.

Duty demanded that I wait and watch these massacres. That, too, was hell. Bemossed remained nailed to his cross on top of the hill just behind the Hesperuk and Sakayan phalanxes, and it seemed that every moment he grew weaker, even as the agonies of all the wounded and dying men and beasts across the battlefield flooded into me like waves of burning pitch. Kane counseled me to keep a grip on my sword and let all this incredible suffering pass through me and into it. But that was something like telling a man cast adrift at sea that he should drink the ocean to keep from drowning.

'Be ready!' Kane called out to me. He clasped hold of my arm and shook it, as if to pull me out of the cloud of pain nearly choking me. 'It won't be long!'

After the elephants had been killed, the Ymaniri and the warriors of Lord Tomavar's first battalion fell upon our enemy with renewed fervor. They drove like a wedge deep into the Hesperuk phalanx. One face of the wedge consisted of the great, white-furred Ymaniri swinging their borkors with wild abandon, splintering shields, caving in helms and pulverizing bone. On the other face, my Meshians' kalamas whipped through the air in a brilliance of steel and blood. Their razor-sharp blades slashed through the Hesperuks' bronze armor. I gritted my teeth against the sight of the hacked limbs and cleaved men falling to the reddened earth.

Then, from the very point of the wedge, where Ymiru had met up with Lord Tomavar, I heard Ymiru's great voice bellow out above the din of battle: 'A hrole! For King Valamesh, let us make a hrole!' I could almost feel, however, the exhaustion burning into Ymiru's great arm and body - and those of his men and Lord Tomavar's. Lord Tomavar himself fought like a fury, cutting through one soldier's chest, stabbing his kalama through the throat of another, and then ripping free his sword with a quick stroke to decapitate a Hesperuk lord. I sensed in him not only a fierce will toward victory but a desire to redeem himself for his wrongful pride in challenging me as king. But I did not know how much longer he or his men behind him could go on fighting this ways.

Then Kane looked back behind us toward the river, and so did I. There, the Seven had come up from our encampment. Abrasax's snowy hair and beard gleamed in the bright sunlight, and so did Master Juwain's bald head. The Masters of the Brotherhood stood gathered in a circle on the grass, with their hands held out toward each other. I knew that each held one of the great gelstei. Arrows fell around them. How they maintained their almost tangible calm in the midst of the great noise and death all around them I did not know.

But I soon saw the fruition of their efforts, or thought I did: the ground, from the river to the rocks of the Detheshaloon, suddenly seemed to grow transparent, as if dirt had been cleansed from a window pane. Deep within the darkness of the earth, a great wheel of light spun with a varicolored radiance. Somehow, the Seven called upon the great earth chakra's flames to feed the life fires of the men doing battle on the field above. They could not direct this force with any kind of precision, favoring the men of my army over our enemy's soldiers. But the flames found their way into those most open to them; they especially enlivened the blood and beings of the Valari warriors, who had sat each morning and evening for many years practicing the Brotherhood's meditations.

'A hole!' I heard Lord Tomavar call back to Yrniru. 'If we must slay a thousand men, we'll make a hole big enough to march an army through!'

I blinked then, and the vision of the earth opening to a deep splendor vanished before my eyes. I felt, however, a terrible new strength flowing into me. Its fire drove back the burning of the kirax and the agony of men dying near me. I sensed this same onstreaming force in Kane, and in Lord Avijan and Joshu Kadar, and in all the Guardians drawn up close behind me. It seemed that the earth was pouring into us her very life.

'Look!' Sar Shivalad cried out as he pointed with his lance ahead of us. 'They have broken the line!'

To the dreadful sound of iron-shod clubs crunching in armor and kalamas chopping through bronze and bone, the wedge of warriors ahead of us worked if the hole they had ripped into the Hesperuk Phalanx. Yrniru and his men fell against one end of the ragged Hesperuk line, while Lord Tomavar directed our Meshians against the other. In the course of two minutes, as our enemy fell in tens and twenties screaming to the ground, the wedge widened to a