Golden Scorpio (4 page)

He sounded most wroth. The Fourth Archers, a fine regiment, had been scattered in billets around the town and only a half pastang had made it up the long stairs. Among that number was Naghan ti Ovoinach, now an ord-Hikdar. Panshi, my Chief Chamberlain, came up and superintended the supply of tea and parclear and fruits. Long before Esser Rarioch could be starved out the attackers would have broken their way in, for there were very many of them, and barely a hundred and fifty souls left in the fortress. As for the Valkan army, that was away in the island of Veliadrin, to the west, fighting those porcupine-like devils of Qua’voil who would rejoice to see the destruction of everything apim within their reach.

So, as I listened to the news tumbling out, there was precious little to cheer me. I remained firm in my decision to send Delia and the children to Strombor. All those incapable of fighting must be crammed into the voller. But, I thought with what I hoped was shrewd cunning and not footling incapacity, suppose the voller was used to take everyone out of the fortress by turn? They could be taken into the Heart Heights. We could resist from there as we had in the old days. Yes, I said to myself, and swung about to tell Chuktar Fergen what I proposed.

“But strom! To abandon Esser Rarioch!”

“Aye, Chuktar Nath. Aye! I would abandon this place that I love so dearly to those devils. What is the importance of stone and sculpture against flesh and blood? I would not lose a single man or woman of Valka to save Esser Rarioch.” I thought of the emperor, grimly holding onto his fine palace, and getting the place burned down around his ears and himself slain for the sake of it. “The important strategy now is to save our people.”

“Yes, my strom — and then we will rise and kick them out — all these invaders, every last one.” His full-fleshed face showed the thick blood-pulse beneath the skin, his beaked Vallian nose outthrust. “As we did in the old days, when we chased the aragorn out of Valka! Hai, Jikai! We will write new stanzas to
The Fetching of Drak na Valka
!”

“Hai, Jikai!” shouted the others clustered on the high battlements. “Hai, Jikai!”

The moment was emotional, no doubt of it, and I responded, thinking that, perhaps, if we did what we said then itmight well be a Jikai we did. And then those people of mine had to go on, and bellow it out, as they loved to do.

“Hai Jikai!” they shouted, and the swords whipped up, glittering in the lights of the Suns of Scorpio. “Hai, Jikai! Dray Prescot! Strom of Valka!”

It was all proud and stupid and a folly. Pride, pride — well, I have no truck with pride, having fallen flat so very many dreadful times. But, I own, if we all fought as well as we shouted, we should be home and dry.

On that sour mental note I looked out and saw that our shouting had attracted the attention of some of those miserable cramphs below. They were running about, mere black ants so far below in the kyro, preparing to ascend the stairs again and, I trusted, many of them to ascend not to any of their heavens but to the quickest way to the Ice Floes of Sicce.

Joining our group on the high battlements, Delia looked down. Her face drew down in a frown that always has the power to seize my heart up in a constricting grip.

“Is this to be Vondium, all over again?” she said.

I forced my craggy old face to smile for her.

“No. We will evacuate. Everyone will be taken to safety in the Heart Heights. From there, as we did in the old days, we will resist the invaders.”

At once she fired up. For only the most fleeting of fallible moments I thought she would protest. But she saw at once that by abandoning Esser Rarioch, for all that we held the place so dear, we would shed an encumbrance and gain freedom of action. To be mewed up in a fortress with a hundred and fifty souls against an army is no way to fight a war. Memories of the Siege of Zandikar ghosted in, and scarlet memories of other sieges; but I looked away to the distant purple haze of those ferocious central mountains of Valka, and took heart.

We held that attack, shooting sheaves of arrows and bolts upon the attackers, rolling masses of stone down the steps, bounding, crunching into the shield, scattering them in a splintering wash of wicker and blood.

In a pause of the action, Jiktar Exand clambered up onto the ramparts, a yellow bandage over his neck and shoulder already glistening with fresh blood. The enormous arch of his ribcage swelled as I greeted him.

I said: “What in the name of the black lotus flowers of Hodan-Set are you doing up here, Exand? Look at that wound!”

Exand’s square face bristled under his helmet and he bashed his red and white banded sleeve across his breastplate. I tensed up for his bellow.

“Strom! I cannot skulk in bed when there is fighting to be done! Strom! We fight to the death!”

He was just the same, massive, bulky, creaking in his armor, bulbous, filled with the fanatical devotion of all my fighting men of Valka.

“Well, Exand, my friend. It is indeed good to see you. Now stand you clear of that varter and get a fresh dressing on that wound. You hear?”

“Quidang!” His bellow vibrated against our eardrums. “I hear, my strom!”

The Lord Farris bustled up and took Exand’s arm, leading him off, talking. I saw Exand halt as though shafted. He swung about. His quivering alertness took everyone’s attention and the shrieking of the infantry below struggling to climb those murderous stairs faded. Exand’s face turned that purple that the best Wenhartdrin wines hold within their bodies.

“Majister!” Exand fairly roared out, purple, immense, consumed with overwhelming joy. “Hai, Emperor of Vallia!”

My first thought was that Farris had to go and open his mouth. He was loyal to the emperor — to the emperor that was — and to Delia. I knew a loyal man, and I valued Farris far too much to fault him in so petty a thing as this.

After that, when we had thrown the attack back and could take a breath, the buzz went around the fortress. The emperor was dead: long live the emperor.

I have mentioned how my folk of Valka continue to call me their strom, somehow or other conveniently overlooking the rather comical thought that I was the Prince Majister of Vallia. Well, now they knew I was the Emperor of Vallia. Although, at that moment, I was the Emperor of Nothing. But they continued to call me strom, with occasionally a lapse into more formal majisters for the sake of propriety.

This somewhat farcical interjection of emperors and majisters into the grim business of staying alive within the besieged fortress served to force upon me the thought that I was more like the fabled Pakkad, the outcast, the pariah, than any emperor. I had not wanted to be emperor, had not sought the throne and crown of Vallia. And, the plain fact was, I did not have them. The corpse of Vallia was being fought over as lurfings fight over a corpse on the great plains.

The desire to dabble my fingers in that stew appeared more and more unattractive, more and more unworthy.

Thrusting these morose broodings aside I joined in the preparations. The voller would take out the people in relays and with them weapons and supplies. Up in the Heart Heights we would find refuge. As an accomplished flier, Farris offered to make the first journeys. For the moment the attackers had drawn off and so I decided to catch up on a little sleep. The first voller load was seen off and then I went into our private apartments and stretched out on the bed. Before I went to sleep two thoughts hovered lazily in my mind and the first of these was cheerful and reassuring.

Among these defenders of Esser Rarioch and all the other fearsome warriors of Valka who would continue the resistance there would be found no place for that robust figure of legend, Vikatu the Dodger, the archetypal Old Sweat of most of the armies of Paz. That mythical old soldier is loved and sworn by with enormous gusto by the swods in the ranks, a paragon of all the military vices, the old hand who looks after Number One and knows every trick in and out of every book and manual of soldiering ever written. The fighting men of Valka might cuss away in Vikatu’s best style, but they were not soldiers in the strict regimental sense, not even the swods of the regiments we had formed, disciplined, controlled, trained. In the struggles that lay ahead I thought that not one fighting man of Valka would misunderstand the reality of Vikatu and dodge his duty.

So that, as far as it went, was all right. We would, as Kregans say, blatter them with a will.

But — by all the grey ones of Sicce — but the other thought coiling in my head made me twist and turn uncomfortably on the bed. I was still totally undecided. I had spoken out about returning, had half-promised to regain the throne and crown. But, even with all the strictures laid on me, the ideas of honor, the knowledge of evil that would cover the land unopposed in any meaningful way, even with all this and the high ideals of the Kroveres of Iztar, even then I was not fully committed to a course that would bring further bloodshed. What was Vallia to me? I cherished estates in other parts of the world. Delia’s father the emperor was murdered and his empire sundered. Why should I seek to restore all that blaze of pomp and pageantry, resuscitate the power and the glory? Were those ends moral? Could the suffering be tolerated? How could all this maelstrom of future misery be justified?

So, as I slipped into sleep with a million torturing thoughts troubling me, you will see I was in a most foul mood. Only that last thought before sleep of Delia held any power to sooth me.

Three

Delia Looses an Opinion at the Star Lords

The sleep lasted long enough to refresh. The voller made two more trips and the defenders of the fortress were very thin along the battlements indeed. We had to take thought to arrange the best way of the final evacuation.

“The folk are being cared for at friendly farms in the Heart Heights,” said Farris. He looked windblown and tired. “But it is wild country up there — wild.”

“Aye. Valka will never fall to invaders whilst the Heart Heights stand.”

The remainder of the force was split into two. I moved along the sun-splashed battlements to talk privately with Delia. I knew I’d encounter opposition.

“I do not think, husband, that that is a very good plan at all. In fact, if you ask me, I’d say it was a plan suitable for Cottmer’s Caverns.”

Below us the incredibly beautiful vista of Valkanium and the Bay spread out, dappled in sunshine, the light drifting of rain after the Hour of Mid burnishing everything with a glistening patina of gold. The attackers far below were thinking of forming up for another onslaught. They had lost a great many men, and they could see no other way of getting at us in Esser Rarioch than of climbing up those blood-spattered stairs.

They did not know of the secret entrances and exits far below the rock.

I persisted stubbornly.

“You will fly out with the children and Aunt Katri. I want you with them.”

“But Aunt Katri is perfectly capable — she may be getting old, now, true; but the nurses—”

“You. You will take the penultimate trip. We may have to cut and run for it on the last one.”

“I know. And don’t you think I would be at your side?”

A shadow fleeted between the ruby glory of Zim and the ramparts. I looked up. My fist tightened on my sword hilt.

Up there, planing in its arrogant wide-winged circles, flew the Gdoinye, the spy and messenger of the Star Lords. That gorgeous golden and scarlet raptor circled up there, his head on one side, one beady eye fixed upon us.

Delia said in a voice that almost but not quite trembled: “There is that bird again—”

“Aye... A Bird of Ill Omen. Delia — I have promised to tell you why I am sometimes dragged away from you when all I want is to stay with you. Not like now, when it is sensible for you to go with the children. But, the other times—”

“I remember them, I remember them all. They were horrible.”

What was horrible to me in that moment, as well as the enforced absences I made at the orders of the Everoinye, the Star Lords, was that Delia could see the bird. I knew Drak my eldest son had seen it, and I had lied to him and said the bird was not there. But the Star Lords did not reveal their powers to many. I feared and hated the idea of my Delia being caught up in the schemes of superhuman unknown and unknowable beings who demanded so much from me without explanation.

“The bird is connected with your — disappearances.”

“Yes. And the Scorpion.”

“On the field of the Crimson Missals, when you said you did not want to go to Hyrklana — and I went there — and—”

I tried to make a laugh and failed. “I’d be sorry, now, if I hadn’t gone to Hyrklana and fought in the Jikhorkdun of Huringa. Then we would not have Tilly and Oby and Naghan the Gnat and Balass the Hawk as friends.”

“And where they are now, Opaz knows.”

“We will fetch them back, if they wish to come.”

“I think they will make their way back here, to Valka, for they are true Valkans now—”

“And what a sorry mess Valka and Vallia are in!”

The scarlet and golden bird circled, watching us. I shook my fist at it, and it continued on, indifferent.

“And when the shanks attacked that little village of Panashti, on the island of Lower Kairfowen, and you fell from the gate and we carried you to a hut. It was all a confusion. The walls and huts were burning. Those terrible Leem Lovers were breaking in — the walls came down and the smoke blew. We fought. Oh, Dray! You should have seen Drak. He was like a young zhantil. You would have been proud.”

Drak had grown up since then, become a man, a prince, a Krozair of Zy. His life had not been easy. Now Delia poured out all the wonder and the hidden-away hurt, the bewilderments she had felt over the years of our life together.

“I had gone to see you in the hut and — and you were not there! Only your armor and your weapons. I feared, then, remembering the other times, Jynaratha, over the Shrouded Sea — and then, even your weapons were gone. We fought as hard as we could and then Tom and Vangar came and we were saved. Drak was suddenly aware. Men looked to him. He and I, between us — and there was Turko and Naghan and Balass and all the others. There was such a lot of shouting and confusion. It was given out that you had gone to punish the shanks. Men believed. We were able to leave Panashti without any suspicion that you had died being voiced. Later, it was suggested — but you know — and, anyway, you have gone before to visit other lands, as all men know.”