But Rophren, that certain Rophren who had been first lieutenant aboard Pur Zenkiren’s Lilac Bird and had failed in the rashoon, recognized me too.
A shout lifted from the foot of the stairs. More torches spattered lurid orange light upon the brilliant tiles.
“Hai! Princess! Princess Susheeng — that man is Stylor! They are escaped slaves! They are dangerous!”
I took the first guard’s sword away and chopped him over the back of the neck. He pitched forward and tumbled all the way to the bottom. Pugnarses and Genal dealt with the second guard, who joined the first in a tumbled heap at the feet of his comrades. They started up.
“Run!” screamed Susheeng.
We now had three long swords.
Rophren reached out a hand.
His haggard face looked uplifted, lightened. He squared his shoulders with a gesture at once instinctive and defiant.
“Lahal, Pur Dray,” he said. His voice sounded thick, drugged. “Give me a sword. I would be pleased to exchange hand blows with these Zair-benighted rasts of Magdag. You go on and take the women with you.”
He knew I could not do that. But he meant it. I looked at him.
“Lahal, Rophren,” I said.
“I am of the Red Brethren of Lizz,” he said proudly, with a lift of his head. “I wished to be a Krozair of Zy, but the rashoon stopped all my hopes there. Give me the sword. I will die here, and none will pass until I am dead.”
“I believe you, Rophren. I will stay with you.”
I reached for the long sword Susheeng held. She was looking at me with a wild light in her eyes and she shrank back. “What—?”
Rophren took the sword. He hefted it. The mailed overlords of Magdag were hurrying up the stairs toward us. “It is good to feel a sword in my fist again,” he said. “I have been captive too long.” He laughed then, and swung the blade. “Stay, as you will, Pur Dray, my Lord of Strombor, you who are a Krozair of Zy. It will be a great fight. Stay and you, a Krozair, may see how a Red Brother of Lizz can die!”
Susheeng was staring at me with all of horror and hell in her eyes. “A Krozair,” she whispered. “You — the Lord of Strombor!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
My Vosk-Helmets greet the overlords of Magdag
Truth to tell, all during this imprisonment in the colossal structures of Magdag where I was a sacrificial victim in the ritual games to insure the return of Genodras, I had been half hoping against all reason that the workers and slaves of the warrens would continue our plans, would mount the attack despite the catastrophic loss of their leaders. If ever there was a need for them to put in an appearance, it was now.
Even while the Princess Susheeng shrank back from me, her face a white mask of fury and despair, a seething agony of acrimony I could well understand impelling her to turn from me at last and finally, the mailed men ran up the flight of stairs.
“A Krozair!” she said. Her fists struck again and again at my chest. “A pest-ridden rast of a Sanurkazz pirate! The vilest Sanurkazzian Krozair of them all, Pur Dray Prezcot, the Lord of Strombor!” She was laughing and shrieking now, mad and wild with the frenzy that tore her. Holly came up and took her shoulders and wrenched her away. Holly’s face was as blanched and set as those of Pugnarses and Genal. To them it was inconceivable that an escaped galley slave hiding in the warrens might be a Krozair. Krozairs, they knew, fought to the death.
“They come,” grunted Rophren. He had wanted to be a Krozair of Zy, and his crisis of nerves during the rashoon had blasted his hopes. But the Red Brethren of Lizz were a renowned order. He had redeemed himself; he would die well. I do not subscribe to the view that a single act of courage can wash out all a man’s crimes, as is so often said; but Rophren, for me, had committed no crime save that of being unfit to be a sailor.
We stood, Rophren, Pugnarses, and I, with our long swords eager to smite down on the coifs of the advancing overlords. We fought. There were only ten of them and in accounting for five of them I felt I had betrayed my comrades, for Pugnarses was wrestling his sword out of the cranium of one while Genal struggled hand-to-hand with another who sought to cut down Pugnarses from the side — and Rophren was down, on his knees, bending over with his life’s blood bubbling through his fingers.
But there were ten dead overlords littering the stair.
We stepped back from the carnage. Pugnarses, with a curse, kicked the bodies down the steps. I knelt by Rophren. He tried to smile. “Say Lahal and Remberee for me to Pur Zenkiren,” he whispered, and so died.
Pugnarses and Genal were collecting the swords.
“Why burden yourself with them?” I asked. Susheeng was vomiting all over those brilliant tiles. I knew it was not because she had seen men die.
“We can give them to the slaves!” snapped Pugnarses. “They will fight—”
“As you have just done, Pugnarses? With your blade wedged in your opponent’s head? The skill, Pugnarses, the skill.”
He swore vilely, bitterly, but he kept the swords.
I approached the Princess Susheeng. She looked up. Her cheeks were stained with tears, vomit slicked on her ripe lips.
“Will you stay here, Princess? You will be safe, for none know now how we escaped.”
I felt sorry for her. She had suffered exceedingly; and now she had discovered that the man for whom she conceived she bore a lifelong love had turned, at a single disastrous stroke, into a hereditary enemy. Truly, I think she had suffered enough.
“And are you truly Pur Dray, Krozair, the Lord of Strombor?”
“I am.” Did I speak boastfully? I do not think so. Did I speak pridefully? Ah, there, I think I did.
“How can I love a man of Zair?” she wailed.
“You do not love me, Susheeng—”
“Have I not proved it?” she flashed back at me.
I could not answer that. There was no answer.
Holly made a small movement, and I turned, and she stood there, clad in the gray slave breechclout, with a sword in her little fist. “We had best be going, Stylor.”
“Yes,” I said. I turned back. “Susheeng — try not to think ill of me. You do not understand the compulsions that drive me. I am not as other men. I do not love you — but I think you have touched a chord in me.”
She stood up. In that moment, with the tears and the vomit smearing her face, her hair unbound and disarrayed, she looked as close to a human being as I had ever seen her. I thought, then, that if she had the luck to fall in love with the right man she would turn out well. But that is something not of that pressing moment when we stood on the stairs with their florid tiles, in the megalith of Magdag.
“I cannot go with you into the warrens, Drak,” she said.
“No. I did not expect you to. Try to think well of me, Susheeng, for red and green will not always be in conflict.” I bent and kissed her. She did not move or respond. I suspect that she was trying to hate me, then, and failing. Her emotions had been drained from her, her will power exhausted. “Go down to your friends, Susheeng. As long as we live, we will not forget this moment.”
She started to walk down the steps. She moved like a mechanical doll of Loh struts, jerkily, almost tottering at each step. She halted. She looked up. “You will all be killed when Genodras returns to the sky.” The words seemed hardly to mean anything to her. “Remberee, Kov Drak.”
“Remberee, Princess Susheeng.”
She walked away from us, her hated red dress draggling on the flight of stairs, under torches, between those brilliant tiles of winged birds and horned beasts.
We descended the opposite flight and passed out into the brilliance of a day on Kregen when only Zim, the red sun, shone in the sky.
With our news, and with what they suspected, and the wailing over the pile of corpses of their group leaders, the warrens were in uproar.
“The overlords will ride in and destroy us all!” shouted Bolan. His bald head gleamed orange in the light.
We had avoided the half-human guards on our way in. But I
knew they would happily fulfill their contracts with the men of Magdag and charge into warrens to discipline us. We faced the kind of decision I think must face any man, any group of men, if he or they wish eventually to taste their rightful portion of life.
Because the orbit of Kregen is slanted steeply to the plane of the ecliptic the green sun during this eclipse appeared to descend at a sharp angle on the red; it would appear at the opposite side at the same angle. I looked about. Were there green tints returning to the orange colors of Kregen?
Soon men and women were running and screaming through the alleys and maze of courts.
“Genodras is returning! Woe! Woe!”
By reason of the place where the green sun was appearing from the red I knew what the men of Zair would say was happening. How that information, that I was a Krozair, had shattered Susheeng! Genal and Pugnarses had little conception; I was still Stylor to them. And I was still their military commander. I ordered the Prophet to be found.
He came up, his beard as defiant as ever. Holly, Pugnarses, Genal, and Bolan gathered at the head of slaves and workers from all over the warrens. I climbed onto the roof of our hovel to harangue them. What I said was a long series of clichés about liberty, freedom, what we had planned, vengeance for our dead. I roused them. I pointed out that from our barricaded warrens we stood a chance of defeating the mailed men.
In the uproar and the driven dust, a furry form glided to the front, leaped up beside me. Sheemiff, the girl Fristle, screamed for attention. When some quiet returned, she shouted:
“We must fight, or we must die. If we die without fighting, what better off are we if we die having tried and struggled to win? This man Stylor, he is a great Jikai — follow him! Fight!”
“My comrades!” I shouted. “We will fight. And we can win by using the weapons we have made and trained ourselves to use. We will fight — and we will win!”
After that there followed all the bustle and hectic activity attending the preparations for a siege as we dragged our clumsy barricades across the mouths of alleys, set our rope and spike traps, brought out the pikes and the shields, the crossbows and the sheaves of bolts. Finally, like a field of daffodils opening all together in the yellow sun of my old Earth, we donned our yellow-painted vosk-helmets. Then, accoutered, ready to fight and die, we took our posts.
Other leaders were appointed to take command of the groups. We four — Bolan, Pugnarses, Genal, and I — would each take a point of the compass, north, south, east, and west, and hold it. We swore to hold until death. We gripped hands, and went to our posts.
I looked up into the sky and saw a white dove circling up there. I swallowed down a knot in my throat. The Savanti, then, had not forgotten me. It had been a long time.
The mailed men, the overlords of Magdag, rode out to crush the slave revolt. With them marched their half-human, half-beast mercenaries: Fristles, Ochs, Rapas, Chuliks, all bent on our destruction.
I placed Holly in command of the sextets of steel-bowed crossbowmen. The shields were raised, carried by lads whose task it was to shield our men from the shafts of the foe. The pike phalanxes waited, ready to thrust out on my command. I intended to leave the Prophet to handle a great deal of my post, that facing away from the city, for I wished to be everywhere the attack was most hotly pressed. Pugnarses had insisted on taking the post facing the city of Magdag. He licked his lips. Though he wore a long sword scabbarded to his hip, he carried a halberd.
We had all snatched time for a little sleep, but a sailor’s life had inured me to working through long periods of sleeplessness. The last of the youngsters, boys and girls both, returned from scattering the caltrops in the spaces before the alley openings into the warrens. Various ugly chevaux-de-frise had likewise been fixed across openings. Horses would not face them and I did not think the sectrixes would, either. I would not have dreamed of lifting a zorca against them, and I would have thought twice of the ability of a vove to surmount them. Behind our crude but, I hoped, effective barricades, our weapons in our hands, our eyes bright, and our breaths hard and short, we awaited the onslaught from the mailed men, the overlords of Magdag.
A little wind lifted the dust. Birds were singing with incongruously cheerful notes into the early air, and a gyp — a brown and white spotted gyp, I recall, very like a Dalmatian — lolloped yelping and alone between the caltrops.
The overlords, confident in their muscle, might, and habitual authority in riding down at will the workers and slaves, attacked firmly and in strength and directly. They knew we had made weapons for ourselves, for Genal, not without the agony of remorse burning him, told me he had shown them an example of a halberd and a glaive. Getting a pike and a crossbow out of the warrens and into the palace had not been possible, for obvious reasons. I sensed that Genal, if not Pugnarses, had regretted his weak decision to betray us for love of a girl at a very early stage. Pugnarses — and I believe he could not rid himself of the sight of Rophren dying on the stairs — remained sullen and hating and determined to prove himself what he truly was: a worker, never an overlord.
That first furious onslaught when the overlords tried to charge into the warrens in their usual fashion foundered on the cruel iron spikes of the caltrops and the chevaux-de-frise.
The mailed cavalry drew off, surprised but undaunted, and the half-human mercenaries ran forward to remove the obstructions covered by a brisk barrage of arrows. Looking down from our barricade I could see the quick movements of the Ochs and the Rapas. Chuliks, of course, would be reserved for more positive and noble kinds of fighting. Pugnarses stood next to me. He looked haggard, lean, and wolfish. He said: “Shall we shoot them down?”
An arrow sailed past our heads, to carom from the upraised shield of a young armor-bearer. I looked at him and, instinctively, he straightened up from his flinch and his jaw set stubbornly.
“No. I want to reserve the bows for the overlords.”
“Hah!” said Pugnarses. He looked extraordinarily mean.
When a lane had been cleared through the caltrops the mailed might charged again. They came straight for us in a great thundering roll of mail and upraised swords. I lifted my own long sword, the one I had retrieved from the straw of my bed, the long sword that was the gift of Mayfwy. I slashed it down.
At once the shooters of the crossbows discharged their bolts. With a smooth and practiced flow of action the shooters handed the discharged bow to the hander, took a freshly-loaded bow, and let fly with that. Behind the shooter his loaders and spanners worked like maniacs to maintain the rate of discharge I demanded. Bolts whickered through the hot air. Mailed men reared back in their saddles. Quarrels struck through their mail, pierced their mounts, lanced into their faces. A shrill screaming arose. The mailed charge lashed in confusion, like a sea running all crisscross on a rocky coast.
And all the time the crossbows twanged and clanged and scattered their death upon the overlords of Magdag.
The overlords had never experienced this before. They reeled back. Their sectrixes galloped away. Dismounted men ran after their comrades and my marksmen shot them down without mercy, for we expected none.
Six times they charged.
Six times we cut them to pieces.
Because there was nowhere near enough mail to equip all my men, I disdained it. Also, I felt a savage affection for people and places and things long past. So I wore a scarlet breechclout strapped around with the leather belt from which swung the long sword. I fancied old Great Aunt Shusha would have smiled could she see me in that moment on the barricades of the warrens. And Maspero, too — for this was a pale replica of the Savanti hunting leathers I had grown to know so well. On my head I wore a yellow-painted vosk skull, like my men, for there were vosk skulls to spare.
On the seventh charge, just as it was falling back in confusion, an uproar began over on the flank of the warrens fronting the river. Here Genal commanded. And here the overlords while keeping us in play with their own mailed cavalry had sent in the Chuliks. T
hose savage and prideful warriors with their yellow skins and their uprearing tusks had fought through the arrow storm and were now at hand-strokes all along the barricades linking the alley mouths. I had known, given the extent of the warrens, that complete defense at every point would be well-nigh impossible, but the Chuliks had stormed through more rapidly than I liked.
With a shout of good cheer to Pugnarses I hurried off toward the river flank.
The Chuliks met me in a plaza, scattering before them a spray of running slaves who dropped their weapons the better to run.
Everything happened very fast, as is the way during moments of crisis. I shouted to Holly as her crossbows fanned out.
“Fast and accurately, Holly!”
She nodded. Her breast heaved beneath the gray tunic with its mailed coat beneath — a hauberk I had insisted she wear — and the yellow and black badges flashed bravely. She rattled out her orders; the sextets formed, like a series of wedges, and then they went into action. I watched, filled with suspense, for this was a severe trial for my bowmen.
“May Zair shine on you now!” said I. “Shoot straight!”
Over the open plaza the Chuliks, strong and agile, should have reached the slave and worker bowmen with ease. But, for a reason those in command could not at first understand, the Chuliks were falling, lying in heaps and droves across the dust and the bloodied mud. Those that did pass through the arrow storm were met by the halberdiers and the swordsmen of the support groups, protecting the bows. We shot and shot. The Chuliks hesitated; they turned — Holly shouted: “Up, all! Loose!”
And every sextet let fly with six bolts.
The Chuliks were never a force in the battle after that.
It raged, that battle; slowly we were forced in, past one barricade after another as the mailed overlords dismounted from their sectrixes and went at it as infantry, with flashing swords. We held them off. The issue hung for some time in the balance.
But the morale of our men, our slaves and workers, grew and increased even as they were being pressed back. For they saw the death toll they were taking. They saw how our armor-bearers, our lads carrying shields, could protect us from the arrow storm until the moment when the arme blanche men stepped out to throw back yet another attack. It went on for a long time, for the overlords could not understand, they could not conceive, that their habitual authority could no longer be imposed. They were used to riding bravely into the warrens and harrying anything they saw. Now, what they saw wore a yellow vosk-helmet and shot a crossbow, or speared with a deadly pike point. They could not understand; but as their losses mounted and they saw their friends writhing in the dust with their mail pierced or shattered, the blood spouting, as they heard the frenzied shrieks of their brothers or cousins in the throes of death, they had to believe they could not subjugate the slaves and the workers.
The Suns of Scorpio Page 20