by Джеффри Лорд
But there was a great deal more that Blade did not understand-starting with the glaring lights that had sprung at him out of the darkness. Yekran was surprised at Blade’s lack of understanding.
«Surely in your home world where you are all Wakers, you must often need to travel about after dark? Do you not use such things? We took a glow-bulb and put it on the end of a long stick. On the other end of the stick we put a cylinder of marconite. Then we connected the marconite to the bulb with wires. Now we can carry daylight with us wherever we go. I do not think the Wakers will like that.»
«You haven’t used the lights on them before?» asked Blade.
«No. This night was the first time we tried them out. We wanted to wait until we had many of them. That way they would he a surprise to the Wakers when we first used them in battle.»
Blade nodded and grinned. Yekran had accidentally hit on one of the basic rules for using secret weapons: don’t spring them on the enemy in penny packets. Hit him hard with a lot of them at once.
But there was more. The vaults were opening by the score each night now, and more than a hundred Dreamers were coming in each week. There were now more than a thousand of them in the enclave that Yekran’s fighting bands had made safe from the Wakers. Nearly five hundred of them were old enough to be trained as fighters, and nearly two hundred had already been trained. The rest could at least throw spears and stones down from the walls that had been built around the enclave. The walls were made of rubble, dragged into place and piled up by the muscles and bare hands of men and women who realized that their city might rise again. It covered a square two blocks on a side near Narlena’s vault.
«You gave us that hope, Blade,» said Yekran in a voice full of emotion. «Perhaps there was only a little that we needed to do to save Pura. But we did not think that we could do even that much until you came to our world and showed us that it could be done. Without you this work would never have been started.»
Blade was silent. In light of all that the Dreamers had done since he had been captured, he had begun to wonder if they had really needed him. Had he been wasting his time and risking his life here in Pura without any need to do so? But in light of Yekran’s tribute he felt slightly embarrassed.
He swallowed and said with as much lightness as he could, «Perhaps. But if I led, you and your people certainly followed me at a run!» He shook his head.
«What else have you done while I was with the Wakers?»
There were numerous tales of large and small fights, sometimes against such unlikely odds that even the Dreamers’ better discipline could not bring them victory but mostly success or at least a draw. There were more peaceful achievements, also. There had been trips into the forests south of the river to bring back wood for the fortifications and new buildings and to hunt fresh meat and fish. The food machines were still working and producing most of the Dreamers’ food. But many of them were developing a taste for fresh meat.
«Just like the Wakers,» said Blade with a grin.
Yekran’s face froze for a moment; then he nodded and broke into a grin, too. «Just like the Wakers, yes.»
The Dreamers now knew a good deal about the habits of the Wakers from the large number of Waker prisoners in the enclave. There had been much talk of making them slaves, the way the Wakers had done with the Dreamers. Those Dreamers who themselves had been Waker slaves were particularly set on vengeance. What did Blade think should be done with them?
«I think they ought to be treated well. Given work, yes. They should not be allowed to wander about where they could betray us, but they should not be made slaves. There should be no more slavery in Pura.»
«Perhaps,» said Yekran. The idea was new to him but apparently not completely unpalatable. «But what about the Dreamers who were once slaves? They hate the Wakers in a way even I cannot believe.»
«Tell them this. If the Wakers know they will be made slaves when the Dreamers rule Pura again, they will fight desperately. It will be a longer and harder battle to win Pura back. But if they know that they can surrender and live fairly well even under the Dreamers, they will not fight so hard.»
«That makes sense,» said Yekran, nodding.
«It does,» said Blade. «There is a Waker leader, the one we were all so worried about, named Krog. He has very much the same idea about treating his Dreamer prisoners.» Blade quickly told Yekran about Krog, his abilities, and his plans for Pura.
When Blade had finished, Yekran’s face was grim. «That man Krog is even more dangerous than we had thought.»
«Yes. You and the other Dreamers should not get the idea that there is only a little more to be done before Pura is free again. If I know Krog, he is going to attack you with every fighter from his own gang and as many other gangs as he can persuade to join him. I think he will be able to persuade a good many. They see you getting stronger each day, and they must realize that soon you will be strong enough to attack and destroy them. They will try to destroy you before you become too strong, and that will mean the biggest battle Pura has ever seen.»
Yekran nodded again. Then he was silent for quite a long time. As they were turning north again toward the Great East Bridge, which led toward the enclave by the most direct route, be grinned and spoke. «A big attack may be bad news for them more than for us. We can wait for them to come to us and kill them from behind our walls, the way you say the People of the Blue Eye did with the People of the Green Tower. We will not have to go running all over the city after them. And when they come, we will have some surprises for them.»
«The lights?»
«The lights, yes, and other things also.»
«What kind of other things?»
«We found a scholar named Malud-«
«I thought all the scholars were dead.»
«Most of them are, but not all. Malud certainly is not. He was one of the scholars who was working on how to fight the Wakers when he decided to retreat to his vault. He has a great many ideas on new weapons. We have already built some, in fact. You will see them when we reach the enclave.»
All the streets leading into the enclave were blocked off by walls of piled rubble ten feet high, reinforced with tree trunks and metal bars. Only in two places were there gates, massively built of wood and rubble, but with heavy steel doors, which had been taken from vaults and hung on new hinges. The amount of work that had gone into fortifying the enclave was incredible. The job would have been completely impossible if it were not for the peculiar architecture of Puran buildings-they had no windows on the first five or six floors except on sides facing enclosed courtyards. Thus it had not been necessary to block off all the lower windows as well as the streets.
Inside the enclave many of the buildings had been cleaned up. They served as living quarters, storage for food, firewood, and weapons, observation posts, and workshops where the marconite lights and the «other things» Yekran had mentioned were being made. There was a continuous bustle of activity with many of the people Blade saw seemingly moving at a dead run. Even after a century of Dreams, Purans could apparently work like demons when necessary.
But not all of the people Blade saw were moving at a run, nor was all the activity warlike. As he explored the enclave, he surprised couples-young and some not so young-sitting in the shadow of the wall or the recess of a window, arms around each other. The Dreamers were discovering some of the interesting things about real life again.
In the workshops, however, all was furious activity. It was there that Blade found the promised surprises, and there were quite a few of them. Bows, for one thing-both crossbows and longbows. The longbows were made of wood from the forests, small and crude. But they would not be ineffective with their bowstrings of woven hair and their arrows fitted with metal vanes and tips. The crossbows, on the other hand, were all metal. Some of their parts Blade recognized as parts of the life-support systems from the vaults. He asked Malud, the scholar and chief weapons designer, about this.
Malud was surprised at th
e question. «Why should we not use the metal from the vaults for our weapons?» he asked. «If we are no longer going to spend all our time in the Dream vaults, we do not need so many of them.»
He said it as though he were explaining to a child why the sun rose or the rain fell. But Blade had to turn away to keep from bursting out a great roar of triumphant laughter in the scholar’s face. So the Dream vaults were being cannibalized for weaponry? The Dreamers were coming along faster than he could have hoped in his wildest moments of optimism. In fact, it was almost wrong to call them Dreamers any more. Or for that matter, to use the term «Wakers» either. The battle for Pura was no longer between Dreamers and Wakers. It was a fight to determine the future of the city, a fight between two strong groups of-Purans. Nothing more.
There were the bows. There were the drawings of battering rams. These looked much like the one the Green Towers had used in their attack. There were scaling ladders three and four stories high. And there were siege engines-not just drawings, but catapults and large ballistae that could throw two hundred pound stones several blocks. These machines squatted on the roofs of half the buildings on the outer edges of the enclave. Their crews slept just below, and tons of rock had been laboriously hauled up the stairs and piled ready for use as ammunition.
There was more than stones for them to throw. Malud, Yekran, and Erlik almost glowed with pride as they showed Blade the fireballs. These were large masses of dried thistle stalks woven or tied together and then dipped in a solution of marconite dissolved in one of the chemicals from the life-support systems. A pinch of marconite added to the chemical would make it easy to ignite and almost impossible to approach or put out, so fiercely did it burn. «We have not tried these out either,» said Yekran with a savage grin. «But we shall be happy to do so when the right time comes.»
Only a week later the right time came. Krog attacked.
Chapter Eighteen
The attack came by night, but it was no surprise to Blade or the Dreamers. Blade had done his best to make sure that it wouldn’t be. There were watchers on top of every building on the outer edges of the enclave and patrols roaming through the streets that led to the Waker towers. The patrols spotted the advance guard of the Wakers when they were still miles away and sent messengers dashing up nearby towers with marconite lights to signal the news to the enclave.
Blade was asleep when Yekran pounded on the door of his chamber. But he awoke almost instantly when the man burst in with a savage grin on his face. «They are coming, Blade, they are coming. The word just came from the sentinels.»
Blade stood up, drew a blanket over the half-asleep Narlena, and began pulling on his clothes. «How many?»
«Many hundreds, perhaps a thousand.» Yekran almost licked his lips. «They are all coming at us together. Krog must have done what you said he would do-form an alliance with all the gangs against us.»
«Yes,» said Blade shortly. «And if he has, we are in more danger than you seem to think. They will outnumber us four or five to one in fighters. And most of the gangs do not care about Krog’s plan for rebuilding Pura. They only want to kill and enslave Dreamers and loot vaults. If they break into the enclave, it will be a bloody mess!»
«Then we shall make sure that they do not break in,» replied Yekran calmly. «Shall we go up to the roof?»
Blade nodded, kissed Narlena, and then followed Yekran out of the chamber. He shook his head irritably. He wished that Krog had attacked at some other time. The Dreamers in the enclave were so overconfident of their new fighting skills and weapons that they might become careless. And when fighting Krog, you could not afford to be careless. Up on the roof they searched the city spread out below them in the darkness. There was only a quarter moon, and it often slipped behind wandering clouds. Faint blue lights from other towers to the north flickered in the blackness-the Dreamer sentinels on distant roofs were signaling the advance of the Waker army. Blade leaned over the heavy metal railing and stared north along the dark streets looking for any sign of the Wakers.
Then he saw it-a ghost-faint flicker of movement along the edges of a wide street half a mile to the north. He waited, eyes fixed on that spot, until a momentary glimmer of moonlight showed a dark mass flowing forward across the street. Unmistakably the moonlight sparked off polished metal.
«I see one column,» he said to Yekran. «Crossing Rona Avenue»
«Good,» said Yekran. «The watchers reported three, though.»
«One of them will certainly come along the riverbank,» said Blade. «They will want to cut us off from retreating into the open country. They won’t want to let a thousand slaves get away.»
Yekran’s jaw hardened. «We don’t want to retreat. We want to stay here and kill those-«His voice trailed off. Apparently he couldn’t think of a word nasty enough to describe the Wakers. They stood in silence for five minutes. A sentinel in a tower overlooking the riverbank signaled that one of the columns was on the move there. A few minutes later the third column also came into sight. It was moving in on the east side of the enclave with scouts out in front.
«The east column will be Krog’s, almost certainly,» said Blade. «I don’t think any of the other gangs know anything about throwing out scouts, unless Krog taught them.»
«I would like to meet this man Krog,» said Yekran slowly. «I hope we do not have to kill him.» Then, briskly, «Well, Blade, I think we know where they are now. Let us go down.»
Below, at street level, the frantic bustle and confusion of the first alert was fading as people reached their stations and peered into the darkness. About half the trained fighters and two thirds of the partly trained ones were manning the walls. Blade had the rest organized into a reserve that he could move to wherever the attack was strongest. Everybody who was too young, too old, or too weak to fight had other jobs-carrying water and extra weapons to the fighters, carrying away the dead and wounded. Except for the Waker prisoners, who were locked up in vaults, everybody in the enclave had something to do. The Wakers would be attacking a whole people, not just the fighters. Blade hoped that fact would give the Dreamers the edge they needed-especially with the new weapons. He hoped those weapons worked as well in battle as they had in the tests.
Time crept on. Blade wondered if the Wakers were going to delay their attack until daylight. He doubted that Krog could have persuaded all the other gangs to fight by day. But if he had, things would go badly for the Dreamers. The new weapons would lose half their terror value in daylight.
A figure came out of the darkness and up to Blade. «A message from the commander of the war machines, Captain Blade. The column on the riverbank is within range now. Can we open fire?» The man wore an expression like a small boy asking if he can open his Christmas presents.
Blade shook his head. «Wait until the eastern column is within range. Then concentrate on them.» The man nodded and dashed off.
The People of the Blue Eye would be hardest to scare with the new weapons. But they would also be the most dangerous if they got over the walls. The farther away they could be hit, the better.
The eastern column must have been at very close range when the messenger arrived. Only minutes later one of the catapults went twonggg. Blade dimly saw something soar through the air and drop down out of sight. He could clearly hear the crash as the stone landed, and he thought he heard faint screams and shouts. He swore to himself in frustration. Up on the roofs he could see but not command; down here he could command but not see. He realized he was in the same maddening situation as every general in history who has wanted to see what was going on.
The siege machines went on firing, and the stones went on crashing down into the streets to the east. The fireballs were being saved for a surprise at close range. Blade heard no more screams from the east, however. If the People of the Blue Eye were out there. Krog had probably ordered them to scatter. A minute later another messenger ran up, confirming Blade’s suspicions. The eastern column had disappeared, but the other two were still movi
ng in.
Blade grinned. Possibly Krog was going to play the same game he had accused Blade of wishing to play with him. He would get his rivals’ fighters killed off and spare his own by delaying his own attack and letting the others go in first. Then Narlena ran up with a message. The column from the riverbank was in sight and coming up the street fast.
«All right,» Blade said to Yekran. «You take the northern side. I’m going down to the south.»
They shook hands, and he followed Narlena off along the street, first walking, then loping, then tearing through the darkness at a run. Ahead of them loomed the wall at the south end of the street, its top and rear face crowded with Dreamer fighters. They ran past the catapult standing in the street, waved to its crew, ran through the aid squads standing ready behind the fighters, and reached the wall. The fighters manning it turned to greet Blade. As they did so, an ear-splitting chorus of war yells and screams shot up from the street beyond. Blade heard the swelling sound of running feet and clashing weapons moving rapidly toward the wall.
The men with the fireballs in the upper windows didn’t wait for orders. Neither did the catapult crew. Two windows lit up with a searing blue-white glare. The two centers of the glare arched out into mid-air, dropping toward the street, trailing twenty-foot streamers of flame, and spitting out sparks like a Roman candle. At the same time the catapult hurled a hundred pound bag of jagged stone and metal fragments clean over the heads of the men on the wall, straight into the oncoming enemy. A very different kind of screaming and yelling now rose from beyond the wall. Blade dashed forward and scrambled up the wall just as the catapult let fly again. He and Narlena flattened themselves on the stones as another bag sailed overhead and crashed into the street.