by Джеффри Лорд
The next day the Baran’s army marched west, toward the desert, the mountains, and the Valley of the Hashomi.
Chapter 23
Once again the horizon Blade saw was dominated by the White Mountain with the plume of snow trailing from its summit. Behind him lay a journey across the desert and the mountains, almost retracing the journey he’d made to Dahaura.
This time he hadn’t covered the route as a bound slave. He’d crossed the desert as part of the Baran’s army of twenty-five thousand men. He’d made his way through the mountains at the head of four hundred of the best fighters in Dahaura. Now he looked down on the Valley of the Hashomi from a new position, half a mile above the hospital where he’d first awakened.
The hospital on its ledge and the valley spreading out below looked the same as the last time he’d seen them. More important, they showed no signs the Hashomi were alert and on their guard against the enemies approaching through the mountains.
It would make no difference in the end whether they were alert or not. They would die, and their valley would be swept from end to end. It would make a great difference to the Baran’s soldiers and the women and farmers of the valley. If Blade had surprise on his side, not nearly so many of them would die in the next few days.
Blade looked behind him and waved one arm cautiously. Two men suddenly appeared where there’d seemed to be only bare rock, crawling forward to lie beside Blade and look where he pointed. One of them was Giraz.
«From the ledge where the hospital sits, it’s a four-hundred-foot drop to the valley,» Blade said. «Only a bird could get up or down it. The only way in or out for men is through the tunnel to the bridge, past the guards at the bridge, and then down the path to the valley floor. Men in the hospital and holding the bridge can hardly be attacked from below. They cannot easily be attacked from above, either, as long as they are alert.»
«But we can attack from above, eh, Blade?» said Giraz, with a thin smile.
«Yes. The Hashomi don’t seem to have garrisoned the hospital. I’ll take thirty of the best climbers down with me tonight. The last five hundred feet are all that really need mountain climbing. Thirty should be enough to take the bridge or at least block the tunnel. Then we can fix ropes and bring the rest of the men and gear down by daylight.»
«And then?» That was a question Giraz had asked several times, and Blade gave him the same answer as before.
«Then we wait and see. The Hashomi can’t heavily attack us without splitting their forces and weakening their hold on the valley entrance.»
«What if they decide to ignore us, Blade?»
Blade grinned. «We’ll make sure they can’t afford to do that.»
Blade scrambled down the last few feet of the cliff, dropping to his hands and knees the moment he felt level ground under his feet. He peered into the darkness that held the ledge and the hospital buildings on it. The buildings were no more than formless lumps in the night. In one window Blade saw a faint yellow spark of light. That building, he remembered, held the doctors’ quarters. He’d given it a wide berth, since the doctors would certainly raise the alarm.
Crawling on his belly like a snake, Blade crept across the twenty yards of open ground to the nearest building. Its shadow covered him, and he knew he was now almost invisible to any human eye. The silence and the darkness remained unbroken.
He turned and watched the rest of the men with him drop down the cliff. They moved as fast as they dared, with only the faintest scraping of booted feet and gloved hands on the rock. One by one they reached level ground, crept under cover, and without a word melted into the darkness.
Now Blade heard faint rustlings from the darkness. The men were pulling off their boots and putting on soft-soled, noiseless sandals and checking their weapons. So far so good. If the Hashomi had put a garrison in the hospital, it didn’t seem to be at all alert.
Blade was rising to his feet, ready to signal to his men, when three robed figures slipped out from between two of the buildings. Instantly Blade’s men sprang up and surrounded them. Blade drew his sword and dashed across to where the three were now flat on the ground. All three were women, and all three were still writhing and trying to kick and scream.
Blade was relieved to see that the men had obeyed his orders: «Kill no one in the hospital unless I say so.» Blade didn’t want any casualties among the women.
Blade drew back the hoods from all three women. He recognized two of them, and one of them he’d bedded. He spoke to that one in an urgent whisper.
«I am Richard Blade, the man from Britain who came to the Valley of the Hashomi and then escaped from it. I have come with many armed men, to end the rule of the Hashomi. What do you say of that?»
The woman Blade spoke to seemed too stunned to understand his words, but one of the others gave a sigh of relief. «You-you are not an enemy to the women?»
«Not unless they make themselves enemies to me. Mirna should have told you that.»
«Mirna no longer serves at the hospital, Blade»
Blade felt a chill of suspicion. «Has she been harmed?»
«I do not know. She was sent to serve at a hospital in the valley, that I know.»
That was as much as the woman could be expected to know, Blade realized. It was too bad that Mirna was not up here, ready to take charge of the women and out of reach of the Hashomi, but it could not be helped.
«We will let you go, if you promise to return to your quarters and tell your sisters that Richard Blade has come again, to help the women of the valley.» He didn’t mention that he came in the service of the Baran of Dahaura, since that might confuse or frighten them.
All three women now had recovered enough to nod, and two of them kissed Blade’s hands. He signaled to his men to let the women up. The women darted away, and Blade led his men off through the darkness.
The invaders advanced in spurts, half of the men keeping watch from under cover while the other half moved. It was slow but safe progress. They took half an hour to cover the three hundred yards to the mouth of the tunnel, but they reached it without raising the alarm.
Blade crawled to the mouth of the tunnel and lay on his belly, looking down it. The torches flickered in their brackets. The damp air with the faint reek from behind the doors was the same. At the far end of the tunnel Blade saw vague hints of movement as the Hashomi on guard walked their posts.
Blade motioned his men forward. The first eight came up holding nine-foot pikes, brought down the cliff in sections and now screwed back together. The pikemen stepped around Blade and formed a double line, holding their pikes level. Eight bristling steel points now confronted any Hashom in the tunnel, ready to impale him before he could get within reach of his opponents.
Now it was time for speed. Blade pointed down the tunnel with his drawn sword, and the eight pikemen broke into a run. Blade ran behind them, and behind him ran all the rest of his men, except five left to guard the hospital end of the tunnel.
They were half way down the tunnel before Blade noticed any reaction from the far end. «Faster!» he snarled. They had to get out of the tunnel before the Hashomi realized what was going on and pulled the bridge back.
One Hashom plunged forward, filled with panic or desperate courage. The pikes spitted him like a chicken and carried him along for twenty feet before he fell off and was trampled underfoot. Blade’s men charged on. An arrow whistled overhead, string sparks from the ceiling. Another arched down and struck a man behind Blade in the chest. Without a cry he staggered out of the path of the men behind him. Then he slumped to the floor, blood spraying from his mouth as he coughed.
The charging men burst out of the tunnel. Their sheer momentum swept two Hashomi on the near end of the bridge into the gap. A Hashom ran around the flank of the pikemen and struck at one of them. His sword clanged on the man’s steel cap. Before he could strike again, Blade closed with him and cut off both his arms, then pushed him over the edge.
The bridge was narrow enough to force the pikemen
to stop and regroup. That gave the Hashomi on the other side of the gap time to rush out of their cave and form a ragged battle line. Some of them wore only loincloths, others nothing at all. They had no time to move the bridge before Blade’s men were advancing again.
Afterward Blade could never forget the battle there on the ledge three hundred feet above the valley floor, but he could never remember any of the details. It was all vague and undefined, like a battle fought in a nightmare.
Blade remembered that men fought with their bare hands when they’d lost their weapons, and with their teeth and feet when their arms were hacked off. He remembered a Treas striking down one of his men with a staff, and the man in his final agony gripping the staff and jerking furiously, so that he and the Treas plunged into the gap together. He remembered that both sides fought in total silence, the Hashomi because it was part of their training, his own men because they didn’t want to raise the alarm.
Finally, he knew that his twenty-five men killed twenty Hashomi and lost only ten themselves. The fighting came to an end, and the bodies of the enemy were stripped and thrown off the cliff. Blade pulled his own dead and wounded back into the tunnel, and the bridge after them. Leaving the tunnel guarded, he ran back to the hospital in time to meet Giraz coming down the cliff with the first reinforcements.
By dawn the hospital was firmly in Blade’s hands. Some of the women and servants were half-mad with joy, most were too stunned to react at all. The doctors and priests were allowed to work under close guard. One of them loudly refused to treat the enemies of the Hashomi, and was promptly heaved off the cliff. After that the others saw the wisdom of obeying Blade’s orders.
By noon the last of Blade’s men was down, except for a small guard left on top of the cliff to give warning of any Hashomi effort to get around Blade’s rear. Shortly after noon the first of the valley people arrived at the foot of the cliff. They were farmers and a few women, for the moment apparently more curious than anything else. None of them tried climbing the trail to join Blade.
These people scattered hastily when the first Hashomi arrived, fifty of them. The Hashomi spread out around the end of the trail and along the foot of the cliff. They shot off a few arrows to test the range, then settled down to wait. Blade stared down at them, and could imagine them staring up.
He did not intend to do much more staring, or leave the Hashomi with time for it.
Chapter 24
Blade’s men couldn’t afford to sit on the ledge above the Valley of the Hashomi forever. There was a spring of fresh water that would supply them until the end of time, but the food in the hospital would only last about ten days. Before that, the Baran’s main army was supposed to push its way into the valley, or at least send reinforcements and supplies through the mountains to Blade.
The night after Blade arrived, he sent a strong force down the trail to the valley floor. Half of them fought their way through the guarding Hashomi and marched out into the valley, stealing all the livestock they found.
The other half went to work with axes, chopping down trees and building a fortified stockade around the bottom of the trail. They’d finished by the time the cattle raiders returned. The livestock was driven into the stockade, and a ditch dug around the outside of it. Now Blade had a fortified strongpoint on the valley floor and several tons of fresh meat on the hoof to add to his supplies. The Hashomi had lost forty more men as against Blade’s twenty. They’d also been given a pointed notice that they’d better take him seriously, or it would be worse for them. Blade intended to march everywhere in the valley and carry off everything and everybody that wasn’t nailed down, if the Hashomi were fool enough to let him.
That day he had a barricade of logs and stones built halfway down the tunnel. Now he had a line of defense to hold even if he lost control of the bridge. Then he had the doors in the tunnel unlocked: Some of the caves were empty, while others held nothing but skeletons and stenches. A few held living prisoners.
Most of the prisoners were farmers, craftsmen, and women who hadn’t been willing to play their assigned roles in the Hashomi’s scheme of things. A few were Hashomi who’d been too openly skeptical of the Master’s wisdom.
All of them were more than ready to greet Blade as a liberator, and fight the Hashomi and the Master with all their strength. Unfortunately, few of them had the strength to get out of bed, let alone raise a sword. So they were carried into the hospital and put in charge of the doctors. At least they would keep the doctors too busy with medical duties to have time for plotting.
Blade wanted able-bodied supporters from the valley people, though. Or at least he wanted to give the Hashomi the impression that he expected to get them. That was the next job.
The last fifty men to come down the mountain each brought one piece of a small catapult. The catapult was now set up and put into action. From the roof of the main hospital building it could reach out nearly a mile into the valley.
Blade kept it firing all day and all night. It shot spears, bundles of arrows, stones, bags of nails and broken glass, filled chamberpots, and anything else that would hurt if it hit somebody. It also fired sacks made of old sheets and filled with appeals to the people of the valley.
«The end of the Hashomi is at hand. Their doom approaches. Freedom for all those who have been their slaves is coming. Kill them. Take their weapons. Gather up food and come to the House of the Free Men by the hospital on K’baq Cliff.»
That was one message. There were many others, most of them written by freed prisoners who had the strength to sit up and use a pen. Dozens of the messages were fired off each day, and sometimes the winds in the valley caught them and carried them far beyond the range of the catapult.
It became a point of pride among the defenders of the hospital to keep the catapult going. When a beam broke, one of the hospital carpenters and one of Blade’s men carved a new one from a timber of one of the huts. When the rope broke, the women cut off their hair and braided a new one that made the catapult more powerful than before.
It also became a point to count how many people fled to the House of the Free Men-and how many Hashomi were killed in the process. Both figures mounted steadily. Every night shouts, screams, the clash of weapons floated up from the valley, as refugees tried to make their way through the line of watching Hashomi. Several hundred succeeded. As many more died, but so did a good many Hashomi.
Eventually the guards grew so strong that the valley people stopped trying to get through. By that time there were more than two hundred Hashomi tied down, watching Blade’s force. Nearly that many had been killed or wounded since Blade arrived at the hospital.
«That makes four hundred Hashomi the Baran will not have to face when he and his men reach the head of the valley,» said Blade. «We haven’t finished with them, either.»
«True,» said Giraz. «But I don’t imagine they’ve finished with us, either. If the Master is as you say he is, it’s going to take all the running we can do to keep ahead of him.»
«Also true,» said Blade, and began giving orders to prepare the hospital for defense. The ditch around the stockade was deepened and timbers placed in the bottom, jutting upward. Blade’s archers kept the Hashomi at a safe distance until the work was done.
Other archers were placed along the trail from the stockade up to the hospital, at every place where the slope might let a Hashom climb up. During daylight they carried improvised drams to give the alarm, by night they had torches.
Still more archers were stationed along the rim of the hospital’s ledge, with a clear field of fire down into the valley. At first the Hashomi tried to keep a line of bonfires alight all along the base of the cliff. They quickly discovered this made them excellent targets for archers they could not even see, let alone reach from four hundred feet below. The Hashomi then tried maintaining their watch without fires, and the valley people at once started slipping through again to join Blade. At last the Hashomi had to draw back and form their line of guards out of r
ange of both the archers and the catapult. That tripled the length of the line and the number of men needed to maintain it. Blade had now tied up a force of Hashomi greater than his own strength, apart from the two hundred casualties he’d inflicted. He’d lost no more than eighty killed and wounded.
It was tempting to think that the job was done, but that was a temptation Blade resisted. Sooner or later the Hashomi would react more violently and effectively than they’d done so far. Then Blade’s easy campaign would suddenly turn into a bloody last-ditch struggle.
He did everything he could to get ready for that struggle.
Every container that would hold water was filled and distributed among the buildings of the hospital. The Hashomi might poison the spring or climb up above the hospital and shoot arrows down. If they did, Blade wanted to be sure that no one would be poisoned or have to expose himself to get water.
Wooden shields were made for the fighting men, so they could move about even under a hail of arrows and stones from above. Large rocks were piled all along the path, ready to be rolled down the slopes at Hashomi trying to climb up.
The refugees from the valley did much of the work, slaving away sixteen and eighteen hours a day. Whatever had brought them to Blade in the first place, they now knew that their only hope of survival was his victory. If Blade’s position was overrun, they were doomed to a quick death in the fighting, or a slower and far more painful death afterward. They knew that the Master of the Hashomi would take the time for a proper vengeance even if the Baran’s army was storming the mouth of the valley at that exact moment.
Day after day went by, and the supply of food in the hospital shrank. The fighting men went on half rations, the civilians on quarter rations. The only people still getting a full ration were the sick and wounded. Faces began to look drawn and flesh melted off bones, but now they had another week before the food would be entirely gone. Before that happened, the Baran’s army or at least fresh supplies should be on hand.