The Sunbird

by Wilbur Smith

  In place of cavalry were the elephants. Huge, ugly-tempered beasts, who struck terror into the hearts of the enemies of Opet when they charged with the archers in the castles upon their backs loosing a shower of arrows as they came on. In battle frenzy, however, they could wreak as much havoc amongst their own army as that of the enemy, and their handlers were equipped with a mallet and spike to drive into the brains of the berserk animals. Lannon took twenty-five of these beasts upon his march.

  With him went his high priest and a dozen lesser priests, engineers, physicians, armourers, cooks, slaves and a huge flock of camp followers: merchants, prospectors, gamblers, soothsayers, liquor-sellers and prostitutes. The bullock train carrying the tentage and supplies stretched for seven miles, while the whole unwieldy column spread out over fifteen miles. This was no problem in the huge unpeopled grass plains of the south with their plentiful supplies of water and forage, but when Huy Ben-Amon stood on a low hill with his king and saw the slow straggling mass coming down out of the north he thought of the time when they would turn north again in a great circle amongst the forests and broken country along the great river. Such a collection of wealth would be a sore temptation to the pagan war bands from the unknown lands beyond the river. He told Lannon his misgivings and Lannon laughed, crinkling his pale blue eyes into the sun.

  ‘You think more like a soldier than a priest.’

  ‘I am both.’

  ‘Of course.’ Lannon dropped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Not for nothing the command of the sixth legion - well, Huy, I have thought much of this march. In the past, it has always been a great time-waster and a sorry expense on the treasury of Opet. My march will be different. I intend to turn a profit.’

  Huy smiled at that magic word, the one understood by all in Opet, noble or commoner, king or priest.

  ‘I intend to make this a different type of march. In the south kingdom we will hunt - hunts such as you have never conceived, and the meat will be smoked and dried and sold to the houses and mines to feed their slaves. We will hunt also for elephant. I would like my army to have 200 of these animals to meet the threats from the north of which you have just reminded me.’

  ‘I had wondered at the multitude of empty wagons that follow us.’

  ‘They will be filled before we turn northwards again,’ Lannon promised. ‘And when we pass through the gardens of Zeng, I will change the garrisons there, leaving these men in their place. Troops who stay too long in one billet grow lazy and corrupt. At Zeng I will meet the emissaries of the Dravs from the east and renew our treaty with them.’

  ‘But what of the north?’ Huy came back to his original question.

  ‘From Zeng we will march north in battle array. The women and the others will be sent home to Opet along the road through the middle kingdom. We will come to the river with two full legions to reinforce the two already there, and we will cross the river on a burning and slave-taking raid that will warn the tribes beyond that a new king reigns in Opet.’

  Lannon turned and glared towards the north, and his mane of golden and red hair and beard shone in the sunlight.

  ‘For a hundred years now they have plagued us, and we have been too soft with them. Each year they have grown more numerous, more daring. I will show them the iron of my hand, Sunbird. I will show them that the river is held by a barrier of bright steel, and they will press against it at their cost.’

  ‘Where do they come from, I wonder, and how many of them are there?’ Huy asked softly.

  ‘They are the hosts of darkness, black because they are not of the sun-god Baal as we are. They were spawned in darkness in the forests of eternal night to the north, and when you can number the greedy locusts, then you will count them also.’

  ‘Are you afraid, Lannon?’ Huy asked, and the king turned to him with a fiery anger darkening his face.

  ‘You presume, priest,’ he snarled.

  ‘Call me friend, not priest - and I do presume to show you that unreasoning hatred is based on fear.’

  Lannon’s anger faded, and he fiddled with the hilt of his sword, glancing about to make sure that his aides were out of earshot.

  ‘There is reason for fear,’ he said at last.

  ‘I know,’ said Huy.

  Huy led the praise chant to Baal in the dawn, but they kept the volume of their voices low so as not to alarm the nearest herds, and afterwards Huy asked the gods to look with favour upon the hunt, promising that a part of the spoils would be left for the Sunbirds to carry on high. Then Huy and Lannon drank a bowl of wine and ate a dry millet cake together as they waited for the hunt to develop.

  Mursil, the huntmaster of the south, had chosen the ground with cunning and care. From where they sat on the low line of the escarpment they could look down the vast funnel-shaped plain hemmed in by hills on either hand; along the summit of the hills the signal fires smoked in the early morning to show that the warriors were in position there to turn any of the game that tried to cross out of the valley.

  In the distance, beyond the range of the eye the two legions were spread out across the plain. Already they were moving forward, 10,000 men, sweeping the grassland like a wave across the beach. The dust of their advance rose palely against the egg-shell blue of the morning sky, and below the pall an occasional flash of light came from helmet or spear.

  ‘It has begun,’ said Lannon with satisfaction.

  Huy looked out on the tens of thousands of grazing animals scattered in herds about the plain. This was the tenth great hunt in fifty days, and the slaughter was beginning to sicken him a little.

  He glanced down to where the plain narrowed and the river that bisected it ran down onto the neck. At the base, squeezed into a wedge shape by the hills, was a gap of 500 paces which promised escape to the limitless expanse of grassland beyond. The whole plain was thinly scattered with tall flat-topped acacia trees.

  Even from where they sat above the gap they could barely see the treble line of concealed pits across the gap that joined the spurs of the two ranges of hills. A thousand of Lannon’s archers lay in ambush there, each with a bundle of 300 arrows and a spare bow.

  Beyond them still was a double line of netting, heavy woven mesh standing on flimsy poles that would collapse when a heavy body charged into it, smothering the animal in its folds until one of the hoplites could jump up from his hiding-place and run forward with a javelin to dispatch the animal and reset the net. Here another 1,000 javelin throwers lay in waiting.

  ‘We should go down now.’ Lannon finished the last of the wine and brushed a few crumbs from his cloak.

  ‘A little longer,’ Huy suggested. ‘I should like to watch this.’

  A restlessness was running through the herds upon the plain, beginning with the animals nearest the lines of beaters. The long lines of gnu began running in aimless circles with their noses almost raking the ground, black bodies with long flowing manes kicking and frolicking. The herds of zebra grouped themselves in compact masses of some 200 or 300 animals and looked curiously towards the line of approaching beaters. Their close relatives, the quagga, short and sturdier, assembled in lesser herds, a darker bay colour than the grey zebra. Mixed with them were herds of brilliant yellow and red hartebeest, purple sassaby, and the great bovine eland, striped and maned and majestic. This vast multitude began a stirring and moving, a general slow retreat down the valley towards the gap - and the dust rose around them.

  ‘Ah,’ said Lannon. ‘What a booty.’

  ‘There could never have been a greater in the history of the hunt,’ Huy agreed.

  ‘How many, do you think?’ Lannon asked.

  ‘I do not know - fifty, a hundred thousand - it would not be possible to count them.’

  Now the long-necked giraffe were infected by the growing alarm, they left the shelter of the acacia trees and their calves followed them as they joined the mass movement down the valley. Amongst the host trotted an occasional rhinoceros, big and cumbersome, horned and snorting, lifting his massive hoove
s high as he ran,

  Like a flux holding the entire mass together moved the smoky brown herds of dainty springbok. They came on down the valley, moving more urgently, like flood waters, and the dust rose thicker, swirling up in choking clouds. The hills squeezed the herds into a denser mass, and when the harte-beest and sassaby tried to cross the ridges on either hand there was a line of screaming, weapon-brandishing men to meet and turn them from the crest. They charged down the slopes again carrying and spreading the panic through the closely packed herds below.

  They surged forward, and the sound of their hooves rose like the sound of storm, surf and wind. The ground began to shake. ‘Come,’ shouted Lannon and he jumped up and went bounding down the slope. For a moment longer Huy watched that unbelievable phalanx of living creatures thundering down on the gap, then he shouldered his axe and went racing down the slope after Lannon. His long black hair streamed out behind him, and he ran goat-footed, rabbit fast, so that he and Lannon came out on the plain together and Huy led the way into the centre of the gap where a pit had been dug for them and a dozen bundles of javelins lay ready.

  Lannon jumped down beside him. ‘There was no gold on that race,’ he laughed.

  ‘There should have been,’ said Huy, and they went to the front lip of the pit and looked up the valley. It was a terrifying sight. The entire valley from side to side was clogged with a great tide of living things, and above them rose a high brown wall of dust through which the low sun glared bale-fully.

  The heads and manes of the lead animals tossed and heaved like the surface of a torrent, and above them rose the stick-like necks of the giraffe and ostrich. The whole bore down upon them, and the earth trembled beneath them and they stared in awe and wonder.

  Lannon was judging his moment carefully, waiting for the first wave of game to cross his range-markers. The moment came and he snapped an order to his trumpeter. The single urgent note of the attack rang out, repeated stridently over and over again.

  From the earth at the feet of the advancing wall of living things rose the line of archers. They loosed four times before the wall swept over them. Four thousand arrows in twenty seconds and those that followed fell over the wind-rows of dead animals, screaming with the agony of broken bone and arrow-impaled flesh.

  Borne by the weight of their own forward momentum the masses of game pressed onwards while flight after flight of arrows decimated their ranks, and the corpses and wounded piled in ridges and huge mounds.

  The smaller game were wiped out by the archers, but the larger thick-skinned animals came through with the arrows bristling in their flanks. Great grey rhinoceros, lumbering wild-eyed towards the line of nets, tossing their long curved nose horns. Giraffe galloping long-legged and terror-driven. A squadron of black buffalo running in a mass, shoulder to shoulder like a team in span.

  They came into the nets, and fell struggling and screaming. The javelins whipped into them as they rolled and roared, smothered in the folds of heavy netting. Desperately Lannon and his men worked to clear the dead from the netting and reset the poles, but it was effort wasted. There were too many of them now, and there was death out there in the open beyond the security of the pits. Arrow-maddened, the wounded game charged for any man who showed himself.

  Huy saw a soldier tossed by an angry rhinoceros. He cartwheeled in the air, and fell on the hard earth to be kicked and trampled to a muddy pulp in the dust by the hordes that followed.

  From the pit now Lannon hurled his javelins with an uncanny accuracy and power, aiming each bolt for the soft ribs behind the shoulder of the passing game. He piled the bodies about the pit, shouting and laughing in the frenzied excitement of the hunt.

  Huy also was infected by it. He danced and shouted and waved his axe, guarding Lannon’s back and flank, hurling a javelin when some huge animal seemed about to crash into the pit on top of them.

  Both he and Lannon were soaked with their own sweat and caked with the swirling dust; a stone flung by a dashing hoof had cut Huy’s forehead open to the bone of the skull and he ripped the hem from his tunic and bound the wound quickly, hardly interrupting his dance of excitement.

  In front of them the archers had been overwhelmed by the sheer weight of animal flesh. With their arrows exhausted they cowered in their pits and let the solid ranks pour over them.

  Huy saw the fresh ranks driving down on them and he grabbed his blood-crazed king and dragged him struggling to the floor of the pit, and they lay with their heads covered by their arms while the edges of the pit crumbled in on top of them under the impact of hooves. Earth smothered them and they covered their faces with the hems of their tunics and gasped for breath.

  A young zebra stallion fell into the pit on top of them, kicking and neighing in terror, with its powerful yellow teeth snapping indiscriminately; it was a deadly danger.

  Huy rolled away from its flying razor-sharp hooves. He paused a moment to aim and then shot his right arm upwards. The spiked head of the vulture axe lanced up under the terrified animal’s jaw, entering the brain cleanly. It collapsed warm and limp and shivering on top of them, and its corpse was a protection from the storm of hooves that raged about them.

  The storm dwindled, passed over, and rumbled away into the distance. In the quiet that followed, Huy rolled towards Lannon.

  ‘Are you safe?’ And Lannon crawled with difficulty from under the dead zebra. They dragged themselves from the pit and looked about them with wonder.

  Across a front of 500 paces, and to a depth of the same distance the ground was covered by a thick carpet of dead and dying game. From their pits amongst this terrible carnage the archers and javelin-throwers climbed and stood staring with the dazed air of drunken men.

  The line of beaters seemed to wade towards them out of a swamp of hanging dust, even the sky was dulled with the dust, and the pitiful cries and the bleating, of the dying and wounded animals shamed the silence.

  The beaters came forward in lines through the fields of bleeding flesh and their swords rose and fell as they killed the wounded. Huy reached under his tunic and brought out a leather flask of Zeng wine.

  ‘I can always trust you for comfort.’ Lannon grinned, and drank greedily. The wine drops shone like blood in his dusty beard.

  ‘Was there ever a hunt like that?’ he asked as he handed the flask to Huy.

  Huy drank and then looked about him at the field. ‘I cannot believe there ever was,’ he said softly.

  ‘We will smoke and dry this kill - and then hunt again,’ Lannon promised and strode away to order the butchery.

  A high dome of orange light hung over the plain, light reflected from 10,000 fires. All afternoon and all that night the army worked to butcher the enormous bag. To cut the flesh into strips and hang it on the rocks over the smoking fires. The smell of sweet raw flesh, the musty reek of split entrails, and the sizzle of the cooking meat drifted across the camp where Huy sat beneath the awning of his leather tent and worked by the fluttering light of an oil lamp.

  Lannon came out of the darkness, still filthy with dust and dried blood.

  ‘Wine! Sunbird, for the love of a friend.’ He pretended to stagger with thirst, and Huy passed both amphora and bowl to him. Scorning the bowl Lannon drank directly from the neck of the jug and wiped his beard on his arm.

  ‘I come with news,’ he grinned. ‘The bag was 1,700 head.’

  ‘How many of them men?’

  ‘Fifteen men died, and there are some wounded - but was it not worth it?’

  Huy did not answer, and Lannon went on.

  ‘There is more news. Another of my javelins has struck the mark. Annel has missed her moon.’

  ‘The southern air must be beneficial. All four of them with child in two months.’

  ‘It is not the air, Sunbird,’ Lannon laughed and drank again.

  ‘I am pleased,’ said Huy. ‘More of the old blood for Opet.’

  ‘When did you ever care for blood, Huy Ben-Amon? You are pleased to have more of my brat
s to spoil - I know you.’ Lannon came to stand behind Huy. ‘You are writing,’ he said, unnecessarily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A poem,’ said Huy modestly.

  ‘What of?’

  ‘The hunt - today’s hunt.’

  ‘Sing it to me,’ commanded Lannon and dropped onto Huy’s fur bed, with the amphora still grasped by the neck.

  Huy fetched his lute, and squatted on the reed mat. He sang, and when he had finished Lannon lay quietly on the bed staring out through the opening of the tent into the night.

  ‘I did not see it like that,’ he said at last. ‘To me it was just a taking, a harvest of flesh.’

  He was silent again.

  ‘I have displeased you?’ Huy asked, and Lannon shook his head.

  ‘Do you truly believe that what we did today has destroyed something that will never be replaced?’ he asked.

  ‘I do not know, perhaps not - but if we hunted like that every day, or even once every ten days, would we not soon turn this land into a desert?’

  Lannon brooded quietly over the half-empty amphora for a long while, then he looked up at Huy and smiled.

  ‘We have taken sufficient meat. We will not hunt again this year - only for ivory.’

  ‘My lord, has the wine jug stuck to your hand?’ Huy asked softly, and Lannon stared at him for a moment then laughed.

  ‘A trade, Sunbird, another song and I will give you wine.’

  ‘A fair trade,’ Huy agreed.

  When the amphora was empty, Huy sent one of his ancient slaves for another.

  ‘Bring two,’ suggested Lannon. ‘It will save time later.’

  At midnight Huy was soft from the wine, and desolated by the beauty of his own voice and the sadness of his own song. He wept, and Lannon seeing him weep, wept with him.

  ‘I will not have such beauty recorded on the skin of beasts,’ cried Lannon with the tears cutting runnels through the dust on his cheeks and pouring into his beard. ‘I will have a scroll made of the finest gold, and on it you will inscribe your songs, my Sunbird. Then they will live forever to delight my children and my children’s children.’