“Oh, Zam, it’s come! Oh, Four—”
I bit it off. The last thing he needed was a hysterical female on his hands. Think! I screamed at myself. Not panic, not, I told you so, not, What are you going to do?
“Beryx . . . ?” I just managed not to bleat.
“Neck-deep and swimming already.” He too had regained control. The one sign of stress was his rapid speech. “The murrain is worse, they’ve had to block the whole western border against fugitives. Kastir will break the cordon. And let the murrain across.”
“It’s just a diversion!” My understanding was crisis fast. “It’s you he wants and he knows the only way is to swamp you so he’s threatened Assharral and invaded Hethria to distract you and maybe kill three birds at once. Zam, the dassyx, Assharral don’t matter. It’s us—”
“Assharral comes first.” With the same speed he shot it back. “I have to stop them on the Kemreswash. Then do something with the dassyx.” He was pale and stiff now, eyes midwinter bleak. “The devil of it is, the Sathellin want to fight. Every time I let them alone some start going back.”
“But the cavalry! Zam, if they get you it’s all over! They’ll—”
I dug the nails into my palms to gag the rest. If they captured Zam he knew, all too well, what they would do to him.
I turned on my heel, feeling heart race, nerves jump as if in the thick of a physical attack. “Breakfast. I’ll bring it down. Then I’ll collect slingstones. A lot of them.”
He had already turned away, but he looked back with a flash of that shimmering laughter in his eyes. “One thing about you, ’Thar. You leave ‘I told you so’ for the facts.”
* * * * * *
He was at work before I took away the cups. An hour’s furious effort to scatter the Kemreswash force before screaming hordes of illusionary Lyngthirans, five minutes collapse; two hours hectic labor to check or reverse the northern advance, then without pause a furious spell of forcing the Sathellin on east, after which he indulged in a quarter hour’s collapse. After that a bout of Wrevurx intended to raise a sandstorm on the Gebros and cut communications, which failed, because the wind was a flat northerly gale, and because he collapsed in the middle of it with what I was quite sure was a heart attack.
Certainly, his heart did stop. He came round to find me pummeling his chest and sobbing, “Zam! No!” and bade me irritably to
The first order I obeyed, the second I refused. So I heard at once when he found the Kemreswash force had regrouped and camped. Paler than ever, he said, “They mean to march at night.” Then, at long last, he turned his attention to the troops headed for us.
First he used Fengthir on both commanders and sent their corps veering off in opposite directions. When the long, deathly trance ended, I said anxiously, “Did it work?”
He answered very grimly, “No.”
“The whole army has been warned,” he answered my mute stare. “They all know the target, and what to expect. The seconds-in-command roused their officers. Fengthir won’t work.”
I dared not ask more. After a moment he shrugged and answered what was probably a silent scream.
“I’ll have to try something else.”
So for the afternoon’s work he deranged troopers, made horses unmanageable, and generally created havoc in the ranks. When I came down at sunset he was propped against a finlythe, limper than a wrung-out rag. After he had eaten, I assumed, he would resume work on the Kemreswash force.
So I was quite stunned when he levered himself to his feet, glanced west to the last glimmer of dusk, and said, “I suppose I’d best try to sleep.”
I gaped at him over the supper dishes. He met my eye with a sardonic look. “Didn’t you know? You can’t use Ruanbrarx at night.”
Something in my pose, or perhaps the mental yell of horror, made him check. Stumbling in half-controlled panic I began, “But surely Fengthir . . . or just read Kastir’s mind to see what they’ll do next . . . you don’t have to see minds!”
“The whole army knows their orders,” he answered somberly. “Kastir is irrelevant.”
“Then the commanders—the officers!”
Now the look was definitely ironic. “On the march. At night. Before you can contact a mind, you have to locate the flesh.”
While I sat in appalled silence he turned and walked slowly, bent like an old man, up toward the cave.
* * * * * *
At dawn, finding the cavalry had regrouped, he fired a torjer belt in their path. When I brought down breakfast he was recovering, less from the exertion, I think, than the hurt. Knowing he would rather be left alone, I set out on a rather distracted food-hunt, and returned to find him in a positive fever, shaking all over because he was too spent to do anything else.
“The Sathellin,” he said despairingly, before I could ask. “Tricked me. Sent the women and children east and the men went to ground in the dassyx. Hid in the cisterns where I couldn’t see them. Now the Estarians are in contact and the cursed fools won’t retreat!”
I gasped, more than appalled. I was trying to prop him up against a finlythe, and perhaps that physical contact helped the image through.
A dassyk, caravanserai ablaze, the green farms trampled, roofed in the black smoke of burning helliens, under which tiny figures charged or ran or fought or fell, to writhe or lie terribly still amid the glint of broken weapons and the small, horribly vivid red splotches of blood. The broad sheen of armor masses, the flying blue of Sathel robes which glanced amid the steel or flickered in and out the alleyways, a bloody battle already in full swing.
“The madmen!” he groaned. “If I try to get them out they’ll be slaughtered. But they can’t hope to hold against that. Oh, Imsar Math, if I were only there. . . .”
“You mustn’t. That would be insane. It’s probably just what Kastir wants.” I tried to keep panic from my voice. “But you could help from here. The Estarians. You can kill some, can’t you?”
“No.” He was slumped against me, spent and overwrought beyond composure, but there was nothing distrait about his voice.
“Not kill,” he said after a moment. Then he heaved himself up. “But help, yes.”
So for the rest of the afternoon Estarian companies were forever marching smartly away from the fighting, only to be intercepted by officers and wheeled back, to be turned away again. . . . But it was an unequal struggle. They were so many that he was literally swamped. When darkness fell he sank back against the finlythe, and said in a thread of mindspeech,
If only Zem were here, I thought wildly. If only I had never led him to his death, never had that crazy idea. . . .
It came with a snap.
My laughter was the febrile release of strain. “Thank you so much!” I cried, and anticipated him. “No, I won’t yell. I know what you mean. Rest until you’ve had dinner, at least.”
If I had little sleep that night it was certainly more than he managed, for he spent most of the time in vain attempts to glimpse the battle and vainer attempts to intervene. Kastir had already taken the point of the night lulls. His troops attacked without torches, and the fires were all put out.
Next morning Zam was positively haggard. He spoke only once, as he drank his tea. “They’re getting killed out there. And there isn’t even a moon.”
The Kemreswash force had not only made thirty miles in the night but had sent detachments south to join the battle for the dassyx. Zam’s morning attempt to check them with a sandstorm was a complete fiasco, thanks to the gibbers of Stirghend, which flank Kemreswash on both sides for two hundred miles, and which reduced his efforts to a few scuds of stinging sand.
Thence he turned to the dassyk
battle, which was moving east as the Sathellin were driven back by the superior numbers that threatened them on either flank, and which swamped him in turn. I heard all that at sunset, in abbreviated chunks of mindspeech that could not hide the urgency of the threat.
When he fell silent, I said, “Zam?” My voice sounded small and shrunk. “The cavalry. Are they marching at night?”
Neither exhaustion nor mindspeech could conceal his awareness of what the answer meant.
* * * * * *
That night he burned another torjer belt, and then, a cruelty which must have pained still worse, he fired the helliens round the next series of dassyx. But their flames showed only Sathel corpses and Estarian garrisons. The battlefront had already passed, driving on into the east, and dawn showed it had drawn perilously close to the Sathel refugees ahead.
“There are just too many of them.”
He was slumped against a finlythe, shoulders hunched, head sunk in his arms, robe wringing with sweat that owed nothing to the afternoon heat. For the first time there was a hint of desperation in his voice.
“Karyx,” I said. “He’s out there somewhere, isn’t he? Zam, speak to him. Give him command of the Sathellin. He’s a soldier, he—you could help. He might be able to rally them.”
“Rally them for what? They’re not soldiers, they’re outnumbered. Their only hope is to disengage, get completely clear of the enemy. And they won’t do that.”
I opened my mouth. He forestalled me. “Where is there to go if they do?”
The silence answered us both. Nowhere but the desert, to run with a relentless enemy at their heels till they did the very thing he was trying to prevent at all costs. Precipitated the whole disaster over the borders of Assharral.
I bit my lip to keep the words inside. Chewed my lip, tried not to look at him, not so much as to think, What will you do now? What can you do now? Zam, for the Four’s sake!
Muscle by muscle, he straightened up.
“Pellathir,” he said. “I’ll send a wing of Phaxian cavalry into the southern troops. It won’t take long. Then I can get back before dark to the dassyx.”
And by then the Kemreswash force would have marched again, and the dassyk battle might well be over, the fugitives overtaken . . . but if the cavalry were let be they would come on again, faster than ever. Panic shot up in me. It was impossible, no single mind, not even an aedr’s, could hope to stem this flood. . . .
“Don’t worry, ’Thar.” All trace of despair or exhaustion had vanished. His voice was steady, comforting, impossibly sure. “Whatever happens, they won’t reach you.”
He caught me so much by surprise, touched so unerringly on the fear I had never allowed myself to face, that my eyes filled with uncontrollable tears. “I’ll make dinner,” I gulped. “And after that you’re going to sleep. All night.”
* * * * * *
Next morning the dassyk battle was over. The Sathellin no longer resisted, they were being swept east in abject rout, except for one force in the thick of a fighting retreat. “Karyx,” said Zam, and I felt a brief surge of pride. Before I looked at his face and forced myself to ask, “And the others?”
I saw him set his teeth.
“The Kemreswash force are already east of us.” He lifted his face to the west. “If it were only a month later, I could have tried a flood. But the rain isn’t there. And to make it would cost too much.”
My heart twinged. So speaks the commander of a beleaguered garrison when the siege reaches the point where he must husband every ounce of his reserves, merely to survive.
He looked round at me, so tired I could almost watch his calculations, whether to tell me something or not, whether I would more likely break if the news came later, or now. My thoughts must have answered. He said, “The cavalry are close behind.”
Down by the well the saeveryrs chuckled, the only life in a still, sultry, storm-thick dawn. I looked down over the rock parapet to the desert’s infinity, back to the small circle of familiar things he had called home. Then I said, “Zam . . . you could always act like a general, if you aren’t one. You could retreat.”
“Kerym Iswyre.” The idea came as brilliantly as the glare off those miles of salt. “Let the cavalry arrive here and find nothing. They won’t know what to do. You could rally the Sathellin there. We could get there, even now, two of us on horseback could do it easily. And if it’s nearly as big as Assharral, not all Estar could find you in there. The fight could go on.”
For a moment the shadow lifted from his face. His overactive mind shot to a yet higher pitch, empathy brought me a flash of thought so fierce and complex I instinctively clapped hands to my ears. He said, “I’m sorry,” and shook his head.
I drew in my breath. The strain of crisis inflames the most placid, and I was never that. “Why not?”
He looked away, about the brightened grass, the remnant of the vines, the morrethans so bright on Fengthira’s grave. “What would happen,” he said, “if they came up here?”
The image may have been transmitted. I saw the cave ransacked, the aivrifel splintered for the sake of the hazian gems on its frets, the morrethans uprooted, possibly the grave itself desecrated, Fengthira’s bones flung to the indifferent air, the cavalry’s boots. I bit my lip, hard.
Before the reaction had passed emotion, he said, “Not the most important. If I fall back to Kerym Iswyre, nothing will stop Kastir going straight into Assharral.”
My fists clenched in irrational denial. But he was right. A handful of Sathellin pent in the salt wastes might survive, might irritate the enemy. They could never check his advance.
I took a deep, deep breath. “Zam?”
His head lifted again. I said it without stress or emphasis.
“You’ll have to kill them. It’s that or have the Sathellin massacred . . . Assharral invaded . . . yourself killed . . . Hethria lost. Zam? It’s a Must.”
He stared at me, unseeing. His eyes were deep-sunken and bloodshot and the light writhed in them now, a furious, incessant dance of power. Or distress. He said quietly, “’Thar, go down and fetch up the horses. Bring any food in walking distance as well.”
Still I tried to keep my voice quiet. “Zam—won’t you do it? Before it’s too late?”
He had dropped his head back in his arms so the reply was muffled, but its resolution was pure granite.
“It’s not too late yet.”
* * * * * *
I foraged for most of the morning, then brought the horses up and turned them into the pocket, before I went back, to find him stretched out in a dead faint. I hesitated, if you can believe it, over whether to revive him or let him come round of himself, and finally decided the latter would be kinder, which when he woke did not please him at all.
“Half a day lost,” he said with the iciness anyone else would have turned to rabid rebuke. “And the blighted sandstorm all to do again.” It was intended for the cavalry, and he set about it without waiting to eat, which, as I told him, was the root of the second collapse in mid-attempt.
Revived from that, he tried to chase the Kemreswash force out of camp with a plague of snakes, but they were inured to illusion now, and set out jauntily, trampling serpents as they went. “Laughing,” he said into the dusk.
He sounded lifeless. My heart turned over and before I could help it I wondered, Will he give up?
“No,” he answered. “I can’t.”
I did not speak. I merely thought, Soon it will be too late.
He sounded more adamant than any granite. “Not yet.”
* * * * * *
For five more days he struggled, and the situation worsened daily. I ran up and down with food and tea, foraged in panicky dashes, piled slingstones in strategic spots about the walls, tried to sharpen my kitchen knife, racked my brains for other means of defense, all of it in that dreadful half-life when your true being is focused somewhere else. Battle itself could n
ot rack the nerves as does watching from the sidelines. But this was worse, for the struggle was invisible, fought on the mind’s field. I could see only the blows’ effect on the defense.
That was the worst of all. Zam was literally driving himself to collapse, over and over, every day and a good part of each night, using every Art he knew as he tried to deter or delay or baffle each army in turn, with illusions, with diversions, with sandstorms, thunderstorms, wind and fire, with Commands exerted on their minds. And each time he was vanquished by the sheer weight of numbers he opposed. As the days passed I found myself waking with fists and teeth clenched, mind insisting, He must kill them. He must.
I dared not suggest it again. I could only watch and wait, while disaster grew ever surer, closer, and I choked down my feelings at the sight of one man trying to stop three armies single-handed, stubbornly refusing to use the sole weapon that would avail him, with the weapon to hand, and the shackles of principle binding him more surely than chains.
* * * * * *
When I finished foraging the sixth day he was resting, if you could call it that, after yet another failure. I knew it had failed, without need to ask. But as I looked at him I thought, Soon it won’t need Kastir’s armies to finish this. He’ll kill himself.
The rock walls contracted, closer than the walls of the queen’s hall had those years ago. I fought the feeling off. Silently I asked for another report.
It came in images, with the odd explanatory word. A wide sweep of desert, scattered Sathellin parties, on the western horizon a broad low cloud of dust.
I waited. When no more came, I said it aloud. “The cavalry. Tell me, Zam, please. How far?”
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