The Diamond Warriors

by David Zindell

  ‘No,’ I said to him, shaking my head, ‘it must be me.’

  At my obduracy, Maram looked at me in anger and frustration as tears filled his eyes.

  Kane, staring up at Bemossed, said to me more tersely: ‘So – it is a trap. A terrible chance.’

  ‘It is our only chance!’ I said to him. ‘Will you ride with me?’

  At this, Kane grimly nodded his head. So did Lord Sharad, Lord Avijan and Lord Noldashan – and others. And then, finally, so did Maram.

  ‘Into the Dragon’s jaws’ he muttered to himself. ‘Well, my friend, I suppose I always knew this would be a day for fire.’

  After sending messengers galloping to speak with Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar, I gave the command for my army to renew its advance. Now, up and down our lines, our war drums began booming out their dreadful thunder. On our far right, out across the steppe’s wind-rippled grasses, I saw that Sajagax had already begun the battle. Companies of Kurmak and Adirii warriors, with the Manslayers, rode upon the Janjii, Mansurii, Zayak and Marituk tribes loosing a hail of arrows. It was no easy work of logistics to cut out my Meshians from our other cavalry massed too near the enemy Sarni. It took some precious minutes of horses whinnying and stamping, and men shouting in confusion, to reform them behind our lines. And then, even as our thousands of foot marched upon our enemy and the tinkling of millions of tiny silver bells rang out into the air, I led my eight hundred knights back behind the advancing Atharian and Waashian infantry toward the center of the field.

  Our enemy, however, remained unmoving. Phalanxes of pike men packed twenty ranks deep and locked together shield to shield do not easily advance in good order over uneven ground across a front of five miles. Why should the Dragon army move forward when they had only to wait for my warriors to impale themselves on the acres of steel-tipped pikes sticking out from a long wall of shining shields?

  Soon our army came within range of our enemy’s archers. Clouds of black arrows, with an unnerving whining, streaked up from behind our enemy’s lines and fell upon my advancing warriors. At this distance, most broke upon or glanced off their armor with a clatter of steel against diamond that was dreadful to hear. A few shafts split the diamond seams and penetrated through the underlying leather to skin and flesh beneath. Men cried out and fell; others hurried forward to take their places. Our archers, keeping pace behind our lines, paused every half minute to stand and loose volleys of their own. A great number of their arrows found their marks, punching through the poorer strip armor worn by the soldiers of Sunguru and the Eannan’s thin mail. The screams of wounded and dying men merged with the cacophony of trumpets, drums, shrieking elephants and jangling bells into a single, terrible sound.

  I rode quickly along, at the head of my companies of knights, whose heavily-amored mounts beat at the ground and churned up the earth. I looked to my right, at the glittering ranks of the Kaashans closing the distance to the great Dragon army. Through the gaps between my men, marching in loose formation, I could now see the faces of the front rank of our enemy. Thousands of pairs of eyes stared out in dismay at the approaching Valari warriors. I felt their fear like a wave of sick heat emanating from them. Although they badly outnumbered us, they must have heard the stories told of the Valari’s long, steel kalamas and the pitiless men who wielded them.

  My warriors’ spirits held true and strong, though I felt how keenly Bemossed’s torture grieved them. Spirit, in battle, was always such a delicate thing. A man’s urge to risk his life for those of his companions could become a dread of death; the natural fear that caused one’s heart to send streams of blood shooting like an elixir through mind and limb could easily explode into a full panic.

  ‘The Valari!’ I heard someone from within the Sakayan phalanxes cry out. ‘The Valari come!’

  Just as our army drew within javelin distance of our enemy, another of the Sakayans called to him in answer: ‘The Dragon will burn them! Let the Dragon burn all the Valari!’

  More arrows streaked down from the sky. One of them clacked off the armor covering Altaru’s neck; another broke against my shoulder’s steel reinforcement. At last, my knights and I had come up behind Lord Tanu’s battalions. Meshian javelin men darted forward between our lines, hurling their spears at our enemy. Javelins in hundreds struck deep into wooden shields with a great thucking sound. As our lines drew even closer to the massed phalanxes, warriors in our front ranks loosed spears of their own; almost all found their marks in the long shields that covered the Sakayans’ bodies.

  ‘Death to the Valari! Let the Dragon burn the Valari!’

  Then, from Lord Tomavar’s fourth battalion, one of my warriors let loose a cry of alarm. He stood some thirty yards ahead of me, and although I could see only the side of his stricken face, I felt sure his name was Garadan of Lashku. Sar Garadan thrust his spear into the air in the direction of Morjin’s army, and he cried out, ‘A dragon! A dragon has come to earth!’

  I turned to gaze up toward the great, looming rocks of the Detheshaloon. So did ten thousand of my men. A black spot above the massif blotted out a tiny bit of blue in the sky. In only moments, however, it grew larger as it flew straight toward us like a flock of crows. But the thing that loosed a terrible cry into the air like a crack of thunder could be no bird nor bat, nor any other of the world’s flying creatures, for it was not of the earth.

  ‘A dragon!’ hundreds of my warriors cried out. ‘A dragon is come!’

  Now I knew what dread thing Atara had warned me of.

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram muttered, pointing out and up.

  Just before my army closed with our enemy, the dragon – for such it truly was – bellowed out again. I could now see it clearly as it streaked closer, beating the air in quick whumphs with its leathery wings. It must be nearly forty feet, I thought, from its iron-like snout to the knotted tip of its tail. Red-black scales covered every inch of its massive body; its great, golden eyes gazed out with what seemed a desire to burn and rend. A long, sinuous neck turned its huge head right and then left as if the dragon was searching for something.

  ‘Yormungand!’ Maram suddenly cried out from beside me. ‘The dragon’s name is Yormungand!’

  His distress caused me to call for a halt. I stared at Maram in amazement. So did Kane, Lord Avijan, Lord Sharad, Joshu Kadar and the other Guardians closest to us.

  ‘But how do you know?’ I asked Maram.

  ‘Because I can feel his mind burning my mind!’ Maram told me. He shoved his long lance down into its holster, and with his free hand, he grabbed his head. ‘The dragon is looking for me!’

  ‘So,’ Kane growled out, staring up into the sky.

  In Argattha, Kane had destroyed the six dragon eggs that we had found in Morjin’s chambers. But Daj, I remembered, had warned us that Morjin kept seven eggs as an assurance that the dragon who had laid them would do as he commanded.

  ‘Morjin must have hatched Angraboda’s seventh egg,’ Maram said, sweating. And raised Yormungand, he added, on human flesh and an inhuman hate of Morjin’s enemies.

  ‘Yormungand wants revenge for his mother’s death,’ he told me. He glanced down at my sword, which I had struck through one of Angraboda’s weakened scales into her heart. ‘Yormungand is looking for you, too, Val.’

  Just then the dragon reached a space in the air above our lines. He opened his jaws to reveal rows of great pointed teeth, nearly a foot long. Then he coughed out a stream of a reddish liquid called relb. This thick, sticky substance burst into fire as it touched the air, and rained down upon the men of Lord Tomavar’s third battalion. Most got their shields up quickly, and so protected themselves from the worst of the dragon fire. But at least ten of them screamed out as if they had been drenched in boiling oil.

  ‘Yormungand,’ Kane said to me, ‘is looking for much more than revenge, Val. Dragons like to kill.’

  Then Yormungand suddenly dove down toward the ground with a thunderous beating of its wings. It fell on top of Lord Tomavar’s third battalion
with a crash that crushed men screaming to the earth. Other men tried to put their spears or swords into Yormungand, but their weapons broke against the dragon’s rock-hard scales. Then Yormungand savaged about, up and down the lines, snapping his jaws and crushing men’s heads between his teeth, pulping their faces with the knotted tip of his tail, stamping them and tearing at them with his claws – and breathing out a fire hot enough to melt steel.

  ‘Maram!’ I cried out. ‘You will not fight men with fire – but you must fight fire with fire!’

  Maram had already taken out his great red gelstei. But with the Guardians and other knights packed so closely about us, he had no clear line along which he might direct its flame at the dragon without also burning up our knights.

  ‘There!’ I cried out again. I pointed behind us at the little hill upon which Kane and I had stood talking the night before. ‘You must go up there! You must stand and fight!’

  ‘But the dragon will see me!’ Maram cried out.

  ‘He will see you in any case, once you loose your stone’s fire.’

  ‘Then maybe I shouldn’t! I never want to burn anything, ever again!’

  At that moment, Yormungand sprang off the ground and left a refuse of crushed and bloody bodies. He took to the air, even as hundreds of arrows loosed by our archers broke against his scales. With a great roar, he flew straight toward my knights and me. His golden eyes seemed to sear open the air. Then he dipped down his head and spat out a stream of flame that fell upon Sar Elkaru Barshan. Sar Elkaru cried out in agony as the burning relb spilled over his small shield and melted his face. I was not the only knight in my army to sport white plumes upon my helm. I noted that the white crane of the Barshans might look very much like the Elahads’ silver swan, especially to a young dragon not familiar with the insignia of the Valari.

  Then the dragon flew along my column of knights, closer to Maram and me.

  ‘Go!’ I said again, pointing at the hill. ‘It is your time, Maram.’

  Maram, sitting on his horse next to me, hesitated as he gazed up at the rapidly approaching dragon. He cried out, ‘Why? Why must I always do precisely what I don’t want to do?’

  He gripped his firestone in his sweating hands with such force that I feared he might bruise his own flesh. Then, with a great sigh, he raised up the gelstei. The crystal caught the rays of the sun; it flared to a deep and angry red, and a bolt of crimson fire streaked out of its point. This flame shot up through the air and scored the dragon’s bulging underbelly. It must have burned the dragon, if not pierced his scales altogether, for Yormungand let loose a great and hideous roar. I waited to see if Yormungand would now try to fall against Maram – and me. But Yormungand suddenly dipped down his wing, and veered off toward the right, back toward Morjin’s army and the rocks of the Detheshaloon.

  ‘He will return!’ Kane called out to Maram. ‘You’ve wounded him, I think, but like his mother, he will return.’

  Maram sighed again as he looked at me. I felt his essential fear give way to an immensely greater love of life. He couldn’t keep the tears from flooding his eyes, and neither could I.

  ‘Farewell, Val,’ he said to me. He tucked his firestone beneath his left arm as he held out his right hand to clasp mine. ‘As long as I remain near you, I’ll draw that damn dragon, won’t I?’

  Likewise, he bade Kane goodbye and clasped his hand, too.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ Maram told him, ‘stay by Val’s side.’

  He swallowed, twice, hard, and adjusted his helmet. He sat up straight on his horse, looking out at Lord Avijan and Sar Shivalad and all the Guardians watching him. And then he drew in a huge breath of air and bellowed out: ‘All right! I’ll go! And let that dragon beware! King Valamesh is right: in all the world, there is only one Maram Marshayk!’

  So saying, he wheeled his horse about and galloped off toward the little hill above the river. Soon – and ever after – it would be known as the Hill of Fire.

  A great clashing of spears against shields and men screaming alerted me that the lines of my army had finally come up against our enemy. There would be much more to this battle than fighting one dragon, no matter how deadly or terrible. At first, up and down the field for miles, my warriors engaged Morjin’s men carefully, and almost delicately, for it is no simple thing to go up against a phalanx. My javelin men kept coming forward through the loose Valari formations with fresh spears, and hurling them at our enemy. The javelins’ long, soft, iron heads embedded themselves in wood, and since they would bend before breaking, they could not easily be ripped free. Soon the shields of the soldiers in our enemy’s front ranks grew so heavy and cumbersome with javelins sticking out of them that they had to be cast down. Then the warriors in the front rank of Lord Tomavar’s and Lord Tanu’s battalions – and those of Kaash, Waas and Athar farther down the lines – went to work with their tharams and long spears, probing with great precision, stabbing them into our enemy’s faces or the weak points in their armor. It was a long, brutal business, for even as we Valari struck down one rank of our enemy, another moved forward to take its place. With men packed twenty ranks deep, I feared it would take hours to tear open our enemy’s phalanxes. Only then would my warriors rush into the great holes in the wall of metal before them with their kalamas. But once these long swords began flashing in the sun, the Red Dragon’s soldiers would fall like hacked barley stalks and begin fleeing in panic – so it had always been, and so I hoped it would now be.

  There were so many thousands, however, to cut down. And my men were too few, and I could feel them tiring beneath their weight of diamond and steel with every stab of their spears and chop of their tharams. I wondered how things went on our flanks, for the fog of battle had now closed in, and I could not see the Sarni warriors far out on the steppe to the east and west. How fared King Mohan in his charge against the Ikurians? Did he and his knights hold their own against the fierce horsemen of Sakai and keep Morjin from extending his lines so as to flank us? Did King Hadaru and his knights succeed in this task, on our west wing? It was hell, I thought, not knowing. And worse dreading the dragon’s return and having to imagine what other nightmares Morjin might unleash upon us. And worst of all, being compelled to ride forward into the center of the field to rescue Bemossed before all was lost.

  I led my knights to that place where Lord Tomavar’s first battalion faced the joint in the Sakayan and Hesperuk lines. Just to the west of Lord Tomavar’s warriors, Ymiru’s five hundred Ymaniri had gone to work trying to batter down the Hesperuk phalanx. I could not tell who fought more fiercely: the eight-foot tall Frost Giants, with their marvelous keshet armor and their fearsome borkors dripping blood and brains, or my own Meshians, now forcing cracks in the Hesperuk and Sakayan lines with all the fury of their slashing kalamas.

  ‘They will break!’ I called to Lord Avijan. ‘Our enemy must soon break!’

  ‘Let us hope that we don’t break first!’ he called back to me.

  To the west, I saw, the Hesperuk phalanx had now moved forward, pressing back the lines of Eannans, Alonians and Thalunes. Farther in that direction across the corpse-strewn steppe, King Waray’s Taroners fought desperately against the end third of the Hesperuk phalanx – and their elephants. These strange, savage beasts nearly struck a panic into my men. Valari warriors – and those of Alonia and Eanna – up and down the field, struggled to effect Kane’s counsel on how to contend with this new terror. Closer to us, in the lines of our enemy ahead of my massed knights, the Hesperuks brought to bear five more mountains of gray, raging flesh against Lord Tomavar’s men. Lord Tomavar sent forward archers shooting arrows at the elephants’ drivers, even as his javelin men hurled volleys of spears at the elephants’ vulnerable bellies and eyes. A few brave warriors rushed in close to the elephants to slash through the trunks with their kalamas.

  But the maddened elephants had stratagems of their own. They raged about the field, trumpeting ferociously, grabbing up men with their trunks and then dashing them to the
ground, knocking them over and stamping them to a bloody mess. One elephant – a great bull – rammed his sharpened tusk straight through Sar Nolwan’s neck, and so died Makarshan of Ki as well.

  Duty demanded that I wait and watch these massacres. That, too, was hell. Bemossed remained nailed to his cross on top of the hill just behind the Hesperuk and Sakayan phalanxes, and it seemed that every moment he grew weaker, even as the agonies of all the wounded and dying men and beasts across the battlefield flooded into me like waves of burning pitch. Kane counseled me to keep a grip on my sword and let all this incredible suffering pass through me and into it. But that was something like telling a man cast adrift at sea that he should drink the ocean to keep from drowning.

  ‘Be ready!’ Kane called out to me. He clasped hold of my arm and shook it, as if to pull me out of the cloud of pain nearly choking me. ‘It won’t be long!’

  After the elephants had been killed, the Ymaniri and the warriors of Lord Tomavar’s first battalion fell upon our enemy with renewed fervor. They drove like a wedge deep into the Hesperuk phalanx. One face of the wedge consisted of the great, white-furred Ymaniri swinging their borkors with wild abandon, splintering shields, caving in helms and pulverizing bone. On the other face, my Meshians’ kalamas whipped through the air in a brilliance of steel and blood. Their razor-sharp blades slashed through the Hesperuks’ bronze armor. I gritted my teeth against the sight of the hacked limbs and cleaved men falling to the reddened earth.

  Then, from the very point of the wedge, where Ymiru had met up with Lord Tomavar, I heard Ymiru’s great voice bellow out above the din of battle: ‘A hrole! For King Valamesh, let us make a hrole!’

  I could almost feel, however, the exhaustion burning into Ymiru’s great arm and body – and those of his men and Lord Tomavar’s. Lord Tomavar himself fought like a fury, cutting through one soldier’s chest, stabbing his kalama through the throat of another, and then ripping free his sword with a quick stroke to decapitate a Hesperuk lord. I sensed in him not only a fierce will toward victory but a desire to redeem himself for his wrongful pride in challenging me as king. But I did not know how much longer he or his men behind him could go on fighting this way.