Allies of Antares (23 page)
“Ever since the day I took a forkful of dungy straw.”
“Ha!”
It would be absolutely superfluous to point out that as we rode down we were each perfectly prepared to give our lives for the other...
“They’re moving about down there, Dray.”
“Like the proverbial ant’s nest stirred by a stick.”
The masses of infantry looked like blocks of multicolored glitter. Cavalry rode out along the wings. The artillery, mainly varters with a few catapults, were lined up ready to swathe in a sleeting discharge of stones and bolts. As archery and ballistae do not fire, but loose or shoot, one cannot really speak of firepower in reference to a Kregan army. The Kregish word is dustrectium. Their dustrectium down there was formidable. We rode on. Every now and then Seg turned in the saddle to glance back. Presently he grunted, and dropped back into the saddle, looking ahead.
“ESW is moving.”
“Then EYJ will be with them.”
“Aye. Their rivalry is a bracing experience.”
“And just what is that rast Garnath thinking, watching two lone riders come trotting down? We have no flag of truce.”
“He’s cunning enough to hear what we have to say.”
“As to that, Seg, you are right. He knows he is trapped. He’ll listen to us.”
Seg looked back. “ESW and EYJ are following us, and are picking up speed. I must say they look a frightening bunch.”
No need for me to look back. I could imagine what the regiments of my guard looked like, a dark solid mass of zorcamen with a froth of steel, proud with banners, riding knee to knee, or riding knee tucked behind knee in the nik-vove regiments.
Seg said, “Garnath’s army will think we’re attacking them. For sure.”
“You’re right, Seg.” I patted Snuffle-nose’s neck. His spiral single horn cut the air as he nodded. “That could be inconvenient.”
“Inconvenient! It could get us both killed.”
“You’re right, Seg. Well, you’ll just have to ride back and stop them. Explain the situation. You carry the weight of authority, and you can quote what I’ll do to the lads if they don’t obey orders.”
Seg’s furious bellow made me laugh out loud.
“You cunning, deceiving devil! You planned this! That’s why you didn’t send word for the Sword Watch and the Yellow Jackets to stand fast!”
“It crossed my mind.”
Seg was fuming. “And EDLG are in it, now. You can’t expect a fellow like Nath Karidge not to ride after his emperor, can you?”
“Well — my old dom — you ride back and stop ’em.”
“Dray, Dray! If we get out of this I’ll—”
I nudged Snuffle-nose into a canter. As we went off down the hill I bellowed back at Seg. “I’ll see you as soon as Garnath and Telmont move toward the coast. We have Shanks to deal with.”
Seg’s answer was partially muffled in the stamp of zorca hooves. But words like cunning and devious and ungrateful figured prominently. But he saw that if we didn’t stop the Guard, the enemy would shoot first and not bother to ask questions.
The moment two squadrons of zorcamen rode out from the enemy ranks I knew Seg had stopped the Guard. No doubt the air was a livid blue above the ranks of my lads. The oncoming zorcamen rode with weapons ready. They closed up about me and I shouted: “King Telmont and Vad Garnath! I must speak with them — now!”
A fellow with the insignia of a Jiktar started to bellow his authority, and I cut him to the quick with a few words. I finished: “There is no time to waste, dom. Shanks. D’you understand?
Shanks
!”
The dread name worked like a passport and I was surrounded and we rode rapidly for the slight eminence on the valley floor where Garnath had set up his headquarters.
King Telmont was just as I had seen him last, a figure to be stared at in all its imposing majesty and then forgotten as the
eminence grise,
this Garnath, imposed his will. He was much as I remembered him, and I forced all that old unhappy history out of my head. If the Shanks established a foothold in Havilfar they would spread out and subdue everyone. This was all too clear.
Garnath ham Hestan, Vad of Middle Nalem, ought to have answered for his crimes seasons ago; that he had not I had to attribute to the protection afforded him by Phu-si-Yantong’s sorcerous powers. Well, that particular Wizard of Loh was now dead. It remained to be seen how long Garnath would remain alive.
The odd thing was — difficult though it had been for me to keep silence with Rees and Chido, instead of doing as I longed to do and roar up to them, bellowing greetings, to keep silence before this yetch Garnath was even more difficult. I wanted to let him know who I was, and tell him a few home truths.
That I’d be fighting for my life in the instant thereafter would have been merely a normal occurrence.
Instead, I stared at him with all the powerful look that emperors can bring to bear.
He wore a gilded armor that ill became him. His short military cape was of green and blue; but he wore a sash of brown and silver, the colors of Lem the Silver Leem, that foul cult that many decent men were pledged to exterminate. His thick face shone with sweat trapped in the creases. His dark combed hair glittered with brilliants. His fingers were not as white, perhaps, as once they had been; but now every finger wore a jeweled ring. He looked at once bloated, ridiculous and obscene.
I said, “Shanks. We must march—”
He cut me off. His face congested.
“Yetch! You speak with propriety to me! Who are you?”
“You may call me Jak the Nose.”
He might imagine this referred to my own beak of a nose; in fact it was an oblique reference to the Bladesman’s duel we had fought, when Garnath had drugged me and I’d managed to summon the Disciplines of the Krozairs of Zy to my aid, and so claim first blood, and force his yetch to grovel on his nose. That, of course, was before I’d encountered Mefto the Kazzur...
“Then, Jak the Nose, you stand in peril of your life.”
“As do you of yours. You know you are trapped. Your army is doomed. The Emperor of Hamal offers you the chance of fighting for your country against Shanks—”
“I am the Emperor of Hamal!” said Telmont, starting forward.
“I crave your silence for a moment, king.” Garnath spoke without looking at Telmont, his gaze fastened on me. He spoke almost unthinkingly, like one accustomed to rote words that achieve a desired end.
“Yes, but Shanks—”
“Majister!”
Telmont turned away, brilliant of color, smothered in jewels and feathers and fur trimmings, blinding of aspect in the lights of the suns. I quelled an instinctive feeling of pity for him. Time allowed thought for only one aim.
“We must move against the Shanks, all of us, your army, my — the emperor’s — army.” I stared hard at Garnath, knowing he would never remember Hamun ham Farthytu in connection with this unpleasant Jak the Nose. “You must know what the Shanks will do.”
Telmont huffed up to speak again, but Garnath waved a hand, and Telmont subsided.
“Why should I throw away what we have fought for? Your army is quitting the field. Look!”
A single glance back up the hillside showed the blocks of color thinning and elongating as the regiments formed columns and marched away over the brow of the hill.
“Aye! They march to fight the Leem-Lovers! Will you?”
“Hamal lies in my grasp now. In King Telmont’s grasp who is, or will soon be, emperor.”
Among the gilded retinue surrounding the chiefs on this slight eminence of the valley floor stood many Katakis. Ranked in the background, waiting, the lines of the King’s Ironfists showed the dull gleam of iron and the wink of steel. They would prove first-class opponents. And, looking about, one hand holding Snuffle-nose’s reins, I saw no sign of Strom Rosil, the Kataki Strom. No doubt he was with a part of the army, his skills as a soldier being used to the full, for he had been promoted from Chuktar to Kapt, and now was no longer the Chuktar Strom but the Kapt Strom. The damned Kataki Strom, rast of a Whiptail, was the better description.
Despicable of character and unpleasant of personality though Vad Garnath was acknowledged to be, it still seemed to me impossible for a Hamalese not to answer the call to defend his country against the raiding Shtarkins, the Shants or Shanks. Even though Garnath professed in secret the cult of Lem the Silver Leem, still I could not see him refusing to answer his call.
“Will you give the order to march, vad? Now!”
“The Shanks have drawn both your armies off and given me the chance to strike. How can I refuse what the gods proffer?”
“You are a dead man—”
He preened, the sweat thick in the creases on his face.
“I have been reported dead more than once. And the reports have been believed. But here I am, and ready to march — on Ruathytu!”
I said, “I do not think even your Whiptails would obey that order now.”
A harsh-faced Chulik, whose yellow-ribboned pigtail was wound around his shaven head ready for him to don his helmet, spoke up. His tusks, which indented the corners of his thin lips, were banded in gold and silver, and studded with gems. He said, “With your permission to speak, Vad Garnath. My men will fight Shanks.”
They’d been raided, had these mercenary Chuliks, in their own homelands. Shanks didn’t share the usual awe of Chuliks.
There were no Pachaks I could see among those surrounding Garnath and Telmont. A group of Khibil officers, foxy faces alert, indicated their willingness to fight Shanks. A Rapa Chuktar riffled his feathers, and his beaked face betrayed a vulturine appetite for blood as he promised to rip out the tripes of any Shanks that came the way of his regiments.
Garnath’s conquested face swung from man to man, and his jaw stuck out in a fashion I saw with wonder was more petulant than grim. The situation was slipping away from him, and he could not grasp that.
A ferret-faced, gimlet-eyed Lliptoh wearing mesh armor and many feathers put one hand to a sword hilt. “As they say in the Risslaca Hork in Balintol, where I come from: ‘This is the day of the Seeking After Truth.’ I am a hyr-paktun and I wear the pakzhan and I will march against the Shanks, for they are enemies to every man.”
This expressed the feelings of the officers gathered here. Looking about, I fancied they might be relieved that they did not have to fight in a battle they were bound to lose; any combat with Shanks was far worse than fighting against fellow men as the Shanks were vindictive slaughterers. These fellows were stepping out of the frying pan into the fire, and knew it — and as I saw with joy — welcomed it.
Garnath’s fury began to shake him with frightening passion.
He shared the view of the generality of people that all paktuns were merely hirelings, paid to kill, devoid of feelings. That they were not was being revealed to him now.
King Telmont stepped forward again. He wet his lips. He was a man obsessed with rank and position and the baubles and symbols that went with the trappings of power. He was the diametric opposite of an
eminence grise.
“You say your name is Jak the Nose. Yet you are clearly a person of position, of rank.”
Garnath looked about and white showed in his eyes.
“I am skilled in war and I know what is happening. This is a trap! Nedfar’s army pretends to march off, to lure us on. It is a trick—”
“You are a fool, Garnath,” I said, and I own much of my feelings for this man rasped in my voice. “There would be no need for tricks and traps if Nedfar wished to crush you. As he will, as he will. Your army was doomed. Your men know it, but they have been hired to fight, and so would have fought enough to earn their money, before throwing down their arms. We march to fight the Shanks. There lies a battlefield where men may stand forth to a sterner test.”
He frothed and leaped for me.
I backhanded him away.
Telmont looked agitated and the Chuktar of the Ironfists stepped up, flushed, bulky, aggressive and completely at sea now.
“King Telmont. You are a man of honor. Start your army toward the coast. Together we will smash the Shanks back into the sea.” My words battered at his indecision.
He wouldn’t change in a flash, as they say. He was still old Hot and Cold. But he could see what his assembled officers thought. So, I thought to add a little spice. As I mounted up on Snufflenose, I looked around the gathered warriors.
“If any paktun wishes to leave his hire in honor, there is a place for him in the emperor’s army that marches to fight the Leem-Lovers.”
With that, I cantered off.
Mind you, I would not have been surprised had a crossbow bolt buried itself between my shoulder blades.
We Fight for Paz
There was no doubt whatsoever in anyone’s mind that this was the most important battle we had ever fought.
There would be other even more important battles in the future if we won this day. If we lost — well, there would be no more of anything quite apart from battles.
From the strength of the Shanks ranged before us the inescapable conclusion had to be drawn that they had at last made the move we had for so long anticipated and dreaded. Their sporadic raiding had turned into a full-scale invasion.
Tyfar pulled his nose as we sat our zorcas, looking out over the host. “Why pick on Hamal? Why now?”
“I would have thought,” said Nedfar, “that Hyrklana would be easier for them.”
Seg glanced across at me and then said, “It is believed that the Shanks are in communication with — persons — in our lands; where, we do not know. They have been told that Hamal was in turmoil and easy pickings. Hyrklana now has a strong king and is ready once again. The Leem-Lovers would not have known that Hamal now has a strong emperor.”
Nedfar’s face did not change; but Seg’s words came out as he said them, unaffected, making the point, and I saw that Nedfar was pleased.
From the ranks of fighting men a steady hum rose. Everything was going forward quietly and easily. There was time for the imposition of strict silence, although, to be sure, many of Kregen’s fighting men do not expect to remain in a disciplined silence during the preliminaries to battle. From a slight eminence where a ruined temple showed splintered walls and fallen columns, the view was breathtaking. Between the sea, a steely bar flecked with light, and the ruins, revealed two armies. The Shanks had offered battle and we had accepted, marching up in good order, and now we and the Fish-heads glared at one another across a sandy waste fringed by the sea and gorse-clad slopes.