Hugh Cook - The wizards and the warriors

Again he wheeled, to find a Melski driving at him with a sword. Alish parried. Their blades locked hilt to hilt. Face to face they struggled, close enough to kiss. Alish slammed his forehead into his enemy's face. The Melski reeled backwards. Alish chopped sword to ribs. Again. Again. Hack through, hack through.

His blade pulled free from the bloody shatter of ribs and arced up for the throat. Something struck him on the back of the head. He fell.

Alish saw water snatch his sword. Then he embraced the cold shock of water. Chain mail jerked him down. Briefly, he glimpsed his blade, a thin thread of blood wisping away as it twirled down into the depths.

In slow motion, he struggled with the chain mail, as one may struggle with a monster in dreams. Pressure hurt his ears. His struggles snapped the thin gold round his neck, which fell away, bearing the red charm down into the depths. Then the jerkin came free. Alish rose, feet kicking slow and clumsy in his waterlogged boots.

Looking up, he saw a raft just above him. Contact! Volumes of green slime broke free and filtered away as he clawed along the underside of the raft. He surfaced, gasped air. A Melski glanced down in surprise, then stamped on his face.

Alish went down. Under, under. He looked around the shadow-green underwater world. In the depths, a wounded Melski turned slow, bloody circles towards darkness as it tried to swim away from agony. Bright surface was the sun. Smudged green shadows were the rafts. Alish swam, then surfaced.

He threw back his head and engulfed an ocean of air.

A small frightened Melski, perching on the edge of a raft, threatened him with a knife. The knife was pitted with rust. There were dried fish scales on the blade.

'Muur!' said the Melski.

Alish screamed at it. The Melski dived in panic.

Alish pulled himself from the water, still gasping in buckets of air. The combs which had held his long black hair in place were lost: his hair fell free. He wiped it out of his face.

Alish snatched up the first weapon he saw – a Melski club – and stood in the sunlight, blinking and gasping. He coughed. The sun was a slash of light in the blue sky. Clouds boiled in the wind. He glanced around and was dazzled by the sunlight on the water. Men, shouting, were plunging from raft to raft, but where were the Melski? Some – little ones – sat in shock, rocking from side to side, moaning. Elsewhere there was still some fighting, but here it was over.

Many of the cabins were burning where cooking fires had been scattered from their foundations of sand and rocks. Smoke streamed across the rafts, driven by the wind, confusing everything. There was fighting somewhere in the smoke. Alish could hear shouts, screams, the thump of boots, the whirr of arrows, the groans of the wounded. He heard the quick crackle of flames sprinting through bamboo cabins, occasional explosions as joints of bamboo heated up then burst.

The Melski club felt heavy in his hand. He dropped it. He saw a sword, but did not pick it up. Ethlite was gone, Ethlite, Ethlite, his sword, his lover, snatched by the river, drowned too deep to dive for.

The weariness that came over him then was sudden and absolute. Without looking any more at the flames and the smoke, without listening any more to the fighting, he started walking back toward the shore. Rafts rocked underfoot as he stepped from one to the other. Some water moved inside his left ear; he shook his head to try and get rid of it. His nose was bleeding. The wind knifing through his wet clothes felt cold.

Alish passed a few of the men who had already begun to plunder the dead. They had all been fighting: they were all hot, red-faced and sweating still. Most were bloodstained; a couple were wounded, but only lightly. Water squelched in Alish's boots as he walked.

On the shore, the two wizards of the order of Arl, Phyphor and Garash, stood watching the battle with detached interest.

'Alish!' said Phyphor. 'That was well done. That was very well done.'

Alish ignored him, and walked past without answering. Wizards! This slaughter was all their fault. A plague on all your houses, then, if you have houses.

In the camp site were the dismembered remains of a few Melski children; one body had fallen into a fire and was charring with a foul stench. Alish threw himself to the ground, threw himself to the earth, wet though he was. He was the leader, and to collapse was not one of his privileges, but he collapsed all the same. He would have wept, except he was too proud to weep, ever.

In the evening, they set off down the river. That night they heard Melski in the water, exchanging recognition signals. Alish feared an attack, but none came: the Melski seemed content to drift downstream with the rafts. When dawn came, there were none to be seen in the water – but soon afterwards, the leading raft saw one asleep on a rock. It woke, and dived into the water, and the current carried it away.

Alish feared the Melski might go downstream ahead of the rafts to organise an ambush. The river banks were growing progressively steeper: soon it would be possible to drop rocks from above.

He also worried about Hearst, who sat apart, brooding. Why? Because he had failed to help Blackwood's Melski friends? Because Alish had lied to him? Or because he had missed the battle?

Whatever the problem, Alish hoped Hearst would not do anything reckless – he did not wish to have to kill the best warrior in his command. However, if it did come to a confrontation, there was no doubt who would win: they had matched blades in practice often enough to know that Elkor Alish was by far the better swordsman.

Another who worried about Hearst was Durnwold, who valued the Rovac warrior above all because he had shown that the world could dispense with the governance of the Favoured Blood. The common wisdom throughout the continent of Argan was that the world would collapse in chaos without the guidance of its traditional rulers, but Hearst had proved that a common warrior could be both wiser and stronger than a prince. When Comedo had grovelled in helpless fear as the Collosnon attacked, Morgan Hearst had dared the lopsloss, secured the mad-jewels – and had then gained victory for Alish by using his judgment and opening the lead box holding the mad-jewels.

However, one man cared nothing for Hearst, and that was Blackwood, who believed that Hearst had conspired with Alish to get him out of the way so the attack on the Melski could proceed without possibility of betrayal. As survivors of the court intrigues of Chi'ash-lan, about which they sometimes told outrageous stories of treachery and deceit, the Rovac were entirely capable of such a stratagem, and Blackwood knew it.

Hearst, for his part, was brooding on the distance separating him from Alish. It had come as a shock to know that he had been excluded from the secret councils which had decided to use a mad-jewel to stand sentry at Castle Vaunting, but now Alish had deceived him, had in fact told him a direct lie – and that was something entirely different again.

Hearst had blurred memories of an argument in Castle Vaunting. He had been drunk at the time, but he thought he vaguely remembered Alish threatening to kill him. Had that really happened? And if Alish had really said that, had he really meant it? Was it possible that they might one day match steel against steel, with lethal intent?

No. That was impossible.

In the Cold West, they had been inseparable. They had shared the same tent, and sometimes the same woman… and then… and then everything had changed…

As the rafts drifted at leisure down the river, Alish completed a commander's rounds by trying to make peace with Blackwood. He had little success.