Alan Akers - A Life for Kregen

Two fliers landed in our rear, cutting off a flight back the way we had come. Cleitar had the flag furled and stowed away now, and his hammer glittered as he lifted it. Nath Nazabhan drew his clanxer and called across to me, “Ride, majister — there is an alley mouth there-”

I looked at him.

“Well,” he said, huffily, swirling the straight cut and thrust sword about, loosening up his muscles. “It was just an idea.”

We numbered about twenty or so, bright rollicking companions of my choice band. We faced about four times our own numbers. Well. Yes, a situation in which I had found myself more than once, and usually through my own block-headedness. I lifted in the stirrups. I’d gone out for a breath of fresh air. I was like, and my companions also, to taste blood as well as air. And the air we tasted might well be let in through our ribs.

“Straight through them!” I bellowed. “Slap bang and no tickles. No man stands for handstrokes. Ride like the agate-winged jutmen of Hodan-Set!”

We clapped in our heels and in a rampaging bunch roared into the forming ranks of our Chulik foemen.

Oh, yes, they were Chuliks all right. Ferocious, yellow-skinned fighting men with ugly three-inch long tusks jutting cruelly up from the corners of their mouths. This bunch was as well-trained in the martial arts as any Chulik mercenary band on Kregen. Reared from their earliest infancy to the bearing of arms, trained to be cold and merciless killers, Chuliks can handle any variety of weaponry they need, and in that heartless and iron-hard discipline they had forgotten if ever they had known the softer virtues of humanity.

They are loyal mercenaries if they are paid and fed. They command higher fees than most, excepting Pachaks and Khibils and a few other, not many, of the vast variety of splendid humans on Kregen. They have always been and continue to be formidable opponents.

But my choice band recked nothing of that. Yelling and cursing they clapped in their heels and went racketing down.

The Chuliks with their oily yellow skins and long dangling pigtails from their shaven heads formed a line swiftly. Their faces remained blank and impassive. They knew exactly what they were doing and they did it well.

Their uniforms were simple tunics of brown cloth over which they wore armor of a scaled form, bronze-studded, highly barbaric and flaunting their power. Their helmets bore black and green feathers, but shorn short, workmanlike, a badge of identity clamping each tuft in place. Black and green. Well, they were colors I knew Yantong had used at least once, and so by their use now he seemed to be openly proclaiming his power and contempt for me.

Truth to tell, in that hectic moment as we belted along, I wondered if we would have done better for Cleitar to let Old Superb float free, a ringing challenge to the power confronting us. But that way lay the hubris, the megalomania, the self-importance I detest so much. I had sworn, as I was called to be Emperor of Vallia, that I would do a good sound workmanlike job. Pride is for the vainglorious, in excess, and its unbounded license has caused great sorrow in two worlds. And then we were among them and Cleitar’s hammer lifted dripping crimson, and so that answered that question.

At my back Korero the Shield bore a single targe, a small parade ornament, but with its yellow and scarlet traceries he fended a sweeping blow and lashed back with the blade gripped in his tail hand. Ferocious, Korero the Shield, a Kildoi whose four arms and handed tail both protect and devastate. With a jolt and a crack we overbore the first line.

Chuliks sagged back — and when a Chulik sags he is either dead or dying. The zorcas responded nobly as only those superb four-spindly-legged steeds can, all fire and spirit. Never meant for the charge, they flowed on and over in a fleetness of rhythm that bore us on and up. Like hunters at chase we cleared the first line and slammed into the second. But the Chuliks were ready, well-knowing the business of tackling a zorca-charge. Their weapons glittered. We sliced and drew our blades reeking in crimson as we leaped ahead. But the fray thickened and grew denser and Largo the Astorka was down, a spear through his throat. We yelled and swirled our blades and pressed on. But our progress slackened. The impetus of the charge dwindled.

The noise bellowed up, echoing in rolling confusion under the Gate of Voxyri. Volodu put three distinct dents into his massive silver trumpet, and each time burst out with genuine anguish at that desecration. But three Chuliks dropped as though the trumpet had been a poleaxe.

The third line of yellow-tuskers swayed, and men went down. But they held us. The zorcas drew back, pirouetting from a hedge of steel. Furiously I bellowed it out.

“Reform! Break out over the Bridge!”

We swung the zorcas about, their nimble hooves clicking on the cobbles where blood ran between the time-worn stones. The Chuliks back there were unlimbering crossbows, and this made me frown.

“Heads down!” I yelled and clapped in my heels and Snowy surged on, picking up speed, elegantly avoiding tumbled bodies.

The bolts would have had us but for the Gate. The trajectory intersected the masonry and the bolts chinked and tumbled like chicks disturbed in the nest. In the next mur we were out in the sunshine again and bearing down on the men from the two guarding fliers. It was all nip and tuck. Korero surged ahead, despite my yell, and his little yellow and red shield whipped up.

I urged Snowy to greater efforts. In a bunch we crashed out and the Chuliks rose to meet us. Naghan Cwonin’s lance tip was a clotted red mass. He lowered that steel wedge of death and then he was hurled back off his saddle, trailing blood, yelling, a stux clear through him. The Chulik who had hurled that spear did not hurl another, for a streaking dagger crossed the narrowing space and chinked in most neatly over the brass-coiled rim of his corselet.

That Chulik bore a golden image of a grascent on his breast, suspended by golden chains around his neck. The dagger protruded above the golden image of the risslaca for a heart beat, and then the Chulik walked forward, as a dead man walks, blindly, walked forward three paces, four, and almost a fifth before he tumbled under the hooves of the zorcas.

The weapons flamed. The Suns beat down. The dust lifted. And the blood spurted. The pandemonium was, for a brief moment, akin to the last dying scenes in a sinking ship where the crew panic. Blades clashed. Korero’s shield split asunder and he used the half in his hand to dash a Chulik away. But another leaped for him, his yellow tusks dripping, and my clanxer only just swept down in time in a precision-controlled arc that kissed death across a corded neck.

“My thanks, majister-”

“There’s another devil, Korero-”

“Your back, Nath!”

“On, on!”

The shouts racketed as we forced our way on. And then we were through. Before us stretched the Bridge of Voxyri, and the open plain with the distant lines of men coming on swiftly. We could have ridden on. We might simply have nudged the zorcas to a further effort and ridden away. But, as one man — as one man — we turned.

We turned back, raging, and tore once again into those murderous Chuliks and their yellow tusks and their ferocious military skills.

The mellow stone of the Bridge and the Gate, the coolness of blue shadows and the piercing brilliance of the suns light, the clatter of hooves, a distinctive, brittle, rousing sound, the pants of men in combat and the yells of the wounded, the stink of rawly spilled blood — yes, yes, it struck responsive chords in me. But until we were done with scenes of this ugliness Vallia would never be the peaceful country we all intended her to be.