Witches of Kregen (3 page)
In that quiet way of his, Seg Segutorio glanced across as he reached out for the first shaft from his quiver, and said: “I’ll fight alongside you, Turko.”
I nodded. The arrangement was sensible.
Turko contented himself with: “Aye, Seg. It is a pity Nath didn’t hang onto that shield.”
Just that, a pity. We looked as though we might be entering on the last great fight. If we were, if we were all to die here, well, I couldn’t hope to go down to the Ice Floes of Sicce in the company of finer comrades.
The oncoming flutsmen spread out into individual dots. The dots sprouted wings and became fluttrells, and the riders on their backs, brandishing their weapons, became men.
There were more nearly three hundred of them.
We set ourselves and grasped our own swords and spears. Seg lifted his bow.
Streaming their flying silks and furs, their standards fluttering in the breeze, their armor and weapons a blaze of glitter in the radiance of the Suns of Scorpio, the flutsmen swooped upon us.
Concerning feet caught in stirrups
Seg shot. As always, he shot superbly. Four shafts spat from his bow, rose-feathered slivers of death. Four flutsmen screeched and toppled to hang from their harness, the clerketers strapped about them, their weapons falling away beneath.
The birds’ wingbeats thrashed the air. Dust spumed. Some flutsmen circled, trying to shoot with their crossbows into the confusion. Some of my lads fell.
The majority of these aerial bandits, seeing the great preponderance of numbers on their side, just landed their fluttrells and jumped off ready to fight.
I, Dray Prescot, was not prepared to let any foeman, particularly not these unhanged rasts of the air, dictate the tactics of a fight. They might land and hop off their birds and prepare themselves to chop us up. Nath might very well have placed our lads in defensive positions, the proper course at the beginning when we expected to be shafted. Now, though, the situation was different...
There is something revolting about the easy, leisurely way some people prepare to kill others. This is nothing to do with the careful preparations that must be made, for killing is an arduous task, and not one to be undertaken lightly. No, I mean in these flutsmen you could almost see them licking their lips as they dismounted and drew their weapons for ground work and so, settling themselves, decided at last to advance and finish toying with us, ending their pleasurable anticipation for the real thing.
Well, they’d get no time allowed by me, no, by the stinking eyeballs and suppurating nostrils of Makki Grodno!
“Form!” I screeched it out, hard and high. Nath jerked as though I’d goosed him. “Form line, two ranks deep.
Bratch!
”
The lads here, many of my bodyguard corps, many from the Phalanx, were what one could call elite quality.
They bratched. They formed a two-deep line. I had no time to think of the panache of it, of the show-off I must appear. I leaped to front and center, yelling words like “Vallia! Charge! Get stuck into ’em!”
With a whooping yell we simply rushed pell-mell on the bunch of flutsmen as they were in the process of dismounting and thinking pleasant thoughts about carving us up.
They had not expected this reaction.
They were not panicked. Oh, no, flutsmen were not riff-raff. They partitioned off the sky to their own nefarious ends, and whenever we came across them we put them down. But they would not run away just because we charged them.
They usually had the pickings of fine weapons. Their crossbows could have been deadly; but I had had long experience of flutsmen and knew that once the crossbow was discharged the fighting fever of the fellow astride his fluttrell wouldn’t allow him time or patience to reload. This was a common tactic with them, as I knew. And here and now most of them had just landed to fight. Their weaponry would be the usual mix of sword and spear. Some would have shields. As you know, the shield was still, at this date, an innovation in Vallia. These flutsmen might hail from Havilfar — almost certainly — and so would know and use the shield, although many an aerial bandit couldn’t be bothered with the flying discipline required to handle a shield aloft.
As for us, well, the new sword we had designed and built in Valka, called the drexer, had proved itself in battle. The drexer now equipped most of our regiments. As for me, well, it is true to say that almost anyone of Vallia who walks abroad without a rapier and main gauche feels naked. In this coming dust-up I’d use my drexer, like the lads.
And — the lack of shields would serve to remind them of earlier days, before a maniac called Dray Prescot had turned up in Vallia — to marry their princess! — and inter alia to foist upon them the coward’s weapon — the shield.
The Suns of Scorpio shone upon the scene, a little breeze blew, the dust spumed up under the stomp of impatient feet, the smell of sweat and oiled leather, the sting of dust in eye, the slick of it along tongue and lip —well, well... A fight is a fight...
“Don’t bother about dressing!” I screeched the words back over my shoulder. “Fast! Get into ’em!” And then, because I felt the occasion warranted the use of the great words, I bellowed out: “Hai Jikai!”
The lads responded. They rushed on, the beat of their boots loud upon the earth. They yelled.
“Hai Jikai! Vallia! The emperor! Dray Prescot! Hai Jikai!”
It was all a bedlam and rush and tumult. And then, the evil flicker and tinker-hammering of swords...
No, the flutsmen didn’t run away when we so unexpectedly charged slap-bang into them as they dismounted. But they were caught, as it were, with one foot in the stirrup.
In that first mad rush I swear each one of our lads dispatched at least one of the thieving bastards to the Ice Floes of Sicce.
The fight spread out, for saddle birds take up a lot of space when they flutter their wings and land. This was where trouble could hit us. If some of us were caught out of formation, straggling, chasing after the foemen, they could be cut down before we could come up with them again. The birds did not like the uproar going on about them. Some incontinently flapped up into the air again. Those that had been quickly stalked down slashed their wings about and struck here and there with their beaks, so that we gave them all very wide berths. The fight settled down to a slogging match in which, I fancied, my lads would have the upper hand.
In a tiny segment in that scarlet rush of madness, Seg, hardly panting, his handsome face hard-set, brought his man down and then turned, panther-swift, for the next. Him, I dispatched. Seg nodded.
“They didn’t know what hit ’em. Dray.”
We glared about between the birds, seeing the clumping as the fighting raged.
“They picked the wrong target today, that’s for sure.”
A flutsman flew through the air toward us.
Nothing unusual in that? Wrong. He was flying without his saddle bird. He turned over twice and came down on his back with such a thump as must have broken his spine into smithereens. Turko smiled.
“They are not enjoying themselves.”
The implications were obvious.
Seg laughed and then started off, sword poised, to where two flutsmen were chasing one of our lads around a bird. Seg was brief and to the point. The soldier — he was a brumbyte — didn’t bother to gasp out thanks but went charging off to where a group of his comrades battled equal numbers. Seg let him go and strolled back to Turko and me.
“Seen Nath?”
“No.”
The area was now a maelstrom of dust, wings, the flicker of steel, and the phantom shapes of running bodies. Just how the day was going was, for the moment, impossible to tell. Seg and Turko were sublimely confident that the flutsmen would soon have had enough and would fly off.
“They don’t like taking casualties,” I said. “That is true. They like easy pickings.”
“May a green-fanged demon from Ledrik’s Nether Hell take ’emall.” Turko swung his arms and glared balefully about. Dust swirled about us and the fluttrell’s noise and confusion gave the whole fight an unreal air, as though we fought in a nether bird-hell of our own.
Three more flutsmen ran at us and were summarily dispatched where they belonged. Although, to be honest, there are some flutsmen who aspire above the generality of their calling, some I have known I have even called friend. Sometimes a fellow is swept up by fate into a life not of his choosing. Well, by Zair, hadn’t I been dragged up by the scruff of the neck from Earth, four hundred light years away, to be dumped down all naked and unarmed on Kregen to make my own way?
“That’s interesting,” observed Seg.
Half a dozen of our men who by their neat and tightly fitting uniforms were flyers from Valka were busily at work. As it were, with one hand they fended off flutsmen and with the other made sure the fluttrells were securely chained down to their stakes.
“My lads of Valka,” I said, with what I admit to being a comfortable feeling, “are indeed great scallywags and rogues and terribly fierce fighting men; they also, thanks be, have an eye to turning an honest profit.”
Mind you, no flyer of Valka, trained up by my Djangs to fly a flutduin, would change that superb saddle flyer for a fluttrell. Not in a million months of the Maiden with the Many Smiles!
Just how much longer the fight would have gone on must remain conjectural. Certainly, in the dust and confusion the flutsmen had lost all idea of thrashing us and taking the spoils. Our resistance — indeed, our sudden and overwhelming attack — had knocked them back on their heels with a surprise from which they did not recover. They fought; but increasingly they sought to escape.
Then our flutduins descended on them.
After that it was a mere matter of rounding up those who would be rounded up and seeing off those who would not. When that was going on strong, parties of my lads of 1ESW and 1EYJ ran up, more in anger than sorrow that they had missed most of the fight.
The men of the Emperor’s Sword Watch and of the Emperor’s Yellow Jackets, sworn to protect the life of the Emperor of Vallia and his family, do not take lightly the discharge of their duties. They were very thorough in their rounding up of flutsmen, severe in their chastisement.
One flutsman, green in the face and with an arm and a leg missing, from which he was dying, stared up with eyes that would soon glaze over. He saw us pass by.
“By Barflut the Razor Feathered,” he got out. “I wish I’d never taken the gold from Layco Jhansi.”
I bent to him.
“Think of Layco Jhansi when the Grey Ones meet you and you wander through the mists of the Ice Floes of Sicce, dom.”
“I’ll remember, Hanitcha the Harrower take him. I’ll remember and curse his name.”
Seg glanced at me as I straightened up.
“A dratted Hamalese.”
“A renegade, evidently.”
Turko said, “There’s more to this. I wonder if they were out on a scavenging expedition on their own account?”
“Or are they scouting for the main force?” Seg looked up at the sky at this, instinctively, and his sinewy fingers curved around his bowstave.
Then, of course, the lads of my bodyguard corps arrived, as I have said, highly incensed. Korero the Shield, magnificent and golden, a Kildoi with four arms and a tail hand, swung his two enormous shields about as though they were saucers. I wondered if he and Turko might exchange a few words.
In the event Turko, who was, after all, now the Kov of Falinur, contented himself with a very politely-spoken: “You are welcome, Korero the Shield.”
And Korero contented himself with: “I am glad to see you, Kov Turko.” He put no heavy emphasis on the word kov. Of course, they could have been so fearfully polite just because I was there and in earshot. These two who had carried shields at my back in battle epitomized the way in which men and women strove to put their heroic bodies between men and the incoming shaft, the slashing blade. I sighed. I knew damn well I didn’t deserve such devotion. But, also, I fancied these two had come to an arrangement, one with the other, and each saw his duty ahead.
“Secure all here,” Nath went past, shouting. He saw me.
“Time we returned to the camp, I think.”
“You’re right. And what we’ll find does not amuse me.”
“By the Veiled Froyvil, my old dom, we’ll soon have the army to rights.”
“Aye,” said Nath na Kochwold in his grimmest voice.
I was not so sure.
If these confounded flutsmen
were
the advance patrol of an army, that army would find ours in parlous case, that seemed certain. We had no time to shilly-shally about.
Layco Jhansi, who had once been the old emperor’s chief pallan, virtually in charge of Vallia, had turned traitor. His schemes had backfired and he had been forced to flee to his estates in the northwest where he had set out on the road of conquest. He was ruthless. He’d had no hesitation in striking down Ashti Melekhi, one of his tools who had failed him.
Recently he had concluded a treaty of non-aggression with the Racters to the north of him so that he could concentrate all his efforts against Turko’s Falinur. If he was recruiting fresh mercenaries, even low-grade ones, to give a hard core to his army of crazies, we’d need every man and animal, every bird, every engine, to hold him and beat him back.
So, as we returned to the shattered camp of the Ninth Army, I began to seek out ways in my mind to draw fresh forces into the field to counter Jhansi’s schemes. The Empire of Vallia, of which I was hauled into being the emperor, was a rickety and ramshackle old construction these days. We ran on a knife edge. One mistake, one error of judgment, one lapse in our spirit of high resolve could let in the ravening monsters of destruction to tear down into ruin all that we strove for.
Of a few words to Kov Turko
The main beam of the catapult lay on the ground, the massive arm of laminated wood smashed through in two separate places. The rest of the engine looked as though a maddened giant had jumped up and down on it with hobnailed boots.
Seg brought across a bronze helmet. The crown was dented into a recurve in the shape of a frog. If any poor devil had been wearing that at the time...