“By Zair!” I shouted. And I was running, too, running like a fool over the planks of the bridge where arrows stood thickly, and taking my turn to grip the rope and so go hand over hand up like a monkey. Korero, with four arms and a tailhand, had no difficulty in swarming up the rope after me, carrying his shields and giving me an assist from time to time. We tumbled over the battlements into a scene of confusion.
Those two ranks had done their job, and there could not have been above fourteen men between the two sections, in jamming the winding mechanism of the bridge and of clambering up the stairs of the left-flank gate tower. They had been unable to prevent the closing of the gates. But their dropped rope gave us an alternative ingress.
The tower top blazed with action, as swords clashed and spears flew. The paktuns, a mixed bunch of diffs with Fristles predominating, fought savagely to hold us back from the battlements. Our way down the gate tower was blocked; but once along the ramparts we could expand. The way into the citadel would lie open. The garrison knew that and fought like leems to hurl us back over the walls to shattered destruction on the ground below.
Very few of our men had climbed the rope with their shields. Vallians still had not fully mastered the art of shield play and had not slung the crimson flowers over their backs. I ripped out my drexer, the straight
— or almost straight — cut and thrust sword, and plunged into the fray. Over the clangor everyone heard the fearsome yells from the tower, dwindling. For a paralyzed instant the action froze. . The soggy thumps sounded eerily loud.
“The rope has broken!” bellowed a hulking Deldar from the nearest group who had just climbed up.
“We are on our own!”
“Not for long!” I fairly shrieked over the fresh hubbub. “Into them! We must open the gates!”
This was the red hurly-burly of action very far removed from sitting a zorca in the rear and methodically working out which way a battle should be run. We were up at the sharp end and if our wits and our sword arms failed us we were done for.
The party of mercenaries blocking the stairway resisted our efforts. They were fighting men. Many of them showed the gleam of the pakmort at throat, or looped into the shoulder of the war harness. We charged into them and were thrust back, struggling desperately.
Our numbers were thinning. Flung stuxes, those thick and heavy throwing spears with the small cross quillons set back from the head, flew into our ranks. Men shrieked and died, blowing bloody froth, vomiting. I hurdled a sprawled bleg, three of his legs missing, and launched myself at the mercenaries. Their swords flamed. It was all a mad business of cut and hack, of duck, of thrust, of parry, and recover. I do not think, I seriously do not think, we could have done it. Looking back at that scene of carnage it seems to me the enemy were slowly overmastering us. We fought; but we were few and they continually fed reinforcements up from the garrison so that we faced what appeared to be an unending stream of foemen.
And then…
And then!
By Zair! But to think of it brings that excruciating tingle in the blood, sets the pulses jumping, shows it all again in splendor.
A shadow dropped down over us, a twinned shadow from the twin suns. An airboat hovered, for she could not settle with that seething mass of struggling men below without squashing friend and foe alike. From the voller leaped men. I saw them. Over the coamings they jumped, roaring into action. I saw their yellow hair flying free, for the Maiden with the Many Smiles was not in the sky. I saw the height of them, seven foot, each fighting man. I saw their weapons, those long single-bladed Saxon-pattern axes. Oh, yes, I saw them as they smashed into the mercenaries and the axes whirled in that old familiar way, ripping arcs of silver and red.
Warriors of Ng’groga, they were, tall sinewy axemen, and there was about their work the fierce controlled power of the typhoon.
At their head, urging them on, slashing with cunning skill, opening a path through the enemy — at their head, in the lead, roared on that tall familiar figure that meant so much to me.
“By Zair!” I said. “If only Seg were here now!”
With that and with renewed heart we swept the enemy from before the stairway. They were sent screaming to topple over the battlements of the tower. The stairway was cleared and men raced down, yelling, striking this way and that with lethal axes. The gate was opened. After that — why, the army poured in and in next to no time the citadel of Kanarsmot was in our hands. Delia found me as I walked out of the open gate and over the bridge. Walking was not easy for the arrows and the corpses. The Sword Watch were busily engaged in the citadel in rounding up prisoners and discovering what portable property there might be worthy the consideration of a guardsman of the Emperor’s Sword Watch.
“Oh, Dray! When you climbed the rope-”
“Did you see him?”
She smiled and the world of Kregen took on a roseate light. “Yes. I saw him. And here he is, walking up just as though nothing had happened.” She was looking past me and as I turned so Delia ran by and threw herself at that tall, yellow-haired, grimly ferocious axeman. He clasped her in his long arms.
“Inch!”
He looked at me over Delia’s brown hair and I swear he had to swallow before he spoke.
“As a comrade of ours would say, Dray — Lahal, my old dom.”
“Lahal and Lahal a thousand times, Inch.”
And I strode forward to clasp his hand. He had had to swallow before speaking. Damned if I didn’t, too…
Chapter Eight
Inch’s adventures would fill a book of their own. We left affairs in the capable hands of Larghos the Left-Handed and prepared to return to the capital. Inch kept on looking about and uttering exclamations of surprise — at the flying sailers so different from those with which we had fought the Battle of Jholaix, at the Phalanx, and this and that. He was delighted to be back, and when, in an odd moment, we found him solemnly standing on his head, reciting the Kregish alphabet backwards and at the end of each recital clapping his heels smartly together, we smiled fondly. Inch and his taboos! If he fell over when he clapped his heels together, he’d have to start all over again.
We did not ask him which particular taboo he had broken. When you got to know Inch of Ng’groga, the Kov of the Black Mountains, you did not bother to question his taboos and simply took delight in his presence.
He told us that after he had been sorcerously flung back from the Pool of Baptism to his native Ng’groga, in southeastern Loh, he had been forced to spend some time atoning for all the mass of broken taboos he felt sure he had left strewn in his wake. Then, with due ritual and protocol and a mass of taboo-legitimized formalities he had wed his Sasha.
Delia clapped her hands.
“Wonderful, Inch, delightful. Congratulations. Is she with you?”
“Yes. I left her in Vondium-”
“Oh?” I said.
He looked at me — by this time he was sitting at a table in a decent chair and we had forbidden squish pie to be brought any closer than an ulm — and he smiled.
“I know you think I am a clever fellow, Dray. But it would take Ngrangi Himself to have known you were here at Kanarsmot. No, the moment we heard in Ng’groga of the troubles in Vallia I set off.”
Across in the continent of Loh they had few if any airboats and travel would be slow and news hardly come by. “I took the liberty of going via Djanduin. I found the people wonderfully hospitable when they discovered I was acquainted with their king.”
“Acquainted,” I said.
Inch laughed at that. “Oh, yes, Ortyg Fellin Coper and Kytun Kholin Dom are great fellows. They greeted me right royally and gave me splendid fliers.”
“Fliers…”
“Well, of course. By Ngrozyan the Axe! You didn’t think I’d come empty-handed? I enlisted a parcel of likely rogues, all friends of mine, or friends of friends, and we look forward to a rollicking time, I can tell you.”