“Harruel, wake up!”
“Stop bothering me. I’m the king.”
“Harruel!”
There was a hand at his throat, fingers digging in deep. He sat up instantly, roaring in rage, as the dream dissolved in shards about him. Weiawala gone, Thaloin gone, the lusty chorus of tall sons all gone, gone, gone. A gray, gritty film of wine covered his brain and shrouded his spirit. He ached in ten places, and someone had been eating turds with his mouth. Minbain stood above him. She had grasped him not by the throat but by the side of his neck: he could still feel the imprint of her fingers. She looked wild and fluttery with some urgent matter.
Angrily he rumbled, “How dare you disturb me when—”
“Harruel, the city is under attack.”
“—I’m trying to rest after—” He caught his breath. “What? Attack? Who? Koshmar? I’ll kill her! I’ll roast her and eat her!” Harruel struggled to his feet, bellowing. “Where is she? Bring me my spear! Call Konya! Salaman!”
“They’re already out there,” Minbain said, fretfully wringing her hands. “It isn’t Koshmar. Here, Harruel. Your spear, your shield. The hjjk-men, Harruel! That’s who it is. The hjjk-men?”
He rose and went stumbling toward the door. From without came the sounds of clamor, cutting through the fog that blanketed his perceptions.
Hjjk-men? Here?
Salaman had said something the other day about fearing an attack of an army of hjjk-men. Some vision he had had, some wild dream. Harruel had been able to make little sense of it. But it seemed to him that Salaman had said the invasion was far away, not to come for many months. That will teach him to trust visions, Harruel thought.
His head ached. The situation demanded clarity of mind. Pausing by the door, he scooped up the bowl of wine that always stood there and put it to his lips. It was more than half full, but he drained it in four robust gulps.
Better. Much better.
He stepped outside.
There was chaos out there. For a moment he had difficulty focusing his eyes. Then the wine took hold and he saw that the city was in the greatest peril. A building was on fire. The animals from the enclosure were loose, dashing in all directions, whinnying and baying. He heard shouts, screams, the cries of children. Just beyond the perimeter of the settled area was a swarm of hjjk-men, ten, fifteen, two dozen of them, armed with weapons that were too short to be swords, too long to be knives. Each tall, angular, many-armed hjjk-man held at least two blades, some three or even four, with which they flailed the air in ominous stabbing gestures. They danced ‘round and ‘round, making the dry chuttering sounds that gave them their name. Harruel saw a dead child lying in a pitiful heap, bloodied animals nearby, tribal possessions scattered everywhere.
“Harruel!” he shouted, running into the midst of the fray. “Harruel! Harruel! Harruel!”
Salaman, Konya, and Lakkamai already were hard at work, poking and prodding with long spears. Bruikkos had somehow acquired two hjjk blades, one in each hand, and he was right in the midst of the attacking force, leaping and cavorting like a madman, slashing at the orange breathing-tubes that ran beside each hjjk-man’s head. Nittin too was fighting, and even the women, furiously swinging poles, brooms, hatchets, anything.
Harruel’s sudden presence in the midst of them fired them all onward. He felt a stirring, a warlike frenzy, among the defenders.
He caught sight of his son Samnibolon on the front line. Though hardly more than a child, Samnibolon was wielding a pruning-hook with which he cut without mercy at the hard, many-jointed legs of the hjjk-men. Harruel let out a cry of delight at this proof of the boy’s warlike nature, and another when Samnibolon sent one of the enemy tottering. Galihine struck the wounded hjjk-man athwart his back with a knob-ended club, and Bruikkos, turning in an offhand way, delivered the fatal blow with a quick flick of one of his knives.
Pride and wine inflamed Harruel’s battle-lust. He laid about him with savage pleasure. As he battled his way toward Salaman’s side he used his size and weight to great advantage, kicking and jostling the hjjk-men to throw them off balance and send them scrabbling down on their many knees before he speared them. The best place for that, he discovered, was in the joint where the legs were attached to the hard carapace: the spear went in easily there, and he struck again and again, with great precision of aim and lethal effect.
He reached Salaman’s side, and together they advanced toward a group of three hjjks who stood back to back, waving their little swords as though they were stingers.
“Where did they come from?” Harruel asked. “Is this the vision you had?”
“No,” Salaman said. “What I saw was a great herd of vermilions — and a vast army of the insect-men—”
“And how many are these?”
“Twenty, perhaps. No more than that. A scouting party for the main force, I think. Lakkamai and Bruikkos blundered upon them by accident in the woods, and they came charging down into the city all at once.”
“We’ll kill them all,” Harruel said.
Already he saw eight or ten of the insect-creatures lying dead, perhaps more.
He sprang forward and jammed his spear into the clustering group of hjjk-men, forcing them to move apart from one another. Salaman at the same time set upon the leftmost one of the three, beating him to the ground with fierce prods of his weapon. Turning, Harruel plunged his spear into the fallen creature’s black-and-yellow carapace and felt a satisfying crunching.
Before he could withdraw it, though, the second hjjk-man ran toward him and drew a line of fire along his arm with what Harruel realized was his beak, not his blade. Harruel winced and grunted. He raised his leg in a tremendous kick that shattered the hjjk-man’s jaw. Nittin came from somewhere and cut through the hjjk’s breathing-tubes. It fell over dead.
“We’re getting there,” Salaman said, between thrusts of his spear. “Must be no more than six or seven of them left. They’re mean, but they don’t really know how to fight, do they?”
“They fight in swarms,” said Nittin. “Ten to your one, that’s how they like to do it, Hresh told me. But they didn’t send enough this time. Behind you, Harruel!”
Turning, Harruel saw two hjjks coming at once. He knocked them both down with a sweeping swing of his spear and thrust its butt end into one narrow, fragile, exposed throat. Salaman disposed of the other attacker.
Harruel grinned. He could foresee the end of the battle now, and already he was looking forward to the wine that waited for him in the celebration of victory.
Lakkamai was chasing a frantically scuttling hjjk-man up the trail to the crater’s rim. Konya and Galihine had another cornered near Nittin’s house. A third had fallen into Salaman’s infernal trench and two of the women were jabbing at its claws as it tried to climb out.
Harruel rested on his spear. It is all over, he realized joyously.
But his elation was short-lived. Fatigue and pain overwhelmed him. There was a terrible pounding in his chest, and the fiery wound in his arm was throbbing and streaming blood. The wine that had sustained him through the heat of the battle had burned away now, leaving him grim and weary.
Looking back now at the city, Harruel saw that it was the palace that was burning. The animals had all escaped. He could not tell which child it was that had died; and now he saw one of the women dead too, or badly wounded. So it was not as great a victory as it had seemed.
Bleakness swept in upon him.
This is the punishment of the gods upon me, he thought.
For all my sins. For my forcing of Kreun, and for my other cruelties and rages, and for every unworthy thought, and for my arrogance. For raising my hand to Minbain. And for filling my head with too much wine. The hjjks have come to destroy this city that I have built, which was to have been my monument. We have killed these few, but what of the vast army that Salaman saw in his vision? How will we hold them away? How will we fend off those monstrous vermilions when they come trampling through our streets? How will we survive at all, when the main army comes?