Empire of the East (42 page)

A little later, when they were securely hidden in a thicket, Rolf looked closely at the stunned face of Catherine, who had not said a word since the bird came down. With a rare full smile on his own face, he said: “Welcome. You see that you have reached the armies of the West.”

After speeding Rolf on his way with a final wave, Chup crouched down between Mewick and Loford on the little sheltered ledge they had scooped out of the side of the ravine. Looking to the southeast, he could see the Constable's force just coming into sight a kilometer away. Despite the distance, Chup thought that he could distinguish Charmian's long golden hair. An illusion, she would have it bound up for the ride. He told himself he should have killed her when he had the chance…Mewick was plucking at his sleeve, and motioning that it was time to move. Down in the bottom of the ravine, Chup mounted and followed the other six men remaining in the party, riding in a single file angling up the side of the ravine. Mewick was leading them to the northeast, at right angles to the course that Rolf had chosen.

About a dozen reptiles were in the sky, Chup noted as they reached the top of the slope and trotted toward the next ravine. The leatherwings were beginning to concentrate above the little Western force. Chup caught another glimpse of Abner's force, advancing steadily, beginning now to come into the broken country.

The chances of perpetrating an ambush seemed vanishingly small at the moment. To Loford, just ahead of him, Chup called: “What's in your bag of tricks, stout one?”

Mewick at the head of the file heard him, turned and called: “Let us see what we can find in our arrow-bags first.” And then he led them down one ravine in a sudden dash toward the enemy column that sent the reptiles speeding ahead to croak their warnings, and then back up another, smaller, narrower ravine, on a winding, reversing course that took them out of sight of the reptiles. Mewick there upon abruptly called a halt, and with virtuosic gestures bade his men draw and nock arrows and aim into the air. When the first reptiles came coasting back over the hilltop close above, to discover what had happened to the vanished subjects of their surveillance, the ready volley brought down one and winged another. While the flock was still recoiling in noisy outrage from this ambush, Mewick led his men on up the winding ravine at a headlong gallop, once more unobserved by the foe. Following some instinct of his own that seemed as accurate as aerial observation, he halted again suddenly, dismounted, and scrambled up a slope to peer through grass at the top. Letting out a hissing noise of satisfaction, he once more pantomimed his wish for archery, this time even correcting his men's angle of aim, and then, with an unmistakable slashing gesture, bidding them loose their arrows blindly. Before the shafts could have tallen from the sky upon any targets, Mewick was in the saddle again and leading the retreat. There was a pained outcry from somewhere below.

The little volley of arrows had fallen scattered among and around the front of the enemy column, and one of them had drawn blood. More important, it stopped the enemy's forward progress for the moment, and assured its somewhat slower and more cautious movement in the future.

Mewick now led his men toward the north, for the time being making no effort to do anything but keep between the enemy and the course he wanted them to think that Rolf was following.

The morning wore along uneventfully. The two groups of mounted men made their way steadily northward on parallel courses. Around the line of march the desert badlands reared up strange barren shapes of rock, among which smaller rocks lay jumbled and dry ravines lost their way.

Mewick somehow found a reasonably straight way through. Then suddenly he stopped, staring intently at the reptiles in the sky. “Demons of all the East!” he muttered fiercely. “But they are getting away from us. West! We must get west, and catch up with them!”

Riding hard, they topped a rise and caught sight of the enemy column moving away to the northwest, seemingly right on the trail of Rolf who had evidently not managed to shake the reptiles after all. Abner had maneuvered himself between the fugitives he was trying to overtake, and the annoying, elusive handful of men who were trying to delay him.

Mewick kept his men moving forward briskly. “Wizard?” he asked.

Loford, riding now in the middle of the file, was letting his mount find its own way, while his large blue eyes looked into distances that were not of earth or sky, and his fingers fumbled in a bag he had withdrawn from his pack. His gross body jiggled unheeded with the rapid ride. He took from the cloth bag a smaller bag of leather, curiously decorated in many colors, and from that in turn a length of sandy-colored twine, twisted into many strange knots. He rode on for some distance, fingering this absently, then suddenly seemed to come to himself, and with a throat-clearing got the attention of all the others.

“Hum. As the signs and powers now stand, the only thing of any consequence that I can manage successfully is to evoke a desert-elemental. But even at best to call one up will mean some difficulty and danger for us all. At worse—well things could get quite out of hand.”

Mewick shook his head. “You had best try. Our swords and arrows are too few, unless we can get between them and Rolf once more.”

“I am wondering,” Chup put in, “how strong a wizard they have with
them.
Not that our pudgy fellow here is easily overmatched, but the Constable of the East will surely be well attended in that regard.”

“As to that,” said Loford, unperturbed, “we will soon enough find out. Now let me do my work. No, keep moving. Just a little silence; I can raise an elemental as well as almost any other man, while I ride on beast-back if need be.”

With fingers suddenly turned extremely skillful, he tilted the little leather bag so that there ran from it a thin stream of ordinary-looking sand, falling to be lost along the trail. Holding the bag in one hand while it slowly continued to spill, he used his other hand and his teeth to tug at certain places in the curiously knotted twine. One by one knots fell away and straightened out. Counting knots as they disappeared, Chup caught his breath. “We'll all be sand-blasted to the bone,” he muttered. But he made no real protest; heroic measures were called for.

Loford's art took quick effect. Looking to the northwest, beyond the enemy force, Chup watched the sandy land seem to shake out its dunes like wrinkles from a blanket, rising with the appearance of a single deep ocean swell as far as eye could see to right and left. Chup, who had seen similar things before, knew it was not in fact the whole earth lifting up, only surface sand raised by a great wave of wind, yet involuntarily he tried to brace his feet more firmly in the stirrups.

Reptiles chattered and shrieked alarm. From near the head of the distant Eastern mounted column, one tiny mounted figure detached itself, spurring with seeming confidence toward the oncoming wall of sand that here and there took on vague shapes of hands and jaws. It would be the Constable's wizard. The tiny man-figure raised its arms, and Chup heard Loford grunt as if he had received a blow. The stout magician turned his animal aside, slid awkwardly from the saddle, and sank down on one knee, eyes squinted shut, while his comrades reined to a halt around him.

“Ah, Ardneh,” Loford groaned, “Ardneh, help! He means to turn what I have raised against us.”

The galloping Eastern wizard seemed to be under no such strain as Loford suffered. Riding easily, he moved his outstretched arms forward and down toward the oncoming elemental; Chup, watching, had the impression of a tremendous quelling, quieting force. But it might almost have been the useless gesture of a child. The wavefront of wind and wind-blown earth poured on remorselessly and struck. For a moment or two there remained a tiny isle of calm, around the mounted Eastern magician, not much wider than his arms could stretch, in which air fell quiet and lifeless before his counterspell. But then he and his defended island vanished; the elemental rolled on unimpeded, reaching out monstrous half-living paws of sand and air for Abner and his fifty men.

With a cry of relief, Loford staggered to his feet. Then the elemental's peripheral winds and dust were beating on the Western men. Chup felt the sting and lash of sand, and the air was a sudden shriek around his ears. The bright sun, and his friends, were suddenly gone, concealed within the desert as it walked. When things cleared for a moment, he glimpsed the dense core of the elemental squatting some hundreds of meters to the northwest, right where Abner's force had been. Abner's force was still there, from the look of things. Out of the solid-looking clouds of raging sand came Eastern men individually, riding, staggering, crawling; and here and there fled blinded and demented animals. This elemental would not kill, at least not quickly and not often, but it would surely disable any human fighting force it settled on.

Chup cried out: “Ah, for a score of men to charge them now!” But to charge and fight in the heart of the storm would be to put oneself under the same disadvantage as the enemy, and he knew full well the impulse had to be restrained. Mewick instead used the time gained to best advantage by getting his few men once more between Rolf and the disorganized foe. The reptiles, hit harder than any land creatures by the elemental's blasts, were swept from the sky for the time being, and Mewick found a place against the steep side of a sheer jutting rock, where his men might hope to remain unobserved should the reptiles manage to come back, and from which they might sally out to sting the Constable again if and when he came on in pursuit of Rolf.

Chup huddled with the others between sheltering rocks, muffling his face with his cloak against the sand. Once more Loford groaned. “Now they too are getting help from greater powers,” he muttered.

The wind died suddenly, rose again, then came and went in fitful gusts. Squinting into the sky above the enemy, Chup could see that the Eastern wizard had at last been able to call upon some effective force. The elemental was broken into a multitude of smaller whirlwinds, each of which raised a cloud of sand and dust, but which taken all together lacked the purpose and power that the single great creature had possessed. He could see, too, that Loford had not abandoned the struggle. The numerous whirlwinds danced around a common center, and seemed to be striving continually to reunite.

“The wind is no longer so bad we cannot walk or ride,” Mewick shouted to his men, making himself heard above the shrieking air. “Let us see if we can strike another blow!”

 

Abner had lost two men to the elemental, one blinded permanently by sand, the other left crazed and unable to do more than whimper to himself. It was midday before he had his forces properly marshalled again, the hopelessly wounded disposed of and their riding-beasts and other useful property distributed among the well. The wind was now no worse than a bearable storm. He considered dividing his force, feeling reasonably confident that there was no superior enemy body anywhere near, but decided against it when his wizard assured him that the winds must continue to decline.

The Constable cast a final look at his assembled force (the woman Charmian, dressed like a soldier and muffled against sand like the others, smiled bravely and admiringly at him; well, he couldn't have left her at the caravanserai, there was no telling when he'd be able to go back) and got it moving forward again. Scarcely had they gone a kilometer, however, when there came a few more arrows down upon them, from a hilltop close ahead. One more man was hit. At the Constable's order forty cavalry charged the hill with leveled lances, but its top was now deserted, and behind it several ravines offered concealment for a small force and the possibility of further ambushes. The Constable's horn sounded a recall.

Again they moved on to the northwest. The first reptile able to return to the column, between disabling wind-blasts, reported flatter, grassier country ahead, into which the two fleeing Westerners were making steady progress, while the seven others remained between the fleeing two and Abner. The Constable consulted his weary wizard, who confirmed him in his opinion that the two more distant fugitives had the huge important gem with them. The Constable ground his teeth and profaned the names of demons in his anger. He felt by no means certain of getting back the gem. Though the long hours of a summer afternoon still lay ahead, the sun had by now definitely passed its highest point.

There now arrived a reptile-courier from the Emperor of the East himself, who was with his main armies in the field a good many kilometers to the south. The courier bore an answer to the Constable's urgent dispatch of the early morning, informing the court that an object had been stolen similar to, but even larger than, that which had been used in the unsuccessful attempt to neutralize Ardneh. The answer from Ominor now was that the object was certainly of great importance, and the Constable must take personal command of the attempt to get it back. Also that he must conduct his search to the northwest—divination at the highest level gave assurance that the thing was being taken in that direction. Also, that reinforcements were being sent as quickly as possible to the Constable's aid. The first of these, a flight of a hundred additional reptiles, began to arrive shortly after the courier.

The West, too, Abner thought sourly, would doubtless be throwing in reinforcements, and there would come a hundred more birds to harass him through the night. As the reptiles came in, he sent them to scour the country far ahead, to try to discover where the fugitives were heading.

Half an hour's steady forward progress followed, before one of the scouting reptiles came screaming that the small Western force was drawing up in a line on a hilltop directly in their line of march.

“Seven men? I wish they would make such a stand.”

When he had got a little closer and could better see the hill, he realized the Western maneuver was not so foolish as it had sounded. The slope was very wide from left to right, and too steep for mounted men to charge up it at any speed in the loose sand. Once more they would take casualties from arrows and find the foe gone when they reached the top. But to go clear around the hill would let the enemy succeed in delaying them, without paying anything for the privilege…Abner quickly decided to spread his men out and charge the hill. He would accept two or three casualties to inflict one; he would be delayed little if at all; and there was always the chance the fools would stand and fight.