And then, as if to confuse me further, the names began. I saw them. I heard them. They were spelled in many different forms of hieroglyphics, chanted in many tongues.
Aubec. Byzantium. Cornelius. Colvin. Bradbury. London. Melniboné. Hawkmoon. Lanjis Liho. Powys. Marca. Elric. Muldoon. Dietrich. Arflane. Simon. Kane. Begg. Corum. Persson. Ryan. Asquiol. Pepin. Seward. Mennell. Tallow. Hallner. Köln. Carnelian. Bastable. Von Bek…
The names went on and on and on.
* * *
I awoke screaming.
And it was morning.
Sweating, I got out of my bunk and splashed cold water all over my body.
Why did it not begin? Why?
I knew that, once the fighting started, the dreams would go away. I was sure of it.
And then the door of my cabin burst open and a slave entered.
“Master—”
A trumpet voiced a brazen bellow. There were the sounds of running men all over the ship.
“Master, the enemy ships are moving.”
With a great sigh of relief I dressed myself, buckling on my armour as quickly as I could and strapping my sword about me.
Then I ran up on deck and climbed to the forecastle where King Rigenos stood, clad in his own armour, his face grim.
Everywhere in the fleet the war signals were being flown and voices called from ship to ship, trumpets snarled like metallic beasts and drums began to beat.
Now I could see for certain that the Eldren ships were on the move.
“Our commanders are all prepared,” Rigenos murmured tensely. “See, our ships are already taking their positions.”
I looked with pleasure as the fleet began to form itself according to our much rehearsed battle plan. Now, if only the Eldren would behave as we had anticipated, we should be the victors.
I looked forward again and gasped as the Eldren ships drew closer, marvelled at their rare grace as they leaped lightly over the water like dolphins.
But they were not dolphins, I thought. They would rend us all if they could. Now I understood something of Katorn’s suspicion of everything Eldren. If I had not known that these were our enemies, that they intended to destroy us, I would have stood there entranced at their beauty.
They were not galleons, as most of our craft were. They were ships of sail only—and the sails were diaphanous on slim masts. White hulls broke the darker white of the surf as they surged wildly, without faltering, towards us.
I studied their armament intently.
They mounted some cannon, but not as many as ours. Their cannon, however, were slender and silver and, when I saw them, I feared their power.
Katorn joined us. He was snarling with pleasure. “Ah, now,” he growled. “Now. Now. See their guns, Erekosë? Beware of them. There is sorcery, if you do not believe me!”
“Sorcery? What do you mean?”
But he was off again, shouting at the men in the rigging to hurry their work.
I began to make out tiny figures on the decks of the Eldren ships. I caught glimpses of eldritch faces, but still could not, at that distance, discern any special characteristics. They moved swiftly about their ships as they swam speedily towards us.
Now our own fleet’s manoeuvres were almost complete and the flagship began to move into position.
I myself gave the orders to heave to and we rocked in the sea, awaiting the Eldren ships rushing towards us.
As planned, we had manoeuvred to form a square that was strong on three sides, but weak on the side facing the Eldren fleet.
Some hundred ships were at the far end of the square, set stem to stern with cannon bristling. The two other strong sides also had about a hundred ships each and were at a far enough distance from each other so that their cannon could not accidentally sink one of their own craft. We had placed a thinner wall of ships—about twenty-five—at the side of the square where the Eldren were drawing in. We hoped to give the impression of a tightly closed square formation, with a few ships in the middle flying the royal colours, to give the impression that this was the flagship and its escorts. These ships were bait. The true flagship—the one on which I stood—had temporarily taken down its colours and lay roughly in the middle of the starboard side of the square.
Closer and closer now the Eldren ships approached. It was almost true what Katorn had said. They did seem to fly through the air rather than through the waves.
My hands began to sweat. Would they take the bait? The plan had struck the commanders as original, which meant that it was not the classical manoeuvre it had been in some periods of Earth’s history. If it did not work, I would lose Katorn’s confidence still further and it would not make my position any better with the king, whose daughter I hoped to marry.
But there was no point in worrying about that. I watched.
And the Eldren took the bait.
Cannon roaring, the Eldren craft smashed in a delta formation into the thin wall and, under their own impetus, sailed on to find themselves thickly surrounded on three sides.
“Raise our colours!” I shouted to Katorn. “Raise the colours! Let them see the originator of their defeat!”
Katorn gave the orders. My own banner went up first—the black field with the silver sword—and then the king’s. We moved to tighten the trap, to crush the Eldren as they realised they had been tricked.
I had never seen such highly manoeuvrable sailing craft as the slender ships used by the Eldren. Slightly smaller than our men-o’-war, they darted about seeking an opening in the wall of ships. But there was no opening. I had seen to that.
Now their cannon bellowed fiercely, gouting balls of flame. Was this what Katorn had meant by “sorcery”? The Eldren ammunition was fire-bombs rather than solid shot of the sort we used. Like comets, the fireballs hurtled through the noonday air. Many of our ships were fired. They blazed, crackling and groaning as the flames consumed them.
Like comets they were and the ships were like flashing sharks.
But they were sharks caught in a net that could not be broken. Inexorably we tightened the trap, our own guns booming heavy iron that tore into those white hulls and left black, gaping wounds; that ripped through those slim masts and brought the yards splintering down, the diaphanous sails flapping and fading like the wings of dying moths.
Our own monstrous men-o’-war, their heavy timbers clothed in brass, their huge oars churning the water, their dark, painted sails bulging, drew in to crush the Eldren.
Then the Eldren fleet divided into two roughly equal parts and dashed for the far corners of the net of ships—its weakest points. Many Eldren craft broke through, but we were prepared for this and with monumental precision our ships closed around them.
The Eldren fleet was now divided into several groups and it made our work easier. Implacably we sailed in to crush them.
The skies were filled with smoke and the seas with flaming wreckage and the air was populated by screams, yells and war-shouts, the whine of the Eldren fireballs, the roar of our own shot, the shattering bellowings of the cannon. My face was covered by a film of grease and ash from the smoke and I sweated in the heat from the flames.
From time to time I caught a glimpse of a tense Eldren face and I wondered at their beauty and feared that perhaps we had been overconfident in our assumption of our victory. They were clad in light armour and moved about their ships as gracefully as trained dancers and their silver cannon did not once pause in their bombardment of our craft. Wherever the fireballs landed, the decks or rigging became instantly alight with a shrieking, all-consuming flame that burned green and blue and seemed to devour metal as easily as it did wood.
I gripped the rail of the foredeck and leaned forward, trying to peer through the stinging smoke. All at once I saw an Eldren ship side-on immediately ahead of us.
“Prepare to ram!” I yelled. “Prepare to ram!”
Like many of our ships, the Iolinda possessed an iron-shod ram lying just below the waterline. Now was our chance to use it
. I saw the Eldren commander on his poop deck shout orders to his men to turn the ship. But it was too late even for the speedy Eldren. We bore down on the smaller craft and, our whole ship reverberating with the mighty roar, we drove into its side. Iron and timber screamed and ruptured, and foam lashed skyward. I was thrown back against the mast, losing my footing, and, as I clambered to my feet, I saw that we had broken the Eldren craft completely in two. I looked on the sight with a mixture of horror and exultation. I had not guessed the brutal power of the Iolinda.
On either side of our flagship I saw the two halves of the enemy ship rear in the water and begin to go down. The horror on my own face seemed matched by that on the Eldren commander’s as he fiercely strove to hold himself erect on his sloping poop deck while his men threw up their arms and leaped into the dark, surging sea that was already full of smashed timbers and drifting corpses.
Swiftly now the sea swallowed the slim ship and I heard King Rigenos laughing behind me as the Eldren drowned.
I turned. His face was smeared by soot and his red-rimmed eyes stared wildly out of his haggard skull. The helmet-crown of iron and diamonds was askew on his head as he continued to laugh in his morbid triumph.
“Good work, Erekosë! The most satisfying method of all when dealing with these creatures. Break them open. Send them to the depths of the ocean so that they can be that much closer to their master, the Lord of Hell!”
Katorn climbed up. His face, too, was exultant. “I’ll give you that, Lord Erekosë. You have proved you know how to kill Eldren.”
“I know how to kill many kinds of men,” I said quietly. I was disgusted by their response. I had admired the way in which the Eldren commander had died. “I merely took an opportunity,” I said. “There is nothing clever in a ship of this size crushing lighter craft.”
But there was no time to dispute the issue. Our ship was moving through the wreckage it had created, surrounded by orange tongues of flame, shrieks and yells, thick smoke which obscured vision in all directions so that it was impossible to tell how the fleets of Humanity fared.
“We must get out of this,” I said. “Into clearer sea. We must let our own ships know that we are unharmed. Will you give the orders, Katorn?”
“Aye.” Katorn went back to his duties.
My head was beginning to throb with the din of the battle. It became one great wall of noise, one huge wave of smoke and flame and the stench of death.
And yet—it was all familiar to me.
Up to now my battle tactics had been somewhat notional—intellectual rather than instinctive. But now it did seem that old instincts came into play and I gave orders without working them out first.
And I was confident that the orders were good. Even Katorn trusted them.
Thus it had been with the order to ram the Eldren craft. I had not stopped to think. It was probably just as well.
Its oars pulling strongly, the Iolinda cleared the worst of the smoke and her trumpets and drums announced her presence to the rest of the fleet. A cheering went up from some of the nearby ships as we emerged into an area relatively free of smoke, wreckage and other ships.
A few of our craft had begun to single out individual Eldren vessels and were hurling out their grappling irons towards the shark-ships. The savage barbs cut into the white rails, ripped through the shining sails, bit into flesh and tore off arms and legs. The great men-o’-war dragged the Eldren craft towards them, as whalers haul in their half-dead prey.
Arrows began to fly from deck to deck as archers, their legs twisted in the rigging, shot at enemy archers. Javelins rattled on the decks or pierced the armour of the warriors, Eldren and human, and threw them prone. The sound of cannon could still be heard, but it was not the steady pounding it had been. The shots became more intermittent and were replaced by the clash of swords, the shouts of warriors fighting hand to hand.
Smoke still formed acrid blossoms in the air above that watery battlefield. And when I could see through the murk to the green, wreckage-strewn ocean itself, I saw that the foam was no longer white. It was red. The sea was covered by a slick of blood.
As our ship beat on to join battle once again, I saw upturned faces staring at me from the sea. They were the faces of the dead, both Eldren and human, and they seemed to share a common expression—an expression of astonished accusation.
After a while, I tried to ignore the sight of those faces.
12
THE BROKEN TRUCE
TWO MORE SHIPS fell to our ram and we sustained hardly any damage at all. The Iolinda moved through the battle like a dignified juggernaut, as if assured of her own invulnerability.
It was King Rigenos who saw it first. He screwed up his eyes and pointed through the smoke, his open mouth red in the blackness of his soot-covered face.
“There! See it, Erekosë? There!”
I saw a magnificent Eldren ship ahead of us, but I did not know why Rigenos singled it out.
“It is the Eldren flagship, Erekosë,” Rigenos said. “It could be that their leader himself is aboard. If that cursed servant of Azmobaana does ride his own flagship and if we can destroy him, then our cause will be truly won. Pray that the Eldren prince rides her, Erekosë!”
Katorn snarled from behind us: “I would like to be the one to bring him down.” He had a heavy crossbow in his mailed hands and he stroked its butt as another man might stroke a favourite kitten.
“Oh, let Prince Arjavh be there. Let him be there,” hissed Rigenos thirstily.
I paid them little heed, but shouted the order for grappling irons to be readied.
Luck, it seemed, was still with us. Our huge vessel reared up on a surging wave at exactly the right moment and we rode it down upon the Eldren flagship, our timbers scraping its sides and turning it so that it lay in a perfect position for our grapples to seize it. The iron claws snaked out on thick ropes, clamped in the rigging, stabbed into the deck, snatched at the rails.
Now the Eldren craft was bound to us. We held it close, as a lover holds his mistress.
And that same smile of triumph began to cross my face. I had the sweet taste of victory on my lips. It was the sweetest taste of all. I, Erekosë, signed for a slave to run forward and wipe my face with a damp cloth. I drew myself up proudly on my deck. Just behind me was King Rigenos, on my right. On my left was Katorn. I felt a comradeship with them suddenly. I looked proudly down on the Eldren deck. The warriors looked exhausted. But they stood ready, with arrows strung on bows, with swords clenched in white fists and shields raised. They watched us silently; they did not attempt to cut the ropes, they waited for us to make the first move.
When two flagships locked in this way, there was always a pause before fighting broke out. This was to enable the enemy commanders to speak and, if both desired it, decide a truce and the terms of that truce.
Now King Rigenos bellowed across the rail of his high deck, calling out to the Eldren who looked up at him, their strange eyes smarting with the smoke as much as ours did.
“This is King Rigenos and his champion, the immortal Erekosë, your ancient enemy come again to defeat you. We, would speak with your commander for a moment, in the usual truce”.
From beneath a canvas awning on his poop deck, a tall man now emerged. Through the shifting smoke I saw, dimly at first, a pointed, golden face with blue-flecked milky eyes staring sadly from the sockets of the slanting brow. An eldritch voice, like music, sang across the sea:
“I am Duke Baynahn, commander of the Eldren fleet. We will make no complicated peace terms with you, but if you let us sail away now, we will not continue to fight.”
Rigenos smiled and Katorn snorted. “How gracious! He knows he is doomed.”
Rigenos chuckled at this. Then he called back to Duke Baynahn.
“I find your proposal somewhat naïve, Duke Baynahn.”
Baynahn shrugged wearily. “Then let us finish this,” he sighed. He raised his gloved hand to order his men to loose their arrows.
“Hold a moment!” Rigenos shouted. “There is another way, if you would spare your men.”
Slowly Baynahn lowered his hand. “What is that?” His voice was wary.
“If your master, Arjavh of Mernadin, is aboard his own flagship—as he should be—let him come out and do battle with Lord Erekosë, Humanity’s champion.” King Rigenos spread out his palms. “If Arjavh should win, why, you will go in peace. If Erekosë should win, then you will become our prisoners.”
Duke Baynahn folded his arms across his chest. “I have to tell you that our Prince Arjavh could not get to Paphanaal in time to sail with our fleet. He is in the west—in Loos Ptokai.”
King Rigenos turned to Katorn.
“Kill that one, Katorn,” he said quietly.
Duke Baynahn continued: “However, I am prepared to fight your champion if…”
“No!” I cried to Katorn. “Stop! King Rigenos, that is dishonourable—you speak during a truce.”
“There is no question of honour, Erekosë, when exterminating vermin. That you will soon learn. Kill him, Katorn!”
Duke Baynahn was frowning, plainly puzzled at our muted argument, striving to catch the words.
“I will fight your Erekosë,” he said. “Is it agreed?”
And Katorn brought up the crossbow and the bolt whirred and I heard a soft gasp as it penetrated the Eldren speaker’s throat.
His hands went up towards the quivering bolt. His strange eyes filmed. He fell.
I was enraged at the treachery shown by one who so often spoke of treachery in his enemies. But now there was no time to remonstrate for already the Eldren arrows were whistling towards us and I had to ensure our defences and prepare to lead the boarding party against the betrayed crew of the enemy ship.
I grasped a trailing rope, unsheathed my glowing sword and let the words come from my lips, though I was still full of anger against Katorn and the king.
“For Humanity!” I shouted. “Death to the Hounds of Evil!”
I swung down through the heated air that slashed against my face in that swift passage and I dropped, with howling human warriors behind me, among the Eldren ranks.
The Eternal Champion Page 8
