“He leads them to the battle,” he muttered. “He never was a coward, whatever else he is. But today I will wipe out his menace to Jotan.”
“They are fighting!” Golden Wings cried, with flaring eagerness.
Clouds of arrows were whizzing between the two nearing armies, as Jotan archers and Bunt bowmen came within range.
Men began to drop in both armies—but in the Jotan army four fell for every stricken Bunt.
“Something’s wrong!” Khal Kan cried. “Every man of ours who is even touched by an arrow is falling. I can’t—”
“Poison!” hissed Golden Wings. “Theyare using poisoned arrows. It’s a trick I’ve heard of the Nameless Men of the far north.”
Khal Kan stared unbelievingly. “Even the Bunts wouldn’t use such hideous means! Yet my uncle is ruthless—”
Red rage misted his brain, and his voice was an unhuman roar as he turned and shouted to his tensely waiting horsemen.
“Our men are being slain by foul magic!” he yelled. “Down upon them—we strike for Jotan!”
It was as though he and Golden Wings were riding the forefront of a human avalanche as they charged down the steep slope to the battle.
They smashed home into the flank of the Bunts. The green men gave way in surprise and momentary terror. Kahl Kan’s sword whipped like a lash of light among ugly green heads and thrusting spears. As always, in a fight, he moved by pure instinct rather than by conscious design.
Yet he kept Golden Wings a little behind him. The girl was fiercely wielding her light sword against those on the ground who sought to hamstring Khal Kan’s horse with spear or sword. His riders were yelling shrilly.
The crazy confusion of the battle took on definite pattern. The Bunts had recoiled from the unexpected attack, but Egir was reforming them.
Khal Kan shouted and spurred to get at Egir. He could see his uncle’s giant form, his cynical, powerful face under his helmet, and could hear his bull voice directing the reforming of the Bunt columns.
But he could not smash through the mad melee toward Egir. And now poisoned Bunt arrows were falling, dropping men from their saddles.
Brusul had reached him, was shouting to him. “Prince, your father is slain—one of those hellish arrows.”
Khal Kan’s heart went cold for a moment. He hardly heard Brusul’ s hoarse voice, shouting on.
“We can’t face those poisoned shafts here in the open! Unless we fall back, they’ll cut us down from a distance like grain in harvest-time!”
Khal Kan groaned. He saw the dilemma. They could not hope to smash the Bunt lines that Egir had reformed—and in a long battle the new poisoned arrows of the green men would take heavier and heavier toll of them.
The safety of Jotan was now a crushing weight on his shoulders. He was king now, and the dire responsibility of the position in this mad moment left him no time even for sorrow for his father. A battle lost here now meant that Jotan was defenseless before Egir’s horde.
With a groan, he ordered a trumpeter to sound retreat.
“Fall back toward Jotan!” he ordered. “March the footmen back on the double, Brusul—we’ll cover your withdrawal with the horsemen.”
Through the long, hot hours of that afternoon, the bitter righting retreat surged back northward to Jotan. The Bunt columns followed closely, the green men howling with triumph.
Ever and again, Khal Kan and his riders charged back against the pursuing Bunts and smashed their front lines, making them recoil. Each time, empty saddles showed the toll of the poisoned shafts.
Sunset was flaring bloodily over the Dragals when they came back by that bitter way to the black towers of Jotan. Footsore, reeling with fatigue, Brusul’s spearmen marched through the gate into the city.
One last charge back at the Bunts made Khal Kan with the horsemen. He rode back then with Golden Wings, who was swaying in her saddle. They two were the last of the riders to enter the city.
The great gates hastily ground shut, as sweating men labored in the dusk at the winches. Through the loopholes of the guard-towers, Khal Kan looked out and saw the Bunt hordes outside spreading to encircle the whole land side of Jotan.
“They have now four fighting-men to every one of ours,” he muttered through his teeth. “We are in a trap called a city.”
He was staggering, his face grimed and smeared with sweat and dust and blood. Golden Wings pressed his arm in complete faith.
“It was only the foul trick of the poisoned arrows that defeated tis!” she exclaimed. “But for that, we’d have rolled them into the sea.”
“We have Egir to thank for that,” rasped Khal Kan. “While that man lives, doom hangs like a thundercloud over Jotan.”
He stepped to the window and sent his voice rolling out into the gathering darkness.”
“Egir, will you settle this man to man, sword to sword? Speak!”
Back came a sardonic voice from the camp of the Bunts.
“I am not so simple, my dear nephew! Your city’s a nut whose shell we’ll soon crack and pick, so rest you.”
Khal Kan set guards at every rod of the wall. Jotan’s streets were dark under the two moons, for no torches had been lit this night. The sound of women’s voices wailing a requiem for his dead father brought his numbed mind a sick sense of loss.
No one else in Jotan spoke or broke the stillness. Awful and imminent peril crushed the city’s folk. But from the darkness outside the walls came the sound of distant hammering as the Bunt hordes began making scaling-ladders for the morrow.
From a window of the palace, before he collapsed in drugged sleep of exhaustion, Khal Kan saw the Bunt fires hemming in the whole landward side of the city in their crescent of flame.…
Henry Steven’s wife had been worried about him all day. He had been acting queerly, she thought anxiously, ever since he had awakened that morning.
He had been pale and stricken and haggard since he had awakened. He had not gone to the office at all, a tiling unprecedented. And he had spent most of the day pacing to and fro in the little house, his haunted eyes not seeming to see her, his whole bearing one of intense excitement.
Henry was afraid—afraid of the dread climax to which things were rushing in the other world of Thar. He knew the awful peril in which Jotan now stood. Once those hordes of Bunts got over the wall, the city was doomed.
“I’ve got to quit driving myself crazy about it,” he told himself desperately that afternoon. “It’s just a dream—Thar and Khal Kan must be only a dream.”
But his feverish apprehension was not lessened by that thought. No matter if Thar was only a dream, it was real to him!
He knew Jotan and its people, from the nightly dreams of his earliest childhood. Every street of the black city he had known and loved, as Khal Kan. Even if it were only a dream, he couldn’t let the old, lovely city and its people be overwhelmed by Egir and his green barbarians.
If Thar was the dream, and the city Jotan was taken and Khal Kan was slain—there would be an end to his precious dreamlife, forever. Only the monotonous existence of Henry Stevens would stretch before him.
And if Thar happened to be the reality, then it was doubly vital that Khal Kan’s people be saved from that menace.
“Yet what can I do?” Henry groaned inwardly. “What can Khal Kan do? The Bunts will surely break into the city—”
The poisoned arrows, new to the Jotanians, gave Egir’s green warriors a terrific advantage. That, and their outnumbering hordes, would enable them to scale the walls of Jotan and then the end would be at hand.
“Damn Egir for his deviltry in using those arrows!” Henry muttered. “I wish I could take a dozen machine-guns across. I’d show the cursed traitor.”
It was a vain and idle wish, he knew. Nothing material could traverse the gulf between dream-world and real world, whichever was which. His own body, even—Henry Stevens’ body—never crossed that gulf. AH he took into Thar each night were his memories of Henry Stevens’ life on Earth duri
ng the day, and that seemed only a dream.
He could take memory across, though. And that thought gave pause to Henry. A faint gleam of hope appeared on his horizon. As Khal Kan, he would remember everything that he did or learned now, as Henry Stevens. Suppose that he—
“By Heaven!” Henry exclaimed excitedly. “There’s a chance I could do it! A trick to overmatch Egir’s poisoned arrows!”
His wife watched him puzzledly as he pored excitedly over certain volumes of their encyclopedia. She saw him hastily jot down notes, and then for a long time that evening he sat, moving his lips, apparently memorizing.
Henry was vibrant with excitement and hope. He, Henry Stevens of Earth, might be able to save Khal Kan’s city for him!
“If Khal Kan will only do it!” he thought prayerfully. “If he won’t just ignore it as dream—”
Waiting tensely for sleep that night, Henry repeated over and over to himself the simple formula he had gleaned from the encyclopedia.
“Khal Kan must try it!” he told himself desperately.
Sleep came slowly to him. And as he fell asleep, he knew that in his dream he would wake to what might be the last day of Jotan’s existence.…
Khal Kan awoke with that thought from his dream vibrating in his mind like an ominous tolling.
“The last day of Jotan!” he whispered. “By all the gods—no!”
Fiercely, the tall young prince rose and buckled on his sword. It was just dawn, and sea-mists shrouded all the city outside in gray fog.
Golden Wings still lay sleeping, Khal Kan heard a persistent hammering from out in the fog, as he went down to the lower level of the palace. Brusul, in full armor, came stalking up to him.
“All’s quiet,” reported the brawny captain. “The Bunts are still working away at their cursed scaling-ladders. When they are ready, they’ll dear the walls of our men with their damned poisoned arrows, and then come over.”
Khal Kan went out with him and inspected their defenses. As he supervised the placing of their fighting-men around the wall, and gave the white-faced people rough encouragement, something oppressed Khal Kan’s mind. Something he should be doing for the defense of the city—
When he got back to the palace with Brusul, Golden Wings’ slim, leather-clad figure came flying into his arms.
“I dreamed the Bunts were already in the city!” she cried. “And then I awoke and found you gone—”
Khal Kan, soothing her, suddenly stiffened. Her words had recalled that vague, forgotten something that had oppressed him.
“My dream!” he exclaimed. “I remember now—in the dream, on that other world, I learned how to make a weapon against the Bunts.”
It had all come back to him now—the dream in which Henry Stevens had feverishly memorized a formula out of the science of that dream-world of Earth, to help him in his struggle against the Bunts.
For a moment, Khal Kan clutched at new hope. Then his eagerness faded. After all, that was only a dream. Henry Stevens and Earth and its science were only an insubstantial vision of his sleeping mind, and nothing that he learned in that could be of any value.
“I could wish you’d dreamed away the Bunts entirely,” Brusul was saying dryly. “Unfortunately, they’re still outside and it won’t be many hours before they attack.”
Khal Kan was not listening. His mind was revolving the simple formula that Henry Stevens had desperately memorized, in the dream.
“It wouldn’t work,” he thought. “It couldn’t work, when there’s no reality to all that—”
Yet he kept remembering Henry Stevens’ desperate effort to help him. That timid, thin little man he was in his dream each night—that little man had prayed that Khal Kan would not ignore his help, would try the formula.
Khal Kan reached decision. “I’m going to try it—the thing I learned in the dream!” he told the others.
Brusul stared. “Are you wit-struck? Dreams won’t help us now! How could a dream-weapon be of any use?”
“I’m not so sure now it was a dream,” Khal Kan muttered. “Maybe this is the dream, after all. Oh, hell take all speculations—dream or reality, I’m going to try this thing.”
He shot orders. “Bring all the charcoal you can find, all the sulphur from the street of the apothecaries, and all of the white crystals we use for drying fruits. Those crystals were called ‘saltpeter’ in the dream.”
Scared, wondering men brought the materials to the palace. There, Brusul and Zoor and Golden Wings watched mystifiedly as Khal Kan supervised their preparation.
He remembered clearly the formula that Henry Stevens had memorized in the dream. He had the men pound and pulverize and mix, until a big mass of granular black powder was the result.
“Now bring small metal vases—enough to hold all this—and lampwicks and day,” he ordered.
A captain came running, breathless. “The Bunts have finished their ladders and I think they’re soon going to make their attack, sire!” he cried.
“And our leader lingers here, muddling in minerals!” cried Brusul gustily. “Khal Kan, forget this crazy dream and make ready for battle!”
Khal Kan paid no attention. He was having the men stuff the small metal vases with the black powder, stopping their mouths with clay through which a fuse-like wick protruded.
“Distribute these vases to all our men along the walls,” he ordered. “Tell them, that when the Bunts place their ladders, they are to light the fuses and fling the vases down among the green warriors, at my command.”
“Hell destroy all dreams!” raged Brusul. “What good will such a crazy plan do? Do you think dropping vases on the Bunts will stop them?”
“I don’t know,” Khal Kan muttered. “In the dream, I thought it would. The dream-me called the powder ‘gunpowder’ and the vases ‘grenades.’ And in the dream they seemed a more terrible weapon even than the poisoned arrows.”
Yells from the walls and the warning blare of trumpets ripped across the sunlit city. A great cry swept through Jotan’s streets.
“The Bunts are coming!”
“To the wall!” Khal Kan cried.
From the parapet atop the great wall, the rising sun revealed an ominous spectacle. From all around the landward side of Jotan, the hordes of the Bunts were surging toward the city.
First came a line of green bowmen whose hissing, poisoned shafts were already rattling along the top of the wall. Jotanian warriors sank groaning as the swift poison sped into their blood. Khal Kan held his shield up, and swept Golden Wings behind him as they waited.
Behind the first line of bowmen came Bunts carrying long, rough wooden scaling-ladders. Behind these came the main masses of the stocky green men, armed with bows and short-swords, led by Egir himself.
The ladders came up against the wall, and the blood-chilling Bunt yell broke around the city as the green warriors swarmed catlike up them. Joranians who sought to push over the ladders were smitten by arrows.
“Over the wall and open the gates!” Egir’s bull voice was yelling to his green men. “Let us into Jotan!”
The main horde of the Bunts was already surging toward the gates of the city, while their attackers on the ladders sought to win the wall.
“Now—light the fuses and drop the vases!” Khal Kan yelled along the parapet, through the melee.
Torches at readiness set the wicks alight. The seemingly harmless little metal vases were tossed over into the surging mass of the Bunts.
A series of ear-splitting crashes shook the air, like thunder. White smoke drifted away to show masses of the Bunts felled by the explosions.
“Gods!” cried Brusul appaliedly. “Your dream-weapon is thunder of heaven itself!”
“Magic!” yelled the Bunts, shrinking back aghast from their own dead, tumbling in panic off the ladders. “Flee, brothers!”
The fear-maddened green warriors surged back from the walls of Jotan, breaking in panic-stricken, disorganized masses. Egir’s bull voice could be heard raging, trying to ral
ly them, but in vain.
The men of Jotan who had lighted and flung the new weapons were as horrified as their victims. Khal Kan’s yell aroused them.
“Horses, and after them!” he cried. “Now is our chance to avenge yesterday!”
The gates ground open—and every horsemen left in jotan galloped out after Khal Kan and Golden Wings in pursuit of the routed, green men.
The Bunts made hardly any effort to turn and fight They were madly intent on putting as great a distance as possible between them and Jotan.
“It’s Egir I’m after!” Khal Kan cried to Brusul. “While he lives, no safety for Jotan!”
“See—there he rides!” cried Golden Wings’ silvery voice.
Khal Kan yelled and put spur to his horse as he saw Egir and his Bunt captains riding full tilt toward the Dragals, in an effort to escape.
They rode right through the Seeing Bunts in pursuit of the traitor. They were overtaking him, when Egir turned and saw them coming. The Jotanian renegade uttered a yell, and he and his green captains turned.
“’Ware arrows!” shouted Brusul, behind Khal Kan.
Khal Kan saw the Bunts loosing the vicious shafts, but he saw it only vaguely, for only Egir’s sardonic face was clear to him as he charged.
Sword out, he galloped toward his uncle. Something stung his arm, and he heard a scream from Golden Wings and knew an arrow had hit him.
“My dear nephew, you’ve two minutes to live!” panted Egir, his eyes blazing hate and triumph as they met and their swords clashed. “You’re a dead man now—”
Khal Kan felt a cold, deadly numbness creeping through his arm with incredible rapidity. He summoned all his fast-flowing strength to swing his sword up.
It left his guard open and Egir stabbed viciously as their horses wheeled. Then Khal Kan’s nerveless arm brought his blade down.
“This for my father, Egir!”
The sword shore the traitor’s shoulder and neck half through. And a moment after Egir dropped from the saddle, Khal Kan felt his own numb body falling. He could not feel the impact with the ground.
The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 15
