Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  Ekuman would dare anything now. His secret passage had another door, hard by the ruined gate where Elephant sat.

  When someone’s hands inside the keep took up the Prisoner’s Stone, and its power burst in the great door of the keep, Rolf was one of the first of the Free Folk to enter. In the lower halls of the keep he used his sword—as inconclusively as before. But there were stronger fighters at Rolf’s sides. The enemy was rapidly pushed back, cut down, being taken by surprise, being outnumbered now in the stronghold where they had thought themselves finally secure.

  Rolf joined others then in pressing up the stairway, fighting now against the last desperate defense of the visiting Satraps and their bodyguards. Chup was not among them. Rolf had not seen Chup, nor Mewick either, since the two of them had begun their duel in the outer court.

  When resistance had failed completely, Rolf, who knew the lay of the land better than anyone else, led the advance into the upper level of the keep. Sword in hand, he was the first of the Free Folk to enter the Presence Chamber, the room from which he had been taken under guard only a few hours earlier. His knees quivered with his relief when he saw that Sarah was alive and unhurt. She was still where Rolf had seen her last, kneeling beside Nils’s stretcher—as if all the time between had found her immune to danger and had flowed around her.

  She raised her eyes joyfully at the entrance of the Free Folk—but when she recognized Rolf under the blood and grime that masked his face, her eyes turned cold. Nils still breathed; he turned drained but living eyes to his rescuers as they entered.

  Thomas swept his glance around the chamber, then faced Sarah. “Did you see which way our gracious Lord Ekuman retired?”

  She could only shake her head, no. The Free Folk spread out, searching. Some went out onto the roof-terrace. Others poked among the hangings on the wall and tested corpses with their blades.

  Rolf chose to follow the stairs that went up to the top-most level of the tower. Only a few steps up, a bundle of clothing lay. He lifted the upper garment with his sword. It was a long gray robe. It caught at his memory, but for the moment he could not remember who….

  A small circlet woven of the sun fell from the robe and dropped upon the stair just at his feet. It flashed across his mind how cold and deadly Sarah’s eyes had been just now, looking at him. Her hair was dark, not at all like this. It was Sarah that he loved, so why should he bend swiftly and pick up this yellow charm?

  The circlet was soft and flawless and intricately knotted, and he thought he could feel power in it. But why should he quickly put it into the inner pocket of his shirt?

  Thomas came up beside him then, and together they went on up the stair. When they saw the richness of the furnishings in the apartment at the top, they felt certain it was Ekuman’s. But the Satrap was not there. In a small anteroom two harem girls were cowering; they screamed in terror when Rolf and Thomas came bursting in on them.

  “Where is he?” Thomas demanded, but the girls could only shake their heads in fear. Rolf noticed that one of them had red hair, the other brown. It seemed there had been only one girl in the Castle, perhaps in all the land, with hair of the particular golden—

  Outside there burst up a roaring cheer, drawing Rolf and Thomas to a window. On the roof-terrace there were torches enough to show them how Ekuman’s banner of black and bronze was being hauled down, torn to ribbons, spat and stamped upon.

  The sight was witnessed by others, the last of Ekuman’s troops to hold a portion of the field. These were the lancers, still huddled together around the Elephant. The fall of the tower, attested by the tearing down of the flag, was enough for them. They abandoned their wounded, and some of them their weapons, and they turned and fled.

  Here high in the tower the windows were broader and shallower than those in the lower walls. Here Thomas could lean out and strike his fist upon the sill. “Fewer of ’em than we thought! We might have got to the Elephant with one more push. Well, it’s ours now—”

  The fire that had started with the breaching of the gate was still spreading slowly among the sheds just inside the outer Castle wall; so there was firelight enough in the courtyard to let Rolf and Thomas see the sudden lifting of a paving stone from below. A man’s head and shoulders rose out of the ground, followed by the rest of a tall spare body. The man turned his head this way and that, then sprinted for the Elephant.

  “It’s Ekuman!” Even at this distance, Rolf knew he could not be mistaken.

  Thomas was shouting something incoherent. Ekuman’s figure seemed to grow tiny as it raced beside the Elephant’s bulk. The Satrap found the hand-grips, climbed, scrambled through the light-circle of the open doorway, reached back to pull the door’s round slab closed behind him. He was only just in time—a farmer broke his pitchfork hurling it at the door, and another came running up quickly to beat on the door uselessly with an axe. But Ekuman was now established where no man might pluck him out; and Rolf knew how ready were the reins for the Satrap’s hands, or anyone’s, to take them up.

  Rolf was running down the stair already, Thomas at his side demanding, “Will the Elephant obey him?”

  “I learned very quickly how to give Elephant orders. And now it is already awake.”

  On impulse Rolf turned aside from the stair at the level of the Presence Chamber. He came to a halt in the middle of the huge, once-splendid room. Across the floor the path of the thunderbolt, was etched black, zig-zagging slightly through patches of persistent foam….

  With a bound Rolf was standing on the throne, reaching to take down from the wall the twin of the red cylinder that Ekuman had used in putting out the fire. It was not heavy.

  Thomas was still right at his side. “Will that thing stop the Elephant? I doubt if the Thunderstone itself could do so.”

  “Nothing that I know can stop the Elephant.” Rolf spoke with conviction. “It can batter down this keep, I think, if the driver’s arms don’t get too tired to work the levers back and forth. But I may be able to blind the Elephant for a little while. Maybe long enough for our people to get to some high mountain, or else back to the swamps.”

  Rolf had thrown down his sword. As he started down the stairs he was already slinging the red cylinder across his back by the leather strap that had been made to hold it on the wall.

  Once sealed inside the Elephant, Ekuman could slow down, think, and be cautious. There must be dismay and uproar among the rebels outside who had seen him enter, but here there was no sound but the grumbling drone of the mysterious power under his feet, and his own heavy breathing. With steady hands he approached and then touched the strange lights around him, so bright and yet so cool. His nerves felt very good, now that there was nothing left for him to lose.

  He soon noticed that someone had recently been sitting in the central chair, cracking and flattening the ancient cushions. He knew who had occupied this seat more powerful than a throne—he had been watching from the roof-terrace when Chup forced Rolf out of the Elephant. He had recognized the same youth, outwardly no more than a peasant, who had been involved in Charmian’s petty intrigue—and who, during questioning, had suddenly risen from his knees and looked Ekuman fearlessly in the eye. “I am Ardneh,” the boy had said, and then it was as if he had thrown the thunderbolt with his right hand.

  But the Satrap Ekuman had survived the bolt, as he had so far survived all of Ardneh’s blows. And now the throne of Elephant’s power was Ekuman’s. Whether Ardneh was only a symbol or something more, Ekuman meant to crush him yet.

  He let his weight down, gingerly, into the chair where Rolf had sat. Nothing happened but the rising of a small cloud of dust, prosaic and somehow reassuring. Now he could perceive the vision-ring, and marveled at it.

  And now, cautiously but steadily, he reached to touch the drive levers. They were the obvious places for a man sitting here to put his hands.

  Rolf ran out through the open doorway of the deep, jumping over bodies and debris. He was just in time to see Elephant make its fi
rst slow tentative movements under the control of its new master. He dodged through the ravaged courtyard, trying to keep the red cylinder as much as possible behind him, so that Ekuman might not see it and know what Rolf intended. Whether Ekuman saw Rolf coming or not, Elephant gave a sudden grinding lurch and freed itself of the ruins of the tower, then with a mumbling roar went backing out of the breach it had created in the wall.

  Elephant vanished from Rolf’s sight, but the noise of Elephant receded only a little way; and when he had run up to the debris of the fallen tower he saw the huge vague armored shape standing motionless a little way ahead, as if waiting for him, on the road that curved down toward the village.

  Rolf knew that the new driver could not yet have much sureness of control. He ran straight toward the Elephant, and Ekuman made it roar and lurch toward him. He waited until the mighty circling treads were almost upon him, until they were shaking the ground violently under his feet; then he sprang out of the way and turned and ran in at Elephant’s flank.

  Before the metal beast could pass him, Rolf’s hands and feet had found the tiny inset steps and he was climbing toward its head. Ekuman made a sudden turn off the road and onto the rougher slope. The move came very near throwing Rolf off, but he clung on grimly, the red cylinder dragging on his back. He leaned his weight outward on the door handle when he reached it, but of course Ekuman had latched the door inside—and Ekuman had no Prisoner’s Stone with him to betray him now.

  When Ekuman reversed his turn, Rolf was able to shift his grip, and with a desperate upward lunge to seize one of the rods projecting from the front of Elephant’s head. In another moment he was able to pull himself up onto that head. Sitting on the topmost hump, he contrived to grip the projecting rods with his legs, so that his arms were free to bring around the red cylinder from his back. He gripped the black snout of it and aimed it as he had seen the Satrap do, and the fingers of his right hand found the trigger. He played the jet from the nozzle over the tiny insect-eyes that were spaced around Elephant’s head. The foam as it went splattering away was the color of nothingness in the dead light of pre-dawn morning.

  The stuff would not cling to Elephant’s eyes as Rolf had hoped it would. The metal and unbreakable glass were very smooth, and with Elephant’s jouncing motion and the wind of his rush the foam fell quickly away. Still, Elephant’s eyes were covered as long as Rolf kept playing the jet on them. Ekuman would not be able to see where he was going, let alone hunt down running targets; Rolf remembered, from his own time in the saddle, how dust, and falling stones, and liquid fire, had each momentarily blinded Elephant.

  Ekuman, who could do nothing else till he had thrown Rolf off, kept Elephant stopping, starting, turning, going down the long slope toward the bottom of the pass. The red cylinder kept on spewing foam at a tremendous rate. Rolf swept the nozzle in a circle, trying to keep foam covering the eyes in the back of Elephant’s head as well as those in the front. When he took a moment to lift his own eyes, he could see numbers of Free Folk scattering and streaming away from the Castle. He was giving them a chance to fight again someday—to fight against a Satrap who rode the Elephant, and the forces that such a man could rally to him.

  But Rolf had no time now to lament the bitter future. Elephant’s turning, twisting run down into the pass continued, with maneuvers that grew more violent as Ekuman gained a better feel of the controls. Several times Rolf was nearly thrown off, had to drop the nozzle of his foam-thrower and use both hands to save himself. But each time he recovered in a moment, and once more covered Ekuman’s eyes.

  Ekuman suddenly abandoned his weaving tactics, and turned for a straight run west. He must have had a few moments of clear vision, enough to give him some idea of directions, but still he chose a course that would soon bring him through the outskirts of the village and ultimately to the river. Was the Satrap grown so desperate to rid himself of Rolf that he would risk the miring of his heavy mount in mud and water? Why?

  The red cylinder gushed on as if it could never empty itself. Now in the first forelightening of dawn the foam covering the great hump of Elephant’s head was white, a white hood spreading and streaming continuously down to hide the eyes. And now Rolf noticed a curious thing; at one small spot, right at the back of Elephant’s head, the foam instead of being blown away was rushing inward—as if Elephant’s nose was there, and he continually inhaled. And Rolf then remembered the circulation of fresh air inside with the door shut tight.

  He twisted around as well as he could on his difficult, bouncing perch, aiming his jet of foam to keep that gasping nostril covered, even if he must let the eyes in front begin to see again.

  Rushing at full speed now down the western slope, Elephant raised its bellowing voice to its loudest roar. Though its eyes were now uncovered it still weaved like a blinded beast. Rolf was bounced back and forward and up and down, bruising his lean bones. He clung on, somehow, and kept his foam-nozzle aimed at the little orifice that sucked so greedily for air. When he looked back he saw that Elephant, like some sickened animal, was now leaving a continuous trail of dropping. A line of foam was dribbling like dung from somewhere under its belly.

  The riverside village was just ahead. Trees rushed by. Rolf bent, clinging desperately to the rods on Elephant’s head, as great branches whipped past just above him. Other trunks were flattened like grass before Elephant’s charge. A low retaining wall was trampled under the treads.

  The scrape of Elephant’s rushing flanks dragged down the walls of houses. There seemed now to be no hand at all upon the reins.

  Rolf saw then that the last steep plunge into the river was unavoidable, and that it was certain to throw him off. Just as Elephant tilted down the bank, he leaped clear. He jumped forward and to one side, as high and wide as he could, hoping for deep water where he came down. The red cylinder was still with him, held by its strap going around his body. His feet were just touching down on the calm surface of the Dolles as the great sheet of Elephant’s oceanic splash began to rise behind him.

  The sound of Elephant’s plunge roared at him while he was underwater. The cylinder was now light enough to float and his treading water brought him easily to the surface. It seemed that the whole riverbed was still rocking, sloshing water like a hand-held basin, with the force of Elephant’s dive.

  Elephant, half submerged, had come to a struggling, straining halt. Its forequarters were evidently forced against some underwater rock, some firm fixed bone of earth. The endless driving treads still spun, like tail-swallowing snakes, flinging up gobs of mud and hurling ribbons of water, digging Elephant deeper into the bottom of the river.

  Exhausted, Rolf struggled back toward the shore. In thigh-deep water he took a stand, and set to work again with his red cylinder. Until the cylinder at last ran empty, he kept the narrow gasping throat of Elephant filled with foam.

  Not that breathing foam seemed to do metallic Elephant any harm. His voice was still as loud, its treads still spun as rapidly as ever. Rolf, though, was thinking of the inside of the cabin. In there, now, all the cool lights would be glowing still, glowing faintly through the solid insubstantial whiteness that was filling all the space there was, filling eye and ear and nose and lung….

  When the cylinder was emptied Rolf dropped it from his deadened arms and let it drift away. He had only just strength enough left to get himself ashore. Once ashore he lay in the mud, hardly able to lift his head at the sound of running feet. He knew his friends as they came in sight. Down the long trail of foam and through the shattered village they had followed him, though Elephant’s mad descent had left them far behind. They were gathering around Rolf now in the morning twilight, lifting him up and crying out the triumph that he was too weak to shout.

  It was about noon on that day when Elephant suddenly died—or once more fell asleep. At any rate the droning voice coughed once or twice and ceased, and with it ceased the endless mindless working of the treads. Instantly the gentle river healed over its torn surface, leavi
ng only one ripple-scar bent around the motionless metal hulk. Those who were standing guard first backed away, then crept closer. But still the round door that they were watching never opened.

  When Rolf woke up, near sunset, they told him about Elephant. Rolf was up in the Castle when he awoke. He vaguely remembered being helped back up the hill by men only just less weary than he was; he did not even remember lying down to sleep.

  There was other news. The troops who had been coming to Ekuman’s reinforcement from outposts scattered throughout the Broken Lands had turned and fled when they saw the Castle lost, and heard from their scouts that the Satrap himself was dead. All of Ekuman’s high commanders were fled or fallen. More important, not one of the visiting Satraps had escaped; so with today’s one blow, all the powers of the East here along the seaboard had been shaken. And here in the Broken Lands, farmers and villagers had seen victory in a sky that was for the first time in years empty of reptiles; and the people were hunting the remnants of Ekuman’s army or driving them on into the eastern desert.

  After enjoying a meal from what had been meant as Ekuman’s festive table, Rolf mounted to the Castle’s battlements to take a turn as lookout. The high roofs and walls had been cleaned of the last reptile’s corpse, and the last bleaching bones of the reptiles’ victims had been removed for burial. Now on all the roosts were birds, beginning to stir with the sunset; Rolf could pick out Strijeef, stretching his bandaged wing.

  Rolf turned in all directions, looking out over the battlements. It seemed to him odd that the new air of freedom should be invisible over distant swamps and farms, villages and roads, the pass, the desert, the Oasis of the Two Stones.

  The Thunderstone was safe, though the Prisoner’s Stone had not yet been found. Nor had Charmian.

  Looking from the roof-terrace into what had been the Presence Chamber, Rolf could see that Sarah was still there. There were many wounded now for her and the other women to tend; but still she spent as much time as she could beside one pallet. Nils still lived. And Mewick still lived, and even walked a bit, though he bore five or six wounds and had been drenched in his own blood.