Empire of the East

by Fred Saberhagen

  What seemed like long minutes were necessary to locate the weapon, stuck in the bottom mud. But it was not needed sooner. Seeing into the shadowed tunnel from sunlight was effectively impossible, but sounds came plainly out: wolf-howls that keened in agony, and what sounded like words, muttered in a basso voice. There came out broken lupine bodies, drifting. Rolf had his sword back in his hand before a single live wolf emerged at last, in a dead frantic yelping run. He cut at and missed the speeding form, and listened to the sounds of its flight diminish in the distance.

  Now something else was stirring in the tunnel mouth. A giant’s hand, covered with orange fur, and somewhere he had once seen the like before…

  “Lord Draffut,” Rolf choked out, and sat down on the stream’s bank, with suddenly trembling knees. “We give you welcome.”

  Catherine marveled greatly, and her awe increased when Draffut laid hold gently of Rolf’s mangled arm and raw, torn flesh became half-healed scar tissue at his touch.

  “My healing powers are not what they once were,” the Beast-Lord rumbled. “Yet what I can give to humans I still give.”

  “Lord Draffut, we thank you.”

  “Ardneh has called me, and I have listened.” With his great hands he touched and began the healing of their smaller wounds as well. Then, with Catherine’s two hands held in one of his, he paused, looking down into her eyes as an adult might regard an infant. “I sense another matter of pain, that has been visited upon you. The work of healing that has already been begun, also.”

  “We thank you again.”

  “No, you have begun it yourselves.”

  Rolf, feeling childlike in size and wisdom, exchanged looks with Catherine. “I do not understand.”

  “Rolf. Have you not now bound yourself to Catherine, so that her life is to you as your own, and more than your own?”

  Rolf still looked at her. “I have.”

  “Catherine, are you so bound to Rolf?”

  “I am bound.”

  “Then from this day let your bodies be as one; no curse of the East can have power to separate you any more, whatever harm may otherwise be done to you.”

  The Lord Draffut very shortly took his leave, saying that many humans a little to the south were in great need of him, and soon there would be even more. Ardneh’s mental presence meanwhile came fitfully to Rolf, with information.

  “We are to rest now,” he announced. “Inside.”

  He and Catherine were asleep, limbs twined on a spread cloak, when Ardneh’s next speech broke an hours-long silence. “Rolf. Catherine. Get up, gather weapons and food. It is time for you to leave me.”

  Still half-sleeping, they arose in silence and began to dress. Almost immediately Ardneh spoke again: “You are to bear my last message to Duncan, and through him to all the West.”

  Rolf came fully awake at last. “Last message?”

  “The eastern army has arrived, and is encircling me. I will be destroyed in a matter of hours.”

  Catherine ceased packing food into a bag and turned stunned eyes to Rolf, who groped for words but could not speak. Ardneh continued: “After you have memorized the message, you will follow the passage on the right just outside this room. You will find a door newly opened, leading to a tunnel that will bring you beyond the Eastern army.”

  Rolf found his tongue. “Catherine can take your message out, Ardneh. I will stay on and fight with you. You still need help. And—and it cannot be hopeless yet! I can help you devise some new—”

  “No.” The imperturbable calm of Ardneh’s voice only made the meaning of his words the more unreal. “The next full scale attack of Orcus will destroy me, and it is not many hours away. And both of you must carry my message. We must make sure that it gets through. I no longer have any other means of communication with Duncan. You must impress upon him the importance of my final message, which is this: he will soon face the choice of either saving his army by retreat, or taking a grave risk of its destruction by trying to save me. He must choose to save the men. They can and will fight again tomorrow. I am finished now. I must serve as I was meant to serve.”

  “I…Ardneh, is there no other way?”

  “You can no longer give me meaningful help in any other way. I have given you your orders now. I will repeat the message several times before you leave me.”

  “You will not need to repeat the message, I understand it.” Rolf exchanged helpless glances with Catherine. “If those are the orders you insist upon, we must obey them. But…”

  Catherine broke in, shouting angrily at the ceiling. “Ardneh, it is not right for you to be so calm. No human being could be so, in your place. With human beings, there is always a chance. Duncan and our men can beat theirs in a pitched battle, if they must. I feel it!”

  “No.”

  Rolf cried: “Ardneh, do not surrender!”

  “I will not, but Orcus with Ominor’s army will be strong enough to overcome me. Now tell this to Duncan also, and spread it throughout the West: in the future, men must not make gods of finite beings like myself.”

  “Gods,” Rolf repeated vacantly. He had heard the word before, but it seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. “Ardneh, tell us what to do if you are killed.”

  “Bear my messages to Duncan. Then live and fight for your humanity. And tell the army not to look back on its retreat. That is important too.”

  Rolf went on arguing and pleading for a time, though Ardneh no longer answered. Then Catherine, tears standing in her eyes, was thrusting a pack at him, and his sword, and was pulling him by the arm. At first Rolf moved dazedly, allowing himself to be led like some stunned prisoner. But when they had reached the new door and passed into the outer tunnel Ardneh had mentioned, he put Catherine gently behind him and took the lead.

  The new passage was crude and narrow, rough-walled, so dark that they must grope their way. From somewhere behind came the sliding closing of a heavy door. Now Ardneh’s presence was very nearly gone from Rolf’s perception.

  After a hundred meters or so, the passage widened; and shortly its walls were no longer rock, but hardened earth. Yet it continued to twist on a long subterranean course. At last the slope they walked began gradually to tend upward, and there came to them warmer air, with the subtle smells of vegetation.

  Their eyes strained ahead for light, but there was none, not even the tenuous sky-glow of a cloudy night. “We must be still within the blackness,” Rolf whispered softly.

  The walls of the tunnel grew further apart, then abruptly fell away altogether. Rolf could not tell how Ardneh had arranged the opening, or prevented the enemy from getting into it. But there was no doubt that Ardneh’s messengers had reached open air; Rolf felt a tuft of grass now brush against his leg.

  Ardneh had said that the tunnel would bring them above ground behind the Eastern lines, outside the noose that Ominor had drawn around Ardneh’s emplacement. Under Orcus’s orders, the Eastern army had evidently dared to enter Ardneh’s zone of darkness; Rolf and Catherine could now hear the mutter and murmur of a great number of men working some distance away, the crunching and scraping of innumerable digging tools. The noise came from somewhere behind them as they faced away from the tunnel mouth from which they had just emerged.

  Reaching behind him to hold Catherine’s left hand in his own, Rolf led on, away from the sounds of digging. The darkness at first remained absolute. Soon he paused; at a few score meters’ distance there came the sound of men in a column tramping past. The marchers were led by a chanting wizard, who bore aloft a kind of witchlight that illuminated a few square meters of the land that Ardneh had interdicted from all light; at Rolf’s distance, no more than a blurred blue spark was visible. After the wizard passed, came the sound of feet in route step, an occasional chink of tools or weapons, and a hushed fragment or two of Eastern talk. Weapons ready, Catherine and Rolf stood motionless until the spark had faded to invisibility and the column was out of earshot.

  Moving on, they soo
n found the ground sloping downward again beneath their feet. Now Rolf put each foot forward with extra caution.

  At last one of his feet found water.

  “The river,” Catherine whispered in his ear.

  “It must be.” But, he thought, the river wound around Ardneh, so to find it was little help in judging directions. Anyway, compass directions in themselves would be useless until he knew where Duncan was.

  “Let us try to wade it,” he whispered. If it came to swimming they might face the question of leaving their heavy metal weapons behind. Easing his way into the water, Rolf made sure to note immediately the direction of the current; if they should get to floundering and swimming in midstream, it wouldn’t do to get turned around and come out unknowingly on the bank from which they had gone in.

  Good fortune attended the crossing, however, through water nowhere more than waist deep. On the new bank, the grass was thicker, and the earth seemed flatter, less disturbed. When they had advanced a hundred meters beyond the riverbank, the sounds of tramping, working men were no longer audible. The normal summer sounds of bird and insect were absent too. Silence seemed complete.

  Rolf, still leading, stopped so abruptly that Catherine stepped on his heel. Suddenly there had become visible to him the glimmering beginning of bright sunlight, a tentative vision caught first with one eye only, like something manufactured by the sight-starved nerves inside his head. But when they had moved forward a few more steps, there appeared a splintered, fragmented scene of daylit grass and sky.

  Before emerging from Ardneh’s night, Rolf called a halt to rest and wait for the setting of the sun. He and Catherine remained where they were until the dimming of the light ahead showed that natural darkness was falling. Then they moved out from under the mountain-sized shadow beneath which Ardneh hid; they had not gone a hundred meters under the open sky before a bird came drifting down on silent wings to greet them.

  XI

  World Without Ardneh

  “We have messages for Duncan, from Ardneh,” Rolf told the bird at once. “Can you guide us to him, quickly?”

  “Whoo. It will take yoouu half the night to reach his camp. I had better bear your words.”

  “The army is still so far? Ardneh needs his help.”

  “They were closer this morning, before the day’s fighting began. Tonight Duncan retreats. Some of us Feathered Folk were sent to watch for youuu.”

  Rolf drew a deep breath. “Yes, you had better bear Ardneh’s words. We will follow as quickly as we can.” Rolf repeated Ardneh’s injunctions, word for word as closely as he was able. “And now, which way does Duncan’s army lie?”

  The bird rose briefly out of sight, then dropped back to earth and pointed with one wing. “There, only a little way, and youu will meet the ground patrol whoo cared for me through the day. I will tell them first that yoouu are here, then carry Ardneh’s messages on.”

  With that the bird was gone. Rolf was relieved to make contact with the foot patrol of eight men after only another hundred meters’ cautious advance. From them, he and Catherine soon learned that Duncan’s efforts to break the Eastern ring round Ardneh’s redoubt had been fierce but unsuccessful.

  “I think you had better take us straight to Duncan,” Rolf told the patrol’s leader. “We can give him more information than you are likely to gain, stumbling about here without your bird.”

  The officer was opening his mouth to answer when the night around them erupted with the clash and yells of ambush. The clutch of sudden terror was no less sharp for being an old acquaintance. Rolf drew and crouched low, trying to see the enemy outlined against the sky. Men rushed and struggled around him, and for the moment he could not distinguish foe from unfamiliar friend, and he did not strike.

  Amid the grunting and shouting there came a single high-pitched scream, from what direction he could not be sure. He called out Catherine’s name. The only answer came from death, singing to his right and left in invisible blades. Rolf threw himself down, rolled away in the grass, and battle-noise swept past him.

  The pounding and scurrying of feet dwindled into silence. Suddenly, inexplicably as could happen in a night action, he found himself apparently alone. Cautiously he rose into a crouch, probing the silent night with all his senses. In the middle distance faint moonlight shone on a crawling form that might be Catherine’s, half-hidden in tall grass. Rolf moved in that direction, stepping slowly at first, then with a short rush when the form seemed to waver and vanish in the light of the deceptive moon.

  At the spot where he thought the figure had been, he called Catherine’s name again, softly, several times, but there came not so much as a rustle of grass in response. He searched in a small circle, but there was no trace of anyone.

  Rolf realized that with every passing moment the chance of finding her here grew more remote. If she was still alive, she must be moving on ahead of him toward Duncan, in the direction the patrol had started to take before the ambush. In that direction Rolf’s duty also urged him. He took his bearings by the stars and at last moved on alone. Somewhere off to his left, men brawled with steel again and then were silent. Rolf kept his weapon ready and held to his course.

  Throughout the rest of the night he maintained a steady progress. Once he came upon a bird lying in the moonlight, dead since the day before most likely, the great wings broken and torn, probably by reptile claws, and the wide eyesockets emptied. Rolf could not tell if it was a bird he knew; it might have been Strijeef for all that he could tell.

  At dawn Rolf could see, but not identify, groups of people in the distance, in several directions. He took cover; fortunately the grass here was tall enough to hide him as he crawled. Well behind him now, Ardneh’s dome of darkness, impervious to sun, still bulked high against the clear sky. Rolf saw numbers of reptiles in the distance, but all appeared to be occupied with matters of more moment than his solitary passage. When a rise of ground shielded him from the distant people, he stood and walked again.

  Near the middle of the morning he knew a great, heart-numbing shock as he came upon Catherine lying dead in bloody rags. But when he turned the body over he saw it was that of some long-haired Western boy of slender build. Quivering in all his limbs, Rolf had to sit down. But at once renewed hope began to grow. Perhaps she was somewhere just ahead of him, or close behind. They might find each other even before they reached the Western army.

  Around noon Rolf had to make a long detour to get round a large Eastern foot patrol. He hoped Catherine had retained her water-bottle. Most of his own was gone by now. The sun beat down into tall windless grass. Only now and then came the ghost of a breeze, cooling his face.

  Shortly after he got past the Eastern patrol Rolf came in sight of what he took to be Duncan’s rear-guard. In another hour of cautious pursuit he had gained enough ground to be sure; the long, thick, twisting column of the retreat was plainly in sight now, going up a gradual rise of land toward the southwest. The retreat was still heading directly away from Ardneh’s shadow-dome, which was now many kilometers distant across the tree-dotted sea of grass.

  When he came in hailing distance of the mounted men who brought up the army’s rear, he was assured that Duncan himself was only a short distance ahead. Alternately walking and trotting, moving up along the column, Rolf could see the special bitter weariness of defeat in every face. It had been defeat, but not disaster; the army was basically intact. Men had retained their weapons, the wounded were being borne efficiently along on animals and in litters.

  Duncan was riding alone, in battle-stained clothing, a little apart from his chief officers. When Rolf came trotting at his stirrup, Duncan looked down, at first with weary curiosity, then with delayed recognition and sudden new interest.

  “Hail, Duncan.” With a minimum of preamble, Rolf passed on Ardneh’s last admonitions, as nearly word for word as he could manage to do.

  “Yes, the bird came through with your message. I thank you for all that you have done.” A new thought see
med to strike Duncan. “What happened to the girl who was with you there?”

  “I had hoped to find her here, sir.”

  Duncan looked sharply back over his shoulder, made a little motion of his head, and a pair of men among those riding a little distance to the rear kicked their mounts into a faster pace that brought them up to Duncan. These two men were well dressed, and though armed they somehow did not look like soldiers. A few words that Rolf did not catch passed between them and Duncan, and then they dismounted, let Duncan ride on ahead, and came to walk beside Rolf, leading their animals. Meanwhile Duncan was engaged in some traveling discussion by some of his high officers.

  The two well-dressed men introduced themselves to Rolf. “We are kinsmen of Catherine’s,” one explained, “and have come all the way from the Offshore Islands in search of her. At first we heard she was enslaved, and meant to try to ransom her; then were rejoiced to hear how she had escaped, with some Western soldiers, at some remote caravanserai. Now we hear that you are one of those soldiers, and that you have seen her lately. We entreat you, tell us whatever more you can.”

  Rolf nodded slowly, looking the men over. Both looked young, elegant, tough. “There is little enough to add.” He turned away momentarily to look out over the surrounding grassy plain. Other stragglers like himself were still coming in, catching up with the army, but none of those in sight at the moment was a woman. Turning back, he asked: “To which one of you was she betrothed?”

  “Neither,” said one. They exchanged glances with each other. “We are both blood relatives. That one would not come.”

  Rolf felt his heart leap up; he could not convince himself that Catherine was really lying out there somewhere dead. He spoke then in a more friendly way to the Islanders, telling them what he could that might afford them some hope. He omitted the business of Charmian’s curse.

  The others in turn searched him carefully with their eyes, no doubt trying to ascertain what had been his exact relationship with their kinswoman. They had him repeat parts of his story—where and when he had seen her last, how was her general health. Then, after offering courteous thanks, they mounted again and dropped back toward the rear of the column.