"Don't worry," Phar told him.
"We've a way to go yet before things get desperate. I'll do what I can to ensure your survival. Fraxinus and I need a right-hand man just as badly as Checuti does, and ours is the nobler purpose. In addition to which, we're presently in a position to pay more. Bear that in mind if you have to decide where your loyalties lie."
"I will," Andris assured him. Privately, however, he reminded himself that when it came to deciding where his loyalties might lie, Ereleth had the whip hand, and the most vital currency of all safely tucked away in her pouch.
When Phar had gone, Merel said: "You're right; you do need more sleep.
Things will look better tomorrow. And whatever happens- whatever happens-I'll be here. No matter whose right-hand man you are, I'm yours. Believe me, that leaves you better off than you've ever been before and don't laugh, or I'll twist your wrist till you beg for mercy."
31?
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Part Three Into the Dragomite Hills, Hurried on by the Tide of Happenstance file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (321 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:22 AM]
<^ We may not raise mountains or hollow out the ocean depths, nor may we set a moon within the sky. We may devise seasons in calendars and mine salt from the soil, but we may not set the world atilt nor make the seas as salty as our blood. We must live in the world as we find it, not as we dream it, but we cannot help dreaming the dreams which rise from the depths of our being, and we cannot entirely resist the temptations of prophecy.
Here, then, is prophecy born of dreams to suckle at the breast of hope: though change be eternal, corruption can be checked; though death comes to every living thing, life may be the victor in the war against decay; though the world be at odds with our blood and our hearts, it is ours to rule if only we can contrive to steady our governing hand. ; ' The Apocrypha of Genesys
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l ucrezia woke up with a sudden start, but didn't know what it was that had startled her until she opened her eyes.
Elema's ancient face was very close to hers. The dark lander wore an expression of deep concern, which seemed to Lucrezia to be cause for considerable anxiety. The princess knew that the old woman must have touched her gently in order to bring her back from steep. She had sense enough not to make a sound.
It was still dark, but the sky was brightening upriver; a new dawn was on the point of breaking.
Elema reached out to touch Lucrezia's cheek, and Lucrezia realised, somewhat belatedly, that the dark lander had managed to free her hands. The princess immediately made as if to roll over so that Elema could start work on the cords knotted about her own wrists, but the old woman shook her head.
"No time," she mouthed silently.
"Lie still."
The dark lander eyes were darting back and forth, her gaze never settling.
Lucrezia realised that the ancient was very frightened, and that her warnings had to do with something far more serious than the possibility of waking the Eblans.
Disregarding Elema's advice, Lucrezia tried to raise herself into a sitting position. The camp was quiet, but not silent; the horses were astir. There was no sign of anything amiss except for Elema's attitude, but that was indication enough for Lucrezia. She looked wildly about, trying to figure out what the danger was, and from which direction it was coming.
Elema suddenly came to her feet, sparing the princess a single apologetic glance, and ran.
No shout of alarm followed the dark lander and Lucrezia deduced that the Eblans were wide open to attack, their sentries having gone to sleep or even worse been quietly eliminated.
3i9
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The old woman ra|^down river, and that was clue enough to tell Lucrezia which way to look for whatever was coming. She looked upriver, and had not long to wait.
There was no warning the sentry who had been posted at the ford was presumably dead. By the time one of the recumbent men reacted, it was far too late. The enemy came swiftly, with weapons at the ready, and it was obvious to Lucrezia that their intention was to cut down as many of the Eblans as they could before a hand could be raised against them.
The first warning that was shouted out turned into a scream before it was fully formed, but it was a lusty scream and it must have cut through the most languorous dream like a rusty saw blade
Once alerted to their peril the Eblans wasted no time in puzzlement; they had been living under threat for so long that they were on the very edge of panic even while they slept. They leapt up and reached for their weapons but their weapons were a sorry lot, including more quarter-staffs and clubs than spears. Such blades as they had were short, and their bows and arrows were of little use in the kind of conflict which had been thrust upon them.
Some of the Eblans tried to run for their tethered horses without pausing to pluck their scattered belongings from the ground, but while they tried to free their mpunts their enemies were already on top of them, hacking this way and that with their own clubs and I stone-headed axes. One of the Eblans had his bow in his hands, with an arrow ready notched, and he managed to loose off a close-range shot at the marauders. The arrow flew straight, but struck a broad breastplate of some material Lucrezia had never seen before. The breastplate was evidently strong enough to ward off a direct hit even at that range, and did not break even though its wearer stumbled backwards under the force of the impact.
The attackers were wearing helmets as well as breastplates, which masked their faces and gave them the look of nightmarish beasts, but their leather-clad arms and legs were plainly human. As if their superior armour and the advantage of surprise were not enough, they outnumbered the Eblans at least three to two.
Lucrezia saw the sense in Elema's warning now. This would be a massacre rather than a battle, and her best hope of survival might be to play dead.
With her hands tied behind her back her own breast presented a wide-open target, and she might easily be slain
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by a single blow but she did not lie
down. She stayed where she was, half-sitting, so she could watch the unfolding scene and savour all its horror. She shrank backwards, pressing herself against the resistant branches of one of the bushes which lined the river bank, but she made no real effort to wriggle into the body of the bush.
The attackers' hands and the flesh that was visible at their necks told Lucrezia that they were pale gold ens almost but not quite ambers. They were certainly not kin to the Eblans. The cut of the clothes they wore beneath their armour was markedly different, as was the style of their weaponry.
They carried as little metal as the men they had come to kill, and had tried to make good the deficit with glass and ceramics, but they favoured axes and maces over spears and quarter-staffs. Any disadvantage they suffered in terms of reach seemed more than compensated by their speed and agility. The Eblans were obviously used to fighting from horseback, but the newcomers had no horses, and they had evidently devoted all their training to the skills of fighting on foot.
The horny material of which the attackers' armour was made was also to be seen in the heads of their short stabbing-spears, but it was their helmets which showed it off most gaudily. Most were black or red-brown, but a few were iridescent green. All of them were very oddly decorated, with dangling filaments not unlike plaits of coarse hair and strange wing-like projections at the front. These fearsome apparitions hurled themselves upon the unready Eblans as if they were fighting dogs avid for blood.
Djemil Eyub had not tried
to run to the horses; he had remained where he was when he came upright from his sleeping-mat. He tried to rally his men with a cry, but only one ran to stand beside him. Eyub had snatched up a weapon which was essentially a quarter-staff, although its two ends had been carefully weighted with twin rounded stones to give it a little extra power when twirled or )abbed; at first he used it to stab at the attackers' bodies, hoping to knock them backwards, aiming for the axe-wielding arms and the helmeted heads. He struck out at elbows and forearms, with accuracy and noticeable effect. He forced at least three weapons to be dropped as his blows brought howls of pain from the assailants thus disarmed but the warriors in question could not be put out of the battle by such tricks, and there were too many of them.
3"
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Had Eyub's me^ been as clever as he was they might have grouped and mounted sufficient defence to stave off defeat for ten or twelve minutes, but they were not. Two men standing together could put up a better show than one alone, but there were a dozen axe-wielding dancers capering around them, taking turns to dart forward and strike. Eyub was agile enough to dodge two such rushes, but the third feinted with an ornamental club to send him the wrong way, then changed the manner of the thrust. Eyub adjusted his defence but was tripped by a trailing root. He used his staff to help himself back to his feet, but he would not have been allowed to do it had it not been for the protection provided by his companion, who hurled his spear like a javelin at the attacker who came to make sure that the fallen man stayed down. Then it was Eyub's turn to defend his rescuer, lashing out yet again with the staff as more axe-wielders came to take the place of their bruised comrades.
The ferocity of the onslaught was awesome. Within a minute half the Eblans were down and dead, while not one attacker had sustained a mortal wound.
Within another minute most of the men who had run to the horses had been cut down, and still the marauders had not suffered a'single serious casualty.
It was obvious to Lucrezia that the Eblans had neither the heart nor the stomach for a fight of this kind they wanted to run, and would have if they icould, but they were given neither time nor space to flee. Now none remained, standing except for D)emil Eyub, his close companion and one other, and they were doomed. Lucrezia saw that they had the advantage of height over their tormentors although they were by'no means tall by Xandrian standards and probably had greater reserves of brute strength, but they could hardly land a telling blow on their opponents.
The lone Eblan was dodging back and forth between riderless horses, trying to use them as living shields. The tactic served him reasonably well, but he had no chance to find a real avenue of escape. Lucrezia saw his enemies corner him twice, but on each occasion it was his blow rather than theirs which told, and for a moment she thought he might win the time to mount up and make use of the horse's strength and aggression- but when his adversaries closed upon him for a third time he was caught by two 3^
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opponents at once,
and could not move his own weapon cleverly enough to counter both of theirs.
After a flurry of desperate thrusts he went down, and stayed down.
For almost a minute Eyub and his friend had forced their own opponents to draw back cautiously. They had established a clear space around their station, but this was not really a victory. They had slain no one, and they were trapped their only achievement was to force their adversaries to pause and make a plan. They had the relatively bare hole of a gnarly tree behind them, and were thus able to stand angled back to back, like two points of a triangle. Their weapons had sufficient reach to intimidate any attackers who might come one by one, and none did- but as the field of battle was finally cleared, more and more armoured warriors became available to keep Eyub and his companion hemmed in.
There was a brief pause as the attackers gathered and grouped a moment when it must have been in Eyub's mind to surrender, had any such opportunity been offered- but his enemies were in no mood to stop short of their objective.
When Lucrezia saw that the Eblans' pursuers had no objective in mind save for the annihilation of their foe she felt a sharp pang of terror but no one had as yet come forward to smash or stab her; she could not even be certain that any of the marauders had deigned to notice her. She wished that Elema had had time to untie her hands, and that she had a good metal blade with which to defend herself preferably something carefully anointed with deadly venom on tip and blade alike but she knew how futile such wishes were. She knew, too, that there was nothing in her armoury of poisons that could be relied upon to bring her safely through such a situation as this.
If the helmeted figures were determined to take no prisoners, she would be dead before she ever got the chance to see their faces.
Eyub was still lashing out with his quarter-staff, trying desperately to use each end in quick succession. He disarmed one more adversary and hurt another, but then the end of his weapon was caught and held.
While he tried to wrench it free another armoured figure leapt forward to grapple with him.
Within a few seconds it was all over. Eyub's brave defender went down too, caught out by the impossibility of trying to ward off three weapons at once.
3^3
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The attackers were jostling one another now for the opportunity to get in a blow at the last of their victims. Lucrezia could not tell how badly Eyub and his companion were being hacked about because she could not see through the crowd.
The few seconds which passed before the armoured figures turned away from their gruesome work seemed unnaturally extended to Lucrezia, who was anticipating the moment when they would direct their attention to her with much trepidation. When that eventually happened, she felt that she had already lived through the moment, and that their slow approach was something she had already experienced, perhaps a thousand times. It seemed unreal.
They came to stand in a semicircle, looking down at her from the eye-slits in their horrid masks. For the princess, time came almost to a standstill, and did not resume its normal pace until one of them perhaps the leader reached up with oddly delicate hands to remove a glossy black helmet which looked as if it had been forged from the carapace of a huge beetle.
The face which emerged from behind the mask seemed unnaturally devoid of expression, but that was a trivial matter. What astonished Lucrezia was that the face was obviously female, and rather beautiful in its peculiar fashion.
She guessed even before the others copied the first and repoved their own helmets that they were all female.
She felt a sudden flood of intuitive relief as she made a further guess that she unlike the Eblans -- was in no immediate danger, simply by virtue of her sex.
She found her voice, and said: "My name is Lucrezia. I am from Xandria, which is a city far to the north of the Forest of Absolute Night. I am not your enemy."
There was no reply to this. The ring of faces presented no changes of expression; the women continued to study her minutely. Her own skin was considered delicately pale in the Inner Sanctum, but it wasn't as pale as the complexions which now confronted her. There was nothing of the dark lander about these faces, however. Lucrezia had no doubts as to the origin of their peculiar armour. These, she knew, were the mysterious companions of the drago mites Djemil Eyub's 'mound-women'.
The rumour of a great and conclusive victory won by the dark landers over the drago mites and their demonic companions was evidently file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (328 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:22 AM]
exaggerated. A dark
land war band would undoubtedly have presented more vigorous
resistance to the kind of attack she had just witnessed than the exhausted Eblans had contrived to muster, but they could not have been sure of a significantly better outcome.
The Eblans took me prisoner," Lucrezia said, when she tired of waiting to be asked a question.
"I would be very grateful if you would be kind enough to untie my hands."
Still there was no answer to her overtures, and no one made any move to comply with her request. The one who had been first to remove her helmet raised a hand to make a curt sign, but it was not directed at the sitting princess. Most of her companions turned away, scattering as they did so.
Some went to look at the fallen Eblans, others to collect the untethered horses, others to gather together the various goods strewn about the battlefield.
In the meantime, their leader continued to look down in her stony-faced fashion, paying close attention to the details of Lucrezia's clothing.
Lucrezia had begun to wonder whether the women knew human language at all when she finally spoke.
"Xandria," she said, in a remarkably flat tone.
"You come from Xandria."
"That's right," Lucrezia confirmed.
"I have friends nearby- traders. They have all manner of goods to offer, including metal implements. They are far better equipped to fight than the men you just slaughtered or the dark landers you might have encountered south of the river, but they are not your enemies. They would be pleased to befriend you."
"We have not forgotten Xandria," the armoured woman remarked impassively.
"It has a high wall, has it not?"
"Very high," Lucrezia informed her, concealing her surprise, 'and very solid.
"
"We have higher walls by far," the other assured her.
"Walls impenetrable to anyone who does not serve the drago mite queen."
"The Dragomite Hills," Lucrezia said evenly.
"We have heard that a great catastrophe has come to the hills- have you come into the forest in search of help? We will gladly give it, if we can."
All the woman would condescend to say in the face of such generosity was:
Serpent's Blood Page 39
