Finally, in exhaustion and frustration Kimban rose for one last impassioned appeal, ending, “Should we succeed alone in defeating the Flints, all the villages at the desert’s rim will benefit. How do you suppose our descendants will regard your descendants when your cowardice is known?”
By the stifled gasps from Epo’s tables, he knew he’d exceeded his authority. But reason had gotten them nowhere, and Cantry was the only village that had cared enough to come to investigate. They had to be the ones to offer help.
In the shocked silence, the Cantry delegates conferred, then the leader of the delegation, a stocky, grandmotherly woman clad in layers of gold jewelry, said, “Cantry can’t spare any men to fight for you. We, too, have been subject to the Flint raids. However, we will send wood from our forests, arrows and swords from inland, and oils to make hurling-fire to defend your walls. That is all we can do.”
That was the only concession Epo won before the delegates left, but Kimban overheard them talking among themselves and felt the tone of their comments had changed radically. They were determined not to be known as cowards.
Fretting and worrying, Kimban attended to his share of the preparations, not only carrying his silver sword out to the traps and warding them, but also peeling off his shirt and digging, hammering, and heaving with all the men. When Cantry’s wagons arrived, he pitched in to unload.
Their best carpenter was a woman who specialized in cabinet making using woods imported from so far away that a man’s weight of them could cost a year’s profits from Briller’s soap output. Now she supervised the construction of traps.
Kimban joined the crew using a rope and pulley to lower a brace into place after she cut it to fit. It went into place the first time, snug and exact. He had never been able to figure out how people did things like that.
They had just gotten the beam in place, and a group of youngsters were camouflaging the trap, when the alarm bell rang out in the pattern that meant Flints coming!
Kimban flicked a glance up the side canyon that led to Briller’s borax mine, the secret ingredient in his soap which was unlike any other soap made. Since it was late afternoon already, the worker’s wagon was returning, and as he watched it round the final bend onto the flat road across the arm of desert that led to the village, the driver lashed his six horses into a gallop, raising a plume of dust behind them.
“Let’s go!” Kimban ordered the builders with him, and herded them all toward the walls. Briller’s on that wagon!
Pausing by the high gates, Kimban yearned to slam them into place assuring his own safety, but leaving Briller and his men outside. Coward! Or is it Briller I want dead? Standing there waiting, scanning the desert to his right and the verdant hills to his left, for any sign of Flints, Kimban faced himself and found no trace of jealousy. He did not want Briller to suffer, he wanted only to keep Chesra safe because he loved her. Is that why I can’t lift her office? Because it would hurt her too much? Is that the real reason love is forbidden between Speaker and Guardian?
Shuddering, Kimban watched Briller’s wagon zigzag around to the eastern wall where the gate was, avoiding the traps. Kimban could See no threat anywhere—no line of black warriors, no hint of dust raised by numbers of horses—no magic energy. But he was sweating heavily, and not from the afternoon heat, when the wagon thundered past him.
Feeling like a charlatan of a Guardian, he nevertheless drew his silver sword, activated the power he’d set into the traps, and signaled to have the gates shut. He summoned all his skill, put all his will behind it, and sealed the gates, welding them to the walls in an arc of power that no one should be able to break. Maybe not even the Flint magician. Surveying the work, he realized that loving Chesra had not diminished his skills, but enhanced them.
As he finished, Chesra arrived panting from the exertion of walking. Seeing he’d finished, she wilted in defeat.
“What’s the matter?” he asked anxiously.
“They were watching. Now they know how our wards are set and where the weak spots are.”
He glanced to the northwest corner of the wall. He had done as they’d planned, yet he had betrayed his office.
Others clustered about them, and Chesra turned, resting her hands on her bulging abdomen, and told them, “I rang the alarm because the Flints have sent their magician’s apprentices to scout Epo. They know we know they’re coming—but they plan to come anyway. It’s only a matter of time.”
They had prepared for this, and the days of waiting went smoothly. But Kimban kept mulling over the events at the gate. If he really wasn’t jealous of Briller, Chesra had Spoken falsely. She could be wrong about everything, and it was his fault. He began to doubt himself as Guardian.
Then, one night well before the full moon, the black clad warriors attacked. They made it to the walls, despite the traps, before Epo sentries spotted them. But then it was a pitched battle in which all the advantage was on Epo’s side.
The Flint magician could do little against flaming oil cast down the stone ramparts onto Flint men. At dawn, Epo marksmen picked off the enemy one by one, confident in their ample supply of arrows. By noon, the Flints retreated.
While the Flints’ magicians were busy treating the wounded, Epo unlimbered catapults and lobbed hellfire into the Flint camp. When the nomads moved their camp back, a squad of Epo’s youths slipped out an escape tunnel and released a gate which fed borax into the water supply the nomads would have to use if they stayed. It would taste peculiar, but they would drink it and their bowels would turn to water. But Epo did not want to chase the Flints away. They wanted a definitive victory.
“When we’re sure they’re weakened,” the head of the Council declared, “we’ll go out after them. Their horses won’t drink much of the tainted water. Thirsty horses don’t run fast. We’ll take them easily.”
The plan seemed to assure victory, and all was going well, but Kimban could not make his peace with it. A victory based on trickery just wouldn’t feel right to him.
The night before their planned assault, Kimban couldn’t sleep. He walked the wall, his silver sword shrouded in black velvet against reflection. Pointing the sword down and out, he felt for the rich warmth of the silver’s response to his wards. He came to the node of the wards at the northwest corner of the walls, attention directed outward, and paused to study Epo’s grain field, harvested a bit early to prepare for war. Beyond, trees rose out of dense underbrush, dark and threatening in the moonlight, but trenches and traps made it virtually impossible to cross that field. Weakest spot or not, they wouldn’t attack here.
Low voices drifted through the silence.
“Of course you can do it, Chesra. You’ve given Epo enough years of service, especially now with your victory over the Flints. You can abdicate and become my wife, raise your own son, and your two daughters in peace. Our children, raised by their own parents.”
“I love my children more than my own life.”
“Then be my wife. Who would you choose for me, if not yourself? Who would you choose for yourself, if not me?”
The words sent hot daggers through Kimban’s guts, and shamed though he was, he held his breath not to miss a word of her reply.
“If I had known how I would feel about my children, before I chose to become Speaker and give up all that, I might have chosen differently. If I’d known what it meant to bear children when I gave you my oath to provide you a son in place of my sister’s son, I might have chosen not to do that even though you freely gave me your oath to let me choose your next wife. Had I known what all of this would cost me, I might not have had the courage to go through with it.”
“But now you have me.”
Kimban heard a smile in her voice as she answered, “You give great back rubs to bulgingly pregnant women.”
“Only one woman—all the woman I want.”
“I wish you’d stop saying that.”
“I mean it. Please, answer me, Chesra. Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to be
my wife?”
The pause was long enough that Kimban could feel her struggling between the Speaker’s impulse to bald honesty, and the woman’s need for emotional expression. He had been right. She should have laid down her burden nearly a month ago, and come what may, he’d have to get her to do it at this next full moon, or do it for her. He glanced up. Tomorrow.
She replied softly, “You married my sister, not me. I can’t be her for you. I am and shall always be Speaker. But if I had not chosen to Speak, I might have chosen Kimban.”
Caught in the grip of the overwhelming thrill of hearing his feelings validated, Kimban shuffled forward a step, then checked himself, embarrassed to intrude.
“What was that?” asked Briller. “Wait. I’ll check it.”
Kimban stepped into the moonlight, calling out the password. He saw them sitting against the battlements, shrouded in deep shadow, and saluted with his sword. “I was just wall-walking. I didn’t know you were here, Chesra.”
A mean, calculating look twisted Briller’s chunky features. “You knew. You checked her house, found her gone, and searched. What were you doing in her house—at night?”
The insinuation lit a fire in Kimban. For all that they felt for each other, neither had ever violated their oath. Gesturing with the sword, he forced words out between gritted teeth, “So long as I hold this sword—”
Without warning, forgetting every caution ingrained from childhood, Briller grabbed the shrouded sword, his bare hand closing on velvet. “You think this gives you license to—you miserable excuse for a man, you haven’t Guarded her, you’ve seduced her!” He tried to wrench the sword away.
Kimban yanked the sword free, leaving the velvet in Briller’s hand, baring the blade in the moonlight.
Briller swatted at the naked blade with his bare hand. “You’ve soiled this sacred—”
Briller’s flesh welded to the silver, and white bolts of energy fountained wildly from the sword’s raised tip. He stiffened, transfixed by the energies he was not conditioned to conduct. Kimban’s own hand was locked to his sword’s hilt, and pulses of shock paralyzed him.
He knew when the charge on the sword was exhausted, for he felt it shift and tap into the warding screen that flowed through the walls. Suddenly, the power ripping through them increased a thousand fold.
Briller emitted a gargling scream, and still Kimban struggled to wrench the sword from Briller’s grasp. Briller was an open channel for the energies which flowed from the highly charged wards to both the sky and the earth through Briller’s own flesh. The more Kimban controlled its flow through himself, the more energy flowed through Briller.
Great jagged streaks of light flashed skyward with the cracking sound of lightning. In a moment, they’d both die.
Then, as abruptly as it had started, it was gone. The darkness that descended was more profound than any Kimban had ever experienced. He could not even see the sword before him. I’m blind.
“Kimban, help me!”
Chesra’s voice. Feeling came back into Kimban’s arms, and his eyes adjusted to the moonlight again. Briller was slumped over Chesra’s legs, and she was struggling to get free. She pulled him away from the contact! Then, as thought began to flow, She fell!
Slipping the sword into its sheath, he knelt to heave Briller aside. “Are you all right?”
“Of course, but he—Kimban, is he dead?”
Briller groaned, head tossing.
“I guess not. But you—the baby.”
“Never mind. The walls! The wards! Can you rebuild—”
He shook his head. She said, “Then I’ll Speak them—”
“No! You’d have to make them from scratch, and that would kill you. I’ll be able to do something soon.”
But it was too late. Just as a squad of men trotted toward them, the thunder of horses hooves filled the night. All over the walls, torchlight sprang up, and below, the tolling bell roused all to their battle posts.
With an anxious glance at Chesra, Kimban trotted out to meet the sentries coming toward them. “You! Go back and get the midwife and the healer. You two, go defend the gate, and tell everyone the wards are all discharged. Get ready to fight in the streets. And you, man Briller’s station.”
Behind him, Chesra laid her cloak over Briller’s supine form, and then came up beside Kimban. “Look!” She pointed.
Approaching the gate was a double file of draft horses escorted by dark shadows bearing torches. Between the horses hung a huge tree trunk. “Ten minutes at the most. I can’t do anything in that time,” admitted Kimban grimly.
“Don’t worry about the gate,” she said tensely. “There! Scaling ladders.”
Now that she pointed them out, he could see the rows of men carrying the horizontal frames. The ladders and the battering ram were made from the trees that grew on the slopes north of the village—Epo’s own trees.
“How could they have known our wards would fail? Their magician’s not a Speaker.”
“They have their ways, I suppose, though I’d never have thought Briller would be so stupid!”
Somehow, the other man’s action was no mystery to Kimban. In his place, he too might have lost common sense. Studying the approaching force, Kimban ran to help move their defending oil pots into place. Shouting orders this way and that, he worked for what seemed like hours, striving to put determination back into the defenders. At the moment when the gates fell, he turned and ran back to the Speaker’s side.
She was still on the northwest corner of the wall, struggling into her ceremonial battle cloak held out by a young girl with a crippled left arm. Turning, the girl caught sight of him, and her confident face went grave and expressionless. “I brought yours, too, Guardian.”
Gruffly, he took the garment and flung it about his shoulders. It was welcome in the predawn chill. “Thank you, now get back to the children’s hole, quickly!”
She left and the Speaker turned to Briller who was now conscious, sitting propped against the battlement with his face buried in his hands. Kimban didn’t need any imagination to sympathize with the man’s headache. Another minute and we’d have both been dead.
He tugged his eyes away from Briller, and stared down at the battle inside the walls. Epo’s citizens were armed with swords, knives, maces, armor and other soldier’s gear—but they had sparse training in their use. Still, the nomads fought wearing nothing but their black shrouds. Their favorite weapon was a wicked short sword. They all wore daggers, but never used throwing knives.
The roofs of Epo were manned by the smaller women and the youngsters too old to be targets of Flint kidnappers, but too immature to be any good at hand to hand fighting of adult men. They used bows, throwing knives and sling shots, dropping stones, and buckets of oil equipped with siphons to spray oil on the unwary so that fire-arrows could ignite them. All the wood in Epo’s buildings had been protected by Kimban’s wards, so it couldn’t be set ablaze. Now, however, all those wards had been depleted of energy.
“I See little protection left for our buildings. There will be fire,” announced Kimban.
“Can you work with the sword yet?” asked Chesra.
He drew the silver shaft. It was light and dull, but its charge was rebuilding. He flicked the blade about experimentally. It moved easily, as if it was only a silver blade. “Not worth much yet.”
Something in the village streets caught Chesra’s eye. Kimban saw a tangled knot of fighters atop the potter’s shed, three defenders against one agile Flint with a gruesome scar on his forehead. Suddenly two of the defenders spun end for end and fell crashing into the street below where they were trampled by Flint horses. The Flint on the roof casually disemboweled the last defender.
“Dorset!” gasped Chesra in recognition.
Looking again, Kimban saw that the last victim was indeed the young man who had served Chesra as a houseboy during his childhood. As they watched, the Flint took out a jeweled dagger and ritually severed the boy’s left hand, offering it up t
o his gods before pocketing it.
Chesra twisted aside, a strangled sound escaping her. Then she tossed her head and blinked aside tears, her mouth a grim line as she focused on the battle outside the walls.
Wrenching his own eyes from the scene, Kimban hefted the silver blade, wishing it could reach the savage on the potter’s roof. Then a scaling ladder thudded into place barely ten paces away. Kimban crouched, his sword coming up.
“You’d better find another weapon,” advised Chesra.
Men who rushed to repel the ladder were cut down by the first Flint over the top. He was dressed in the usual baggy black pants, and belted tunic over which he wore a cloak pulled back and fastened to leave his arms free for his short sword. His head was swathed in a fold of black cloth that had a loose end trailing down the back of his neck.
With a stream of men mounting the wall behind him, the nomad sighted Chesra. As his comrades went to meet the defenders coming along the west wall, the first man came north, mowing down two men with casual flicks of his sword.
Kimban slammed the useless silver sword back into its sheath, and ran toward the attacker in a low crouch. While a third defender engaged him, Kimban snatched up the iron sword of one of the defeated, and came up on the Flint from behind. The man sidestepped as if he had eyes in back of his head, then his sword flashed between Kimban and the other defender whom Kimban now recognized as Epo’s potter.
Kimban and the potter retreated before the nomad, and Kimban thought he’d be forced over the edge of an embrasure, so unbalanced he felt with the iron sword that moved through the air without resistance. But he was getting the feel of it, using the same forearm muscles it took to work the silver sword, when Briller scuttled under their clashing swords, and came up with a weapon of his own.
Three on one, they pressed the Flint back. A gust of wind blew the man’s garments about. Briller grabbed hold of a free end and tugged hard, intending to bring the nomad down. Instead, his headdress unwound and came free into Briller’s hand. This left the man’s hair and face bare.
A snarl split the handsome face, and suddenly, the Flint’s sword was buried under Briller’s breastbone. With a savage twist, the Flint freed his blade. Blood fountained as Briller collapsed, dead before he hit the ground.
Science Is Magic Spelled Backwards and Other Stories Page 14
