“Are there weapons here?” Ophir asked, ignoring the bland acceptance of encroaching death.
“That question is beyond my competency, sir. I am a medical computer,” the voice said.
“You are nothing,” the old man said with sudden fury. “You are an anachronism--worthless.”
The computer, failing to detect a question, remained silent.
Ophir came to his feet with an effort. The weight of his prosthesis seemed too much to bear. His shoulder ached with it. He felt the torturing thirst and dermal sensitivity that warned of trilaudid withdrawal syndrome. He forced himself to ignore it and went into the passageway.
He had never been trained medically, but an imperial heir’s education was catholic. A man destined to rule an empire dare not be a specialist. The thought was clouded and scarred with lacunae of amnesia, but the form of it was there. Ophir’s sense of responsibility was forcing him to reaccept the realities he had abandoned so long ago in his hedonistic flight from a civilization he despised as corrupt.
The standard instruments to be found in a hospital of his time--the personality probes and exchangers, the hypno-teachers, the lasers and sonic scalpels--must exist in this echoing tomb, he thought vaguely. Perhaps he was engineer enough to use them as weapons? And if they were not effective agencies for destruction, surely they could be used to overawe a troop of savages?
He forced aching thoughts through his mind, examining and discarding. He could hear the weyrherders of Trama. They had gathered in one of the common rooms and were huddling there, praying to who knew what dark gods?
To you, Ophir beloved, the lady Dihanna whispered in his ear, they are praying to you, their Prince.
The holographic projectors from the library, Ophir thought suddenly. For a beginning, the ghostly warriors of the Dawn Age, created from the plays and novels of Earth before the Age of Space. Yes, he thought, suddenly gleeful: that for a beginning. But as an overture, as something to give the invaders a taste of terror--the eagles.
His cracked laughter rang down the vaulted corridor. First the wild birds and then the shadowy hosts of Stalingrad, Agincourt, Bataan, and Kasserine. Why, one had the whole blood-soaked history of man to choose from! When one had history, what need of soldiers? The holographic projectors were easily portable--suddenly the whole pattern of the engagement to come took on the dimensions of a beautiful, cosmic joke. He laughed gleefully and trotted unsteadily toward the sound of his devotee’s prayers. If it was magic they wanted, a Prince of the Rigellian Empire would give them magic.
Chapter Nine
With an heart of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander
With a burning spear and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end--
--Fragment attributed to R.L. Stevenson,
Dawn Age poet
My ancestors were men of no sensitivity or imagination. It takes many generations to produce a truly talented man.
--Torquas the Poet, Vykan Galacton of the Second Empire,
Middle Second Stellar Empire period
The morning sun was marking its path along the western cliff faces of the valley of Trama as Glamiss led his company down the steep path into the treeline.
A stillness lay on the valley. The wind was down and the sound of the river came softly through the forest. Occasionally a mare would mutter or a padded foot would bring a sound from the shale of the path. The warmen studied the sky, wary of the eagles.
At the foot of the shale talus where the ground leveled and sloped more gently toward the meadows, Glamiss signaled the flank guards out. Three horsemen on each side vanished into the thickening brush growing among the tree trunks.
From their packs the warmen had taken crossbows, stubby machines with curling pistol grips and twin horn-bows cocked by the small windlass at the butt end of the weapon. The crossbows were each loaded with two quarrels of lead or shaped stone affixed to a leather tail to hold the missies straight in flight.
The crossbows were not favored weapons among the horseback soldiers, who preferred their short throwing lances and the heavy swords sheathed at their backs. But Glamiss was a strict disciplinarian, and his men learned the use of the crossbow or risked his displeasure--which could be severe.
Now the weapons were carried across the saddlebows, held in the left hand while the right held the throwing lances. The mares, of course, needed no guidance by their riders save the spoken or mental commands.
Glamiss had learned this particular selection of weaponry and technique on Rhada, while serving there in the household of some blood-kin of Emeric’s during one of the infrequent intervals when Ulm enjoyed good relations with the Northern Rhad. Alone among the troops of Ulm of Vara were the men Glamiss had trained in this fashion.
Riding at Glamiss’s side, Emeric said, “It’s too quiet by half. Where are those wild birds?”
Glamiss glanced at the high canopy of trees above their heads. “We will see them when we reach the open meadows.”
Emeric, who as a priest-Navigator did not carry a throwing lance, swung the morningstars on the end of his flail anxiously. He was battlewise and experienced, as any Rhad would be and as all Navigators were as well, but he had never been able to cure himself of the habit of nervous talk before an engagement.
“Vulk Rahel could have been mistaken about Ulm,” he said. “The Order would never help him to attack his own people.”
“You are a man of faith, Nav Emeric,” Glamiss said dryly. “But Vulk Rahel was not mistaken. Matters have been touchy between me and my bond-lord for some time. I am a threat to him.”
“Are you, Glamiss?” the Navigator asked.
“Yes, he’s right to think of me so,” Glamiss replied. “It may shock your Rhad sense of honor, but the thought of taking Vara-Vyka from him has been in my mind more than once.”
Emeric rode in silence, listening to the soft clatter of weapons behind them. Glamiss was right. It did offend his Rhad sense of the fitness of things to think of his friend as a possible oathbreaker and rebel. But against that one had to weigh the savage way Ulm ran his fief, his cruelty to his people, and the gradual deterioration of the holding under Ulm’s stewardship. Barbarism was like a lapping bog everywhere on the worlds of the Great Sky. The Order of Navigators could salvage and protect only so much of the civilization of the old Empire. It could not accomplish the reversal of a tide of savagery alone. What was needed, Emeric realized, was a class of tough-minded, reasonably enlightened rulers for the people--men who could think beyond the next meal, the next wench, the next border raid. Men, when all was said, like Glamiss the Vykan.
He thought again of the strange dream Glamiss had described last evening. His friend was no liar, Emeric thought with a shiver, and no man would court the Adversaries by spinning tales on the night before battle. Glamiss had dreamed and did dream of Nyor, Queen of the Stars. What was it that stimulated so hopeless, so strange a dream, Emeric wondered. Was it some racial memory, some remembrance of man’s days of glory? Or was it the intercession of God in the Holy Star, pointing a path toward--what?
That men must unite or perish was common knowledge among the educated classes. But knowing something to be true was an unbelievable distance from the reality. By what path, then? The priest-Navigator looked ahead along the shaded trail into the valley of Trama. This one? Was there something here that transformed an outland skirmish--a bit of border-lord treachery--into a keystone of. . . Emeric’s thoughts collapsed into a welter of unbelievable images: of great armies of warmen storming across the galaxy, a jihad of unification--bloody and terrible but essential if man were to survive among the holy stars, and at the end of the path--Glamiss, in the crown and feathered cape of the Star King, lord of an empire. An Empire?
The priest shook his head, shaken by his visions. What am I thinking? Glamiss is a fin
e soldier, but he is only a man. To recreate what was once a hegemony encompassing a thousand suns needed more than a man. It needed a hero with a clear vision of all that had ever been--and all that might one day be.
Emeric glanced at his friend’s intent face under the rim of his iron helmet. I do not wish this for you, Glamiss, he thought. I love you as a brother, and I pray that this dream will pass from you . . .
“Eagles!” A flanker was galloping toward the column from the left, where the forest was thinning into grassland and river bank. Emeric heard the high-pitched scream of the great birds and saw shadows crossing the sun above the canopy of trees.
Glamiss rose in the stirrups and gave a sharp command. The troop wheeled toward the open ground, the mares snarling angrily.
“Emeric, stay with Asa,” Glamiss said.
“I don’t plan to miss this fight,” the Navigator said.
Glamiss smiled grimly. “I didn’t think you did. But you have no crossbow and I need someone to protect the Vulk.”
Emeric frowned but accepted the mild rebuff. As a priest-Navigator he was, technically, under no one’s commands but his superiors in the clergy. But, practically, priests serving as military chaplains took their orders from the warleaders in tactical charge of operations. In war, the warband must survive and, if possible, triumph. The niceties of protocol submitted to the needs of the battle.
He wheeled Sea Wind and trotted to the rear where Vulk Asa sat perched on the broad back of an over-age but still pugnacious war mare.
“The eagles are definitely under mental control now,” the Vulk said, his smooth face lifted skyward. “The controller is a human adept. A young female.”
Emeric made the sign of the Star and gripped the handle of his flail more firmly. “How would a peasant girl learn such things, Asa?” he wondered aloud.
“How, indeed, Nav Emeric. There is much that is strange in this valley,” the Vulk replied.
Emeric watched the warband’s movements at the edge of the forest. Glamiss had dispersed the troopers at the treeline and they waited there, under cover of the high canopy of leaves, while the flank guards circled out into the open meadow beyond.
As the eagles caught sight of the mounted men in the open they took up a screaming clamor, wheeling and beating the clear mountain air with their great pinions to gain altitude for their first attacks.
Emeric watched them with a feeling of apprehension. These birds had been used for blood sports in the time of the Empire, but they had bred in the wild in this place, and so were far more savage than the “falcons” used by imperial nobles to bring down mountain game. He wondered at the degree of control being exercised on them by the unknown falconer. In the last years of the Golden Age, telepathic control of birds and animals had been commonplace. The holy emanations of the stars, the hard radiations pouring from the great solar phoenixes, had caused millions of human and animal mutations in the early days of galactic travel, and applied genetics had produced not only strains of mentally receptive beasts, but a class of human adepts to control them.
Even now, after the dark confusion of the Interregnum’s unnumbered centuries, the results of these trends survived. The Rhadan mare between his knees was a descendant of animals bred from the stock of mythic Earth to understand and respond to the energies generated by the human brain.
But here in Trama, Emeric thought, the remnants of the Empire seemed stronger, more fully preserved--and somehow more terrifyingly hostile.
He looked again at Glamiss, in his element now, controlling his men with gestures and signals. Yes, the Navigator thought, it was easy to see why a gross and abusive dullard like Lord Ulm would fear Glamiss and want him dead. The warmen responded to the young leader with a spirit and élan that were rare among the troops of the savage lands.
In the meadow, the flankers had formed a skirmishing circle, cantering in seemingly random patterns, always moving, tempting the eagles to attack.
“The adept is no soldier,” Vulk Asa said. “Look, now.”
The birds milled and screamed a hundred meters in the air. Emeric, unfamiliar with the tactics of attack from the air as he was, sensed that they were bunching, and that this was wrong. Had the adept been himself, he thought (with a Navigator’s scholastic mind), he would have divided the birds and attacked the skirmishers on the flanks, forcing them to abandon their cantering mobility. Instead, the eagles swooped together in a shrieking, thrumming mass. The Navigator swallowed hard. There were fully a hundred birds in the feathered, clawed cloud diving at the horsemen--possibly the entire eagle population of the valley.
As the larger and swifter birds outdove their companions, the horsemen wheeled and galloped for the treeline. Their crossbows and lances were held ready, but not used. Instead, the skirmishers were drawing the birds toward the trees, luring them to a level below the high canopy and into the forest.
The riders approached the standing troop at an extended run, the birds close behind them, claws and beaks extended. Emeric wet his lips and held more tightly to the handle of his flail. The eagles were magnificent--and terrifying. Their great wings made a thrumming noise in the forest and their shrieking pierced the brain.
The skirmishers poured through the open ranks of the troopers and into the forest to turn in a wide circle and return. Meanwhile, Glamiss had given a shouted command and there was a noise like the sound of fifty great lute-strings being plucked. A flight of metal quarrels converged on the low-flying eagles, striking home with a terrible thudding patter.
A dozen birds were torn apart in flight by the heavy missiles. The pale grasses of the meadow were suddenly spattered with dark blood.
Vulk Asa averted his face and moaned as his sensitive, nonhuman mind staggered under the death-thoughts of the mutilated eagles.
Glamiss gave a command and the crossbows were fired again, their second strings loosing a final barrage of quarrels. A half-dozen birds tumbled to the ground. The meadow seemed to boil with dying, wounded eagles. The remainder fluttered and screamed, beating at the air with frantic fury--some seeking to escape to higher altitudes, others still raging to reach the horsemen sheltering under the feathery trees.
Some few of the birds had flown into the forest and crashed heavily into the palisade of tree trunks, stunning themselves or injuring their wings. Emeric caught sight of a shimmering brown body hurtling downward toward Vulk Asa who sat defenseless and unaware on his growling mare. The animal reared and bared her claws to meet the attack. In the confined space between the trees, Emeric wheeled his mount and swung his morningstars in a sweeping arc above the Vulk’s head. The spiked balls crushed the eagle’s chest, and the great bird tumbled to the leafy floor of the forest to lie gasping, talons extended in final defiance. Emeric looked at the iridescent feathers and bright blood, sickened by the cruel death of a magnificent creature.
The Vulk spoke thinly, as though from a great distance. “The adept is weeping,” he said. “She feels the death of the birds.”
At the forest’s edge, Glamiss had reformed the troop into a single rank and at a command the men moved out into the meadow, throwing lances ready. The birds had scattered, but some few, who were too low to fly over the treetops without making a heavy circle, were forced to fly across the warband’s front. A volley of thrown spears took a further bloody toll from the eagles. Another score fell, pierced by the iron-tipped javelins.
“They flee, Warleader!” a trooper shouted with shrill excitement. He wheeled to break ranks and pursue the flight, sword drawn in futile threat.
“Thesu! Back into ranks!” Glamiss shouted warningly.
It was too late for the man who had broken the warband’s iron discipline. From low above the canopy of leaves a large bird appeared in a shrieking dive. Emeric watched in horror as the eagle’s talons struck the warman’s unprotected throat, dragged him from his mare, and left him crumpled, spilling his life onto the grass to mingle with the blood of the slaughtered birds.
Thesu’s mare screamed
in rage and grief for her master, rearing to reach hopelessly for the vanishing eagles.
A stillness fell on the meadow. Emeric was amazed to realize that the entire engagement had taken no more than the space of five hundred heartbeats.
Despite the urgency of the need to move quickly across the valley, Glamiss took the time required for Emeric to say the ancient prayers for the dead over the body of the foolish Thesu. The Navigator noted that the men approved of this, and he noted, too, the sincere grief on the face of the young warleader. As he prayed over Thesu, he could not help but think of the future he and Glamiss had been discussing earlier. If Glamiss were indeed the conqueror to be, how many times would this scene be repeated? A thousand times a thousand, for though the worlds of the Great Sky lay supine and ready for conquest, a jihad would bleed the galaxy white before it was done.
At a command from Glamiss, the troop loaded the body of the dead warman on his mare, who moaned her sorrow, and placed her at the rear of the column with Vulk Asa. Then the band moved out again, crossing the meadows toward the river.
Once again, Glamiss dispatched outriders to scout ahead and led the troop along the riverbank in the directions of the clutch of hovels that lay under the far loom of the mountains.
In the distance, Emeric could see the soaring shapes of eagles, but the birds stayed high and far off, as though the adept who controlled them had been shocked into despair by the savagery of the Vara-Vykans’ counterattack and could not bring herself to press home another costly foray.
The bright morning was growing slightly warmer as the rays of the Vyka sun touched the lower levels of the western cliffs. Here and there the meadows and the thinning groves of conifers were in sunlight. Emeric said to Glamiss, “It is a beautiful valley, Glamiss Warleader.”
“The sky is filled with beautiful places--and ugly men,”
Glamiss replied bitterly, his heart heavy with the death of his trooper.
The warband moved silently, for on the soft riparian ground the mares’ padded feet made no sound at all. The stillness was palpable, and Emeric listened to it as he would have listened to a whisper.
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