Lion's Blood

by Steven Barnes

  "First line, fire!"

  One of the rifle barrels exploded in a mamluks face. He reeled back screaming, flesh peeled away from shattered skull.

  The men around him were horrified, fumbled with their weapons, and the Aztecs closed.

  "Swords!" Kai roared as the lines collided. Men screamed and killed and died in that first moment. Kai laid about himself with his sword, nothing in his mind except the hacking, brawling melee.

  "Hold them!" he screamed. "Hold for your lives—" and he glimpsed the Aztec camp, now fully awakened, charging through the grass toward them. His heart beat so fast he thought it would burst. His war horse bucked and wheeled, obeying its unaccustomed rider but still nervous in the face of such chaos.

  He wished that it were Djinna beneath him. And then realized that he might ride his beloved horse again soon, very soon, in the fields of Paradise.

  Aidan had found a pocket of calm in the midst of the storm. The Bilalian forces had stolen the advantage, and even though outnumbered, had a better position, their own horses raging through the enemy while the Aztecs struggled to recapture their mounts.

  He used that moment to reload. He was one of the few mamluks with a breech-loading cartridge rifle, which enabled him to fire more swiftly. That margin of seconds was all that saved his life. He glanced up just as an Aztec charged him, and blew the bare-chested man out of his half-fastened sandals—

  A second sprang at him, and Aidan swung the rifle like a club. Both skull and stock splintered.

  He discarded the useless weapon as another Aztec leapt on him, and Aidan went down under the charge. An obsidian knife flashed up and then down. He managed to roll to the side, and the knife slashed his shoulder. He screamed but managed to get his hands around his attacker's wrists. The Aztec chopped at him with the side of his fist. Aidan felt his jaw crack. The world began to swim.

  Then mighty Donough was there. He buffeted the Aztec along the side of his head so strongly that the man's eyes rolled up and his grip weakened.

  Aidan rolled him over and gripped the man's throat with his good hand. When the Aztec nearly struggled out of his grip Aidan head-butted him once, twice. He clamped his teeth on the man's nose, holding him in place as he fumbled for the dropped knife. He found it in the grass, grasped it.

  The Aztec's eyes widened with fear as the knife flashed. Then the fear left his eyes, and they stared up at a cold, uncaring sky.

  Aidan rose from his combat, spitting torn flesh. He was trembling, his shoulder gashed and throbbing. He turned to run toward the mosque, and suddenly it was as though a burning stick had been thrust against his leg.

  Shot!

  He tumbled, then staggered up with Donough's arm around his waist. Together they hobbled toward safety.

  The retreat was desperate now, the Aztecs streamed without end. Kai's mounted cavalry pulled back. Additional snipers provided as much cover as they could, but by now they were breaking and running.

  Every step was a nightmare. Even Donough was beginning to weaken, and Aidan noticed for the first time that the side of the giant's face was caked with blood and that half of his scalp had been torn off.

  Aidan glimpsed Kai, galloping back toward the mosque. A thin black man, side smeared with blood, clung behind him.

  "Retreat!" Kai screamed.

  Run, Kai, thought Aidan. Live.

  The retreating men reached the mosque's walls. Black and white, mamluk, common soldier, and noble, they sought safety behind its gates.

  As Kai reached them he felt Kzami finally weaken and slip off the saddle into the arms of waiting mamluks.

  "Get him in!" Kai screamed. "And close the gates!"

  As dozens of mamluks and soldiers crowded in, the mosque's great gates swung closed. As Muslim riflemen picked at the Aztecs from the second story, others lowered ropes for the men trapped outside the walls. Kai leapt from horseback to one of the ropes hanging from the windows, flaying the skin from his palms as he slid a cubit before finding purchase. Then, feeling more vulnerable than he ever had in his life, knowing himself to be a target for any Aztec with a rifle, he began to climb, muscles cracking from the strain, breath burning in his lungs and heart pounding as the battle raged beneath him.

  The riflemen in the window provided as much covering fire as they could as Kai finally reached the window, eager hands helping him through. Then he seized a rifle from one of the mamluks, firing down as the last of his soldiers reached the walls.

  Several were dragged down and killed, but most were climbing the ropes now, their horses running wild or captured by the ravening horde.

  "Pull them up!" he screamed to the men in the long, low room. His men put their backs to it, straining and pulling as each of the ropes, with several men dangling, began to come up, one man after another scrambling through the window and then helping to pull up his fellows. Kai loaded and fired, loaded and fired, the bullets crashing around his head, fully expecting at any moment to receive a lethal wound.

  "Get the hell out of here!" The air filled with stinking smoke, the smell of gunpowder, the screams of men hit by snipers' bullets. The explosions and howls were overpowering, enough to overload his mind and send him into a kind of fugue. There was nothing to be done now but to kill, and kill, and kill, and perhaps to die.

  And the dark place within Kai, the place that his father claimed was joined to the majestic beast whose vital fluids had quenched his jambaya's glowing blade, called welcome to him and enfolded him in its dark and living heart.

  Outside, Cuahutomec's second in command was enraged. Toaquatyl had stepped from his tent just in time to see his cousin felled by cowardly assassins after they had offered honorable terms of surrender to the blacks.

  This was not the behavior of warriors, it was the demeanor of dogs and things lower than dogs. The blacks were not worthy of respect, barely worthy to offer as sacrifice to the Feathered God. And their pale, grublike slaves revolted him. The thought of soiling a sacred obsidian knife with their blood seemed blasphemous. Still, Cuahutomec had been determined to honor them with a great death, and Toaquatyl had bowed to his wisdom.

  And now this. Peace be damned, they would kill every one of these sneaking animals, pull their hearts from their chests and lay them in a smoking heap, and all of that would not assuage the pain Toaquatyl felt. Great Cuahutomec, dead and gone.

  "Bring ladders!" he cried. They had more than enough men to take this wretched building, with its great ugly walls and dome of gold paint. And if by some miracle they were repulsed, there were a thousand Aztecs not more than a day's ride away. The slaughter would be glorious.

  Around Toaquatyl, bullets smashed into the ground, into horses, into men. He laughed at the invisible death. Guns were powerful indeed, but it was the power of the heart that made a warrior great. He might die, but others of his blood would live, and the Aztecs would roll across this land like waves on the golden shore, sweeping all before them.

  His own men returned fire, smashing the riflemen back. The fire above them was slowly diminishing. He watched one face after another explode into a crimson mask, watched his own men swarm up the ladders to engage the riflemen with sword and axe.

  One of his best screamed down to him: "They've fallen back and barred the door!"

  Toaquatyl growled. The enemy would take up another position, hope to use concentrated firepower to keep the superior force from advancing through the halls.

  These were old tactics, familiar to Toaquatyl's people since long before the black men had arrived. Then, it had been arrows and blow darts rather than gunpowder-driven lead and steel. The principle was the same. He would not play their game—he would, in fact, use their own dishonorable technology against them.

  He had sent several runners back to the camp, and now they returned at a trot, carrying barrels of gunpowder. While Toaquatyl's snipers kept watch on the upper windows, the barrels were pushed against the door and a wool fuse packed with gunpowder thrust into the bunghole.

  Toaqua
tyl's troops scattered, finding shelter where they could. Fifteen seconds later the powder detonated with an explosion that hammered their ears and shook the earth. A vast cloud of dust, metal slivers, and wood splinters erupted from the side of the mosque, and Toaquatyl, who had taken cover behind a dead horse, grinned savagely as the dust cleared and he saw the great doors hanging, shattered, suspended only by their twisted hinges.

  There was a moment of silence, and then his men streamed in. The returning fire from inside the mosque was weak and sporadic, as if the blast had completely unnerved the defenders. Toaquatyl's men poured fire into the inner doors and windows, and most especially at the little house at the rear of the main room, from which they could actually see rifle fire.

  Black and white defenders fell from the doorways, writhing as bullets riddled them.

  A tiny warning at the back of Toaquatyl's mind told him that the fire was insufficient, that they were withholding the mass of their men, that they hoped to trap him, tricking him into thinking that they were so weak.

  "Take the second level!" His men raced up the clay stairs, more streaming in behind him. Whatever the accursed blacks had planned, he had more than enough men to handle it.

  He led the charge across the courtyard, as rifles from the enclosed area tore into his men. They set shoulders to the door, once, twice, now so enraged that they were ignoring the feeble fire, and the door cracked and swung open—

  Within, there were only five or six badly wounded defenders, and perhaps twenty rifles lying about. Preloaded, then, so that a few men in the hutch and a few upstairs could pretend to be many. A ploy, a—

  Then Toaquatyl's eyes widened as a stick-thin black man in a fur cap laughed at him. His face was gaunt as death, and he coughed blood. But he was smiling. And holding a torch that he had just touched to a fuse. And the fuse disappeared into a barrel, and the barrel was set atop a dozen other barrels. One of the white men, his right arm a burned, ragged stump, grinned up at Toaquatyl with a mouthful of brown teeth. "Fock ye," he said, and slumped over.

  Willing himself out of his shock, Toaquatyl turned to run, but then his entire world turned to light, and there was nothing more except the fragment of a bitter thought:

  We were tric—

  And then nothing.

  Chapter Seventy-two

  From the safety of the wadi, Aidan watched in awe as the top of the mosque erupted into the sky, smoke and flame arcing a hundred feet into the air as Aztec gunpowder and blasting sticks, piled and linked desperately in the last hours, detonated with a clap like the end of worlds.

  For an instant he had time to think of the men who had sworn to escape the pain of their mortal wounds by bringing death to the Aztecs. One moment to ask himself if he could have been so brave, done so much.

  Then dust and smoke, driven by the blast wave, belched out of the escape hole like powder from a cannon.

  "Get them out!" he bawled, and the men in the wadi dug with their hands and knives and anything they could find, struggling to extract the last few men from the tunnel, praying that it wouldn't collapse.

  They pulled out three, and then a fourth, before the tunnel ceiling gave way and the men backed up, despairing. From inside came coughing, and a voice that Aidan recognized. He crawled into the hole at once, pulling rocks out of the way, digging until his fingernails were broken and bloody, until he found a hand, grasped it, and was infinitely relieved to feel the answering pressure.

  "Pull me. Pull my feet, dammit!" The men behind him pulled, and he held and pulled, until Kai slid out of the tunnel.

  Kai had insisted on being the last out. He was gagging, puking dust, covered with gray powder, gasping for air.

  Kai rose on shaky legs, steadied himself, and then said: "Let's see."

  "My very thought," Aidan said, and together they climbed up the dirt wall and peered over the lip.

  Dust and smoke were everywhere, but a cool, mournful wind blew from the east, and it created gaps through which they could blink and gain a view.

  Bodies and chunks of bodies were scattered through the wreckage, shattered men sprawled in postures of death like drowned beetles. The mosque lay in ruins, the entire eastern wall blown out, flames and acrid oily smoke curling up through the remnants of the roof.

  A few Aztecs staggered dazedly in circles, trying to help their fellows to their feet—at least, those few whose feet were still attached to legs.

  Cuahutomac's army was crushed. A great, primal wail of lamentation and animal rage emerged from a hundred wounded throats. Aidan slipped back down the dirt wall, too shocked at the results of their plan to think or feel or celebrate.

  Kai landed beside him a moment later. He gulped a few deep breaths, and then punched Aidan's shoulder weakly. "I guess it worked," he said.

  "If you don't mind that the mosque looks just a wee bit. . . damaged."

  Kai winced. "There's that, yes."

  "We could ask the Aztecs what they think."

  "No," Kai said. "Let's not."

  Kai directed his men to move their wounded further east along the wadi. The sun was up now, and if one of the dazed and battered Aztecs had glanced into the riverbed, it would have been easy to spot them. Once they rounded an eastern bend, they were safer and better concealed.

  "Come on," Kai said to Donough, who held the shoulders of a wounded mamluk as Kai took the legs. The giant's scalp lay open. The crawl through the tunnel had to have pushed dust and dirt into it, and it would be a diseased mass of suppurating tissue within a day or two if they did not get medical aid.

  Donough wasn't alone. The survivors were a mess: not a one of them was without cuts, scrapes, bullet wounds, sword cuts, stab wounds, bruises, or breaks. About thirty men had made it out of the mosque alive. Thirty men out of a hundred.

  He thought of the men who had agreed to stay behind, to spend what life they had left destroying their enemy. Would he have had such courage? he wondered. He hoped he would never have to know.

  "God," Kebwe said, sagging beneath his load as he and one of the mamluks carried a black soldier. "I'm so tired."

  "We're all tired. We'll be able to rest soon."

  Kai's wounded mamluk clenched a leather strap between his teeth. Kai stumbled and the mamluk thumped against the ground. He bit into the strap and whimpered, but did not scream.

  "I'm sorry," Kai whispered. The man did not speak in reply, but the gratitude in his eyes spoke volumes.

  Exhaustion made them rest five minutes for every ten minutes of walking, and it was on their third rest break that Aidan, who had acted as scout, scrambled back to them and whispered: "The Aztecs are close. Hunker down!"

  The men all retreated to the shadows on the north side of the wadi, backs against the rock wall. All held silent.

  And in that silence, Kai heard the soft, deliberate crunch of feet against sand. Two men. Maybe three. The Aztecs were searching for surviving comrades, and retreating Bilalians. Had they additional forces close by? What were their numbers? He didn't know how many had been killed in the mosque explosion, or how many had scattered.

  Allah preserve us, he thought. If the Aztecs had received reinforcements, his drastic maneuver would avail little.

  "Get ready," he whispered to Kebwe, who closed his eyes, whispered a prayer, then pulled his notched and bloody sword from its scabbard.

  Kai reached down inside himself, fighting to find strength. It was there. As long as there was life there was strength, and hope. These were his men, and he would not let them down, would not fail them. They had placed their lives in his hands, and—

  Then, distantly, Kai heard the trumpets. Their call drifted on the wind like birds floating on a warm current of air, ethereal and almost unworldly. At first he was certain that he was wrong, that there were no bugle calls, but then he heard shouting from the Aztecs and the sound of running feet, and in the instant after that he heard horses.

  Then the air crackled with volleys of rifle fire, and a cry of "Allah huakbar!" followed
by a hundred answering screams, and another volley.

  Kai sagged back against the wadi wall, the breath heavy and hot in his lungs, the late-morning sun beating down on his face.

  Happy to be alive.

  Chapter Seventy-three

  The commander of the relief battalion was Colonel Wakil Abu Kwame himself, an older Moor with African skin and Arabic nose and cheeks. His face was scarred, his eyes seared clean of illusions. Behind Kwame marched a column of at least three hundred men. His standard-bearer carried aloft the flag of Bilalistan: crescent moon and lion on a field of gold.

  Seated next to Kwame was Fodjour, who did little to conceal his confusion and dismay at the destruction encountered on arrival.

  Kai faced the mounted colonel with what he hoped was a proper military bearing and saluted fist over heart.

  "What in Allah's name happened here?" asked Kwame.

  Kai held his salute. After a scowl, the colonel returned it. Kai felt that if he didn't sit soon, he was going to collapse. "Sir. We had no hope to see you before tomorrow."

  "Your messenger intercepted our column as it came south, Captain."

  "Thank Ar-Rahman, the Merciful. Captain Kai Jallaleddin ibn Rashid al Kushi relinquishing command, sir."

  Kwame nodded, eyes boring into Kai like gun barrels. "You report to me in three hours."

  In three hours another company of troops had reinforced the first, guards had been deployed, and a city of tents erected around the fallen mosque.

  Hundreds of Aztec bodies were still buried beneath the wreckage. Dozens of dazed and wounded Aztecs had been captured.

  Aidan was beyond fatigue, into some twilight zone where his body continued to move as if it were a resuscitated corpse under a sorcerer's spell. It would take days of sleep before he felt human again. If he ever did.