A Life for Kregen

by Alan Burt Akers

  Over the clangor, over the blood, over the agony and death below I flew. I left the battle in the culminating moments of victory and defeat. Headlong, caring for one person and one person only in all of Kregen, I flew like a maniac across the gory battlefield of Kochwold.

  Delia...

  Chapter Twenty-one

  A Life for Vallia

  Desertion. Infamous conduct. Lack of moral fiber in the face of the enemy. Lack of judgment of issues. Nothing of that mattered. Vallia did not matter, nor Kregen itself.

  Only Delia mattered.

  I knew the Sakkora Stones.

  Like the Kharoi Stones of my island of Hyr Khor in distant Djanduin, it had been raised by the Sunset People who had lived on Kregen before the Star Lords had brought diffs to that beautiful planet to make it the wild and terrible world it is today. Ruined, tumbled into moldering stones, mysterious, unforgettable, the buildings of the Sunset People yet lived in legend and song.

  Over the battlefield I flew and mirvols attacked me and I shot and slew them and their riders, and with the long whippy aerial sword strapped to the saddle fought off those who would have stopped me. In a straight line across the front I flew. The Sakkora Stones had been figured into our calculations in picking this site for the battle, and had been reckoned as not having any influence, one way or the other. They stood some ulm or so in rear of the position taken up by Zankov and we expected them to be used as a field hospital or supply dump. They lifted from the moorland, quite plainly, fallen columns, walls and roofs marking a once-vast star-shaped structure whose function remained obscure. As on Earth today, when an archaeologist is faced with an artifact whose manner of use he does not know will say it is a cult object or a ritual object, so we said the Sakkora Stones were a cult object.

  Over the rear echelons of Zankov’s army I flew and alighted in the grove of drooping trees gaining nourishment from some underground stream in this desolate moorland country. The flutduin immediately lifted off with a massive beat of his pinions and a wicked toss of his head. Magnificent saddle birds, flutduins. He was off back to his master.

  I looked about, sternly and yet filled with terror. What in blue blazes Delia had been up to, how Jilian was involved, I did not know. But, by Vox, I would find out!

  All the detritus, human, animal and material, in rear of a great army in conflict, lay scattered about. The trees afforded a slight amount of cover and men and animals moved to and fro, with a steady stream of wounded coming back. A party of spearmen, second-line troops no doubt assigned to guard the baggage train, approached the wood to question me. It were better — and more decent — not to relate what happened to them. I did not deign to don one of their uniforms as a disguise. I ran toward the nearest abutment of the Stones.

  Anything could be happening in there. Jilian had been in no case to be specific. If she did not die I would be in her debt — if Delia lived. Whether or not I lived seemed to me of scant importance then, which is a strange attitude for me, Dray Prescot, to take, by Zair!

  As I ran on with the blood thumping around my body it felt as though that very blood fought against constrictions in my veins. I’d been living very high and mighty, just lately, very high on the vosk, and, now...! This was more like the old Dray Prescot, rushing headlong into danger with a naked sword in his fist. Rushing, like the veritable onker I am, headlong into danger that forethought would avoid. But, then, that is me, Dray Prescot, prince of onkers.

  The clansmen started up from their fire on which grilling ponsho smelled sweet. There were four of them and they were not skulkers, each being wounded. They saw my scarlet and gold flummery of dress and they did not hesitate. Out whipped their broadswords and they charged.

  Well, it was a merry little ding-dong; but I was frantic with worry and in no mood for a long exchange of handstrokes. The drexer snapped back into the scabbard. The next instant the Krozair longsword flamed. They were skilled clansmen, enormously powerful warriors; but they were not fighting for the life of Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains.

  As the last of them sank down, he gasped out: “You fight like a clansman, Vallian.”

  “Believe it, Clanner,” I said, hurdling him and rushing on into the gloom of the stones. “By the Black Chunkrah, believe it!”

  Something caught in his eyes as he died.

  Headstrong, headlong, and utterly foolish, Dray Prescot. I should have paused to snatch up a clansman’s russets and cover my insolent scarlet and gold. But there was no time, no time... Through the gloomy aisles of the leaning columns I raced. And I began to catch a glimpse of the truth. This place had been used as a headquarters. That would have made no difference to us. And what had been wrought here had been wrought with cunning and stealth and high courage. Running on I passed dead clansmen, dead mercenaries of various races of diffs. And, also, I passed dead bodies of Jikai Vuvushis, Battle Maidens. They looked pitiful and twisted in their fighting leathers of russet or black. And on their supple bodies, so lax and ghastly now in the final sleep, the badges of the Sisters of the Rose glowed in mockery.

  This was the kind of operation I, the stupid, proud, so inordinately presumptuous Emperor of Vallia, should have mounted. I had not. I had staked all on the impregnability of the Phalanx, the prowess of the warriors of the army and the new Filbarrka zorcamen. I prowled on, understanding what had passed here, and knowing that I would find the answers I sought when I came at last to the operations room of this headquarters and discovered what had chanced between Delia and her Battle Maidens, and Zankov, the slayer of her father.

  Entwined clumps of purple-flowered Blooms depended from the shattered columns. Here and there the orange cones of Hyr-flicks congealed spots of deadly color. Their green tendrils snaked this way and that, seeking prey, snatching up the tikos of the cracked masonry, snaring any animal of reasonable size unwary enough to venture here. A Rapa had been caught and engulfed; only his beaked face glared sightlessly from a distended orange cone, and soon that would be gone, digested along with the rest of him.

  Many of the Hyr-flicks, gigantic cousins of the flick-flicks that graced the windowsills of Kregen homes, had been slashed through. And yet still their tendrils writhed.

  “Sink me!” I burst out as I ran on. “That Delia has put her head into a mighty unsavory pest hole, by Zair!”

  The Krozair brand carved me a slimy way through and I understood this way was what could be called the rear entrance. Those four clansmen, hunkering wounded over their roasting ponsho, had been all unwitting of the drama enacted here. They had been of a clan I did not know. But I would know them hereafter, and Hap Loder would be advised.

  Thinking sour thoughts like that led me on, as I ran, to a single scarlet speculation of the fate of the battle. The front would still be in flux, for the sounds of combat reached here as a muted hum, as of bees on a sunny summer afternoon, without the devil-boom of gunnery. The Hakkodin would be fully in action, the sword and shield men attempting to smash forward, the reserves being used — I must trust Seg. He must judge the time when to send in the reserves, when to commit our nikvove cavalry. But I pushed on without a pause, for ahead of me in the half-light of the aisled and gloomy Stones a radiance like the eye of the setting Zim, the red sun of Antares, drew me on.

  There were diffs there, I remember, men in armor and brandishing weapons, and the manner of their going is something I do not clearly recall. I can still feel the hot wet drops of blood falling from my longsword onto my fists.

  I must, I realize, have looked a monstrous sight. I had fathomed out, or thought I had, what had passed here. Delia and her Battle Maidens had struck, and kept their doings close, and somewhere up past that blood-red radiance which vanished from sight ever and anon as I twisted through the labyrinth of columns, up there — yes — Delia? Where was she, what was she doing now? Where her Jikai Vuvushis?

  The Sakkora Stones spread over an extensive area, more than I realized; but through smothering vegetation I neared the operations room a
t the forward edge of the Stones — and Zankov. The battle raged apace, and knowledge of what reserves he could muster would have mightily interested me only a very short time earlier. Now — only reaching Delia obsessed me.

  Soon I reached a part of the Stones where recent work had provided roof coverings, imported wooden beams with straw laid across making impromptu roofs. In one chamber a pile of dead lay sprawled in the attitudes of frozen battle. Diffs of various races including Katakis, Jikai Vuvushis at whom I looked with a mingling of quick and useless sympathy and a live and vibrant dread, and clansmen. I passed on and now the sounds of voices raised in anger reached me from beyond a curtaining wall of vegetation. I quickened my steps. I realized with a shock my hands were trembling on the hilt of the Krozair longsword.

  The half-lit gloom of the place and the bone-aching sensation of its unfathomable age lent mystery and terror to the Sakkora Stones. I slashed away a tendril that sought to encircle my neck and drag me into an orange gullet, and so put my ear to the green and living wall.

  “Keep out of it, mother! It is no concern of yours!”

  “You are my daughter and therefore my concern—”

  “If Ros pleads for your life, I may grant it.”

  I knew those three voices. I knew them!

  With a vicious and intemperate slash with the longsword I ripped the curtained hangings across. Samphron oil lamps beyond splashed mellow light into a lurid scene. I stepped across the threshold and checked, struggling to focus on what lay beyond.

  A further hanging partially obscured my view and, in turn, hid me from those who wrangled so bitterly. Delia — Delia stood there, pale-faced, wrought-up as I could see, unutterably lovely in her russet leathers, bereft of weapons, chained to one of the millennia-old columns of the Sakkora Stones. Facing her — Zankov stood, thin and brittle, alert and alive, his head jutting forward and the sneer of his face like the blow from a whip. At his side, Dayra — Dayra, Delia’s daughter and my daughter, Dayra, who would be called Ros the Claw. She wore the wicket stell set of talons now and they glittered in the lampglow. She looked almost bereft of reason, high-colored, frantic, beside herself with a fury she could neither understand nor control.

  Delia, Dayra, and Zankov. I stood for perhaps a heart beat, for I saw they did not intend to kill Delia just yet. And the reason for that lay in Delia’s spirit, in her refusal to beg or to cringe. She spoke to Dayra as she must have spoken to her in the long ago, when I was banished to Earth.

  “Do you know, daughter, who and what this man is? Do you know what he has done?”

  “Whatever he has done — he belongs to me!”

  “No man and no woman ever belong one to the other, Dayra.”

  Those words struck through to me with the pain of a white hot iron. I knew Delia spoke the truth; but I could not accept that truth. Perhaps the word “belong” was the wrong word. I could accept another, less final, word...

  “My army is now winning a great victory over that onkerish cramph of a husband of yours, majestrix.”

  So Zankov still spoke to Delia as majestrix. I listened on for a space, wanting the words I hungered for to be spoken.

  But Delia just said: “I do not think you will beat him. He is very proud of his new army. He is a man with a stiff neck. I know.”

  “He is a clansman, is he not? A hairy barbarian savage?” Zankov laughed in his bright, brittle way, most puffed up with his own pride and cleverness. “Then he knows full well the ferocity of the clansmen. They obey me, me! And I am Zankov.”

  “You call yourself Zankov. But that is not your name. I know who you are, now—”

  “Mother!” cried Dayra. She started around, and I saw she trembled.

  “Aye, daughter. This man who calls himself Zankov is the son of Nankwi Wellon, the High Kov of Sakwara. And Kov Nankwi has sworn allegiance to the Emperor of Vallia—”

  “Son!” shrieked Zankov. “Aye, son. Illegitimate son!”

  “So you seek to gain all by slaying all—”

  “That is the way of the Hawkwas.”

  “And if you murder me before the eyes of my daughter, as you murdered her—”

  “Enough of this nonsense!” bellowed Zankov and I saw he thus shouted in anger because Dayra did not know he had killed her grandfather. “You will say the words required to pass Ros — Dayra — into my keeping. You will say them, majestrix, if I have to—” Then he paused, and shifted his gaze to Dayra, who stood taut and lovely at his side.

  “You had best leave us for a space, Ros. There are things of the bokkertu I must discuss with your mother.”

  So that was the way of it, then. The mother’s agreement and her full acceptance of the bokkertu must be obtained. Even in this, the people of Vallia would not be hoodwinked. So Delia’s life was safe for a space yet.

  This knowledge did not make me relax as much as the point of a Lohvian arrow. But I did become aware of other people in the partially roofed chamber between the Stones. They stood under a straw-thatched roof supported by twisted beams of raw wood, in a shadowy space, and they watched Zankov and his doings with the bright blood-lusting avidity of a crowd in the Jikhorkdun watching the death-sports of the arena. As I looked at them the whole brilliantly attired group wavered and rippled as though I peered drunkenly at them through a ghostly waterfall. I blinked my eyes. The images slowly refocused and I put my hand up to my neck, just above the rim of the kax, and, lo! an arrow, embedded in the flesh, all unknown to me. I must have got this beauty in one of the fights astride the flutduin.

  With a pettish snap I broke it off.

  There was no time, now, for shilly-shallying; but my warrior instincts recognized why I had not rushed headlong out into the cleared area. Those cramphs watching so avidly would take a deal of beating. But, beat they had to be, because Dayra was at last leaving the chamber, with a long hungry look back at Zankov, and I knew what lay in store for Delia.

  “Do not be long, my love,” she said.

  “Not so long as the time between an axe and death.”

  I felt a fist constrict around my heart, and then Dayra, looking back, her eyes brilliant, her form tensed, lifted that vicious steel claw. “I shall do as you ask of me, and my Jikai Vuvushis call. But, Zankov, as you love me, I wish to speak with my mother when I return.”

  His laugh was high, brittle and, at least to me, artificial. But, I could be wrong. “Of course, Ros. She is, after all, your mother whom you love. It is not your father we ask this bokkertu in all legal formality.”

  “Him!” spat Dayra. “The betraying rast — I would it was him. Then I would stroke him with my claw.”

  The scene wavered again before my eyes. For a desperate moment ghastly phantasms of the time I had ridden after my daughter Velia rose to rend and torture me. I shut my eyes, pressed down hard, hard, and struggled to regain my senses. When I looked again, Dayra had gone. Now I saw under that partial roofing there were Battle Maidens there, twisted lesten-hide thongs cruelly constricting their limbs. There were four Katakis in the front rank, arrogant, lofty men, with their bladed whiptails flaunted menacingly. Them first, then...

  Next to them the two clansmen... They were Zorcanders. No doubt they were witnesses to this bokkertu, the Vovedeers out conducting the battle. And, the sight of Katakis, here, involved in legalities of Vallia gave eloquent testimony to the kind of country Vallia would be if Zankov had his way.

  Very carefully I placed the Krozair longsword hilt-up on the stone flagging, leaning against the column. Next to it went six Lohvian arrows. I bent the great Lohvian longbow. Seg believes I can shoot as well as he, although I am not sure; I think even he might nod a tight approval of that six-shot group.

  The four Katakis and the two clansmen were flung back by the smashing power of that tremendous bow. The longsword was in my fists and I was leaping forward and, as though the uproar in the chamber was the signal, other men boiled in from the far side, men and Jikai Vuvushis.

  Leaping for Zankov, who sprang away wit
h a high screech of sudden fear, I saw Barty Vessler there, splendid, splendid, hacking his way through the ranks of diffs who sought to drag him down. His personal guard fought at his side. He made for Zankov who, attempting to escape me, scrambled into Barty’s path.

  Men reared before me and there were handstrokes aplenty. Then I was through them or their remains and the Krozair blade bit cleanly through the iron links of the lapping chain. I took Delia into my arms.

  She said: “Dayra—”

  “I know. Hush.”

  “There is no time to hush. Give me a weapon, and—”

  “Perhaps she truly loves this Zankov, as he her. Perhaps—”

  “No, my heart. It is not like that.” She pushed me away and bent to retrieve a fallen rapier. As she straightened, her face, incredibly lovely, tautened, and I whirled, sword up.

  Barty was in the act of bringing his drexer down on Zankov. Zankov’s rapier angled, the light runneled along the blade, and then the drexer bit into his face. With a demoniac screech he leaped away and the blood poured down that thin and bitter face, painting him like a devil of Cottmer’s Caverns.

  His face as red with passion as Zankov’s was red with blood, Barty bellowed. “Cramph! Seducer! Pray to all your evil gods, for, by Opaz, your time has come!”

  I saw it.

  Colun Mogper, the Kov of Mursham, sprang up, tall at Barty’s back. The dagger in his fist did not glitter, for it was dulled a deep and ominous green. High, Kov Colun raised the poisoned dagger. With a convulsive effort he brought it down and plunged it deeply into Barty’s neck.

  His life saved by his ally, Zankov did not hesitate. He ran under the roofing and vanished in shadows. I started after him, and found I was barely moving. The stones of the floor surged up and down under me like a swifter in a gale. I was sitting down. I was the Emperor of Vallia. I could not sit down when the country depended on me. Delia bent to me.

  “Stay still, my love. The arrow is deep.”

  “Zankov... Dayra ... Barty!”