“You did well,” he said. “We handled about a thousand out here and killed and wounded a lot of them, but there are maybe twice as many in the pass or on the far side. Let their wounded hamper them. They won’t come prodding after us.
“What next?” she asked.
“You’ve already said that. Stop to water the horses at that little stream, then on to where we left the baggage under guard. Leave scouts here to observe, though I doubt we’ll be followed.”
“You’re confident,” Ketriazar half accused. “You’ve been confident all along.”
“Only fools are confident all along,” said Wulf.
“Will they have mercy on their wounded?” asked Yaunis. “They seem like a merciless breed to me.”
“Only to their enemies,” said Wulf. “They’ll carry the wounded all the way back to Carthage.”
“We came out of it very well,” Yaunis spoke up. “Their losses were heavy. They’ll plan a long time before they try us again.”
“Exactly,” said the Cahena. “Let’s start back.”
The chiefs rode away to do as she said. The Cahena smiled.
“I wonder if I’ll ever get used to you,” she said.
He met her gaze.
“Just because I killed that man who rode at you —”
With that, she walked away to where two men were bandaging a prone wounded comrade. She knelt there, she seemed to shimmer for a moment. She leaned above the wounded man, put her hands on him, spoke something. Then she rose, and the man rose, too. He smiled.
Tifan came, leading a spotted horse. “You should have this extra one,” he said. “I saw you kill the man off of it.”
“Thanks,” said Wulf. He remembered the man and the horse. “Tell me, does the Cahena heal wounds?”
“Yes, she does.”
On all sides, a happy chatter rose. Warriors beamed at their spoils of swords or cloaks or helmets. Ketriazar bore the enemy’s green battle flag. The wounded were helped astride captured horses, and those who were most badly hurt were lashed to their saddles. Other horses carried captured foodstuffs and water containers. The column moved westward at a walk, the Cahena at the head.
“Ride with me, Wulf,” she called, and he joined her.
“You must realize that you’ve done a great thing,” she said. “Your head is as strong as your hand.”
“I killed a few,” he said again. “Maybe wounded others.” He rode in silence for a moment. “We’ll have a bigger battle than this one. They’ll come with ten times as many.”
“Then we’ll muster ten times as many ourselves,” she said.
“And arm and feed them?”
“You think, four javelins each. We’ll do it, if those invaders give us a little time. We make our own javelins, make them well. But food — that’s a problem. It wasn’t easy to ration this three thousand or so, even among good farms and orchards.”
The sun rose hot and high when they reached the narrow stream and stopped to fill their water bottles and let the horses drink. The captured food was shared out. The Cahena ate a scrap of white Moslem bread and some dates.
“You don’t eat,” she said to Wulf. “You’re not hungry.”
“Not so hungry that I can’t give my share to someone hungrier, Lady Cahena.”
“Spoken like a chief,” she said. “Mallul, carry the word that anyone who wishes to bathe may do so.”
Everybody, it seemed, wanted to bathe. Wulf staked out his two horses, stripped, and waded in. The water was no deeper than his waist. He wished for the soap he had known in Constantinople and Carthage, and made shift with grating handfuls of wet sand. Bhakrann, also bathing, stared at Wulf’s great body.
“Very few of us your size,” he said. “You’re muscled like a bull.”
Out of the water and dressed, the men mounted again. They rode over land where they saw the hoofmarks of their earlier advance. Wulf looked back to the distant heights where the pass was. He saw tiny specks, probably riders left to see if the enemy would do anything. Men laughed and joked in the columns. The Cahena rode to where a wounded man slumped in his saddle. She spoke to him, touched him. He sat up straight as if he was healed.
There was a halt to rest at noon. The Cahena sat quietly in the shade of her horse. She beckoned Wulf and Bhakrann near.
“You two like each other,” she said.
“We almost fought at first, Cahena,” said Bhakrann. “That’s a good way to begin, if it doesn’t get to a fight.”
“Now already, within hours, he’s not a stranger,” she said. “You and Wulf will be brothers.”
“Cahena,” said Bhakrann, “I already think of him as a brother.”
“Think of Bhakrann the same.” Her eyes stared from Wulf to Bhakrann. “I call Bhakrann my son, Wulf.”
“Call me your son, Cahena,” he ventured.
She rose. “If the horses are rested, we’ll ride again.”
At midafternoon they came to the larger stream, where baggage camels and spare horses waited under guard. Messengers had ridden ahead with news of the victory. Guards howled happy greetings.
As the Cahena dismounted among her chiefs, there was a rush to kiss her shadow on the ground. Wulf expected her to make a speech. But she said only that food for an early supper would be distributed and that they would camp, to start home on the following day.
“There’ll be more fighting,” she said, in a voice that carried over the listening warriors. “We’ll do our share of it.”
Bhakrann and Wulf rubbed down their horses well and found them a patch of grass to crop. Then they made a small fire to boil couscous and meat in a brass bowl. Bhakrann had secured a crockery flask of strong, sharp wine. Near them, other messes ate and chattered. At last they sat and stared at their fire. Night had brought a chill into the air.
“She said be brothers,” said Bhakrann. “Think of each other as brothers.”
Bearded chin in hand, he stared. “Who was your father? You had one, I suppose.”
“His name was Fyr,” said Wulf. “He was a farmer, raised grain and cows and some pigs, had two or three horses.”
“Was he a good father?” Bhakrann asked.
“I think so. When the priest said I learned my letters quickly, he sent me to learn to be a priest, too. But I became a soldier.”
“Your wars — you learned in them. I took a moment or two today to watch you cut those Moslems down. There’s strength in your arm.”
“In yours, too, Bhakrann. Now I’ve told you about my father, how about yours?”
“I don’t know who he was.”
Wulf stared into the savage, scarred face. Bhakrann looked back with raw blue eyes.
“My mother never knew who he was, either. My name’s Bhakrann, son of nobody.” His face drew into bitter lines. “Who dares call me that? I’ll rip his tongue out.”
His big, brown hands clutched at the sword taken from Okba across his lap. In his beard the flames woke a flash of red, like blood grown old without being avenged.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, Bhakrann…”
“No, I’ll tell you,” Bhakrann said. “We’re to be brothers. Listen, my birth was shameful.”
Another moment of heavy silence.
“How I was born is my heart’s shame, and it’s been the calamity of some who reminded me.” Bhakrann grimaced. “Who wants to die? All he needs to say is Bhakrann, son of nobody.”
The hands shifted on the sword sheath.
“It was like this.” Pain in Bhakrann’s voice. “Fifty years ago, some of the Djerwa rode down from Arwa with donkeys and camels loaded with dates and almonds and raisins, to trade at the seashore for salt. They camped on that beach. That night a company of sea-robbers landed and rushed the camp. Nobody knows what people they were, only that they spoke foreign and had yellow hair.”
And Bhakrann’s gaze fell upon the tawny hair of Wulf the Saxon.
“I wasn’t one of them,” said Wulf. “I wasn’t born fifty years ago, a
nd my father never went to sea.”
“Who knows who those sea-robbers were? They shouted and flowed over the camp like a wave. The merchants ran, those who could. The robbers killed those they caught — all but one. She was a girl.” The bearded, battered face clamped. “They didn’t kill her.”
Wulf said nothing.
“Isn’t that the way of conquered men with conquered women?” said Bhakrann tightly. “They tore off her clothes and tied her hands and feet to pegs in the sand. She lay helpless.”
In his beard again, the red sheen of the old unavenged infamy.
“She endured them all night long, in terror and pain. And when the rovers sailed away on the morning tide, the merchants came back and found her pegged there — bleeding, fainting, bruised but still alive. They brought her back with them.”
“Then she lived,” said Wulf.
“Yes, she lived. In disgrace and scorn. She swelled up with a child bred on her by one or other of those robbers.”
Bhakrann gestured with a clenched fist.
“Maybe it was bred by that whole band of them? She was despised among her people. She lived by drudgery, to support herself and her shameful son.”
Wulf waited for him to continue. He continued.
“I’m that son. Bhakrann’s my only name. How many men with how many names have I killed and trampled under my feet?”
“Yes,” was all Wulf could say.
“The other children laughed and pointed at me and called me son of nobody. I’d run and hide, until I got strong and fierce, and struck back at them. When I was eight years old, I gouged an eye out of the head of a mocker. When I was twelve and my mother dead, a grown man laughed and called me son of nobody. I went for his throat, and when he drew his knife I caught his hand and turned his own point to drive into him and he was dead. That was the first of many I’ve killed, how many I don’t know — I’ve stopped counting.”
“You’re a good fighter.”
“Yes, but not a thinking fighter like you. Our tribes were at war then, before the Cahena joined us into one people. When I was still a boy, I went to those wars. I never thought of being killed, only of killing. When I was eighteen, I was thought the foremost killer of the Djerwa. Then the first Moslems prowled in, while I was still young. I was the chief of war parties. I fought whenever there was fighting to do. I got wounded, but I was never killed. I did the killing.”
“Bhakrann,” said Wulf, “you didn’t have to tell me this.”
“Maybe I did have to tell you. Maybe I had to talk.”
“Isn’t there any joy in your heart, Bhakrann?” Wulf half reached his hand out, then drew it back. “Do you have a heart at all?”
“No god I ever heard of would dare look into my heart,” came the slow reply. “But I have a heart. There’s even tenderness in it.”
“Tenderness for what?” Wulf asked him.
“For the Cahena. She calls me her son. And she wants me to call you my brother. Now, don’t you think I’ve talked enough for tonight?”
* * *
VII
On the move at pale dawn, munching scraps of barley cake as they rode. There was little discipline to their formation. They ambled in clumps and straggles, still loudly congratulating themselves and each other on their victory. Camels blubbered complaints under their burdens. The captured horses had mostly been appropriated by their captors, and many riderless Imazighen horses were herded along. Wulf heard that they headed for the Cahena’s town on Mount Arwa.
The land looked rich, pleasant. Cattle and sheep grazed on grassy stretches. Here and there stood houses of mud brick and thatch, with fruit orchards and grape arbors. Streams flowed, enough water for grateful horses. Wulf reined aside once to study a closed structure of rough stones that rose to a cone. Zeoui said that it was an ancient Imazighen tomb, of someone once important and now forgotten.
A messenger summoned Wulf to ride with the Cahena and her chieftains.
They greeted him with noisy friendship, pockmarked Ketriazar, lean, pale-eyed Daris, the more elegant Yaunis. Bhakrann came, nodding cheerfully, as though he had never told his bitter tale of shameful birth. The Cahena beckoned Wulf with her riding whip. “Tell us more of this fighting you say we’ll do,” she said.
“Yesterday we defeated only a reconnaissance force,” he reminded her. “Their main body will come, a great big main body.”
“We ate them up like a relish of pickles,” said Ketriazar.
“We ate up the ones who got out to us, and we outnumbered those,” said the Cahena, easy in her saddle. “Wulf’s plan. I saw at once that it would succeed.”
“What would you have ordered?” asked Yaunis, and she turned a dry smile upon him.
“Why tell you what I’d have ordered?” she said. “Wulf had a good plan ready. I gave the orders, but they were Wulf’s orders.”
“Your decisions are always right, Cahena,” said Yaunis.
“Which is why she is so great,” added Daris.
Wulf had listened. “What makes her great is that her men hear her and obey her,” he said.
“Lucky, Wulf says,” the Cahena reminded them. “Luck is everything. I’ve been lucky in having my orders obeyed ever since I was a girl, fighting tribes that became allies, with Vandals and Romans and so on. And now with Moslems.” Her eyes shone on Wulf. “You think they’ll bring forty thousand against us.”
“Hassan ibn an-Numan had that many to take Carthage,” he said again. “Maybe he’ll have more now. It’ll be a big army to bring into strange country, finding rations and keeping fit for action.”
“And stopping to pray five times a day,” contributed Yaunis.
“They’ve done that all the way from the far side of Egypt,” went on Wulf. “They’ll come, as many of them as they can manage.”
“We’ll start gathering our own men as soon as we get to Tiergal,” said the Cahena.
“Tiergal,” Wulf repeated, and she laughed musically.
“It’s nowhere as big as those old Roman towns on the coast,” she said. “We Imazighen don’t build big towns. We do things simply and try to do them well.”
Wulf gazed at a string of nearby riders, tousled, sunburned, bare-armed. Their shocks of hair defied the sun. They wore daggers and javelins and shields as though they could use any of them, or all of them at once. Enough such men could win. But were there enough?
“We’ll find the men,” said the Cahena, as though yet again she read his mind.
They passed a mud-walled house with a hedge of prickly pear. A hoopoe fluttered close, speckle-bodied, yellow-crested. More houses showed ahead. The Cahena ordered men to ride to each.
“Offer them money for what food they have,” she directed. “Here, take these coins we captured. Meat, grain, fruit, anything. If they won’t sell, say it’s for the Cahena.”
The messengers jogged away to door after door.
“What if the food isn’t given when they say it’s for you?” Wulf asked the Cahena.
“I’m afraid it will be taken anyway. People mustn’t refuse me.”
Past the little settlement they marched, and bargained for food at houses beyond. The sun blazed high, then sank westward toward the distant ridge. When it set in a red blur, they camped in a broad hollow with grassy slopes and a swift stream at the bottom. Men unsaddled and made preparations for supper.
Wulf found Bhakrann and Zeoui and Cham exulting that an injured baggage camel had been slaughtered and was being cut up for roasts over a score of fires. As they licked their lips, Mallul appeared.
“The Cahena asks that Wulf eat with her,” he said, and Wulf followed him to the enclosure of javelin-propped robes. Inside, she bent over a pot set on hot coals.
“You accepted my invitation,” she greeted Wulf.
“People mustn’t refuse you,” he said, giving her back her own words.
She laughed, more merrily, perhaps, than the half-impudent jest deserved. Mallul served the food into bowls. It was a stew of mutto
n and green pods and couscous, seasoned with peppers. The Cahena poured cups of wine. The three ate and drank. The Cahena studied Wulf thoughtfully.
“Forty thousand of them,” she said at last, putting a spoon between her full lips.
“Hard-fighting veterans,” said Wulf. “Ready to die in battle and go to their promised paradise.”
“So you said. But I asked you here to learn who you are, what you are.” Eating, Wulf told her at greater length the story he had told Bhakrann of his English boyhood, his studies of histories and languages, his service with the Franks and the Byzantines.
“We’ve needed you,” she said, nodding her dark head. “You’re learned and brave. Not all brave men are learned, not all learned men are brave.”
“You flatter me, Lady Cahena.”
“I tell the truth about you. I had a vision of you. I saw even the pattern of your tunic. I know what will happen.”
“That’s true, Wulf,” said Mallul.
“Wisdom sees the future by indications of the past and present.”
“You’re a philosopher,” the Cahena half crooned. She poured wine for them both and sipped from her cup as he sipped from his.
“You’re kind to entertain me,” he said. “To talk to me.”
“We’ll talk again, another time.”
That was his leave to go. He rose and bowed, but did not fall down to kiss her shadow that still showed in the sun’s last redness.
“How big you are, Wulf,” she said. “We’ll make you a coat of mail.”
“Thank you,” he said, reflecting that other women had praised his stature, ever since he was an upstanding lad in England.
“Good night, Wulf.”
He went back to where Bhakrann and Zeoui and Cham were finishing their camel meat. Yaunis was with them, eating more daintily.
“We’ll be fewer tomorrow,” said Bhakrann. “Yaunis will lead his men off to the north at sunrise.”
“I hope to talk with you again, Wulf,” said Yaunis, wiping his fingers on the leg of his boot. “After all, I’ve been to Carthage. I went to the theater and the circus. My people are the Djerdilan. We have civilized traditions, we appreciate culture.”
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1986 Page 7
