by Robert Earl
The Strigany scurried into the undergrowth by the side of the road. They were close enough to the passing monster to see the cracks in its yellow toenails, each of which was as large as a shield, and to smell the full ammonia stench of its unwashed rags.
“There’s the other one,” Bran hissed into Mihai’s ear, and he turned to watch another giant following in the footsteps of the first. Its face was a blank slab of mindless indifference, but it carried a tree trunk in each hand. The crude clubs swung in rhythm with its footsteps, and it was making a deep, rumbling noise in its throat, which could have been an attempt at a marching song.
“Cheerful fellows, aren’t they?” Boris asked. Mihai said nothing. He was thinking about the destruction that these two had wrought on a forest of ancient oaks, and what would happen when they reached his people’s encampment.
He thought about his father, and Dannie, and Petru Engel. He thought about Chera. Then he tried to think of a plan, a way of stopping these two walking breathing catastrophes from falling upon his people.
As he thought, there came, like a gift from Ushoran, the key to the problem.
The giant’s handler was following his two charges on the back of an ancient-looking mule. The man’s leather coat was flapping around his knees as his mount trotted gamely forward, and the tin cone of his loudspeaker was slung on his back. He wore a sword at his side, but he was obviously more comfortable with the purse of coins that he was counting. Safe in the shadow of his charges, he remained oblivious to the rest of the world. His eyes glittered as he counted his coins.
“See him?” Mihai hissed to the twins, as the man drew level. “I think that we should ask him for a quick chat.”
“How can you think of thievery at a time like this?” Boris asked, his tone a mixture of admiration and horror.
“It’s not thievery,” Mihai hissed, “at least it’s only incidentally thievery. He’s the giants’ handler. We get him, we get them, probably.”
“Probably,” Boris repeated miserably, swapping an identical look with his twin.
“On my signal,” Mihai told them. “Go!”
The three men darted from their cover. Terror lent a frantic speed to their attack as, bent double, they sprinted towards their prey.
Bran was the first to reach him. He ignored the man, and seized his mule’s bridle, feeling the warmth of the beast’s breath on the back of his hand, as he gripped the leather. The rider squawked in surprise and fumbled to draw his sword, but, before his fingers had even properly grasped the hilt, Boris had grabbed one leg and tipped him from his saddle.
Mihai caught him as he fell, twisting the man’s arm up behind his back, and pressing a dagger into the small of his back.
“What do you want?” the man yelped, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down with fright.
“Mihai!” Bran hissed.
“We want to offer you a job,” Mihai told the man.
“Mihai!” Bran hissed again.
“In a minute,” Mihai hissed back, and then turned back to his captive. “In fact, we want to hire you and your friends.”
The man’s eyes rolled in his head.
“Well, I’m flattered,” he squeaked, “but we already have an employer.”
“I’m sure we can beat any offers you might have received. I can offer you an intact liver, for example.” Mihai smiled winningly and pressed the tip of the dagger deeper into the man’s back.
“Mihai!” This time both Boris and Bran called him, and neither was whispering anymore.
“What?” Mihai snapped, turning to them. Then he saw the face of one of the giants, which had turned and now loomed over them, curiosity twisting its features. It was a horrible expression. Especially, Mihai considered, when the thing bared the rotten tombstones of its teeth.
“So,” Mihai said cautiously, “as well as leaving your kidneys intact, how about we match what you’ve been paid already?”
The giant’s handler pursed his lips.
“I don’t know,” he began. “Loyalty is hard to put a price on.”
The giant took a single, earth-shuddering step forward.
“Name your price,” Mihai said, and, despite the knife that still pressed against his ribs, the giant’s handler smiled.
“First of all,” he said, “how about you remove that knife from my back? Now, if you’ll just let me have a word with my colleagues,” he said, easing away from Mihai’s knife, and unslinging the cone of his loud-hailer. “I’ll have a word with them. If you don’t mind, of course?”
“Be my guest,” Mihai said, nodding. Then he cautiously stepped back, sheathed his knife, and waited to see if the man was as disloyal as he hoped.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Anybody can make plans. Anybody can give orders. A leader must do more than this. A leader must give hope, and he must give it even when he has none himself. After all, how can there be endurance without hope? How can there be courage? How can there be victory?”
– A Tale of Ushoran Buried in the damp and the darkness, Brock had thought that the pain would be the worst of it. Although his wounds had been dressed after the fight, he had refused the most powerful of the petru’s unguents. He knew that, today of all days, he would need his wits kept sharp, his judgement unclouded. If that meant that the agony from his smashed gristle and cracked ribs had to be left as unchecked as a fire in a burning house, then so be it.
He was, after all, Kazarkhan.
It wasn’t the pain that kept him sweating in the cold embrace of his hastily dug burrow. It was the constant, nagging fear that he had made a mistake.
There was, after all, so much that could go wrong with the plan. If the mercenaries realised that the bulk of his forces were hiding beneath their wagons, covered only by scrapes of soil and breathing tubes, there would be a massacre, Their foxholes would become graves, and the strongest among them would die without even wielding their weapons.
Then again, what if the inner stockade didn’t hold? What if he and his men burst from the ground to fall upon the rear of an army that had already slaughtered the women and children?
Brock wriggled at the thought and listened to the muted sounds of battle. Should he have left more men on the surface? Should he have put everybody behind the stockade and hoped to hold off their attackers, rather than to trap them between the hammer of his warriors and the anvil of their families’ defence? That was what many of his people had advised, during that hurried council of war the night before. If he hadn’t still been bloodied with Ushoran’s blessing, they probably would have outvoted him, too.
However, he had been bloodied with Ushoran’s blessing.
“Relax,” Brock told himself. “One way or another it will all be over soon.”
And so it was. Even as Brock heard the first whistles of the Striganies’ retreat, somebody jerked at his breathing tube, hard. He ignored the taste of blood as the thing cut his lip and concentrated on making himself lie still. Through the earth all around him, he could feel the reverberations of running feet as his people fled from the outer perimeter and stampeded past his ring of hidden men into the sanctuary of the inner stockade.
What if they come in waves and we’re caught between them?
“Then we’ll fight them both,” Brock muttered in the darkness, and then spat out a crumb of soil.
The rushing of feet continued, although they sounded heavier, iron-shod, or perhaps that was only his imagination. Either way, he fidgeted with the communication cord that connected him with the men hidden beneath the nearby wagons. Once he pulled, they would pass on his signal, and the ground beneath their wagons would erupt with hundreds of the Striganies’ strongest fighters.
What if I give the signal too soon?
Brock waited and waited. He counted his heartbeats to try to keep some sense of time as, alone on the darkness, the seconds stretched out into infinity. For the first time, he realised how fast his heart was beating, hammering in his veins and hissing in his ears.
He swallowed dryly, and there was a crash and a cheer from above. He prayed to Ushoran that the splintering wood was that of the outer stockade, and not the inner. Images of the slaughter that would take place, if the mercenaries reached that central sanctuary, sprang unbidden to his mind, and he winced.
Brock waited until he sensed another rush of feet charging past above. Only then did he scrape away the covering of earth above him, and slowly lift his head from his bolt hole.
After so long spent in the darkness, the daylight was painfully bright. He squinted through the wheel spokes of the wagon that rested above him, trying to make sense of the noise and the rushing figures that were charging past.
Their knee-high boots and steel greaves marked them out as mercenaries. So did the sound of their exultant voices and the wild laughter of men who knew that the battle was almost over.
Brock sank back down so that only his eyes and the top of his head showed above the loose earth of his hiding place. He made no effort to count the mercenaries as they charged past his hiding place. There were too many of them. All he did was wait until the tide of them had washed past and the first sounds of the struggle on the inner barricade had begun to ring out.
Then, and only then, did he pull on the communicating cord and drag himself up out of the cold stillness of the earth. All around him, other men slithered from their hiding places, emerging from the ground like the restless dead.
From up ahead, Brock heard the clash of steel on steel, and shouted orders and curses. A woman’s scream momentarily eclipsed all other sounds. It was cut off suddenly.
The Kazarkhan exchanged a glance with the nearest of his men, a domnu he had never met until the night before. Without a word, Brock drew his cutlass and signalled the advance.
As they slipped forward to the battle ahead, he felt a tide of relief wash over him. The waiting was over, and so were the doubts. Now, there was only kill or be killed, the euphoria of victory or the merciful release of defeat. For the first time since his victory in the ring, the Kazarkhan felt at peace. Perched on the barricades, Dannie lunged forwards, to chop through the Estalian’s throat with a grunt and a single, perfectly-timed, blow. He blinded another with the back stroke, opening up a deep, bloody crevasse in the front of the man’s skull. He disembowelled his third victim as he tried to vault the barricade. Glistening intestines spooled from the wound, and the stink of his innards clogged Dannie’s nose.
He ignored the stink, just as he ignored the animal screams of the dying man. One of the children would put the dying man out of his misery soon enough, be it with a razor blade to the jugular, or an iron to the head.
He ignored the patch of damp numbness that was spreading down his left flank, too. He supposed that he had been cut, but he couldn’t remember how. He didn’t have time to remember how.
Anyway, he thought as he lunged forward to reach another victim, it doesn’t matter. Only Chera matters.
He snatched a glance across at his beloved, suddenly needing to see her as much as a drowning man needs air, and his heart swelled.
She was perfect, he thought, as he watched her swing her billhook against a pair of mercenaries. The way she moved was fluid with supple strength. Then there was the beauty of her face, the whiteness of her teeth and the dark flame of her hair. She was like a lioness defending her cubs.
In that moment, she turned, and their eyes met.
For a moment, Dannie stood still, stunned by her beauty. It would have been the death of him, if, warned by some instinct, he hadn’t torn himself from the magnificence of her gaze, and peered back to the battle. At first, he wasn’t sure what had caught his attention. Then he had it. It was a sound, a sound that was different from the screams and cries, and the clash of steel on steel.
Dodging a thrown javelin, he squinted over the melee of mercenaries in front of him. They had stopped their advance and, as their captain bellowed at them, they broke away from the barricade, and fell back.
A chorus of wild jeering broke out around Dannie, but he didn’t join in. This was no victory. Although the men were falling back, they were doing so almost reluctantly.
Then Dannie saw what they were doing among the abandoned wagons of the outer camp, and his breath caught in his throat.
“They’re running,” Chera exulted, her face beautiful with joy, despite the spattered blood that marked her porcelain skin.
“We’ve won!” somebody else called, and another cheer went up, as the last of the Estalians disappeared into the confusion of abandoned wagons.
Dannie watched, nervously, unconvinced. It wasn’t until the shouted orders of the Estalians sharpened into the steady, rhythmic pulse of a galley slaves’ drummer that he was sure of what they were doing.
“The wagons!” he cried, pointing at the nearest of them with a blood-smeared cutlass. “They’re using the wagons.”
The cheers along the Strigany line died away. Silence fell upon them, as they watched the wagons that the Estalians had seized. The men swarmed around half a dozen of them, and they were pulling them away from the inner stockade.
“So, let them steal a few wagons,” somebody said.
“No,” Dannie said, shaking his head. “I don’t think that they’re stealing them. I think that they’re going to use them.”
“What as?”
“As a battering ram,” Chera answered, and Dannie cast her another loving look.
She was so intelligent.
He was still beaming when the Estalians paused, turned, and, with a roar of combined effort, turned to push the wagons back towards the inner stockade. As they drew nearer, the wagons moved even faster, momentum taking over.
Dannie knew the vehicles were heavy, made of solid wood. Most of them were full of food, pans, tools and what not. All that weight was running on perfectly crafted, perfectly sprung wheels. He watched the hubs of the nearest blur as its speed picked up.
“Get off the barricades,” somebody said, and Dannie found himself hand in hand with Chera as they leapt from the earth bank, and sprinted away from their posts. Behind them, the wagons rattled closer, bouncing easily over the litter of corpses that lay outside the stockade, and crashing into it with a bone-splintering force.
A few of the Strigany, who had been too slow or too stubborn to leave their posts, were caught under the avalanche of careening wagons and splintered stockade. Those that survived didn’t survive for long. The Estalians finished them off as they swarmed over the wreckage of the crashed wagons and into the compound beyond.
“Don’t let them in,” Dannie yelled, running back to the fallen barricades, cutlass blurring in a bloody arc, to meet the first of the mercenaries. Chera followed behind, and behind her came the old men, women and children who had been defending the heart of their encampment.
They threw themselves against the attackers with the courage of the truly desperate, but, without the advantage of the barricade, the Strigany were pushed back, cut down and overwhelmed. And, they were not alone. Even among the chaos of their defeat, Dannie could hear the terrible, splintering crash of other wagons crushing through other parts of the barricade, the rest of the mercenaries obviously taking inspiration from the Estalians’ success.
As even more men poured over the barricades, the melee around him collapsed into a riot of crushed bodies, packed against each other. Dannie could smell the cloves on his opponents’ breaths, the stink of their sweat, and he could see the terror and exhilaration that shone in their eyes. He cut, twisted and stabbed.
He did whatever he had to in order to stay beside Chera. With their line broken, and with nowhere to run, he knew that they were both dead.
Still, he thought, with a grim fatalism, at least we can die together.
A pair of Estalians emerged from the press, coming at him from either side. He blocked the swinging cutlass blade of the first, and twisted, as the second stabbed at his midriff. This time, he wasn’t quick enough, and the steel, which felt as cold as fire and as hot as ice,
sliced neatly through his muscles and ground against his ribs.
Dannie grabbed the man’s wrist, and brought his forehead down to crack into his face. With a crunch of gristle and a howl of pain, the Estalian staggered back, tearing his hand from Dannie’s grip. Before he could strike again, he fell, and, through a confusion of falling limbs, Dannie saw the hunched form of Petru Maria, her eyes twinkling like a crow’s, as she pulled her stiletto from the Estalian’s back and slashed it across his throat.
Dannie had no time to witness the man’s fate, however. His friend had already raised his cutlass for another strike.
It was a mistake. Before the Estalian could chop down, the melee around him surged, and he was knocked off balance. Dannie stabbed towards him, catching the man in the thigh as he was swept away.
He took a glance over at Chera, and breathed a sigh of relief that she was flanked by two of the men from her caravan.
Then, although he could hardly believe it, he felt the tide of the battle turning. He heard it in the voices of the mercenaries from the back of the melee. He felt it in their movements, and the sudden, panicked shift in their packed ranks. Then he heard the cry that began to echo through the wreckage of the abandoned camp.
One word, as terrible and as glorious now as it had been the night before: one word that reminded him, and every other Strigany, that Ushoran was on their side.
One word to bind them all into a single, unstoppable force: “Kazarkhan.”
The cry came from a thousand throats, and the mercenaries turned in panic to see what fresh enemy had fallen upon their rear. Dannie realised that he might survive today after all, and, in that moment, he began to fear. Blyseden had long since given up on his telescope. There was too much to see, too much to take in all at once, and too much to worry about.
Normally, Blyseden was not a man to worry about anything. After a lifetime of brutal measures and cold-blooded command, there was little in this world that he didn’t feel capable of facing. The Strigany, however, were like nothing he’d come across before. How many times, Blyseden wondered, had they seemed to be on the verge of defeat? How many times had his troops scented victory, only to have it snatched away again?
