by Robert Adams
“Then they must not be allowed a free passage over my . . . over our lands, my son, and you must join with me to halt them. If we both call for a general muster, I’ve no doubt but that our people will arise. Considering what seems to be their line of march, the best place to stop the savages would be —”
Martuhn shook his head slowly. “No, your grace, I shall never serve you or this duchy again for any consideration or amount. Immediately the last of the tribe and their herds are across the river, I shall quit this citadel with all my company. We will then trek eastward with the tribe until opportunity presents itself. There is always a market somewhere for good fighting men, especially for a company of veterans.”
Tcharlz snarled, “Then don’t look to me for letters of reference, you whoreson blackguard! I’ll damn you the length of both rivers as a forsworn would-be usurper, see if I don’t. And I’ll stop these goddam unwashed swarms of barbarians myself.”
Martuhn realized that he should have held his piece, but he asked gently, “And how will you do that, your grace? The only reason you arrived here at all was that I asked Milo to order that you and your men be spared, if possible.”
The duke arose, his face empurpled, his eyes bulging. For a moment he could only splutter, such was his rage. Then he burst out, “And what gave you the right to beg a stinking, murdering nomad for my life? Better to have let them do your dirty work for certain this time around. They could’ve brought you my severed head as warranty of a job well done. Then you could have named yourself duke without any opposition.”
“Dammit, your grace,” snapped Mahrtuhn in clear exasperation, “how many times must I tell you that I do not want your damned duchy, ere you believe me?”
“How can I believe a clear lie?” snapped Tcharlz in quick retort, adding somewhat bitterly, “For the duchy is yours even now in all save name. Why even in my own home county, the only fighters who answered my summons this time were my own relatives of various degrees of kinship and a few old comrades of days long gone.
“I don’t know what you did or how you did it, Martuhn. The whole business smacks to me of witchcraft, if you’d hear the truth, but you are become the sole power in this duchy.
“D’you recall our progress from here to Pahdookahport, Martuhn, d’you recall how I canceled all my grandiose plans and rode down to my palace, all a-seethe with my rage? D’you know why?
“It was because in every little hamlet, at every hall and farm and on every stinking pig track, the people didn’t cheer and laud their duke, just returned from the dead, the fuckers cheered you, every last mother’s mistake of them. It was ‘Long life to our Count Martuhn!’ first, then a few remembered to shout for me, their lawful lord.
“When that stringy-haired harridan held her snot-nosed brat up above her head, she didn’t shout for it to look on and remember Duke Tcharlz — oh, no, it was ‘Look, Hwil, see the tall man dressed all in gray. That’s Count Martuhn — God bless him — who brought your papa and uncles home safe from Traderstown! You remember him in your prayers tonight.”
“And when we got to Pahdookahport, it was the same story, Martuhn, magnified by the larger crowds. And that was all that I found myself able to stomach.”
Tcharlz refilled his flagon from the big ewer, drained a good half of it off, then said candidly, “I strongly considered having you killed. I had even sent for a trusted assassin I’ve used in the past, but then I reconsidered and sent him away. Nor was that reconsideration from any love of you — I’ve never in all my life loved anyone enough to allow them to stand between me and anything I really wanted — but rather the simple realization that, were I to have you killed, the entire duchy might well rise up against me — all classes and orders. That was when I decided that you must quit the duchy forever.”
The duke rose to his feet. “But now” — taking the short single step to the desk, his right hand moved up from his side in a blur of motion and its horny palm cracked against Martuhn’s scarred left cheek — “it is become obvious to me that one of us must die before the other can reassume control of this duchy.
“So what will it be, Martuhn? Longswords or short? Axes or spears? We’re both of us masters of them all. Shall we fight ahorse or afoot? In private now, or in public later? You say your wishes and I’ll go along . . . within reason, of course. I just want to get the beastly business over and done with and get back to collecting my taxes and hiring on some decent fighters and continuing my expansion. Well, Martuhn?”
The tall captain had gone pale with anger under his weather-browned skin, and the imprint of the duke’s buffet glowed red over the long, purplish scar, but he shook his head. “No, your grace, I have no reason to kill you. I do not want your damned little duchy. Yes, I was tempted when we all thought you dead and the people needed an overlord, but more for them and their welfare than for me and mine.
“If a death you must have, open your veins or fall on your sword, but don’t look at me to make it easier for you; my becoming an executioner was never a part of our contract.”
With a feral snarl of bestial rage, the older man slapped the younger again . . . and again, palm and back, back and palm. Finally, Martuhn’s own hands closed on the duke’s wrists in an armor-crushing grip.
“Enough, your grace.” His voice was low but there was steel in his tone. “You have overstayed your welcome within these walls. It’s time for you to leave.”
With a glare of pure hate, but no other words, the duke stalked from the office and the building, swung up on his mount and rode out the gate and back over the bridge at a fast trot.
* * *
Despite the drugs, Sir Wolf could not sleep this night. He lay still on the bed, his nostrils cloyed with the reek of medicines and sweat and suppurating flesh. He felt cheated by life and fate. This was no way for a fighting man to die; a warrior’s death should be delivered quickly, with clean, sharp steel, while he guarded his lord’s back. Not a slow, endless torment such as he had endured these last months.
The buffet of the mace had taken him in the small of the back, and from that moment he had been as dead from his waist down, for all that his upper, living body had been continually racked with spasms of an agony both fierce and indescribable.
The drugs that alleviated all but the worst of the pain also took away his appetite, so that the flesh had gradually wasted away from his big bones, leaving only blotched and wrinkled skin lying in folds on a weakening frame that was dying by slow inches.
“Oh, damn him!” he raged silently as so often before. “Damn that scurvy, worm-crawling bastard of a lard-sow and a poxy he-goat! Why the hell couldn’t he have crushed my frigging skull and been done with it — that’s what a mace is for, anyhow.”
He did not hear either door open — the one to the hallway or the one to Nahseer’s room — but he was suddenly aware that at least one other person was now with him in the chamber, near to him and moving nearer, but almost soundlessly. He said no word, made no movement except to close his eyes; let Nahseer think him asleep.
But the hand that touched his withered right arm was not Nahseer’s. A needle-pointed blade came to rest swiftly and surely, despite the stygian blackness of the room, just over his heart, and an unfamiliar voice breathed, in a hoarse whisper, “One peep out of you, old one, and you’re dead meat. Get up and come with us, show us to Captain Martuhn’s chamber . . . and I just might spare you your life.”
Soundlessly, frantically, Wolf tried to raise Martuhn’s mind. “My Lord Martuhn, beware. Assassins. Armed enemies are at large in the tower.”
But Martuhn, sleeping soundly after a lengthy love-bout with Stehfahnah, who had come to the citadel as one of the archers, could not be roused.
Even as Wolf croaked, aloud, “Kill me if you will, but I cannot arise — my legs are lifeless since my backbone was crushed in battle,” he was beaming to Nahseer in the next room, “Nahseer, I can’t wake Martuhn. Arm yourself and guard him. Assassins are in my room seeking him.”
Nahseer, who had often in past months of nursing the dying man been awakened by telepathic means, made no answer of any description but rather rolled silently from his bed, armed himself with saber, dirk, helmet and a small target, then padded barefoot toward the hall door.
But the valiant Wolf, thinking that his message had failed to reach Nahseer either, made one last, heroic effort. Filling his lungs, he roared out in that booming voice which had risen above the din and clangor of so many hard-fought battles, “To arms, soldiers, guard your captain!”
Cursing aloud, for sounds didn’t matter now, the unseen man plunged the slender blade into Wolfs chest, skewering the mighty heart. After wiping the weapon on the sheet, he sheathed it and turned to go back the way he had come, but the sudden ringing clash of hard-swung metal on metal, the scuff of feet on the stones and the huffing of exertion told him of an open fight — not at all his preferred form of activity — in the corridor.
Feeling his way, catlike, among the cluttered furniture, the intruder found a wall at right angles to the corridor and felt along it until he located a narrow doorway. The room beyond was as small and as dark as that he had just quitted, but when he gently cracked open the hall door of this one, a thin sliver of light from the watch lantern gave his inordinately keen eyes enough illumination to discern that the room was tenantless.
There was a high-pitched scream from the corridor, then a babbling, bubbling whine in a voice that the intruder recognized. Apparently, Roofuhs Rat-face had taken a death-wound.
The intruder never carried a sword, only a dagger, a small leathern bag of lead balls and a wire garrote, so he cast about the room for something with which he might hope to fight his way out of the tower. At last he lifted down a hunting spear from its place on the wall, opened the door just a bit wider and slipped silently out into the corridor.
There had been three of them — all unarmored, clad in tight-fitting dark garments, with soft slippers rather than boots and no weapons but hangers and daggers. Even stark naked save for his baldric, dirk belt and helmet, Nahseer was better-armed than any of them, so now one lay nearly decapitated in a widening pool of blood, one sat hunched against a wall, trying in vain to hold back the coils of gut exiting the foot-long lateral slash across his abdomen, and the other was backed into an angle of the corridor, while the hulking Zahrtohgahn stalked toward him at a half-crouch, his target and blood-smeared saber held before him.
For all his intentness toward his victim, Nahseer heard the creak of the door and the pad of swift footsteps behind him, but before he could turn, his chest was filled with a white-hot, agonizing pressure. He tried to scream, but his lungs would take no air. However, even as a murky, steaming, spiraling red blackness seemed to infuse him, he took the last step forward and drove his dripping saber unerringly into the body of the screaming man trapped in the angle of walls.
The intruder jerked the broad blade of the spear out of the back of the naked warrior as he fell. But before he could take even a single step toward the down-spiraling stairs, his right thigh was struck hard, penetrated by something that felt to be as huge and hurtful as the gore-splotched wolf spear he had just used. Nor would the leg support him longer, but still he tried to crawl to the stairhead.
But it was too late for him. Soldiers of the guard — all armored and with bared blades — came stomping and clanking up the stairs, while from behind him, from the level above, came striding another naked men. This one was tall and deep-chested, and where the speared saberman’s skin had been uniformly the dark brown of an old saddle, the skin of this one was pinkish-fair where not weathered darker by sun and wind. He bore in his big right hand a bared longsword, and a bedsheet had been hastily wound and wadded about his left hand and forearm.
Beside him was a small, fine-boned young woman — looking tiny beside his tall massiveness. Her long, red-blonde hair hung loose down her back, and she was as naked as her companion, save for a bracer of metal and leather on her left forearm. In her right hand was a short, thick hornbow and also a couple of black-shafted, steel-headed war arrows, mates to the one which the intruder now could see had so cruelly skewered his thigh.
All three of the soldiers closest to the intruder raised their swords to end his life, but the big, nude man spoke.
“No! Before this one dies, I’ll have at least one answer, though I think I know it already. Someone take that shaft out of him, bind his wound and his hands and take him below. I’ll be along presently to question him.”
* * *
Somehow, sometime, without his being aware of it, it had begun to rain. A soft rain, it was, but insistent. It made gurgling noises as it trickled down the creases in the felt roof of the yurt to splash gently onto the grass below.
Both he and Stehfahnah had turned in their sleep, so that they two now lay on their left sides, legs slightly flexed, nestled together like two spoons, the top of her head under his chin, so that his throat was sunk into the gossamer-soft wealth of her hair.
Carefully, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife, Martuhn placed his arm about her small body, just beneath the swell of her pointed breasts, and gently drew her body closer to his own. Then he relaxed, to let the sounds of the rain lull his senses and the waves of sleep wash over him.
And just before that sleep at last reclaimed him, he thought, “It took me near forty years of my life, but I did finally find the happiness that good old Wolf always said would someday be mine. Here, in a felt tent, on a cowhide stuffed with grass, with this dear, sweet child-woman in my arms, I’m far happier than is any duke in his stone-walled palace or his silken bed.
“I wonder if my . . . if our sons will ever appreciate the truly good life to which they’ll be born.”
Then Martuhn joined his Stehfahnah in sleep.
About The Author
ROBERT ADAMS lives in Richmond, Virginia. Like the characters in his books, he is partial to fencing and fancy swordplay, hunting and riding, good food and drink. And when he is not hard at work on his next science fiction novel, Robert may be found slaving over a hot forge to make a new sword or busily reconstructing an historically accurate military costume.
