Warrior of the Altaii

by Robert Jordan

  Their flanks began to curve around us, moving to encircle us. The infantry stood firm, shield wall solid, a hedge of spears presented, ready to hold us until the horsemen could finish our destruction.

  The first Altaii warriors reached them, the blood-oath men, and flung themselves from their saddles, impaling themselves on the spears. Their hands clawed at the shield wall, and dying, they opened holes in it.

  Into those holes we rode, pressing our attack, shearing deep, ripping the gaps wider. Their cavalry hadn’t made contact before the infantry was falling back, trying desperately, uselessly to regroup and re-form.

  I brushed aside a lance with my shield as the first horsemen reached us, and decapitated its owner with a backhand blow in passing. Another rode to meet me, a Lantan. He fought well, but death rode at my shoulder, and I little cared if it was mine or another’s. There was a look of horror in his eyes as I pulled my steel from his body and let him slide from his horse.

  Near me Dunstan wove a circle of flashing steel around himself. All who entered that circle died. Then, with a sweeping blow, a Morassa severed his sword hand, sending sword and hand spinning. Laughing, the Morassa raised his sword for the easy kill, but Dunstan, pushing the stump of his wrist into his face to blind him, broke his neck with a blow from his shield rim. Dropping the shield, he bent low from the saddle to snatch up a sword in his left hand and disappeared into the swirl of battle, heedless of his life pumping out. Die, but die killing your enemies.

  Thunder was added to the boiling clouds, a low, growling, unnatural thunder. Light flashed in the clouds, as lightning, but not lightning. The foul wind grew stronger, swelling into a storm.

  My horse screamed as a Lantan infantryman put a spear through his side. As he rolled to the ground I stepped from the saddle and put steel through the Lantan’s ribs. Many now fought on foot, Lantan cavalry and Altaii alike. I saw a group of Morassa, trying to maneuver like the infantry, ridden down by a mass of Altaii and Lantans intent on their fight. Here and there Lantan infantry tried to form squares and defend against the death that rode around them. None lasted beyond the first attack.

  Through the carnage Bohemund cut his way with his intentions written on his forehead. He gave no heed to the death struggles taking place on every side. He didn’t slow to strike down an enemy unless that man tried to get in his way. In the midst of the battle he searched only for the men who’d killed his son.

  A Morassa came riding down on me, screaming a war cry, lance leveled. Dropping my sword I grabbed hold of the lance just behind the head at the last possible instant, and falling, I pushed the blade to the ground. His cry of triumph turned to a grunt as the impact shivered him out of his saddle. Dazed, he tried to rise, only to find his own lance pinning him to the ground. I left him pawing weakly at the shaft, his life leaking away. My death or another’s, it was all the same.

  A blade struck me on the shoulder, but I killed the one who wielded it almost without noticing him. Before me, almost within reach, stood Ivo. Ivo, of the Street of Five Bells. Ivo, the Morassa, and a Morassa had murdered Harald.

  Wordlessly I advanced on him. He tried to speak, but I wasn’t there for talking. I attacked with all the energy I could muster. There was no skill in it, only sheer strength and hacking butchery, for it was butchery I intended. From the first instant all of his efforts had to be directed at stopping my attack, or slowing it, at least, for stop it he could not. Again and again I forced home a blow, cutting at him, tearing at him, forcing him back. He tripped, falling, and I closed for the kill. And he caught himself.

  It was impossible, but he caught himself. He twisted aside from my blow, nearly kicked my legs out from under me, and took a cut at my chest that laid me open to the bone, severing the bag Mayra had given me. Almost before I could turn to face him he was ready. More than ready, I saw.

  Like Daiman below the Palace of the Twin Thrones, he suddenly had a look of utter confidence. Before my very eyes he seemed to grow, to become taller. His wounds no longer bled, and he had an aura of strength about him. He was now the tool of a Sister of Wisdom, while I faced him on my own. And if he killed me, with Harald already dead, it might well extinguish the last hope of my people. That thought cooled me. Sanity returned. I wanted him still, but I was now all that might stand between the Altaii and oblivion. He smiled and moved toward me.

  I circled him carefully, watching. He moved as if he was at practice, casually, almost negligently. Neither of us was aware of the battle any longer. For each only the other existed.

  He feinted. Again. I took neither. I could afford to take no chances. Suddenly he leaped in, swinging at my head, trying for decapitation. I met each swing, one after the other, and it came to me that I shouldn’t be able to. He was moving with blazing speed. His sword, his hand, his arm was a blur, but I still met each of his blows. And slowly I began to attack, to counter his strikes with strikes of my own. There was only one possible explanation. In some fashion Mayra had found that I needed her. In some way she was taking a part of her attention away from her own battle to aid me in mine.

  We sprang apart. The confidence was still on his face, but it seemed less complete than it had. There was wariness, now, in his circling, caution. This time I made the attack.

  We stood toe-to-toe, and each swing was a try for the kill. If his blade was a blur, mine was too. Sparks struck whenever they met. His lips began to twitch, from anger or frustration, and he tried to press harder. I moved to meet him, on ground churned into mud by a thousand hooves and countless feet, and my foot slipped.

  I fell, and he came for the kill, raising his sword. Mine was gone in the fall, but my hand had fallen on something. The sky-stone. The sky-stone with the Terg carved in it, fallen from the cut-away pouch. Snatching it up, I threw it at him.

  It struck his chest, and he screamed, a scream that pierced the ear like a hot wire, a scream that echoed over the entire battlefield, going on and on eerily. In an instant he was a living flame, a statue of blue-white fire. Another scream, coming from nowhere and everywhere, joined his, twinning with it, reverberating.

  I thrust my hands over my ears, but it went on, digging into my skull. I closed my eyes, but the burning image scorched even behind my eyelids. There was no escape.

  Abruptly, both the scream and the light were gone. I opened my eyes. All that remained of Ivo was a pile of ashes with a plume of greasy smoke rising from it. One mass of melted metal within the pile was his sword, I was sure. Another must be the sky-stone.

  I picked up my own sword and looked to rejoin the battle, but it was done. In all directions, as far as I could see, streams of Lantans and Morassa fled, pursued by Altaii. All over the field they were throwing down their weapons, crying quarter, and Altaii were herding them together. And a fresh breeze was breaking up the dark clouds.

  XXXI

  A GREEN BRANCH

  The skies over the field before the Great Ravine cleared, but there was still much else to make it a nightmare place. The moans of the injured, the cries of the dying filled the air like babble in a marketplace. There was no escaping it. The dead lay in heaps, like drifts of sand driven by the wind. Prisoners in chains and under guard separated our dead from theirs. Ours would be burned, if wood enough could be found. Theirs would be left to the dril and the insects. That foul wind had gone, but an odor hung over the place. It was an odor of the mind, perhaps, but real nonetheless for that. It was the odor of a superabundance of death.

  I sat on a small rock at the edge of the field, trying to bind the gash where I’d been struck just before fighting Ivo. One end of the rag I held in my teeth while trying to fold the other under. The healers were too busy to bother with such trifling things.

  “Let me do that.” Mayra took the rag and tossed it away with a grimace. “You’ll manage to kill yourself yet, if you use that.” From under her robe she produced a pouch, and from the pouch bandages and salves. She looked as if she’d just risen from sleep.

  “If I can survi
ve this, no dirty rag will kill me.”

  The salve felt cool at first, then warm as she rubbed it in. “Luck may have kept you alive on the battlefield, but it won’t do as much good if you get an infection in your shoulder.”

  “It wasn’t luck, Mayra, as you know well. I thank you. Whatever debt I owed you before, I owe ten times, now.”

  Her fingers stopped. “What do you mean?” she asked softly, but her eyes were intent.

  “Why, when I fought Ivo, of course. You know I—” I stopped. She didn’t know. She had no idea what I was talking about. “Then how did it happen?”

  “From the beginning, Wulfgar. Tell me everything that happened. Leave nothing out, not the smallest detail.”

  Haltingly I told her of the fight with Ivo, of the power that aided him and the power that aided me, and finally of Ivo’s death by fire. All the while I spoke, I wondered. If my help hadn’t come from Mayra, then from where?

  When I finished she sighed and shook her head. “I knew nothing of any of this. Not even a scream such as you described could have gotten into the spell-star, and I suppose everyone assumed like you that Moidra and I had something to do with it, and for that reason it wasn’t necessary to mention it. Most men are reticent enough about magic. About magic that won a battle they’d be silent as a tomb. And it did win the battle, you realize.”

  “A fight with Ivo?” I said, bewildered. “Even with magic—”

  “Yes, the fight. Either Sayene or Ya’shen must have been searching for you, even while the battle was fought. Once you were found, she took enough of herself away from the battle to control Ivo. Without his own mind Ivo was a living lie, so the oath-stone burned him—a monstrous lie, so he was consumed, not just burned where it touched him. That must have distracted her. She couldn’t have expected anything like it. And that momentary distraction was all Moidra and I needed.”

  “And you were able to attack?”

  “Something like that. We’d both been searching for Harald, so even within the spell-star we sensed his death. Then all of you forgot everything except that insane male attempt to commit suicide. Drawing on your energies we could sense that, too. All we could do was try to bundle that, the insanity, the ferocity, the disregard for life, the almost desire for death, and hurl all of it at Sayene and Ya’shen. It must have struck at the very instant Ivo’s death broke their concentration on us.”

  I breathed deep. The air smelled and tasted good suddenly. Perhaps I’d been reminded of what it could have been like. “The baraca was with us, Mayra,” I said softly. “There was more luck in that happening than any man has a right to ask for.”

  “Luck,” she snorted. “There wasn’t any luck in it. Things don’t just happen, my fine warrior. They’re ordered and arranged by higher powers. Sayene directed one such against us. Another aided you, and may have arranged what you seem to think was coincidence.”

  “But how? Beneath the Palace of the Twin Thrones you were there. Facing Ivo, I was alone.” Suddenly the hair stood up on the back of my neck. “Mayra, these powers—You’re not talking about gods?”

  “Some gods are such powers. Some are just lumps of stone.” She smiled and shook her head. “Some are one thing one time and the other another. It doesn’t matter, though. Whatever it was, it saved you, and it saved the Altaii people.” The smile faded. “This does underscore what I said, Wulfgar. You’ve become a nexus, a conduit between this world and powers beyond. It can bring you great wealth and power. It can also bring death or worse.” She tucked the corners of the bandage under neatly and rose. “We’ll talk about it later, and I’ll see how I can help you. For now let me try helping some more of the wounded.”

  She walked away straight-backed, stopping to bend over this one or that one. She limped slightly. The battle hadn’t left her entirely untouched, either.

  Orne passed her, riding and leading a spare horse. Stopping in front of me he put both hands on the front of his saddle and looked at me portentously. “My lord,” he announced, “we still live.”

  I nodded. “It seems we’ll have to put off the lamb until next year.”

  “Or even the next, my lord.”

  “Or even the next.” I mounted the horse he’d brought. “But the cost has been very high to avoid eating a meal, Orne.”

  “Has it ever been small, my lord?”

  “I suppose it hasn’t,” I breathed. “Is Bohemund well?”

  “He is. He sent me for you, in fact. Over that way.” He turned his horse toward the Ravine, and I followed. “Lord Karlan is dead, though, and Lord Shen Ta and Lord Otogai and Lord Dunstan. There’ll be no end to the funeral fires from this day, my lord.”

  “No end,” I agreed, and we rode in silence.

  We picked our way around and sometimes over the bodies of men and horses. On every side men sat binding each other’s wounds. Captives carried away our dead in numbers to make the bones shake and the stomach grow cold. No matter the alternatives, the smell of death clogged my nostrils again.

  Bohemund saw us approaching and rode to meet us. His helmet was off, and his face was full of contempt. “He ran,” he said without prelude. “Brecon ran.”

  I stared in astonishment, and Orne muttered something about carrion eaters. “Why?” I asked. “Even a Morassa wouldn’t run from combat with the king in the middle of a battle.”

  “He was the one who gave his sword for Harald to be killed.” His voice was cold and hard. “Three times I managed to get close to him, and each time he avoided me in the press. Finally I was able to meet him face-to-face, and he seemed to have gathered enough courage to fight. He knew why I wanted him, all right. Then that scream came. It was enough to tear at any man’s courage, but his blood and bones turned to water in front of my eyes. He actually threw away his shield to run better. It affected many of them that way, it seemed, and there were too many of them, all packing together in their efforts to escape, for me to catch him again.”

  We were all too disgusted to mention Brecon again. Cowardice, even an enemy’s, left a foul taste in the mouth.

  “Did any of them manage to retreat in good order?” I asked.

  “None that I saw,” the king replied, “but that’s not to say they won’t try to rally somewhere. I want you to make a wide sweep around us. If you see anything that indicates they’ve still got a taste for fighting, let me know right away.”

  Bohemund rode away, and I turned to Orne. “Gather as many men as you can in a half turn of the sand glass and meet me there.” I indicated a stone outcrop. “We’ll have to hurry if we’re to cover any distance before dark.”

  We split, and I rode from place to place, telling this man to fall in behind me, that man to find others and meet me. Three times I met a leader of a thousand lances and told him to find as many of his thousand as he could and join me. At the half turn I rode away from the Ravine at the head of some two thousand lances.

  I pushed hard, paying no heed to the ones and twos and threes we saw. It was bigger, more dangerous game I sought. Some of the lances wanted to stop long enough to scoop the stragglers up, as if there weren’t already more prisoners chained at the Ravine than we’d likely be able to sell.

  “We’ve no time for them,” I said each time. “Let them run.”

  And run they did, even harder after they saw us. There was no taste for fighting there, no desire for anything but escape. If we found nothing more than those scared remnants, I’d go right back to tell the king our enemy was broken beyond recall. But then, topping a rise, I found the larger game I sought.

  Below us several hundred warriors bunched tightly around several tents of the Lantan type and a cluster of that city’s wagons, with their big boxy bodies. There was a palanquin nearby, and a cluster of women in white robes. A small knot of slaves huddled under the wagons.

  Our appearance above them caught them by surprise. In spite of what had happened, they had no sentries out. When they saw us the warriors rushed to form a line. The women ran into the large
st tent.

  “Orne, find a green branch and tie it to a lance. I’ll parley with them.”

  “Parley? My lord—”

  “Get the branch, Orne,” I said impatiently. “What’s here is worth talking for. Bartu, ride to Bohemund, quickly. Tell him to come as fast as he can. Tell him I’ve a partial repayment for him. I think he’ll understand.”

  Bartu brushed past Orne, who was preparing the truce staff, and sped away, trailing dust. His departure caused some excitement among the Lantan soldiers. Perhaps they thought he went for more lances.

  “I still don’t see why we don’t just ride them down,” Orne grumbled.

  “Enough Altaii have died today. We’ll gain this prize another way, if we can. If it doesn’t work—” I shrugged and rode down toward the wagons and tents.

  XXXII

  LEASH AND COLLAR

  The officer commanding them was young, certainly no more than a junior officer of the City Guard. He was covered with dirt and sweat, and there was blood on a face that showed all too clearly the fatigue of battle.

  “You speak for these men?” I asked.

  He glanced wearily at the lances spread across the rise. “I do.”

  “I will speak here.” The one I’d hoped for, the one I’d known must be here as soon as I saw the palanquin, pushed in front of the young officer. Elana. She sat a city woman’s saddle, one with a back like a chair and both of her feet on a ledge on one side of the horse. If she’d suffered any in the fighting, she didn’t show it. Her robes were as resplendent, the jewels in her hair as flawless, as if she was in the great hall of the Palace of the Twin Thrones. And she was as arrogant as ever. “You’ve come to try and take me captive then, barbarian, have you? You’ll find I’m not such easy prey as my sister was. I’ve heard how she comported herself, crawling to you, begging for her life, begging to be a slave. She was always soft. You’ll find nothing so easy here. We’ll fight you to the last drop of blood.” Her voice sank to a hiss. “We’ll resist to the death.”