The Witch War Cycle

Chapter three

Chapter three

Of a hillside in HamalAmong the harsh rocks of the Hamalian Mountains of the West a small party of warriors huddled behind boulders or in scrapes painfully dug from the barren and stony soil. There were perhaps twenty of them, twenty soldiers left from the eighty that had formed their pastang. They were tired, thirsty, hungry, bloodshot of eye, striped with wounds, and each one knew that the end could not be far off.

Penning them in, ringing them in a hoop of steel, a horde of the wildmen from the vasty unknown lands beyond the mountains were content for the moment to shoot into the pitiful stronghold, to rush closer in a swirl of noise and action to draw return shots, to drop down — and to wait. Soon the soldiers would have no more shafts to stem the final attack.

This scene, painful though it was, held no originality.

So long as the civilized lands patrolled the borders and contested the notion that the wildmen might raid with impunity, then just so long would parties be cut off and surrounded and exterminated. This was the savage and pitiless species of warfare practiced along the Mountains of the West now that the Empire of Hamal had retracted from its westward march of triumph.

There was no question that the bloodthirsty moorkrim from the wild lands of the west could overwhelm and destroy these last few soldiers. But the wildmen taunted their victims, showed themselves to draw a shaft, and dropped flat again. They did not pour in in a last lethal tide of death. No doubt the chief concern in the primevally savage and cunning head of the moorkrim chieftain was that the trapped soldiers would all commit suicide before his men could lay hands on them.

For the soldiers forming the remnant of the pastang trapped on that desolate hillside were Jikai Vuvushis, Warrior Maidens, every one.

Some distance to the east in the foothills of the ragged mountain chain stood the tumbledown frontier town of Hygonsax. Dust lay thickly everywhere, the suns scorched, hardy semi-desert vegetation drooped in the heat. The adobe fort from which floated the flags of two regiments appeared sunk in lethargy.

One flag displayed the number and devices of the One Hundred Twenty-Sixth Regiment of Aerial Cavalry of Hamal. The other, less obvious, more cryptic, told those who understood that this standard was of the Seventh Regiment, SOS, of Vallia.

Both treshes hung limply against the flagstaffs.

The only sounds were of a calsany moodily kicking a mudbrick wall, and the scrape, scrape, scrape of a little gyp scratching himself for fleas.

In a sudden rush of leathery wings, an aerial patrol whistled over the town. The mirvols extended their claws to seize the perching poles and folded their wings. The riders, stiffly, walking like men who have been too long aloft in the saddle, moved thankfully to their quarters where they might try to wash away the dust inside and out. Their commander fairly ran into the fort and through to the wide, cool room past an abruptly galvanized sentry.

The woman striding uncertainly about the commander’s room turned expectantly.

“You have found them?”

Jiktar Nango ham Hofnar halted, embarrassed at his news, depressed, cross, feeling the heat and the strain as though an iron helmet crushed down about his brows.

“I am sorry, Jiktar Marion.”

“Then it must be all over with them—”

“I cannot believe that.”

“But you have searched everywhere. Your patrols have flown day and night. How could they still be alive without your finding them?”

“I do not know, but I do know that I shall not rest until we have found the answer, one way or another.”

Jiktar Nango swayed as he spoke, and put a quick hand to the back of a chair. He gripped the wood harshly, supporting himself.

Instantly, Marion darted forward. She took his arm and made him sit down, and then fetched a pitcher and glass. She poured parclear, and the bright fizzy drink sparkled in the mingled radiance of the suns falling between the columns of the adobe house’s open walls. She looked at him critically, and frowned.

“You have not slept for three days and nights. You cannot go on like this, Jiktar Nango.”

“I must. You know that.”

“But my girls—”

“Your girls are my responsibility out here. I marched with King Telmont against your emperor, and then with him we fought the damned Shanks at the Battle of the Incendiary Vosks. I hated all Vallians. But now—” He drank again, feeling the fizzy liquid cleaving a path down his throat, tingling his toes. “Now we are allies. I shall not rest, Jiktar Marion, never, until we know!”

She understood enough to know that this man spoke with honest conviction. He had hated Vallians; now he was allied to them. But it was not just that causing him to labor so strenuously. He was concerned for her Warrior Maidens, anxious for them, feeling this a matter of honor. He was a man of high chivalry determined to do all and more that could be done. If he killed himself doing it, he’d have only mundane regrets, none for the style of the thing.

Nango lay back in the chair and his eyelids drooped. Watching him, Marion felt an emotion to which she could not, she would not, put a name.

He jerked as a tremor contracted his muscles and then, like a man breasting a swift and treacherous current, he opened his eyes and struggled up onto his feet.

“What am I thinking of!” His left hand raked down to his sword hilt and gripped. “By Krun! Those rascals of mine had better be ready.”

“But you’ve only just returned—”

“The mirvols brought us back. They are exhausted. And I expected good news...”

He glanced at the sand clock on its shelf and made a face. “I gave instructions the patrol could wash, eat and drink and be out on parade again in a single bur. We have enough mirvols to provide second string mounts for us all. So, I must bratch.”

Bratching, as Marion could see, meant in Jiktar Nango’s book jumping very hard and very fast indeed.

Heavy-winged, the mirvols took off in scurries and flurries of dust. The yellow drifted in the air, and settled, and added another fine coating to roofs and walls. She watched the flying animals wing away aloft, shading her eyes against the bright dazzlement of Zim and Genodras, which here in Havilfar are called Far and Havil, and the sensation of helplessness made her dizzy, so sick and powerful it fell upon her.

In order to retain any semblance of normality she had to convince herself that the pastang lost in the hills was not destroyed. The girls had had food and water for a number of days, plenty of shafts, a local guide, and unbounded confidence. The Seventh Regiment, SOS, had recently been assigned this duty out here along the Mountains of the West. Vallia and Hamal, allied, shared a common interest in preventing the raiding incursions of the wildmen, for the moorkrim had recently destroyed one of the famous flying islands. That had seen the loss of much-needed production for the airboats’ silver boxes that lifted and propelled them through thin air.

The scattered detachments of the regiments were being called in. But, right here and now, Nango and she had only their small patrols to call on to prosecute the search.

Even when Nango returned, more haggard, more exhausted, she still clung doggedly to her belief that although it seemed inevitable that it must be all over for her girls, Nango’s persistence must find them in the end.

“I shall fly with you, Nango—”

“But—!”

“I shall.”

“Very well.”

He gave instructions that flying leathers should be found for the Jiktar Marion, and a good strong clerketer. He inspected this harness personally. With this an aerial rider was fastened to the saddle; if it broke in the air — splat!

“I have the strongest conviction, Marion, it is strange, very strange. I know — it is in my bones, my blood — that we shall find your girls. And, even stranger, I know we shall find them alive. Not all, perhaps, but there have been odd portents reported—”

“Surely you don’t believe mumbo-jumbo!”

“No. Nothing like two-headed ordels, or Havil drenched in the blood of Far. It is in me. We fly in half a bur, Marion. Are you ready?”

His change of tone jolted her. She nodded. “I am ready, Nango.”

How Nango mounted his flying animal, how he had the strength to buckle himself in, grasp the reins, how he summoned the dregs of energy to kick in his heels, all astounded Marion. By Vox! She was tired. But Nango had flown continuously since the pastang had not reported in when it should have, and although his men had flown by rotation, Nango had flown on every patrol.

The man was clearly past the end of his resources; yet his sense of honor, his desire to uphold his own esteem of his regiment and his nation, drove him on.

Also, suspecting her own feelings, Marion guessed there were other similar forces at work in this Hamalese.

The leathery wings of the mirvols beat heavily against the warm air. They flew low over the rounded hills, cutting corners, edging higher into the jagged valley gashes between peaks. Everywhere the contused landscape of desolation met the eye.

Gripping on tightly, feeling the rush of wind blustering past, swaying with the floating, soaring and sinking sensations of the flying animal, Marion found she could cope perfectly well with flying. Given time, she might quite come to like it. She narrowed her gaze against the windrush and peered ahead.

The patrol skirted a jagged cliff edge where a few small birds of prey were quite content to let these large flyers sail past. Flying beasts of that size would find nothing to live on here, where the prey consisted of insects, lizards, animals constituted to live on practically nothing. Around that edge the valley opened out, peaks on either hand lofting against the dazzlement. Ahead of the patrol the eroded valley dozed in the heat.

The four-man advance echelon wheeled up into the sky, and one came hammering back.

He handled his mirvol with consummate, unthinking skill, swirling to fly wing-beat to wing-beat with Nango.

“Jiktar! Many dead bodies ahead!”

Marion’s heart went thump in her breast.

Nango thwacked his beast and the flyer surged ahead. Marion copied him and only the leather straps of the clerketer saved her from falling back over the animal’s tail.

In a vast swishing of wings the mirvols circled the site of the tragedy.

There were many dead bodies. Many of them. The moorkrim littered the stony ground. They lay abandoned in the attitudes of death, ringing the central area where a semblance of a fortress had been constructed from sangars and scrapes.

Within that central space lay the girls of the Seventh Regiment of the Sisters of the Sword.

As Marion gazed down, the whole scene wavered in the heat waves, and she could feel the blood bursting in her head, the fiery sting behind her eyes, the sense of desolation and panic and misery — and anger.

A tanned arm lifted. A brown-haired head turned to look up. Another arm waved.

Marion swallowed.

Nango shouted: “They live!”

Somehow, in an uproar of wings and fountains of dust, the patrol was down, landing in any cleared space among the bodies. Marion’s fingers wrestled with the stubborn buckle of the harness, and the fool thing would not come undone, and Nango was there, his hard tired face smiling, to free the buckle and assist her to alight. They ran across to the nearest Sangar, stumbling in among the piled boulders, ignoring the sprawled wreckage of the wildmen on the way.

It was all a wonder and a salvation.

Hikdar Noni Thostan managed to stand up and salute as her regimental commander ran up. She was dirty, disheveled, wounded, her uniform and armor tattered and dangling; yet she smiled as Jiktar Marion approached.

“Noni — Thank Opaz!”

“Marion — Thank Opaz you came... I’ve lost good girls — too many — they are gone—”

There were nineteen living survivors and one about to die.

Nango saw to everything that had to be done, moving with quickness, speaking with authority, and his men jumped to obey. The shambles was clear and hideous. The girls had fought a good fight. Yet...

Arrangements were put in hand to transport the living and the dead back to Hygonsax. The Hamalese swods, simple fighting men of the air, spoke in low tones. Nango kept himself on his feet and moving only by a final effort of willpower. He did say: “I could swear we flew up this valley two days ago.” But his mind worked sluggishly now. When he had slept and refreshed himself would be the time to rejoice at this marvelous deliverance.

The moorkrim were left where they lay. Their flying saddle animals, tyryvols mostly, had all flown off long since. Marion bent to study one dead wildman. She shuddered. The viciousness in those harsh browned features, the tribal markings, the decorations, all spoke eloquently of a life far removed from that of civilization.

The man bore no mark of wounds; yet he was dead and all his viciousness would slough and decompose as the body rotted and he joined the food chain of the mountains.

The elation that nineteen of her girls had survived could not alter the sorrow that the rest of the pastang had died. So many fine young girls from Vallia, trained up by the Sisters of the Sword, smart and skilled, courageous, eager, and now all lying dead in their neat rows and ready for burial. Marion went through the funeral ceremony numbly.

She could taste the ceremonial wine they had drunk before the regiment left Vallia, still see in the eye of memory the long refectory tables, the candles, smell the flowers so tenderly cared for. As though less than a single heartbeat separated that farewell dinner, she was here, in Hamal, among the dust and heat and flies, the smells of so different a nature. The effort of opening her eyes to look at Nango as he spoke the words he felt necessary consumed her.

Her own emotions were forcing her on, and she could foresee in part what the future might hold.

Less than a heartbeat...

The regiment had marched out with the bands and the banners. Duty called them to a hard life here in the Mountains of the West of Hamal. She had met this hard, competent Jiktar of Aerial Cavalry, this Strom Nango ham Hofnar. It seemed to her less than a heartbeat ago she had left Vallia to serve overseas, and now here she was overseas and in Hamal and far too many of her fine young girls were dead...

Such misery she did not think she could bear alone. As the ceremony concluded with the proprieties reverently fulfilled, and she walked slowly away, she looked across at Nango. At the same moment he turned to look at her.

In that moment, in the enervating heat and the dust tasting of schoolroom chalk in her mouth, her gaze met Nango’s. Oblivious of heat, of dust, of flies, negating everything else, they stared one at the other, and their futures were settled.