Entangled (69 page)

Ria saw that Driff had found Sakkan, the smaller man’s slim build and tomahawks at first seeming puny against the giant warrior swinging a big double-headed axe.

But Driff was agile and fearless, darting in under his opponent’s blows to cut him with his blades, opening dripping wounds between his ribs, gashing his thighs and shoulders, driving him to madness. In an explosion of rage, Sakkan charged him, sweating, his massive chest heaving, but Driff slipped aside and cut him again as he pounded past, leaving a slab of bloody flesh flapping loose from his back.

In a circle around them, as the last of the Illimani were dispatched, Ria’s fighters, men and women, began to gather to watch. But she could not spare them for this. Not yet.
‘Finish him, Driff!’
she pulsed.
‘The battle isn’t over.’

Driff didn’t seem to hear her. He was laughing at Sakkan, shouting insults at him, and now he lunged forward again under a sweep of the axe, leapt into the air and dislodged the bear-skull headdress, sending it rolling. With a roar the big man swung wildly but was over-committed to the blow and stumbled when he missed. Instantly Driff was on him. He hammered his first hatchet – CRUNCH! – between the vertebrae at the base of his enemy’s thick neck and buried the second – SMACK! – in the top of his skull.

‘Finished!’
he pulsed to Ria who was already leading the charge back towards the camp, leaving behind a battlefield strewn with Illimani dead.

So great was the advantage of surprise that only a handful of Bont’s men fell in the ambush, and a hundred of the Merell women were still able to fight, so it was a large force that Ria took back down the valley to relieve the hard-pressed archers. More than half of them still lived, and they were locked in hand-to-hand combat with the Illimani all along the far side of the meeting ground where it gave way to uncleared land filled with gorse and bracken.

The distance between Ria’s force and the battle on the meeting ground was closing fast. Urging her fighters to a charge, she led them straight across the curve of the valley and the whole mass thundered between
the empty thorn-bush stockades to their right and the escaped children who had gathered in the shade of a copse of bushes and small trees along the valley side to the left. A ragged cheer went up from the children and, ahead, there came an immediate change in the character of the battle as the Illimani – who had the upper hand – discovered they were doomed.

Some ran at once, seeking cover and escape through the gorse.

Others, turning to face the new threat, were struck down from behind.

A few of them regrouped and attempted to form defensive circles but broke under the massive force and numbers of Ria’s attack and were cut to pieces. Many of the rest, scattered in ones and twos along the battlefront, attempted to surrender, and many of the fallen had been injured but were not dead. ‘What shall we do with them?’ asked Bont

‘Kill them all,’ said Ria. ‘That’s the only thing we came here to do.’

While Bont gave the orders for execution squads to comb the battlefield and sent other men to hunt down runaways, Ligar and Sebittu walked up arm in arm. They were both covered in blood – mostly not their own, as they themselves had survived the thick of the fight with only minor injuries. ‘I owe you an apology,’ Ligar said to Ria as he embraced her. ‘I didn’t think we could do this, I tried to talk you out of it, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. You’ve won us a fantastic victory here! A fantastic victory! It’s the stuff of legend – a legend, by the way, in which I myself plan to be remembered as Ligar the Great. I think that will suit me well. Or perhaps Ligar the Slayer?’ He gestured to the battlefield where more than half of the dead, lying in thick heaps, had been killed by arrows.

Sebittu was more serious – as well he might be, Ria thought, since many of his archers had died in this fight. She wondered if he would upbraid her for not reinforcing him sooner. But instead he fell on one knee before her, which made her feel uncomfortable.

Men and women, some Merell, some from other tribes, were gathering round. Amongst them Ria’s heart leapt to see Birsing. Still clutching her little flint knife, she was covered in cuts and bruises but there was joy in her eyes.

Sebittu raised his voice: ‘Hail to Ria,’ he declaimed, ‘the harbinger of the light. After such a victory none may doubt who you are. The foe has run proudly through our valleys scattering us to the four directions,
but you have united the tribes to stop him... Triumph is yours this day, Ria. You have bloodied the evil one.’

Only the Merell could have understood his words but Ria saw everyone gazed at her with the same rapt intensity. For a moment there was total silence. Then in a swirl of movement Sebittu was back on his feet and he and Ligar stooped and lifted Ria, surprised and laughing, onto their shoulders. Bont and Grondin, Driff and Oplimar linked arms with them and they carried her through the crowd.

She didn’t know who shouted her name first, although she was sure it was a woman, but very soon hundreds of people, wearied and bloodied, were chanting – ‘RIA! RIA! RIA!’ – and she was looking down at a sea of faces raised towards her in something very like adoration. Many were the hands that reached out to touch her as she was carried past, as though they might absorb from her the blessing of the spirits.

Ria’s head felt light. All through the battle she had not thought for a moment what it might mean to win. But now, with the flash of a blinding revelation, it came to her that victory meant power.

Not personal power over others – she cared nothing for that – but the power to move men’s minds, to overcome their differences, to inspire them to action, and to bind them together into an unstoppable force. Today she had fought the Illimani in their hundreds and proved they could be beaten. But the time was not far off, she knew, when she would have to face Sulpa and thousands more of his warriors on the battlefield.

He wasn’t going to let her get away with what she’d done to him today – which was why she’d done it. She would need more men – a lot more men – but she had an idea where she might find them.

Still on her friends’ shoulders, still being carried through the crowd to roars of acclamation, she was lost in her plans for Sulpa’s destruction when she sensed Leoni’s presence again, just a shimmer on the morning air. ‘There are twenty Illimani you didn’t see,’ Ria heard her say. ‘They’re going to kill the children. You’ve got to stop them.’

Ria looked back to the little stand of bushes and trees a thousand paces away where the prisoners were sheltering. A great outcry of children’s voices rose up.

As the battle unfolded fifty feet below her Leoni saw the whole mechanism of Ria’s plan: an ambush within an ambush, a powerful enemy caught off balance and fatally duped into dividing his force. The naked women were the bait, the archers the spring and Bont’s men the hammer in a perfect trap.

While it lasted, the battle moved too fast for Leoni to risk distracting Ria. Besides, although Ria often seemed in danger as the fighting swirled around her, she was astonishingly agile and deadly and had uncanny survival instincts. Again and again she dodged lethal blows by a hair’s breadth, and her lean body – naked, dusty and blood-smeared after the fight – had suffered just one new wound. Some jagged edge, perhaps a knife or a spear point, had sliced open her left breast from nipple to armpit. The gash was ugly, and oozed blood, but Ria seemed unaware of it as her triumphant warriors carried her across the battlefield shoulder-high, and cheers and shouts of victory rose all round her.

Leoni was in far worse shape. Since she’d made the choice to return, she’d known that the restoration of her aerial body by Ruapa and Baiyakondi could only be temporary. As she hovered over the battle, following its shifting fortunes, she once more become aware of the awful lassitude and creeping numbness that had afflicted her before, and of the frightening thinness and attenuation of her aerial form which seemed to be slowly evaporating and drifting away. It was difficult to resist the warm shelter of her meat body and the call of her own place and time. She felt its strong pull upon her and sensed she needed only to unlock her focus from Ria and she would be back in an instant with Don Leoncio and the Tarahanua shamans who would heal her wounds.

As though triggered by her thoughts of return, a tunnel of light opened in the air a few feet in front of her. It was inviting and she began to drift towards it when a distant flutter of movement – that yet had a sort of
purposive
flow about it – made her look off to her right.
A thousand feet back across the curve of the valley, near the stockades, she saw a group of men, crouched low, running.

The tunnel would have to wait. With the power of flight Leoni reached the place in an instant and swooped down amongst twenty Illimani who all Ria’s forces had somehow failed to root out. Some were armed with axes, some with long flint knives, and as she watched they ducked out of sight between two of the stockades and squirmed forward.

What were they doing? Leoni soared higher and saw their target could only be the two hundred women and children, formerly their prisoners, gathered in the shade of the bushes and small trees growing along the opposite side of the valley. It seemed crazy for these warriors to take time out for murder when they had a real chance to slip away and escape, but no doubt these were the kinds of decisions people made when they’d sold their souls to a demon.

Leoni darted down to Ria, where her men still carried her on their shoulders, and projected the thought urgently: ‘There are twenty Illimani you didn’t see.’ With every atom of her will she fought the weakness spreading across her aerial body: ‘They’re going to kill the children. You’ve got to stop them.’

‘Sister!’ exclaimed Ria. ‘It’s so good to have you back.’ In the same instant her gaze swept towards the valley side where a distant chorus of screams now rose up and figures could be seen scattering. Her expression changed to one of fury and as she sprang to the ground, yelling orders, Leoni streaked back along the valley, expecting the bloodbath to have begun.

Instead she saw flights of arrows pouring down off the ridge line above the copse sheltering the women and children and thudding into the twenty Illimani where they’d charged across the open ground from the stockades. All but three were already down, two more fell in the next second and only the last one got anywhere near the copse before a dozen arrows smashed him off his feet. Another flight arched from the ridge, thudding into the lifeless and bloody bodies, then another, and then it was all over. Not a woman or child had been harmed.

Leoni soared up to take a look at the rescuers. There were twenty of them, under the command of the third Neanderthal – the one whose name she didn’t know – and they occupied the very position she’d suggested to Ria as a good spot to place some archers. They’d got here late, it seemed, because they’d missed the main fighting, but that had
put them in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to save the innocents.

Ria was coming down the valley at a run with fifty of her fighters, but when they saw the threat had been dealt with they slowed to a walk. Hovering transparent and invisible above the ridge line, Leoni watched as a milling joyous crowd streamed towards them from all sides, victorious warriors mingled with the women and children they had saved, and whirling dances broke out amidst wild hand-clapping and exultant whoops.

A tunnel of light blinked open again at Leoni’s side and in the same instant she saw that two of Sulpa’s little creatures had appeared in the valley – no doubt he had sent them out in their hundreds to search the countryside. The gargoyles flew closer but they didn’t seem to see her, perhaps because she was now so insubstantial or because their eyes were fixed on Ria. Leoni made no movement to attract their attention. She only knew she must catch them and kill them. All would be lost, and Ria would be followed and hunted down wherever she tried to flee, if she failed to do that.

Leoni stayed above the ridge while the creatures flew past and watched as they descended to hover directly over Ria’s head.

Now!

She dived, swept up behind them and snatched them out of the air.

That was the easy part, but she feared that her hands and fingers might no longer have enough substance to hold them as they lashed and squirmed away from her. She tried smashing them together as she’d done before but couldn’t get the same degree of force – SMACK! SMACK! It just seemed to make them more angry. Then SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! – one of the creatures burst apart in a puff of smoke.