Below us and less than half a dwabur away marched the hosts of Zair, advancing to the west. How marvelous they looked, with their many red banners fluttering, the suns striking back in gleam and glint from armor and weapons. Sectrix cavalry trotted on the flanks. Infantry marched at the center. On they came, proud in their might, a splendid army gathered from the fortress cities of Pynzalo and Zimuzz, from the inland towns of Jikmarz and Rozilloi, and from many of the villages of the fertile inland territories.
In all those brave banners of the Red I saw the proud devices, and recognized many of them. Justice and hope marched there, pride and honor. On the right flank, their sectrixes’ hooves sometimes cutting through the surf, trotted a contingent of splendid cavalry on whose red banners the device of the hubless spoked wheel within the circle blazed and coruscated.
Only a small contingent of Krozairs of Zy there were. I guessed that the bulk of the Krzy would be far to the west, fighting with Pur Zenkiren and the two generals of the combined armies there.
My heart lifted when I saw that grand and formidable array advancing toward the massed green banners before me.
Gafard, the King’s Striker, sat his sectrix and chuckled and ever and anon he pulled that black hawk-beard of his. He had given no further orders after those that had drawn out the army of Magdag into its allotted positions.
Two sennights had gone by since my disastrous debacle on the night the king’s voller had been stolen by the famous Krozair, the Lord of Strombor. Although a strict watch was kept against the flyer’s return, no more had been seen of her.
I had hoped she would be flying over the host of Zair when they marched to the attack. The Zairians had worked like demons to collect this army to reinforce the armies of the west. Now we had appeared unexpectedly in their path. They attacked recklessly. This was the way they reacted to the descent upon their coasts of the Green of Grodno.
The king and Gafard had been highly delighted.
All thought of investing Pynzalo had been abandoned. The garrison of the city marched in the host fronting us. Gafard had said, "They save us much labor and casualties." He had slapped his thigh with his riding glove before throwing it to a slave and taking up the metaled war-gauntlets he would wear for the battle. "You ride as aide to me, Gadak. Nalgre and Nath and Insur, with Gontar and Gerigan, will be all I need. Once the battle is joined there will be little need for messages. The army of the king knows what to do!"
"One wonders," said Gontar, who prided himself that his father was an overlord of Magdag who owned estates requiring ten thousand slaves to run, "if that cramph the Lord of Strombor is with the onkers this day."
"One," said Gafard, Sea-Zhantil, "sincerely trusts he is not."
They took that to mean the obvious, but I glanced at Gafard — and away smartly, to be sure — and guessed he meant he hoped Pur Dray would not be there to be slain by a casual pike-thrust. Gafard wanted to cross swords with the great Krozair in person, so I said to myself, pondering imponderables.
I admit, in all fairness, that I was not only coming to share these damned Grodnims’ obsession with Pur Dray, Krozair, and regarding him in the third person, but also was still much surprised that his legend persisted so vividly after fifty years. I could scarce credit that no other Krozair had risen to a similar eminence in the Eye of the World.
The truth was that Gafard so hungered after a similar renown his well-known obsession fostered the persistence of the stories and tales of the Lord of Strombor. Now that Pur Dray had returned to life, had been declared Apushniad by the Krzy and had actually been seen back at his old activities, no wonder speculation and rumor buzzed around the camp like flies over the carcass of a chunkrah slain by leems on the plains.
Also in this fascination with a Red Krozair must be the dread knowledge in the minds of the overlords that Pur Dray had witnessed the private, terrible rites that went on in the utmost secrecy within the megaliths at the time of the Great Death, when the red sun eclipsed the green sun.
I suppose, trying to think about it logically and restraining myself from taking the amused and cynical line that was too treacherously easy, there was a terrible and malefic aura about the name and deeds of Pur Dray, the Lord of Strombor, Krozair of Zy.
The hosts of Red marched on, their banners flying. The ranks of Green waited calmly, silent, and their green banners flaunted no less vividly under the suns.
Gafard was eyeing the distances. We could all see the restiveness in the Red cavalry on the wings. They would charge at any moment, a torrent of mailed men bursting down on the ranks of Green footmen. Those footmen were fronted by a glittering, slanting wall of pike-heads.
I knew the heart of that formation down there below us on the sandy soil. I had created it myself. The serried mass of pikes in the strong phalanx to take the shock of the cavalry change. The halberdiers and swordsmen to protect the pikes from swordsmen. The wedges of arbalesters shooting with controlled rhythm. And the shields — that cowards’ artifice — the shields to protect the men and deflect the shafts from the short, straight bows and the crossbows of the enemy. Oh, yes, I had designed that fighting machine to destroy mailed overlords of Magdag. And now those same devilish overlords used my fighting instrument, remade by them with their own swods, to destroy my comrades in Zair. I tell you, my thoughts were bleak and spare.
I hoped that the Zairians would win.
I knew the worth of my work and the genius of Genod Gannius, whose parents I had saved from destruction, and I knew, darkly and with agony and remorse, the inevitable outcome of the battle.
What I would do was already worked out. I knew that despite all, I could not stop myself.
The red cloth was stuffed again within the breast of my tunic. I would don the red, draw my longsword, and so hurl myself into the rear of the pikes as the charges went in. Perhaps there would be a little chance for the Krozairs, for the Red Brethren, for the warriors of Zair.
That chance was slender to the point of nonexistence.
But, despite all, I could not stop myself.
Sharply, a shadow fleeted over the ground and we all looked up and there, skimming through the bright air, flew the two-place voller with Genod Gannius gorgeous in green and gold leaning over and encouraging his troops.
If he had fire-pots up there. . .
The army of the Green let out a dull surf-roar of welcome and greeting to their king. Very pretty it was. And in defiant answer rose the shouts from the Reds.
"Grodno! Zair! Green! Red!" The shouts rose and clashed. "Krozair! Ghittawrer!" The yells twined in the brilliant atmosphere. And, a new shout, a shrill screeching: "Genod! Genod! The king!"
The Zairian cavalry charged, a torrential mass of steel and red bearing down on the massed pikes. I reined Blue Cloud a little way back of the other aides. They were all standing in their stirrups, craning to look down from our eminence onto the drama spread out below. Now was the time to don the red and so charge down and make a finish.
It might not be a Jikai, but with those Krozair shouts ringing through the air and the brave scarlet fluttering I could do no other. . .
A shadow flitted into the corner of my eye and I turned, quickly, the red half drawn from my green tunic.
A Pachak with only one left arm, and a bloody stump where the other should be, rode frantically up to Gafard, his hebra foundering. He yelled at Gafard. I heard his words, caught and blown by the wind; I saw Gafard’s hard mahogany face turn abruptly gray within the iron rim of his helmet.
"My Lady — treachery — we were surprised — slain — black — men in black — my lord . . ."
The Pachak fell even as his hebra collapsed.
Gafard lifted his head and screeched.
I thrust the red away and kicked Blue Cloud over.
"Gadak! You I trust! Find Grogor! Find Nath ti Hagon! Take men — anyone — ride, Gadak, ride! My Lady of the Stars — my pearl, my heart . . . ride, Gadak! Ride as you love me!"
I didn’t love the devil. But — my Lady of the Stars!
What do I know, now, of my thoughts, my emotions, and my feelings? I know I knew the Zairian army below me was doomed, for I had wrought the instrument of their destruction. But there would come another time, another field, and another battle. Now all my blood clamored that I save my Lady of the Stars.
I rode. I did not ride wearing the red. I rode not for my lord Gafard, the King’s Striker, the Sea-Zhantil — but for my Lady of the Stars.
Even now, after all that happened, I do not regret that decision.
If only some easy power of sorcery had been open to me!
If only by some magic formula I could have prevented what was fated to occur.
But I am a mortal man and the fantasies of wish-fulfillment belong to the myths and legends of Kregen, not to the hard reality of that beautiful and terrible world beneath the Suns of Scorpio.
Yes, there is seeming magic on Kregen, and the wizards practice mighty sorceries, but they are of a piece, following ordained paths. The wonder and mystery of Kregen can never be denied, but it is men and women with hope and courage who flesh out the true fantasies.
I rode.
Grogor, Gafard’s second in command, that surly man, did not hesitate a fraction. He screeched a savage order to a squadron of sectrixmen, all picked men-at-arms, apims and diffs, and wheeled his mount and was away with streaming mane and flying feathers. We picked up Nath ti Hagon, Gafard’s trusted ship-Hikdar, and then, in a compact body, we rode from the battlefield. Sand blew from our sectrixes’ hooves. The wind of our passage blustered in our plumes and scorched into our faces. So we left the action, the battle, that debacle for the Red, which the mad genius king Genod called the Battle of Pynzalo.
Wherever Gafard had hidden his beloved, the rasts of men in black had found her. I had one hope. The voller had been flown by Genod himself and it had flown over the battlefield. We had to deal with men mounted on sectrixes like ourselves.
In one item of my reading of the situation I was wrong.
We went flying through the near-deserted camp, sending the camp followers stumbling out of our way, only the green of our plumes and dress able to convince them they were not attacked by a raiding party of Zairians. We belted past the lines of tents. I had nudged Blue Cloud gently to the head of the pack, for although I wished to conserve him for what I thought would be a long ride, I still felt the mad desire to hurry on like a maniac and be the first there to rescue my Lady of the Stars.
The Pachak of her guard who had escaped to warn Gafard must have been a most intelligent as well as a brave man. He must have fought until he saw there was no hope left and then, instead of going on fighting and throwing his life away, had turned and raced for the King’s Striker. Out past the camp we saw the flurry of green cloaks. I looked closer. A party of sectrixmen was picking its way down the sandy slopes toward the beach. A swifter waited there, her stern ladder erected, one end on the quarter and the other on the beach. Beneath the green cloaks I saw — instead of the expected white, or green, or the flash of mail — black.
Grogor saw, also, and shrilled and we all pelted along, hurling ourselves madly over the bluffs and so roaring down the sandy slopes in great clouds and smothers of sand.
Somehow Blue Cloud kept his six legs under him. We were on the beach. I yanked out my longsword, that Ghittawrer blade with the device removed, and whirled along the packed sand.
The black-clad men saw us coming.
There was a struggle in their midst.
Grogor and Nath were neck and neck with me. Our three swords thrust forward, three-pronged retribution.
The black-clad men tried to face us.
There must have been few men who could have stood up to us in that frenzied moment.
In the moments before we hit I saw my Lady of the Stars.
She wielded a long, thin dagger in her white hand, and she toppled one kidnapper from his saddle and whirled on another who tried to spit her through. She parried — it was marvelously done, marvelously! — and riposted and stuck the rast through the eye. He screamed and fell and then we were upon them.
Our rage was terrible and genuine.
The longswords whirled and glittered, split and cleft, and whipped aloft again for the next blow, dripping red.
Blade clanged against blade. My Ghittawrer longsword sang above my head. Aye! It sang as I whirled it up and down. I smashed with full force, seeing a head spin off, seeing a black-masked face abruptly disappear into a ghastly red mask, seeing an arm spin up and away as a back-hander curled beneath a blow. It was all over in scant murs. We panted. I dragged in a great lungful of air and then, dismounting, walked over to my Lady, who lay in the sand. Her green veiling remained in place, for she had one hand to it. But she knew me.
"Gadak! So you rescue me again."
"Aye, my Lady. You are unhurt?"
She stood up. She put a hand on my shoulder. Her left hand. In her right hand, smothered in blood, she still gripped the slender, jeweled dagger.
"I am unharmed. They tried to — at the end — when they saw you coming. But—"
"Yes, my Lady. You yourself created a Jikai, I saw." Then I smiled — I, who am a surly beast and with a face like the ram of a swifter. "I am minded of another lady, my Lady."
"I would not have thought—" she began, and then stopped and threw the dagger to the sand. She took her hand from my shoulder and drew herself up. She put that clean left hand to her hair. Typically, the next words she said were, "And my lord? How goes the battle?"
"The battle will go well enough."
She sighed.
She, like myself, had been Zairian once.
"I returned to the camp, Gadak, and they were waiting for me. Men in black. Stikitches — kidnappers for a space — but real stikitches, nonetheless."
"Aye."
My men were inspecting the corpses. The swifter was gone, pulling madly out to sea.
Grogor turned one body over with his foot and then cocked an eye at me. I looked down.