Krozair of Kregen

Chapter Seventeen

“We are doomed!”

The cries rang out with chilling panic through the early morning mists. This was a time for instant action.

There was no time to shaft the running paktun, as he deserved. I grabbed a varterist by the ear and ran him up to his engine. I hurled both of us at the windlass, for the varters were kept unspun to save their springs, and began a frenzied winding. “Orlon!” I bellowed at another varterist, who hung over the battlements, gaping. “Shove a dart in! Hurry, man!”

The dart slapped into the chute as the nut engaged and the windlass clanked full. I swung the varter on its gimbals and sighted on a vast bottle-green hide and pressed the trigger. Praise Zair — or praise Erthyr the Bow, the guiding spirit of Erthyrdrin bowmen — the dart flew true. Its massive bulk smashed into the tough hide where an arrow would break or spin free. The turiloth squealed at first, and then when he realized how deeply he had been wounded, he began to scream. His six tusks whipped about as he tried to reach back to dislodge the cruel barb in his guts. His tendrilous tails lashed in frenzy. But he was not the monster aimed for the gate beneath our feet. I had had to shoot in enfilade to hit a flank. I glared about for Sniz the Horn, my trumpeter, and yelled, “Load another! Get at it, you onkers! These are only beasts and may be slain, the poor hulus! Sniz! Sound the rally! Blow hard!”

“Quidang, Dak!”

I had spared the time to shoot, myself. Now all who looked over the battlements could see at least one monster screaming in agony, and slowly sinking down onto his sixteen knees. Turiloths are usually ponderous and slow; but with their three hearts they can be whipped up into a short and vicious charge of surprising speed. If that happened before we got them all, any one of them could go straight through the timbers of the gate as a swifter’s ram smashes through the scantlings of a broad ship. The watchfires of the night had not yet been doused.

“Torches!” I roared. “Torches to set their tails alight!”

After that first blind, unthinking panic my men rallied. Varters clanged from the towers along the walls. Torches were catapulted out. We had rocks ready, and vast caldrons of hot water that would come to the boil as the fires were stoked. It was a pretty set-to while it lasted. But with Sniz blowing his lungs out and the drums rolling and the air filled with varters and torches, with the boiling water spilling out and down on the last turiloth that lumbered into a charge, we held them. It was a near thing. The last one, bearing two varter darts, four of his six tusks knocked away by a rock, boiling water fuming from his gray back, slumped to his knees before the gate. One of his remaining tusks touched the wood. It made a sound so small it was lost in the uproar of continuing battle.

For the Grodnims charged in, anyway, bearing scaling ladders. Their towers had been set alight many times and still they built more and shielded them with wet hides and sheets of bronze. We smashed them with varter rocks. The scaling ladders were pushed away with forked sticks. Arrows darkened the bright morning as the mists burned away. It was a merry set-to, as I say, and many a good man went down to the Ice Floes of Sicce, or up to sit in glory on the right hand of Zair or Grodno in the radiance of Zim or Genodras, according to his color.

Before the Hour of Mid the last few Grodnims were shafted and sent reeling, the main pack retreating sullenly. Among the attackers there had been men who bore pikes, men with shields, men compact in the grouping of six cross-bowmen in sextets. So Glycas was sending in the new army, was he? Actually committing men trained to fight in the open in phalanx into the messy business of assaulting a wall? That was a fine omen for our continued holding.

When the excitement had died down Duhrra found me. He did not look pleased.

“Nath the Slinger has been wounded, a shaft through his arm. Oh, and the Krozair, Pur Trazhan, is dead.”

I said, “Fetch me his sword, Duhrra.”

Oh, yes, it was callous. But other good men were dead. And I could use the Krozair brand, where probably others could not. If pride had gone to my head, I trust I understood why. I went to see Nath the Slinger and found him cursing away, in good spirits, but very foulmouthed about the Magdaggians.

“My shots were bouncing off their shields, Dak. A coward’s trick, the shield.”

He but mouthed the usual opinion in Turismond.

“I got one of ’em, though, a beauty right under the helmet rim. And then his mate shot me in the arm.”

“Rest and have it seen to and you will be fine.”

“Oh, aye, I’ll be fine. By Zair! It is not my slinging arm!”

The turiloths were the subject of conversation for the rest of the day. As was my custom I sent strong parties out, well screened, to pick up every weapon they could among the corpses. As for them, we scattered pungent ibroi on them and gradually the smell went away. The boloth of Chem has eight tusks, and is apple-green and yellow; otherwise he is much the same as a turiloth. I thought of Delia, naked, tied with silver chains to the stake, and of the boloth — and of Oby and Tilly and Naghan the Gnat. By Kaidun! If a man could get out of a scrape like that, with good friends like Seg and Inch and Turko the Shield, then surely I could get out of this one with my son Drak flying to our rescue! The problem there was, as Pur Trazhan who was now dead had said, that Drak’s army would most likely relieve Zimuzz first. We just had to hold. So I glared upon the gigantic mute corpses of the turiloths as my men picked up weapons, and debated how to dispose of the monstrous things before they choked us out with their stink.

In the end the clouds of warvols attracted to any scene of death floated on their wide black wings from the sky and settled on the corpses and began the long and succulent job of picking the bones clean. The vulturelike warvol has his uses in nature. I had my eye on the bones, for the meat was not pleasant enough for us to eat, rich as we were with mergem. If we starved, we’d eat turiloth meat and gag and chew and choke, but we’d eat it right enough.

This siege would be decided one way or the other before the mergem ran out. A small teaspoonful of mergem in two pints of water, boiled up, produces a rich and nourishing broth, with all the proteins and vitamins and whatnot a man’s metabolism requires. For roughage we ate of the chipalines, and almost everywhere possible in Zandikar the flowers had been replaced by vegetables. Only along walls in those days were flowers to be seen in the besieged city.

No, I will not detail all our sufferings and tribulations during the Siege of Zandikar. That siege was not really one of the great and illustrious defenses of Kregen; for one thing we did not starve. But we fought well. We held the Greens off. They vastly outnumbered us, and for all that we kept on killing the rasts, still they seemed never to decrease in number. Glycas had used a part of the famous new army of King Genod in the assault; so we were hurting them. A frenzy grew in the attacks. They became more and more desperate, lacking in finesse, wave after wave of yelling men hurling themselves frantically at the gray-white walls of Zandikar, screaming, “Grodno! Grodno! Magdag!” We heard the shouts for Prince Glycas, and, also, the shouts for King Genod. But for all the shouting and the onslaughts they did not pierce or climb the walls — unless we allowed them.

On one crucial night attack a brave party of Grodnims managed to make a lodgment on the walls. They held a wall and a flanking tower. We came up, realizing we faced a task of gigantic proportions to force them off. But they did not drop down on the inside. They made a deal of noise, banging drums and blowing trumpets; but we released a series of firepots into the darkness beyond the walls and after a time the Grodnims dropped back outside the walls, abandoning what they had achieved. Roz Janri and Pallan Zavarin and others of the high officers were puzzled. They had become used to decisiveness in the Magdaggian army. I said, “This is a great and good sign. The rasts believed we prepared a trap for them. They have been caught before. They thought that if they attacked further we were waiting. Well, the mind is often more powerful than the muscle.”

The information heartened everyone in Zandikar.

Now we believed we would hold.

Then came the moment that I, alone among all those people with such high hopes in Zandikar, had dreaded.

Yes, I had told the people of the city: yes, we will hold.

But I had not told them that King Genod had formed an alliance with the empress Thyllis in far Hamal. I had not told them that Genod had bought fliers and saddle-birds from Thyllis. I had not told them that as soon as the king arrived he would bring with him vollers and fliers. We did not know if he had been reducing Zimuzz, or if he had tried a fling at the sacred Isle of Zy. All we knew early one morning was that King Genod, the war genius, had arrived in his camp before besieged Zandikar.

We saw the dots in the high air. People looked up and pointed. Exclamations broke out. They had seen the flier that Duhrra and Vax had brought here with Hikdar Ornol ti Zab. That had long since been smashed and no one knew where Ornol was. So they knew what these fliers were, and they also knew what they portended.

I knew that this day, the very same day he landed here, the genius at war, King Genod, would launch his aerial armada against Zandikar. The walls would avail nothing. Assailed at a hundred points within the city itself, Zandikar must fall.