It raged, that battle; slowly we were forced in, past one barricade after another as the mailed overlords dismounted from their sectrixes and went at it as infantry, with flashing swords. We held them off. The issue hung for some time in the balance.
But the morale of our men, our slaves and workers, grew and increased even as they were being pressed back. For they saw the death toll they were taking. They saw how our armor-bearers, our lads carrying shields, could protect us from the arrow storm until the moment when the arme blanche men stepped out to throw back yet another attack. It went on for a long time, for the overlords could not understand, they could not conceive, that their habitual authority could no longer be imposed. They were used to riding bravely into the warrens and harrying anything they saw. Now, what they saw wore a yellow vosk-helmet and shot a crossbow, or speared with a deadly pike point. They could not understand; but as their losses mounted and they saw their friends writhing in the dust with their mail pierced or shattered, the blood spouting, as they heard the frenzied shrieks of their brothers or cousins in the throes of death, they had to believe they could not subjugate the slaves and the workers. And still the sleeting hail of the crossbow-shot bolts and quarrels burst about them. There were very many slaves in the warrens of Magdag, and many workers. We had manufactured a great many bolts for the crossbows — a very great many.
The body of longbowmen from Loh performed stoutly, and I used them as snipers and sharpshooters. I did not know how many surprised Magdaggian overlords pitched from their saddles with a cloth yard shaft in them — surprised in the few moments left before they died.
All over the city-end of the warrens slaves and workers were pushing back the overlords and their hired mercenary beast-men.
I sensed the victory within our grasp.
We had fought our way back toward the original line where the conflict had begun. I ordered my pikes to form phalanx ready for what I hoped would be the final charge. Holly prepared to march in the intervals to give cover. I was covered in a thick paste of sweat and mud and blood. It was not my blood; I looked past the torn-down barricade, out onto the open area from which the overlords had begun their attack and where now a mass of overlords on foot and mercenary beast-men milled. They were saddling up, out there, taking their sectrixes from their slave grooms. Was this their final charge, as we marched out?
I smiled, then, at the thought of mailed men charging my pike phalanx covered by my steel crossbows. That, as a sight and a terrible retribution, would repay me much.
A single figure rode out toward us. Clad all in white, a long white trailing robe, the Princess Susheeng rode her sectrix out to parley with me, Dray Prescot.
“What can I say, Kov Drak?”
She could not bring herself, I could see, to use any other name for me. She was pale, her moist red lips now thinned, almost bloodless, shrunken. Her eyes glared out on me from deep bruised wells. Her hands fidgeted with her reins.
“There is nothing to say, Princess Susheeng. You and your brother, all the overlords of Magdag, you merely reap what you have sown.”
“Do you hate me so much?”
“I-” I began. Then I hesitated. I had hated this woman. I still believed I hated all the men of green. I was young, then, and hatred was easy, Zair forgive me.
“You are a Krozair,” she said, with some difficulty. “A Lord, a man of Zair. You could arrange a truce with Sanurkazz — you yourself said the red and the green would one day cease to fight.” She leaned over toward me from the high saddle. “Why should not today be that day, Dray Prezcot, Kov Drak?”
“You still do not see. It is not between red and green. It is between the overlords and their slaves.”
A harsh discordant shriek shattered the waiting silence as the two armies faced each other. I looked up, shading my eyes. Up there, wheeling in lazy hunting circles, a great scarlet and golden raptor swung on wide cruel pinions.
“Slaves!” Susheeng made a dismissive gesture. “Slaves are slaves. They are necessary. There will always be slaves.” She looked down on me, and a spark of her old fire returned. “And, ma faril, you look ridiculous, standing there with an old vosk skull on your head!” She had not forgotten and she was paying me back.
“The old vosk skulls will win this fight, Susheeng.”
“I appeal to you, Drak! Think what it is you do! Please — you owe me something, after all — Zair does not hold your true allegiance, you are not of the inner sea, the Eye of the World. Make peace between the red and the green, and we will settle the problem of the slaves-”
Now, in that shining sky as the twin suns of Kregen slanted, close together but separate now, toward the horizon, the scarlet and golden hunting bird was circling with a more deadly intent. A white dove was matching its moves, dive for dive, volplane for volplane. They circled and maneuvered like two fighter planes of a later age. Once again I sensed my own helplessness as the phantom forces of the Savanti and the Star Lords clashed in this world so far from the planet of my birth. Susheeng saw my face. She moved irritably and I saw that she wore mail beneath that white robe. She twiddled her riding crop and the reins. She said: “I have appealed to you, Drak. Now hear the message I have brought from my brother, Glycas. If you do not all return to your warrens and lay down your arms you will all be destroyed-”
I moved back a pace.
“There is nothing left between us to be said, Princess. Tell Glycas my message is the same as I called him in the dungeon of the great Hall na Priags. He will understand.”
A handful of overlords, impatient, were riding out toward us. They carried bows. The bows were bent and strung in their hands. Pugnarses began to walk out to me, tall and ugly with his mop of hair and his sprouting eyebrows. Susheeng lifted her crop.
An arrow arched from the overlords. It struck Pugnarses in the throat. He fell sideways, retching, clawing the arrow that had killed him.
“There!” I shouted, impassioned, savage with anger. “There is your answer to your foul brother!”
She brought the crop down hard on my face, but I turned my head down and the blow glanced harmlessly off the vosk-helmet.
When I looked up she was spurring back to her own kind.
I had to run, zigzagging and dodging, through a pelting rain of arrows, but I stopped to carry Pugnarses back to his friends. Holly bent over him, weeping.
“Prepare to move!” I yelled at my men — my men who were workers of the warrens, and slaves from the gangs, and girls like Holly, and youngsters with their shields. The phalanx stiffened. Holly looked up from Pugnarses’ dead body. Genal was at her side. He lifted her up. “Yes!” I shouted at them. “Yes! We fight now in the last battle. We will utterly destroy the evil of the overlords of Magdag.” I lifted the long sword. “
Beneath the measured tramp of the phalanx of slaves the ground shook. The phalanx advanced. The pikes were all held in their correct alignment, angled forward and upward. The yellow of the vosk skulls glowed in the streaming opaline light. The steel bows of the crossbowmen winked back brilliant reflections. All — everyone in my little army — all moved forward. With us now were the thousands of other workers and slaves, men and women with snatched up weapons or implements to use as weapons in their hands. The dust rose chokingly. Trumpets shrilled and called. I strode on, wishing I had Mayfwy’s mail coat about me now, but moving on, moving on. . I knew, as nearly as a man may know anything, that now we had these arrogant overlords. Against the new weapons of the phalanx and the pike, supported by the crossbows, they would be swept away. Exultantly I strode on. Shouts and rallying cries echoed. Arrows and bolts began to crisscross in the air.
“Krozair! Krozair!” I yelled, swinging the long sword and pressing on, the pikes all about me. Holly’s sextets were lavishing loving care in their shooting. “Jikai! Jikai!”
We would win. Nothing could stop that.
In all that uproar, all that bedlam, with the pikes seeming to lean forward in their eagerness to get at these hated mailed overlords of Magdag, I looked up. I looked up. The scarlet and golden hunting bird circled up there — alone. The dove had gone.
“Against Magdag!” I yelled and my sword caught that falling streaming light and blazed like a flaming brand.
The light was changing. Blue tints crept in around the edges of my vision — and I knew what was happening.
