down onto the earth again as the great cat plunged. He felt muscle and sinew tear in his arm and shoulders, felt the gry-lion’s claws raking the flimsy leather shield, felt weakness in his body and darkness in his head, but still the storm raged and shook him.
Once more the gry-lion roared and reared. Lannon felt himself hurled towards the heavens, the shaft of the lion-spear snapped like a brittle twig, and Lannon was thrown with the butt of it still in his hands. He flew for long seconds, bird free, then earth thumped the breath from his lungs. Painfully he dragged himself into a sitting position, and looked around him stunned, clutching the broken shaft of the spear to his chest.
Ten paces away the gry-lion was crawling towards him through the grass. The broken hilt of the spear protruded from the exact spot in the neck where Lannon had aimed. The gry-lion’s throes had worked the blade mercilessly in its own flesh, opening a hideous wound from which the bright heart blood pumped, but the gry-lion’s yellow eyes were still upon him, and those great curved fangs gleamed for his flesh.
Slowly it crawled towards him, its breath drumming in the mighty throat, dragging its paralysed hind quarters, dying but still deadly.
‘Die,’ thought Lannon, watching it with fascination, crushed by the conflict, unable to move. ‘Die,’ he thought. ‘Please die.’ And suddenly the final spasm caught the giant cat. Its back arched, the legs stiffened, claws ripping into the earth, the mouth opened wide and pink, and it groaned. One last long pitiful groan, and it died.
The half circle of watchers shouted, a cheer that was lost in the great silence of the swamps, and they began moving forward slowly towards the tiny figure of the king out on the grassy plain. But Huy was running. On legs too long for his crumpled trunk he seemed to dance over the ground, his long black tresses flowing out behind him and the vulture axe on his shoulder.
He was halfway to where Lannon sat bowed in the grass when the second gry-lion stood up from where it had lain concealed behind the carcass of the nearest buffalo, Huy saw it and shouted as he ran.
‘Lannon! Behind you! Beware!’
Lannon looked back and saw it. It was the female, lighter in colour, daintier in build, but notoriously more savage than the male. It moved towards Lannon with the deadly concentration of a stalking cat.
‘Baal speed me!’ Huy prayed as he ran towards his prince, and saw him trying to struggle to his feet. The gry- lion was slinking low along the ground, moving forward in short dashes.
Huy ran with all his might, driven by horror and fear for his prince, Lannon was on his feet now, reeling weakly away from the stalking cat. The movement triggered the hunting reflex of the gry-lion, it closed remorselessly.
Huy shouted at it. ‘Here!’ he yelled. ‘Come!’ And the cat noticed him for the first time. It lifted its head and looked at him. The fangs glinting long and pale, the eyes yellow and splendid.
‘Yes!’ shouted Huy. ‘Here I am!’ He saw Lannon stagger and fall, dropping out of sight into the grass, but he watched the beast. Saw the tail stiffen and the head drop. It began its charge, and Huy checked his.
He stood to meet the gry-lion, braced on long powerful legs, with the axe on his shoulder, and he let the cat come straight.
As it closed he fastened his gaze on the black diamond pattern between the gry-lion’s eyes, and he adjusted his grip on the axe, settling it carefully.
The axe went up and the gry-lion covered the last few paces in a soft roan-coloured blur of fluid movement, towering over the little hunchback.
‘For Baal!’ howled Huy and the axe moaned in flight. The blade cracked into skull, buried in the gry-lion’s brain and was instantly torn from his grip as the full weight of the dead beast smashed into his chest.
Huy came back from deep down and tar away along a tunnel of roaring darkness, and when he opened his eyes Lannon, Hycanus, the forty-seventh Gry-Lion of Opet, knelt over him in the sunlight.
‘The fool,’ said the king, his own face bruised and swollen, caked with drying blood. ‘Oh! The brave little fool.’
‘Brave, yes,’ whispered Huy painfully. ‘But fool never, Majesty.’ And saw the relief dawn in Lannon’s eyes.‘
They spread the wet skins of the two gry-lions on the main mast of the flagship, and Lannon Hycanus received the oaths of allegiance from the heads of the nine houses of Opet while reclining on a couch of soft fur beneath them. Huy Ben-Amon carried the cup of life, despite the protests of his king.
‘You must rest, Huy. You are badly wounded, I believe the ribs of your chest are stove—’
‘My lord, I am the cup-bearer. Would you deny me that honour?’
Asmun was the first of the nine to make oath. His sons helped him from the litter, but he shrugged away their hands as he approached Lannon.
‘In respect of the snow upon your brow, and the scars of your body, you need not kneel, Asmun.’
‘I will kneel, my king,’ replied Asmun, and went down on the deck in the sunlight. Baal must witness the oath of this frail old man. When Huy held the cup of life to his lips he sipped it, and Huy carried the cup to the king. He drank and then offered it back to Huy.
‘Drink also, my priest.’
‘It is not the custom,’ Huy demurred.
‘The King of Opet and the four kingdoms makes the custom. Drink!’
Huy hesitated a moment longer, then lifted the cup and took a long draught. By the time Habbakuk Lal, the last of the nine, came forward the cup had been refilled five times with the heavy sweet wine of Zeng.
‘Do your wounds still trouble you?’ Lannon asked softly as Huy brought the cup to him for the last time.
‘Majesty, I feel no pain,’ Huy replied and then giggled suddenly and spilled a drop of wine down the king’s chest.
‘Fly high, Sunbird,’ laughed Lannon.
