hold the walls.”
Drak looked at me, taken aback. Then his eyebrows lifted by a hairbreadth and a shadow passed over his face. I glared at him malignantly.
“The queen has told me of you, Zadak. I give you Lahal. I am outnumbered two to one. But we will hold the Grodnims until not one of us flies.”
He spoke up in a grave way, as a man with the cares of high office speaks. I liked the set of his head on his shoulders, the way he held himself. If Vax was still a young tearaway and Zeg a haughty and imperious killer, Drak was a darkly powerful man of affairs, versed in the ways of Kregen; a true prince of Vallia.
What a situation! I stood with my three sons, and could not acknowledge them, could not stride forward and clasp them in my arms. I suppose something more demoniacal than mere malignity showed on my face. I half turned away and shouted, “The prince has spoken! We resist to the end!”
“Hai!” came the answering shouts. “Hai, Jikai!”
“You-” said my son Drak. “We have never met, I know, and yet, something in you — it is odd.” On that darkly handsome face of his, in which the beauty of his mother had somehow not been altogether overlaid by my own ugly features, although he was not as handsome as Vax, and not as brilliant in appearance as Zeg, a small, puzzled smile flitted. “It is a long time ago, now, and I grieve for that. But, by Vox, you remind me of my father.”
“And do you hate your father, as your brothers do?”
“Of course he does!” Zeg said sharply. “For we have been cruelly treated. Apushniad! Let us get to work.”
“Hatred?” said Drak. “Sometimes I think — but, this is a private affair, of the family and of honor. I give you respect for your defense of Zandikar, Zadak. But this is not a matter to discuss in public.”
“I agree. Before you go aloft, I beg a favor. Go down with me to the central square. There is a man I would wish you to see before he is dumped in an unmarked grave.”
The last was not strictly true. I’d see that a marker was set up — if I lived. So Drak, too, stared down on the dead face of his brother-in-law. I spoke to him as I had to Zeg and Vax. He understood I wanted to boast of my prowess, and he frowned, and I did not disabuse him. He soared aloft to join his little fleet as the two aerial armadas clashed.
The fight that followed bellowed and clanged away in grisly style. We faced great odds. One enormous advantage we had, for the men of Vallia and Valka flying our vollers were trained men, many of them of the Vallian Air Service, and their experience in the air served them well in the fight against twice their number. Even then I saw a couple of Vallian vollers flutter to the ground, victims of the inferior workmanship with which Hamal cursed all the fliers she sold abroad. The tactics of Glycas were simple. While some fliers attempted to get through and land parties of men inside the city, others settled just inside the walls and made determined onslaughts on the gates to open them to the waiting army. These we attacked with grim and savage ferocity, knowing that the opening of one gate would finish us. We fought desperately. But I saw, as I was staggering back from a charge that had destroyed the men from four fliers but had withered our own men away, that we were losing. More and more fliers settled inside and the green banners waved thickly in clumps, here and there. At any moment now a gate would go down and the damned Grodnims would be in.
“I think.” said Zeg as he wiped his dripping blade, “they have us now.”
“Do not speak like that, Zeg!”
He glared at me, his eyes over bright, his mouth ugly.
“You and I will settle this, if we live. You deserve to be jikaidered for your foulmouthed insolence. Ha!
My brother Drak was right when he compared you with our father! He must be just such a braggart as you.”
If that was not fair I had no time to care as once again we went hammer and tongs into a pack of Fristles running, screeching, from a newly landed flier. Our varters shot-in our attack and we routed them. The Zandikarese archers proved their worth on this day, and my Lohvian longbow sang sweetly whenever a target looked likely. But, all the same, we could last little longer. A particularly fierce attack developed against that nodal central gate of the landward wall. Outside, waiting, the Magdaggian army stood at ease, drawn up in formation, ready to burst in. Over our heads the vollers circled and clashed and men and fliers fell from the sky. Many a green flag smashed into the dust and many a red flag followed. Our strength was being whittled away, and yet even as our fliers dwindled in numbers so did the Grodnim vollers shrink. There remained the force ready to launch itself at the central gate, and here we positioned ourselves to withstand the assault that might end all.
“If only our mean old devil of a grandfather had spared Drak good vollers!” said Zeg, with a vicious burst of anger. “He has them, for our cramph of a father took them in the Battle of Jholaix.”
“We must fight with what we have, lad.” I made up my mind. “If the city does fall, you must take a voller and Miam and escape.”
He roared at me then, as a Valkan prince might roar. I bellowed over his furious protests. “Do you want to see what will happen to Miam? Are you that callous and hardhearted — and stupid?”
“And the warriors and the people, you rast! Do I leave them?”
“If they cannot escape, at least you and Miam-”
He turned away from me, unable to answer so base a suggestion as it should be answered, with a blow or the sword, for through all his Zairian fervor he recognized this Zadak was useful to Zandikar in a fight. He did say, bitterly, “But
I did not answer. Sniz was there, a bloody bandage around his head. “Blow, Sniz! Blow as you have never blown before.”
Everything depended on this gate. Glycas had ceased to throw his fliers haphazardly into the city, where we waited for them and shot his soldiers up as they disembarked. Now he put everything into this last attack. The vollers descended and we could see their brave green banners, the fierce glint of weapons, and hear the ferocious shrilling war chants. “Magdag! Grodno!”
“Zair!” we yelled, and our archers shot. “Zair! Zandikar!”
The Green vollers descended in clouds, like flies onto a carcass. The wall, the gate-towers, the courtyards, filled with battling men. We heard the shrill yelping of men and trumpets from outside. With a crash that tore at our heartstrings we saw the gate burst in with a smother of flying chips of wood. The gate burst and went down and hordes of Green mailed warriors broke through, yelling in triumph.
“Now is the end!” bellowed Zeg and he leaped forward, swirling his Krozair longsword above his head, resplendent, shining in mail and blood, smashing a bloody trail through the Greens. I used the Lohvian longbow and preserved his life, as Seg had done for me in the long-ago. Other red banners pressed in from the side and for a space, a tiny space, we held them. But we could not hold the pressure. We sagged back. We sagged and stumbled back, and wounded men fell and dead men were crushed and it seemed that this final moment was the end.
We saw the ranks of Green draw back a space and knew they summoned up their energies for the last smashing attack. Duhrra stood at my side, splashed with blood, fearsome in his might. Vax was with him. Their flier had been smashed and they had lived so that they might die here, at the gate of Zandikar. Drak was there, calm and powerful, darkly dominant, giving orders that tightened up a flank. Our exhausted men ran to do his bidding. So, for that tiny space, we stood there, Drak, Zeg, and Jaidur — for that was Vax’s name. We stood there, three sons who did not know their hated father stood with them in the final hour, and I, that same father who had so failed his sons.
I saw the green-clad ranks forming for the next charge, saw them sorting themselves out after the skirling charge that had driven them through the gate. Now they formed the phalanx, that phalanx I had created in the warrens of Magdag. I saw the pikes all slanting forward, the halberdiers and swordsmen in the front ranks. The sextets of crossbowmen took up their positions in flank. This was a mighty force, this killing instrument of war. It would roll over us, as we smashed with our swords, roll over us and obliterate us. Theory might say otherwise; but I had trained well and I knew Genod’s father had carried on that training, and King Genod, who was now dead, the rast, had profited by it. So we braced ourselves for the final charge of that superb machine of war. Then I saw men looking up and a shadow pressed down over the gateway. Like a clump of thistledown in lightness and like a floating solid fortress for power, an enormous skyship landed gently before the gate and stoppered the smashed opening with solid lenken walls bristling with varters and longbowmen. The sleeting discharge of darts and shafts shattered the phalanx. The smashing force of varter-driven rocks carved bloody pathways through rived mail and tattered flesh. The Archers of Valka drove their shafts pitilessly into the gaps. The shields of the phalanx could not withstand
