Lord of Lies (36 page)

'Perhaps they're only the vanguard,' Maram said. 'Perhaps more of them are coming. Should we retreat?'

We could not retreat. With the cold, rushing river to our back and to either side of us, we had no escape in those directions. Escape, in any case, out on the steppe, was impossible. The lithe and swift Sarni ponies could overtake our heavy warhorses even as the Sarni warriors, at full gallop, fired arrows at us and picked us off one by one.

'If only we'd had time to finish making camp,' Maram muttered.

'Then we'd be safe enough, wouldn't we? Ah, well, if they wait much longer, it will fall dark, and perhaps we can raise up a stockade against their arrows.'

But this hope, too, was futile. Surely our enemy, if they were indeed our enemy, would not allow us simply to go about our business of fortifying our camp. And even if they did, what would
we
do then? Cower behind our flimsy breastworks while the Sarni besieged us and waited for our food to run out? It seemed that I had led my men into a trap, though I couldn't see how I could have done otherwise; for us Valari, the entire steppe of the Wendrush was one enormous trap, from the Morning Mountains to the white peaks of the Nagarshath four hundred miles away. At no time in my life, except in Argattha, had I felt so helpless.

'What should we do, Val?' Maram asked me. Two hundred silent knights along the lines to my right and left looked my way, and their black, blazing eyes seemed to ask me the same question. They were the finest of Valari warriors, and yet they were still men whose insides churned with dread as if they had swallowed whole bellyfuls of writhing worms.

There is always a way,
I told myself, remembering how we had fought our way out of Argattha.
Always a way toward victory.

I nudged Altaru out a few paces before turning right to ride down our line and then back to the left. I spoke no brave words to my men. But I looked at each of them eye to eye. I opened my heart to them. And so I passed to them the flaming torch that blazed inside me. An understanding passed back and forth between us, growing brighter and brighter, driving away fear and doubt.

'Champion!' they seemed to shout at me. 'Champion! Champion!' A radiance lit up the center of my being with all brilliance and sound of a thunderbolt.

'Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!' And then, as I remembered my purpose and who I really was, another thought came over me:
And there must be a way to end war.

1 returned to my place at the center of our line. To Maram, I said, 'What we will do is to fight like angels, if fight we must. But first we will seek peace.'

I called for a white flag of truce then. Sar Artanu brought the banner forward, and I took it from his hand.

'No, Val!' Baltasar called out as I made ready to ride forward. 'You forget yourself - your place is here, in command. Let me go instead.'

I considered giving the banner to him. But just then, from the rise before us, a harsh tattoo blared out from one of the Sarni's battle horns. The entire host of blue-faced warriors let loose a long and terrible battle cry. And then perhaps a hundred of them spurred their horses forward and charged down upon us.

'Oh, Lord!' Maram called out to me. 'It seems we'll have to fight after all.'

In my haste to draw my sword, I dropped the white flag to the ground beneath us. Alkaladur's blade flared bright silver in the setting sun's light. I dreaded the thought of reddening it in the bodies of these screaming savages. My stomach tightened into a hard knot of pain; although it was not a warm day, sweat slicked my body beneath my diamond armor. My sword arm burned with a sick heat even as the shake and shudder of Altaru's trembling body beneath me filled mine with a rage to ride down our enemies and trample them into the grass.

Our archers began loosing their arrows before the Sarni did, for their longbows, cut of mountain yew, slightly outranged the Sarni's bows. The whine of feathered shafts split the air like huge insects flying furiously to drink blood. Three of the arrows found targets, but their companions all had bows of their own, and they were more than a hundred to our twenty archers. As they thundered closer, they began firing off arrows of their own. Hundreds of them hissed forth in a hazy cloud. The Sarni were the finest archers on earth. Even the difficulty of aiming at distant targets from on top of bounding ponies, it seemed, would not keep them very long from decimating us.

As I struggled to slow the wild beating of my heart, a great many arrows struck straight into us. Only our armor saved us. Arrow points broke against the rows of diamonds encasing our chests and limbs or glanced off altogether. The clacking of steel against these sparkling crystals was horrible to hear. And even more horrible to bear. An arrow bounced off my shoulder, bruising it. Another slammed into my belly, and nearly knocked the wind from me. A third pinged against my helmet. It was like being caught in the open in a hailstorm of death.

'Oh, Lord!' Maram called out next to me. 'Oh, Lord, oh, Lord!'

The Sarni drew.closer, and I held my shield over my face. Five arrows struck against it; four of them pierced the silver swan and stars etched into its black steel and stuck there, rendering it useless. I cast it down on top of the white flag beneath me. Then Lansar Raasharu nudged his horse over to me and extended me
his
shield. 'Damn them! They've singled you out, Lord Valashu. Please take this and keep your face covered!'

'No, this is too much,' I said to him. 'You'll have nothing to cover yourself.'

'They're not concentrating on me. Now, please, take it and remember to angle it so that the arrows glance off.'

I nodded my head as more arrows whined past me. I strapped on his shield and said, 'Thank you.'

Down the line from me, Aivar of Taron cried out as an arrow pierced his eye. Other arrows found chinks in the diamond armor of other knights, killing or wounding them. An arrow tore into the flank of Sar Eladaru's horse, which screamed out its agony. In despair, one of the younger knights, Sar Shivalad cried out, 'Why don't they just kill
all
our horses and be done with us?'

But the Sarni do not kill horses; they would rather kill their mothers or wives. Any warrior who knowingly took aim at a horse in battle would be seized by his fellow warriors and staked out on the grass for the lions to eat. Even so, in any battle, even the finest of Sarni archers sometimes missed their marks.

'This is too much!' Maram muttered against the whine and clacking of the arrows and the Sarni warriors' terrible screams. 'What should we do, Val?' 'Wait,' I told him. 'But it's hopeless! If they don't kill us all on this charge, they will the next - or the one after that.'

'No!' I told him, remembering what Kane had said to me in Argattha. 'There might yet be a chance!'

With every yard that the hundred Sarni gained toward us, their arrows found their targets with ever greater accuracy and frequency. Three of my knights cried out as they fell from their horses, and then four more. I sensed that this emboldened the Sarni, even as our archers struck down three of them. Closer and closer they galloped, yelling at us and firing arrows with an almost drunken frenzy.

'Too close,' I whispered to myself as I peered over the rim of the shield that Lord Raasharu had given me. I studied the grassy undulations of the rapidly shrinking ground between our lines and the rampaging Sarni. And then called out, 'First line! Lances ready! Charge!'

Not a single knight in the first line of the Guardians hesitated in spurring his horse forward. In truth, after the horrible helplessness of enduring the arrow storm, my knights exploded into action with a violent joy. Horses whinnied out their fury as my sixty knights drove them to a full gallop. The Sarni, it seemed, had been expecting just such a maneuver. For their tactics in battle were almost as old as the steppe itself: torment or tantalize the enemy into breaking ranks and charging - and then quickly retreat in order that they and their brethren might shoot their arrows from a safe distance. But the commander of
these Sarni,
I thought, had miscalculated the distances here. Either that or he had no experience in battle against Valari knights.

Seeing us now thundering down upon them with our steel-pointed lances, the Sarni reined in their horses and wheeled about with amazing skill. Like a flock of birds suddenly changing direction, they began racing back toward their companions still waiting on the rise toward the north. They knew, even as I did, that their smaller ponies could always outdistance our heavy warhorses. That is, they could could either gain upon us or escape us over long distances.

Altaru, my fierce, black stallion, like the other horses along our charging line, was a sprinter. His great muscles gathered and exploded to the rhythm and beat of his driving legs. He snorted and sweated as we fairly flew through the air with my sixty companions a scant few yards behind us. Wind whipped into my face. I felt the fear of the Sarni warriors ahead of us, and smelled the blood of their wounded. We had the advantage of momentum and rushing upon them at a full gallop even as they were still building speed from their abrupt halt. We gained on them quickly. Many of them turned in their saddles to fire off quick shots at us; one of these sizzling arrows crashed into my hip with a sharp, piercing pain that enraged me. It enraged Altaru, too. He bore down upon the Sarni like a black fury ready to smash our enemy into the bloody grass with his great, pounding hooves.

BA-ROO! BA-ROO! BA-ROO!

One of the Sarni's warhorns blared out three times, and again, they halted and wheeled about. They had no intention of letting us ride them down and putting our lances through their backs.

'Death to the Valari!' their leader cried out. He was a large man with long blond hair flowing out beneath his shining helm and blue diamonds painted on his cheeks and forehead. 'Death to the Elahad!'

The Sarni faced us at close range over the trampled grass. Some shot arrows straight at us, and they killed three more knights. Many, though, had run out of arrows. These drew their curving sabers and clutched their little leather shields. Then, to their leader's command, they screamed as they spurred their horses toward us.

'Death to the Valari! Kill them all!'

They were a hundred to our sixty - now fifty-seven - but we were Valari knights, and so now the odds favored us. All along our charging line, one by one, my knights came up against the Sarni warriors. A dozen lances tore through leather armor and through the bodies or our enemies. Blood and froth sprayed the air as the screams of the dying shook the earth. A Sarni warrior shot an arrow straight into the mouth of Sar Jonawan; three others fired arrows at me that broke upon my armor. Two more warriors - one a huge man whose blue paint couldn't hide the scars on his face - charged at me screaming out their battle cry. The scarred man reached me a moment before the other and him I cleaved through the neck, splitting the gold gorget there and sweeping of his head in a single stroke. And on the backstroke, I turned in my saddle and lunged out toward the other side of me in a furious thrust that split open his friend's chest and pushed Alkaladur's point clean through his back. As I wrenched free my sword, it was as if my own heart had been wrenched from me, I screamed in agony. My enemies, in their last pulse of malice, seemed to grab my ribs from the inside and pull me down with them into death. Only Alkaladur saved me. My shining sword connected me so the sky and drew upon the deep currents of the earth. It drove back the icy nothingness, for a time, and filled me with new life.

'Sar Jarlath!' someone cried out.

I turned to see this large knight beset by four Sarni warriors. I whirled Altaru about and charged into them. I struck out to the right and left trying to protect him. My sword split open leather and skin and sent founts of blood spraying into the air. When the four warriors lay dead in the grass, Sar Jarlath raised his red-tipped lance toward me in gratitude for saving his life.

'Lord Valashu - behind you!'

In the melee of our two forces crashing together, a Sarni warrior on a dappled mare tried to sneak up behind me Lansar Raasharu raced forward and intercepted him with a savage lance-thrust that tore through the man's eye. Other warriors screamed and descended upon us. Lord Raasharu, now shieldless, stabbed out with his lance again and again, even as I cut and lunged with my sword. A rage to kill leapt along my blood like fire. I felt it touch Lord Raasharu - or perhaps it was his own fury that burned into me. So it went all about us, my Guardians thrusting with their lances or whipping free their long kalamas in a rare rage to protect me and destroy our ancient enemy. Soon many of the Sarni lay hacked and pierced on the grass. Our horses trampled their bodies; to the sound of steel clanging against steel was added the sickening crunch of iron shod hooves breaking skin and bones. Those Sarni warriors not immediately engaged began racing back toward the position that the main body of their company still held on the rise. And then, one by one, any of these blue-faced savages who could broke off their engagements and joined the retreat. And we, of the long swords and the Morning Mountains, slaugntered the rest.

'Val, are you all right?' Maram gasped out as he rode up to me. His sword was red, and his face was white as he gazed at the carnage all about us. 'Oh, Lord, what a day! These Sarni have courage - but no care for their brothers.'

He pointed toward the hundred and twenty Sarni warriors watching from the rise, and he shook his head as if he couldn't understand why Trahadak the Elder, whoever he was, didn't order his men forward to aid their brethren. But if Trahadak had commanded such an advance of his reserve, so would I have done - as I still could.

I turned back toward the two lines of Guardians still waiting behind us across the sun-streaked steppe. I cupped my hand around my mouth and shouted, 'Archers mount! First line, to us, and charge! Second line follow at half speed!'

I nodded at Maram and at Lord Raasharu. To Baltasar and Sunjay Raviru and all the other knights who gathered about me in the middle of that bloody field, I called out, 'Let's break them!'