Knight of the Swords

  She looked up vaguely, nodding. "Well enough." Corum began painfully to buckle on his armor. Beldan helped him. They left for the battlements.

  The Denledhyssi had regrouped on the shore. The dead men and their ponies, as well as the corpse of the Brown Man of Laahr, had been washed away by the sea. A few corpses bobbed among the rocks below the castle.

  They had formed the same ranks as earlier. The mounted masked riders were massed some ten ranks deep with Glandyth behind them and the charioteers behind Glandyth.

  Cauldrons of lead bubbled on fires built on the battlements; small catapults had been erected, with piles of stone balls beside them, for ammunition; extra arrows and javelins were heaped by the far wall.

  Again the tide was retreating.

  The metallic drum began to beat again. There was the distant jingle of harness. Glandyth was speaking to some of the horsemen.

  "I think he will attack," said Corum.

  The sun was low and all the world seemed turned to a dark, chill gray. They watched as the causeway gradually became exposed until only a foot or two of water covered it.

  Then the beat of the drum became more rapid. There was a howl from the riders. They began to move forward and splash onto the causeway.

  The real battle for Moidel's Castle had begun.

  Not all the horsemen rode along the causeway. About two thirds of the force remained on the shore. Corum guessed what this meant.

  "Are all points of the castle guarded now, Beldan?"

  "They are, Prince Corum."

  "Good. I think they'll try to swim their horses round and get a hold on the rocks so that they can attack from all sides. When darkness falls, have flare arrows shot regularly from all quarters."

  Then the horsemen were storming the castle. The cauldrons of lead were upended and beasts and riders screamed in pain as the white-hot metal flooded over them. The sea hissed and steamed as the lead hit it Some of the riders had brought up battering rams, slung between their mounts. They began to charge at the gates. Riders were shot from their saddles, but the horses ran wildly on. One of the rams struck the gates and smashed into them and through them, becoming jammed. The riders strove to extricate it, but could not. They were struck by a wave of boiling lead, but the ram remained.

  "Get archers to the gates," Corum commanded. "And have horses ready in case the main hall is breached."

  It was almost dark, but the fight continued. Some of the barbarians were riding round the lower parts of the hill. Corum saw the next rank leave the shore and begin to swim their horses through the shallow waters.

  But Glandyth and his charioteers remained on the beach, taking no part in the battle. Doubtless Glandyth planned to wait until the castle defenses were breached before he crossed the causeway.

  Conun's hatred of the Earl of Krae had increased since the betrayal earlier that day and now he saw him using the superstitious barbarians for his own purposes, Corum knew that his judgment of Glandyth was right. The man would corrupt anything with which he came in contact.

  All around the castle now, the defenders were dying from spear and arrow wounds. At least fifty were dead or badly hurt and the remaining hundred were spread very thinly.

  Corum made a rapid tour of the defenses, encouraging the warriors to greater efforts, but now the boiling lead was finished and arrows and spears were running short. Soon the hand-to-hand fighting would begin.

  Night fell. Flare arrows revealed bands of barbarians all around the castle. Beacons burned on the battlements. The fighting continued.

  The barbarians reconcentrated on the main gates. More rams were brought up. The gates began to groan and give way.

  Corum took all the men he could spare into the main hall. There they mounted their horses and formed a semicircle behind the archers, waiting for the barbarians to come through.

  More rams pierced the gates and Corum heard the sound of swords and axes beating on the splintered timbers outside.

  Suddenly they were through, yelling and howling. Firelight glinted on their masks of brass, making them look even more evil and terrifying. Their ponies snorted and reared.

  There was time for only one wave of arrows, then the archers retreated to make way for Corum and his cavalry to charge the disconcerted barbarians.

  Corum's sword smashed into a mask, sheared through it, and destroyed the face beneath. Blood splashed high and a nearby brand fizzed as the liquid hit it.

  Forgetful of the pain of his wounds, Corum swung the sword back and forth, knocking riders from their mounts, striking heads from shoulders, limbs from bodies. But slowly he and his remaining men were retreating as fresh waves of Pony Tribesmen surged into the castle.

  Now they were at the far end of the hall, where a stone stairway curled up to the next floor. The archers were positioned here, along the stairs, and began to shoot their arrows into the barbarians. The barbarians not directly engaged with Corum's men retaliated with javelins and arrows, and slowly Moidel's archers fell.

  Corum glanced around him as he fought. There were few left with him—perhaps a dozen—and there were some fifty barbarians in the hall. The fight was nearing its conclusion. Within moments he and his friends would all be dead.

  He saw Beldan begin to descend the stairs. At first Corum thought he was bringing up reinforcements, but he had only two warriors with him.

  "Corum! Corum!"

  Corum was pressed by two barbarians. He could not reply.

  "Corum! Where is the Lady Rhalina?"

  Corum found extra strength now. He delivered a blow to the first barbarian's skull, which killed him. He kicked a man from his saddle, then stood on the back of bis horse and jumped to the stairs. "What? Is the Lady Rhalina in danger?"

  "I do not know, Prince. I cannot discover where she is. I fear ..."

  Corum raced up the stairs.

  From below the noise of the battle was changing. There seemed to be disconcerted shouts coming from the barbarians. He paused and looked back.

  The barbarians were beginning to retreat in panic.

  Corum could not understand what was happening, but he had no more time to watch.

  He reached his apartments. "Rhalina! Rhalina!" No reply.

  Here and there were the bodies of their own warriors and barbarians who had managed to sneak into the castle through poorly defended windows and balconies.

  Had Rhalina been taken by a party of barbarians?

  Then, from the balcony of her apartment, he heard a strange sound.

  It was a singing sound, like nothing he had experienced before. He paused, then approached the balcony cautiously.

  Rhalina stood there and she was singing. The wind caught her garments and spread them about her like strange, multicolored clouds. Her eyes were fixed on the far distance and her throat vibrated with the sounds she made.

  She seemed to be in a trance and Corum made no sound, but watched. The words she sang were in no language he knew. Doubtless it was an ancient Mabden language. It made him shudder.

  Then she stopped and turned in his direction. But she did not see him. Still in the trance, she walked straight past him and back into the room.

  Corum peered around a buttress. He had seen an odd green light shining in the direction of the mainland.

  He saw nothing more, but heard the yells of the barbarians as they splashed about near the causeway. There was no doubt now but they were retreating.

  Corum entered the apartments. Rhalina was sitting in her chair by the table. She was stiff and could not hear him when he murmured her name. Hoping that she would succumb no further to the peculiar trance, he left the room and ran for the main battlements.

  Beldan was already there, his jaw slack as he watched what was taking place.

  There was a huge ship rounding the headland to the north. It was the source of the strange green light and it sailed rapidly, though there was no wind at all now. The barbarians were scrambling onto their horses, or plunging on foot through the water that was
beginning to cover the causeway. They seemed mad with fear. From the darkness on the shore, Corum heard Glandyth cursing them and trying to make them go back.

  The ship flickered with many small fires, it seemed. Its masts and its hull seemed encrusted with dull jewels.

  And Corum saw what the barbarians had seen. He saw the crew. Flesh rotted on their faces and limbs.

  The ship was crewed by corpses.

  "What is it, Beldan?" he whispered. "Some artful illusion?"

  Beldan's voice was hoarse. "I do not think it is an illusion, Prince Corum."

  "Then what?"

  "It is a summoning. That is the old Margrave's ship. It has been drawn up to the surface. Its crew has been given something like life. And see—" he pointed to the figure on the poop, a skeletal creature in armor which, like Corum's, was made from great shells, whose sunken eyes flickered with the same green fire that covered the ship like weed—"there is the Margrave himself. Returned to save his castle."

  Corum forced himself to watch as the apparition drew closer.

  "And what else has he returned for, I wonder?” he said.

  The Twelfth Chapter

  The Margrave's Bargain

  The ship reached the causeway and stopped. It reeked of ozone and of decay.

  "If it be an illusion," Corum murmured grimly, "it is a good one."

  Beldan made no reply.

  In the distance they heard the barbarians blundering off through the forest. They heard the sound of the chariots turning as Glandyth pursued his allies.

  Though all the corpses were armed, they did not move, but simply turned their heads, as one, toward the mam gate of the castle.

  Corum was transfixed in astonished horror. The events he was witnessing were like something from the superstitious mind of a Mabden. They could have no existence in actuality. Such images were those created by ignorant fear and morbid imagination. They were something from the crudest and most barbaric of the tapestries he had looked at in the castle.

  "What will they do now, Beldan?"

  "I have no understanding of the occult, Prince. The Lady Rhalina is the only one of us who has made some study of such things. It was she who made this summoning. I only know that there is said to be a bargain involved . . ."

  "A bargain?"

  Beldan gasped. "The Margravine!"

  Corum saw that Rhalina, still walking in a trance, had left the gates and was moving, calf-deep, along the causeway toward the ship. The head of the dead Margrave turned slightly and the green fire in his eye sockets seemed to burn more deeply.

  "NO!"

  Corum raced from the battlements, leapt down the stairway, and stumbled through the main hall over the corpses of the fallen.

  "NO! Rhalina! NO!"

  He reached the causeway and began to wade after her, the stench from the ship of the dead choking him.

  "Rhalina!"

  It was a dream worse than any he had had since Glandyth's destruction of Castle Erorn.

  "Rhalina!"

  She had almost reached the ship when Corum caught up with her and seized her by the arm with his good hand.

  She seemed oblivious of him, continued to try to reach the ship.

  "Rhalina! What bargain did you make to save us? Why did this ship of the dead come here?"

  Her voice was cold, toneless. "I will join my husband now."

  "No, Rhalina. Such a bargain cannot be honored. It is obscene. It is evil. It—it . . ." He tried to express his knowledge that such things as this could not exist, that they were all under some peculiar hallucination. "Come back with me, Rhalina. Let the ship return to the depths."

  "I must go with it. Those were the terms of our bargain."

  He clung to her, trying to drag her back, and then another voice spoke. It was a voice that seemed without substance and yet which echoed in his skull and made him pause.

  "She sails with us, Prince of the Vadhagh. This must be."

  Corum looked up. The dead Margrave had raised his hand in a commanding gesture. The eyes of fire burned deeply into Corum's single eye.

  Corum tried to alter his perspective, to see into the other dimensions around him. At last he succeeded.

  But it made no difference. The ship was in each of the five dimensions. He could not escape it.

  "I will not let her sail with you," Corum replied. "Your bargain was unjust. Why should she die?"

  "She does not die. She will awaken soon."

  "What? Beneath the waves?"

  "She has given this ship life. Without it, we shall sink again. With her on board, we live."

  "Live? You do not live."

  "It is better than death."

  "Then death must be something more awful than I imagined."

  "For us it is, Prince of the Vadhagh. We are the slaves of Shool-an-Jyvan, for we died in the waters he rules. Now, let us be rejoined, my wife and myself."

  "No." Corum took a firmer grip on Rhalina's arm. "Who is this Shool-an-Jyvan?"

  "He is our master. He is of Svi-an-Fanla-Brool."

  "The Home of the Gorged God!" The place where Corum had meant to go before Rhalina's love had kept him at Moidel's Castle.

  "Now. Let my wife come aboard."

  "What can you do to make me? You are dead! You have only the power to frighten away barbarians."

  "We saved your life. Now give us the means to live. She must come with us."

  "The dead are selfish."

  The corpse nodded and the green fire dimmed a little. "Aye, the dead are selfish."

  Now Conun saw that the rest of the crew were beginning to move. He heard the slithering of then: feet on the slime-grown deck. He saw their rotting flesh, their glowing eye sockets. He began to move backward, dragging Rhalina with him. But Rhalina would not go willingly and he was completely exhausted. Panting, he paused, speaking urgently to her. "Rhalina. I know you never loved him, even in life. You love me. I love you. Surely that is stronger than any bargain!"

  "I must join my husband."

  The dead crew had descended to the causeway and were moving toward them. Corum had left his sword behind. He had no weapons.

  "Stand back!" he cried. "The dead have no right to take the living!"

  On came the corpses.

  Corum cried up to the figure of the Margrave, still on the poop. "Stop them! Take me instead of her! Make a bargain with me!"

  "I cannot.”

  "Then let me sail with her. What is the harm in that? You will have two living beings to warm your dead souls!"

  The Margrave appeared to consider this.

  "Why should you do it? The living have no liking for the dead."

  "I love Rhalina. It is love, do you understand?"

  "Love? The dead know nothing of love."

  "Yet you want your wife with you."

  "She proposed the bargain. Shool-an-Jyvan heard her and sent us."

  The shuffling corpses had completely surrounded them now. Corum gagged at their stench.

  "Then I will come with you."

  The dead Margravine inclined his head.

  Escorted by the shuffling corpses, Corum allowed himself and Rhalina to be led aboard the ship. It was covered in scum from the bottoms of the sea. Weed draped it, giving off the strange green fire. What Corum had thought were dull jewels were colored barnacles which encrusted everything. Slime lay on all surfaces.

  While the Margravine watched from his poop, Corum and Rhalina were taken to a cabin and made to enter. It was almost pitch-black and it stank of decay.

  He heard the rotting timbers creak and the ship began to move.

  It sailed rapidly, without wind or any other understandable means of propulsion.

  It sailed for Svi-an-Fanla-Brool, the island of the legends, the Home of the Gorged God.

  Book Two

  In which Prince Corum receives a gift and makes a pact

  The First Chapter

  The Ambitious Sorcerer

  As they sailed through the night, Corum m
ade many attempts to waken Rhalina from her trance, but nothing worked. She lay amongst the damp and rotting silks of a bunk and stared at the roof. Through a porthole too small to afford escape came a faint green light. Corum paced the cabin, still barely able to believe his predicament.

  These were plainly the dead Margrave's own quarters. And if Corum were not here now, would the Margrave be sharing the bunk with his wife . . . ?

  Corum shuddered and pressed his hand to his skull, certain that he was insane or had been entranced—certain that none of this could be.

  As a Vadhagh he was prepared for many events and situations that would have seemed strange to the Mabden. Yet this was something that seemed completely unnatural to him. It defied all he knew of science. If he were sane and all was as it seemed, then the Mabden's powers were greater than anything the Vadhagh had known. Yet they were dark and morbid powers, unhealthy powers that were quintessentially evil . . .

  Corum was tired, but he could not sleep. Everything he touched was slimy and made him feel ill. He tested the lock on the cabin door. Although the wood was rotten, the door seemed unusually strong. Some other force was at work here. The timbers of the ship were bound by more than rivets and tar.

  The weariness did not help his head to clear. His thoughts remained confused and desperate. He peered frequently through the porthole, hoping to get some sort of bearing, but it was impossible to see anything more than the occasional wave and a star in the sky.

  Then, much later, he noticed the first line of gray on the horizon and he was relieved that morning was coming. This ship was a ship of the night. It would disappear with the sun and he and Rhalina would awake to find themselves in their own bed.

  But what had frightened the barbarians? Or was that part of the dream? Perhaps his collapse within the gates after his fight with Glandyth had induced a feverish dream? Perhaps his comrades were still fighting for then-lives against the Pony Tribesmen. He rubbed at his head with the stump of his hand. He licked his dry lips and tried to peer, once again, into the dimensions. But the other dimensions were closed to him. He paced the cabin, waiting for the morning.