“No, Khai,” she said, placing a restraining hand on his chest. “You can’t get up. I’ve not spoon-fed you for a over a week to see you undo my work in minutes!”
He gritted his teeth, firmly moved her hand aside and finally sat up. The pain in his back did not noticeably increase, despite the fact that his head swam a little, and so he swung his feet out from under the pelt and onto the cool, dusty stone floor.
“You’ll be weak as a kitten,” Ashtarta protested, then shrugged and gave in. “Oh, come on then, but at least let me help you.” She pulled his right arm over her shoulder and let him lean his weight on her as he stood up and stumbled on stiff legs. He was naked apart from a linen loincloth and a swathe of bandages tightly bound about his upper body. He leaned against the wall of the cave and shuffled his feet into a pair of sandals, then allowed Ashtarta to ease a shirt onto his back as he belted a kilt about his waist.
“If I had a stick to lean on, I could manage,” he said.
She nodded. “You shall have a crutch . . . when Mattas says you’re well enough to be up and about. As for now, you can make do with my shoulder to lean on.” She tossed her ropes of hair. “Or is that too distasteful to you?”
He frowned at her for a moment, then shook his head and slowly smiled. “No, Princess, I don’t mind—as long as you don’t ask me to ride behind you on a horse again.”
“Huh!” it was her turn to frown. “Well, at least I know that wasn’t distasteful to you, you dirty-minded—”
“No, Princess,” he held up the flats of his palms, “let’s not fight. I suppose I should be grateful to you—honored, in fact—to have the next Candace of Kush fetching and carrying for me, as if I too were of royal blood.”
“I only fed you!” she snapped. “Others saw to your other needs. And I wouldn’t have fed you if The Fox hadn’t ordered it.”
“The Fox,” he answered, remembering Melembrin’s wound. “How is your father?”
“He has not youth on his side,” she answered, her eyes clouding over. “Also, the dog who shot him dipped his dart in excrement. The Fox is not well—but he’s on his feet. It was him I was shedding tears for when you awoke. . . .”
“Ah!” he nodded. “I had wondered about that. And where is he now?”
“You shall see him for yourself if you wish. But mind your tongue, Khai, for he holds you in high esteem. You can do well in his army. Indeed, he has asked after your health and will be glad to see you.”
She half-carried him from the cave out onto a boulder-strewn wasteland of stone and sun-baked earth. A sudden and unusually chill wind blew dust in their faces and made sand devils at their feet. When the wind died down Khai blinked dust out of his eyes and gazed at horizons of sky. On every side there was only the wasteland, reaching away for hundreds of yards to enclosing walls of boulders where they had been piled high.
He looked at Ashtarta. She had said that they were “on the heights over Hortaph.” It seemed more like the Roof of the World to Khai.
“This is the rim of the Gilf Kebir,” she said, “a natural fortress mightier by far than the walls of Asorbes. Ten miles north the heights stretch, and ten south. Full of false passes and gorges. Hortaph is just such a canyon, carved by a stream when the world was young.”
She led him to one side where the boulders were piled highest. If he had wondered where the Kushites were, he wondered no longer: they were crouched behind the heaped walls, looking down through gaps in the boulders. All of them were dressed alike, in brown jackets and kilts, so that they merged with the stones and rock formations of the plateau.
“Look down there,” Ashtarta ordered as a Kushite warrior gave Khai access to an observation point. Khai looked—and grew dizzy at the sight that opened before and below him. He drew back, his head reeling. He had looked down almost vertically into a huge gorge where a rivulet wound its way out from the Gilf Kebir into the foothills to the east. On both sides of the stream, the valley was narrow and flat, grown with grasses and trees, splashed with the colors of flowers and dotted here and there with fallen boulders. From any other viewpoint, it might have looked most inviting.
“You do well to draw back, Khai,” Ashtarta told him. “In many places, these cliffs overhang. But come, quick as you can. Everything is so quiet.” She sniffed the air. “It smells funny to me. Perhaps the Khemites are readying themselves to attack.”
“Here, wait,” Khai answered, stumbling where he leaned on her shoulder. “That dry stick there, the one with the fork. Give it to me. Good! It’s hardly a crutch, but . . . there, that’s better. Now lead on. And by the way, I saw no Khemites.”
“No, for you looked into the keep. The Khemites are outside in the foothills, keeping their heads down. What did you see when you looked down, Khai?”
Following her toward the east-facing wall of boulders, he answered: “Mainly, I saw how high it was!”
“What else?” she snorted.
“I saw stout gates standing open, and a pair of sentries sunning themselves on large boulders. I saw a shepherd tending sheep, and the smoke from cooking fires. Typical signs of a healthy settlement. I’d suspect that the ravine opens out deeper inside, and that there’s a fair-sized village hidden in there.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to suspect, as will the Khemites. Except that Hortaph is not the name of a village but of the stream itself. There is no village. The canyon narrows to a defile which finally peters out where the cliffs rise sheer and unassailable. There are ladders, however, which can be drawn up to the top at a moment’s notice. Come, this way.”
As she led him along the base of the piled wall of boulders, past evenly spaced out watchers who all kept their heads down and out of sight, Khai noticed many logs where they were positioned over boulder fulcra. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the devastation below when these avalanche traps were sprung, and he wondered how Melembrin would contrive to bring Pharaoh’s troops close enough to spring them. This was soon to be explained.
One hundred yards south of the Hortaph canyon, they came upon Melembrin where he crouched with a handful of his men and peered out through gaps in the boulders. Khai immediately recognized the warrior king’s tightly-curled beard and bushy eyebrows, and The Fox was not slow to know him.
“Young Khai!” grunted Melembrin in greeting. “Get down here—and keep your head low! I see you’re all strapped up under that shirt? Aye, well that makes two of us. Damn Khemite archers! How do you feel?”
“Hungry, Lord, and a bit stiff in the joints.”
“You’re lucky, lad. They wouldn’t let me rest at all! Still, it’s as well I’m up and about. There was poison on that arrow and this way I may work it out of my system. Now then—look down there.”
For a moment longer, Khai stared at Melembrin’s face, at the puffy flesh about his eyes and the sickly yellow of their whites, before following the king’s gaze out through the heaped boulders and dizzily down to where the foothills of the Gilf Kebir rolled eastward. The lower hills and the valleys between were quite thickly wooded and green with lush grass. The country seemed almost designed to give good cover—at ground level. But from up here?
Khai could plainly see his former countrymen, soldiers of Khem, where they camped in the woods beyond a low rise less than half a mile from the keep’s gates. There were no fires and movement was controlled, no telltale gleam of sunlight struck fire from metal and no permanent works had been built that Khai could see—but simply by gauging the size of the encampment he could tell that there must be a least a thousand Khemites camped below. Even as he watched, he could pick out the covert movements of others through the trees they used for cover as they came out of the valleys to the east. Scanning left and right, he could see still more, at present distant from the massive walls of the Gilf Kebir, but creeping ever closer along a five or six mile front.
“A thousand, two thousand of them!” Khai finally gasped.
“More like three,” Melembrin grunted, ?
??but spread out along a wide front. Don’t worry, lad, the entire wall is defended. We call the plateau’s face a ‘wall,’ you see—a wall against Khem. This is the first time the Khemites have ventured so far in anger, and they’re ignorant of this country of ours. But I tell you now that though our borders lie many miles to the east, there’s not a single Kushite settlement between here and the Nile. No, for we pulled our peoples back into the Gilf Kebir and onto the western steppes years ago—against just such an eventuality as this.”
“Then the plateau’s front is uninhabited?” said Khai.
“Oh, there are some villages and small settlements—even a few big ones—but they all have their escape routes onto the heights, and they’re all equally well-defended.”
“Just as well,” came the low voice of one of Melembrin’s warriors, and Khai saw that it was Mattas the physician. “This is only the beginning. And if you’re right, Melembrin, it’s about to begin right now. For look—look there. Here comes our decoy!”
VI
RAIN OF DEATH
Down below, riding hard from the north along the crest of the low rise that separated the foot of the plateau from the wooded hollows and valleys lying to the east, came a dozen horsemen. Typical of a small raiding party, weighted down with weapons and bundles of loot, they looked for all the world as if just now returned from some successful foray into Khem. They rode arrogantly, shouting and laughing, totally ignorant—or so it seemed—of their peril. Less than fifty yards away from where they rode the crest, Khemish soldiers lay in their hundreds, waiting and watching, screened by trees and long grasses.
Khai could sense the bunched-muscle tension in those watchers and wondered at the audacity of the Kushite riders. He began to fidget as he felt excitement building in him, threatening to spill over. “Don’t they know the soldiers are there?” he nervously, breathlessly whispered.
“Oh, they know, all right,” Melembrin answered, equally breathless. “As Mattas said, they’re a decoy. Until now, to the Khemites, the gorge of Hortaph has been simply a Kushite settlement—concealing a small village, perhaps, or a half-nomadic tribe. But now—now it can be seen that Hortaph is a base for guerrillas. Look—”
And now the horsemen wheeled to their right, rode down from the crest along a well-worn track toward the gates. They were greeted by the sentries sitting on their tall boulders just within the gates, and a pair of them brought their mounts to a halt and began to banter and laugh with these guardians of the keep. The others rode on into the valley, their cries echoing back from the looming walls as they headed deeper into the green gorge.
“See,” said Melembrin. “That was what the Khemites were waiting for, proof positive that there’s more to Hortaph than meets the eye. They weren’t willing to use a boulder to crush a grape, do you see? But now—”
“Here they come!” cried Mattas.
The Khemites rose up in the grasses and trees, rank upon rank of them, and threw themselves up the slope of that final rise. They shouted and banged spears on shields as they came, and those on the flanks funneled themselves inward, crushing toward the gates of the keep. The sentries atop the boulders jumped nimbly down, slammed the gates shut, then leapt up onto the back of their friends’ horses, which were immediately turned into the gorge to follow the path the others had taken. The lone shepherd likewise mounted a horse’s back, and also disappeared along the winding trail of the stream. All of the riders had quickly outdistanced the pursuing Khemites, miraculously avoiding a cloud of arrows which had buzzed around them before they passed from sight into Hortaph’s winding interior.
A moment later and the Khemites were storming the gates, knocking them flat in the sheer weight and crush of their charge. In less than two minutes, a thousand of them were in the keep, streaming deeper into the valley, and half as many again were forming into back-up parties beneath the beetling walls. That was when Melembrin sprang to his feet with a bellow like a bull elephant:
“All right, lads, now!—Let them have it!”
The Kushite warriors crouching behind their boulder walls now threw themselves on the bristling levers of protruding logs. Down below, the first two hundred yards of gorge were crammed with Khemites. They still rushed forward, deeper into Hortaph’s cleft, seeking opposition and finding . . . death!
It was the earth-shaking rumble of avalanching boulders that first drew the attention of Pharaoh’s soldiers to the heights, and in that same instant, their invasion of the keep became a mad rout of fleeing hundreds. They saw, turned and fled—but too late! There was nowhere to run. The entrance to the keep was jammed with their crowding colleagues; beyond the flattened gates, hundreds more pushed blindly forward, unaware as yet of the terror up ahead; and even those outside the gates were not safe. Not by any means.
Down came the boulders, thousands of tons of them raining from the heights, bringing huge sections of the very cliffs tumbling with them, falling on the Khemites where they milled in mindless confusion and horror. From both sides of the keep the boulders rained down, until the very ground heaved and bucked with the force of their impact. And still it was not at an end. Before the soldiers who crowded outside the keep could draw back, they too were caught in a rain of death, this time from the forward rim of the heights.
The fall of boulders was seemingly unending, and such was the cloud of dust that rose over everything that before very long no detail could be seen of what passed below. Nor did the frantically toiling Kushites on the heights pause until the last pebble had been dislodged and sent plummeting down into that roiling sea of dust.
Finally, Melembrin said: “It’s done,” and he caught Khai’s shoulder in an iron grip. “Now we’ll wait and see how successful our little trap has been, eh?” He looked down at Khai and frowned. “Did I feel a tremor in you there, boy? Is the killing a bit much for you after all?”
Khai shook his head. “My legs feel a bit rubbery, Lord, that’s all. I’ve been on my back for over a week. As for killing: Pharaoh killed my mother, father, sister and brother. His entire army cannot compensate for that. Nothing can, except his own death and that of Anulep the Vizier. Yes, and the Black Guard, too. When they are dead, Lord, then I’ll say an end to killing. . . .”
“Well said, lad,” the king rumbled. “But look down there. That should compensate a little for your loss.”
The dust was settling. The mouth of the gorge was choked to a depth of almost fifty feet with boulders and debris ripped from the faces of the cliffs. Away up the gorge, for more than two hundred yards, beyond which the stream turned a bend and passed into unseen canyons, the boulders lay deep and silent. Nothing living stirred down there, where already the stream formed a pool because its path was blocked. Along the front of the plateau, Pharaoh’s forces dazedly drew back and shaped themselves into small formations, with their officers counting losses. Little more than half of the original force survived. Some thirteen or fourteen hundred men had been crushed and buried, never to be seen again.
And now, winding its way out along its old bed and gaining in strength even as Khai watched, having found a channel beneath all of those toppled tons of rock, the stream once more appeared. But Khai’s face paled a little as he noted the color of the stream, which was red. It would stay that way for a day and a half. . . .
“Look there!” cried Ashtarta, drawing Khai’s attention elsewhere. “There on that great boulder outside the gates. Father, do you see who it is?”
“Aye,” Melembrin sourly grunted, “and I’d sooner we’d killed him than any hundred of the dead!”
“Who is it?” Khai asked, staring down from the now naked rim at the figure of a man who railed and roared and shook his fists at the massive, impenetrable wall which was the Gilf Kebir. Whoever he was he wore a scarlet turban and shirt, and black breeches of the type favored by Arabbans. His sword was Arabban, too, curving and vicious. He seemed to be in a veritable frenzy, screaming and threatening, and his voice reached almost to the heights.
?
??It’s Red Zodba,” Mattas answered for the king. “An Arabban slaver in Pharaoh’s pay. He’s the one who organizes the raids on Nubia, but recently he’s spent a lot of time with Khasathut’s border patrols. We know he’s always had a greedy eye on the Gilf Kebir. He’d love to take slaves out of Kush—that’s why he’s here! And those threats he’s making—they’re not idle ones. If ever we do go under the yoke of Khem, be sure Red Zodba will be cracking Pharaoh’s whip!”
“Do you want him dead?” Khai quietly asked.
“Are you deaf, lad?” Melembrin answered. “Haven’t we just said so?”
“Then fetch me my bow and one good straight arrow.”
“Eh?” Mattas laughed. “You’d shoot at him from up here? Are you daft? There’s not an archer in all Kush could—”
“Nor in Khem,” Khai cut him off, “not any more.”
Ashtarta caught Khai’s arm, stared deep into his blue eyes. They were cold as high mountain springs. “I’ll get you your weapon,” she said. “I know where it is.” And she sped away across the roof of the plateau.
“You’ll look a damn fool if you miss,” said Melembrin.
“And if I don’t miss . . . Lord?”
“Then I’ll let you train my own archers. There’s not a damn one of them worth his salt.”
“Good,” said Khai. “How high are we, Lord?”
Melembrin shook his great head. “Thirteen, fourteen hundred feet, perhaps. How can you hope to shoot an arrow that far?”
“Most of the way the arrow will be falling,” Khai answered. “I have only to find the target—the world’s pull will do the rest.” He tested the air with a dampened finger. “Did you say you’d make me your Master of Archers, Lord?”
“Eh?” Melembrin frowned. “There’s no such position.”
“High time there was, Lord, if your bowmen are poor as you say they are. And what rank would a Master of Archers hold, I wonder?”
Melembrin joined in the game. “Captain, at least, I suppose.”