Ashtarta was back. Breathlessly, she handed Khai his bow and a single arrow. He looked at her, smiled wryly, strung the bow, nocked the arrow, turned and sighted down the shaft at the red shirt of the figure on the rock far below. Then, standing firm and solid as the Gilf Kebir itself, he raised the bow a little and sighted out into empty air. In another moment, the bow was empty in his hand and the arrow was lost in a sigh of air, a blur that flew out from the clifftop and disappeared in sky and space.
All eyes were on the scarlet figure that capered and roared below like an enraged monkey. Again Zodba shook his fist at the looming cliffs—then seemed to freeze in that position. And slowly he toppled backward and fell from his boulder, then lay still in the grass and the dust. Seeing him fall, several soldiers ran to him. Khai’s arrow transfixed his heart, with only its flight protruding from his breast.
Up on the heights, Khai turned to a voiceless Melembrin and said: “Thus will I serve you, Lord, who am your Master of Archers, your Captain of Bowmen.”
Unashamedly, before her father could utter a single word in reply, Ashtarta grabbed Khai and hugged him to her breast.
Half an hour later when the Khemites had counted their losses, their commander came out and stood beneath the great cliffs near the boulder-blocked gorge of Hortaph. He saluted the watchers on the heights, then fell on his sword. This was obviously vastly preferable to returning to Khem and reporting his ignominious defeat to Pharaoh. His officers wrapped his body in his own standard and bore it away eastward, and for four years no more Khemites were seen beneath the looming walls of the Gilf Kebir. . . .
part
EIGHT
I
KHAI’S PROGRESS
On those occasions in later life when Khai would be asked how he fared during his first years in Kush, his reactions would be varied. Despite the fact that he now held a definite position on Melembrin’s staff of officers, still he was only a youth; and when he was not teaching his considerable skills as an archer he was subject, as are all strangers in strange lands, to the gibes and taunts and occasional cruelties of his hosts. One man in particular—albeit a young one, that same Manek Thotak who would have whipped him—was openly hostile, for a time at any rate. And since Manek was now a Captain of Horse and holding the same rank as Khai, there was little that the adopted Khemite could say or do about it.
Despite all odds, however, he soon formed a circle of firm friends, not least among them being the Princess Ashtarta herself, but he often felt lonely for all of that. He blamed his loneliness for the dreams—those inexplicable visions which came in the night to taunt him with half-remembered scenes of times and lands all but forgotten, or as yet unconceived—and began to spend a deal of time on his own, away from the camps and villages out on the free wild face of the steppes.
For following the crushing of Pharaoh’s pursuit force at Hortaph, Melembrin had drawn back into the hinterland of Kush to convalesce. The sweet air and rolling green slopes to the east of the Gilf Kebir would be good for him, he had thought, and had retired to his birthplace in Nam-Khum. This was where he garrisoned his men, and from here they were allowed to filter back to their former homes and work, ready at a moment’s notice for recall whenever Khem should pose her next threat. Surprisingly, that threat did not materialize; the lull turned into a period of real peace; and gradually Melembrin’s guerrillas drifted back to their own tribes and became one with the fields, mountains and steppes which had spawned them.
Thus, as his duties declined, Khai found himself with much more time on his hands, which only sufficed to increase his loneliness and the incidence of peculiar dreams. The latter were no longer confined to the hours of darkness and of sleep but might come upon him as brief waking visions, and they were often so strange as to be frightening. He had always been prone to oddish nightmares even as a child, and some of his childhood dreams and fancies now repeated themselves: such as dreams of flying, or of riding at incredible speed in strange vehicles along black paths in an alien land. But if anything his newer nightmares were stranger by far than these earlier dreams. On awakening, he could never remember any real details of them, only the faintest shadows that remained to cloud his thoughts; but the waking visions—in the form of weird, intuitive flashes—were completely different and utterly bewildering.
It was at the half-yearly games at Nam-Khum that Khai first found some benefit from these peculiar visitations. He took part in the archery competition, of course, and easily won each of the four events. Manek Thotak equalled this achievement in the equestrian events, and he also took second place in whip-handling. Then came the wrestling.
This was more or less a free-for-all in which any young man who fancied his chances entered a great ring marked on the earth with pebbles. The idea was that the last man in the ring was the winner. The town’s children had been playing at the game all morning and Khai had watched them. As he did so, a recurrent picture kept flitting over the surface of his mind, of small yellow men who bowed to one another and grinned with big teeth—before hurling themselves into hand-to-hand combat that was fast, furious and utterly ruthless!
As quick as they came the visions were gone, only to repeat after a minute or so until Khai shook his head in an attempt to clear it of their influence. For it seemed to him that he had fought with these yellow men. They had instructed him, made him a master of their arts. He knew it. Somewhere, somehow, it was so. His arms had been stronger then and his body heavily muscled, and his speed had been that of a striking snake. He had been a man, then—but how could he have been? Looking down at himself, at his body, his hands, he felt suddenly a stranger in this youthful flesh. But that, too, was a vision and soon vanished with the rest of them. Nevertheless, as he had watched the village children tumble and squirm, he had vowed that he, too, would try the wrestling.
Of all the young men who entered the ring of pebbles that day, Khai was easily the youngest. Tall and rangy, he had none of the breadth or muscle of the other contenders, but he did have . . . something. And no sooner had the game been opened then Khai became the center of attraction. Melembrin, near-crippled now and pale in his pain, sat on the judges’ dais nearby and grunted his approval. Beside him, Ashtarta was astonished by a side of Khai she had never before seen, at which she could not possibly have guessed.
At first, the other contestants more or less ignored the fair-haired, blue-eyed youth out of Khem, but after he had very quickly thrown all of the lesser wrestlers out of the circle he was suddenly a very real threat. Three of the more experienced men, clad only in loincloths and gleaming with the sweat of their exertions, exchanged glances full of meaning. They turned on the Master of Archers in unison, and while one contrived to drive his elbow into Khai’s mouth—totally against all of the rules, which did not allow striking as such—another tripped him from behind. As Khai sprawled and dabbed in astonishment at his bleeding mouth, the third man made a play of falling over him, his knees coming down on Khai’s ribs. That was what should have happened. . . .
Instead it was as if a key had turned in the lock of Khai’s mind. His reactions became those of someone else—he was someone else—and his speed and strength suddenly increased threefold. When those knees came down where his chest had been, Khai had already rolled aside, was springing to his feet, driving rigid knuckles in a stiff-armed jab that broke the nose of the largest of his attackers. At the same time, his head had turned, his eyes had seen the man who kneeled where he had lain, and his elbow had driven backward to strike him in the forehead with stunning force. The youth who had tripped him sprang at him from the rear, threw an arm around his neck and forced a knee into his back. His free hand he used to clout Khai on the side of the head.
A cry split the air then: of an enraged martial arts warrior under attack, turning his body to a fighting machine in a controlled frenzy of activity. Khai tore the man from his back and in a single motion hurled him headlong from the circle of pebbles. Then he was in among the remaining contestants, stri
king left and right, stretching them out almost as fast as the eye could follow his blows. By this time Melembrin was on his feet, shouting his encouragement, beside himself with savage pleasure.
“Sh’tarra, look at him! I was like that as a boy, daughter, since when I’ve never seen such fighting. The Khemite is a born killer!”
“But they’re not wrestling,” she answered. “They’re really fighting! There’s blood everywhere, and Khai’s to blame for most of it.”
“All of it—that I can see, girl. But they turned on him first. Hah! Like cubs snapping at a sleeping lion. Well, they’ve woken him up, and now they’re paying the price!”
Now, seeing their danger and concerned that Khai had already bested so many of their friends, the remaining half-dozen Kushites threw themselves upon him in a last desperate attempt to get him out of the circle. He was a whirlwind among the six, sending them flying left and right, until at last he stood face to face with Manek Thotak. They tottered, both of them near-exhausted, at the very edge of the circle, glowering at each other with red-rimmed eyes. By now, however, Khai was feeling just as bewildered as the spectators. The mood was off him and his skill and speed were gone. When Manek mustered his last ounce of strength and charged at him, it was as much as he could do to turn the charge so that they flew out of the circle together.
“A draw!” cried Melembrin, on his feet again. “What say you, Sh’tarra?”
“A draw, father, yes. And look—do you suppose that they’ll be friends now?”
The king looked and saw Manek and Khai staggering from the field of combat. Each had an arm around the other’s neck, and their weary laughter came back to Melembrin where his eyes followed them. They limped, yes, but they also laughed.
“Friends?” he finally answered his daughter. “Yes, I should think so. I hope so, for they certainly can’t afford to be enemies. And Kush can’t afford to be divided.”
As Khai became a man and moved into his third year with the Kushites, news began to filter back from Khem to the tribes of the mountains. War had flared up along the Nubia-Khem border—a confrontation over Pharaoh’s continual and blatant slave-taking—and N’jakka had carried out punitive raids on Peh-il and Phemor. Pharaoh had begun to build forts all along the river between Peh-il and Subon; he had further cemented his friendship with the Arabbans beyond the Narrow Sea; and he was demanding vast tribute from Siwad and Syra to pay for a planned mobilization. Trouble was in the air, big trouble, and Kush began to feel the first vibrations of its coming.
Meanwhile Khai and Manek, with certain reservations, had become firm friends. For one thing, Manek never failed to let it be known that he considered Khai of inferior stock, a good Khemite but a Khemite for all that. And Khemish blood, as everyone knew, was degenerate, inferior. Oh, there could be little question of Khai’s value to Kush, but he must really be looked upon as a mercenary rather than a true friend of the peoples of the Gilf Kebir and its hinterlands.
Both men were young colonels now and rising in stature with each passing day. Melembrin relied on their military judgement, took their advice and planned the rather sporadic training of his troops accordingly. The day was coming, he was certain, when Kush must once more protect herself against Pharaoh and his territorial avarice. The king was failing, however, and he knew it. The poison was spreading through his system at an ever-accelerating rate, and the end could not be too far away. As for Ashtarta: she was being groomed for her duties as the next Candace, and so had little time for anything else.
Khai’s dreams no longer bothered him quite so much, but certain aspects of them had become more specific, more detailed, so that he could remember something of them on awakening. Now he dreamed of saddles, of wheels, and of dark metals in the earth; and there were names in his dreams which seemed synonymous with these strange symbols of his subconscious.
Then, toward the end of the third year, Melembrin died and Ashtarta became Candace. She went into mourning for a month, and when finally she took her seat on the throne of Kush, it could be seen that the transformation was complete. There had been a metamorphosis, and the tomboy princess was now an imperially beautiful, fully-fledged Queen. Without exception, the chiefs of the tribes accepted her and her administration.
II
THE COMING OF THE MAGES
It was at this time, too, that Khai first mentioned his dreams to the aged wizard, Imthra. Imthra had been Khai’s friend for two years now, and the more he learned of the Khemite, the more fascinating he found him. It was not only Khai’s blue eyes and fair hair—a combination of physical anomalies hitherto unknown to the peoples of the region—but also his ideas, his battle skills and now his dreams.
Khai had mentioned dreaming about a dark metal in the ground and had even given it a name: “iron.” He had connected the metal with a name: Mer-ow-eh, which Ithra knew to be a town in jungled Nubia south of the Nile. Similarly, Khai spoke of “wheels” and had drawn a picture of a “chariot” for Imthra; and again he had a name to supplement these weird ideas. This time it was “Hyrksos,” which Imthra knew to be the name of a people who lived some hundreds of miles to the west. And so it went.
Now Imthra, who was one of the wisest men in all Kush, soon came to realize that there was much more to his young friend than first met the eye. He spoke to others of his discovery, wise men from far and wide across the country, and gradually Khai’s fame as a mystic, his recognition as a seer with access to as yet untapped powers, spread afar. Certainly the soldiers in his command already considered him as something magical. When Khai shot an arrow it invariably found its target, and when he wrestled . . . who could stand against him? Moreover, in this last year he had shot up like a sapling, putting on meat and muscle until he truly looked the young general which Ashtarta would soon make him. In Kush’s army, the commanders were all young, for they must be where the fighting was thickest and their thinking must have the clarity, scope and vision of youth.
And this was the way things stood when, some months later, the seven mages came to Kush. They came from all the lands which enclosed Khem, some of them having traveled for thousands of miles to avoid that central country, and yet somehow all of them contrived to arrive on the same day, at the same hour, which was noon. Imthra had known that something of great importance was in the wind—he had seen seven shadows looming in his shewstone—but he had never dreamed that he would see this day, when the seven mages should all come together and visit him in his own humble dwelling in Nam-Khum on the steppes of Kush. Of the seven, he already knew Kush’s own hermit-mage and had met him many times; the others he knew only by repute.
When formal introductions were done with and while Imthra took refreshment with his visitors, he asked the seven why they honored him with this visit to his humble house, why they had left their homelands and traveled so far to see him. The seven told Imthra that they did not wish to offend him, but they had merely called on him because he was Ashtarta’s resident mage. In fact, they had come to Kush to offer their services to the Candace. Also, to give her their advice in a certain matter which would presently concern her people; and finally they had come to speak to the General Khai Ibizin, once of Khem.
“But Khai is not a general, not yet,” Imthra had protested, only to be told:
“No, but he will be—tomorrow, after we have seen the Candace. . . .”
In the afternoon of the next day, at Ashtarta’s palatial house, a meeting was held of all the chiefs or their representatives in Nam-Khum. This was the quarterly council meeting of the chiefs, presided over by Ashtarta; but on this occasion the agenda was to be other than the petty problems of tribes and far more important. All of Ashtarta’s advisers were there, tribal elders in the main, and also fourteen chiefs or their representatives. In addition, there were six colonels—including Khai and Manek, the latter pair having returned that very morning from a hunting trip in the hills—and old Imthra, who was also Ashtarta’s chief adviser.
The seven mages had seen the Candace
in private earlier and had spent several hours with her. They had also seen Khai and had questioned him about his strange dreams and visions, and about his vow to return to Asorbes one day and destroy Pharaoh. They had not tried to explain Khai’s dreams—indeed their entire audience with him had seemed designed purely to glean information from him—but upon leaving him they had all saluted him and called him General. Also, the Nubian mage had taken his hands, examining them minutely as if to satisfy himself of something. And upon Khai showing the black mage Adonda Gomba’s sign, which he still carried with him wherever he went, then the ancient Nubian had addressed him as Khai the Killer.
At the meeting in the great hall of Ashtarta’s house, the atmosphere was one of high tension. Obviously something massively important was happening, so that when Ashtarta finally stood and addressed the assembly her every word was eagerly seized upon.
“Chiefs, military men, councilors and friends,” she began, “this will not be our usual meeting of tribal heads, but as you have doubtless guessed a most unusual meeting. Information of great moment has been brought to me by the seven wise men from all the lands around, whose word, I am assured, may only be ignored at the peril of all Kush. And this is the word: that even now Pharaoh poises his army like a great spear for a mighty thrust at Kush—one which will pierce the land through and through!”
As an excited babble broke out among the chiefs, Ashtarta held out her arms and spoke over their voices. “Make no plans, you chiefs, nor speak of battle and the ways of war. For every man you can muster Pharaoh has ten, and this time they won’t fall into your traps so readily. No, and I am advised that . . . that Kush should not defend herself!”
“Not defend?” a gnarled old chief jumped to his feet. “Is this Melembrin’s daughter who speaks to us? What then shall we do, O Candace? Give ourselves over into Pharaoh’s tender care?”