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He descended from the heights and released the Barak Dayir from his sensing-organ, and sat quietly for a time, thinking only that this had been a very long day, and even now it had barely reached its midpoint. Then Hresh closed his eyes, and sleep took him swiftly, like a falling sword.
Salaman had seen the assault on the City of Yissou so many times now in visions that the actual event, as it descended upon the city, seemed overfamiliar to him and roused little emotion at first in his breast. Some weeks had passed since the sudden attack by that small advance troop of hjjk-folk, that ill-fated band of foreru
Bruikkos was the first to spy them — for lately Harruel had had sentries watching all day and all night on the rim of the crater.
“Hjjks!” he cried, ru
Salaman nodded. There might have been a cold stone in his breast. He felt nothing. No fear, no joy of battle, no sense of prophecy fulfilled. Nothing. Nothing. He had lived through this moment too many times already.
Weiawala, trembling against him, said, “What will happen to us? Will we all die, Salaman?”
He shook his head. “No, love. We will each kill ten thousand thousand hjjks, and the city will be saved.” He spoke in a flat, unemotional way. “Where is my spear? Give me some wine, sweet Weiawala. Wine makes Harruel fight better; it may be the thing for me also.”
“The hjjks!” came the hoarse cry from without. Bruikkos was banging on doors, pounding on walls. “The hjjks are coming now! They’re here! They’re here!”
Salaman took a deep pull of the dark, cool wine, strapped his sword about his waist, seized hold of his spear. Weiawala too picked up weapons: there was no one who would not fight today, except the small children, who had been put in one place to look after each other. Together Salaman and Weiawala left their little house.
The day was chilly after a long spell of warm, humid weather. A strong breeze came from the north. There was a dry harsh scent riding on that breeze, hjjk-scent, oppressive and insistent, the smell of old wax and rusting metal and dead crackling leaves; and beneath that pungent odor lay another, broad and deep and full, the rich musky scent of vermilions, with which the odor of the hjjks was interwoven as scarlet threads of bright metal might be interwoven in a cloak of heavy wool.
Harruel, fully armed, came limping out of his half-charred palace. Since the day of the first hjjk attack he had gone about everywhere in that lumbering, lopsided way, although so far as Salaman knew the only wound Harruel had received had been in his shoulder. That wound had been bad enough, though Minbain had doctored it with herbs and poultices and by this time it was little more than a ragged red track through Harruel’s thick fur.
But Salaman wondered whether perhaps Harruel had had some other wound that day, a deeper one, a wound to the heart, that had crippled him somehow. Certainly he had seemed even darker and more bleak than usual ever since, and he walked in this strange new uneven ma
Now, though, Harruel gri
The prospect of war seemed to have brightened Harruel’s soul. Salaman nodded an acknowledgment to him and raised his spear in a halfhearted gesture of solidarity.
Harruel must have detected Salaman’s indifferent mood. The king clumped over to Salaman and clapped him lustily on the back, a blow of such bone-shivering violence that Salaman’s eyes flashed with wrath and he came close to returning it with all his force. But it was meant merely as encouragement. Harruel laughed. His face, looming high above Salaman’s own, was flushed with excitement.
“We’ll kill them all, lad! Eh? Eh! Dawi
Weiawala, under her breath, said to Salaman, “What does he need more wine for? He’s drunk already!”
“I’m not sure that he is. I think he’s just intoxicated with the thrill of making war.”
“The thrill of dying, you mean,” Weiawala said. “How can we survive this day, any of us?”
Salaman gestured wryly. “Then it’s dying that excites him, I suppose. But this is a Harruel reborn that we see here today.”
Indeed Salaman began then to realize that he too was at last awakening to the thing that was coming upon them this day. His apathy, his torpor, was falling away. He was ready to fight, and to fight well, and if necessary to die bravely. Feeling his soul surging suddenly within him, Salaman understood some of what must be taking place within Harruel.
The first intrusion of the hjjks must have been a hard and bitter disturbance for him. Harruel’s kingship, his manhood itself, had been jeopardized. The child Therista had been slain; the woman Galihine had been wounded so gravely that she would have been better dead; the palace had been set ablaze; most of the meat-animals had been set free and it had taken forever to round them up again. Even though the enemy had been turned back in total defeat, everyone knew that a far greater army was on the way and the city could not possibly withstand it. Harruel’s little world had been impinged upon from without and soon it would be destroyed.
In these weeks just past the king had been in a somber state indeed. Harruel had steeped himself so deep in drink that the city’s stores of wine had been all but depleted by his guzzling alone. Limping and solitary he had roamed the perimeter of the crater night after night, roaring in drunken rage. He had fought a bloody fistfight with Konya, who was his most loyal and dearest follower. He had summoned every woman of the tribe to his couch, sometimes three of them at once, and yet, so the report was, he had not been able to achieve a coupling with any of them. In his more sober moments he had spoken broodingly of the sins that he had committed and of the punishment that he merited, soon to be meted out by the hjjks. Which left Salaman wondering what sins he had committed, or Weiawala, or the infant Chham; for everyone would die together when the hjjks overran the City of Yissou, the wicked and the i
Still, they had done all they could to prepare for the hopeless struggle that was coming. There had not been time enough to complete the palisade around the crater rim, but they had built a smaller one of sharpened stakes lashed with vines that completely enclosed the city’s inhabited zone. Just within it was a wide and deep trench, bridged by planks that could be removed if the invaders came close. A narrow new trail had been cut through the underbrush from the city’s southern side to the densest part of the forest that grew on the crater’s slope; if all else failed, they could slip away by ones and twos and try to lose themselves in the woods until the hjjk-folk grew bored with the search and moved along.
More than that the defenders could not do. There were only eleven of them, of which five were women and one of those wounded, and a few half-grown children. Salaman expected this to be the last day of his life and it seemed quite clear to him that Harruel’s vigor and animation this day stemmed from the same expectation. But though Harruel had plainly grown weary of life, Salaman had not. More than once in these recent days Salaman had thought of taking Weiawala and Chham and slipping away toward Vengiboneeza and safety before the hjjks arrived. But that would be cowardly; and that was probably foredoomed, too, for it was many weeks’ march to Vengiboneeza, assuming he could find it at all, and in that great wilderness what chance did a man and a woman and a child stand against the many creatures of the wilds?