IV
The courtyard was filled with Khazaki warriors, standing silently in the slow heavy rain. It was the darkness of early morning, and only an occasional wan lightning flash, gleaming on spears and axes, broke the chill gloom. Anse was aware of softly-moving supple bodies pressing around him, of night-seeing eyes watching him with an impassive stare. It was he and Janazik who had the plan, and who had the most experience in warfare, and the rest looked to them for leadership. It was not easy to stand under that cool, judging scrutiny, and Anse strode forth into the street with a feeling of relief at the prospect of action.
As they moved toward the castle, along the narrow cobbled lanes winding up the hills, their army grew. Warriors came loping from alleys, came slipping out of the dark barricaded houses, seemed to rise out of the rainy night around them. All Krakenau was abroad, it seemed, but quietly, quietly.
And throughout the town other such forces were on the move, gathering under the lead of anyone who could be trusted, converging on the citadel and the rocketship it guarded.
Tonight—victory, or destruction of the boat and a drawn battle … or repulsion and ultimate shattering defeat. The gods are abroad tonight.
Somewhere, faint and far through the dull washing of rain, a trumpet blew a harsh challenge, once and again. After it came a distance-muted shouting of voices and a clattering of swords.
“One of our bands has come across a patrol,” said Janazik unnecessarily. “Now all hell will be loose in Krakenau. Come on!”
They broke into a trot up the hill. Rounding a sharp turn in the street, they saw a close-ranked mass of warriors with spears aloft.
Guardsmen!
The two forces let out a simultaneous yell and charged at each other in the disorderly Khazaki fashion. It was beginning to lighten just a little; Anse could make out enough for purposes of battle. Hai-ah—here we go!
He smashed into a leading guard, who stabbed at him with his long pike. The edge grazed off Anse’s heavy chain mail as the Earthling chopped out with his sword. He knocked the shaft aside and thrust in, hewing at the Khazaki’s neck. The guard intercepted the blow with his shield, and suddenly rammed it forward. The murderous spike on its boss thudded against the Terrestrial’s broad chest and the linked rings gave under that blow—just a little, just enough to draw blood. Anse roared and chopped down across the other’s right arm. The Khazaki howled his pain and stumbled back.
Another was on the Earthling like a spitting cat. Swords hummed and clashed together. Leaping and dodging, the Khazaki lashed out with a blade like a flickering flame, and none of Anse’s blows could land on him.
The Khazaki leaped in suddenly, his edge reaching for the human’s unprotected throat. Anse parried with his sword, while his left fist shot out like an iron cannonball. It hit the native full in the face, with a crunch of splintering bones. The guard’s head snapped back and he fell to the blood-running street.
Janazik was fighting two at once, his sword never resting. He leaped and danced like the shadow of a flame in the wind, and he was laughing—laughing! Anse hewed out, and one of the foemen’s heads sprang from its neck. Janazik darted in, there was a blur of steel, and the other guardsman toppled.
Axe and sword! Spear and dagger and flying arrows! The fight rolled back and forth between the darkling walls of houses. It grew with time; Volakech’s patrols were drawn by the noise, loyalists crouched in hiding heard of the attack and sped to join it. Anse and Janazik fought side by side, human brawn and Khazaki swiftness, and the corpses were heaped where they went.
A pike raked Anse’s hand. He dropped his sword and the enemy leaped in with drawn knife. Anse did not reach for his own dirk—no human had a chance in a knife fight with a Khazaki—but his arms snaked out, his hands closed on the native’s waist, and he lifted the enemy up and hurled him against another. They both went down in a crash of denting armor and snapping bones. Anse roared his war-cry and picked up his sword again.
Janazik leaped and darted and fenced, grinning as he fought, demon-lights in his yellow eyes. A spear was hurled at him. He picked it out of the air, one-handed, and threw it back, even as he fought another guardsman. The rebel took advantage of it to get in under Janazik’s guard. Swifter than thought, the warrior’s dagger was in his left hand—and into the rebel’s throat.
Back and forth the battle swayed, roaring, trampling, and the rain mingled with blood between the cobblestones. Thunder of weapons, shrieking of wounded, shouting of challenges—lightning dancing overhead!
Suddenly it was over.
Anse looked up from his last victim and saw that the confusion no longer snarled around him. The street was heaped with dead and wounded, and a few individual battles were still going on. But the surviving guardsmen were in full flight, and the victorious warriors were shouting their triumph.
“That was a fight!” panted Janazik. He quivered with feral eagerness. “Now on to the castle!”
“I think,” said Slavatozik thoughtfully, “that this was the decisive struggle as far as the city is concerned. Look at how many were involved. Almost all the patrols must have come here—and now they’re beaten. We hold the city!”
“Not much good to us while Volakech is in the castle,” said Anse. “He need only sally forth with the Earth-weapons—” He leaned on his sword, gasping great lungfuls of the cool wet air into him. “But where’s Ellen?”
“We’ve had heralds out shouting for her, as you suggested,” said Slavatozik. “Now that the city is in our control, she should come out. If not—”
“—then I know how to blow up the boat,” said Gonzales Alonzo bleakly. “If we can get inside the citadel to it.”
The loyalists were reassembling their forces. Warriors moved over the scene of battle, plundering dead guardsmen, cutting the throats of wounded enemies and badly mutilated friends. It was a small army that was crowding around Anse’s tall form.
His worried eyes probed into the dull gray light of the rainy dawn. Of a sudden, he stiffened and peered more closely. Someone was coming down the street, thrusting through the assembled warriors. Someone—someone—he knew that bright bronze hair. …
Ellen.
He stood waiting, letting her come up to him, and his eyes were hungry. She was tall and full-bodied and supple, graceful almost as a Khazaki, and her wide-set eyes were calm and gray under a broad clear forehead and there was a dusting of freckles over her straight nose and her mouth was wide and strong and generous and—
“Ellen,” he said wonderingly. “Ellen.”
“What are you doing?” she asked. “What have you planned?”
No question of how he was, no look at the blood trickling along his sides and splashed over his face and arms—well—“Where were you?” he asked, and cursed himself for not being able to think of a better greeting.
“I hid with the family of Azakhagar,” she said. “I lay in their loft when the patrolmen came searching for me. Then I heard your heralds going through the streets, calling on me to come out in your name. So I came.”
“How did you know it wasn’t a trick of Volakech’s?” asked someone.
“I told the heralds to use my name and add after it—well—something that only she and I knew,” said Anse uncomfortably.
Janazik remained impassive, but he recalled that the phrase had been “Dougald Anson, who once told you something on a sunny day down by Zamanaui River.” He could guess what the something had been. Well, it seemed to happen to all Earthmen sooner or later, and it meant the end of the old unregenerate days. He sighed, a little wistfully.
“But what did you want me for?” asked Ellen. She stood before Anse in her short, close-fitting tunic, the raindrops glittering in her heavy coppery hair, and he thought wryly that the question was in one sense superfluous. But in another sense, and with time so desperately short—
“You’re the only one of us who can plot a course for the rocket,” he said. “Alonzo here, or almost anyone, should be able to pilot it, but you’re the only one who can take it to the Star Ship. So that, of course, is why Carson and Volakech were after you, and why we had to have you too. If we can get into the citadel, capture the rocket and get up to the Star Ship, it’ll be easy to overthrow Volakech. But if he gets there first, all Khazak couldn’t win against him.”
She nodded, slowly and wearily. Her gray eyes were haunted. “I wonder if it matters who gets there,” she said. “I wonder why we’re fighting and killing each other. Over who shall sit on the throne of an obscure city-state on an insignificant planet? Over the exact disposition to be made of one little spaceship? It isn’t worth it.” She looked around at the sprawled corpses, lying on the bloody cobblestones with rain falling in their gaping mouths, and shuddered. “It isn’t worth that.”
“There’s more to it than that,” said Janazik bleakly. “Masefield Carson and his friend—his puppet, I think—Volakech would use the ship to bring all the world under their rule. Then they would mold it into a pattern suited for conquering a small empire among the neighboring stars.”
“Volakech always talked that way, before his first revolution,” said Ellen. “And Carse used to say—but that can’t be right! He can’t have meant it. And even if he did—what of it? Is it worth enough for brothers to slay each other over?”
“Yes.” Janazik’s voice was pitiless. “Shall the freemen of Khazak become the regimented hordes of a tyrant? Let all this world be blown asunder first!”
“Shall the innocent folk of the other stars become his victims?” urged Alonzo. “Shall Khazak become a menace to the Galaxy, one which must be destroyed—or must itself destroy? Shall there be war with—Earth herself?”
“To Shantuzik with that,” growled Anse. “These are our enemies, to be fought and beaten. Out there is the great civilization of the Galaxy, and they would keep us from it for generations yet, and make it in the end our foe. And Volakech is a murderer with no right to the throne of Krakenau. I say let’s get at his liver!”
“Well—” Ellen looked away. When she turned back, there was torment in her eyes, but her voice was low and steady: “I’m with you in whatever you plan. But on one condition. Carse is not to be harmed.”
“Not harmed!” exploded Janazik. “Why, that dirty traitor deserves—”
“He is still my brother,” said Ellen. “When Volakech is beaten, he will not be able to do any more harm, and he will see that he was wrong.” Her eyes flashed coldly. “Whoever hurts Carse will have me for blood-enemy!”
“As you will,” shrugged Anse, trying to hide the pain in his heart. “But now. … Our plan is to storm the citadel. We can’t hope to take it, but we’ll keep the garrison busy. Meanwhile a few of us break in, get the rocket, and take it back out here, where you will have an orbit plotted—”
“I can’t make one that quickly. And who can pilot it well enough to land it here without cracking it up?”
They looked at each other, and then eyes turned to Gonzales Alonzo. He smiled mirthlessly. “I can try,” he said. “But I’m only an engineer; I never imagined I’d have to fly the thing. Chiang Ching-Wei was supposed to be the pilot, but he’s a prisoner now.”
“If we smash the rocket—well, then we smash it,” said Anse heavily. “It’ll mean a long and hard war against Volakech from outside, and he’ll have all the advantages of the new weapons. We may never overthrow him before he gets another boat built. Still—we’ll just have to try.”
Ellen said quietly: “I can pilot it.”
“You!”
“Of course. I’ve been working on the second boat from the beginning. I know it as well as anyone, every seam and rivet and wiring diagram. I was aboard when Chiang took her on a practice run only a few days ago. I’ll fly it for you!”
“You can’t—we have to fight our way into the castle itself, the very heart of Volakech’s power—you’d be killed!”
“It’s the best chance. If you think we can get in at all, I stand as good a chance of living through it as anyone else.”
“She’s right,” said Janazik. “And while we waste time here arguing, the citadel is getting ready. Come on!”
Automatically, Anse broke into movement, trotting along beside Janazik, and the army formed its ranks and followed them.
He had time for a few hurried words with Ellen, whispered as they went up the hill: “Stay close by me. There’ll be a small group of us getting in, picked fighters, and we’ll make a ring about you.”
“Of course,” she nodded. Her gray eyes shone, and she was breathing quickly. “I begin to see why you were a rover all those years, Anse. It’s mad and desperate and terrible—but before Cosmos, we’re alive!”
“Most recruits are frightened green before their first battle,” he said. “You have a warrior’s heart, Ellen—” He broke off, hearing the banality of his own words.
“Listen, my dearest,” he said then, quickly. “We may not come alive through all this. But remember what I did say, down by the river that day. I love you.”
She was silent. He went on, fumbling for words: “You wouldn’t answer me then—”
“I thought it was just your usual talk to women.”
“It may have been—then,” he admitted. “But it hasn’t been since, and it isn’t now.” His sword-calloused hand found hers. “Don’t forget, Ellen. I love you. I will always love you.”
“Anse—” She turned toward him, and he saw her eyes alight. “Anse—”
A bugle shrilled through the rain, high and harsh ahead of them. Dimly, they made out the monstrous bulk of the castle, looming through the misty gray light, its towers lost in the vague sky. Janazik’s sword flashed from its sheath.
“The battle begins,” said a voice out of the blurring rain.
Anse drew Ellen over against a wall and kissed her. Her lips were cool and firm under his, wet with rain; he would never forget that kiss while life was in him.
They looked at each other for a moment of wonder, and then broke apart and followed Janazik.