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Authors: R. Scott Bakker

The Warrior Prophet (57 page)

BOOK: The Warrior Prophet
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Serwë huddled, wracked by sobs, struggling to cover herself with her blanket.
“What have I done?” she bawled. “What have I done to displease you?”
A haloed hand struck her, and she slammed against the carpets.
“I love you!” she shrieked.
“Kellhuuuus!”
The Warrior-Prophet laughed.
“Tell me, sweet, sweet Serwë, what have I planned for the Holy War?”
 
The Swazond Standard leaned in a gust, the bolts of white billowing and snapping like sails. Martemus had already resolved to kick the abomination to the ground—afterward … Everyone had abandoned the hillock, save himself, Prince Kellhus, and Conphas’s three assassins.
Though more dust than ever plumed along the southern hills, Martemus could see what had to be Ainoni infantry fleeing the pale clouds. He’d long since lost sight of the Scylvendi across the broken pasture. To the west of the looming disaster, he could see the Columns of his countrymen reforming. Soon, Martemus knew, Conphas would have them marching double-time toward the marshes. The Nansur were old hands when it came to surviving Fanim catastrophes.
Prince Kellhus sat with his back to the four of them, his feet sole to sole and his palms flat upon his knees. Beyond him, men climbed and toppled from fortress walls, lines of knights galloped across dusty pastures, northmen axed hapless Shigeki to the ground …
The Prophet seemed to be … listening.
No. Bearing witness.
Not him,
Martemus thought.
I cannot do this.
The first of the assassins approached.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
ANWUR AT
 
Where the holy take men for fools, the mad take the world.
—PROTATHIS,
THE GOAT’S HEART
 
Late Summer, 4111 Year-of-the-Tusk, Shigek
 
A dried riverbed creased the heart of the plain, and for a time Cnaiür raced through it, climbing out only when the course began winding like an old man’s veins. He jerked his black to a stamping halt on the bank. The coastal hills piled above him, their heights and seaward reaches still skirted in chalklike dust. To the west, the remaining Ainoni phalanxes were withdrawing down the slopes. To the east, innumerable thousands sprinted across the broken pasture. Not far, on a small knoll, he saw a clot of infantrymen dressed in long black leather kilts stitched with iron rings, but without helms or weapons. Some sat, others stood, stripping off their armour. Save those who wept, all watched the shrouded hills with a look of stunned horror.
Where were the Ainoni knights?
To the extreme east, where the turquoise and aquamarine band of the Meneanor disappeared behind the dun foundations of the hills, he saw a great cataract of Kianene horsemen spill across the strand. He need not see their devices to know: Cinganjehoi and the Grandees of Eumarna, pounding across uncontested ground …
Where were the reserves? Gotian and his Shrial Knights, Gaidekki, Werijen Greatheart, Athjeäri, and the others?
Cnaiür felt a sharp pang in his throat. He clenched his teeth.
It’s happening again …
Kiyuth.
Only this time
he
was Xunnurit.
He
was the arrogant mule!
He pinched sweat from his eyes, watched the Fanim gallop behind a screen of distant scrub and stunted trees—an endless tide …
The encampment. They ride for the encampment …
With a yell he spurred his horse to the east.
Serwë.
 
Masses of warring men animated the horizon, crashing into stubborn ranks, churning in melee. The air didn’t so much thunder as
hiss
with the sound of distant battle, like a sea heard through a conch shell, Martemus thought—an angry sea. Winded, he watched the first of Conphas’s assassins stride up behind Prince Kellhus, raise his short-sword …
There was an impossible moment—a sharp intake of breath.
The Prophet simply turned and caught the descending blade between his thumb and forefinger. “No,” he said, then swept around, knocking the man to the turf with an unbelievable kick. Somehow the assassin’s sword found its way into his left hand. Still crouched, the Prophet drove it down through the assassin’s throat, nailing him to the turf.
A mere heartbeat had passed.
The second Nansur assassin rushed forward, striking. Another kick from a crouch, and the man’s head snapped backward, his blade flew from senseless fingers. He slumped to the earth like a cast-off robe—obviously dead.
The Zeumi sword-dancer lowered his great tulwar and laughed.
“A civilized man,” he said, his voice deep.
Without warning, he sent the tulwar whooshing through the air around him. Sunlight flashed as though from the silvered spokes of a chariot wheel.
Now standing, the Prophet drew his strange, long-pommelled sword from his shoulder sheath. Holding it in his right hand, he lowered its tip to the ground before his booted feet. He flicked a clot of dirt into the sword-dancer’s eyes. The sword-dancer stumbled back, cursing. The Prophet lunged, buried his sword point deep into the assassin’s palate. He guided the towering corpse to the earth.
He stood alone against a vista of strife and woe, his beard and hair boiling in the wind. He turned to Martemus, stepped over the sword-dancer’s body …
Illuminated by the morning sun. A striding vision. A walking aspect …
Something too terrible. Too bright.
The General stumbled backward, struggled to draw his sword.
“Martemus,” the vision said. It reached out and clasped the wrist of his frantic sword arm.
“Prophet,” Martemus gasped.
The vision smiled, saying: “Skauras knows the Scylvendi leads us. He’s seen the Swazond Standard …”
General Martemus stared, uncomprehending.
The Warrior-Prophet turned, nodded toward the sweeping landscape.
No recognizable lines remained. Martemus saw Proyas and his Conriyan knights first, stranded about the mud-brick warren of the distant village. Erupting from the shadow of the orchards, several thousand Kianene horsemen swept about their flank, led by the triangular standard of Cuäxaji, the Sapatishah of Khemema. The Conriyans were doomed, Martemus thought, but otherwise he didn’t understand what the Warrior-Prophet meant … Then he glanced toward Anwurat.
“Khirgwi,” the General murmured. Thousands of them, mounted on tall loping camels, plowing into the hastily drawn ranks of Conriyan infantry, spilling around their flanks, racing toward the hillock, toward the Swazond Standard …
Toward them.
Their unnerving, ululating war cries permeated the din.
“We must flee!” he cried.
“No,” the Warrior-Prophet said. “The Swazond Standard cannot fall.”
“But it will!” Martemus exclaimed. “It already has!”
The Warrior-Prophet smiled, and his eyes glittered with something fierce and unconquerable. “
Conviction,
General Martemus …” He gripped his shoulder with a haloed hand.
“War is conviction.”
 
Confusion and terror ruled the hearts of the Ainoni knights. Disoriented in the dust, they hailed one another, trying to determine some course of action. Cohorts of fleet archers swept about them, shooting their caparisoned horses out from beneath him. Knights cursed and hunched behind arrow-studded shields. Every time Uranyanka, Sepherathindor, and the others charged, the Kianene scattered, outdistanced them while sending more knights crashing into the sun-baked turf. Many of the Ainoni lost their way and were stranded, harassed from all sides. Kusjeter, the Count-Palatine of Gekas, blundered onto the summit of the slopes and found himself trapped between the spiked earthworks that had defeated the initial Ainoni charges and the ruthless lances of the Coyauri below. Time and again he fought off the elite Kianene cavalrymen, only to be unhorsed and taken for dead by his own men. His knights panicked, and he was trampled in their flight. Death came swirling down …
Meanwhile the Sapatishah of Eumarna, Cinganjehoi, charged across the pastures below. Most of his Grandees fanned northward, eager to visit ruin on the Inrithi encampment. The Tiger himself struck westward, riding hard with his household through fields of bolting Ainoni infantrymen. He stormed the command of General Setpanares, overrunning it. The General himself was killed, but Chepheramunni, the King-Regent of High Ainon, managed a miraculous escape.
Far to the northwest, the command of Cnaiür urs Skiötha, Battlemaster of the Holy War, dissolved in confusion and accusations of treachery. The masses of Shigeki conscripts composing Skauras’s centre had utterly folded before the combined might of the Nansur, Thunyeri, and the flanking charge of Proyas and his Conriyan knights. Believing the Holy War victorious, the Inrithi had dashed forward in pursuit, abandoning their formations. The battle line broke into disordered masses separated by glaring expanses of open pasture. Many actually fell to their knees on the parched turf, crying out thanks to the God. Very few heard the horns signalling a general retreat, largely because very few horns carried the call. Most trumpeters had refused to believe the command was real.
Not once did the thundering drums of the heathen falter.
The Grandees of Khemema and tens of thousands of camel-mounted Khirgwi, ferocious tribesmen from the southern deserts, materialized out of the masses of fleeing Shigeki and charged headlong into the scattered Men of the Tusk. Cut off from his infantry, Proyas withdrew to the mud-brick alleys of a nearby village, crying out to both the God and his men. Falling into shield-wall circles across the pastures, the Thunyeri fought with stubborn astonishment, shocked to encounter an enemy whose fury matched their own. Prince Skaiyelt desperately called for his Earls and their knights, but they were frustrated by the embankments.
One great battle had become dozens of lesser ones—more desperate and far more dreadful. Everywhere the Great Names looked, cohorts of Fanim rode hard across the open pasture. Where the heathen outnumbered, they charged and overwhelmed. Where they could not grapple, they circled and harried with deadly archery.
BOOK: The Warrior Prophet
11.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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