Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures Page 15

  On and on the battle raged. Many Moslems had fallen, but many Vikings had died too. The remnant had been slowly hurled back by repeated charges until they were battling on the beach almost beneath the ledge whereon I stood with the girl. There the formation was broken among the boulders and the conflict changed to a straggling series of single conflicts. The Norsemen had taken fearful toll – by Allah, no more than a hundred Persians remained able to lift the sword! And of Franks there were less than a score.

  Skel Thorwald’s son and Yar Akbar met face to face just as the Viking’s notched sword broke in a Moslem’s skull. Yar Akbar shouted and swung up his scimitar but ere he could strike, the Viking roared and leaped like a great lion. His iron arms locked about the huge Afghan’s body and I swear I heard above the battle, the splintering of Yar Akbar’s bones. Then Skel Thorwald’s son dashed him down, broken and dead, and catching up an axe from a dying hand, made at Muhammad Khan. Kai Kedra was before him. Even as the Viking struck, the Seljuk drove his scimitar through mail links and ribs and the two fell together.

  I saw Sir Eric hard beset and bleeding and I rose and spoke to the girl.

  “Allah defend you,” said I, “but my brother-at-arms dies alone and I must go and fall beside him.”

  She had watched the fight white and still as a marble statue.

  “Go, in God’s name,” she said, “and His power nerve your sword-arm – but leave me your dagger.”

  So I broke my trust for once, and dropping stiffly from the ledge, came across the battle-trampled beach, my scimitar in my right hand. As I came I saw Kojar Khan and King Harold at sword strokes, while Hrothgar, beard a-bristle, dealt mighty blows on all sides with his dripping axe. And the Arab, Ahmed El Ghor, ran in from the side and hacked through Harold’s mail so the blood flowed over his girdle. Hrothgar cried out like a wild beast and lunged at Ahmed who faltered an instant before the Saxon’s terrible eyes. And Hrothgar smote him a blow that sheared through mail like cloth, severed the shoulder and split the breast-bone, and splintered the haft in the Saxon’s hand. At almost the same instant King Harold caught Kojar Khan’s blade on his left forearm. The edge sheared through a heavy golden armlet and bit to the bone but the ancient king split the Kurd’s skull with a single blow.

  Sir Eric and Mirza Khan fought while the Persians surged about, seeking to strike a blow that would drop the Frank and yet not touch their emir. And I strode untouched through the battle, stepping over dead and dying men, and so came suddenly face to face with Muhammad Khan.

  His lean face was haggard, his fine eyes shadowed, his scimitar red to the hilt. He had no buckler and his mail had been hacked to open rents in many places. He recognized me and slashed at me, and I locked his blade hilt to hilt; leaning my weight upon my weapon, I said to him: “Muhammad Khan, why be a fool? What is a Frankish girl to you, who might be emperor of half the world? Without you Kizilshehr will fall, will crumble to dust. Go your way and leave the girl to my brother-at-arms.”

  But he only laughed as a madman laughs and tore his scimitar free. He leaped in, striking, and I braced my legs and parried his stroke, and driving my blade beneath his, found a rent in his mail and transfixed him beneath the heart. A moment he stood stiffly, mouth open, then as I freed my point, he slid to the blood-soaked earth and died.

  “And thus fade the hopes of Islam and the glory of Kizilshehr,” I said bitterly.

  A great shout went up from the weary, blood-stained Persians who yet remained and they stood frozen. I looked for Sir Eric; he stood swaying above the still form of Mirza Khan and as I looked he lifted his sword and pointed waveringly out to sea. And all the living looked. A long strange craft was sweeping inshore, low in the waist, high of stern and bows, with a prow carved like a dragon’s head. Long oars hurtled her through the calm water and the rowers were blond giants who roared and shouted. And as we saw this, Sir Eric crumpled and fell beside Mirza Khan.

  But the Persians had had enough of war. They fled, those who were left to flee, taking with them the senseless Kai Kedra. I went to Sir Eric and loosened his mail, but even as I did so, I was pushed away and the girl Ettaire was sobbing on her lover. I helped her get off his mail and by Allah, it but hung in blood-stained shreds. He had a deep stab in his thigh, another in his shoulder and most of the mail had been hacked clean away from his arms, which bore many flesh wounds; and a blade had cut through steel cap and coif links, making a wide scalp wound.

  But none of the hurts was mortal. He was insensible from weakness – loss of blood and the terrific grind of the previous days. King Harold had been slashed deeply in the arm and across the ribs, and Hrothgar bled from gashes in the face and across the chest muscles, and limped from a stroke in the leg. Of the half dozen warriors that still lived, not one but was cut, bruised and gashed. Aye, a strange and grisly crew they made, with rent, crimson mail and notched and blood-stained weapons.

  Now as King Harold sought to aid the girl and me in staunching Sir Eric’s blood-flow, and Hrothgar cursed because the king would not allow his own wounds to be seen to first, the galley grounded and the warriors thronged the shore. Their chief, a tall, mighty man with long black locks, gazed at the corpse of Skel Thorwald’s son and shrugged his shoulders. “Thor’s love on a valiant warrior,” was all he said. “He will revel in Valhalla this night.”

  Then the Franks took up Sir Eric and others of the wounded and took them aboard the ship, the girl clinging to his blood-stained hand and having no eyes or thought for any but her lover which is the way of women-kind, and as it should be. King Harold sat on a boulder while they bandaged his wounds and again deep awe came over me to see him so, with his sword across his knees and his white elf locks flying in the rising wind, and his strange aspect, like a grey and ancient king of some immemorial legend.

  “Good sir,” he said to me, “you cannot bide in this naked land. Come with us.”

  But I shook my head. “Nay, my lord, it may not be. But one thing I ask; let one of your warriors bring to me here the steeds we left down the beach. I can walk no more on this wounded leg.”

  It was done and the horses had so revived that I believed that by slow riding and changing mounts often I could win back out of the wilderness. King Harold hesitated as the rest went aboard: “Come with us, warrior! The sea-road is good for wanderers and landless men. There is quenching of thirst on the grey paths of the winds, and the flying clouds to still the sting of lost dreams. Come!”

  “Nay,” said I. “The trail of Azrael ends here. I have fought beside kings and seen sultans fall and my mind is dizzy with wonder. Take Sir Eric and the girl and when they tell their sons the tale in that far land beyond the plains of Frankistan, let them sometimes remember Kosru Malik. But I may not come with you. Kizilshehr has fallen on this shore but there be other lords of Islam who have need of my sword. Salaam!”

  And so sitting my steed, I saw the ship fade southward, and my eyes made out the ancient king standing like a grey statue on the poop, sword lifted high in salute, until the galley vanished in the blue haze of the distance and solitude brooded over the quiet waves of the sea.

  The Lion of Tiberias

  I

  The battle in the meadowlands of the Euphrates was over, but not the slaughter. On that bloody field where the Caliph of Bagdad and his Turkish allies had broken the onrushing power of Doubeys ibn Sadaka of Hilla and the desert, the steel-clad bodies lay strewn like the drift of a storm. The great canal men called the Nile, which connected the Euphrates with the distant Tigris, was choked with the bodies of the tribesmen, and the survivors were panting in flight toward the white walls of Hilla which shimmered in the distance above the placid waters of the nearer river. Behind them the mailed hawks, the Seljuks, rode down the fleeing, cutting the fugitives from their saddles. The glittering dream of the Arab emir had ended in a storm of blood and steel, and his spurs struck blood as he rode for the distant river.

  Yet at one spot in the littered field the fight still swirled and eddied, where the
emir’s favorite son, Achmet, a slender lad of seventeen or eighteen, stood at bay with one companion. The mailed riders swooped in, struck and reined back, yelling in baffled rage before the lashing of the great sword in this man’s hands. His was a figure alien and incongruous, his red mane contrasting with the black locks about him no less than his dusty gray mail contrasted with the plumed burnished headpieces and silvered hauberks of the slayers. He was tall and powerful, with a wolfish hardness of limbs and frame that his mail could not conceal. His dark, scarred face was moody, his blue eyes cold and hard as the blue steel whereof Rhineland gnomes forge swords for heroes in northern forests.

  Little of softness had there been in John Norwald’s life. Son of a house ruined by the Norman conquest, this descendant of feudal thanes had only memories of wattle-thatched huts and the hard life of a man-at-arms, serving for poor hire barons he hated. Born in north England, the ancient Danelagh, long settled by blue-eyed vikings, his blood was neither Saxon nor Norman, but Danish, and the grim unbreakable strength of the blue North was his. From each stroke of life that felled him, he rose fiercer and more unrelenting. He had not found existence easier in his long drift East which led him into the service of Sir William de Montserrat, seneschal of a castle on the frontier beyond Jordan.

  In all his thirty years, John Norwald remembered but one kindly act, one deed of mercy; wherefore he now faced a whole host, desperate fury nerving his iron arms.

  It had been Achmet’s first raid, whereby his riders had trapped de Montserrat and a handful of retainers. The boy had not shrunk from the sword-play, but the savagery that butchers fallen foes was not his. Writhing in the bloody dust, stunned and half-dead, John Norwald had dimly seen the lifted scimitar thrust aside by a slender arm, and the face of the youth bending above him, the dark eyes filled with tears of pity.

  Too gentle for the age and his manner of life, Achmet had made his astounded warriors take up the wounded Frank and bring him with them. And in the weeks that passed while Norwald’s wounds healed, he lay in Achmet’s tent by an oasis of the Asad tribes, tended by the lad’s own hakim. When he could ride again, Achmet had brought him to Hilla. Doubeys ibn Sadaka always tried to humor his son’s whims, and now, though muttering pious horror in his beard, he granted Norwald his life. Nor did he regret it, for in the grim Englishman he found a fighting-man worth any three of his own hawks.

  John Norwald felt no tugging of loyalty toward de Montserrat, who had fled out of the ambush leaving him in the hands of the Moslems, nor toward the race at whose hands he had had only hard knocks all his life. Among the Arabs he found an environment congenial to his moody, ferocious nature, and he plunged into the turmoil of desert feuds, forays and border wars as if he had been born under a Bedouin black felt tent instead of a Yorkshire thatch. Now, with the failure of ibn Sadaka’s thrust at Bagdad and sovereignty, the Englishman found himself once more hemmed in by chanting foes, mad with the tang of blood. About him and his youthful comrade swirled the wild riders of Mosul; the mailed hawks of Wasit and Bassorah, whose lord, Zenghi Imad ed din, had that day outmaneuvered ibn Sadaka and slashed his shining host to pieces.

  On foot among the bodies of their warriors, their backs to a wall of dead horses and men, Achmet and John Norwald beat back the onslaught. A heron-feathered emir reined in his Turkoman steed, yelling his war-cry, his house-troops swirling in behind him.

  “Back, boy; leave him to me!” grunted the Englishman, thrusting Achmet behind him. The slashing scimitar struck blue sparks from his basinet and his great sword dashed the Seljuk dead from his saddle. Bestriding the chieftain’s body, the giant Frank lashed up at the shrieking swordsmen who spurred in, leaning from their saddles to swing their blades. The curved sabers shivered on his shield and armor, and his long sword crashed through bucklers, breastplates and helmets, cleaving flesh and splintering bones, littering corpses at his iron-sheathed feet. Panting and howling the survivors reined back.

  Then a roaring voice made them glance quickly about, and they fell back as a tall, strongly built horseman rode through them and drew rein before the grim Frank and his slender companion. John Norwald for the first time stood face to face with Zenghi esh Shami, Imad ed din, governor of Wasit and warden of Bassorah, whom men called the Lion of Tiberias, because of his exploits at the siege of Tiberias.

  The Englishman noted the breadth of the mighty steel-clad shoulders, the grip of the powerful hands on rein and sword-hilt; the blazing magnetic blue eyes, setting off the ruthless lines of the dark face. Under the thin black lines of the mustaches the wide lips smiled, but it was the merciless grin of the hunting panther.

  Zenghi spoke and there was at the back of his powerful voice a hint of mockery or gargantuan mirth that rose above wrath and slaughter.

  “Who are these paladins that they stand among their prey like tigers in their den, and none is found to go against them? Is it Rustem whose heel is on the necks of my emirs – or only a renegade Nazarene? And the other – by Allah, unless I am mad, it is the cub of the desert wolf! Are you not Achmet ibn Doubeys?”

  It was Achmet who answered; for Norwald maintained a grim silence, watching the Turk through slit eyes, fingers locked on his bloody hilt.

  “It is so, Zenghi esh Shami,” answered the youth proudly, “and this is my brother at arms, John Norwald. Bid your wolves ride on, oh prince. Many of them have fallen. More shall fall before their steel tastes our hearts.”

  Zenghi shrugged his mighty shoulders, in the grip of the mocking devil that lurks at the heart of all the sons of high Asia.

  “Lay down your weapons, wolf-cub and Frank. I swear by the honor of my clan, no sword shall touch you.”

  “I trust him not,” growled John Norwald. “Let him come a pace nearer and I’ll take him to hell with us.”

  “Nay,” answered Achmet. “The prince keeps his word. Lay down your sword, my brother. We have done all men might do. My father the emir will ransom us.”

  He tossed down his scimitar with a boyish sigh of unashamed relief, and Norwald grudgingly laid down his broadsword.

  “I had rather sheathe it in his body,” he growled.

  Achmet turned to the conqueror and spread his hands.

  “Oh, Zenghi – ” he began, when the Turk made a quick gesture, and the two prisoners found themselves seized and their hands bound behind them with thongs that cut the flesh.

  “There is no need of that, prince,” protested Achmet. “We have given ourselves into your hands. Bid your men loose us. We will not seek to escape.”

  “Be silent, cub!” snapped Zenghi. The Turk’s eyes still danced with dangerous laughter, but his face was dark with passion. He reined nearer. “No sword shall touch you, young dog,” he said deliberately. “Such was my word, and I keep my oaths. No blade shall come near you, yet the vultures shall pluck your bones tonight. Your dog-sire escaped me, but you shall not escape, and when men tell him of your end, he will tear his locks in anguish.”

  Achmet, held in the grip of the powerful soldiers, looked up, paling, but answered without a quaver of fear.

  “Are you then a breaker of oaths, Turk?”

  “I break no oath,” answered the lord of Wasit. “A whip is not a sword.”

  His hand came up, gripping a terrible Turkoman scourge, to the seven rawhide thongs of which bits of lead were fastened. Leaning from his saddle as he struck, he brought those metal-weighted thongs down across the boy’s face with terrible force. Blood spurted and one of Achmet’s eyes was half torn from its socket. Held helpless, the boy could not evade the blows Zenghi rained upon him. But not a whimper escaped him, though his features turned to a bloody, raw, ghastly and eyeless ruin beneath the ripping strokes that shredded the flesh and splintered the bones beneath. Only at last a low animal-like moaning drooled from his mangled lips as he hung senseless and dying in the hands of his captors.

  Without a cry or a word John Norwald watched, while the heart in his breast shrivelled and froze and turned to ice that naught could touch
or thaw or break. Something died in his soul and in its place rose an elemental spirit unquenchable as frozen fire and bitter as hoar-frost.

  The deed was done. The mangled broken horror that had been Prince Achmet ibn Doubeys was cast carelessly on a heap of dead, a touch of life still pulsing feebly through the tortured limbs. On the crimson mask of his features fell the shadow of vulture wings in the sunset. Zenghi threw aside the dripping scourge and turned to the silent Frank. But when he met the burning eyes of his captive, the smile faded from the prince’s lips and the taunts died unspoken. In those cold terrible eyes the Turk read hate beyond common conception – a monstrous, burning, almost tangible thing, drawn up from the lower pits of hell, not to be dimmed by time or suffering.

  The Turk shivered as from a cold unseen wind. Then he regained his composure. “I give you life, infidel,” said Zenghi, “because of my oath. You have seen something of my power. Remember it in the long dreary years when you shall regret my mercy, and howl for death. And know that as I serve you, I will serve all Christendom. I have come into Outremer and left their castles desolate; I have ridden eastward with the heads of their chiefs swinging at my saddle. I will come again, not as a raider but a conqueror. I will sweep their hosts into the sea. Frankistan shall howl for her dead kings, and my horses stamp in the citadels of the infidel; for on this field I set my feet on the glittering stairs that lead to empire.”

  “This is my only word to you, Zenghi, dog of Tiberias,” answered the Frank in a voice he did not himself recognize. “In a year, or ten years, or twenty years, I will come again to you, to pay this debt.”

  “Thus spake the trapped wolf to the hunter,” answered Zenghi, and turning to the memluks who held Norwald, he said, “Place him among the unransomed captives. Take him to Bassorah and see that he is sold as a galley-slave. He is strong and may live for four or five years.”