River god - Smith Wilbur (чтение книг .TXT) 📗

  Without rising, and with my shawl masking my face, I turned my head slowly and looked up at the crests of the cliffs that stood higher than the temple walls. The shark's-tooth silhouette of the granite hills began to alter most subtly. I had to blink my eyes to be certain of what I was seeing. Then slowly I turned my head in a full circle, and it was the same in whichever direction I looked. The skyline all about us was picketed with the dark and menacing shapes of armed men. They formed an unbroken palisade around us through which no fugitive could hope to escape.

  I knew then why Shufti had delayed his retaliation so long. It would have taken him all this time to gather together such an army of thieves. There must be a thousand or more of them, although in the poor light it was not possible to count their multitudes. We were outnumbered at least ten to one, and I felt my spirits quail. It was poor odds, even for a company of the Blues.

  The Shrikes stood as still as the rocks around them, and I was alarmed at this evidence of their discipline. I had expected them to come streaming down upon us in an untidy rabble, but they were behaving like trained warriors. Their stillness was more menacing and intimidating than any wild shouting and brandishing of weapons would have been.

  As the light strengthened swiftly, we could make them out more clearly. The first rays of the sun glanced off the bronze of their shields and their bared sword-blades, and struck darts of light into our eyes. Every one of them was muffled up, a scarf of black wool wound around each head so that only their eyes showed in the slits, eyes as malevolent as those of the ferocious blue sharks that terrorize the waters of the sea we had left behind us.

  The silence drew out until I thought that my nerves might tear and my heart burst with the pressure of blood within it. Then suddenly a voice rang out, shattering the dawn silence and echoing along the cliffs. 'Kaarik! Are you awake?'

  I recognized Shufti then, despite the scarf that masked him. He stood in the centre of the west wall of the cliff, where the road cut through it. 'Kaarik!' he called again. 'It is time for you to pay what you owe me, but the price has risen. I want everything now. Everything!' he repeated, and flung aside the scarf so that his pock-marked features were revealed. 'I want everything you have, including your stupid and arrogant head.'

  Tanus rose from his mat and threw aside his sheepskin rug. "Then you will have to come down and take % from me,' he shouted back, and drew his sword.

  Shufti raised his right arm, and his blind eye caught the light and gleamed like a silver coin. Then he brought his arm down abruptly.

  At his signal, a shout went up from the ranks of men that lined the high ground, and they lifted their weapons and shook them to the pale yellow dawn sky. Shufti waved them forward and they streamed down the cliffs in a torrent into the narrow valley of Gallala.

  Tanus raced to the centre of the temple court where the ancient inhabitants had raised a tall stone altar to their patron Bes, the dwarf god of music and drunkenness. Kratas and his officers ran to join him, while the slave girls and I crouched on our mats and covered our heads, wailing with terror.   '

  Tanus leaped up on to the altar, and went down on one knee as he flexed the great bow Lanata. It took all of his strength to string it, but when he stood erect again it shimmered in its coils of silver electrum wire, as though it were a living thing. He reached over his shoulder and drew an arrow from the quiver on his back and faced the main gateway through which the horde of Shrikes must enter.

  Below the altar, Kratas had drawn up his men into a single rank, and they also had strung their bows and faced the entrance to the square. They made a pitifully small cluster around the altar, and I felt a lump rise in my throat as I watched them. They were so heroic and undaunted. I would compose a sonnet in their honour, I decided on a sudden impulse, but before I could find the first line, the head of the mob of bandits burst howling through the ruined gateway.

  Only five men abreast could climb the steep stairway into the opening, and the distance to where Tanus stood on the altar was less than forty paces. Tanus drew and let his first arrow fly. That single arrow killed three men. The first of them was a tall rogue dressed in a short kilt, with long greasy tresses of hair streaming down his back. The arrow took him in the centre of his naked chest and passed through his torso as cleanly as though he were merely a target cut from a sheet of papyrus.

  Slick with the blood of the first man, the arrow struck the man behind him in the throat. Although the force of it was dissipating now, it still went through his neck and came out behind him, but it could not drive completely through. The fletchings at the back of the shaft snagged in his flesh, while the barbed bronze arrow-head buried itself in the eye of the third man who had crowded up close behind him. The two Shrikes were pinned together by the arrow, and they staggered and thrashed about in the middle of the gateway, blocking the opening to those who were trying to push then-way past them into the courtyard. At last the arrow-head tore out of the third man's skull, with the eye impaled .upon the point. The two stricken men fell apart, and a throng of screaming bandits poured over them into the square. The small band around the altar met them with volley after volley of arrows, shooting them down so that then- corpses almost blocked the opening, and those coming in from behind were forced to scramble over the mounds of dead and wounded.

  It could not last much longer, the pressure of warriors from behind was too great and their numbers too overwhelming. Like the bursting of an earthen dyke unable to stem the rising flood of the Nile, they forced the opening, and a solid mass of fighting men poured into the square and surrounded the tiny band around the altar of the god Bes.

  It was too close quarters for the bows now, and Tanus and his men cast them aside and drew their swords. 'Horus, arm me!' Tanus shouted his battle-cry, and the men around him took it up, as they went to work. Bronze rang on bronze as the Shrikes tried to come at them, but they had formed a ring around the altar, facing outwards. No matter from which side they came, the Shrikes were met by the point and the deadly sword-play of the guards. The Shrikes were not short of courage, and they pressed in serried ranks around the altar. As one of them was cut down, another leaped into his place.

  I saw Shufti in the gateway. He was holding back from the fray, but cursing his men and; ordering them into the thick of it with horrid howls of rage. His blind eye rolled in its socket as he exhorted them, 'Get me the Assyrian alive. I want to kill him slowly and hear him squeal.

  The bandits completely ignored the women who cowered on their sleeping-mats, their heads covered, waiting and screeching with terror. I wailed with the best of them, but the struggle in the centre of the yard was too uncomfortable for my liking. By this time, there were over a thousand men crowded into the confined space. Choking in the dust, I was kicked and pummelled by the sandalled feet of the battling horde, until I managed to crawl away into a corner of the wall.

  One of the bandits turned aside from the fighting and stooped over me. He tore the shawl away from my face and for a moment stared into my eyes. 'Mother of Isis,' he breathed, 'you are beautiful!'

  He was an ugly devil with gaps in his teeth and a scar down one cheek. His breath stank like a sewerage gutter as he lusted into my face. 'Wait until this business is over. Then I'll give you something to make you squeal with joy,' he promised, and twisted my face up to his. He kissed me.