“Look down there,” Ashtarta ordered as a Kushite warrior gave Khai access to an observation point. Khai looked—and grew dizzy at the sight that opened before and below him. He drew back, his head reeling. He had looked down almost vertically into a huge gorge where a rivulet wound its way out from the Gilf Kebir into the foothills to the east. On both sides of the stream, the valley was narrow and flat, grown with grasses and trees, splashed with the colors of flowers and dotted here and there with fallen boulders. From any other viewpoint, it might have looked most inviting.
“You do well to draw back, Khai,” Ashtarta told him. “In many places, these cliffs overhang. But come, quick as you can. Everything is so quiet.” She sniffed the air. “It smells funny to me. Perhaps the Khemites are readying themselves to attack.”
“Here, wait,” Khai answered, stumbling where he leaned on her shoulder. “That dry stick there, the one with the fork. Give it to me. Good! It’s hardly a crutch, but... there, that’s better. Now lead on. And by the way, I saw no Khemites.”
“No, for you looked into the keep. The Khemites are outside in the foothills, keeping their heads down. What did you see when you looked down, Khai ?”
Following her toward the east-facing wall of boulders, he answered: “Mainly, I saw how high it was!” “What else?” she snorted.
“I saw stout gates standing open, and a pair of sentries sunning themselves on large boulders. I saw a shepherd tending sheep, and the smoke from cooking fires. Typical signs of a healthy settlement. I’d suspect that the ravine opens out deeper inside, and that there’s a fair-sized village hidden in there.” “Good,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to suspect, as will the Khemites. Except that Hortaph is not the name of a village but of the stream itself. There is no village. The canyon narrows to a defile which finally peters out where the cliffs rise sheer and unassailable. There are ladders, however, which can be drawn up to the top at a moment’s notice. Come, this way.”
As she led him along the base of the piled wall of boulders, past evenly spaced out watchers who all kept their heads down and out of sight, Khai noticed many logs where they were positioned over boulder fulcra. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the devastation below when these avalanche traps were sprung, and he wondered how Melembrin would contrive to bring Pharaoh’s troops close enough to spring them. This was soon to be explained.
One hundred yards south of the Hortaph canyon, they came upon Melembrin where he crouched with a handful of his men and peered out through gaps in the boulders. Khai immediately recognized the warrior king’s tightly-curled beard and bushy eyebrows, and The Fox was not slow to know him.
“Young Khai!” grunted Melembrin in greeting. “Get down here—and keep your head low! I see you’re all strapped up under that shirt? Aye, well that makes two of us. Damn Khemite archers! How do you feel?”
“Hungry, Lord, and a bit stiff in the joints.”
“You’re lucky, lad. They wouldn’t let me rest at all! Still, it’s as well I’m up and about. There was poison on that arrow and this way I may work it out of my system. Now then—look down there.”
For a moment longer, Khai stared at Melembrin’s face, at the puffy flesh about his eyes and the sickly yellow of their whites, before following the king’s gaze out through the heaped boulders and dizzily down to where the foothills of the Gilf Kebir rolled eastward. The lower hills and the valleys between were quite thickly wooded and green with lush grass. The country seemed almost designed to give good cover—at ground level. But from up here?
Khai could plainly see his former countrymen, soldiers of Khem, where they camped in the woods beyond a low rise less than half a mile from the keep’s gates. There were no fires and movement was controlled, no telltale gleam of sunlight struck fire from metal and no permanent works had been built that Khai could see—but simply by gauging the size of the encampment he could tell that there must be a least a thousand Khemites camped below. Even as he watched, he could pick out the covert movements of others through the trees they used for cover as they came out of the valleys to the east. Scanning left and right, he could see still more, at present distant from the massive walls of the Gilf Kebir, but creeping ever closer along a five or six mile front.
“A thousand, two thousand of them!” Khai finally gasped.
“More like three,” Melembrin grunted, “but spread out along a wide front. Don’t worry, lad, the entire wall is defended. We call the plateau’s face a ‘wall,’ you see—a wall against Khem. This is the first time the Khemites have ventured so far in anger, and they’re ignorant of this country of ours. But I tell you now that though our borders lie many miles to the east, there’s not a single Kushite settlement between here and the Nile. No, for we pulled our peoples back into the Gilf Kebir and onto the western steppes years ago—against just such an eventuality as this.”
“Then the plateau’s front is uninhabited?” said Khai. “Oh, there are some villages and small settlements—even a few big ones— but they all have their escape routes onto the heights, and they’re all equally well-defended.”
“Just as well,” came the low voice of one of Melembrin’s warriors, and Khai saw that it was Mattas the physician. “This is only the beginning. And if you’re right, Melembrin, it’s about to begin right now. For look—look there. Here comes our decoy!”
VI
Rain of Death
Down below, riding hard from the north along the crest of the low rise that separated the foot of the plateau from the wooded hollows and valleys lying to the east, came a dozen horsemen. Typical of a small raiding party, weighted down with weapons and bundles of loot, they looked for all the world as if just now returned from some successful foray into Khem. They rode arrogantly, shouting and laughing, totally ignorant—or so it seemed— of their peril. Less than fifty yards away from where they rode the crest, Khemish soldiers lay in their hundreds, waiting and watching, screened by trees and long grasses.
Khai could sense the bunched-muscle tension in those watchers and wondered at the audacity of the Kushite riders. He began to fidget as he felt excitement building in him, threatening to spill over. “Don’t they know the soldiers are there?” he nervously, breathlessly whispered.
“Oh, they know, all right,” Melembrin answered, equally breathless. “As Mattas said, they’re a decoy. Until now, to the Khemites, the gorge of Hortaph has been simply a Kushite settlement—concealing a small village, perhaps, or a half-nomadic tribe. But now—now it can be seen that Hortaph is a base for guerrillas. Look—”
And now the horsemen wheeled to their right, rode down from the crest along a well-worn track toward the gates. They were greeted by the sentries sitting on their tall boulders just within the gates, and a pair of them brought their mounts to a halt and began to banter and laugh with these guardians of the keep. The others rode on into the valley, their cries echoing back from the looming walls as they headed deeper into the green gorge.
“See,” said Melembrin. “That was what the Khemites were waiting for, proof positive that there’s more to Hortaph than meets the eye. They weren’t willing to use a boulder to crush a grape, do you see? But now—”
“Here they come!” cried Mattas.
The Khemites rose up in the grasses and trees, rank upon rank of them, and threw themselves up the slope of that final rise. They shouted and banged spears on shields as they came, and those on the flanks funneled themselves inward, crushing toward the gates of the keep. The sentries atop the boulders jumped nimbly down, slammed the gates shut, then leapt up onto the back of their friends’ horses, which were immediately turned into the gorge to follow the path the others had taken. The lone shepherd likewise mounted a horse’s back, and also disappeared along the winding trail of the stream. All of the riders had quickly outdistanced the pursuing Khemites, miraculously avoiding a cloud of arrows which had buzzed around them before they passed from sight into Hortaph’s winding interior.