Up on the heights, Khai turned to a voiceless Melembrin and said: “Thus will I serve you, Lord, who am your Master of Archers, your Captain of Bowmen.”
Unashamedly, before her father could utter a single word in reply, Ashtarta grabbed Khai and hugged him to her breast.
Half an hour later when the Khemites had counted their losses, their commander came out and stood beneath the great cliffs near the boulder-blocked gorge of Hortaph. He saluted the watchers on the heights, then fell on his sword. This was obviously vastly preferable to returning to Khem and reporting his ignominious defeat to Pharaoh. His officers wrapped his body in his own standard and bore it away eastward, and for four years no more Khemites were seen beneath the looming walls of the Gilf Kebir….
PART EIGHT
I
Khai’s Progress
On those occasions in later life when Khai would be asked how he fared during his first years in Kush, his reactions would be varied. Despite the fact that he now held a definite position on Melembrin’s staff of officers, still he was only a youth; and when he was not teaching his considerable skills as an archer he was subject, as are all strangers in strange lands, to the gibes and taunts and occasional cruelties of his hosts. One man in particular—albeit a young one, that same Manek Thotak who would have whipped him—was openly hostile, for a time at any rate. And since Manek was now a Captain of Horse and holding the same rank as Khai, there was little that the adopted Khemite could say or do about it.
Despite all odds, however, he soon formed a circle of firm friends, not least among them being the Princess Ashtarta herself, but he often felt lonely for all of that. He blamed his loneliness for the dreams—those inexplicable visions which came in the night to taunt him with half-remembered scenes of times and lands all but forgotten, or as yet unconceived—and began to spend a deal of time on his own, away from the camps and villages out on the free wild face of the steppes.
For following the crushing of Pharaoh’s pursuit force at Hortaph, Melembrin had drawn back into the hinterland of Kush to convalesce. The sweet air and rolling green slopes to the east of the Gilf Kebir would be good for him, he had thought, and had retired to his birthplace in Nam-Khum. This was where he garrisoned his men, and from here they were allowed to filter back to their former homes and work, ready at a moment’s notice for recall whenever Khem should pose her next threat. Surprisingly, that threat did not materialize; the lull turned into a period of real peace; and gradually Melembrin’s guerrillas drifted back to their own tribes and became one with the fields, mountains and steppes which had spawned them.
Thus, as his duties declined, Khai found himself with much more time on his hands, which only sufficed to increase his loneliness and the incidence of peculiar dreams. The latter were no longer confined to the hours of darkness and of sleep but might come upon him as brief waking visions, and they were often so strange as to be frightening. He had always been prone to oddish nightmares even as a child, and some of his childhood dreams and fancies now repeated themselves: such as dreams of flying, or of riding at incredible speed in strange vehicles along black paths in an alien land. But if anything his newer nightmares were stranger by far than these earlier dreams. On awakening, he could never remember any real details of them, only the faintest shadows that remained to cloud his thoughts; but the waking visions—in the form of weird, intuitive flashes—were completely different and utterly bewildering.
It was at the half-yearly games at Nam-Khum that Khai first found some benefit from these peculiar visitations. He took part in the archery competition, of course, and easily won each of the four events. Manek Thotak equalled this achievement in the equestrian events, and he also took second place in whip-handling. Then came the wrestling.
This was more or less a free-for-all in which any young man who fancied his chances entered a great ring marked on the earth with pebbles. The idea was that the last man in the ring was the winner. The town’s children had been playing at the game all morning and Khai had watched them. As he did so, a recurrent picture kept flitting over the surface of his mind, of small yellow men who bowed to one another and grinned with big teeth—before hurling themselves into hand-to-hand combat that was fast, furious and utterly ruthless!
As quick as they came the visions were gone, only to repeat after a minute or so until Khai shook his head in an attempt to clear it of their influence. For it seemed to him that he had fought with these yellow men. They had instructed him, made him a master of their arts. He knew it. Somewhere, somehow, it was so. His arms had been stronger then and his body heavily muscled, and his speed had been that of a striking snake. He had been a man, then—but how could he have been? Looking down at himself, at his body, his hands, he felt suddenly a stranger in this youthful flesh. But that, too, was a vision and soon vanished with the rest of them. Nevertheless, as he had watched the village children tumble and squirm, he had vowed that he, too, would try the wrestling.
Of all the young men who entered the ring of pebbles that day, Khai was easily the youngest. Tall and rangy, he had none of the breadth or muscle of the other contenders, but he did have … something. And no sooner had the game been opened then Khai became the center of attraction. Melembrin, near-crippled now and pale in his pain, sat on the judges’ dais nearby and grunted his approval. Beside him, Ashtarta was astonished by a side of Khai she had never before seen, at which she could not possibly have guessed.
At first, the other contestants more or less ignored the fair-haired, blue-eyed youth out of Khem, but after he had very quickly thrown all of the lesser wrestlers out of the circle he was suddenly a very real threat. Three of the more experienced men, clad only in loincloths and gleaming with the sweat of their exertions, exchanged glances full of meaning. They turned on the Master of Archers in unison, and while one contrived to drive his elbow into Khai’s mouth—totally against all of the rules, which did not allow striking as such—another tripped him from behind. As Khai sprawled and dabbed in astonishment at his bleeding mouth, the third man made a play of falling over him, his knees coming down on Khai’s ribs. That was what should have happened….
Instead it was as if a key had turned in the lock of Khai’s mind. His reactions became those of someone else—he was someone else—and his speed and strength suddenly increased threefold. When those knees came down where his chest had been, Khai had already rolled aside, was springing to his feet, driving rigid knuckles in a stiff-armed jab that broke the nose of the largest of his attackers. At the same time, his head had turned, his eyes had seen the man who kneeled where he had lain, and his elbow had driven backward to strike him in the forehead with stunning force. The youth who had tripped him sprang at him from the rear, threw an arm around his neck and forced a knee into his back. His free hand he used to clout Khai on the side of the head.
A cry split the air then: of an enraged martial arts warrior under attack, turning his body to a fighting machine in a controlled frenzy of activity. Khai tore the man from his back and in a single motion hurled him headlong from the circle of pebbles. Then he was in among the remaining contestants, striking left and right, stretching them out almost as fast as the eye could follow his blows. By this time Melembrin was on his feet, shouting his encouragement, beside himself with savage pleasure.
“Sh’tarra, look at him! I was like that as a boy, daughter, since when I’ve never seen such fighting. The Khemite is a born killer!”