“But they’re not wrestling,” she answered. “They’re really fighting! There’s blood everywhere, and Khai’s to blame for most of it.”
“All of it—that I can see, girl. But they turned on him first. Hah! Like cubs snapping at a sleeping lion. Well, they’ve woken him up, and now they’re paying the price!”
Now, seeing their danger and concerned that Khai had already bested so many of their friends, the remaining half-dozen Kushites threw themselves upon him in a last desperate attempt to get him out of the circle. He was a whirlwind among the six, sending them flying left and right, until at last he stood face to face with Manek Thotak. They tottered, both of them near-exhausted, at the very edge of the circle, glowering at each other with red-rimmed eyes. By now, however, Khai was feeling just as bewildered as the spectators. The mood was off him and his skill and speed were gone. When Manek mustered his last ounce of strength and charged at him, it was as much as he could do to turn the charge so that they flew out of the circle together.
“A draw!” cried Melembrin, on his feet again. “What say you, Sh’tarra?”
“A draw, father, yes. And look—do you suppose that they’ll be friends now ?”
The king looked and saw Manek and Khai staggering from the field of combat. Each had an arm around the other’s neck, and their weary laughter came back to Melembrin where his eyes followed them. They limped, yes, but they also laughed.
“Friends?” he finally answered his daughter. “Yes, I should think so. I hope so, for they certainly can’t afford to be enemies. And Kush can’t afford to be divided.”
As Khai became a man and moved into his third year with the Kushites, news began to filter back from Khem to the tribes of the mountains. War had flared up along the Nubia-Khem border—a confrontation over Pharaoh’s continual and blatant slave-taking—and N’jakka had carried out punitive raids on Peh-il and Phemor. Pharaoh had begun to build forts all along the river between Peh-il and Subon; he had further cemented his friendship with the Arabbans beyond the NarrowSea; and he was demanding vast tribute from Siwad and Syra to pay for a planned mobilization. Trouble was in the air, big trouble, and Kush began to feel the first vibrations of its coming.
Meanwhile Khai and Manek, with certain reservations, had become firm friends. For one thing, Manek never failed to let it be known that he considered Khai of inferior stock, a good Khemite but a Khemite for all that. And Khemish blood, as everyone knew, was degenerate, inferior. Oh, there could be little question of Khai’s value to Kush, but he must really be looked upon as a mercenary rather than a true friend of the peoples of the Gilf Kebir and its hinterlands.
Both men were young colonels now and rising in stature with each passing day. Melembrin relied on their military judgement, took their advice and planned the rather sporadic training of his troops accordingly. The day was coming, he was certain, when Kush must once more protect herself against Pharaoh and his territorial avarice. The king was failing, however, and he knew it. The poison was spreading through his system at an ever-accelerating rate, and the end could not be too far away. As for Ashtarta: she was being groomed for her duties as the next Candace, and so had little time for anything else.
Khai’s dreams no longer bothered him quite so much, but certain aspects of them had become more specific, more detailed, so that he could remember something of them on awakening. Now he dreamed of saddles, of wheels, and of dark metals in the earth; and there were names in his dreams which seemed synonymous with these strange symbols of his subconscious.
Then, toward the end of the third year, Melembrin died and Ashtarta became Candace. She went into mourning for a month, and when finally she took her seat on the throne of Kush, it could be seen that the transformation was complete. There had been a metamorphosis, and the tomboy princess was now an imperially beautiful, fully-fledged Queen. Without exception, the chiefs of the tribes accepted her and her administration.
II
The Coming of the Mages
It was at this time, too, that Khai first mentioned his dreams to the aged wizard, Imthra. Imthra had been Khai’s friend for two years now, and the more he learned of the Khemite, the more fascinating he found him. It was not only Khai’s blue eyes and fair hair—a combination of physical anomalies hitherto unknown to the peoples of the region—but also his ideas, his battle skills and now his dreams.
Khai had mentioned dreaming about a dark metal in the ground and had even given it a name: “iron.” He had connected the metal with a name: Mer-ow-eh, which Ithra knew to be a town in jun-gled Nubia south of the Nile. Similarly, Khai spoke of “wheels” and had drawn a picture of a “chariot” for Imthra; and again he had a name to supplement these weird ideas. This time it was “Hyrksos,” which Imthra knew to be the name of a people who lived some hundreds of miles to the west. And so it went.
Now Imthra, who was one of the wisest men in all Kush, soon came to realize that there was much more to his young friend than first met the eye. He spoke to others of his discovery, wise men from far and wide across the country, and gradually Khai’s fame as a mystic, his recognition as a seer with access to as yet untapped powers, spread afar. Certainly the soldiers in his command already considered him as something magical. When Khai shot an arrow it invariably found its target, and when he wrestled … who could stand against him? Moreover, in this last year he had shot up like a sapling, putting on meat and muscle until he truly looked the young general which Ashtarta would soon make him. In Kush’s army, the commanders were all young, for they must be where the fighting was thickest and their thinking must have the clarity, scope and vision of youth.
And this was the way things stood when, some months later, the seven mages came to Kush. They came from all the lands which enclosed Khem, some of them having traveled for thousands of miles to avoid that central country, and yet somehow all of them contrived to arrive on the same day, at the same hour, which was noon. Imthra had known that something of great importance was in the wind— he had seen seven shadows looming in his shewstone—but he had never dreamed that he would see this day, when the seven mages should all come together and visit him in his own humble dwelling in Nam-Khum on the steppes of Kush. Of the seven, he already knew Kush’s own hermit-mage and had met him many times; the others he knew only by repute.
When formal introductions were done with and while Imthra took refreshment with his visitors, he asked the seven why they honored him with this visit to his humble house, why they had left their homelands and traveled so far to see him. The seven told Imthra that they did not wish to offend him, but they had merely called on him because he was Ashtarta’s resident mage. In fact, they had come to Kush to offer their services to the Candace. Also, to give her their advice in a certain matter which would presently concern her people; and finally they had come to speak to the General Khai Ibizin, once of Khem.
“But Khai is not a general, not yet,” Imthra had protested, only to be told:
“No, but he will be—tomorrow, after we have seen the Candace… .”
In the afternoon of the next day, at Ashtarta’s palatial house, a meeting was held of all the chiefs or their representatives in Nam-Khum. This was the quarterly council meeting of the chiefs, presided over by Ashtarta; but on this occasion the agenda was to be other than the petty problems of tribes and far more important. All of Ashtarta’s advisers were there, tribal elders in the mam, and also fourteen chiefs or their representatives. In addition, there were six colonels—including Khai and Manek, the latter pair having returned that very morning from a hunting trip in the hills—and old Imthra, who was also Ashtarta’s chief adviser.