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met drilled and disciplined opposition they would decamp and set up shop elsewhere.
I sweated, suddenly.
Had I made a ghastly mistake? The onrushing host of aragorn were almost on the Phalanx now. The
Phalanx was composed of green troops. Were these aragorn different from the usual? Were they about
to topple my massed brumbytes into bloody ruin? I sat my zorca and I trembled. Pride, pride, what a
stupid thing to do and I had done it. I, Dray Prescot called Jak the Drang, Emperor of Vallia
Emperor of Nothing!
But how splendid the Phalanx looked...
With fierce down-bent heads, their helmets all in line, plumes nodding, the pikes thrust forward into a
glittering hedge of steel yes, yes, the old words, the old words. But, by Zair! How they stood,
clamped to the earth, like a primeval cliff face, adamant against the sea. A song rose from their packed
ranks, a paean, a soaring battle hymn. The words were the old words, and they set the blood to pulsing.
With the front rank pikes firmly bedded in the earth, the next thrust over the first, and the next in
two-handed grips, shoulder high, twelve men deep, the Third Vallian Phalanx took the shock. As the
rolling thunders of the ocean break in spume and fury against those weathered cliff faces, so the aragorn
foamed against the pikes. A welter of uprearing steel, of screaming animals, of blood, of noise and
bedlam and then of a receding wash of sound, as the recoiling waves break and flow and surge away,
rippling, spreading, so those Opaz-forsaken aragorn, damned slavers to a man, broke and fled.
The trumpets rang out, crashing notes of silver urgency.
The Phalanx formed, became a cohesive whole, surged upright, moved, advanced charged!
And on the flanks the Hakkodin hacked and slashed and carved a path through the fleeing cavalry.
Time for our cavalry, Volodu, I said.
Volodu the Lungs blew Cavalry, General Chase.
The Vallian zorcas, totrixes and nikvoves leaped forward.
Spuming down in their turn like the returning tide, they roared on after the fleeing aragorn.
Everything now could be left to Nath. And here came a zorcaman, red-faced, exhilarated, racing down
from the town, roaring out that the place was in our hands. I acknowledged him, shouted, Well done!
and turned my zorca toward the mob of chained slaves crouched in long rows of misery.
As I trotted carefully across I reflected that the aragorn had not known how heavily, man for man, we
outnumbered them. The close-packed blocks of the Phalanx tended to conceal the numbers. But, for all
that disparity, there had been a sizable crowd of slavers, and their captives stretched in row after row,
chained, naked, hairy and filthy, crooning those soul-songs of misery and inwardness that pass beyond
mere despair.
The naked bodies sprawled on the dirt in postures of abandonment. Calloused elbows and knees, sores,
scars, the brutal signatures of whips, the matted forests of hair in which lice roamed, miniature denizens of
miniature jungles, yes, the trademark of the slaver is far-removed from the fictions written and believed
by the willfully blinkered. Looking at those bare, bruised and begrimed bodies, exposed in nakedness, I
was reminded of Jilian s comments outside the marquee of Fat Lango. And, also, of nakedness I recalled
what a dowager, quivering in repulsion and outraged moral rectitude had said, speaking with that plummy
voice of conscious refinement. Going naked, she had said, is disgusting. Why, if God had intended us
to go naked we would have been born like it.
The contrast between these bundles of half-starved naked wretches in their filth and degradation, and the
well-fed, smart and sumptuously-clothed men who had rescued them could not have been more marked.
Everywhere the movement of crimson and yellow as the troops busied themselves about humanitarian
tasks seemed at least to me to bring a glow of glory to the field. And my views on glory are well
known and hardly repeatable in mixed company. Crimson is the imperial color. The cavalry attired in
scarlet and yellow formed a kind of personal body not a bodyguard and the brave old scarlet
struck a distinctive spark as Targon took the choice band trotting out.
Karidge s Regiment streamed past heading up to the town to make sure of the place. We knew it from
our maps as Yervismot, and I was damned sure Nath knew what he was doing when he d brought the
aerial squadron here.
The totrix regiments and the nikvoves were distant figures under the slanting rays of the suns, dispersing
the last of the aragorn. Their uniform colors varied, for according to long tradition the cavalry wore
regimental colors distinct from those of the infantry. This practice had been allowed to continue. In the
glittering group of riders surrounding me were representatives from all the regiments to act as messengers,
in addition to my own aides de camp. So as I rode toward the slaves, where a fresh hullabaloo started up
with a deal of chain swinging, I moved in the midst of a tapestry of color in which the scarlet and yellow
predominated.
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