and the two of them quickly made for the side street and gate beyond. As they entered the dark lane, the sound of approaching warriors made Arkan motion for Morgeth to stop. He pointed to the door of an abandoned building and they ducked inside, crouching down beneath broken windows.
A moment later, they heard the sound of a large band of armed warriors passing by. The two warriors from the northern mountains kept silent until the sound of boot heels on cobbles was replaced by war-cries and the noise of steel ringing against steel. Arkan touched his companion and signalled, and they ran from the abandoned building towards the distant gate.
‘Narab seeks to be king, then?’ asked Morgeth once they were clear of danger.
‘Since killing Delekhan’s heir.’
‘A hundred years of hunger is a long time.’
Arkan nodded, then pointed to the distant gate.
Morgeth frowned. ‘What do we do if it’s guarded?’
‘Talk first, then fight.’
They reached the gateway and found a company of guards waiting: a dozen warriors stationed in front of fifty or more horses. Even before the warrior in charge could challenge them, Arkan waved and shouted, ‘Hurry!’
‘What is it?’ asked the leader.
‘Take your detail up the road, and go north at the first cross street. Cut off those trying to escape behind the palace! Hurry!’
‘The horses—’
‘We will take care of the horses, now go!’
The twelve warriors hurried off and Morgeth shook his head. ‘Clan Bighorn always were a little thick.’
Arkan said, ‘Our horses are on the other side of the city.’ Looking at the large selection of mounts they had to choose from, he added, ‘Seems a fair trade.’
Picking a handsome gelding, Morgeth said, ‘You can’t possibly think of taking them all?’
Getting into the saddle on a bay mare, Arkan said, ‘I was thinking of it, but we have more pressing business. We should hurry back to camp before word of this fighting reaches them.’
‘Should we break camp?’ asked Morgeth.
‘That would draw too much suspicion. Narab has been planning this for a while, I think. He’s made arrangements: Bighorn is not one of his usual allies, which means he has added new ones. No, have our men stay close to the tents and tell my sons to be ready to fight, but we should keep our swords sheathed unless attacked first. No one is to look for trouble. Anyone who starts a fight, answers to me.’ He grew thoughtful for a moment as he gazed into the distance. Then he said, ‘I don’t think Narab is ready to crown himself yet. Tonight he was merely showing the unallied clans who held the most power here by breaking a few heads. I doubt more than two or three warriors will die before morning.
‘Tell Goran that if I discover his sword has been drawn before I get back I’ll personally make him eat it.’
‘Your son won’t like that,’ observed Morgeth with a wry half-smile.
‘He doesn’t like a lot of things, which is why Antesh is my heir,’ answered Arkan. ‘Make sure Cetswaya stays close to my sons.’
Morgeth nodded. Cetswaya was their shaman and always a calm voice and wise counsel.
‘If I don’t return by sunrise tomorrow, have Goran and Antesh take the men north, then west. Find the rest of our people and take them back into the icelands, then wait until it’s safe to return to our normal range.’
‘And how will we know when that time arrives?’
‘That will not be my problem, for if you must flee tomorrow, I will likely be dead. If I don’t find you in the north by next spring, I will certainly be dead.’ Arkan put his heels to his horse and shouted, causing the other mounts to shy. Some pulled up stakes.
As Morgeth watched his chieftain ride off into the deepening gloom of the hills around Sar-Sargoth, he said to no one, ‘They’re not going to like this much.’
Then weighing Clan Bighorn’s ire at finding their mounts scattered against the wrath of Narab discovering that Arkan wasn’t among those chieftains in the square, he decided his chieftain had the better bargain. He shouted at the horses nearby without enthusiasm, then turned his mount down towards the plains. There, twenty thousand moredhel warriors awaited the return of their chieftains, and he wondered if it was possible for the Ardanien to somehow get away intact.
Arkan rode for more than an hour, circling the vast array of camps outside the walls of Sar-Sargoth. A thousand fires or more burned as the main host of the moredhel nation had gathered outside the walls of the massive city.
Despite being the closest thing to a moredhel capital, the city was deserted for most of the year. Delekhan, the last moredhel chieftain who had attempted to occupy the city as a symbol of his supremacy, had been killed by Arkan’s father, Gorath, during the second abortive attempt to seize the Kingdom city of Sethanon.
Since then, Narab had occasionally moved his clans into the vicinity, but had avoided the vanity of occupying any of the palaces scattered through the city. Today, it appeared, was to be the day he decided to advance his claim to pre-eminence, if only symbolically.
And so Arkan rode through the night, seeking the one leader among the moredhel with enough power to baulk Narab’s ambition for a crown that no moredhel in history had dared to wear. The Ardanien chief hoped what he saw tonight was just another tribal conflict, one quickly resolved, rather than the beginning of a true dynastic struggle. For in the first instant he had seen them, Arkan knew that the true threat came from the elves from the distant stars.
Their presence beside Narab told the chieftain all he needed to know: Narab would rather stand in good stead with them than confront them as enemies, so they were powerful and very dangerous. Arkan knew it was Narab’s nature to plot, but he was clearly overmatched if he thought he could court them and make them serve his ends, or even count them as true allies. The taredhel might be content to allow those living north of the Teeth of the World to think themselves free, but eventually they would seek to put their boot on the necks of the moredhel. The strange elves wanted to claim all of Midkemia as their own: of that, he was certain.
Not for the first time in his life, Arkan wondered if his people weren’t their own worst enemies. Beyond the constant bickering and occasional bloodshed, there was an underlying drive for supremacy between rival clans … but for what? It was as if struggle itself was the point of existence, rather than as a means to achieving some higher goal.
Not usually reflective by nature, Arkan had been forced by the exigency of leading his clan on more than one occasion to weigh what he felt was an obvious truth against a more ambiguous, less easily understood reality. The world was not a simple place and life was never effortless, especially when most of one’s day was filled with the struggle merely to survive, but few of his people considered the world beyond their daily needs: hunting, eating, defending their lands and raising their families. Peace had made that so much more probable, yet his people still had an appetite for bloodshed that ran counter to their own best interests.
Why was that? Arkan wondered. Struggle as he might, he had never come close to an answer. Every time he pondered it, he was left to concede he lacked the mental gift of someone like Cetswaya, his shaman. In the end he shrugged off the question, accepting that it was simply their nature.
Still, this was not the time for abstract musing. He had a real problem to confront and his experience told him there were two things he must now do quickly. The first was to get his people back into the high mountains to the north. Almost two generations before, his father had been the first to lead the tribe into the vast frozen peaks and the glaciers beyond. In doing so he had saved the Ardanien from obliteration at the hands of their ancient enemies, and had given them their new name, the Ice Bears. Part of the once-powerful Clan Bear, most of their kin had been obliterated by the mad prophet, the false Murmandamus, during his war against the