Sword of the Barbarians

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

A massive migration of the gods threatens the March of Gamelon with apocalyptic change. Only Torr Vorkun of Darkholm and his lovely twin sister, Tara, can preserve order and prepare the people for a new era. Torr is a magnificently powerful youth who bears the magical broadsword, Lycheaper. Tara, too, is magnificent, yet her secret power lies in the witchery she can invoke - when naked. Kenneth Bulmer, a leading British writer of fantasy and science fiction, paints a vivid and heroic picture of a world convulsed with change and aflame with new hope.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

The moral of this imbroglio, Torr chuckled to himself as he ducked a wildly swung club and leaped a market stall keeper who clutched screeching for his legs, taught him that next time he was forced to seize a chicken he should better remember the hard lessons of his youth.

How Tara would mock him now!

The late evening market of Gamelon Town seethed with housewives and slaves and purveyors all clamouring to complete their business in the windy light of torches before the gathering storm struck. Banners cracked stiffly above the battlements of the time-worn walls. The exotic hues and spicy scents and shrill barterings blended into a background against which the figure of Torr Vorkun of Darkholm, if taller and wider than average, should yet have passed unnoticed.

Yet his first attempt at bargaining with a stallkeeper resulted in this dismaying if enjoyable hue and cry.

Everyone in Gamelon grew red hair on their ugly heads, that was the truth of it.

Apples and multi-hued fruits from strange foreign lands sprayed from overset stalls. Awnings split with raucous rip-pings as fat men staggered back from Torr’s swinging arms. The bedlam raged.

‘Thief! Outlander! Bring him down! Beat out his brains!’

‘By the swag belly of Obese Rumphaldi Himself! I’m no thief!’ roared Torr. He shoved a gesticulating man over into a pile of pots and cascaded an avalanche of pots and cups across the cobbles. ‘I just don’t happen to have any of your decadent money! Out of my way, riff-raff!’

He roared across the market leaving a swathe of devastation in his wake. The chicken swung by its legs and squawked and fluttered its wings. Torr felt the familiar weight of his broadsword slung from his belt. He left it lie in its scabbard. This was no work for Lycheaper.

He ducked a flung cobblestone, butted a fat man where wind and water met, leaped a stall of stinking fish too long netted from the Opal Sea and raced, shouting with laughter, into the black net of alleys surrounding the market place. The rout hallooed at his heels.

No sorcery was likely to be hurled at him from the crowd. They kept their towers these days, did the sorcerers of Gamelon Town, quaking in their shoes trying to influence the coming invasion from Garthland and the inevitable war. A strange place, this, to Torr Vorkun, a young man not unacquainted with strange corners of his world, and yet one he might have grown to like had he the means to pay his way.

Several ways presented themselves and he chose the narrowest and darkest. Storm clouds gathered above the rooftops and the wind whistled with a keener bite on the evening air. He ran with the long loping stride of the superb athlete he was, and yet in his every movement the wariness and the alert expectancy of the born fighter displayed clearly how in an age of sudden death he had remained alive for five and twenty years.

So it was that the four guards who came on him around a crumbling corner of mouldering brick where a single torch sputtered from its iron bracket against the darkness ran not into a helpless man fleeing from a mob but a fiercely prepared warrior.

The guards’ halberds lowered, their points glinting.

Torr Vorkun laughed again and ran in without halting.

The sergeant of the guard, him with the bronze helmet and the red sash of office, shouted – once.

‘Take the foreign devil alive!’

Then he shouted no more as Vorkun forced up the halberd, wrenched it free and struck once – twice – thrice. The fourth guard stood for a single frozen instant, his mouth hanging open. Then with a screech of pure fright he dropped his weapon and turned and ran. His fierce eyes filled with savage glee, Torr hurled the halberd after the guard. He roared with laughter as the shaft tangled the man’s legs, brought him down in a tumble of rolling helmet and tangled accoutrements.

‘When the Garthlanders get here you’d best fight better than mat, fellow! By the stinking armpit of Obese Rumphaldi Himself ! They’ll chop you finer than best mince!’

Then he looked around with a curse. The chicken had vanished. Squawking, it had leaped free. Now, Torr Vorkun of Darkholm of Drugay was supperless once more.

The rout bayed in the next alley.

He shouted an insult at the petrified guard and took himself off, not well pleased.

Since Tara and he had arrived in Gamelon Town after tramping across the great plains and traversing the dismal defiles of the Forest of Stretting they had found themselves squalid lodgings, eaten one stingy meal on the proceeds of the last of Tara’s bangles and were still no nearer finding the wizard Jaran the All-Seeing. His attempts at bargaining for a chicken had ended in insults and a hot-headed natch. Food these days under the stress of forthcoming war had increased in price and decreased in supply.

‘By Gitanji the Gourmet!’ he rumbled. ‘Better for us to shake the filthy dust of Gamelon Town from our boots!’

He moved on along squalid alleys, beneath overhanging balconies close-shuttered, into vagrant pools of light from scattered torches and plunging into the soft shadows between. Accustomed to the wild free life of the open plains and the sheer-walled mountains of his youth towns gave him a fretting sense of confinement, even after his long sojourn in Paltomir, the greatest city of the League of Praterxes.

His straight soft-brown hair hung almost to his shoulders, confined by a single strap of good curlish leather without embroidery of other finery. His tunic and breech-clout, too, had been crudely fashioned by a hunch-backed dwarf in far off Khurdisrane from softened curlish leather. But his belt from which hung the scabbard of his true sword Lycheaper and his knee-high riding boots had been well-made in Paltomir the Blessed itself, from the tough hide of the wild and ferocious dragobrane. The hunt in which he’d started and finally killed that dragobrane had been roundly sung and storied by all the bards of Paltomir, not least by old Grendan, the Lord High King’s harper of golden melody. Yes, they had been good times, when he’d been a captain in the guard of the Lord High King. But at the first whisper that the sorcerer Jaran the All-Seeing might possess the answers to the questions Torr and Tara of Darkholm and Drugay had quested since first they could talk he had left Blessed Paltomir and set his face towards the plains and forests.

And now, here he was, skulking through stinking back alleys, supperless.

How, by the profane name of Chomath the Defiled, could he face his twin sister Tara empty-handed?

As though the tenuous and inexplicable link that bound them at times of peril had been sharpened by his own shamed thoughts of her, Tara’s voice shocked into his mind.

‘Torr! I am beset! Beasts in the guise of men! Torr – Help!’

Without thought, without pause Torr Vorkun of Drugay raced wide-mouthed and gulping foetid air through the sullen tangle of alleys. He did not pause for a single heartbeat to question, to doubt, the reality of that thin ghostly voice that whispered in his brain. Only when in dire danger could that uncanny link between twin and twin function. Now, of a certainty, Tara faced peril that, being only guessable, was all the more terrible for that.

The pursuit from the market place had been thrown off. He raged down the alleys, vaulting heaps of rotting refuse, hurdling open drains, until he came to the leaning wooden stair leading up to the single room they had bargained a bangle for. A few torches scattered light that emphasised the shadows. Stained walls and shuttered windows crowded close. He could hear the noise as he put his foot on the first worm-eaten tread.

Hoarse men’s voices, raised in coarse laughter and ribald witticisms, pelted the night with profanity. A chill wind gusted. Somewhere a loose shutter clacked. He padded up the treads like a black beast from the night and as he went he drew Lycheaper from the scabbard.

Again Tara’s ghostly voice echoed in his mind. No panic, no screaming blind terror that would oust reason, rode in with that whispering voice in his head. Yet there must be deadly peril for Tara to call so vehemently.

A resonant voice boomed beyond the closed and rickety door.

‘Treat the girl gently. We want her for our pleasuring! Not for blood sport!’

A sound of a soggy blow and a man’s abrupt ‘Oof!’

A roar of laughter, then: ‘By Tremineds, the girl fights well for her honour!’

Feet scuffling on the floor, the crash of their single chair overturning, hoarse panting, lascivious laughter – all brought Vorkun up the stairs with his naked brand in his fist.

He kicked the door open.

By the light of a torch thrust into a becket by the door – a light brought by the would-be rapists – he saw five men grappling with Tara and a sixth sitting doubled-up on the floor clutching his belly and groaning. They were all clad in the loose puce tunics and white cloaks of the Gamelon soldiery, much bedizened with embroidery, their helmets laid aside, their swords still clasped in scabbards. Fierce merciless faces stared wolfishly on Tara as she struggled with them.

‘Foreign witch! She devil!’ they were yelling as they pawed and groped and tried to hold her down.

‘You gutter-bred impotent slug-worms!’ she blazed, razoring fingernails down a bearded cheek. ‘You limp-weaponed filth-eating znunderbug offal!’

The struggle reeled across the floor. The table crashed over. Another man staggered away holding his guts, gurgling with pain, vomiting.

‘By all the devils in Sintian! She fights like a she-wolf!’

‘Witch! Throw yourself on our mercy!’

A roaring string of epithets ripped from Tara that made Torr almost smile with pride. Apart from her knee-high riding boots, twins to those worn by Torr, Tara of Darkholm of Drugay struggled stark naked.

But no laughter could touch Torr Vorkun of Drugay now. No light-hearted romp of combat, no joyous blood-singing battle – not when his sister was being mauled by men like this.

Magnificent she was, gorgeous in all the pride and womanliness of youth and health and beauty. Tanned and smooth, her skin glowed. Her hair, of the same soft-brown colour as her brother’s, hung a little longer, a little silkier. Pride and love clutched at Torr Vorkun as he gazed on his twin sister, acknowledged the fairest of all women in the world.

Her figure maddened the soldiers of Gamelon Town. They pressed in, grasping and groping, trying to capture her pummelling arms and kicking legs. Yet they saw with amazement that continually she sought to strip from herself those soft-leather riding boots, sought to strip herself completely naked.

‘Hold the witch down!’ and ‘My prize! She has wounded me for life!’ and ‘Crack her over the head, Karl, and have done!’

Torr took a single step into the room.

His broadsword lifted, the light running down the blade in crooked whirlicues of brilliance.

He did not bother to shout a warning, a challenge, a defiance. He simply rushed straight in. The pommel of Lycheaper smashed down on to a red-haired head, driving a man on to his face on the floor. Torr’s left hand ripped a sweating neck up out of the ruck, hurled its owner bone-breakingly against the wall. The flat of the blade crushed a nose and cheekbone into a red jelly.

Then the others whipped their swords o. . .