People of the Talisman

XI

The festival stones, a broken ring of cyclopean blocks, stood alone on a great space below the pass, a space so flat and smooth that Stark knew it must have been leveled artificially. And he knew that whatever the original purpose of the stones might have been, it had nothing to do with sun-worship. He recognized them, with a lifting of the hair at the back of his neck, as soon as he could see them clearly. They were the foundation courses of a tower like the one in which Camar had died. The rest of the structure, apparently shaken down in some ancient cataclysm, lay tumbled over the rock, the cut stones so worn now by time and frost and the gnawing wind that they had lost their precise shapes and might have been only a casual scattering of boulders.

The circle was full of people, and more were coming, straggling in little bands across the plain from Kushat. They were, on the whole, quiet, but it was a bitter, angry quiet. From time to time an eddy of the wind brought a taint of smoke from the city.

Lugh looked around, estimating the numbers and the ration of women and children to men. “Not much of an army,” he muttered.

“It will have to do,” Stark said. He moved through the huddled groups, searching for Thanis, and he was beginning to get panicky when he saw her. She was helping some other women patch up the wounded, her face pulled into a deep frown of weariness and concentration. He called her name. She started and then ran to him and threw her arms around him. She did not say anything, but he felt the tightness of her grip and the way she trembled, and he held her until she drew a long unsteady breath and stood away from him, half smiling. She began to unbuckle the belt from around her waist, as though she could not get rid of it fast enough.

“Here, you can have this back,” she said. “It’s too big for me.”

Stark took it and put it on, feeling a great number of eyes watching him. “Where’s Balin?”

“Out with some others, rounding up refugees. Some got away that were not from our Quarter, and he thought they might be useful.”

“Every man helps.” He smiled briefly. “Yes, even he.” Thanis was looking at Lugh in a way that should have felled him on the spot. Lugh bore it patiently, without resentment, and presently Thanis shrugged and dropped her gaze.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “We’re all here together, now.”

Stark said, “Yes.” He put his hands on the boss of Camar’s belt and turned and looked at the people who were gathered there inside the great circle of stone. He looked up at the pass high above them, with the long rays of the sun touching the icy rocks to flame so that it burned as it had when he first saw it, with the sullen fires of hell, and it seemed to him that the wind that blew down from it carried a hint of strangeness that plucked at his nerves. He remembered with a sudden and shocking vividness how the talisman had glowed between his hands, and how from somewhere far away the tiny unhuman voices had spoken.

He clenched his hands firmly around the boss and walked to the center of the ring, where a kind of altar had been made by piling together some of the fallen stones. He stood on this and called to the people, and while they came closer to hear him he watched the smoke rise up from Kushat and thought of Ciaran and the lash and the dark axe, and hardly at all of night-black hair and white skin and a beautiful woman’s face.

He said aloud to the people, “Most of you know that the talisman of Ban Cruach was stolen by a thief named Camar.”

They did, and said so, and many of them cursed his name. And some others said, in an ugly mood, “Who are you, outlander, to be talking about the talisman?”

Two of the men that Stark had seen in the taverns on the night before the attack climbed up on the altar beside him. “Balin vouches for him,” they said. “And he has something to say that you would do well to listen to.” They sat down on the top of the altar, their knives bare in their hands.

Stark went on. “I was a friend of Camar. He died on his way here, to return that which he had taken. Because I owed him a debt, I finished the journey for him.”

He opened the boss, and took from it the bit of crystal wrapped in silk.

“Most of you knew, or guessed, that the so-called talisman in the shrine was only a piece of glass put there by the nobles to hide the loss.” He waited until the angry growl had quieted, and then he held up his hands, with the crystal cupped between them. And he said, “Look now at this.”

He laid back the covering of silk. The level sunlight struck against the crystal, and it seemed to draw the light, to feed on it, to suck it down and down into its many facets until each one glowed with a separate radiance. Stark caught his breath sharply and held himself rigid, watching the crystal brighten into a small sun between his hands. It was warm now. It dazzled his eyes.

And the voices spoke. In his ear. Over his shoulder. Close, immediate, just beyond… just beyond…

“Stark!”

It was Balin’s voice. The sound of it broke through the other voices and shocked him back into the sane world. He caught a brief reeling glimpse of the people staring, their eyes stretched and their mouths gone slack with awe, and he realized that they were looking at him as much as they were at the talisman. He closed his hands over it, shutting off the radiance but not the warmth, and huddled the silk wrapping over it and hid it again in the boss, and all the time Balin was pushing through the crowd toward him. In the background where Balin had left them, was a party of refugees, and Stark recognized Rogain among them.

Balin stood at the foot of the altar, looking up. “Stark, there are riders coming from Kushat.”

“Well,” said Stark. “Then we had best be moving.” He bent down, still dazed and acting more by instinct than by conscious thought, and gave Balin a hand up beside him. “You know Balin,” he said to the people. “Hear him speak.”

Balin said, “Stark and I will take the talisman through the Gates of Death, and see what power we can find there to drive the tribesmen out of Kushat. Let everyone who wishes follow us.”

He sprang down from the altar, with Stark behind him. They started for the opening in the ring of stones. A tremendous cry went up, a confusion of cries, and the whole untidy crowd began to coalesce and form itself into a solid band. Someone shouted, “Ban Cruach!", like a war cry, and others took it up. Lugh appeared at Stark’s elbow, yelling, “The talisman! Follow the talisman!” The people began to pour out of the circle. Stark gave Lugh the lantern and candles he had brought from the tunnel.

“Lead on ahead,” he said. “The first place you come to that can be fortified and held by the number of men we have—get about it. Even the children can haul stones.”

“I would like to go with him,” said someone at his shoulder. It was Rogain. The day had worn hard on him. He was wounded and beaten, and his scholar’s hands were stained with blood. But he stood proudly and gave Stark look for look without apology or comment. Stark nodded, and he went to join Lugh, walking stiffly, with his head up.

“There’s a good man,” Stark said. “A pity he wasn’t a better general.” He began to shout to the people. “Let the women and the young ones go first. The men stay behind—we may have to fight. Balin, keep them moving there. Hurry on now. Hurry on!”

In the reddening light of late afternoon the men and women and children streamed upward toward the pass, where the fires burned brighter as the sun sank. Stark and Balin were the last to leave the circle. They looked back toward Kushat and Stark could see the riders, a company of fifty or more picking its way over the frost-wracked and gullied surface of the plain. In the forefront was a figure in dark mail.

“Can that be Ciaran leading them?” asked Balin, astonished.

“Why not?” asked Stark.

“But she has barely taken the city. Any other chieftain…”

“… would be baying after loot and women. She has no use for either. All that concerns her is her ambition.”

They followed on up the naked slope, and Stark thought that it was a measure of Ciaran’s power that she could find fifty men willing to leave the plundering of Kushat. Probably they were clan chiefs whose men were bound to give them their share in any case. Or perhaps the lure of the talisman was great enough to draw them.

Balin said hesitantly, “Stark… when you stood there with the talisman in your hands, just before I called your name…”

“Yes?”

“Your face was strange. It was like the face of a madman—or a god.”

“Something spoke to me,” Stark said.

Balin looked at him, startled, and Stark shook his head. “Something. Voices. But I seemed to know that they were there, beyond the pass.”

“Ah,” said Balin, and his eyes were bright. “Then we may hope to find help there as Ban Cruach did.”

“The gods know,” Stark said. “For an instant, just before you spoke, I thought I understood…”

He broke off, shivering involuntarily. “Time enough for that when we’re through the pass.” He glanced back at the riders. “They’re gaining.”

“And look there,” said Balin. “Beyond the Festival Stones.”

Tribesmen had appeared on the plain as though out of nowhere. Stark nodded. “I was expecting them. They came after us through the tunnel.” They had seen the people going up into the pass, and they began to run. They were closer, but the mounted men were faster. Stark judged that both groups would reach the pass at about the same time, and that that time would be much sooner than he wanted it.

“What shall we do?” Balin asked.

“Be ready for a rear-guard action, but keep ahead of them if we can.” They ran up the slope, urging the men to go faster, driving them on. The lower parts of the plain were lost now where the dusk flowed over them. In the high places there was still light, and it shone into the pass so that the people seemed to move in a bath of blood. Stark thought how small they looked under those vast sheer cliffs, and how quickly they vanished into the narrow jaws of the Gates of Death. He left Balin and pushed on, past the line of march, in a fever to see the place before the daylight left it altogether.

It was an evil place, a crack in the mountain wall with towering sides that leaned together overhead, a thousand feet or more, and the wind came viciously through it. Stark hated it. He hated it as an aborigine, sensing the unknown and unnatural and cringing from it. And he hated it as a rational man, because it was a death-trap.

Balin had said that this was a place of grinding rockfalls, and that at least was no myth. The floor of the pass was heaped with detritus, and Stark, who knew his mountains well, having grown up where all the world was mountain, could look up at the looming sides and see where the rock was rotten and treacherous, ready to crash down at the slightest disturbance. He caught up to Lugh and Rogain and cautioned them to be careful. They sent his word back along the line and went on.

Stark stayed where he was, standing aside on a pile of boulders and looking up at the cliffs.

The people hurried by him, burdened women, older children carrying younger ones who were too tired now to walk, the men with some of the wild zeal sweated out of them by the climb. Finally Balin came and saw him and stopped.

“They’re close behind us, Stark. Hadn’t we better prepare to fight?”

“I think,” said Stark, looking upward, “there’s a better way. Get me a spear.” Balin took one from one of the men. Stark laid it by. He stripped off Camar’s belt and gave it to Balin, along with every other thing that he could spare, and then rigged a thong to hold the spear across his back. While he did this he told Balin what he had in mind.

Balin squinted up at the cliffs and shuddered. “I won’t even offer to help you.”

“Don’t,” said Stark feelingly. “Just keep them moving on. I want everyone clear, around the bend there.” He pointed ahead to where the pass turned around a jutting shoulder. “Do we have any slingers?”

“A few, I think. They came with Rogain and some others.”

“Station them there, behind the shoulder. Keep them well out of sight.”

Balin nodded, muttering something about the gods lending Stark strength. He ran on.

Stark went across the floor of the pass and began to climb up the cliff.

The aborigines had taught him how to climb, and he had spent the years of his boyhood clinging to rocks with his fingers and toes and the pores of his naked skin, slithering up and down on his belly like the lizards he hunted. It was a skill he had never lost, any more than he had ever forgotten how to breathe, because for so long the two functions had been interdependent. He found now that the going was easier than he had thought. The rock was rougher than it had looked from below, and its inward slope was greater. He had picked his place carefully, where the rock was sound and the holds did not crumble under his hands and feet. He swarmed up fairly quickly, toward a narrow ledge that angled across the cliff face. The daylight was fading much faster than he could climb, receding upward ahead of him as the sun went lower, but he thought that he would have all he needed. The thing that he was shortest on was time.

He climbed almost recklessly, leaning into the rock, merging with it, moving his four limbs as he had learned to do in imitation of the great rock-lizard, so that he looked like one himself, going claw-over-paw up the cliff and lacking only the balancing tail. He reached the ledge and hauled himself onto it, lying still to get his breath. In the pass below him he heard the clink of arms and harness, and he looked down. The shadows were thickening there, but enough light still reflected from the sky and the high cliffs to show him the riders. The narrowness of the pass had strung them out in a long line, and the treacherous footing had slowed them down. The unmounted tribesmen presumably were somewhere behind them. At the head of the line was Ciaran in her black mail. Her voice rose up to him, a thin thread of sound much broken by the wind. He could not understand the words, but it was obvious that she was impatient and urging the others to move faster. Stark smiled. She must feel that the talisman was already in her hands.

He rose and went along the ledge. Ciaran drew level with him, passed him by. Behind her came the Mekhish chiefs, grumbling and cursing at the evil nature of the place and at the growing dark. Some of them had torches and paused to light them, fighting the wind. Stark was not in any hurry now. He came to where the ledge was blocked by stones fallen from above, and he stopped and undid the thong that held the spear across his back. The wind tore at him, beating him back against the cliff. He set his head against it. He thrust the long stout blade of the spear in among the rocks, and set his feet, and pried.

Beyond the point where he stood the cliff face had rotted inward, where frost and the summer melt had eaten away the softer veins. The detritus had fallen, and piled, and slipped, and piled again, and now there were countless tons of rock poised and ready to slide. All that was needed was a touch.

Stark heaved up on the butt of the spear. The dislodged boulders went bounding down with a heavy ominous clashing, like a series of hammer-strokes.

Stark turned and ran.