People of the Talisman

XII

There was an outcry of startled voices, and after that a complete cessation of sound from below. Stark could picture them sitting stiffly in their saddles, stretching eye and ear in the darkness, listening. The hammer-strokes died away in a booming rattle as the boulders hit the floor of the pass and wore out their momentum. For a brief space it seemed that there was silence, except for the wind. Then there began to be other sounds, of stones rolling and clacking together, and knocking, and shifting. The sounds overlapped each other, growing louder, and underneath them was a deep groaning grinding bass. Stark thought that he heard voices shouting again, very loud this time. The ledge began to quake under him. He threw himself flat, hugging the inner surface. The grinding noise exploded into a great roar. Behind him a section of the cliff face disappeared downward into darkness and a mighty cloud of dust.

Stark clung to the ledge, his arms over his head, his face pressed grinning against the rock. He howled triumphant obscenities that neither he nor anyone else could hear. And it was better than he had hoped. His deafened ears picked up, as though they were echoes, the crashings of three lesser rockfalls touched off by the first one. Very quickly after the last one there came a sort of stunned quiet, stitched through with a trickling of pebbles and a faint screaming.

Stark got to his hands and knees and looked down. The dust hung in the air like smoke, but it was heavy and the wind was tearing it. Below it was a mass of rock completely blocking the pass. And it had fallen like a portcullis between Ciaran and her men, except for a handful that Balin’s slingers should take care of.

Stark laughed and began leisurely to climb down the cliff.

He did part of that climb in complete darkness, a task that left him no margin of attention for what was going on below. He could hear cries of pain and anger, and what he thought was Balin’s voice raised in some rather violent demands, or orders. There were other sounds, all confused, and all of them at the moment of no interest to him. The nearer moon swung overhead and after that it was easier, though not nearly as easy as it had been going up. By the time the light of a high-held torch reached to him, and hands caught him to ease him down, he was glad of the help.

Balm’s face appeared in the torchlight, wild with excitement “We have her. We have her! And the pass is closed.”

“For a while,” Stark said. “For a while.”

He flexed his legs, bending to rub the aching stiffness out of them. It dawned on him that he was tired enough to drop right where he stood. “Has anybody got wine? I could do with a drink.” Somebody handed him a leather bottle and he drank thirstily. Balin was still talking, telling how Ciaran and the seven or eight men who had kept up with her had tried to break back at the first sound of falling rock, and how three of the chieftains had been caught under the slide. Before the rest could gather their stunned wits together Balin’s slingers had dropped them out of their saddles. Ciaran had tried to charge them with her axe and they had dropped her, too, and Balin had thought that she was dead. Then a great many of the people of Kushat had rushed back from around the bend. They had killed the chieftains on the ground, those who had not been slain outright by the stones, and they had wanted to kill Ciaran too when they found that she was still breathing.

“I had to mount guard over her myself.” Balin said. “Then I thought they were going to kill me. I had the devil of a time convincing them.”

“We may need her,” said Stark. “Her men will start pulling away those rocks With the first light. I think there are three more falls, though not such big ones, between here and the mouth of the pass, and it will all take them time, but sooner or later they’ll clear the way. When they do we must have the means to destroy them—or else we must buy our way free.”

A considerable crowd had gathered. They had been cheering Stark, but now there was some growling and muttering, and Stark said, “Don’t be so impatient. You can always kill her later on, if we find we don’t need her.”

Thanis pushed her way to him. “Stark, why don’t we trade her to them in exchange for Kushat? They’d give up the city to get her back.”

Apparently there were many who agreed with her. Stark shook his head. “Of course they would. And you’d have Kushat for just as long as Ciaran would need to rally her men and retake it. And then you would wish that you had killed her.”

Thanis considered that, walking beside him and Balin as they started through the crowd. “We could say that we would give her back, and then as soon as they left the city we could kill her…”

Stark looked at her. “That’s treachery. And it’s also bad business. The tribesmen would stamp your city flat and use the stones for butcher’s blocks.” He found himself suddenly shouting at them all. “Can’t you understand? You couldn’t hold the city with every man and every weapon you had, and you can’t hold it now, with nothing. You lost Kushat, and you’ll never get it back unless the talisman gives you the power.” They were silent, startled by his anger and impatience. “If it does not, we may buy our own lives with Ciaran, but don’t hope for more.”

He tramped on ahead and they let him go. Even Thanis stood away from him. He passed the bodies of the chieftains and went around the shoulder where the pass turned. On the other side was a bay or pocket in the cliff, cut out by the waters that had poured through here over the millennia. It offered a partial shelter from the wind, and here the women and children were huddled in a makeshift camp, sharing out cold rations and trying to cover themselves against the night. There was nothing with which to make fires, and only two or three torches burned. Stark saw the dim glow of the candle lamp and made for it. Lugh and Rogain were there, and between them, sitting erect with her back against the cliff wall, was Ciaran.

She had been stripped of her armor, down to the dark close-fitting leather she wore beneath it, and someone had wrapped a tattered cloak around her. Her hands and feet were bound. Her forehead was cut, marred with a purpling bruise. There were streaks of dried blood all down her cheek and her white neck. And still she sat like a king. Stark looked down at her. Her eyes met his without wavering, without pleading or softness or a hint of tears. She did not speak.

He passed on by her. Lugh gave him a robe. He wrapped it around him and lay down on the cold stone and was instantly asleep. When he woke again, stiff and chilled in the predawn dark, Ciaran seemed not to have moved at all, and he wondered whether she had slept, and what her dreams were like. He did not ask her.

“Keep her close behind us,” he said to Lugh and Rogain. “I want her guarded well.”

They ate their meager breakfast and started on through the Gates of Death. Stark thought that he had never seen a more shivering, miserable army on its way to a blind destiny. He walked at the head of it, with Balin beside him. Lugh and Rogain came with Ciaran just behind. After that the people were strung out as they pleased, since for the present there was no more danger from the rear.

For Stark there began an ordeal.

The sun came up, but now they were going deeper into the pass, and the walls stretched higher, and the light was dim and strange at the bottom of that cleft. The wind boomed and howled. It spoke with many tongues in the crevices of the rock, and Stark thought he heard in it the unhuman voices that had spoken to him as he held the talisman. Balin had given Camar’s belt to him, saying he deserved the honor. Stark thought it was more that Balin had an uneasy passion to be rid of the thing. Now again it was a burden to him, and he hated it. In this place he was more conscious than ever of the strange powers that lived in that bit of crystal, and the fact that the answer to them lay somewhere up ahead, he could not tell how close, and that he was being forced inevitably into seeing what they were, whether he wanted to or not.

He did not want to.

He tried to reason with himself. He tried to force his attention to stay fixed on realities, the ever-present and highly important realities of the pass, which was no less dangerous here than it had been where he had brought down the slide. In spite of himself, his nostrils twitched to the smell of evil, ancient and dusty and old but still living, a subtle unclean taint on the wind that only a beast, or one as close to it as he, can sense and know. Every nerve was a point of pain, raw with apprehension. The thin veneer of civilization began to slough away from him no matter how hard he grasped at it, so that the farther he went the more his very body changed, drawing in upon itself and flattening forward, bristling and starting and pausing to test the wind, more like a four-footed thing than a man walking upright.

The worst of it was that he knew Ciaran watched him, and understood. All that morning she walked with bound hands between her guards, and never once spoke. But he felt that her eyes never left him.

When they stopped to rest and eat a little more of their scanty food he went to where she sat, on a heap of boulders off to one side, away from the others. She had not been given anything to eat or drink, and she had not asked for anything. Stark broke off half of his dry cold hunk of bread and handed it to her. She took it and began to eat, rigidly controlling what must have been her very great hunger. Stark sat down on the rocks facing her and nodded to Lugh and Rogain, who were glad enough to leave their charge. He held out a bottle with some dregs of wine left in it, and they shared that too.

He said, “You’re thinking how you may kill me.”

“Yes.” The wind tumbled her hair across her face and she shook it aside impatiently. “You’ve been a curse to me, Stark.”

“I’m not a forgiving man.” He nodded at the people of Kushat. “Neither are they.”

“They had no choice,” she said. “You did. I made you an offer once.” She looked at him with honest curiosity. “You have no more loyalty to these people than I have. Why did you refuse?”

“Two reasons. I had made a promise…”

“To a dead man.”

“To a friend.”

“That is only one reason. Go on.”

“You and I,” said Stark, “are much alike. I think you said that yourself. Much too much alike, for one to lead and the other to follow. Besides, I had no desire to take Kushat.” He handed her the wine again. “I suppose you might say I lack ambition, but you have too much. You were Lord of Mekh. You should have been content.”

“Content!” she said. “Are you content? Have you ever been content?”

He considered that. “Not often. And not for long. But the spurs are not so deep in me.”

“The wind and the fire,” Ciaran said. “One wastes its strength in wandering, the other devours. Well, we shall see who was wiser when the battle is over. But don’t talk to me of contentment.”

Her face had a white blaze to it, a strength and an iron pride. He studied her, sitting tall and straight on the cold rock, with her long legs and her splendid shoulders, and the fine hands that seemed forlorn without the axe to fondle. “I would like to know,” he said, “what made you as you are?”

She said impatiently, “A man is free to be what he will without questions, but a woman is supposed to be a woman and nothing more. One gets tired of explaining.” She leaned back against the boulders, and there was a certain triumph in her eyes. “I did not ask for my sex. I will not be bound by it. I did not ask to be a bastard, and I will not be bound by that, either. So much I have accomplished, if I die today.”

She was silent for a time, and he thought that she was through talking. Then she said softly, “If I live, there will be more to do. Kushat was only a stepping-stone.”

Her eyes looked somewhere else, far off, and what they saw was bitter.

“A stepping-stone?” asked Stark. “To where?”

“To Narrissan.” Her voice was very low. “That is a walled city, Stark, much like Kushat, but farther south, and far more rich and powerful. My grandfather was kind in Narrissan. By the time I could walk, I was a servant in his house. I don’t think he ever knew it. Why should he? I had no name. My father knew. He came upon me and my mother once in the passageway, and he looked at me as one might look into a mirror. ‘So that’s the brat.’ he said. My mother spoke, complaining, I believe, though I hardly heard her, and he cut her off sharply, saying, ‘Be thankful it’s a girl-child. Otherwise I would be afraid to let it grow. It’s too much in my image.’ ”

She smiled. “After that he forgot about me. But when I was old enough I left my scrubbing of floors to practice arms with the young boys. I was beaten for it every day, but every day I went. My father was a good man of his hands, and as he said, I was made in his image. I learned. When I had learned enough I started out to make my own fortune. With these two hands, Stark,” she said, holding them up. “With what I am myself, and what I can do, not what I can trick and wheedle and whore out of others by the ancient usages of the bed-chamber.”

Stark nodded. “And that is why you wanted the talisman so badly—because it might help you to take your father’s city.”

“To take Narrissan. My father is dead these three years, and I was his only issue. I hope the gods allow him to be amused…” She shook her head, looking at Stark. “If you had fought with me instead of against me… Well, that is past. But who knows what lies ahead?”

She gave him a keen glance. “You have a hint, I think. And it frightens you.”

“We’ll soon know,” Stark said, and rose, going back to the head of the straggling column. He did not bother to tell Ciaran that if ever they did face each other again it would still be as man to man and equal to equal, with no regard for her sex. He knew that she knew that. And he knew that it would be more than a little foolish to say so, since in any case the choice was not his.

The line of march formed up and moved on again.

The pass dropped lower and the uncanny twilight deepened to a kind of sickly night. There was nothing but rock and ice. Yet the sense of danger increased, so that Stark moved against it as a man might move against water. And not he alone was oppressed. Balin, Lugh, Rogain, Thanis, all of the people now moved grudgingly and in silence. Even Ciaran’s face began to show apprehension under the stoic mask.

Then suddenly the rock walls dropped away. The pallid darkness lifted to a clear daylight. They were through the Gates of Death.

Beyond them was a stony slope widening out and down into a great valley locked between the mountains. They filed out of the pass and stood there on the slope. The cessation of the wind that had hammered and howled at them in the narrow cleft made it seem that the valley was terribly quiet.

They stood a long time. Thanis came up between Stark and Balin, her cloak wrapped tight around her, her dark eyes wide and stricken.

“What does it mean?” she asked finally.

Stark answered, “I don’t know.”