People of the Talisman

II

Stark waited, until they should tire of their own silence.

Finally one demanded, “Of what country are you?”

He answered, “I am called N’Chaka, the Man-Without-a-Tribe.”

This was the name his foster-folk had given him, the half human aboriginals who had found him orphaned and alone after an earthquake wiped out the mining community that had been his home; the folk who had raised him, in the blaze and thunder and bitter frosts of Mercury’s Twilight Belt. It still seemed to Stark to be his true name.

“A stranger,” said the leader, and smiled. He pointed to the dead Camar and asked, “Did you slay him?”

“He was my friend,” said Stark. “I was bringing him home to die.”

Two riders dismounted to inspect the body. One called up to the leader, “He was from Kushat, if I know the breed, Thord! And he has not been robbed.” He proceeded to take care of that detail himself.

“A stranger,” repeated the leader, Thord. “Bound for Kushat, with a man of Kushat. Well, I think you will come with us, stranger.”

Stark shrugged. And with the long spears pricking him, he did not resist when the tall Thord plundered him of all he owned except his clothes and Camar’s belt, which was not worth the stealing. His gun Thord flung contemptuously away.

One of the men brought Stark’s beast and Camar’s from where they were tethered and the Earthman mounted, as usual over the violent protest of the creature, which did not like the smell of him. They moved out from under the shelter of the walls, into the full fury of the wind.

For the rest of that night and through the next day and the night that followed it they rode eastward, stopping only to rest the beasts and chew on their rations of jerked meat. And to Stark, riding a prisoner, it came with full force that this was the North country, half a world away from the Mars of spaceships and commerce and visitors from other planets. The future had never touched these wild mountains and barren plains. Not even the present had reached them. The past held pride enough.

Far to the north, below the horizon, the polar pack made a glimmering white blink on the sky, and at night there were the cold flames of the aurora to burn out the stars. The wind blew down from the ice, through the mountain gorges, across the plains, never ceasing. And here and there the cryptic towers rose, broken monoliths of stone, of unknown history and unguessed purpose. The men of Mekh could tell Stark nothing about them, though they seemed to prefer to avoid them.

Thord did not make any mention to Stark about where they were taking him, or why, and Stark did not ask. It would have been an admission of fear. Since there was nothing else he could do at the moment he exercised the patience of the chained beast, and simply waited. But there were times when he found it difficult. Camar’s belt sat uncomfortably at his middle. He kept thinking about the talisman and wondering how much of its strangeness was his own imagination and how much was real, and it made for uneasy thinking. All he wanted now was to get as quickly as possible to Kushat and be rid of the thing. And he cursed Thord and his riders, silently but with great viciousness.

In mid-afternoon of the second day they came to a lip of rock where the snow was swept clean, and below it was sheer drop into a narrow valley. Looking down, Stark saw that on the floor of the valley, up and down as far as he could see, were men and beasts and shelters of hides and brush, and fires burning. By the hundreds, by the several thousand, they camped under the cliffs and their voices rose up on the thin air in a vast deep murmur that was deafening after the silence of the plains.

A war party, gathered now, before the thaw. Stark smiled. He became curious to meet the leader of this army.

They found their way single file along a winding track that dropped down the cliff face. The wind stopped abruptly, cut off by the valley walls. They came in among the shelters of the camp.

Here the snow was churned and soiled and melted to slush by the fires. There were no women in the camp, no sign of the usual cheerful rabble that follows a barbarian army. There were only men, hillmen and warriors all, tough-handed killers with no thought but battle.

They came out of their holes to shout at Thord and his men, and stare at the stranger. Thord was flushed and jovial with his own importance.

“I have no time for you,” he shouted back. “I go to speak with the Lord Ciaran.”

Stark rode impassively, a dark giant with a face of stone. From time to time he made his beast curvet, and laughed at himself inwardly for doing it.

They came at length to a shelter larger than the others but built exactly the same and no more comfortable. A spear was thrust into the snow beside the entrance, and from it hung a black pennant with a single bar of silver across it like lightning in a night sky. Beside it was a shield with the same device. There were no guards.

Thord dismounted, bidding Stark to do the same. He hammered on the shield with the hilt of his sword, announcing himself.

“Lord Ciaran! It is Thord, with a captive.”

A voice, toneless and strangely muffled, spoke from within.

“Enter, Thord.”

Thord pushed aside the hide curtain and went in, with Stark at his heels.

The dim daylight did not penetrate the interior. Cressets burned, giving off a flickering brilliance and a smell of strong oil. The floor of packed snow was carpeted with furs, much worn so that the bare hide showed through in places. Otherwise there was no adornment, and no furniture but a chair and a table, both dark with age and use, and a pallet of skins in one shadowy corner with what seemed to be a heap of rags thrown upon it.

In the chair sat a man.

He seemed very tall in the shaking light of the cressets. From neck to thigh his lean body was cased in black link mail, and under that a tunic of leather, dyed black. Across his knees he held a sable axe, a great thing made for the shearing of skulls, and his hands lay upon it gently, as though it were a toy he loved.

His head and face were covered by a thing that Stark had seen before only in very old paintings, but he recognized it. It was the ancient war-mask of the Inland Kings of Mars. Wrought of black and gleaming steel, it presented an inhuman visage of slitted eyeholes and a barred slot for breathing. At the top and back of the head it sprang out in a thin soaring sweep of curving metal like a dark wing edge-on in flight.

The intent, expressionless scrutiny of that mask was bent, not upon Thord, but upon Eric John Stark.

The hollow voice spoke again, from behind the mask. “Well?”

“We were hunting in the gorges to the south,” said Thord. “We saw a fire…” He told the story of how they had found the stranger and the body of the man from Kushat.

“Kushat!” said the Lord Ciaran softly. “Ah! And why, stranger, were you going to Kushat?”

“My name is Stark. Eric John Stark, Earthman, out of Mercury.” He was tired of being called stranger. He was tired of the whole business, and the blank mask irritated him. “Why should I not go to Kushat? Is it against some law, that a man may not go there in peace without being hounded all over the Norlands? And why do the men of Mekh make it their business? They have nothing to do with the city.”

Thord held his breath, watching with delighted anticipation.

The hands of the man in armor caressed the axe. They were slender hands, smooth and sinewy. Small hands, it seemed, for such a weapon.

“We make what we will our business, Eric John Stark.” He spoke with a peculiar gentleness. “I have asked you. Why were you going to Kushat?”

“Because,” Stark answered with equal restraint, “my comrade wanted to go home to die.”

“It seems a long hard journey, just for dying.” The black helm bent forward in an attitude of thought. “Only the condemned or the banished leave their cities, or their clans. Why did your comrade flee Kushat?”

A voice spoke suddenly from out of the heap of rags that lay on the pallet in the shadows of the corner. A man’s voice, deep and husky, with the harsh quaver of age or madness in it.

“Three men beside myself have fled Kushat, over the years that matter. One died in the spring floods. One was caught in the moving ice of winter. One lived. A thief named Camar, who stole a certain talisman.”

Stark said, “My comrade was called Greshi.” The leather belt weighed heavy about him, and the iron boss seemed hot against his belly. He was beginning now to be afraid.

The Lord Ciaran spoke, ignoring Stark. “It was the sacred talisman of Kushat. Without it, the city is like a man without a soul.”

As the Veil of Tanit was to Carthage, Stark thought, and reflected on the fate of that city after the Veil was stolen.

“The nobles were afraid of their own people,” the man in armor said. “They did not dare to tell that it was gone. But we know.”

“And,” said Stark, “you will attack Kushat before the thaw, when they least expect you.”

“You have a sharp mind, stranger. Yes. But the great wall will be hard to carry, even so. If I came, bearing in my hands the talisman of Ban Cruach…”

He did not finish, but turned instead to Thord. “When you plundered the dead man’s body, what did you find?”

“Nothing, Lord. A few coins, a knife, hardly worth the taking.”

“And you, Eric John Stark. What did you take from the body?”

With perfect truth he answered, “Nothing.”

“Thord,” said the Lord Ciaran, “search him.”

Jhord came smiling up to Stark and ripped his jacket open.

With uncanny swiftness, the Earthman moved. The edge of one broad hand took Thord under the ear, and before the man’s knees had time to sag Stark had caught his arm. He turned, crouching forward, and pitched Thord headlong through the door flap.

He straightened and turned again. His eyes held a feral glint. “The man has robbed me once,” he said. “It is enough.”

He heard Thord’s men coming. Three of them tried to jam through the entrance at once, and one of them had a spear. Stark took it out of his hands. He used the butt of it, not speaking nor making a sound except the hard cracking of wood on bone. He cleared the doorway and flung the spear contemptuously after the stunned barbarians.

“Now,” he said to the Lord Ciaran, “will we talk as men?”

The man in armor laughed, a sound of pure enjoyment. It seemed that the gaze behind the mask studied Stark’s savage face and then lifted to greet the sullen Thord who came back into the shelter, his cheeks flushed crimson with rage.

“Go,” said the Lord Ciaran. “The stranger and I will talk.”

Thord had his sword in his hands and was panting to use it. “But Lord, it is not safe…”

“My dark mistress looks after my safety,” said Ciaran, lifting the axe across his knees, “and better than you have done. Go.”

Thord went.

The man in armor was silent then, the blind mask turned to Stark, who met that eyeless gaze and was silent also. And the bundle of rags in the shadows straightened slowly and became a tall old man with rusty hair and beard, through which peeped craggy juts of bone and two bright, small points of fire, as though some wicked flame burned within him.

He shuffled over and crouched at the feet of the Lord Ciaran, watching the Earthman. And the man in armor leaned forward.

“I will tell you something, Eric John Stark. I am a bastard, but I come of the blood of kings. My name and rank I must make with my own hands. But I will set them high, and my name will ring in the Norlands.

“I will take Kushat. Who holds Kushat holds the power and the riches that lie beyond the Gates of Death.”

Ciaran paused, as though he might be dreaming, and then he said, “Ban Cruach came out of nowhere and made himself half a god. I will do the same.”

The old man made a chuckling sound. “I told them, in Kushat. I said it was time to rouse themselves and regain their power. They could have done it easily then, when they still had the talisman. The city was dying, and I told them it was their last chance to live, but they were too content. They only laughed, and chained me. Now they will laugh in a different way. Ha! How they will laugh!”

Stark looked at him with distaste, but he, like Ciaran, was too occupied with his dreams to notice.

And Ciaran said, “Now the city is naked, and I will take it, and talisman or not, I will go beyond the Gates of Death to see what may be there.”

He paused again, the dark mask inscrutable and compelling, turned toward Stark.

“Ride with me,” he said abruptly. “Yield up the talisman, if indeed you can, and be the shield at my back. I have offered no other man that honor.”

Stark asked slowly, “Why do you choose me?”

“We are of one blood, Stark, though we are strangers.”

The Earthman’s cold eyes narrowed. “What would your red wolves say to that? And what would Otar say? Look at him, already stiff with jealousy and fear lest I answer ‘Yes’.”

“I do not think you would be afraid of either of them.”

“On the contrary,” said Stark, “I am a prudent man.” He studied Ciaran. “Very prudent. So much so that I will bargain with no man until I have looked into his eyes. Take off your helm, Ciaran. Then perhaps we will talk.”

Otar’s breath made a snakelike hissing between his toothless gums, and the hands of the Lord Ciaran tightened on the haft of the axe.

“No,” he whispered. “That I can never do.”

Otar rose to his feet, and for the first time Stark felt the full strength that lay in this strange old man.

“Would you look upon the face of destruction?” he thundered. “Do you ask for death? Do you think a thing is hidden behind a mask of steel without a reason, that you demand to see it?”

He turned. “My Lord,” he said. “By tomorrow the last of the clans will have joined us. After that, we must march, as it was planned. But I think it likely that this man is lying. I think it likely that he knows where the talisman is. Give him to Thord for the time that remains.”

The blank, blind mask was unmoving, and Stark thought that from behind it came a faint sound that might have been a sigh.

Then…

“Thord!” cried the Lord Ciaran, and lifted up the axe.