People of the Talisman

IX

It was a waste of time, and Stark knew it. He thought that probably a fair number of the men swarming up with them knew it too, and certainly for the thieves at least it would have been much easier simply to slip away out of Kushat and avoid the inevitable. But he was beginning to have considerable respect for the people of Kushat. To his simple way of thinking, a man who would not fight to defend what was his did not deserve to have it and would not have it for long. Some people, he knew, professed to find nobility in the doctrine of surrender. Maybe they did. To him it was only a matter of making a virtue out of cowardice.

At any rate, they fought, these men. Thief and weaver, butcher and blacksmith, stonemason and tavern-keeper, they fought. They were not very good at it, and the officers who ordered them this way and that along the Wall were not much better. The intermittent thunder of the rams still boomed from the gateway. The barbarian spearheads attacking the Wall began to play a game of shift, striking and then withdrawing to strike again in another place. “Playing with us,” Stark thought, and noticed that the supply of arrows seemed to be exhausted, as more and more of the defenders threw away their bows. He looked out at the black standard, where it waited on the plain.

And then the wait was over.

The mounted standard-bearer lifted the banner and rode with it to the forefront of the reserve force. The black-mailed form of Ciaran rode in its shadow. The pipers set up a thin wild crying, and the mass of men was suddenly in motion, coming down on Kushat like a thunderbolt.

Stark said to Balin, “Don’t wait too long, friend. Remember there is a second battle to be fought.”

“I know,” said Balin. “I know.” His face was agonized, watching the death of his city. He had not yet found occasion to flesh his blade.

The occasion came swiftly.

A ladder banged against the stones only a few feet away. Men came leaping up the rungs, fierce-eyed clansmen out to avenge their fallen brothers and wipe out the defeat they had suffered that morning. Stark was at the ladderhead to greet them, with a spear. He spitted two men through with it and lost it as the second one fell with the point jammed in his breastbone. A third man came over the parapet. Stark received him into his arms.

Balin stood frozen, his borrowed sword half raised. He saw Stark hurl the warrior bodily off the Wall and heard the cry as he fell, and he saw Stark’s face as he grasped the ladder and shoved it outward. There were more screams. Then there were more ladders and more red-haired men, and Stark had found a sword and was using it. Balin smelled the blood, and suddenly he was shaken with the immediacy of it, the physical closeness of an enemy come to slaughter him and destroy everything he loved. A fever burned through him. He moved forward and began to chop at the heads that appeared over the Wall. But it was as Stark had said, and at first he found that it was easier if he did not look too closely into their faces. Because of this one of them got under his uncertain guard and almost gutted him. After that he had no more difficulty.

Things had become so hot and confused now that the officers had lost control and men fought wherever they wished and could. And there was fighting in plenty for all, but it did not last long. The barbarians gained the Wall in three places, lost it in two and then regained it in one, and from these two footholds they spread inward along the ledges, rolling up the defenders, driving them back, driving them down. The fighting spread to the streets, and now all at once the ways leading back into the city were clogged with screaming women and children. Stark lost sight of Balin. He hoped that he was still alive and sensible enough to get away, but however it might be he was on his own and there was nothing Stark could do about it. So he forgot it and began to think of other things.

The great gate still held against the booming rams. Stark forced his way through to the square. The booths of the hucksters were overthrown, the wine-jars broken and the red wine spilled. Tethered beasts squealed and stamped, tired of their chafing harness and driven wild by the shouting and the smell of blood. The dead were heaped high where they had fallen from above. The last of the defense was here, soldiers and citizens forming a hollow square more or less by instinct, trying to guard their threatened flanks and their front, which was the gate, all at the same time. The deep thunder of the rams shook the very stones under them. The iron-sheathed timbers of the gate gave back an answering scream, and toward the end all other sounds grew hushed. The nobles had come down off the Wall. They mounted and sat waiting.

There were fewer of them now. Their bright armor was dented and stained, and their faces had a pallor on them. Still they held themselves erect and arranged their garments and saw that the blazons on their shields were clean of blood. Stark saw Rogain. His scholar’s hands were soft, but they did not tremble.

There was one last hammer-stroke of the rams. With a bitter shriek the weakened bolts tore out and the great gate was broken through.

The nobles of Kushat made their first, and final, charge.

As soldiers they went up against the riders of Mekh, and as soldiers they held them until they were cut down. The few who survived were borne back into the square like pebbles on the forefront of an avalanche. And first through the gates came the winged battle-mask of the Lord Ciaran.

There were many beasts tied among the ruined stalls with no riders to claim them. Stark mounted the nearest one and cut it free. Where the press was thickest, there was the man in black armor, riding like a god, and the sable axe drank life wherever it hewed. Stark’s eyes shone with a strange cold light. The talisman was gone, the fate of Kushat was nothing to him. He was a free man. He struck his heels hard into the scaly flanks and the beast plunged forward.

It was strong, and frightened beyond fear. It bit and trampled, and Stark cut a path through the barbarians with the long sword, and presently above the din he shouted, “Ciaran!”

The black mask turned toward him. “Stark.”

He spurred the beast again. “I claim my sword-right, bastard!”

The remembered voice spoke from behind the barred slot. “Claim it, then!” The black axe swept a circle, warning friend and foe alike that this was a single combat. And all at once they two were alone in a little space at the heart of the battle.

Their mounts shocked together. The axe came down in a whistling curve, and the red swordblade flashed to meet it. There was a ringing clash of metal, and the blade was shattered and the axe fallen to the ground.

There was a strange sound from the tribesmen. Stark ignored it. He spurred his mount ruthlessly, pressing in.

Ciaran reached for his sword, but his hand was numbed by the force of the blow and lacked its usual split-second cunning. The hilt of Stark’s weapon, still clutched in his own numb grip and swung viciously by the full weight of his arm, fetched Ciaran a stunning blow on the helm so that the metal rang like a flawed bell. He reeled back in the saddle, only for a moment, but long enough. Stark grasped the war-mask and ripped it off, and got his hands around the naked throat.

He did not break that neck, as he had planned to do. And the clansmen all around the circle stopped and stared and did not move.

Stark knew now why the Lord Ciaran had never shown his face.

The throat he held was white and strong, and his hands around it were buried in a mane of black hair that fell down over the shirt of mail. A red mouth passionate with fury, wonderful curving bone under sculptured flesh, eyes fierce and proud and tameless as the eyes of a young eagle. A splendid face, but never on any of the nine worlds of the sun could it have been the face of a man.

In that moment of amazement, she was quicker than he.

There was nothing to warn him, no least flicker of expression. Her two fists came up together between his outstretched arms and caught him under the jaw with a force that nearly snapped his neck. He fell backward out of the saddle and lay sprawled on the bloody stones, and for a moment the sun went out.

The woman wheeled her mount. Bending low, she caught up the axe from where it had fallen and faced her chieftains and her warriors, who were as dazed as Stark.

“I have led you well,” she said. “I have taken you Kushat. Will any man dispute me?”

They knew the axe, if they did not know her. They looked from side to side uneasily, completely at a loss. Stark, lying on the ground, saw her through a wavering haze. She seemed to tower against the sky in her black mail, with her dark hair blowing. And he felt a strange pang deep within him, a kind of chill foreknowledge, and the smell of blood rose thick and strong from the stones.

The nobles of Kushat chose that moment to charge. This strange unmasking of the Mekhish lord had given them time to rally their remnants together, and now they thought that the gods had wrought a miracle at last to help them. They found hope, where they had lost everything but courage.

“A woman!” they cried. “A strumpet. A drab of the camps. A woman!”

They howled it like an epithet, and tore into the barbarians.

She who had been the Lord Ciaran drove the spurs in deep, so that the beast leaped forward screaming. She went, and did not look once to see if any had followed, in among the men of Kushat. The great axe rose and fell.

She killed three and left two others bleeding on the stones. And still she did not look back.

The clansmen found their tongues.

“Ciaran! Ciaran! Ciaran!”

The crashing shout drowned out the sound of battle. As one man they turned and followed her. These tall wild children that she led could see only two choices, to slay her out of hand or to worship her, and they had chosen to worship. From here on they would follow her anywhere she led, with a kind of devotion different from and more powerful than any they could have given to a man—so long as she did nothing to tarnish the image they had of her, as a goddess.

Stark almost laughed. Instead of killing Ciaran, he had succeeded in giving her power and freedom she had never had before. Now nothing short of death could stop her.

Very well, he thought, in some dark corner of his mind. Very well, if that is the way the thread is woven.

Feet trampled him, kicked him, stumbled over him. Men were fighting above him, and the padded hoofs of beasts came stamping toward him. His head cleared with a panic rush. He got his knees under him and started to rise, and the movement attracted the attention of a warrior who must have thought he was dead, judging from the expression of surprise. He yelled and started the lunge that was meant to run Stark through, and then suddenly he dropped down flat as an old sack, with the back of his neck shorn through, and somebody was telling Stark bitterly, “Pick up his sword, damn it, pick up his sword, I can’t hold them all off alone.”

It was Lugh, filthy, battered, bleeding, and a hundred years older than he had been the last time Stark saw him. Stark bent quickly and caught up the sword. He stood beside Lugh and they fought together, moving with the flow of the fight, which was becoming a rout so swiftly that before they knew it they had been carried out of the square. Here in the narrow, crooked streets, the press of refugees was simply too great. Clots of men formed like corks, bottling up the ways, and the barbarians cut them down happily at leisure. Stark grunted. “There’s no profit in this. Can we get clear?”

“What matter?” said Lugh. “We might as well die here as anywhere.”

Stark said, “There is a second line of battle, if you’d rather fight than die.”

Lugh looked at him out of haggard eyes, a man’s eyes where only a few hours ago they had been the eyes of a petulant boy. “Where, Stark? Where? The city is lost.”

“But another thing has been found.” The barbarians held all the streets under the Wall now. There was no way back to the places Balin had shown him. He took Lugh sharply by the shoulder. “If you can point me the way to the Quarter of the Blessed, I’ll show you.”

Lugh looked at him for a moment more. They were hemmed in by the press of people, jammed against the cold stone of the buildings. Lugh shook his head. “I can point the way, but we must still go over or through this mob.”

Stark nodded. The walls were solid, and in any case one street would be no better than another. The roofs were a blind alley, and the houses traps. “We’ll go through, then. Stick close.”

He began to forge his way by main strength through the press, being perfectly ruthless about it, as he thought that very quickly now Ciaran of Mekh would be looking for him. She—it still came very strangely to think of Ciaran as “she"—would have killed him when he challenged her because no leader could violate the customs of single combat, but he knew that she would vastly prefer to have him alive. There was still that matter of the talisman. Only the shock of the unmasking and the subsequent necessities of battle had saved him in the square. He moved faster and harder the more he thought about it. Men cursed and struck at him, but he was bigger and stronger than most of them, and a little more coherently desperate, and with Lugh to back him up he found himself before too long at the other side of the jam, where the press began to thin out into streams of people blindly running.

Stark ran too, but not blindly, with Lugh coming at a sort of loose-jointed weary gallop beside him. They passed through the gate of the Thieves’ Quarter, where they had passed before on their way to the King City. The streets of the artisans had in them only the first stirrings of chaos. Mostly the shops were shuttered, the houses quiet. The folk had left them to watch the fighting, and now the buildings stood in the winter sunlight as peacefully as on a holiday afternoon.

Lugh sobbed, an abrupt, harsh sound. “They betrayed us,” he said. “They lied.”

“About the talisman? Yes.”

“They lied!” A pause. Their feet rang on the paving stones. “But that wasn’t the worst. They were fools, Stark. Idiots!”

“Fools are plentiful everywhere. A man has to learn to think for himself.”

“They’re dead,” said Lugh vindictively. “They were paid for their folly.”

“Fools generally are. Did they die well?”

“Most of them. Even Old Sowbelly. But what good is courage at the last minute, when you’ve already thrown everything away?”

“Every man has to answer that question for himself,” Stark said, looking back. People were pouring through the gate now, and over the low wall. Over their heads he saw mounted men, forging their way in a tight group through the refugees. There were eight or nine of them and they looked as though they were hunting for something. “You were satisfied well enough with your leaders yesterday, so it might be said that you deserved them. Now let’s drop the subject and think about staying alive.” He shoved Lugh bodily aside into a transverse street. “Which way to the Quarter of the Blessed?”

Lugh opened his mouth, shut it again hard, and then made a wry gesture. “I can’t argue with that,” he said. “This way.” He started to walk.

“Faster,” said Stark. “Ciaran’s riders are on the hunt.”

They ran, looking frequently over their shoulders.

“She won’t forgive you,” Lugh said, and swore. “What a shame to us, to be defeated by a woman!”

Stark said, “Kushat has been taken by a warrior, and never forget it.”

The street had curved and twisted, shutting off the view of the main avenue, but Stark’s quick ears caught the sound of riders coming, the feet of the beasts making a soft heavy thudding as they ran. He caught Lugh and pulled him into an alley that led between the buildings, no more than three feet wide. They fled along it and into a mews behind the crumbling rear premises of the street, and Stark realized that most of these buildings had been abandoned long ago. The windows gaped and walls had spilled their carefully-cut blocks into the mews, where they were drifted over with dust and the wind-blown sloughings of a city. The sounds of war and death seemed suddenly very far away.

“How much farther?” Stark asked.

“I don’t know… not much farther, I think.”

They floundered, slipping and scrambling over the debris, their flanks heaving. And then the mews ended in a blank wall some eight feet high, and Lugh said, “There. On the other side.”