A woman! And 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 went over backward, clean out of the saddle, and lay sprawled on the bloody stones, half stunned, the wind knocked out of him.
The woman wheeled her mount. Bending low, she took up the axe from where it had fallen, and faced 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, and Stark, still gasping on the ground, thought that he had never seen anything as proud and beautiful as she was then in her black mail, with her bright hair blowing and her glance like blue lightning.
The nobles of Kushat chose that moment to charge. This strange unmasking of the Mekhish lord had given them time to rally, and now they thought that the Gods had wrought a miracle to help them. They found hope, where they had lost everything but courage.
"A wench!" they cried. "A strumpet 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 to see if any had followed, in among the men of Kushat. And the great axe rose and fell, and rose again.
She killed three, and left two others bleeding on the stones, and not once did she look back.
The clansmen found their tongues.
"Ciaran! Ciaran!"
The crashing shout drowned out the sound of battle. As one man, they turned and followed her.
Stark, scrambling for his life underfoot, could not forbear smiling. Their childlike minds could see only two alternatives--to slay her out of hand, or to worship her. They had chosen to worship. He thought the bards would be singing of the Lord Ciaran of Mekh as long as there were men to listen.
He managed to take cover behind a wrecked booth, and presently make his way out of the square. They had forgotten him, for the moment. He did not wish to wait, just then, until they--or she--remembered.
She.
He still did not believe it, quite. He touched the bruise under his jaw where she had struck him, and thought of the lithe, swift strength of her, and the way she had ridden alone into battle. He remembered the death of Thord, and how she had kept her red wolves tamed, and he was filled with wonder, and a deep excitement.
He remembered what she had said to him once--We are of one blood, though we be strangers.
He laughed, silently, and his eyes were very bright.
The tide of war had rolled on toward the King City, where from the sound of it there was hot fighting around the castle. Eddies of the main struggle swept shrieking through the streets, but the rat-runs under the Wall were clear. Everyone had stampeded inward, the victims with the victors close on their heels. The short northern day was almost gone.
He found a hiding place that offered reasonable safety, and settled himself to wait.
Night came, but he did not move. From the sounds that reached him, the sacking of Kushat was in full swing. They were looting the richer streets first. Their upraised voices were thick with wine, and mingled with the cries of women. The reflection of many fires tinged the sky.
By midnight the sounds began to slacken, and by the second hour after the city slept, drugged with wine and blood and the weariness of battle. Stark went silently out into the streets, toward the King City.
According to the immemorial pattern of Martian city-states, the castles of the king and the noble families were clustered together in solitary grandeur. Many of the towers were fallen now, the great halls open to the sky. Time had crushed the grandeur that had been Kushat, more fatally than the boots of any conqueror.
In the house of the king, the flamboys guttered low and the chieftains of Mekh slept with their weary pipers among the benches of the banquet hall. In the niches of the tall, carved portal, the guards nodded over their spears. They, too, had fought that day. Even so, Stark did not go near them.
Shivering slightly in the bitter wind, he followed the bulk of the massive walls until he found a postern door, half open as some kitchen knave had left it in his flight. Stark entered, moving like a shadow.
The passageway was empty, dimly lighted by a single torch. A stairway branched off from it, and he climbed that, picking his way by guess and his memories of similar castles he had seen in the past.
He emerged into a narrow hall, obviously for the use of servants. A tapestry closed the end, stirring in the chill draught that blew along the floor. He peered around it, and saw a massive, vaulted corridor, the stone walls panelled in wood much split and blackened by time, but still showing forth the wonderful carvings of beasts and men, larger than life and overlaid with gold and bright enamel.
From the corridor a single doorway opened--and Otar slept before it, curled on a pallet like a dog.
Stark went back down the narrow hall. He was sure that there must be a back entrance to the king's chambers, and he found the little door he was looking for.
From there on was darkness. He felt his way, stepping with infinite caution, and presently there was a faint gleam of light filtering around the edges of another curtain of heavy tapestry.
He crept toward it, and heard a man's slow breathing on the other side.
He drew the curtain back, a careful inch. The man was sprawled on a bench athwart the door. He slept the honest sleep of exhaustion, his sword in his hand, the stains of his day's work still upon him. He was alone in the small room. A door in the farther wall was closed.
Stark hit him, and caught the sword before it fell. The man grunted once and became utterly relaxed. Stark bound him with his own harness and shoved a gag in his mouth, and went on, through the door in the opposite wall.
The room beyond was large and high and full of shadows. A fire burned low on the hearth, and the uncertain light showed dimly the hangings and the rich stuffs that carpeted the floor, and the dark, sparse shapes of furniture.
Stark made out the lattice-work of a covered bed, let into the wall after the northern fashion.
She was there, sleeping, her red-gold hair the colour of the flames.
He stood a moment, watching her, and then, as though she sensed his presence, she stirred and opened her eyes.
She did not cry out. He had known that she would not. There was no fear in her. She said, with a kind of wry humor, "I will have a word with my guards about this."
She flung aside the covering and rose. She was almost as tall as he, white-skinned and very straight. He noted the long thighs, the narrow loins and magnificent shoulders, the small virginal breasts. She moved as a man moves, without coquetry. A long furred gown, that Stark guessed had lately graced the shoulders of the king, lay over a chair. She put it on.
"Well, wild man?"
"I have come to warn you." He hesitated over her name, and she said,
"My mother named me Ciara, if that seems better to you." She gave him her falcon's glance. "I could have slain you in the square, but now I think you did me a service. The truth would have come out sometime--better then, when they had no time to think about it." She laughed. "They will follow me now, over the edge of the world, if I ask them."
Stark said slowly, "Even beyond the Gates of Death?"
"Certainly, there. Above all, there!"
She turned to one of the tall windows and looked out at the cliffs and the high notch of the pass, touched with greenish silver by the little moons.
"Ban Cruach was a great king. He came out of nowhere to rule the Norlands with a rod of iron, and men speak of him still as half a god. Where did he get his power, if not from beyond the Gates of Death? Why did he go back there at the end of his days, if not to hide away his secret? Why did he build Kushat to guard the pass forever, if not to hoard that power out of reach of all the other nations of Mars?
"Yes, Stark. My men will follow me. And if they do not, I will go alone."
"You are not Ban Cruach. Nor am I." He took her by the shoulders. "Listen, Ciara. You're already king in the Norlands, and half a legend as you stand. Be content."
"Content!" Her face was close to his, and he saw the blaze of it, the white intensity of ambition and an iron pride. "Are you content?" she asked him. "Have you ever been content?"
He smiled. "For strangers, we do know each other well. No. But the spurs are not so deep in me."
"The wind and the fire. One spends its strength in wandering, the other devours. But one can help the other. I made you an offer once, and you said you would not bargain unless you could look into my eyes. Look now!"
He did, and his hands upon her shoulders trembled.
"No," he said harshly. "You're a fool, Ciara. Would you be as Otar, mad with what you have seen?"
"Otar is an old man, and likely crazed before he crossed the mountains. Besides--I am not Otar."
Stark said somberly, "Even the bravest may break. Ban Cruach himself...."
She must have seen the shadow of that horror in his eyes, for he felt her body tense.
"What of Ban Cruach? What do you know, Stark? Tell me!"
He was silent, and she went from him angrily.
"You have the talisman," she said. "That I am sure of. And if need be, I will flay you alive to get it!" She faced him across the room. "But whether I get it or not, I will go through the Gates of Death. I must wait, now, until after the thaw. The warm wind will blow soon, and the gorges will be running full. But afterward, I will go, and no talk of fears and demons will stop me."
She began to pace the room with long strides, and the full skirts of the gown made a subtle whispering about her.
"You do not know," she said, in a low and bitter voice. "I was a girl-child, without a name. By the time I could walk, I was a servant in the house of my grandfather. The two things that kept me living were pride and hate. 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. I knew even then that only force would free me. And my father was a king's son, a good man of his hands. His blood was strong in me. I learned."
She held her head very high. She had earned the right to hold it so. She finished quietly,
"I have come a long way. I will not turn back now."
"Ciara." Stark came and stood before her. "I am talking to you as a fighting man, an equal. There may be power behind the Gates of Death, I do not know. But this I have seen--madness, horror, an evil that is beyond our understanding.
"I think you will not accuse me of cowardice. And yet I would not go into that pass for all the power of all the kings of Mars!"
Once started, he could not stop. The full force of that dark vision of the talisman swept over him again in memory. He came closer to her, driven by the need to make her understand.
"Yes, I have the talisman! And I have had a taste of its purpose. I think Ban Cruach left it as a warning, so that none would follow him. I have seen the temples and the palaces glitter in the ice. I have seen the Gates of Death--not with my own eyes, Ciara, but with his. With the eyes and the memories of Ban Cruach!"
He had caught her again, his hands strong on her strong arms.
"Will you believe me, or must you see for yourself--the dreadful things that walk those buried streets, the shapes that rise from nowhere in the mists of the pass?"
Her gaze burned into his. Her breath was hot and sweet upon his lips, and she was like a sword between his hands, shining and unafraid.
"Give me the talisman. Let me see!"
He answered furiously, "You are mad. As mad as Otar." And he kissed her, in a rage, in a panic lest all that beauty be destroyed--a kiss as brutal as a blow, that left him shaken.
She backed away slowly, one step, and he thought she would have killed him. He said heavily:
"If you will see, you will. The thing is here."
He opened the boss and laid the crystal in her outstretched hand. He did not meet her eyes.
"Sit down. Hold the flat side against your brow."
She sat, in a great chair of carven wood. Stark noticed that her hand was unsteady, her face the colour of white ash. He was glad she did not have the axe where she could reach it. She did not play at anger.
For a long moment she studied the intricate lens, the incredible depository of a man's mind. Then she raised it slowly to her forehead.
He saw her grow rigid in the chair. How long he watched beside her he never knew. Seconds, an eternity. He saw her eyes turn blank and strange, and a shadow came into her face, changing it subtly, altering the lines, so that it seemed almost a stranger was peering through her flesh.
All at once, in a voice that was not her own, she cried out terribly, "Oh gods of Mars!"
The talisman dropped rolling to the floor, and Ciara fell forward into Stark's arms.
He thought at first that she was dead. He carried her to the bed, in an agony of fear that surprised him with its violence, and laid her down, and put his hand over her heart.
It was beating strongly. Relief that was almost a sickness swept over him. He turned, searching vaguely for wine, and saw the talisman. He picked it up and put it back inside the boss. A jewelled flagon stood on a table across the room. He took it and started back, and then, abruptly, there was a wild clamor in the hall outside and Otar was shouting Ciara's name, pounding on the door.
It was not barred. In another moment they would burst through, and he knew that they would not stop to enquire what he was doing there.
He dropped the flagon and went out swiftly, the way he had come. The guard was still unconscious. In the narrow hall beyond, Stark hesitated. A woman's voice was rising high above the tumult in the main corridor, and he thought he recognized it.
He went to the tapestry curtain and looked for the second time around its edge.
The lofty space was full of men, newly wakened from their heavy sleep and as nervous as so many bears. Thanis struggled in the grip of two of them. Her scarlet kirtle was torn, her hair flying in wild elf-locks, and her face was the face of a mad thing. The whole story of the doom of Kushat was written large upon it.
She screamed again and again, and would not be silenced.
"Tell her, the witch that leads you! Tell her that she is already doomed to death, with all her army!"
Otar opened up the door of Ciara's room.
Thanis surged forward. She must have fled through all that castle before she was caught, and Stark's heart ached for her.
"You!" she shrieked through the doorway, and poured out all the filth of the quarter upon Ciara's name. "Balin has gone to bring doom upon you! He will open wide the Gates of Death, and then you will die!--die!--die!"
Stark felt the shock of a terrible dread, as he let the curtain fall. Mad with hatred against conquerors, Balin had fulfilled his raging promise and had gone to fling open the Gates of Death.
Remembering his nightmare vision of the shining, evil ones whom Ban Cruach had long ago prisoned beyond those gates, Stark felt a sickness grow within him as he went down the stair and out the postern door.
It was almost dawn. He looked up at the brooding cliffs, and it seemed to him that the wind in the pass had a sound of laughter that mocked his growing dread.
He knew what he must do, if an ancient, mysterious horror was not to be released upon Kushat.
I may still catch Balin before he has gone too far! If I don't--
He dared not think of that. He began to walk very swiftly through the night streets, toward the distant, towering Gates of Death.
