Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn 4 Darkbridge

by Adam Corby

  ‘Certainly, your majesty.’

  ‘And Kiva, before you go, tell me – how goes it with Ara-Karn?’

  The lovely red-haired woman lowered her long, darkened eyes. ‘Your majesty, I do not like to say. He has been good to me, for reasons only he knows, and so I should be grateful and loyal to him now. But there are strange tales the merchants bring us of what goes on the Black Citadel.’

  * * *

  That sleep, encamped on a high flattened hill in the cold, snow-flecked wilderness near the dusky border, Allissál drank wine and tended her little fire, and thought again of what the chieftainess of Orn had told her. There was no doubt of it, that one had been a superb lady of the couch. Allissál lifted her head and drew the warm, hooded hunting-cloak about her slim shoulders, and looked northward. Even more than after finding Emsha’s stiff body upon her or hearing Kis Halá’s death-struggles in the cold oily waters, she felt alone in the world.

  XIII

  The Lady of the Sword

  IT HAD BEGUN LIFE as a fortress. Elna himself ordered the building of its gates. It had grown into a town, a city, and then a city-state rich with prosperous merchants who traded with the barbarians of the far North, and for cheap trinkets took possession of priceless raw goods and bandar-skins to sell at staggering profit to the civilized cities. And then it had fallen beneath a shadow, the shadow of Ara-Karn.

  Now the haunted ruins of Gerso in the Pass of Gerso had become a memorial and a shrine to his dark worship.

  None lived there now. But from a score of cities in the North, and from every village and tribe in the far North, streamed men and women to look with awe upon the Conqueror’s first footprint on the world.

  Many came, and not all with pretty things to mutter about the Conqueror, to the Gray Oak.

  The Gray Oak stood in a small hollow just outside the broken remnants of the gates. The tree rose majestic and fearless in the winds of the pass. It was dead and no leaves sprang from its branches, but when the storms of winter howled down through the pass, and broke trees just as great, no branch cracked or fell from the Gray Oak. No snow gathered on its branches or the sere dead circle of brown grass that surrounded it; no drop of rain could touch it. And it was said that the light of Goddess never fell upon that place.

  Deep paths were worn down the valleys of the pass and up from the city ruins, to the circle about the Gray Oak. Many worshipers gathered there at all seasons of the year. They came to look upon the tree and what the tree embraced within its breast. The worshipers left offerings of flowers, green boughs, twigs of evergreen. They brought their infants there, and blessed them in its presence.

  There were no paths worn within the dead circle. Every blade of withered grass stood as it had on that fateful pass when the city fell, and the Conquerer here had wrought one of his signal triumphs. It was whispered that a curse lay upon the spot, and no living thing might endure to enter there.

  Mostly it was women who came. They were worshipers of Goddess from the barbarians and the civilized cities both. They came to offer what they could, to the body caught in the Gray Oak’s embrace.

  One winter, a woman came up out of the North, and followed the pilgrims’ road through the blackened walls of Gerso. She wore rags and a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg. The woman wore the hood over her head, masking her features.

  There was something about the woman that made the other pilgrims keep apart from her.

  She walked beneath the mountain-high pillars that had once held the gates of legend. She made her way to the Gray Oak as though reluctant to go there, unwilling, but drawn against her own desire.

  She walked about the circle three times. The hooded head did not rise, the woman in rags did not look up the tower of the tree. But its presence seemed to weigh down upon her shoulders.

  She stopped when she reached for the third time the hollow spot heaped with treasures and green offerings to the Gray Priestess.

  The woman knelt among the offerings, and faced the bole of the Gray Oak where Ara-Karn had worked his will, and there impaled the Gray Priestess, the Guardian of Gerso, upon the tree with the sword of Tont-Ornoth.

  For a long time the woman knelt there. She spoke no word and made no gesture. The other pilgrims grew nervous at her silent presence. They moved aside and made their offerings at the cross-quarters of the circle instead. When the hour of the longsleep came, they seemed glad to go among the tents clustered under the feet of the mountains.

  The woman in rags stood. She faced the tree. She stepped forward.

  Her foot, booted in animal skins and bound with leather straps, was the first to touch the grass since the Conqueror’s.

  She walked forward. Almost it seemed she walked like one in sleep or some trance, or like a priestess fulfilling an ancient ceremony.

  She reached the base of the great tree.

  Before her the bark and bole of the tree had embraced the frail, thin body, so that the form of the Gray Priestess sank half within the wood. The body had not decayed in the years since Gerso fell. The flesh was as supple as though life still coursed through it and the heart still beat. There was not even a stain of blood upon the gray linen of her robes, there where the hilt of Tont-Ornoth stood out of the chest.

  The woman in rags stretched forth her hand, and touched the age-old hilt.

  It shifted, and drew out of the body and the hard wood easily in her hand.

  The Guardian of Gerso opened her eyes.

  For a moment she looked, she the dead one, out of deeply tormented eyes, upon the woman who had come to draw the sword out of the tree. A slight breath, or wheeze, or it might have been a word, issued from the thin lips; but if it was a word, none heard it but the woman in rags.

  Then the body of the Gray Priestess crumbled into dust, which sank into the ground.

  Some few pilgrims had come forth from their tents. Some call or dream had troubled their sleep and drew them out. They stood at a distance from the dead circle; with awestruck eyes they beheld what the woman did.

  She turned, holding the sword out away from her. She saw the others and stopped. She put up the sword within the folds of the hunting-cloak, and fled up the pilgrim’s path, up the valleys of the Pass of Gerso, into the wild lands of the far North.

  Behind her the others gathered about the circle. They murmured in awe. Even those who had wakened in time to see with their own eyes how the woman had drawn the sword and given peace to the dead, even these found it hard to believe. Had it been a dream? they wondered. And yet there was the proof before them.

  Snow began to fall. It drifted gently down from Heaven. And this snow touched the branches of the Gray Oak, and gathered in soft mounds on the dead grass between its roots.

  And when dark God rose again as a thin cruel sickle from the bright horizon, the final magic appeared in the mingling of jade and golden light. For Goddess shone upon the tree, and the stalks that struggled up through the snow about the ancient oak were green. And green buds appeared on the tips of branches long thought dead.

  XIV

  Refuge

  FAR AWAY from the happenings in the cities of the world, on the Ocean of Death in the far North, a little village stood. Compare it with Tarendahardil and it would seem of no importance whatsoever. In this village were three or four score huts of logs and mud, and seven larger buildings recently begun, whose walls were made of stone.

  Women and children were there, tall, with light hair, large bones and wide, bright eyes. But there were few men to be seen, and they were small and lithe, with dark hair and eyes black like olive-stones. These men worked on the new buildings of stone and plowed the fields on the hillsides. A few women worked also in the fields, and the children went in bands into the forest, bows and long sacks slung across their shoulders. The children vanished in the dappled shade of the forest, their legs brushed by the light-green ferns. Spring had reached at last this final co
rner of the world, after a bitter winter: time to stock the storing-holes and eat fresh greens again.

  Above the sandy clearing in the center of the village one hut stood apart from the others, built of stout logs thicker than a woman’s hips, sealed with bark and mud and straw. A long veranda faced the clearing, roofed with fresh green boughs. White smoke poured from the hut’s roof-hole, filling the village with the savor of roasting meat.

  From the open doorway of that hut, a squat old woman walked on the veranda. She wore an old woolen dress with a shoulder-mantle pinned about her neck. Some women hailed her from below the sandy clearing; the old woman nodded and answered them.

  She went through the village, moving slowly as though to soothe the ache out of her bones. A band of merchants had arrived and were unloading their packs and rich bundles from the backs of their ponies in the clearing. With boisterous cries the merchants called the women of the village, displaying their wares. Other women came running, but the old woman went her way.

  At the edge of the village she looked out over the Ocean of Death. There for generations beyond memory the village had sent their dead in simple little barges. The stony beach was littered with fishing boats, most in ruins. Away from the fishing boats a marble shelter stood above the beach, six ornate columns with a roof tiles. Inside the shelter a death-barge hung on silk-rope lines. The beach was empty of people, all the women and their children having been drawn by the call of the merchants. But one woman, a stranger, stood in the shadow of the marble shelter, staring upon the death-barge.

  It was a death-barge of curious workmanship. The rim was a band of hammered gold. On the prow there was a sunburst of gold half-eaten by the sea, and along the sides were ornate friezes of oddly-angled charactery impossible to make out, and stylized figures writhing in odd postures.

  The woman looked at it as if awed by the barge’s frailty and seeming antiquity. She was not of the tribes, but she was young, tall, and in rags and a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a spider. The rags were open below the long throat, baring most of the bosom; before it the women was held a long jade-handled knife of workmanship as curious as that of the barge.

  ‘Are you a pilgrim, child?’

  The stranger woman started. For a moment she stared at the old barbarian women, saying nothing; then thrust the dagger into her rags.

  ‘A pilgrim, yes.’ She spoke the tongue of the far North well for one born below the Spine. ‘Did he – did Ara-Karn truly cross in this?’

  ‘This very barge, to come to land upon this very spot,’ the older woman answered. ‘Kuln-Holn drew it ashore despite all the fear in his heart. We knew not what to make of him then. My man was the one to name him; yet he never received naming-gift.’ Heavily the bosom of the old woman rose and fell. ‘Well, and there was nothing else to do. I was afraid of him, but all the same I helped spare him, and so became his tool.’

  She stooped and placed beneath the shrine the basket she had brought. In the basket were vessels of food, drink and clothing. In the straw-mixed sand around it were many other offerings. The tribeswoman seemed even older now, standing with her broad shoulders bowed as if in prayer. Strands of gray hair slipped from the shoulder-mantle and fluttered in the wind. She stooped lower, raised herself, and stepped back.

  ‘Of course the poor take most of it, and birds eat the rest,’ she said. ‘But still I have hope that Goddess will see that the offering has been made, and provide for my husband, who is unvoyaged. I am now the leader of this tribe in the name of the Warlord. I am called Hertha-Toll. Won’t you come with me, child?’

  Silently they walked up from the beach. The older woman leaned a little on the arm of the younger when it came time to mount the slope just at the edge of the beach.

  ‘My husband was Gundoen Strong-In-Girth,’ the old woman said. ‘Many children I bore him, but none lived to reach the rites of blood and spear. And even so he loved me. He might have taken any of his concubines to wife, but would not. He was a hunter, a spearman, and chief over all our tribe, but he loved to wrestle best of all. And never once, not even in his youth, was he beaten, save only by Ara-Karn who fought with more than strength. What a fighter my husband was! But he perished in the wars, in one of the cities of the Southron folk. They would not tell me how he died. They only said he arose like the smoke of a feast-fire out of his own body and soared to the Happy Shores under the guidance of Ara-Karn himself. That is what they told me. But I know the truth of it, even if they do not.’

  They reached the edge of the sandy clearing, where the women of the tribe clustered around the merchants’ wares. The women shouted as they tried to outbid one another, waving hands full of gold above their heads. Hertha-Toll tugged at the younger woman’s sleeve and led her past smaller, poorer huts.

  ‘Yes, he thought it was only a joke when it began,’ Hertha-Toll said. ‘A way to mock poor Kuln-Holn. Kuln-Holn was the man who readied our dead and took the barges out, and he was filled with the fear of Goddess and the promise of great things to come. You know, he was the only one who truly in his heart believed that man to be a god.’

  They passed by a charred ruin. ‘That was Kuln-Holn’s hut. He gave it to his daughter and her husband and went away to serve that man. I always liked Turin Tim, she was a hard-working girl. When the word came that her man had been killed, she took to drinking the fiery southern wine. One pass her hut burned to the ground: she was dead, and her little boy too. No one knew what happened. They called it the work of the immortals, but that was ever the way with ignorant folk.’

  The green branches cast webwork shadows over them, and the salt tang of the sea vied with the savor of the roasting meat. Above them on the hillside the dark-haired men labored to raise the long, gaunt walls of stone of the new buildings.

  ‘As you can see, ours is now a wealthy tribe. They bring us robes of silk, golden goblets, wines and linens. We are growing fat as Southrons, as poor Alli’s jest once went. Still, it does not suit us. We were not born for riches. The younger girls hardly know what work is anymore. We have too many slaves. Once we despised slaves – now we rely on them. Well, maybe it is just my age showing. Surely it is lonely here without the men, I cannot blame the younger women, whose blood is hotter. And Kuln-Holn foresaw it all. He prophesied an age of peace and fatness, and here it is come already. Myself I was not so wise, seeing death and burnings but not beyond.

  ‘Ara-Karn has given us much,’ she said suddenly, bitterly. ‘Even at his price. Do you know, my dear, that this winter, only six children died of hunger. Think of that: only six dead in the whole village.’

  They stood now before the steps leading up into the great hut of Tont Ornoth. Here of a sudden the nameless woman hesitated, and seemed not to want to go on. But the dead chief’s wife held her by the arm and spoke soothingly to her, the way a hunter speaks to a bear, an untamed hound, or an unbroken pony.

  ‘Please, child,’ she said, ‘enter and guest with me. There will be a goodly meal for you and a soft dimplace, and unworn linens from southern looms. And we will bathe you with cleansing oils. It grows lonely here now, and I should be glad of the company. Why do you draw back? None will harm you or speak words against you here. There are no wars in this place. Come, and I will tell you of my husband and, if you like, of Ara-Karn.’ In the end the stranger ceased resisting, and let herself be drawn into the darkness of the smoky hut.

  And so it came to pass even as Kuln-Holn had foretold, that the Empress of Tarendahardil the City Over the World came as a shabby beggar to the tribe that had fostered Ara-Karn.

  XV

  The Passing of the Queen

  LATER, when the fires burned low and the voices fell still, the women sought their dimplaces. On the wide veranda overlooking the clearing Allissál stood alone.

  The sleepy village was quiet at that hour. The wives, mothers and children of the men who had conquered all the South and North lay now alone on deep furs. A
llissál had eaten of their food, but had neither bathed nor accepted the fine linens Hertha-Toll had offered her. She came out of the hut as she entered it. She leaned against one of the support-pillars. The rags slid down her arm and she saw the bruises on her wrist. After all these months she still bore his mark.

  She had ridden upland from Tezmon, away from Elna’s Sea. The snows fell lightly on the stony highlands, revealing the tracks of the game she hunted. She had drifted with neither aim nor purpose, avoiding all towns and cities, meeting with no one, lost in these lands where she had never been before. Pure and purifying, the Goddess-filled blinding cold swirled around her, the lone traveler on the hills.

  She broke the sword and her pony died, and so on foot, using only the bow, she wandered ever Northward, pursuing the game-tracks in the retreating snows. At length she came with the white desert to the skirts of a high wall of mountains running with the moon. This wall she followed and so, at length, reached a great gap in the mountains. By then the snow had retreated above her, where she had not the strength to go.

  Wondering, she descended into the gap and walked among fields of stones and gray dead earth. Then she knew she stood in the Pass of Gerso, and that beyond her the gap opened upon the wild lands where once Elna had penned the barbarians. She had looked upon the Gray Oak and the Gray Priestess, and there did a thing she found so hard to believe, it now abode within her memory like a tale Emsha had told her when she was small. It was a memory she did not trust, for it bore within it the seed of a duty she would never accept. So she had fled from the gaping faces of the other pilgrims, she had hidden the sword away, and she had wandered far from the broad paths among the forests of the wilderness.

  The trees were already greening on the far side, when she fell in with a band of merchants and asked the way to Gundoen’s tribe.

  Now dark clouds gathered from the Ocean of the Dead. A storm was stirring, the last blow of winter. Lights sparked in the clouds in distant silence. It struck Allissál as somehow beautiful to know herself the sole spectator of that approaching fury.