Several more trails came into it from the east, and it widened with each one until it became almost a road. Stark scouted ahead at each bend, distrusting what might lie beyond.
Even so, he smelled the clearing long before he saw it.
"Carrion," he said. "A lot of it. And ripe."
Ashton grunted. "It would ripen quickly in this climate."
They went along the green-shadowed tunnel under the trees, stepping softly. Stark could hear voices clashing and quarreling. The voices of scavengers. When they came to the end of the road and saw the temple and the sacred grove, the carrion-eaters were the only things that moved there.
The temple was small and exquisite, built of wood wonderfully carved and gilded, but the ceremonies depicted in those carvings that were still whole were unpleasant in the extreme. The temple had been seared with fire and its ivory doors were shattered. The bodies of priests and servants, or the rags of them, were strewn across the steps and the ground below as if they had stood there together in a posture of defense. The tongue of fire had licked them, too. "Penkawr-Che's work."
"Off-world work, anyway. Since we're not looking for treasure, perhaps they've left something we can use." The scavengers flapped and growled, undisturbed. The sacred grove—many small trees grown together in a tangle, or a single tree monstrously multiplied—drooped languidly in the heat. The trunks were smooth and pale, lovely shapes of alabaster trailing graceful branches with feathery leaves.
The temple and grove appeared desolate, peaceful with the peace of death. And yet Stark did not move out of the shelter of the jungle. "Something?"
"I don't know." He smiled briefly. "I've grown too dependent on the hounds. Stay close."
He moved out across the compound, past the sacred grove. Sunlight struck across the alabaster trunks, showing veins of a darker shade. In the shadows between them he glimpsed pale forms that were not trees, held spiderlike in a webbed embrace of branches. He saw a girl's long dark hair. But nothing within the grove stirred or spoke.
"It's true, then," he said.
"What is?"
"The tale I heard in the north, that in this country the trees eat men." He looked at the scattered human carrion by the temple, amid singed shreds of priestly robes. "I don't feel quite so much pity for them as I did."
" 'And every tree holy with human blood,' " said Ashton, and held his nose. "Let's get on with it."
They skirted the grove, keeping well out of reach of the branches. Beyond it they came into the open space before the temple, where the scavengers fed and marks were on the ground to show where a hopper had landed. The ivory doors of the temple hung open onto darkness.
The scavengers hopped and scuttered away, protesting. Then, suddenly, in the midst of that raucous screeching came another voice, wilder, higher, more demented. A man ran out of the temple door and down the steps. He came in a headlong rush, naked, smeared with ashes, streaked with his own blood where he had gashed his flesh, and he held in his hands a great, heavy sword with a butcher's blade.
"Murderers!" he screamed. "Demons!" And he raised the sword high.
Stark thrust Ashton aside. He caught up a morsel of carrion from the littered ground, a gnawed skull, and he hurled it fair in the man's face so that he had to bring his arms down to shield himself. He broke stride and Stark ran at him. The man slashed out with the blade. Stark twisted in mid-leap and came in at him from the side, swinging a deadly hand that took the man under the ear. There was a dry, sharp, snapping sound and the man went down and did not move again. Stark pulled the sword out from under his body.
No one else was in the temple, nor in the living quarters behind it. They found clothing, light loose things more suited to the climate than the off-world garments they wore, and far less conspicuous. Among these were wide hats of woven fiber, and sandals. In the kitchens they found food and took of it as much as they could carry, as well as knives and a flint-and-steel. They had no trouble finding a weapon for Ashton.
A path led from the temple compound toward the river. Following it, they came to a landing where one fine boat with a high, carved prow was moored in the place of honor and two battered old dugouts were drawn up on the bank. They left the fine boat to wait for the priests who would never come and pushed one of the dugouts into the brown water. It took them—a broad, strong current without haste.
They passed a few fishing villages, keeping always to the far side of the river. The villages were poor things and the fishermen seemed content to ignore them. Later in the afternoon, when they were in the middle of a wide reach, Stark heard a faraway faint sound and stiffened.
"Hoppers coming."
"What do we do, just carry on?"
"No. They would wonder why we weren't scared. Paddle like hell for the bank and don't lose your hat."
They paddled, churning a clumsy wake across the current.
The hoppers appeared from the west, high enough for the men in them to spot the villages and temple clearings they were looking for. They came over the river and then dropped suddenly, one behind the other, until they were almost on top of the dugout.
The downdraft hit. Stark and Ashton tumbled into the water, desperately holding the dugout to keep it from turning over and dumping everything they had.
Stark thought, They know us, they've recognized us in spite of the clothes . . .
But the hoppers, having had their little joke, swooped upward again and went their way east.
Stark and Ashton hauled themselves back into the dugout, and Ashton said, "I thought they had us."
"So did I. I wonder if they're Penkawr-Che's, or is there another ship closer by? The one that brought back Pedrallon."
"I don't know. But it's likely that ship would stay, if there are enough temples to loot."
Stark dug his paddle in. "We'll keep to the bank."
After a while he added, "If there is a ship, and if we can get to Pedrallon while it's still here, and if he's willing to help us, there might be something constructive we could do." Ashton said nothing. He waited.
"When the hoppers are away raiding," Stark said, "and there's only a skeleton crew aboard, a strong force might capture the ship and hold it long enough for us to use the deep-space communications center. It's the only hope I can see now of getting us off this planet."
"Then, let us try. Anything at all." They sent the dugout flying.
The hoppers crossed the river again at sunset, high and heading west.
Under the shadow of the bank, Stark smiled and said, "They're not Penkawr-Che's."
Hope took them down the river faster than the current.
11
In the House of the Mother, deep under the icy sparkle of the Witchfires in the far north, Kell à Marg, Skaith-Daughter, sat on the knees of the Mother and heard what her chief Diviner had seen in the great crystal Eye.
"Blood, yes," he said. "Blood, as we have seen before. Because of the off-worlder Stark, the House will be violated and some few will die. But that is not the worst."
Kell à Marg's body was slim and proud. Her white fur gleamed against the brown stone of the Mother's breast. Her eyes were large and dark, shining in the pearly light of the lamps.
"Let us hear the worst, then."
"The Mother's heartbeat slows," said the Diviner, "and the Dark Goddess moves. She is shod with ice and her mouth breathes silence. My lord Darkness walks at her right hand, and at her left is their daughter Hunger, and where they walk all is desolation."
"They have always shared this realm with the Mother," said Kell à Marg, "since the time of the Wandering. But Mother Skaith will live as long as Old Sun lives."
"Her life draws in, as his does. Has Skaith-Daughter looked out from her high windows across the Plain of Worldheart?"
"Not since the burning of the Citadel. I hate the wind."
"It would be wiser if you did so, nevertheless."
Kell à Marg looked at her chief Diviner, but he did not waver nor turn aside; and so she shrug
ged and rose from her high seat, stepping from between the Mother's arms. She called one of her sleek tiring-women to come and bring a cloak. No one else was in the hall. The Diviner had wished to give her his heavy news in private.
They walked, Kell à Marg and the Diviner and the tiring-woman, through the long corridors and winding ways of the House of the Mother, past a hundred doorways into a hundred chambers filled with the relics of vanished cities and dead races. The quiet air smelled of dust and the sweet oil of the lamps, and it smelled of time also. The labyrinth extended upward and downward and on all sides through the mountain heart, the life work of this mutant race that had turned its back deliberately to the sky. Now there were so few of the Children left that a large part of the labyrinth was abandoned, with all its treasures, to the eternal dark.
A small coldness touched Skaith-Daughter, the veriest fingertip of fear.
At length they came into a corridor where there was nothing but bare stone and a bitter draft that bent the lamp flames, and at the far end an arch of light. Kell à Marg took the cloak about her shoulders and went ahead alone.
The arch gave onto a narrow balcony, a falcon's perch far below the peaks of the Witchfires that glittered against the sky, but high above the Plain of Worldheart. Kell à Marg's body flinched from the cruelty of the wind. Hugging the cloak about her, she leaned against the rock by the high parapet and looked out across the plain.
At first, she could see nothing but the glare of Old Sun and the blinding pallor of snow, shaping a dreadful emptiness. But as she forced herself to endure this ordeal, she was able to make out details. She could see where the Harsenyi road used to run, safe from the guardian Northhounds. She could see where the permanent camp of the Harsenyi had been, from which they had served the Lords Protector and such Wandsmen as had need of them on their comings and goings to the Citadel and among the dark settlements of the High North. She could see the vast, white emptiness of the plain and the wall of the Bleak Mountains beyond it; there the Northhounds had once ranged, before the man Stark had managed somehow to subdue them to his alien will.
She could not detect that anything had greatly changed. Seasons meant nothing to her, safe in the gentle womb of the Mother, but she knew that summer was a brief and stunted interval between one winter and the next, and that even in summer there was always snow. Summer, plainly, had come and gone; nevertheless, this winter that she looked upon seemed no different than any other. The cold might be more intense, the snow deeper, but she could not be sure. The wind skirled snow-devils across the plain, mingled with plumes of steam that spurted from the Thermal Pits, so that it was difficult to tell which was snow and which was steam. Beyond the pits, on the flank of the Bleak Mountains and invisible behind its eternal curtain of mist, would be the ruins of the Citadel. Because of that mist she had never seen the Citadel—only the smoke and flame of its burning.
But she saw it now.
She saw the ruins, black and broken, through the new thinness of the mist.
It frightened her. She pressed against the parapet, studying with a new intensity the action of the fumaroles. And it seemed to her that all across the thermal field the plumes of steam were scanter than she remembered, their spurting less frequent. That same thermal field underlay the House of the Mother. The food supply depended upon its warmth and moisture. If it should grow cold, all those who dwelt within the House must perish.
Great black clouds moved over the face of Old Sun. The light dimmed. The first veils of snow began to fall on the distant peaks.
Kell à Marg shivered and left the balcony.
She did not speak until they had gone from that corridor to another place that was free from draft and where the lamp flames were burning upright, and even then she kept the cloak about her.
She sent the tiring-woman away and said to the Diviner, "How long?"
"I cannot tell you, Skaith-Daughter. Only that the end is there, and that the Mother has given you a choice."
Kell à Marg knew what that choice was, but she made him put it into words, nonetheless, in case his wisdom might be greater than hers.
"We must go back into the world and seek another place, or else stay here and prepare to die. That may take some generations, but the decision cannot wait. When the Dark Goddess establishes her rule, there will be no second choice."
Kell à Marg drew the cloak still more closely about her, and still she was cold.
On the other side of the Witchfires, below the pass of the Leaning Man, the Ironmaster of Thyra cast his own auguries. He did this in private, with only his First Apprentice to assist him, in the forge that was sacred to Strayer of the Forges. This forge was set well into the towering flank of the ruin-mound where the men of Thyra burrowed and labored and brought forth iron pigs.
From the small furnace he took a little crucible of molten metal, and while the apprentice chanted the proper words he tipped the contents of the crucible into an iron basin filled with fine sand and cold water. A tremendous steam arose, and a wild bubbling, and when all that had gone the apprentice dipped away what water was left and the Ironmaster looked at the pattern that had formed on the sand.
Looked, and crossed his hands upon the great iron pectoral he wore that was wrought in the shape of Strayer's Hammer, and bowed his head. "It is the same. There is no health in the metal. The divine strength of Strayer is gone from us."
"Will you try again, Ironmaster?"
"There is no use. We have the word of Strayer, he will not alter it. Look you. These small bright rills pointing south. Always south. But here to the north, again, the metal is twisted and dark."
The apprentice whispered, "Must we then leave Thyra?"
"We may stay," said the Ironmaster. "That choice is ours. But Strayer has gone before us. His quality is heat, the fire of the forges. He has fled before my lady Cold."
Southward from Thyra on the edge of the Dark-lands, the People of the Towers prepared themselves for winter.
The summer, always a blighted season, had been abnormally short and chill, so that the lichen-gatherers had been driven in early with a scant harvest and the hardy grasses had never come to seed. The People had faced bad winters before in their fortress-camp, where the broken towers stood around a wide circle with a faceless monument at its center. But never, they thought, had a winter come so soon as this one—with such terrible winds—and never had their beasts and their larders been so lean.
Hargoth the Corn-King and his sorcerer-priests, all narrow gray men with gray masks to cover their narrow faces from the cold, took up their ritual position. Hargoth, who worshiped the Dark Goddess but also fed Old Sun, maintaining a precarious balance between the two, spoke with his Lady. When this was done, he was silent for a long while.
Then he said, "I will cast the finger-bones of the Spring Child."
He cast them, three times, and three times, and three times.
Only Hargoth's eyes and mouth were visible behind his mask, which was marked with the stylized symbols of corn ears in a place where no corn had grown for a thousand years. Hargoth's eyes glittered and were bright with a light of madness that comes from the winter dark. His mouth spoke in jets of white vapor that blew away on the wind.
"They point south," he said. "Three tunes, and three times, and yet three times again. That way lies life and Old Sun. Here lies death and the rule of the Goddess. We must decide now which of them we shall choose." He lifted his gaze to the remote and mocking sky and cried out, "Where is our Deliverer, the star-born one who was to lead us to a better world?"
"He was a false prophet," said one of the priests who had followed Stark and Hargoth to Thyra, and survived. "The ships are gone from Skaith. The star-roads are closed to us, as they have always been."
Hargoth walked toward the Towers, where his people dwelt. Beside the monument he paused and said, "For us they are closed, but perhaps they may open for our children, or for their children. And any life is better than death."
Again he cast th
e finger-bones. And again they pointed south . . .
12
Alderyk the Fallarin perched on a rock, looking at the view and disliking it intensely.
Accustomed as he was, for a lifetime, to the cold clean northern desert, he found the steamy air of these lowlands difficult to breathe, the over-active vegetation both wasteful and repulsive. Things grew on each other's backs, so that a plant was forced under and beginning to rot almost before it ripened. A sticky, green stench always filled his nostrils, and what time his fine dark fur was not being drenched by sudden rains it was dripping disgustingly with his own sweat.
Now, stretched out before him and running away over the rim of the world, was a heaving unpleasantness called the sea.
Beside him, his friend Vaybars said, "I think perhaps we made a mistake when we decided to follow the wise woman."
Alderyk grunted, and fingered the place at his neck where his gold torque had been before he gave it to Penkawr-Che as part of Vaybars's ransom.
"At least," he said, "we're doing one thing we set out to do when we came south. We're learning a lot about this wretched world we live on."
The mercenary had led them well, after one mistake. He had attempted to betray them by leading them to a town where there was a force sufficient to overwhelm them. Gerd had stopped that, and the hounds had given the man a lesson in the folly of trying to outsmart a pack of telepaths. He had not tried again.
He had brought them by rough and relatively un-traveled ways, where the only people they met were vagabonds, or armed peasants who shut themselves up in their villages and watched them pass but did nothing to hinder them, except to charge enormous prices for food, which they bartered over their walls.
Even so, the party could not have got through without the hounds. Bands of mercenaries were quartering the country, searching for them. More than once they had hidden in a wood to watch a mounted troop go jingling by, or turned aside from their chosen direction to take a roundabout way because the hounds warned them of men ahead. All of one long night they had played cat-and-mouse with a mounted band in the defiles of some jungle hills—men they never saw and only managed to avoid because of the hounds.
The Reavers of Skaith-Volume III of The Book of Skaith Page 7
