Stark had discounted most of Camar’s talk as superstition, but even so he expected something more spectacular than the object he held in his palm.
It was a lens, some four inches across, and made with great skill, but still only a bit of crystal. He turned it about, frowning. It was not a simple lens. There was an intricate interlocking of many facets, incredibly complex. Far too complex, Stark would have thought, for the level of technology that must have existed in Ban Cruach’s time. He found that it was hypnotic if one looked at it too long.
“What is its use?” he asked of Camar.
“We are as children. We have forgotten. But it is surely a thing of great power. You will see that, Stark. There are some who believe that if Kushat were threatened it would call Ban Cruach himself back through the Gates of Death to lead us again. I do not know.”
“Men seldom come back through the Gates of Death for any purpose,” said Stark dryly. “Unless in Kushat those words have another meaning?”
Camar answered, “It is the name of a pass that opens into the black mountains beyond Kushat. The city stands guard before it. No man remembers why, except that it is a great trust.”
His gaze feasted on the talisman, in agony and pride.
Stark said, “You wish me to take this to Kushat?”
“Yes. Yes!” Camar looked at Stark joyfully. Then his eyes clouded and he shook his head. “No. The North is not used to strangers. With me you might have been safe, but alone…. No, Stark. You’ve risked too much already. Go back, out of the Norlands, while you can.”
He Iay back on the blankets. Stark saw that a bluish pallor had come into the hollows of his cheeks.
“Camar,” he said. And again, “Camar?”
“Yes?”
“Go in peace, Camar. I will take the talisman to Kushat.”
The Martian sighed, and smiled, and Stark was glad he had made the promise.
“The riders of Mekh are wolves,” said Camar suddenly. “They hunt these gorges. Look out for them.”
“I will.”
Stark’s knowledge of the geography of this part of Mars was vague in the extreme, but he knew that the mountain valleys of Mekh lay ahead and to the north, between him and Kushat. Camar had told him about these upland warriors. He was willing to heed the warning.
And now Camar was done with talking. Stark knew that he did not have long to wait. The wind spoke with the voice of a great organ. The moons had set and it was very dark outside the tower, except for the white glimmering of the snow. Stark looked up at the brooding walls and shivered. There was a smell of death already in the air.
To keep from thinking, he bent closer to the fire, studying the lens. An ornament, he thought, probably worn as a badge of rank. Strange ornament for a barbarian king in the dawn of Mars. The firelight made tiny dancing sparks in the endless inner facets. It seemed to gather the light into itself, until it glowed with a kind of throbbing witch-fire, brightening, as though the thing were coming alive in his hands.
A pang of primitive and unreasoning fear shot through him. He fought it down. The part of him that had learned with much pain and effort to be civilized forced him to sit and consider the crystal, when what he really wanted to do was rid himself of it by hurling it far away into the snow.
A talisman. A promise from a king long dead, the safety of a city. A piece of crystal, encrusted with legend and superstitious faith. That was all it was. The firelight, coupled with Camar’s fervor and the approach of death, were making him imagine things.
Only a bit of crystal….
Yet it glowed brighter in his hands, a warm and living thing. It drew his gaze and held it. The wind talked in the hollow stone, and after a while it seemed to Stark that he heard other voices, very faint and distant, tiny thready things that plucked and slid along the edges of his mind. He started up, shaken by an eerie terror, listening, and when he listened all he could hear was the wind and the chafing of the hard snow blowing, and the painful breathing of Camar.
He looked at the crystal, forcing himself to hold it. But he turned away from the fire so that some of the light died slowly out of it and the quivering witch-fires were a little dimmed.
Imagination, he told himself. One might hear anything in a place like this. One might see anything….
Only still the crystal glowed, as though it might be taking life from his own living hands now that the fire was denied it. And the inner facets called his gaze down to dim depths that stretched into somewhere that was not space, into time perhaps, or….
The tiny voices spoke again, scratching, chittering spider-sounds coming from a million miles away where no ear could possibly hear them. But Stark heard them. He heard them this time just long enough to recognize a certain thing about them, and then he yelled and flung the crystal from him in blind atavistic fear, because suddenly he knew that wherever it came from and however it had gotten to Kushat, no human had made it.
It fell into the banked snow by the doorway, vanishing without a sound. Stark stood shivering violently, and then in a minute or two he began rather uncertainly to curse himself for an idiot. The voices were gone again and he stretched his hearing, trying to catch them and reassure himself that they had been only his oversensitive capacity to find strange gods and evil spirits with every step he took. The primitive aboriginal was still very close under his skin. He knew and recognized it, finding it often a curse and only sometimes a blessing. The naked boy who had run with Tika and Old One among the haunted rocks on the edge of Darkside had been playing tricks again with Eric John Stark.
He stood still, cataloguing the sounds, the many shadings of the wind blowing far, blowing near, the chafing of the snow, Camar’s breathing….
But Camar’s breathing had stopped.
Stark went to him and knelt down, rather wishing now that he could retract his promise and knowing it was too late. He crossed Camar’s hands in the ritual posture and then drew the tattered edge of his cloak across his face. He rose and gave Camar the gesture of farewell, and then turned to where he had thrown the talisman. He was on his knees groping for it in the drifted snow when one of the beasts tethered outside the tower started up from its sleep with a shrill hissing. Motionless he listened, and heard it answered.
Working desperately, Stark probed the icy drift with his fingers, felt the smooth oval of the talisman and plucked it out, placing it in the boss of Camar’s belt. He closed it and clasped the belt around his waist, and then, not hurrying now, he found the small flask that lay with his gear beside the fire and took a long pull at it.
Then he waited.
They came silently on padded feet, the rangy mountain brutes moving daintily through the rubble of the sprawling ruin. Their riders too were silent, tall men with fierce eyes and russet hair. They wore leather coats, and each man carried a long straight spear.
There were a score of them around the tower in the windy gloom. Stark did not bother to draw his gun. He had learned very young the difference between courage and idiocy.
He walked out toward them, moving slowly lest one of them be startled into spearing him, yet not slowly enough to denote fear. And he held up his right hand and gave them greeting.
They did not answer him. They sat their restive mounts and stared at him, and Stark knew that Camar had spoken the truth.
These were the riders of Mekh, and they were wolves.
II
Stark waited, until they tired 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 sti
ll 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 a 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 thousands, 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 wells. 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 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.”
Thord 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.
Eric John Stark Page 10
