by Andre Norton
Tamisan, surprised, asked a question to which she hoped he would give a true and open answer: “You do not like—you have reason to fear Lord Kas?”
“Like? Fear?” She could see that thin shadow of Starrex overlaying Hawarel become more distinct. “Those are emotions. I have had little to do with emotions for some time.”
“But you wanted him to share the dream,” she persisted.
“True. I may not be emotional about my esteemed cousin, but I am a prudent man. Since it was by his urging, in fact his arrangement, that you were added to my household, I thought it only fair he share in his plan for my entertainment. I know that Kas is very solicitous of his crippled cousin, ready-handed to serve in any way—so generous of time, energy—”
“You suspect him of something?” She thought she had sensed what lay behind his words.
“Suspect? Of what? He has been, as all would assure you freely, and as far as I would allow, my good friend.” But there was a closed look about him, warning her off from any further exploration of that.
“His crippled cousin.” This time Hawarel repeated those words as if he spoke to himself and not to her. “At least you have done me a small service on the credit side of the scale.” Now he did look to Tamisan as he thumped his right leg with a satisfaction which was not of the Starrex she knew. “You have provided me with a body in good working order. Which I may well need, since so far bad has outweighed the good in this world.”
“Hawarel—Lord Starrex—” she was beginning when he interrupted her.
“Give me always Hawarel. Remember! There is no need to add to the already heavy load of suspicion surrounding me in these halls.”
“Hawarel, then. I did not choose you for the champion; that was done by that power I do not understand, working through me. If they agree—then you have a good chance to find Kas. You may even demand that he be the one you battle.”
“Find him how?”
“They may allow me to select the proper one from the off-world force,” she suggested. A very thin thread on which to hang any plan of escape, but she could not see a better one.
“And you think that this sand painting will pick him out—as it did me?”
“But it did you, did it not?”
“That I can not deny.”
“And the first time I foresaw—for one of the First Standing—it made such an impression on her that she had me summoned here to foresee for the Over-Queen.”
“Magic!” Again he uttered that half laugh.
“To another worlder, much that the space travelers can do might be termed magic.”
“Well enough. I have seen things—yes, I have seen things myself, and not while dreaming either. Very well, I am to volunteer to meet an enemy champion from the ship and then you sand paint out the proper one. If you are successful and do find Kas—then what?”
“It is simple—we wake.”
“You take us with you, of course?”
“If we are so linked that we can not leave here without one another—then a single waking will take us all.”
“Are you sure you need Kas? After all, I was the one you were planning this dream for.”
“We go, leave the Lord Kas here?”
“A cowardly withdrawal you think, my dreamer. But one, I assure you, which would solve many things. However—can you send me through, return for Kas? It is in my mind I would like to know what is happening now for myself—in our own world. Is it not by the dreamer’s oath that he for whom the dream is wrought has first call upon the dreamer?”
So he did have some lurking uneasiness tied to Kas! But in a manner he was right. She reached out before he was aware of what she would do and seized his hand, at the same time using the formula for waking. Once more that mist which was nowhere enveloped her. But it was no use; her first guess had been right—they were still tied. And she blinked her eyes open upon the same room. Hawarel had slumped, was falling from his stool so that she had to go to one knee to support his body with her shoulder or he would have slid full length to the floor. Then his muscles tightened and he jerked erect, his eyes open and blazing into hers with the same cold anger with which he had first greeted her upon entering this room.
“Why—?”
“You asked,” she countered.
His lids drooped so she could no longer see that icy anger. “So I did. But I did not quite expect to be so quickly served. Now, you have effectively proven your point—three go or none. And it remains to be seen how soon we can find our missing third.”
He asked her no more questions and she was glad, since that whirl into nowhere in the abortive attempt at waking had tired her greatly. She moved the stool a little so her back could rest against the wall and she was farther from him. But in a little while he got to his feet and paced back and forth as if some driving desire for wider action worked in him, to the point where he could not sit still.
Once the door opened, but they were not summoned forth. Instead food and drink were brought to them by one of the guards, the other standing ready with a crossbow at thigh, his eyes ever upon them.
“We are well served.” Hawarel opened the lids of bowls and inspected their contents. “It would seem we are of importance. Hail, Rugaard, when do we go forth from this room, of which I am growing very tired?”
“Be at peace, you shall have action enough when the Great One desires it,” the officers by the crossbowman answered. “The ship from the stars has been sighted, the mountain beacons have blazed twice. They seem to be aiming for the plain beyond Ty-Kry. It is odd that they are so single-minded and come to the same pen to be taken each time. Perhaps Dalskol was right when he said that they do not think for themselves at all, but carry out the orders of an off-world power which does not allow them independent judgment. Your service time will come. And, Mouth of Olava—” He took a step forward to see Tamisan the better. “The Great One says that it might be well to read the sand on your own behalf. For false seers are given to those they have belittled in such seeing, to be done with as those they have so shamed may decide.”
“As is well known,” she answered him. “I have not dealt falsely, as shall be seen at the proper time and in the proper place.”
When they were gone she was hungry, and so it seemed was Hawarel, for they divided fairly and left nothing in the bowls. When they were done he said, “Since you are a reader of history and know old customs, perhaps you remember one which it is not too pleasant to recall now—that among some races it was the proper thing to dine well a prisoner about to die.”
“You choose a heartening thing to think on!”
“No, you choose it, for this is your world, remember that, my dreamer.”
Tamisan closed her eyes and leaned her head and shoulders back against the wall. Perhaps she even slept a little, for there was the clang of sudden noise and she gasped out of a doze. The room had grown dark, but at the door was a blaze of light and in that stood the officer, behind a guard of spearmen.
“The time has come,” he said.
“The wait has been long.” Hawarel stood up, stretching wide his arms as one who has been ready for too long. Then he turned to her and once more offered his wrist. She would have liked to have done without his aid, but she found herself stiff and cramped enough to be glad of it.
They went on a complicated way through halls, down stairs until at last they issued out into the night. And awaiting them was a covered cart much larger than the chair on wheels which had brought her to the castle, this one with two grypons between its shafts.
Into this their guard urged them, drawing the curtains, pegging those down tightly outside, so that even had they wished they could not and looked out. And as the cart creaked out, Tamisan tried to guess by sound where they might be going.
There was little noise to guide her. It was as if they now passed through a town deep in slumber. But in the gloom of the cart she felt rather than saw movement, and then a shoulder brushed hers and a whisper so faint she had to st
rain to hear it was at her ear.
“Out of the castle—”
“Where?”
“My guess is the field—the forbidden place—”
The memory of the this-world Tamisan supplied explanation. That was where two other spacers had planeted—not to rise again. In fact, the one which had come fifty years ago had never been dismantled but stood, a corroded mass of metal, to be a double warning—to the stars not to invade, to Ty-Kry to be alert against such invasion.
It seemed to Tamisan that their ride would never come to an end. Then there was an abrupt halt which bumped her soundly against the side of the cart, and lights bedazzled her eyes as the end curtains were pulled aside.
“Come, Champion and Champion-maker!”
Hawarel obeyed first and turned to give her assistance once more; but he was elbowed aside as the officer pulled rather than led her into the open. Torches in the hands of spearmen ringed them around. Beyond was a colorful mass of people, with a double rank of guards drawn up as a barrier between those and the dark of the land beyond.
“Up there—” Hawarel was beside her again.
Tamisan raised her eyes, almost blinded by the glare as a sudden pillar of fire burst across the night sky. A spacer was riding down on tail rockets to make a fin landing.
9
BY the light of those flames, the whole plain was illumined. Beyond stood the hulk of the unfortunate spacer which had last planeted here. And there, drawn up in lines was a large force of spearmen, crossbowmen, officers with the basket-hilted weapons at their sides. However, as they stood they might seem a guard of honor for the Over-Queen, who sat raised above the rest on a very tall chair cart—certainly not an army in battle array.
And those in the ship—they might well look contemptuously on such archaic weapons as useless. How had those of Ty-Kry taken the other ship and her crew? By wiles, treachery—as the victims might declare—or by clever tricks, suggested that part of Tamisan who was the Mouth of Olava.
The surface of the ground boiled away under the descent rockets. Then the bright fires vanished, leaving the plain in semi-darkness until their eyes adjusted to the far lesser light of the torches.
There was no expression of awe by the waiting crowd. Though they might be, by their trappings, dress and arms, accounted centuries behind the technical knowledge of the newcomers, they were braced by their history to know that they were not to face gods of unknown powers but mortals with whom they had successfully fought before. What gave them this barrier against the star rovers, Tamisan wondered, and why were they so adverse to any contact with star civilization? Apparently they were content to stagnate at a level of civilization perhaps five hundred years behind her world. Did they not produce any inquiring minds any who desired to do things differently?
The ship was down and gave no outward sign of life, though Tamisan knew its scanners must be busy feeding back what information they gathered to appear on video-screens. If those had picked up the derelict ship, the newcomers would have so much of a warning. She glanced from the silent bulk of the newly landed spacer to the Over-Queen, just in time to see the ruler raise her hand in a gesture. Four men came forward from the ranks of nobles and guards. Unlike the latter, they wore no body armor nor helms, only short tunics of an unrelieved black. And in the hands of each was a bow—not the crossbow of the troops, but the yet older hand-bow of expert archers.
That part of Tamisan which was of this world knew a catch of breath. For those bows were unlike any other in the land, and those who held them unlike any other archers. No wonder ordinary men and women gave them wide room. For they were a monstrous lot. Over the heads of each was fitted so skillfully fashioned a mask that it seemed no mask at all, rather their natural features, save that the features were not those of human men, but rather copies of the great heads which surmounted, one for each point of the compass, the defensive walls of Ty-Kry. Neither human nor animals, but something of both, and something beyond both.
And the bows they raised were fashioned of treated human bone, strung with cords woven of human hair. The bones and hair of ancient enemies and ancient heroes, so that the intermingled strength of both were ready to serve the living now.
From closed quivers each took a single arrow, and in the torchlight those arrows glittered, seeming to draw and condense radiance until they were shafts of solid light. Fitted to the cords, they had a hypnotic effect, holding one’s attention to the exclusion of all else. Tamisan was suddenly aware of that and tried to break the attraction, but at that moment the arrows were fired. And her head turned with all the rest in that company to watch the flight of what seemed to be lines of fire across the dark sky, rising up and up until they were well above the dark ship, then following a curve, to plunge out of sight behind it.
Oddly enough, in their passing they had left great arcs of light behind which did not fade at once, but cast faint gleams on the bubble of the ship. Ingathering—one part of Tamisan’s mind supplied—a laying on of ancient power to influence those in the spacer. Though that of her which was a dreamer could not so readily believe in the efficiency of any such ceremony.
There had been sound with the arrows’ passing, a shrill high whistling which hurt the ears so that those in that throng put hands to the sides of their heads to shut out the screech. A wind arose out of nowhere and with it a loud crackling. Tamisan looked up to see above the Over-Queen’s head a large bird flapping wings of gold and blue, until a closer look said it was no giant bird but rather a banner so fashioned that the wind set it flying to counterfeit the action.
The black-clad archers still stood in a line a little out from the ranks of the guards. And now, though the Over-Queen made no visible sign, those about Hawarel and Tamisan urged them forward until they came to front both those archers and the Over-Queen’s tall throne cart.
“Well, champion, is it in your mind to carry out the duties this busy Mouth has assigned you?” There was jeering in the Over-Queen’s question, as if she did not honestly believe in Tamisan’s prophecy but was willing to allow a dupe to march to destruction in his own way.
Hawarel went to one knee; but as he did so, he swung his empty sword sheath across his knee, making very visible the fact that he lacked a weapon.
“At your desire, Great One, I stand ready. But is it your will that my battle be without even steel between me and the enemy?”
Tamisan saw a smile on the lips of the Over-Queen. And at that moment, she glimpsed a little into this ruler—that it might just please her to will such a fate on Hawarel. But if the Over-Queen played with that thought for an instant or two, she put it aside. Now she gestured.
“Give him steel, and let him use it. The Mouth has said he is the answer to our defense this time. Is that not so, Mouth?”
And the look she gave to Tamisan had a cruel core.
“He has been chosen in the farseeing. And twice has it read so.” Tamisan found the words to answer in a firm voice, as if what she said was an absolutely unchangeable decree.
The Over-Queen laughed. “Be firm, Mouth, put your will behind this choice of yours. In fact, do you go with him, to give him the support of Olava!”
Hawarel had accepted a sword from the officer on his left. Now he arose to his feet, swinging that blade as he saluted with a flourish which suggested that, if he knew he were going to extinction, he intended to march there as one who moved to trumpets and drums.
“The Right be strength to your arm, a shield to your body,” intoned the Over-Queen. But there was that in her voice which one might detect to mean that the words she spoke were only ritual, not intended to encourage this champion.
Hawarel turned to face the silent ship. From the burnt and blasted ground about its landing fins arose trails of steam and smoke. Small, red, charring ran in lines away from that ruin. The faint arcs which had remained in the air from the arrow flights were gone now.
As Hawarel moved forward, Tamisan followed a pace or two behind. Though if the ship remain
ed closed to them, with no entrance hatch opened and no ramp run forth, she did not see how they could carry out their plans. And what if that were so, would the Over-Queen expect them to wait hour after hour for some decision from the spacer’s commander as to whether or not he would contact them?
Fortunately the spacecrew were more enterprising. Perhaps the sight of that hulk on the edge of the field had given them the need to learn more. The hatch which opened was not the large entrance one, but a smaller door above one of the fins; and from it shot a stunner beam.
Luckily it caught its prey, both Hawarel and Tamisan, before they had reached the edge of the sullenly burning turf, so that their suddenly helpless bodies did not fall into that fire. Nor did they lose consciousness—only the ability to control slack muscles.
Tamisan had crumpled face down, and only the fact that one cheek pressed the earth gave her room to breathe. But her sight was sharply curtailed to the edge of burning grass which crept inexorably on toward her. Seeing that, she forgot all else.
Those moments were the worst she had ever spent. She had conjured up narrow escapes in dreams, but always there had been the knowledge that at the last moment escape was possible. Now there was no escape, only her helpless body and the line of advancing fire.
With the suddenness of a blow delivering a shock through her still painful bruises, she was caught, right side and left, by what felt like giant pinchers. As those closed about her body, she was drawn aloft, still face down, the fumes and heat of the burning vegetation choking her. She coughed until the spasm made her sick, spinning in that brutal clutch, being drawn to the spacer, as if the ship had shot forth a robot’s arm to pull her in.
She came into a burst of dazzling light. Then hands seized upon her, pulling her down, but holding her upright. The force of the stunner was wearing off; they must have set the beam on lowest power. There was the prickle of feeling returning in her legs and her heavy arms. She was able to lift her head a fraction, to see men in space uniforms about her. They wore helmets as if expecting to issue out on a hostile world, and some of them had the visors closed. Two picked her up easily and carried her along, down a corridor, before dropping her without any gentleness in a small cabin with a suspicious likeness to a cell.