by Tanith Lee
As the bloody wave collapsed, the supernatural ripping of the sky came again. Men flung themselves flat as if before a god. This bolt struck farther off, more to the north. And from that section, a second bloody wave of screaming and horror crashed upward and fell back, spent.
I had known nothing before of city cannon, or the great iron shot that was expelled from them. This initial lesson was thorough. It was the first occasion true terror laid hold on me. Terror, for me, was explicit in this sense of utter helplessness before an engine without laws and without vulnerability.
We lay on the valley floor, awaiting death. Twice more death raked the valley. Finally there was a time it did not come.
A sort of lull, not silence, a kind of stifling of sounds and cries, and through this stew of smoke and smothering, an avalanche rattled on the western slope. No wailing, no whooping of braves in battle. Just hoofbeats, the singing of jeweled harness.
Something made me stir, and start to thrust up blindly, with my teeth bared like an animal.
I became aware I was lying on a mattress of cinders and twigs and blood, others’ or my own. At this instant, a beast ridden by a man came flying through the thorn.
It was a burnished horse, oil-black as sharkskin, its serpent-long neck stretched out and mouth flaring wide. The man astride it was a lightning of bright ornaments and gaping ragged furs. He had a golden face, the face of a golden hawk, and behind the hawk-crest a banner of white-saffron hair.
He did not glance aside at me. He judged me dead, probably.
The tangle of thorns splintered. They were gone.
After that, it became quiet. I kicked a corpse off my legs, and got up, gazing about in a stupid state of remembering where I was and who I had been. Presently I pushed through the wreck of the trees. The roasting carcass, fallen in the fire, was augmented by a dead man fallen on top of it. Both now roasted together.
Along the valley you could see the path they had smashed for themselves, the riders, like a trail cut through brush. They had fired their hell-bolts, then ridden the periphery of the confusion, sweeping men before them as clever wolves will do with cattle, next herding them at a pitched run up the far ridges and away. There had been a small fight; not much. None with gold and silver faces had remained to feed the crows, but had raced clear, the devil horses leaping the rocks as if wings were strapped on their feet, into the ruby twilight.
It was a savage madman’s raid. Indiscriminate, wasteful, irresistible. They had captured around thirty men, and fifty more would be dead from their wounds by moonrise.
The Dagkta warriors floundered formlessly, as if returning to themselves after a fit. None of us made to chase the enemy. Only an aimless shouting blew through the valley, anger and fear venting themselves. Certain chiefs, Ettook with them, were bellowing and shaking spears in the reeking, darkening air.
There are two clever tricks men know. One is to make much of nothing. The second is to make nothing of much.
The hurt and dying warriors were put together to be tended by the seers. The rest banked up the fire, poured out beer in bowls, and so held a war council. The substance of which was this: You could not fight a mask-faced city man; particularly you could not fight iron tubes that coughed out death. Therefore let him be. True, they grumbled about dogs or horses that had perished in the explosions, and some were silent, thinking of dead friends or kin, while gossips told legends of earlier raids, and a good many curses were minted in the firelight. It was well known that the mask-faces whipped and starved their slaves, no doubt the hard winter had finished them, and this was why their masters had come hunting so early.
Eventually, those who had lost sons, brothers, or fathers took up mementos of the corpses, or whole bodies where they were to be found, and rode silently homeward to their camping valleys. Others, whose comrades had been driven westward by the raiders, scowled and stamped and invoked their gods and totems for vengeance. The dismembered dead were left in a pile with their weapons to be burned like the rubbish in the morning.
This was the sum total of their action.
I was like a man getting back complete use of his limbs after a paralysis. Then all my sinews burning and eager for work, I discovered there was none.
Having been afraid, nonplussed by the raiders’ alien weaponry, now I was impatient to redeem myself. It would not be enough to rant and rave and make up oaths. I was dishonored in my own eyes, for what that was worth, for abruptly I had choked down the awareness that the enemy were only men. They were not invincible after all, merely carried some dangerous invention on wheels, which they had created. I had lain on my face in the spring mud, and they had ridden over me, as if they had some right to confiscate free men, and barely a hand had lifted against them, and even that hand had not been mine.
Presently, roaming the pines where the wounded shrilled and sobbed and expired, I had got myself in a white-hot rage, and went among the fires with it.
I went where Ettook was cursing and eating and drinking with his warriors.
“My father,” I said, “they took five of your people for slaves. Give me ten, and I will go after them.”
He chewed his meat, his beard gleaming with fat. His eyes gleamed too. They told me I should have known better than to beg of him after what I had said to him before.
“Listen to the puppy bark. He wet his drawers at sunset and cried for his mother. Even so brave a warrior as Tuvek swoons like a maid at city men.”
The warriors grunted. A couple laughed, then saw my face and shut their mouths. I was so angry I could not get a word out.
Ettook said, “No, Tuvek. You haven’t earned the right to lead my krarl to battle. But wipe your eyes. Never fear, we will not tell your wives how you ran to hide in the mud.”
Suddenly my anger seemed to burst and was dissipated like a poisoned swelling.
Surprised by my own coolness, I smiled confidently back at him.
“It is good of you, my father, to tell no one. I am grateful. I shall never forget your own bravery. The priests should make a song of it.”
It was too delicate for him, but he labored at the problem and shortly he had puzzled it out. He had himself been hidden somewhere; his gear was muddier than mine, and his knives neither bloody nor newly cleaned.
His face writhed itself into a congestion, and I said, “Your pardon, my father. I am embarrassed by the presence of your valor.”
And I walked away before he could recover himself, straight to the horse pens. Here, judging my roan would have run off, I stole a mount.
A small piece of an hour later, I was out of the valley and riding west, on the trail of the slave-takers.
They left a fine trail, the city raiders. Horse dung caked the rocks, and hooves pocked in the soft soils of spring, and the footmarks of men, and in places a bluish dust-powder spilled from their wheeled cannon. In one spot even a golden bead on a ring, from harness or rider, dazzled like a firefly in a bush—as if they had intended me to follow and meant to leave me spoor.
A whole night and day I sought them, and part of a second night.
After twenty miles or so of finicky, careful riding, I saw the mountains begin to level and sink down toward high rocky plateaus. The going was better for horses, theirs and mine. By midnight of the first dark, I was confident enough of the quarry that I took a few hours’ sleep, lying in a shallow cave. Their trail ran northward, which was not the way to the old burned city, Eshkir, so I deduced, which lay more west and south of us.
The western heights were yellow as a goat’s eyes, bare and treacherous as horns, but the northern steeps were thinly green with a reluctant grazing. Presently I passed the site of a recent bivouac, black fire-pits, the ubiquitous dung of horses and men, the earth churned up and despoiled, and the charred bones of two deer they had roasted. Apparently the city demons needed food, despite the tales.
I myself feasted
on cold broiled hare, shot at dawn and half burned in my hurry to get on.
My plan was very simple when I should come up with them. I meant to steal in by night on their camp, and unbind and rouse the Dagkta men they had captured. I and they should then appropriate weapons and fall on the mask-faces, taking them unawares, for they would never expect such treatment, proud and crazy as they were. It did not occur to me either that this plan of mine was nothing if not as proud and crazy as anything of theirs. I never thought to question it. I felt I could do no other thing but what I did, as if the road had been especially paved for me, and I had only to walk on it.
It was curious, uncanny almost. When my fury left me in the face of Ettook’s jeering, it was as if I had turned some corner of my brain and come on myself. And I was not as I had thought, not angry, fierce, or filled with old hatreds, not even beset by enemies. I had never been so cool in my life.
I found a cast horseshoe in the afternoon, and some broken waterskins an hour later. My city men were moving more quickly; you could gauge it from the formation of their tracks. I had a notion I might come up with them before dawn, because the manner of their progress and the indications they left behind them showed a new slovenly disregard of detail and leisure, as if they were nearing some base or camp where everything could be set to rights in comfort. They were not reckoning on being chased, of course. Had they known the strength of the pursuit, they would have died of laughter and saved me my trouble.
I snatched some sleep at moonrise and had a dream I had gone blind. Being blind, I had fallen into an icy water, a pool or river, and the liquid was biting like a million knives. I came awake to find myself saying, passionless and clear, “I will kill her.”
This sent me cold. I could still hear my voice and what I had said echoing around in the air. But it was like another man’s voice, speaking words that had a meaning for him, none for me.
The cave where I slept seemed full of ghosts, or the emanations the tribes named ghosts. I got up to be free of them and went outside. I untethered the horse, but did not mount up. The stars were bright as windows cut in a black wall, and the low moon a coin of light.
The slopes folded up in bony shoulders to a thick palisade of larches, branches stripped by the winter’s heavy snows. I walked the horse up into the trees. Beyond the larch wood, a mile away, a rock stack gathered itself from the landscape like a high chimney on the roof of the earth. And the chimney smoked. The smoke rose from the fires that crowned it, gilding its crevices in ribbings of black and gold.
Somehow, from the instant of waking, I had guessed they were near me. Now I stared at the tall rock, knowing perfectly what came next. With wary fascination I had realized I would climb the rock and move among the fires, confront the city raiders, looking into the glass eyes of their masks. . . . Javhovor. So enorr Javhovor . . . what was this? A piece of their language I had overheard? Part of the dream of blindness, maybe; some gibberish.
Sometimes, if the power of a god is considered needful, certain priests will offer themselves to him, open their souls for him to enter if he will. One does not always believe in the god who comes. Too often he looks like drunkenness or sham. What came to me that night I had not invited, but I never doubted it.
I tethered the horse, there in the wood, and made on.
It was no hard journey up the rock. There was an ancient stepway cut in the stone; close to, you saw the stack itself was barely natural, terraced and bastioned by men a thousand years before. It was an outpost of the cities, of Eshkir probably, topped by a palace-fortress now in ruins. Each city and its might had come to ruin. This made me arrogant as I climbed their hill to find them, the children of that perished glory, in their jewels and rags, still clutching at history like a rotten plank in the river.
There was a man. He stood on the terraced track, by a single pale skeletal tree. The tree thrust wildly sideways from the rock, and he was leaning on it. Everything was shadow there, only his bronze mask gleamed faintly, and white metal on his wrists.
He must have heard or sensed me coming up. He tilted his mask-face, and he said, “Ez et kme?” His voice was laconic, casual. He was expecting no others than his own kind. At first it seemed I guessed what he had said, simply by his inflection (“Who is here?”) then I found I could answer him.
“Et so,” I said. He grunted. It was a joke, for I had replied merely, “I.” Before he could speak again, I went up to him and stabbed him in the side. He was no taller than I, and thinner under his furs. Somewhere in the mask he whimpered, but that was all. He died in gaunt bewilderment, as the krarl men in the valley had died.
I put off my cloak and put on his outer garments, and his weapon belt with mine. I pulled the mask off his face last—his mouth was open as if he would ask me another question. As he was going into the Black Place, I thought, he would be asking them there who had slain him, but he would get no Blood-Price off me for his grave.
Even then I was not afraid, finding, as I had, his language ready in my mouth. It was as if I read the stones and learned the tongue from them. I never queried it. It came the way a bird will fly the instant he leaves the tree. That sure, that easy. At a need.
The mask was a bronze eagle’s head. I had supposed it would disturb me, but it did not seem so very ill to wear it. Only the eyepieces of clear blue glass made the strange night stranger yet. A violet moon went down, leaving only the dying fires above, the color of brass, and a sky of stars like flecks of sapphire.
I pulled the dead man’s patchy cloak over my head, and went on up the stepway, toward the ruined fort.
3
The man I killed had been a sentry of sorts, but they regarded the watch like a game. At the head of the terraces another two bronze-masks sat against a crumbling arch. I anticipated interrogation, seeing they would assume I was their fellow from the post below, but neither spoke. One was striking soft chords from a hollow wooden case with strings held across it on silver pegs, a pretty noise to herald what was coming to them. The other raised his hand to me; no more.
So I got inside the fortress.
Through the blue eagle’s eyes I saw their camping bathed in the transparent auburn glow of flames. Here and there men sat or lay beside their fires, mostly silent, as watchful men are often silent in the moonfall of the night, the hour when all tides are turning.
Not much seemed to remain of the building save the outer shell. Centrally, a marble stair ran up to nothing but space; there had been some great hall there once. Along the west wall stretched the picket line of their lean horses, fretful and unslumbering. The play of their muscles was like light on silk, and each neck like the slender curve of a bow. The warrior in me was thinking he should have three or four of those horses after tonight, but it was a remote greed, like a memory.
On the far side of the marble staff, eastward, about thirty tents were pitched. They were not like the tenting of a krarl, but raised on frameworks that gave them many domed and pointing shapes, the fabrics various, exotic, and decaying. Torn banners hung before them, fringed with bullion and jewels.
It was as though I had come into the court of Death, skeletons in bright armor and wormwood in golden cups to drink.
Behind me, the man with the stringed instrument began to sing. He had a fine voice, chiming on the stillness. I did not really catch the words, but it was a love song, not like any music the warriors knew.
Between the picket line of horses and the tents, right under the stair, two cannon stood on carts, motionless nozzled tubings of black iron. They smelled incendiary, as though they were dragons. It was their smell rather than their size that warned me of the danger in them, for they were not large. Perhaps, guessing me a stranger, they would spit fire at me of their own volition. But this was a child’s fancy, something out of my tribal recollection, not my own. Some men slept, sitting by the cannon. They were unlike the rest, dark skinned and also dark haired as I was, w
hile the others in the camp were very fair. Neither did these drip ornaments. Their faces were like knobs of wood, brutal, ugly, and expressionless, even asleep. They were slaves, no mistaking it.
The other slaves, the red men, lay close by. The north end of the ground roofed over a pit, an old cellar or dungeon, with an oval opening looking into it from above, covered by a grating of green crusted metal. The fires shone dimly now and then into this hole, and I could make out a mass of bodies and shadows, and hear them crooning and groaning their discontent. They were past the bawling stage, and past the fighting stage too, maybe. They had had a night and day of forced marching, a caress or two from gemmed whips like that which I had noted hung from the belt of the sentry, little food, if any, and no hope.
No one had challenged me this far. Now a man stepped out of his pavilion. His mask was an eagle’s head like mine, but silver, with a green stone between the eyes. He nodded at the grating.
“The trash are unhappy with their lot,” he said. The clearness of his speech shocked me at last, for it could have been a tongue I had had since birth.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m sick of their noise.”
I was looking for a means to get in the pit, other than the grating. The last section of the northern wall sloped down into a kind of gully, which seemed a likely entry point. I was formulating some story in the alien language about visiting our prisoners and offering them the whip for their racket, when the silver face strode up to me and grasped my arm.
“You are not Slarn,” he said.
The masks of the city men had no apertures at the mouth and the voices that came from them were filtered and changed.
I could tell this much, however: he was neither a young man nor a nervous one.
“True, sir, I am not Slarn.”
“Who then?”
I had been careless, trusting too much my peculiar luck, the occult demon-guide delivered from me.
“Come,” he said. “Unmask. I will know you.”