by Adam Corby
‘Well, but I think there are reasons beyond those,’ offered Zaristin. ‘Else why should men of such wealth continue to subject themselves to a yearly trek of such toil and misery? And I have heard it said some of these barbarian women can be quite pretty, in an earthy, crude sort of way.’
‘You would not say so, reverend lady,’ said Burdelna Tovis, ‘if you could but see them squatting down in the fields, legs of a color with the mud, hands like leather gloves, and hair crawling with – yet I need go no further, surely, in distressing the ladies present with even more unappetizing pictures, accurate though they may be. Suffice it to say, dear lady, that in their artlessness and filth they do not even deserve the name of woman, especially when compared to such studied loveliness as yours.’
The Porekanin, who was then somewhat beyond the threshold of middle age and had begun to put on weight, blushed gratefully and lowered her eyes in a most lovely way; and Burdelna sipped at his silver wine cup smugly. The Governor-General would regret that he had granted those two licenses-of-trade to Telran Welsar’s house.
‘Zelatar Bonvis, I believe, has already begun to assemble his goods,’ said Leilerick Pasch.
‘Tut, he always sets out early,’ said the Welsar. ‘Old habits are hard to break, they say, in old beasts.’
‘I am surprised to hear you say so, Telran,’ offered Rathimin Coracano. ‘Especially when it was you, I believe, who was soundly cursing Zelatar for gaining an unfair advantage when his house won the perpetual right to be the first bandar traders licensed each year.’ Rathimin said this sweetly, with an air of innocence; whereat Telran Welsar scowled. The Rathimin had taken over her father’s house three years ago and had since built it up to a position of great influence – one of the five wealthiest houses in Gerso. She had a way of using her virginal, lovely face and manner that had been the deception and downfall of more than one male trading adversary. This Telran had learned to his own dismay two years ago, when he had taken pity on the poor girl, so lost in the thickets of the merchants’ ways, and had ended being taken for some seven thousand golden Elnics’ worth. Now he knew better her ways: and thought he could detect in her innocent remarks concerning Zelatar Bonvis a slight, secret air of pleasure. He wondered if the rumors were true that she and Zelatar had formed an alliance to take away his, Telran Welsar’s, pre-eminence among the merchant houses of the North. He had had several confirmed reports of Mergo Donato paying secret visits to the Rathimin’s palace.
He noticed that Usaris had taken her place at the table again, somewhat closer to the Governor-General. Let her play her games, Telran thought – he had more important concerns to occupy him now. Usaris’ expenses were growing out of hand anyway. The Porekan would doubtless find her a luxury he could ill afford; and if he could be made to feel some twinge of guilt for having taken her away from Telran, perhaps he would be more disposed to grant the extra license Telran had requested.
‘Well, certainly so shrewd a judge of men as yourself, Rathimin, with such a memory, must be ceded to,’ Telran remarked with an equable air. ‘And I must admit that, when it seemed Zelatar Bonvis would by that unfair right gain first choice of all the pelts, I was not a little distressed at it. Several I know called it favoritism and even hinted that the turning face of some golden Elnas had had not a little to do with it. Of course, I disagreed with them. There are few governments in the North with such spotless histories as our Porekanstar. Yet, when Zelatar chooses to set out so early as this, when the savages have not yet even begun preparations for their Hunt, I cannot but feel relief, and, I may confess it, not a little concern for the state of my good friend and competitor’s mental judgment. I am certain that one with such accurate sources of information as yours, dear Rathimin, can hardly be unaware that last season Zelatar lost over three thousand Elnics on his expedition. Poor man, he seems bent upon repeating his error this season.’
Telran leaned back upon the pillows, calm in the satisfaction of his last remarks. Rathimin’s face had let slip she had not known the extent of Zelatar’s losses. Let her have the taste of that dissolving on her tongue, and see what she has to say to Mergo Donato next time!
‘You don’t mean it!’ Leilerick Pasch exclaimed. ‘Did he really lose three thousand?’
‘Sadly I must confirm it,’ Burdelna Tovis said gravely. ‘All the more sadly, since my wife’s father had invested some ten thousand in Zelatar’s house. Well, but I cannot say I did not warn him – nay, entreat him even – from so rash a course.’ Burdelna did not seem so grave now.
‘And what of these other tales of the savages?’ asked Usaris of the Porekan. ‘Is it true they have a new – what do you call him – now?’
‘Warlord, my dear; and yes, that has been confirmed.’ The Governor-General laid aside the pipe and summoned one of the slaves with what he hoped was a demanding gesture. ‘Yet you need have no concern over that; in many ways I am glad to see Gen-Karn replaced. I had some disturbing reports concerning him. He seems to have been a bad one altogether.’
‘Is there such a thing as a good one?’ asked the Porekanin.
‘Certainly, madam,’ said Burdelna Tovis, ‘when he has been properly trained.’
The laughter did not further the air of dangerous gravity the Governor-General had wished to preserve. In a dignified (if somewhat pompous) manner he spoke across the laughter, saying, ‘It had reached me, that Gen-Karn’s ambition was to unite the tribes under his rule and make an assault on the Gates.’
‘How terrible!’ breathed Usaris, looking up at the Porekan from the depths of her lake-blue eyes.
‘Never fear it,’ the Governor-General said courageously. ‘My men would hold against them.’
‘Zelatar Bonvis believes that the old prophecy may soon be realized in a dozen or score’s space of years,’ said Leilerick Pasch. ‘Their numbers have been growing at an alarming rate. He believes the barbarians will rise.’
‘All the greater cause we should fear for poor Zelatar’s reason,’ said Telran Welsar, shaking his head.
‘Yet it was ever taught me, that a wise man considers all possible events, that he might thereby be prepared to deal with them,’ Rathimin Coracano said.
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ Burdelna dismissed it with a wave of his hand. ‘When the savages grow too numerous, they generally solve the problem themselves, by murdering one other. By my mind it is a very convenient arrangement; and, moreover, the price they will pay for arms doubles in times of feuds.’ Burdelna owned, in part or whole, four armories and had a right to feel smug about it. His profits for this past Winter, generally his slowest time, had been tenfold his every expectation. Thankfully, he had managed to keep that news secret, so that none of his competitors might know how far his fortunes had risen.
‘They have been most extraordinarily quiet this past Winter,’ remarked Zaristin. ‘Apparently their new leader is not so ambitious.’
‘In truth,’ offered Telran, ‘we have never had much cause to fear them. They are too fractious ever to support a united effort.’
‘All the more reason we should continue to offer them arms unrestrictedly,’ said Burdelna.
‘Yet if they did come – if they did, I say,’ said the Porekan heatedly and stoutly, ‘then we should have nothing to fear. My men should hold them!’
‘What courage and fortitude it must require to be a leader of men!’ Usaris sighed.
‘Tush, my dear, hardly so great as that,’ the Governor-General remarked with a sideways glance at his wife. ‘Friend Telran, at our earlier meeting it slipped my mind entirely – I have had a letter of my cousin, the mayor of Tezmon. Shall I summon one to read it?’
‘By all means,’ said Telran quickly, disturbed that the others should know he had met with the Governor-General. ‘And what is the state of trade out of Tezmon? My shippers have complained that this past Winter’s storms went on longer than they had any right to.’
‘You shall hear all,’ said the Porekan. ‘Festor, the letter. It lies on my desk
. You will never guess what Armand has purchased,’ he went on, as the slave vanished into the interior of the palace. ‘A dancing-troupe! Yes, and that is not all; the girls of this troupe were trained by a master from Vapio itself!’
There were exclamations of surprise and envy at this, which pleased the Governor-General no little. Zaristin, his wife, nodded with the others. ‘And we have been considering asking Armand,’ she said, ‘that he send the troupe here to us on loan this summer.’
‘That would be the height of culture,’ said Burdelna Tovis. ‘You know, I usually spend my Winters at Tezmon, enjoying the sea instead of the bitter snows that are our fate here. Yet this year business held me here. How pleased Armand must be!’
‘Yes,’ sighed the Governor-General with a downward, lingering glance at Usaris’ long, golden-skinned leg where it emerged gleaming from the black pleated folds of her silken skirts. ‘We are really no better than the barbarians here, you know. Eh? What’s that?’
Firmly but most apologetically, the Porekan’s major-domo bowed at the threshold. ‘My most reverend master,’ he announced, ‘a man is here – one of the guardians of the Gate – with some frightening and most urgent news.’
‘Please allow me the privilege of deciding how urgent it may be,’ said the Governor-General. ‘And, as for that word frightening, how dare you use it? Can you not see the effect it has had upon my wife and these other ladies?’
‘Pardon, your worship; yet it really does demand immediate attention,’ said the major-domo, angrily twisting at his mustache.
‘Oh, very well,’ said the Governor-General, who despite himself grew nervous at this unaccustomed behavior on the part of his servant. He fixed his eye wrathfully upon the disheveled guard. ‘Well, fellow, what have you to say for yourself? Where is your captain – and what is your name?’
The poor guard, beside himself with the turmoil he had undergone, cast his eyes about upon the assembled merchants and their companions. If the attack meant what he feared, what should become of his city? If it did not mean what he feared, what should become of him beneath the Porekan’s rage? His eyes bulged, his throat worked, but at first nothing would come forth. His knees were quavering. ‘Your honor,’ he began, then choked in despair. ‘Ara-Karn!’ he wailed. ’Ara-Karn!’
Burdelna Tovis, Telran Welsar, and several others who had some inkling of what that name was opened their mouths and paled. Usaris and the Porekanin looked each other in the eye and colored. The Governor-General’s scowl deepened. His chest swelled and he began to speak, but what he might have said is no more than a matter for conjecture, for at that very instant the terrace, the palace, the entire city itself, it seemed, was rocked in an enormous, deafening crash. The walls reverberated and the ceiling plaster cracked, dividing faced painted figures; the water pipe and wine bottles shattered; the disheveled guard was thrown to the floor headlong and lay there like one dead. So was it like as if monstrous, malevolent God had chosen that instant to stamp His foot upon the city of Gerso, thereby to announce his momentous arrival.
For several moments all lay still. Their minds and ears were blank as walls of slate. The crash lingered on and on in their skulls. Slowly, it faded. And then, in the preternatural stillness that ensued, another sound was faintly heard. The ancient bronze bells were being hammered. Again and again they tolled in the quivering air. The city was under attack.
XVIII
Gray Priestess
WITHIN THE GATES Gundoen shouted his triumph over the bodies of the slain guardsmen, shaking his reddened blade; but Ara-Karn was calm.
‘The mechanism,’ he said.
They found it in the next room in the stone walls, seeming vast and monstrous in the dimness. Great wooden gears, metal plates and rods, and cables of great rope thicker than a woman’s hips were everywhere. Ara-Karn lifted a flaring lamp, studying the forms carefully.
Gundoen looked upon it too, but it was only a shadow to him. He took down lamps from the walls and put them this way and that, but still could make nothing of it.
‘We can lead them through the brass doors,’ he shrugged. ‘It will take longer but is there a hurry?’
‘We do not know what forces they can bring to bear upon us here,’ muttered Ara-Karn. ‘Nor is there time to open the Gates properly.’ He pointed at a huge cable, the thickest and strongest of all. ‘There. Cut that.’
The warriors who had entered with them sheathed their swords and took out their war-axes. And they began hacking at the cable, which was thick beyond the imagining of any who had not seen it with his own eyes or felt it with his own hands.
Cutting it took as much sweat as there had been blood spilt and more time. Beyond the walls they could hear the desperate shouts of the guards who had escaped. Finally there was only as much cable left as a strong man’s forearm. Gundoen swept the others aside. He drew his own heavy sword and, with a half-score desperate strokes, severed the tremendous cable.
With a thud it fell to the floor. There was no other movement. The gears did not turn, the ropes did not pull. The Gates without remained shut fast.
‘It needs oiling,’ said Ara-Karn. He pointed. ‘There and there.’
So the men took cups and brass tankards from the barracks room walls and scooped up hot blood from the pools about the guardsmen’s dead bodies, and splashed it red upon the cable where Ara-Karn had pointed.
For a few moments nothing occurred. From without the shouts grew louder, more insistent. Then there was a sudden loud creak, and the cable began to move. Slowly it was drawn back into the mechanism, pulled as if with irresistible force.
And with that, the force that had held the Gates shut fast departed.
A tiny crack appeared in those gigantic gates of stone.
At first there seemed to be no sign of any movement, but then the dark line cracked down the middle of those huge stone blocks. Slowly, a finger’s-breadth at a time, the crack widened, and the Gates parted. Then, in the depths of that dark crack, another crack appeared – this one of light. And beyond that bright crack could be faintly seen shining domes and palaces of red stone.
Now the Gates fell open not a finger’s-breadth at a time, but as fast as a man might walk – and even faster than that. It was as if the very mountains were rising, falling, moving back before the warriors of Ara-Karn. The pull of the earth dragged those mountainous Gates soundlessly on the invisible hinges built into the walls of stone by the master builders of Elna in centuries past. The warriors were silenced by the sight: the Gates swinging, the naked fairness of the city beyond.
Wide, wide the Gates swung, fast as a pony might canter. They swung back against the ancient stone stoppers, built like buttresses against the walls of the Pass. The Gates smashed into the stoppers with a sound of thunder and of solid stone shattering. The tremendous clap reverberated wrathfully from the stone cliffs.
Even outside the Pass they heard it. The war-ponies bucked for the madness of their sudden fear, but strong thighs and fists steadied them. The whole mass of men milled about, stunned and doubtful at the fearsomeness of that sound. Tales were risen in their minds – tales of great Elna, whom the Southrons called a god. Was it not prophesied that one pass he would return? Gerso lay before them like the bride upon the marriage-bed, yet they held back and looked at one another and muttered.
Then one of them, Garin of Gundoen’s tribe, rode his pony up to the crest of the ridge. His brown cloak waved out behind him and vanished behind the ridge. A few others went after; still more followed them. The ponies tossed their shaggy heads; swords clanked against thighs; lances raked the skies. The movement restored them; the growing fairness of red-roofed Gerso restored their avarice and their hate. The great, antlike mass surged forward, down into the perpetual shadow of the cliffs. All the valley floor filled with them, from the shattered Gates to the ridge beyond the mountains – and still men waited their turn outside the Pass.
Then Ara-Karn emerged from the small brass doors, and at the sight of him the hor
de stopped and recoiled, like a great wave running back. And they saw him and were struck dumb, and knew again their vengeance.
And he rode quietly before them, from one side of the Gates to the other. And behind him were Gundoen and the others, bearing aloft reddened bits of soft and pretty bronze armor. But the hands of Ara-Karn were as clean as when he had entered, for he had done no killing yet. He reached the far side of the Gates and rode back, sternly surveying the sea of leather and steed and sword before him. He reached the very threshold of the Gates, where the curving grooves, cut deeply into the sand, began. He brought his pony to a halt.
He raised his sword, which was cold and sharp.
‘Remember your oaths!’ he called, and his hundred voices were audible to all, like the voices of the dead of Urnostardil that cried aloud for vengeance. ‘Death to all Southrons!’
He wheeled and plunged ahead. Down beyond the Gates he came again into the light of Goddess, and all his armor and his sword gleamed fiercely, as if it were ablaze.
And the warriors behind him, awed by the sight, rumbled in their throats, ‘Death! Death! Death!’ A thousand voices raised that cry of all the warriors of all the tribes of all the far North.
Through the vast open Gates they poured, like the springtime flood that will not be denied and that washes away all that stands before it.
Down those broad streets they poured, yelling the fierce ululations of their tribes. The sound of their ponies’ hooves was like a rocky avalanche. The soldiers of the watch, responding to the incoherent prayers of the fugitive guards, had formed in a body in the opened cobble-stoned avenue just below the Gates. The warriors of the tribes saw them and laughed horribly. They raised swords, axes, lances, and bows. And they passed over the mangled remnants of the soldiery of Gerso with hardly a break in their stride.
Before them reared the many-storied palace of the Governor-General of Gerso. The Porekan’s palace quartered a full complement of his personal guards: these now issued forth from the gate, bewildered at what had happened. They saw before them a thousand demons on horseback bearing down on them. That was enough; the soldiers turned and ran screaming back into the courtyard. Five hundred barbarians rode after them, up the steps, burst asunder the palace doors, and rode laughing down the corridors within. In moments the palace was a bedlam. Servants, slaves, and houseguests ran back and forth and into one another in their efforts to escape the invaders – leaped from windows and cowered under beds. The warriors rode on, enjoying well their sport, taking whom they would, killing, maiming whom they would, letting free whom they would. Life and death and fate were theirs alone, sweeter far than the smoothest beer.