Swords Against Darkness

by Paula Guran

A cunning that was purely animal guided his movements then. His head fell forward, and his body hung inert against the thongs. He might almost have been dead.

  A knot of men came toward him. He listened to them. They were hesitant and afraid. Then, as he did not move, they plucked up courage and came closer, and one prodded him gently with the point of his spear.

  “Prick him well,” said another. “Let us be sure!”

  The sharp point bit a little deeper. A few drops of blood welled out and joined the small red streams that ran from the weals of the lash. Stark did not stir.

  The spearman grunted. “He is safe enough now.”

  Stark felt the knife blades working at the thongs. He waited. The rawhide snapped, and he was free.

  He did not fall. He would not have fallen then if he had taken a death wound. He gathered his legs under him and sprang.

  He picked up the spearman in that first rush and flung him into the fire. Then he began to run toward the place where the scaly mounts were herded, leaving a trail of blood behind him on the snow.

  A man loomed up in front of him. He saw the shadow of a spear and swerved, and caught the haft in his two hands. He wrenched it free and struck down with the butt of it, and went on. Behind him he heard voices shouting and the beginning of turmoil.

  The Lord Ciaran turned and came back, striding fast.

  There were men before Stark now, many men, the circle of watchers breaking up because there had been nothing more to watch. He gripped the long spear. It was a good weapon, better than the flint-tipped stick with which the boy N’Chaka had hunted the giant lizard of the rocks.

  His body curved into a half crouch. He voiced one cry, the challenging scream of a predatory killer, and went in among the men.

  He did slaughter with that spear. They were not expecting attack. They were not expecting anything. Stark had sprung to life too quickly. And they were afraid of him. He could smell the fear on them. Fear not of a man like themselves, but of a creature less and more than man.

  He killed, and was happy.

  They fell away from him, the wild riders of Mekh. They were sure now that he was a demon. He raged among them with the bright spear, and they heard again that sound that should not have come from a human throat, and their superstitious terror rose and sent them scrambling out of his path, trampling on each other in childish panic.

  He broke through, and now there was nothing between him and escape but two mounted men who guarded the herd.

  Being mounted, they had more courage. They felt that even a warlock could not stand against their charge. They came at him as he ran, the padded feet of their beasts making a muffled drumming in the snow.

  Without breaking stride, Stark hurled his spear.

  It drove through one man’s body and tumbled him off, so that he fell under his comrade’s mount and fouled its legs. It staggered and reared up, hissing, and Stark fled on.

  Once he glanced over his shoulder. Through the milling, shouting crowd of men he glimpsed a dark, mailed figure with a winged mask, going through the ruck with a loping stride and bearing a sable axe raised high for the throwing.

  Stark was close to the herd now. And they caught his scent.

  The Norland brutes had never liked the smell of him, and now the reek of blood upon him was enough in itself to set them wild. They began to hiss and snarl uneasily, rubbing their reptilian flanks together as they wheeled around, staring at him with lambent eyes.

  He rushed them, before they should quite decide to break. He was quick enough to catch one by the fleshy comb that served it for a forelock, held it with savage indifference to its squealing, and leaped to its back. Then he let it bolt, and as he rode it he yelled, a shrill brute cry that urged the creatures on to panic.

  The herd broke, stampeding outward from its center like a bursting shell.

  Stark was in the forefront. Clinging low to the scaly neck, he saw the men of Mekh scattered and churned and tramped into the snow by the flying pads. In and out of the shelters, kicking the brush walls down, lifting up their harsh reptilian voices, they went racketing through the camp, leaving behind them wreckage as of a storm. And Stark went with them.

  He snatched a cloak from off the shoulders of some petty chieftain as he went by, and then, twisting cruelly on the fleshy comb, beating with his fist at the creature’s head, he got his mount turned in the way he wanted it to go, down the valley.

  He caught one last glimpse of the Lord Ciaran, fighting to hold one of the creatures long enough to mount, and then a dozen striving bodies surged around him, and Stark was gone.

  The beast did not slacken pace. It was as though it thought it could outrun the alien, bloody thing that clung to its back. The last fringes of the camp shot by and vanished in the gloom, and the clean snow of the lower valley lay open before it. The creature laid its belly to the ground and went, the white spray spurting from its heels.

  Stark hung on. His strength was gone now, run out suddenly with the battle-madness. He became conscious now that he was sick and bleeding, that his body was one cruel pain. In that moment, more than in the hours that had gone before, he hated the black leader of the clans of Mekh.

  That flight down the valley became a sort of ugly dream. Stark was aware of rock walls reeling past, and then they seemed to widen away and the wind came out of nowhere like the stroke of a great hammer, and he was on the open moors again.

  The beast began to falter and slow down. Presently it stopped.

  Stark scooped up snow to rub on his wounds. He came near to fainting, but the bleeding stopped and after that the pain was numbed to a dull ache. He wrapped the cloak around him and urged the beast to go on, gently this time, patiently, and after it had breathed it obeyed him, settling into the shuffling pace it could keep up for hours.

  He was three days on the moors. Part of the time he rode in a sort of stupor, and part of the time he was feverishly alert, watching the skyline. Frequently he took the shapes of thrusting rocks for riders, and found what cover he could until he was sure they did not move. He was afraid to dismount, for the beast had no bridle. When it halted to rest he remained upon its back, shaking, his brow beaded with sweat.

  The wind scoured his tracks clean as soon as he made them. Twice, in the distance, he did see riders, and one of those times he burrowed into a tall drift and stayed there for several hours.

  The ruined towers marched with him across the bitter land, lonely giants fifty miles apart. He did not go near them.

  He knew that he wandered a good bit, but he could not help it, and it was probably his salvation. In those tortured badlands, riven by ages of frost and flood, one might follow a man on a straight track between two points. But to find a single rider lost in that wilderness was a matter of sheer luck, and the odds were with Stark.

  One evening at sunset he came out upon a plain that sloped upward to a black and towering scarp, notched with a single pass.

  The light was level and blood-red, glittering on the frosty rock so that it seemed the throat of the pass was aflame with evil fires. To Stark’s mind, essentially primitive and stripped now of all its acquired reason, that narrow cleft appeared as the doorway to the dwelling place of demons as horrible as the fabled creatures that roam the Darkside of his native world.

  He looked long at the Gates of Death, and a dark memory crept into his brain. Memory of that nightmare experience when the talisman had made him seem to walk into that frightful pass, not as Stark, but as Ban Cruach.

  He remembered Otar’s words—I have seen Ban Cruach the mighty. Was he still there beyond those darkling gates, fighting his unimagined war, alone?

  Again, in memory, Stark heard the evil piping of the wind. Again, the shadow of a dim and terrible shape loomed up before him . . .

  He forced remembrance of that vision from his mind, by a great effort. He could not turn back now. There was no place to go.

  His weary beast plodded on, and now Stark saw as in a dream that a great walled city s
tood guard before that awful Gate. He watched the city glide toward him through a crimson haze, and fancied he could see the ages clustered like birds around the towers.

  He had reached Kushat, with the talisman of Ban Cruach still strapped in the blood-stained belt around his waist.

  IV

  He stood in a large square, lined about with huckster’s stalls and the booths of wine-sellers. Beyond were buildings, streets, a city. Stark got a blurred impression of a grand and brooding darkness, bulking huge against the mountains, as bleak and proud as they, and quite as ancient, with many ruins and deserted quarters.

  He was not sure how he had come there, but he was standing on his own feet, and someone was pouring sour wine into his mouth. He drank it greedily. There were people around him, jostling, chattering, demanding answers to their questions. A girl’s voice said sharply, “Let him be! Can’t you see he’s hurt?”

  Stark looked down. She was slim and ragged, with black hair and large eyes yellow as a cat’s. She held a leather bottle in her hands. She smiled at him and said, “I’m Thanis. Will you drink more wine?”

  “I will,” said Stark, and did, and then said, “Thank you, Thanis.” He put his hand on her shoulder, to steady himself. It was a supple shoulder, surprisingly strong. He liked the feel of it.

  The crowd was still churning around him, growing larger, and now he heard the tramp of military feet. A small detachment of men in light armor pushed their way through.

  A very young officer whose breastplate hurt the eye with brightness demanded to be told at once who Stark was and why he had come there.

  “No one crosses the moors in winter,” he said, as though that in itself were a sign of evil intent.

  “The clans of Mekh are crossing them,” Stark answered. “An army, to take Kushat—one, two days behind me.”

  The crowd picked that up. Excited voices tossed it back and forth, and clamored for more news. Stark spoke to the officer.

  “I will see your captain, and at once.”

  “You’ll see the inside of a prison, more likely!” snapped the young man. “What’s this nonsense about the clans of Mekh?”

  Stark regarded him. He looked so long and so curiously that the crowd began to snicker and the officer’s beardless face flushed pink to the ears.

  “I have fought in many wars,” said Stark gently. “And long ago I learned to listen, when someone came to warn me of attack.”

  “Better take him to the captain, Lugh,” cried Thanis. “It’s our skins too, you know, if there is war.”

  The crowd began to shout. They were all poor folk, wrapped in threadbare cloaks or tattered leather. They had no love for the guards. And whether there was war or not, their winter had been long and dull, and they were going to make the most of this excitement.

  “Take him, Lugh! Let him warn the nobles. Let them think how they’ll defend Kushat and the Gates of Death, now that the talisman is gone!”

  “That is a lie!” Lugh shouted. “And you know the penalty for telling it. Hold your tongues, or I’ll have you all whipped.” He gestured angrily at Stark. “See if he is armed.”

  One of the soldiers stepped forward, but Stark was quicker. He slipped the thong and let the cloak fall, baring his upper body.

  “The clansmen have already taken everything I owned,” he said. “But they gave me something, in return.”

  The crowd stared at the half healed stripes that scarred him, and there was a drawing in of breath.

  The soldier picked up the cloak and laid it over the Earthman’s shoulders. And Lugh said sullenly, “Come, then.”

  Stark’s fingers tightened on Thanis’ shoulder. “Come with me, little one,” he whispered. “Otherwise, I must crawl.”

  She smiled at him and came. The crowd followed.

  The captain of the guards was a fleshy man with a smell of wine about him and a face already crumbling apart though his hair was not yet gray. He sat in a squat tower above the square, and he observed Stark with no particular interest.

  “You had something to tell,” said Lugh. “Tell it.”

  Stark told them, leaving out all mention of Camar and the talisman. This was neither the time nor the man to hear that story. The captain listened to all he had to say about the gathering of the clans of Mekh, and then sat studying him with a bleary shrewdness.

  “You have proof of all this?”

  “These stripes. Their leader Ciaran ordered them laid on himself.”

  The captain sighed, and leaned back.

  “Any wandering band of hunters could have scourged you,” he said. “A nameless vagabond from the gods know where, and a lawless one at that, if I’m any judge of men—you probably deserved it.”

  He reached for wine, and smiled. “Look you, stranger. In the Norlands, no one makes war in the winter. And no one ever heard of Ciaran. If you hoped for a reward from the city, you overshot badly.”

  “The Lord Ciaran,” said Stark, grimly controlling his anger, “will be battering at your gates within two days. And you will hear of him then.”

  “Perhaps. You can wait for him—in a cell. And you can leave Kushat with the first caravan after the thaw. We have enough rabble here without taking in more.”

  Thanis caught Stark by the cloak and held him back.

  “Sir,” she said, as though it were an unclean word. “I will vouch for the stranger.”

  The captain glanced at her. “You?”

  “Sir, I am a free citizen of Kushat. According to law, I may vouch for him.”

  “If you scum of the Thieves’ Quarter would practice the law as well as you prate it, we would have less trouble,” growled the captain. “Very well, take the creature, if you want him. I don’t suppose you’ve anything to lose.”

  Lugh laughed.

  “Name and dwelling place,” said the captain, and wrote them down. “Remember, he is not to leave the Quarter.”

  Thanis nodded. “Come,” she said to Stark. He did not move, and she looked up at him. He was staring at the captain. His beard had grown in these last days, and his face was still scarred by Thord’s blows and made wolfish with pain and fever. And now, out of this evil mask, his eyes were peering with a chill and terrible intensity at the soft-bellied man who sat and mocked him.

  Thanis laid her hand on his rough cheek. “Come,” she said. “Come and rest.”

  Gently she turned his head. He blinked and swayed, and she took him around the waist and led him unprotesting to the door.

  There she paused, looking back.

  “Sir,” she said, very meekly, “news of this attack is being shouted through the Quarter now. If it should come, and it were known that you had the warning and did not pass it on . . . ” She made an expressive gesture, and went out.

  Lugh glanced uneasily at the captain. “She’s right, sir. If by chance the man did tell the truth . . . ”

  The captain swore. “Rot. A rogue’s tale. And yet . . . ” He scowled indecisively, and then reached for parchment. “After all, it’s a simple thing. Write it up, pass it on, and let the nobles do the worrying.”

  His pen began to scratch.

  Thanis took Stark by steep and narrow ways, darkling now in the afterglow, where the city climbed and fell again over the uneven rock. Stark was aware of the heavy smells of spices and unfamiliar foods, and the musky undertones of a million generations swarmed together to spawn and die in these crowded catacombs of slate and stone.

  There was a house, blending into other houses, close under the loom of the great Wall. There was a flight of steps, hollowed deep with use, twisting crazily around outer corners.

  There was a low room, and a slender man named Balin, vaguely glimpsed, who said he was Thanis’ brother. There was a bed of skins and woven cloths.

  Stark slept.

  Hands and voices called him back. Strong hands shaking him, urgent voices. He started up growling, like an animal suddenly awaked, still lost in the dark mists of exhaustion. Balin swore, and caught his fingers a
way.

  “What is this you have brought home, Thanis? By the gods, it snapped at me!”

  Thanis ignored him. “Stark,” she said. “Stark! Listen. Men are coming. Soldiers. They will question you. Do you hear me?”

  Stark said heavily, “I hear.”

  “Do not speak of Camar!”

  Stark got to his feet, and Balin said hastily, “Peace! The thing is safe. I would not steal a death warrant!”

  His voice had a ring of truth. Stark sat down again. It was an effort to keep awake. There was clamor in the street below. It was still night.

  Balin said carefully, “Tell them what you told the captain, nothing more. They will kill you if they know.”

  A rough hand thundered at the door, and a voice cried, “Open up!”

  Balin sauntered over to lift the bar. Thanis sat beside Stark, her hand touching his. Stark rubbed his face. He had been shaved and washed, his wounds rubbed with salve. The belt was gone, and his blood-stained clothing. He realized only then that he was naked, and drew a cloth around him. Thanis whispered, “The belt is there on that peg, under your cloak.”

  Balin opened the door, and the room was full of men.

  Stark recognized the captain. There were others, four of them, young, old, intermediate, annoyed at being hauled away from their beds and their gaming tables at this hour. The sixth man wore the jeweled cuirass of a noble. He had a nice, a kind face. Grey hair, mild eyes, soft cheeks. A fine man, but ludicrous in the trappings of a soldier.

  “Is this the man?” he asked, and the captain nodded.

  “Yes.” It was his turn to say Sir.

  Balin brought a chair. He had a fine flourish about him. He wore a crimson jewel in his left ear, and every line of him was quick and sensitive, instinct with mockery. His eyes were brightly cynical, in a face worn lean with years of merry sinning. Stark liked him.

  He was a civilized man. They all were—the noble, the captain, the lot of them. So civilized that the origins of their culture were forgotten half an age before the first clay brick was laid in Babylon.

  Too civilized, Stark thought. Peace had drawn their fangs and cut their claws. He thought of the wild clansmen coming fast across the snow, and felt a certain pity for the men of Kushat.