Background Colour: -White- -NavajoWhite- -Wheat- -Beige- -AntiqueWhite- -LightGray- -Silver- -BurlyWood- -Tan- -Black- -Blue-
Text Colour: -Black- -Brown- -Blue- -Green- -Red- -Yellow- -White- -Orange- -Silver-
Published in Marchers of Valhalla, 1972.
The sky was lurid, gloomy and repellent, of the blue of tarnished steel, streaked with dully crimson banners. Against the muddled red smear lowered the low hills that are the peaks of that barren upland which is a dreary expanse of sand drifts and post-oak thickets, checkered with sterile fields where tenant farmers toil out their hideously barren lives in fruitless labor and bitter want.
I had limped to a ridge which rose above the others, flanked on either hand by the dry post-oak thickets. The terrible dreariness of the grim desolation of the vistas spread before me turned my soul to dust and ashes. I sank down upon a half-rotted log, and the agonizing melancholy of that drab land lay hard upon me. The red sun, half veiled in blowing dust and filmy cloud, sank low; it hung a hand’s breadth above the western rim. But its setting lent no glory to the sand drifts and shinnery. Its somber glow but accentuated the grisly desolation of the land.
Then suddenly I realized that I was not alone. A woman had come from the dense thicket, and stood looking down at me. I gazed at her in silent wonder. Beauty was so rare in my life I was hardly able to recognize it, yet I knew that this woman was unbelievably beautiful. She was neither short nor tall; slender and yet splendidly shaped. I do not remember her dress; I have a vague impression that she was richly but modestly clad. But I remember the strange beauty of her face, framed in the dark rippling glory of her hair. Her eyes held mine like a magnet; I can not tell you the color of those eyes. They were dark and luminous, lighted as no eyes I ever saw were lighted. She spoke and her voice, strangely accented, was alien to my ears, and golden as distant chimes.
“Why do you fret, Hialmar?”
“You mistake me, Miss,” I answered. “My name is James Allison. Were you looking for someone?”
She shook her head slowly.
“I came to look at the land once more. I had not thought to find you here.”
“I don’t understand you,” I said. “I never saw you before. Are you a native of this country? You don’t talk like a Texan.”
She shook her head.
“No. But I knew this land long ago—long, long ago.”
“You don’t look that old,” I said bluntly. “You’ll pardon me for not getting up. As you see, I have but one leg, and it was such a long walk up here that I’m forced to sit and rest.”
“Life has dealt harshly with you,” she said softly. “I had hardly recognized you. Your body is so changed—”
“You must have known me before I lost my leg,” I said bitterly, “although I’ll swear I can’t remember you. I was only fourteen when a mustang fell on me and crushed my leg so badly it had to be amputated. I wish to God it had been my neck.”
Thus cripples speak to utter strangers—not so much a bid for sympathy, but the despairing cry of a soul tortured beyond endurance.
“Do not fret,” she said softly. “Life takes but it also gives—”
“Oh, don’t give me a speech about resignation and cheerfulness!” I cried savagely. “If I had the power I’d strangle every damned blatant optimist in the world! What have I to be merry about? What have I to do except sit and wait for the death which is slowly creeping on me from an incurable malady? I have no memories to cheer me—no future to look forward to—except a few more years of pain and woe, and then the blackness of utter oblivion. There has not even been any beauty in my life, lying as it has in this forsaken and desolate wilderness.”
The dams of my reticence were broken, and my bitter dreams, long pent up, burst forth; nor did it seem strange that I should pour out my soul to a strange woman I had never seen before.
“The country has memories,” she said.
“Yes, but I have not shared in them. I could have loved life and lived deeply as a cowboy, even here, before the squatters turned the country from an open range to a drift of struggling farms. I could have lived deep as a buffalo hunter, an Indian fighter, or an explorer, even here. But I was born out of my time, and even the exploits of this weary age were denied me.
“It’s bitter beyond human telling to sit chained and helpless, and feel the hot blood drying in my veins, and the glittering dreams fading in my brain. I come of a restless, roving, fighting race. My great-grandfather died at the Alamo, shoulder to shoulder with David Crockett. My grandfather rode with Jack Hayes and Bigfoot Wallace, and fell with three-quarters of Hood’s brigade. My oldest brother fell at Vimy Ridge, fighting with the Canadians, and the other died at the Argonne. My father is a cripple, too; he sits drowsing in his chair all day, but his dreams are full of brave memories, for the bullet that broke his leg struck him as he charged up San Juan Hill.
“But what have I to feel or dream or think?”
“You should remember,” she said softly. “Even now dreams should come to you like the echoes of distant lutes. I remember! How I crawled to you on my knees, and you spared me—aye, and the crashing and the thundering as the land gave way—man, do you never dream of drowning?”
I started.
“How could you know that? Time and again I have felt the churning, seething waters rise like a green mountain over me, and have wakened, gasping and strangling—but how could you know?”
“The bodies change, the soul remains slumbering and untouched,” she answered cryptically. “Even the world changes. This is a dreary land, you say, yet its memories are ancient and marvelous beyond the memories of Egypt.”
I shook my head in wonder.
“Either you’re insane, or I am. Texas has glorious memories of war and conquest and drama—but what are her few hundred years of history, compared to the antiquities of Egypt—in ancientness, I mean?”
“What is the peculiarity of the state as a whole?” she asked.
“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” I answered. “If you mean geologically, the peculiarity that has struck me is the fact that the land is but a succession of broad tablelands, or shelves, sloping upward from sea-level to over four thousand feet elevation, like the steps of a giant stair, with breaks of timbered hills between. The last break is the Caprock, and above that begins the Great Plains.”
“Once the Great Plains stretched to the Gulf,” she said. “Long, long ago what is now the state of Texas was a vast upland plateau, sloping gently to the coast, but without the breaks and shelvings of today. A mighty cataclysm broke off the land at the Caprock, the ocean roared over it, and the Caprock became the new shoreline. Then, age-by-age, the waters slowly receded, leaving the steppes as they are today. But in receding they swept into the depths of the Gulf many curious things—man, do you not remember—the vast plains that ran from the sunset to the cliffs above the shining sea? And the great city that loomed above those cliffs?
I stared at her, bewildered. Suddenly she leaned toward me, and the glory of her alien beauty almost overpowered me. My senses reeled. She threw her hands before my eyes with a strange gesture.
“You shall see!” she cried sharply. “You see—what do you see?”
“I see the sand drifts and the shinnery thickets gloomy with sunset,” I answered like a man speaking slowly, in a trance. “I see the sun resting on the western horizon.”
“You see vast plains stretching to shining cliffs!” she cried. “You see the spires and the golden dome of the city, shimmering in the sunset! You see—”
As if night had shut down suddenly, darkness came upon me, and unreality, in which the only thing that had existence was her voice, urgent, commanding—
There was a sense of fading time and space—a sensation of being whirled over illimitable gulfs, with cosmic winds blowing against me—then I looked upon churning clouds, unreal and luminous, which crystallized into a strange landscape—familiar, and yet fantastically unfamiliar.
Vast treeless plains swept away to merge with hazy horizons. In the distance, to the south, a great black cyclopean city reared its spires against the evening sky, and beyond it shone the blue waters of a placid sea. And in the near distance a line of figures moved through the still expanse. They were big men, with yellow hair and cold blue eyes, clad in scale-mail corselets and horned helmets, and they bore shields and swords.
One differed from the rest in that he was short, though strongly made, and dark. And the tall yellow-haired warrior that walked beside him—for a fleeting instant there was a distinct sense of duality. I, James Allison of the twentieth century, saw and recognized the man who was I in that dim age and that strange land. This sensation faded almost instantly, and I was Hialmar, a son of the Fair-haired, without cognizance of any other existence, past or future.
Yet as I tell the tale of Hialmar, I shall perforce interpret some of what he saw and did and was, not as Hialmar, but as the modern I. These interpretations you will recognize in their place. But remember Hialmar was Hialmar and not James Allison; that he knew no more and no less than was contained in his own experiences, bounded by the boundaries of his own voice. I am James Allison and I was Hialmar, but Hialmar was not James Allison; man may look back for ten thousand years; he can not look forward, even for an instant.
We were five hundred men and our gaze was fixed on the black towers which reared against the blue of sea and sky. All day we had guided our course by them, since the first red glow of dawn had disclosed them to our wondering eyes. A man could see far across those level, grassy plains; at first sight we had thought that city near, but we had trudged all day, and still we were miles away.
Lurking in our minds had been the thought that it was a ghost city—one of the phantoms which had haunted us on our long march across the bitter dusty deserts to the west, where, in the burning skies we had seen mirrored, still lakes, bordered by palms, and winding rivers, and spacious cities, all which vanished as we approached. But this was no mirage, born of sun and dust and silence. Etched in the clear evening sky we saw plainly the giant details of massive turret and grim abutment; of serrated tower and titanic wall.
In what dim age did I, Hialmar, march with my tribesmen across those plains toward a nameless city? I can not say. It was so long ago that the yellow-haired folk still dwelt in Nordheim, and were called, not Aryans, but red-haired Vanir and golden-haired Æsir. It was before the great drifts of my race had peopled the world, yet lesser, nameless drifts, had already begun. We were the travelling of years from our northern homeland. Lands and seas lay between. Oh, that long, long trek! No drift of people, not even of my own people, whose drifts have been epic, has ever equaled it. It had led us around the world—down from the snowy north into rolling plains, and mountain valleys tilled by peaceful brown folk—into hot breathless jungles, reeking with rot and teeming with spawning life—through eastern lands flaming with raw primitive colors under the waving palm-trees, where ancient races lived in cities of carven stone—up again into the ice and snow and across a frozen arm of the sea—then down through the snow-clad wastes, where squat blubber-eating men fled squalling from our swords; southward and eastward through gigantic mountains and titanic forest, lonely and gigantic and desolate as Eden, after man was cast forth—over searing desert sands and boundless plains, until at last, beyond the silent black city, we saw the sea once more.
Men had grown old on that trek. I, Hialmar, had come to manhood. When I had first set forth on the long trail, I had been a young boy; now I was a young man, a proven warrior, mighty limbed, with great broad shoulders, a corded throat, and an iron heart.
We were all mighty men—giants beyond the comprehension of moderns. There is not on earth today a man as strong as the weakest of our band, and our mighty thews were tuned to a blinding speed that would make the motions of finely-trained modern athletes seem stodgy and clumsy and slow. Our might was more than physical; born of a wolfish race, the years of our wandering and fighting man and beast and the elements in all forms, had instilled in our souls the very spirit of the wild—the intangible power that quivers in the long howl of the grey wolf, that roars in the north wind, that sleeps in the mighty unrest of turbulent rivers, that sounds in the slashing of icy sleet, the beat of the eagle’s wings, and lurks in the brooding silence of the vast places.
I have said it was a strange trek. It was no drift of a whole tribe, men and yellow-haired women and naked children. We were all men, adventurers to whom even the ways of wandering, warlike folk were too tame. We had taken the trail alone, conquering, exploring, and wandering, driven only by our paranoidal drive to see beyond the horizon.
There had been more than a thousand at the beginning; now there were five hundred. The bones of the rest bleached along that world-circling trail. Many chiefs had led us and died. Now our chief was Asgrimm, grown old on that endless wandering—a gaunt, bitter fighter, one-eyed and wolfish, who forever gnawed his graying beard.
We came of many clans, but all of the golden-haired Æsir, except the man who strode beside me. He was Kelka, my blood brother, and a Pict. He had joined us among the jungle-clad hills of a far land that marked the eastern-most drift of his race, where the tom-toms of his people pulsed incessantly through the hot star-flecked night. He was short, thick-limbed, deadly as a jungle-cat. We of the Æsir were barbarians, but Kelka was a savage. Behind him lay the abysmal chaos of the squalling black jungle. The pad of the tiger was in his stealthy tread, the grip of the gorilla in his black-nailed hands; the fire that burns in a leopard’s eyes burned in his.
Oh, we were a hard-bitten horde, and our tracks had been laid in blood and smoldering embers in many lands. I dare not repeat what slaughters, rapine, and massacres lay behind us, for you would recoil in horror. You are of a softer, milder age, and you can not understand those savage times when wolf pack tore wolf pack, and the morals and standards of life differed from those of this age as the thoughts of a grey killer wolf differ from those of a fat lap-dog dozing before the hearth.
This long explanation I have given in order that you may understand what sort of men marched across that plain toward the city, and by this understanding interpret what came after. Without this understanding the saga of Hialmar is howling chaos, without rhyme or meaning.
As we looked at the great city we were not awed. We had ravaged red-handed through cities in other lands beyond the sea. Many conflicts had taught us to avoid battle with superior forces when possible, but we had no fear. We were equally ready for war or the feast of friendship, as the people of the city might choose.
They had seen us. We were close enough to make out the lines of orchards, fields, and vineyards outside the walls, and the figures of the workers scurrying to the city. We saw the glitter of spears on the battlements, and heard the quick throb of war-drums.
“It will be war, brother,” said Kelka gutturally, settling his buckler firmly on his left arm. We took up our girdles and gripped our weapons—not of copper and bronze as our people in far Nordheim still worked in, but of keen steel, fashioned by a conquered, cunning people in the land of palm-trees and elephants, whose steel-armed warriors had not been able to withstand us.
We drew up on the plain a moderate distance from the great black walls, which seemed to be built of gigantic blocks of basaltic stone. From our lines Asgrimm strode, weaponless, with his hands lifted, open palm outward, as a sign of parley. But an arrow cut into the sod near him, arching from the turrets, and he fell back to our lines.
“War, brother!” hissed Kelka, red fires glimmering in his black eyes. And at that instant the mighty gates swung open, and out filed lines of warriors, their war-plumes nodding above them in a glitter of lifted spears. The westering sun striking fire from their burnished copper helmets.
They were tall and leanly built, dark of skin, though neither brown nor black, with straight hawk-like features. Their harness was of copper and leather, their bucklers covered with glossy shagreen. Their spears and slender swords and long daggers were of bronze. They advanced in perfect formation, fifteen hundred strong, a surging tide of nodding plumes and gleaming spears. The battlements behind them were lined with watchers.
There was no parley. As they came, old Asgrimm gave tongue like a hunting wolf and we charged to meet the attack. We had no formation; we ran toward them like wolves, and we saw scorn on their hawk-features as we neared them. They had no bows, and not an arrow was winged from our racing lines, not a spear thrown. We wished only to come to hand-grips. When we were within javelin-cast they sent a shower of spears, most of which glanced from our shields and corselets, and then with a deep-throated roar, our charge crashed home.
Who said the ordered discipline of a degenerate civilization can match the sheer ferocity of barbarism? They strove to fight as a unit; we fought as individuals, rushing headlong against their spears, hacking like madmen. Their entire first rank went down beneath our whistling swords, and the ranks behind crushed back and wavered as the warriors felt the brute impact of our incredible strength. If they had held, they might have flanked us, hemmed us in with their superior numbers, and slaughtered us. But they could not stand. In a storm of hammering swords we ploughed through, breaking their lines, treading their dead underfoot as we surged irresistibly onward. Their battle formation melted; they strove against us, man to man, and the battle became a slaughter. For in personal strength and ferocity, they were no match for us.
We hewed them down like corn; we reaped them like ripe grain! Oh, when I relive that battle, it seems that James Allison gives place to the mailed and mighty Hialmar, with the war-madness in his brain and the war-chant on his lips! And I am drunk again with the singing of the swords, the spattering of hot blood, and the roar of the slaying.
They broke and fled, casting away their spears. We were hard at their heels, cutting them down as they ran, to the very gates through which the foremost streamed and which they slammed in our faces, and in the faces of the wretches who were last in the flight. Shut off from safety these clawed and hammered at the unyielding portals until we hewed them down. Then we, in turn, battered at the gates until a shower of stones and beams cast from above brained three of our warriors, and we gave back to a safe distance. We heard the women howling in the streets, and the men lined the walls and shot arrows at us, with no great skill.
The bodies of the slain strewed the plain from the spot where the hosts clashed to the threshold of the gates, and where one Æsir had died, half a dozen plumed warriors had fallen. The sun had set. We pitched our rude camp before the gates, and all night we heard wailing and moaning within the walls, where the people howled for those whose still bodies we plundered and cast in a heap some distance away. At dawn we took the corpses of the thirty Æsir who had fallen in the fight, and leaving archers to watch the city, we bore them to the cliffs, which pitched sheer for fifteen hundred feet to the white sandy beach. We found sloping defiles which led down, and made our way to the water’s edge with our burdens.
There, from fishing boats drawn up on the sands, we fashioned a great raft, and heaped it high with driftwood. On the pile we laid the dead warriors, clad in their mail, with their weapons by their sides, and we cut the throats of the dozen captives we had taken, and stained the weapons and the raft-sides with their blood. Then we set the torch to the wood, and shoved the raft off. It floated far out on the mirrored surface of the blue water, until it was but a red glare, fading into the rising dawn.
Then we went back up the defiles, and ranged ourselves before the city, chanting our war-songs. We unslung our bows, and man after man toppled from the turrets, pierced by our long shafts. From trees we found growing in the gardens outside the city, we built scaling ladders, and set them against the walls. We swarmed up them in the teeth of arrow and spear and falling beam. They poured molten lead down on us, and burnt four warriors like ants in a flame. Then once more we plied our shafts, until no plumed heads showed on the battlements.
Under cover of our archers, we again set up the ladders. As we tensed ourselves for the upward rush that would carry us over the walls, on one of the towers that rose above the gates appeared a figure which halted us in our tracks.
It was a woman, such as we had not seen for long years—golden hair blowing free in the wind, milky white skin gleaming in the sunlight. She called to us in our own tongue, stumblingly, as if she had not used the language in many years.
“Wait! My masters have a word for you.”
“Masters!” Asgrimm spat the word. “Whom does a woman of the Æsir call masters, except the men of her own clan?”
She did not seem to understand, but she answered, “This is the city of Khemu, and the masters of Khemu are lords of this land. They bid me say to you that they can not stand before you in battle, but they say you shall have small profit if you scale the walls, because they will cut down their women and children with their own hands, and set fire to the palaces, so you will take only a mass of crumbling stones. But if you will spare the city, they will send out to you presents of gold and jewels, rich wines, and rare foods, and the fairest girls of the city.”
Asgrimm tugged his beard, loath to forego the sacking and the blood-letting, but the younger men roared: “Spare the city, old grizzly! Otherwise they will kill the women—and we have wandered many a moon where no women came.”
“Young fools!” snarled Asgrimm. “The kisses and love-cries of women fade and pall, but the sword sings a fresh song with each stroke. Is it the false lure of women, or the bright madness of slaughter?”
“Women!” roared the young warriors, clashing their swords. “Let them send out their girls, and we will spare their cursed city.”
Old Asgrimm turned with a sneer of bitter scorn, and called to the golden-haired girl on the tower.
“I would raze your walls and spires into dust, and drench the dust with the blood of your masters,” he said, “but my young men are fools! Send us forth food and women—and send us the sons of the chiefs for hostages.”
“It shall be done, my lord,” replied the girl, and we cast down the scaling ladders and retired to our camp.
Soon then the gates swung open again, and out filed a procession of naked slaves, laden with golden vessels containing foods and wines such as we had not known existed. They were directed by a hawk-faced man in a mantle of bright-hued feathers, bearing an ivory wand in his hand, and wearing on his temples a circlet of copper like a coiling serpent, the head reared up in front. It was evident from his bearing that he was a priest, and he spoke the name, Shakkaru, indicating himself. With him came half a dozen youths, clad in silken breeks, jeweled girdles, and gay feathers, and trembling with fear. The yellow-haired girl stood on the tower and called to us that these were the sons of princes, and Asgrimm made them taste the wine and food before we ate or drank.
For Asgrimm the slaves brought amber jars filled with gold dust, a cloak of flaming crimson silk, a shagreen belt with a jeweled golden buckle, and a burnished copper head-dress adorned with great black plumes.
He shook his head and muttered, “Gauds and bright trappings are dust of vanity and fade before the march of the years, but the edge of slaughter is not dulled, and the scent of fresh-spilled blood is good to an old man’s nostrils.”
But he donned the gleaming apparels, and then the girls came forth—slender young things, lithe and dark-eyed, scantily clad in shimmering silk—he chose the most beautiful, though morosely, as a man might pluck a bitter fruit.
Many a moon had passed since we had seen women, save the swart, smoke-stained creatures of the blubber-eaters. The warriors seized the terrified girls in fierce hunger—but my soul was dizzy with the sight of the golden-haired girl on the tower. In my mind there was room for no other thought. Asgrimm set me to guard the hostages, and to cut them down without mercy if the wine or food proved poisoned, or any woman stabbed a warrior with a hidden dagger, or the men of the city made a sudden sally on us.
But men came forth only to collect the bodies of their dead, which they burned, with many weird rituals, on a lofty promontory overlooking the sea.
Then there came to us another procession, longer and more elaborate than the first. Chiefs of the fighting men walked along unarmed, their harness exchanged for silken tunics and cloaks. Before them came Shakkaru, his ivory wand uplifted, and between the lines young slave youths, clad only in short mantles of parrot feathers, bore a canopied litter of polished mahogany, crusted with jewels.
Within sat a lean man with a curious crown on his high, narrow head and the eyes of a vulture. Beside the litter walked the white-skinned girl who had spoken from the tower. They came before us, and the slaves knelt, still supporting the litter, while the nobles gave back to each side, dropping to their knees. Only Shakkaru and the girl stood upright.
Old Asgrimm faced them, gaunt, fierce, wary, his deep-lined face shadowed by the black plume which waved above it. And I thought how much more the natural king he looked, standing on his feet among his giant fighting men, sword in hand, than the man who lolled supinely in the slave-borne litter.
But my eyes were all for the girl, whom I saw for the first time face to face. She was clad only in a short, sleeveless, and low-necked tunic of blue silk, which came to a hand’s breadth above her knees, and soft green leather sandals were on her feet. Her eyes were wide and clear, her skin whiter than the purest milk, and her hair caught the sun in a sheen of rippling gold. There was a softness about her slender form that I had never seen in any woman of the Æsir. There was a fierce beauty about our flaxen-haired women, but this girl was equally beautiful without that fierceness. She had not grown up in a naked land, as they had, where life was a merciless battle for existence, for man and for woman. But these thoughts I did not pursue to their last analysis; I merely stood, dazzled by the blond radiance of her, as she translated the words of the king, and the deep-growled replies of Asgrimm.
“My lord says to you, ‘Lo, I am Akkheba, priest of Ishtar, king of Khemu. Let there be friendship between us. We have need of each other, for ye be men wandering blindly in a naked land, as my sorcery tells me, and the city of Khemu has need of keen swords and mighty arms, for a foe comes up against us out of the sea whom we can not withstand alone. Abide in this land, and lend your swords to us, and take our gifts for your pleasure and our girls for your wives. Our slaves shall toil for you, and each day you shall sit ye down at boards groaning with meats, fishes, grains, white breads, fruits, and wines. Fine raiment shall you wear, and you shall dwell in marble palaces with silken couches, and tinkling fountains.’ ”
Now Asgrimm understood this speech, for we had seen the cities of the palm-tree lands; but it was at the talk of foes and sword-heaving that his cold blue eyes gleamed.
“We will bide,” he answered, and we roared our assent. “We will bide and cut out the hearts of the foes who come against you. But we will camp outside the walls, and the hostages will abide with us, night and day.”
“It is well,” said Akkheba, with a stately inclination of his narrow head, and the nobles of Khemu knelt before Asgrimm and would have kissed his high-strapped sandals. But he swore at them and gave back in wrathful embarrassment, while his warriors roared with rough mirth. Then Akkheba went back in his litter, bobbing on the shoulders of the slaves, and we settled ourselves for a long rest from our wanderings. But my gaze hung on the golden-haired interpreter, until the gates of the city closed behind her.
So we dwelt outside the walls, and day by day the people brought us food and wine, and more girls were sent out to us. The workers came and toiled in the gardens, the fields, and the vineyards without fear of us, and the fishing boats went out—narrow crafts with curving bows and striped silken sails. And we accepted the king’s invitation at last, and went in a compact body, the hostages in the center with naked swords at their throats, through the iron-grilled gates and into the city.
By Ymir, Khemu was mightily built! Surely the present masters of the city sprang from the loins of gods, for who else could have reared up those black basaltic walls, eighty feet in height, and forty feet at the base? Or erected that great golden dome which rose five hundred feet above the marble-paved streets?
As we strode down the broad column-flanked street, and into the broad market place, our swords in our fists, doors and windows were crowded by eager faces, fascinated and frightened. The chatter of the market place died suddenly as we swung into it, and the people crowded back from the shops and stalls to give us room.We were wary as tigers, and the slightest mishap would have sufficed to make us explode in a frenzied burst of slaughter. But the people of Khemu were wise, and the provocation did not come.
The priests came and bowed before us and led us to the great palace of the king, a colossal pile of black stone and marble. Beside the palace was a broad, open court, paved with marble flags, and from this court marble steps, broad enough for ten men to mount abreast, led up to a dais, where the king stood on occasion to harangue the multitude. One wing of the palace extended behind this court, and against this wing the steps were built. This wing was of older construction than the rest of the palace, and was furnished with a curiously carven slanting roof of stone, steep and high, towering above all other spires in the city except the golden dome. The edge of this carven slope of masonry was but a few feet above the dais, and what was contained in that wing, none of the Æsir ever saw; folk said it was Akkheba’s seraglio.
Beyond this open court were the mysterious column-fronted stone houses of the lesser priests, on both sides of a broad, marble-paved street, and beyond them again the lofty golden dome which crowned the great temple of Ishtar. On all sides rose sapphirean spires and gleaming towers, but the dome shone serenely above all, just as the bright glory of Ishtar, Shakkaru told us, shone above the heads of men. I say Shakkaru told us; in the few days they had spent among us, the young princes had learned much of our rugged, simple language, and by their interpretation and by the medium of signs, the priests of Khemu talked with us.
They led us to the lofty portals of the temple, but looking through the lines of tall marble columns, into the mysterious dim gloom of the interior, we balked, fearing a trap, and refused to go in. All the time I was looking eagerly for the golden-haired girl, but she was not in evidence. No longer needed as interpreter, the silence of the mysterious city had engulfed her.
After this first visit, we returned to our camp outside the walls, but we came again and again, at first in bands, and then, as our suspicions were lulled, in small groups or singly. However, we would not sleep within the city, though Akkheba urged us to pitch our tents in the great market place, if we disliked the marble palaces he offered us. No man of us had ever lived in a stone house, or within high walls. Our race dwelt in tents of tanned hides, or huts of mud and wattle, and we of the long trek as often as not slept like wolves on the naked earth. But by day we wandered through the city, marveling at the wonders of it, taking what we wished at the stalls, to the despair of the merchants, and entering palaces, warily, but at will, to be entertained by women who feared us, yet seemed to be fascinated by us. The people of Khemu were wondrous apt at learning; they soon spoke our language as well as we, though their speech came hard to our barbaric tongues.
But all this came in time. The day after we first visited the city, a number of us went again, and Shakkaru guided us to the palace of the higher priests which adjoined the temple of Ishtar. As we entered I saw the golden-haired girl, shining a pudgy copper idol with a handful of silk. Asgrimm laid a heavy hand on the shoulder of one of the young princes.
“Tell the priest that I would have that girl for my own,” he growled, but before the priest could reply, red rage rose in my brain and I stepped toward Asgrimm as a tiger steps toward his rival.
“If any man of us takes that woman it shall be Hialmar,” I growled, and Asgrimm wheeled cat-like at the thick killer’s purr in my voice. We faced each other tensely, our hands on our hilts, and Kelka grinned wolfishly and began to edge toward Asgrimm’s back, stealthily drawing his long knife, when Akkheba spoke through the hostage.
“Nay, my lords, Aluna is not for either of you, or for any other man. She is handmaiden to the goddess Ishtar. Ask for any other woman in the city, and she shall be yours, even to the favorite of the king; but this woman is sacred to the goddess.”
Asgrimm grunted and did not press the matter. The incense-breathing mystery of the temple had impressed even his fierce soul, and though we of the Æsir had not overmuch regard for other people’s gods, yet he had no desire to take a girl who had been in such close communion with deity. But my superstitions were less than my desire for the girl Aluna. I came again and again to the palace of the priests, and though they little liked my coming, they would not, or dared not, say me nay; and with small beginnings, I did my wooing.
What shall I say of my skill at courtship? Another woman I might have dragged to my tent by her long hair, but even without the priestly ban, there was something in my regard for Aluna that tied my hands from violence. I wooed her in the way we of the Æsir wooed our fierce lithe beauties—with boastings of prowess, and tales of slaughter and rapine. And in truth, without exaggeration, my tales of battle and massacre might have drawn to me the most wayward of the fierce beauties of Nordheim. But Aluna was soft and mild, and had grown up in temple and palace, instead of wattle hut and ice field! My ferocious boastings frightened her; she did not understand. And by the strange perversity of nature, it was this very lack of understanding which made her more enthralling to me. Even as the very savagery she feared in me made her look upon me with more interest than she looked on the soft-thewed men of Khemu.
But in my conversations with her, I learned of her coming to Khemu, and her saga was strange as that of Asgrimm and our band. Where she had dwelt in her childhood she could little say, having no geography, but it had been far away across the sea to the east. She remembered a bleak wave-lashed coast, and straggling huts of wattle and mud, and yellow-haired people like herself. So I believe she came of a branch of the Æsir which marked the westernmost drift of our race up to that time. She was perhaps nine or ten years old when she had been taken in a raid on the village by dark-skinned men in galleys—who they were she did not know, and my knowledge of ancient times does not tell me, for then the Phoenicians had not yet put to sea, nor the Egyptians. I can but guess that they were men of some ancient race, a survival of another age, like the people of Khemu—destroyed and forgotten before the rise of the younger races.
They took her, and a storm drove them westward and southward for many days, until their galley crashed on the reefs of a strange island where alien, painted men swarmed onto the beach and slaughtered the survivors for their cooking pots. The yellow-haired child they spared, for some whim, and placing her in a great canoe with skulls grinning along the gunwales, they rowed until they sighted the spires of Khemu on the high cliffs.
There they sold her to the priests of Khemu, to be a handmaiden for the goddess Ishtar. I had supposed her position to be holy and revered, but I found that it was otherwise. The worm of suspicion stirred in my soul against the Khemuri, as I realized, in her words, the cruel and bitter contempt in which they held folk of other, younger races.
Her position in the temple was neither honorable nor dignified, and though the servant of the goddess, she was without honor herself, save that no man except the priests was allowed to touch her. She was, in fact, no more than a menial, subject to the cold cruelty of the hawk-like priests. She was not beautiful to them; to them her fair skin and shimmering golden hair were but the marks of an inferior race. And even to me, who was not prone to tax my brain, came the vague thought that if a blond girl was so contemptible in their eyes, that treachery must lurk behind the honor they gave to men of the same race.
Of Khemu I learned a little from Aluna and more from the priests and the princes. As a people, they were very old. They claimed descent from the half-mythical Lemurians. Once their cities had girdled the gulf upon which Khemu overlooked. But some the sea had gulped down, some had fallen before the painted savages of the islands, and some had been destroyed by civil wars, so that now, for nearly a thousand years, Khemu had reigned alone in solitary majesty. Their only contact had been with the wayward, painted people of the islands, who, until a year or two before, had come regularly in their long, high-prowed canoes to trade ambergris, coconuts, whale’s teeth, and coral gotten from among their islands; and mahogany, leopard-skins, virgin gold, elephant tusks, and copper ore, procured from some unknown tropical mainland far to the south.
The people of Khemu were a waning race. Although they still numbered thousands, many were slaves, descendants of a thousand generations of slaves. Their race was but a shadow of its former glory. A few more centuries would have seen the last of them, but on the sea to the south, out of sight over the horizon, was brooding a menace that threatened to sweep them all out of existence at one stroke.
The painted people had ceased to come in peaceful trade. They had come in war-canoes, with a clashing of spears on hide-covered shields, and a barbaric chant of war. A king had risen among them who had united the warring tribes, and now launched them against Khemu—not their former masters, for the old empire of which Khemu had been a part had crumbled before the drift of these people into the isles from that far-away continent which was the cradle of their race. This king was unlike them; he was a white-skinned giant like ourselves, with mad blue eyes and hair crimson as blood.
They had seen him, the people of Khemu. By night his war-canoes full of painted spearmen had stolen along the coast, and at sunrise the slayers had swept up the defiles of the cliff, slaying the fishermen who then slept in huts along the beach, cutting down the laborers just going to work in the fields, and storming at the gates. The great walls had held, however, and the attackers had despaired of the storming and drawn off. But the red-haired king had stood up before the gates, dangling the severed head of a woman by its long hair, and shouted his bloody vow to return with a fleet of war-canoes that should blacken the sea, and to raze the towers of Khemu to the red-stained dust. He and his slayers were the foes we had been hired to fight, and we awaited their coming with fierce impatience.
And while we waited we grew more and more used to the ways of civilization, insofar as barbarians can accustom themselves in such a short time. We still camped outside the walls, and kept our swords ready within, but it was more in instinctive caution than fear of treachery. Even Asgrimm seemed lulled to a sense of security, especially after Kelka, maddened by the wine they gave him, killed three Khemurians in the market-place, and no blood-vengeance or man-bote for the deed.
We overcame our superstitions and allowed the priests to guide us into the breathless dim cavern of a building that was the temple of Ishtar. We went even into the inner shrine, where sacred fires burned dimly in the scented gloom. There a screaming slave girl was sacrificed on the great black, red-veined altar at the foot of the marble stairs which mounted upward in the darkness until they were lost to view. These stairs led to the abode of Ishtar, we were told, and up them the spirit of the sacrifice mounted to serve the goddess. Which I decided was true, for after the corpse on the altar lay still, and the chants of worship died to a bloodfreezing whisper, I heard the sound of weeping far above us, and knew that the naked soul of the victim stood whimpering in terror before her goddess.
I asked Aluna later if she had ever seen the goddess, and she shook with fright, and said only the spirit of the dead looked on Ishtar. She, Aluna, had never set foot on the marble stair that led up to the abode of the goddess. She was called the hand-maiden of Ishtar, but her duties were to do the biddings of the hawk-faced priests and the evil-eyed naked women who served them, and who glided like dusky shadows among the purple gloom amidst the columns.
But among the warriors grew discontent, and they wearied of ease and luxury, and even of the dark-skinned women. For in the strange soul of the Æsir, only the lust for red battle and far-wandering remain constant. Asgrimm daily conversed with Shakkaru and Akkheba on ancient times; I was chained by the lure of Aluna; Kelka guzzled each day in the wine shops until he fell senseless in the streets. But the rest clamored against the life we were leading and asked Akkheba what of the foe we were to slay?
“Be patient,” said Akkheba. “They will come, and their red-haired king with them.”
Dawn rose over the shimmering spires of Khemu. Warriors had begun to spend the nights as well as the days in the city. I had drunk with Kelka the night before and lain with him in the streets until the breeze of morn had blown the fumes of the wine from my brain. Seeking Aluna, I strode down the marble pave and entered the palace of Shakkaru, which adjoined the temple of Ishtar. I passed through the wide outer chambers, where priests and women still lolled in slumber, and heard on a sudden, beyond a closed door, the sound of sharp blows on soft naked flesh. Mingled with them was a piteous weeping and sobs for mercy in a voice I knew.
The door was bolted, and it was of silver-braced mahogany, but I burst it inwards as if it had been match-wood. Aluna grovelled on the floor with her scanty tunic tucked up, before a hatchet-faced priest who with cold venom was scourging her with a cruel, small-thonged whip which left crimson weals on her bare flesh. He turned as I entered, and his face went ashy. Before he could move I clenched my first and gave him a buffet that crushed his skull like an egg shell and broke his neck in the bargain.
The whole palace swam red to my maddened glare. Perhaps it was not so much the pain the priest had inflicted on Aluna—because pain was the most common thing in that fierce life—but the proprietorial way in which he inflicted it—the knowledge that the priests had possessed her—all of them, perhaps.
A man is no better and no worse than his feelings regarding the women of his blood, which is the true and only test of racial consciousness. A man will take to himself the stranger woman, and sit down at meat with the stranger man, and feel no twinges of race-consciousness. It is only when he sees the alien man in possession of, or intent upon, a woman of his blood, that he realizes the difference in race and strain. So I, who had held women of many races in my arms, who was blood-brother to a Pictish savage, was shaken by mad fury at the sight of an alien laying hands on a woman of the Æsir.
I believe it was the sight of her, a slave of an alien race, and the slow wrath it produced, which first stirred me toward her. For the roots of love are set in hate and fury. And her unfamiliar softness and gentleness crystallized the first vague sensation.
Now I stood scowling down at her as she whimpered at my feet. I did not lift her and wipe her tears as a civilized man would have done. Had such a thought occurred to me, I would have rejected it disgustedly as unmanly. As I stood so, I heard my name shouted suddenly, and Kelka raced into the chamber, yelling: “They come, brother, just as the old one said! The watchers on the cliffs have run to the city, with a tale of the sea black with war-boats!”
With a glance at Aluna, and a dumb incoherence struggling for expression, I turned to go with the Pict, but the girl staggered up and ran toward me, tears streaming down her cheeks, her arms outstretched pleadingly.
“Hialmar!” she wailed. “Do not leave me! I am afraid! I am afraid!”
“I can not take you now,” I growled. “War and slaughter are forward. But when I return I will take you, and not the priests of all the gods shall stay me!”
I took a quick step toward her, my hands yearning toward her—then smitten with the fear of bruising her tender flesh,myhands dropped empty to my side. An instant I stood, dumb, torn by fierce yearning, speech and action frozen by the strangeness of the emotion which tore my soul. Then tearing myself away, I followed the impatient Pict into the streets.
The sun was rising as we of the Æsir marched toward the crimson-etched cliffs, followed by the regiments of Khemu. We had thrown aside the gay garments and head-pieces we had worn in the city. The rising sun sparkled on our horned helmets, worn hauberks, and naked swords. Forgotten the months of idleness and debauchery. Our souls were riot with the wild exultation of coming strife.We went to slaughter as to a feast, and as we strode we clashed sword and shield in crude thundering rhythm, and sang the slaying-song of Niord who ate the red smoking heart of Heimdul. The warriors of Khemu looked at us in amazement, and the people who lined the walls of the city shook their heads in bewilderment and whispered among themselves.
So we came to the cliffs, and saw, as Kelka had said, the sea black with war-canoes, high prowed, and adorned with grinning skulls. Scores of these boats were already pulled up on the beach, and others were sweeping in on the crests of the waves. Warriors were dancing and shouting on the sands, and their clamor came up to us. There were many of them—three thousand, at the very least—probably many more. The men of Khemu blenched, but old Asgrimm laughed as we had not heard him laugh in many a moon, and his age fell from him like a cast-off mantle.
There were half a dozen runways leading down through the cliffs to the beach, and up these the invaders must come, for the precipices on all other sides were unclimbable. We ranged ourselves at the heads of these runways, and the men of Khemu were behind us. Little part they had in that battle, holding themselves in reserve for aid that we did not call for.
Up the passes swarmed the chanting, painted warriors, and at last we saw their king, towering above the huge figures. The morning sun caught his hair in a crimson blaze, and his laughter was like a gust of sea wind. Alone of that horde he wore mail and helmet, and in his hand his great sword shone like a sheen of silver. Aye, he was one of the wandering Vanir, our red-haired kin in Nordheim. Of his long trek, his wanderings, and his wild saga, I know not, but that saga must have been wilder and stranger than that of Aluna or of ours. By what madness in his soul he came to be king of these fierce savages, I can not even offer a guess. But when he saw what manner of men confronted him, new fury entered his yells, and at his bellow his warriors rolled up the runways like steel-crested waves.
We bent our bows and our arrows whistled in clouds down the defiles. The front ranks melted away, the hordes reeled backward, then stiffened and came on once more. Charge after charge we broke, and charge after charge hurtled up the passes in blind ferocity. The attackers wore no armor, and our long shafts tore through hide-covered shields like they were cloth. They had no skill at archery.Whenthey came near enough they threw their spears in whistling showers, and some of us died. But few of them came within spear-cast and less won through to the heads of the passes. I remember one huge warrior who came crawling up out of the defile like a snake, crimson froth drooling from his lips, and the feathered ends of arrows standing out from his belly, ribs, neck and limbs. He howled like a mad dog, and his death-bite tore the heel of my sandal as I stamped his head into a red ruin.
Some few did break through the blinding hail and came to hand-grips, but there they fared little better. Man to man we of the Æsir were the stronger, and our armor turned their spears, while our swords and axes crashed through their wooden shields as though they were paper. Yet so many there were, but for our advantage in location, all the Æsir had died there on the cliffs, and the setting sun had lighted the smoking ruins of Khemu.
All through that long summer day we held the cliffs, until, when our quivers were empty and our bow-strings frayed through, and the defiles were choked with painted bodies, we threw aside our bows, and drawing our swords, went down into the defiles and met the invaders hand to hand and blade to blade. They had died like flies in the passes, yet there were many of them left, and the fire of their rage burned no less brightly because of the arrow-feathered corpses which lay beneath our feet.
They came on and up, roaring like a wave, stabbing with spear and lashing with war-club. We met them in a whirlwind of steel, cleaving skulls, smashing breasts, hewing limbs from their bodies and heads from their shoulders, till the defiles were shambles where men could scarcely keep their feet on the blood-washed, corpse-littered paths.
The westering sun cast long shadows across the cliff-shaded beaches when I came upon the king of the attackers. He was on a level expanse where the upward trending slope ran level for a short distance before it tipped up again at a steeper slant. Arrows had wounded him, and swords had gashed him, but the mad blaze in his eyes was undimmed, and his thundering voice still urged his gasping, weary, staggering warriors to the onset. Yet now, though the battle raged fiercely in the other defiles, he stood among a host of the dead, and only two huge warriors stood beside him, their spears clotted with blood and brains.
Kelka was at my heels as I rushed at the Vanir. The two painted warriors leaped to bar my path, but Kelka was upon them. From each side they leaped at him, their spears driving in with a hiss. Yet as a wolf avoids the stroke he writhed beyond the goring blades, and the three figures caromed together an instant; then one warrior fell away, disemboweled, and the other dropped across him, his head half severed from his body.
As I leaped toward the red-haired king, we struck simultaneously. My sword tore the helmet from his head, and at his terrible stroke, his sword and my shield shattered together, before I could strike again, he dropped the broken hilt and grappled with me as a grizzly grapples. I let go my sword, useless at such close quarters, and close-locked we reeled on the crest of the slope.
We were evenly matched in strength, but his might was ebbing from him with the blood of a score of wounds. Straining and gasping with the effort, we swayed, hard-braced, and I felt my pulse pound in my temples, saw the great veins swell in his. Then suddenly he gave way, and we pitched headlong, to roll down the slanting defile. In that grim strife neither dared try to draw a dagger. But as we rolled and tore at each other, I felt the iron ebbing from his mighty limbs, and by a volcanic burst of effort, heaved up on top, and sunk my fingers deep in his corded throat. Sweat and blood misted my vision, my breath came in whistling gasps, but I sank my fingers deeper and deeper. His tearing hands grew aimless and groping, until with a racking gasp of effort, I tore out my dagger and drove it home again and again, until the giant lay motionless beneath me.
Then as I reeled upright, half-blinded and shaking from the desperate strife, Kelka would have hewed off the king’s head, but I prevented it.
A long wavering cry went up from the invaders and they flinched for the first time. Their king had been the fire which had held them like doom to their fate all day. Now they broke suddenly and fled down the defiles, and we cut them down as they ran.We followed them down onto the beach, still slaughtering them like cattle, and as they ran to their canoes and pushed off, we waded into the water until it flowed over our shoulders, glutting our mad fury. When the last survivors, rowing madly, had passed to safety, the beach was littered with still forms, and floating bodies sprawled to the wash of the surf.
Only painted bodies lay on the beach and in the shallow water, but in the defiles, where the fighting had been fiercest, seventy of the Æsir lay dead. Of the rest of us, few there were who bore not some mark or wound.
By Ymir, that was a slaying! The sun was dipping toward the horizon when we came back from the cliffs, weary, dusty and bloody, with little breath left for singing, but with our hearts glad because of the red deeds we had done. The people of Khemu did the singing for us. They swarmed out of the city in a vast shouting, cheering throng, and they laid carpets of silk, strewn with roses and gold dust, before our feet.We bore with us our wounded on litters. But first we took our dead to the beach, and broke up war-canoes to make a mighty raft, and lade it with the corpses and set it afire. And we took the red-haired king of the invaders, and laid him in his great war-canoe, with the corpses of his bravest chiefs about him to serve him in ghostland, and we gave to him the same honors we gave to our own men.
I looked eagerly for Aluna among the throng, but I did not see her. They had put up tents in the market place, and there we placed our wounded, and leeches of the Khemuri came among them, and they dressed the wounds of the rest of us. Akkheba had prepared a mighty victory feast for us in his great hall, and thither we went, dust-stained and blood-stained. Even old Asgrimm grinned like a hungry wolf as he wiped the clotted blood from his knotty hands and donned the garb they had given him.
I lingered for a space among the tents where lay those too desperately wounded to walk or even be carried to the feast, hoping that Aluna would come to me. But she did not come, and I went to the great hall of the king, without which the warriors of Khemu stood at attention—the more to do honor to their allies, Akkheba said.
That hall was three hundred feet in length, and half as many wide. It was floored with polished mahogany, half covered with thick rugs and leopardskins. The walls were of carven stone, pierced by many arched, mahoganypaneled doors, and towering up to a lofty arching ceiling, and half covered with velvet tapestries. On a throne at the back of the hall, Akkheba sat, looking down at the revelry from a raised dais, with files of plumed spearmen on either side. At the great board which ran the full length of the hall, the Æsir in their battered, stained, dusty garments and corselets, many with bloody bandages, drank and roared and gorged, served by bowing slaves, both men and women.
Chiefs and nobles and warriors of the city in their burnished harnesses sat among their allies, and for each Æsir it seemed tomethere were at least three or four girls, laughing, jesting, submitting to their rude caresses. Their laughter rose shrill and strident above the clamor. There was an unreality about the scene—a strained levity, a forced gaiety. But I did not see Aluna, so I turned and, passing through one of the mahogany arched doors, crossed a silken-hung chamber, and entered another. It was dimly lighted, and I almost ran into old Shakkaru.Herecoiled, and seemed much put out at meeting me, for some reason or another. I noted that his hand clutched at his robe, which Akkheba had told us, all priests wore that night in our honor.
A thought occurred to me and I voiced it.
“I wish to speak to Aluna,” I said. “Where is she?”
“She is at present occupied with her duties and can not see you,” he said. “Come to the temple tomorrow—”
He edged away from me, and in a vague pallor underlying his swarthy complexion, in a tremor behind his voice, I sensed that he was in deadly fear of me and wished to be rid of me. The suspicions of the barbarian flashed up in me. In an instant I had him by the throat, wrenching from his hand the long, wicked blade he drew from beneath his robe.
“Where is she, you jackal?” I snarled. “Tell me—or—”
He was dangling like a puppet in my grasp, his kicking heels clear of the floor, his head bent back almost to the snapping point. With the fear of death in his distended eyes, he jerked his head violently, and I eased my grasp a trifle.
“In the shrine of Ishtar,” he gasped. “They sacrifice her to the goddess—spare my life—I will tell you all—the whole secret and plot—”
But I had heard enough. Whirling him on high by girdle and knee, I dashed out his brains against a column, and leaping through an outer door, raced between rows of massive pillars, and gained the street.
Abreathless silence reigned over all.Nothrongs were abroad that night, as one would have thought, celebrating the destruction of their enemies. The doors were shut, the windows shuttered. Hardly a light shone, and I did not even see a watchman. It was all strange and unreal; the silent, ghostly city, where the only sound was the strident, unnatural revelry rising from the great feast hall. I could see the glow of torches in the market place where our wounded lay.
I had seen old Asgrimm sitting at the head of the board, with his hands stained with dried blood, and his hacked and dusty mail showing under the silken cloak he wore; his gaunt features shadowed by the great black plumes that waved above him. All up and down the board the girls were embracing and kissing the half-drunken Æsir, lifting off their heavy helmets and easing them of their mail as they grew hot with wine.
Near the foot of the board, Kelka was tearing at a great beef-bone like a famished wolf. Some laughing girls were teasing him, coaxing him to give them his sword, until suddenly, infuriated by their sport and importunities, he dealt his foremost tormentor such a blow with the bone he was gnawing that she fell, dead or senseless, to the floor. But the high pitched laughter and wild merriment did not slacken. I likened them suddenly to vampires and skeletons, laughing over a feast of dust and ashes.
I hurried down the silent street, crossing the court and passing the houses of the priests, which seemed deserted except for slaves. Rushing into the lofty-pillared portico of the temple—I ran through the deep-lying gloom, groping in the darkness—burst into the vaguely lighted inner shrine—and halted, frozen. Lesser priests and naked women stood about the altar in positions of adoration, chanting the sacrificial song, holding golden goblets to catch the blood that ebbed down the stained grooves in the stone. And on that altar, whimpering softly as a dying doe might whimper, lay Aluna.
Shadowy was the cloud of incense smoke which gloomed the shrine; crimson as hell-fire the cloud which veiled my sight. With one inhuman yell that rang hideously to the vaulted roof, I rushed, and skulls splintered beneath my madly lashing sword. My memories of that slaughter are frenzied and chaotic. I remember frenzied screams, the whir of steel and the chop and crunch of murderous blows, the snapping of bones, spattering of blood, and the gibbering flight of figures that tore their hair and screeched to their gods as they ran—and I among them, raging in silent deadliness, like a blood-mad wolf among sheep. Some few escaped.
I remember, clear etched against a murky red background of madness, a lithe, naked woman who stood close to the altar, frozen with horror. A goblet at her lips, her eyes flaring. I caught her up with my left hand and dashed her against the marble steps with a fury that must have splintered every bone in her body. For the rest I do not well remember. There was a brief, mad whirling blast of ferocity that littered the shrine with mangled corpses. Then I stood alone among the dead, in a shrine that was a shambles, with streaks of clots and pools of blood and human fragments scattered hideously and obscenely about the dark, polished floor.
My sword trailed in a suddenly nerveless hand as I approached the altar with dragging steps. Aluna’s eyelids fluttered open as I looked down at her, my hands hanging limply, my entire body sagging helplessly.
She murmured, “Hialmar!” then her eyelids sank down, the long lashes shadowing the youthful cheek, and with a little sigh, she moved her flaxen head and lay like a child just settling to sleep. All my agonized soul cried out within me, but my lips were mute with the inarticulateness of the barbarian. I sankdownuponmyknees beside the altar and, groping hesitantly about her slender form with my arms, I kissed her dying lips, clumsily, falteringly, as a callow stripling might have done. That one act—that one faltering kiss—was the one touch of tenderness in the whole, hard life of Hialmar of the Æsir.
Slowly I rose, and stood above the dead girl, and as slowly and mechanically I picked up my sword. At the familiar touch of the hilt, there surged through my brain again the red fury of my race.
With a terrible cry I sprang to the marble stairs. Ishtar! They had sent her spirit shuddering up to the goddess, and close on the heels of that spirit should come the avenger! No less than the bloody goddess herself should pay for Aluna. Mine was the simple cult of the barbarian. The priests had told me that Ishtar dwelt above and the steps led to her abode. Vaguely I supposed it mounted through misty realms of stars and shadows. But up I went, to a dizzy height, until below me the shrine was but a vague play of dim lights and shadows, and darkness was all around me.
Then I came suddenly, not into a broad starry expanse of the deities, but to a grill of golden bars, and beyond them I heard a woman sobbing. But it was not Aluna’s naked soul which wailed before some divine throne, for dead or alive, I knew her cry.
In mad fury I gripped the bars and they bent and buckled in my hands. Like straws I tore them aside and leaped through, my killing yell trembling in my throat. In the dim light that came from a torch set high in a niche, I saw that I was in a circular, domed chamber, whose walls and ceiling seemed to be of gold. There were velvet couches there, and silken cushions, and among these lay a naked woman, weeping. I saw the weals of a whip on her white body, and I halted, bewildered. Where was the goddess, Ishtar?
I must have spoken aloud in my barbaric Khemuri, for she lifted her head and looked at me with luminous dark eyes, swimming with tears. There was a strange beauty about her, something alien and exotic beyond my reckoning.
“I am Ishtar,” she answered me, and her voice was soft as distant golden chimes, though broken now with sobbing.
“You—” I gasped, “you—Ishtar—the goddess of Khemu?”
“Yes!” she rose to her knees, wringing her white hands. “Oh, man, whoever you are—grant me one touch of mercy, if there be mercy left in the world at all! Cut my head from my body and end this long agony!”
But I drew back and lowered my sword.
“I came to slay a bloody goddess,” I growled. “Not to butcher a whimpering slave girl. If you be Ishtar—who—where—in Ymir’s name, what madness is this?”
“Listen, and I will tell you!” she cried, hitching toward me on her knees and catching at the skirt of my corselet. “Only listen, and then grant me the little thing I ask—the stroke of your sword!
“I am Ishtar, a daughter of a king in dim Lemuria, which the sea drank so long ago. As a child I was wed to Poseidon, god of the sea, and in the awesome mysterious bridal night, when I lay floating and unharmed on the breast of the ocean, the god gave to me the gift of life everlasting, which has become a curse in the long centuries of my captivity.
“But I dwelt in purple Lemuria, young and beautiful, while my playmates grew old and grey about me. Then Poseidon wearied of Lemuria and of Atlantis. He rose and shook his foaming mane, and his white steeds raced over the walls and the spires and the crimson towers. But he lifted me gently on his bosom and bore me unharmed to a far land, where for many centuries I dwelt among a strange and kindly race.
“Then in an evil day I went upon a galley from distant Khitai, and in a hurricane it sank off this accursed coast. But as before I was borne gently ashore on the waves of my master, Poseidon, and the priests found me upon the beach. The people of Khemu claim descent from Lemuria, but they were a subject race, speaking a mongrel tongue. When I spoke to them in pure Lemurian, they cried out to the people that Poseidon had sent them a goddess and the people fell down and worshipped me. But the priests were devils then as now, necromancers and devil-worshippers, owning no gods save the demons of the Outer Gulfs. They pent me in this golden dome, and by cruelty they wrung my secret from me.
“For more than a thousand years I have been worshipped by the people, who were sometimes given faint glimpses of me, standing on the marble stair, half-hidden in the sacrificial smoke, or were allowed to hear my voice speaking in a strange tongue as oracle. But the priests—oh, gods of Mu, what I have suffered at their hands! Goddess to the people—slave to the priests!”
“Why do you not destroy them with your sorcery?” I demanded.
“I am no sorceress,” she answered, “though you might deem me such, were I to tell you what mysteries the ages have unfolded to me. Yet there is one sorcery I might invoke—one terrible, overwhelming doom—if I might escape from this prison—if I might stand up naked in the dawn and call upon Poseidon. In the still nights I hear him roaring beyond the cliffs, but he sleeps and heeds not my cries. Yet if I might stand up in his sight and call upon him, he might hear and heed. The priests are crafty—they have shut me from his sight and hearing—for more than a thousand years I have not looked on the great blue monster—”
Suddenly we both started. From the city far below us welled up a strange wild clamor.
“Treachery!” she cried. “They are murdering your people in the streets! You destroyed the enemies they feared—now they turn on you!”
With a curse I raced down the stairs, cast one anguished glance at the still white form on the altar, and ran out of the temple. Down the street, beyond the houses of the priests, rose the clanging of steel, howls of death, yells of fury, and the thunderous war-cries of the Æsir. They were not dying alone. The Khemuri’s cries of hate and triumph were mingled with screams of fear and pain. Ahead of me the street seethed with battling humanity, no more silent and deserted. From the doors of shops, hovels, and palaces alike swarmed screeching city folk, weapons in hand, to aid their soldiers who were locked in mad battle with the yellow-haired aliens. Flame from a score of fires lighted the frenzied scene like day.
As I neared the court adjoining the king’s palace, along streets through which men ran howling, an Æsir warrior staggered toward me, drift of the storm of battle which was raging further down. He was without armor, bent almost double, and though an arrow stood out from his ribs, it was his belly he was gripping with his empty hands.
“The wine was poisoned,” he groaned. “We are betrayed and doomed! We drank deep, and in our cups the women coaxed from us our swords and armor. Only Asgrimm and the Pict would not give them up. Then suddenly the women slipped away, that old vulture left the feast hall—then the pangs took hold on us! Ah, Ymir, it twists my vitals like a knotted rope! Then the doors swarmed suddenly with archers who drove their arrows upon us—the warriors ofKhemudrew their swords and fell upon us—the priests who swarmed the hall tore hidden blades from their robes. Hark to the yelling in the market place where they cut the throats of the wounded! Ymir, cold steel a man may laugh at, but this—this—ah, Ymir!”
He sank to the pave, bent like a drawn bow, froth drooling from his lips, his limbs jerking in horrible convulsions. I raced into the court. On the further side, and in the street in front of the palace, was a mass of struggling figures.
Swarms of dark-skinned men in armor battled with half-naked yellow-haired giants, who smote and rent like wounded lions, though their only weapons were broken benches, arms snatched from dying foes, or their naked hands, and whose lips were flecked with the froth of the agony that knotted their entrails. I swear by Ymir, they did not die alone; mangled corpses were trodden under their feet, and they were like wild beasts whose ferocity is not quenched save with the extinguishing of the last, least spark of life.
The great feast hall was burning. In its light I saw, standing on the dais high above the conflict, old Akkheba, shaking and trembling with terror at his own treachery, with two stalwart guards on the steps below him. The fighting scattered out over the court, and I saw Kelka. He was drunk, but this did not alter his deadliness. He was the center of a struggling clump of thrusting, hacking figures, and his long knife flashed in the firelight as it ripped through throats, and bellies, spilling blood and entrails on the marble pave.
With a low, sullen roar I charged into the thick of them, and in an instant we stood alone in a ring of corpses.
He grinned wolfishly, his teeth champing spasmodically.
“There was the devil in the wine, Hialmar! It claws at my guts like a wildcat—come, let us kill some more of them before we die. Look—the Old One makes his last stand!”
I glanced quickly where, directly in front of the blazing feast hall, Asgrimm’s gaunt frame loomed among the swarming pack. I saw the flash of his sword and the dropping ofmenabout him. An instant his black plumes waved over the horde—then they vanished and over the place he had stood rolled the dark wave.
The next instant I was leaping toward the marble stairs, with Kelka close at my heels. We smote the line of warriors on the lower steps, and burst through. They surged in behind to pull us down, but Kelka wheeled and his long blade made deadly play among them. They swarmed in on him from all sides, and there he died as he had lived, slashing and slaying in silent frenzy, neither asking quarter nor giving it.
I leaped up on the steps, and old Akkheba howled at my coming. My broken sword I had left wedged in a guardsman’s breastbone. With my naked hands I charged the two guardsmen at the upper steps. They sprang to meet me, stabbing hard. I caught the driving spear of one and hurled him headlong down the stairs, to dash out his brains at the bottom. The spear of the other one tore through my mail and blood gushed over the shaft. Before he could tear it free for a second thrust, I gripped his throat and tore it out withmyfingers. Then wrenching forth the spear and casting it aside, I rushed at Akkheba, who screamed and sprang up, grasping the scrolled edge of the sloping stone roof behind the dais. Mad terror lent the old one strength and courage. Up the steep slope he clambered like a monkey, catching at the carved decorations with fingers and toes, and howling all the time like a beaten dog.
And I followed him. My life was ebbing out of the wound beneath my mail. It was soaked with blood, but my wild beast vitality was as yet undiminished. Up and up he climbed, shrieking, and higher and higher we rose above the city, until we swayed precariously on the level roof-ridge, five hundred feet above the howling streets. And then we were frozen, the hunted and the hunter.
A strange, haunting cry rang above the hellish tumult that raged below us, above Akkheba’s frenzied howling. On the great golden dome, high above all other towers and spires, stood a naked figure, hair blown in the dawn wind, etched in the red dawn glow. It was Ishtar, waving her arms and screaming a frenzied invocation in a strange tongue. Faintly it came to us. She had escaped from the golden prison I had burst open. Now she stood on the dome, calling upon the god of her fathers, Poseidon!
But I had my own vengeance to consummate. I poised for the leap that would carry us both crashing five hundred feet to death—and under my feet the solid masonry rocked. A new frenzy rang in Akkheba’s screams. With a thunderous crash the distant cliffs fell into the sea. There was a long, rumbling, cataclysmic crash, like the shattering of a world, and to my startled gaze the entire vast plain waved like a surf, gave way, and dipped southward.
Great chasms gaped in the tilting plain, and suddenly, with an indescribable rumble, a grinding thunder, and a crashing of falling walls and buckling towers, the entire city of Khemu was in motion! It was sliding in a vast, chaotic ruin down to the sea which rose, rearing, to meet it! In that sliding horror, tower crashed against tower, buckling and toppling, grinding screaming human insects to red dust, crushing them to bits with falling stones. Where I had looked out upon an ordered city, with walls and spires and roofs, all was a mad, buckled, crumpled, splintering chaos of thundering stone, where spires rocked crazily above the ruins, and came thundering down.
Still thedomerode the wrack, and the white figure upon it still screamed and gestured. Then with an awesome roar, the sea stirred and rose, and great tentacles of green foam curled mountain high and roared down over the sliding, rumbling ruins, mounting higher and higher until the entire southern side of the crushed city was hidden in swirling green waters.
For an instant the ancient roof-ridge on which we clung had risen above the ruin, holding its place. And in that instant I leaped and gripped old Akkheba. His death-shriek yowled in my ear as under my iron fingers I felt his flesh tear like rotten pulp, his thews rip from his bones, and the bones themselves splinter. The thunderings of the breaking world were in my ear, the swirling green waters at my feet, but, as the whole earth seemed to crumble and break, as the masonry dissolved beneath my feet, and the roaring green tides surged over me, drowning me in untold shimmering fathoms, my last thought was that Akkheba had died by my hand, before a wave touched him.
I sprang up with a cry, hands out thrown as if to fend off the swirling waves. I reeled, dizzy with surprise. Khemu and the eld had vanished. I stood on the oak-clad hill, and the sun hung a hand’s breadth above the post-oak shinnery. Seconds only had elapsed since the woman had gestured before my eyes. Now she stood looking at me with that enigmatic smile that had less of mockery than pity.
“What is this?” I exclaimed, dazedly. “I was Hialmar—I am James Allison—the sea was the Gulf—the Great Plains ran to the shore then, and on the shore stood the accursed city of Khemu. No! I can not believe you! I can not believe my own reason. You have hypnotized me—made me dream—”
She shook her head.
“It came to pass long, long ago, Hialmar.”
“Then what of Khemu?” I exclaimed.
“Its broken ruins sleep in the deep blue waters of the Gulf, whither they washed in the long ages that passed after the breaking of the land, before the waters receded and left these long rolling steppes.”
“But what of the woman Ishtar, their goddess?”
“Was she not the bride of Poseidon, who heard her cry and destroyed the evil city? On his bosom he bore her unharmed. She was deathless and eternal. She wandered through many lands, and dwelt with many people, but she had learned her lesson, and she who had been a slave of priests, became their ruler. She who had been a goddess in cruel seeming, became a goddess in her right, by virtue of her ancient wisdom.
“She was Ishtar of the Assyrians, and Ashtoreth of the Phoenicians; she was Mylitta and Belit of the Babylonians, Derketo of the Philistines. Aye, and she was Isis of Egypt, and Astarte of Carthage; and she was Freya of the Saxons, and Aphrodite of the Grecians, and Venus of the Romans. The races call her by many names, and worship her in many ways, but she is one and the same, and the fires of her altars are not quenched.”
As she spoke she lifted her clear, dark luminous eyes to me; the last lurid sheen of the sunset caught the rippling glory of her hair, dusky as night, framing the strange beauty of her face, alien and exotic beyond my understanding. And a cry broke from my lips.
“You! You are Ishtar! Then it is true! And you are deathless—you are the Eternal Woman—the root and the bud of Creation—the symbol of life everlasting! AndI–IwasHialmar, and knew pride and battle and far lands, and the bright glory of war—”
“As truly as you shall know them all again, oh weary one,” she said softly, “when, in a little while, you shall put off that misshapen mask of broken flesh and don new raiment, bright and gleaming as the armor of Hialmar!”
Then night dipped down, and whither she went I know not, but I sat alone on the thicket-clad hill, and the night wind murmured up from the sand-drifts and the shinnery, and whispered among the dreary branches of the post-oaks.