The Hammer of the Sun (19 page)

It proved so indeed. The Ekwesh treated their captive with greater regard, and even something like awe, but they drove him as hard as ever through all the daylight hours. It was a lonely road, too, for few had language or inclination to talk to him, and what he understood of their speech told chiefly of strife and bloodshed. Only the chieftain came to quiz him now and again, on why he had come, and what he sought; most often Elof also said nothing, or adamantly changed the subject, because he knew the Ekwesh took a direct rebuttal or denial as an insult, and to insult rather than challenge these fierce folk could be a deadly error. A straight path they might walk, but they were a warrior race nonetheless; their orders to bring in soldiers alive would not stop them shedding his blood in some less than fatal fashion. He took his cue from the chieftain, matching his studied calm and his frank speech, and found it well received. It could not be said that any liking arose between them, so alien were they to each other, but a degree of understanding came, the more so as they sought to practise each other's tongue. Each spoke more freely to the other than they might to any who shared their concerns. The chieftain was a bitter man in his way, on behalf of his folk as well as himself; for generations now they had striven to serve both the expanding realms of the Ekwesh, and their own notions of what was upright and fitting, and inevitably they had suffered for it. Their code was fierce and pitiless, but it had within it some concept of order greater than continual and bloody conquest, of duty to weaker peoples greater than mere enslavement and exploitation, of holding and building on gains. Such an attitude had made them influential in die uniting of the scattered, quarrelsome tribes and the rise of something like a coherent realm. But beyond that realm it also made them poor agents of the Ice, whose interest lay in bringing havoc and disorder, in scorning die very name of Raven and teaching its initiates likewise. As its influence had grown among the Ekwesh, so the prestige of the Raven Clan had fallen, their more purposeful ferocity branding them cowards, their careful consolidation of conquests earning them the name of fainthearts and laggards. Elof understood now that his bid to overawe this little group, though it had won him better treatment, had had no real chance of success. The Ravens were determined to reinstate themselves with a show of zeal and loyalty, and he was a prime opportunity. Even had they wanted to let him go, they would not have dared.

When that gruelling day's march came to an end, Elof again fell down in agony. He guessed, as he lay curled on the ground, that they had covered some ten leagues of rough going, over hill and heathland roadless save for the occasional beast-track. Only once, in a marshy place, had he thought he detected a fragment of an ancient roadbed buried far beneath the mud. But on the next day's march, begun as early and as swiftly, he began to see the small heaps and circles of rough-hewn stone that he knew were the remains of simple buildings, cot and sheepfold perhaps; beneath the grass and heather underfoot he heard the rasp of laid stones. Once this had been inhabited land. And ere long he came upon clearer remains, many of those ruins with the weathered walls and gable-ends bare of any roof that Nordeney folk had come to call 'Ekwesh footprints,' the marks they left upon a countryside. Yet these looked ancient, far older than the Ekwesh incursions into Nordeney. How long had they held this land? Or who had held it before them? And how, how could they have reached it?

Elof restrained his impatience. The chieftain might be persuaded to tell him something, but he was some distance away, striding ahead of the others as if he too were impatient; it would have to wait till they halted at nightfall. But there was no halt; for as the sun sank down towards the clouds in the distant west, setting the ice-islands aglitter on the sea, the chief, reaching the top of a low slope, cried out triumphantly to his men. Elof understood, and he felt a host of new fears; they had reached their destination, with all that it held for him. What new menace must he face? Yet such was the majesty of the sight awaiting him that it drove all lesser concerns from his mind.

At first he hardly took it in. He saw only a wide bay of the sea, awash with floating ice, and behind it an encircling arm of three smallish mountains, low and craggy, joined by a thin-topped ridge; its stark flanks sloped precipitously down to a strip of flat brown land at the water's edge. Then a long ray of the low sun escaped the clouds and rested a moment upon the lower central peak, tinging it with warm fire, and Elof saw that it was no work of nature. A high castle crowned the ridge, and he thought it the mightiest work that he had ever seen.

In that he was right; for no mightier then existed in the world, save only the citadels of the Ice itself. This was its fashion, as it became gradually clear to Elof while he and his captors traversed the remaining half-league from the hills. From the base of the ridge two vast square towers of the same sand-hued stone arose; their flat-roofed capitals reached three-fourths of the way to its crest. Between them was a wide wall, bridged at its top by a great gallery between the towers, lined with many columns, graceful and fluted; below this opened many lesser galleries, but the lower half of the wall was featureless save for a single arch at its centre. Vast this must have been, taller at its keystone than the masts of great ships, but against that height of wall it seemed small, no more than a gate. And seen above the height of that first immense wall reared another, after the same pattern, a gallery between two towers; but this was lower and narrower, and the overhanging pediments of the towers were level with the ridge. At each corner stood a statue, and between the statues a tracer-ied rail of carven stone. But above these vastnesses loomed a third level still, round like the base of an unseen column that upheld the sky, like a crown fit for the brows of Powers in their majesty. A high palace it was, in itself greater than the citadel of Kerbryhaine or the palace of Morvanhal that was his home. Windows and galleries latticed its walls, statues encircled its roof; its every line spoke nobility and power - chiefly power. This was a place made to daunt, and daunt it did. With the sun's fire upon its walls it seemed rich and noble, fit for the court of the living Powers; but the sun was slipping behind the clouds, and as Elof was shepherded ever nearer the air turned murky and cold, and the fire fled. A low mountain it seemed once more as the shadow wrapped itself around, and few lights showed upon those towering walls. It was at the foot of the ridge that lights shone out, the bleak land flickering under the flares of a myriad torches, warmed with the kindling of numberless fires, as if beneath the castle a sprawling town had sprung up, almost a city by its extent, huddled at its feet like hound to master. It was towards this lake of lights that Elof s captors led him.

The sound of harsh voices reached him from afar, of flutes and drumming, and he guessed that this must be some huge encampment of the Ekwesh. It proved to be that and more, however, for instead of tent and shelter there were many boat-shaped longhouses of rough tarry planking set within sturdy compound fences, above whose gates hung sign and symbol of the clans. Curiosity overcame fear in him, for he had never before seen a full Ekwesh community; also a sense of regret and anger, for the houses with their flanks of pattern-painted clapboard were very like those of his own village, that the Ekwesh themselves had devastated. It was their own cousins, their own flesh they had been induced to scorn and betray. And the gap between even modest civilization and savagery was all too apparent. Livestock wandered free and untended between the houses, and there seemed to be little or no attempt at drainage; they walked on boards among filth, and the stench of the place was terrible. Life in all its aspects seemed to be carried on in the open air, amid howl, hubbub, and the beat of drums from the open spaces between the compounds; as they passed one of these Elof saw a shaman dancing some rite with warriors. He was an eerie figure, clad only in a long skirt of leather strips, his scrawny body painted in many colours with the emblem of the Mosquito clan, and his white hair flying as he whirled about among the warriors, hurling a much shorter figure from one to another. It was a girl, wearing only some rags about her thighs; ochre plastered her cropped hair flat, but her skin gleamed a much lighter brown than the rest. That would make her half-bred, and therefore by definition a thrall here; he wondered what her fate would be, and then remembered with a sudden jolt that in even more immediate question was his own.

They wound a way through the outskirts of the encampment, down ways of mire and slime, often having to leap aside to avoid horsemen who came cantering through, and once a column of thralls being driven like ponies, at the run. The compound they finally entered was broad, but few fires burned there; the door before which the chieftain paused and called was wide, but the light within dim and smoky. Swift words were exchanged, and Elof was thrust forward into the gloom. His smarting eyes could barely pick out a double row of figures seated around a trench of fire, many white-haired and bent. Words flew again, and a burst of harsh laughter. Then he was seized by the arms and bundled outside once again, with the chieftain by his side, his face a grimace of satisfaction. "So!" he said, savouring the words. "A great prize you are, and one awaited! You bring us fortune, West-shaman! Come, we go to
Ilta-sya\"
He pointed up into the darkness where the heights of the castle were hidden.

They passed out of the Ekwesh town then, and up the slopes of the ridge to the side of the nearer tower. It was an easy enough climb, for there were steps sunk in the stone, ancient and dished with weather and wear, but well-formed and serviceable. The air blew strangely chill from below. Looking down, Elof saw beyond the town a harbour of many ships, large and small, behind a strong sea wall; and that was needed, for the whole bay was speckled with ice-islands in various stages of decay, as if some freak of the currents drew them in here in their last melting. He shivered, and was glad when they passed through a narrow wicket into the blackness of the tower. Torches blossomed, flickering in the air flow, and their light fell upon a narrow flight of stone steps, steep and cramped between high walls. Elof swallowed, remembering how tall that tower had seemed from without, but hard hands at his back thrust him forward. In single file they climbed into an echoing vault of shadow, lit blue-gray only by faint spills of moonlight through the narrow windowslits; the right-hand wall dropped away into emptiness. They were mounting the inner wall of the tower, by stairs that ringed its hollow heart.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that it was not wholly empty, that heart; a curious engine of cables and pulleys hung there, extending both above and below in the tall well. It seemed to him like some enormous lifting hoist, able to raise great weight of goods or men; that this place should have such a thing made sense, and it looked in reasonable repair. But in that case why did the Ekwesh not use it? However hardy they were, in time alone it offered advantages over this endless climb, this overpowering darkness. Because they couldn't? It was more than likely; this place was nothing of theirs. Here all voices were hushed in awe; the least word spoken went fluttering away into the cavernous dark above, and after a while no man spoke, but concentrated on the exhausting climb. The only sounds were those of rasping breath echoing around the enclosing walls, and the monotonous thud of heavy sandalled feet upon the steps. It seemed to merge, that constant rhythm, with the leaden passing of the hours, until he forgot that he was walking, that the distant ache was his weary limbs. Space and time were one, and he was floating upwards, ascending out of the past that lay below into the future above, and all was as shadows, dim and indistinct in that strange undersea light. Somewhere above many deep bells were tolling.

Suddenly it was as if the world had turned on its side, the great space above opening out instead before him. Dreamily he looked up, and saw revealed through the blue dimness vaulting so high and wide-swept it might have been the very roof of the sky. Gradually, as his exhausted trance faded, he realised he was climbing no longer, that he was stumbling along the smooth and level floor of a majestic hallway towards a high-arched door where points of fire burned, gleaming red on the metal of armed sentinels. Weapons were levelled, a harsh challenge raised the echoes, was answered as harshly; he caught no more than the name
Iltasya
once again. Other sentinels appeared from within the gate, and herded in the Raven clansmen much as they herded him, into an even darker corridor behind; the roof was hidden, but from the echoes it sounded less high. A screech and a crash made him start; an upheld torch shone fire upon a heavy door, thrown back to reveal a small chamber, its walls of dusty stone, windowless. The sentinels seized his arms and flung him down on the flagstones; darkness slammed shut about him.

He almost welcomed it, in his exhaustion, so restful it seemed. It felt impossibly good simply to lie still and silent, no matter how hard his bed. He was half aware that he no longer had his pack, but he was too weary to feel any concern. His eyelids fluttered, his head sank down; he struggled to stave off sleep, to guess where he might be and what might happen next. But what was the point? He could do nothing about it; as well be rested when it came…

Thunder and light jerked him awake, his eyes sticky, his limbs stiff and aching as he was hauled bodily to his feet and shoved stumbling into the corridor; it was still gloomy, and he guessed he had slept at most for an hour. Ekwesh guards with swords and spears surrounded him, and it disturbed him that none of them bore Raven crests, and many only a meaningless pattern of white bars; he had seen too many like them in Morvanhal, acknowledged members of the Hidden Clan. Yet though they prodded him along roughly enough, hustling him round corner after corner and up long echoing flights of stairs, they were never brutal; in fact they seemed to be taking elaborate if cold-blooded care of him, as might one charged with carriage of some precious thing. Yet the brutality lurked there in their blank dark eyes; acknowledged or not, they were all of the Hidden Clan,
if any
were. In the shadows above the stairs a tall double door was seamed in yellow light; it opened, and the flood was dazzling. Into the midst of it he was thrust, blinded and squinting foolishly; he reached out to steady himself, and closed his hand on what was unmistakeably worked velvet, heavy and costly. A heavy, aromatic scent filled the air, and a welcome warmth crept up through his boots. One of the Ekwesh pushed past him and spoke, his harsh tones sunk almost to a breathless, awed whisper; Elof heard no reply, but he was pushed forward at once and his jacket was pulled from his back, his tattered clothes and boots stiffened with filth and salt, ripped off him. He started to struggle, but as his sight cleared of its swirling colours he was astonished to find himself tottering on the glossed stone steps of a wide bath, filled almost to floor level with steaming water. He stared at it unbelieving; a bath was what his whole frame ached for, and he could almost believe this some tantalizing torture. Before he could hesitate any longer, however, the grim-faced guards seized him and hurled him bodily into the water. The heat and the impact of it struck his breath away, and he rose gasping and spluttering, eyes smarting with pungent oils. But water-filled ears heard only the receding ring and slap of sandals on the stone; he turned, and saw the doors close smoothly on their heels. All his guards had gone.