Stark slapped him, carefully and without heat, across the face. "Get
your sister, Balin. Hide her, unless you would be uncle to a red-haired
brat."
He went then, like a man who has been stunned. Screaming women with
their children clogged the ways that led inward from the Wall, and there
was bloody work afoot on the rooftops and in the narrow alleys.
The gate was holding, still.
* * * * *
Stark forced his way toward the square. The booths of the hucksters were
overthrown, the wine-jars broken and the red wine spilled. Beasts
squealed and stamped, tired of their chafing harness, driven wild by the
shouting and the smell of blood. The dead were heaped high where they
had fallen from above.
They were all soldiers here, clinging grimly to their last foothold. The
deep song of the rams shook the very stones. The iron-sheathed timbers
of the gate gave back an answering scream, and toward the end all other
sounds grew hushed. The nobles came down slowly from the Wall and
mounted, and sat waiting.
There were fewer of them now. Their bright armor was dented and stained,
and their faces had a pallor on them.
One last hammer-stroke of the rams.
With a bitter shriek the weakened bolts tore out, and the great gate was
broken through.
The nobles of Kushat made their first, and final charge.
As soldiers they went up against the riders of Mekh, and as soldiers
they held them until they died. Those that were left were borne back
into the square, caught as in the crest of an avalanche. And first
through the gates came the winged battle-mask of the Lord Ciaran, and
the sable axe that drank men's lives where it hewed.
There was a beast with no rider to claim it, tugging at its headrope.
Stark swung onto the saddle pad and cut it free. Where the press was
thickest, a welter of struggling brutes and men fighting knee to knee,
there was the man in black armor, riding like a god, magnificent, born
to war. Stark's eyes shone with a strange, cold light. He struck his
heels hard into the scaly flanks. The beast plunged forward.
In and over and through, making the long sword sing. The beast was
strong, and frightened beyond fear. It bit and trampled, and Stark cut a
path for them, and presently he shouted above the din,
"Ho, there! _Ciaran!_"
The black mask turned toward him, and the remembered voice spoke from
behind the barred slot, joyously.
"The wanderer. The wild man!"
Their two mounts shocked together. The axe came down in a whistling
curve, and a red sword-blade flashed to meet it. Swift, swift, a ringing
clash of steel, and the blade was shattered and the axe fallen to the
ground.
Stark pressed in.
Ciaran reached for his sword, but his hand was numbed by the force of
that blow and he was slow, a split second. The hilt of Stark's weapon,
still clutched in his own numbed grip, fetched him a stunning blow on
the helm, so that the metal rang like a flawed bell.
The Lord Ciaran reeled back, only for a moment, but long enough. Stark
grasped the war-mask and ripped it off, and got his hands around the
naked throat.
He did not break that neck, as he had planned. And the Clansmen who had
started in to save their leader stopped and did not move.
Stark knew now why the Lord Ciaran had never shown his face.
The throat he held was white and strong, and his hands around it were
buried in a mane of red-gold hair that fell down over the shirt of mail.
A red mouth passionate with fury, wonderful curving bone under
sculptured flesh, eyes fierce and proud and tameless as the eyes of a
young eagle, fire-blue, defying him, hating him....
"By the gods," said Stark, very softly. "By the eternal gods!"