Filing out on the stone quays, their rustling sandals eroded by time,
the men stood clean and bright. Starke paced, a caged animal, at their
center, so his dark body would pass unnoticed.
They were seen.
The cliff guard looked down over the dirty slave dwellings, from their
arrow galleries, and set up a cry. Hands waved, pointed frosty white
in the dawn. More guards loped down the ramps and galleries, meeting,
joining others and coming on.
Linnl, in the sea by the quay, suggested a theme on the harp. The other
harps took it up. The shuddering music lifted from the water and with
a gentle firmness, set the dead feet marching down the quays, upward
through the narrow, stifling alleys of the slaves, to meet the guard.
Slave people peered out at them tiredly from their choked quarters. The
passing of warriors was old to them, of no significance.
These warriors carried no weapons. Starke didn't like that part of it.
A length of chain even, he wanted. But this emptiness of the hands.
His teeth ached from too long a time of clenching his jaws tight. The
muscles of his arms were feverish and nervous.
At the edge of the slave community, at the cliff base, the guard
confronted them. Running down off the galleries, swords naked, they ran
to intercept what they took to be an enemy.
The guards stopped in blank confusion.
* * * * *
A little laugh escaped Starke's lips. It was a dream. With fog over,
under and in between its parts. It wasn't real to the guard, who
couldn't believe it. It wasn't real to these dead men either, who were
walking around. He felt alone. He was the only live one. He didn't like
walking with dead men.
The captain of the guard came down warily, his green eyes suspicious.
The suspicion faded. His face fell apart. He had lain on his fur pelts
for months thinking of his son who had died to defend Falga.
Now his son stood before him. Alive.
The captain forgot he was captain. He forgot everything. His sandals
scraped over stones. You could hear the air go out of his lungs and
come back in in a numbed prayer.
"My son! In Rann's name. They said you were slain by Faolan's men one
hundred darknesses ago. My son!"
A harp tinkled somewhere.
The son stepped forward, smiling.
They embraced. The son said nothing. He couldn't speak.
This was the signal for the others. The whole guard, shocked and
surprised, put away their swords and sought out old friends, brothers,
fathers, uncles, sons!
They moved up the galleries, the guard and the returned warriors,
Starke in their midst. Threading up the cliff, through passage after
passage, all talking at once. Or so it seemed. The guards did the
talking. None of the dead warriors replied. They only _seemed_ to.
Starke heard the music strong and clear everywhere.
They reached the green gardens atop the cliff. By this time the entire
city was awake. Women came running, bare-breasted and sobbing, and
throwing themselves forward into the ranks of their lovers. Flowers
showered over them.
"So this is war," muttered Starke, uneasily.
They stopped in the center of the great gardens. The crowd milled
happily, not yet aware of the strange silence from their men. They were
too happy to notice.
"Now," cried Starke to himself. "Now's the time. Now!"
As if in answer, a wild skirling of harps out of the sky.
The crowd stopped laughing only when the returned warriors of Falga
swept forward, their hands lifted and groping before them....
The crying in the streets was like a far siren wailing. Metal made a
harsh clangor that was sheathed in silence at the same moment metal
found flesh to lie in. A vicious pantomime was concluded in the green
moist gardens.
Starke watched from Rann's empty citadel. Fog plumes strolled by the
archways and a thick rain fell. It came like a blood squall and washed
the garden below until you could not tell rain from blood.
The returned warriors had gotten their swords by now. First they killed
those nearest them in the celebration. Then they took the weapons from
the victims. It was very simple and very unpleasant.
The slaves had joined battle now. Swarming up from the slave town,
plucking up fallen daggers and short swords, they circled the gardens,
happening upon the arrogant shining warriors of Rann who had so far
escaped the quiet, deadly killing of the alive-but-dead men.
Dead father killed startled, alive son. Dead brother garroted
unbelieving brother. Carnival indeed in Falga.
An old man waited alone. Starke saw him. The old man had a weapon, but
refused to use it. A young warrior of Falga, harped on by Linnl's harp,
walked quietly up to the old man. The old man cried out. His mouth
formed words. "Son! What _is_ this?" He flung down his blade and made
to plead with his boy.
The son stabbed him with silent efficiency, and without a glance at the
body, walked onward to find another.
Starke turned away, sick and cold.
A thousand such scenes were being finished.
He set fire to the black spider-silk tapestries. They whispered and
talked with flame. The stone echoed his feet as he searched room after
room. Rann had gone, probably last night. That meant that Crom Dhu
was on the verge of falling. Was Faolan dead? Had the people of Crom
Dhu, seeing Beudag's suffering, given in? Falga's harbor was completely
devoid of ships, except for small fishing skiffs.
The fog waited him when he returned to the garden. Rain found his face.
The citadel of Rann was fire-encrusted and smoke shrouded as he looked
up at it.
A silence lay in the garden. The fight was over.
The men of Falga, still shining with Source-Life, hung their blades
from uncomprehending fingers, the light beginning to leave their green
eyes. Their skin looked dirty and dull.
Starke wasted no time getting down the galleries, through the slave
quarter, and to the quays again.
Linnl awaited him, gently petting the obedient harp.
"It's over. The slaves will own what's left. They'll be our allies,
since we've freed them."
Starke didn't hear. He was squinting off over the Red Sea.
Linnl understood. He plucked two tones from the harp, which pronounced
the two words uppermost in Starke's thought.
"Crom Dhu."
"If we're not too late." Starke leaned forward. "If Faolan lives. If
Beudag still stands at the masthead."
Like a blind man he walked straight ahead, until he fell into the sea.
* * * * *
It was not quite a million miles to Crom Dhu. It only seemed that far.
A sweep of tide picked them up just off shore from Falga and siphoned
them rapidly, through deeps along coastal latitudes, through crystal
forests. He cursed every mile of the way.
He cursed the time it took to pause at the Titan's city to gather fresh
men. To gather Clev and Mannt and Aesur and Bruce. Impatiently, Starke
watched the whole drama of the Source-Fire and the bodies again. This
time it was the bodies of Crom Dhu men, hung like beasts on slow-turned
spits, their limbs and vitals soaking through and through, their
skins taking bronze color, their eyes holding flint-sparks. And then
the harps wove a garment around each, and the garment moved the men
instead of the men the garment.
In the tidal basilic now, Starke twisted. Coursing behind him were the
new bodies of Clev and Aesur! The current elevated them, poked them
through obsidian needle-eyes like spider-silk threads.
There was good irony in this. Crom Dhu's men, fallen at Falga under
Conan's treachery, returned now under Conan, to exonerate that
treachery.
Suddenly they were in Crom Dhu's outer basin. Shadows swept over them.
The long dark falling shadows of Falga's longboats lying in that
harbor. Shadows like black culling-nets let down. The school of men
cleaved the shadow nets. The tide ceased here, eddied and distilled
them.
Starke glared up at the immense silver bottom of a Falgian ship. He
felt his face stiffen and his throat tighten. Then, flexing knees, he
rammed upward, night air broke dark red around his head.
The harbor held flare torches on the rims of long ships. On the neck
of land that led from Crom Dhu to the mainland the continuing battle
sounded. Faint cries and clashing made their way through the fog veils.
They sounded like echoes of past dreams.
Linnl let Starke have the leash. Starke felt something pressed into his
fist. A coil of slender green woven reeds, a rope with hooked weights
on the end of it. He knew how to use it without asking. But he wished
for a knife, now, even though he realized carrying a knife in the sea
was all but impossible if you wanted to move fast.
He saw the sleek naked figurehead of Rann's best ship a hundred yards
away, a floating silhouette, its torches hanging fire like Beudag's
hair.
He swam toward it, breathing quietly. When at last the silvered
figurehead with the mocking green eyes and the flag of shoal-shallow
hair hung over him, he felt the cool white ship metal kiss his fingers.
The smell of torch-smoke lingered. A rise of faint shouts from the
land told of another rush upon the Gate. Behind him--a ripple. Then--a
thousand ripples.
The resurrected men of Crom Dhu rose in dents and stirrings of
sparkling wine. They stared at Crom Dhu and maybe they knew what it
was and maybe they didn't. For one moment, Starke felt apprehension.
Suppose Linnl was playing a game. Suppose, once these men had won the
battle, they went on into Crom Dhu, to rupture Romna's harp and make
Faolan the blinder? He shook the thought away. That would have to be
handled in time. On either side of him Clev and Mannt appeared. They
looked at Crom Dhu, their lips shut. Maybe they saw Faolan's eyrie and
heard a harp that was more than these harps that sang them to blade and
plunder--Romna's instrument telling bard-tales of the rovers and the
coastal wars and the old, living days. Their eyes looked and looked at
Crom Dhu, but saw nothing.
The sea shepherds appeared now; the followers of Linnl, each with his
harp and the harp music began, high. So high you couldn't hear it. It
wove a tension on the air.
Silently, with a grim certainty, the dead-but-not-dead gathered in a
bronze circle about Rann's ship. The very silence of their encirclement
made your skin crawl and sweat break cold on your cheeks.
A dozen ropes went raveling, looping over the ship side. They caught,
held, grapnelled, hooked.
Starke had thrown his, felt it bite and hold. Now he scrambled swiftly,
cursing, up its length, kicking and slipping at the silver hull.
He reached the top.
Beudag was there.
Half over the low rail he hesitated, just looking at her.
* * * * *
Torchlight limned her, shadowed her. She was still erect; her head was
tired and her eyes were closed, her face thinned and less brown, but
she was still alive. She was coming out of a deep stupor now, at the
whistle of ropes and the grate of metal hooks on the deck.
She saw Starke and her lips parted. She did not look away from him. His
breath came out of him, choking.
It almost cost him his life, his standing there, looking at her.
A guard, with flesh like new snow, shafted his bow from the turret and
let it loose. A chain lay on deck. Thankfully, Starke took it.
Clev came over the rail beside Starke. His chest took the arrow. The
shaft burst half through and stopped, held. Clev kept going after the
man who had shot it. He caught up with him.