Still, I gave them some trouble.
The worst thing was my woman’s dress—I had almost for gotten it, and so it hampered me with surprise as well as cloth. In the end, tangled in it, covered in their blood and mine, the skull-men closed on me, and I took my death wound.
I scarcely felt the pain, only a great numbness. The light and blackness ran together. The moon floated like a bulbous, pallid growth on the face of the sky, then darkened, and went out.
Part III: The Dark City
1
So I did not see them take the wagoners. For some days I did not see anything at all, except things in a fever dream, best forgotten.
I suppose it was two or three days I lay dead, if it can be called death when all the time the death wound is healing itself. I woke finally in great pain and very weak, in a place of oppressive darkness. I thought for a while I had returned beneath the Mountain, and must start again. Then the raw stench of bruised earth penetrated to me, and I understood. I was in the ground where the Dark People had buried me.
Not so strange—like many primitive groups, they feared the hauntings of the unpropitiated dead. There were even a few dried-up fruits and a clay bowl of milk set down beside me, and they had left me my clothes and the shireen, and put a black cloth over my face. Luckily the soil was so dry and scattery it had not put much weight on me and left me air to breathe, and it was a shallow grave, for they had little time for me despite their spiritual fears. Nevertheless it took me a long time to tear and scrabble my way free, and, in my sickness, I knew all manner of terrors—that I would truly die, that I would never reach the surface, that perhaps I was dead after all, and this some sort of morbid fantasy. But in the end the ground gave way above and around me, falling onto me, into my mouth and eyes, and I crawled upward into the cleanness of a gray day. I fell on the earth weeping, and could not move again until the sun was a low purple on the horizon.
Then I sat and looked around me. I was some way from the steading; I could just make out the rock walls, the trees, and a drift of cook smoke going up beyond. Near, there was something more interesting—a patch of yellowish grassland, where three or four scraggy, bony horses were nibbling frustratedly.
In the lavender twilight I dragged myself toward this place, and reached the fence and gate just as a young boy was coming to bring the animals into the steading. He took one white-faced look at me, then turned and flew away, shrieking in fear. Small wonder—I had been a corpse, and behind me now gaped the uprooted grave; I was gray with dust and dirt, my hands covered in blood from my torn nails, my hair matted, stuck with clay, white and terrifying as the quills of some strange beast: a ghost, an undead. The horses, too, shied away from me, but I got one by its straggling rough mane. The effort it took me to swing onto its back drained the last of my strength. I leaned forward across its neck, kicked its sides lightly, and it started forward at a frightened gallop.
I did not think they would follow.
There was a road—paved stone, the blocks irregular now, pushed up in places, sunken in others.
The first part of the ride had passed in a sick dream. Now it was moonlight—dark, the black and white world of the desert night.
I was a long way from the steading, and wondered why the horse had taken itself in this direction. It occurred to me later that probably the steaders would ride this way from time to time, and the horse, responding to the familiar kick, had started off to it accordingly. There seemed no point in altering its course.
I straightened, and looked around and ahead of me.
Desolation.
A flat landscape, occasional stark rock stacks, short and squat and crumbling. And the ancient road, so like the Lforn Kl Javhovor I had traveled with Darak. Ahead, the desert and the road repeated themselves across the land, tireless and monotonous. The moon burned white holes through my eyes.
I thought then I did not know why I let the horse take me along that ancient Road, but I think, perhaps, I did. Toward dawn, I began to feel the pull. A fish, dragged shoreward in the cruel net, cannot have felt more helpless. Yet I had no fish’s terror. I was glad to be drawn, to be pulled; excited, elated, joyous. A new strength ran into me, hardened and warmed me. I sat very straight, and slapped the horse with the flat of my hand. It had been trotting for some time, now it ran forward again, very fast and sure on the rotten paving.
Overhead, the sky was melting into grayness, the stars dissolving like salt cast on water. In the east, almost at my back, golden cracks were splintering the cloud.
I did not see it for a long while, the light behind me. the sky indigo ahead. But then the sun broke free and struck on it, and, I saw very well what I was hurrying to. About two miles away, the ground began to rise upward, and the paved road became a wide causeway, some fifty feet above the surrounding barrenness. A mile beyond that, two great pillars stood up on either side, made of dark stone, and the paving seemed reinforced and level. Beyond those, about five miles from me, the monotonous land had erupted into a great cliff, flat-topped and black as blindness. On the cliff’s summit stood the City.
It too was black, but the gleaming black of basalt and marble. The rearing spires and many-terraced roofs caught the sun like mirrors.
I held the horse still, and stared at it, breathing quickly. How old was the City? Old enough. It had stood in their time; they, the Old Ones, had been the builders of it, through the medium of their human slaves.
There was no repulsion in me, no fear. Only the need to be there among the glittering darknesses.
The horse leaped under my hands and feet, and rushed forward toward the causeway.
I had no thought I would see them on the road, but I had forgotten that many chained men move more slowly than a single rider, however hard they are flogged.
It had been a fast ride—the paving even underfoot. Between the dark pillars, very tall, crowned with the carvings of flames and phoenixes picked out in gold. The light was full and harshly bright now. Abruptly I saw the crawling shape ahead, a mile away, the black riders and the stumbling men, linked together by dull metal. The captive wagoners and the band that had come for them, the men with swords who had stabbed me in the heart, which to them meant death.
I kicked the horse, and it ran forward again. Its pace tended to slacken whenever I ignored it. The air sang, and the shapes of the desert rushed by. The unpleasant procession in front drew nearer and nearer.
Three black soldiers, riding at the back, heard me first. They turned swiftly, and the sun ignited whitely on their silver skull-masks. One let out a startled cry. They floundered their horses around in confusion, drawing their swords. But it was an impotent gesture. Had they not killed me once before? The halting rhythm of the march broke up entirely. The captives’ gray faces turning, men grunting in despair, surprise, pain. The useless flick of the whips even now. Then twenty of the black soldiers riding back to confront me, one of them seeming to be their new captain, the thick armlet of twisted black and golden metals on his right arm now.
I reined the horse in, and sat looking at them. They were faceless, yet so was I. Thirty men in all, and I was not afraid. I felt only contempt. They and I knew how little was the damage they could do me.
The silence lasted a long while. Then one of them broke out breathlessly: “She was dead—Mazlek killed her. I saw the blade go in through her left breast—she fell.”