People of the Talisman

I

Through all the long cold hours of the Norland night the Martian had not moved nor spoken. At dusk of the day before Eric John Stark had brought him into the ruined tower and laid him down, wrapped in blankets, on the snow. He had built a fire of dry lichens, and since then the two men had waited, alone in the vast wasteland that girdles the polar cap of Mars.

Now, just before dawn, Camar the Martian spoke.

“Stark.”

“Yes?”

“I am dying.”

“Yes.”

“I will not reach Kushat.”

“No.”

Camar nodded. He was silent again.

The wind howled down from the northern ice, and the broken walls rose up against the wind, brooding, gigantic, roofless now but so huge and sprawling that they seemed less like walls than cliffs of ebon stone. Stark would not have gone near them but for Camar. They were wrong, somehow, with a taint of forgotten evil still about them.

The big Earthman glanced at Camar, and his face was sad. “A man likes to die in his own place,” he said abruptly. “I am sorry.”

“The Lord of Silence is a great personage,” Camar answered. “He does not mind the meeting place. No. It was not for that I came back into the Norlands.”

He was shaken by an agony that was not of the body. “But I will not reach Kushat.”

Stark spoke quietly, using the courtly High Martian almost as fluently as Camar.

“I have known that there was a burden heavier than death upon my brother’s soul.”

He leaned over, placing one large hand on the Martian’s shoulder. “My brother has given his life for mine. Therefore, I will take his burden upon myself, if I can.”

He did not want Camar’s burden, whatever it might be. But the Martian had fought beside him through a long guerilla campaign far to the south, among the harried tribes of the Dryland borders. He was a good man of his hands, and in the end had taken the bullet that was meant for Stark, knowing quite well what he was doing. They were friends.

That was why Stark had brought Camar into this bleak north country, trying to reach the city of his birth. The Martian was driven by some secret demon. He was afraid to die before he reached Kushat.

And now he had no choice.

“I have sinned, Stark,” he said softly. “I have stolen a Holy thing.”

Stark crouched beside him. “What thing?”

“You’re an outlander, you would not know about Ban Cruach and the talisman that he left when he went away forever beyond the Gates of Death.”

Camar flung aside the blankets and sat up, his voice gaining a febrile strength.

“I was born and bred in the Thieves’ Quarter under the Wall. I was proud of my skill. And the talisman was a challenge. It was a treasured thing, so treasured that hardly a man has touched it since the days of Ban Cruach. And that was in the days when men still had the luster on them, before they forgot that they were gods.

“ ‘Guard well the Gates of Death,’ he said, ‘that is the city’s trust. And keep the talisman always, for the day may come when you will need its strength.’ No enemy, you see, could ever harm Kushat as long as it was there.

“But I was a thief, and proud. And I stole the talisman.”

His hands went to his girdle, a belt of worn leather with a boss of battered steel. But his fingers were already numb.

“Take it, Stark. Open the boss, there, on the side, where the beast’s head is carved.”

Stark took the belt from Camar and found the hidden spring. The rounded top of the boss came free. Inside it was something wrapped in a scrap of silk.

“I had to go away from Kushat,” Camar whispered. “I could not ever go back. But it was enough, to have taken that.”

He watched, shaken between awe and pride and remorse, as Stark unwrapped the bit of silk.

Stark had discounted most of Camar’s talk as superstition, but even so he expected something more spectacular than the object he held in his palm.

It was a lens, some four inches across, and made with great skill, but still only a bit of crystal. He turned it about, frowning. It was not a simple lens. There was an intricate interlocking of many facets, incredibly complex. Far too complex, Stark would have thought, for the level of technology that must have existed in Ban Cruach’s time. He found that it was hypnotic if one looked at it too long.

“What is its use?” he asked of Camar.

“We are as children. We have forgotten. But it is surely a thing of great power. You will see that, Stark. There are some who believe that if Kushat were threatened it would call Ban Cruach himself back through the Gates of Death to lead us again. I do not know.”

“Men seldom come back through the Gates of Death for any purpose,” said Stark dryly. “Unless in Kushat those words have another meaning?”

Camar answered, “It is the name of a pass that opens into the black mountains beyond Kushat. The city stands guard before it. No man remembers why, except that it is a great trust.”

His gaze feasted on the talisman, in agony and pride.

Stark said, “You wish me to take this to Kushat?”

“Yes. Yes!” Camar looked at Stark joyfully. Then his eyes clouded and he shook his head. “No. The North is not used to strangers. With me you might have been safe, but alone… No, Stark. You’ve risked too much already. Go back, out of the Norlands, while you can.”

He lay back on the blankets. Stark saw that a bluish pallor had come into the hollows of his cheeks.

“Camar,” he said. And again, “Camar?”

“Yes?”

“Go in peace, Camar. I will take the talisman to Kushat.”

The Martian sighed, and smiled, and Stark was glad he had made the promise.

“The riders of Mekh are wolves,” said Camar suddenly. “They hunt these gorges. Look out for them.”

“I will.”

Stark’s knowledge of the geography of this part of Mars was vague in the extreme, but he knew that the mountain valleys of Mekh lay ahead and to the north, between him and Kushat. Camar had told him about these upland warriors. He was willing to heed the warning.

And now Camar had done with talking. Stark knew that he did not have long to wait. The wind spoke with the voice of a great organ. The moons had set and it was very dark outside the tower, except for the white glimmering of the snow. Stark looked up at the brooding walls and shivered. There was a smell of death already in the air.

To keep from thinking, he bent closer to the fire, studying the lens. An ornament, he thought, probably worn as a badge of rank. Strange ornament for a barbarian king in the dawn of Mars. The firelight made tiny dancing sparks in the endless inner facets. It seemed to gather the light into itself, until it glowed with a kind of throbbing witch-fire, brightening, as though the thing were coming alive in his hands.

A pang of primitive and unreasoning fear shot through him. He fought it down. The part of him that had learned with much pain and effort to be civilized forced him to sit and consider the crystal, when what he really wanted to do was to rid himself of it by hurling it far away into the snow.

A talisman. A promise from a king long dead, the safety of a city. A piece of crystal, encrusted with legend and superstitious faith. That was all it was. The firelight, coupled with Camar’s fervor and the approach of death, were making him imagine things.

Only a bit of crystal…

Yet it glowed brighter in his hands, a warm and living thing. It drew his gaze and held it. The wind talked in the hollow stone, and after a while it seemed to Stark that he heard other voices, very faint and distant, tiny thready things that plucked and slid along the edges of his mind. He started up, shaken by an eerie terror, listening, and when he listened all he could hear was the wind and the chafing of the hard snow blowing, and the painful breathing of Camar.

He looked at the crystal, forcing himself to hold it. But he turned away from the fire so that some of the light died slowly out of it and the quivering witch-fires were a little dimmed.

Imagination, he told himself. One might hear anything in a place like this. One might see anything…

Only still the crystal glowed, as though it might be taking life from his own living hands now that the fire was denied it. And the inner facets called his gaze down to dim depths that stretched into somewhere that was not space, into time perhaps, or…

The tiny voices spoke again, scratching, chittering spider-sounds coming from a million miles away where no ear could possibly hear them. But Stark heard them. He heard them this time just long enough to recognize a certain thing about them, and then he yelled and flung the crystal from him in blind atavistic fear, because suddenly he knew that wherever it came from and however it had gotten to Kushat, no human man had made it.

It fell into the banked snow by the doorway, vanishing without a sound. Stark stood shivering violently, and then in a minute or two he began rather uncertainly to curse himself for an idiot. The voices were gone again and he stretched his hearing, trying to catch them and reassure himself that they had been only his oversensitive capacity to find strange gods and evil spirits with every step he took. The primitive aboriginal was still very close under his skin. He knew and recognized it, finding it often a curse and only sometimes a blessing. The naked boy who had run with Tika and Old One among the haunted rocks on the edge of Darkside had been playing tricks again with Eric John Stark.

He stood still, cataloguing the sounds, the many shadings of the wind blowing far, blowing near, the chafing of the snow, Camar’s breathing…

But Camar’s breathing had stopped.

Stark went to him and knelt down, rather wishing now that he could retract his promise and knowing it was too late. He crossed Camar’s hands in the ritual posture and then drew the tattered edge of his cloak across his face. He rose and gave Camar the gesture of farewell, and then turned to where he had thrown the talisman. He was on his knees groping for it in the drifted snow when one of the beasts tethered outside the tower started up from its sleep with a shrill hissing. Motionless he listened, and heard it answered.

Working desperately, Stark probed the icy drift with his fingers, felt the smooth oval of the talisman and plucked it out, placing it in the boss of Camar’s belt. He closed it and clasped the belt around his waist, and then, not hurrying now, he found the small flask that lay with his gear beside the fire and took a long pull at it.

Then he waited.

They came silently on padded feet, the rangy mountain brutes moving daintily through the rubble of the sprawling ruin. Their riders too were silent, tall men with fierce eyes and russet hair. They wore leather coats, and each man carried a long straight spear.

There were a score of them around the tower in the windy gloom. Stark did not bother to draw his gun. He had learned very young the difference between courage and idiocy.

He walked out toward them, moving slowly lest one of them be startled into spearing him, yet not slowly enough to denote fear. And he held up his right hand and gave them greeting.

They did not answer him. They sat their restive mounts and stared at him, and Stark knew that Camar had spoken the truth.

These were the riders of Mekh, and they were wolves.