The Sword of Rhiannon

X. The Sea Kings

Carse was leaning on the rail, watching the sea, when the Sky Folk came. Time and distance had dropped behind the galley. Carse had rested. He wore a clean kilt, he was washed and shaven, his wounds were healing. He had regained his ornaments and the hilt of the long sword gleamed above his left shoulder.

Boghaz was beside him. Boghaz was always beside him. He pointed now to the western sky and said, “Look there.”

Carse saw what he took to be a flight of birds in the distance. But they grew rapidly larger and presently he realized that they were men, or half-men, like the slave with the broken wings.

They were not slaves and their wings stretched wide, flashing in the sun. Their slim bodies, completely naked, gleamed like ivory. They were incredibly beautiful, arrowing down out of the blue.

They had a kinship with the Swimmers. The Swimmers were the perfect children of the sea and these were brother to wind and cloud and the clean immensity of the sky. It was as though some master hand had shaped them both out of separate elements, moulding them in strength and grace that was freed from all the earth-bound clumsiness of men, dreams made into joyous flesh.

Jaxart, who was at the helm, called down to them, “Scouts from Khondor!”

Carse mounted to the platform. The men gathered on the deck to watch as the four Sky Folk came down in a soaring rush.

Carse glanced forward to the sheer of the prow. Lorn, the winged slave, had taken to brooding there by himself, speaking to no one. Now he stood erect and one of the four went to him.

The others came to rest on the platform, folding their bright wings with a whispering rustle.

They greeted Jaxart by name, looking curiously at the long black galley and the hard-bitten mongrel crew that sailed her and, above all, at Carse. There was something in their searching gaze that reminded the Earthman uncomfortably of Shallah.

“Our chief,” Jaxart told them. “A barbarian from the back door of Mars but a man of his hands and no fool, either. The Swimmers will have told the tale, how he took the ship and Ywain of Sark together.”

“Aye.” They acknowledged Carse with grave courtesy.

The Earthman said, “Jaxart has told me that all who fight Sark may have freedom of Khondor. I claim that right.”

“We will carry word to Rold, who heads the council of the Sea Kings.”

The Khonds on deck began to shout their own messages then, the eager words of men who have been a long time away from home. The Sky Men answered in their clear sweet voices and presently darted away, their opinions beating up into the blue air, higher and higher, growing tiny in the distance.

Lorn remained standing in the bow, watching until there was nothing left but empty sky.

“We’ll raise Khondor soon,” said Jaxart and Carse turned to speak to him. Then some instinct made him look back, and he saw that Lorn was gone.

There was no sign of him in the water. He had gone overside without a sound and he must have sunk like a drowning bird, pulled down by the weight of his useless wings.

Jaxart growled, “It was his will and better so.” He cursed the Sarks and Carse smiled an ugly smile.

“Take heart,” he said, “we may thrash them yet. How is it that Khondor has held out when Jekkara and Valkis fell?”

“Because not even the scientific weapons of the Sarks’ evil allies, the Dhuvians, can touch us there. You’ll understand why when you see Khondor.”

Before noon they sighted land, a rocky and forbidding coast. The cliffs rose sheer out of the sea and behind them forested mountains towered like a giant’s wall. Here and there a narrow fiord sheltered a fishing village and an occasional lonely steading clung to the high pasture land, a collar of white flame along the cliffs.

Carse sent Boghaz to the cabin for Ywain. She had remained there under guard and he had not seen her since the mutiny—except once.

It had been the first night after the mutiny. He had with Boghaz and Jaxart been examining the strange instruments that they had found in the inner cabin of the Dhuvian.

“These are Dhuvian weapons that only they know how to use,” Boghaz had declared. “Now we know why Ywain had no escort ship. She needed none with a Dhuvian and his weapons aboard her galley.”

Jaxart looked at the things with loathing and fear. “Science of the accursed Serpent! We should throw them after his body.”

“No,” Carse said, examining the things. “If it were possible to discover the way in which these devices operate—”

He had soon found that it would not be possible without prolonged study. He knew science fairly well, yes. But it was the science of his own different world.

These instruments had been built out of a scientific knowledge alien in nearly every way to his own. The science of Rhiannon, of which these Dhuvian weapons represented but a small part!

Carse should recognize the little hypnosis machine that the Dhuvian had used upon him in the dark. A little metal wheel set with crystal stars, that revolved by a slight pressure of the fingers. And when he set it turning it whispered a singing note that so chilled his blood with memory that he hastily set the thing down.

The other Dhuvian instruments were even more incomprehensible. One consisted of a large lens surrounded by oddly asymmetrical crystal prisms. Another had a heavy metal base in which flat metal vibrations were mounted. He could only guess that these weapons exploited the laws of alien and subtle optical and sonic sciences.

“No man can understand the Dhuvian science,” muttered Jaxart. “Not even the Sarks, who have alliance with the Serpent.”

He stared at the instruments with the half-superstitious hatred of a nonscientific folk for mechanical purposes.

“But perhaps Ywain, who is daughter of Sark’s king, might know,” Carse speculated. “It’s worth trying.”

He went to the cabin where she was being guarded with that purpose in mind. Ywain sat there and she wore now the shackles he had worn.

He came in upon her suddenly, catching her as she sat with her head bowed and her shoulders bent in utter weariness. But at the sound of the door she straightened and watched him, level-eyed. He saw how white her face was and how the shadow lay in the hollows of the bones.

He did not speak for a long time. He had no pity for her. He looked at her, liking the taste of victory, liking the thought that he could do what he wanted with her.

When he asked her about the Dhuvian scientific weapons they had found Ywain laughed mirthlessly.

“You must be an ignorant barbarian indeed if you think the Dhuvians would instruct even me in their science. One of them came with me to overawe with those things the Jekkaran ruler, who was waxing rebellious. But S’San would not let me even touch those things.”

Carse believed her. It accorded with what Jaxart had said, that the Dhuvians jealously guarded their scientific weapons from even their allies, the Sarks.

“Besides,” Ywain said mockingly, “why should Dhuvian science interest you if you hold the key to the far greater science locked in Rhiannon’s tomb?”

“I do hold that key and that secret,” Carse told her and his answer took the mockery out of her face.

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

“On that,” Carse said grimly, “my mind is clear. Whatever power that tomb gives me I’ll use against Sark and Caer Dhu—and I hope it’s enough to destroy you down to the last stone in your city!”

Ywain nodded. “Well answered. And now—what about me? Will you have me flogged and chained to an oar? Or will you kill me here?”

He shook his head slowly, answering her last question. “I could have let my wolves tear you if I had wished you killed now.”

Her teeth showed briefly in what might have been a smile. “Small satisfaction in that. Not like doing it with one’s own hands.”

“I might have done that too, here in the cabin.”

“And you tried, yet did not. Well then—what?” Carse did not answer. It came to him that, whatever he might do to her, she would still mock him to the very end. There was the steel of pride in this woman.

He had marked her though. The gash on her cheek would heal and fade but never vanish. She would never forget him as long as she lived. He was glad he had marked her.

“No answer?” she mocked. “You’re full of indecision for a conqueror.”

Carse went around the table to her with a pantherish step. He still did not answer because he did not know. He only knew that he hated her as he had never hated anything in his life before. He bent over her, his face dead white, his hands open and hungry.

She reached up swiftly and found his throat. Her fingers were as strong as steel and the nails bit deep.

He caught her wrists and bent them away, the muscles of his arms standing out like ropes against her strength. She strove against him in silent fury and then suddenly she broke. Her lips parted as she strained for breath, and Carse suddenly set his own lips against them.

There was no love, no tenderness in that kiss. It was a gesture of male contempt, brutal and full of hate. Yet for one strange moment then her sharp teeth had met in his lower lip and his mouth was full of blood and she was laughing.

“You barbarian swine,” she whispered. “Now my brand is on you.”

He stood looking at her. Then he reached out and caught her by the shoulders and the chair went over with a crash.

“Go ahead,” she said, “If it pleases you.”

He wanted to break her between his two hands. He wanted…

He thrust her from him and went out and he had not passed the door since.

Now he fingered the new scar on his lip and watched her come onto the deck with Boghaz. She stood very straight in her jeweled hauberk but the lines around her mouth were deeper and her eyes, for all their bitter pride, were somber.

He did not go to her. She was left alone with her guard, and Carse could glance at her covertly. It was easy to guess what was in her mind. She was thinking how it felt to stand on the deck of her own ship, a prisoner. She was thinking that the brooding coast ahead was the end of all her voyaging. She was thinking that she was going to die.

The cry came down from the masthead—“Khondor!”

Carse saw at first only a great craggy rock that towered high above the surf, a sort of blunt cape between two fiords. Then, from that seemingly barren and uninhabitable place, Sky Folk came flying until the air throbbed with the beating of their wings. Swimmers came also, like a swarm of little comets that left trails of fire in the sea. And from the fiord mouths came longships, smaller than the galley, swift as hornets, with shields along their sides.

The voyage was over. The black galley was escorted with cheers and shouting into Khondor.

Carse understood now what Jaxart had meant. Nature had made a virtually impregnable fortress out of the rock itself, walled in by impassable mountains from land attack, protected by unscalable cliffs from the sea, its only gateway the narrow twisting fiord on the north side. That too was guarded by ballistas which could make the fiord a death trap for any ship that entered it.

The tortuous channel widened at the end into a landlocked harbor that not even the winds could attack. Khond longships, fishing boats and a scattering of foreign craft filled the basin and the black galley glided like a queen among them.

The quays and the dizzy flight of steps that led up to the summit of the rock, connecting on the upper levels with tunneled galleries, were thronged with the people of Khondor and the allied clans that had taken refuge with them. They were a hardy lot with a raffish sturdy look that Carse liked. The cliffs and the mountain peaks flung back their cheering in deafening echoes.

Under cover of the noise Boghaz said urgently to Carse for the hundredth time, “Let me bargain with them for the secret! I can get us each a kingdom—more, if you will!”

And for the hundredth time, Carse answered, “I have not said that I know the secret. If I do it is my own.”

Boghaz swore in an ecstasy of frustration and demanded of the gods what he had done to be thus hardly used.

Ywain’s eyes turned upon the Earthman once and then away.

Swimmers in their gleaming hundreds, Sky Folk with their proud wings folded—for the first time Carse saw their women, creatures so exquisitely lovely that it hurt to look at them—the tall fair Khonds and the foreign stocks, a kaleidoscope of colors and glinting steel. Mooring lines snaked out, were caught and snubbed around the bollards. The galley came to rest.

Carse led his crew ashore and Ywain walked erect beside him, wearing his shackles as though they were golden ornaments she had chosen to become her.

There was a group standing apart on the quay, waiting. A handful of hard-bitten men who looked as though sea water ran in their veins instead of blood, tough veterans of many battles, some fierce and dark-visaged, some with ruddy laughing faces, one with cheek and sword arm hideously burned and scarred.

Among them was a tall Khond with a look of harnessed lighting about him and hair the color of new copper and by his side stood a girl dressed in a blue robe.

Her straight fair hair was bound back by a fillet of plain gold and between her breasts, left bare by the loose outer garment, a single black pearl glowed with lustrous darkness. Her left hand rested on the shoulder of Shallah the Swimmer.

Like all the rest the girl was paying more attention to Ywain than she was to Carse. He realized somehow bitterly that the whole crowd had gathered less to see the unknown barbarian who had done it all than to see the daughter of Garach of Sark walking in chains.

The red-haired Khond remembered his manners enough to make the sign of peace and say, “I am Rold of Khondor. We, the Sea Kings, make you welcome.”

Carse responded but saw that already he was half forgotten in the man’s savage pleasure at the plight of his arch-enemy.

They had much to say to each other, Ywain and the Sea Kings.

Carse looked again at the girl. He had heard Jaxart’s eager greeting to her and knew now that she was Emer, Rold’s sister.

He had never seen anyone like her before. There was a touch of the fey, of the elfin, about her, as though she lived in the human world by courtesy and could leave it any time she chose.

Her eyes were gray and sad, but her mouth was gentle and shaped for laughter. Her body had the same quick grace he had noticed in the Halflings and yet it was a very humanly lovely body.

She had pride, too—pride to match Ywain’s own though they were so different. Ywain was all brilliance and fire and passion, a rose with blood-red petals. Carse understood her. He could play her own game and beat her at it.

But he knew that he would never understand Emer. She was part of all the things he had left behind him long ago. She was the lost music and the forgotten dreams, the pity and the tenderness, the whole shadowy world he had glimpsed in childhood but never since.

All at once she looked up and saw him. Her eyes met his—met and held, and would not go away. He saw their expression change. He saw every drop of color drain from her face until it was like a mask of snow. He heard her say:

“Who are you?”

He bent his head. “Lady Emer, I am Carse the barbarian.”

He saw how her fingers dug into Shallah’s fur and saw how the Swimmer watched him with her soft hostile gaze. Emer’s voice answered, almost below the threshold of hearing.

“You have no name. You are as Shallah said—a stranger.” Something about the way she said the word made it seem full of an eery menace. And it was so uncannily close to the truth.

He sensed suddenly that this girl had the same extrasensory power as the Halflings, developed in her human brain to even greater strength.

But he forced a laugh. “You must have many strangers in Khondor these days.” He glanced at the Swimmer. “Shallah distrusts me, I don’t know why. Did she tell you also that I carry a dark shadow with me wherever I go?”

“She did not need to tell me,” Emer whispered. “Your face is only a mask and behind it is a darkness and a wish—and they are not of our world.”

She came to him with slow steps, as though drawn against her will. He could see the dew of sweat on her forehead and abruptly he began to tremble himself, a shivering deep within him that was not of the flesh.

“I can see… I can almost see…”

He did not want her to say any more. He did not want to hear it.

“No!” he cried out. “No!”

She suddenly fell forward, her body heavy against him. He caught her and eased her down to the gray rock, where she lay in a dead faint.

He knelt helplessly beside her but Shallah said quietly, “I will care for her.” He stood up and then Rold and the Sea Kings were around them like a ring of startled eagles.

“The seeing was upon her,” Shallah told them.

“But it has never taken her like this before,” Rold said worriedly. “What happened? My thought was all on Ywain.”

“What happened is between the Lady Emer and the stranger,” said Shallah. She picked up the girl in her strong arms and bore her away.

Carse felt that strange inner fear still chilling him. The “seeing” they had called it. Seeing indeed, not of any supernatural kind, but of strong extra-sensory powers that had looked deep into his mind.

In sudden reaction of anger Carse said, “A fine welcome! All of us brushed aside for a look at Ywain and then your sister faints at sight of me!”

“By the gods!” Ronald groaned. “Your pardon—we had not meant it so. As for my sister, she is too much with the Halflings and given as they are to dreams of the mind.”

He raised his voice. “Ho, there, Ironbeard! Let us redeem our manners!”

The largest of the Sea Kings, a grizzled giant with a laugh like the north wind, came forward and before Carse realized their intention they had tossed him onto their shoulders and marched with him up the quay where everyone could see him.

“Hark, you!” Rold bellowed. “Hark!”

The crowd quieted at his voice.

“Here is Carse, the barbarian. He took the galley—he captured Ywain—he slew the Serpent! How do you greet him?”

Their greeting nearly brought down the cliffs. The two big men bore Carse up the steps and would not put him down. The people of Khondor streamed after them, accepting the men of his crew as their brothers. Carse caught a glimpse of Boghaz, his face one vast porcine smile, holding a giggling girl in each arm.

Ywain walked alone in the center of a guard of the Sea Kings. The scarred man watched her with a brooding madness in his unwinking eyes.

Rold and Ironbeard dumped Carse to his feet at the summit, panting.

“You’re a heavyweight, my friend,” gasped Rold, grinning. “Now—does our penance satisfy you?”

Carse swore, feeling shamefaced. Then he stared in wonder at the city of Khondor.

A monolithic city, hewn in the rock itself. The crest had been split, apparently by diastrophic convulsions in the remoter ages of Mars. All along the inner cliffs of the split were doorways and the openings of galleries, a perfect honeycomb of dwellings and giddy flights of steps.

Those who had been too old or disabled to climb the long way down to the harbor cheered them now from the galleries or from the narrow streets and squares.

The sea wind blew keen and cold at this height, so that there was always a throb and a wail in the streets of Khondor, mingling with the booming voices of the waves below. From the upper crags there was a coming and going of the Sky Folk, who seemed to like the high places as though the streets cramped them. Their fledglings tossed on the wind, swooping and tumbling in their private games, with bursts of elfin laughter.

Landward, Carse looked down upon green fields and pasture land, locked tight in the arms of the mountains. It seemed as though this place could withstand a siege forever.

They went along the rocky ways with the people of Khondor pouring after them, filling the eyrie-city with shouts and laughter. There was a large square, with two squat strong porticoes facing each other across it. One had carven pillars before it, dedicated to the God of Waters and the God of the Four Winds. Before the other a golden banner whipped, broidered with the eagle of Khondor.

At the threshold of the palace Ironbeard clapped the Earthman on the shoulder, a staggering buffet.

“There’ll be heavy talk along with the feasting of the Council tonight. But we have plenty of time to get decently drunk before that. How say you?”

And Carse said, “Lead on!”