The Barbarian Swordsmen, page 8
The men of Amelia were hard, sinewy, wiry, else they could not have lived in that age, for all their bows and their tall stockade. But they lacked my height and the might of my muscles. They were white men, but black of hair and dark of eye, and their skins were of a faint olive hue. Their old men had scanty beards, which were greatly esteemed.
But how shall I speak of Taramis? 1 can tell you her body was a poem in supple rhythm, that her skin was a rich luscious olive, that her thick, burnished black locks fell over shoulders exquisitely moulded; that her dark eyes gleamed and smouldered with the vital life of the primitive; that her limbs were lissome and ripe with young womanhood—but I have not painted even a dim likeness to the vibrant figure that was Taramis, the daughter of King Jogah.
From the moment I first saw her, bearing water from the spring, the gourd on her glossy head, her slim body swaying in a poem of rhythm, I loved her—I desired her—with all the fierce passion of my race. To her own people Taramis was beautiful; to me, this dark haired woman of the strangers was the ultimate fulfilment of all desire. When I looked at her, merely looked at her, my brain swam with dizziness and the blood beat like war-drums in my ears. Love? Desire? What does James Allison know of the terms? What do you, what does any weak modern know? Ashes of passion burnt out when the earth was young—pale, dim reflections of a flame that once shook the worlds—passion that topples kingdoms, slaughters tribes, breaks down cities and uproots mountains—this we knew in the youth of the earth. Oh, I have loved as well as slain and wandered in my time, when I was Man in the south of the world. I have renounced crowns to win the woman of my choice, and I have destroyed empires for the lame reason; I have mated on reeking battlefields, with the crimson of the slaying still clotted on my fingers, and the screams of the dying resounding in my ears. But enough. It is of an earlier, simpler age I would tell—of the love of Taramis ind the horror of the Shaggy One.
When I came to speak the language of Amelia—and that ms not long, for it was simple and Kelts were always linguists,:ven in those dim days—I asked for her—asked? A Kelt did not ask for anything, save from his own chief. I demanded her, and had her father laugh at me for a giftless wanderer, I was ready to make a red slaughter in his palace-hut before lumbers overcame me. For the desire of Taramis was a white-hot brand in my bosom.
But old King Jogah did not laugh. He tugged his long beard, and he stared at me, and he stared at his warriors. And:hen he set me a task. And therein he could not lose, for if I failed he was rid of a restless and turbulent guest, and if I won, le was rid of a horror that had haunted the land since time immemorial.
I have often wondered, as James Allison, in what distant and the men of Amelia had their being. They had dim legends >f a far trek from the southeast, and in years to come, in my Far wanderings, I came upon people of their blood again. Yet here were differences—and in all the modem world today [here is no race who shows their characteristics, even mongrel is we have become.
But it is certain that their ancestors came to the valleys of Amelia centuries before, and there they found a race already in possession—a grim, hairy race which were like men, yet hideously unlike. Long and horrible had been the war, but at ast the true men conquered, the beast-men fled into the barren hills, there to wage a desultory warfare for another:century.
In the ending of a race sometimes its survivals take strange and terrible forms. So this sub-race culminated in the Shaggy One. That is what they called him. Last of all his race, he lurked high in the grim hills, a horror too grisly to dream of, a retrogression of a race originally horribly low in the scale of human development—yet horribly advanced in certain shuddersome branches.
He brooded high in the hills, descending from time to time I to make raids in the valleys, with the cunning and ferocity of a fiend. Parties which went out to slay him never came back, or their survivors straggled back, mad with fear at what they had seen. The head of this prehistoric demon was the price I should pay for Taramis.
At dawn, at the first dim light of dawn, I fared forth from the village of Amelia, and the young men played on reed pipes the wailing dirge for the dead. But 1 was Brachan, a Kelt and a sword-slayer, and I laughed as the gates of the village dosed behind me.
Only one weapon I bore, the sword men called Skull-biter. Oh, I could sing a whole saga of that shimmering blade! It has glittered down through history like a star of war and slaughter. There is no blade like it, nor has there ever been. It was the sword of Goliath, and with it David smote off the giant Js head on that bloody field. It was the two-edged sword of Islam, and gleamed in the unsteady hands of Muhammad the Prophet; aye, and by devious ways it preceded the Moslems into Europe, and with it in his hands Roland dies in the Pass of Roncesvalles. Richard the Lion-Hearted bore it, not dreaming that he wielded the very brand Durandal of which Blondin sang. Akbar hewed with it a road to empire; it was the sword of Attila; and today it hangs in the palace of some Afghan prince, awaiting the day when fate shall bring it forth again, to drink deep of the red wine of blood.
I forged it myself, I, Brachan the Kelt, mixing in the bronze the blood of men and of tigers, and by a curious process, never to be duplicated, the bronze took on the hardness and toughness of Damascus steel, unbreakable, imperishable. A handsbreadth wide below the guard it was, tapering to a sharp point, with a curious curving slant that lent the double edges almost a concave edge. The pommel was a heavy ball of bronze…but Skull-biter was a sword among swords. I can no more describe the beauty of her, the balance and the springy swiftness, than 1 can describe the beauty of my other mistress, Taramis.
1 went into the hills with Skull-biter slung to my shoulders. Through a maze of ravines and crags I made my way, until I came to a high cliff and far up upon it I saw a cave. And up the cliff to that cave led steps, niched in the rock—laboriously, perhaps, with a flint hand-axe, gripped in a hairy, brutish band.
I, James Allison, wonder at the incredible recklessness of Brachan, which was unbelievable, even in a Kelt. Up that dizzy ladder I went, not knowing what awaited me above, and whether it slept or was awake. But I had trailed the thing’s bloody misshapen footprints from a countryside where it bad tom a man limb from limb and sucked his blood, arid [ believed it was sluggish and heavy with slaughter and satiation.
Into the cave 1 came on tip-toe, lightly, Skull-biter in my hand, and I saw the monster sleeping, horribly like a man, on a great slab of rock, resting his head on his arm. I stood staring in wonder for a moment. The Shaggy One was much like an ape, yet he was no more an ape than I was. He was taller than I—upright on his gnarled, bowed legs I am sure he would have towered seven feet in height. He was covered with shaggy black hair, shot with silver. He had a strange grotesque head, but it was not the head of an ape. The forehead was very low and slanting, but the back of the head was large and well developed. The nose was flattish, the nostrils flaring*, the ears were close set, and twitched in his slumber; the mouth was wide, the lips loose.
Then, as he awoke with a start, before he could rise, I swung my sword and hewed the head from the giant sloping shoulders. The head fell to the rock floor of the cavern, the headless body reared upright, spouting blood, then staggered and toppled down, grasping horribly at the empty air. I did not delay. A nameless horror brooded over that cavern. The Shaggy One dead was more terrible to me than the Shaggy One alive. Yet part of that terror I was forced to carry with me. I took up the severed head and dropped it into the leathern bag I carried, and I returned to the village of Amelia. There I claimed my prize, Taramis, and it was a great wedding feast they gave us, old Jogah and his people of Amelia.
Jirel of Jory in:
Jirel Meets Magic
By C. L. Moore
Over Guischard’s fallen drawbridge thundered Joiry’s warrior lady, sword swinging, voice shouting hoarsely inside her helmet. The scarlet plume of her crest rippled hi the wind. Straight into the massed defenders at the gate she plunged, careering through them by the very impetuosity of the charge, the weight of her mighty warhorse opening up a gap for the men at her heels to widen. For a while there was tumult unspeakable there under the archway, the yells of fighters and the clang of mail on mail and the screams of stricken men. Jirel of Joiry was a shouting battle-machine from which Guischard’s men reeled in bloody confusion as she whirled and slashed and slew in the narrow confines of the gateway, her great stallion’s iron hoofs weapons as potent as her own whistling blade.
In her full armor she was impregnable to the men on foot, and the horse’s armor protected him from their vengeful blades, so that alone, almost, she might have won the gateway. By sheer weight and impetuosity she carried the battle through the defenders under the arch. They gave way before the mighty warhorse and his screaming rider.
Jirel’s swinging sword and the stallion’s trampling feet cleared a path for Joiry’s men to follow, and at last into Guischard’s court poured the steel-clad hordes of Guischard’s conquerors.
Jirel’s eyes were yellow with blood-lust behind the helmet bars, and her voice echoed savagely from the steel cage that confined it, “Giraud! Bring me Giraud! A gold piece to the man who brings me the wizard Giraud!”
She waited impatiently in the courtyard, reining her excited charger in mincing circles over the flags, unable to dismount alone in her heavy armor and disdainful of the threats of possible arbalesters in the arrow-slits that looked down upon her from Guischard’s frowning gray walls. A crossbow shaft was the only thing she had to fear in her impregnable mail.
She waited in mounting impatience, a formidable figure in her bloody armor, the great sword lying across her saddlebow and her eager, angry voice echoing hoarsely from the helmet, “Giraud! Make haste, you varlets! Bring me Giraud!”
There was such bloodythirsty impatience in that hollowly booming voice that the men who were returning from searching the castle hung back as they crossed the court toward their lady in reluctant twos and threes, failure eloquent upon their faces.
“What!” screamed Jirel furiously. “You; Giles! Have you brought me Giraud? Watkin! Where is that wizard Giraud? Answer me, I say!”
“We’ve scoured the castle, my lady,” said one of the men fearfully as the angry voice paused. “The wizard is gone.”
“Now God defend me!” groaned Joiry’s lady. “God help a poor woman served by fools! Did you search among the slain?”
“We searched everywhere, Lady Jirel. Giraud has escaped us.”
Jirel called again upon her Maker in a voice that was blasphemy in itself.
“Help me down, then, you hell-spawned knaves,” she grated. “I’ll find him myself. He must be here!”
With difficulty they got her off the sidling horse. It took two men to handle her, and a third to steady the charger. All the while they straggled with straps and buckles she cursed them hollowly, emerging limb by limb from the casing of steel and swearing with a soldier’s fluency as the armor came away. Presently she stood free on the bloody flagstones, a slim, straight lady, keen as a blade, her red hair a flame to match the flame of her yellow eyes. Under the armor she wore a tunic of link-mail from the Holy Land, supple as silk and almost as light, and a doeskin shirt to protect the milky whiteness of her skin.
She was a creature of the wildest paradox, this warrior lady of Joiry, hot as a red coal, chill as steel, satiny of body and iron of soul. The set of her chin was firm, but her mouth betrayed a tenderness she would have died, before admitting. But she was raging now.
“Follow me, then, fools!” she shouted. “I’ll find that God-cursed wizard and split his head with this sword if it takes me until the day I die. I swear it. I’ll teach him what it costs to ambush Joiry men. By heaven, he’ll pay with his life for my ten who fell at Massy Ford last week. The foul spell-brewer! He’ll learn what it means to defy Joiry!”
Breathing threats and curses, she strode across the court, her men following reluctantly at her heels and casting nervous glances upward at the gray towers of Guischard. It had always borne a bad name, this ominous castle of .the wizard Giraud, a place where queer things happened, which no man entered uninvited and whence no prisoner had ever escaped, though the screams of torture echoed often from its walls. Jirel’s men would have followed her straight through the gates of hell, but they stormed Guischard at her heels with terror in their hearts and no hope of conquest.
She alone seemed not to know fear of the dark sorcerer. Perhaps it was because she had known things so dreadful that mortal perils held no terror for her-there were whispers at Joiry of their lady, and of things that had happened there which no man dared think on. But when Guischard fell, and the wizard’s defenders fled before Jirel’s mighty steed and the onrush of Joiry’s men, they had plucked up heart, thinking that perhaps the ominous tales of Giraud had been gossip only, since the castle fell as any ordinary lord’s castle might fall. But now-there were whispers again, and nervous glances over the shoulder, and men huddled together as they re-entered Guischard at their lady’s hurrying heels. A castle from which a wizard might vanish into thin air, with all the exits watched, must be a haunted place, better burned and forgotten. They followed Jirel reluctantly, half ashamed but fearful.
In Jirel’s stormy heart there was no room for terror as she plunged into the gloom of the archway that opened upon Guischard’s great central hall. Anger that the man might have escaped her was a torch to light the way, and she paused in the door with eager anticipation, sweeping the corpse-strewn hall at a glance, searching for some clue to explain how her quarry had disappeared.
“He can’t have escaped,” she told herself confidently. “There’s no way out. He must be here somewhere.” And she stepped into the hall, turning over the bodies she passed with a careless foot to make sure that death had not robbed her of vengeance.
An hour later, as they searched the last tower, she was still telling herself that the wizard could not have gone without her knowledge. She had taken special pains about that. There was a secret passage to the river, but she had had that watched. And an underwater door opened into the moat, but he could not have gone that way without meeting her men. Secret paths and open, she had found them all and posted a guard at each, and Giraud had not left the castle by any door that led out. She climbed the stairs of the last tower wearily, her confidence shaken.
An iron-barred oaken door closed the top of the steps, and Jirel drew back as her men lifted the heavy cross-pieces and opened it for her. It had not been barred from within. She stepped into the little round room inside, hope fading completely as she saw that it too was empty, save for the body of a page-boy lying on the uncarpeted floor. Blood had made a congealing pool about him, and as Jirel looked she saw something which roused her flagging hopes.
Feet had trodden in that blood, not the mailed feet of armed men, but the tread of shapeless cloth shoes such as surely none but Giraud would have worn when the castle was besieged and falling, and every man’s help needed. Those bloody tracks led straight across the room toward the wall, and in that wall-a window.
Jirel stared. To her a window was a narrow slit deep in stone, made for the shooting of arrows, and never covered save in the coldest weather. But this window was broad and low, and instead of the usual animal pelt for hangings a curtain of purple velvet” had been drawn back to disclose shutters carved out of something that might have been ivory had any beast alive been huge enough to yield such great unbroken sheets of whiteness. The shutters were unlatched, swinging slightly ajar, and upon them Jirel saw the smear of bloody fingers.
With a little triumphant cry she sprang forward. Here, then, was the secret way Giraud had gone. What lay beyond the window she could not guess. Perhaps an unsuspected passage, or a hidden room. Laughing exultantly, she swung open the ivory shutters.
There was a gasp from the men behind her. She did not hear it. She stood quite still, staring with incredulous eyes. For those ivory gates had opened upon no dark stone hiding-place or secret tunnel. They did not even reveal the afternoon sky outside, nor did they admit the shouts of her men still subduing the last of the defenders in the court below. Instead she was looking out upon a green woodland over which brooded a violet day like no day she had ever seen before. In paralyzed amazement she looked down, seeing not the bloody flags of the courtyard far below, but a mossy carpet at a level with the floor. And on that moss she saw the mark of blood-stained feet. This window might be a magic one, opening into strange lands, but through it had gone the man she swore to kill, and where he fled she must follow.
She lifted her eyes from the tracked moss and stared out again through the dimness under the trees. It was a lovelier land than anything seen even in dreams; so lovely that it made her heart ache with its strange, unearthly en- chantment-green woodland hushed and brooding in the hushed violet day. There was a promise of peace there, and forgetfulness and rest. Suddenly the harsh, shouting, noisy world behind her seemed very far away and chill. She moved forward and laid her hand upon the ivory shutters, staring out.
The shuffle of the scared men behind her awakened Jirel from the enchantment that had gripped her. She turned. The dreamy magic of the woodland loosed its hold as she faced the men again, but its memory lingered. She shook her red head a little, meeting their fearful eyes. She nodded toward the open window.
“Giraud has gone out there,” she said. “Give me your dagger, Giles. This sword is too heavy to carry far.”
“But lady-Lady Jirel-dear lady-you can’t go out there-Saint Guilda save us! Lady Jirel!”
Jirel’s crisp voice cut short the babble of protest.
