Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the third book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: The Iron Gate.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Ul Raambar and After
AT THE EDGE of the borders of the Empire nal Bordakasha a forlorn wood grew along the heights. From the wood a narrow goat-track climbed to a gaunt tower perched at the edge of a cliff, bleak and alone. One window in the tower opened to Goddess-Sun, and the gate. All the other openings looked to the dark horizon.
From the wood below broke a band of armored horsemen. They reined their chargers at the foot of the goat-track, and stared up at the tower.
Their trappings boasted copper and silver and fine embroidered signs. But their tunics were filthy, and haggard looks rode their eyes.
‘Think you he’ll be in?’
‘I see none about, not even in the shadow of the walls.’
‘Maybe he was warned.’
Nearby, an old woman crouched behind bushes.
Some goats grazed on the weeds behind her. One kid butted her and bleated. The old woman tugged at the kid’s ears. ‘Hush, child,’ she warned. But the armored men had heard.
‘Old woman! Come here.’
The woman turned and ran.
‘Get her!’
They cut the woman off at the tree-line and drove her back. The old woman flinched when the lanceheads swatted her.
They herded her to the edge of the cliff. Her goatskin shoes almost slid over the brink. She gripped tufts of grass in bony hands and glared up at the horsemen. Beneath those men in mud and armor astride their warhorses, she seemed as fragile as dry twigs.
‘Old woman! We mean you no harm. You’re nought to us. Tell us what land this is, and whose is that tower yonder.’
The old woman straightened. ‘Shouting’s uncalled for,’ she said. ‘I’m not deaf yet.’
‘Tell us then, whether that be the tower of Ghezbal Daan?’
She looked up at the tower as though she had never beheld it before. ‘That is a tower. What Ghezbal Daan do you mean?’
‘How many Ghezbal Daans walk this side of the Lands of the Dead? The mercenary from Ul Raambar – the most famous captain in the lands where men dwell – does that answer you, hag?’
‘We don’t care for warfarers hereabouts, my gentleman, nor strangers either. Yet if it will serve to rid me of you, I’ll tell you. That is the tower of the Raamba.’
‘And are you one of his servants?’
‘I only serve my goats. The land down yonder has been dry these months. It drove us here. What have you to do with the Daan?’
‘Not two months have fled, since the summons went abroad from the Empress Allissál, the Divine Queen in Tarendahardil, that the last civilized cities should band together into a League – the League of Elna. Fightingmen and lords of a dozen cities heeded the summons. It was our last chance to stop the barbarian Ara-Karn. And the man sworn to general the League was none other than Ghezbal Daan.
‘We all believed the doom of the barbarians was come at last. Against the genius of Ghezbal Daan, how could any barbarian prevail?’
Another grunted and spat. ‘If he came. If he had come.’
The first took up his tale again. ‘Ghezbal Daan never came. The Empress chose our own lord, the Charan Fronaril Thibbold, for general, and we went to Egland Downs to await the barbarians.
‘Eighty thousand strong we were: the best of all the Southlands. We had thirty thousand heavy horse, ten thousand skirmishers and stone-throwers, five thousand chariots, and thirty thousand others to swell our ranks. And against us there were no more than two score thousand in all, and them but mere barbarians, renegades and unwilling troops levied from fallen cities. They wore dirty armor, were led by barbarians, and knew little of the art or sciences of war.’
‘If they had only fought fairly, by God’s mailed fist!’
‘We never reached them to strike with our lances or our swords. They fought only with their damned bows, slaying us from afar, out of reach even of the stone-throwers.’
‘Aye – it was a rout,’ said the first. ‘The foot-lancers perished. The chariots were forsaken beside their dead horse-teams. All around us the barbarians roamed, and slew us at their leisure. Dark God wheeled overhead, and many followed Him that pass.
‘Charan Thibbold fell upon his sword in atonement. I was there beside him as he faced Goddess and the Blessed Lands beyond the bright horizon. I steadied him so that the blade should enter cleanly. His ka did not go alone. Sixty thousand corpses, of the finest men of the South, now lie like trampled rushes on that foul field. Fewer than two in thirty escaped. We eight – we are now the Peshtrian army.
‘And now,’ he said, grimly stroking his lance-haft, ‘we are come to put this up the nose of the vaunted Ghezbal Daan, and call him coward and traitor before the ears of all the world. And if he will not stomach that, there are eight swords here, will gladly stomach him!’
The old woman nodded. ‘So,’ she said. ‘You have not heard?’
‘Heard what, old harridan?’
She pointed one bony arm at the tower. ‘Let your own eyes tell you.’
The Peshtrians frowned.
Over the gate one word was carved in the stone, with the likeness of a flower: the flower was the Raamba toloald, and the word, the modest Daan. The iron-studded gate hung ajar, as if left thus by a thing of no intelligence.
The Peshtrians kneed their horses nearer. At that moment, as if the tower were aware of them, a breath of wind rose up from the Marches and swung the gate apart. The Peshtrians looked up from lowered brows. Warily they went into the gate’s embrace.
Within, there was a small courtyard, flint-paved and ringed with shelters for horses and cattle and other beasts. The stalls were vacant. Moveless shadows painted the empty hall within the rust-red tower. The wind made a little moaning sound, redoubling the silence. Not so much as a dog did they find, to whimper at their presence.
The Peshtrians rode back down the trail.
‘Where then?’
The old woman leered at them.
‘Come,’ she said.
She led them to where the precipice broke. There she spread her hands across the Marches.
‘There. Thither has your prey gone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Will you tell us the famous Ghezbal Daan has descended to live as common muck such as you?’
‘Ah.’ The old woman shrugged, and pointed again. ‘No. Ul Raambar.’
They waited, but she said no more. ‘What mean you now? Do you say he has ended his long exile, and gone back into the city where he was born?’
She looked on them strangely, then laughed, the laugh of an old goat. ‘Have you not heard that, either?’
‘Heard what, you foul hag?’
‘Ah, ah – how little you know, for such fine gentlemen, of the tidings of the world!’ She slipped between the horses’ legs, and went amongst her flock. The Peshtrians followed her, angrily bidding her tell them all she knew. But she only scratched her head and led her goats into the wood.
‘Ul Raambar!’ her voice called back to them. ‘In Ul Raambar you’ll find him!’
§
THE HOUR for the longsleep found the Peshtrians still mounted. Emerging from the foot of the cliffs, they rode into the Marches. Before them a new path cut the grass, broad as ten horsemen, scored with cart-tracks like lash-marks.
Straight as a lance-haft the trail ran toward the dark horizon, and the Peshtrians followed it. As they journeyed, they asked every herder they met how the hard, dead swath came there. The herders’ answer was ever the same: ‘That be the track of Ghezbal Daan.’
They would say no more.
The peoples of the Marches were of race promiscuous. They had no skill at weapons, held aloof from the cities, and spoke rarely, even amongst themselves. It happened from year to year that a man would weary of city life, and take his family to find space in the Marches. There was always space in the Marches. They swallowed men and the works of men, and left naught but greener grass behind.
It was a land for lonely men, and women forsaken in love, and those for whom the ceaseless whisper of the wind was not a thing unbearable.
The Peshtrians rode close together, clutching at their cloaks.
Before them, inexorably, a wall rose above the far champaign. A wall of mountains, here snow-wigged and iron-gray, there crimson and purple in the slanting light of Goddess: the wall men called Yron Ghadil, the Place of the Knife-Edge. Upon the near side of that wall were light and fields, birds and beasts, palaces, the Empire, and all the lands where men dwell. The far side was darkness, barren and cold – the hideous lands of the Madpriests who reviled Goddess, and drank blood after God.
Only one thing contained the Madpriests on the far side of the Knife-Edged border, and that was Ul Raambar the Unassailable, the city-fastness that stood in the mouth of the only break in Yron Ghadil’s wall. It was said that the spires of the towers of Ul Raambar shone beneath the white plumes of her foundries like a jewel, and that so long as that jewel shone, the cities of the Southlands would prevail.
From Ul Raambar had Ghezbal Daan come with a band of loyal men, when Ankhan of the Strong Heart took the Raamba crown and Lisalya for his Lady. For fifteen years Ghezbal Daan had plied the trade of a mercenary captain. More than a dozen crowns his genius saved, and more than half had been as easy for him to take as an apple on his knees. But always Ghezbal Daan saw his veterans paid and rode back to his lonely tower. For fifteen years Ghezbal Daan shunned the city of his birth. And now he had run back to her as though plague-dogs bit his heels.
The barren track narrowed and failed as the sparse grasses of the hills ceded to stone-flecked earth and rocky ledges. The Peshtrians rested for the shortsleep.
‘Do you think this track of death truly leads to Ul Raambar?’ asked one, shivering beneath his cloak.
The soldiers glanced away.
‘I have never been so near the dark horizon,’ another said.
The first squinted up at Goddess-sun, where She sat like a fattened blood beetle, just upon the bright horizon. ‘And still we have had no sight of the white reek of her foundries. And yet, even if this be not the way to Ul Raambar, it is still the trail of Ghezbal Daan.’
They mounted and went on. Soon the trail joined a trade-route that came by a more devious way to evade the floods of winter.
The trade-route ended at a narrow path leaping back and forth up the mountainside. The Peshtrians halted and made camp. They had encountered no folk then for thirteen passes of the jade moon of God.
Wearily they lay in the shadows of the rocks and passed a bitter, futile longsleep.
They woke as weary as before. They ate the first meal, consuming the last of their provisions. They harnessed their broken horses. Then in single file they led their horses up the narrow steep trail, upward to Ul Raambar.
§
SOUTH of the ancient trade-route, the wall of Yron Ghadil stepped a pace back, and there the mountains rose so tall that even now in early autumn their peaks were thick with snow. Streams of icewater fell through mantles of thick pine abundant with game. There in rude cabins lived huntsmen and wood-fellers, a hardy, wary lot. For often it happened that a band of Madpriests would steal by unknown ways over the mountains, to murder men and drag off women for their abominable rites. So it was not surprising, when the Peshtrians appeared, that the hill folk met them with axes at the ready.
The soldiers gazed upon the pale-skinned folk where they stood among the pines. The soldiers gazed upon the wood-folk as if they saw phantoms. At length one horseman spoke.
‘What has become of it?’ he asked, his voice cracking as though he had had no drink for many a pass. ‘What has befallen Ul Raambar?’
The wood-folk shrugged and shook their heads. They turned back into the wood.
‘Wait,’ cried the horseman.
A young lad, glancing at his fellows as they waded back into the green, lingered. He had short-cropped hair the color of sand, and his ears stuck out. Wonder glowed out of his big dark eyes as he looked at these mail-clad, brown-faced men. Unlike the others of his kind, he seemed to like their looks.
‘Don’t you want beer and meat?’ he asked.
‘Tell us rather, what has befallen Ul Raambar.’
‘Ay,’ he said. He beckoned. Clumsily, like soldiers carved of wood, they stepped down from their steeds.
He led them to the cool shadow of the pine, where they used the ledgelike boulders for seats. He stood before them, gripping in his hands the hilt of a thick hunting knife, which was a sword in his small hands. Shyly he glanced up at the faces of the men, so strangely darkened by the Sun, like loaves left too long beside the fire. But they sat stonily, awaiting his words.
‘It was them,’ he said. He pointed.
‘Who? The Madpriests?’
The lad nodded, glancing about and brandishing the knife. Not so rashly were the Yonder Folk named in these parts.
‘Yet the Raambas have withstood the efforts of the Madpriests for ten generations of men and more,’ one of the Peshtrians said. He spoke slowly, and the song of his speech was like a beating on a hollow wooden drum, all the notes alike. ‘And but now the Charan Ankhan of the Strong Heart ruled there, and the Chara Lisalya at his side, and no prince in all the South was more famed for justice, strength, or the loyalty of his people.’
‘I know,’ the lad said. ‘They hunted here, and I spied on them. How strong they were! Once they caught me – the soldiers. They took me before Ankhan. Lisalya sat beside him, and smiled at me. There was a flower caught in my shoe – she asked me if I knew where there were others like it. I said, lots. She wanted me to lead her there, and offered to pay me. I was bold and said, only if I might name the price. She laughed and asked what jewels or coins I would have, but I wanted a kiss from her, and one of the soldiers’ knives. They laughed, the soldiers. But Ankhan and Lisalya did not laugh. She held my shoulders in her hands, and she kissed me – here.’ He colored crimson.
‘Then Ankhan handed me this hunting knife, his own. It was forged of Raamba steel – see? I bet not even you have one so fine. Lisalya made me show her the flowerbeds. They were toloalds, and she said she loved them over all other flowers in the world.’
‘But Ul Raambar,’ said the soldiers.
‘Yes, they are gone now,’ the lad said. ‘After it happened, some of them came down here for a while, for shelter. They seemed like the animals when cloudfire strikes too close, and they don’t know where to go, or hardly who they be. But I don’t like to say all they told us, of how it happened. Those folk, from beyond – they came in more numbers than anyone had known since the death of the old lord Garkhan, Ankhan’s father. They came over the walls and swarmed through the Fastness. Oh, they told us horrid tales. The Yonder Folk had – what did they call them – bows.’
‘But bows are the creation of Ara-Karn,’ the strangers protested. ‘None but the barbarians know the secrets of their making.’
‘That’s what they said – the Raamba folk. They never knew such things before, but guessed what they must be. Ankhan, they said, died fighting – I can see him so. But Lisalya, and the other women, and the children, they took into the darkness.’ The boy’s voice failed him.
The strangers’ fingers tightened on their knees. ‘Yet where are the surviving Raambas? We must learn more of this.’
The boy swallowed and shook his head. ‘They’re gone,’ he said. ‘They went with Ghezbal Daan.’
‘Ghezbal Daan? Is he here?’
‘He took them away. In the lower hills, down by the merchants’ road, he met with them. They made a big camp, and shouted and roared so that it sounded like the rock-giants in winter, when they throw stones down at us. And leading them on was Ghezbal Daan.
‘They slaughtered all their goats and burned the meat over long fires, and wrapped it in the skins. And then they went away – yonder. Ghezbal Daan led them. My father’s brother saw them marching through the pass. They sang death-dirges for marching-songs, so old that half the words were nonsense. And the Yonder Folk closed behind them, all along the wall of Yron Ghadil. Ghezbal Daan had vowed a great public oath, that for his former lord’s death he would himself slay – Estar Kane. My father’s brother said the torches lit up all their eyes, so that they seemed almost like they belonged to that place they went.’
The soldiers traded glances. The boy’s eyes were red and wet. He snuffled, and pawed his nose. Half he turned, as if to go. Then he turned back.
‘That was weeks ago, and none has seen them since. But it was not long after Ghezbal Daan went beyond the world’s end that the highland men say they saw great flaring of witchlights over the mountains. Then the lights died, and it has been silent since. There have been no raids since then.’
‘So was that his end?’ one of the strangers mused. ‘O captain, wheresoever you now may be, forgive my hasty words! For now I see it was not cowardice that kept you from Egland Downs.’
‘Please sirs,’ the lad said. ‘Don’t you want beer and cheese and meat? My folk make good beer and cheese. Wait, I’ll bring you some.’ He started off; stopped and turned back. ‘I’ll be quick,’ he said. The men looked at him like pale ghosts behind the owls in the pines. The lad scampered off, and cut at passing branches as he ran.
The Peshtrians watched him. Slowly they twisted their thick, metalclad necks, looked one another in the eye, and away.
One bent and raked his iron-gloved hand through the thick carpet of needles about his boots. The tindery needles sifted between his heavy fingers, and took again their time-wonted attitudes.
‘There passed a true soldier.’
‘Say rather a true lover. Did you not mark the carving on the lintel of his tower gate?’
The leader had said nothing, but only stared after the wood-boy. He stood and looked upon the unspeaking icy peaks, bright against the dusky sky. He mounted his stallion.
They rode around the bend in Yron Ghadil, once more up to ghostly Ul Raambar. And as they ascended in single file the red light of Goddess gleamed like fire from off their muddied, armored backs.
Below the fastness walls they reined in their steeds. Some gazed up at the walls over them, and the gates, which were smashed and broken from the inside. But the youngest turned his horse about and looked back brightward.
The leader drew his sword. He stared at the blade. The fingers wrenched apart, and the blade fell clattering on the stone-lined path.
‘By Goddess,’ he swore, ‘but I am sick with war, though all my life I have plied its trade. Our little Peshtria will buy her peace from Ara-Karn – if he will sell them peace, and not take their gold and slaughter them regardless. And yet I will not see her so despoiled – nor yet have I any great desire to cast away my life in vain stands or despair, as this Captain has done, or as they say Arstomenes of Vapio did long before the barbarians reached him, with vice and gluttonous pleasure. Rather let us leave the world, and all these things behind.’
‘Where shall we go, and how reach it? There are no lands beyond the vast Southern Ocean but paltry isles, unfit for life; and Ara-Karn lords it across the South and North.’
‘Where else,’ he answered, ‘but Darkbridge, and the world beyond?’
The others sat silent a space. ‘Yet what if that be no more than fable?’
‘Why then, we shall meet with that same end which by now doubtless has overtaken Ghezbal Daan. Did we not say and make oath upon it, that we should follow him, even unto the Darklands?’
And so they laid their hands along the shaft of a lance, and their leader said, slowly, mouthing each word,
‘I swear that I shall follow Darkbridge where it leads me, and there fashion out by strength and skill whatsoever life I may, or else perish.’
‘So swear we all,’ the others said.
And they rode up through the shattered gates back into ghostly Ul Raambar.
The mountain-lad came after them. He guessed where they must go. And he waited for the strangers for eight passes of dark God overhead, to share his beer and meat and cheese. But the Peshtrians nevermore returned.
They found Darkbridge instead.
