What a fool I am! he thought.
There she was, ten paces away, standing as frozen as he was, staring at him as if he had been transformed into some beast of the wilderness, something ghastly with gnashing jaws and blazing eyes. He wished she would simply turn and run, and leave him alone with his shame, but no, she continued to stand there, staring at him in that strange way.
Then, while he stood there too, yearning to sink into the ground, there came a raucous outcry from far off, from the direction of the city’s entrance, that spared him from further torment just then.
“Helmet People! Here come the Helmet People! The Helmet People are coming!”
Koshmar was drowsing in her bedchamber when the cry arose. The day had been a low one for her, the lowest in a succession of low days. Not even the end of the rains and the coming of this clear dry weather had buoyed her dank clogged spirit. Her mind was full of Torlyri and Lakkamai, Lakkamai and Torlyri.
It should not change anything. She had told herself that a thousand times. Torlyri would still be her twining-partner. Twining was the true communion. If Torlyri now felt the need for coupling too, or even for mating — though who had ever heard of an offering-woman taking a mate? — why, even that should make no difference. Torlyri would still need a twining-partner. And Koshmar would be that partner.
Or would she?
Among breeding couples, it was customary for the mate also to be the twining-partner. For the rest of the tribe, one coupled or did not couple with whomever one wished, and then one also had one’s twining-partner. But that had been in the cocoon days. This was the time of the New Springtime.
Koshmar had yearned with all the force within her to be the one to lead the tribe out of the cocoon into the New Springtime. Well, now she had; and what had it brought her but confusion, doubt, misery? Here she was hunched down gloomily on her own bed in midafternoon, lost in despair, while bright shafts of sunlight danced on the towers of Vengiboneeza. Hour after hour, nothing but brooding. Brooding. The future seemed all mystery and despair to her now. She had never known such hopelessness before.
“The Helmet People! The Helmet People! Here come the Helmet People!” a hoarse voice cried outside her window.
Almost before the meaning of the words had had time to sink in, Koshmar was off her bed, heart beating fiercely, fur rising in prickles, body and mind on full alert.
A kind of savage joy arose in her. Was an enemy tribe invading? Very well. Let them come. She would deal with them. She welcomed their coming. Better to take up arms against enemies than to lie here wrapped up in absurd miserable ruminations.
From her collection of masks she chose the Mask of Nialli, the most ferocious of all. Nialli, so it was said, had been a chieftain with the soul of ten warriors. Her mask was a shining black-and-green thing half again as broad as it was long, with six sharp blood-red spikes jutting upward from it at steep angles on either side. It pressed down with awesome weight against Koshmar’s cheeks. Narrow slits provided her with access for vision.
She threw a yellow shawl of office over her shoulders. She seized her spear of chieftainship. She hurried outside into the crossroads in front of the temple tower.
People were running in all directions, wildly, madly.
“Stop!” Koshmar roared. “Everyone still! To me, to me!”
She caught young Weiawala by the wrist as she sped by. The girl seemed half berserk with terror, and Koshmar had to shake her violently to get her even a little under control. From her, finally, Koshmar extracted some fragments of the story. An army of hideous strangers, riding on frightful monstrous animals, had passed through the south gateway of the city, down by the place where the sapphire-eyes mechanicals sat. They had Sachkor with them, as a prisoner. And they were heading this way.
“Where are the warriors?” Koshmar asked.
Konya, someone said, had already gone down toward the gateway. So had Staip and Orbin. Hresh was with them too, and possibly Praheurt. Lakkamai was said to be on his way. Nobody had seen Harruel. Koshmar caught sight of Minbain and cried out to her, “Where is your mate?” But Minbain did not know. Boldirinthe said that she had seen Harruel, looking black-faced and sullen as he often did these days, trudging off alone toward the mountain early that morning.
Koshmar spat. Enemies at the gate, and her strongest warrior was sulking on the mountain! The very one who had made such ceremony over keeping watch day and night against the attack of the Helmet People, and where was he when the Helmet People came?
No matter. If she had to, she told herself, she could get along without Harruel.
She waved her spear aloft. “Women and children into the temple, and lock the sanctuary doors after you! The rest follow me. Salaman! Thhrouk! Moarn!” She looked around, wondering why Torlyri was not here. She had difficulty seeing out of the Mask of Nialli; her side vision was nearly blocked by the sharp-angled projections. But it was a fearsome mask. “Torlyri,” she said. “Who has seen Torlyri?” Torlyri could fight as well as any man.
Koshmar remembered that Torlyri had gone off to initiate Hresh in the art of twining. Yes, but Hresh supposedly was down at the gate confronting the invaders. Where was Torlyri, then? And what business did Hresh have risking his irreplaceable life at the gate? Well, there was no more time to lose. Koshmar turned to Threyne, who stood glassy-eyed with fear, clutching her child, and angrily waved her toward the temple. “Go. Hide yourself. If Torlyri’s in there, tell her she’ll find me at the south gateway. And tell her to bring her spear!”
She hastened down the grand boulevard to the plaza of the gate.
When she was less than halfway there, she caught sight of her warriors standing in a line across the boulevard from one side to the other: Orbin, Konya, Staip, Lakkamai, Praheurt. Old Anijang was with them too, and Hresh. They were facing south, standing still as statues, utterly without movement, scattered so far apart from one another that they would have been all but useless as a defensive force. Koshmar could not understand why they had arranged themselves so ineptly.
Then she came closer to them, and she too halted in her tracks and stared in wonder toward the southern gate.
A fantastic procession was slowly making its way up the boulevard toward them.
The Helmet People had indeed come: thirty, forty, fifty of them, maybe more. And they were riding the most extraordinary animals Koshmar had ever seen, or imagined. Monstrous hulking beasts, they were. Colossal monsters, like walking hills, twice as high as a man, or more, and three times as long as they were high. With every step they took the ground shook as if in an earthquake. The fur of those great animals, thick and shaggy and densely matted, was a brilliant eye-stabbing scarlet. Their high-domed heads were long and narrow, with ears like platters and cavernous nostrils rimmed with black, and fiery golden eyes of startling size. Their four huge legs, which bent oddly at the knee, ended in terrifying curved black claws, rising backward almost to the level of their great protuberant ankles. A pair of towering humps rose on their backs, with a kind of natural saddle between them, big enough for two Helmet Men to ride comfortably on each creature.
If the beasts on which the Helmet People had entered Vengiboneeza were frightful, the Helmet People themselves were the stuff of nightmare.
They all had eerie crimson eyes like the spy that Harruel and Konya had captured long ago, and fine golden fur. And each of them wore an enormous horrific helmet, and no two helmets were alike. This one was a three-sided tower of metal plates with dark jutting studs emerging everywhere on it, and a pattern of golden flames inlaid in front. This, a domed bowl of black metal with two gigantic mirror-bright metal eyes set at its upper corners. This, a bleak low-brimmed half-mask with three square shield-shaped plaques above it. One warrior wore what looked like a lacquered mountain sprinkled with silver dust; another, a startling red-and-yellow cone with mighty horns; another, a sharp-peaked gold headpiece with a pair of coiling green tails sweeping up and up and up. There was nothing human about those helmets. They seemed to have come from some other world, a dark and terrible one. It was hard to see where the man left off and the helmet began, which made the invaders seem all the more horrendous.