He tramped on ahead and they let him go. Even Thanis stood away from him. He passed the bodies of the chieftains and went around the shoulder where the pass turned. On the other side was a bay or pocket in the cliff, cut out by the waters that had poured through here over the millennia. It offered a partial shelter from the wind, and here the women and children were huddled in a makeshift camp, sharing out cold rations and trying to cover themselves against the night. There was nothing with which to make fires, and only two or three torches burned. Stark saw the dim glow of the candle lamp and made for it. Lugh and Rogain were there, and between them, sitting erect with her back against the cliff wall, was Ciaran.
She had been stripped of her armor, down to the dark close-fitting leather she wore beneath it, and someone had wrapped a tattered cloak around her. Her hands and feet were bound. Her forehead was cut, marred with a purpling bruise. There were streaks of dried blood all down her cheek and her white neck. And still she sat like a king. Stark looked down at her. Her eyes met his without wavering, without pleading or softness or a hint of tears. She did not speak.
He passed on by her. Lugh gave him a robe. He wrapped it around him and lay down on the cold stone and was instantly asleep. When he woke again, stiff and chilled in the predawn dark, Ciaran seemed not to have moved at all, and he wondered whether she had slept, and what her dreams were like. He did not ask her.
“Keep her close behind us,” he said to Lugh and Rogain. “I want her guarded well.”
They ate their meager breakfast and started on through the Gates of Death. Stark thought that he had never seen a more shivering, miserable army on its way to a blind destiny. He walked at the head of it, with Balin beside him. Lugh and Rogain came with Ciaran just behind. After that the people were strung out as they pleased, since for the present there was no more danger from the rear.
For Stark there began an ordeal.
The sun came up, but now they were going deeper into the pass, and the walls stretched higher, and the light was dim and strange at the bottom of that cleft. The wind boomed and howled. It spoke with many tongues in the crevices of the rock, and Stark thought he heard in it the unhuman voices that had spoken to him as he held the talisman. Balin had given Camar’s belt to him, saying he deserved the honor. Stark thought it was more that Balin had an uneasy passion to be rid of the thing. Now again it was a burden to him, and he hated it. In this place he was more conscious than ever of the strange powers that lived in that bit of crystal, and the fact that the answer to them lay somewhere up ahead, he could not tell how close, and that he was being forced inevitably into seeing what they were, whether he wanted to or not.
He did not want to.
He tried to reason with himself. He tried to force his attention to stay fixed on realities, the ever-present and highly important realities of the pass, which was no less dangerous here than it had been where he had brought down the slide. In spite of himself, his nostrils twitched to the smell of evil, ancient and dusty and old but still living, a subtle unclean taint on the wind that only a beast, or one as close to it as he, can sense and know. Every nerve was a point of pain, raw with apprehension. The thin veneer of civilization began to slough away from him no matter how hard he grasped at it, so that the farther he went the more his very body changed, drawing in upon itself and flattening forward, bristling and starting and pausing to test the wind, more like a four-footed thing than a man walking upright.
The worst of it was that he knew Ciaran watched him, and understood. All that morning she walked with bound hands between her guards, and never once spoke. But he felt that her eyes never left him.
When they stopped to rest and eat a little more of their scanty food he went to where she sat, on a heap of boulders off to one side, away from the others. She had not been given anything to eat or drink, and she had not asked for anything. Stark broke off half of his dry cold hunk of bread and handed it to her. She took it and began to eat, rigidly controlling what must have been her very great hunger. Stark sat down on the rocks facing her and nodded to Lugh and Rogain, who were glad enough to leave their charge. He held out a bottle with some dregs of wine left in it, and they shared that too.
He said, “You’re thinking how you may kill me.”
“Yes.” The wind tumbled her hair across her face and she shook it aside impatiently. “You’ve been a curse to me, Stark.”
“I’m not a forgiving man.” He nodded at the people of Kushat. “Neither are they.”
“They had no choice,” she said. “You did. I made you an offer once.” She looked at him with honest curiosity. “You have no more loyalty to these people than I have. Why did you refuse?”
“Two reasons. I had made a promise…”
“To a dead man.”
“To a friend.”
“That is only one reason. Go on.”
“You and I,” said Stark, “are much alike. I think you said that yourself. Much too much alike, for one to lead and the other to follow. Besides, I had no desire to take Kushat.” He handed her the wine again. “I suppose you might say I lack ambition, but you have too much. You were Lord of Mekh. You should have been content.”
“Content!” she said. “Are you content? Have you ever been content?”
He considered that. “Not often. And not for long. But the spurs are not so deep in me.”
“The wind and the fire,” Ciaran said. “One wastes its strength in wandering, the other devours. Well, we shall see who was wiser when the battle is over. But don’t talk to me of contentment.”
Her face had a white blaze to it, a strength and an iron pride. He studied her, sitting tall and straight on the cold rock, with her long legs and her splendid shoulders, and the fine hands that seemed forlorn without the axe to fondle. “I would like to know,” he said, “what made you as you are?”
She said impatiently, “A man is free to be what he will without questions, but a woman is supposed to be a woman and nothing more. One gets tired of explaining.” She leaned back against the boulders, and there was a certain triumph in her eyes. “I did not ask for my sex. I will not be bound by it. I did not ask to be a bastard, and I will not be bound by that, either. So much I have accomplished, if I die today.”
She was silent for a time, and he thought that she was through talking. Then she said softly, “If I live, there will be more to do. Kushat was only a stepping-stone.”
Her eyes looked somewhere else, far off, and what they saw was bitter.
“A stepping-stone?” asked Stark. “To where?”
“To Narrissan.” Her voice was very low. “That is a walled city, Stark, much like Kushat, but farther south, and far more rich and powerful. My grandfather was kind in Narrissan. By the time I could walk, I was a servant in his house. I don’t think he ever knew it. Why should he? I had no name. My father knew. He came upon me and my mother once in the passageway, and he looked at me as one might look into a mirror. ‘So that’s the brat.’ he said. My mother spoke, complaining, I believe, though I hardly heard her, and he cut her off sharply, saying, ‘Be thankful it’s a girl-child. Otherwise I would be afraid to let it grow. It’s too much in my image.’ ”
She smiled. “After that he forgot about me. But when I was old enough I left my scrubbing of floors to practice arms with the young boys. I was beaten for it every day, but every day I went. My father was a good man of his hands, and as he said, I was made in his image. I learned. When I had learned enough I started out to make my own fortune. With these two hands, Stark,” she said, holding them up. “With what I am myself, and what I can do, not what I can trick and wheedle and whore out of others by the ancient usages of the bed-chamber.”