The night was so balmy he couldn’t endure the notion of wrapping himself up in the fleece-lined sleeping cloak of orthavva fur, so he simply stretched out on the cool, dewy moss and slept in the raw.
In the morning the assault on Zhiam would begin, he knew.
Despite his thirst for revenge, he wasn’t looking forward to it.
Zarouk was up before dawn, rousting his men from their hot, untidy slumbers—for they had slept in the furs, as they were accustomed to sleeping—and preparing for the assault.
The advance unit marched across the causeway to the closed gate, without being attacked from above. Neither spear nor dart was let fall upon them from above. And the walls indeed seemed unattended.
They marched back, feeling foolish.
Two squads were sent back into the forest to cut down the trees so that Xinga’s team could construct rams and scaling ladders. And all the time the City lay dreaming beneath the radiance of dawn, serene and untroubled, scarcely deigning to notice them.
Before noon, they attacked the walls. The ladders went up and the ram team assaulted the gates of the City. They were of bronze, and rang beneath the beaten blows like a mighty gong.
Strange figures appeared atop the walls, and, at first, Zarouk grinned at the sight of them. It was a relief to be no longer ignored; it had been as if their force was so neglible that the men of the City were indifferent to it. Now, at last, the defenders of Zhiam had come forth.
But they were strange defenders.
Darts glanced off them, tinkling to fragments, without causing them any discomfort. Their bodies were curiously thick and sheathed in some odd crystalline white substance which hid even their faces.
They carried no weapons at all.
Ignoring the rain of darts—ignoring the heavy, metal-shod spears—they confined their activities to throwing the ladders back off the walls, one by one. Men fell, squalling, from the toppling ladders, and the ones who were lucky landed in the moatlike lake before the gate. The unlucky ones fell in the bushes or on the mossy ground, to their considerable detriment. There were broken legs aplenty, and more than a few men fell on their heads.
The ladders were raised again—and again—and again—by the dozens. But the strange armored men threw them down every time. They seemed utterly impervious to the darts, even to the darts tipped with the nerve poison the Martians distill from venom, and the heavy spears ricochetted from their breasts or heads or shoulders without even staggering them.
Zarouk was baffled, and getting angry. He sent a team out armed with lassos made of leather thongs, to capture one of the warriors on the wall.
It was a man-shaped statue of living stone.
The desert men shrank back from the uncanny thing, hissing in superstitious terror. Even Zarouk blanched and recoiled from it, shuddering.
It was rather roughly hewn from some strange, sparkling white stone, hard and crystalline, resembling quartz. Its hands were shaped like crude mittens, and its face was devoid of any features whatsoever, not even eyes.
And it really was entirely made of solid stone.
Yet it lived, and moved.
Ryker stared with fascination as the stone giant writhed slowly, straining against its bonds until they snapped and broke. The places where elbows or knees would have been on something human, the stone seemed to suddenly soften—the joints became viscous—when the limb was about to flex. As soon as the limb had moved, the stone hardened again.
A head and a half taller than the tallest of the warriors, the stone colossus got clumsily to its feet and began ponderously to stride back towards the City.
The men shrank from it fearfully, but it ignored them.
Xinga turned questioning eyes on his master, and hefted a lasso tentatively.
“No, let it go,” muttered Zarouk. “How do you kill a thing that isn’t really alive? Let it go.”
The walking statue crossed the causeway, approaching the gate. Then it began to climb, using the ornate carvings around the gate for stepping-stones. It fell twice and climbed back each time unhurt before it gained the top of the walls again.
Zarouk watched with hating eyes, while the City dreamed on, indifferent to anything he might bring against it.
18. The Winged Serpents
Zarouk was in a furious rage, and Houm carefully avoided his company in so far as he was able. Even Xinga thought it most prudent to busy himself with certain tasks which precluded his personal attendance on his prince.
Zhiam seemed quite adequately defended by the Stone Giants, and any further attempts to storm the walls by ladder appeared hopeless of success. Nevertheless two more such forays were launched during the night, under the cover of darkness.
At four widely separated points about the walls of the City, assault squadrons, muffled in dark robes and careful to avoid excessive noise, stole in secret to the foot of the ramparts and sought to scale the battlements without being discovered.
The night was heavily overcast with clouds, and was probably as dark as ever nights were on this strange world. However, despite the furtive and stealthy nature of the attack, it was a dismal failure.
The Stone Giants, as they had done before, simply threw the ladders down from the walls, and the men who were ascending them fell squalling lustily. Then, gathering up their dead and injured, and retrieving the ladders, they limped away and returned to camp to report to their scowling master.
Evidently, the Stone Giants had senses that could perceive the approach of dangerous enemies even in the moonless, starless gloom. Also, they seemingly patrolled the ramparts by day and by night, which was, thought Ryker, only to be expected. Men fashioned of lifeless stone, who were invulnerable to injury, also should be impervious to weariness or fatigue, and—not actually being living creatures, save in a technical sense—did not ever require sleep.
None of this did anything to improve the ferocious temper of the Desert Hawk.
The following day, Zarouk made a tour of the outer works of the Dreaming City, and rode the circuit of the walls, looking for weaknesses. He was forced to ford the streams and canals, and to ride about the small lake, but otherwise he examined every yard of the perimeter, finding no loopholes in the defenses of Zhiam.
There was only one gate, and it was of solid metal. While it might prove possible to break in through this portal by the employment of rams, that would take considerable time. The City had no other gates, not even a small postern gate.
The stone ramparts completely encircled the metropolis of the Lost Nation, and were of equal height at every point. And during his tour of the defenses, Zarouk counted no fewer than sixty of the Stone Giants maintaining their constant and imperturbable vigilance.
Unless he could manage it so that his warriors attacked the wall at more than sixty points, it did not seem possible for them to successfully assault the barricades. And such was the length of the wall and the size of the City itself, that even were he to mount such an attack, the Stone Giants would still be near enough to the unprotected portions to reach them in time to prevent any of the desert raiders from reaching the crest of the walls.
And, besides, to attempt to attack the ramparts simultaneously in more than sixty places was numerically impossible. Zarouk did not have enough men with him to mount such an attack effectively.
Even it it was possible for him to get a few men atop the wall, they would be useless against the unkillable defenders. None of their weapons could inflict upon the Giants an injury sufficient to disable them.