her up standing, shaking in every limb. She had dropped the talisman. It lay gleaming in the snow at her feet, and the alien memories were gone—and Camara was dead.
After a time she crouched down, breathing harshly. She did not want to touch the lens again. The part of her that had learned to fear strange gods and evil spirits with every step she took, the primitive aboriginal that lay so close under the surface of her mind, warned her to leave it, to run away, to desert this place of death and ruined stone.
She forced herself to take it up. She did not look at it. She wrapped it in the bit of silk and replaced it inside the iron boss, and clasped the belt around her waist. Then she found the small flask that lay with her gear beside the fire and took a long pull, and tried to think rationally of the thing that had happened.
Memories. Not her own, but the memories of Ban Cruach, a million years ago in the morning of a world. Memories of hate, a secret war against unhuman beings that dwelt in crystal cities cut in the living ice, and used these ruined towers for some dark purpose of their own.
Was that the meaning of the talisman, the power that lay within it? Had Ban Cruach, by some elder and forgotten science, imprisoned the echoes of her own mind in the crystal?
Why? Perhaps as a warning, as a reminder of ageless, alien danger beyond the Gates of Death?
Suddenly one of the beasts tethered outside the ruined tower started up from its sleep with a hissing snarl.
Instantly Stark became motionless.
They came silently on their padded feet, the rangy mountain brutes moving daintily through the sprawling ruin. Their riders too were silent—tall women with fierce eyes and russet hair, wearing leather coats and carrying each a long, straight spear.
There were a score of them around the tower in the windy gloom. Stark did not bother to draw her gun. She had learned very young the difference between courage and idiocy.
She walked out toward them, slowly lest one of them be startled into spearing her, yet not slowly enough to denote fear. And she held up her right hand and gave them greeting.
They did not answer her. They sat their restive mounts and stared at her, and Stark knew that Camara had spoken the truth. These were the riders of Mekh, and they were wolves.
II
STARK WAITED, UNTIL THEY should tire of their own silence.
Finally one demanded, "Of what country are you?"
She answered, "I am called N'Chaka, the Woman-Without-a-Tribe."
It was the name they had given her, the half-human aboriginals who had raised her in the blaze and thunder and bitter frosts of Mercury.
"A stranger," said the leader, and smiled. She pointed at the dead Camara and asked, "Did you slay her?"
"She was my friend," said Stark, "I was bringing her home to die."
Two riders dismounted to inspect the body. One called up to the leader, "She was from Kushat, if I know the breed, Thorda! And she has not been robbed." She proceeded to take care of that detail herself.
"A stranger," repeated the leader, Thorda. "Bound for Kushat, with a woman of Kushat. Well. I think you will come with us, stranger."
Stark shrugged. And with the long spears pricking her, she did not resist when the tall Thorda plundered her of all she owned except her clothes—and Camara's belt, which was not worth the stealing. Her gun Thorda flung contemptuously away.
One of the women brought Stark's beast and Camara's from where they were tethered, and the Earthwoman mounted—as usual, over the violent protest of the creature, which did not like the smell of her. They moved out from under the shelter of the walls, into the full fury of the wind.
For the rest of that night, and through the next day and the night that followed it they rode eastward, stopping only to rest the beasts and chew on their rations of jerked meat.
To Stark, riding a prisoner, it came with full force that this was the North country, half a world away from the Mars of spaceships and commerce and visitors from other planets. The future had never touched these wild mountains and barren plains. The past held pride enough.
To the north, the horizon showed a strange and ghostly glimmer where the barrier wall of the polar pack reared up, gigantic against the sky. The wind blew, down from the ice, through the mountain gorges, across the plains, never ceasing. And here and there the cryptic towers rose, broken monoliths of stone. Stark remembered the vision of the talisman, the huge structure crowned with eerie darkness. She looked upon the ruins with loathing and curiosity. The women of Mekh could tell her nothing.
Thorda did not tell Stark where they were taking her, and Stark did not ask. It would have been an admission of fear.
In mid-afternoon of the second day they came to a lip of rock where the snow was swept clean, and below it was a sheer drop into a narrow valley. Looking down, Stark saw that on the floor of the valley, up and down as far as she could see, were women and beasts and shelters of hide and brush, and fires burning. By the hundreds, by the several thousand, they camped under the cliffs, and their voices rose up on the thin air in a vast deep murmur that was deafening after the silence of the plains.
A war party, gathered now, before the thaw. Stark smiled. She became curious to meet the leader of this army.
They found their way single file along a winding track that dropped down the cliff face. The wind stopped abruptly, cut off by the valley walls. They came in among the shelters of the camp.
Here the snow was churned and soiled and melted to slush by the fires. There were no men in the camp, no sign of the usual cheerful rabble that follows a barbarian army. There were only men—hillmen and warriors all, tough-handed killers with no thought but battle.
They came out of their holes to shout at Thorda and her women, and stare at the stranger. Thorda was flushed and jovial with importance.
"I have no time for you," she shouted back. "I go to speak with the Lady Ciara."
Stark rode impassively, a dark giant with a face of stone. From time to time she made her beast curvet, and laughed at herself inwardly for doing it.
They came at length to a shelter larger than the others, but built exactly the same and no more comfortable. A spear was thrust into the snow beside the entrance, and from it hung a black pennant with a single bar of silver across it, like lightning in a night sky. Beside it was a shield with the same device. There were no guards.
Thorda dismounted, bidding Stark to do the same. She hammered on the shield with the hilt of her sword, announcing herself.
"Lady Ciara! It is Thorda—with a captive."
A voice, toneless and strangely muffled, spoke from within.
"Enter, Thorda."
Thorda pushed aside the hide curtain and went in, with Stark at her heels.
THE DIM DAYLIGHT did not penetrate the interior. Cressets burned, giving off a flickering brilliance and a smell of strong oil. The floor of packed snow was carpeted with furs, much worn. Otherwise there was no adornment, and no furniture but a chair and a table, both dark with age and use, and a pallet of skins in one shadowy corner with what seemed to be a heap of rags upon it
In the chair sat a woman.
She seemed very tall, in the shaking light of the cressets. From neck to thigh her lean body was cased in black link mail, and under that a tunic of leather, dyed black. Across her knees she held a sable axe, a great thing made for the shearing of skulls, and her hands lay upon it gently, as though it were a toy she loved.
Her head and face were covered by a thing that Stark had seen before only in very old paintings—the ancient war-mask of the inland Queens of Mars. Wrought of black and gleaming steel, it presented an unhuman visage of slitted eyeholes and a barred slot for breathing. Behind, it sprang out in a thin, soaring sweep, like a dark wing edge-on in flight.
The intent, expressionless scrutiny of that mask was bent, not upon Thorda, but upon Erica Joan Stark.
The hollow voice spoke again, from behind the mask. "Well?"
"We were hunting in the gorges to the south," said Thorda. "We saw a
fire…" She told the story, of how they had found the stranger and the body of the woman from Kushat.
"Kushat!" said the Lady Ciara softly. "Ah! And why, stranger, were you going to Kushat?"
"My name is Stark. Erica Joan Stark, Earthwoman, out of Mercury." She was tired of being called stranger. Quite suddenly, she was tired of the whole business.
"Why should I not go to Kushat? Is it against some law, that a woman may not go there in peace without being hounded all over the Norlands? And why do the women of Mekh make it their business? They have nothing to do with the city."
Thorda held her breath, watching with delighted anticipation.
The hands of the woman in armor caressed the axe. They were slender hands, smooth and sinewy—small hands, it seemed, for such a weapon.
"We make what we will our business, Erica Joan Stark." She spoke with a peculiar gentleness. "I have asked you. Why were you going to Kushat?"
"Because," Stark answered with equal restraint, "my comrade wanted to go home to die."
"It seems a long, hard journey, just for dying." The black helm bent forward, in an attitude of thought. "Only the condemned or banished leave their cities, or their clans. Why did your comrade flee Kushat?"
A voice spoke suddenly from out of the heap of rags that lay on the pallet in the shadows of the corner. A woman's voice, deep and husky, with the harsh quaver of age or madness in it.
"Three women beside myself have fled Kushat, over the years that matter. One died in the spring floods. One was caught in the