envied it. She would have liked to go with Thanir. She was cold and doubtful, but she stayed.
Time passed, endless minutes of it, lengthening into what seemed hours.
Stark said, "Can you hear them?"
"No."
"They come." Her hearing, far keener than Balina's, picked up the little sounds, the vast inchoate rustling of an army on the move in stealth and darkness. Light-armed women, hunters, used to stalking wild beasts in the show. They could move softly, very softly.
"I hear nothing," Balina said, and again they waited.
The westering stars moved toward the horizon, and at length in the east a dim pallor crept across the sky.
The plain was still shrouded in night, but now Stark could make out the high towers of the Queen City of Kushat, ghostly and indistinct—the ancient, proud high towers of the rulers and their nobles, set above the crowded Quarters of merchants and artisans and thieves. She wondered who would be queen in Kushat by the time this unrisen sun had set.
"You were wrong," said Balina, peering. "There is nothing on the plain." Stark said, "Wait."
SWIFTLY NOW, in the thin air of Mars, the dawn came with a rush and a leap, flooding the world with harsh light. It flashed in cruel brilliance from sword-blades, from spearheads, from helmets and burnished mail, from the war-harness of beasts, glistened on bare russet heads and coats of leather, set the banners of the clans to burning, crimson and gold and green, bright against the snow.
There was no sound, not a whisper, in all the land.
Somewhere a hunting horn sent forth one deep cry to split the morning. Then burst out the wild skirling of the mountain pipes and the broken thunder of drums, and a wordless scream of exultation that rang back from the Wall of Kushat like the very voice of battle. The women of Mekh began to move.
Raggedly, slowly at first, then more swiftly as the press of warriors broke and flowed, the barbarians swept toward the city as water sweeps over a broken dam.
Knots and clumps of women, tall women running like deer, leaping, shouting, swinging their great brands. Riders, spurring their mounts until they fled belly down. Spears, axes, swordblades tossing, a sea of women and beasts, rushing, trampling, shaking the ground with the thunder of their going.
And ahead of them all came a solitary figure in black mail, riding a raking beast trapped all in black, and bearing a sable axe.
Kushat came to life. There was a swarming and a yelling in the streets, and soldiers began to pour up onto the Wall. A thin company, Stark thought, and shook her head. Mobs of citizens choked the alleys, and every rooftop was full. A troop of nobles went by, brave in their bright mail, to take up their post in the square by the great gate.
Balina said nothing, and Stark did not disturb her thoughts. From the look of her, they were dark indeed.
Soldiers came and ordered them off the the Wall. They went back to their own roof, where they were joined by Thanir. He was in a high state of excitement, but unafraid.
"Let them attack!" he said. "Let them break their spears against the Wall. They will crawl away again."
Stark began to grow restless. Up in their high emplacements, the big ballistas creaked and thrummed. The muted song of the bows became a wailing hum. Women fell, and were kicked off the ledges by their fellows. The blood-howl of the clans rang unceasing on the frosty air, and Stark heard the rap of scaling ladders against stone.
Thanir said abruptly, "What is that—that sound like thunder?"
"Rams," she answered. "They are battering the gate."
He listened, and Stark saw in his face the beginning of fear.
It was a long fight. Stark watched it hungrily from the roof all that morning. The soldiers of Kushat did bravely and well, but they were as folded sheep against the tall killers of the mountains. By noon the officers were beating the Quarters for women to replace the slain.
Stark and Balina went up again, onto the Wall.
The clans had suffered. Their dead lay in windrows under the Wall, amid the broken ladders. But Stark knew her barbarians. They had sat restless and chafing in the valley for many days, and now the battle-madness was on them and they were not going to be stopped.
Wave after wave of them rolled up, and was cast back, and came on again relentlessly. The intermittent thunder boomed still from the gates, where sweating giants swung the rams under cover of their own bowmen. And everywhere, up and down through the forefront of the fighting, rode the woman in black armor, and wild cheering followed her.
Balina said heavily, "It is the end of Kushat."
A LADDER banged against the stones a few feet away. Women swarmed up the rungs, fierce-eyed clansmen with laughter in their mouths, Stark was first at the head.
They had given her a spear. She spitted two women through with it and lost it, and a third woman came leaping over the parapet. Stark received her into her arms.
Balina watched. She saw the warrior go crashing back, sweeping her fellows off the ladder. She saw Stark's face. She heard the sounds and smelled the blood and sweat of war, and she was sick to the marrow of her bones, and her hatred of the barbarians was a terrible thing.
Stark caught up a dead woman's blade, and within ten minutes her arm was as red as a butcher's. And ever she watched the winged helm that went back and forth below, a standard to the clans.
By mid-afternoon the barbarians had gained the Wall in three places. They spread inward along the ledges, pouring up in a resistless tide, and the defenders broke. The rout became a panic.
"It's all over now," Stark said. "Find Thanir, and hide him."
Balina let fall her sword. "Give me the talisman," she whispered, and Stark saw that she was weeping. "Give it me, and I will go beyond the Gates of Death and rouse Ban Cruach from her sleep. And if she has forgotten Kushat, I will take her power into my own hands. I will fling wide the Gates of Death and loose destruction on the women of Mekh—or if the legends are all lies, then I will die."
She was like a woman crazed. "Give me the talisman!"
Stark slapped her, carefully and without heat, across the face. "Get your brother, Balina. Hide him, unless you would be uncle to a red-haired brat."
She went then, like a woman who has been stunned. Screaming men with their children clogged the ways that led inward from the Wall, and there was bloody work afoot on the rooftops and in the narrow alleys.
The gate was holding, still.
STARK FORCED her way toward the square. The booths of the hucksters were overthrown, the wine-jars broken and the red wine spilled. Beasts squealed and stamped, tired of their chafing harness, driven wild by the shouting and the smell of blood. The dead were heaped high where they had fallen from above.
They were all soldiers here, clinging grimly to their last foothold. The deep song of the rams shook the very stones. The iron-sheathed timbers of the gate gave back an answering scream, and toward the end all other sounds grew hushed. The nobles came down slowly from the Wall and mounted, and sat waiting.
There were fewer of them now. Their bright armor was dented and stained, and their faces had a pallor on them.
One last hammer-stroke of the rams.
With a bitter shriek the weakened bolts tore out, and the great gate was broken through.
The nobles of Kushat made their first, and final charge.
As soldiers they went up against the riders of Mekh, and as soldiers they held them until they died. Those that were left were borne back into the square, caught as in the crest of an avalanche. And first through the gates came the winged battle-mask of the Lady Ciara, and the sable axe that drank women's lives where it hewed.
There was a beast with no rider to claim it, tugging at its headrope. Stark swung onto the saddle pad and cut it free. Where the press was thickest, a welter of struggling brutes and women fighting knee to knee, there was the woman in black armor, riding like a god, magnificent, born to war. Stark's eyes shone with a strange, cold light. She struck her heels hard into the scaly flanks. The beast plunged for
ward.
In and over and through, making the long sword sing. The beast was strong, and frightened beyond fear. It bit and trampled, and Stark cut a path for them, and presently she shouted above the din,
"Ho, there! Ciara!"
The black mask turned toward her, and the remembered voice spoke from behind the barred slot, joyously.
"The wanderer. The wild woman!"
Their two mounts shocked together. The axe came down in a whistling curve, and a red swordblade flashed to meet it. Swift, swift, a ringing clash of steel, and the blade was shattered and the axe fallen to the ground.
Stark pressed in.
Ciara reached for her sword, but her hand was numbed by the force of that blow and she was slow, a split second. The hilt of Stark's weapon, still clutched in her own numbed grip, fetched her a stunning blow on the helm, so that the metal rang like a flawed bell.
The Lady Ciara reeled back, only for a moment, but long enough. Stark grasped the war-mask and ripped it off, and got her hands around the naked throat.
She did not break that neck, as she had planned. And the Clansmen who had started in to save their leader stopped and did not move.
Stark knew now why the Lady Ciara had never shown her face.
The throat she held was white and strong, and her hands around it were buried in a mane of red-gold hair that fell down over the shirt of mail. A red mouth passionate with fury, wonderful carving bone under sculptured flesh, eyes fierce and proud and tameless as the eyes of a young eagle, fire-blue, defying her, hating