People of the Dark Robert Ervin Howard Read online

  “A virgin died on my altar at the full tide of each moon — but youths and maidens die at the waxing and the waning, the rising and the setting of each moon, before Gol-goroth, on whose altar a fresh human heart forever throbs! Ska is but a shadow! Your real lord is Gothan, who sits above the city like a vulture! Once you were a mighty people; your galleys filled the seas. Now you are a remnant and that is dwindling fast! Fools! You will all die on the altar of Gol-goroth ere Gothan is done and he will stalk alone among the silent ruins of Bal-Sagoth!

  “Look at him!” her voice rose to a scream as she lashed herself to an inspired frenzy, and even Turlogh, to whom the words were meaningless, shivered. “Look at him where he stands there like an evil spirit out of the past! He is not even human! I tell you, he is a foul ghost, whose beard is dabbled with the blood of a million butcheries — an incarnate fiend out of the mist of the ages come to destroy the people of Bal-Sagoth!

  “Choose now! Rise up against the ancient devil and his blasphemous gods, receive your rightful queen and deity again and you shall regain some of your former greatness. Refuse, and the ancient prophesy shall be fulfilled and the sun will set on the silent and crumbled ruins of Bal-Sagoth!”

  Fired by her dynamic words, a young warrior with the insignia of a chief sprang to the parapet and shouted: “Hail to A-ala! Down with the bloody gods!”

  Among the multitude many took up the shout and steel clashed as a score of fights started. The crowd on the battlements and in the streets surged and eddied, while Ska glared, bewildered. Brunhild, forcing back her companions who quivered with eagerness for action of some kind, shouted: “Hold! Let no man strike a blow yet! People of Bal-Sagoth, it has been a tradition since the beginning of time that a king must fight for his crown! Let Ska cross steel with one of these warriors! If Ska wins, I will kneel before him and let him strike off my head! If Ska loses, then you shall accept me as your rightful queen and goddess!”

  A great roar of approval went up from the walls as the people ceased their brawls, glad enough to shift the responsibility to their rulers.

  “Will you fight, Ska?” asked Brunhild, turning to the king mockingly. “Or will you give me your head without further argument?”

  “Slut!” howled Ska, driven to madness. “I will take the skulls of these fools for drinking cups, and then I will rend you between two bent trees!”

  Gothan laid a hand on his arm and whispered in his ear, but Ska had reached the point where he was deaf to all but his fury. His achieved ambition, he had found, had faded to the mere part of a puppet dancing on Gothan’s string; now even the hollow bauble of his kingship was slipping from him and this wench mocked him to his face before his people. Ska went, to all practical effects, stark mad.

  Brunhild turned to her two allies. “One of you must fight Ska.”

  “Let me be the one!” urged Turlogh, eyes dancing with eager battle-lust. “He has the look of a man quick as a wildcat, and Athelstane, while a very bull for strength, is a thought slow for such work —”

  “Slow!” broke in Athelstane reproachfully. “Why, Turlogh, for a man my weight —”

  “Enough,” Brunhild interrupted. “He must choose for himself.”

  She spoke to Ska, who glared red-eyed for an instant, then indicated Athelstane, who grinned joyfully, cast aside the bird’s head and unslung his sword. Turlogh swore and stepped back. The king had decided that he would have a better chance against this huge buffalo of a man who looked slow, than against the black-haired tigerish warrior, whose cat-like quickness was evident.

  “This Ska is without armor,” rumbled the Saxon. “Let me likewise doff my mail and helmet so that we fight on equal terms —”

  “No!” cried Brunhild. “Your armor is your only chance! I tell you, this false king fights like the play of summer lightning! You will be hard put to hold your own as it is. Keep on your armor, I say!”

  “Well, well,” grumbled Athelstane, “I will — I will. Though I say it is scarcely fair. But let him come on and make an end of it.”

  The huge Saxon strode ponderously toward his foe, who warily crouched and circled away. Athelstane held his great sword in both hands before him, pointed upward, the hilt somewhat below the level of his chin, in position to strike a blow to right or left, or to parry a sudden attack.

  Ska had flung away his light shield, his fighting-sense telling him that it would be useless before the stroke of that heavy blade. In his right hand he held his slim spear as a man holds a throwing-dart, in his left a light, keen-edged hatchet. He meant to make a fast, shifty fight of it, and his tactics were good. But Ska, having never encountered armor before, made his fatal mistake in supposing it to be apparel or ornament through which his weapons would pierce.

  Now he sprang in, thrusting at Athelstane’s face with his spear. The Saxon parried with ease and instantly cut tremendously at Ska’s legs. The king bounded high, clearing the whistling blade, and in midair he hacked down at Athelstane’s bent head. The light hatchet shivered to bits on the Viking’s helmet and Ska sprang back out of reach with a blood-lusting howl.

  And now it was Athelstane who rushed with unexpected quickness, like a charging bull, and before that terrible onslaught Ska, bewildered by the breaking of his hatchet, was caught off his guard — flat-footed. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the giant looming over him like an overwhelming wave and he sprang in, instead of out, stabbing ferociously. That mistake was his last. The thrusting spear glanced harmlessly from the Saxon’s mail, and in that instant the great sword sang down in a stroke the king could not evade. The force of that stroke tossed him as a man is tossed by a plunging bull. A dozen feet away fell Ska, king of Bal-Sagoth, to lie shattered and dead in a ghastly welter of blood and entrails. The throng gaped, struck silent by the prowess of that deed.

  “Hew off his head!” cried Brunhild, her eyes flaming as she clenched her hands so that the nails bit into her palms. “Impale that carrion’s head on your sword-point so that we may carry it through the city gates with us as token of victory!”

  But Athelstane shook his head, cleansing his blade: “Nay, he was a brave man and I will not mutilate his corpse. It is no great feat I have done, for he was naked and I full-armed. Else it is in my mind, the brawl had gone differently.”

  Turlogh glanced at the people on the walls. They had recovered from their astonishment and now a vast roar went up: “A-ala! Hail to the true goddess!” And the warriors in the gateway dropped to their knees and bowed their foreheads in the dust before Brunhild, who stood proudly erect, bosom heaving with fierce triumph. Truly, thought Turlogh, she is more than a queen — she is a shield woman, a Valkyrie, as Athelstane said.

  Now she stepped aside and tearing the golden chain with its jade symbol from the dead neck of Ska, held it on high and shouted: “People of Bal-Sagoth, you have seen how your false king died before this golden-bearded giant, who being of iron, shows no single cut! Choose now — do you receive me of your own free will?”

  “Aye, we do!” the multitude answered in a great shout. “Return to your people, oh mighty and all-powerful queen!”

  Brunhild smiled sardonically. “Come,” said she to the warriors; “they are lashing themselves into a very frenzy of love and loyalty, having already forgotten their treachery. The memory of the mob is short!”

  Aye, thought Turlogh, as at Brunhild’s side he and the Saxon passed through the mighty gates between files of prostrate chieftains; aye, the memory of the mob is very short. But a few days have passed since they were yelling as wildly for Ska the liberator — scant hours had passed since Ska sat enthroned, master of life and death, and the people bowed before his feet. Now — Turlogh glanced at the mangled corpse which lay deserted and forgotten before the silver gates. The shadow of a circling vulture fell across it. The clamor of the multitude filled Turlogh’s ears and he smiled a bitter smile.

  The great gates closed behind the three adventurers and Turlogh saw a broad white street stretching away in front of h
im. Other lesser streets radiated from this one. The two warriors caught a jumbled and chaotic impression of great white stone buildings shouldering each other; of sky-lifting towers and broad stair-fronted palaces. Turlogh knew there must be an ordered system by which the city was laid out, but to him all seemed a waste of stone and metal and polished wood, without rhyme or reason. His baffled eyes sought the street again.

  Far up the street extended a mass of humanity, from which rose a rhythmic thunder of sound. Thousands of naked, gayly plumed men and women knelt there, bending forward to touch the marble flags with their foreheads, then swaying back with an upward flinging of their arms, all moving in perfect unison like the bending and rising of tall grass before the wind. And in time to their bowing they lifted a monotoned chant that sank and swelled in a frenzy of ecstasy. So her wayward people welcomed back the goddess A-ala.

  Just within the gates Brunhild stopped and there came to her the young chief who had first raised the shout of revolt upon the walls. He knelt and kissed her bare feet, saying: “Oh great queen and goddess, thou knowest Zomar was ever faithful to thee! Thou knowest how I fought for thee and barely escaped the altar of Gol-goroth for thy sake!”

  “Thou hast indeed been faithful, Zomar,” answered Brunhild in the stilted language required for such occasions. “Nor shall thy fidelity go unrewarded. Henceforth thou art commander of my own bodyguard.” Then in a lower voice she added: “Gather a band from your own retainers and from those who have espoused my cause all along, and bring them to the palace. I do not trust the people any more than I have to!”

  Suddenly Athelstane, not understanding the conversation, broke in: “Where is the old one with the beard?”

  Turlogh started and glanced around. He had almost forgotten the wizard. He had not seen him go — yet he was gone! Brunhild laughed ruefully.

  “He’s stolen away to breed more trouble in the shadows. He and Gelka vanished when Ska fell. He has secret ways of coming and going and none may stay him. Forget him for the time being; heed ye well — we shall have plenty of him anon!”

  Now the chiefs brought a finely carved and highly ornamented palanquin carried by two strong slaves and Brunhild stepped into this, saying to her companions: “They are fearful of touching you, but ask if you would be carried. I think it better that you walk, one on each side of me.”

  “Thor’s blood!” rumbled Athelstane, shouldering the huge sword he had never sheathed. “I’m no infant! I’ll split the skull of the man who seeks to carry me!”

  And so up the long white street went Brunhild, daughter of Rane Thorfin’s son in the Orkneys, goddess of the sea, queen of age-old Bal-Sagoth. Borne by two great slaves she went, with a white giant striding on each side with bared steel, and a concourse of chiefs following, while the multitude gave way to right and left, leaving a wide lane down which she passed. Golden trumpets sounded a fanfare of triumph, drums thundered, chants of worship echoed to the ringing skies. Surely in this riot of glory, this barbaric pageant of splendor, the proud soul of the North-born girl drank deep and grew drunken with imperial pride.

  Athelstane’s eyes glowed with simple delight at this flame of pagan magnificence, but to the black haired fighting-man of the West, it seemed that even in the loudest clamor of triumph, the trumpet, the drum and shouting faded away into the forgotten dust and silence of eternity. Kingdoms and empires pass away like mist from the sea, thought Turlogh; the people shout and triumph and even in the revelry of Belshazzar’s feast, the Medes break the gates of Babylon. Even now the shadow of doom is over this city and the slow tides of oblivion lap the feet of this unheeding race. So in a strange mood Turlogh O’Brien strode beside the palanquin, and it seemed to him that he and Athelstane walked in a dead city, through throngs of dim ghosts, cheering a ghost queen.

  3. The Fall of the Gods

  Night had fallen on the ancient city of Bal-Sagoth. Turlogh, Athelstane and Brunhild sat alone in a room of the inner palace. The queen half-reclined on a silken couch, while the men sat on mahogany chairs, engaged in the viands that slave-girls had served on golden dishes. The walls of this room, as of all the palace, were of marble, with golden scrollwork. The ceiling was of lapis-lazuli and the floor of silver-inlaid marble tiles. Heavy velvet hangings decorated the walls and silken cushions; richly-made divans and mahogany chairs and tables littered the room in careless profusion.

  “I would give much for a horn of ale, but this wine is not sour to the palate,” said Athelstane, emptying a golden flagon with relish. “Brunhild, you have deceived us. You let us understand it would take hard fighting to win back your crown — yet I have struck but one blow and my sword is thirsty as Turlogh’s ax which has not drunk at all. We hammered on the gates and the people fell down and worshipped with no more ado. And until a while ago, we but stood by your throne in the great palace room, while you spoke to the throngs that came and knocked their heads on the floor before you — by Thor, never have I heard such clattering and jabbering! My ears ring till now — what were they saying? And where is that old conjurer Gothan?”

  “Your steel will drink deep yet, Saxon,” answered the girl grimly, resting her chin on her hands and eyeing the warriors with deep moody eyes. “Had you gambled with cities and crowns as I have done, you would know that seizing a throne may be easier than keeping it. Our sudden appearance with the bird-god’s head, your killing of Ska, swept the people off their feet. As for the rest — I held audience in the palace as you saw, even if you did not understand and the people who came in bowing droves were assuring me of their unswerving loyalty — ha! I graciously pardoned them all, but I am no fool. When they have time to think, they will begin to grumble again. Gothan is lurking in the shadows somewhere, plotting evil to us all, you may be sure. This city is honeycombed with secret corridors and subterranean passages of which only the priests know. Even I, who have traversed some of them when I was Gothan’s puppet, know not where to look for the secret doors, since Gothan always led me through them blindfolded.

  “Just now, I think I hold the upper hand. The people look on you with more awe than they regard me. They think your armor and helmets are part of your bodies and that you are invulnerable. Did you not note them timidly touching your mail as we passed through the crowd, and the amazement on their faces as they felt the iron of it?”

  “For a people so wise in some ways they are very foolish in others,” said Turlogh. “Who are they and whence came they?”

  “They are so old,” answered Brunhild, “that their most ancient legends give no hint of their origin. Ages ago they were a part of a great empire which spread out over the many isles of this sea. But some of the islands sank and vanished with their cities and people. Then the red-skinned savages assailed them and isle after isle fell before them. At last only this island was left unconquered, and the people have become weaker and forgotten many ancient arts. For lack of ports to sail to, the galleys rotted by the wharves which themselves crumbled into decay. Not in the memory of man has any son of Bal-Sagoth sailed the seas. At irregular intervals the red people descend upon the Isle of the Gods, traversing the seas in their long war-canoes which bear grinning skulls on the prows. Not far away as a Viking would reckon a sea-voyage, but out of sight over the sea rim lie the islands inhabited by those red men who centuries ago slaughtered the folk who dwelt there. We have always beaten them off; they can not scale the walls, but still they come and the fear of their raid is always hovering over the isle.

  “But it is not them I fear; it is Gothan, who is at this moment either slipping like a loathly serpent through his black tunnels or else brewing abominations in one of his hidden chambers. In the caves deep in the hills to which his tunnels lead, he works fearful and unholy magic. His subjects are beasts — serpents, spiders, and great apes; and men — red captives and wretches of his own race. Deep in his grisly caverns he makes beasts of men and half-men of beasts, mingling bestial with human in ghastly creation. No man dares guess at the horrors that have spawned in
the darkness, or what shapes of terror and blasphemy have come into being during the ages Gothan has wrought his abominations; for he is not as other men, and has discovered the secret of life everlasting. He has at least brought into foul life one creature that even he fears, the gibbering, mowing, nameless Thing he keeps chained in the farthest cavern that no human foot save his has trod. He would loose it against me if he dared. . . .

  “But it grows late and I would sleep. I will sleep in the room next to this, which has no other opening than this door. Not even a slave-girl will I keep with me, for I trust none of these people fully. You shall keep this room, and though the outer door is bolted, one had better watch while the other sleeps. Zomar and his guardsmen patrol the corridors outside, but I shall feel safer with two men of my own blood between me and the rest of the city.”

  She rose, and with a strangely lingering glance at Turlogh, entered her chamber and closed the door behind her.

  Athelstane stretched and yawned. “Well, Turlogh,” said he lazily, “men’s fortunes are unstable as the sea. Last night I was the picked swordsman of a band of reavers and you a captive. This dawn we were lost outcasts springing at each other’s throats. Now we are sword brothers and right-hand men to a queen. And you, I think, are destined to become a king.”

  “How so?”

  “Why, have you not noticed the Orkney girl’s eyes on you? Faith there’s more than friendship in her glances that rest on those black locks and that brown face of yours. I tell you —”

  “Enough,” Turlogh’s voice was harsh as an old wound stung him. “Women in power are white-fanged wolves. It was the spite of a woman that —” He stopped.

  “Well, well,” returned Athelstane tolerantly, “there are more good women than bad ones. I know — it was the intrigues of a woman that made you an outcast. Well, we should be good comrades. I am an outlaw, too. If I should show my face in Wessex I would soon be looking down on the countryside from a stout oak limb.”