Chapter XXVI: The Gate Again

There was no fighting near by, though sounds of battle still came from the buildings on my right, where some of the enemy were resisting. On the far side of the open space our men were being reorganized, and all down the long street small bodies of troops were collecting the inhabitants so as to clear that quarter of the town. The first lust for killing had passed, and, as I entered the main street, I passed sullen groups of prisoners, powerfully built, cruel-looking men, darker-skinned than their captors. Again I remarked that faint trace of Mongoloid blood that I had noticed in Atana’s face.

Some looting had started, as was inevitable, but it was quickly put down with a firm hand, and all valuables and stores were collected under guard, to be distributed in due shares later. Kyrlos stood for order and good government, and he intended to administer Shamanland under strict military rule after the war. As he told his people, they could not afford to kill off all the Shamans, since their knowledge of metal-working and their mining skill--they really controlled all the Brown Sakae mines--could ill be spared.

Headquarters were in a big house about a hundred yards down the street, with a flat roof, whence one could overlook most of the town. And there I found Kyrlos with some of his chiefs portioning out the town for them to clear up and hold for such time as we stayed in the city. Andros was below talking to Henga, who had just arrived from mopping up the gate defences. From the grim look on his face, I could see that the latter was counting the moments till he could find Atros, who so far had not been seen, nor was there any news of his body being among the dead. Henga greeted me with a smile as I limped in.

“A good fight, Harilek! I love your Wrexham more and more. And the doctor, too, is a man after my own heart. Seldom have I seen such stout sword-play as he made in the Shaman ranks, though he uses the edge more than we do. Yes; a good fight!”

He looked as if he had passed a pleasing morning. His cap was bitten across by a long sword-gash that had dinted the steel, his mail was hacked in half a dozen places, the over-collar of his under-leather jerkin had been ripped across by some sharp weapon, but his grey-blue eyes were steady as ever.

“A good fight, but comes a better,” he continued. “When Wrexham has blown in the citadel door as he broke down the fort gate, then I lead the storming party--’tis Kyrlos’s own promise--and then”--his mouth set hard again--“I shall speak with Atros.”

Some one brought us a jug of wine, and we washed out our dusty throats, Henga solemnly spilling a few drops on the floor to thank his gods for a good fight. We sat over our drink for a few minutes, and then Andros got to his feet.

“I see the doctor with Wrexham’s sappers and their stores, Harilek. How long will they take, think you?”

“About three hours, Wrexham says. But he will want two or three changes of men, for the heat inside is stifling. If it suits you, I will take up my men with Philos. They are collected in that courtyard at the corner.”

“If you will, Harilek. I was going to send some of my men, but, since you understand this new kind of war, it will perhaps be better if you go. If the rest of us are ready in two hours, will that do?”

“Quite. We shall be longer, I think.”

Andros tightened up his belt and went off to give out more orders, while Henga and I joined Philos and his cousin, who with their men were seizing the opportunity for a rest and a bite of food. We had been afoot since long before dawn. I told Philos to bring them up to the gate and come ahead himself for orders, and then I led Henga along the dark passage up to the shaft, where, in a stokehold atmosphere getting hotter every moment, John with his first shift of workers was blocking up the passage. Above us in the darkness the iron door now glowed a dull sullen red.

The powder was piled under blankets, which a chain of men handing skins of water up the passage kept continuously damp. We had no safety-lamps, nothing but the flaring, crackling torches, and one little spark on the powder in that confined space would send the lot of us into eternity. Minute after minute the wall of sandbags grew, and the sweating men stumbled along the dark passage with their loads, faces and chests grimed with the torches’ smoke and dripping with sweat. We had been there an hour and a half and more, when John ordered his sappers to get the fuses ready.

“Better get along now,” he said to us. “Henga has to get his party in position, for another half-hour will see us ready. As for you, Harry and Alec, you’re doing no good here now. There’s no point in all of us going west if anything goes wrong. Besides, you’ve other people to think of. Be standing by half an hour from now.”

With that he sent Henga, Alec, and me away. It was true that we three were of no particular use in the shaft, now that the less technical part of the work was completed, and my men were getting ready to leave. Nevertheless, as I followed them and Philos, filing down the passage, these reflections did not render any the more pleasant my last glimpse of John’s sturdy figure among his grimy engineers, busy with their powder-bags and fuses in the glow of the spluttering torches, when one little spark-- However, it was no good anticipating trouble; that comes of itself without any seeking.

When we emerged into the daylight once more, we found Andros superintending the troops getting into position, and Henga went off to join his company. Alec again insisted on accompanying them, and left me when he saw them falling in. Our preparations drew the attention of the watching enemy above, and some heavy stones and a few arrows came down, doing but little harm, however.

Presently came word that no more water was required, and the last shifts of the working parties filed out into the sunlight, grimed and blinking. Another ten minutes brought the bulk of Wrexham’s sappers. Then at last four more figures who clustered about the gateway, last of them John himself. Three minutes later there was a dull roar in the heart of the rock, and--visible to the watchers farther back, though not to us close under the cliff--a leap of red flame upon the cliff-top.

A long pause to let the gases escape up the shaft, and then John, with a few men with ropes and lights, went in, for the confined space in the shaft might now be filled with mine fumes, though we hoped that the strong northerly wind blowing into the passage from our end, combined with the draught created by the great fires burning above the trapdoor, would clear out any gas formed by the explosion. And, luckily, so it proved, for almost immediately word came back that it was safe, and the storming party was to advance at once before the enemy could close the way again.

Henga’s men poured into the passage for what Forsyth called “the last fence,” and--all my cautious resolutions thrown to the winds--I followed them with Andros at the head of the supporting column. Ahead of us shouts and cries, clang of blows, dull thud of falling bodies, and crash of stones in the shaft, and then, coming to where Wrexham’s sappers stood by the reopened barricade, we were aware of daylight above us. Stumbling over the fallen débris and the twisted forms among it, we clambered up the steep stairs, shivered and wrecked by the explosion, and climbing through the opening previously blocked by the great iron door--now shattered fragments of still-glowing metal scattered around--came out on the steep cliff-side.

In front of us--close-packed--raged a swaying, surging _mêlée_ where Henga’s men sought to drive the Shamans up the steep road to where on the hilltop in an open space showed the low stone buildings of the chief Shaman’s palace and the living-quarters of the citadel.

Ten yards ahead of me in the _mêlée_ that swayed now backward, now forward, in little eddies of struggling men, was John fighting with the short-handled pickaxe he had used to clear the barricade in the passage. His face was grimed like that of a miner from his own Durham pits, but his eyes were alight with lust of battle. I saw the pickhead crash into the forehead of a Shaman knifeman ere a new eddy in the battle hid him again. On either side were Forsyth’s tall figure and Henga’s great shoulders.

The extra weight of Andros’s column, now pouring out of the shaft mouth, settled the scales in our favour, and, step by step, fighting tooth and nail, the enemy were driven backward up the hill, check and sway and surge forward again over the limp forms underfoot. Behind us the town--lit by the westering sun--lay spread out like a map, and on the edge of the drop behind us--clear-cut against the sky--Andros with his standard-bearer signalling down that we had made good the entrance. Then he joined us again as the fight drove relentlessly forward up the steep slope, and with one final rush we surged into the chief Shaman’s palace in a pack of steel. Somehow my game leg got me there, though well behind the leaders: Andros with his dancing plumes; Stephnos with his keen young face and yellow locks looking like some angel of destruction; John, Henga, and Alec, with dripping blade and blood-smeared pick, smashing their way through the now wavering foe.

The last resistance died away as we swept into the low-pillared halls and out again to the back of the palace, where in front of us--hidden by yet one more wall of rock--lay the cleft of the gate and the vultures. But no trace found we of that fiend from the nether pit--the chief Shaman--as we hunted out the fleeing foe from hole and corner, from dark-shadowed room and ghostly hall, with red torch and redder steel. Spear-point and sword and reeking pickhead checked and sank as there was no more living flesh to stay their relentless way, and our grim-faced swordsmen halted to tie up wounds and get breath.

But while we stayed uncertain on the farther exit of the palace, Henga gave a loud cry and leaped forward as a man slipped from cover at a corner to bolt down a flight of stairs beyond into a gloomy passage. Just one word, “Atros,” but that was enough for me, and game leg and all I followed the flying figures, Philos, Stephnos, Payindah, and a dozen men at my heels. We raced down the stairs past screaming women, past darkened rock-cut rooms, and came out at the end upon a little platform giving upon the gorge over the gate of death.

And there we stayed, for on the very verge of the open space above the sheer void, guarded only by a ledge a few inches high, two mail-clad figures, locked together, struggled and fought above the cavernous depths below. They reeled and fell, but as we closed Henga shrieked to us to stand back. The locked figures rose again, neither willing to loose grip, and then crashed to the ground once more; but this time Henga was on top, and his fingers writhed about the Shaman’s throat.

Then, just as he had dealt with Atana, so dealt he with Atros, speaking to him slowly the while, as the man’s face worked and the sweat stood out upon his brow. And there on the sheer cliff, hundreds of feet above the vultures below, Henga exacted the last farthing of his debt. Then rising to his feet, he swung up the limp body and hurled it out into the dim gulf, leaning over to watch it spinning down, arms and legs whirling through the air. Then he turned to us grimly.

“I think such carrion would poison even the vultures. Note you he was not in the fight, but lurking in the palace while better men than he went forth to death. Atana had, at least, courage.”

I leaned out over the giddy drop, and saw opening before me the great cleft up which we had first come to Sakaeland. At the foot--veiled already by the gathering shadows--was the open place of death, the circling vultures wheeling upward, disturbed by the fall of Atros’s body. Kyrlos’s words came back to me, “Ere the spring buds show, I will feed your master and his friends to the vultures in the gate.” The little twisted trees above us were still void of leaf, bare of the least little bud.

Then we made our way back into the palace now thronged with our men, seeking high and low for the Shaman chief. We passed through a honeycomb of narrow passages, and a warren of chambers hewn into the rock. The dark winding stairs and gloomy tunnels had carried us down perhaps three hundred feet, when we came to another maze of rooms--a crowd of tawdry-clothed women huddled in the corners--the archers’ quarters above the gate. Through these we passed into a small pillared hall lighted with torches set in iron wall-brackets, with a single arrow-slit overlooking the gate of death.

There in his black robes, upon a carven chair supported by writhing figures in stone, sat the chief Shaman looking at us with dead eyes--his hands resting upon the carven arms of his chair--and sprawling at his feet, face down on the bloodstained floor with a knife hilt protruding from his back, the black-robed figure of his head councillor--slain, we guessed, by his master lest his knowledge might aid us.

We could get no details from our prisoners: doubtless none saw that last scene. But from the crystal phial still clutched in the dead hand one could reconstruct some of it. The sudden blow that struck down the other unsuspecting figure, the deliberate assuming of the seat in the chair of judgment, the smoothing out of the folds of the rich sombre robe, the last thought of hate as the poison was swallowed that left us with only the mask of what had been.

The cruel, narrow eyes looked out at us from the hairless, parchment-like face that was strangely devoid of wrinkles, smooth as wax under the close-fitting, black, fur-trimmed cap; the thin-lipped mouth still bore traces of the last sardonic smile at cheating us to the end. Kyrlos could feed only a dead man to the vultures, naught but the empty shell of the lamp remained. Seated there the dead figure was imposing, but when we moved it, I realized what Aryenis had meant with her taunt about a “misshapen vulture”: the scraggy neck in the fur collar, the distorted rounded back, the talon-like hands, had all something of kinship with the loathsome birds without.

And, thinking of Aryenis, I looked around the chamber with its carvings, foul but vivid representations of torture and mutilation, and I shivered involuntarily. How many shrinking prisoners, men and women alike, had prayed there in vain, not for life, but just for clean, speedy death! In a corner was a sheaf of arrows, black-shafted and white-lettered, such as we had found in the gate. The use of these we learnt from one of the guard archers whose life had been spared. When the chief Shaman considered a prisoner to be of no further use, he was made to pick an arrow from the cloth-swathed sheaf. One does not like to think of the scenes that room must have witnessed. Then, according to the lettering upon it, once outside the gate the tortured wretch might feel the prayed-for point in his heart, or know the lingering death of many hours as he lay crippled among the vultures and the obscene horrors of the place of death.

So, leaving a guard upon the chamber, we returned to the topmost palace where, in the last rays of the sun just sinking behind the hills, Kyrlos announced to the leading Shaman prisoners his intention of ruling their country, and, with the unanimous assent of his chiefs, appointed Henga as military governor, and Wrexham to take charge of all the mines and metal industries of the Shaman and Brown Sakae countries.

That night we slept in the palace, and all next day explored the Shaman citadel, cleansing its foul prisons, and giving decent burial to the pitiful remains. Many of our men clamoured for the Shamans to be flung to the vultures in the gate, but I am glad to say that Kyrlos insisted on more humane measures, slaying only such as were definitely proven guilty of murder and raid, and allowing the dead to be carried away by their own folk. But none came to claim the chief Shaman’s body.

Whence he came none could tell us for certain. The office was hereditary, but the advent of this man was a mystery, since his reputed father was old beyond even the long-lived Shaman elders, and his mother none knew. The chief Shaman and his successor-designate never left the citadel, and until attaining years of manhood the Shaman’s heir was not brought to the council save only if his father died before he became of age. Those who knew the history of the dead fiend in the great chair were dead. Perhaps the secret--if secret there were--lay locked in the brain of that still figure sprawling on the floor before its master. Of papers and records we found none. Any that existed--and we knew the Shaman councillors had ancient records of their history and religion--must have been hidden or destroyed.

But, since that brain is dead, the chief Shaman’s twisted soul, returned to the judgment-seat of Him who made it, we shall never know. All that matters is that Sakaeland is now at peace under the strong firm governance which--so long as men are men, not angels--can alone ensure that each man reap what he has sown. The Shaman hold, cleansed of its foul traces, is manned by clean-visaged Sakae bowmen, and straight-mouthed, honest-eyed Henga dispenses simple, unbiassed, soldierly justice in the open sunlight before the gate of the dark passage where John Wrexham and his sappers laboured under the glowing trapdoor.