light and streaked, ochreous foam came frothing from between teeth like Deelguy knives. Over one shoulder – and this drove him almost mad with fear, for it proved that this was no earthly creature – it carried a great, pointed stake, dripping with blood. Blood, too, covered the claws curving from the one paw raised above its head as though in some horrible greeting of death. Its eyes – the eyes of a mad creature, inhabiting a world of cruelty and pain – looked down upon Gel-Ethlin with a kind of dark intelligence all too sufficient for its single purpose. Meeting that gaze, he let his sword drop from his hand; and as he did so the beast struck him with a blow that crushed his skull and drove his head down through his shoulders.
A moment later Shaltnekan fell across his body, his chest broken in like a smashed drum. Kreet-Liss, stumbling on the wet slope, made one thrust with his sword before his neck was ripped open in a fountain of blood. And this sword-thrust, wounding it, drove the creature to such a frenzy of murderous destruction that every man ran shrieking as it ploughed its way up the crowded slope, seeking whom to tear and destroy. The men on the wings, halted and crying out to learn what had happened, felt their bowels loosen at the news that the bear-god, more dreadful than any imagined creature from the nether wastes of fever and nightmare, had indeed appeared, and had recognized and killed of intent the General and two commanders.
From the wavering Ortelgan line there rose a triumphant shout. Kelderek, limping and staggering with exhaustion, was the first man to emerge from the trees, shouting 'Shardik! Shardik the Power of God!' Then, with yells of 'Shardik! Shardik!', which were the last sound in the ears of Ta-Kominion, the Ortelgans poured up the slope, hacking and thrusting anew through the broken Beklan centre. A few minutes afterwards Kelderek, Baltis and a score of others reached the mouth of the gorge beyond the ridge and, heedless of their isolation, faced about to hold it against any who might try to force an escape. Of Shardik, vanished into the falling darkness, there remained neither sight nor sound.
Within half an hour, when night put an end to the bloodshed, all Beklan resistance had been quenched. The Ortelgans, following the terrible example which had redeemed them from defeat, showed no mercy, killing their enemies and stripping their bodies of weapons, shields and armour, until they were as well-found a force as had ever swept down upon the Beklan plain. A few of Gel-Ethlin's men succeeded in escaping towards Gelt. None found his way past Kelderek, to regain the plain by the road up which they had marched that afternoon.
With the clouded, rainy moon rose the white smoke of fires coaxed into life by the victors to cook the plundered rations of the enemy. But before midnight the army, urged forward by Zelda and Kelderek so fervently that they stayed not even to bury the dead, were limping on towards Bekla, outstripping all news of their victory and of the total destruction of Gel-Ethlin's force.
Two days later, reduced to two-thirds of their strength by fatigue and the privations of their forced march, the Ortelgans, advancing by the paved road across the plain, appeared before the walls of Bekla; smashed in the carved and gilded Tamarrik gate – that unique masterpiece created by the craftsman Fleitil a century before – after storming it for four hours with an improvised ram at a cost of over five hundred men; overcame the garrison and the citizens, despite the courageous leadership of the sick Santil-ke-Erketlis; sacked and occupied the city and began at once to strengthen the fortifications against the risk of counter-attack as soon as the rains should end.
Thus, in what must surely have been one of the most extraordinary and unpredictable campaigns ever fought, fell Bekla, the capital of an empire of subject provinces 20,000 square miles in extent. Of those provinces, the furthest from the city seceded and became enemies to its new rulers. The nearer, rather than face the rapine and bloodshed of resistance, put themselves under the protection of the Ortelgans, of their generals Zelda and Ged-la-Dan and their mysterious priest-king Kelderek, styled Crendrik – the Eye of God.
Book III Bekla
24 Elleroth
Bekla, city of myth and conjecture, hidden in time as Tiahuanaco in the Andes fastness, as Petra in the hills of Edom, as Atlantis beneath the waves! Bekla of enigma and secrets, more deeply enfolded in its religious mystery than Eleusis of the reaped corn, than the stone giants of the Pacific or the Kerait lands of Prester John. Its grey, broken walls – across whose parapets only the clouds come marching, in whose hollows the wind sounds and ceases like the trumpeter of Cracow or Memnon's statue on the sands – the stars reflected in its waters, the flowers scenting its gardens, are become like words heard in a dream that cannot be recalled. Its very history lies buried, unresolved – coins, beads and gaming-boards, street below street, shards below shards, hearth beneath hearth, ash under ash. The earth has been dug away from Troy and Mycenae, the jungle cut from about Zimbabwe; and caged in maps and clocks are the terrible leagues about Urumchi and Ulan Bator. But who shall disperse the moon-dim darkness that covers Bekla, or draw it up to view from depths more lonely and remote than those where bassogigas and ethusa swim in black silence? Only sometimes through tales may it be guessed at, those tokens riddling as the carved woods from the Americas floating centuries ago to the shores of Portugal and Spain: or in dreams, perhaps, it may be glimpsed – from the decks of that unchanging navy of gods and images that sails by night, carrying its passengers still in no bottoms else than those which bore, in their little time, Pilate's wife, Joseph of Canaan and the wise Penelope of Ithaca with her twenty geese. Bekla the incomparable, the lily of the plain, the garden of sculpted and dancing stone, appears from its mist and dusk, faint as the tracks of Shardik himself in forests long consumed.
Six miles round were the walls, rising on the south to encircle the summit of Mount Crandor, with its citadel crowning the sheer face of the stone quarries below. A breakneck flight of steps led up. that face, disappearing, at a height of eighty feet, into the mouth of a tunnel which ran upwards through the rock to emerge into the twilight of the huge granary cellar. The only other entry to the citadel was the so-called Red Gate in the south wall, a low arch through which a chalybeate brook flowed from its source within to the chain of falls – named the White Girls – that carried it down Crandor's gradual southern slope. Under the Red Gate, men long ago had worked to widen and deepen the bed of the brook, but had left standing, two feet beneath the surface of the water, a narrow, twisting causeway of the living rock. Those who had learned this padi's subaqueous windings could wade safely through the deep pool and then – if permitted – enter the citadel by the stairway known as the Vent
It was not Mount Crandor, however, which drew the gaze of the newcomer to Bekla, but the ridge of the Leopard Hill below, with its terraces of vines, flowers and citrous tendriona. On the crest, above these surrounding gardens, stood the Palace of the Barons, the range of its towers reflecting light from their balconies of polished, rose-coloured marble. Twenty round towers there were in all, eight by the long sides of the palace and four by the short; each tapering, circular wall so smooth and regular that in sunlight not one stone's lower edge cast a shadow upon its fellow below, and the only blackness was that within the window-openings, rounded and slitted like key- holes, which lit the spiral stairways. High up, as high as tall trees, the circular balconies projected like the capitals of columns, their ambulatories wide enough for two men to walk side by side. The marble balustrades were identical in height and shape, yet each was decorated differently, carved on each side, in low relief, with leopards, lilies, birds or fish; so that a lord might say to his friend, 'I will drink with you tonight on the Bramba tower,' or a lover to his mistress, 'Let us meet this evening on the Trepsis tower and watch the sun set before we go to supper.' Above these marvellous crow's-nests the towers culminated in slender, painted spires – red, blue and green – latticed and containing gong-toned, copper bells. When these were rung – four bells to each note of the scale – the metallic, wavering sounds mingled with their own echoes from the precipices of Crandor and vibrated over the roofs below until the citizens, thus summoned to rejoice at festival, holiday or royal welcome, laughed to feel their ears confounded in sport as the eye is confounded by mirrors face to face.
The palace itself stood within its towers and separate by several yards from their bases. Yet – wonderful to see – at the height of the roof, that part of the wall that stood behind each tower sloped outwards, supported on massive corbels, to embrace it and project a little beyond, so that the towers themselves, with their pointed spires, looked like great lances set upright at regular intervals to pierce the walls and support the roof as a canopy is supported at the periphery. The voluted parapets were carved in relief with the round leaves and flame-shaped flower-buds of lilies and lotus; and to these the craftsmen had added, here and there as pleased them, the
