Marauders of Gor (44 page)

           
He reached out and put his hand on the arrow. He took it from me.

           
"Send the war arrow," I said.

           
The Forkbeard looked down on the arrow.

           
"I think," I said, "I begin to understand the meaning of a man who lived more than a thousand winters ago. This man, call him Torvald, built within a mountain a chamber for sleep, in which he would not sleep, but to which men would come to waken him. Here they would find not Torvald, but themselves, themselves, Ivar, alone, and an arrow of war."

           
"I do not understand," said Ivar.

           
"I think," I said,'that Torvald was a great and a wise man.

           
Ivar looked at me.

           
'In building this chamber," I said, "it was not the intention of Torvald that it should be he who was awakened within it, but rather those who came to seek hirn."

           
"The chamber is empty," said Ivar.

           
"No," I said, "we are within it." I put my hand to his shoulder. "It is not Torvald who must awaken in this chamber. Rather it is we. Here, hoping for others to do our work, we find only ourselves, and an arrow of war. Is this not Torvald's way of telling us, from a thousand years ago, that it is we on whom we must depend, and not on any other. If the land is to be saved, it is by us, and others like us, that lt must be saved. There are no spells, no gods, no heroes to save us. In this chamber, it is not Torvald who must awaken It is you and I." I regarded the Forkbeard evenly. "Lift,' said I, "the arrow of war."

           
I stood back from the couch, my torch raised. Slowly, his visage terrible, the Forkbeard lifted his arm, the arrow in his fist.

           
I am not even of Torvaldsland, but it was I who was present when the arrow of war was lifted, at the side of the couch of Torvald, deep within the living stone of the Torvaldsberg.

           
Then the Forkbeard thrust the arrow in his belt. He crouched down, at the foot of the couch of Torvald. He sorted through the weapons there. He selected two spears, handing me one. "We have two Kurii to kill," he said.

           
Chapter 17
                  
Torvaldslanders visit the camp of Kurii

           
It was very quiet.

           
The men did not speak.

           
Below us, in the valley, spread out for more than ten pasangs we saw the encampment of Kurii.

           
At the feet of Ivar Forkbeard, head to the ground, nude, waiting to be commanded, knelt Hilda the Haughty, daughter of Thorgard of Scagnar.

           
"Go," said Ivar to her.

           
She lifted her head to him. "May I not have one last kiss, my Jarl?" she whispered.

           
"Go," said he. "If you live, you will be more than kissed."

           
"Yes, my Jarl," she said, and, obediently, slipped away into the darkness.

           
The ax I carried was bloodied. It had tasted the blood of a Kur guard.

           
We stood downwind of the encampment.

           
Not far from me was Svein Blue Tooth. He stood, not moving. It was cold. I could see the outline of his helmet, the rim of the shield, the spear, dark against darkness.

           
Near us, behind us, stood Gorm, Ottar and Rollo, and others of Forkbeard's Landfall. It was some Ehn before the Gorean dawn. On a distant world, lit by the same star, at a comparable time, men turned in their beds, mercury vapor lamps burned, lonely, heavy lorries rumbled down streets, keeping their delivery schedules, parts of yesterday's newspapers fluttered down lonely sidewalks. With us stood Bjarni of Thorstein Camp, and with him he who had in the formal duel carried his shield. At Bjarni's shoulder, too, stood the young man, scarcely more than a boy, whom he had in that duel intended to fight. With the boy, too, was his friend, who would have carried the shield for him. The war arrow had been carried. It had been carried to the Inlet of Green Cliffs, to Thorstein Camp, from Ax Glacier to Einar's Skerry; it had been carried to the high farms, to the lakes, to the coast; it had been carried on foot and by swift ship; a thousand arrows, each touched to the arrow of Torvald, had been carried, and where the arrow had been carried, men had touched it, saying "I will come." They came. Captains and rovers, farmers, fishermen, hunters, weavers of nets, smiths, carvers of wood, tradesmen and traders, men with little more than leather and an ax to their name, and jarls in purple cloaks, with golden pommels on their swords. And among them stood, too, thralls. Their heads were not lower than those with whom they stood. Among them was the lad called Tarsk, formerly Wulfstan of Kassau, to whom Thyri had once been given for the night. In the night of the attack he, at the Forkbeard's encampment near the thing field, with an ax, had slain a Kur. I remembered finding the carcass of the animal beneath the fallen, half-burned canvas of the Forkbeard's tent. Thralls are not permitted to touch the war arrow, but they are permitted to kneel to those who have. Wulfstan had handed the Forkbeard the ax, disarming himself, and had then knelt before him, putting his head to his feet. Thralls may be slain for so much as touching a weapon. He had taken dirt from beneath the feet of the Forkbeard and, kneeling, had poured it on his head. "Rise, Thrall," had said the Forkbeard. The young man had then stood, and straightly, head high, before the Forkbeard. The Forkbeard threw him back the ax. "Carry it," said the Forkbeard. On another world, lit by the same star, in another place, dawn, too, drew near. The distant light in the great cities, unknowing, soon to be occupied with the concerns of their days, piercing the haze of daily, customary poisons, first struck the heights of the lofty buildings, reflecting from the rectangular windows, like sheets of burnished copper reflecting the fire of the sun. Men would soon be up and about their duties, hurrying from one nothing to another, to compromises, to banal degradations, anxious lest they fail to be on time. They would not care for the blackened grass growing between the bricks; they would take no note of the spider's architecture, nor marvel at the flight of a wren darting to its nest among the smoke-blackened, carved stones. There would be no time. There would be no time for them, no time for seeing, or feeling, or touching, or loving or finding out what it might be to be alive. Clouds would be strangers to them; rain an inconvenience; snow a nuisance; a tree an anachronism; a flower an oddity, cut and frozen in a florist's refrigerator. These were the men without meaning, so full and so empty, so crowded, so desolate, so busy, so needlessly occupied. These were the gray men, the hurrying men, the efficient, smug, tragic insects, noiseless on soft feet, in the billion iron hills of technology. How few of them gazed ever on the stars. Is grandeur so fearful that men must shield themselves with pettiness from its glory; do they not understand that in themselves, and in perhaps a thousand other intelligences, reality has opene,el its eyes upon its own immensity; do they shut their eyes lest they see gods? We could see now a glimmer of light on the peak of the Torvaldsberg.

           
I wondered how many men would die. I wondered if I myself, this morning, in Torvaldsland, in bleak light, would die. I gripped the ax. It had good weight. The balance was apt.

           
Across the valley, there were others, men, waiting, too. The signal would be a shield signal, taking the morning sun, a flash, and then the attack. Hundreds of war cries would be mingled as men poured down the slopes. There were men here, too, even from Hunjer, Sjkern, Helmutsport and Scagnar itself, on whose cliffs Thorgard's fortress ruled.

           
Never before, to my knowledge, had men attacked Kurii.
 

           
I gazed at the giant, Rollo. His eyes seemed vacant. He stood as a child, with his great ax. About his neck was a golden medallion. His chest was bare, beneath a leather vest.

           
Svein Blue Tooth fingered the tooth of the Hunjer whale, dyed blue, on its chain about his neck. He was a good
 
jarl. He had been the third, after Ivar Forkbeard and Tarl Cabot a warrior of Ko-ro-ba, to lift the arrow of Torvald. Not far away from him was even Ketil, of his high farm, the wrestler
 
whose arm I had broken. It was splinted with a third of a spear shaft. In his left hand he carried a sword. Among the men, too, was a large fellow, as large as, or larger than, Rollo, whom I did not know. He was fiercely bearded, and carried a spear. He had told us he was Hrolf, and from the East. None had questioned him.

           
Below us, in the valley, we could see the coals of thousands of fires in the camp of the Kurii. They slept, curled, several in each shelter. The field shelters of the Kurii are made of skins and furs, arched over bent saplings. Each is little more than four or five feet high, with a comparable width, but is fifty or sixty feet in length, some being as long as a hundred feet in length. These shelters, too, are often curved and irregular in outline; sometimes they adjoin one another, with entrances giving mutual access. They resemble caves, sometimes networks of caves, constructed in the open. Kurii drop to all fours to enter and leave them. No Kur enjoys sleeping exposed. If in a field they will sometimes even burrow into the ground, almost like a sleen, and cover the opening with grass and sticks from the bottom. It always sleeps with its head toward the opening.

           
The Kurii herds were quiet. There was little stirring in them. I could see the white herd of verr, hundreds of the animals, penned in the northwest quadrant of the camp; in the northeast quadrant were the tarsk pens. I could smell them in the early morning air. I could smell, too, the odors of Kurii, and the tramped dung of bosk. The bosk were at the south of the camp. They would, effectively, prevent the Kurii from slipping free on the south. The herd numbered some several thousand. The northern pole of the camp would be left free, as a seeming avenue of escape, to lure embattled Kurii, should the tide of the war turn against them, into flight northward. It would be, in the language of Gorean strategists, the bridge of jewels, beckoning, alluring, promising safety, prophetic of escape.

           
Near the center of the camp, but somewhat to the south and east of the center, like the verr, the tarsk, the bosk, was another herd of Kurii animals; it, too, resided in its pen, a wide pen, more than a quarter of a pasang in diameter, formed of poles and crossbars, lashed together; this pen, however, waspatrolled by prowling, domesticated sleen; the animals huddled together, within the pen, hundreds of them, terrified of the sleen; these were herd sleen, trained to group and control animals.

           
To the north and west of the camp's center I could see the tents of Thorgard of Scagnar and his men.

           
I smiled.

           
The Kurii had been in no hurry to initiate their march to the south. They had failed, several days ago, in the Thing Assembly, to intimidate the men of Torvaldsland into furnishing them provisions for
 
their
 
march. After their devastating victory of the night of
 
Svein Blue Tooth's feast, in which his hall was burned, and the thing encampments laid waste, they had formed their own camp, and set methodically about gathering supplies for their southern march. Hundreds of sorties had penetrated the hills and valleys, burning farms, and gathering goods, generally tools and weapons, and livestock. There were collection points to which such materials were brought, from which, by short marches, they were conveyed to the camp. During this time, a hundred pasangs to the south, Svein Blue Tooth had set the rallying point of the men of Torvaldsland.

           
In these days I had much spied on Kurii, living on the land, returning more than once to the Blue Tooth's war camp. It is nothing for a warrior to cover ninety pasangs on foot in a day. This is usually done by alternating the warrior's pace with the warrior's stride, and allowing for periods of rest. Few who have been invested in the scarlet of the warriors cannot match this accomplishment. I, and many others, can considerably improve upon it.

           
A typical Kurii foraging squad consists of six animals, called a "hand," with its "eye," or leader. Two such "hands" with their "eyes," constitutes a "Kur," or "Beast." The military Kur, in this sense a unit, is commanded by a "Blood"
 
This seems peculiar perhaps but is explained by ancient Kurii belief, that thought is a function of the blood. One "thinks" thus with one's entire body, not just the brain. Contemporary Kurii understand, naturally, that cognitive processes brain-centered, or largely brain-centered, but the anc terminology, in their songs, poetry, and even military 1 con, remains. Analogously, humans continue to speak of affairs of the heart, a man of good heart, that someone h; big heart, etc., which terminology perhaps lingers from ti when the heart was regarded not as a chemomechanical pump but as the throne and home of the emotions.