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“Ah, but we will be aided, just a little, for just long enough, in an illusion, great Queen.”
“It will have to be a strong one,” said she, smiling—and I, now, had retreated to the back of her mind. For the course of events I had seen projected by Klorathy was altered: I had seen nothing of this: what was happening because of our intervention.
Nasar, revived a little by the swallow of water, but still staggering as he went, descended the stairways of this lovely building, so soon to be ruins. and arrived in the open square below the palace as the people he had brought across the deserts of the west came in. They, too, could hardly stand. They were an army of ghosts and phantoms. And yet they were to live, a good many of them.
The Queen divested herself of her dagger, her ornaments, and, wrapping herself in a dark cloak, walked along the northern wall of her kingdom as the first horseman came chasing up the ravine.
Flights of arrows were already on their way to her when the leader shouted an order. These men who could shoot at full gallop as accurately as from the ground rested their bows on their horses’ necks. There was not room in the narrow ravine, dark between its rock edges, for more than a few hundred of them. They were gazing up to the sunlit walls of this famed city, where there stood a single figure, a woman, confronting them steadily and without moving at all.
As they looked, it seemed as if rays of light dazzled around her. Their ideas of deity did not include an illuminated female figure, and they were only temporarily stayed. They were riding steadily nearer, and higher, and soon, as the gates of the city swung back on a signal from the Queen, they saw the city itself, in its gardens and orchards and fantastic variety, a scene of plenty and deliciousness that had never failed to inflame these men—whose measures of worth were all related to the hardships and endurance of their symbiotic relationship with their herds—into a rage to destroy and afflict. Yet as they looked, every tree and flower seemed to dazzle with light that was like a million minute rainbows. The woman on the high wall, the gardens, the buildings, all shone and dazzled, and from the watching horsemen there rose a deep and anguished groan. Their leader shouted to them that they were faced with demons; and the massed horsemen in their close leather tunics and trousers and caps, emanating a smell of sweaty skins—their own and their beasts—sent up, too, the smell of fear as they jostled back down the pass again, in the shades of the evening.
Sending back fearful glances they saw high above them the red sandstone walls, and the woman there, motionless, surrounded by a dazzle of light.
They made a camp at the foot of the escarpment, and their cooking fires seemed to burn with otherworldly lights. But then their fear became anger, and, after that, derision. These were not cowards, these men. They could not remember ever staying their hands before. Besides, not all had seen the enchanted city in its halo of iridescence. Even those who had now doubted what they had seen. Their General Ghonkez maintained steadily—as his troops, who were not accustomed to subservience and blind obedience, but only to following orders whose sense they could understand, and who increasingly shouted criticisms at him—that they had done well to wait there through the night until the morning came and they could again ride up the pass and face the city in the plain light of day.
When these horsemen again jostled up the pass to the city, it in a mood of savage anger against their general. The gates of the city were still open. They rode inside the walls like avenging devils and found only what they had seen in a hundred other places—an intricate and rich comfortable web of streets and markets and gardens, which they felt they had to obliterate. No radiant mists of light surrounded what saw and they burned and destroyed as they rode. But there were very few living creatures. A dog sitting at the door of his empty house. Cats su
And when reached the reached the palace, they found Queen Sha’zvin standing alone in her rooms and they killed her. They then turned on their General Ghonkez and slew him, so that we two lay side by side, in our deaths, as the palace burned down around us.
Meanwhile, Nasar had led away long columns of people out of the eastern gates of the city. Not all had had time to leave and these were killed. And then, suddenly, and out of season, a blizzard descended, and the horsemen were stopped. They knew blizzards and cold from the terrible winters of their northern plains. But they understood nothing of the treacherous snowdrifts and the ice masses and the murderous winds of the mountains. They rode away down into the plains to wait until better weather, so that they could chase the refugees into their high fastnesses and kill them all. For they had sworn to leave no one alive in all the lands they raided. But the winter came and blocked the way. Thousands of the fleeing ones died of cold and deprivation but most did reach the high sheltered valleys. When spring came and the snows of the passes melted and the way was open for horsemen, they did not come. There were rumours of an enchantment and of dangers from demons. Their killing of their general had put a curse on them—so it was said. And they had heard that none of the refugees had survived their ordeals in the snow.
But among those who did survive were enough with the skills and knowledge of their destroyed civilisation to instruct others. Those who came to be instructed were the descendants of these same horsemen.
And that was how I, Ambien II , and Klorathy, and Nasar, together with others who have not been mentioned, took our roles in this drama. And this was not the only one. In other sequences of events, at that time of the cruel horsemen, did we three play our parts, altering enough of the pattern to save a few here, preserve a city there, and keep safe men and women equipped with the knowledge of the sciences of matching the ebbs and flows of the currents of life with invisible needs and imperatives. These were scientists. Real scientists, armoured by their subtle knowledge against all the wiles and machinations of Shammat.
Klorathy and I sat together in the Sirian moon station. I had just rescued him from slow death in prison. Nasar had made me captive to save me from being executed, and had secretly released me. I had been one of the raiding horsemen. Klorathy was a deposed judge. Nasar was a female slave from the heart of Southern Continent I, who had risen to be the manager of a large household belonging to an indolent and tyra
A monitor showed that above us on the moon’s surface it was night, and very cold. Rohanda was hidden from us, being between us and the sun.
Klorathy clapped his hands, and on to the blank wall came a map of Rohanda—the continents and oceans laid flat. Klorathy went to stand beside it. With his finger he outlined that part of the main landmass that had been afflicted by the horsemen. Holding me with his eyes he outlined it again—slowly. I knew he wanted me to understand: that all those centuries of invasion and destruction were being contained within the shape his finger had traced. And he expected me to make, too, comparisons with Sirius, our vast Empire.
“Very well,” I said.
“The horsemen have terrorised this part of Rohanda for centuries, and the fear of them is imprinted in the i