Ah, yes. And behind them crouched the utterer of that ululant alarm; Boris Zchakow, the fanatic, wind-maddened Russian, Ithaqua’s number one priest. Behind Zchakow’s sledge sped two others recently fled, returning again with their complement of lesser priests; and bringing up the very rear, at a distance of about a mile, as many wolf-warriors again as I had yet seen.
Twelve, no fifteen hundred of them. All armed and hurtling pell-mell in a strong, wedge-shaped formation, harpoons and spears tilted forward—and then, even as we threw ourselves to one side to sprawl on the frozen snow, the runners of the leading sledge hurled ice in our faces as it careened past. The six great warriors leaped from it to rush upon us. Now I could see that they carried metal shields—and huge metal tomahawks!
Crouching low, advancing with their weapons held high, they closed in a circle backed by a dozen wolves and their riders. From my prone position I could see the Russian priest’s face. His eyes were triumphantly ablaze as, behind the advancing warriors, he peered over the prow of the now stationary sledge.
“Zchakow, you dog!” I yelled, firing one quick shot in his direction. I saw splinters fly from the sledge’s woodwork near his face, then was forced to turn my weapon to more immediate work. Almost upon us, at point-blank range, was a fur-clad giant, then a second. My first shot clanged harmlessly off metal, the second took its target full in the throat above the giant’s shield. This was the white man, towering at least seventy-eight inches and broad-bodied, screaming bubblingly and clawing at his scarlet throat as he went down in a welter of blood. Far from deterring the remaining five warriors, my shots seemed to spur them on. They leaped forward—
Jimmy Franklin’s weapon had more penetrating power than the two pistols; crouching, he now slammed round after round into whichever target presented itself. Two of the huge Eskimos and an Indian fell, gaping holes showing in both shields and bodies. A pair of the wolf-warriors, too, reeling bloodily from their mounts. My own and Whitey’s weapon both were taking their toll in support of the rifle, but they were simply not enough. Spears flew; the warriors rushed in; tomahawks flashed—
Knocked down, I rolled, and hearing a shrill scream from Tracy bonded back to my feet. Whitey was down, struggling with the shaft of a spear where it pinned his thigh to the snow. A great arm had snatched my sister aloft to throw her across a broad, fur-draped shoulder. I fired a bullet straight into the heart of the hawkfaced redskin who held her struggling form, heard his scream as he toppled.
Tracy fell beside me, winded and sobbing. Whitey had passed out flat on the snow. Jimmy Franklin’s hoarse cry rang out, bringing me whirling about in a crouch to seek a new target. None was near. Some way off stood the single remaining giant Eskimo. I aimed at him carefully and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.
Now I saw that Jimmy deliberately held his fire, noticed that the special force of wolf-warriors had fallen back along with the sole surviving giant. And yet still the Russian priest roared with rage from the safety of the sledge. Without understanding a single word of the language he spoke I knew that he goaded them on, calling them cowards and heaping all kinds of insults upon them. But they were not listening to him, and though they were suddenly fearful I knew that it was neither fear of my pitifully small party nor of our marvelous weapons that stayed them.
They stared at something behind us, above us—stared openmouthed, wide-eyed—fearfully! They lowered their weapons and backed still farther away from us, a lone footsoldier springing into the saddle of a riderless wolf; and all the time they stared, yes, and they listened
In another second the mad Russian’s roaring stopped abruptly as he, too, looked beyond and above us, stared and listened. Now there was an amazing hush as the armies frozen in the midst of bloody battle. Slowly we turned our heads, Tracy, Jimmy and I. We looked in the direction of the plateau.
Part Two
I
Woman of the Winds
(Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)
Staring at the sky above the low, ominous outcropping of the plateau, I thought: One of two things, either these people have especially sensitive hearing, or they are accustomed to listening for things that I would not normally expect to hear.
But then I did hear it; a whirling of high winds, a great tumult in the heavens of Borea whose physical effects could not for the moment be felt on the plain where I stood. Then, slowly but surely, the whirling became a rushing, a roaring as of a swollen river.
Since the battle on the plain first began the skies had been piling up with cloud. Over the plateau the air was dark and writhing, pulsating as if alive; and now, in the center of this chaos, there formed a circle of madly spinning black cloud like a slice cut through the upper stem of a tornado.
Weirdly that disc of frenzied vapour tilted toward us and with quickening pace, independent of all other atmospheric formations, sped across the lowering skies. Such was its independence that all other clouds, large and small, fled to clear a gray path for it that led straight across the heavens! Strangely, seeing that clearing of the sky-path, the stricken wolf-warriors were mortally afraid, while I personally felt great awe but no fear. Neither did the men of the snow-ships nor my own small team, although judging by the gasps of amazement from the latter they were as much in awe of this fantastic sight as I was.
Tilting my head up higher, I followed the flight of the disc of whirling cloud along the sky-path until it slowed and stopped almost immediately overhead. And now a vast and gasping sigh, composed of a mass moaning from the wolf-warriors and a concerted, ecstatic exhalation from the rest, went up from the hypnotized tableau on the plain. In the next moment, as if a spell had been lifted by that sighing murmur of the armies, the battle resumed.
But now there was a difference, for from the instant of resumption the battle progressed clearly in favor of the men of the snowships. The wolf-warriors fought as they retreated, true, but their lines were bending like grass before a breeze as they milled back from the swaggering bears and their jubilant riders, and to a man they seemed to keep one eye on the sky overhead—on the sky, and on the ominous black disc that whirled and roared above us.
Seeing that the battle was rejoined and having clipped a fresh magazine into my pistol, I prepared to defend myself once more. I crouched beside Tracy where she huddled over Whitey’s still form, trying to free the spear that pinned his leg to the frozen surface. Whitey’s pistol, flown from his hand when he fell, was nowhere to be seen.
Jimmy Franklin, out of ammunition, had reversed his rifle and now gripped the barrel with both hands like a club. For a moment we stared at each other, jimmy and I, and then he said, “Hank, it looks to me like these people here are scared to death—almost as scared as I am. This could be our chance to make a break for the snow-ships.”
He was right. The circling wolf-warriors had pulled farther back from us; much closer were the advancing lines of fighting bears, cutting off our attackers from the rest of the wolf-warrior pack. I handed Tracy my pistol, put both hands to the shaft of the spear (mercifully a true spear and not a barbed harpoon) that fastened Whitey down and pulled it free as smoothly and gently as I could.
Whitey moaned and trembled on the frozen ground. Tracy handed the pistol back to me and sat down to cradle Whitey’s head, wiping his brow with snow.
Jimmy Franklin threw down his useless rifle and reached for the bloodied spear. “All right,” I told him, “we’ll make a break for it. I’ll carry Whitey; Tracy will have to stay between us.”
Then before we could make our move—even above the crazed rushing and roaring of the whirling black disc hanging above us, over the clash of battle and the screams of dying men and beasts—again the mad Russian priest’s scornful voice rang out, lashing our ring of attackers into activity.
But no, despite the fact that they obviously feared this wild-eyed white man, the warriors would have none of it. True, they made a half-hearted show of rushing upon us, but as soon as my pistol resume
d its vicious spitting they spurred their wolves to a hurried retreat. And now they were gathering into a group, no longer ringing us, backing away in the direction of the distant pyramid altar and prepared at any moment to turn and flee.
It could have been that their reluctance was due to the fact that the men of the snow-ships were now breaking through the disordered wolf-warrior lines in a dozen different places, but I was sure that it was much more than this, that it still had a lot to do with the whirling disc in the maddened sky. But now, however hesitantly, indecisively, massive wolf-warrior reinforcements were arriving to bolster the faltering morale of their battered brothers. Well over a thousand of them, these were the men of that wedge-shaped formation I had seen bringing up the rear behind the three sledges of the priests. They paused momentarily before entering the battle.
It was at that moment that the insane Russian, wearied now of trying to goad his men to the attack, grabbed the Eskimo driver of his sledge by the arm and screamed a harsh command into his ear. Immediately the squat driver leaned forward to crack his whip across the backs of the six harnessed wolves.
Round in a semicircle the heavy sledge skidded, while Zchakow clung like a great white leech to its prow. Now, as the team of wolves hurtled straight toward us, I saw that it was the Russian’s intention simply to run us down. I yanked Tracy to her feet and thrust her away, slipping and stumbling over the snow.
The sledge of the high priest hissed down upon us, and again he screamed a harsh command. In answer to that urgent cry, spurring his wolf forward out of a milling, snarling crush of human and animal bodies, rode that massive Eskimo survivor of the six warriors Zchakow had sent against us. Straight for Tracy the giant guided his massive mount, leaning out to reach for her with avid, grasping hands.
“Tracy!” I yelled. “Tracy—look out!”
And at that precise instant of time, simultaneous with my cry. came a fantastic intervention. Twin, deafening reports sounded from the sky, a double-barreled blast like that of some cosmic shotgun.
High in the heavens, emanating from the center of the whirling disc of cloud, two great dazzling bands of fire reached out, curling over and down, swaying above the plain like twin serpent heads before leaping earthward to flash unerringly to their targets. Magnificent, awesome, fearfully sentient they were—thunderbolts that crashed down with pin-point accuracy on those who would destroy us!
When they were almost upon us, suddenly the wolves that hauled Zchakow’s sledge were enveloped in crackling white flame that reached from the sky. One second they were there, caught in that awful holocaust of electrical energies, and the next second that pillar of fire was gone and they were ashes through which the sledge, its prow blazing, careened to spill onto its side.
Two figures were thrown like rag dolls onto the snow: the Russian and his Eskimo driver. The latter got to his knees—just in time to catch a stray spear full in the back. The shaft ran him through, knocking him face down and stone dead upon the frozen ground. It was just as well for him that he died that way. He had been screaming hideously even before the spear hit him, and I had seen that his arms ended in steaming, redly dripping stumps at the elbows. Reaching over the prow of the sledge, those arms of his must have been caught in that same pillar of flame that incinerated the wolves.
But what of Zchakow? Where was he now? Then I saw him, mounting a riderless wolf, in a hurry to make good his escape. I lifted my weapon and had him fairly in my slights when a stumbling figure fell against me, deflecting my aim. It was Tracy, weakly calling my name, half-fainting with shock and terror.
“Oh, Hank, Hank—it was terrible!” she cried. I tried to clasp her to me but she pulled free to point shudderingly at a pile of smoldering fur and gray ashes on the snow: the remains of the giant Eskimo warrior and his mount. “That fire—that awful fire from the sky!” “Come on!” Jimmy Franklin suddenly cried. “Now we can make it!”
I saw that he was right; the tide of battle had washed by us. Apart from a narrow strip of frozen plain littered with dead and dying men and animals, nothing now stood between us and the line of motionless snow-ships.
I threw Whitey across my shoulders and Jimmy picked up Tracy. As we stumbled toward the snow-ships a quartet of massive bears lumbered forward, their riders holding out brawny arms to us. Tracy was taken from Jimmy by a black-haired, hawkfaced man who could only be of pure Indian stock, possibly Tlingit or Chinook. She clung to him grimly as his huge mount turned about. Ten or eleven feet tall, a second bear approached me. At the command of its Eskimo rider, this moving mountain of fur lifted Whitey from my back to tuck him under a massive limb. Yet another rider reached down a hand to me, and as I swung up beside him I saw the fourth pick up Jimmy. Then we were off at a lumbering run for the nearest ship of the snow.
As we reached the ship, willing hands reached down to lift us aboard from the backs of the bears. The deck was of rough planking, along which we were hurried to the upward-sweeping prow. Whitey was borne away to the rear of the ship; I assumed that his wound was to be given immediate attention.
Tracy was on her own feet again by then, and as we gathered at the rail of the bird-beaked prow to watch the battle from this point of higher elevation, so Jimmy Franklin struck up a conversation with the stern-faced brave whose arms had lifted my sister from him. They spoke slowly at first, Jimmy finding his way with the Koluscha-Tlingit tongue, but soon the conversation became an excited babble. Shortly Jimmy held up his hand to still the tongue of his new friend; he turned to me.
“He says that we showed great courage in defying Ithaqua, and that we have done the people of the Plateau a great service in ridding Borea of so many of Ithaqua’s people. He welcomes us aboard the ship of Northan the Warlord, where we await the coming of Armandra, the Woman of the Winds.”
“Hold on, Jimmy,” I told him. “Let’s take it slowly. Is your friend here this, er, Northan the Warlord? And who is Armandra?”
Again they engaged in the obscure Indian dialect, then, “No, this is not Northan; his name is Kota’na, and he is the Keeper of the Bears. Northan is a man like you—and yet not like you. He has your height and your blue eyes, but he is darker skinned and his hair is jet.”
“And Armandra?” Tracy asked him.
Jimmy lifted his eyes to stare out over the battle that still raged on the white plain, then turned them skyward to that enigmatic disc of madly spinning darkness. “He says that Armandra is Priestess of the Plateau, the Woman of the Winds.” He paused, then lifted an unsteady hand to point at the whirling disc. “And he says that Armandra is—there!”
“Look!” Tracy cried. “Hank, what’s happening?”
Decimated, the ranks of wolf-warriors had drawn back to form triple lines of perhaps four hundred and fifty men mounted, and another two hundred or so riderless wolves. Behind them, spaced out along the line they formed, Ithaqua’s six lesser priests leaped and cavorted on the snow, their cries reaching us on the wings of a wind that suddenly rose up to blow from the distant altar into the faces of the warriors of the snow-ships. Behind the six priests, raised high atop a human pyramid of white-robed warriors, Boris Zchakow held up his arms to the skies and offered up a cry the like of which I was sure civilized man never heard before from the throat of man.
Close about us pressed a dozen or so of the half-naked men of the ships, murmuring excitedly, expectantly, staring out across the plain. Jimmy Franklin asked a further guttural question of Kota’na and on receipt of the answer again turned to me.
“He says that Ithaqua’s priests are fools; that while their master is undisputed ‘First Lord of the Winds,’ Armandra’s powers are second only to his, and that any forces the priests can call up will be child’s play for the Woman of the Winds. And such tomfoolery, he says, will only anger her. Look!”
As he spoke he flung out an arm to point across the battlefield. About two hundred yards of death-littered plain separated the two armies. Now, between them and growing up out of the frozen ground in front of
the ranks of wolf-warriors, six towering tornadoes reached skyward. Thin spirals at their bases, thickening at their tops to about one hundred feet in diameter, they whirled like spinning tops, gathering up all of the loose surface rime of the plain and rapidly becoming almost solid cones of snow and ice.
Then, with almost military precision, these evocations of an alien science began to move forward toward the opposing army. As they crossed the open space the bodies of fallen men and beasts—Eskimo, Indian, Mongol and European, and the carcasses of wolves and bears alike—were swept up into their funnels to whirl madly in the tumult of frozen debris.
Now those six priests also moved forward, advancing between the wolf-warriors, urging their fantastic, inhuman charges on with cries and crazed cavortings All of this I saw through the binoculars which I still wore round my neck, but soon I could no longer hear the cries of those priests for they were utterly drowned out in the torrent of sound that washed outward from the awesome scene on the plain.
Staunchly stood the men and bears of the ships, unfaltering in a whipping wind that threatened to blow them all away like leaves in a gale, facing the whirligigs of doom that rushed upon them. And then a gasp went up from the figures that crowded me in the prow of the snow-ship. In the sky above the armies, something was happening.
Dead center in the whirling disc of black cloud an opening had appeared, and down through this opening a shape now lowered—a human shape. No, perhaps not human, for how could any person of flesh and blood be up there, walking down the wind beneath that enormous aerial Catherine-wheel? And yet, unless my own eyes played games with me, that figure was indeed human—the gorgeous shape of a woman whose flesh was as white as the snow of the plain—a woman garbed in white fur boots and a short fur smock, who fell in a swift but controlled motion down through the air with her arms held wide and parallel to the ground, forming a living cross. Her hair was billowing above her, long and flaming red, rippling as she fell like the tail of some fiery meteorite of flesh.