Jirel of Joiry (19 page)

“I go as loath as you,” she told him. “I go wincing under spurs too, my pretty. But go I
must,
and you too.” And she cursed Guy again in a lingering whisper as the slow
hoofbeats
reverberated upon the stone arches of the causeway.

Beyond it loomed
Hellsgarde
, tall and dark against the sunset. All around her lay the yellow light of evening, above her in the sky, below her in the marshy pools beneath which
quicksands
quivered. She wondered who last had ridden this deserted causeway in the yellow glow of sunset, under what dreadful compulsion.

For no one sought
Hellsgarde
for pleasure. It was Guy of
Garlot’s
slanting grin that drove
Jirel
across the marshes this evening—Guy and the knowledge that a score of her best men-at-arms lay shivering tonight in his dripping dungeons with no hope of life save the hope that she might buy their safety. And no riches could tempt Black Guy, not even
Jirel’s
smoothly curving beauty and the promise of her full-lipped smile. And
Garlot
Castle, high on its rocky mountain peak, was impregnable against even
Jirel’s
masterfully planned attacks. Only one thing could tempt the dark lord of
Garlot
, and that a thing without a name.

“It
lies
in
Hellsgarde
, my lady,” he had told her with that hateful smooth civility which his sleek grin so belied. “And it is indeed Hell-guarded.
Andred
of
Hellsgarde
died defending it two hundred years ago, and I have coveted it all my life. But I love living, my lady! I would not venture into
Hellsgarde
for all the wealth in Christendom. If you want your men back alive, bring me the treasure that
Andred
died to save.”

“But what is it, coward?”

Guy had shrugged. “Who knows? Whence it came and what it was no man can say now. You know the tale as well as I, my lady. He carried it in a leather casket locked with an iron key. It must have been small—but very precious. Precious enough to die for, in the end—as I do not propose to die, my lady! You fetch it to me and buy twenty lives in the bargain.”

She had sworn at him for a coward, but in the end she had gone. For after all, she was
Joiry
. Her men were hers to bully and threaten and command, but they were hers to die for too, if need be. She was afraid, but she remembered her men in
Garlot’s
dungeons with the rack and the boot awaiting them, and she rode on.

The causeway was so long. Sunset had begun to tarnish a little in the bright pools of the marsh, and she could look up at the castle now without being blinded by the dazzle beyond. A mist had begun to rise in level layers from the water, and the smell of it was not good in her nostrils.

Hellsgarde
—
Hellsgarde
and
Andred
.
She did not want to remember the hideous old story, but she could not keep her mind off it this evening.
Andred
had been a big, violent man, passionate and
wilful
and very cruel. Men hated him, but when the tale of his dying spread abroad even his enemies pitied
Andred
of
Hellsgarde
.

For the rumor of his treasure had drawn at last besiegers whom he could not overcome.
Hellsgarde
gate had fallen and the robber nobles who captured the castle searched in vain for the precious casket which
Andred
guarded. Torture could not loosen his lips, though they tried very terribly to make him speak. He was a powerful man, stubborn and brave. He lived a long while under torment, but he would not betray the hiding-place of his treasure.

They tore him limb from limb at last and cast his dismembered body into the
quicksands
, and came away empty-handed. No one ever found
Andred’s
treasure. Since then for two hundred years
Hellsgarde
had lain empty. It was a dismal place, full of mists and fevers from the marsh, and
Andred
did not lie easy in the
quicksands
where his murderers had cast him. Dismembered and scattered broadcast over the marshes, yet he would not lie quiet. He had treasured his mysterious wealth with a love stronger than death itself, and legend said he walked
Hellsgarde
as jealously in death as in life.

In the two hundred years searchers had gone fearfully to ransack the empty halls of
Hellsgarde
for that casket—gone, and vanished. There was magic in the marshes, and a man could come upon the castle only by sunset, and after sunset
Andred’s
violent ghost rose out of the
quicksands
to guard the thing he died for. For generations now no one had been so foolhardy as to venture upon the way
Jirel
rode tonight.

She was drawing near the gateway. There was a broad platform before it, just beyond the place where
Andred’s
draw-bridge had once barred the approach to
Hellsgarde
. Long ago the gap in the causeway had been filled in with rubble by searchers who would reach the castle on horseback, and
Jirel
had thought of passing the night upon that platform under the gate arch, so that dawn might find her ready to begin her search.

But—the mists between her and the castle had thickened, and her eyes might be playing her false—but were not
those the
shapes of men drawn up in a double row before the doorway of
Hellsgarde
?
Hellsgarde
, that
had stood empty and haunted these two hundred years? Blinking through the dazzle of sun on water and the thickening of the mists, she rode on toward the gateway. She could feel the horse trembling between her knees, and with every step she grew more and more reluctant to go on. She set her teeth and forced him ahead resolutely, swallowing her own terror.

They
were
the figures of men, two rows of them, waiting motionless before the gate. But even through the mist and the sun-dazzle she could see that something was wrong. They were so still—so unearthly still as they faced her. And the horse was shying and trembling until she could scarcely force him forward.

She was quite near before she saw what was wrong, though she knew that at every forward step the obscure frightfulness about these guardsmen grew greater. But she was almost upon them before she realized why. They were all dead.

The captain at their front stood slumped down upon the great spear that propped him on his feet, driven through his throat so that the point stood out above his neck as he sagged there, his head dragging forward until his cheek lay against the shaft which transfixed him.

And so stood all the rest, behind him in a double row, reeling drunkenly upon the spears driven through throat or chest or shoulder to prop them on their feet in the hideous semblance of life.

So the company of dead men kept guard before the gateway of
Hellsgarde
. It was not unfitting—dead men guarding a dead castle in the barren
deadlands
of the swamp.

Jirel
sat her horse before them for a long moment in silence, feeling the sweat gather on her forehead, clenching her hands on the pommel of the saddle. So far as she knew, no other living person in decades had ridden the long causeway to
Hellsgarde
; certainly no living man had dwelt in these haunted towers in generations. Yet—here stood the dead men reeling against the spears which had slain them but would not let them fall. Why?—how?—when
?…

Death was no new thing to
Jirel
. She had slain too many men herself to fear it. But the ghastly unexpectedness of this dead guard! It was one thing to steel oneself to enter an empty ruin, quite another to face a double row of standing dead men whose blood still ran in dark rivulets, wetly across the stones at their feet. Still wet—they had died today, then. Today while she struggled cursing through the wilderness something had slain them here, something had made a jest of death as it propped them on their dead feet with their dead faces toward the causeway along which she must come riding. Had that something expected her?

Could the dead
Andred
have known—?

She caught herself with a little shudder and shrugged beneath the mail, clenching her fingers on the pommel, swallowing hard. (Remember your men—remember Guy of
Garlot
—remember that you are
Joiry
!) The memory of Guy’s comely face, bright with mockery, put steel into her and she snapped her chin up with a murmured oath. These men were dead—they could not hinder her…

Was that motion among the ghastly guard? Her heart leaped to her throat and she gripped the saddle between nervous knees with a reflex action that made the horse shudder. For one of the men in the row before her was slipping silently toward the flagstones. Had the spear-butt slid on the bloody tiles? Had a breeze dislodged his precarious balance? There was no breeze. But with a curious little sigh from collapsing lungs he folded gently downward to his knees, to his side, to a flattened proneness on the stones. And a dark stream of blood trickled from his mouth to snake across the pavement as he lay there.

Jirel
sat frozen. It was a nightmare. Only in nightmares could such things happen.
This unbearable silence in the dying sunset, no breeze, no motion, no sound.
Not even a ripple upon the mirroring waters lying so widely around her below the causeway, light draining from their surfaces. Sky and water were paling as if all life receded from about her, leaving only
Jirel
on her trembling horse facing the dead men and the dead castle. She scarcely dared move lest the thump of her mount’s feet on the stones dislodge the balance of another man. And she thought she could not bear to see motion again among those motionless ranks. She could not bear it, and yet—and yet if something did not break the spell soon the screams gathering in her throat would burst past her lips and she knew she would never stop screaming.

A harsh scraping sounded beyond the dead guardsmen. Her heart squeezed itself to a stop. And then the blood began to thunder through her veins and her heart leaped and fell and leaped again in a frenzied pounding against the mail of her tunic.

For beyond the men the great door of
Hellsgarde
was swinging open. She gripped her knees against the saddle until her thighs ached, and her knuckles were bone-white upon the pommel. She made no move toward the great sword at her side. What use is a sword against dead men?

But it was no dead man who looked out under the arch of the doorway, stooped beneath his purple tunic with the heartening glow of firelight from beyond reddening his bowed shoulders. There was something odd about his pale, pinched face upturned to hers across the double line of dead defenders between them. After a moment she recognized what it was—he had the face of a hunchback, but there was no deformity upon his shoulders. He stooped a little as if with weariness, but he carried no hump. Yet it was the face of a cripple if she had ever seen one. His back was straight, but could his soul be? Would the good God have put the sign of deformity upon a human creature without cause? But he was human—he was real.
Jirel
sighed from the bottom of her lungs.

“Good evening to you, my lady,” said the hunchback (but he was not humped) in the flat, ingratiating voice of a cripple.

“These
—did not find it good,” said
Jirel
shortly, gesturing. And the man grinned.

“My master’s jest,” he said.

Jirel
looked back to the rows of standing dead, her heart quieting a little. Yes, a man might find a grim sort of humor in setting such a guard before his door. If a living man had done it, for an understanding reason, then the terror of the unknown was gone. But the man—

“Your master?” she echoed.

“My lord Alaric of
Hellsgarde
—you did not know?”

“Know what?” demanded
Jirel
flatly. She was beginning to dislike the fellow’s sidelong unctuousness.

“Why, that my lord’s family has taken residence here after many generations away.”

“Sir Alaric is of
Andred’s
kin?”

“He is.”

Jirel
shrugged mentally. It was God’s blessing to feel the weight of terror lift from her, but this would complicate matters. She had not known that
Andred
left descendants, though it might well be so. And if they lived here, then be sure they would already have ransacked the castle from keep to dungeon for that nameless treasure which
Andred
had died to save and had not yet forsaken, were rumor true. Had they found it? There was only one way to learn that.

“I am nighted in the marshes,” she said as courteously as she could manage. “Will your master give me shelter until morning?”

The hunchback’s eyes—(but he was no
hunchback,
she must stop thinking of him so!)—his eyes slid very quickly, yet very comprehensively, from her tanned and red-lipped face downward over the lifting curves of her under the molding chain-mail, over her bare brown knees and slim, steel-
greaved
legs. There was a deeper unctuousness in his voice as he said:

“My master will make you very welcome, lady. Ride in.”

Jirel
kicked her horse’s flank and guided him, snorting and trembling, through the gap in the ranks of dead men which the falling soldier had left. He was a battle-charger, he was used to dead men; yet he shuddered as he minced through these lines.

The courtyard within was warm with the light of the great fire in its center. Around it a cluster of loutish men in leather jerkins looked up as she passed.

“
Wat
, Piers—up, men!” snapped the man with the hunchback’s face. “Take my lady’s horse.”