The voyage was over. The black galley was escorted with cheers and shouting into Khondor.
Carse understood now what Jaxart had meant. Nature had made a virtually impregnable fortress out of the rock itself, walled in by impassable mountains from land attack, protected by unscalable cliffs from the sea, its only gateway the narrow twisting fiord on the north side. That too was guarded by ballistas which could make the fiord a death trap for any ship that entered it.
The tortuous channel widened at the end into a landlocked harbor that not even the winds could attack. Khond longships, fishing boats and a scattering of foreign craft filled the basin and the black galley glided like a queen among them.
The quays and the dizzy flight of steps that led up to the summit of the rock, connecting on the upper levels with tunneled galleries, were thronged with the people of Khondor and the allied clans that had taken refuge with them. They were a hardy lot with a raffish sturdy look that Carse liked. The cliffs and the mountain peaks flung back their cheering in deafening echoes.
Under cover of the noise Boghaz said urgently to Carse for the hundredth time, “Let me bargain with them for the secret! I can get us each a kingdom—more, if you will!”
And for the hundredth time, Carse answered, “I have not said that I know the secret. If I do it is my own.”
Boghaz swore in an ecstasy of frustration and demanded of the gods what he had done to be thus hardly used.
Ywain’s eyes turned upon the Earthman once and then away.
Swimmers in their gleaming hundreds, Sky Folk with their proud wings folded—for the first time Carse saw their women, creatures so exquisitely lovely that it hurt to look at them—the tall fair Khonds and the foreign stocks, a kaleidoscope of colors and glinting steel. Mooring lines snaked out, were caught and snubbed around the bollards. The galley came to rest.
Carse led his crew ashore and Ywain walked erect beside him, wearing his shackles as though they were golden ornaments she had chosen to become her.