Polaris of the Snows

by Charles B. Stilson

Rose Emer caught the word Sardanes and echoed it.

"Sardanes," she breathed, and turned to Polaris with an awed look in her eyes. "It is as if a page of the ages had been turned back for us, isn't it?" she asked.

From the wondrous scene he glanced to the face of the girl and smiled quietly, and she remembered that here was one who gazed for the first time on the reality of the world of men of any age.

Kard raised his voice in a long, shrill call. His voice was lost in the angry baying of the dog pack as a small goat leaped from covert close to them and clattered away up the ledges.

At the combined clamor, several men raised their faces wonderingly from their work in a field near by. For a moment they gazed in amazement at the travelers, and then ran toward them, talking excitedly as they went.

All were clad lightly in sleeveless tunics of cloth that reached the knees. They wore no head coverings, and their faces and bare arms were tanned from exposure to the sun. Their feet were covered with leather sandals, buckled at the ankle. Their limbs were bare from the sandals to the short, loose-legged trousers, which they wore beneath their tunic skirts. The texture of their garments was dyed in several different hues.

Nearly all wore close-cropped beards like that of Kard, and their hair was trimmed at the neck. Armlets and rings and the buckles on their garments, all of the strange, iridescent metal, glittered in the sunlight as they ran.

For a moment there was a babel of astonished queries leveled at Kard the Smith as the men pulled up and drank in the sight of the strangers and their yet stranger beasts, now roused to a frenzy which required all of the authority of Polaris to hold in bounds. "Who?" and "What?" and "Where?" came in breathless succession from the mouths of the Sardanians.

"Now, be quiet, all of you, that I may tell you," commanded Kard with a disgusted wave of his hand. They were spoiling his peroration for him.

"These," and he waved his hand again, "be Polaris of the Snows, and Rose Emer of America, come to visit Sardanes. The man with the sunlight hair and eyes of the sky hath lived in the outer snows all his life, he saith. The woman," and Kard bowed low, "is a great princess from the world far to the north, beyond all the snows, the world whereof the priests have sung."