CHAPTER XXV
SHAMANTOWN
Before us towered up the great walls of Shamantown, grey weathered stone, rising up for forty feet and more before jutting out into overhanging galleries, arrow-slitted through all their length. All round the grim walls ran a sheer rock crevice, in which—twenty feet below us—flowed a slow stream of sluggish, black, oily water. This precipitous moat was crossed at one point by a narrow bridge of natural rock, the one weak spot in an otherwise impregnable defence.
On the far side of the bridge the entry-way ran in a narrow passage, flanked by loopholes, at whose end were the great gates of iron-shod timber, nowise different from the stone one we had seen in the tangi. But that place of death was now hidden from us by the stupendous wall of cliff under whose shelter nestled the Shaman stronghold. Lying in grotesque twisted attitudes about the farther end of the bridge and in the narrow passage were the bodies of some of the men Kyrlos had lost in his first efforts to storm his way in.
The walls were crowned with tall catapults, and now and again a great stone or a shower of lighter stuff would crash past where Kyrlos, Andros, Wrexham, and I crouched in the shelter of a timber mantlet studying the entry. Or a long-shafted arrow would thud into the stout wood or stand quivering near by in the damp soil. Away, on either hand, reaching round to the cliffs that backed the city, was our long besieging line, breastwork and sentry’s shelter, catapult and wooden tower, with behind them the little tents and huts of Kyrlos’s army, for we had driven the Shamans to their lair, and ringed them with a ring of steel.
Behind us, in all the twenty miles of jagged hill country that Wrexham and I, with his train of mysterious engineer stores, had traversed after crossing the fertile river plains beyond the Blue Sakae country, was no single Shaman, only the gaunt bands of outlaws and masterless men, and the raiding gangs of the Brown Sakae, who roved hither and thither pillaging what the Shamans had left. But these constituted no menace to us, and could be dealt with at leisure once the chief enemy had been crushed.
We had ridden from Aornos a week before, and Aryenis’s dear farewells were still fresh in my memory, the last glimpse of her on her grey mare at the turning of the lane into the Aornos road, where she and I had ridden to await Wrexham’s party, still vivid to my mind. For two days afterward we had ridden steadily southwest, past the battle-field of the Astara with its heavy-winged vultures and jet-black ravens, past the frontier forts, over the ravaged fields and derelict villages into the maze of Shaman hills, where now and again upon some prominent peak we saw the glitter of steel in the little stone-ringed shelters, marking the detachments left by our people as they followed the retreating Shamans.
On our arrival Kyrlos had greeted me open-armed, and I felt, indeed, that, as Paulos insisted, I had become one of themselves. Aryenis and I had written to her father the day after that unforgettable evening, and his answer was in all ways satisfactory, while his words, when we met, left no shadow of doubt as to his real pleasure at the news we had sent him. Andros, whom I half-expected to find anything but friendly, was friendship personified.
“So you are now loudly one of us, Harilek,” he had said as he greeted me. “I told you at the Astara that you were to be envied, and now that gay touch of colour in your cap proves my statement true. You have taken the fairest flower in all Sakaeland, but—and I speak as one knowing—you have fairly earned it. I know Aryenis will be utterly happy, and that is the greatest wish that I—her friend—can have.”
And he wrung my hand, looking me honestly in the eyes. I consider that Andros is all that a man ought to be.
I had joined the army at Aornos almost a stranger. I rejoined it in front of Shamantown as one coming back to his own, with Paulos’s men—who, reinforced, had preceded us by three days—fallen in under Philos to lower blade in salute as we rode in, and many acquaintances to greet me with honest, if disconcertingly straightforward, appreciation. The lower ranks swarmed about Payindah, for whom they entertained a real friendliness, and I saw him but little that evening. His stay with John at Miletis had been productive of still greater admiration of Sakaeland and Sakae ways due, perhaps, to the now indefinite period we were like to remain in the country. Perhaps the matter of Aryenis had also somewhat to do with it, and he was very insistent on the accuracy of his forecasts in that direction. I think also that the charms of Temra’s sister-in-law, a well-made, pleasing-looking damsel with dark locks, had some corner in his thoughts. He seemed to have picked up a lot more Sakae in the last fortnight, and I had noticed that women are quicker teachers than men.