Harilek

by Martin Louis Alan Gompertz

I leaned out over the giddy drop, and saw opening before me the great cleft up which we had first come to Sakaeland. At the foot—veiled already by the gathering shadows—was the open place of death, the circling vultures wheeling upward, disturbed by the fall of Atros’s body. Kyrlos’s words came back to me, “Ere the spring buds show, I will feed your master and his friends to the vultures in the gate.” The little twisted trees above us were still void of leaf, bare of the least little bud.

Then we made our way back into the palace now thronged with our men, seeking high and low for the Shaman chief. We passed through a honeycomb of narrow passages, and a warren of chambers hewn into the rock. The dark winding stairs and gloomy tunnels had carried us down perhaps three hundred feet, when we came to another maze of rooms—a crowd of tawdry-clothed women huddled in the corners—the archers’ quarters above the gate. Through these we passed into a small pillared hall lighted with torches set in iron wall-brackets, with a single arrow-slit overlooking the gate of death.

There in his black robes, upon a carven chair supported by writhing figures in stone, sat the chief Shaman looking at us with dead eyes—his hands resting upon the carven arms of his chair—and sprawling at his feet, face down on the bloodstained floor with a knife hilt protruding from his back, the black-robed figure of his head councillor—slain, we guessed, by his master lest his knowledge might aid us.

We could get no details from our prisoners: doubtless none saw that last scene. But from the crystal phial still clutched in the dead hand one could reconstruct some of it. The sudden blow that struck down the other unsuspecting figure, the deliberate assuming of the seat in the chair of judgment, the smoothing out of the folds of the rich sombre robe, the last thought of hate as the poison was swallowed that left us with only the mask of what had been.

The cruel, narrow eyes looked out at us from the hairless, parchment-like face that was strangely devoid of wrinkles, smooth as wax under the close-fitting, black, fur-trimmed cap; the thin-lipped mouth still bore traces of the last sardonic smile at cheating us to the end. Kyrlos could feed only a dead man to the vultures, naught but the empty shell of the lamp remained. Seated there the dead figure was imposing, but when we moved it, I realized what Aryenis had meant with her taunt about a “misshapen vulture”: the scraggy neck in the fur collar, the distorted rounded back, the talon-like hands, had all something of kinship with the loathsome birds without.

And, thinking of Aryenis, I looked around the chamber with its carvings, foul but vivid representations of torture and mutilation, and I shivered involuntarily. How many shrinking prisoners, men and women alike, had prayed there in vain, not for life, but just for clean, speedy death! In a corner was a sheaf of arrows, black-shafted and white-lettered, such as we had found in the gate. The use of these we learnt from one of the guard archers whose life had been spared. When the chief Shaman considered a prisoner to be of no further use, he was made to pick an arrow from the cloth-swathed sheaf. One does not like to think of the scenes that room must have witnessed. Then, according to the lettering upon it, once outside the gate the tortured wretch might feel the prayed-for point in his heart, or know the lingering death of many hours as he lay crippled among the vultures and the obscene horrors of the place of death.

So, leaving a guard upon the chamber, we returned to the topmost palace where, in the last rays of the sun just sinking behind the hills, Kyrlos announced to the leading Shaman prisoners his intention of ruling their country, and, with the unanimous assent of his chiefs, appointed Henga as military governor, and Wrexham to take charge of all the mines and metal industries of the Shaman and Brown Sakae countries.

That night we slept in the palace, and all next day explored the Shaman citadel, cleansing its foul prisons, and giving decent burial to the pitiful remains. Many of our men clamoured for the Shamans to be flung to the vultures in the gate, but I am glad to say that Kyrlos insisted on more humane measures, slaying only such as were definitely proven guilty of murder and raid, and allowing the dead to be carried away by their own folk. But none came to claim the chief Shaman’s body.

Whence he came none could tell us for certain. The office was hereditary, but the advent of this man was a mystery, since his reputed father was old beyond even the long-lived Shaman elders, and his mother none knew. The chief Shaman and his successor-designate never left the citadel, and until attaining years of manhood the Shaman’s heir was not brought to the council save only if his father died before he became of age. Those who knew the history of the dead fiend in the great chair were dead. Perhaps the secret—if secret there were—lay locked in the brain of that still figure sprawling on the floor before its master. Of papers and records we found none. Any that existed—and we knew the Shaman councillors had ancient records of their history and religion—must have been hidden or destroyed.

But, since that brain is dead, the chief Shaman’s twisted soul, returned to the judgment-seat of Him who made it, we shall never know. All that matters is that Sakaeland is now at peace under the strong firm governance which—so long as men are men, not angels—can alone ensure that each man reap what he has sown. The Shaman hold, cleansed of its foul traces, is manned by clean-visaged Sakae bowmen, and straight-mouthed, honest-eyed Henga dispenses simple, unbiassed, soldierly justice in the open sunlight before the gate of the dark passage where John Wrexham and his sappers laboured under the glowing trapdoor.