Staunchly stood the men and bears of the ships, unfaltering in a whipping wind that threatened to blow them all away like leaves in a gale, facing the whirligigs of doom that rushed upon them. And then a gasp went up from the figures that crowded me in the prow of the snow-ship. In the sky above the armies, something was happening.
Dead center in the whirling disc of black cloud an opening had appeared, and down through this opening a shape now loweredâa human shape. No, perhaps not human, for how could any person of flesh and blood be up there, walking down the wind beneath that enormous aerial Catherine-wheel? And yet, unless my own eyes played games with me, that figure was indeed humanâthe gorgeous shape of a woman whose flesh was as white as the snow of the plainâa woman garbed in white fur boots and a short fur smock, who fell in a swift but
controlled
motion down through the air with her arms held wide and parallel to the ground, forming a living cross. Her hair was billowing above her, long and flaming red, rippling as she fell like the tail of some fiery meteorite of flesh.
Down she came, slowing to a gradual halt, still as a hawk on the wind, level with and facing the flat caps of the viciously spinning tornadoes. She stood in thin air, surveying the scene before and beneath her with lowered head. Her back was toward us and her face hidden, but nevertheless I knew she must be beautiful. Beautiful and regalâand powerful.
Now she moved her arms out toward the six white titans that threatened her with their spinning, nodding heads, palms flat against them, denying themâand they paused in their forward motion as if suddenly come up against an invisible wall. Trembling and swaying wildly, fighting to move forward against the will of that Woman of the Winds, the great spinning tops strove to obey the ecstasies of the priests behind them. But her will was stronger than theirs, stronger than the combined wills of all the priests of Ithaqua together.
Faster the tornadoes whirled, frenziedly battering themselves against the invisible wall of Armandra's will, gyrating erratically and losing all of that precision with which they had marched across the plain. Their end was quick; unable to move forward they began to
sway from side to side, falling one against the next like dominoes tumbling in a row, and since they could not tumble forward they fell back the way they had come.
And that was a sight to remember, the tumbling and crashing of those nearly solid inverted cones of snow and ice. An avalanche from the sky, the collapsing columns smashed down to raise a thick haze of ice-dust that momentarily obscured the panic gripping the wolf-warrior army. How the Priests of Ithaqua escaped with their lives in that shattering deluge I could never say, but escape they did, for when the white haze began to settle they were already aboard their sledges, and Boris Zchakow with them, rushing back across the white waste toward the distantly towering pyramid altar.
With my binoculars I found the mad Russian, saw him turn to glare, eyes bulging, at the figure of the woman in the sky, mouthing some unheard obscenity and shaking a fist at her in lunatic fury.
Ah, the foolâfor Armandra saw him too!
The flaming hair of that fantastic figure billowed up on her head and seemed to glow with an unnatural light, turning her whole body and the simple garment she wore a peculiar copper color, like frozen gold. Slowly, deliberately, she reached up, one slender arm above her head and the chill copper glow extended from her pointing hand to spiral upward to the great disc of black cloud that yet whirled and roared above her, a primal watchdog guarding its mistress.
She began to rotate her arm, the circle rapidly growing wider as it she twirled the rope of some enormous lasso. And the cloud-dise the loop of that lasso, spun with her arm, speeding up until its edges became a wispy blur laced with flickering traceries of electrical fire
Now the wolf-warrior army was in full flight, hurtling away down the slight slope toward the distant circle of totems and its central altar. Totally disarrayed, chaotic, theirs was a panic flight which, like a stampede, would not be checked until men and beasts had run themselves out. They were done with fighting for this day, hurrying home to lick their wounds and count their dead; and riding with them in their midst went Boris Zchakow, head and shoulders taller than the three men who rode his sledge with him.
From this fleeing rabble back to the Woman of the Winds my binoculars flew, and now I could almost feel the anger radiating from her where she stood in coppery splendor atop the very air. “
Zchakow
,” I told the distant madman under my breath, “
Russianâif you think
you have an enemy in me, you don't know the half of it. Human enemies you can possibly afford, but not such as this Woman of the Winds!
”
And oh, I was right.
Now the figure in the sky seemed to swell outward, burning bronze to match the billowing tresses that crowned herâand for a moment I thought I knew where I had seen a similar
expansion
before. But then, in another moment, the shape was human again, only human.
Human? I laughed at myself derisively. There must be that in this being which was human, yes, but there was more, much more than that to her. There was this power of hers over the elementsâand there was her anger.
Now she lowered that slender arm of hers to a horizontal position, and the great disc above her head tilted forward, dipped, slid down the wind, rushed like some gigantic discus thrown by a god in the Games of Heavenâor a demon in hell's chaos. Leveling out over the white waste, it rushed after the fleeing army of wolf-warriors.
Tracy clutched my arm, her breath pluming faster as she watched that incredible scene. “Oh, Hankâhow
could
she?”
It was one thing to be engaged in a fight for one's life with fallible, mortal enemies, but another thing entirely to see this Woman of the Winds, this being who fought with weapons fashioned of the forces of nature, ruthlessly, cold-bloodedly destroy a small army.
And surely that army, or what was left of it, would be destroyed if the whirling juggernaut Armandra had unleashed upon it were allowed to run amuck through its scattered, fleeing ranks.
“IâI don't know,” finally I answered Tracy's question, surprised to find that my throat was dry and my voice cracked.
“They are terrible people,” Tracy continued, “but they are people!” Then she closed her eyes and turned her face to me as the great disc caught up with the hindmost of the fleeing wolf-warriors.
Unable to tear my eyes away from the scene, I felt my lips draw back in a gasp of horror as the disc struck, tearing into and ripping through men and beasts as the blade of a circular saw rips wood, flinging the debris of its passing hundreds of feet into the icy air and across the white waste. And then, even as I watched, the disc paused, hesitated.
With shaking hands I focused yet again upon the Woman of the
Winds. Now she had thrown up an arm before her eyes, her other hand thrust out before her as if to ward off some unseen horrorâthe horror of her own inhuman anger unleashed. In the next instant she shook her head, sending her magnificent red tresses billowing, then waved her arms outward in a sharp, clear sign of dismissal.
And suddenly there was a tremendous roaring from the plain, such as a tidal wave might make breaking on some unsuspecting promontory. The weapon she had hurled at the fleeing army flew apart, disintegrated, returned in the space of a few seconds to its elemental form, lay inert over the plain as a gray cloud! A cloud that settled to a ground haze, revealing at last the hundred or so remaining wolf-warriors racing frenziedly on beyond its drifting, curling tendrils.
Faintly, breaking the sudden silence, reaching us on a mournful wind that sprang up in the wake of all that had passed, came a distant rumbling and hysterical screaming from the spared, fleeing wolf-warriors. For certainly Armandra had spared them, and I knew now that there was more of the human in her than I had suspected.
“She let them go!” breathed Tracy.
“Let them go!” Jimmy Franklin gasped, echoing her, his voice clearly displaying relief.
“Yes she did,” said another well know voice, edged now with pain, from behind us.
It was Whitey, hobbling on one leg, his arm around the fat neck of a grinning Eskimo. “She did, so there's hope for her yet,” he finished.
“Whitey, what do you mean?” I asked.
He nodded grimly in answer, eyebrows lowering, staring at the figure of the woman in the sky. “See for yourself,” he said.
As a tremendous accolade of cheering, whooping, and the rattling of hundreds of weapons on shields went up from the victorious army of the snow-ships, I looked up and sawâand understood. I understood this woman's power over the elements of the air, her ability to walk on the wind, her inhuman anger and her all-too-human anguish.
For now she had turned to face her people, and hearing their wildly clamorous applause she held out her slender arms to them. Her marvelous hair swirled above her and her eyes shone momentarily as a great queen's to the ringing cheers of her subjects.
Her eyes shone, then for the space of a single instant blazed bright carmine, twin stars in her regal face!
Whitey nodded again, then said, “The safest hunch I ever had in
my life, Hank. That woman is without doubt a child of Ithaqua, and we must thank our lucky stars that she appears to have broken away from her monstrous father!”
On the Ship of Northan
(Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)
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Half an hour
later, during which time the ski-borne ships were brought about and the great bears paraded up onto their decks to be chained to individual rings, the last few wounded men and animals were being brought aboard when Armandra herself took her place at the prow of this ship of her warlord.
During that interval we had also met Northan the Warlord, if it could be called a meeting. A big man, tall as myself and muscled about his arms and shoulders like one of the bears, he had paused momentarily in the issuing of multilingual commands to stride to the prow of the ship and look us over. He literally did that; looked us over, and the frown of disdain that grew on his darkly handsome face told me that he hardly considered us worth the effort.
I immediately, irrationally, took a dislike to him. Blue-eyed with light brown skin and long dark hair, his face and form seemed to me to hold elements of many races, a powerful lineage.
My dislike increased by leaps and bounds when he casually chucked Tracy under the chin, lifted her head and grunted grudgingly. Before I could say or do anything lie had strode away again, but from then on I watched him more closely; not because I believed that Tracy needed a watchdog, but simply because I don't like being held in any sort of contempt. The man who does that to me or mine must then live up to it.
I was still thinking dark and as yet unjustified thoughts when finally Armandra came aboard. Her arrival at the prow of the snow-ship was as awe-inspiring as anything we had seen of her yet, for of course she walked down the wind to step aboard the vessel from an invisible platform of air that buoyed her up as if she were a bubble.
Watching Northan as he strode the deck issuing his orders and pointing here and there with the stock of a short whip, I turned only
in time to see her take the last step that brought her aboardâfrom a position some fifteen to twenty feet above the frozen surface of the plainâand I would have missed even that last step but for the sudden gasp that went up from the vessel's crew. That and the fact that all around me men were falling to their knees, heads bowed in absolute reverence. Kota'na went down instantly, dragging Jimmy Franklin with him unprotesting; even Whitey knelt, though it brought a moan of pain to his lips to have to bend his wounded leg. I couldn't see Tracy for she stood slightly to my rear, but I later learned that even she had humbly lowered her head; Tracy, as proud a girl as ever walked.
Without any shadow of doubt this Woman of the Winds had magic; a magic which, while my body must ever stay rooted to earth, was nevertheless powerful enough to send my soul walking on air. Oh, yes, she was beautiful, this Armandra.
Draped as she was in a white fur smock, still her long full body was a wonder of half-real, half-imagined curves that grew out of the perfect pillars of her white thighs. Her neck, framed now in the red silk of her tresses, was long and slender, adorned with a large golden medallion.
I have never been much of a poet, and no less could do justice to her face. It was the face of an angel; oval and beautifully molded, white as snow. In it great green evesâmercifully green where once I had seen them glow redâstared out from beneath fine golden eyebrows that lay straight and horizontal beneath a high brow. Her nose was straight, too, but delicate and rounded at its tip, while her mouth was curved in a perfect, if a fraction too ample, cupid's bow.
Hair red as fire and eyes green as the deep northern seas of Earth, and a skin as white and smooth as the snowy marble of quarries of dream; this was Armandra's face. And as I gazed at that face I saw one eyebrow lift a little, wonderingly, and the smallest of smiles beginning toâ
And then I was knocked from my feet by a charging blow to my shoulder that would have brought down an ox! I went flying, to crash jarringly against the rail of the prow where I fell to my knees. The next moment Northan appeared over me, legs spread wide and eyes blazing.
I knew immediately that the warlord's anger sprang from my apparently irreverent attitude toward the Woman of the Winds, in which
he could not in fact be more mistaken. Indeed, I already revered this woman, but not as any religious worshiper. Snarling and blustering the bully raised his whip, and as I came to my feet he snapped the thing to send its single metal-tipped thong flying in my face. How easily he might have caught my eye, but instead the metal cut me high on the cheekâand higher still on my pride. Pride goes before a fall they say, but be that as it may this time it would be Northan's fall. On that I was determined.
I reached up a hand to my face to feel a thin trickle of blood, and I felt my eyes widen and the skin about my mouth tighten involuntarily. Northan's arm went back againâand immediately a chiming voice rang out. Too late that golden voice of imperial command, for already the whip was snapping, and I was moving forward inside its wicked radius.
As the metal-tipped thong flew harmlessly over my shoulder I turned slightly to one side and drove my elbow deep into Northan's body below his ribcage. He bent over, almost double, and as he expelled air in a great gasp of surprise, so my cupped hands, clenched into a hard knot, rose up to strike his descending brow.
Most men would have died there and then, of a fractured skull or broken neck, but not Northan the Warlord. His neck was like that of a bull. The shock of the blow I had delivered nearly broke my arms as my opponent's body lifted clean from the planking, flew across the narrow prow and smashed through the opposite rail. He spun out of sight and fell to earth. The fact that I had not killed him was all too obvious from the cry of disbelieving rage that swelled up a moment later from below, and in the outraged bellow that followed as the warlord came limping up the wide gangplank amidships, his dark face working and a picklike weapon gleaming in his fist.
But again Armandra's bell-like tones rang out, and this time she spoke in English. “Stop this now, Northan! You should be ashamed of yourself, thus to treat a man who has fought so well against Ithaqua's wolf-warriors. And youâ” she turned her now wrathful eyes on me, “to attack the man whose army has saved all of your lives!”
“I only returned his blows,” I answered, neither liking this chastisement nor yet quite knowing how to answer it.
“My brother allows no man to strike him.” Tracy's sweet, angry voice came from beside me as Northan swung himself up onto the
raised platform. “The warlord must consider himself lucky to be alive!”
I had to grin at my sister's pluck and her faith in me; and I saw now that Armandra also smiled at Tracy, that her smile widened noticeably as she said, “Your brother? I had thought perhaps thatâ”
“You, man, stand and fight!” came Northan's rage-filled, guttural voice. He crouched before me on the raised deck eyes red with fury, picklike weapon grasped tightly in a massive, bloodless hand.
“Northan!” the Woman of the Winds grasped. “I have told you thanâ”
“But Armandra, he refused to kneel before you, and struck me with his naked hands when I would have punished him! The dog mustâ”
“He struck fair blows when you should have expected them, and they were telling blows,” she taunted him. “And where you used a weapon, he did not, though his weapon,” she indicated the pistol at my waist, “could have killed you instantly.”
For a moment longer we stood there, the three of us, in some sort of confrontation. Then, “Enough,” the Woman of the Winds cried. “It is done now, finished. We are wasting time and no one knows when Ithaqua might return to Borea.” She fingered the medallion she wore about her neck, seeming suddenly nervous. “It is time we were away. I will call a wind to blow us home to the plateau.”
The dark frown stayed on Northan's face, but as Armandra spoke he lifted his head and sniffed the air. “It's much too quiet,” he finally rumbled in agreement. “Can you not see, Armandra, what Ithaqua's devils are up to?”
“No, not now,” she shook her head. “I need my strength to call the wind. Today's work was hard.”
So saying, she stepped into the very point of the prow, lifting up her arms until she resembled some perfectly carved figurehead. As she assumed that posture her red tresses eerily floated up over her head, while tiny gusts of wind sprang up from nowhere to play with the fur collar of her smock. A moment later the great, loosely hanging sails began to fill out. Behind us, far back across the death-strewn white waste, a hundred snow-devils grew up from the frozen ground to race toward us, lifting into the air and swirling themselves into nothingness.
And then the wind came, moaning in tune to the sudden groaning of the rigging and the creaking of straining timbers, and we were off with a lurch and a slither and a hissing of huge skis, riding the snow-ship of Northan the Warlord back to its berth in the base of the plateau. Gracefully the great ships slid into an arrowhead formation, and the wind Armandra had called blew us steadily away from the scene of the recent battle.
Â
Oh, there were sights to be seen and thrills to be experienced during that short, strange voyage, no doubt about that; but for meâI could not take my eyes off the figure of the not-quite-human woman-creature who stood so proudly in the prow with her hair floating weirdly over her head and her slender arms held up to feel the loving caress of currents of air. And I envied those gentle currents whose soft fingers caressed her. The othersâTracy, Whitey, and Jimmyâthey could watch the sailors of the snow-ship about their tasks, speculate on the origins of the many tongues they heard, thrill to the sway of the deck and the strange odors of men and beasts. For my eyes there was only Armandra.
After a while she must have felt my eyes upon her for she turned her head slightly in my direction. Can snow blush? I believe I saw the slightest tinge of red blossoming on her cheeks, or was it only the reflection of that red halo of hair she wore? Whichever it was, she immediately lifted her head higher and looked straight ahead, but I saw that now her great green eyes twinkled with something that had not been there before.
I was just wondering if I dared attempt to touch her telepathically, if that were at all possible, when suddenly, without looking at me, she said, “Why do you stare at me so?”
I was taken unawares. “Whyâbecauseâbecause you are a fascinating woman. You have strange powers,” I lamely answered.
“And is that all?” Still she stared straight ahead, but I sensed disappointment in her tone.
Encouraged, I told her, “No, that's not all. You are very beautiful. In my world women are seldom so beautiful.”
“In your world,” she dreamily answered. “In the Motherworld. And are they also fascinating, these women of the Motherworld?”
“Not like you.”
“Northan would whip you for your boldness. He would have Kota' na set his bears on you.” Her warning was offered in grave tones, but there was color in her cheeks.
“Is the fervor of Northan's loyalty really so great, or does he lay claim to you as a woman, Armandra?” Having uttered these words I could have bitten my tongue clean through. Her eyebrows lifted and her smile disappeared in a twinkling. She half-lowered her arms and tossed her head angrily, setting her red tresses in motion. Most of her humanity was gone in as much time as it takes to tell. She was now the Woman of the Winds again, a chill priestess of powers unknown.
“Am I a spear or axe or piece of fine fur that a man shall
claim
me?” her voice cracked as sharply as had Northan's whip. “Northan? He has hopes, the warlord, and he is a strong man and a brave warrior. But a claim? No man has any claim over Armandraâno man! What mere man could ever hope to hold me, when the winds themselves want me for their bride?”
Finally she turned to me, anger and frustration bubbling up from oceanic depths of eyes, flaming tresses alive upon her head. “I have promised my people that soon I will take a man, and it will be so. But no man claims Armandra. I will have a mate, yes; and bear his children as my duty to the plateau. But he will not be my lover on his terms, nor my âhusband' on any terms. His task may give him pleasure but it will only give me children. Children to walk the winds like their mother, and do mortal battle with their unutterable grandfather!”
Now she leaped upâor did she float?ânimbly to the rail of the prow, poising for a moment before diving headlong to breast the air, to spiral up, up to the skies, borne aloft in a cauldron of rushing wind that almost bowled me from my position. She disappeared over the rim of the now looming plateau.
As suddenly as she was gone Northan was at my side. He had plainly been close at hand, had seen the anger in Armandra's face. His own face was not so dark now; blue eyes glittered slyly as he said, “Perhaps I should have warned you, man of the Motherworld. Men do not speak to Armandra as they do to other women. She is no pretty toy but a princess of the gods.”
He turned as if to leave me, then looked back. “One other thing: when Armandra takes a mate it will be Northan the Warlord. Others want her, true, and they may challenge my right if they dare. Make
sure that
you
do not challenge it. You have yet to pay for shaming me today, in which you were exceedingly lucky, and though Armandra has forbidden it I would dearly love to crush you like a snowflake. Do not give me the opportunity.”