The Hero And The Crown
Part Two Chapter 23

AFTER THAT THE DAY belonged to the Damarians, for between the White Rider and the Scarlet there was no hope for the Northerners. But it was nonetheless a long and bitter day for the victors, and they lost many more of their people before it was over, including many simple folk who had never held weapons in their lives before, but who preferred the deadly risk of the battlefield to the terrible passive waiting to hear the final news. The Northerners, too, were slow to acknowledge defeat, even after they knew there was no chance left of their winning. In this war no captives were taken, for a captive demon is a danger to his jailer. It was not till evening drew near, and Talat was limping heavily with weariness, and Aerin held on to her saddle with her shieldless hand, that the remaining Damarians began to be able to gather at the foot of the king's way before the City gates, and lay down their arms, and think about rest. The Northerners were fleeing at last, fleeing as best they might, on three legs, or four, or five; some crawled. What Damarians had yet the strength pursued the slowest and gave them the last blow of mercy, but as darkness fell they left their treacherous enemies to the shadows, and crowded around the fire that had been built near the last standing monolith.
There was little rejoicing, for all were weary, bone-weary, death-weary; and they had had so little hope that morning that now in the evening they had not yet truly begun to believe they had won after all. And there were the wounded to attend to; and all those still left on their legs helped, for there were few enough of them. Many of them were children, for even the healers had taken sword or knife by the end and gone into battle. But the youngest children could at least carry bandages, and collect sticks for the fire, and carry small skins of water to fill the great pot hung over the fire; and as there was no child who had not lost a father or mother or elder brother or sister, the work was the best comfort the weary remaining Damarians could give them.
Aerin and Tor were among those still whole, and they helped as they could. No one noticed particularly at the time, but later it was remembered that most of those who had felt the hands of the first sol, her blue sword still hanging at her side, or of the first sola, the Hero's Crown still set over his forehead, its dull grey still shadowed with red, recovered, however grave their wounds. At the time all those fortunate enough to feel those hands noticed was that their touch brought unexpected surcease of pain; and at the time that was all any could think of or appreciate.
Perlith had died on the battlefield. He had led his company of cavalry tirelessly through the last endless weeks, and his men had followed him loyally, with respect if not with love; for they trusted his coolness in battle, and learned to trust his courage; and because even as he grew worn and haggard as the siege progressed, his tongue never lost its cleverness or its cutting edge. He died on the very last day, having come unscathed so far, and his horse came back without him after darkness had fallen, and the saddle still on its back was bloody.
Galanna was holding a bowl of water for a healer when Perlith's horse came back, and someone whispered the news to her where she knelt. She looked up at the messenger, who was too weary himself to have any gentleness left for the breaking of bad news, and said only, "Thank you for telling me." She lowered her eyes to the pink-tinted water again and did not move. The healer, who had known her well in better days, looked at her anxiously, but she showed no sign of distress or of temper; and the healer too was weary beyond gentleness, and thought no more about it. Galanna was conscious that her hair needed washing, that her gown was torn and soiled - that her hands would be trembling were it not for the weight of the bowl she carried; that someone had just told her that Perlith was dead, that his horse had returned with a blood-stained saddle. She tried to think about this, but her mind would revert to her hair, for her scalp itched; and then she thought, I will not see my husband again, it does not matter if my hair is clean or not. I do not care if my hair is ever clean again. And she stared dry-eyed into the bowl she held.
But the second sola was not the worst of their losses. Kethtaz had fallen in battle too, and everyone had lost sight of Arlbeth for a time - just at the time when Aerin and Tor met and Aerin forced the Hero's Crown over Tor's head. They two looked for him anxiously, and it was Aerin who found him, fighting on foot, a long grim wound in his thigh, so that he could not move around much, but could only meet those who came to him. But his sword arm rose and fell as though it were a machine that knew no pain or weariness.
"Up behind me," said Aerin; "I will carry you back to the gates, and they will find you another horse"; but Arlbeth shook his head. "Come," Aerin said feverishly.
"I cannot," said Arlbeth, and turned that his daughter might see the blood that matted his tunic and breeches to his right leg. "I cannot scramble up behind you with only one leg - in your saddle without stirrups."
"Gods," said Aerin, and flung herself out of the saddle, and knelt down before her father. "Get up, then." Arlbeth, with horrible slowness, clambered to Aerin's shoulders, while she bit her lips over the clumsy cruel weight of him, and while her folstza and yerig kept a little space cleared around the three of them, and he got into Talat's saddle, and slumped forward on his old horse's neck.
"Gods," said Aerin again, and her voice broke. "Well, go on, then," she said to Talat; "take him home." But Talat only stood, and looked bewildered, and shivered; and she thumped him on the flank with her closed fist. "Go on! How long can they hold them off for us? Go!" But Talat only swerved away from her and came back, and would not leave, and Arlbeth sank lower and lower across his withers.
"Help me," whispered Aerin, but there was no one to hear; Tor and the rest of them were hard pressed and too far away; and so she raised Gonturan again, and ran forward on foot, and speared the first Northerner she found beyond the little ring of wild dog and cat; and Talat followed her, humbly carrying his burden and keeping close on his lady's heels. And so they brought Arlbeth to the gates of his City, and two old men too crippled to fight helped his daughter pull him down from Talat's saddle. He seemed to come a little awake then, and he smiled at Aerin.
"Can you walk a little?" she said, the tears pouring down her face. "A little," he whispered, and she pulled his arm around her shoulders, and staggered off with him; and the two old men stumbled on before her, and shouted for blankets, and three children came from the shadows, and looked at their bloody king and his daughter with wide panicky eyes. But they brought blankets and cloaks, and Arlbeth was laid down on them by the shadow of one of the fallen monoliths at his City's gates.
"Go on," murmured Arlbeth. "There's no good you can do me." But Aerin stayed by him, weeping, and held his hands in her own; and from her touch a little warmth strayed into the king's cold hands, and the warmth penetrated to his brain. He opened his eyes a little wider. He muttered something she could not hear, and as she bent lower over him he jerked his hands out of hers and said, "Don't waste it on me; I'm too old and too tired. Save Damar for yourself and for Tor. Save Damar." His eyes closed, and Aerin cried, "Father! Father - I brought the Crown back with me." Arlbeth smiled a little, she thought, but did not open his eyes again.
Aerin stood up and ran downhill to where Talat waited, and scrambled onto him and surged back into the battle, and the battle heat took her over at last, and she need think no more, but was become only an extension of a blue sword that she held in her hand; and so she went on, till the battle was over.
Arlbeth was dead when she returned to him. Tor was there already, crouched down beside him, tear marks making muddy stains on his face. And there, facing each other over the king's body, they talked a little, for the first time since Aerin had ridden off in the night to seek Luthe, and her life.
"We've been besieged barely a month," Tor said; "but it seems centuries. But we've been fighting - always retreating, always coming back to the City, riding out again less far; always bringing a few more survivors from more burnt-out villages here for shelter - always fighting, for almost a year. It began ... shortly after you left."
Aerin shivered.
Tor said, and he sounded bewildered, "Even so, it has not been so very long; wars have lasted years, generations. But this time, somehow, we felt defeated before we began. Always we were weary and discouraged; we never rode out in hope that we could see victory." He paused a minute, and stared down at the shadowed peaceful face of their king. "It's actually been a bit better these last weeks; perhaps we only adjusted finally to despair."
Later they spoke in snatches as they tended their horses and helped elsewhere as they could. Aerin, numb with shock and sorrow, did not think of her father's last words to her, and did not think there might be special healing in her hands, or in the hands of him who wore the Hero's Crown; for that was something else that Luthe had forgotten to teach her. And so she went merely where there was a cry for an extra pair of hands. But somehow she and Tor managed to stay near each other, and the presence of the other was to each a comfort.
Aerin thought of a black tower falling as she tucked blankets, of the Hero's Crown no longer on the head of one who worked to do Damar evil as she pinned bandages; and as she crouched for a moment near the great campfire that threw wild shadows on the walls of her City, she thought of words spoken by another fire: How could anyone be so stupid as to bring back the Black Dragon's head as a trophy and hang it on a wall for folk to gape at?
Abruptly she turned to Tor and said; "Where is Maur's head?"
Tor stared at her; he was dazed with grief and exhaustion even as she was, and he could not think who Maur was.
"Before I left, I asked that Maur's head be put somewhere that I need not look at it. Do you know where it was taken?" There was urgency in her question, suddenly, although she herself did not know why; but the urgency penetrated the fog in Tor's mind.
"In - in the treasure hall, I believe," Tor said uncertainly. "I'm not sure."
Aerin reeled to her feet, and a plush-furred black head was at once beneath her hand, propping her up. "I must go there."
"Now?" Tor said unhappily, looking around. "Then I'll go too .... We'll have to walk; there isn't a fresh horse in all the City."
It was a brutally long walk, almost all uphill, for the king's castle stood at the City's peak, a lower Hat-topped shoulder within the encircling mountains. Several of Aerin's army came with them, and the tallest ones silently supported Tor, and he wonderingly stroked the heads and backs he found beneath his fingers. "A long story you have to tell me," Tor said; it was not a question.
Aerin smiled as much of a smile as her weariness allowed. "A very long story." She was much too tired to weep any more, but she sighed, and perhaps Tor heard something in that sigh, for he edged a yerig out of the way and put an arm around her, and they toiled up together, leaning on each other.
The castle was deserted. Tomorrow many of the sick and wounded would be brought here; for this night they would stay by the fire at the foot of the king's way, for even the hale and whole had no strength left, and there had been no one in the City during the last days' fighting; all had been below, doing what they could.
Tor found candles, and by some wonder he still carried his flint. The castle was eerie in its silence and solitude and darkness; and Aerin's tiredness drew little dancing designs at the corners of her sight and pulled the shadows closer in around the candlelight. She found she had to follow Tor blindly; she had spent almost her whole life in these halls, and yet in but a few months she had forgotten her way through them; and then horribly she remembered climbing centuries of stairs in a darkness very like this, and she shivered violently, and her breath hissed through her teeth. Tor glanced at her and held out his free hand, and she took it gratefully for she had been all alone on those other stairs.
"Here we are, I believe," Tor said. She dropped his hand so that he could attend to the lock, one of the small magics she had never been able to learn. He muttered a moment, touched the door in five places, and the door slid open.
A blast of grief, of the deaths of children, of crippling diseases that took beauty at once but withheld death; of unconsummated love; of love lost or twisted and grown to hate; of noble deeds that proved useless, that broke the hearts of their doers; of betrayal without reason, of guilt without penance, of all the human miseries that have ever occurred; all this struck them, like the breath of a slaughterhouse, or the blow of a murderer. Tor fell to his knees and covered his face with his hands, and the beasts cringed back, moaning. Aerin put out her hand, leaned against the doorframe; just this she had feared, had half expected; yet the reality was much worse than what her tired mind had been able to prepare her for.
Greetings, said Maur's head. I did not think to have the pleasure of seeing you again.
It is you, responded Aerin. She opened her mouth to gasp, and despair rushed in, bitter as aloes. Tears filled her eyes, but she pushed herself away from the threshold and bent slowly and carefully to pick up the candle Tor had set down before he opened the door. She shook her head to clear her vision, held the candle aloft, and stepped inside the high vaulted room, despite the silent keening of the air. I know despair, she said. There is nothing more that you can show me.
Oh?
The keening changed tone and madness edged it, drifted across her skin, fluttered in her hair like bats' wings; she ducked, and the candle guttered and almost went out. Maur laughed. She remembered that silent hollow laugh.
Angry, she said: Nothing!
"Aerin," a voice said hoarsely behind her: Tor. "Light my way - I cannot - see you." The words dragged out of him as he dragged himself to his feet. "This - is why - we've been - so - tired - all along."
"Yes." The sibilant hissed in the silence like adders' tongues, but Aerin's anger made a small clear space around her, and her beasts crept to her feet and breathed it gratefully, and Tor staggered to her like a man crossing a narrow bridge to freedom, and put an arm around her again, but this time it was for his own comfort.
"Tor," she said calmly, "we must get rid of Maur's head. Get it out of the City."
Tor shook his head slowly; not in refusal but confusion. "How? It is too huge; we cannot lift it. We must wait ...."
Wait, snickered Maur's head.
"No." Aerin looked around wildly. The reek of despair stilt tingled in her nostrils and in her brain, and her anger was ebbing. She had to think. How?
"We can roll it," she said at last. "It's roundish. We can roll it downstairs, and then downhill - out of the City gates." She thrust the candle at him. "Hold this."
She walked purposefully up to the low platform where Maur's skull lay; the shadows in the eye sockets glinted. Her beasts came after her, clinging to her shadow; and Tor came behind them, just clear-headed enough to hold the light high, and to watch Aerin.
She set her shoulder in one of the ridged hollows at the base of the skull and heaved. Nothing happened but that Maur laughed louder; its laughter crashed in her head like thunder, and her vision was stained red. Then Tor found a niche for the candle and came to help her; they heaved, and heaved again, and barely the massive skull rocked on its base. Then her beasts came, and clawed at the thing, and chipped their teeth on it; their lady's anger and their own fear gave them a wild frenzy, and the skull shuddered where it lay, but they could stir it no further, and Aerin cried at last, "Peace!" and laid her hands on her loyal friends. They calmed under her touch, but they panted where they sat, even the cats, the curved white fangs glinting in the dim light. The candle was burning low.
"It's no use," said Tor heavily. He was still leaning against the skull, pressed up against it as if he loved the touch of it; Aerin grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him away, and he staggered. He blinked at her, and a little more of Tor crept back into his eyes, and he almost smiled, and with his sleeve he rubbed his face where it had lain against the skull.
Are you finished yet? inquired Maur's head.
No, said Aerin fiercely.
I'm glad. This is the finest amusement I've had since you fled the banqueting-hall. Thank you for opening the door, by the way. Your folk by the City gates should taste me quite clearly by now.
You shall not bully me again! Aerin said, and, almost not knowing what she did, pulled Gonturan free of her scabbard and slapped the flat of her across the base of Maur's head where once the backbone had joined. Blue fire leaped up in sharp tongues that lit the entire vault, with its many shelves and cupboards and niches, and doors into further strongrooms. It was a ghostly unhealthy color, but the skull shrieked, and there was a crack like a mountain splitting, and the skull fell off its pedestal to the floor.
Aerin hurled herself at it as it was still moving, and grudgingly it rolled another half turn; but as it fell, the thickness of the despair pressing around them weakened suddenly, and with something like hope again Tor and the beasts shoved too, each as they could; and it moved another half circumference. The moon was high by the time they reached the courtyard, for they could not take the most direct way - the size of the skull precluded all but the widest corridors. The night wind was cold, for they were sweating hard with their labor; and the moon became two moons as Aerin's tired eyes refused to focus. Tor had found rope, and they had tried to drag the thing, but that had worked even less well than rolling it, so they went back to the rolling. It was not nearly round, and it progressed in lumbering half-circle flops, and each flop jarred Tor's and Aerin's muscles painfully; and they had been painfully tired before they began.
"We must rest," murmured Tor.
"Food, "said Aerin.
Tor roused himself. "Bring some. Wait."
The slightly moldy dry bread and more than slightly moldy dry cheese he found gave them more strength than they would have thought possible. "Second wind," said Tor, standing up and stretching slowly till his spine cracked.
"Fourth or fifth wind," said Aerin grimly, feeding the end of her cheese to her beasts; "and the strength of panic."
"Yes," said Tor, and they put their shoulders to the work again, the grim echoes of bone against rock ringing terribly in the dark empty City. Depression still gnawed at them, but in a curious way their weariness worked to their advantage, for depression often went with weariness, and so they could ignore the one as a simple unfearsome result of the other. Maur had lost its ascendance once Gonturan had struck it, and while the skull still stank, it seemed almost an organic stench now, under the open sky; no more than the faint rotting smell of ancient carrion.
It was a little easier once they reached the king's way; each heave grew a little less, the fall-over a little hastier, and the crash a little more forceful. Then it began almost to roll; for each circle it lurched seriously twice, but it did not quite come to a complete halt each time; Tor and Aerin needed only to push with their hands. Both Aerin's shoulders were raw beneath her tunic, and there was a long shallow cut along her jaw where one of the dragon's ear spines had caught her briefly; and the old cut on her palm from Gonturan's edge throbbed dimly.
Then, just above the City gates, the vast head broke away from them. It was not merely the incline, which was little greater now than it had been down most of the slope behind them; it was Maur's final moment, and Aerin heard its last scream of gleeful malevolence as it plunged down the road.
"Scatter!" shouted Aerin, just as Tor' bellowed, "'Ware!"
The folk before the gates had indeed smelled Maur's foul miasma after the door of the treasure house was opened, and most of them lay or crouched wherever they had been when that dreadful wind had first blown over them. It had lifted a little since, but the days past had been too much, and once undiluted despair had touched them they found it hard to shake themselves free. They shifted a little now, at the voices, and the desperate urgency in them, and looked up.
The fire had burned down, for no one had had the strength of purpose to feed it since the treasure-house door opened. Maur's skull struck the fire's center, and the still smoldering branches flew in all directions, and the embers splashed like water; and while a few people cried out with sudden pain, there was too little fire to do much harm. The skull crashed into one of the fallen monoliths, which shattered, and then the black skull disappeared into the night, and there was a rumbling and an echo, like an avalanche, and the people, shaken out of their lethargy, looked around fearfully and wondered which way to run; but no mountains fell. The rumbling grew louder, till people put their hands over their ears, and Aerin and Tor knelt down in the roadway with their arms around each other. The rumbling became a roar, and then there was a sudden storm of wind from the battlefield, laden with the smell of death; but the death smell passed them and in its place came a hot, dry, harsh smell like nothing the green Hills of eastern Damar had ever known; but Tor raised his head from Aerin's shoulder and said, "Desert. That's the smell of the western desert." And on the wind were small gritty particles, like sand.
Then the wind died, and the people murmured to one another; but though there was a half moon it shed no light through the thick shadows that hung over the battlefield. They built up the fire again, but not very large, for no one wanted to venture far to look for fuel; and they tended to each other's burns, which all proved slight; and rounded up the horses again, who had been too tired to run far, even in terror.
Aerin and Tor stood up slowly and came into the firelight, and the rest of Aerin's beasts came joyfully up to greet them,  those that were still alive, for many of them had not left the battlefield. She blinked up at Tor for a moment and said: "What have you done with the Crown?"
Tor looked blank, then sheepish. "I left it in the treasure hall. Not such a bad place for it; it will be spending most of its time there anyway."
Aerin felt a curious tickling sensation at the back of her throat. When she opened her mouth she discovered it was a laugh.