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Updated: June 15, 2025
Credit will fail and, like their savage forefathers, men must once more take to barter to supply their needs as they do in Kaloon to-day." "Why not?" she asked. "It would be more simple and bring them closer to the time when they were good and knew not luxury and greed." "And smashed in each other's heads with stone axes," added Leo.
Put briefly, the substance of what I learned from him then and afterwards was as follows Trade was unknown to the people of Kaloon, for the reason that all communication with the south had been cut off for ages, the bridges that once existed over the chasm having been allowed to rot away.
The College of them was established by the conquerors, who subdued all the land. Or rather, it took the place of another College of those who fashioned the Sanctuary and the Temple, whose god was the fire in the Mountain, as it is that of the people of Kaloon to-day." "Then who is worshipped there now?"
Lo! all was past and gone, and above us shone the quiet evening sky, and before us lay the empty bridge, and beyond it the flaming city of Kaloon. But the armies of Atene, where were they? Go, ask of those great cairns that hide their bones. Go, ask it of her widowed land. Yet of our wild company of horsemen not one was lost.
"Fear not, Shaman, my wrath is past, yet be wise, mine enemy, and prophesy no more evil to the great. Come, let us hence." So, still led by Leo, she passed from that chamber and stood presently upon the apex of the soaring pillar. The sun was up now, flooding the Mountain flanks, the plains of Kaloon far beneath and the distant, misty peaks with a sheen of gold.
The Khania Atene also is mad with rage against thee and our holy College. Labouring night and day, she has gathered two great armies, one of forty, and one of twenty thousand men, and the latter of these she sends against the Mountain under the command of her uncle, Simbri the Shaman. In case it should be defeated she purposes to remain with the second and greater army on the plains about Kaloon."
It was evening, and Ayesha stood at my bedside. "All is prepared," she said. "Awake and ride with me." So we went, escorted by a thousand cavalry, for the rest stayed to occupy, or perchance to plunder, the land of Kaloon. In front the body of Leo was borne by relays of priests, and behind it rode the veiled Ayesha, I at her side. Strange was the contrast between this departure, and our arrival.
Know, O Ayesha, that I and my uncle, the great seer, have searched the heavenly books to learn what is written there of the issue of this war. "This is written: For me, death, whereat I rejoice. For thee a spear cast by thine own hand. For the land of Kaloon blood and ruin bred of thee! "Atene, "Khania of Kaloon." Ayesha listened in silence, but her lips did not tremble, nor her cheek pale.
"You must believe," she went on, "that I, who have ever hated men, that I I swear that it is true whose lips are purer than those mountain snows, I, the Khania of Kaloon, whom they name Heart-of-Ice, am but a shameless thing." And, covering her face with her hand, she moaned in the bitterness of her distress. "Nay," I said, "there may be reasons, explanations, if it pleases you to give them."
Now the white-draped corpse, the slow-pacing horses, the riders with their spears reversed, and on either side, seen in that melancholy moonlight, the women of Kaloon burying their innumerable dead. And Ayesha herself, yesterday a Valkyrie crested with the star of flame, to-day but a bereaved woman humbly following her husband to the tomb. Yet how they feared her!
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