The conspirators came from every direction.
The marg each traveled converged at the great kingsroad of Madhya Desha, where all roads united. With their entourages, they were the size of a small army and could have been mistaken for an invading force. Their demeanor was grim enough, but after further observation, it was evident that they were here on a cooperative venture, not at loggerheads.
As they joined together and proceeded farther north, approaching the jagged rises of the mountain ranges, the marg they now traveled dwindled to a path and, before long, was nothing more than a fading scar across the stony face of the land. Nothing grew easily here, except small game and predators. There were shapes moving in the gathering shadows as dusk fell, and a peculiar odor in the air. On the tiny scratch of a path, the company trundled along together until even that unwelcoming trail dwindled away to terrain dotted with rocks large enough to break the hooves of any carriage horse. A ridge rose steeply from this point, cutting off the view of the mountains that lay beyond.
The irritated travelers dismounted and then debated how best to proceed. Their awkward pleasantries were interrupted by a piercing whistle from above. Several of them reached for their weapons. They were foreigners here, after all, and the mountain folk were notorious for their lack of love for outlanders.
A wizened old woman looked down on them from the peak of the ridge.
She leaped down from her perch, hopping and skipping as easily as if she were playing a child’s game, all the thirty yards down to where the company stood.
Landing with a broken-toothed smile, she rattled off a stream of words in the mountain tongue. A few of the travelers understood enough to translate for the others. But it was hardly necessary to know the language to understand her message: she was to be their guide; they were to follow her.
She instructed them to leave their valets and accompanying guards and, without waiting to see if they had heeded her instructions, disappeared behind a cluster of large boulders nearby, reappearing shortly after with a pack of ugly-faced mules with too-large ears. She handed each traveler the reins of a mule.
The travelers looked at one another, then at the flea-bitten, ragged-eared creatures with open repulsion.
“We are royalty,” one of them pointed out haughtily. “We expect royal treatment.”
Their guide looked up at him—she was short enough that the withers of the shortest mount reached as high as the top of her grey head—and chattered a comment in her tongue.
The two or three travelers who knew the language sniggered or laughed in response.
“What did she say?” demanded the pompous one.
“To put it in more polite words: she said you could park your royal ass upon a mule and follow her or you could bugger it royally for all she cared.”
The pompous one glared but said nothing further.
There was much grumbling and some cursing from the others as well; the indignity of riding a mule was something few of them had suffered until now. But their own selectmen and valets advised them that it was in their own best interest to endure this minor indignity. These mountains were notorious for claiming more lives than any enemy they had faced in battle. The mules were the only way to navigate the harsh and dangerous pathway to their destination.
The cursing and grumbling continued. But the wizened old guide led the way and the company followed, their royal asses mounted uncomfortably on the ugly mules. The woman cackled in her own tongue that it was hard to tell which were the bigger asses, the ones riding or the ones being ridden! The pompous one stared at the others who knew what she meant, but they stifled their laughter and did not translate.
As the path wound steeper, the ridge grew more brittle, and the chance of falling more likely. Even the protests died out. It is a peculiarity of mortals that only when confronted by their mortality do they realize life’s value. After a few hours of teetering over sheer falls, the only sound on that knife-edge pathway was the chuffing of the mules.
Apparently unconcerned with the mortals astride them, the mules would deign to pause wherever the fancy took them, here to chew on a tiny patch of weeds, there to fart noisily and violently, or a few yards farther, to defecate the well-digested remains of an earlier meal, without any consideration for the royal noses and constitutions being assaulted by these frequent bodily purges.
The wizened guide glanced back from time to time, and chuckled at the discomfort of her unlikely followers. Occasionally, she would pause to stroll back, walking as easily on an inch of dubious ridge as a royal carriage rolling by on the kingsroad of Hastinaga. The travelers could hardly bear to look at her as she went past, swinging out over a sheer drop without a downward glance.
A touch of a saddle here, a stirrup there, a twitching tail further on, and she was by, handing out savories suitable only for mule constitutions. The animals made gleeful chuffing noises at each of these feed stops, and the travelers grew accustomed to a marked increase in the passing of wind and feces for the hour or so following this ritual. The woman winked at the pompous one as she went by, slapping his mule’s backside affectionately. The creature chuffed happily in response; the pompous traveler remained as stony-faced as the cliff beside him, not with his customary arrogance but with stone-cold fear. He had discovered in the course of the journey that he was terrified of heights, but his royal pride prevented him from admitting it. And even if he had confessed, surely he would not relish the thought of turning around and going back the way he had climbed, alone.
The guide fed with the mules, chewing at regular intervals on the odd-looking (and odder-smelling) contents of her hemp sack. She did not offer a share of her repast to her followers, nor did any ask for it. Accustomed to their every need being met the very instant such a need arose, none had thought to bring any nourishment for the journey.
By the midway point in their trek, around the time the sun began declining on the late afternoon of the first day, the grumbling and whinging had ceased altogether.
Now only the mules spoke. Chuffing, breaking wind, doing what they did routinely. The mortals mounted on their back endured silently.
There was absolutely no doubt who was in command.
Viewed from a great height, as by one of the floating silhouettes high in the sky above the snowcapped peaks, the procession appeared as nothing more than a worm wriggling its way up the mountain. It proceeded with agonizing slowness, reminding the travelers at every curve in the narrow pathway why the Mountain Kingdoms had never been successfully invaded by any mortal army.
The pathway was barely narrow enough for a large man to stand facing forward—and only just sufficient for the mules to remain afoot with all four hooves pressed close together—there was no room for privacy or modesty. Though the royals protested even more vociferously, they all ended up relieving themselves in like fashion. If you wished to survive the mountain, dignity was an unaffordable luxury, no matter who you might be. They rested on their mounts too, sitting on those high, windy, bone-chilling mountain path ridges, one misstep away from permanent sleep. Most were barely able to doze more than a few moments at a time; for all, it was a harrowing night.
By dawn of the second day, they were almost as indifferent about falling as about reaching their destination: they just wanted this nightmare on hooves to end.
It was with a great sense of relief that they came into sight of their destination.
The late morning sun illuminated it as they rounded yet another curve, all but hugging the mountainside with fingernails to aid their mounts, some of whom, at long last, now displayed signs of tiring. With bleary, sleep-deprived—yet irritably curious—eyes, they gazed, finally, upon the place that they had endured such hardship to reach.
The remote, desolate, snowcapped, stony peaks of a place so rarely visited and perpetually feared by all who had heard tell of its terrors, that none dared but whisper of it in the dark watches of the coldest winter nights.
Darkfortress.
The mountain fortress bore the ravages of a recent siege and assault. Toppled towers, demolished ramparts, great gouges and pits in the sides of the stony slopes themselves, all marked the terrible conflict that had been waged here not long before.
Yet despite these ravages, the keep was still magnificent. A haunted capital city of a kingdom of mountain fortresses ranging for hundreds of miles in an interweaving maze of stone and rock and black ice. Its rugged rough-hewn beauty, carved from the very rock of the mountain with chiseled artistry, was an achievement to be admired. All of the travelers had heard of the great city. None had had the pleasure, dubious though it might seem at this moment, of having visited. Its very remoteness and inaccessibility was its strength. But what none of them had expected was its extraordinary beauty. Beauty of a piece with the mountains that it stood astride. Not a thing made by mortals that had been set upon this landscape, but a thing drawn by mortals, inch by painfully carved inch, out of the landscape itself. It was organic to the mountain, as much a part of it as these mules were to these impossibly narrow pathways. That was its true beauty.
There were fewer abuses and insults voiced during the remainder of the journey. As each hooved step took them closer to that vaulting masterpiece of stonecraft, their thoughts turned finally from the discomforts that had plagued them the past day and a half, and toward the invitation that had summoned them here.
When the visitors finally reached the sloping paved approach to the gate of Darkfortress, they heaved a sigh of relief. Some had traveled for the better part of a fortnight to reach this remote keep. Even the closest had been on the road for several days. And then the tortuous path up the mountain on the backs of the mules, to whom their rear ends now felt wedded after all these painful hours.
All swore a silent vow they would never visit this wretched place again. Some swore not-so-silently, not caring if they offended their hosts. The king of Darkfortress was just a mountain lord, after all. Not true royalty like themselves. None of the Houses they represented would ever think of making a marital alliance with him or his family.
Their guide hand-fed savories to the relieved mules and cackled merrily, shaking her head as she led them beneath the giant draw-gate. One of the travelers was so large that the instant he dismounted, his mule teetered for a moment, then fell over on its left side. The guide bent over it, fussing briefly. But the unfortunate creature was dead, its heart burst from exhaustion. The old woman remained crouched, her cackling giving way to a single silent moan. The pompous one passed her by, grinning down at her and the dead beast as he trundled past heavily. He said something to her that only she heard. Whether or not she understood his words, she did not look up immediately, but after he had gone by, she looked in the direction he had gone, and had her gaze been lethal, the pompous one would have dropped dead as suddenly as the mule.
Barely had the last of the company passed through when the gate slammed down with a boom that echoed across the mountains.