“Harlot of Hell! What madness has your sorcery instilled in my brain?”
“No madness!” she laughed, striking his hand aside. “You have journeyed to the House of Arabu, and you have returned. You have spoken with and overcome with the sword of Apsu, the shade of a man dead for long centuries.”
“Then it was no dream of madness! But Naram-ninub—” he halted in confused thought. “Why, of all the men of Nippur, he has been my staunchest friend!”
“Friend?” she mocked. “What is friendship but a pleasant pretense to while away an idle hour?”
“But why, in Ymir’s name?”
“What are the petty intrigues of men to me?” she exclaimed angrily.
“Yet now I remember that men from Erech, wrapped in cloaks, steal by night to Naram-ninub’s palace.”
“Ymir!” Like a sudden blaze of light Pyrrhas saw reason in merciless clarity. “He would sell Nippur to Erech, and first he must put me out of the way, because the hosts of Nippur cannot stand before me! Oh, dog, let my knife find your heart!”
“Keep faith with me!” Lilitu’s importunities drowned his fury. “I have kept faith with you. I have led you where never living man has trod, and brought you forth unharmed. I have betrayed the dwellers in darkness and done that for which Tiamat will bind me naked on a white-hot grid for seven times seven days. Speak the words and free Ardat Lili!”
Still engrossed in Naram-ninub’s treachery, Pyrrhas spoke the incantation. With a loud sigh of relief, the were-man rose from the tiled floor and came into the moonlight. The Argive stood with his hand on his sword and his head bent, lost in moody thought. Lilitu’s eyes flashed a quick meaning to her mate. Lithely they began to steal toward the abstracted man. Some primitive instinct brought his head up with a jerk. They were closing in on him, their eyes burning in the moonlight, their fingers reaching for him. Instantly he realized his mistake; he had forgotten to make them swear truce with him; no oath bound them from his flesh.
With feline screeches they struck in, but quicker yet he bounded aside and raced toward the distant city. Too hotly eager for his blood to resort to sorcery, they gave chase. Fear winged his feet, but close behind him he heard the swift patter of their feet, their eager panting. A sudden drum of hoofs sounded in front of him, and bursting through a tattered grove of skeleton palms, he almost caromed against a rider, who rode like the wind, a long silvery glitter in his hand. With a startled oath the horseman wrenched his steed back on its haunches. Pyrrhas saw looming over him a powerful body in scale-mail, a pair of blazing eyes that glared at him from under a domed helmet, a short black beard.
“You dog!” he yelled furiously. “Damn you, have you come to complete with your sword what your black magic began?”
The steed reared wildly as he leaped at its head and caught its bridle. Cursing madly and fighting for balance, Naram-ninub slashed at his attacker’s head, but Pyrrhas parried the stroke and thrust upward murderously. The sword-point glanced from the corselet and plowed along the Semite’s jawbone. Naram-ninub screamed and fell from the plunging steed, spouting blood. His leg bone snapped as he pitched heavily to earth, and his cry was echoed by a gloating howl from the shadowed grove.
Without dragging the rearing horse to earth, Pyrrhas sprang to its back and wrenched it about. Naram-ninub was groaning and writhing on the ground, and as Pyrrhas looked, two shadows darted from the darkened grove and fastened themselves on his prostrate form. A terrible scream burst from his lips, echoed by more awful laughter. Blood on the night air; on it the night-things would feed, wild as mad dogs, making no difference between men.
The Argive wheeled away, toward the city, then hesitated, shaken by a fierce revulsion. The level land lay quiescent beneath the moon, and the brutish pyramid of Enlil stood up in the stars. Behind him lay his enemy, glutting the fangs of the horrors he himself had called up from the Pits. The road was open to Nippur, for his return. His return?—to a devil-ridden people crawling beneath the heels of priest and king; to a city rotten with intrigue and obscene mysteries; to an alien race that mistrusted him, and a mistress that hated him.
Wheeling his horse again, he rode westward toward the open lands, flinging his arms wide in a gesture of renunciation and the exultation of freedom. The weariness of life dropped from him like a cloak. His mane floated in the wind, and over the plains of Shumir shouted a sound they had never heard before—the gusty, elemental, reasonless laughter of a free barbarian.
BUT THE HILLS WERE ANCIENT THEN
Weird Tales, June 1936
Now is a summer come out of the sea,
And the hills that were bare are green.
They shower the petals and the bee
On the valleys that laze between.
~
So it was in the dreaming past,
And life is a shifting maze,
Summer on summer fading fast,
In a mist of yesterdays.
~
Out of the East, the tang of smoke,
The flight of a startled deer,
A ringing axe the silence broke,
The tread of the pioneer.
~
Saxon eyes in a weathered face,
Cabins where trees had been,
Hard on the heels of a fading race,
But the hills were ancient then.
~
Up from the South a haze of dust,
The pack mules’ steady pace,
Armor tarnished and red with rust,
Stern eyes in a sun-bronzed face.
~
The mesquite mocked the flag of Spain,
That the wind flung out again,
The grass bent under the pack mule train—
But the hills were ancient then.
THE ONE BLACK STAIN
(Sir Thomas Doughty, executed at St. Julian’s Bay, 1578)
Red Shadows (1968)
They carried him out on the barren sand where the rebel captains died;
Where the grim grey rotting gibbets stand as Magellan reared them on the strand,
And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land wail to the lonely tide.
~
Drake faced them all like a lion at bay, with his lion head upflung:
“Dare ye my word of law defy, to say this traitor shall not die?”
And his captains dared not meet his eye but each man held his tongue.
Solomon Kane stood forth alone, grim man of sober face:
“Worthy of death he may well be, but the trial ye held was mockery,
“Ye hid your spite in a travesty where justice hid her face.
~
“More of the man had ye been, on deck your sword to cleanly draw
“In forthright fury from its sheath and openly cleave him to the teeth—
“Rather than slink and hide beneath a hollow word of Law.”
~
Hell rose in the eyes of Francis Drake. “Puritan knave!” swore he,
“Headsman! Give him the axe instead! HE shall strike off yon traitor’s head!”
Solomon folded his arms and said, darkly and somberly:
~
“I am no slave for your butcher’s work.” “Bind him with triple strands!”
Drake roared in wrath and the men obeyed, hesitantly, as men afraid,
But Kane moved not as they took his blade and pinioned his iron hands.
~
They bent the doomed man to his knees, the man who was to die;
They saw his lips in a strange smile bend; one last long look they saw him send
At Drake, his judge and his one-time friend, who dared not meet his eye.
~
The axe flashed silver in the sun, a red arch slashed the sand;
A voice cried out as the head fell clear, and the watchers flinched in sudden fear,
Though ’twas but a sea bird wheeling near above the lonely strand.
~“This be every traitor’s end!” Drake cried, and yet again;
; Slowly his captains turned and went, and the admiral’s stare was elsewhere bent
Than where the cold scorn with anger blent in the eyes of Solomon Kane.
~
Night fell on the crawling waves; the admiral’s door was closed;
Solomon lay in the stenching hold; his irons clashed as the ship rolled,
And his guard, grown weary and overbold, lay down his pipe and dozed.
~
He woke with a hand at his corded throat that gripped him like a vise;
Trembling he yielded up the key, and the somber Puritan stood up free,
His cold eyes gleaming murderously with the wrath that is slow to rise.
~
Unseen to the admiral’s cabin door went Solomon from the guard,
Through the night and silence of the ship, the guard’s keen dagger in his grip;
No man of the dull crew saw him slip through the door unbarred.
~
Drake at the table sat alone, his face sunk in his hands;
He looked up, as from sleeping—but his eyes were blank with weeping
As if he saw not, creeping, Death’s swiftly flowing sands.
~
He reached no hand for gun or blade to halt the hand of Kane,
Nor even seemed to hear or see, lost in black mists of memory,
Love turned to hate and treachery, and bitter, cankering pain.
~
A moment Solomon Kane stood there, the dagger poised before,
As a condor stoops above a bird, and Francis Drake spoke not nor stirred,
And Kane went forth without a word and closed the cabin door.
A Thunder of Trumpets Page 24
