by C. L. Moore
He was the image. Save that he was of flesh and blood, life size, and the statue was of black stone and gigantic, there was no difference. The same harsh, arrogant, majestic face turned its grim smile upon Jirel. From under scowling black brows, eyes that glittered blackly with little red points of intolerable brilliance blazed down upon her. She could not meet that gaze. A short black beard outlined the harshness of his jaw, and through it the white flash of his smile dazzled her.
This much about the face penetrated even Jirel’s dazed amazement, and she caught her breath in a sudden gasp, sitting up straighter among her cushions and staring. The dark stranger’s eyes were eager upon the long, lithe lines of her upon the couch. Red sparkles quickened in their deeps, and his grin widened.
“Welcome,” he said, in a voice so deep and rich that involuntarily a little burr of answer rippled along Jirel’s nerves. “Welcome to the dark land of Romne.”
“Who brought me here?” Jirel found her voice at last. “And why?”
“I did it,” he told her. “I—Pav, king of Romne. Thank me for it, Jirel of Joiry. But for Pav you had lain among the worms tonight. It was out of your death-bed I took you, and no power but mine could have mended the pike-hole in your side or put back into you the blood you spilled on Triste battlefield. Thank me, Jirel!”
She looked at him levelly, her yellow eyes kindling a little in rising anger as she met the laughter in his.
“Tell me why you brought me here.”
At that he threw back his head and laughed hugely, a bull bellow of savage amusement that rang in deep echoes from the walls and beat upon her ears with the sound of organ notes. The room shook with his laughter; the little flames around the image’s head danced to it.
“To be my bride, Joiry!” he roared. “That look of defiance ill becomes you, Jirel! Blush, lady, before your bridegroom!”
THE blankness of the girl’s amazement was all that saved her for the moment from the upsurge of murderous fury which was beginning to seethe below the surface of her consciousness. She could only stare as he laughed down at her, enjoying to the full her mute amaze.
“Yes,” he said at last, “you have traveled too often in forbidden lands, Jirel of Joiry, to be ignored by us who live in them. And there is in you a hot and savage strength which no other woman in any land I know possesses. A force to match my own, Lady Jirel. None but you is fit to be my queen. So I have taken you for my own.”
Jirel gasped in a choke of fury and found her voice again.
“Hell-dwelling madman!” she spluttered. “Black beast out of nightmares! Let me waken from this crazy dream!”
“It is no dream,” he smiled infuriatingly. “As you died in Joiry Castle I seized you out of your bed and snatched your body and soul over the space-curve that parts this land from yours. You have awakened in your own dark kingdom, O Queen of Romne!” And he swept her an ironical salute, his teeth glittering in the darkness of his beard.
“By what right——” blazed Jirel.
“By a lover’s right,” he mocked her. “Is it not better to share Romne with me than to reign among the worms, my lady? For death was very near to you just now. I have saved your lovely flesh from a cold bed, Jirel, and kept your hot soul rooted there for you. Do I get no thanks for that?”
Yellow fury blazed in her eyes.
“The thanks of a sword-edge, if I had one,” she flared. “Do you think to take Joiry like some peasant wench to answer to your whims? I’m Joiry, man! You must be mad!”
“I’m Pav,” he answered her somberly, all mirth vanishing in a breath from his heavy voice. “I’m king of Romne and lord of all who dwell therein. For your savageness I chose you, but do not try me too far, Lady Jirel!”
She looked up into the swart, harsh face staring down on her, and quite suddenly the nearest thing she had ever known to fear of a human being came coldly over her; perhaps the fear that if any man alive could tame her fierceness, this man could. The red prickles had gone out of his eyes, and something in her shuddered a little from that black, unpupiled stare. She veiled the hawk-yellow of her own gaze and set her lips in a straight line.
“I shall call your servants,” said Pav heavily. “You must be clothed as befits a queen, and then I shall show you your land of Romne.”
She saw the black glare of his eyes flick sidewise as if in search, and in the instant that his gaze sought them there appeared about her in the empty air the most curious phenomenon she had ever seen. Queer, shimmering bluenesses swam shoulder-high all around her, blue and translucent like hot flames, and like flames their outlines flickered. She never saw them clearly, but their touch upon her was like the caress a flame might give if it bore no heat: swift, brushing, light.
All about her they seethed, moving too quickly for the eyes to follow; all over her the quick, flickering caresses ran. And she felt queerly exhausted as they moved, as if strength were somehow draining out of her while the blue flames danced. When their bewildering ministrations ceased the strange weariness abated too, and Jirel in blank surprize looked down at her own long, lovely body sheathed in the most exquisite velvet she had ever dreamed of. It was black as a starless night, softer than down, rich and lustrous as it molded her shining curves into sculptured beauty. There was a sensuous delight in the soft swirl of it around her feet as she moved, in the dark caress of it upon her flesh when motion stirred the silken surfaces against her skin. For an instant she was lost in pure feminine escstasy.
But that lasted only for an instant. Then she heard Pav’s deep voice saying, “Look!” and she lifted her eyes to a room whose outlines were melting away like smoke. The great image faded, the gleaming floor and the jagged, roofless walls turned translucent and misty, and through their melting surfaces mountains began to loom in the distance, dark trees and rough, uneven land. Before the echoes of Pav’s deeply vibrant “Look!” had shivered wholly into silence along her answering nerves, the room had vanished and they two stood alone in the midst of the dark land of Romne.
It was a dark land indeed. As far as she could see, the air swallowed up every trace of color, so that in somber grays and blacks the landscape stretched away under her eyes. But it had a curious clarity, too, in the dark, translucent air. She could see the distant mountains black and clear beyond the black trees. Beyond them, too, she caught a gleam of still black water, and under her feet the ground was black and rocky. And there was a curiously circumscribed air about the place. Somehow she felt closed in as she stared, for the horizon seemed nearer than it should be, and its dark circle bound the little world of grayness and blackness and clear, dark air into a closeness she could not account for.
She felt prisoned in and a little breathless, for all the wide country spreading so clearly, so darkly about her. Perhaps it was because even out at the far edge of the sky everything was as distinct in the transparent darkness of the air as the rocks at her very feet, so that there was no sense of distance here at all.
Yes, it was a dark land, and a strange land, forbidding, faintly nightmarish in the color-swallowing clarity of its air, the horizons too near and too clear in the narrowness of their circle.
“This,” said Pav beside her, in his nerve-tingling voice that sent unconquerable little shudders of answer along her resounding nerves, “this is your land of Romne, O Queen! A land wider than it looks, and one well befitted to your strength and loveliness, my Jirel. A strange land, too, by all earthly standards. Later you must learn how strange. The illusion of it——”
“Save your breath, King of Romne,” Jirel broke in upon his deep-voiced speech. “This is no land of mine, and holds no interest for me save in its way out. Show me the gate back into my own world, and I shall be content never to see Romne or you again.”
Pav’s big hand shot out and gripped her shoulder ungently. He swung her round in a swirl of velvet skirts and a toss of fire-colored hair, and his dark, bearded face was savage with anger. The little red dazzles danced in his unpupiled black eyes until she
could not focus her own hot yellow gaze upon them, and dropped her eyes from his in helpless fury.
“You are mine!” he told her in a voice so deep and low that her whole body tingled to its vibration. “I took you out of Joiry and your death-bed and the world you knew, and you are mine from this moment on. Strong you may be, but not so strong as I, Jirel of Joiry, and when I command, henceforth obey!”
BLIND with fury, Jirel ripped his hand away and fell back one step in a swirl of black skirts. She tossed her head up until the curls upon it leaped like flames, and the scorching anger in her voice licked up in matching flames, so hotly that her speech was broken and breathless as she choked in a half-whisper,
“Never touch me again, you black hell-dweller! Before God, you’d never have dared if you’d left me a knife to defend myself with! I swear I’ll tear the eyes out of your head if I feel the weight of your hand on me again! Yours, you filthy wizard? You’ll never have me—never, if I must die to escape you! By my name I swear it!”
She choked into silence, not for lack of words but because the mounting fury that seethed up in her throat drowned out all further sound. Her eyes were blazing yellow with scorching heat, and her fingers flexed like claws eager for blood.
The King of Romne grinned down at her, thumbs hooked in his belt and derision gleaming whitely in the whiteness of his smile. The little beard jutted along his jaw, and red lights were flickering in the fathomless darkness of his eyes.
“You think so, eh, Joiry!” he mocked her, deep-voiced. “See what I could do!”
He did not shift a muscle, but even through her blinding fury she was aware of a sudden altering in him, a new power and command. His red-gleaming eyes were hot upon hers, and with sick anger she realized anew that she could not sustain that gaze. There was something frightening in the unpupiled blackness of it, the blazing, unbearable strength that beat out from it in heavy command. It was a command all out of proportion to his moveless silence, a command that wrenched at her intolerably. She must obey—she must . . .
Suddenly a fresh wave of soul-scorching heat surged over her, blindingly, terribly, in such a burst that the whole dark land of Romne blazed into nothingness and she lost all grip upon reality. The rocky ground swirled sidewise and vanished. The dark world dissolved around her. She was not flesh and blood but a white-hot incandescence of pure rage. Through the furnace heat of it, as through a shimmer of flame, she saw the body that her own violence had wrenched her out of. It stood straight in its gown of velvety blackness, facing Pav’s unmoving figure defiantly. But as she watched, a weakening came over it. The stiffness went out of its poise, the high red head drooped. Helplessly she watched her own forsaken body moving forward step by reluctant step, as if the deserted flesh itself resented the subjection so forced upon it. She saw herself come to Pav’s feet. She saw her black-sheathed body bend submissively, ripple pliantly to its knees. In a stillness beyond any ultimate climax of incarnate fury, she saw herself abased before Pav, her head bowed, her body curving into lines of warm surrender at his feet.
And she was afraid. For from somewhere a power was beating of such intolerable magnitude that even the inferno of her fury was abashed before it. Her body’s obedience lost all significance in the rush of that terrible force. She would have thought that it radiated from Pav had it been possible for any human creature to sustain such an incredible force as that she was so fleetingly aware of.
For the briefest instant the knowledge of that power was all around her, terrifyingly, thunderously. It was too tremendous a thing to endure in her state of unbodied vulnerability. It scorched her like strong flame. And she was afraid—for Pav was the center of that inferno’s might, and he could be no human thing who radiated such an infinity of power. What was he? What could he be?
In that instant she was horribly afraid—soul-naked in the furnace blast of something too tremendous . . . too terrible . . .
Then the moment of separation ceased.
With a rush and a dazzle she was bade in her kneeling body, and the knowledge of that power faded from about her and the humiliation of her pose burned again hotly in her throat. Like a spring released she leaped to her feet, starting back and blazing into Pav’s smiling face so hotly that her whole body seemed incandescent with the rage that flooded back into it. That moment of terror was fuel to feed the blaze, for she was not naked now, not bodiless and undefended from the force she had so briefly sensed, and anger that she had been exposed to it, that she had felt terror of it, swelled with the fury of her abasement before Pav. She turned eyes like two pits of hell-blaze upon her tormenter. But before she could speak:
“I admit your power,” said Pav in a somewhat surprized voice. “I could conquer your body thus, but only by driving out the blaze that is yourself. I have never known before a mortal creature so compounded that my will could not conquer his. It proves you a fit mate for Pav of Romne. But though I could force you to my command, I shall not. I desire no woman against her will. You are a little human thing, Jirel, and your fullest strength against mine is like a candle in the sun—but in these last few minutes I have learned respect for you. Will you bargain with me?”
“I’d bargain sooner with the Devil,” she whispered hotly. “Will you let me go, or must I die to be free?”
Somberly he looked down at her. The smile had vanished from his bearded mouth, and a dark majesty was brooding upon the swarthy face turned down to hers. His eyes flashed red no longer. They were black with so deep a blackness that they seemed two holes of fathomless space—two windows into infinity. To look into them sent something in Jirel sick with sudden vertigo. Somehow, as she stared, her white-blazing fury cooled a little. Again she felt subtly that here was no human thing into whose eyes she gazed. A quiver of fright struggled up through her fading anger. At last he spoke.
“What I take I do not lightly give up. No, there is in you a heady violence that I desire, and will not surrender. But I do not wish you against your will.”
“Give me a chance then, at escape,” said Jirel. Her boiling anger had died almost wholly away under his somber, dizzying gaze, in the memory of that instant when inferno itself had seemed to beat upon her from the power of his command. But there had not abated in her by any fraction of lessening purpose the determination not to yield. Indeed, she was strengthened against him by the very knowledge of his more than human power—the thing which in her unbodied nakedness had burned like a furnace blast against the defenseless soul of her was terrible enough even in retrospect to steel all her resolution against surrender. She said in a steady voice,
“Let me seek through your land of Romne the gateway back into my own world. If I fail——”
“You cannot but fail. There is no gateway by which you could pass.”
“I am unarmed,” she said desperately, grasping at straws in her determination to find some excuse to leave him. “You have taken me helpless and weaponless into your power, and I shall not surrender. Not until you have shown yourself my master—and I do not think you can. Give me a weapon and let me prove that!”
Pav smiled down on her as a man smiles on a rebellious child.
“You have no idea what you ask,” he said. “I am not”—he hesitated—“perhaps not wholly as I seem to you. Your greatest skill could not prevail against me.”
“Then let me find a weapon!” Her voice trembled a little with the anxiety to be free of him, to find somehow an escape from the intolerable blackness of his eyes, the compulsion of his presence. For every moment that those terrible eyes beat so hotly upon her she felt her resistance weaken more, until she knew that if she did not leave him soon all strength would melt away in her and her body of its own will sink once more into surrender at his feet. To cover her terror she blustered, but her voice was thick. “Give me a weapon! There is no man alive who is not somehow vulnerable. I shall learn your weakness, Pav of Romne, and slay you with it. And if I fail—then take me.”
The smile faded slowly from Pav’s b
earded lips. He stood in silence, looking down at her, and the fathomless darkness of his eyes radiated power like heat in such insupportable strength that her own gaze fell before it and she stared down at her velvet skirt-hem on the rocks. At last he said,
“Go, then. If that will content you, seek some means to slay me. But when you fail, remember—you have promised to acknowledge me your lord.”
“If I fail!” Relief surged up in Jirel’s throat. “If I fail!”
He smiled again briefly, and then somehow all about his magnificent dark figure a swirl of rainbow dazzle was dancing. She stared, half afraid, half in awe, watching the tall, black tangibility of him melting easily into that multicolored whirling she had seen before, until nothing was left but the dazzling swirl that slowed and faded and dissipated upon the dark air—and she was alone.
She drew a deep breath as the last of the rainbow shimmer faded into nothing. It was a heavenly relief not to feel the unbearable power of him beating unceasingly against her resistance, not to keep tense to the breaking-point all the strength that was. in her. She turned away from the spot where he had vanished and scanned the dark land of Romne, telling herself resolutely that if she found no gateway, no weapon, then death itself must open the way out of Romne. There was about Pav’s terrible strength something that set the nerves of her humanity shuddering against it. In her moment of soul-nakedness she had sensed that too fully ever to surrender. The inferno of the thing that was Pav burning upon her unbodied consciousness had been the burning of something so alien that she knew with every instinct in her that she would die if she must, rather than submit. Pav’s body was the body of a man, but it was not—she sensed it intuitively—as a man alone that he desired her, and from surrender to the dark intensity of what lay beyond the flesh her whole soul shuddered away.
