by Brian Lumley
He moaned again, tried to sit up, again opened his eyes — but kept them half-shuttered. She helped him, propped him up, said, 'How did… how did he die? My father, Dezmir Babeni. He was the short one, bearded, laughing.'
Shaitan avoided the question. 'I didn't see it all,' he answered. 'I only heard their cries, and went to help. But… your father?' And glancing around the caravan, as if noticing his whereabouts for the first time: 'Where am I?' His question was so innocent, childlike.
She sat on the edge of his bed and told him everything he desired to know. About the Szgany Hagi, the Szgany in general, herself, her situation — everything. And as his eyes opened more fully (but oh so slowly, so gradually), so Maria's small feelings of anxiety retreated, her ill-formed suspicions fell away, her will was subverted.
His voice was so low — like the rumble of a great cat, deceptively gentle but full of a fierce energy — and fluent despite its as yet alien use of her tongue. And behind every word a hint, a suggestion, an enticement. Shaitan beguiled, entranced, seduced; of course, for he was the great seducer. He seduced with his eyes, his tongue, the lure of his magnet personality, so unlike anything Maria had ever known before. And despite his strangeness, and the strangeness of her own innermost feelings, awakened now for the first time, she was drawn like a moth to the blood-red fire of his eyes.
She knew his fingers were at the fastenings of her night clothes, turning them back, laying her flesh bare; but as if to salve each burning brush of those fingers against her sensitized skin, Shaitan poured forth his balm of words. And his furnace heat enveloped her, spreading into every region of her body. So that she grew hot, so very hot.
Maria felt the perspiration swelling in her pores, forming droplets, trickling from neck and shoulders, breasts and belly. And she heard Shaitan's honeyed voice confirming the sultry oppression of the night, telling her how hot it was, how good to be free of such clammy restrictions as clothes and bed covers.
He had turned back his blankets; he sat up and helped her disrobe entirely; their sweat mingled as he rubbed his body against hers. Maria's breasts were firm and proud, with dark brown buds… erect, now, where Shaitan stroked her. Before, she'd known only Szgany lads, clumsy buffoons whose hands and faces she'd slapped. But now, when Shaitan stood up, drew off his shirt, stepped from his breeches… she clung to him and kissed his nipples, and stroked his horn where it steamed and jerked.
'See?' he said. 'My body would know all of you! For while my eyes have observed this softest of soft fruits,' and while my hands have touched its perfect skin, still the lips of my probe would test its flesh for succulence. Aye, for I fear it may be bitter, that a worm may have crept into your juicy core, to itch there in the heart of your heat and spoil your flavour. But don't you feel him itching?'
He touched her belly, the cleft in her bush, and her thighs lolled open. And: 'Ah, you see? You see?' Shaitan's face showed his amaze, and a very little of his lust. This dark and secret hole, all unsuspected! That's where he entered, be sure. So let me in, of your own free will, to drown your worm with my cock's wet kiss.'
He entered her in one, long, slow pulse, breaking her without pause and feeling her sweet virgin's blood hot on his bony shaft. And Maria's hunger was such that she might cry aloud for more, but could only gasp and gurgle as he rode to and fro, in and out between her salivating lips.
And for a long, long time Shaitan took Maria in every way he knew and others which he invented, until his lust was sated, however temporarily. And sprawling there lewdly, with the girl all bruised and insensible between his thighs, and his sperm like foam on all her openings, he thought: These people are clever, yet in many ways they are innocent as trogs. And like the trogs, the Szgany Hagi shall be mine!
It was Shaitan's first major error. His stay with the trogs had lasted for two long years, and little occurring in all that time to tax or stimulate his superior mind and talents; so that in certain respects he had grown lax, and perhaps as naive as the trogs themselves. But as he would soon discover, the men of Sunside were in no way trogs.
For now, however… his excesses with the girl had wearied him. He would join Maria in sleep a while.
Which was his second big mistake…
One third of the way into the night, Turgo Zolte was called to his duty watch. Zolte was a big, taciturn man; tough, iron-grey in the eyes, with shoulder-length hair to match. He wore silver earrings, a silver buckle on his belt, silver buttons to fasten his black clothes; like all Sunsider men he jingled when he walked, only more so. Zolte was a loner, not quite an outsider. The Szgany Hagi had accepted him now.
He'd come to them only a year ago, chased out of his own far western band by a chief whose son he'd killed. According to him, it was a fair fight; the other had called him out over a woman, and Turgo had broken his neck. Well, he had the brawn for it, certainly; and since there was no lack of space among the Hagis for big, strong fighting men — so long as they were working men, too — Heinar had let him stay. Since when no one had bothered with Turgo Zolte very much, and he'd kept mainly to himself. But if a man could catch him in the right frame of mind, with a jug of good plum brandy inside him, he might occasionally tell a few wild tales of his latter days along the western reaches. Campfire tales, of bogeymen and beasts. His audience might snort a bit, but none called him a liar.
This night, when Turgo reported to the fire, the tables were turned; the man he relieved was the one with the tale to tell. Turgo heard it out, scowled and narrowed his glinty eyes, finally said, 'You saw all of this? Young Vidra with his neck torn and scabbed? And this stranger — he was pale, you say? Not much of a description!'
The other shrugged. 'What's to describe? A man: tall, pale, with a girl's long soft hands. Somehow, he didn't look Szgany — he was all smooth and unweathered, like he'd lived in a cave all his days. And his eyes were… they seemed full of blood!'
'Blood? In his eyes?'
'Exactly! Like he'd been poked in them, or had sand thrown in 'em — which no doubt he had, in the fighting.'
Turgo's own eyes narrowed more yet and he nodded, mainly to himself. And sitting down by the fire, he said, 'Tell me more, everything, but in finer detail. Leave nothing out.'
The telling didn't take very long.
And shortly -
— Heinar Hagi came awake instantly, looked at the earnest face of the man who had given him a shake, grunted and glanced up through an opening in the roof of his caravan at the night sky. He knew the hour at once, from the position of the stars, grunted again and growled, 'Anyway, I was due to be up about now.'
Turgo Zolte wasn't much of a diplomat. He shrugged and said, 'Due or undue, you're up.' And: 'It looks like there's business to attend to, Heinar. Bad business, I fear.'
Heinar threw on his clothes, put on his eye-patch to cover the hole which an eagle had torn in his face when he was just a lad. Teach him to hunt eggs in the heights! 'Business?' He repeated the other. 'You'll be talking about murderers in the hills, right? Aye, we'll be doing what we can — but at sunup. You want to come along, you're welcome. Couldn't it wait?'
Turgo shook his head, stepped down from the caravan into the night, waited for Heinar to join him. 'Not what I've got to say,' he answered. 'Not unless you want to see plague in the camp, spreading through all your people!'
And now Heinar was very much awake. 'What?' he grasped the other's arm. 'Plague?'
Turgo nodded. 'But quiet! Let's not wake the entire camp. Not yet. Now listen, and I'll tell you what I heard from the watch. Except I know it may have been exaggerated. But you were there, so if all tallies…' He repeated the story of the watchman. And when he was done:
'Aye, that's the story,' Heinar grunted. 'Blow for blow.'
'Huh!' Turgo returned his grunt. 'Well, and now I've a different story for you…"
And after a moment, as they made for the campfire: 'I came from west of here, as you know,' Turgo began, 'out of the tribe and territories of Ygor Ferenc. That's way up at the
end of the barrier range, where the hills slump into misted valleys, fens and mire. The swamps are dire: quicksands, mosquitoes, leeches, but the Ferenc's borders fall short of them by a good seventy miles — which to my mind is still too close by far!'
They had reached the fire; the watchmen were out, patrolling the camp's perimeter; Turgo seated himself on a stool and Heinar chose the well-worn branch of a fallen tree. They each took tea, strong and bitter, and eventually Turgo continued.
'Well, about eighteen months ago, some funny things began to happen there on the edge of nowhere. As you'd imagine, they have their share of mountain men up there, much as you do down here: loners who take to the hills, look after themselves, live on their own in the wild. And now and then such a one will come into camp with a beast he's killed, too much meat for one man, and they'll usually make him welcome. There'll be a feast, and brandy to wash it down; the women will dance till sundown; the likely lads will end up fighting… and so on. That's how it goes.
'But there in the western reaches, that wasn't always the way it went, not in the last six-month. Some of the mountain men up there in the misty hills where they descend to the valleys and swamps, and even the occasional lone wolf… they were suddenly changed, different. Something weird had got into them.
There were rumours: about men with red eyes, madmen with the lusts of beasts, and wolves that snatched people right off the fringes of their camps and territories! Always by night, or in the light of the moon. It was like an infection, a sickness spreading out of the swamps, and people grew wary of any stranger who might come into their camps at twilight or sundown. But in the Ferenc's camps, or on the march, beating his bounds… well, as I've said, all of this was rumour. The other camps may have been hit, if the stories were true, but old Ygor was the lucky one. For a while, anyway.
Then, just before I landed in trouble — Ygor's hotheaded fool of a son, Ymir, forcing me to kill him over a woman's favours and what all — that's when the luck of the Szgany Ferenc ran out. It happened like this:
'I was out with Ygor and maybe a dozen others, beating the bounds just like now. One twilight, we reached this old clearing where we'd make camp. Ygor knew the place well enough: it was about as far west as folks have ever journeyed, except for the loners, of course, who often step where no one else would. Nothing superstitious about that, it's just that west of there the ground's no good for growing things; the water's scummy and the mists are far too frequent. It's like the end of the world! But old Ygor, he likes to beat the ground there anyway, to make sure no one will come down out of the hills and settle on it.
'And there in the clearing, that's where we found Oulio lonescu — something that looked like Oulio, anyway…'
As Turgo paused, so Heinar cast him a sharp glance. 'Eh? Something that looked like him?'
'Give me a chance and I'll explain,' the other held up a restraining hand. And after a moment's thought:
'Oulio was one of these types who'd come into camp for an evening's entertainment. Oh, he liked his own company best, but from time to time got a little too much of it. His parents had been mountain people, too — until an avalanche killed them — and Oulio had a cave up there somewhere. Also, he was known to wander west and trap big lizards in the swamps. See this belt of mine? A bit of Oulio's good leather.
'So, we knew him well. Or thought we did. But this time he was in trouble.
'At first we didn't know what we'd stumbled over. The Oulio we knew was big and wild as they come: clothes all in patches, eyes black as night, hair like a waterfall. And garrulous? He was full to the brim of words that didn't mean much, all spilling out of him because he'd kept them so long bottled up. He played his fiddle like no one I ever heard, drank brandy like water, would dance till he fell. But he danced alone, because he was wary of the women.
'But now? Well, he wouldn't be doing any dancing for a while, for sure.
'How long he'd wandered like that, who knows? But it had slimmed him down a lot. All of his fat was gone, and quite a bit of his skin, too. Why, he was… black! Burned black, by the sun, as it turned out. But he was red, too. Red where the skin had peeled from his face and limbs, and red in his eyes. Aye, red as blood. And there he lay, sprawled like a dead man in the clearing, with only the occasional twitch or moan to hint of any life left in him at all.
'We looked after him. We didn't know what had befallen him, but despite all rumours and old wives' tales we cared for him. Even as we're now caring for this stranger…'
'Eh?' Heinar gave a start. 'The stranger? But he was here, by the fire!'
'Until Maria Babeni took him in,' Turgo nodded grimly. 'She had him carried to her cart.'
And now Heinar thought that maybe he understood something of what was going on here; for he knew that Turgo had paid one or two small, polite attentions to Maria, even though the girl hadn't seemed to notice or acknowledge them. But Turgo saw the Hagi's thoughts written plain in his one good eye, and:
'Better let me finish,' he said, 'before you go jumping to any conclusions.'
'Get on with it, then,' Heinar told him.
'Oulio was taken to the tent of one of the younger men, a man who had his young wife with him. There were four couples like that, who'd come along to form the germ of a settlement in the woods to the south, much as you've started a permanent camp south of this place. He and his slip of a wife knew Oulio from other times; they took him in, bathed him, laid him on a clean blanket and rubbed good butter and salt into all of his sore places. By which time it was night.
'As darkness came down in full and the moon came up, so this same young man was called to keep watch. And he left his girl wife tending the much-ravaged Oulio. Ah, but when he came back all those hours later…
'… Only picture it, only imagine the lad's horror, to discover his much-ravaged wife! And Oulio still grinding away at her like a pig; her breasts all bruised and bloodied from his long nails, and the beast they'd cared for using her as worst he could. He'd gagged her, tied her hair to the tent's pole at the floor. But he'd hit her once or twice, too, and broken her nose and jaw, before having her whichever way he fancied. And he'd fancied them all!
'And there stood this young man, at the flap of his tent, and his wife broken like a doll and still being used by this flame-eyed fiend! Worse, Oulio's teeth were like fangs, which he'd stuck in her neck to suck her blood! And as he heard the lad's horrified gasp behind him, so he bit down on the artery and sliced it through!
'He turned his head and glared at the intruder, snarling at him like a wolf! And his face wasn't dissimilar to that of a wolf, except his eyes weren't feral but crimson! Red as the blood which spurted with each faltering heartbeat from this poor girl's torn neck!'
Heinar's eye bulged and he gripped Turgo's arm. 'Man, what a story!' His voice was hoarse. 'But finish it.'
The other nodded, and continued: The lad had been on watch and carried his crossbow with him, loaded. For a moment he'd been paralysed, unmanned; but now he screamed his outrage, let fly, put a bolt through the sod close to his black heart. It would have finished any other man, to be stuck through and through like that with a hardwood bolt, only a hairbreadth from his heart. But not Oulio, not the thing which Oulio had become. With the strength of a maniac, he knocked the husband aside, kicked him in the face, and rushed out of the tent into the sleeping camp. His hissing and howling woke all of us up…
'Well, everything I've told so far is the way I heard it and how I remember it. But from here on in it's the way I saw it. And I've no sinister motive for telling this tale, Heinar; no, for I've learned my lesson where women are concerned, and I'm not much of a one for subterfuge. But the Szgany Hagi took me in and for that I owe you a favour. So here's how the rest of it goes:
'Before the camp was fully awake, before anyone could say, ask, or do anything, this young lad — who was now mad as Oulio himself — put another bolt in him, in his spine. Oulio toppled into the campfire, and the lad had him! He grabbed a leg, dragged him screami
ng out of the cinders, noosed him round the neck and strung him up from a tree there and then! And then he took us to his wife, so that we'd understand.
'We'd understand some of it, anyway…
'And no one cut Oulio down, so that he might well be swinging there yet, except… that wasn't the end of it. No, not by a long shot.
'For at sunup, Oulio's coughing and grunting brought us awake again! He was still alive, yes! With a rope round his neck, his face all purple, dangling there in mid-air; one bolt skewering him through the chest, and another deep in his spine. And none of these things had killed him! But something was in the offing which would for sure. It was the sun, coming up over the trees and blazing down into the clearing. And when it lit on Oulio — how he smoked and steamed!
'And then… this awful, impossible commotion: he choked and kicked and danced up there! Until the knot came loose, letting him down. And so he crumpled to the ground and lay there, staring at us with those scarlet eyes of his. And we called for the lad, who'd just finished burying his poor wife, to come and finish it. It seemed only right…
'He brought a machete and went to Oulio where he lay. But before he could take his head… the monster spoke to him! Oh, he didn't cry out, beg for mercy, plead for his life; none of that. His throat, all puffy and grooved, wouldn't have allowed for it, and anyway he had no wind. And in a voice no more than a hoarse whisper, he said: "I'm sorry! It wasn't me!"
The liar! For of course the lad, and everyone else, knew it had been none other! Half crazy, the poor bereaved husband snarled and his machete went up, but before it could fall… Oulio began to choke and flop about, so that we knew it was the end of him. And perhaps the lad thought, "Why should I make it easier for him?" At any rate, he stayed his hand.
