The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  Crovak recognized her at once. He shouted at her:

  “So, you have come to claim payment for your warning, have you?”

  It seemed she had. Up the silent hall, more silent than ever after Crovak’s shout, she moved. She had no look of anything real, more like something painted or enameled than a living thing. Her gown was white, and not of the fashion of the time, and it left bare her shoulders, though she had been walking in the snow. Her gown was white, and as white as the gown was her flesh, as if there were no blood in it, and her flaxen hair was nearly as white. There was no color in her face, even her mouth was bloodless, but her brows were black and her eyes were black, and the nails of her hands were red as rubies, as if they, out of all her bloodlessness, had been dipped in blood. And indeed, her hands were so pale on the pale gown that it was hard to make them out, but for those nails like ten drops of blood splashed there.

  “What will you have, woman?” Crovak roared. “Ask your price.”

  The woman kept walking toward him, but she did not speak. Alongside, the warriors glanced this way and that, at Crovak, then where he stared, at her. It seemed to the warriors that Crovak was afraid. Sweat stood on his forehead and in his black beard, though he grinned. But Crovak did not feel himself afraid. Not even when the woman reached him, and halted, facing him across the board. Her face was blank, and her mouth so pale he could not tell if it smiled or grimaced at him.

  “Well, she-wolf,” said Crovak, “I never believed in your like before, but here you are. Will you sit with me? You will be the first of your sex to sit at my table, but then you are fey, so perhaps you have earned it.” Then he called for more beer to fill his skull-cup. The woman, however, did not sit, nor touch anything on the board. She only gazed at Crovak with her eyes as black as ravens. Crovak turned to his men. “What do you think of her?”

  A man near to him, a fool, said haltingly: “Who are you seeing, Crovak lord? Is it your dead woman?”

  Crovak gave a cry of rage, and turning about, struck the man sprawling.

  “Who does not see her?” Crovak shouted.

  The men looked at each other, the slaves huddled by the hearth and hid their eyes. It was borne in on Crovak that none but he could perceive the woman. At that, he laughed again.

  “Only for me, are you?” He drank deep, and drank. “Only for me?”

  When the fourth skull-full of beer was in his belly, he reached across the board and put his hand on her naked shoulder. She felt more real than she appeared, but her flesh was very smooth, as if there were not a pore in it, very smooth and cool. “Now, lass, shall you tell me what you want, or is it only to feast your glance on Crovak White-Tooth? Feast then.”

  Crovak called for more beer. He drank till the skin was empty, till he was drunken and the hall blurred and the sensations of his body blurred. Yet still he could see her very clearly, her with her black eyes. At length he rose, staggering and merry. He turned his back on her, and slurred over his shoulder at her: “Bid you good night, white sow,” and he rolled through the silent hall and up the stair, through the hanging into the upper room where seven hours before he had ended his marriage to his redheaded wife. The blood had been cleaned away and the bedding changed, but the frame of the bed and the floor would always hold the mark of the spear’s passage, which would be a grand thing to show the next wife he lay down here with.

  Crovak stripped his boots and belt, went to the outer door and urinated out upon the stair. Turning back into the room, he beheld the white woman standing at the bed’s foot.

  Crovak shouted, wordlessly now. Just for one second, he went cold in his belly. Then he showed his teeth to her again and he said: “You would be wife to me, would you?” And he strode to her, rocking somewhat in his gait, and seized her in his two strong hands.

  She made no resistance and no remonstrance as he half lifted her to the bed and slung her down there. He was ready for a woman, and pushed up her skirts. Even that part of her was pallid, but it did not deter him, nor the white points of her breasts which should have had some color in them, when he dragged down the neck of her bodice to see. He had her, but the drink made him slow. Slow enough he could notice how she watched him, kept on watching as he worked inside her. She did not catch her breath, she did not make a sound, and her eyes were wide. Her eyes bored into him, cold for his heat And when he shuddered and grunted and fell down upon her, even then her eyes were somehow watching him, observing his fit with a pitiless and detached interest

  No sooner was the paroxysm over than a vile sickness took him, and lurching up and to the door, he vomited forth the beer.

  She watched that too.

  And when again he lay groaning on the bed, still she watched. And when he summoned his strength and struck her from the bed, next moment she was there again beside him, her face turned to him, unbruised, her eyes watching.

  He grew faint or else he dozed. When he woke, darkness filled the Drom, and dimly through the outer door he scented the stench of his own sickness, and there she lay beside him yet.

  “How now, bitch? Fey or not, you have outstayed my leave.”

  Rising then, he raised her, too, and she was light to carry. He went through the hanging to the inner stair, and he tossed her down it with no trouble. He saw her motionless at the stair’s foot, against the dim glow of a single torch left burning in the hall.

  Crovak chuckled. He feared her not at all.

  He went to his bed and slept heavily. But when he roused in the hour before sunrise, she was beside him again, her eyes mere inches from his own, polished, frigid and terrible as the eyes of a serpent.

  At that Crovak beat her. He gave her a beating no woman could take and live, and few men. She did not attempt to defend herself, neither did she cower away. She must be mute for she made no outcry even now, yet once he thought he glimpsed her tongue—pointed and pale—he thought he noted blood too, and when she tumbled on the ground, he applied his feet, kicking her in the shank and stomach. All this while he was bellowing like the bull, till his men came running up the stair and burst into the room, blear-eyed, with swords in their hands.

  “What is amiss, Crovak lord?”

  “Nothing!” he ranted, kicking at her, knowing they would not see, that she was his alone, snarling his hate while the sweat flew from his congested face. “Get to your kennels, and leave me to my own deeds.”

  Later, when they had gone, Crovak took the white woman down the outer stair and threw her over a horse, and calling two slaves from the straw where they slept, he sent them off with the horse in the chill gray dawn. “Ride him fast, and leave him when he is done.”

  The slaves’ eyes were huge. Wolves came near the Drom in winter. Wolves would have the horse and possibly themselves also. But Crovak had gone mad, gone mad when he caught his wife at her game, gone mad even before, on the way home, some said . . . The slaves, not daring to disobey, raced the horse out of the stockade gate. Crovak watched them go with the horse and the white woman on its back. He grinned, but the cold day struck into his jaw and made it ache, though his jaw had never ached till then.

  The warriors were muttering in the hold, but when Crovak came close, they were dumb.

  Crovak carved for himself a piece of last night’s roast, and turning about, with his knife in his grip, beheld the woman at his elbow.

  Crovak screamed. He thrust the knife into her breast and snatched it out. She stood unharmed, unbloody, watching him. Crovak laughed. He laughed and crashed his fist upon the wall, laughed till the warriors slunk from his hall and the slaves hid themselves beneath the benches.

  “Am I not to be rid of you? Be damned then, companion me!”

  “How long have we to brook this?” the men asked each other. “Our lord by right, well, so he is. And if he was highhanded in the past, we bore with him, for he was a man, a warrior. We did well enough. But this winter—”

  “He is mad this winter,” others said. “Some new lord should master the Drom. Must we vow our swor
ds to a madman?”

  But still they feared Crovak too much to rebel openly against him. He had taught them that fear ten years, though now they had had a taste of his lunacy for two months. They had seen him strike out and mutter and shout at nothing, they had seen him sneer over his shoulder at nothing. They had seen him linger in the hall till sun-up and not go to his bed, as if he feared to go, nor did he ever take a woman. If any offered, he would knock them down. “I have a woman!”

  The men did not see this: How Crovak, when exhaustedly he had sought his bed, would try to hold himself awake, knowing that as he slept two polished, greasy-shining black stones would stare at him. Nor did the men see how once or twice he had lain down on this woman of his, and how lusty Crovak could not take his pleasure with her, his fire put out by her cold water. Even her loins were cold, winter cold, and winter white as the rest of her. He gripped her feverishly and struggled to be a man with her, but she was stone and he was dead. And even the huzzies of the hall could not stir him, for he was aware that she would be by, watching, watching.

  He grew morose. Always he spoke to her. He spoke because she did not and he must speak for both.

  “What are you wanting? Tell me. You shall have it. Is it the pipe, the pipe with the ruby which called you? Eh? Will I give it you back? Here, take it.” But her red-tipped hands stayed at her sides, blood drops on the white gown. He put the pipe under his heel, but it would not break. He tossed it away from him, but it reappeared in his belt, as always she reappeared at his side.

  Certain of the warriors of Drom-Crovak began to steal out, generally by night, in bands of five or six, ten or fourteen. They went to seek other Droms, other lords. Some, whose kind were in Drom-Crovak, and whose roots ran deeper there, began small plots, but discarded them. Clan law was stringent, and they could not quite forget it. Nor the strength of Crovak’s arm. Once in the dusk, as Crovak made water up against a wall, a man came by with a knife, but Crovak, with the white woman at his side watching even this, was aware of the man creeping near, and slew him. Truly, Crovak was swift and powerful.

  But was he as powerful as he had been? At drink, and he was often drunken now, his hands shook. Sometimes he sat holding his jaw, for his teeth ached. In the second month, this trouble in his jaw became so bad his face was swollen, and he called the smith to pull out one of his front teeth. He howled with the pain, and started up as if he would kill the smith. No longer would they call Crovak “White-Tooth,” with the black gap there. He lost another tooth later; it turned brown and cracked in his mouth. It was a strange thing, but it showed how his strength was leaving him.

  The winter thickened on the Low Country. The snows descended, turning the black nights gray. The wolves showed themselves even at the gates of the. stockade, and the men of Drom-Crovak went hunting them, and as Crovak rode, he turned often to the air behind him and jeered and spat at this air: “Are you comfortable, sow? Is it good to ride with Crovak?” And when he cast his spears, they missed their aim.

  Then came an evening when Crovak jumped up from the board and began to roar and rant without ceasing. It was the third month, and he brought more fear on his depleted hall than ever before. He was berserk and it seemed he would never be calm again. He over-set the benches in his raving. He picked up a slave boy and flung him the breadth of the room. They did not know what particular thing had caused this outburst, nor why he screamed at them his old boast: “A man makes men!”

  But abruptly he blundered out into the torchlit darkness, and flung himself on a horse and plunged from the Drom, all the while yet screaming. And his noise died away on the night silence as a man’s cry dies away down the length of a precipice from which he has fallen.

  The woman shuddered with horror as she listened at the bolted door of the hut.

  “Who is there?”

  “I, bitch,” the huge hoarse mad voice thundered. “Crovak. Now open, or I kick in the door.”

  The woman backed away, and the next moment the door was indeed broken in shivers, and Crovak strode in. The woman ascertained a great change in him, his ruined teeth, the gray in his black beard, the red veins in his eyes and his shaking demented body. This woman’s man was dead, wolves had had him not a month ago. Now she was hard put to it to fend for herself. She stared at the Drom chieftain with miserable terror and no surprise, for who did not understand her life would be bitter and brief.

  “Where is your bratling?” Crovak demanded.

  Fresh horror—what would he do to her child?

  “Come,” he snapped, “your bairn is fey, is it not? It sees what others are blind to.”

  “It is sometimes thus with the very young, or the old ones, Crovak lord—they are nearer life’s edge—”

  “Get your piglet!” he screamed at her.

  The woman turned and lifted the child up from the hearth. The din had not woken it, but now it woke, and looked at Crovak.

  Crovak sighed. He glared dully at the woman.

  “Tell me first, sow, if I am alone.”

  The woman nodded, holding tight to her infant.

  “Now you,” Crovak said to the child, “you tell me.”

  The child giggled. The woman, in alarm, coaxed it: “Tell the lord what you see. If any are with him.”

  “White woman,” said the child.

  “Where?” rasped Crovak, his eyes ablaze.

  “By your left shoulder.”

  “Yes, you snake. My left shoulder. So. Now say how she is."

  The child lowered its eyes and crooned, playing with the mother’s hair. The mother became distrait, coaxing, coaxing: “Tell the lord, tell him—”

  “All white,” said the child, “but soot on her eyes and red on her fingers.”

  Crovak panted, showing his discolored teeth. He muttered, “And she is thicker at the waist than she was, plumper, is she not? Three months since I lay with her . . ."

  The child’s mother put her free hand to her mouth. The girl child simpered. It had suddenly a sly and canny look.

  Crovak rode home, and he entered the gate and saw all about him the congealed glances of wary dislike, mistrust and underlying scorn. Crovak announced a feast in his hall. He ordered three cows slaughtered, five sheep, ten beer barrels broached, though there were fewer men now in Drom-Crovak than there had ever been. Fewer slaves, too, for many had fled. Even fewer women, for five of those Crovak had struck down in his fierce moods had died.

  “This feast,” Crovak told the Drom folk, spit running from his mouth, “is to celebrate the coming of another son to me. My demon wife is with child. Behold her belly—no, but you cannot. Little matter. She carries. She will give me a boy.”

  The feast was a grim and a weird one. Crovak went on drinking three nights and the days between. Sometimes he would go out and throw up what he had taken, then come back to eat and drink again. He dragged the women onto the board before him, and pawed them and straddled them, but he did not have them. “Note how faithful I am, my wife,” he said.

  Eventually Crovak crashed forward in a stupor, and when he recovered himself he found he lay on the floor of his hall, bound and helpless and his mouth stopped with a rag. And all about his warriors stood with their swords.

  They had not killed him. As with the slaughter of a child, it was bad luck and unlawful to slay a sleeping man, let alone the chief. But they had spoken long, the warriors of Drom-Crovak. How their women were not safe, how the Drom was cursed, how priests were needed there, and the jurisdiction of the Clan elders. Even the legal sons of Crovak sanctioned what was to be done. No one but did not fear the bane which had fallen on their chieftain and hence upon his hold.

  Sluggish and stupid, Crovak writhed in his bonds. The men informed him of what was to be done, informed him courteously. They could afford to be courteous, seeing they had the upper hand at last.

  He was put over a horse and carried to a deserted steading about two miles from the Drom. Here was a hut made of stone and weatherproofed to some extent. In the floor was
a stone post and a length of iron fetter attached to it—hostages taken in war had been brought to this place now and then, and kept for ransom. It served very well for mad Crovak. Though he was yet strong, they said, he could not rip his way free from iron chains.

  Nor did he. Four months he rotted there.

  Rotted there, and sat or lay on the straw mattress, or paced about on his short leash, like a restless dog. He had warmth, for his men left him pelts and furs to wrap himself in, bundles of wood to feed the fire, and every five days someone would come and leave more wood, and food, and drink besides, and while this one saw to that, three others would keep watch on Crovak. One other kept her watch, too.

  They swore to him that when the snow broke, they would send word to the elders of the Clan and ask for the Council to be held, and there decide his fate.

  But each time they visited him, Crovak was a fraction more sullen, or else louder; he lunged at them or he whimpered. It seemed he became madder and more mad. And he would frequently turn to his invisible demon and tell her things. If any warrior recalled the ivory pipe taken from the empty Drom that night the snow came, none spoke of it. For a superstitious folk, they had given small specific heed to Crovak’s demon, and maybe they were wise.

  She sat facing him, across his fire. She never ceased to fix her look on him. At night she lay by him, but he had no warmth from her. Her eyes never closed, she never blinked. Her belly swelled.

  One night, in the fourth month, he woke and, in the dull shine of the fire’s embers, he seized her throat and tried to throttle her, although he knew there was no use in it. He ground his decaying teeth and squeezed with all his might, and her black eyes went on staring into his, and the swollen belly pressed into his groin which had made it and now could make nothing.

  “Will you kill me then?” he crowed at her. “Will you take my soul, too?”