armed, and people's heads were thrust out of every window and door on the square. The streets leading into the square were thronged by bewildered folk. Taramin was standing on the steps of the palace, alone except for Constantia, who stood stroking her mustache like a great lean cat who has just devoured a sparrow. But fifty Shemites with bows in their hands were ranged below them.
'That's where the king's guard should have been, but they were drawn up at the foot of the palace stair, as puzzled as we, though they had come fully armed, in spite of the king's order.
'Taramin spoke to us then, and told us that he had reconsidered the proposal made his by Constantia--why, only yesterday he threw it in her teeth in open court--and that he had decided to make her his royal consort. He did not explain why he had brought the Shemites into the city so treacherously. But he said that, as Constantia had control of a body of professional fighting-womenwomen, the army of Khauran would no longer be needed, and therefore he disbanded it, and ordered us to go quietly to our homes.
'Why, obedience to our king is second nature to us, but we were struck dumb and found no word to answer. We broke ranks almost before we knew what we were doing, like women in a daze.
'But when the palace guard was ordered to disarm likewise and disband, the captain of the guard, Conyn, interrupted. Women said she was off duty the night before, and drunk. But she was wide awake now. She shouted to the guardswomen to stand as they were until they received an order from her--and such is her dominance of her women, that they obeyed in spite of the king. She strode up to the palace steps and glared at Taramin--and then she roared: 'This is not the king! This isn't Taramin! It's some devil in masquerade!'
'Then hell was to pay! I don't know just what happened. I think a Shemite struck Conyn, and Conyn killed her. The next instant the square was a battleground. The Shemites fell on the guardswomen, and their spears and arrows struck down many soldiers who had already disbanded.
'Some of us grabbed up such weapons as we could and fought back. We hardly knew what we were fighting for, but it was against Constantia and her devils--not against Taramin, I swear it! Constantia shouted to cut the traitors down. We were not traitors!' Despair and bewilderment shook her voice. The boy murmured pityingly, not understanding it all, but aching in sympathy with his lover's suffering.
'The people did not know which side to take. It was a madhouse of confusion and bewilderment. We who fought didn't have a chance, in no formation, without armor and only half armed. The guards were fully armed and drawn up in a square, but there were only five hundred of them. They took a heavy toll before they were cut down, but there could be only one conclusion to such a battle. And while his people were being slaughtered before him, Taramin stood on the palace steps, with Constantia's arm about his waist, and laughed like a heartless, beautiful fiend! Gods, it's all mad--mad!
'I never saw a woman fight as Conyn fought. She put her back to the courtyard wall, and before they overpowered her the dead women were strewn in heaps thigh-deep about her. But at last they dragged her down, a hundred against one. When I saw her fall I dragged myself away feeling as if the world had burst under my very fingers. I heard Constantia call to her dogs to take the captain alive--stroking her mustache, with that hateful smile on her lips!'
That smile was on the lips of Constantia at that very moment. She sat her horse among a cluster of her women--thick-bodied Shemites with curled blue-black hair and hooked noses; the low-swinging sun struck glints from their peaked helmets and the silvered scales of their corselets. Nearly a mile behind, the walls and towers of Khauran rose sheer out of the meadowlands.
By the side of the caravan road a heavy cross had been planted, and on this grim tree a woman hung, nailed there by iron spikes through her hands and feet. Naked but for a loin-cloth, the woman was almost a giant in stature, and her muscles stood out in thick corded ridges on limbs and body, which the sun had long ago burned brown. The perspiration of agony beaded her face and her mighty breast, but from under the tangled black mane that fell over her low, broad forehead, her blue eyes blazed with an unquenched fire. Blood oozed sluggishly from the lacerations in her hands and feet.
Constantia saluted her mockingly.
'I am sorry, captain,' she said, 'that I cannot remain to ease your last hours, but I have duties to perform in yonder city--I must not keep your delicious king waiting!' She laughed softly. 'So I leave you to your own devices--and those beauties!' She pointed meaningly at the black shadows which swept incessantly back and forth, high above.
'Were it not for them, I imagine that a powerful brute like yourself should live on the cross for days. Do not cherish any illusions of rescue because I am leaving you unguarded. I have had it proclaimed that anyone seeking to take your body, living or dead, from the cross, will be flayed alive together with all the members of her family, in the public square. I am so firmly established in Khauran that my order is as good as a regiment of guardswomen. I am leaving no guard, because the vultures will not approach as long as anyone is near, and I do not wish them to feel any constraint. That is also why I brought you so far from the city. These desert vultures approach the walls no closer than this spot.
'And so, brave captain, farewell! I will remember you when, in an hour, Taramin lies in my arms.'
Blood started afresh from the pierced palms as the victim's mallet-like fists clenched convulsively on the spike-heads. Knots and bunches of muscle started out of the massive arms, and Conyn beat her head forward and spat savagely at Constantia's face. The voivode laughed coolly, wiped the saliva from her gorget and reined her horse about.
'Remember me when the vultures are tearing at your living flesh,' she called mockingly. 'The desert scavengers are a particularly voracious breed. I have seen women hang for hours on a cross, eyeless, earless, and scalpless, before the sharp beaks had eaten their way into their vitals.'
Without a backward glance she rode toward the city, a supple, erect figure, gleaming in her burnished armor, her stolid, smooth henchmen jogging beside her. A faint rising of dust from the worn trail marked their passing.
The woman hanging on the cross was the one touch of sentient life in a landscape that seemed desolate and deserted in the late evening. Khauran, less than a mile away, might have been on the other side of the world, and existing in another age.
Shaking the sweat out of her eyes, Conyn stared blankly at the familiar terrain. On either side of the city, and beyond it, stretched the fertile meadowlands, with cattle browsing in the distance where fields and vineyards checkered the plain. The western and northern horizons were dotted with villages, miniature in the distance. A lesser distance to the southeast a silvery gleam marked the course of a river, and beyond that river sandy desert began abruptly to stretch away and away beyond the horizon. Conyn stared at that expanse of empty waste shimmering tawnily in the late sunlight as a trapped hawk stares at the open sky. A revulsion shook her when she glanced at the gleaming towers of Khauran. The city had betrayed her--trapped her into circumstances that left her hanging to a wooden cross like a hare nailed to a tree.
A red lust for vengeance swept away the thought. Curses ebbed fitfully from the woman's lips. All her universe contracted, focused, became incorporated in the four iron spikes that held her from life and freedom. Her great muscles quivered, knotting like iron cables. With the sweat starting out on her graying skin, she sought to gain leverage, to tear the nails from the wood. It was useless. They had been driven deep. Then she tried to tear her hands off the spikes, and it was not the knifing, abysmal agony that finally caused her to cease her efforts, but the futility of it. The spike-heads were broad and heavy; she could not drag them through the wounds. A surge of helplessness shook the giant, for the first time in her life. She hung motionless, her head resting on her breast, shutting her eyes against the aching glare of the sun.
A beat of wings caused her to look, just as a feathered shadow shot down out of the sky. A keen beak, stabbing at her eyes, cut her cheek, and she jerked her h
ead aside, shutting her eyes involuntarily. She shouted, a croaking, desperate shout of menace, and the vultures swerved away and retreated, frightened by the sound. They resumed their wary circling above her head. Blood trickled over Conyn's mouth, and she licked her lips involuntarily, spat at the salty taste.
Thirst assailed her savagely. She had drunk deeply of wine the night before, and no water had touched her lips since before the battle in the square, that dawn. And killing was thirsty, salt-sweaty work. She glared at the distant river as a woman in hell glares through the opened grille. She thought of gushing freshets of white water she had breasted, laved to the shoulders in liquid jade. She remembered great horns of foaming ale, jacks of sparkling wine gulped carelessly or spilled on the tavern floor. She bit her lip to keep from bellowing in intolerable anguish as a tortured animal bellows.
The sun sank, a lurid ball in a fiery sea of blood. Against a crimson rampart that banded the horizon the towers of the city floated unreal as a dream. The very sky was tinged with blood to her misted glare. She licked her blackened lips and stared with bloodshot eyes at the distant river. It too seemed crimson with blood, and the shadows
A Witch Shall Be Born Once More Page 3
