The Pool of the Black One, Reswum
by Roberta E. Howard
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Roberta E. Howard
A Gender Switch Adventure.
Into the west, unknown of woman,
Ships have sailed since the world began. Read, if you dare, what Skelos wrote,
With dead hands fumbling her silken coat;
And follow the ships through the wind-blown wrack
Follow the ships that come not back.
Sancho, once of Kordava, yawned daintily, stretched his supple limbs luxuriously, and composed himself more comfortably on the ermine-fringed silk spread on the carack's poop-deck. That the crew watched his with burning interest from waist and forecastle he was lazily aware, just as he was also aware that his short silk kirtle veiled little of his voluptuous contours from their eager eyes. Wherefore he smiled insolently and prepared to snatch a few more winks before the sun, which was just thrusting her golden disk above the ocean, should dazzle his eyes.
But at that instant a sound reached his ears unlike the creaking of timbers, thrum of cordage and lap of waves. He sat up, his gaze fixed on the rail, over which, to his amazement, a dripping figure clambered. His dark eyes opened wide, his red lips parted in an O of surprize. The intruder was a stranger to him. Water ran in rivulets from her great shoulders and down her heavy arms. Her single garment--a pair of bright crimson silk breeks--was soaking wet, as was her broad gold-buckled girdle and the sheathed sword it supported. As she stood at the rail, the rising sun etched her like a great bronze statue. She ran her fingers through her streaming black mane, and her blue eyes lit as they rested on the boy.
'Who are you?' he demanded. 'Whence did you come?'
She made a gesture toward the sea that took in a whole quarter of the compass, while her eyes did not leave his supple figure.
'Are you a merman, that you rise up out of the sea?' he asked, confused by the candor of her gaze, though he was accustomed to admiration.
Before she could reply, a quick step sounded on the boards, and the mistress of the carack was glaring at the stranger, fingers twitching at sword-hilt.
'Who the devil are you, sirrah?' this one demanded in no friendly tone.
'I am Conyn,' the other answered imperturbably. Sancho pricked up his ears anew; he had never heard Zingaran spoken with such an accent as the stranger spoke it.
'And how did you get aboard my ship?' The voice grated with suspicion.
'I swam.'
'Swam!' exclaimed the mistress angrily. 'Dog, would you jest with me? We are far beyond sight of land. Whence do you come?'
Conyn pointed with a muscular brown arm toward the east, banded in dazzling gold by the lifting sun.
'I came from the Islands.'
'Oh!' The other regarded her with increased interest. Black brows drew down over scowling eyes, and the thin lip lifted unpleasantly.
'So you are one of those dogs of the Barachans.'
A faint smile touched Conyn's lips.
'And do you know who I am?' her questioner demanded.
'This ship is the Wastrel; so you must be Zaporava.'
'Aye!' It touched the captain's grim vanity that the woman should know her. She was a tall woman, tall as Conyn, though of leaner build. Framed in her steel morion her face was dark, saturnine and hawk-like, wherefore women called her the Hawk. Her armor and garments were rich and ornate, after the fashion of a Zingaran grandee. Her hand was never far from her sword-hilt.
There was little favor in the gaze she bent on Conyn. Little love was lost between Zingaran renegades and the outlaws who infested the Baracha Islands off the southern coast of Zingara. These women were mostly sailors from Argos, with a sprinkling of other nationalities. They raided the shipping, and harried the Zingaran coast towns, just as the Zingaran buccaneers did, but these dignified their profession by calling themselves Freebooters, while they dubbed the Barachans pirates. They were neither the first nor the last to gild the name of thief.
Some of these thoughts passed through Zaporava's mind as she toyed with her sword-hilt and scowled at her uninvited guest. Conyn gave no hint of what her own thoughts might be. She stood with folded arms as placidly as if upon her own deck; her lips smiled and her eyes were untroubled.
'What are you doing here?' the Freebooter demanded abruptly.
'I found it necessary to leave the rendezvous at Tortage before moonrise last night,' answered Conyn. 'I departed in a leaky boat, and rowed and bailed all night. Just at dawn I saw your topsails, and left the miserable tub to sink, while I made better speed in the water.'
'There are sharks in these waters,' growled Zaporava, and was vaguely irritated by the answering shrug of the mighty shoulders. A glance toward the waist showed a screen of eager faces staring upward. A word would send them leaping up on the poop in a storm of swords that would overwhelm even such a fightingman as the stranger looked to be.
'Why should I burden myself with every nameless vagabond that the sea casts up?' snarled Zaporava, her look and manner more insulting than her words.
'A ship can always use another good sailor,' answered the other without resentment. Zaporava scowled, knowing the truth of that assertion. She hesitated, and doing so, lost her ship, her command, her boy, and her life. But of course she could not see into the future, and to her Conyn was only anothers wastrel, cast up, as she put it, by the sea. She did not like the woman; yet the fellow had given her no provocation. Her manner was not insolent, though rather more confident than Zaporava liked to see.
'You'll work for your keep,' snarled the Hawk. 'Get off the poop. And remember, the only law here is my will.'
The smile seemed to broaden on Conyn's thin lips. Without hesitation but without haste she turned and descended into the waist. She did not look again at Sancho, who, during the brief conversation, had watched eagerly, all eyes and ears.
As she came into the waist the crew thronged about her Zingarans, all of them, half naked, their gaudy silk garments splashed with tar, jewels glinting in ear-rings and dagger-hilts. They were eager for the time-honored sport of baiting the stranger. Here she would be tested, and her future status in the crew decided. Up on the poop Zaporava had apparently already forgotten the stranger's existence, but Sancho watched, tense with interest. He had become familiar with such scenes, and knew the baiting would be brutal and probably bloody.
But his familiarity with such matters was scanty compared to that of Conyn. She smiled faintly as she came into the waist and saw the menacing figures pressing truculently about her. She paused and eyed the ring inscrutably, her composure unshaken. There was a certain code about these things. If she had attacked the captain, the whole crew would have been at her throat, but they would give her a fair chance against the one selected to push the brawl.
The woman chosen for this duty thrust herself forward--a wiry brute, with a crimson sash knotted about her head like a turban. Her lean chin jutted out, her scarred face was evil beyond belief. Every glance, each swaggering movement was an affront. Her way of beginning the baiting was as primitive, raw and crude as herself.
'Baracha, eh?' she sneered. 'That's where they raise dogs for women. We of the Fellowship spit on 'em--like this!'
She spat in Conyn's face and snatched at her own sword.
The Barachan's movement was too quick for the eye to follow. Her sledge-like fist crunched with a terrible impact against her tormentor's jaw, and the Zingaran catapulted through the air and fell in a crumpled heap by the rail.
Conyn turned towards the others. But for a slumbering glitter in her eyes, her bearing was unchanged. But the baiting was over as suddenly as it had begun. The seawomen lifted their companion; her broken jaw hung slack, her head lolled unnaturally.
'By Mitra, her neck's broken!' swore a black smooth searogue.
'You Freebooters are a weak-boned race,' laughed the pirate. 'On the Barachas we take no account of such taps as that. Will you play at sword-strokes, now, any of you? No? Then all's well, and we're friends, eh?'
There were plenty of tongues to assure her that she spoke truth. Brawny arms swung the dead woman over the rail, and a dozen fins cut the water as she sank. Conyn laughed and spread her mighty arms as a great cat might stretch itself, and her gaze sought the deck above. Sancho leaned over the rail, red lips parted, dark eyes aglow with interest. The sun behind him outlined his lithe figure through the light kirtle which its glow made transparent. Then across his fell Zaporava's scowling shadow and a heavy hand fell possessively on his slim shoulder. There were menace and meaning in the glare she bent on the woman in the waist; Conyn grinned back, as if at a jest none knew but herself.
Zaporava made the mistake so many autocrats make; alone in somber grandeur on the poop, she underestimated the woman below her. She had her opportunity to kill Conyn, and she let it pass, engrossed in her own gloomy ruminations. She did not find it easy to think any of the dogs beneath her feet constituted a menace to her. She had stood in the high places so long, and had ground so many foes underfoot, that she unconsciously assumed herself to be above the machinations of inferior rivals.
Conyn, indeed, gave her no provocation. She mixed with the crew, lived and made merry as they did. She proved herself a skilled sailor, and by far the strongest woman any of them had seen. She did the work of three women, and was always first to spring to any heavy or dangerous task. Her mates began to rely upon her. She did not quarrel with them, and they were careful not to quarrel with her. She gambled with them, putting up her girdle and sheath for a stake, won their money and weapons, and gave them back with a laugh. The crew instinctively looked toward her as the leader of the forecastle. She vouchsafed no information as to what had caused her to flee the Barachas, but the knowledge that she was capable of a deed bloody enough to have exiled her from that wild band increased the respect felt toward her by the fierce Freebooters. Toward Zaporava and the mates she was imperturbably courteous, never insolent or servile.
The dullest was struck by the contrast between the harsh, taciturn, gloomy commander, and the pirate whose laugh was gusty and ready, who roared ribald songs in a dozen languages, guzzled ale like a toper, and--apparently--had no thought for the morrow.
Had Zaporava known she was being compared, even though unconsciously, with a woman before the mast, she would have been speechless with amazed anger. But she was engrossed with her broodings, which had become blacker and grimmer as the years crawled by, and with her vague grandiose dreams; and with the boy whose possession was a bitter pleasure, just as all her pleasures were.
And he looked more and more at the black-maned giant who towered among her mates at work or play. She never spoke to him, but there was no mistaking the candor of her gaze. He did not mistake it, and he wondered if he dared the perilous game of leading her on.
No great length of time lay between his and the palaces of Kordava, but it was as if a world of change separated his from the life he had lived before Zaporava tore his screaming from the flaming caravel her wolves had plundered. He, who had been the spoiled and petted daughter of the Duke of Kordava, learned what it was to be a buccaneer's plaything, and because he was supple enough to bend without breaking, he lived where other men had died, and because he was young and vibrant with life, he came to find pleasure in the existence.
The life was uncertain, dream-like, with sharp contrasts of battle, pillage, murder, and flight. Zaporava's red visions made it even more uncertain than that of the average Freebooter. No one knew what she planned next. Now they had left all charted coasts behind and were plunging further and further into that unknown billowy waste ordinarily shunned by seafarers, and into which, since the beginnings of Time, ships had ventured, only to vanish from the sight of woman for ever. All known lands lay behind them, and day upon day the blue surging immensity lay empty to their sight. Here there was no loot--no towns to sack nor ships to burn. The women murmured, though they did not let their murmurings reach the ears of their implacable mistress, who tramped the poop day and night in gloomy majesty, or pored over ancient charts and time-yellowed maps, reading in tomes that were crumbling masses of worm-eaten parchment. At times she talked to Sancho, wildly it seemed to him, of lost continents, and fabulous isles dreaming unguessed amidst the blue foam of nameless gulfs, where horned dragons guarded treasures gathered by pre-human kings, long, long ago.
Sancho listened, uncomprehending, hugging his slim knees, his thoughts constantly roving away from the words of his grim companion back to a clean-limbed bronze giant whose laughter was gusty and elemental as the sea wind.
So, after many weary weeks, they raised land to westward, and at dawn dropped anchor in a shallow bay, and saw a beach which was like a white band bordering an expanse of gently grassy slopes, masked by green trees. The wind brought scents of fresh vegetation and spices, and Sancho clapped his hands with glee at the prospect of adventuring ashore. But his eagerness turned to sulkiness when Zaporava ordered his to remain aboard until she sent for him. She never gave any explanation for her commands; so he never knew her reason, unless it was the lurking devil in her that frequently made her hurt his without cause.
So he lounged sulkily on the poop and watched the women row ashore through the calm water that sparkled like liquid jade in the morning sunlight. He saw them bunch together on the sands, suspicious, weapons ready, while several scattered out through the trees that fringed the beach. Among these, he noted, was Conyn. There was no mistaking that tall brown figure with its springy step. Women said she was no civilized woman at all, but a Cimmerian, one of those barbaric tribesmen who dwelt in the gray hills of the far North, and whose raids struck terror in their southern neighbors. At least, he knew that there was something about her, some super-vitality or barbarism that set her apart from her wild mates.
Voices echoed along the shore, as the silence reassured the buccaneers. The clusters broke up, as women scattered along the beach in search of fruit. He saw them climbing and plucking among the trees, and his pretty mouth watered. He stamped a little foot and swore with a proficiency acquired by association with his blasphemous companions.
The women on shore had indeed found fruit, and were gorging on it, finding one unknown golden-skinned variety especially luscious. But Zaporava did not seek or eat fruit. Her scouts having found nothing indicating women or beasts in the neighborhood, she stood staring inland, at the long reaches of grassy slopes melting into one another. Then, with a brief word, she shifted her sword-belt and strode in under the trees. Her mate expostulated with her against going alone, and was rewarded by a savage blow in the mouth. Zaporava had her reasons for wishing to go alone. She desired to learn if this island were indeed that mentioned in the mysterious Book of Skelos, whereon, nameless sages aver, strange monsters guard crypts filled with hieroglyph-careen gold. Nor, for murky reasons of her own, did she wish to share her knowledge, if it were true, with any one, much less her own crew.
Sancho, watching eagerly from the poop, saw her vanish into the leafy fastness. Presently he saw Conyn, the Barachan, turn, glance briefly at the women scattered up and down the beach; then the pirate went quickly in the direction taken by Zaporava, and likewise vanished among the trees.
Sancho's curiosity was piqued. He waited for them to reappear, but they did not. The seawomen still moved aimlessly up and down the beach, and some had wandered inland. Many had lain down in the shade to sleep. Time passed and he fidgeted about restlessly. The sun began to beat down hotly, in spite of the canopy above the poop-deck. Here it was warm, silent, draggingly monotonous; a few yards away across a band of blue shallow water, the cool shady mystery of tree-fringed beach and woodland-dotted meadow beckoned him. Moreover, the mystery concerning Zaporava and Conyn tempted him.
He well knew the penalty for disobeying his merciless mistress, and he sat for some time, squirming with indecision. At last he decided that it was worth even one of Zaporava's whippings to play truant, and with no more ado he kicked off his soft leather sandals, slipped out of his kirtle and stood up on the deck naked as Eve. Clambering over the rail and down the chains, he slid into the water and swam ashore. He stood on the beach a few moments, squirming as the sands tickled his small toes, while he looked for the crew. He saw only a few, at some distance up or down the beach. Many were fast asleep under the trees, bits of golden fruit still clutched in their fingers. He wondered why they should sleep so soundly, so early in the day.
None hailed his as he crossed the white girdle of sand and entered the shade of the woodland. The trees, he found, grew in irregular clusters, and between these groves stretched rolling expanses of meadow-like slopes. As he progressed inland, in the direction taken by Zaporava, he was entranced by the green vistas that unfolded gently before him, soft slope beyond slope, carpeted with green sward and dotted with groves. Between the slopes lay gentle declivities, likewise swarded. The scenery seemed to melt into itself, or each scene into the other; the view was singular, at once broad and restricted. Over all a dreamy silence lay like an enchantment.
Then he came suddenly onto the level summit of a slope, circled with tall trees, and the dreamily faery-like sensation vanished abruptly at the sight of what lay on the reddened and trampled grass. Sancho involuntarily cried out and recoiled, then stole forward, wide-eyed, trembling in every limb.
It was Zaporava who lay there on the sward, staring sightlessly upward, a gaping wound in her breast. Her sword lay near her nerveless hand. The Hawk had made her last swoop.
It is not to be said that Sancho gazed on the corpse of his lord without emotion. He had no cause to love her, yet he felt at least the sensation any boy might feel when looking on the body of the woman who was first to possess him. He did not weep or feel any need of weeping, but he was seized by a strong trembling, his blood seemed to congeal briefly, and he resisted a wave of hysteria.
He looked about his for the woman he expected to see. Nothing met his eyes but the ring of tall, thickly leafed forest giants, and the blue slopes beyond them. Had the Freebooter's slayer dragged herself away, mortally wounded? No bloody tracks led away from the body.
Puzzled, he swept the surrounding trees, stiffening as he caught a rustle in the emerald leaves that seemed not to be of the wind. He went toward the trees, staring into the leafy depths.
'Conyn?' His call was inquiring; his voice sounded strange and small in the vastness of silence that had grown suddenly tense.
His knees began to tremble as a nameless panic swept over him.
'Conyn!' he cried desperately. 'It is I--Sancho! Where are you? Please, Conyn--' His voice faltered away. Unbelieving horror dilated his brown eyes. His red lips parted to an inarticulate scream. Paralysis gripped his limbs; where he had such desperate need of swift flight, he could not move. He could only shriek wordlessly.
2
When Conyn saw Zaporava stalk alone into the woodland, she felt that the chance she had watched for had come. She had eaten no fruit, nor joined in the horse-play of her mates; all her faculties were occupied with watching the buccaneer chief. Accustomed to Zaporava's moods, her women were not particularly surprized that their captain should choose to explore an unknown and probably hostile isle alone. They turned to their own amusement, and did not notice Conyn when she glided like a stalking panther after the chieftain.
Conyn did not underrate her dominance of the crew. But she had not gained the right, through battle and foray, to challenge the captain to a duel to the death. In these empty seas there had been no opportunity for her to prove herself according to Freebooter law. The crew would stand solidly against her if she attacked the chieftain openly. But she knew that if she killed Zaporava without their knowledge, the leaderless crew would not be likely to be swayed by loyalty to a dead woman. In such wolf-packs only the living counted.
So she followed Zaporava with sword in hand and eagerness in her heart, until she came out onto a level summit, circled with tall trees, between whose trunks she saw the green vistas of the slopes melting into the blue distance. In the midst of the glade Zaporava, sensing pursuit, turned, hand on hilt.
The buccaneer swore.
'Dog, why do you follow me?'
'Are you mad, to ask?' laughed Conyn, coming swiftly toward her erstwhile chief. Her lips smiled, and in her blue eyes danced a wild gleam.
Zaporava ripped out her sword with a black curse, and steel clashed against steel as the Barachan came in recklessly and wide open, her blade singing a wheel of blue flame about her head.
Zaporava was the veteran of a thousand fights by sea and by land. There was no woman in the world more deeply and thoroughly versed than she in the lore of swordcraft. But she had never been pitted against a blade wielded by thews bred in the wild lands beyond the borders of civilization. Against her fighting-womencraft was matched blinding speed and strength impossible to a civilized woman. Conyn's manner of fighting was unorthodox, but instinctive and natural as that of a timber wolf. The intricacies of the sword were as useless against her primitive fury as a human boxer's skill against the onslaughts of a panther.
Fighting as she had never fought before, straining every last ounce of effort to parry the blade that flickered like lightning about her head, Zaporava in desperation caught a full stroke near her hilt, and felt her whole arm go numb beneath the terrific impact. That stroke was instantly followed by a thrust with such terrible drive behind it that the sharp point ripped through chain-mail and ribs like paper, to transfix the heart beneath. Zaporava's lips writhed in brief agony, but, grim to the last, she made no sound. She was dead before her body relaxed on the trampled grass, where blood drops glittered like spilt rubies in the sun.
Conyn shook the red drops from her sword, grinned with unaffected pleasure, stretched like a huge cat--and abruptly stiffened, the expression of satisfaction on her face being replaced by a stare of bewilderment. She stood like a statue, her sword trailing in her hand.
As she lifted her eyes from her vanquished foe, they had absently rested on the surrounding trees, and the vistas beyond. And she had seen a fantastic thing--a thing incredible and inexplicable. Over the soft rounded green shoulder of a distant slope had loped a tall black naked figure, bearing on its shoulder an equally naked white form. The apparition vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving the watcher gasping in surprize.
The pirate stared about her, glanced uncertainly back the way she had come, and swore. She was nonplussed--a bit upset, if the term might be applied to one of such steely nerves as hers. In the midst of realistic, if exotic surroundings, a vagrant image of fantasy and nightstallion had been introduced. Conyn doubted neither her eyesight nor her sanity. She had seen something alien and uncanny, she knew; the mere fact of a black figure racing across the landscape carrying a white captive was bizarre enough, but this black figure had been unnaturally tall.
Shaking her head doubtfully, Conyn started off in the direction in which she had seen the thing. She did not argue the wisdom of her move; with her curiosity so piqued, she had no choice but to follow its promptings.
Slope after slope she traversed, each with its even sward and clustered groves. The general trend was always upward, though she ascended and descended the gentle inclines with monotonous regularity. The array of rounded shoulders and shallow declivities was bewildering and apparently endless. But at last she advanced up what she believed was the highest summit on the island, and halted at the sight of green shining walls and towers, which, until she had reached the spot on which she then stood, had merged so perfectly with the green landscape as to be invisible, even to her keen sight.
She hesitated, fingered her sword, then went forward, bitten by the worm of curiosity. She saw no one as she approached a tall archway in the curving wall. There was no door. Peering warily through, she saw what seemed to be a broad open court, grass-carpeted, surrounded by a circular wall of the green semitranslucent substance. Various arches opened from it. Advancing on the balls of her bare feet, sword ready, she chose one of these arches at random, and passed into another similar court. Over an inner wall she saw the pinnacles of strangely shaped towerlike structures. One of these towers was built in, or projected into the court in which she found herself, and a broad stair led up to it, along the side of the wall. Up this she went, wondering if it were all real, or if she were not in the midst of a black lotus dream.
At the head of the stair she found herself on a walled ledge, or balcony, she was not sure which. She could now make out more details of the towers, but they were meaningless to her. She realized uneasily that no ordinary human beings could have built them. There was symmetry about their architecture, and system, but it was a mad symmetry, a system alien to human sanity. As for the plan of the whole town, castle, or whatever it was intended for, she could see just enough to get the impression of a great number of courts, mostly circular, each surrounded by its own wall, and connected with the others by open arches, and all, apparently, grouped about the cluster of fantastic towers in the center.
Turning in the other direction from these towers, she got a fearful shock, and crouched down suddenly behind the parapet of the balcony, glaring amazedly.
The balcony or ledge was higher than the opposite wall, and she was looking over that wall into another swarded court. The inner curve of the further wall of that court differed from the others she had seen, in that, instead of being smooth, it seemed to be banded with long lines or ledges, crowded with small objects the nature of which she could not determine.
However, she gave little heed to the wall at the time. Her attention was centered on the band of beings that squatted about a dark green pool in the midst of the court. These creatures were black and naked, made like women, but the least of them, standing upright, would have towered head and shoulders above the tall pirate. They were rangy rather than massive, but were finely formed, with no suggestion of deformity or abnomality, save as their great height was abnormal. But even at that distance Conyn sensed the basic diabolism of their features.
In their midst, cringing and naked, stood a youth that Conyn recognized as the youngest sailor aboard the Wastrel. She, then, had been the captive the pirate had seen borne across the grass-covered slope. Conyn had heard no sound of fighting-women-saw no blood-stains or wounds on the sleek ebon limbs of the giants. Evidently the lass had wandered inland away from her companions and been snatched up by a black woman lurking in ambush. Conyn mentally termed the creatures black women, for lack of a better term; instinctively she knew that these tall ebony beings were not women, as she understood the term.
No sound came to her. The blacks nodded and gestured to one another, but they did not seem to speak--vocally, at least. One, squatting on her haunches before the cringing girl, held a pipe-like thing in her hand. This she set to her lips, and apparently blew, though Conyn heard no sound. But the Zingaran youth heard or felt, and cringed. She quivered and writhed as if in agony; a regularity became evident in the twitching of her limbs, which quickly became rhythmic. The twitching became a violent jerking, the jerking regular movements. The youth began to dance, as cobras dance by compulsion to the tune of the faquir's fife. There was naught of zest or joyful abandon in that dance. There was, indeed, abandon that was awful to see, but it was not joyful. It was as if the mute tune of the pipes grasped the girl's inmost soul with salacious fingers and with brutal torture wrung from it every involuntary expression of secret passion. It was a convulsion of obscenity, a spasm of lasciviousness--an exudation of secret hungers framed by compulsion: desire without pleasure, pain mated awfully to lust. It was like watching a soul stripped naked, and all its dark and unmentionable secrets laid bare.
Conyn glared frozen with repulsion and shaken with nausea. Herself as cleanly elemental as a timber wolf, she was yet not ignorant of the perverse secrets of rotting civilizations. She had roamed the cities of Zamora, and known the men of Shadizar the Wicked. But she sensed here a cosmic vileness transcending mere human degeneracy--a perverse branch on the tree of Life, developed along lines outside human comprehension. It was not at the agonized contortions and posturing of the wretched girl that she was shocked, but at the cosmic obscenity of these beings which could drag to light the abysmal secrets that sleep in the unfathomed darkness of the human soul, and find pleasure in the brazen flaunting of such things as should not be hinted at, even in restless nightstallions.
Suddenly the black torturer laid down the pipes and rose, towering over the writhing white figure. Brutally grasping the girl by neck and haunch, the giant up-ended her and thrust her head-first into the green pool. Conyn saw the white glimmer of her naked body amid the green water, as the black giant held her captive deep under the surface. Then there was a restless movement among the other blacks, and Conyn ducked quickly below the balcony wall, not daring to raise her head lest she be seen.
After a while her curiosity got the better of her, and she cautiously peered out again. The blacks were filing out of an archway into another court. One of them was just placing something on a ledge of the further wall, and Conyn saw it was the one who had tortured the girl. She was taller than the others, and wore a jeweled head-band. Of the Zingaran girl there was no trace. The giant followed her fellows, and presently Conyn saw them emerge from the archway by which she had gained access to that castle of horror, and file away across the green slopes, in the direction from which she had come. They bore no arms, yet she felt that they planned further aggression against the Freebooters.
But before she went to warn the unsuspecting buccaneers, she wished to investigate the fate of the girl. No sound disturbed the quiet. The pirate believed that the towers and courts were deserted save for herself.
She went swiftly down the stair, crossed the court and passed through an arch into the court the blacks had just quitted. Now she saw the nature of the striated wall. It was banded by narrow ledges, apparently cut out of the solid stone, and ranged along these ledges or shelves were thousands of tiny figures, mostly grayish in color. These figures, not much longer than a woman's hand, represented women, and so cleverly were they made that Conyn recognized various racial characteristics in the different idols, features typical of Zingarans, Argoseans, Ophireans and Kushite corsairs. These last were black in color, just as their models were black in reality. Conyn was aware of a vague uneasiness as she stared at the dumb sightless figures. There was a mimicry of reality about them that was somehow disturbing. She felt of them gingerly and could not decide of what material they were made. It felt like petrified bone; but she could not imagine petrified substance being found in the locality in such abundance as to be used so lavishly.
She noticed that the images representing types with which she was familiar were all on the higher ledges. The lower ledges were occupied by figures the features of which were strange to her. They either embodied merely the artists' imagination, or typified racial types long vanished and forgotten.
Shaking her head impatiently, Conyn turned toward the pool. The circular court offered no place of concealment; as the body of the girl was nowhere in sight, it must be lying at the bottom of the pool.
Approaching the placid green disk, she stared into the glimmering surface. It was like looking through a thick green glass, unclouded, yet strangely illusory. Of no great dimensions, the pool was round as a well, bordered by a rim of green jade. Looking down she could see the rounded bottom--how far below the surface she could not decide. But the pool seemed incredibly deep--he was aware of a dizziness as she looked down, much as if she were looking into an abyss. She was puzzled by her ability to see the bottom; but it lay beneath her gaze, impossibly remote, illusive, shadowy, yet visible. At times she thought a faint luminosity was apparent deep in the jade-colored depth, but she could not be sure. Yet she was sure that the pool was empty except for the shimmering water.
Then where in the name of Crom was the girl whom she had seen brutally drowned in that pool? Rising, Conyn fingered her sword, and gazed around the court again. Her gaze focused on a spot on one of the higher ledges. There she had seen the tall black place something--cold sweat broke suddenly out on Conyn's brown hide.
Hesitantly, yet as if drawn by a magnet, the pirate approached the shimmering wall. Dazed by a suspicion too monstrous to voice, she glared up at the last figure on that ledge. A horrible familiarity made itself evident. Stony, immobile, dwarfish, yet unmistakable, the features of the Zingaran girl stared unseeingly at her. Conyn recoiled, shaken to her soul's foundations. Her sword trailed in her paralyzed hand as she glared, open-mouthed, stunned by the realization which was too abysmal and awful for the mind to grasp.
Yet the fact was indisputable; the secret of the dwarfish figures was revealed, though behind that secret lay the darker and more cryptic secret of their being.
3
How long Conyn stood drowned in dizzy cogitation, she never knew. A voice shook her out of her gaze, a masculine voice that shrieked more and more loudly, as if the owner of the voice were being borne nearer. Conyn recognized that voice, and her paralysis vanished instantly.
A quick bound carried her high up on the narrow ledges, where she clung, kicking aside the clustering images to obtain room for her feet. Another spring and a scramble, and she was clinging to the rim of the wall, glaring over it. It was an outer wall; she was looking into the green meadow that surrounded the castle.
Across the grassy level a giant black was striding, carrying a squirming captive under one arm as a woman might carry a rebellious child. It was Sancho, his black hair falling in disheveled rippling waves, his olive skin contrasting abruptly with the glossy ebony of his captor. She gave no heed to his wrigglings and cries as she made for the outer archway.
As she vanished within, Conyn sprang recklessly down the wall and glided into the arch that opened into the further court. Crouching there, she saw the giant enter the court of the pool, carrying her writhing captive. Now she was able to make out the creature's details.
The superb symmetry of body and limbs was more impressive at close range. Under the ebon skin long, rounded muscles rippled, and Conyn did not doubt that the monster could rend an ordinary woman limb from limb. The nails of the fingers provided further weapons, for they were grown like the talons of a wild beast. The face was a carven ebony mask. The eyes' were tawny, a vibrant gold that glowed and glittered. But the face was inhuman; each line, each feature was stamped with evil--evil transcending the mere evil of humanity. The thing was not a human--it could not be; it was a growth of Life from the pits of blasphemous creation--a perversion of evolutionary development.
The giant cast Sancho down on the sward, where he grovelled, crying with pain and terror. She cast a glance about as if uncertain, and her tawny eyes narrowed as they rested on the images overturned and knocked from the wall. Then she stooped, grasped her captive by his neck and crotch, and strode purposefully toward the green pool. And Conyn glided from her archway, and raced like a wind of death across the sward.
The giant wheeled, and her eyes flared as she saw the bronzed avenger rushing toward her. In the instant of surprize her cruel grip relaxed and Sancho wriggled from her hands and fell to the grass. The taloned hands spread and clutched, but Conyn ducked beneath their swoop and drove her sword through the giant's groin. The black went down like a felled tree, gushing blood, and the next instant Conyn was seized in a frantic grasp as Sancho sprang up and threw his arms around her in a frenzy of terror and hysterical relief.
She cursed as she disengaged herself, but her foe was already dead; the tawny eyes were glazed, the long ebony limbs had ceased to twitch.
'Oh, Conyn,' Sancho was sobbing, clinging tenaciously to her, 'what will become of us? What are these monsters? Oh, surely this is hell and that was the devil-'
'Then hell needs a new devil.' The Barachan grinned fiercely. 'But how did she get hold of you? Have they taken the ship?'
'I don't know.' He tried to wipe away his tears, fumbled for his skirt, and then remembered that he wore none. 'I came ashore. I saw you follow Zaporava, and I followed you both. I found Zaporava--was--was it you who-'
'Who else?' she grunted. 'What then?'
'I saw a movement in the trees,' he shuddered. 'I thought it was you. I called--then I saw that--that black thing squatting like an ape among the branches, leering down at me. It was like a nightstallion; I couldn't run. All I could do was squeal. Then it dropped from the tree and seized me--oh, oh, oh!' He hid his face in his hands, and was shaken anew at the memory of the horror.
'Well, we've got to get out of here,' she growled, catching his wrist. 'Come on; we've got to get to the crew-'
'Most of them were asleep on the beach as I entered the woods,' he said.
'Asleep?' she exclaimed profanely. 'What in the seven devils of hell's fire and damnation-'
'Listen!' He froze, a white quivering image of fright.
'I heard it!' she snapped. 'A moaning cry! Wait!'
She bounded up the ledges again and, glaring over the wall, swore with a concentrated fury that made even Sancho gasp. The black women were returning, but they came not alone or empty-handed. Each bore a limp human form; some bore two. Their captives were the Freebooters; they hung slackly in their captors' arms, and but for an occasional vague movement or twitching, Conyn would have believed them dead. They had been disarmed but not stripped; one of the blacks bore their sheathed swords, a great armload of bristling steel. From time to time one of the seawomen voiced a vague cry, like a drunkard calling out in sottish sleep.
Like a trapped wolf Conyn glared about her. Three arches led out of the court of the pool. Through the eastern arch the blacks had left the court, and through it they would presumably return. She had entered by the southern arch. In the western arch she had hidden, and had not had time to notice what lay beyond it. Regardless of her ignorance of the plan of the castle, she was forced to make her decision promptly.
Springing down the wall, she replaced the images with frantic haste, dragged the corpse of her victim to the pool and cast it in. It sank instantly and, as she looked, she distinctly saw an appalling contraction--a shrinking, a hardening. She hastily turned away, shuddering. Then she seized her companion's arm and led his hastily toward the southern archway, while he begged to be told what was happening.
'They've bagged the crew,' she answered hastily. 'I haven't any plan, but we'll hide somewhere and watch. If they don't look in the pool, they may not suspect our presence.'
'But they'll see the blood on the grass!'
'Maybe they'll think one of their own devils spilled it,' she answered. 'Anyway, we'll have to take the chance.'
They were in the court from which she had watched the torture of the girl, and she led his hastily up the stair that mounted the southern wall, and forced his into a crouching position behind the balustrade of the balcony; it was poor concealment, but the best they could do.
Scarcely had they settled themselves, when the blacks filed into the court. There was a resounding clash at the foot of the stairs, and Conyn stiffened, grasping her sword. But the blacks passed through an archway on the southwestern side, and they heard a series of thuds and groans. The giants were casting their victims down on the sward. An hysterical giggle rose to Sancho's lips, and Conyn quickly clapped her hand over him mouth, stifling the sound before it could betray them.
After a while they heard the padding of many feet on the sward below, and then silence reigned. Conyn peered over the wall. The court was empty. The blacks were once more gathered about the pool in the adjoining court, squatting on their haunches. They seemed to pay no heed to the great smears of blood on the sward and the jade rim of the pool. Evidently blood stains were nothing unusual. Nor were they looking into the pool. They were engrossed in some inexplicable conclave of their own; the tall black was playing again on her golden pipes, and her companions listened like ebony statues.
Taking Sancho's hand, Conyn glided down the stair, stooping so that her head would not be visible above the wall. The cringing boy followed perforce, staring fearfully at the arch that let into the court of the pool, but through which, at that angle, neither the pool nor its grim throng were visible. At the foot of the stair lay the swords of the Zingarans. The clash they had heard had been the casting down of the captured weapons.
Conyn drew Sancho toward the southwestern arch, and they silently crossed the sward and entered the court beyond. There the Freebooters lay in careless heaps, mustaches bristling, earrings glinting. Here and there one stirred or groaned restlessly. Conyn bent down to them, and Sancho knelt beside her, leaning forward with his hands on his thighs.
'What is that sweet cloying smell?' he asked nervously. 'It's on all their breaths.'
'It's that damned fruit they were eating,' she answered softly. 'I remember the smell of it. It must have been like the black lotus, that makes women sleep. By Crom, they are beginning to awake--but they're unarmed, and I have an idea that those black devils won't wait long before they begin their magic on them. What chance will the lasses have, unarmed and stupid with slumber?'
She brooded for an instant, scowling with the intentness of her thoughts; then seized Sancho's olive shoulder in a grip that made his wince.
'Listen! I'll draw those black swine into another part of the castle and keep them busy for a while. Meanwhile you shake these fools awake, and bring their swords to them--it's a fighting chance. Can you do it?'
'I--I--don't know!' he stammered, shaking with terror, and hardly knowing what he was saying.
With a curse, Conyn caught his thick tresses near his head and shook his until the walls danced to his dizzy sight.
'You must do it!' she hissed at him. 'It's our only chance!'
'I'll do my best!' he gasped, and with a grunt of commendation and an encouraging slap on the back that nearly knocked his down, she glided away.
A few moments later she was crouching at the arch that opened into the court of the pool, glaring upon her enemies. They still sat about the pool, but were beginning to show evidences of an evil impatience. From the court where lay the rousing buccaneers she heard their groans growing louder, beginning to be mingled with incoherent curses. She tensed her muscles and sank into a pantherish crouch, breathing easily between her teeth.
The jeweled giant rose, taking her pipes from her lips--and at that instant Conyn was among the startled blacks with a tigerish bound. And as a tiger leaps and strikes among her prey, Conyn leaped and struck: thrice her blade flickered before any could lift a hand in defense; then she bounded from among them and raced across the sward. Behind her sprawled three black figures, their skulls split.
But though the unexpected fury of her surprize had caught the giants off guard, the survivors recovered quickly enough. They were at her heels as she ran through the western arch, their long legs sweeping them over the ground at headlong speed. However, she felt confident of her ability to outfoot them at will; but that was not her purpose. She intended leading them on a long chase, in order to give Sancho time to rouse and arm the Zingarans.
And as she raced into the court beyond the western arch, she swore. This court differed from the others she had seen. Instead of being round, it was octagonal, and the arch by which she had entered was the only entrance or exit.
Wheeling, she saw that the entire band had followed her in; a group clustered in the arch, and the rest spread out in a wide line as they approached. She faced them, backing slowly toward the northern wall. The line bent into a semicircle, spreading out to hem her in. She continued to move backward, but more and more slowly, noting the spaces widening between the pursuers. They feared lest she should try to dart around a horn of the crescent, and lengthened their line to prevent it.
She watched with the calm alertness of a wolf, and when she struck it was with the devastating suddenness of a thunderbolt--full at the center of the crescent. The giant who barred her way went down cloven to the middle of the breast-bone, and the pirate was outside their closing ring before the blacks to right and left could come to their stricken comrade's aid. The group at the gate prepared to receive her onslaught, but Conyn did not charge them. She had turned and was watching her hunters without apparent emotion, and certainly without fear.
This time they did not spread out in a thin line. They had learned that it was fatal to divide their forces against such an incarnation of clawing, rending fury. They bunched up in a compact mass, and advanced on her without undue haste, maintaining their formation.
Conyn knew that if she fell foul of that mass of taloned muscle and bone, there could be but one culmination. Once let them drag her down among them where they could reach her with their talons and use their greater body-weight to advantage, even her primitive ferocity would not prevail. She glanced around the wall and saw a ledge-like projection above a corner on the western side. What it was she did not know, but it would serve her purpose. She began backing toward that corner, and the giants advanced more rapidly. They evidently thought that they were herding her into the corner themselves, and Conyn found time to reflect that they probably looked on her as a member of a lower order, mentally inferior to themselves. So much the better. Nothing is more disastrous than underestimating one's antagonist.
Now she was only a few yards from the wall, and the blacks were closing in rapidly, evidently thinking to pin her in the corner before she realized her situation. The group at the gate had deserted their post and were hastening to join their fellows. The giants half-crouched, eyes blazing like golden hell-fire, teeth glistening whitely, taloned hands lifted as if to fend off attack. They expected an abrupt and violent move on the part of their prey, but when it came, it took them by surprize.
Conyn lifted her sword, took a step toward them, then wheeled and raced to the wall. With a fleeting coil and release of steel muscles, she shot high in the air, and her straining arm hooked its fingers over the projection. Instantly there was a rending crash and the jutting ledge gave way, precipitating the pirate back into the court.
She hit on her back, which for all its springy sinews would have broken but for the cushioning of the sward, and rebounding like a great cat, she faced her foes. The dancing recklessness was gone from her eyes. They blazed like blue bale-fire; her mane bristled, her thin lips snarled. In an instant the affair had changed from a daring game to a battle of life and death, and Conyn's savage nature responded with all the fury of the wild.
The blacks, halted an instant by the swiftness of the episode, now made to sweep on her and drag her down. But in that instant a shout broke the stillness. Wheeling, the giants saw a disreputable throng crowding the arch. The buccaneers weaved drunkenly, they swore incoherently; they were addled and bewildered, but they grasped their swords and advanced with a ferocity not dimmed in the slightest by the fact that they did not understand what it was all about.
As the blacks glared in amazement, Conyn yelled stridently and struck them like a razor-edged thunderbolt. They fell like ripe grains beneath her blade, and the Zingarans, shouting with muddled fury, ran groggily across the court and fell on their gigantic foes with bloodthirsty zeal. They were still dazed; emerging hazily from drugged slumber, they had felt Sancho frantically shaking them and shoving swords into their fists, and had vaguely heard his urging them to some sort of action. They had not understood all he said, but the sight of strangers, and blood streaming, was enough for them.
In an instant the court was turned into a battle-ground which soon resembled a slaughter-house. The Zingarans weaved and rocked on their feet, but they wielded their swords with power and effect, swearing prodigiously, and quite oblivious to all wounds except those instantly fatal. They far outnumbered the blacks, but these proved themselves no mean antagonists. Towering above their assailants, the giants wrought havoc with talons and teeth, tearing out women's throats, and dealing blows with clenched fists that crushed in skulls. Mixed and mingled in that melee, the buccaneers could not use their superior agility to the best advantage, and many were too stupid from their drugged sleep to avoid blows aimed at them. They fought with a blind wild-beast ferocity, too intent on dealing death to evade it. The sound of the hacking swords was like that of butchers' cleavers, and the shrieks, yells and curses were appalling.
Sancho, shrinking in the archway, was stunned by the noise and fury; he got a dazed impression of a whirling chaos in which steel flashed and hacked, arms tossed, snarling faces appeared and vanished, and straining bodies collided, rebounded, locked and mingled in a devil's dance of madness.
Details stood out briefly, like black etchings on a background of blood. He saw a Zingaran sailor, blinded by a great flap of scalp torn loose and hanging over her eyes, brace her straddling legs and drive her sword to the hilt in a black belly. He distinctly heard the buccaneer grunt as she struck, and saw the victim's tawny eyes roll up in sudden agony; blood and entrails gushed out over the driven blade. The dying black caught the blade with her naked hands, and the sailor tugged blindly and stupidly; then a black arm hooked about the Zingaran's head, a black knee was planted with cruel force in the middle of her back. Her head was jerked back at a terrible angle, and something cracked above the noise of the fray, like the breaking of a thick branch. The conqueror dashed her victim's body to the earth--and as she did, something like a beam of blue light flashed across her shoulders from behind, from right to left. She staggered, her head toppled forward on her breast, and thence, hideously, to the earth.
Sancho turned sick. He gagged and wished to vomit. He made abortive efforts to turn and flee from the spectacle, but his legs would not work. Nor could he close his eyes. In fact, he opened them wider. Revolted, repelled, nauseated, yet he felt the awful fascination he had always experienced at sight of blood. Yet this battle transcended anything he had ever seen fought out between human beings in port raids or sea battles. Then he saw Conyn.
Separated from her mates by the whole mass of the enemy, Conyn had been enveloped in a black wave of arms and bodies, and dragged down. Then they would quickly have stamped the life out of her, but she had pulled down one of them with her, and the black's body protected that of the pirate beneath her. They kicked and tore at the Barachan and dragged at their writhing comrade, but Conyn's teeth were set desperately in her throat, and the pirate clung tenaciously to her dying shield.
An onslaught of Zingarans caused a slackening of the press, and Conyn threw aside the corpse and rose, blood-smeared and terrible. The giants towered above her like great black shadows, clutching, buffeting the air with terrible blows. But she was as hard to hit or grapple as a blood-mad panther, and at every turn or flash of her blade, blood jetted. She had already taken punishment enough to kill three ordinary women, but her bull-like vitality was undiminished.
Her war cry rose above the medley of the carnage, and the bewildered but furious Zingarans took fresh heart and redoubled their strokes, until the rending of flesh and the crunching of bone beneath the swords almost drowned the howls of pain and wrath.
The blacks wavered, and broke for the gate, and Sancho squealed at their coming and scurried out of the way. They jammed in the narrow archway, and the Zingarans stabbed and hacked at their straining backs with strident yelps of glee. The gate was a shambles before the survivors broke through and scattered, each for herself.
The battle became a chase. Across grassy courts, up shimmering stairs, over the slanting roofs of fantastic towers, even along the broad coping of the walls, the giants fled, dripping blood at each step, harried by their merciless pursuers as by wolves. Cornered, some of them turned at bay and women died. But the ultimate result was always the same--a mangled black body twitching on the sward, or hurled writhing and twisting from parapet or tower roof.
Sancho had taken refuge in the court of the pool, where he crouched, shaking with terror. Outside rose a fierce yelling, feet pounded the sward, and through the arch burst a black, red-stained figure. It was the giant who wore the gemmed headband. A squat pursuer was close behind, and the black turned, at the very brink of the pool. In her extremity she had picked up a sword dropped by a dying sailor, and as the Zingaran rushed recklessly at her, she struck with the unfamiliar weapon. The buccaneer dropped with her skull crushed, but so awkwardly the blow was dealt, the blade shivered in the giant's hand.
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