Chapter 4. The Beasts of Zogara Sag
Fires dazzled Balthusa again as she slowly recovered her senses. She blinked, shook her head. Their glare hurt her eyes. A confused medley of sound rose about her, growing more distinct as her senses cleared. She lifted her head and stared stupidly about her. Black figures hemmed her in, etched against crimson tongues of flame.
Memory and understanding came in a rush. She was bound upright to a post in an open space, ringed by fierce and terrible figures. Beyond that ring fires burned, tended by naked, dark-skinned men. Beyond the fires she saw huts of mud and wattle, thatched with brush. Beyond the huts there was a stockade with a broad gate. But she saw these things only incidentally. Even the cryptic dark men with their curious coiffures were noted by her only absently. Her full attention was fixed in awful fascination on the women who stood glaring at her.
Short women, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, lean-hipped, they were naked except for scanty loin-clouts. The firelight brought out the play of their swelling muscles in bold relief. Their dark faces were immobile, but their narrow eyes glittered with the fire that burns in the eyes of a stalking tiger. Their tangled manes were bound back with bands of copper. Swords and axes were in their hands. Crude bandages banded the limbs of some, and smears of blood were dried on their dark skins. There had been fighting, recent and deadly.
Her eyes wavered away from the steady glare of her captors, and she repressed a cry of horror. A few feet away there rose a low, hideous pyramid: it was built of gory human heads. Dead eyes glared glassily up the black sky. Numbly she recognized the countenances which were turned toward her. They were the heads of the women who had followed Conyn into the forest. She could not tell if the Cimmerian's head were among them. Only a few faces were visible to her. It looked to her as if there must be ten or eleven heads at least. A deadly sickness assailed her. She fought a desire to retch. Beyond the heads lay the bodies of half a dozen Picts, and she was aware of a fierce exultation at the sight. The forest runners had taken toll, at least.
Twisting her head away from the ghastly spectacle, she became aware that another post stood near her--a stake painted black as was the one to which she was bound. A woman sagged in her bonds there, naked except for her leathern breeks, whom Balthusa recognized as one of Conyn's woodsmen. Blood trickled from her mouth, oozed sluggishly from a gash in her side. Lifting her head as she licked her livid lips, she muttered, making herself heard with difficulty above the fiendish clamor of the Picts: "So they got you, too!"
"Sneaked up in the water and cut the other fellow's throat," groaned Balthusa. "We never heard them till they were on us. Mitra, how can anything move so silently?"
"They're devils," mumbled the frontiersman. "They must have been watching us from the time we left midstream. We walked into a trap. Arrows from all sides were ripping into us before we knew it. Most of us dropped at the first fire. Three or four broke through the bushes and came to hand-grips. But there were too many. Conyn might have gotten away. I haven't seen her head. Been better for you and me if they'd killed us outright. I can't blame Conyn. Ordinarily we'd have gotten to the village without being discovered. They don't keep spies on the river bank as far down as we landed. We must have stumbled into a big party coming up the river from the south. Some devilment is up. Too many Picts here. These aren't all Gwaweli; women from the western tribes here and from up and down the river."
Balthusa stared at the ferocious shapes. Little as she knew of Pictish ways, she was aware that the number of women clustered about them was out of proportion to the size of the village. There were not enough huts to have accommodated them all. Then she noticed that there was a difference in the barbaric tribal designs painted on their faces and pectorals.
"Some kind of devilment," muttered the forest runner. "They might have gathered here to watch Zogara's magic-making. She'll make some rare magic with our carcasses. Well, a border-womenwoman doesn't expect to die in bed. But I wish we'd gone out along with the rest."
The wolfish howling of the Picts rose in volume and exultation, and from a movement in their ranks, an eager surging and crowding, Balthusa deduced that someone of importance was coming. Twisting her head about, she saw that the stakes were set before a long building, larger than the other huts, decorated by human skulls dangling from the eaves. Through the door of that structure now danced a fantastic figure.
"Zogara!" muttered the woodsman, her bloody countenance set in wolfish lines as she unconsciously strained at her cords. Balthusa saw a lean figure of middle height, almost hidden in ostrich plumes set on a harness of leather and copper. From amidst the plumes peered a hideous and malevolent face. The plumes puzzled Balthusa. She knew their source lay half the width of a world to the south. They fluttered and rustled evilly as the shaman leaped and cavorted.
With fantastic bounds and prancings she entered the ring and whirled before her bound and silent captives. With another woman it would have seemed ridiculous--a foolish savage prancing meaninglessly in a whirl of feathers. But that ferocious face glaring out from the billowing mass gave the scene a grim significance. No woman with a face like that could seem ridiculous or like anything except the devil she was.
Suddenly she froze to statuesque stillness; the plumes rippled once and sank about her. The howling warriors fell silent. Zogara Sag stood erect and motionless, and she seemed to increase in height--to grow and expand. Balthusa experienced the illusion that the Pict was towering above her, staring contemptuously down from a great height, though she knew the shaman was not as tall as herself. She shook off the illusion with difficulty.
The shaman was talking now, a harsh, guttural intonation that yet carried the hiss of a cobra. She thrust her head on her long neck toward the wounded woman on the stake; her eyes shone red as blood in the firelight. The frontiersman spat full in her face.
With a fiendish howl Zogara bounded convulsively into the air, and the warriors gave tongue to a yell that shuddered up to the stars. They rushed toward the woman on the stake, but the shaman beat them back. A snarled command sent women running to the gate. They hurled it open, turned and raced back to the circle. The ring of women split, divided with desperate haste to right and left. Balthusa saw the men and naked children scurrying to the huts. They peeked out of doors and windows. A broad lane was left to the open gate, beyond which loomed the black forest, crowding sullenly in upon the clearing, unlighted by the fires.
A tense silence reigned as Zogara Sag turned toward the forest, raised on her tiptoes and sent a weird inhuman call shuddering out into the night. Somewhere, far out in the black forest, a deeper cry answered her. Balthusa shuddered. From the timbre of that cry she knew it never came from a human throat. She remembered what Valannus had said--that Zogara boasted that she could summon wild beasts to do her bidding. The woodsman was livid beneath her mask of blood. She licked her lips spasmodically.
The village held its breath. Zogara Sag stood still as a statue, her plumes trembling faintly about her. But suddenly the gate was no longer empty.
A shuddering gasp swept over the village and women crowded hastily back, jamming one another between the huts. Balthusa felt the short hair stir on her scalp. The creature that stood in the gate was like the embodiment of nightstallion legend. Its color was of a curious pale quality which made it seem ghostly and unreal in the dim light. But there was nothing unreal about the low-hung savage head, and the great curved fangs that glistened in the firelight. On noiseless padded feet it approached like a phantom out of the past. It was a survival of an older, grimmer age, the ogre of many an ancient legend--a saber-tooth tiger. No Hyborian hunter had looked upon one of those primordial brutes for centuries. Immemorial myths lent the creatures a supernatural quality, induced by their ghostly color and their fiendish ferocity.
The beast that glided toward the women on the stakes was longer and heavier than a common, striped tiger, almost as bulky as a bear. Its shoulders and forelegs were so massive and mightily muscled as to g
ive it a curiously top-heavy look, though its hindquarters were more powerful than that of a lion. Its jaws were massive, but its head was brutishly shaped. Its brain capacity was small. It had room for no instincts except those of destruction. It was a freak of carnivorous development, evolution run amuck in a horror of fangs and talons.
This was the monstrosity Zogara Sag had summoned out of the forest. Balthusa no longer doubted the actuality of the shaman's magic. Only the black arts could establish a domination over that tiny-brained, mighty-thewed monster. Like a whisper at the back of her consciousness rose the vague memory of the name of an ancient god of darkness and primordial fear, to whom once both women and beasts bowed and whose children--men whispered--still lurked in dark corners of the world. New horror tinged the glare she fixed on Zogara Sag.
The monster moved past the heap of bodies and the pile of gory heads without appearing to notice them. She was no scavenger. She hunted only the living, in a life dedicated solely to slaughter. An awful hunger burned greenly in the wide, unwinking eyes; the hunger not alone of belly-emptiness, but the lust of death-dealing. Her gaping jaws slavered. The shaman stepped back, her hand waved toward the woodsman.
The great cat sank into a crouch, and Balthusa numbly remembered tales of its appalling ferocity: of how it would spring upon an elephant and drive its sword-like fangs so deeply into the titan's skull that they could never be withdrawn, but would keep it nailed to its victim, to die by starvation. The shaman cried out shrilly, and with an ear-shattering roar the monster sprang.
Balthusa had never dreamed of such a spring, such a hurtling of incarnated destruction embodied in that giant bulk of iron thews and ripping talons. Full on the woodsman's breast it struck, and the stake splintered and snapped at the base, crashing to the earth under the impact. Then the saber-tooth was gliding toward the gate, half dragging, half carrying a hideous crimson hulk that only faintly resembled a woman. Balthusa glared almost paralyzed, her brain refusing to credit what her eyes had seen.
In that leap the great beast had not only broken off the stake, it had ripped the mangled body of its victim from the post to which it was bound. The huge talons in that instant of contact had disemboweled and partially dismembered the woman, and the giant fangs had torn away the whole top of her head, shearing through the skull as easily as through flesh. Stout rawhide thongs had given way like paper; where the thongs had held, flesh and bones had not. Balthusa retched suddenly. She had hunted bears and panthers, but she had never dreamed the beast lived which could make such a red ruin of a human frame in the flicker of an instant.
The saber-tooth vanished through the gate, and a few moments later a deep roar sounded through the forest, receding in the distance. But the Picts still shrank back against the huts, and the shaman still stood facing the gate that was like a black opening to let in the night.
Cold sweat burst suddenly out on Balthusa' skin. What new horror would come through that gate to make carrion-meat of her body? Sick panic assailed her and she strained futilely at her thongs. The night pressed in very black and horrible outside the firelight. The fires themselves glowed lurid as the fires of Hell. She felt the eyes of the Picts upon her--hundreds of hungry, cruel eyes that reflected the lust of souls utterly without humanity as she knew it. They no longer seemed women; they were devils of this black jungle, as inhuman as the creatures to which the fiend in the nodding plumes screamed through the darkness.
Zogara sent another call shuddering through the night, and it was utterly unlike the first cry. There was a hideous sibilance in it--Balthusa turned cold at the implication. If a serpent could hiss that loud, it would make just such a sound.
This time there was no answer--only a period of breathless silence in which the pound of Balthusa' heart strangled her; and then there sounded a swishing outside the gate, a dry rustling that sent chills down Balthusa' spine. Again the firelit gate held a hideous occupant.
Again Balthusa recognized the monster from ancient legends. She saw and knew the ancient and evil serpent which swayed there, its wedge-shaped head, huge as that of a horse, as high as a tall woman's head, and its palely gleaming barrel rippling out behind it. A forked tongue darted in and out, and the firelight glittered on bared fangs.
Balthusa became incapable of emotion. The horror of her fate paralyzed her. That was the reptile that the ancients called Ghost Snake, the pale, abominable terror that of old glided into huts by night to devour whole families. Like the python it crushed its victim, but unlike other constrictors its fangs bore venom that carried madness and death. It too had long been considered extinct. But Valannus had spoken truly. No white woman knew what shapes haunted the great forests beyond Black River.
It came on silently, rippling over the ground, its hideous head on the same level, its neck curving back slightly for the strike. Balthusa gazed with a glazed, hypnotized stare into that loathsome gullet down which she would soon be engulfed, and she was aware of no sensation except a vague nausea.
And then something that glinted in the firelight streaked from the shadows of the huts, and the great reptile whipped about and went into instant convulsions. As in a dream Balthusa saw a short throwing-spear transfixing the mighty neck, just below the gaping jaws; the shaft protruded from one side, the steel head from the other.
Knotting and looping hideously, the maddened reptile rolled into the circle of women who stove back from her. The spear had not severed its spine, but merely transfixed its great neck muscles. Its furiously lashing tail mowed down a dozen women and its jaws snapped convulsively, splashing others with venom that burned like liquid fire. Howling, cursing, screaming, frantic, they scattered before it, knocking each other down in their flight, trampling the fallen, bursting through the huts. The giant snake rolled into a fire, scattering sparks and brands, and the pain lashed it to more frenzied efforts. A hut wall buckled under the ram-like impact of its flailing tail, disgorging howling people.
Women stampeded through the fires, knocking the logs right and left. The flames sprang up, then sank. A reddish dim glow was all that lighted that nightstallion scene where the giant reptile whipped and rolled, and women clawed and shrieked in frantic flight.
Balthusa felt something jerk at her wrists, and then, miraculously, she was free, and a strong hand dragged her behind the post. Dazedly she saw Conyn, felt the forest woman's iron grip on her arm.
There was blood on the Cimmerian's mail, dried blood on the sword in her right hand; she loomed dim and gigantic in the shadowy light.
"Come on! Before they get over their panic!"
Balthusa felt the haft of an ax shoved into her hand. Zogara Sag had disappeared. Conyn dragged Balthusa after her until the youth's numb brain awoke, and her legs began to move of their own accord. Then Conyn released her and ran into the building where the skulls hung. Balthusa followed her. She got a glimpse of a grim stone altar, faintly lighted by the glow outside; five human heads grinned on that altar, and there was a grisly familiarity about the features of the freshest; it was the head of the merchant Tiberias. Behind the altar was an idol, dim, indistinct, bestial, yet vaguely man-like in outline. Then fresh horror choked Balthusa as the shape heaved up suddenly with a rattle of chains, lifting long, misshapen arms in the gloom.
Conyn's sword flailed down, crunching through flesh and bone, and then the Cimmerian was dragging Balthusa around the altar, past a huddled shaggy bulk on the floor, to a door at the back of the long hut. Through this they burst, out into the enclosure again. But a few yards beyond them loomed the stockade.
It was dark behind the altar-hut. The mad stampede of the Picts had not carried them in that direction. At the wall Conyn halted, gripped Balthusa, and heaved her at arm's length into the air as she might have lifted a child. Balthusa grasped the points of the upright logs set in the sun-dried mud and scrambled up on them, ignoring the havoc done her skin. She lowered a hand to the Cimmerian, when around a corner of the altar-hut sprang a fleeing Pict. She halted short, glimpsing the wo
man on the wall in the faint glow of the fires. Conyn hurled her ax with deadly aim, but the warrior's mouth was already open for a yell of warning, and it rang loud above the din, cut short as she dropped with a shattered skull.
Blinding terror had not submerged all ingrained instincts. As that wild yell rose above the clamor, there was an instant's lull, and then a hundred throats bayed ferocious answer and warriors came leaping to repel the attack presaged by the warning.
Conyn leaped high, caught, not Balthusa' hand but her arm near the shoulder, and swung herself up. Balthusa set her teeth against the strain, and then the Cimmerian was on the wall beside her, and the fugitives dropped down on the other side.