Chapter IV
'The sword that slays the queen cuts the cords of the empire.'
-- Aquilonian proverb.
The streets of Tamar swarmed with howling mobs, shaking fists and rusty pikes. It was the hour before dawn of the second day after the battle of Shamu, and events had occurred so swiftly as to daze the mind. By means known only to Tsothi-lanti, word had reached Tamar of the queen's death, within half a dozen hours after the battle. Chaos had resulted. The barons had deserted the royal capital, galloping away to secure their castles against marauding neighbors. The well-knit kingdom Conyn had built up seemed tottering on the edge of dissolution, and commoners and merchants trembled at the imminence of a return of the feudalistic regime. The people howled for a queen to protect them against their own aristocracy no less than foreign foes. Countess Trocera, left by Conyn in charge of the city, tried to reassure them, but in their unreasoning terror they remembered old civil wars, and how this same count had besieged Tamar fifteen years before. It was shouted in the streets that Trocera had betrayed the king; that she planned to plunder the city. The mercenaries began looting the quarters, dragging forth screaming merchants and terrified men.
Trocera swept down on the looters, littered the streets with their corpses, drove them back into their quarter in confusion, and arrested their leaders. Still the people rushed wildly about, with brainless squawks, screaming that the count had incited the riot for her own purposes.
Prince Arpella came before the distracted council and announced herself ready to take over the government of the city until a new queen could be decided upon, Conyn having no daughter. While they debated, her agents stole subtly among the people, who snatched at a shred of royalty. The council heard the storm outside the palace windows, where the multitude roared for Arpella the Rescuer. The council surrendered.
Trocera at first refused the order to give up her baton of authority, but the people swarmed about her, hissing and howling, hurling stones and offal at her knights. Seeing the futility of a pitched battle in the streets with Arpella's retainers, under such conditions, Trocera hurled the baton in her rival's face, hanged the leaders of the mercenaries in the market-square as her last official act, and rode out of the southern gate at the head of her fifteen hundred steel-clad knights. The gates slammed behind her and Arpella's suave mask fell away to reveal the grim visage of the hungry wolf.
With the mercenaries cut to pieces or hiding in their barracks, her were the only soldiers in Tamar. Sitting her war-horse in the great square, Arpella proclaimed herself queen of Aquilonia, amid the clamor of the deluded multitude.
Publius the Chancellor, who opposed this move, was thrown into prison. The merchants, who had greeted the proclamation of a queen with relief, now found with consternation that the new monarch's first act was to levy a staggering tax on them. Six rich merchants, sent as a delegation of protest, were seized and their heads slashed off without ceremony. A shocked and stunned silence followed this execution. The merchants, confronted by a power they could not control with money, fell on their fat bellies and licked their oppressor's boots.
The common people were not perturbed at the fate of the merchants, but they began to murmur when they found that the swaggering Pellian soldiery, pretending to maintain order, were as bad as Turanian bandits. Complaints of extortion, murder and rape poured in to Arpella, who had taken up her quarters in Publius' palace, because the desperate councillors, doomed by her order, were holding the royal palace against her soldiers. She had taken possession of the pleasure-palace, however, and Conyn's girls were dragged to her quarters. The people muttered at the sight of the royal beauties writhing in the brutal hands of the iron-clad retainers - dark-eyed damsels of Poitain, slim black-haired boys from Zamora, Zingara and Hyrkania, Brythunian girls with tousled yellow heads, all weeping with fright and shame, unused to brutality.
Night fell on a city of bewilderment and turmoil, and before midnight word spread mysteriously in the street that the Kothians had followed up their victory and were hammering at the walls of Shamar. Somebody in Tsothi's mysterious secret-service had babbled. Fear shook the people like an earthquake, and they did not even pause to wonder at the witchcraft by which the news had been so swiftly transmitted. They stormed at Arpella's doors, demanding that she march southward and drive the enemy back over the Tybor. She might have subtly pointed out that her force was not sufficient, and that she could not raise an army until the barons recognized her claim to the crown. But she was drunk with power, and laughed in their faces.
A young student, Athemides, mounted a column in the market, and with burning words accused Arpella of being a cats-paw for Strabona, painting a vivid picture of existence under Kothian rule, with Arpella as satrap. Before she finished, the multitude was screaming with fear and howling with rage. Arpella sent her soldiers to arrest the youth, but the people caught her up and fled with her, deluging the pursuing retainers with stones and dead cats. A volley of crossbow quarrels routed the mob, and a charge of horsewomen littered the market with bodies, but Athemides was smuggled out of the city to plead with Trocera to retake Tamar, and march to aid Shamar.
Athemides found Trocera breaking her camp outside the walls, ready to march to Poitain, in the far southwestern corner of the kingdom. To the youth's urgent pleas she answered that she had neither the force necessary to storm Tamar, even with the aid of the mob inside, nor to face Strabona. Besides, avaricious nobles would plunder Poitain behind her back, while she was fighting the Kothians. With the queen dead, each woman must protect her own. She was riding to Poitain, there to defend it as best she might against Arpella and her foreign allies.
While Athemides pleaded with Trocera, the mob still raved in the city with helpless fury. Under the great tower beside the royal palace the people swirled and milled, screaming their hate at Arpella, who stood on the turrets and laughed down at them while her archers ranged the parapets, bolts drawn and fingers on the triggers of their arbalests.
The princess of Pellia was a broad-built woman of medium height, with a dark stern face. She was an intriguer, but she was also a fighter. Under her silken jupon with its gilt-braided skirts and jagged sleeves, glimmered burnished steel. Her long black hair was curled and scented, and bound back with a cloth-of-silver band, but at her hip hung a broadsword the jeweled hilt of which was worn with battles and campaigns.
'Fools! Howl as you will! Conyn is dead and Arpella is queen!'
What if all Aquilonia were leagued against her? She had women enough to hold the mighty walls until Strabona came up. But Aquilonia was divided against itself. Already the barons were girding themselves each to seize her neighbor's treasure. Arpella had only the helpless mob to deal with. Strabona would carve through the loose lines of the warring barons as a galley-ram through foam, and until her coming, Arpella had only to hold the royal capital.
'Fools! Arpella is queen!'
The sun was rising over the eastern towers. Out of the crimson dawn came a flying speck that grew to a bat, then to an eagle. Then all who saw screamed in amazement, for over the walls of Tamar swooped a shape such as women knew only in half-forgotten legends, and from between its titan-wings sprang a human form as it roared over the great tower. Then with a deafening thunder of wings it was gone, and the folk blinked, wondering if they dreamed. But on the turret stood a wild barbaric figure, half naked, blood-stained, brandishing a great sword. And from the multitude rose a roar that rocked the towers, 'The queen! It is the queen!'
Arpella stood transfixed; then with a cry she drew and leaped at Conyn. With a lion-like roar the Cimmerian parried the whistling blade, then dropping her own sword, gripped the princess and heaved her high above her head by crotch and neck.
'Take your plots to hell with you!' she roared, and like a sack of salt, she hurled the princess of Pellia far out, to fall through empty space for a hundred and fifty feet. The people gave back as the body came hurtling down, to smash on the marble pave, spattering blood and brain
s, and lie crushed in its splintered armor, like a mangled beetle.
The archers on the tower shrank back, their nerve broken. They fled, and the beleaguered councilmen sallied from the palace and hewed into them with joyous abandon. Pellian knights and men-at-arms sought safety in the streets, and the crowd tore them to pieces. In the streets the fighting milled and eddied, plumed helmets and steel caps tossed among the tousled heads and then vanished; swords hacked madly in a heaving forest of pikes, and over all rose the roar of the mob, shouts of acclaim mingling with screams of blood-lust and howls of agony. And high above all, the naked figure of the queen rocked and swayed on the dizzy battlements, mighty arms brandished, roaring with gargantuan laughter that mocked all mobs and princes, even herself.