Seeing the hunched figure creep off, Dagmar laughed spitefully, making a secret promise to herself that even a man she might choose to throw away would go to no other woman. But since at present she needed aid and not ill-will, she put that aside.
When the Countess was out of sight, Dagmar went in to Maid and stood in the half-light of the fire, proud and tall, exulting over the other woman in all the sensual strength and grace of her body, as she had over the Countess Ana in her mind.
“I would have what I desire most, Andrei Varoff,” she said boldly, speaking with the arrogance of a woman who rules men by their lusts.
“Let him but look on you. You need no help here,” returned Maid.
“I cannot come to him easily; he is not one to be met by chance. Give me that which will bring him to me by his own choice.”
“You are a wedded wife.”
Dagmar laughed shrilly. “What good does a man who must hide ever in a mountain cave do me, Old One? I have slept too long in a cold bed. Let me draw Varoff, and you and the valley will have kin within the enemy’s gate.”
Maid studied her for a long moment, and Dagmar grew uneasy, for those eyes in age carved pits seemed to read far too deeply. But, without making any answer in words, Maid began certain preparations. There was a strange chanting, low and soft but long, that night. The words were almost as old as the hills around them, and the air of the hut was thick with the scent of burning herbs.
When it was done Dagmar stood again by the fire, and in her hands she turned and twisted a shining, silken belt. She looped it about her arm beneath her cloak and tugged at the heavy coronet of her braids. The long locks Maid had shorn were not missed. Her teeth showed in white points against her lip as she brought out of her pocket some of those creased slips of paper our conquerors used for money.
Maid shook her head. “Not for coin did I do this,” she said harshly. “But if you come to rule here as you desire, remember you are kin.”
Dagmar laughed again, more than ever sure of herself. “Be sure that I will, Old One.”
Within two days the silken belt was in Varoff’s hands, and within five Dagmar was installed in the castle. But in the Colonel she had met her match, for Varoff found her no great novelty. She could not bend him to her will as she had Ivor, who was more sensitive and less guarded. But, being shrewd, Dagmar accepted the situation with surface grace and made no demands.
As for the valley women, they spat after her, and there was hate in their hearts. Who told Ivor I do not know, though it was not the Countess Ana. (She could not wound where she would die to defend.) But somehow he managed to get a message to Dagmar, entreating her to come to him, for he believed she had gone to Varoff to protect him.
What that message aroused in Dagmar was contempt and fear: contempt for the man who would call her to share his harsh exile and fear that he might break the slender bond she had with Varoff. She was determined that Ivor must go. It was very simple, that betrayal, for Ivor believed in her. He went to his death as easily as a bullock led to the butcher, in spite of warnings from the Countess Ana and his men.
He slipped down by night to where Dagmar promised to wait and walked into the hands of the Colonel’s guard. They say he was a long time dying, for Andrei Varoff had a taste for such treatment for prisoners when he could safely indulge it. Dagmar watched him die; that, too, was part of the Colonel’s pleasure. Afterward there was a strange shadow in her eyes, although she walked with pride.
It was two months later that she made her second visit to Maid. But this time there were two to receive her. Yet in neither look, word, nor deed, did either show emotion at that meeting; it was as if they waited. They remained silent, forcing her to declare her purpose.
“I would bear a son.” She began as one giving an order. Only—confronted by those unchanging faces she faltered and lost some of her assurance. She might even have turned and gone had the Countess Ana not spoken in a cool and even voice.
“It is well known that Varoff desires a son.”
Dagmar responded to that faint encouragement. “True! Let me be the one to bear the child and my influence over him will be complete. Then I can repay—it is true, you frozen faces!” She was aroused by the masks they wore. “You believe that I betrayed Ivor, not knowing the whole of the story. I have very little power over Varoff now. But let me give him a son; then there will be no limit on what I can demand of him—none at all!”
“You shall bear a son. Certainly you shall bear a son,” replied the Countess Ana. In the security of that promise Dagmar rejoiced, not attending to the finer shades of meaning in the voice which uttered it.
“But what you ask of us takes preparation. You must wait and return when the moon once more waxes. Then we shall do what is to be done!”Reassured, Dagmar left. As the door of the hut swung shut behind her, the Countess Ana came to stand before the fire, her crooked shape making a blot upon the wall with its shadow.
“She shall have a son, Maid, even as I promised, only whether thereafter she will discover it profitable—”
From within the folds of her coarse peasant blouse, she brought out a packet wrapped in a scrap of fine but brown-stained linen. Unfolding the cloth, she revealed what it guarded: a lock of black hair, stiff and matted with something more than mud. Maid, seeing that and guessing the purpose for which it would be used, laughed. The Countess did not so much as smile.
“There shall be a son, Maid,” she repeated, but her promise was no threat. There was a more subtle note, and in the firelight her eyes gleamed with an eagerness to belie the ruin of her face.
Within two days came the night she had appointed, Dagmar with it. Again there was chanting and things done in secret. When Dagmar left at dawn she smiled a thin smile.
Let her but bear a child and they would see, all would see, how she would deal with those who now dared to look crosswise after her and spit upon her footprints! Let such fools take heed!
Shortly thereafter it became known that Dagmar was with child. Varoff could not conceal his joy. During the months which followed he made plans to send her out of the valley, that his son might be born with the best medical care; and he loaded her with gifts. But the inner caution of an often-disappointed man made him keep her prisoner.
Dagmar did not leave the valley. She could not make the rough trip by river and sea. The road over the mountain was but a narrow track, and just before Varoff prepared to leave with her there was such a storm as is seldom seen at that time of year. A landslide blotted out the road. The Colonel cursed and drove his own soldiers and the valley men to dig a way through, but even he realized it could not be cleared in time.
So he was forced to summon Maid. His threats to her were cold and deadly, for he had no illusions concerning the depth of the valley’s hatred. But the old woman bore his raving meekly, and he came to believe her broken enough in spirit to be harmless.
Thus, though he still suspected her, he brought her to Dagmar and bade her use her skill.
For a night and a day Dagmar lay in labor, and what she suffered must have been very great. But greater still was her determination to be the one to place a living son in the arms of Andrei Varoff. In the evening the child was born, its thin cry echoing from the walls of the ancient room like the wail of a tormented soul. Dagmar clawed herself up.
“Is it a boy?” she demanded hoarsely.
Maid nodded her white head. “A boy.”
“Give him to me and call—”
But there was no need to complete that order for Andrei Varoff was already within the chamber and Dagmar greeted him proudly, the baby in the curve of her arm. As he strode to the bedside she thrust away the swaddling blanket and displayed the tiny body fully. But her eyes were for Varoff rather than for the child she had schemed to make a weapon in her hand.
“Your son—” she began. Then something in VarofTs eyes as he stared down upon the child chilled her as if naked steel, ice cold, had been plunged into her sweating body.
For the first time she looked upon the baby. This was her key, a son for Varoff.
Her scream, thin and high, tore through the storm wind moaning outside the narrow window. Andrei loomed over her as she cowered away from what she read in his eyes, in the twist of his thick lips.
It was Maid who snatched the baby and sped from that room, at a greater speed than her years might warrant, to be joined by another within a secret way of the castle. The twisted, limping figure took the child eagerly into long empty arms, to hold it tenderly as a long-desired gift.
But neither of the two Maid left were aware of her flight. What was done there cannot be told, but before the coming of dawn Varoff shot himself.
Where is the magic in all this, besides the muttering of old woman? Just this: when Dagmar demanded a son from the Countess Ana, she indeed obtained her desire. But the child she bore had fine black hair growing in a sharp peak above a wolf cub’s face—a face which Andrei Varoff and Dagmar Kark had excellent reason to know well. Who fathered Dagmar’s child, a man nigh twelve months dead? And who was its true mother? Think carefully, my friend.
Not a pretty story, eh? But, you see, old gods do not tend to be mild when called on to render justice.
The Gifts of Asti
Fantasy Book Vol. 1, No. 3 (1948)
Even here, on the black terrace before the forgotten mountain retreat of Asti, it was possible to smell the dank stench of burning Memphir, to imagine that the dawn wind bore upward from the pillaged city the faint tortured cries of those whom the barbarians of Klem hunted to their prolonged death. Indeed it was time to leave—
Varta, last of the virgin Maidens of Asti, shivered. Lur, the scaled and wattled creature crouching beside her, turned his reptilian head so that his golden eyes met her aquamarine ones set slantingly at a provocative angle on her smooth ivory face.
“We go—?”
She nodded in answer to that question Lur had sent into her brain, and turned toward the dark cavern which was the mouth of Asti’s last dwelling place. Once, more than a thousand years before when the walls of Memphir were young, Asti had lived among men below. But in the richness and softness which was trading Memphir, empire of empires, Asti found no place. So He—and those who served Him—had withdrawn to this mountain outcrop. And she, Varta, was the last, the very last, to bow knee at Asti’s shrine and raise her voice in the dawn hymn, for Lur, as was all of his race, mute.
Even the loot of Memphir would not sate the shaggy headed warriors who had stormed her gates this day. The stairway to Asti’s Temple was plain enough to see, and there would be those to essay the steep climb hoping to find a treasure which did not exist. For Asti was an austere God, delighting in plain walls and bare altars. His last priest had lain in the grave niches these three years; there would be none to hold that gate against intruders.
Varta passed between tall, uncarved pillars, Lur padding beside her, his spine-mane erect, the talons on his forefeet clicking on the stone in steady rhythm. So they came into the innermost shrine of Asti, and there Varta made graceful obeisance to the great cowled and robed figure which sat enthroned, its hidden eyes focused upon its own outstretched hand.
And above the flattened palm of that wide hand hung suspended in space the round orange-red sun ball which was twin to the sun that lighted Erb. Around the miniature sun swung in their orbits the four worlds of the system, each obeying the laws of space, even as did the planets they represented.
“Memphir has fallen.” Varta’s voice sounded rusty in her own ears. She had spoken so seldom during the past lonely months. “Evil has risen to overwhelm our world, even as it was prophesied in Your Revelations, O Ruler of Worlds and Maker of Destiny. Therefore, obeying the order given of old, I would depart from this, Thy house. Suffer me now to fulfill the Law—”
Three times she prostrated her slim body on the stones at the foot of Asti’s judgment chair. Then she arose and, with the confidence of a child in its father, she laid her hand palm upward upon the outstretched hand of Asti. Beneath her flesh the stone was not cold and hard, but seemed to have an inner heat, even as might a human hand. For a long moment she stood so and then she raised her hand slowly, carefully, as if within its slight hollow she cupped something precious.
And, as she drew her hand away from the grasp of Asti, the tiny sun and its planets followed, spinning now above her palm as they had above the statue’s. But out of the cowled figure some virtue had departed with the going of the miniature solar system; it was now but a carving of stone. And Varta did not look at it again as she passed behind its bulk to seek a certain place in the temple wall, known to her from much reading of the old records.
Having found the stone she sought, she moved her hand in a certain pattern before it so that the faint radiance streaming from the tiny sun gleamed on the grayness of the wall. There was a grating, as from metal long unused, and a block fell back, opening a narrow door to them.
Before she stepped within, the priestess lifted her hand above her head, and when she withdrew it, the sun and planets remained to form a diadem just above the intricate braiding of her dull red hair. As she moved into the secret way, the five orbs swung with her, and in the darkness there the sun glowed richly, sending out a light to guide their feet.
They were at the top of a stairway, and the hollow clang of the stone as it moved back into place behind them echoed through a gulf which seemed endless. But that too was as the chronicles had said, and Varta knew no fear.
How long they journeyed down into the maw of the mountain and, beyond that, into the womb of Erb itself, Varta never knew. But by the time her feet were weary and she knew the bite of real hunger, they came into a passageway which ended in a room hollowed of solid rock. And there, preserved in the chest in which men born in the youth of Memphir had laid them, Varta found that which would keep her safe on the path she must take. She put aside the fine silks, the jeweled cincture, which had been the badge of Asti’s service, and drew on over her naked body a suit of scaled skin, gemmed and glistening in the rays of the small sun. There was a hood to cover the entire head, taloned gloves for the hands, webbed, clawed coverings for the feet—as if the skin of a giant, man-like lizard had been tanned and fashioned into this suit. And Varta suspected that indeed might be so—the world of Erb had not always been held by the human-kind alone.
There were supplies here too, lying untouched in ageless containers within a lizard-skin pouch. Varta touched her tongue without fear to a powdered restorative, sharing it with Lur, whose own mailed skin would protect him through the dangers to come.
She folded the regalia she had stripped off and laid it in the chest, smoothing it regretfully before she dropped the lid upon its shimmering color. Never again would Asti’s servant wear the soft stuff of His Livery. But she was resolute enough when she picked up the food pouch and strode forward, passing out of the robing chamber into a narrow way which was a natural fault in the rock unsmoothed by the tools of man.
But when this rocky road ended upon the lip of a gorge, Varta hesitated, plucking at the throat latch of her hood-like helmet. Through the unclouded crystal of its eye-holes she could see the sprouts of yellow vapor which puffed from crannies in the rock wall down which she must climb. If the records of the Temple spoke true, these curls of gas were death to all lunged creatures of the upper world. She could only trust that the cunning of the scaled hood would not fail her.
The long talons fitted to the fingertips of the gloves, the claws of the webbed foot coverings clamped fast to every hand- and foothold, but the way down was long, and she caught a message of weariness from Lur before they reached the piled rocks at the foot of the cliff. The puffs of steamy gas had become a fog through which they groped their way slowly, following a trace of path along the base of the cliff.
Time did not exist in the underworld of Erb. Varta did not know whether it was still today, or whether she had passed into tomorrow when they came to a crossroads. She felt Lur press against her, forci
ng her back against a rock.
“There is a thing coming—” his message was clear.
And in a moment she saw a dark hulk nosing through the vapor. It moved slowly, seeming to balance at each step as if travel was a painful act. But it bore steadily to the meeting of the two paths.
“It is no enemy—” But she did not need that reassurance from Lur. Unearthly as the thing looked it had no menace.
With a last twist of ungainly body the creature squatted on a rock and clawed the clumsy covering it wore about its bone-thin shoulders and domed-skull head. The visage it revealed was long and gray, with dark pits for eyes and a gaping, fang-studded, lipless mouth.
“Who are you who dare to tread the forgotten ways and rouse from slumber the Guardian of the Chasms?”
The question was a shrill whine in her brain, her hands half arose to cover her ears—
“I am Varta, Maiden of Asti. Memphir has fallen to the barbarians of the Outer Lands and now I go, as Asti once ordered—”
The Guardian considered her answer gravely. In one skeleton claw it fumbled a rod and with this it traced certain symbols in the dust before Varta’s webbed feet. When it had done, the girl stooped and altered two of the lines with a swift stroke from one of her talons. The creature of the Chasm nodded its misshapen head.
“Asti does not rule here. But long and long and long ago there was a pact made with us in His Name. Pass free from us, woman of the Light. There are two paths before you—”
The Guardian paused for so long that Varta dared to prompt it.
“Where do they lead, Guardian of the Dark?”
“This will take you down into my country.” It jerked the rod to the right. “And that way is death for creatures from the surface world. The other—in our old legends it is said to bring a traveler out into the upper world. Of the truth of that I have no proof.”