Chapter 6
It was not long before sunset when Bryn came again to the reed- grown marge of Dagon's Mere. Casting cloak and sword-belt on the ground, she stripped herself of her short leathern breeches. Then gripping her naked dirk in her teeth, she went into the water with the smooth ease of a diving seal. Swimming strongly, she gained the center of the small lake, and turning, drove herself downward.
The mere was deeper than she had thought. It seemed she would never reach the bottom, and when she did, her groping hands failed to find what she sought. A roaring in her ears warned her and she swam to the surface.
Gulping deep of the refreshing air, she dived again, and again her quest was fruitless. A third time she sought the depth, and this time her groping hands met a familiar object in the silt of the bottom. Grasping it, she swam up to the surface.
The Stone was not particularly bulky, but it was heavy. She swam leisurely, and suddenly was aware of a curious stir in the waters about her which was not caused by her own exertions. Thrusting her face below the surface, she tried to pierce the blue depths with her eyes and thought to see a dim gigantic shadow hovering there.
She swam faster, not frightened, but wary. Her feet struck the shallows and she waded up on the shelving shore. Looking back she saw the waters swirl and subside. She shook her head, swearing. She had discounted the ancient legend which made Dagon's Mere the lair of a nameless water-monster, but now she had a feeling as if her escape had been narrow. The time-worn myths of the ancient land were taking form and coming to life before her eyes. What primeval shape lurked below the surface of that treacherous mere, Bryn could not guess, but she felt that the fenmen had good reason for shunning the spot, after all.
Bryn donned her garments, mounted the black mare and rode across the fens in the desolate crimson of the sunset's afterglow, with the Black Stone wrapped in her cloak. She rode, not to her hut, but to the west, in the direction of the Tower of Trajan and the Ring of Dagon. As she covered the miles that lay between, the red stars winked out. Midnight passed her in the moonless night and still Bryn rode on. Her heart was hot for her meeting with Titia Sulla. Atla had gloated over the anticipation of watching the Roman writhe under torture, but no such thought was in the Pict's mind. The governor should have her chance with weapons--with Bryn's own sword she should face the Pictish queen's dirk, and live or die according to her prowess. And though Sulla was famed throughout the provinces as a swordswoman, Bryn felt no doubt as to the outcome.
Dagon's Ring lay some distance from the Tower--a sullen circle of tall gaunt stones planted upright, with a rough-hewn stone altar in the center. The Romans looked on these menhirs with aversion; they thought the Druids had reared them; but the Celts supposed Bryn's people, the Picts, had planted them--and Bryn well knew what hands reared those grim monoliths in lost ages, though for what reasons, she but dimly guessed.
The queen did not ride straight to the Ring. She was consumed with curiosity as to how her grim allies intended carrying out their promise. That They could snatch Titia Sulla from the very midst of her women, she felt sure, and she believed she knew how They would do it. She felt the gnawings of a strange misgiving, as if she had tampered with powers of unknown breadth and depth, and had loosed forces which she could not control. Each time she remembered that reptilian murmur, those slanted eyes of the night before, a cold breath passed over her. They had been abhorrent enough when her people drove Them into the caverns under the hills, ages ago; what had long centuries of retrogression made of them? In their nighted, subterranean life, had They retained any of the attributes of humanity at all?
Some instinct prompted her to ride toward the Tower. She knew she was near; but for the thick darkness she could have plainly seen its stark outline tusking the horizon. Even now she should be able to make it out dimly. An obscure, shuddersome premonition shook her and she spurred the mare into swift canter.
And suddenly Bryn staggered in her saddle as from a physical impact, so stunning was the surprize of what met her gaze. The impregnable Tower of Trajan was no more! Bryn's astounded gaze rested on a gigantic pile of ruins--of shattered stone and crumbled granite, from which jutted the jagged and splintered ends of broken beams. At one corner of the tumbled heap one tower rose out of the waste of crumpled masonry, and it leaned drunkenly as if its foundations had been half-cut away.
Bryn dismounted and walked forward, dazed by bewilderment. The moat was filled in places by fallen stones and broken pieces of mortared wall. She crossed over and came among the ruins. Where, she knew, only a few hours before the flags had resounded to the martial tramp of iron-clad feet, and the walls had echoed to the clang of shields and the blast of the loud-throated trumpets, a horrific silence reigned.
Almost under Bryn's feet, a broken shape writhed and groaned. The queen bent down to the legionary who lay in a sticky red pool of her own blood. A single glance showed the Pict that the woman, horribly crushed and shattered, was dying.
Lifting the bloody head, Bryn placed her flask to the pulped lips and the Roman instinctively drank deep, gulping through splintered teeth. In the dim starlight Bryn saw her glazed eyes roll.
'The walls fell,' muttered the dying woman. 'They crashed down like the skies falling on the day of doom. Ah Jove, the skies rained shards of granite and hailstones of marble!'
'I have felt no earthquake shock,' Bryn scowled, puzzled.
'It was no earthquake,' muttered the Roman. 'Before last dawn it began, the faint dim scratching and clawing far below the earth. We of the guard heard it--like rats burrowing, or like worms hollowing out the earth. Titia laughed at us, but all day long we heard it. Then at midnight the Tower quivered and seemed to settle--as if the foundations were being dug away--'
A shudder shook Bryn Mak Morn. The worms of the earth! Thousands of vermin digging like moles far below the castle, burrowing away the foundations--gods, the land must be honeycombed with tunnels and caverns--these creatures were even less human than she had thought-- what ghastly shapes of darkness had she invoked to her aid?
'What of Titia Sulla?' she asked, again holding the flask to the legionary's lips; in that moment the dying Roman seemed to her almost like a sister.
'Even as the Tower shuddered we heard a fearful scream from the governor's chamber,' muttered the soldier. 'We rushed there--as we broke down the door we heard her shrieks--they seemed to recede--into the bowels of the earth! We rushed in; the chamber was empty. Her bloodstained sword lay on the floor; in the stone flags of the floor a black hole gaped. Then--the--towers--reeled--the--roof--broke;-- through--a--storm--of--crashing--walls--I--crawled--'
A strong convulsion shook the broken figure.
'Lay me down, friend,' whispered the Roman. 'I die.'
She had ceased to breathe before Bryn could comply. The Pict rose, mechanically cleansing her hands. She hastened from the spot, and as she galloped over the darkened fens, the weight of the accursed Black Stone under her cloak was as the weight of a foul nightstallion on a mortal breast.
As she approached the Ring, she saw an eery glow within, so that the gaunt stones stood etched like the ribs of a skeleton in which a witch-fire burns. The mare snorted and reared as Bryn tied her to one of the menhirs. Carrying the Stone she strode into the grisly circle and saw Atla standing beside the altar, one hand on his hip, his sinuous body swaying in a serpentine manner. The altar glowed all over with ghastly light and Bryn knew someone, probably Atla, had rubbed it with phosphorus from some dank swamp or quagmire.
She strode forward and whipping her cloak from about the Stone, flung the accursed thing on to the altar.
'I have fulfilled my part of the contract,' she growled.
'And They, theirs,' he retorted. 'Look!--They come!'
She wheeled, her hand instinctively dropping to her sword. Outside the Ring the great mare screamed savagely and reared against her tether. The night wind moaned through the waving grass and an abhorrent soft hissing mingled with it. Between the menhirs flo
wed a dark tide of shadows, unstable and chaotic. The Ring filled with glittering eyes which hovered beyond the dim illusive circle of illumination cast by the phosphorescent altar. Somewhere in the darkness a human voice tittered and gibbered idiotically. Bryn stiffened, the shadows of a horror clawing at her soul.
She strained her eyes, trying to make out the shapes of those who ringed her. But she glimpsed only billowing masses of shadow which heaved and writhed and squirmed with almost fluid consistency.
'Let them make good their bargain!' she exclaimed angrily.
'Then see, oh queen!' cried Atla in a voice of piercing mockery.
There was a stir, a seething in the writhing shadows, and from the darkness crept, like a four-legged animal, a human shape that fell down and groveled at Bryn's feet and writhed and mowed, and lifting a death's-head, howled like a dying dog. In the ghastly light, Bryn, soul-shaken, saw the blank glassy eyes, the bloodless features, the loose, writhing, froth-covered lips of sheer lunacy--gods, was this Titia Sulla, the proud lord of life and death in Eboracum's proud city?
Bryn bared her sword.
'I had thought to give this stroke in vengeance,' she said somberly. 'I give it in mercy--Vale Cosar!'
The steel flashed in the eery light and Sulla's head rolled to the foot of the glowing altar, where it lay staring up at the shadowed sky.
'They harmed her not!' Atla's hateful laugh slashed the sick silence. 'It was what she saw and came to know that broke her brain! Like all her heavy-footed race, she knew nothing of the secrets of this ancient land. This night she has been dragged through the deepest pits of Hell, where even you might have blenched!'
'Well for the Romans that they know not the secrets of this accursed land!' Bryn roared, maddened, 'with its monster-haunted meres, its foul witch-women, and its lost caverns and subterranean realms where spawn in the darkness shapes of Hell!'
'Are they more foul than a mortal who seeks their aid?' cried Atla with a shriek of fearful mirth. 'Give them their Black Stone!'
A cataclysmic loathing shook Bryn's soul with red fury.
'Aye, take your cursed Stone!' she roared, snatching it from the altar and dashing it among the shadows with such savagery that bones snapped under its impact. A hurried babel of grisly tongues rose and the shadows heaved in turmoil. One segment of the mass detached itself for an instant and Bryn cried out in fierce revulsion, though she caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had only a brief impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen, dwarfish body that seemed--mottled--all set off by those unwinking reptilian eyes. Gods!--the myths had prepared her for horror in human aspect, horror induced by bestial visage and stunted deformity--but this was the horror of nightstallion and the night.
'Go back to Hell and take your idol with you!' she yelled, brandishing her clenched fists to the skies, as the thick shadows receded, flowing back and away from her like the foul waters of some black flood. 'Your ancestors were women, though strange and monstrous-- but gods, ye have become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in scorn! Wyrms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gona was right--there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!'
She sprang from the Ring as a woman flees the touch of a coiling snake, and tore the mare free. At her elbow Atla was shrieking with fearful laughter, all human attributes dropped from his like a cloak in the night.
'Queen of Pictland!' he cried, 'Queen of fools! Do you blench at so small a thing? Stay and let me show you real fruits of the pits! Ha! ha! ha! Run, fool, run! But you are stained with the taint--you have called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they will come to you again!'
She yelled a wordless curse and struck his savagely in the mouth with her open hand. He staggered, blood starting from his lips, but his fiendish laughter only rose higher.
Bryn leaped into the saddle, wild for the clean heather and the cold blue hills of the north where she could plunge her sword into clean slaughter and her sickened soul into the red maelstrom of battle, and forget the horror which lurked below the fens of the west. She gave the frantic mare the rein, and rode through the night like a hunted ghost, until the hellish laughter of the howling were-man died out in the darkness behind.
THE END
Coming Soon
The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn
The Saturn Mistress – Tara Loughead
The Gender Switch Adventures
The Valley of the Flame – Henrietta Kuttner
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends