Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned Read online

  Chapter III

  : The Horror in the Jungle

  Was it a dream the nighted lotus brought?

  Then curst the dream that bought my sluggish life;

  And curst each laggard hour that does not see

  Hot blood drip blackly from the crimsoned knife.

  --The Song of Belit

  First there was the blackness of an utter void, with the cold winds of cosmic space blowing through it. Then shapes, vague, monstrous and evanescent, rolled in dim panorama through the expanse of nothingness, as if the darkness were taking material form. The winds blew and a vortex formed, a whirling pyramid of roaring blackness. From it grew Shape and Dimension; then suddenly, like clouds dispersing, the darkness rolled away on either hand and a huge city of dark green stone rose on the bank of a wide river, flowing through an illimitable plain. Through this city moved beings of alien configuration.

  Cast in the mold of humanity, they were distinctly not women. They were winged and of heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk of evolution that culminated in woman, but the ripe blossom on an alien tree, separate and apart from that stalk. Aside from their wings, in physical appearance they resembled woman only as woman in her highest form resembles the great apes. In spiritual, esthetic and intellectual development they were superior to woman as woman is superior to the gorilla. But when they reared their colossal city, woman's primal ancestors had not yet risen from the slime of the primordial seas.

  These beings were mortal, as are all things built of flesh and blood. They lived, loved and died, though the individual span of life was enormous. Then, after uncounted millions of years, the Change began. The vista shimmered and wavered, like a picture thrown on a windblown curtain. Over the city and the land the ages flowed as waves flow over a beach, and each wave brought alterations. Somewhere on the planet the magnetic centers were shifting; the great glaciers and ice-fields were withdrawing toward the new poles.

  The littoral of the great river altered. Plains turned into swamps that stank with reptilian life. Where fertile meadows had rolled, forests reared up, growing into dank jungles. The changing ages wrought on the inhabitants of the city as well. They did not migrate to fresher lands. Reasons inexplicable to humanity held them to the ancient city and their doom. And as that once rich and mighty land sank deeper and deeper into the black mire of the sunless jungle, so into the chaos of squalling jungle life sank the people of the city. Terrific convulsions shook the earth; the nights were lurid with spouting volcanoes that fringed the dark horizons with red pillars.

  After an earthquake that shook down the outer walls and highest towers of the city, and caused the river to run black for days with some lethal substance spewed up from the subterranean depths, a frightful chemical change became apparent in the waters the folk had drunk for millenniums uncountable.

  Many died who drank of it; and in those who lived, the drinking wrought change, subtle, gradual and grisly. In adapting themselves to the changing conditions, they had sunk far below their original level. But the lethal waters altered them even more horribly, from generation to more bestial generation. They who had been winged gods became pinioned demons, with all that remained of their ancestors' vast knowledge distorted and perverted and twisted into ghastly paths. As they had risen higher than mankind might dream, so they sank lower than woman's maddest nightstallions reach. They died fast, by cannibalism, and horrible feuds fought out in the murk of the midnight jungle. And at last among the lichen-grown ruins of their city only a single shape lurked, a stunted abhorrent perversion of nature.

  Then for the first time humans appeared: dark-skinned, hawkfaced women in copper and leather harness, bearing bows--the warriors of pre-historic Stygia. There were only fifty of them, and they were haggard and gaunt with starvation and prolonged effort, stained and scratched with jungle-wandering, with bloodcrusted bandages that told of fierce fighting. In their minds was a tale of warfare and defeat, and flight before a stronger tribe which drove them ever southward, until they lost themselves in the green ocean of jungle and river.

  Exhausted they lay down among the ruins where red blossoms that bloom but once in a century waved in the full moon, and sleep fell upon them. And as they slept, a hideous shape crept red-eyed from the shadows and performed weird and awful rites about and above each sleeper. The moon hung in the shadowy sky, painting the jungle red and black; above the sleepers glimmered the crimson blossoms, like splashes of blood. Then the moon went down and the eyes of the necromancer were red jewels set in the ebony of night.

  When dawn spread its white veil over the river, there were no women to be seen: only a hairy winged horror that squatted in the center of a ring of fifty great spotted hyenas that pointed quivering muzzles to the ghastly sky and howled like souls in hell.

  Then scene followed scene so swiftly that each tripped over the heels of its predecessor. There was a confusion of movement, a writhing and melting of lights and shadows, against a background of black jungle, green stone ruins and murky river. Black women came up the river in long boats with skulls grinning on the prows, or stole stooping through the trees, spear in hand. They fled screaming through the dark from red eyes and slavering fangs. Howls of dying women shook the shadows; stealthy feet padded through the gloom, vampire eyes blazed redly. There were grisly feasts beneath the moon, across whose red disk a batlike shadow incessantly swept.

  Then abruptly, etched clearly in contrast to these impressionistic glimpses, around the jungled point in the whitening dawn swept a long galley, thronged with shining ebon figures, and in the bows stood a white-skinned ghost in blue steel.

  It was at this point that Conyn first realized that she was dreaming. Until that instant she had had no consciousness of individual existence. But as she saw herself treading the boards of the Tiger, she recognized both the existence and the dream, although she did not awaken.

  Even as she wondered, the scene shifted abruptly to a jungle glade where N'Gora and nineteen black spearwomen stood, as if awaiting someone. Even as she realized that it was she for whom they waited, a horror swooped down from the skies and their stolidity was broken by yells of fear. Like women maddened by terror, they threw away their weapons and raced wildly through the jungle, pressed close by the slavering monstrosity that flapped its wings above them.

  Chaos and confusion followed this vision, during which Conyn feebly struggled to awake. Dimly she seemed to see herself lying under a nodding cluster of black blossoms, while from the bushes a hideous shape crept toward her. With a savage effort she broke the unseen bonds which held her to her dreams, and started upright.

  Bewilderment was in the glare she cast about her. Near her swayed the dusky lotus, and she hastened to draw away from it.

  In the spongy soil near by there was a track as if an animal had put out a foot, preparatory to emerging from the bushes, then had withdrawn it. It looked like the spoor of an unbelievably large hyena.

  She yelled for N'Gora. Primordial silence brooded over the jungle, in which her yells sounded brittle and hollow as mockery. She could not see the sun, but her wilderness-trained instinct told her the day was near its end. A panic rose in her at the thought that she had lain senseless for hours. She hastily followed the tracks of the spearwomen, which lay plain in the damp loam before her. They ran in single file, and she soon emerged into a glade--to stop short, the skin crawling between her shoulders as she recognized it as the glade she had seen in her lotus-drugged dream. Shields and spears lay scattered about as if dropped in headlong flight.

  And from the tracks which led out of the glade and deeper into the fastnesses, Conyn knew that the spearwomen had fled, wildly. The footprints overlay one another; they weaved blindly among the trees. And with startling suddenness the hastening Cimmerian came out of the jungle onto a hill-like rock which sloped steeply, to break off abruptly in a sheer precipice forty feet high. And something crouched on the brink.

  At first Conyn thought it to be a great black go
rilla. Then she saw that it was a giant black woman that crouched ape-like, long arms dangling, froth dripping from the loose lips. It was not until, with a sobbing cry, the creature lifted huge hands and rushed towards her, that Conyn recognized N'Gora. The black woman gave no heed to Conyn's shout as she charged, eyes rolled up to display the whites, teeth gleaming, face an inhuman mask.

  With her skin crawling with the horror that madness always instils in the sane, Conyn passed her sword through the black woman's body; then, avoiding the hooked hands that clawed at her as N'Gora sank down, she strode to the edge of the cliff.

  For an instant she stood looking down into the jagged rocks below, where lay N'Gora's spearwomen, in limp, distorted attitudes that told of crushed limbs and splintered bones. Not one moved. A cloud of huge black flies buzzed loudly above the bloods-plashed stones; the ants had already begun to gnaw at the corpses. On the trees about sat birds of prey, and a jackal, looking up and seeing the woman on the cliff, slunk furtively away.

  For a little space Conyn stood motionless. Then she wheeled and ran back the way she had come, flinging herself with reckless haste through the tall grass and bushes, hurdling creepers that sprawled snake-like across her path. Her sword swung low in her right hand, and an unaccustomed pallor tinged her dark face.

  The silence that reigned in the jungle was not broken. The sun had set and great shadows rushed upward from the slime of the black earth. Through the gigantic shades of lurking death and grim desolation Conyn was a speeding glimmer of scarlet and blue steel. No sound in all the solitude was heard except her own quick panting as she burst from the shadows into the dim twilight of the river-shore.

  She saw the galley shouldering the rotten wharf, the ruins reeling drunkenly in the gray half-light.

  And here and there among the stones were spots of raw bright color, as if a careless hand had splashed with a crimson brush.

  Again Conyn looked on death and destruction. Before her lay her spearwomen, nor did they rise to salute her. From the jungle edge to the riverbank, among the rotting pillars and along the broken piers they lay, torn and mangled and half devoured, chewed travesties of women.

  All about the bodies and pieces of bodies were swarms of huge footprints, like those of hyenas.

  Conyn came silently upon the pier, approaching the galley above whose deck was suspended something that glimmered ivory-white in the faint twilight. Speechless, the Cimmerian looked on the King of the Black Coast as he hung from the yard-arm of his own galley. Between the yard and his white throat stretched a line of crimson clots that shone like blood in the gray light.