The Pool of the Black One, Reswum Read online

be of the wind. He went toward the trees, staring into the leafy depths.

  'Conyn?' His call was inquiring; his voice sounded strange and small in the vastness of silence that had grown suddenly tense.

  His knees began to tremble as a nameless panic swept over him.

  'Conyn!' he cried desperately. 'It is I--Sancho! Where are you? Please, Conyn--' His voice faltered away. Unbelieving horror dilated his brown eyes. His red lips parted to an inarticulate scream. Paralysis gripped his limbs; where he had such desperate need of swift flight, he could not move. He could only shriek wordlessly.

  2

  When Conyn saw Zaporava stalk alone into the woodland, she felt that the chance she had watched for had come. She had eaten no fruit, nor joined in the horse-play of her mates; all her faculties were occupied with watching the buccaneer chief. Accustomed to Zaporava's moods, her women were not particularly surprized that their captain should choose to explore an unknown and probably hostile isle alone. They turned to their own amusement, and did not notice Conyn when she glided like a stalking panther after the chieftain.

  Conyn did not underrate her dominance of the crew. But she had not gained the right, through battle and foray, to challenge the captain to a duel to the death. In these empty seas there had been no opportunity for her to prove herself according to Freebooter law. The crew would stand solidly against her if she attacked the chieftain openly. But she knew that if she killed Zaporava without their knowledge, the leaderless crew would not be likely to be swayed by loyalty to a dead woman. In such wolf-packs only the living counted.

  So she followed Zaporava with sword in hand and eagerness in her heart, until she came out onto a level summit, circled with tall trees, between whose trunks she saw the green vistas of the slopes melting into the blue distance. In the midst of the glade Zaporava, sensing pursuit, turned, hand on hilt.

  The buccaneer swore.

  'Dog, why do you follow me?'

  'Are you mad, to ask?' laughed Conyn, coming swiftly toward her erstwhile chief. Her lips smiled, and in her blue eyes danced a wild gleam.

  Zaporava ripped out her sword with a black curse, and steel clashed against steel as the Barachan came in recklessly and wide open, her blade singing a wheel of blue flame about her head.

  Zaporava was the veteran of a thousand fights by sea and by land. There was no woman in the world more deeply and thoroughly versed than she in the lore of swordcraft. But she had never been pitted against a blade wielded by thews bred in the wild lands beyond the borders of civilization. Against her fighting-womencraft was matched blinding speed and strength impossible to a civilized woman. Conyn's manner of fighting was unorthodox, but instinctive and natural as that of a timber wolf. The intricacies of the sword were as useless against her primitive fury as a human boxer's skill against the onslaughts of a panther.

  Fighting as she had never fought before, straining every last ounce of effort to parry the blade that flickered like lightning about her head, Zaporava in desperation caught a full stroke near her hilt, and felt her whole arm go numb beneath the terrific impact. That stroke was instantly followed by a thrust with such terrible drive behind it that the sharp point ripped through chain-mail and ribs like paper, to transfix the heart beneath. Zaporava's lips writhed in brief agony, but, grim to the last, she made no sound. She was dead before her body relaxed on the trampled grass, where blood drops glittered like spilt rubies in the sun.

  Conyn shook the red drops from her sword, grinned with unaffected pleasure, stretched like a huge cat--and abruptly stiffened, the expression of satisfaction on her face being replaced by a stare of bewilderment. She stood like a statue, her sword trailing in her hand.

  As she lifted her eyes from her vanquished foe, they had absently rested on the surrounding trees, and the vistas beyond. And she had seen a fantastic thing--a thing incredible and inexplicable. Over the soft rounded green shoulder of a distant slope had loped a tall black naked figure, bearing on its shoulder an equally naked white form. The apparition vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving the watcher gasping in surprize.

  The pirate stared about her, glanced uncertainly back the way she had come, and swore. She was nonplussed--a bit upset, if the term might be applied to one of such steely nerves as hers. In the midst of realistic, if exotic surroundings, a vagrant image of fantasy and nightstallion had been introduced. Conyn doubted neither her eyesight nor her sanity. She had seen something alien and uncanny, she knew; the mere fact of a black figure racing across the landscape carrying a white captive was bizarre enough, but this black figure had been unnaturally tall.

  Shaking her head doubtfully, Conyn started off in the direction in which she had seen the thing. She did not argue the wisdom of her move; with her curiosity so piqued, she had no choice but to follow its promptings.

  Slope after slope she traversed, each with its even sward and clustered groves. The general trend was always upward, though she ascended and descended the gentle inclines with monotonous regularity. The array of rounded shoulders and shallow declivities was bewildering and apparently endless. But at last she advanced up what she believed was the highest summit on the island, and halted at the sight of green shining walls and towers, which, until she had reached the spot on which she then stood, had merged so perfectly with the green landscape as to be invisible, even to her keen sight.

  She hesitated, fingered her sword, then went forward, bitten by the worm of curiosity. She saw no one as she approached a tall archway in the curving wall. There was no door. Peering warily through, she saw what seemed to be a broad open court, grass-carpeted, surrounded by a circular wall of the green semitranslucent substance. Various arches opened from it. Advancing on the balls of her bare feet, sword ready, she chose one of these arches at random, and passed into another similar court. Over an inner wall she saw the pinnacles of strangely shaped towerlike structures. One of these towers was built in, or projected into the court in which she found herself, and a broad stair led up to it, along the side of the wall. Up this she went, wondering if it were all real, or if she were not in the midst of a black lotus dream.

  At the head of the stair she found herself on a walled ledge, or balcony, she was not sure which. She could now make out more details of the towers, but they were meaningless to her. She realized uneasily that no ordinary human beings could have built them. There was symmetry about their architecture, and system, but it was a mad symmetry, a system alien to human sanity. As for the plan of the whole town, castle, or whatever it was intended for, she could see just enough to get the impression of a great number of courts, mostly circular, each surrounded by its own wall, and connected with the others by open arches, and all, apparently, grouped about the cluster of fantastic towers in the center.

  Turning in the other direction from these towers, she got a fearful shock, and crouched down suddenly behind the parapet of the balcony, glaring amazedly.

  The balcony or ledge was higher than the opposite wall, and she was looking over that wall into another swarded court. The inner curve of the further wall of that court differed from the others she had seen, in that, instead of being smooth, it seemed to be banded with long lines or ledges, crowded with small objects the nature of which she could not determine.

  However, she gave little heed to the wall at the time. Her attention was centered on the band of beings that squatted about a dark green pool in the midst of the court. These creatures were black and naked, made like women, but the least of them, standing upright, would have towered head and shoulders above the tall pirate. They were rangy rather than massive, but were finely formed, with no suggestion of deformity or abnomality, save as their great height was abnormal. But even at that distance Conyn sensed the basic diabolism of their features.

  In their midst, cringing and naked, stood a youth that Conyn recognized as the youngest sailor aboard the Wastrel. She, then, had been the captive the pirate had seen borne across the grass-covered slope. Conyn had heard no sound of fighting-women-
saw no blood-stains or wounds on the sleek ebon limbs of the giants. Evidently the lass had wandered inland away from her companions and been snatched up by a black woman lurking in ambush. Conyn mentally termed the creatures black women, for lack of a better term; instinctively she knew that these tall ebony beings were not women, as she understood the term.

  No sound came to her. The blacks nodded and gestured to one another, but they did not seem to speak--vocally, at least. One, squatting on her haunches before the cringing girl, held a pipe-like thing in her hand. This she set to her lips, and apparently blew, though Conyn heard no sound. But the Zingaran youth heard or felt, and cringed. She quivered and writhed as if in agony; a regularity became evident in the twitching of her limbs, which quickly became rhythmic. The twitching became a violent jerking, the jerking regular movements. The youth began to dance, as cobras dance by compulsion to the tune of the faquir's fife. There was naught of zest or joyful abandon in that dance. There was, indeed, abandon that was awful to see, but it was not joyful. It was as if the mute tune of the pipes grasped the girl's inmost soul with salacious fingers and with brutal torture wrung from it every involuntary expression of secret passion.