The Pool of the Black One, Reswum Read online

rending crash and the jutting ledge gave way, precipitating the pirate back into the court.

  She hit on her back, which for all its springy sinews would have broken but for the cushioning of the sward, and rebounding like a great cat, she faced her foes. The dancing recklessness was gone from her eyes. They blazed like blue bale-fire; her mane bristled, her thin lips snarled. In an instant the affair had changed from a daring game to a battle of life and death, and Conyn's savage nature responded with all the fury of the wild.

  The blacks, halted an instant by the swiftness of the episode, now made to sweep on her and drag her down. But in that instant a shout broke the stillness. Wheeling, the giants saw a disreputable throng crowding the arch. The buccaneers weaved drunkenly, they swore incoherently; they were addled and bewildered, but they grasped their swords and advanced with a ferocity not dimmed in the slightest by the fact that they did not understand what it was all about.

  As the blacks glared in amazement, Conyn yelled stridently and struck them like a razor-edged thunderbolt. They fell like ripe grains beneath her blade, and the Zingarans, shouting with muddled fury, ran groggily across the court and fell on their gigantic foes with bloodthirsty zeal. They were still dazed; emerging hazily from drugged slumber, they had felt Sancho frantically shaking them and shoving swords into their fists, and had vaguely heard his urging them to some sort of action. They had not understood all he said, but the sight of strangers, and blood streaming, was enough for them.

  In an instant the court was turned into a battle-ground which soon resembled a slaughter-house. The Zingarans weaved and rocked on their feet, but they wielded their swords with power and effect, swearing prodigiously, and quite oblivious to all wounds except those instantly fatal. They far outnumbered the blacks, but these proved themselves no mean antagonists. Towering above their assailants, the giants wrought havoc with talons and teeth, tearing out women's throats, and dealing blows with clenched fists that crushed in skulls. Mixed and mingled in that melee, the buccaneers could not use their superior agility to the best advantage, and many were too stupid from their drugged sleep to avoid blows aimed at them. They fought with a blind wild-beast ferocity, too intent on dealing death to evade it. The sound of the hacking swords was like that of butchers' cleavers, and the shrieks, yells and curses were appalling.

  Sancho, shrinking in the archway, was stunned by the noise and fury; he got a dazed impression of a whirling chaos in which steel flashed and hacked, arms tossed, snarling faces appeared and vanished, and straining bodies collided, rebounded, locked and mingled in a devil's dance of madness.

  Details stood out briefly, like black etchings on a background of blood. He saw a Zingaran sailor, blinded by a great flap of scalp torn loose and hanging over her eyes, brace her straddling legs and drive her sword to the hilt in a black belly. He distinctly heard the buccaneer grunt as she struck, and saw the victim's tawny eyes roll up in sudden agony; blood and entrails gushed out over the driven blade. The dying black caught the blade with her naked hands, and the sailor tugged blindly and stupidly; then a black arm hooked about the Zingaran's head, a black knee was planted with cruel force in the middle of her back. Her head was jerked back at a terrible angle, and something cracked above the noise of the fray, like the breaking of a thick branch. The conqueror dashed her victim's body to the earth--and as she did, something like a beam of blue light flashed across her shoulders from behind, from right to left. She staggered, her head toppled forward on her breast, and thence, hideously, to the earth.

  Sancho turned sick. He gagged and wished to vomit. He made abortive efforts to turn and flee from the spectacle, but his legs would not work. Nor could he close his eyes. In fact, he opened them wider. Revolted, repelled, nauseated, yet he felt the awful fascination he had always experienced at sight of blood. Yet this battle transcended anything he had ever seen fought out between human beings in port raids or sea battles. Then he saw Conyn.

  Separated from her mates by the whole mass of the enemy, Conyn had been enveloped in a black wave of arms and bodies, and dragged down. Then they would quickly have stamped the life out of her, but she had pulled down one of them with her, and the black's body protected that of the pirate beneath her. They kicked and tore at the Barachan and dragged at their writhing comrade, but Conyn's teeth were set desperately in her throat, and the pirate clung tenaciously to her dying shield.

  An onslaught of Zingarans caused a slackening of the press, and Conyn threw aside the corpse and rose, blood-smeared and terrible. The giants towered above her like great black shadows, clutching, buffeting the air with terrible blows. But she was as hard to hit or grapple as a blood-mad panther, and at every turn or flash of her blade, blood jetted. She had already taken punishment enough to kill three ordinary women, but her bull-like vitality was undiminished.

  Her war cry rose above the medley of the carnage, and the bewildered but furious Zingarans took fresh heart and redoubled their strokes, until the rending of flesh and the crunching of bone beneath the swords almost drowned the howls of pain and wrath.

  The blacks wavered, and broke for the gate, and Sancho squealed at their coming and scurried out of the way. They jammed in the narrow archway, and the Zingarans stabbed and hacked at their straining backs with strident yelps of glee. The gate was a shambles before the survivors broke through and scattered, each for herself.

  The battle became a chase. Across grassy courts, up shimmering stairs, over the slanting roofs of fantastic towers, even along the broad coping of the walls, the giants fled, dripping blood at each step, harried by their merciless pursuers as by wolves. Cornered, some of them turned at bay and women died. But the ultimate result was always the same--a mangled black body twitching on the sward, or hurled writhing and twisting from parapet or tower roof.

  Sancho had taken refuge in the court of the pool, where he crouched, shaking with terror. Outside rose a fierce yelling, feet pounded the sward, and through the arch burst a black, red-stained figure. It was the giant who wore the gemmed headband. A squat pursuer was close behind, and the black turned, at the very brink of the pool. In her extremity she had picked up a sword dropped by a dying sailor, and as the Zingaran rushed recklessly at her, she struck with the unfamiliar weapon. The buccaneer dropped with her skull crushed, but so awkwardly the blow was dealt, the blade shivered in the giant's hand.

  She hurled the hilt at the figures which thronged the arch, and bounded toward the pool, her face a convulsed mask of hate.

  Conyn burst through the women at the gate, and her feet spurned the sward in her headlong charge.

  But the giant threw her great arms wide and from her lips rang an inhuman cry--the only sound made by a black during the entire fight. It screamed to the sky its awful hate; it was like a voice howling from the pits. At the sound the Zingarans faltered and hesitated. But Conyn did not pause. Silently and murderously she drove at the ebon figure poised on the brink of the pool.

  But even as her dripping sword gleamed in the air, the black wheeled and bounded high. For a flash of an instant they saw her poised in midair above the pool; then with an earth-shaking roar, the green waters rose and rushed up to meet her, enveloping her in a green volcano.

  Conyn checked her headlong rush just in time to keep from toppling into the pool, and she sprang back, thrusting her women behind her with mighty swings of her arms. The green pool was like a geyser now, the noise rising to deafening volume as the great column of water reared and reared, blossoming at the crest with a great crown of foam.

  Conyn was driving her women to the gate, herding them ahead of her, beating them with the flat of her sword; the roar of the water-spout seemed to have robbed them of their faculties. Seeing Sancho standing paralyzed, staring with wide-eyed terror at the seething pillar, she accosted his with a bellow that cut through the thunder of the water and made his jump out of his daze. He ran to her, arms outstretched, and she caught his up under one arm and raced out of the court.

  In the court which opened on
the outer world, the survivors had gathered, weary, tattered, wounded and blood-stained, and stood gaping dumbly at the great unstable pillar that towered momentarily nearer the blue vault of the sky. Its green trunk was laced with white; its foaming crown was thrice the circumference of its base. Momentarily it threatened to burst and fall in an engulfing torrent, yet it continued to jet skyward.

  Conyn's eyes swept the bloody, naked group, and she cursed to see only a score. In the stress of the moment she grasped a corsair by the neck and shook her so violently that blood from the woman's wounds spattered all near them.

  'Where are the rest?' she bellowed in her victim's ear.

  'That's all!' the other yelled back, above the roar of the geyser. 'The others were all killed by those black-'

  'Well, get out of here!' roared Conyn, giving her a thrust that sent her staggering headlong toward the outer archway. 'That fountain is going to burst in a moment-'

  'We'll all be drowned!' squawked a Freebooter, limping toward the arch.

  'Drowned, hell!' yelled Conyn. 'We'll be turned to pieces of petrified bone! Get out, blast you!'

  She ran to the outer archway, one eye on the green roaring tower that loomed so