"The Bronze Axe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffrey)

Chapter Seven

Blade lay in shadow, on soft sward in an open glen, cushioned and half concealed by bracken and pink-tipped heather. The glen was bathed in a greenish cathedral light, save where a single ray of sun struck downward through the trees.

She stood in the golden beam, clad all in white, scarlet girdled and deep cowled, and she carried the golden sword before her as if in offering. Blade could not see her eyes, yet knew they regarded him with a strange and burning intensity that set his blood to coursing. He was conscious of a tremendous sexual stirring in himself.

It was the Dru High Priestess, she who had sacrificed the girl in the oak glade, and Blade spoke her name as though he had always known it.

"Drusilla! Come to me."

She nodded slowly, thrust the golden sword into earth and threw back her cowl. Blade could not breathe. Slowly, her hands outstretched to him, she approached and the beam of sun moved with her. Her hair floated in argent tendrils around a cream-skinned, heart-shaped face with a scarlet glistening mouth and eyes as lambent gold as the sword itself. The white robe did not mask, but revealed,and as she rippled toward him Blade saw her breasts dance, each to a separate tune, and her thighs and buttocks moved in a liquid flow.

She halted before him, one hand plucking at the front of her robe. A single loop and button held the garment in place.

"How know you my name?" Her voice held the chime of faery bells, yet with a deeper and mocking note.

Ravished by desire, lusting for her, Blade held out a hand and blurted, "I do not know how I just knew it. But this is not a time for talk. Come lie with me, Drusilla."

Her amber eyes devoured him, and her hand toyed with the fastening of her robe, yet she shook her head and said, "Not so, Blade. Here is not a time or place. Yet I will not altogether deny you. Do you desire a taste of Paradise, Blade, a view of treasures you may one day win? Speak and it shall be so."

Blade groaned. "I thirst and you offer me promises. You are cruel, Drusilla!"

Her smile was edged with mockery and he thought her teeth suddenly grown long, and while she was still lovely it was now the beauty of the beast. She knelt beside him, unfastening her robe, and gave him sight and touch of the blue-veined breasts, brown tipped and wide of aureole, white as milk and firm as marble, and as cold to his touch.

The line came unbidden into his mind la belle dame sans merci and both words and language were familiar, yet he did not grasp their meaning. He caressed her breasts with his fingers, wondering why they were so cold, and she leaned closer to him. The golden eyes were half closed and she moaned as she said: "Suckle me, Blade. My breasts are heavy with milk of bloody sin. Suckle me, drink my milk, and half my sins are yours. It will make a lighter burden for both of us."

Her teat was in his mouth, cold and firm, yet he did not suckle. A great fear was on him, and at the same time a great lust, and his loins betrayed him and he groaned and writhed in spasm

"Master! Master wake up! Your cursed moaning is like a beacon they will be on us within the hour. Wake up, master. And shut up if you value our skins."

Richard Blade rolled over and stared up at Sylvo. Here was no verdant grotto, no succubus High Priestess. Here was a hideaway in the fens, a narrow ledge of mud above water, screened by high growing reeds and capped by a gray and sunless sky. Marsh birds made dun arrows overhead and nearby the three horses cropped discontentedly at rank sedge and salt grass.

Blade rubbed sleep from his eyes and combed back his hair with fingers that were uncommonly dirty. Things had gone well enough, the diversion had worked and he had snatched Taleen from the queen's house without hindrance, yet what followed had been such a hurly-burly and helter-skelter of frantic improvisation that he had very nearly despaired.

Yet they won free of Sarum Vil Blade killed two men of arms in the doing, with Sylvo leaving his best knife in the belly of a third and the man had somehow followed marsh paths in the dark and fog to get them this far. It was a miracle for which Blade was duly grateful.

He fingered his curling dark stubble and stood up. "I was having a nightmare," Blade said a bit sheepishly. "I was loud?"

Sylvo, squatting on his haunches, squinted and twisted his harelip into a grimace. "Loud enough to wake the dead, master. Which we shall soon be if there are searchers nearby. Ar, had there been a moon I would have thought you struck by it! Who is Drusilla, master? It has a familiar ring, yet I cannot place it."

Blade waded off into the ankle deep water to relieve himself. Here a screen of rushes hid him from the still sleeping Princess Taleen.

"I do not know," he said sternly. "A phantom in a dream, no more, no less. Who can know of dreams? And who cares! How is the Princess? Not yet awakened?"

Sylvo shook his head. "Nothing changed, master. She sleeps like a babe, and yet no healthy babe ever slept so deep. We must wake her, master, or I fear she will never wake this side of Frigga's domain."

Blade went to where Taleen slept beneath the scarlet cloak that had been Horsa's. Her long auburn hair was all in knots and tangles, her face was pinched and wan, and there were crescent purple bruises beneath her eyes. Sweat glinted on her brow. Blade, kneeling used a corner of the cloak to wipe it away. He damned the Lady Alwyth and himself for his need for sleep. Had he only noted this earlier

Sylvo, testing the edge of his second best dirk with a thumb, said: "I could make her a posset, master." He gazed around him at the desolate fens. "There is no lack of noxious matter for the making of it. It will make her vomit, ar, how it will make her vomit, and so will she rid her belly of the sleeping poison. There is naught to lose, for I think she is dying now."

Blade glared at him. "You are a physician, then? How do I know you will not poison her further?"

Sylvo was already busy. He went to the horses and came back with a small bronze pot. Without looking at Blade he said, "When I was sure you were winning, master, I made a swift trip to Horsa's house to collect a few things. It was not thieving, as Thunor knows, because I knew it would soon belong to you. And as your man I had right to it."

"I know," Blade said dryly. "In the few minutes I spent in the house I could see it had been looted. More of that later. What of this posset?"

Sylvo dipped water into the pot and added a small quantity of mud. Into this he shredded some rotting leaves and sprinkled them with a brown powder that he produced from a fine new purse on his belt. Then he began to search the ground and rank foliage about them, dirk in hand. Blade watched with the faint beginnings of nausea.

"Aha," cried Sylvo. He jabbed with his dirk at the ground and came up with a toad wriggling on the point. He tossed it into the pot and cut it to shreds. To this he added a few worms, well slashed, and then stirred the whole vigorously.

Sylvo grinned at Blade. "I am famous for this posset, master. In all of Alb none can make worse. I swear it would make a horse empty itself."

"I have a good mind," Blade said, "to try it on you first."

He thought Sylvo paled beneath the grime that caked him. "Nay, master! Do not waste it. There is not much, and anyway I am not the one who lies dying of the swooning sickness. Come, master, hold the lady's mouth open while I pour it down her."

Blade wiped sweat from her again, then cradled her head in his lap as Sylvo tipped the pot. Taleen choked, strangled, swallowed and then choked again.

"A moment," Blade commanded. "Let her breathe."

Sylvo objected, frowning. "She must have it all, master, to make her sicker. Hold her up a bit, so it goes easier down her gullet."

They got the last drop of the horrible concoction down Taleen's throat. She had been pale before, now her complexion grew more livid and was tinged with green. She rolled over suddenly and began to retch.

Sylvo leaped back. "It works, master! I told you it would. In a moment now there will be such a puking as you have never seen."

It was true. Blade held her while she vomited, with great moans and many cries for death, her slim body twisting and writhing in his arms. When at last she opened her eyes it was to stare at him in wonderment and fear.

"You? Blade! How are you come here, and I? What is this "

He stood her upright and let her hang limp over his arm while he pressed her belly gently. "You have been sick, Taken. Now you are going to be well that's it! Throw it all up. Everything. Get it all out of you."

She dangled, her arms hanging, her hair about her face, in a great torture of gasping and retching. "I die, Blade! Let me do so, then. Frigga take me this minute! I am sick to my death! Frigga curse you, Blade, if you do not let me die this instant."

Sylvo, a little distance off, regarded his handiwork with something akin to awe. "Did I not tell you, master? She is the sickest lady I have ever had privilege to watch in all my years of sinning."

Taleen, regal even in her agony, raised her head to stare at the man. "Who is this ugly cheater of hangmen? How dare he speak so? Do you allow such insolence, Blade? Teach him manners, or I shall " And she went into another paroxysm of retching.

"Make the horses ready," Blade ordered. "We had best quit this place as soon as the lady can ride."

Sylvo looked uneasy. "Darkness would serve us best, master."

Blade frowned at him. "Do as I say! I think it safe. If there was pursuit it was short and half-hearted. Lycanto and his Albs still have Redbeard to worry over that will take precedence over us. You can take us northward through these marshes?"

"Ar, master, that I can. I know the fens as I know my own hand. Some twenty kils north of here we strike into the forest again."

Blade nodded, well pleased. "Good. Lycanto must march east, or south, to meet Redbeard. He can spare no men to seek us. It may be that the lady will see her father again after all."

He turned again to Taleen, who was clinging weakly to a stunted marsh tree and looking a trifle less pale.

"You heard? We are heading north toward Voth. Are you fit to ride?"

Her brown eyes snapped at him. She was fast recovering. "I heard, Blade. I was poisoned, not deafened! But how can I ride?" She gazed down at her short linen tunic, the same she had worn when they met. It was rumpled now, and not very clean, but that was not the problem. Blade, when he heard what the problem was, had trouble restraining a curse.

"My kirtle is too short," she complained. "If I stride a horse I will show everything to that low-born fellow of yours, I cannot ride, Blade."

He glared, but kept his voice low. "You will ride, Taleen! I vow that. And hear another thing, and mark it we both owe much to that low-born fellow. I will have no more of this talk his name is Sylvo and you will address him so. He knows his place and he will keep it. See that you do and keep a civil tongue in that pretty head. You are a princess, I know, but I rule here and now, and shall do so until I give you into your father's hands. This is well understood?"

Her chin was up and her brown eyes dangerous, yet he thought her on the verge of tears. She was, as the dead Horsa had said, only a maid after all.

Sylvo, whose ears were as long as his nose, had missed nothing of this. Now he called Blade aside and whispered to him. Blade grinned and clapped him on the back.

"I hope your Thunor forgives you for thieving, man. I do. Fetch the things at once and my thanks. I would not have thought of it."

Sylvo rolled his beady eyes. "I have had vast experience with women, master. Their brain does not work like a man's. Simple things go best with them."

Blade cuffed him toward the horses again. "Get the things and spare me the advice. We must get started."

Sylvo came back with a collection of oddments that brought reluctant thanks from Taleen. There was a wooden comb she set about her tangled locks at once and a polished bronze mirror and a sewing kit with bone needles and both wool and linen thread.

Blade pointed to her dress, where it limned the shapely thighs. "A few stitches and you will have breeches. Your modesty will be preserved and you can ride. Hurry. I have a great yearning to find this Voth of Voth, your father, and be rid of you."

She turned her back on him. "You are as insolent as ever, I see. I also hope we come soon to Voth, so I can have you properly whipped. And your mangy servant with you."

Blade grinned at her rigid back. She was no longer a sick girl. The genuine, the real Taleen, was back.

All that day they rode the misty fens with only an occasional glimpse of the sun. Sylvo rode point, for only he could take them safely through the treacherous bogs and quicksands, while Blade, the great bronze axe resting on the pommel, brought up the rear.

Taleen, wearing the scarlet cloak against the chill, rode between them and for the most part in silence. Blade noticed that once she had taken the few stitches necessary to transform her tunic into breeches, she did not appear to mind disclosing her tanned legs nearly to the hip. Women were wayward creatures in any time, place or dimension!

Blade grew more uncomfortable as the day wore on. His buttocks had been well scorched and the chafing of the wooden saddle did not improve matters. During a halt to rest themselves and to blow the horses and let them drink the brackish water, Blade mentioned this discomfort to Sylvo.

The man laid a finger alongside his nose, blinked, then went to where his horse was drinking. Blade followed him, Taleen having discreetly withdrawn behind a tall screen of reeds for reasons of her own.

For the first time Blade paid close attention to the bulging saddlebags borne by Sylvo's horse. They were crude, of unworked hide, and so fully packed that they would not latch. Blade, who was wearing a new shirt and breeches, and a vest of light mail, all taken from Horsa's domicile, watched Sylvo as he rummaged in the saddle bags.

"You spent some time in Horsa's place, then? More than I. I had barely time to take what is on my back."

Sylvo kept digging into the saddle bags. "None so long, master. I am an experienced thief, you are not. Ar, that makes the difference. A man of my quality knows what to look for, and where to look for it. A gentleman would not know of such matters."

Blade stroked his chin, hiding a grin with a hand. "There was a dead man in the kitchen, with his throat well slit. As a gentleman I know nothing of it. Do you?"

Sylvo came up with a small parcel wrapped in oiled skin and tied with leather thongs. "I know of it, master. He was a kitchen knave, a servant, of no consequence. He disputed my right there."

"As well he might," Blade said dryly. "Considering that at the time I had not yet killed Horsa."

Sylvo avoided Blade's eye. He indicated the parcel. "Here is a wondrous soothing ointment, master. By your leave I will spread some on you. It has magic powers, or so I have heard, and was made by Ogarth the Dwarf, who also cast the great bronze axe for Horsa."

Blade was staring at the new purse on Sylvo's belt. It was bulging at the sides. He prodded the purse with a finger.

"You found other things as well? Smaller things, but of greater value, that fit easier into a purse?"

"Only some trinkets, master. Poor things they are, too. Horsa had the taste of a barbarian whore. Now, master, shall we apply this magic to your burns?"

Blade let it pass. Taken had reappeared and was standing by her horse, gazing disconsolately at the vast fens stretching northward. Blade and Sylvo vanished behind the reeds.

Blade, dropping his breeches, found a relatively dry spot and stretched on his belly. Sylvo rubbed a dark sweet-smelling ointment on the scorched flesh.

"Ar, master, you took a burning indeed. I could not have stood it I would have run, or begged for mercy."

"And found none."

"Ar, that is Thunor's truth."

"And if I am scorched," Blade said grimly, "it was not so bad as Horsa took." He thought of Horsa standing in the flames, burning alive and still fighting, and shook his head. "You did not see it, Sylvo, for you were too busy thieving, but that Horsa was a man!"

The servant did not answer and after a moment Blade glanced up at him. There was an odd, and thoughtful, expression on Sylvo's seamed and scapegrace face as he applied the ointment in even strokes.

Blade watched three ants dragging a dead fly toward a tiny mound.

Sylvo said: "Ar, master. Horsa was a man. Yet you slew him, so that you are a better man. And at times I wonder vastly at the nature of things "

Already Blade's pain was vanishing. He stifled a yawn, confessing himself still weary, yet knew there was no rest, safety or peace, until he had come to Voth and delivered the girl. There he might expect thanks, along with reward and rest, and a chance to puzzle out this new life of his.

So it was without much real interest that he said: "The nature of what things, man?"

Sylvo spread more ointment. "This thing, master. Putting ointment on your arse! It is a magnificent arse, I admit, and I admire it, but it's really only an arse after all. My own arse is skinny and ill favored, though prettier than my face, but it is as much an arse as yours in the end I do not pun, master.

"So why the difference, master, in our stations? In the nature of things, in true things that count, our arses are much similar. Then why are you master and I man? It is a matter I think on from time to time."

Blade smiled and cuffed him with a good-natured backhand. "Then think on your own time, man, when I have no use for you. Thunor forbid that I have found a philosopher instead of a man and companion at arms. If you voiced such thoughts around Sarum Vil I do not wonder they gave you a dog's name." He stood and pulled up his breeches. "Thank you, Sylvo. I will ride easier now."

"Master."

Blade turned back, slightly vexed. "What now? More philosophy?"

"No, master. This." Sylvo extended the bulging purse to Blade. "I am a liar, master."

Blade kept a straight face. "That I knew already. What else?"

"Look you in the purse, master. You will see. It was a great temptation. I have always been a poor man, and this time I thought to find my fortune. But you have been good to me and have treated me as a man and now I cannot lie to you. Take it all, master, and beat me afterward."

Blade tumbled out the contents of the purse. There were scores of coins, large and small, iron and bronze, and a small leather bag with a drawstring.

"More than twenty mancus," said Sylvo. He sounded pained. "Enough for three farms, and cattle and horses, and as many servants as I could beat. A wife also if I could find one to take me."

Blade emptied the contents of the leather bag into his broad palm. There were twenty matched black pearls, as shining dark as the Devil's heart. Blade extended his palm to let Sylvo see. Faint sunlight broke through just then and the pearls glowed in tenebrous splendor.

"What of these? How came Horsa by such wealth?"

But Sylvo was not impressed by the pearls. He shrugged.

"I know little of such things, though I have seen them before. They are found on the far shore of the Narrow Sea and it is said that the sea raiders value them over all other things. No doubt Horsa took them as loot from a dead enemy. Am I to be beaten, master?"

Blade tucked the little bag of pearls into the waistband of his breeches. The money he scooped back into the purse and tossed to Sylvo. "You will not be beaten. I do not beat honest men, though with you it is sometimes a near thing. The money is yours, the pearls mine. Now come I would reach the forest before the sun goes."

There was yet an hour of light when they left the fens and came into the forest once more. By that time Taleen's mood had changed, she being as mercurial as any weathercock, and during the last hour in the fens Blade rode at her side while they exchanged stories. Blade held back nothing, even to the bargain Lady Alwyth had sought to make with him.

Taleen's lustrous eyes sparked with anger, but her tone was grave. "So you have scorned her, Blade, and because of her face she will deem it worse than that as betrayal. She will not forgive. And she has long had a reputation for dark deeds. I pray Frigga that this Getorix routs Lycanto and puts all Albs to the sword, even though we be cousins. A sword in her heart is all that will quell the evil in Alwyth."

Her face flushed and she used words that might have made Sylvo blanch. "A fine fool she made of me! I admit it. I should have known not to match wiles with her, but I was weary and hungry and thirsty and off guard. She listened to all I said of you and I spoke well, Blade, and praised you too much, because of the danger. I made you out a great deal more than you are."

He nodded, unsmiling. "My thanks, princess. I know you meant it well."

She shot him a suspicious glance, then continued. "So when she did offer me a broth I took it without thought."

She made a face. "Fool! I remember nothing until I came back to sickness in the fens."

Blade looked ahead. The fens were ending and the dark arching forest, with caverns of shadows and dusky twilight, lay just ahead. A path led plainly from the fens into tall oaks and beeches and thick trunked yew wearing garlands of vine.

"Forget the Lady Alwyth," advised Blade. "Her fate will overtake her without our help. Neither she nor Lycanto can harm us here, but there may be other dangers. Know you anything of this country, Taleen? How far to the north lies Voth?"

She frowned. "I know little enough, never having traveled this way. What of that low fellow of yours? He has gotten us through the fens without mishap cannot he do likewise in the forest?"

Blade shook his head. "No. I asked. Sylvo is a fensman and also knows something of the sea, but he will be as lost in the forest as ourselves. Which," he added cheerfully to hearten her, "will not be so lost if we have the sun. I am woodsman enough for that."

"The Drus know of such things," said Taleen. She shot him a sidelong glance and he knew her thinking. As for himself, he had not thought recently of the sacrifice in the glade. Rather had his mind, when he let it range, been full of the strange and compelling, the passionate, dream of the woman called Drusilla. Drusilla! Dru? Odd he had not marked it before. But what matter it was all fantasy, a phantom play conjured in his unconscious mind.

"The Drus," Taleen went on, "can tell direction by stars, and how lichen grows on a tree, or by the set of the moon."

"Forget the Drus also," Blade said harshly. "They cannot harm us any more than can Alwyth. I am more interested in what Sylvo can find to put in that pot of his I am starving again."

Taleen smiled again and laughed. "I too. It seems we are always hungry, Blade! If that rapscallion of yours can find us food I may begin to forgive him his looks."

When they reached a suitable clearing Blade called a halt. Sylvo, after cutting some vines for snares, went in search of a hare or two for their dinner. They had twice seen deer since entering the forest, but the axe was no weapon for deer and Sylvo had only his knife.

Taleen gathered faggots and Blade struck a fire with flints, using an iron striker Sylvo had given him. As twilight thickened around the merry little blaze, and Taleen warmed her hands, Blade thought he heard a sound in the forest. Seizing the bronze axe he strode to the edge of the clearing and stood listening. It could have been anything a deer or some other animal, or merely Sylvo falling over a root. But it did not come again and Blade did not like the silence. No birds sang and the rustling of small creatures had ceased.

Taleen joined him, huddling close. "What is it, Blade? Your man does not return does it take so long to catch hares?"

He put a hand over her mouth, his lips to her ear. She had lost the odor of chypre now and smelled only of sweet girlish flesh.

"Stay here and keep quiet," said Blade. "I will go look for Sylvo."

"No! I will not stay in this place alone. I will come with you."

"Quietly, then, and not too close. If there is danger I must have room to swing my axe."

He had no chance to use the great axe. He and Taleen were not fifty yards into the trees, along a faint path, when the finely woven nets fell from above and enmeshed them. There was a sudden great shouting and men leaped from the trees and from bushes fringing the path.

Blade, his stalwart frame netted like any fish, could not free the axe for action. He heard Taleen scream once "Beata's men! We are taken!"

He butted and bellowed and made a rare fight of it while he could. He got his hands through the net and knocked heads together, swinging his massive fists like maces, sending half a dozen of his attackers sprawling. At the last, standing like one of the forest oaks, choking a man black-faced with either hand, Blade went down before a dozen men. He took three with him and kept pummeling them until a spear butt crashed down on his head.

At the very last, before the darkness, he heard a man scream a command: "Do not kill the big one! Queen Beata wants him alive."

Chapter Eight

Blade awoke in an oubliette. The slimy stone floor was covered with dank straw in which things crawled. A wick, guttering in a pannikin of fish oil, gave the only light. He was chained, hand and foot, to a ring bolt set into a wall. He itched intolerably and there was a great soreness at the back of his head. For a moment he lost control, slipped the habit of self-discipline built up over the years, and raged at the chains, tugging at them with fierce oaths and swinging and slamming them about.

"No use, master," said a voice from a dim corner. "We are well taken. The evil Queen Beata has us, and even the Lady Alwyth is merciful by comparison. I have been thinking hard, master, and my thought is that we are in a great deal of trouble!" There was a great rattling of chains as Sylvo shifted his malformed bones.

Blade, forcing calm on himself, squatted in the filthy straw. "What of the Princess Taleen?"

He could not see the man's shrug, but heard the chains rattle again.

"Safe enough, master. At least not yet harmed, as I saw. Beata holds her for ransom from Voth, as before I remember your telling of it and so we are back to the beginning. Or the lady is. What happens to us may be another matter and not one on which I like to think."

Blade quietly tested one of the chains, his huge sinews cracking with the effort. The chain held.

"Keep your heart up," said Blade. "I will somehow get us out of this." At the moment he could not have said how.

Sylvo's tone grew more cheerful. "So you will, master. I was forgetting that you are something of a wizard."

Blade, testing the chains again, scowled in the gloom. It was going to take a little more than wizardry to get them out of this. He began to question Sylvo; the basis of all effort, of all successful action, is knowledge.

"What is this place and how came we here?"

"A great castle called Craghead. On the Western Sea. As to coming here I walked, the Lady Taleen rode, and you were carried on a litter. You were well drugged to keep you sleeping, master, as Beata's men were in fear of you."

That accounted for his slight headache. He remembered the spear butt crashing down and fingered the wound on his head, swollen and sticky through the thick hair.

"They had nets in the trees," Blade mused. "I wonder how at just that place and time?"

"Ar, master. I wondered also. I was taken like a minnow and stifled without a cry. But I think I have it the Lady Alwyth must have sent word to Beata. They are in league, no doubt. King Lycanto would never have done it he and the Queen are enemies."

It was possible. Indeed it was probable. Lady Alwyth ran deep, was an intriguer by nature, and Blade had spurned her. Taleen was hated for her beauty, if nothing else, and Alwyth would have many tendrils to her web. She and Queen Beata may have been conspiring for years. Blade dismissed the thought. He must think of what would serve him now.

"Tell me of this Queen Beata, Sylvo. What manner of woman is she?"

Sylvo told him and Blade felt the prickles rise on his neck as he listened. Yet he doubted not a word. Such things were in this strange dimension he now inhabited. As real as life or death.

"And that is all I know," Sylvo concluded. "She is a bawd, if the stories can be believed, and likes women as well as men in bed. Children also it is said that she murders these afterwards so they cannot carry tales and I myself have seen her cruelty to those who serve her. Most of the men lack an ear, the left one, and many of her women have their left breast cut off. As we entered the castle I saw men hanging on iron hooks on the walls, and was told they were the guards who let the Lady Taleen escape. One was still wriggling, poor bastard."

"What is her age?"

Chains rattled as Sylvo moved. "Who knows that? Some say fifty, some say five hundred. If she is a witch, as is also said, I doubt not that the last figure could be possible. All say she is beautiful, but none is allowed close to her and so it may be artifice. Women are full of tricks, even witches, and "

A trapdoor opened in the ceiling and a face stared down at them.

"You he who is called Richard Blade you are wanted by the Queen at once. No tricks, now, or you will be slain on the instant."

A ladder was lowered into the oubliette and armed men swarmed down it. They wore the same loose breeches and cross-gaitering of the Albs, but their mailed coats were longer and heavier and their helmets flatter. The helmets bore the blazon of a unicorn instead of the Albian dragon.

None of them had a left ear.

They unchained Blade and pushed him to the ladder. Sylvo set up a squalling. "I lack water here. And food! Will you let a man starve and thirst? The place is also lousy and you have rats in all as stinking a dungeon as I have ever seen."

Some of the men laughed. One walked over to Sylvo and kicked him into silence. "I'll wot," the man said, "that you know whereof you speak and have known many prisons. Now shut that ugly mouth or you die before the time set."

Blade was prodded up the ladder. None of the men approached him too closely. As he went through the trapdoor he heard Sylvo call after him.

"Be of cheer, master, and remember that you are a wizard."

The castle called Craghead was vast. Blade was conducted down endless long corridors floored with rushes, ill lit by torches in sconces. They ascended score after score of stairs, the stone hollowed by centuries of wear, and crossed bristling battlements where Blade caught the tang of salt and heard the sullen mutter of surf far below in the mist. It was dark, without stars or moon, and the roiling bank of mist below was like cloud seen from above.

They came to a round, tall thrusting tower, the pinnacle of Craghead. Then more stairs and Blade was pushed into a chamber and a great ironbound door slammed behind him. He heard a heavy bar fall. He was alone.

And yet not alone. He sensed it from the first. He made no sign that he suspected a watcher as he strolled about the chamber, his mien calm and his handsome face impassive. If Queen Beata wished to play cat and mouse it was all right with him. He was thinking now, planning again, and he judged it a good omen that he and Sylvo had not been immediately executed.

The chamber, really a series of rooms with connecting doors, was furnished sumptuously. He had seen nothing like it in Alb. There were skins on the flagstoned floor one of a bear that must have stood ten feet tall when alive and flat couches covered with hide. He saw no windows. The rooms were warm enough, and the stone floors warmest of all. He guessed at thermal ducts that were heated from below.

In a corner was a large table laden with cold meats and white bread another thing he had not seen in Alb and bronze and pewter vessels containing beer and wine. Blade ate, but was careful not to drink. He was going to need all his wits about him.

He covertly examined the wall hangings, of pale leather richly worked with golden thread, mostly in cabals that he did not understand. There was one large and central hanging depicting a unicorn and, as he watched in seeming unconcern, he saw the flicker of an eye. The watcher! He had no doubt it was Queen Beata.

Blade, his mouth full, and with a joint of meat in his right hand, bowed extravagantly to the unicorn. "I thank you for the food, good queen. It is excellent and I am hungry. Might I request that some be sent to my man now languishing in your dungeon?"

The eye glittered. Then came a muffled laugh, and a voice as husky and deep as many a man's.

"I have heard true of you, Blade. An upstart rogue of great impudence. Neither did Alwyth lie about your face and figure both are as fair as she wrote. Tell me, Blade, are you the man you look to be? For I warn you fairly, your life depends on it."

There was a chill beneath the huskiness that sent the prickles up his spine again. He did not know the manner of it, but grasped the substance he was on trial again.

With another bow he answered, "If I am a rogue, your Majesty, at least I am a modest one. As to being a man I lay claim to that also. How much a man I cannot say until I know the hazards I face."

Again the muffled laugh. "You mince words like a Dru! I do not like that. But in other aspects you please me and you shall have a chance to prove yourself. I shall put you to the sweetest ordeal of all, Blade, and if you win I may be persuaded to spare your life."

He did not bow again. Hands on hips, he stared straight at the unicorn. "And that of my man, Queen? And the Princess Taleen shall go free to her father?"

Silence. Then, in a voice as cold as the mist enshrouding the battlements: "You try too far, Blade! A little impudence is like salt, I relish it, but you dare to bargain with me? So soon as though you had rights here!"

He had begun with boldness and with boldness he must continue. He stared at the flickering eye and answered in a voice as cold as her own. "I only ask, my queen. A man is no man who does not seek to aid his friends."

"Enough! You will be prepared for my coming. I advise you to spend some of that time in learning how to leash your tongue."

The eye vanished.

There was a rippling of leather as a door opened behind another wall hanging and four maidens came into the room. They wore only gauzy pants, cut full and falling to the knee, and secured by a single amber button. Their hair was cut short, in mannish style, and each lacked a left breast. Where the breast had been each carried a saucer-shaped red scar. The sanguinary badge of Beata's service. Blade marveled that the men and women would serve such a cruel mistress, and for an instant his memory flickered into life and he could remember another place, another world, in which such things were not tolerated. And yet that world, as much as he could recall of it, had been bad enough. Then the mists closed in again and memory vanished.

The maidens were all young and fair, discounting the mammary scars, and they went about their tasks with efficiency and absolute silence. They did not look directly at Blade, nor converse among themselves. He guessed at the reason for this and, while the others stared in stricken horror, he gently seized a shapely blonde girl and pried her mouth open. Her tongue had been cut out.

They filled a large bronze tub with foamy warm water and bathed him. He was dried on towels of fine linen, perfumed with chypre and dressed in saffron-dyed linen breeches and a long tunic. He was given soft leather sandals that laced to his knees. His beard was combed out and his thick dark hair combed into place.

When they had finished he was allowed to see the results in a bronze mirror and could not repress a grimace of disgust at the finery he was wearing. Yet this was Queen Beata's game and he must play by her rules. By this time he had a shrewd idea of what the game would be, and he was determined to best her at it. In his past life he had been a sensual man, highly sexed, and hardly let a day pass without gratification. Now he was more than ready. He had had enough of blood and iron for the nonce, and of vixens like Lady Alwyth and malicious kittens like Taleen.

The maidens left and Blade strode the chambers alone, a hard smile on his face. He would give this cruel queen a bit more than she bargained for, and so might ensure his future. He knew, better than most men, what women are born knowing, that sex is a weapon.

There was movement behind the unicorn wall hanging. Blade, at his ease on one of the couches, regarded the hanging with equanimity. Let the bitch come. He was more than ready for her.

The hanging parted in the center and Queen Beata stepped forth. She wore a simple black robe that clung to her supple figure. The robe was girdled with a scarlet cord and though it was opaque it concealed nothing, clinging like oil to her breasts and buttocks and thighs. Her face was long and deathly pale, with a scarlet slash of mouth and a high arching nose, and her upswept hair, dark and tinged with silver, was so intricately coifed that Blade guessed at once that it was a wig.

There had been a dozen large candles in the room before; the maidens, on leaving, had taken all but one. In this tiny spear of unwavering light she approached him.

Blade stood up and bowed slightly, with a touch of insolence. Instinct told him that servility was not the ploy.

"Your Majesty, you are beautiful."

It was, in a certain sense, the truth. She was not young even in the dim candlelight he saw the finespun wrinkles around her mouth and the throat creases, and what the wig concealed he did not know yet she had beauty. Or the relic of beauty. He was in no position, or mood, to make fine distinctions.

For a moment she regarded him without speaking. The almond shaped eyes, as shiny black as lacquer, glinted through narrowed lids that had been painted blue. She examined every inch of him before she spoke.

"You will approach me, Blade, on your knees. It is the custom here all who seek my favor must tender to me that homage. Do so now."

It occurred to Blade that he was not so much seeking her favors, as having them thrust on him, yet he complied. He slid off the couch and to his knees, with what grace he could muster, and sidled toward her.

Queen Beata's robe fell open. Blade, glancing up, saw that the body, if not the face, was young. Her breasts were firm pale goblets, her belly flat and unwrinkled, her hips trimly flowed into legs that were slim as any girl's. Her body scent was cloying, thick with woman smell and chypre.

"Good," Beata said, her voice cold and mocking, yet excited. He wondered which pleased her the most to kill a man and hang him on hooks, or to have him sexually. Both? "You have made homage and so will live a little time. I will confess that I am glad of it, for you are a man such as I have never seen before this night. Come now, Blade, to the couch, and prove me that you are a man and not a phantom, not a tunic and breeches stuffed with muscles that are useless to a woman."

At the couch she bade him lie just so. She adjusted his brawny limbed body to her exact liking. Then she disrobed him, lingering over each part of his nakedness with her lips and fingers. She was still wearing the black robe and when he reached for one of her breasts she slapped his hand aside.

"I decide, Blade, when it is time for that! You will obey. That is all I require of you. That you obey and be instantly ready when I have need of you."

Blade, who at the moment was very much instantly ready, still thought it a tall order. Every man has his limitations. The situation might have been amusing, take away the grim reality. His life, and that of Sylvo, and possibly the Princess Taleen, hung on his ability to perform for the lady. He had an instant of panic during which he feared that the tension, the pressure of the moment, might in itself cause him to fail. He fought off the idea. It would be irony indeed to die of that.

The queen took the dominant position. She kept silent and would not let him speak. She kissed his mouth, avidly and wetly, her tongue sharp and probing, while her hands roamed over his big body. Her pleasure was at first tactile, she could not seem to have enough of his flesh; then her pleasure switched and became oral. She suckled him lightly, teasing and biting, then put that aside to straddle him and permit him to thrust himself into her. She moaned at last the first amorous sound she had uttered and fell into rhythm with him. Blade, watching her face contort the mouth writhing and the eyes wild, the sinews taut and stringy in her throat knew that this was an old woman. At the moment it did not matter.

She began to talk, the words gasping and jolting out of her straining mouth as she rode him down to climax.

"You-do-well-Blade! That is good. No! Keep you silent. Only I speak Ah, sweet Frigga, you do well! Do not stop. Never stop until I command or you die on the morning. Many have pleased me this far, only to fail at last and so die of it. Ahhhhhh, Blade! Blade! Frigga take me if I am not beswooned of you!"

The queen, trembling and thrashing about, collapsed atop him and murmured: "Ah, Blade, that was fine for first encounter. You did not spend?"

So tumultuous was his breathing that he could not speak and shook his head. He had been on the verge a dozen times and had fought it back. A fine pass, he thought bitterly, when a man's life depends on his ability to last.

Beata placed herself so her breasts were against his lips. "Caress me, Blade. I will have more of you, and soon. Meantime, for such fine first service, I will grant you any small favor you may ask."

At such close vantage, as she lay on him with eyes closed and face limned in candle ray, he saw how heavily she painted. The wig had slipped a bit, was askew a trifle, but he could not make out the color beneath it.

"I have given you large satisfaction," he said boldly, "yet you offer me only a small favor. Is this worthy of a great queen?"

The blue painted eyelids twitched. "You are still too impudent, Blade, and still do not understand your position. Grant that you are a great stallion, with a bear bone such as I have never known, yet it gains you nothing special. You are alive, man! Alive! Yet you do not seem grateful."

He must go very cannily now, but he thought boldness was still the ploy.

"Only a small man is satisfied with small things," he said. "I am not a small man and I do not accept small favors. I would have the life of my man, and the safety of the Lady Taleen."

With her eyes closed she traced her fingers over his cheek. The nails were long and blue painted. "You please me, Blade, you greatly please me. It may be that Frigga has sent me a true man at last. Yet how can I know? The test is over the long journey, not a single trip. And there is much you do not understand were I not cruel and ruthless, and without pity in my heart, I could not rule here in Craghead. My people are so, and expect me to be so, and if I weaken I am done. I cannot grant what you ask me, Blade. Not in total. Yet there may be a chance if you are man enough."

When he would have questioned her further she bade him be silent and closed his mouth with her own. She laved his body with her tongue and searched him inch by inch with her fingers. She bade him watch while she titillated herself and then sought his body for final pleasure. She demanded copulation in grotesque positions that Blade, for all his experience, had only guessed at heretofore. She suckled him to massive climax, swallowing his seed greedily, then produced a water clock from behind an arras and gave him a quarter hour to regain his readiness. Blade made it.

She doubled the scarlet girdle, whipped him lightly with it and at last permitted Blade to mount her, the first time he had been granted the dominant position.

Blade forgot his exhaustion and rammed into her like any wild beast in heat. For the better part of an hour he strove on her, while she uttered little screams and moans and begged for more, refusing to let him go. He knew her demented and himself in little different case. To probe her belly, to hurt her, to split her raw and bleeding, became his sole aim in life.

Her lithe young-old body was bathed in sweat. Blade hammered away. It was a sexual saturnalia he had not known before, and knew he would not know again, nor wanted to, but for the moment he was as much a senseless creature as she.

In a rare moment of sanity, looking into her contorted face, he saw that her teeth were false, cunningly contrived of some animal bone. Her wig fell away and her head was clipped and bare, with gray stubble showing.

In the end it was she who cried quits, as Blade had sworn she would. She arched high, screamed once in piercing crescendo, and went lax under him. She pushed him away.

"Go now, Blade. Go at once." She kept her eyes closed. "I will not look on you again now, for I am surfeit, and I know my own moods. If you were an ordinary man I would have you killed now. So go quickly! Your wants will be seen to."

Blade stood over her, fighting back nausea, his brawny legs trembling with weariness and something of self-disgust. Her wig had tumbled to the floor beside the couch and in the fading candle gleam she was a bald-pated hag with a painted skull for face.

And yet he dared. "My man? And the Princess Taleen? Surely I have earned their safety this night."

She turned her face from him, ready for sleep, and he heard her whisper.

"I cannot grant you that, Blade. My people must have a show. They want blood and entertainment. It is how I rule them. But you have earned the right to try. This very day you shall be given the opportunity to save them and yourself. This much I promise. Now go before I forget how you have pleasured me and have you killed!"

There was movement behind the leather hangings and two of the maidens entered. One of them picked up the black robe and spread it over the sleeping Queen. Then, without looking at Blade directly, they conducted him to the door by which he had entered and turned him over to armed men.

He was not returned to the oubliette where Sylvo waited if he still lived but was taken to a large chamber hewn out of the living stone. He was given food and drink and there was a pile of skins in a corner for sleeping. The guards left him and he heard a great bar slotted into place.

One small barred window overlooked the battlements. Blade, weary to the marrow, stared through the bars and wondered what the day would bring. For day had come,gray, dank and misty, with the surf moaning like a lost soul in the fog below. Around him the castle was coming awake, with the familiar sounds of dawn and a great clanking of iron and bronze as the guard was changed.

He thought of Taleen, wondering where she was kept and how she fared. It was not likely she would come to harm not if Beata planned to ransom her back to King Voth of the North and yet there was no surety of this. Beata and Voth were brother and sister and there is no hatred so fierce and unrelenting as blood hate.

Blade's smile was faint as he turned from the window. He would not have harm come to Taleen. She was an irksome child yet not so much child that she did not at times tempt his flesh and he would be glad to see the last of her. Yet she figured large in his plans. In a way he was holding Taleen to ransom as much as was the queen for through the princess, Blade meant to earn the good will of Voth and so come to some status and independence in this new world in which he must live. As live he would. As live he must! He vowed it fiercely. Then, being a practical man and having need of his strength for whatever new ordeal lay ahead that day, he threw his body atop the pile of skins and was fast asleep in a minute.