— and bit.
She screeched.
That got to the bitch.
Guards yanked me back and the whips and the balass sticks rose and fell. In for a zorca, in for a vove.
I reared up, flailing the chains, laid a guard’s head open, kicked another betwixt wind and water. But the devils had fixed my chains in a new way so that I could not get a good swing on them. They hampered me, tripping me, and flail as I might I could not reach any more of the onkers, and so half stood, half crouched, growling like a veritable wild beast of the jungle, panting with fury, my hair over my eyes, roaring, futile, ludicrous.
This time I spent a good long session pacing in my cell, wondering what the Queen would do. No one told me if I had given her blood poisoning when I bit her toe. The rancid food they fed me, the slops and stinking cheese and rock-hard crusts, might all easily contain poison enough to bloat her toe, and her leg, and her body, and her evil, scheming, cold-blooded head. .
Still, she had not introduced me to the dungeons below the castle; I had not visited the Hanitchik. There were torture chambers below her palace, here on the island in the artificial lake in the River Havilthytus. I needed no one to tell me that. She was playing with me, as a strigicaw might play with a woflo. All the vaunted laws of Hamal were excluded here in this diabolical palace of Queen Thyllis. On the occasions I was dragged bleeding and struggling to the great hall to be made a butt of I wondered if among those bright sycophantic courtiers stood and laughed any of my acquaintances of the sacred quarter. They would not have recognized me. I was a hairy mess, for Queen Thyllis, although having me washed, would not have my hair cut. She had a use for it, she said, taunting me. She got over the toe-biting, and I was dealt with most unpleasantly. As you know, my dip in the Pool of Baptism in distant Aphrasoe — I thought of the Swinging City a great deal during that horrible time -
besides assuring me of a thousand years of life, gave me also remarkable, vital recuperative powers. I playacted for all I was worth, groaning and yelling to prove I was not mended. But they thwacked me, anyway.
Despite my original belief that no sexual taint motivated the Queen’s sadistic behavior, inevitably and by degrees I came to realize that sex must go at least some way toward explaining her conduct. Yet she made no overtures whatsoever during this captivity. I have had experiences with amatory queens, but suffice it to say at this time Queen Thyllis played with me for the slaking of her lust for cruelty. She could easily have been far worse. I know that. But I gave her no encouragement whatsoever. The arrival of King Doghamrei in my cell, recovered from the bruised ribs I had given him on the dais of the Queen’s throne, heralded a fresh face, and a new phase of unpleasantness. This king lorded it over a moderate-sized kingdom within the empire, the kingdom of Hirrume. I discovered he had plans to enlarge his kingdom, strictly within the empire, at the expense of neighboring kings and Kovs, and he had not been king long. Also, as I discovered, he hankered after the Queen, with a view to making himself King of Hamal and, when the due observances had been made, emperor. The setback in Pandahem had also set back the ceremonies Queen Thyllis had promised herself as marking her coronation as empress. The various priests and monks of Havil the Green, the state religious establishment, would no doubt argue strongly that the coronation could not take place until all the omens were auspicious. That made sense. The new face turned out to be long and thin and of a yellowish cast, with two thin black moustaches drooping past a narrow mouth, and with a pair of boot-button black eyes of penetrating brilliance. I guessed who this thin and angular man must be the moment I saw him. Not from his appearance alone, was I thus confident. There was about him an aura of mystical fanaticism, that aura of power I had seen before in the person of Lu-si-Yuong. Also, his red hair shone in the torchlight with a most pressing brilliance. He obviously blackened his moustaches from vanity — and I found that passing strange in one of the famous Wizards of Loh.
“Examine this yetch, Que-si-Rening.” King Doghamrei spoke with his usual uncouth bellow. “By Krun! I want to know all there is to know about his miserable body and his thrice-damned ib! Make him talk, Que-si- Rening!”
The Wizards of Loh in these days may be merely a dying and faded remnant of the great force they once were, but they wield hidden and some say occult powers. It was as well to be on the safe side with them. This bully-boy king with his roaring ways, steel armor, and rapier seemed to me to be digging a pit for himself.
“You are the man known as Bagor ti Hemlad, slave?” The wizard’s voice crackled like old parchment.
“I am, San. Ask your questions.”
His head went up when I gave him that ancient title for sage, dominie, master. He stared at me narrowly.
“You have met a Wizard of Loh before?”
“Aye, San. He did me a turn — as I did him.”
“Then maybe I will find something here to make of my life less barren. I do not receive the meed that is my due.”
“It is strange that here in Hamal I should find a Wizard of Loh, in a land where all things Lohvian are detested.”
“The Queen has her fancies. I am kept secret.”
“Get on with it, get on with it!” rasped Doghamrei.
The great blockheaded idiot didn’t seem to realize that in this three-cornered contest the Wizard of Loh was already in my corner.
Que-si-Rening sat on the straw-stuffed pallet that served as a bed. There were not above a dozen nits in it, for I had gone hunting with thumbnails sharp and at the ready.
“Tell me, Bagor, whom men dub a wild leem, do you lust after the body of Queen Thyllis of Hamal?”
“Eh?” I gaped at him.
“Don’t shilly-shally, you rast! Give an answer, or you will be flogged jikaider!”
“If you need a Wizard of Loh to worm out the answers to questions that have no sense, cramph,” I said to King Doghamrei, “you should know jikaidering will avail you nothing.” I added, for good measure,
“Kleesh!”
He roared and tried to strike me, but I ducked, my chains jangling, and he hit the wall and bellowed like a stuck chunkrah.
“May Havil the Green pour onto you from a great height, cramph,” I said with great equanimity. The wizard brushed his long moustaches. He’d enjoyed it, too.
But this was a serious matter. I saw what was in this puffed-up king’s mind. Truth to tell, in all honesty, it must have seemed, to many people around the court in this great island palace of Hammabi el Lamma, that the Queen was besotted by more than mere cruelty. Her treatment of me would be measured in many a scheming brain as an exhibition of frustrated lust. Well, so be it. I had to turn this to my own account, as any wily clansman would.
The king sucked his knuckles and swore. Que-si-Rening bent forward. His dark hypnotic eyes bored into mine, and I forced myself to contain all that was Dray Prescot, to hold on to my own ib, as the Kregan saying has it.
“You will save much pain, Bagor, if you speak.”
“I’ll speak,” I said. “By Krun! This nurdling oaf Doghamrei may have that ice-cold bitch to bed at night, and he’ll freeze to death.”
Doghamrei started bellowing for the guards and but for the wizard’s few quick and pointed words we might have had a fair old dust up then. I had been eating, if not luxuriously, enough, and I had not lost my strength. I was a little stiff and sore, to be sure, but I am used to discomfort.
“Tell this onker he can keep his queen. And to the Ice Floes-”
“Enough, Bagor!”
Well, enough is enough. But, being Dray Prescot, I was ready to take this as far as it would go. A streak of agony hit me as I thought of my Delia, my Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains. Then the king, still sucking his knuckles, was yelling violently at the guards, and going out, and ordering the Wizard of Loh to get his stupid backside out after him.
If he was satisfied with my answers — all well and good. I thought I had made it clear. As it turned out, the fool didn’t believe me — for which, later on, I mentally gave thanks to Zair in his omnipotent wisdom. As though her spies had given her cognizance of what had transpired in my cell, the very next interview with the Queen differed radically from all those that had gone before. I was dressed up in those ridiculous and demeaning clothes. I was led in my chains along new corridors, the guards very tense and nervous (the acupuncture needles must have been busy pricking their aches and pains away), and so to a private chamber deep within the palace of Hammabi el
