Robin nodded obediently. She glanced at Cobra warily, then scooted in close to the horned helmet so that one knee nearly touched the hot metal. She reached for its horns, hesitated and looked timidly at the bukko, mumbling with fear, “What… what if I can’t do it anymore?”
“Are you afraid?” snarled Cobra accusingly.
“No! No!” Robin whimpered, “I’m not, but…”
“Then do it! Remove it! He’s dying.”
Brown John nodded agreement. “Do it, child. It’s the only way you’ll know if you still have the power.” Robin nodded again, and kept on nodding as she drew in a breath and leaned over Gath. She took hold of the horns, flinching at their heat, and pulled. The helmet twisted, but did not budge. She lowered her grip, this time using the weight of her body to help her. She tugged until she was panting and sweat drained from her temples. Suddenly black smoke billowed from the eye slits, swirling about her arms and startled face. She yanked her hands away and sat back choking and shaking with terror.
“I can’t,” she whimpered, “I can’t do it anymore.”
“Nonsense,” snapped Cobra. “It’s just wedged against the floor boards.” She turned imperiously on Brown John and demanded, “Help her, you old mousebag. Lift his head.”
Brown John obediently lowered his sword, realized what he was doing and put it back against her ribs. “Wait just a minute now, you’re not in command here!”
“Arrggg!” growled Cobra. She brushed the sword away and dropped next to Gath on the opposite side from Robin. “Try again, girl! I’ll lift his head.”
Cobra forced her hands under the searing metal and flinched painfully, but held on and lifted Gath’s helmeted head. Robin took hold of the horns, set herself and yanked hard. The helmet whipped off, and both women fell back, with the headpiece flying out of their blistered hands. Gath’s head dropped hard to the stage, and the helmet rolled five feet off, came to rest with a horn stuck in the stage.
Cobra and Robin quickly rose to their knees, blowing on their fingers. Brown John, edging up behind them, lowered the lantern to Gath’s head, and they all looked down uncertainly.
The flickering orange light still showed in his partially open eyes. It cast deep black shadows on his savage, chiseled face. His wild black hair and the thick eyebrows on the ridge of his blunt brow were singed and smoking, and the scar running from the left corner of his mouth to his chin was all but burnt away. His lips were parched and bleeding, and the dark sun-brown flesh was burnt raw on his nose, cheeks, jaw and forehead. Black charcoal crust rimmed the wounds. His eyes closed, and his head slowly fell sideways.
Whimpering with fear, Robin fell across his massive chest embracing him. “Oh, Gath, don’t die. You can’t.”
Cobra, involuntarily nodding agreement, reached out a long-fingered hand and gently stroked his tangled burnt hair.
Robin raised her head and looked into Gath’s eyes, her tears dropping on his chest and her voice breaking. “Please, Gath, we need you.”
Cobra’s eyes shifted curiously as she watched the girl look up at the black sky where a single white jewel, the midnight star, glimmered brightly.
Robin spoke to it, saying, “I’ll never leave you again. I swear it by the…” She stopped short, looked off at the shadow of the handsome young man and dropped back on Gath’s chest sobbing.
Cobra looked down in defeat at the charred bits of black hair clinging to her fingers. She smiled with cold bitterness, then suddenly looked back at Gath.
His eyes flickered, then opened. He sat up and rolled over onto all fours in one erupting movement. His hand, having instinctively caught hold of the body lying across him by the shoulder, had thrown Robin down on her back beneath him, and the impact made her gasp harshly. He took no notice and held her body beneath his, straddling it with one great paw crushing her breast. He looked around, growling, with his head lowered like a trapped wolf. Then he hesitated, as if recognizing Brown John and Cobra, both of whom had jumped back, and looked down at Robin.
The hot glow came back into his eyes.
Robin, gasping in shame, pulled his hand away from her breast and drew it to her lips. “It’s all right, Gath. It’s me. Robin.”
He growled and leapt to his feet, hauling her up by the neck, and she shrieked.
“It’s Robin, Gath!” Both Cobra and Brown John shouted it.
Gath did not hear them. His head was lowered, and his eyes were on fire above his charred cheeks. He looked about the stage, grabbed up his helmet, shoved it in Robin’s hands, then plucked her off her feet. Holding her under one arm, he jumped on his stallion and galloped off.
Cobra staggered after him, wanting to cry out and stop him, but did not. She knew it was too late for words. But Brown John, standing beside her, shouted, “Wait, Gath! Come back! I’ve got to talk to you. Robin’s in grave danger!”
Gath did not look back, and rode off with Robin clinging helplessly to his chest, vanished amid the apple trees.
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Brown John. “It’s not him,” Cobra replied, “it’s the helmet.” He looked at her with sudden fear as the handsome young man galloped off on the dappled grey stallion in pursuit.
Brown John shouted after him, “Don’t, Jakar! Come back! You don’t know him. He could kill you!”
The rider did not stop or look back.
Cobra and Brown John watched the forest until they could no longer hear hoofbeats. Then Cobra looked off into the darkness as if it were her only friend. After a moment, she composed herself and smiled at the bukko, speaking in a low, ironic purr.
“I think, old man,” she said, “the last time we met, you put me in a bottle.”
“I remember it well,” he said uneasily, then added, “I think I’ll use a rope this time.”
“There is no need,” she said. “But if your manliness requires a rope to arouse it, I will not fight you. On the contrary, I intend to cooperate with you in every way I am able.” Her voice was solemn. “Whether we like it or not, we are allies now.”
“Just how, may I ask, did you come by that plot?”
“You are obviously aware that the girl is in grave danger?”
“I am.”
“And you presume Gath can deal with it?”
“Exactly.”
“Are you aware of just how grave the danger is?” He nodded. “A Lord of Destruction, Baskt, tried to kill her.”
Cobra gasped with shock. “He was here?”
“Yes, at Clear Pond. The filth killed five of my girls thinking one of them was Robin.”
All color left her face. “Then the danger is far worse than I thought. She knows… someone has told her everything.” His eyes questioned her, and she answered them. “Tiyy, the Nymph Queen of Pyram. Baskt belongs to her.” She took a breath. “Where is he now?”
“I had him followed, and he took Amber Road north, then headed west toward the Barrier Mountains.”
“Did he,” she hesitated, lowering her voice respectfully, “did he take the remains of your girls with him?” He nodded, and she relaxed slightly. “Then he’s headed back to Pyram. That gives us some time. But as soon as Tiyy examines them, she’ll know the Lakehair girl is not among them. She’ll send him back. But it will take him better than two weeks.”
“That won’t do Robin any good. The bloody demon left his soldiers behind, to keep track of my Grillards, it seems. We could be being watched right now.”
She looked off at the threatening darkness of the forest, listening to the whistle of the wind in the tree canopy, and said quietly, “Then the girl is our only hope.”
“As I recall,” Brown John said, getting her attention with the tip of his sword, “it wasn’t so long ago that you wanted her dead yourself. In fact, wanted all of us dead.”
Her pale cheeks lifted in an agreeing smile. “I know. But I am nothing but a woman now and, as such, I believe I am entitled to change my mind.”
“A woman,” he scoffed. “That you will have to p
rove.”
“In time, I am certain it will be all too apparent. In the meantime, I suggest we work together. I know Tiyy, and the nature of her powers. Perhaps you, being a man of plots, can use the information I have and fashion one to save us all… providing, of course, that Gath doesn’t kill the girl.”
“Kill Robin?” He laughed. “You don’t know him.”
“Oh, but I do, bukko… as well as you, if not better. But it is not Gath we are concerned with, not tonight… it’s the helmet.”
“But he’s not wearing it now!”
“That no longer matters,” she said, a rush of childish fear pulsing through her voice. “It’s part of him now… perhaps the strongest part.”
Fifteen
SAVAGE HEAT
The black stallion bolted out of the dark body of the forest into a moonlit clearing beside the river, Whitewater, bordering the eastern edge of the Valley of Miracles. It pulled up, snorting steam and stomping the wild periwinkles and snapdragons to muddy pulp, and Gath swung out of the saddle with Robin in his arms. He dropped onto the mossy ground, and she staggered free, fearfully averting her face and clutching the horned helmet to her breasts.
He put a meaty hand on her shoulder, and turned her to him as easily as a swinging gate. She gasped. Singed, tangled hair hung beside his flushed face, brutish with raw wounds glittering wetly in the moonlight. She moaned and again looked away. Growling, he ripped the horned helmet out of her hands and threw it savagely aside.
It clanged against the trunk of an oak and tumbled across the moss, splashing to rest in the shallows of the river beside the startled horse. Cold water lapped against its hot metal, and steam rose, drifting around the stallion’s head. He bolted back, snorting in complaint, and waded further out into the river to drink elsewhere.
Robin’s shoulders twisted for release inside the grip of Gath’s hands, and her eyes continued to avoid his.
“What’s wrong?” she pleaded. “Why are you acting like this? Why… why did you bring me here? I’m…”
His thumb and fingers circled her throat. They were not gentle, and she gasped painfully. The sound encouraged him. He pushed her back against the sloping side of a boulder and pressed his metal-clad body against her pliant length, bending her slowly back. Blunt steel edges burrowed into her breasts and hipbones, and rock cut into the soft flesh of her back. She convulsed against him and cried out, an inarticulate, wailing plea.
The sound rang in his head like a mating call. His eyes narrowed, and he began to pant, lust mad, like a wolf fresh from the grip of death, frothing to defy its terrors in the forgetfulness of a sheet of flaming pleasure.
His hand gripped her jaw, turning her face to his, and his lips hungrily kissed her cool cheek, her open, gasping mouth, her throat. He pressed into her with chest and driving thigh, his lips and fingers probing and exploring the small body that twisted and cringed and shuddered like a mouse in the maw of a cat.
“No!” she screamed, beating at his shoulders. “Nooooo!”
Nothing in him could have resisted her wild song; the animal inside him had taken control.
He rolled her over, facedown. Taking hold of her clothing at the base of her back, he ripped both cloak and nightgown apart and fell heavily against her. His hands held her by armpits and shoulders. One of her closed eyes and a shuddering cheek were bright in a spill of moonlight.
He moved against her, his body heat mingling with hers despite the separating metal. Suddenly he held still, eyes transfixed by the moonlit cheek. It was so beautiful it hurt.
He snarled, and her red curls shuddered in the spill of moonlight. Her head rolled to the side as she moaned helplessly, and eye and cheek and lips again languished in the wan light.
Her beauty knifed into him, and his grip lost its rage. His fingers tenderly conformed to the soft sculpture of her back and shoulder. The savage heat in his blood cooled. The snarl on his face withdrew slowly.
Tears were welling from her eye, draining over her white cheek to gather in glistening drops on her lips. Their plump red flesh trembled fitfully as sobs racked her body.
The brutal glint faded from Gath’s eyes, and he studied her uncertainly, like the wolf finding a human babe abandoned in the forest, sensing her helplessness and need.
His fingertips explored her lips, careful now to be gentle, and memories passed behind his eyes. Vivid memories of the first time he had seen Robin sleeping beneath the blackened thorn tree atop Calling Rock. Her lips had danced then in the fire’s glow, to the song of her contented sighs and the night wind in the treetops. They had enchanted him, and brought back his childhood dreams for the first time since he could remember. But it was different now, and he withdrew his fingers as his flesh began to crawl and his neck hairs bristled.
Her lips were not dancing, but shuddering, and the song they moved to was that same song his lips had sung when, as a boy in Baal, he had been put to bed at night in his cage.
He released her and stepped back. His muscle and sinew contracted with self-revulsion, bending his huge frame.
Robin, still sobbing, placed her palms against the rock and pushed weakly, her head hanging. Her body lifted and she sagged back facing him with her hands outstretched, steadying herself against the boulder. Without raising her head, she wiped her tears away. Her body suddenly heaved for breath, and she staggered, but caught herself, again using both hands.
Gath watched her red-gold curls tremble, watched her breasts rise and fall against her cloak where his fingers had left dirty smudges. Lust again heated him, and he turned away, fighting off the demands the helmet had planted within him.
From the river bank, the helmet’s black eyes watched him, mocking, as the shallow water washed in and out of the mouth hole.
He straightened, his pride returning, and strode to the helmet, stood over it. Frustrated rage, long caged inside him, suddenly broke free, and he roared, a sound echoing out of an ancient, howling age. His boot caught the face of the helmet, drove it deep under the water into the muddy bottom. Geysers of water and mud and sparks erupted to his thighs, and his body sank to one side. His leg was knee-deep in river bottom. He yanked it out with a sucking sound, and the water swirled around the hole, gulping and bubbling, then flowed on.
He glared down at the tiny bubbles rising from the unseen metal. His hard breathing slackened, and he strode out into the deeper shallows to the stallion. Leading, the animal back into the mossy clearing beside Robin, he removed his black cloak from a saddlebag and wrapped it around her.
Her head lifted timidly, and she looked up under long feathery lashes. Her eyes were vacant, hollow corridors to shocked bone and blood and mind.
He gathered water from the river and held it up to her lips with cupped hands. She stared at them a moment, then brought her hands up to his, but hesitated, not touching them. Looking into his eyes, she asked, “Gath?”
The single word hung heavily on the night air. When he answered it, his voice was thick and slow.
“Yes,” he said, “it is Gath.” That surprising mystical tenderness which marked his soul even more deeply than his savage strength was back in his eyes and voice. “Forgive me.”
Robin, voice trembling, whispered, “It was the helmet, wasn’t it? Not you.”
He nodded. “It will never happen again.” It was a vow.
She took hold of his hands as if they were a bowl, and held his fingertips to her lips, drinking slowly. Two more times he fed her water. When his hands had emptied the third time, she held their cool, wet fingers against her hot cheeks, and kissed his palms softly. As she did this, she spoke to him in a voice that trembled with surrender.
“You must forgive me,” she said. “I should not have resisted. It was wrong of me. You saved my life… my people… everyone. I… I have no right to refuse you. I belong to you.”
“No!” His low, coarse voice commanded her. “You saved my life… twice…I am the one who is in debt.”
Her eyes widened, startled
by his intensity.
“I will protect you, but I do not belong to you… or you to me.”
“But I do,” she protested. “I vowed myself to you… by the midnight star. This is written… isn’t it?”
The surrender in her voice, her closeness and the smell of roses on her lips again stirred him. Heat flowed back into his wounded face, the brutal glint returned to his eyes. But as he spoke, he forced it back, his voice blunt.
“You were young and filled with victory… your vow means nothing.”
“Nothing? But…”
“Nothing. We are bound by a mutual danger, that is all. I am your guardian… this is what is written.” A hesitant smile lifted her cheeks, as if with a sudden rush of relief.
He wanted to touch that smile, but turned away and strode to the river’s edge. There he dropped his sword and dagger belts on the ground and ripped off boots, chain mail and padded undertunic. Clothed only in loincloth and moonlight, he waded out into hip-deep water, splashing his body, and steam furled from chest, shoulders and face. He dove into the water, stroked out into the strong rushing current and swam against it, defying it to wash him downriver. It could not.
When he came out of the river, he found Robin sitting on a rock beside his armor. She was wrapped in his cloak, and her own was spread across her lap. One of his daggers rested beside her. She had cut thongs on one side of the ripped seam and parallel eye slits on the opposite side. By overlapping the torn parts and passing the thongs through the eye slits and tying them off, she was mending the cloak.
Watching her, he kneeled in the shallows and scrubbed his face with water, removing the crusted ash and dirt and cleaning his wounds. Then he moved his massive bulk beside her and began to dress.
When she finished mending her cloak, she held it up and said, “This is the first way I learned to join cloth, when I was very little. The temple priestesses in Weaver taught it to us the first week of school. It’s a very old and primitive method, but quite effective.”
02 - Lords of Destruction Page 8