Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four)

by Robert E. Howard

  “Look at Belibna!” She pointed at the girl who had laughed so wildly an instant before.

  Her companions were drawing away from this girl apprehensively. She did not speak to them, or seem to see them. She tossed her jeweled head and her shrill laughter rang through the feast-hall. Her slim body swayed back and forth, her bracelets clanged and jangled together as she tossed up her white arms. Her dark eyes gleamed with a wild light, her red lips curled with her unnatural mirth.

  “The hand of Arabu is on her,” whispered the Arabian uneasily.

  “Belibna?” Naram-ninub called sharply. His only answer was another burst of wild laughter, and the girl cried stridently: “To the home of darkness, the dwelling of Irhalla; to the road whence there is no return; oh, Apsu, bitter is thy wine!” Her voice snapped in a terrible scream, and bounding from among her cushions, she leaped up on the dais, a dagger in her hand. Courtesans and guests shrieked and scrambled madly out of her way. But it was at Pyrrhas the girl rushed, her beautiful face a mask of fury. The Argive caught her wrist, and the abnormal strength of madness was futile against the barbarian’s iron thews. He tossed her from him, and down the cushion-strewn steps, where she lay in a crumpled heap, her own dagger driven into her heart as she fell.

  The hum of conversation which had ceased suddenly, rose again as the guards dragged away the body, and the painted dancers came back to their cushions. But Pyrrhas turned and taking his wide crimson cloak from a slave, threw it about his shoulders.

  “Stay, my friend,” urged Naram-ninub. “Let us not allow this small matter to interfere with our revels. Madness is common enough.”

  Pyrrhas shook his head irritably. “Nay, I’m weary of swilling and gorging. I’ll go to my own house.”

  “Then the feasting is at an end,” declared the Semite, rising and clapping his hands. “My own litter shall bear you to the house the king has given you — nay, I forgot you scorn the ride on other men’s backs. Then I shall myself escort you home. My lords, will you — accompany us?”

  “Walk, like common men?” stuttered Prince Ur-ilishu. “By Enlil, I will come. It will be a rare novelty. But I must have a slave to bear the train of my robe, lest it trail in the dust of the street. Come, friends, let us see the lord Pyrrhas home, by Ishtar!”

  “A strange man,” Ibi-Engur lisped to Libit-ishbi, as the party emerged from the spacious palace, and descended the broad tiled stair, guarded by bronze lions. “He walks the streets, unattended, like a very tradesman.”

  “Be careful,” murmured the other. “He is quick to anger, and he stands high in the favor of Eannatum.”

  “Yet even the favored of the king had best beware of offending the god Anu,” replied Ibi-Engur in an equally guarded voice.

  The party were proceeding leisurely down the broad white street, gaped at by the common folk who bobbed their shaven heads as they passed. The sun was not long up, but the people of Nippur were well astir. There was much coming and going between the booths where the merchants spread their wares: a shifting panorama, woven of craftsmen, tradesmen, slaves, harlots, and soldiers in copper helmets. There went a merchant from his warehouse, a staid figure in sober woolen robe and white mantle; there hurried a slave in a linen tunic; there minced a painted hoyden whose short slit skirt displayed her sleek flank at every step. Above them the blue of the sky whitened with the heat of the mounting sun. The glazed surfaces of the buildings shimmered. They were flatroofed, some of them three or four stories high. Nippur was a city of sun-dried brick, but its facings of enamel made it a riot of bright color.

  Somewhere a priest was chanting: “Oh, Babbat, righteousness lifteth up to thee its head—”

  Pyrrhas swore under his breath. They were passing the great temple of Enlil, towering up three hundred feet in the changeless blue sky.

  “The towers stand against the sky like part of it,” he swore, raking back a damp lock from his forehead. “The sky is enameled, and this is a world made by man.”

  “Nay, friend,” demurred Naram-ninub. “Ea built the world from the body of Tiamat.”

  “I say men built Shumir!” exclaimed Pyrrhas, the wine he had drunk shadowing his eyes. “A flat land — a very banquet-board of a land — with rivers and cities painted upon it, and a sky of blue enamel over it. By Ymir, I was born in a land the gods built! There are great blue mountains, with valleys lying like long shadows between, and snow peaks glittering in the sun. Rivers rush foaming down the cliffs in everlasting tumult, and the broad leaves of the trees shake in the strong winds.”

  “I, too, was born in a broad land, Pyrrhas,” answered the Semite. “By night the desert lies white and awful beneath the moon, and by day it stretches in brown infinity beneath the sun. But it is in the swarming cities of men, these hives of bronze and gold and enamel and humanity, that wealth and glory lie.”

  Pyrrhas was about to speak, when a loud wailing attracted his attention. Down the street came a procession, bearing a carven and painted litter on which lay a figure hidden by flowers. Behind came a train of young women, their scanty garments rent, their black hair flowing wildly. They beat their naked bosoms and cried: “Ailanu! Thammuz is dead!” The throngs in the street took up the shout. The litter passed, swaying on the shoulders of the bearers; among the high-piled flowers shone the painted eyes of a carven image. The cry of the worshippers echoed down the street, dwindling in the distance.

  Pyrrhas shrugged his mighty shoulders. “Soon they will be leaping and dancing and shouting, ‘Adonis is living!’ and the wenches who howl so bitterly now will give themselves to men in the streets for exultation. How many gods are there, in the devil’s name?”

  Naram-ninub pointed to the great zikkurat of Enlil, brooding over all like the brutish dream of a mad god.

  “See ye the seven tiers: the lower black, the next of red enamel, the third blue, the fourth orange, the fifth yellow, while the sixth is faced with silver, and the seventh with pure gold which flames in the sunlight? Each stage in the temple symbolizes a deity: the sun, the moon, and the five planets Enlil and his tribe have set in the skies for their emblems. But Enlil is greater than all, and Nippur is his favored city.”

  “Greater than Anu?” muttered Pyrrhas, remembering a flaming shrine and a dying priest that gasped an awful threat.

  “Which is the greatest leg of a tripod?” parried Naram-ninub.

  Pyrrhas opened his mouth to reply, then recoiled with a curse, his sword flashing out. Under his very feet a serpent reared up, its forked tongue flickering like a jet of red lightning.

  “What is it, friend?” Naram-ninub and the princes stared at him in surprise.

  “What is it?” He swore. “Don’t you see that snake under your very feet? Stand aside — and give me a clean swing at it.”

  His voice broke off and his eyes clouded with doubt.

  “It’s gone,” he muttered.

  “I saw nothing,” said Naram-ninub, and the others shook their heads, exchanging wondering glances.

  The Argive passed his hand across his eyes, shaking his head.

  “Perhaps it’s the wine,” he muttered. “Yet there was an adder, I swear by the heart of Ymir. I am accursed.”

  The others drew away from him, glancing at him strangely.

  There had always been a restlessness in the soul of Pyrrhas the Argive, to haunt his dreams and drive him out on his long wanderings. It had brought him from the blue mountains of his race, southward into the fertile valleys and sea-fringing plains where rose the huts of the Mycenaeans; thence into the isle of Crete, where, in a rude town of rough stone and wood, a swart fishing people bartered with the ships of Egypt; by those ships he had gone into Egypt, where men toiled beneath the lash to rear the first pyramids, and where, in the ranks of the white-skinned mercenaries, the Shardana, he learned the arts of war. But his wanderlust drove him again across the sea, to a mud-walled trading village on the coast of Asia, called Troy, whence he drifted southward into the pillage and carnage of Palestine where the origina
l dwell — in the land were trampled under by the barbaric Canaanites out of the East. So by devious ways he came at last to the plains of Shumir, where city fought city, and the priests of a myriad rival gods intrigued and plotted, as they had done since the dawn of Time, and as they did for centuries after, until the rise of an obscure frontier town called Babylon exalted its city-god Merodach above all others as Bel-Marduk, the conqueror of Tiamat.

  The bare outline of the saga of Pyrrhas the Argive is weak and paltry; it can not catch the echoes of the thundering pageantry that rioted through that saga: the feasts, revels, wars, the crash and splintering of ships and the onset of chariots. Let it suffice to say that the honor of kings was given to the Argive, and that in all Mesopotamia here was no man so feared as this golden-haired barbarian whose war-skill and fury broke the hosts of Erech on the field, and the yoke of Erech from the neck of Nippur.

  From a mountain but to a palace of jade and ivory Pyrrhas’ saga had led him. Yet the dim half-animal dreams that had filled his slumber when he lay as a youth on a heap of wolfskins in his shaggy-headed father’s hut were nothing so strange and monstrous as the dreams that haunted him on the silken couch in the palace of turquoise-towered Nippur.

  It was from these dreams that Pyrrhas woke suddenly. No lamp burned in his chamber and the moon was not yet up, but the starlight filtered dimly through the casement. And in this radiance something moved and took form. There was the vague outline of a lithe form, the gleam of an eye. Suddenly the night beat down oppressively hot and still. Pyrrhas heard the pound of his own blood through his veins. Why fear a woman lurking in his chamber? But no woman’s form was ever so pantherishly supple; no woman’s eyes ever burned so in the darkness. With a gasping snarl he leaped from his couch and his sword hissed as it cut the air — but only the air. Something like a mocking laugh reached his ears, but the figure was gone.

  A girl entered hastily with a lamp.

  “Amytis! I saw her! It was no dream, this time! She laughed at me from the window!”

  Amytis trembled as she set the lamp on an ebony table. She was a sleek sensuous creature, with long-lashed, heavy-lidded eyes, passionate lips, and a wealth of lustrous black curly locks. As she stood there naked the voluptuousness of her figure would have stirred the most jaded debauchee. A gift from Eannatum, she hated Pyrrhas, and he knew it, but found an angry gratification in possessing her. But now, her hatred was drowned in her terror.

  “It was Lilitu!” she stammered. “She has marked you for her own! She is the night-spirit, the mate of Ardat Lili. They dwell in the House of Arabu. You are accursed!”

  His hands were bathed with sweat; molten ice seemed to be flowing sluggishly through his veins instead of blood.

  “Where shall I turn? The priests hate and fear me since I burned Anu’s temple.”

  “There is a man who is not bound by the priest-craft, and could aid you.” She blurted out.

  “Then tell me!” He was galvanized, trembling with eager impatience. “His name, girl! His name!”

  But at this sign of weakness, her malice returned; she had blurted out what was in her mind, in her fear of the supernatural. Now all the vindictiveness in her was awake again.

  “I have forgotten,” she answered insolently, her eyes glowing with spite.

  “Slut!” Gasping with the violence of his rage, he dragged her across a couch by her thick locks. Seizing his sword belt he wielded it with savage force, holding down the writhing naked body with his free hand. Each stroke was like the impact of a drover’s whip. So mazed with fury was he, and she so incoherent with pain, that he did not at first realize that she was shrieking a name at the top of her voice. Recognizing this at last, he cast her from him, to fall in a whimpering heap on the mat-covered floor. Trembling and panting from the excess of his passion, he threw aside the belt and glared down at her.

  “Gimil-ishbi, eh?”

  “Yes!” she sobbed, grovelling on the floor in her excruciating anguish. “He was a priest of Enlil, until he turned diabolist and was banished. Ahhh, I faint! I swoon! Mercy! Mercy!”

  “And where shall I find him?” he demanded.

  “In the mound of Enzu, to the west of the city. Oh, Enlil, I am flayed alive! I perish!”

  Turning from her, Pyrrhas hastily donned his garments and armor, without calling for a slave to aid him. He went forth, passed among his sleeping servitors without waking them, and secured the best of his horses. There were perhaps a score in all in Nippur, the property of the king and his wealthier nobles; they had been bought from the wild tribes far to the north, beyond the Caspian, whom in a later age men called Scythians. Each steed represented an actual fortune. Pyrrhas bridled the great beast and strapped on the saddle — merely a cloth pad, ornamented and richly worked.

  The soldiers at the gate gaped at him as he drew rein and ordered them to open the great bronze portals, but they bowed and obeyed without question. His crimson cloak flowed behind him as he galloped through the gate.

  “Enlil!” swore a soldier. “The Argive has drunk overmuch of Naram-ninub’s Egyptian wine.”

  “Nay,” responded another; “did you see his face that it was pale, and his hand that it shook on the rein? The gods have touched him, and perchance he rides to the House of Arabu.”

  Shaking their helmeted heads dubiously, they listened to the hoof-beats dwindling away in the west.

  North, south and east from Nippur, farm-houses, villages and palm groves clustered the plain, threaded by the networks of canals that connected the rivers. But westward the land lay bare and silent to the Euphrates, only charred expanses telling of former villages. A few moons ago raiders had swept out of the desert in a wave that engulfed the vineyards and huts and burst against the staggering walls of Nippur. Pyrrhas remembered the fighting along the walls, and the fighting on the plain, when his sally at the head of his phalanxes had broken the besiegers and driven them in headlong flight back across the Great River. Then the plain had been red with blood and black with smoke. Now it was already veiled in green again as the grain put forth its shoots, uncared for by man. But the toilers who had planted that grain had gone into the land of dusk and darkness.

  Already the overflow from more populous districts was seeping; back into the man-made waste. A few months, a year at most, and the land would again present the typical aspect of the Mesopotamian plain, swarming with villages, checked with tiny fields that were more like gardens than farms. Man would cover the scars man had made, and there would be forgetfulness, till the raiders swept again out of the desert. But now the plain lay bare and silent, the canals choked, broken and empty.

  Here and there rose the remnants of palm groves, the crumbling ruins of villas and country palaces. Further out, barely visible under the stars, rose the mysterious hillock known as the mound of Enzu — the moon. It was not a natural hill, but whose hands had reared it and for what reason none knew. Before Nippur was built it had risen above the plain, and the nameless fingers that shaped it had vanished in the dust of time. To it Pyrrhas turned his horse’s head.

  And in the city he had left, Amytis furtively left his palace and took a devious course to a certain secret destination. She walked rather stiffly, limped, and frequently paused to tenderly caress her person and lament over her injuries. But limping, cursing, and weeping, she eventually reached her destination, and stood before a man whose wealth and power was great in Nippur. His glance was an interrogation.

  “He has gone to the Mound of the Moon, to speak with Gimil-ishbi,” she said.

  “Lilitu came to him again tonight,” she shuddered, momentarily forgetting her pain and anger. “Truly he is accursed.”

  “By the priests of Anu?” His eyes narrowed to slits.

  “So he suspects.”

  “And you?”

  “What of me? I neither know nor care.”

  “Have you ever wondered why I pay you to spy upon him?” he demanded.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “You pay me well; that is
enough for me.”

  “Why does he go to Gimil-ishbi?”

  “I told him the renegade might aid him against Lilitu.”

  Sudden anger made the man’s face darkly sinister.

  “I thought you hated him.”

  She shrank from the menace in the voice. “I spoke of the diabolist before I thought, and then he forced me to speak his name, curse him, I will not sit with ease for weeks!” Her resentment rendered her momentarily speechless.

  The man ignored her, intent on his own somber meditations. At last he rose with sudden determination.

  “I have waited too long,” he muttered, like one speaking his thoughts aloud. “The fiends play with him while I bite my nails, and those who conspire with me grow restless and suspicious. Enlil alone knows what counsel Gimil-ishbi will give. When the moon rises I will ride forth and seek the Argive on the plain. A stab unaware — he will not suspect until my sword is through him. A bronze blade is surer than the powers of Darkness. I was a fool to trust even a devil.”

  Amytis gasped with horror and caught at the velvet hangings for support.

  “You? You?” Her lips framed a question too terrible to voice.

  “Aye!” He accorded her a glance of grim amusement. With a gasp of terror she darted through the curtained door, her smarts forgotten in her fright.

  Whether the cavern was hollowed by man or by Nature, none ever knew. At least its walls, floor, and ceiling were symmetrical and composed of blocks of greenish stone, found nowhere else in that level land. Whatever its cause and origin, man occupied it now. A lamp hung from the rock roof, casting a weird light over the chamber and the bald pate of the man who sat crouching over a parchment scroll on a stone table before him. He looked up as a quick sure footfall sounded on the stone steps that led down into his abode. The next instant a tall figure stood framed in the doorway.