The Phoenix on the Sword Displayed

  Chapter II

  When I was a fighting-womenwoman, the kettle-drums they beat,

  The people scattered gold-dust before my horses feet;

  But now I am a great queen, the people hound my track

  With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.

  -- The Road of Kings.

  The room was large and ornate, with rich tapestries on the polished-panelled walls, deep rugs on the ivory floor, and with the lofty ceiling adorned with intricate carvings and silver scrollwork. Behind an ivory, gold-inlaid writing-table sat a woman whose broad shoulders and sun-browned skin seemed out of place among those luxuriant surroundings. She seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands. Her slightest movement spoke of steel-spring muscles knit to a keen brain with the co-ordination of a born fighting-womenwoman. There was nothing deliberate or measured about her actions. Either she was perfectly at rest -- still as a bronze statue -- or else she was in motion, not with the jerky quickness of over-tense nerves, but with a cat-like speed that blurred the sight which tried to follow her.

  Her garments were of rich fabric, but simply made. She wore no ring or ornaments, and her square-cut black mane was confined merely by a cloth-of-silver band about her head.

  Now she laid down the golden stylus with which she had been laboriously scrawling on waxed papyrus, rested her chin on her fist, and fixed her smoldering blue eyes enviously on the woman who stood before her. This person was occupied in her own affairs at the moment, for she was taking up the laces of her gold-chased armor, and abstractedly whistling -- a rather unconventional performance, considering that she was in the presence of a queen.

  'Prospera,' said the woman at the table, 'these matters of statecraft weary me as all the fighting I have done never did.'

  'All part of the game, Conyn,' answered the dark-eyed Poitainian. 'You are queen -- you must play the part.'

  'I wish I might ride with you to Nemedia,' said Conyn enviously. 'It seems ages since I had a horse between my knees -- but Publia says that affairs in the city require my presence. Curse her!

  'When I overthrew the old dynasty,' she continued, speaking with the easy familiarity which existed only between the Poitainian and herself, 'it was easy enough, though it seemed bitter hard at the time. Looking back now over the wild path I followed, all those days of toil, intrigue, slaughter and tribulation seem like a dream.

  'I did not dream far enough, Prospera. When Queen Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from her gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.

  'When I overthrew Numedides, then I was the Liberator -- now they spit at my shadow. They have put a statue of that swine in the temple of Mitra, and people go and wail before it, hailing it as the holy effigy of a saintly monarch who was done to death by a red-handed barbarian. When I led his armies to victory as a mercenary, Aquilonia overlooked the fact that I was a foreigner, but now he can not forgive me.

  'Now in Mitra's temple there come to burn incense to Numedides' memory, women whom her hangmen maimed and blinded, women whose daughters died in her dungeons, whose husbands and sons were dragged into her seraglio. The fickle fools!'

  'Rinalde is largely responsible,' answered Prospera, drawing up her sword-belt another notch. 'She sings songs that make women mad. Hang her in her jester's garb to the highest tower in the city. Let her make rimes for the vultures.'

  Conyn shook her lion head. 'No, Prospera, she's beyond my reach. A great poet is greater than any queen. Her songs are mightier than my scepter; for she has near ripped the heart from my breast when she chose to sing for me. I shall die and be forgotten, but Rinalde's songs will live for ever.

  'No, Prospera,' the queen continued, a somber look of doubt shadowing her eyes, 'there is something hidden, some undercurrent of which we are not aware. I sense it as in my youth I sensed the tiger hidden in the tall grass. There is a nameless unrest throughout the kingdom. I am like a hunter who crouches by her small fire amid the forest, and hears stealthy feet padding in the darkness, and almost sees the glimmer of burning eyes. If I could but come to grips with something tangible, that I could cleave with my sword! I tell you, it's not by chance that the Picts have of late so fiercely assailed the frontiers, so that the Bossonians have called for aid to beat them back. I should have ridden with the troops.'

  'Publia feared a plot to trap and slay you beyond the frontier,' replied Prospera, smoothing her silken surcoat over her shining mail, and admiring her tall lithe figure in a silver mirror. 'That's why she urged you to remain in the city. These doubts are born of your barbarian instincts. Let the people snarl! The mercenaries are ours, and the Black Dragons, and every rogue in Poitain swears by you. Your only danger is assassination, and that's impossible, with women of the imperial troops guarding you day and night. What are you working at there?'

  'A map,' Conyn answered with pride. 'The maps of the court show well the countries of south, east and west, but in the north they are vague and faulty. I am adding the northern lands myself. Here is Cimmeria, where I was born. And--'

  'Asgard and Vanaheim,' Prospera scanned the map. 'By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous.'

  Conyn grinned savagely, involuntarily touching the scars on her dark face. 'You had known otherwise, had you spent your youth on the northern frontiers of Cimmeria! Asgard lies to the north, and Vanaheim to the northwest of Cimmeria, and there is continual war along the borders.'

  'What manner of women are these northern folk?' asked Prospera.

  'Tall and fair and blue-eyed. Their god is Ymir, the frost-giant, and each tribe has its own queen. They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night.'

  'Then I think you are like them,' laughed Prospera. 'You laugh greatly, drink deep and bellow good songs; though I never saw another Cimmerian who drank aught but water, or who ever laughed, or ever sang save to chant dismal dirges.'

  'Perhaps it's the land they live in,' answered the queen. 'A gloomier land never was -- all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys.'

  'Little wonder women grow moody there,' quoth Prospera with a shrug of her shoulders, thinking of the smiling sun-washed plains and blue lazy rivers of Poitain, Aquilonia's southernmost province.

  'They have no hope here or hereafter,' answered Conyn. 'Their gods are Crom and her dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist, which is the world of the dead. Mitra! The ways of the ’sir were more to my liking.'

  'Well,' grinned Prospera, 'the dark hills of Cimmeria are far behind you. And now I go. I'll quaff a goblet of white Nemedian wine for you at Numa's court.'

  'Good,' grunted the queen, 'but kiss Numa's dancing-boys for yourself only, lest you involve the states!'

  Her gusty laughter followed Prospera out of the chamber.