So lost in mortification was I that I bellowed at her, insulting her, calling her all the Makki-Grodno diseased names I could put my coarse sailorman’s tongue around. She rode them all, wallowing in a kind of perverted masochism in the luxury of seeing me suffer. I was dressed like a popinjay, in silks and ribbons and bows and feathers.
The costume was obscene to me. I tried ripping it off, but they thrashed me and put fresh clothes on my bleeding back. I was partially senseless when I was dragged before this evil playacting Queen of Pain. She allowed one of her pet jiklos to come down and lick my bleeding wounds. I spat in the thing’s face, but my parched mouth wouldn’t bring up a single gobbet.
“Give him a drink, so that he may scream,” said the Queen. I drank — scummy water, but like Jholaix.
“I should have let Nath and Nalgre have their way with you, Queen!” I croaked up. “They would have enjoyed that.”
“Onker. Those flutsmen were paid by someone in Pandahem to kidnap me. You forget yourself, Bagor the wild leem.” She leaned down toward me, so that the gems in her solid breastplate dazzled me.
“Would you care to face my pretty jiklos in the Jikhorkdun?”
A flash of spirit shook me. Would she be such a fool?
I dissembled. “That would be sport for you, shishi.”
She did not flinch at the word.
“It would be too easy for you. My pretty manhounds would slay you too fast.” She tickled one manhound behind the ear and he purred, tongue lolling. And he was human, apim, like me! She breathed faster. “You do not like being flogged, Bagor?”
“Ask a silly question, Queen, and. .”
“You will be flogged, Bagor. Maybe even the syatra will suck on you, crunching your bones! But I will be merciful to you. Crawl to me, Bagor the zhantil! Crawl to me and kiss my foot, oh Bagor, the great Jikai!”
Well, maybe I would have kissed her foot with its green-painted toenails, just to avoid a flogging, if she hadn’t flung in that taunt about Jikai. I know what a High Jikai is. I crawled up the marble steps to her, over the crystal footstool of the throne. Guards followed my every move. They were enjoying the fun, not as much as their queen, who overmatched them in depravity, but it was fun to them all the same. I crawled up and she negligently pulled her silver-glitter dress up her ankles. She pulled it over her calves, past her knees. She craned over to look down on me, her green slanting eyes bright upon me with malicious intent, her twisted lips glistening.
I thought she would kick me in the face.
She did not. “Kiss my foot, Bagor the zhantil!”
I bent down and brushed my lips against her foot, got her big toe nicely positioned, opened my mouth
— 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.”