Her heart was stirred to wonder by the spectacle. But beneath the wonder was a great numbness and a sadness like unmelting ice. Hilar, she knew, would never return to her—except as a ray of the light, a spark of the vital heat, that he had helped to relumine. For the nonce, there was irony rather than comfort in the memory of his promise: “I will come back to you—in the sunlight.”
THE THEFT OF THE
THIRTY-NINE GIRDLES
Vixeela, daughter of beauty and doom!
Thy name, an invocation, calls to light
Dead moons, and draws from overdated night
The rosy-bosomed specter of delight.
Like some delaying sunset, brave with gold,
The glamours and the perils shared of old
Outsoar the shrunken empire of the mould.
—
Lament for Vixeela
Let it be said, as a preamble to this tale, that I have robbed no man who was not in some way a robber of others. In all my long and arduous career, I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, sometimes known as the master-thief, have endeavored to serve merely as an agent in the rightful re-distribution of wealth. The adventure I have now to relate was no exception: though, as it happened in the outcome, my own pecuniary profits were indeed meager, not to say trifling.
Age is upon me now; and sitting at that leisure which I have earned through hazards many and multiform, I drink the wines that are heartening to age. To me, as I sip, return memories of splendid loot and brave nefarious enterprise. Before me shine the outpoured sackfuls of djals or pazoors, removed so dexterously from the coffers of iniquitous merchants and money-lenders. I dream of rubies redder than the blood that was shed for them; of sapphires bluer than depths of glacial ice; of emeralds greener than the jungle in spring. I recall the escalade of pronged balconies; the climbing of terraces and towers guarded by men or monsters; the sacking of altars beneath the eyes of malign idols or sentinel serpents.
Often I think of Vixeela, my one true love and the most adroit and courageous of my companions in burglary. She has long since gone to the bourn of all good thieves and comrades; and I have mourned her sincerely these many years. But still dear is the memory of our amorous or adventurous nights and the feats we performed together. Of such feats, perhaps the most signal and audacious was the theft of the thirty-nine girdles.
These were the golden and jewelled chastity girdles, worn by the virgins consecrated to the moon-god Leniqua, whose temple had stood from immemorial time in the suburbs of Uzuldaroum. The virgins were always thirty-nine in number. They were chosen for their youth and beauty, and retired from service to the god at the age of thirty-one.
The girdles were padlocked with the toughest bronze and their keys retained by the high-priest who, on certain nights, rented them at a high price to the richer gallants of the city. It will thus be seen that the virginity of the priestesses was nominal; but its frequent and repeated sale was regarded as a meritorious act of sacrifice to the god.
Vixeela herself had at one time been numbered among the virgins; but had fled from the temple and from Uzuldaroum several years before the sacerdotal age of release from her bondage. She would tell me little of her life in the temple; and I surmised that she had found small pleasure in the religious prostitution, and had chafed at the confinement entailed by it. After her flight she had suffered many hardships and vicissitudes in the cities of the south; of these, too, she spoke but sparingly, as one who dreads the reviving of painful recollections.
She had returned to Uzuldaroum a few months prior to our first meeting. Being now a little over age, and having dyed her russet-blonde hair to a raven black, she had no great fear of recognition and punishment by the priests of Leniqua. As was their custom, they had promptly replaced her loss with another and younger virgin; and would have small interest now in one so long delinquent.
At the time of our foregathering, Vixeela had already committed various petty larcenies; but, being unskilled, she had failed to finish any but the easier and simpler ones, and had grown quite thin from starvation. She was still attractive; and her keenness of wit and quickness in learning soon endeared her to me. She was small and agile and could climb like a lemur. I soon found her help invaluable, since she could climb through windows and other apertures impassable to my greater bulk.
We had consummated several lucrative burglaries, when the thought of entering Leniqua’s temple and making away with the costly girdles occurred to me. The problems offered, and the difficulties to be overcome, appeared at first sight little less than fantastic. But such obstacles have always challenged my acumen and have never daunted me.
Firstly, there was the problem of entrance without detection and serious mayhem at the hands of the sickle-armed eunuchs who guarded Leniqua’s fane on all sides with baleful and incorruptible vigilance. Luckily, during her term of temple service, Vixeela had learned of a subterranean adit, long disused but, she believed, still passable. This entrance was through a tunnel, the continuation of a natural cavern located somewhere in the woods behind Uzuldaroum. It had been used almost universally by the virgin’s visitors in former ages. But the visitors now entered openly by the temple’s main doors or by posterns little less public: a sign, perhaps, that religious sentiment had deepened or that modesty had declined. Vixeela had never seen the cavern herself; but she knew its approximate location. The temple’s inner adit was closed only by a flagstone, easily levitated from below or above, behind the image of Leniqua in the great nave.
Secondly, there was the selection of a proper time, when the women’s girdles had been unlocked and laid aside. Here again Vixeela was invaluable, since she knew the nights on which the rented keys were most in demand. These were known as nights of sacrifice, greater or lesser, the chief one being at the moon’s full. All the women were then in repeated request.
Since, however, the fane on such occasions would be crowded with people, the priests, the virgins and their clients, a seemingly insurmountable difficulty remained. How were we to collect and make away with the girdles in the presence of so many persons? This, I must admit, baffled me.
Plainly, we must find some way in which the temple could be evacuated, or its occupants rendered unconscious or otherwise incapable during the period needed for our nefarious operations.
I thought of a certain soporific drug, easily and quickly vaporized, which I had used on more than one occasion to put the inmates of a house asleep. Unfortunately the drug was limited in its range and would not penetrate to all the chambers and alcoves of a large edifice like the temple. Moreover it was necessary to wait for a full half hour, with doors or windows opened, till the fumes were dissipated: otherwise the robbers would be overcome together with their victims.
There was also the pollen of a rare jungle lily, which, if cast in a man’s face, would induce a temporary paralysis. This too I rejected: there were too many persons to be dealt with, and the pollen could hardly be obtained in sufficient quantities.
At last I decided to consult the magician and alchemist, Veezi Phenquor, who, possessing furnaces and melting-pots, had often served me as the converter of stolen gold and silver work into ingots or other safely unrecognizable forms. Though skeptical of his powers as a magician, I regarded Veezi Phenquor as a skilled pharmacist and toxicologist. Having always on hand a supply of strange and deadly medicaments, he might well be able to provide something that would facilitate our project.