The grille was raised with a jerk and a clang, and there bounded into the pit some twenty large animals.
Cheetahs, I thought them for a second, springing forward with such eagerness they seemed to run upon their hind legs. But even before I clearly saw that they were not animals I heard great gusts of laughter from the Count and knew what he had intended by interrupting the lecherous pleasure of his flabby guests. The beautiful spotted coats shining sleek in the light below us were taut-stretched on the backs and full-rounded breasts of a troop of young women so matched in size and age and proportions that they must have been sought and selected with connoisseur's care among all the slave-breeding farms of the Greater Reich. They were strong and shapely, not fat, but in such perfect fullness of health and condition that the smooth curves of their limbs and bodies roused all the excitement that rare feminine beauty can, while the play of the muscles, flexing and flowing under the bright sun-tanned skin awoke in me something beyond admiration, an awe-no, ultimately a fear– of the power, the wild-beast power of sudden savage exertion, that those superficially lovely and womanly forms possessed. In repose they would have been models for a sculptor of ideal feminine beauty, but as they bounded into that arena, circling it with a fluid speed of movement almost too quick for the eye to follow, they were utterly unhuman: women transformed by a demonic skill in breeding and training into great, supple, swift and dangerous cats.
Their heads and necks were covered by a close-fitting helmet of spotted skin which bore the neat, rounded ears of a leopard, but the oval of the face was exposed, and each face as I saw it upturned to the lights was contorted in a grin, with red lips drawn back from strong white teeth, and in each pair of eyes a pale glitter of pure madness. Their screaming whimper now sounded like a lunatic song, and the babbling undercurrent seemed a crazy, tumultuous speech. I remembered the Doctor's remark about the dumb slaves and guessed that the surgeons had operated on these women too.
The tight skin jerkins covered their shoulders and arms and their bodies as far as the lower ribs; behind, they were shaped to a point terminating just above the buttocks, and from this swung a short-haired tail. Their feet and ankles were cased in a kind of high moccasins of the same spotted skin. But the feature of their costume that caught my eye at once and held it most was the queer gloves in which their tight sleeves ended. There was a shine of metal there, and hard as it was to keep my eye on the hands of any one of them as they raced and bounded about the pit, I could make out that each had fastened on her hands a pair of the strange, hook-like contraptions I had seen in the keeper's room. Imagine four curving strips of steel joined to some kind of flexible base-plate and one opposable strip fixed at the side, all arranged exactly in the pattern of a human hand, but each strip provided with a leopard-claw of steel with a hollow base to admit the last joint of each finger and thumb, and the whole thing worn inside the hand and fastened firmly with straps across the wrist, the back of the hand and each finger. I saw that the steel must be of spring temper, for they could half double their fists, and in their running they frequently went for a moment or two on all fours, touching the ground with their knuckles, and I distinctly heard then the slight click of the steel claws glancing together as one ran in that way beneath me.
As soon as the 'cats' had entered the pit the three foresters had come together in a knot in the middle; there, two of them, like a pair of ring-masters in a circus, facing outwards, kept the troop circling round, the length of their whip-lashes away from the centre, while the third held the two does, which plunged and struggled in an extreme of terror. The 'cats' were only half-trained, and it was as much as both keepers could do by constant exercise of their whips to keep them from breaking their sinuously flowing circuits and rushing into the centre. Each time one darted in, the heavy lash shot out, expertly cutting at her unprotected loins and rump, and at each crack and sound of the biting impact the screaming of all the rest rose wildly higher and higher, while she who felt the whip bounded high, dancing with pain and rage, shrieking and spitting and shaking her flashing steel claws in fury at the keepers. And above all that screaming I heard, gust upon gust, the tremendous laughter of Hans von Hackelnberg.
The keepers kept their cats racing round the walls of the pit until the sweat glistened on their thighs and their breasts heaved. Then the Count winded his horn once more, standing and blowing a long-drawn-out note with a dying close, the lamenting and receding music of the Mort.
As soon as he began to blow, the unbearable screaming in the pit below diminished to an eager whimpering, and as he finished the three keepers leapt aside and darted to the open grille.
Immediately and quite silently, more terrifying in their silent, swift intentness than in all their rage, the cats rushed in upon the two does. The poor animals sprang high into the air, but the bright steel claws swept and slashed, gripped and sank deep into neck and legs and ripped open belly and flanks. There was a moment of horrible, packed writhing of bodies, of vigorous thrusting of legs and haunches as heads and arms went down fiercely busy into the centres of two groups of cats; my nostrils were filled suddenly with the stench of warm entrails and I backed from the edge of the pit. A moment or two later the cats were scattered all about the turf, oblivious of their keepers now, tearing and gulping raw flesh gripped in their reddened talons. The only sound was the sucking and slobbering of their mouths or a low snarl as one brushed by another. Blood dabbled all their faces, the breasts and arms of their sleek coats and the clear bright brown of their bellies and smooth thighs.
Hans von Hackelnberg gave a hearty shout: «Es ist zu Ende! Komm, meine Herren!» The foresters jumped up, the torch-bearers turned and began to march off in two files back to the Hall again; the guests, in complete silence, shuffled with averted heads past the towering Count who stood waiting to bring up the rear, grinning and shaking with laughter, looking down on his deflated little flock of bullies with ferocious amusement. They had not the air of men going to enjoy the rest of a night's frolic I saw our own fat little sportsman of the morning, held up between two foresters, being miserably sick under a tree.
I lingered until the last pairs of torch-bearers were moving off from the bank of turf, hoping that von Hackelnberg would follow his guests, but some brilliant white lanterns were beginning to shine at the edge of the pit now, and fearing to be shown up, isolated and conspicuous, I attached myself to the last knot of four or five young foresters and marched past the Count with my head bent.
I thought I had passed him unnoticed, when a great hand on my shoulder stopped me as suddenly as if I had collided with the down-bending branch of an oak-tree. He wheeled me about, demanding to know who I was, and I found myself looking into that tawny forked beard, that wide, grinning mouth and those hot eyes from a distance of two feet. Abruptly, with his other hand he arrested the last torch-bearer, whose cresset swung above us and then shone steadily down on my face. The Count repeated his question in a voice of loud menace. The foresters closed in round us and, looking helplessly from side to side, I recognised one of the boys who had been in the butt with us that morning. Before I could collect enough German in my mind to begin to answer, he had explained. But I saw him tap his forehead as he talked, and the Count interrupted him, crying: «I know! I know!» Then, to me, gripping as though he would break the bones of my shoulder: «So! Thou art an escaper from prisons? Eh? Thy lust is to be free? So thou shalt be. Free of the forest! Drive him to the woods, boys! Turn him loose to find his fodder with the deer!»