Le long du bois couvert de givre, je
marchais; mes cheveux devant ma bouche se
fleurissaient de petits glaçons, et mes
sandales étaient lourdes de neige fangeuse
et tassée.Pierre Louÿs, “Le Tombeau des Naïades” (1894).
Pre-eminent for piety and mercy in his youth, Mzbimborec-Yicla had ascended the throne of the city Aramac-Ludmu to the universal rejoicing of her folk; but within a month they were whispering that the golden weight of the crown was crushing a must of madness from the white raceme of his brain. For had he not loosed the beasts of the royal menagerie on the morning after his coronation, then laughed himself into the vomitarium at news of the depredations they wrought? And had he not, a week later, hanged from the obelisk of the central square all those whom his new-hired spies discovered had slain the beasts in revenge or precaution? And was he not now beggaring the city in rearing a vast tower of livid, red-flecked marble where once his father’s gardens of night-scented cacti had lain?
A month later the quietest whisper was stilled even in the darkest corner between the oldest friends, for none dared stir tongue against the king. His madness and malevolence were proved to the limit a hundred times, and all shuddered to guess what horrors awaited the inauguration of his tower. Yet on the morning it was complete, the king appeared at dawn with no great ceremony at its gate and ascended its stair companioned by only his bodyguard, his sycophants, and his parasites, to gaze from its summit in dreamy meditation while daylight lasted. Or so those who dared raise head from the streets reasoned to themselves, staring aloft to the pale, gold-glittered dot of the king’s face; but an eagle’s eye might have discerned the drunken gloat instinct therein, as he watched the huge shadow of his tower sweep the city as a gnomon-shadow sweeps the face of a sun-dial.
The next day the tower’s true and belated inauguration began, when trumpets blew from its summit at mid-morn, picking out the notes of the “Halt and hold fast” used at times of public proclamation. Then the king’s guard clattered from its barracks, selecting one-in-thirteen of those city-folk who stood directly within the shadow of the tower, till the day’s quota was filled and they dragged their prisoners through the streets to the tower’s base. Hence the prisoners, seized by the tower-guard, were taken aloft to await the king’s pleasure. The trumpets blew again, picking out the “Carry about your business” to the city, but many noted that the tower glittered dully now up its shadowed face, as though blades of steel had been protruded therefrom. And aye, ’twas so: thrice-sharpened blades of steel had been sent forth by the ingenious mechanism built into the tower by its vanished architect and masons, and now waited with famished edge for their aliment.
The trumpets blew for a third time, picking out notes then unfamiliar, soon to haunt the city’s dreams. In their fading echo, fainter by far than the trumpet-notes, but investing them with their true and dread significance, came down-drifting the high and sudefactory laughter of the king; and the first of the tredecimated prisoners was flung from the tower’s summit onto the blades, which were set in such fashion as first to lop off limbs, then to quarter torsos, finally to divide and sub-divide all that fell, till naught but a drenching of blood and myriad of flesh-collops showered to the flagstones around the tower’s base. Thirty-one men and women were sacrificed thus before the horrid inauguration was complete, and the king issued orders that the heap of divided flesh was to be left undisturbed for the kites and vultures he would release later from his aviary.
Thereafter the ceremony of the shadow was conducted once a month, with the number selected for the death-fall corresponding to that of days in the month; nor was the ceremony alone among the ingenious and harrowing jests Mzbimborec-Yicla directed against his subjects. The commoners of Aramac-Ludmu began to pray most earnestly for recession of the king’s madness and evil, while certain of the most daring among the aristocracy began, by glances and half-winks, to seek each other out for a plot of assassination. Yet its embryo was barely conceived before the espionage of the king’s agents proved a most effective abortifacient, and the king laughed long and wet-cheeked to hear of the modus necandi the Duke of Nezdorek and his co-conspirators had divulged under torture: that of recruiting his favorite galactoparthenos, or milk-maid, to their cause. She was supposed now the last influence for good in the king’s life, for at the height of his cruelties she was often seen to whisper in his ear, whereupon he might suspend some torture a space or even order its victim released.
The Duke had suggested that the girl, Anina-Casor by name, might be persuaded to down a draught of some rescindible poison an hour or two before the king drank with his customary greed from her perpetually yielding breasts. Her breasts having been drained of their poisoned milk by the king, she would hasten to swallow the antidote so soon as she were able, leaving the king to slide gradually into a death-coma indistinguishable, in its initial stage, from the sotted slumber in which he habitually ended his banquets. But the king laughed at the very notion of Anina-Casor’s raising hand, or rather nipple, against him; and laughed again when the Duke and his co-conspirators, joints and muscles permanently racked out of use, were carried to the lip of his tower and held ready for the leap “into shadow”, as the dissection-by-blade was termed. What explained his merriment was a secret he and the girl carried to their deaths, but the Duke caught an inkling of it in the instant before he was dropped, when he cast gaze to Anina-Casor in futile plea for help, as she stood bare-breasted by her king.
For she half-winked in reply to him. Aye, ’twas no pleas for mercy the girl was pouring in the king’s ears at height of his cruelties, but reminders rather that torture suspended-and-resumed was torture doubled or that a half-dead victim might suffer long years more of agony and sorrow by being released on the spot. The girl was more wicked than her master, being rock-headedly sane, and however heavily she drank of the dark and puissant wines of Phirrun or Amnar, that he might grown drunken on her milk an hour later, she never stumbled or slurred in her speech and was clear-eyed and calculating as ever in her observation of the tortured. And so these two, a moon and planet of wickedness, might have risen for decades to come in the heavens of Aramac-Ludmu, had not the king sought to encompass a last and most ingenious cruelty of all, which proved his nemesis.
Perpetually seeking means of replenishing his debauchery-drained treasure, Mzbimborec-Yicla had ordered new explorations for deposits of mineral and salt in the mountainous regions of his demense, and one day his magister torturorum, the sinister and sextidigitate Suluc-Nunar, came to him with news of a great and startling discovery beneath the roots of the mountain Aropho-Porthna, where miners had penetrated to a vast subterranean sea inhabited by a race of pure white, and purblind, merfolk, breathing water as their mythic counterparts of the true ocean. Mzbimborec-Yicla, knowing that Suluc-Nunar had brought him the news with some dark purpose concealed, nodded wearily to prolong the charade and enquired whether any of the merfolk had been captured and brought to Aramac-Ludmu for his inspection.
Thereat Suluc-Nunar smiled and nodded, informing his king that a captured representative of the merfolk waited atop his tower in a vast sphere of water-filled crystal, which was set on a copper tripod.
“And I thought, my lord,” he continued, “that, having inspected, ye might choose to have the creature boiled slowly alive in its sphere, that we might observe its behavior as it dies and see whether this aquispiratrix undergoes changes of color as fish do, subject to the same.”
Here, of course, Mzbimborec-Yicla clapped hands and chortled for pleasure of the coming torture, before sending word to his favorite Anina-Casor that she should quaff wine in preparation for a death-banquet. Then he waited an hour with twitching impatience; and finally hastened to his tower and the ensphered and fish-tailed captive, which was female and of the most bewitching beauty, for all its subterranean pallor and blindness. Yet capture had evidently bewildered it almost to madness, for it swam ceaselessly from curve to curve of the sphere in fruitless search of egress, wringing its hands and beating its white elastic breasts at its repeated failure in a manner almost human. Mzbimborec-Yicla, having laughed long and heartily at its distress, strode to the sphere and rapped on the crystal thereof, seeking to attract the attention of the creature and exciting further laughter from his sycophants and parasites when it cowered back from the din, hands clapped to its pearly ears. Then the insidious whisper of Suluc-Nunar was at his own ear.
“Shall the boiling commence, my lord?”
Mzbimborec-Yicla rapped again on the sphere, lips pursed as though in thought, and abruptly grinned and nodded. Anina-Casor, who hovered at his other hand, sighed for pleasure at the permission, though pitching the breath too low for any but the king to catch; and then her master seized her by the waist and drew her back to his summit-throne of gold and obsidian, whereon he waited as faggots were heaped beneath the copper tripod of the sphere and drenched in oil in readiness for his further command. Mzbimborec-Yicla was now sucking greedily from the breasts of the galactoparthenos, who had inebriated her milk with two flagons of thrice-distilled liquor on receiving word of the planned torture an hour before; but he kept close eye on the preparations and when they were complete he nodded again to his magister torturorum.
Suluc-Nunar bowed, straightened to seize a torch from a waiting assistant, and flung it expertly amid the faggots, which took roaring flame in three heart-beats, leaping and leaping against the underside of the sphere between the three copper struts of the tripod. Ah — and the pale mermaid, whose skin must have been of the tenderest and most sensitive, was almost instantly aware of the ignition, for she thrust anxious hands toward the flames, holding them flat to catch the rays and read their growing strength. Soon she was dashing from curve to curve of the sphere more frantically than ever, mouthing in anxiety and pain at the rising heat of the water in which she swam. Anina-Casor watched narrow-eyed, feeling a certain professional jealousy of the size, symmetry and elasticity of the creature’s breasts, though in truth they differed not a hair’s-breadth in any of these aspects from her own; then bent to whisper in the king’s ear.
A murmur of disappointment ran through the king’s sycophants and parasites, who believed that the soft-hearted slut was pleading for the mermaid’s life or a suspension of the torture; and the murmur redoubled as the king nodded slowly, flushed already with the wine-tainted milk he had drunk, and signaled to Suluc-Nunar that the fire be extinguished for the nonce. Guards ran to fling blankets of woven asbestos thereon and the panic of the mermaid, to further murmurs of disappointment from the sycophants and parasites, subsided with the flames. Then Anina-Casor did the strangest of things, deserting her master’s side and advancing to the sphere, whereto she flattened her hand, drumming the crystal most gently with her fingertips.
The mermaid, hovering at the center of her aqueous prison, was attracted to the sound and swam forward to flatten her hand in like fashion to the crystal opposite Anina-Casor’s, with correspondent drumming of the fingertips, whereon it was apparent that the hands of the one and t’other, like their breasts, were of identical size and shape. Indeed, it struck many eyes now that the two were geminate in many other ways above the waist, concealed though the similitude had been by the pallor of the mermaid’s flesh. Then Anina-Casor, with a final finger-drum, drew back from the sphere and returned to her master, who nodded for the fire to be ignited anew. The guards ran forward to drag the blankets clear and re-soak the half-consumed faggots in oil, while Suluc-Nunar awaited the king’s nod.
It came; and the torturer seized a torch as before and flung it amid the faggots. Yet as the flames roared to lusty new life, no panic was inspired in the mermaid, who had resumed her station at the heart of the sphere. Nay, to the contrary, she was seen to smile as renewed heat lapped around her fish-tail, ere bowing her head in apparent, if misdirected, obeisance to the king. Then she opened her small and pale-lipped mouth, and began to sing in a voice of haunting clarity and shrilth. The flames surged in immediate response, licking around half the curve of the sphere and roaring as though to drown the notes, but guards swore with superstitious dread, for no further heat radiated from them but an intense and bitter cold tangible even to the sotted king, and a dendric frosting of ice was already flowing across the face of the sphere, veiling the mermaid from sight.
A gaping Suluc-Nunar turned to his king, who gaped in reply, then re-gathered his wits to signal that the sphere be smashed and its occupant be flung “into the shadow” for the sorceress she was. Suluc-Nunar rapped out orders first to the bladesmen, who set the executionary mechanism of the tower into operation, next to certain of the guards, who swung out their swords and rushed forward to smash the sphere. All these latter, with abrupted screams of fear and agony, were turned to statues of ice within a pace or two of the flames. And still the mermaid’s song was heard from the frost-veiled heart of the sphere, playing chords of mystery and doom on the heart-strings of all who heard it. Panic rose in the ranks of Mzbimborec-Yicla’s sycophants and parasites, who began to mill and dash for escape as though all memory of the tower’s stair had been driven from their cold-wildered brains. A snap of metal sworded their screams, then another and another, and the tripod of copper collapsed beneath the frost-veiled sphere, which flopped atop the fire, dashing its gelifactory flames to all corners of the tower’s summit.
Then the frosted sphere began to roll hither and thither over the summit, crushing or grinding down all in its path, whether warm-blooded and living or stark-frozen by the ice-magic. A foaming must of blood ran and sloshed to the sphere’s passage, crusting and freezing like splintered ruby in its immediate wake, and Mzbimborec-Yicla snuffed its irony brine in wonder as Anina-Casor whispered finally into his ear, persuading him to the last and most ironic of his death-jests. The sphere was rolling themward now, having crushing all else living and dead atop the summit to flesh-pulp or ice-powder, and the king nodded his assent to Anina-Casor’s whispering; seized his favorite’s hand; and ran with her, stumbling in ruts of frozen blood, to the shadow-lip of his tower for their shared leap into collopy oblivion.