From the many-venomed earth...A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896).
It was a simple matter for the she-thief Azihro-Lutcad to arrange the death by poison of the six-hundred-and-sixty-six priestesses of Kirran-Tihirrimokh at Rhantanamek, for though she could not reach their water, their victuals came by mensual caravan over thirty leagues of desert. ’Twas true that an ambush had never taken place before against the caravan — but then the nomads of the desert were superstitious, and more sophisticated thieves had been previously disinclined to sweat so heavily for such meagre reward, the victuals being of the cheapest and coarsest.
However, when Azihro-Lutcad promised that the weeviled grain and grubby dates would be not an end in themselves, but rather the key to the treasures of Kirran-Tihirrimokh, she found a ready enough audience in the thieves’ quarter of Gucnunar. The thieves she recruited were, it is true, persuaded that the victuals would be dosed merely with a soporific, not a letifer, but Azihro-Lutcad was accustomed to the squeamishness of the male in enterprises against her own sex and had no intention of spoiling the temple for a mnar ’s-worth of incense. An unnamed oasis, last on the caravan’s route before the shrine, was the proposed site of the ambush, and thither Azihro-Lutcad and her five conspirators transferred a week before the caravan traveled.
By the day of its arrival, they were heartily sick both of each other’s company and of their diet of bread and lizard, and fell on the lightly-armed caravaneers with relief. None of these latter was killed during the attack, but Azihro-Lutcad drove home the necessity of their subsequent coöperation by lopping the hands off their leader, who then bled noisily to death, urged on by the callous jesting of her thieves, before the horrified eyes of his fellows. The surviving caravaneers then readily assisted the thieves to unpack the camel-borne bales and sprinkle them thoroughly with the allegedly soporific dust Azihro-Lutcad had prepared.
At Azihro-Lutcad’s advice, all went veiled during this operation, for the dust, she had informed them, would take three days of consciousness from their lives if it were inhaled; and this was true enough, though Azihro-Lutcad’s suggestio falsi by suppressio veri was that the three unconscious days would be succeeded by an awakening, whereas they would in fact be the first of an infinite series. The bales were then re-sealed and the camel-train resumed its journey, conducted now by Azihro-Lutcad and her thieves, who left behind them the fresh and handless corpses of the four remaining caravaneers. They arrived at the shrine before nightfall, made the habitual responses to their interlocutrices they had threatened out of the dead caravaneers, and were shown to their sleeping quarters precisely as, watched by the unblinking eye of ascendant Mlaan, the circlet of Vasungô cleared the eastern horizon, rising to crown the zenith after midnight.
On the next day Azihro-Lutcad and her bravos departed the shrine for the oasis, hearing a chorus of harsh voices as they approached it in the early afternoon, like flesh-sodden epicures quarreling at a feast, till their arrival unstrung in quick succession five knots of heavy vultures around the corpses of the murdered caravaneers. They themselves then feasted away the remainder of the day in celebration of their successful ambush and delivery, but Azihro-Lutcad alone rose from the fire and staggered to her sleeping furs, for the wine she supplied had been well-dosed with a quicker-acting batch of her letiferous powder and though she had quaffed as heavily as any, she was long-since mithridatized against its infarction. She slept easily, and though she woke dry-mouthed and crapulous, her mouthfuls of water at the oasis pool took on an additional sweetness and coolth from the knowledge that she was not numbered among the insensuate dead.
She then retired to the shade of the palms with a scroll of the poet Namsuoh, whose pellucid periods and muted metaphors she had long treasured, and saw out the sun of the first of the seven days she intended to wait. The vultures returned towards mid-morning, either forgetful of her presence or concluding that she had allied herself with them, and she smiled as she unwound the scroll, contrasting the beauty of the verse she read with the squawk and beak-snap of the vultures and the squelch and flesh-snap of their feasting, for the poison worked not against creatures of a lower order than man. At nightfall she rose to prepare her solitary meal, startling Mlaan-eyed jackals crept in from the desert to clean scraps adhering to the bone-platters of the dead. She drank again of the poisoned wine when she had eaten, then read Namsuoh by the light of the fire, which cracked and sparkled as it gnawed the innutrition of the stones wherewith it had been circumferenced by Naam-Psumlu, a former lover of hers among the thieves.
When she rose from the fire for sleep, Azirho-Lutcad noted idly that some molten metal had been leached from the stones and trickled towards her in five narrow streams that somewhat resembled the fingers of a hand. She slept easily again and woke uncrapulous, but took the same added delight in the water she drank, surrounded by the jackal-polished bones of the caravaneers and thieves. The sun had blasted those outwith the palm-shade to an extra whiteness by the day of her departure for the shrine of Rhantanamek, whereto she took but one camel, leaving the remainder at the oasis to revert to the wild or be claimed by the nomads, deabus voluntibus. She rode leisurely along the trail she had traversed in company but a week before, expecting to find the shrine as much louder with vultures than the oasis as it was better-provisioned for their feasting.
But perfect silence reigned amid its flint oratories, dormitories, and campanili as she surveyed it from atop the slope of the bowl of desert wherein it lay, and she might have supposed her plot detected and foiled had not a fugitive desert breeze brought her the first whiff of corruption. As she rode down the slope to complete her theft, it was as though she submerged gradually in a sea of stench whose strength seemed sufficient to start a humming in her ears, and had she not been well-accustomed by profession and upbringing to the presence and smell of death, she might have turned her camel’s head and departed for easier pickings elsewhere. The powder had evidently done its work some time before, for she had chosen a fastless month in the shrine’s calendar and the priestesses must have sat to two communal meals of the fresh-brought grain and dates ere it unsheathed its claws in their viscera and squeezed their hearts to bursting, as a wanton boy squeezes a ripe fruit of the murbur, scattering his laughing playmates with its yellow seeds and scarlet pulp. She loosened her scimitar in its scabbard as she approached the arch of the entrance gate, but no maddened priestess, immune by some freak of physiology, rushed upon her as she rode her camel beneath and across the courtyard beyond.
Hereacross the bloating corpses of the priestesses were scattered everywhere on the grey flags, seeming like the swelling black stalks of hail-scythed grain; and if vultures had been disinclined to descend, flies had been ready enough to swarm to the harvest she had sown. Theirs had been the humming she had heard as she approached, an aural simulacrum of the stench, and they flew up like reversing hail as her camel, its nostrils plugged with camphoric wool lest it revolt of its obedience, picked its way through the corpses to the stair of the central shrine. Yet Azihro-Lutcad saw as she swayed thereto atop the beast that the decomposition of her victims had been anomalous, for though blackened and bloated faces with staring, fly-marched eyeballs met her gaze beneath the dark hoods of the priestesses’ robes, such hands as she could see were white and slender still, seeming to wear the flies that strutted upon them like mobile jewels of sun-glittered emerald and sapphire.
She dismissed the mystery, satisfied by the hugeness of the stench and heaviness of the fly-hum that her poison had thoroughly worked her malevolence upon the priestesses, and, reaching the foot of the stair, swung down from her camel to ascend. The first flight had thirty-six treads of slate, the second thirty-five of gneiss, the third thirty-four of obsidian; and so they diminished to the final flight of but a single tread of liutta, over which she now passed to enter the central shrine. The clatter that greeted her entrance had her clutching for her scimitar, but it was only a final hand of the silk-gauzed idol of six-armed Kirran-Tihirrimokh within, falling to join the five others on the floor about its dias. It seemed a belated symbol of the shrine’s dissolution and greatly assisted Azihro-Lutcad in her thievery, for the rings wherewith the hands were laden would have been most difficult of access had the latter stayed attached to the idol’s wrists.
She strode forward to stoop and retrieve the polished ivory of the nearest, examining the stump for a moment as she wondered how the amputation had come about, then slid or levered the rings off the giant fingers one by one and dropped them in a pocket of her robe. Then she let the hand fall and stooped for a second, glad though puzzled that the chamber was deserted, for she might have expected the priestesses to crowd its gloom in their final agony, beseeching the idol for life. The second hand she let fall and stooped for a third, one pocket already heavy with the idol’s rings, any one of which might have kept her a year in luxury. The third hand she let fall and stooped for the fourth; and so for the fifth, stooping to it and letting it fall. But the rings of the sixth hand proved stubborn, as though sunk somehow in the ivory, and she let it fall for the nonce, meaning to carry it away whole and retrieve the rings at her leisure.
But when the sixth hand struck the hexagonally-flagged floor of the shrine, all thought of the idol’s further riches — its sextuple necklaces and chatelaines of alternate emerald and sapphire, its six-tined crown of ruby-studded gold — was struck from her mind, for the steady hum of flies from without on a sudden swelled cacophonously, as though the creatures were disturbed at their mating and egg-laying. Azihro-Lutcad swung from the idol and ran for the door of the shrine, wherefrom she surveyed the courtyard below. It was swirling black with disturbed flies and for a moment she could see nothing of whatwith they had been startled to flight. Then she caught movement on the initial thirty-six treads of the stair, and gaped as she realized that unloosed hands were climbing swiftly crabwise in her tracks, while more scuttled across the courtyard, dropping free everywhere of the corpses’ wrists.
Her hand relaxed on the hilt of her scimitar, for she saw that her only hope of salvation lay in speedy flight. Six hand-pairs she might overcome, stamping or slicing them to destruction, but six-hundred-and-sixty-six pairs were impossible of resistance. A sound behind her made her spin and curse at what she saw, for further hands were descending the tapestries of the walls, to fall with plop and plap the final space to the floor, or scuttling beneath the arrasses that screened off the adyta behind the idol, as though corpses lying elsewhere than the courtyard had given up their anomalous pairs. Her theft-trained eyes swung, sought, and found an alternative route of egress; and she dashed forward, kicking three hands out of her path, to leap to the dias whereon the idol stood. Thence she leapt with a grunt to seize the jeweled chatelaines of the idol’s waist and haul herself up the sturdy legs.
Below her the hands were collaborating to mount the dias, piling atop each other to raise the first thereon, which scuttled instantly to the feet of the idol and began to climb slowly but determinedly up its gauzy silks. She swore her defiance and reached for the necklaces whereby she could haul herself over the breasts to the idol’s shoulders, on which she could stand to grasp a railing she had glimpsed above and behind the idol (wherefrom, though she knew it not, petals of rose and monkshood had been thrown during certain festivals of Kirran-Tihirrimokh). A scrabbling boot, as she seized and hauled on the necklaces, snapped a gold cord of the chatelaines and the shrine’s gloom resounded with a cascade of falling gems. She glanced down, sweating with fear that the necklaces too would snap and crash her down among the hands that now carpeted the floor before the dias, scrabbling to mount it and pursue her.
But no, she had an arm hooked around the smooth column of the idol’s neck and could drag herself to the vast safety of the shoulders. She paused a moment, gasping with her exertions, then was spurred to fresh endeavor by the sight of hands abandoning the dias to stream into the adyta, as though forsaking a failed route to her capture and seeking some hidden stair that led to the railing. Aye, and the hands climbing the idol were relaxing their hold and sliding or falling plop to the floor. She plucked the gold crown from the idol’s head, tossed it over the railing, and seized its edge to haul herself up and over, breathing a prayer to her own secret deity that it would bear her weight. It did, but her scimitar caught thereon as she hauled herself over, tipping her sprawling and swearing on the floor.
She picked herself up, ears pricked for the patter of hands climbing a stair, caught up the crown, tore apart the black arrases embroidered in gold and silver behind the railing, and raced along the dim-lit corridor therebeyond. The expected stair-patter of hands was audible now, rising somewhere to her left, so she took the first turn to her right, thinking to out-run the hands within the corridors of the shrine till she could reach an exit to the desert. Then she would circle back in hope of finding the courtyard deserted and her camel unmolested. She flung herself through the black arras that ended the corridor and found there-through the landing of a narrow spiral stair lit by a blade of light through a window-slit. To go up was sure suicide, she thought, so she began to pound down, then stopped with a curse, dropping the crown and grasping at the rough-bricked wall to control her skidding boots.
Just below her a woman’s hand, glimmering in the gloom, was scrabbling upward around the curve of the spiral; and she could hear through the harshness of her breath and the thudding of her heart that many more followed it. She spun and pounded upward, unable to restrain a shriek as she reached the landing and saw the lower edge of the arras billow to release a further hand plop to the floor, then heard the busy patter of further hands following it down the corridor. She could not guess how they had followed in her tracks, but follow they had and up was the only route that remained to her. She took it with a sudden flare of hope. If this was the stair of a campanile and she could draw most or even all of the hands after her up its length, ¿might she not be able, having reached its summit, to slide down the bell-ropes and escape? New strength flowed into her limbs at the thought, but she did not draw on it, forcing herself to slow and even debating whether she should stand and resist for a time, kicking the vanguard of the hands off the treads.
But the thought of losing her footing as she kicked, so that she bumped downward to be seized and gripped by her foe, was powerful dissuasion, though she paused three breaths at the next landing, listening downward and smiling mirthlessly to hear the soft implacable scrabble of pursuit. Then she set off up the stair again, climbing ever higher into the heavens. Six landings later she was grown increasingly puzzled. ¿Surely she had climbed long enough and should be reaching the bell-cupola by now? She paused again to spy through a window-slit and cried aloud in consternation. ¿What land was this she looked over? It was thickly forested and fat rivers wound in lazy silver curves through its boscage, sprinkled with flights of white or pink waterfowl.
She stared till the scrabble of pursuit had waxed to a spiral-turn or two’s distance, then set off up the stair again, dreading what new bewitchment would greet her next. On the next landing she snatched another glimpse through the window-slit, and moaned to see that her vantage over the land of forest and rivers was vastly increased, as though she had climbed the stair not a further minute but an hour. Then on she climbed, spurred by the soft and implacable scrabble below, but gradually beginning to feel a thinning and chilling of the air, which deepened momently till the walls of the stair were frosted white and her boots were slipping on ice-slicked treads. She paused at the next landing, clutching a stitch-lanciated flank as she looked out to see herself risen beyond sight of the forest and rivers and gazing out over a sun-gilded cloud-plain whereon, so a distant rumble of thunder foretold, the hooves of the horses of Kirran-Tihirrimokh would shortly gallop, come to collect her soul for the goddess’s feasting-hall among the stars.