Dawn of Flame
Stanley G. Weinbaum (1936)
Country of origin: USA
Available texts by the same author here
Chapter 7: Betrayal
Hull paused at the door of the west chamber to permit the Princess to enter. For the merest fraction of a second her glorious green eyes flashed speculatively to his face, then she stepped back. "You first, Weed," she commanded.He did not hesitate. He turned and strode into the room, hoping that the Harrier riflemen, if indeed they lurked in the copse, might recognize his mighty figure in time to stay their eager trigger fingers. His scalp prickled as he moved steadily across the window, but nothing happened.
Behind him the Princess laughed softly. "I have lived too long in the aura of plot and counterplot in N'Orleans," she said. "I mistrust you without cause, honest Hull Tarvish."
Her words tortured him. He turned to see her black robe mold itself to her body as she moved, and, as sometimes happens in moments of stress, he caught an instantaneous picture of her with his senses so quickened that it seemed as if she, himself, and the world were frozen into immobility. He remembered her forever as she was then, with her limbs in the act of striding, her green eyes soft in the lamplight, and her perfect lips in a smile that had a coloring of wistfulness. Witch and devil she might be, but she looked like a dark-haired angel, and in that moment his spirit revolted.
"No!" he bellowed, and sprang toward her, striking her slim shoulders with both hands in a thrust that sent her staggering back into the hallway, there to sit hard and suddenly on the floor beside the amazed guard.
She sprang up instantly, and there was nothing angelic now in 'her face. "You--hurt me!" she hissed. "Me! Now, I'll--" She snatched the guard's weapon from his belt, thrust it full at Hull's chest, and sent the blue beam humming upon him.
It was pain far worse than that at Eaglefoot Flow. He bore it stolidly, grinding into silence the groan that rose in his throat, and in a moment she flicked it off and slapped it angrily into the guard's holster. "Treachery again!" she said. "I won't kill you, Hull Tarvish. I know a better way." She whirled toward the stair-well. "Lebeau!" she called. "Lebeau! There's--" She glanced sharply at Hull, and continued, "Il y a des tirailleurs dans le bois. Je vais les tireer en avant!" It was the French of N'Orleans, as incomprehensible to Hull as Aramaic.
She spun back. "Sora!" she snapped, and then, as the fat woman appeared, "Never mind. You're far too heavy." Then back to Hull. "I've a mind," she blazed, "to strip the Weed clothes from the eldarch's daughter and send her marching across the window!"
He was utterly appalled. "She--she was in town!" he gasped, then fell silent at the sound of feet below.
"Well, there's no time," she retorted. "So, if I must--" She strode steadily into the west chamber, paused a moment, and then stepped deliberately in front of the window!
Hull was aghast. He watched her stand so that the lamplight must have cast her perfect silhouette full on the pane, stand tense and motionless for the fraction of a breath, and then leap back so sharply that her robe billowed away from her body.
She had timed it to perfection. Two shots crashed almost together, and the glass shattered. And then, out in the night, a dozen beams crisscrossed, and, thin and clear in the silence after the shots, a yell of mortal anguish drifted up, and another, and a third.
"There are snipers in the copse. I'll draw them out!"
The Princess Margaret smiled in malice, and licked a crimson drop from a finger gashed by flying glass. "Your treachery reacts," she said in the tones of a sneer. "Instead of my betrayal, you have betrayed your own men."
"I need no accusation from you," he said gloomily. "I am my own accuser, and my own judge. Yes, and my own executioner as well. I will not live a traitor."
She raised her dainty eyebrows, and blew a puff of grey smoke from the cigarette still in her hand. "So strong Hull Tarvish will die a suicide," she remarked indifferently. "I had intended to kill you now. Should I leave you to be your own victim?"
He shrugged. "What matter to me?"
"Well," she said musingly, "you're rather more entertaining than I had expected. You're strong, you're stubborn, and you're dangerous. I give you the right to do what you wish with your own life, but"--her green eyes flickered mockingly--"if I were Hull Tarvish, I should live on the chance of justifying myself. You can wipe out the disgrace of your weakness by an equal courage. You can sell your life in your own cause, and who knows?--perhaps for Joaquin's--or mine!"
He chose to ignore the mockery in her voice. "Perhaps," he said grimly, "I will."
"Why, then, did you weaken, Hull Tarvish? You might have had my life."
"I do not fight women," he said despondently. "I looked at you--and turned weak." A question formed in his mind. "But why did you risk your life before the window? You could have had fifty woods runners scour the copse. That was brave, but unnecessary."
She smiled, but there was a shrewd narrowness in her eyes. "Because so many of these villages are built above the underground ways of the Ancients--the subways, the sewers. How did I know but that your assassins might slip into some burrow and escape? It was necessary to lure them into disclosure."
Hull shadowed the gleam that shot into his own eyes. He remembered suddenly the ancient sewer in which the child Vail had wandered, whose entrance was hidden by blackberry bushes. Then the Empire men were unaware of it! He visioned the Harriers creeping through it with bow and sword--yes, and rifle, now that the spell was off the valley--springing suddenly into the center of the camp, finding the Master's army, sleeping, disorganized, unwary. What a plan for a surprise attack!
"Your Highness," he said grimly, "I think of suicide no more, and unless you kill me now, I will be a bitter enemy to your Empire army."
"Perhaps less bitter than you think," she said softly. "See, Hull, the only three that know of your weakness are dead. No one can name you traitor or weakling."
"But I can," he returned somberly. "And you."
"Not I, Hull," she murmured. "I never blame a man who weakens because of me--there have been many. Men as strong as you, Hull, and some that the world still calls great." She turned toward her own chamber. "Come in here," she said in altered tones. "I will have some wine. Sora!" As the fat woman padded off, she took another cigarette and lit it above the lamp, wrinkling her dainty nose distastefully at the night-flying insects that circled it.
"What a place!" she snapped impatiently.
"It is the finest house I have ever seen," said Hull stolidly.
She laughed. "It's a hovel. I sigh for the day we return to N'Orleans, where windows are screened, where water flows hot at will, where lights do not flicker as yellow oil lamps nor send heat to stifle one. Would you like to see the Great City, Hull?"
"You know I would."
"What if I say you may?"
"What could keep me from it if I go in peace?"
She shrugged. "Oh, you can visit N'Orleans, of course, but suppose I offered you the chance to go as the--the guest, we'll say, of the Princess Margaret. What would you give for that privilege?"
Was she mocking him again? "What would you ask for it?" he rejoined guardedly.
"Oh, your allegiance, perhaps. Or perhaps the betrayal of your little band of Harriers, who will be the devil's own nuisance to stamp out of these hills."
He looked up startled that she knew the name. "The Harriers? How?"
She smiled. "We have friends among the Ormiston men. Friends bought with land," she added contemptuously. "But what of my offer, Hull?"
He scowled. "You say as your guest. What am I to understand by that?"
She leaned across the table, her exquisite green eyes on his, her hair flaming blue-black, her perfect lips in a faint smile. "What you please, Hull. Whatever you please."
Anger was rising. "Do you mean," he asked huskily, "that you'd do that for so small a thing as the destruction of a little enemy band? You, with the whole Empire at your back?"
She nodded. "It saves trouble, doesn't it?"
"And honesty, virtue, honor, mean as little to you as that? Is this one of your usual means of conquest? Do you ordinarily sell your--your favors for--?"
"Not ordinarily," she interrupted coolly. "First I must like my co-partner in the trade. You, Hull--I like those vast muscles of yours, and your stubborn courage, and your slow, clear mind. You are not a great man, Hull, for your mind has not the cold fire of genius, but you are a strong one, and I like you for it."
"Like me!" he roared, starting up in his chair. "Yet you think I'll trade what honor's left me for--that! You think I'll betray my cause! You think-- Well, you're wrong, that's all. You're wrong!"
She shook her head, smiling. "No. I wasn't wrong, for I thought you wouldn't."
"Oh, you did!" he snarled. "Then what if I'd accepted? What would you have done then?"
"What I promised." She laughed at his angry, incredulous face. "Don't look so shocked, Hull. I'm not little Vail Ormiston. I'm the Princess Margaret of N'Orleans, called Margaret the Divine by those who love me, and by those who hate me called-- Well, you must know what my enemies call me."
"I do!" he blazed. "Black Margot, I do!"
"Black Margot!" she echoed smiling. "Yes, so called because a poet once amused me, and because there was once a very ancient, very great French poet named François Villon, who loved a harlot called Black Margot." She sighed. "But my poet was no Villon; already his works are nearly forgotten."
"A good name!" he rasped. "A good name for you!"
"Doubtless. But you fail to understand, Hull. I'm an Immortal. My years are three times yours. Would you have me follow the standards of death-bound Vail Ormiston?"
"Yes! By what right are you superior to all standards?"
Her lips had ceased to smile, and her deep green eyes turned wistful. "By the right that I can act in no other way, Hull," she said softly. A tinge of emotion quavered in her voice. "Immortality!" she whispered. "Year after year after year of sameness, tramping up and down the world on conquest! What do I care for conquest? I have no sense of destiny like Joaquin, who sees before him Empire--Empire--Empire, ever larger, ever growing. What's Empire to me? And year by year I grow bored until fighting, killing, danger, and love are all that keep me breathing!"
His anger had drained away. He was staring at her aghast, appalled.
"And then they fail me!" she murmured. "When killing palls and love grows stale, what's left? Did I say love? How can there be love for me when I know that if I love a man, it will be only to watch him age and turn wrinkled, weak, and flabby? And when I beg Joaquin for immortality for him, he flaunts before me that promise of his to Martin Sair, to grant it only to those already proved worthy. By the time a man's worthy he's old." She went on tensely, "I tell you, Hull, that I'm so friendless and alone that I envy you death-bound ones! Yes, and one of these days I'll join you!"
He gulped. "My God!" he muttered. "Better for you if you'd stayed in your native mountains with friends, home, husband, and children."
"Children!" she echoed, her eyes misting with tears. "Immortals can't have children. They're sterile; they should be nothing but brains like Joaquin and Martin Sair, not beings with feelings--like me. Sometimes I curse Martin Sair and his hard rays. I don't want immortality; I want life!"
Hull found his mind in a whirl. The impossible beauty of the girl he faced, her green eyes now soft and moist and unhappy, her lips quivering, the glisten of a tear on her cheek--these things tore at him so powerfully that he scarcely knew his own allegiance. "God!" he whispered. "I'm sorry!"
"And you, Hull--will you help me--a little?"
"But we're enemies--enemies!"
"Can't we be--something else?" A sob shook her.
"How can we be?" he groaned.
Suddenly some quirk to her dainty lips caught his attention. He stared incredulously into the green depths of her eyes. It was true. There was laughter there. She had been mocking him! And as she perceived his realization, her soft laughter rippled like rain on water.
"You--devil!" he choked. "You black witch! I wish I'd let you be killed!"
"Oh, no," she said demurely. "Look at me, Hull."
The command was needless. He couldn't take his fascinated gaze from her exquisite face.
"Do you love me, Hull?"
"I love Vail Ormiston," he rasped.
"But do you love me?"
"I hate you!"
"But do you love me as well?"
He groaned. "This is bitterly unfair," he muttered.
She knew what he meant. He was crying out against the circumstances that had brought the Princess Margaret--the most brilliant woman of all that brilliant age, and one of the most brilliant of any age--to flash all her fascination on a simple mountainy from Ozarky. It wasn't fair; her smile admitted it, but there was triumph there, too.
"May I go?" he asked stonily.
She nodded. "But you will be a little less my enemy, won't you, Hull?"
He rose. "Whatever harm I can do your cause," he said, "that harm will I do. I will not be twice a traitor." But he fancied a puzzling gleam of satisfaction in her green eyes at his words.