Free The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson Page B

body.”
    Tall, defiant, the red handprint bright on her skin, she made no move. Theseus shoved. She went sprawling sidewise into the sewer, thrust white hands into its reeking muck to check her fall.
    Breathless, silent, she got slowly back to her feet. Flies swarmed dark about her, filth dripped from her hands and her gown. She tried to scramble out of the ditch.Theseus met her with his red steel.
    “The child,” he said, “All-Mother!”
    For a moment her green eyes stared at him. They had turned dark, and something glittered in their frosty depths. Her dripping hands clenched, and slowly relaxed. Silently, then, she bent and lifted the small, brown body in her arms.
    Theseus caught her elbow, helped her back to the palanquin.
    “Thus, Cybele,” he whispered,“you have begun to prove your motherhood. But the proof is not done, and we shall meet again when the games are played.”
    The red lips moved, but she spoke no word.
    Another horn snarled, and the drum of hoofs and the rattle of weapons came down the narrow street. Gripping the Falling Star, Theseus turned away from the white palanquin. He glimpsed the pallid face of Snish, peering furtively fromthe doorway of a wine shop.
    “Well, cobbler,” he shouted, “there was no need to volunteer!”

N INE

    T HESEUS MADE a necessary gesture toward his own defense. In fact, the Etruscans being the fighting men they were, he was able to make the gesture quite vigorous, with no danger of escape.
    An officer in a chariot whose axle spanned the street, was followed by a dozen men on foot. He left the chariot at the corner, with a slave to hold the horses, and led six men up the street. The othersvanished, and Theseus guessed that they were going around the block to take him from behind.
    A dozen alleys and doorways beckoned, but he brushed the humming flies off his red hands, and waited quietly. Three tall, notched shields made a moving barrier, from wall to wall, and long bronze blades lifted through the notches.
    Waiting, Theseus snatched another glimpse of Ariadne. One of the palanquinslaves stood ready to assist her back into the litter. But she was standing in the mud beside it, the child’s brown body, dripping blood and filth, still clutched against her. Her green eyes were fixed on Theseus.
    “Wait, slave!” Theseus caught her muted golden voice. “Let me see the Northman fight.”
    He fought. The Falling Star was thin and keen enough to probe far through the bull-hide shields,and the narrow slippery way hampered the rigid formation of the Etruscans. One man, and then another, slipped down behind the wall of shields.
    If he had really sought escape, Theseus knew, he could have leaped through the wall when it wavered. But he waited for men to replace the fallen, waited for the second wall to form behind him. And he heard the ring of Ariadne’s voice:
    “Take the savagealive, for the games!”
    The probing steel found a heart behind the second barrier. But the walls came inexorably together. Bronze blades reached Theseus, from before and behind. But it was a mace that reached over the rawhide wall, and crushed him out of consciousness.
    With bitter mouth and splitting head, Theseus came back to life in a dungeon whose fetor was thicker than the street’s. Thiswas a square pit, twenty feet deep. The walls were polished, well-fitted stone, unscalable. A faint, gray light came through a grating in the roof.
    Dimly, that light revealed his five companions, groaning or snoring on the bare stone floor. They were all condemned criminals, he learned, waiting for the games. A slave who had been indiscreet with his master’s wife. A palace scullion who had gotdrunk and burned a roast. An unemployed carpenter who had stolen bread. Two merchants who had neglected to pay certain tithes to the Dark One. They were all hopeless as men already dead.
    The pit was not a pleasant place. Water trickled down the walls, to make foul little pools on the porous gypsum floor.