Daughter of the Night Part 3

Meanwhile the people of Armora had awakened from the tumult, and crowded everywhere about the gardens, getting underfoot and wondering loudly what this was all about. Eos hurried from the bed chamber of their Queen with a great bundle of material she had selected as of possible future use. They tried to stop her, but one glance of the potent magnetic power that flamed from her great eyes sent them all to their knees in worshipful, helpless adoration.

Druga, waiting above with the snake wound round with ropes and lashed to the pillars, watched this evidence of her powers with awe, for he had himself but narrowly escaped the swords of the guards, and had been about to plunge down the ladder with his own sword in a futile attempt to rescue Eos.

She sent the disk spinning upward in flight, and Druga took himself from her and went and sat by the writhing, fettered body of the Amphis-Baena, or Dionaea-Baena, or two-headed snake, saying to her as she spat venom at him:

"Listen to me, Dionaea, the best thing you can do for yourself is to try to win the favor of Eos. She is an enemy who has suffered as greatly as yourself from the work of Diana, and would help you if you earned it, to acquire a human body again. I think the snake himself would like that better too. He is too greatly married, I would say, to relish the state overmuch."

Baena relaxed at these words, and ceased to struggle. Then in great snake hisses, he made himself heard.

"Dionaea, I think too you should seize this opportunity to get out of this fix we are in. I gave you my tail to roost upon as a temporary measure, not as a permanent part of my future. Diana, whom we both serve, could have released us if she had been so inclined, and fixed us up with separate bodies, but she chose not."

That Dionaea was considering his words was evident. She ceased to spit at him, and composed her face into thought. Druga leaned back and smiled.

Eos brought the disk to rest again at the meadow at the foot of the gla.s.s bridge before Feronia's cliff palace, and came in to them. She stood gazing at the two-headed creature trussed to the pillars of the chamber. Feronia gazed at them with her stone eyes, and all the men gazed at Feronia as if transfixed by her stony beauty, and the sight made Dionaea shiver with apprehension. For she thought that these were people who had angered Eos and that Eos had changed them into stone. She wondered why Eos had added Feronia to the collection.

CHAPTER III

Eos sat beside Feronia and watched the great, writhing two-headed Dionaea, and waited. After a time the flowing golden bands of Life-energy entered, focusing subtly all about her, so that she seemed to Dionaea truly to be the Mother of All, and the greatest of All G.o.ddesses anywhere.

At the entrance of the golden energy Eos smiled with relief, for now she had a power that she had not thought to use against Diana before. For to Eos this aversion to all men of the G.o.ddess Diana spelled out the message of her weakness, and this energy of the life pole was going to pierce that weakness.

Day dragged after day, and the weird scene there in the banquet hall of the stone men of the past became to Druga a tense place of waiting for his own demise and change into a similar relic to decorate this hall of death. For Eos would not tell him what she planned for fear he would give her away in the tense moments that were to come when Diana at last rejoined her Dionaea in their strange dual existence.

The inducted energies of the female pole had a most disturbing effect upon the mingled male and female of the Amphis-Baena.

Baena, driven half mad by the increased female qualities of the head of Dionaea, made inadvertent love to her, caressing her face with his long forked tongue, and combing at her tangled hair with his fangs, always Baena was distraught with her attraction. This attention drove the woman near frantic, strained as she was in her unnatural condition, and she could not afford to anger the beast whose body she had been grafted upon. For even a serpent has been known to swallow its tail, and Dionaea had no desire to know if Baena could do that trick.

Eos, sitting quietly and watching the bound serpent, smiled at this continual by-play, and offered to release Dionaea for revealing her knowledge of Diana, so that some c.h.i.n.k in her armor might be found. Not that Eos now needed any such thing, but she was kind-hearted, and wanted Baena at least on her side. For she could see into the dual life and thought of the two-headed monster, and knew that if Baena chose to set his will against Diana when she was within the body and mind of Dionaea--it would help her in what she planned.

"Baena," Eos at last said, "if you can find a way to help me against this unnatural mistress of your mistress, I will repay you by giving you anything you may ask of me."

Baena looked at Dionaea's head with the reptilian love-light glowing frustrate in his great green-and-gold eyes.

"If you will promise to give me what is in my mind that I desire, why then when the time comes I will see what I can do. I am weary of being the tail when I was meant to be the head, and if I had it to do over, this unnatural and self-willed appendage would remain in her proper place."

Now Eos knew that Baena could not help desiring Dionaea as a mate, for she seemed most reptilian in the strange snake-growth that had come over her, and knowingly she nodded at Baena, so that he knew that she knew what he wanted, but Dionaea did not know, for it never occurred to her.

To Eos, what the future might bring to Dionaea as the mate of a snake seemed a proper revenge for what she had done in aiding Diana, and for other cruelties of which Druga had told her. She planned accordingly.

Came that day which was the time appointed by Diana Triformis for her visit to Dionaea. Much as she detested the need for entering the male body of Baena to interview Dionaea, still Dionaea had been a valuable ally, and Diana did intend in time to release her and give her again a human body.

To this end she had made some inquiries as to how this might be done.

For in truth the method of doing so had evaded her mind in the excitement and rage of finding what had happened, and in the task of the spell she had created to turn Feronia into a stone image. For Diana knew that what Baena had accomplished she could accomplish, certainly, and the shame of forgetting how it might be done before the wise Baena's critical eyes made her neglect to mention her intentions to either of the two heads of the snake.

As the swirl of ethereal force that was Diana's traveling form settled within the golden-moted atmosphere of the great chamber of the disk-mansion, Eos stood up, and dropped from her body her insulating blue robe of shimmering magic, so that her supercharged beauty shone everywhere in blinding, awful attraction.

Druga, who had been sitting disconsolately talking to himself, rose to his feet like an automaton and walked toward that more than mortal beauty, his eyes blinded and his senses wholly submerged in ecstasy at the sight of the glory of Eos unveiled. As he reached the G.o.ddess he put out his arms like a sleepwalker to take her to him, but she avoided him, seizing him by a wrist and turning him about, hissing in his ear, imperatively:

"Now prove to me that you are truly a mighty man of his word, with courage and strength, and in spite of this body of mine go out of this chamber and wait till I call without once letting your attention turn toward me or noting anything that goes on, else are we both lost!"

Like a man weighted down with lead on his feet, Druga strove to obey her, moving inch by slow inch away from that vast flood of energetic attraction.

Eos watched him move slowly away from her, every muscle standing out on his body and his neck corded with effort to keep his head turned away, and a vast admiration for him rose in her throat and choked her. It seemed to her that the statue of Feronia moved and that the stone face changed, suffused for an instant with admiration also.

The swirling purple cloud of Diana's entrance moved nearer to Dionaea, for in the hyper-s.p.a.ce of her travelling, the points and dimensions of this world were much alike, and she did not realize that Dionaea was not in her palace at Armora. Settling about the two-headed creature lashed fast to the pillars of the chamber, she moved herself within the snake body and came to rest within the body of Baena, the snake.

Looking out of the dual heads of Dionaea and Baena now, Diana Triformis, who was no stranger to dual and triple existence even in the same body, saw with those four eyes the naked body of Eos, reflecting, emanating, giving off in vast floods the focused energies of the Pole of Female Life-energy, and those four eyes fastened hypnotized upon that glory, female beyond any other life in all s.p.a.ce.

Eos moved closer and closer to the bound snake, murmuring soft words:

"Oh, Diana, wonderful one, long have I desired you, for I know your secret, that you are not female as your body seems, but male. So I have decided to have you for myself, for I am weary of men, and want only the boy Diana himself for my love, forever. Come to me, Diana, and dwell with me here at the pole of love, and never leave me. Can you not see that the enmity that has sprung up between us is the result of misunderstood love!"

Now Baena, seeing his opportunity, thrust his own male personality to the fore, trying to sway the intricate balance of s.e.xes in the weird self of Diana--and with his mind and his eyes upon Eos, made himself to desire that infinite female attraction, which was not hard, so as to add that much weight to the attraction which even a G.o.d might not resist unless, as Druga had done, he turned his back upon it.

Diana could _not_ turn her back, and the whole sudden surprise of finding herself not in the palace in Armora, but here in the halls of her erstwhile enemy, Eos of the Dawn-light, made her natural male attributes become dominant so that she desired Eos mightily.

Trapped thus by the circ.u.mstances, the lashed serpent body of Baena which insisted upon gazing steadily at the vast and overwhelming beauty of the unveiled body of Eos, and by the ignorance of Dionaea as to what was going on, by her own masculine nature into desiring this essence of all female attraction, Diana gazed upon Eos while the energies sent by Eos' skill coursed in greater and greater ecstacy through her.

So it was that Diana fell in love with Eos, as Eos desired, and with the G.o.ds, love is an overmastering pa.s.sion that may not be resisted.

Now Eos and the trapped spirit of Diana conversed together, and at the subtle words of Eos and the overmastering attraction, Diana swirled out of the body of Baena and settled engrossed about the glowing glory that was Eos. Inward she was drawn, and mated there in mysterious communion with the G.o.ddess.

"If you but had a strong male body, Diana, we could live here forever in love and ecstasy. Why not return one of the stone men of the past into flesh again, become a man instead of half-woman as in the past--and so learn anew to live and love differently and gloriously...."

Such were Eos' words, made potent by the golden glowing energies within her, swaying the bemused Diana to her will. And Diana, with Eos' hands, went to the wall cabinets and set out certain magical apparatus, brewing an antidote for the stony seizure she had sent to Eos' lovers in the past. This liquid she poured over the male of stone that Eos selected, and even as the stone man stirred and quickened into life again, her ethereal self whirled out of Eos and settled into the reanimated flesh of the man.

When he arose to his feet and spoke, it was Diana herself who spoke and not the man who had loved Eos long ago. What this desecration of her past love meant to Eos we shall not know, for she hid it beneath languishing glances and subtle swayings of her body, drawing Diana to her, wrapping her arms about the reanimated being, and walking with the new male Diana out of the room and so to her own chambers.

Druga, as Eos had foreseen, had been unable to contain his curiosity as to what was going on, and had at last peered from the hallway where he waited, just in time to see the purple swirl that was Diana settle into and seem to reanimate the ancient long-dead stone image.

The emotions natural to a man rose in him. He was not sure just what he was seeing, but jealousy rose in him like a flame, and his pa.s.sion so steadfastly controlled and so rewarded by the fickle Eos made this jealousy into a terrible, red rage against her who had withheld herself from him only to give herself to her worst enemy in the form of a man.

Druga, overcome with this jealous rage, strode out into the banquet hall of dead men, took from the side of one of the dead men a great war-axe of bronze, and hefting it in his hand as if it were a trembling feather plume, strode after the two figures like the wrath of G.o.d.

As Eos reclined sensuously upon her couch in her sleeping chamber, and Diana in the man's body stretched beside her, bending back Eos' head and planting there a burning kiss, Druga entered, and standing over the pair like an outraged husband, shouted in a voice he was unable to make articulate.