Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur - Страница 147

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With one fluid movement the Neptune sword sprang from its scabbard as though it were a living thing. Slow John was no warrior. His victims were always delivered to him trussed and chained. He had never been matched against a man like Schreuder. He jumped forward, the knife held low in front of him, but Schreuder flicked his own blade across the inner side of Slow John's wrist, severing the sinews so that the man's fingers opened involuntarily and the knife dropped to the tiles.

Then Schreuder thrust for the heart. Slow John had neither time nor chance to evade the stroke. The point took him in the centre of his broad, hairless chest and the blade buried itself right up to the jewelled pommel. The two men stood, locked together by the weapon. Gradually Slow John's sex wilted and hung white and flaccid. His eyes glazed over and turned opaque and sightless as yellow pebbles. As he sank to his knees, Katinka began to scream.

Schreuder plucked the blade from the executioner's chest. Its burnished length was dulled by his blood. Katinka screamed again as a feather of bright heart-blood stood out of the wound in Slow John's chest, and he toppled headlong to the tiles.

"Don't scream," Schreuder snarled, with the black rage still upon him, and advanced upon her with the sword in his hand. "You have played me false with this creature. You knew I loved you. I came to fetch you. I wanted you to come away with me." She backed away before him, both fists clenched upon her cheeks, and screamed in high, ringing hysteria.

"Don't scream," he shouted. "Be quiet. I cannot bear it when you do that." The dreadful sound, echoed in his head and made it ache, but she retreated from him, her cries louder now, a terrible sound, and he had to make her stop.

"Don't do that!" He tried to catch hold of her wrist, but she was too swift for him. She twisted out of his grip. Her screams grew even louder, and his rage broke its bounds as though it were some terrible black animal over which he had no control. The sword in his hand flew without his brain or his hand commanding it, and he stabbed her satiny white belly, just above the golden nest of her mons vener is

Her screaru turned to a higher, agonized shriek and she clutched at the blade as he jerked it from her flesh. It cut her palms to the bone, and he thrust again to quieten her, twice more in the belly.

"Quiet!" he roared at her and she turned away and tried to run for the doors of her closet, but he stabbed her in the back just above her kidneys, pulled out the blade and thrust between her shoulders. She fell and rolled on her back, and he stood over her and stabbed and hacked and thrust at her. Each time the blade passed clean through her body and struck the tiles on which she squirmed.

"Keep quiet!" he yelled, and kept on stabbing until her screams and sobs died away. Even then he continued to thrust at her, standing in the spreading pool of her blood, his uniform drenched with gouts of scarlet, his face and arms splashed and speckled so that he looked like a plague victim covered with the rash of the disease.

Then, slowly, the black rage drained from his brain, and he staggered back against the wall, leaving daubs of her blood across the whitewash.

"Katinka!" he whispered. "I did not mean to hurt you. I love you so."

She lay in the wide deep pool of her own blood. The wounds were like a choir of red mouths on her white skin. The blood still trickled from each of them. He had not dreamed there could be so much blood in that slim white body. Her head lay in a scarlet puddle, and her hair was soaked red. Her face was daubed thickly with it. Her features were twisted into a rictus of terror and agony that was no longer lovely to look upon.

"Katinka, my darling. Please forgive me." He started across the floor towards her, stepping through the river of her blood that spread across the tiles. Then he stopped with the sword in his hand as, in the mirror across the room, he glimpsed a wild blood-smeared apparition staring back at him.

"Oh, sweet Mary, what have I done?" He tore his eyes from the creature in the Mirror, and knelt beside the body of the woman he loved. He tried to lift her, but she was limp and boneless. She slid out of his embrace, and flopped into the puddle of her own blood.

He stood again and backed away from her. "I did not mean you to die. You made me angry. I loved you, but you were unfaithful."

Again he saw his own reflection in the mirror, "Oh sweet God, the blood. There is so much." He wiped, with sticky hands, at the mess of crimson that covered his jacket, then at his face, spreading the blood into a scarlet carnival mask.

For the first time he thought of flight, of the boat waiting for him on the beach and the frigate lying out in the bay. "I cannot ride through the colony like this! I cannot go aboard like this!"

He staggered across the room to the door of the Governor's dressing room. He stripped off his sodden jacket and threw it from him. A pitcher of water was standing in a basin on the cabinet and he plunged his gory hands into it and sloshed it over his face. He seized the washcloth from its hook and soaked it in the pink water, then scrubbed at his arms and the front of his breeches.

"So much blood!" he kept repeating, as he wiped then rinsed the cloth and wiped again. He found a pile of clean white shirts on one of the shelves, and pulled one on over his damp chest. Van de Velde was a big man, and it fitted him well enough. He looked down and saw that the bloodstains were not so obvious on the dark serge of his breeches. His wig was stained so he pulled it off and flung it against the far wall. He chose another from the row set on blocks along the back wall.

He found a woollen cloak that covered him from shoulders to calves. He spent a minute cleaning the blade and the sapphire of the Neptune sword, then thrust it back into its scabbard. When he looked again in the mirror he saw that his appearance would no longer shock or alarm. Then a thought struck him. He picked up his soiled jacket and ripped the stars and decorations from the lapels. He wrapped them in a clean neck cloth he found on one of the shelves and stuffed them into the inner pocket of the woollen cloak.

He paused on the threshold of the Governor's dressing room and looked for the last time at the body of the woman he loved. Her blood was still moving softly across the tiles, like a fat, lazy adder. As he watched, it reached the edge of the smaller puddle in which Slow John lay. Their blood ran together, and Schreuder felt a deep sense of sacrilege that the pure should mingle thus with the base.

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