The Raja of Rukh strained hearing and nerves for the sound of English aeroplanes.
None came.
The sun sank lower.
A group of priests was gathered at the doorway of the great gloomy hall that opened on to the public open place of greatest and ceremonial sacrifice—as priests had gathered there for centuries at such times as this, when big tribal events called for special observation, of triumph, or defeat or peril quivered and bleated for special appeasement of their six-armed deity. Wild-eyed, four-footed, soft-skinned creatures had been slaughtered in their terrified, moaning hecatombs out there in that courtyard, and human lives had been offered in sacrifice there before this—the lives of miscreants who had angered a prince—but not often enemy lives—not nearly often enough: Rukh lay too far from other principalities, too remote, too rock-and-peak-bound, and the tribes that lay nearest were too strong and warlike, too as apt to give defeat as to meet it. And never before had the courtyard ground run red with white blood.
To-day was the supreme day of Rukh’s history. Not a man there, not a little child, not a woman giving suck as they waited, but thanked the gods for having been born, and having lived to see it.
To see the white man die, when the blood-red of the sunset came! They ached for that. And most of all they longed to see the Feringhi woman slaughtered, and her head laid at the feet of their Goddess. Not one here had ever seen a white woman die, not even the ancient few who had trapped and disemboweled human prey near the Khyber. Only one of them all ever had seen a Feringhi woman until two days ago when the great bird had thrown at the feet of their Goddess the Feringhi woman who was being decked now, up there in the palace, in her death robes.
It was the woman’s death they most longed to see—a white she-victim slain at the feet of the great green she-god! It was that that they craved with drunken, demented longing.
For a whisper had crept through the Kingdom of Rukh.
And the women there, waiting and lusting, longed for it most.
The crowd at the edge of the courtyard seethed and pushed. And silk-clad, veil-and-shawl-shrouded figures glided down from the palace-harem, some in their litters, some on foot, squeezed in among the crowding, packed peasants, harem ladies, royal-born or bought for great price. Their jewels jingled and flashed under their shawls and veils, and they scented the day with attar of roses.