At the Queen's Mercy

by Mabel Fuller Blodgett

She swayed backward and forward. She was perfectly bald, and her face was a mass of wrinkles, though the ashen, parchment-like skin was drawn tight over the bones.

I saw that the creature was wrapped in a red mantle. She turned her head and opened her eyes full upon me. Such eyes! Two sparks of living fire, deep set, that ate through bone and muscle, flesh and sinew, and laid bare the soul. I shrank back, and the head of the red witch dropped down once more between her shoulders. I felt the terror that had seized me pass, but I had lost all wish to move. So I waited, in patience and unsurprised, the pleasure of the shrivelled hag, to whose lair the Queen had brought me.

For a space the red witch sat still as some carven image. As the firelight fell on the wizened, peering face, the peaked features took on new shapes of ugliness; the lips writhed in a terrible smile, yet stirred not, and I drew back into the shadows and waited for that which was to come. As I did so, the hag arose. For an instant I feared that she was about to approach my couch, but she passed into the outer darkness with never a backward glance.

Another moment and she had come again, walking slowly and with evident pain, and indeed with so much feebleness that I thought every step would be her last.

Upheld by her skinny arms was a curious image in painted stone, the god Hed, as I saw at once.

The weight of the thing must have been a tax on the strength of a man even of my inches, but this strange woman now held it aloft, and without pausing, lightly as though lifting a feather, set the god in a niche prepared for him above and opposite the cauldron.

Then she drew from her withered bosom a small bag, and took from it a pinch of powder. This she threw into the pot, and at once a thin blue vapor arose from its depths.

The hag squatted beside her brew, and began a monotonous beating with her hands upon a hollow log, across either end of which a tanned skin had been tightly drawn.

Then she commenced to sing in a curious cracked voice, and the song had no melody, but instead a kind of rhythm that met with the drum beats, and stirred, I know not how or why, to frenzy him who listened.

This is a fragment of the song as near as I can remember. For reasons that I shall tell presently I stopped my ears in horror before its end. It was no common chanting; for even as it rose, the thin blue smoke took on form and substance and imaged what she sang.