“Sandanis.... That is his voice now in the hall. It is as though the sea were behind me and about and before.... Ah, Sandanis! I hate thee!”
“Hate or love, be wolf or dog—by all the dark gods, what does it matter?” said Eunica.
“Has it been always, in your earth, that a man could do so with a woman?”
“Always that ever I heard of,” answered Eunica. “I do not know where time goes to, behind us.”
“Will not the women conspire and slay them?”
But Eunica laughed at that. “When creatures are tamed, the power to bound and to rend is there and is not there!”
“Now, by the goddess! I would untame them!”
Eunica laughed again. “Then, to show the way, each must rend its own hunter! Now I had Milon by Myrtus, and I could not rend Myrtus.—I have wonder if you would rend King Sandanis.”
Rising, she moved to the wall and with her fingers loosened a wedge of wood, broad as an axe-head. The cell became more light, the sound of revel fuller and more plain. The old handmaid came back to the pallet. In the hall they sang war the glorious, the chief exalted, the warlike gods. They sang man-strength and what they called freedom. They sang the rape of gold and land, the rape of women and the rape of lives. The harp-strings were struck, wine flowed, men beat fist against board. With flashing eyes, with eloquence of gesture, starting to their feet, men declaimed their virtues. All through the king’s house was listening; up and down ran an hypnotized, inner murmuring. “It must be so. It must be so.”
The night passed, and the next day and night, other days and other nights. Sandanis the king and Lindane from the Amazon country drew together, dragged apart, and neither knew at times whether a passion of love or a passion of hatred was what their souls meant....