Page:Beyond Fantasy Fiction Volume 1 Issue 1 (1953-07).djvu/68

 you as my rude sisters led you away from me. And how much I desired to tell you that I was lost too. How much I wanted to tell you to wait patiently until the time was ripe.

''But now, my heart’s desire, you must not wait, you must not tarry. Oh, there! You’ve stumbled! Get up, my love! Stand up and run! For death is close behind you!''

HAT first night away from you, how my body ached with loneliness, how I longed for the enveloping warmness of your soft and pliable flesh! But I held myself firm to my purpose, for by then my plan was complete.

The next day I visited you at the man-compound. How proud and attractive you looked, how you stood out in beauty from the so poorly formed male specimens of Frth’s impoverished race.

I brought to you that day the richest, most pungently flavored foods to be found in Frth. Day by day I tempted you to eat, adding pound after pound of handsomeness to your already perfect body. The Matriarch watched my every move jealously, but with a secret smile. For she planned to have you for herself. That, I and all my sisters understood.

And so I let her watch and smile, for she knew nothing of my plan. And I, alone, knew that she would be forced to accept one of the shabby, over-muscular Frthian males in your place. How I hated her?

For three long months I fed you. Then, one morning, the Matriarch stopped me as I came away from the man-compound.

“Why do you waste so much of your time and company on the foreign man-god?” she asked me tauntingly, a twisted grin on her face. “Do you not realize that in just two more nights the mating season will begin and the man-compound will be opened to all the eligible women in Frth?”

“I do this because I love him, Most Venerable One, and because I cannot do otherwise, no matter what the outcome.”

“Ah, it is well. You are young and fleet of foot. Perhaps you will outdistance the others after all,” she said.

But I knew it to be a lie. She would never have allowed you in the open competition. However, I did not care. For I alone knew that you would be mine long before then.

ATE that evening I slipped away from my dwelling and hid beside the man-compound where you were an unwilling prisoner. The guards were few, for all but one or two were resting well for the festivities that would begin the following night. All that night they would spend in sacred 66