Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/88

 and while something like a tremendous lassitude swept over Aziza.

She stared at them.

Knowing the Orient by right of birth and race, she realized that her psychological moment had arrived.

Now or never! Mastery or death! There lay her choice, her chance.

So she jerked her wandering, trembling mind back into the control of her senses. She held herself erect and motionless except for her right arm which grasped the dripping blade.

“I am the ruler of this land,” she said again; and there was in her soft, low voice an enormous, metallic resonance, the ring of utter conviction.

“Thus shall I enforce my commands—thus—and thus—and thus!”

And, tightly pressing her lips together, her heart writhing in revolt at her own unwomanly brutality, she stepped down from the peacock throne and dealt blow after blow with her sword, right, left, indiscriminately, pricking, slashing, cutting, wounding …

And the reaction on the mob was instantaneous, and typical.

For these men were Asians; men inherently callous; men devoid of that weakening outgrowth of the imagination which the Occident calls sympathy; men in whom ruthlessness and cruelty excite a certain kind of admiration as a conspicuous and unmistakable exhibition of energy.

“By the red pig's bristles!” cried the governor of the eastern marches, as he tied a handkerchief about