Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 6 (1925-06).djvu/16

Rh damp ground. They were the queen's own retinue, and they had been painted and bedecked for the occasion. Their arms and legs were tattooed; white and blue rings encircled their wrists and ankles; and their breasts were covered by monstrous smudges of bluish paint. Their eye-brows had been shaved; and their lips were cracked and swollen, and a few wore plugs through their lips. One played upon a cracked violin, and several of the blackest and most ghastly made music of cymbal and bassoon. They danced and shouted and screamed, and twisted themselves into devious shapes, and struck each other violently with long thongs made of rubber and flax. They were a jolly crew, but Mpatanasi was deep in religious contemplation and saw them only as instruments; or perhaps he did not see them at all.

They formed a circle about him, and began to gibber meaninglessly, and Mu-senyui, who stood at a distance, turned away with white lips.

"But supposing you are responsible!"

Mu-senyui saw the daughter of Mpatanasi standing before him, her thin lips writhing back gloriously from her white teeth. The lips of Mpatanasi's daughter were enticing, even when distorted by ecstatic cruelty, and Mu-senyui thought that a man must be lucky indeed to possess such lips.

"I have prayed that responsibility shall fall upon me as a cloak," he said, patting the daughter of Mpatanasi upon the shoulder. "And why should I reproach myself? You are mad to think that I should reproach myself!"

She drew close to him, and ran her long fingers through his beard. "You are a dear, Mu-senyui! It is horrible to have such a dreadful old man say to you: 'It is not proper to put paint upon your lips! It is not according to the law for a priest's daughter to play upon the bassoon!' He is a terrible old man! But he doesn't suspect, does he?"

"Of course not! He has very little shrewdness. He does not even know that the king—"

The daughter of Mpatanasi laid the second and third fingers of her right hand across Mu-senyui's lips.

"Look! Even now he pronounces a doom!"

looked out into the clearing, and his fingers tightened on the shoulders of Mpatanasi's daughter. "It is a hideous thing to witness, that doom. It comes straight from the forest-devil, and your father is but an agent—and yet it is your father who pronounces a doom!"

"It is silly of you, my dear, to believe in devils! The forest-god exists only in the imagination of Mu-senyui. My father is a man, and he makes dooms out of his silly old head. Mu-senyui, you have no idea how much I have to put up with!"

Out in the clearing Mpatanasi threw back his head, and bellowed out a terrible doom.

"Mu-senyui," asked Mpatanasi's daughter, with hot shame looking out of her eyes and flushing red over her cheeks and throat; "Mu-senyui, will you describe the forest-devil?"

Mu-senyui swallowed a lump in his throat and his cheeks blanched. "It is impossible to describe the unholy thing in detail. I should prefer simply to state that it is very tall, with one large eye in the center of its forehead, and its lips are swollen and cover the entire lower portion of its face. It is clad in white fur. It has a long neck, square shoulders, and enlongated lower limbs."

"Mu-senyui, do you really believe such nonsense? And if you do, how—how can you explain it?"

"There has always been a forest-devil, as long as the forest has been there, and no one knows when the