Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/114



LAUS kicked aside the curtain at the doorway and looked into the darkness of the little house. A woman crouched cross-legged on the earthen floor, her hair unbound, her gown ripped open to expose her breasts. On her knees, very quiet, but not sleeping, lay a baby boy, and on the little breast there flowered a crimson wound. Klaus recognized it—a gladiator knew the trademark of his calling!—a sword-cut. Half a hands-span long, ragged at the edges, sunk so deep into the baby flesh that the glinting white of breastbone showed between the raw wound's gaping, bloody lips.

"Who hath done this thing?" The Northman's eyes were hard as fjord-ice, and a grimness set upon his bearded lips like that they wore when he faced a Cappadocian nerman in the circus. "Who hath done this to thee, woman?"

The young Jewess looked up from her keening. Her eyes were red and swollen with much weeping, and the tears had cut small rivulets into the dust with which her face was smeared, but even in her agony she showed some traces of her wonted beauty.

"The soldiers," she replied between breath-breaking sobs. "They came and smote and slew; there is not a man-child left alive in all the village. Oh, my son, my little son, why did they do this thing to thee, thou who never did them any harm? Oh, woe is me; my firstborn, only son is slain"

"Thou liest, woman!" Klaus's words rang sharp as steel. "Soldiers do not do things like this. They war with men, they make no war on babes."

The mother rocked her body to and fro and beat her breast with small clenched fists. "The soldiers did it," she repeated doggedly. "They came and went from house to house, and slew our sons"

"Romans?" Klaus asked incredulously. Cruel the Romans were at times, but never to his knowledge had they done a thing like this. Romans were not baby-killers.

"Nay, the soldiers of the King. Romans only in the armor that they wore. They came marching into town, and"

"The soldiers of the King? Herod?"

You cannot afford to miss this mystic story of the Yuletide and a barbarian from the North in the Roman army; a reverent tale of the Crucifixion, and Pontius Pilate, and a hetæra from the house of Mary the Magdalene. This fascinating and unusual novelette will be published complete in the next issue of