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Opal-Eyed Queen

The Second Siege of Prim-Constantinople:

"Princess where are we going?" Brea asked her mistress as she struggled to keep up. The princess had already told her handmaiden to stay behind. She made no short step to let her short servant keep pace with her as she hurried through the underground corridors beneath the keep. Outside, the cannons of the Ur-Turks continued to befall her father's mighty walls.

Prim-Constantinople was finally being taken by the vicious Vice-Christian hordes. The last stronghold of the Goddess-Mother would soon be defiled by the innumerable Ur-Turk crusaders.

"Do you really believe my mother? She is going to stay in her chambers with my sisters and the concubines. Eighteen of my father's knights will not save them from those Ur-Turks. You do realize what their Saracen mercenaries will do to them when the knights are dead and the doors to the queen's chambers lie in splinters?" The princess replied as she swapped torches for a fresher one and left the lit one behind. She still hoped another girl besides Brea would disobey and abandon the fool queen. Princess Atheyu had taken her miniature crossbow and a dagger and sneaked away. If Brea was caught, she would be executed. The princess would be in worse trouble for abandoning the queen.

"Of course, I do. But this way leads to the sewers, doesn't it?" Brea held up her dress and ran behind the princess.

"It does eventually. If we meet any rats, I can shoot them before they can bite us. I doubt a fifty-handed draw would even seriously injure a soldier in armor. I will take my chances with the rats." The princess claimed. The two young women eventually did find the sewers and the torch had begun to burn low. They had to descend a ladder into the filth. They were knee deep in slime as they waded towards the sea. Although the climax to the siege had occurred around midnight of its first anniversary, it was dawn when the only women to escape Constantinople emerged from the city's sewers. Both were noble and one of them was royalty. In the burning city behind them noblewomen and common women had found themselves equals as subjects of Saracen enslavement.

"We made it." Brea sighed in relief as she beheld the rising sun. Behind them columns of smoke were mixing into a black pillar above the city.

"Whoa there." A man's voce caught them. At least it was Indo-Greek. Brea cringed immediately, believing that pirates had caught them. The princess did not make that realization as quickly. They turned to find six men standing above them on the mounds above the estuary.

"Look at them. From the palace and the sewers at-once."

"Don't run off ladies. We will let you go unmolested. Would you point us to the palace? Grimaldie here says that this leads up into it."

"What assurance do you offer us that you will not try to harm us?" Princess Atheyu aimed her tiny weapon. It could potentially do some damage if any of them got closer. These men were not pirates, after all, but common shift swords.

"I, Grimaldie, master swordsman, do swear on my prestige that we will not attack or capture you. We merely see that you have obviously escaped this one tunnel and do ask if it leads back to the palace."

"You know that it must. Now ignore us so we may leave." Princess Atheyu demanded.

"Not so fast." The second shift sword growled. He alone had not unsheathed his own short blades yet and as he stepped forward the princess released her shot at his heart. He instantly unslung a blade and batted the blurred crossbow bolt from the air with impossible speed. Shift swords were renowned for feats of swordplay, but this gesture stunned both women into standing there dumbly as he approached them with malintent.

"Stop right there, Frace. I gave my word."

"You can die for it then. These are noble virgins. They are worth their weight in silver." Frace objected.

The two treacherous men were suddenly squaring off in the shallow mud of the splash-swamp. The footing seemed to favor the younger, faster Frace. He seemed confident that he could quickly kill this fool Grimaldie. As he made his drawing move Grimaldie swiftly darted out of the way of the forceful and elaborate lightning attack and neatly lopped off the interloper's head with his own, already drawn sword.

"I apologize for his manners. He usually listens to me. Perhaps next time he will keep his head on straight and remember his place." Grimaldie turned and gallantly gestured at his slain comrade with strangely mirth.

"You killed him." Atheyu was amazed. She had never seen a decapitation up close before. She had secretly watched executions before, but those had been different, lacking in violence and such a heartbeat.

"He tried to break my words." Grimaldie explained. His remaining men had dropped into the mire and filed into the tunnel entrance. Grimaldie saluted the women again then followed.

"We must go." Brea reminded her mistress.

"Who was that man?" Atheyu asked her friend.

"He said his name, but I forgot. He is a common shift-sword. Barely better than a pirate. We got lucky now let us not squander our luck." The noble women fled along the boulder strewn beaches, safe from pirates. All the pirates were circling the ports of the city. The Saracens were greedy plunderers, but much would be left for the lesser scavengers. The ports of the massive city were filled with boats helplessly laden with fleeing refugees and the treasures of the city. There was so much chaos that the pirates sailed among the ships of the Ur-Turks.

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All day Atheyu and Brea clambered along the shoreline over slime covered boulders and around tidepools of quicksand. The black sand grew warm and then hot as they reached the dunes by midafternoon. By then both women had completely lost their palace slippers and their dresses were dirty and torn. Each of them was exhausted and hungry and had no idea where they were going. Twice Brea looked back at the burning city. The Ur-Turks would not be able to keep the city without torching out the residents. Constantinople was being razed after the long siege. "My lady, where are we going?' Brea asked her mistress. The princess said nothing but finally sat down with her back to two massive tear drop shaped boulders that leaned upon each other with the beach-slime draped between them.

"Here." Atheyu sighed. She had absolutely no strength left. The palace life had left her too soft to continue more than a few miles from the city's walls. Brea shook her hands and cried for a moment in defeat and fear. They had nowhere to go. They had escaped their fate at the palace only to get covered in sewage, their clothes and slippers ruined and at the mercy of the elements and starvation.

"What is here? We have to go on. To a town or something." Brea said after she had regained her own courage.

"There are no towns, no villages. Not for many miles. You forget the Ur-Turk hordes have lived off the local kingdom during the siege for an entire year." Atheyu was tired and spoke very slowly, trying to remain alert and brave. "But there is a city, it is very far, and belongs to Vice-Christians."

"We will be found by hunger or pirates out here." Brea pointed out. At last Brea sat down near the princess. They sat resting and quiet for a few minutes before something happened.

A low growl sounded from the direction of the waters of the sea. A large dog missing half of its face was watching them. The dog suddenly darted forward barking and snarling menacingly. Both women leapt to their feet and backed up to the boulders. The beast had them cornered. The dog stopped its charge a few feet away and pranced around barking and growling. It seemed that the animal would come to them and tear them apart at any moment as it grew more and more frantic and mean. The princess got her crossbow and readied it. She aimed and shot at the dog but missed. It suddenly lunged at her, and she threw the weapon at it, striking its wounded face. With a yelp the angry dog retreated a few steps back but continued to herd them against the rocks. Its eyes held a fierce pain and hatred. The creature had become a monster because of its festering wound. Pain had driven it mad.

The women were both crying and screaming in terror at the dog as it danced back and forth getting ever closer like a pendulum. When it was close enough the dog leapt through the air at Brea who placed herself between the dog and the princess at the last moment. The teeth were flashing as the deadly bite flew for her throat.

The dog's head kept flying directly past Brea's face and splatted harmlessly after it had been severed from the body. The glint of a four-foot-long steel razor sword introduced one of the shift swords from earlier. He was dressed in black and wore a black thawab, often effected by a shift sword's apprentice.

"Ladies, I thought you might have needed some help with that mutt." He said "But where are my manners? My name is Afriel. Afriel the Queer, they call me for my capricious nature." He spoke quickly, with an odd inflection. Both women stared in shock and fright, trembling now at the blood and drawn blade. He swung it clean, polished it without a smudge on the cloth and sheathed it. He walked away from them facing the sea and then started eating something. Atheyu led Brea closer. He offered them some dried fish he was eating. They gobbled it up forgetting in one afternoon of hunger a lifetime of palace pleasantries.

"You are both very brave. I couldn't resist seeing what becomes of you. I have never seen such a strange escape. I myself have had to fight my way out of danger before, but I am a soldier. What are you? Handmaidens? Never mind. I am not trying to ransom you. I was only curious." Afriel mused, not looking at them but at the gathering storm out at sea. A few gulls cried. The women sat again and held each other near him but still very frightened of the deadly shift sword. He was probably a pirate, really, Brea thought. She still wasn't entirely sure there was a difference. "I guess if you intend to just lay here and die under rain and wind tonight, I will have to miss out on witnessing your fate. I am going back to Lud, where I live." He told them and began crossing the sand dunes.

"We must follow him." Atheyu said quietly to Brea.

"Are you mad? Did you see how easily he killed that dog?" Brea objected.

"Dare you speak to me..." Atheyu replied without any emphasis. She was far too exhausted to properly chastise her servant. Instead, she climbed to her feet, straightened herself out and set afoot to follow the trail to Lud. Brea reluctantly followed as well.

It was growing dark. Weariness had overtaken both women, yet they plod onward, barely able to see the shift sword. Ahead in the distance were the lights of Lud. They both collapsed some miles from the city of the Saracens, unable to walk another step. Chill winds were catching up to them from the storm that had come from the sea.

Afriel the Queer stood there in the winds, so desolate and silent that he was as a tattered visage beside his gout of flames. The wind blew his fire sideways and hot. He had made it somehow from the driftwood that sat petrifying where the sea met the dunes.

They sat by his fire.

"Couldn't go further. See those webs? A Mosest - giant sandspider." Afriel watched the darkness for any signs of movement.

"Would it come to the fire?" Brea asked, shivering but getting warm near the blazing heat.

"Yes. But I will kill it if it does." Afriel told her. "And it probably knows that."

"So, you triumph without a fight?" Atheyu asked.

"Indeed. It is the correct way to win, if you think about it."

Then they rested but it was in the night that the daughter of the queen found herself, as herself, but amid these moments of her life:

The queen and all her handmaidens and many of the women of Constantinople stood with jeweled eyes and silence. They were dead, slain by the queen's command by the eighteen knights. Then the knights fought against the invaders to the death and joined their queen. They were there also, and their armor was stoned with opals. Their faces were as skulls.

"My queen what have you done?" Atheyu stared in bewilderment. The queen had left nothing but cold bodies for the Ur-Turks. The princess realized she was now the only one of royal blood left and also that that the queen would forever haunt her.

She awoke before dawn and the visitants had gone.

Lud awaited and Afriel dressed the women in the appropriate hijab worn by most of the women in Lud. Now the princess was only a pair of eyes in a brown covering. Her eyes were haunted and bejeweled, a sinister white sheen and dark unsleeping rings under her eyes:

For every night the visitants returned, staring at the one that did not die with so much vanity. Atheyu had escaped and the dead resented her, staring in silence, the white-eyed handmaidens, the black eye sockets of the skull faced knights and the queen with eyes of opals.