“For the Blood is the Life”
by Lin Carter
The bushes parted and a young girl stepped cautiously into the clearing and peered about alertly, searching with every sense for danger. These, the Yuthog Woods, were reputedly the haunt of the most terrible predators—ghouls being the least dreaded.
The girl was young, no more than sixteen, and ill-equipped for this savage wilderness. She was tall for her age, and slim, with long coltish legs and strong arms, well-muscled as those of a boy. But she was no boy, not with those ripe, firm, pointed breasts and warmly curved hips and thighs. Her eyes were large, tip-tilted, green as emeralds between their thick fringe of sooty lashes; her mouth full, soft, lush and sweet, her face heart-shaped, with a small snub nose sprinkled with toast-brown freckles, her long hair crimson as sunset flames.
She was as naked as a babe, save for the soft leather buskins which shod her small feet. And her only weapon was a long, leaf-shaped dagger which she clenched in one fist. It was made from an alloy of silver wedded with steel, and etched along its length were strong protective runes—strange and alien sigils, cut into the curious metal by needles of adamant dipped in the slobber of Gorgons.
It was her only weapon in all this savage wild. She had found it atop the bared sarcophagus of a half-uncovered tomb the night before. Something about the odd metal or the weird signs drawn down the blade had affrighted the ghoul-pack who had excavated the tomb. So she had taken it up, as much for hopes that it would similarly repel whatever ghosts or demons haunted the Woods of Yuthog as for the reason that she had no weapon, and felt more comfortable when armed.
She was a War Maid, one of the questing Starhonna.
Her name was Tara.
She had become separated from her companions in peril due to the hazards of the road. These parts of the strange, shadowy world called Twilight were unknown to her, so she went cautiously. In a world devoid of sun, moon or stars, all directions seemed alike to the Starhoenne, but she went forward bravely, trusting to Those who guided her on her virgin quest as a War Maid.
From the edges of the glade where she stood, the woods sloped away into a swampy place of tufted hummocks of dry, withered grass which lifted from sodden pools of rancid mud and brackish water. The girl stepped carefully, testing every place of footing with a dry branch snatched from the brush. And then she encountered a marvel, of sorts.
Sunken to her chin in a patch of quicksand, a woman looked pleadingly, but without words, into her eyes. The woman’s bare arms were spread on the surface of the yellow mud to give her body greater buoyancy and to prolong the slow, sucking death to which she was doomed. But there was nothing solid within the reach of those long, slender but sinewy arms for her to cling to. And she did not speak because the quicksand was level with her chin: to have opened her mouth would have been to swallow down a gulp of the stinking, yellow mud.
Tara did not hesitate, but flung herself prone and inched on her bare belly until her pointed breasts sank into the surface of the pool, while she reached out with both strong hands to grasp the helpless woman by the throat. Her toes wriggling for some purchase in the lank, withered grass, the War Maid held the woman’s head above the mud and slim muscles knotted and writhed as she sought to drag the other from the dreadful embrace of the sucking doom which had her in its deadly clutches.
Within a few moments, she had drawn the woman’s torso out of the yellow mud; now her forearms hugged the woman just below her naked breasts, which were full and succulent and which weighed warmly against Tara's bare skin. The nipples, she noticed, were distended and erectile, as if impending doom were somehow a cause for erotic arousal.
It took Tara the better part of an hour to drag the naked woman out of the quicksand and upon the dry grass, where at length both lay, panting and trembling from the exertion.
“I have ... no strength left,” the woman sighed faintly. “But if you can help me . . . my house lies not far off—in that direction,” she said, indicating the location with a nod. Tara helped the stranger to her feet and bearing more than half the weight, began to stagger and stumble in the direction of the house . . . although it occurred to the young girl to wonder for what cause anyone would choose this ill-reputed place for their dwelling. Surely, only witches or ghouls would care to dwell in the dreadful proximity of these dire and haunted woods, or this death-dealing swampland.
The house was long and low, builded of logs chinked with dried clay, with a thatched roof that frowned above small, dim, blind windows like a scowling brow. The door was unlatched. Tara half carried and half dragged the woman within, lay her on the rug before the grate, touched dry tinder to warming flame, and soaked cloths found in a chest in ewers of fresh water to sponge her body clean of the vile mud.
It was lean and long-legged, that body, leaner and more fleshless than Tara’s succulence. When cleaned and dried, the woman’s body shone white as bleached bone, incurious contrast to Tara’s own rosy creaminess. The woman's face was strong, long-jawed, with jutting cheekbones, the full lips scarlet as a raw wound, the eyes deep black but filled with restless glints of fire-red. Her long, slick hair was black and lusterless. Her breasts were hard and rubbery and pointed, her loins lean, with narrow hips.
The woman lay quietly, listlessly, while Tara ministered to her; but from time to time her black and restless eyes strayed to the ripe curves and tender flesh of the girl’s naked body, and she licked full lips with a dry and furtive tongue. She said nothing. When Tara had finished, and had wrapped the bare, dry body in warm woolen robes, the woman nodded to a chest.
“There is wine and cheese and bread for you,” she said hoarsely. “As for myself, I require nothing, for I have but recently . . . fed.”
The emphasis she placed on the last word was odd, but Tara thought little of it. She satisfied her hunger and thirst, then curled up next to the woman who lay asleep by now before the crackling flames. Wolves—or werewolves—howled in the distance; fingers of clammy mist coiled and seethed against the grimy panes; thin, sour rain battered upon the thatched roof.
But Tara slept.
It was near “Lambence” when she woke, that gradual brightening of the skies which was the nearest that those who dwelt in Twilight ever knew to day. Someone had lifted her into the bed and drawn soft covers over her: obviously, the woman she had rescued from the clutch of the quicksand. Indeed, she awoke to find the naked woman standing near and gazing at her half-bared beauty with desireful eyes, where she had pushed the covers down in her sleep.
Tara stretched, yawned. “Is it Lambence, then? I must have slept . . . how do you feel?” The tall woman shrugged.
“I have recovered my strength,” she said in her deep, throaty voice. “My name is Morhalla, by the way; the quicksand caught me unawares when I strayed from my homeward path during the Dimming.” By this word she meant the dark. Tara named herself. The woman gestured.
“There is wine and fruit and dried meat on the table,” she said. “As for myself, I desire nothing.” Tara rose and performed her ablutions and ate; all the while, the strange woman —Morhalla—watched her with an unblinking gaze.
All that day, Tara assisted her hostess. She gathered tubers and spice-bulbs from the neglected fields and water from the stream for a stew, into which she also put the remainder of the meat. The woman seemed to keep no domestic beasts or fowl and Tara wondered upon what she fed. That night they shared the last of the wine, but Morhalla declined to share the one bed with her guest, claiming urgent business. She stalked from the house, leaving Tara to stretch and drowse and stare sleepily into the leaping flames upon the grate.