Chapter 37 Dena's Curse
It was Zheng, the Ox, who broke the silence a minute later. "Dena's
curse," murmured the Ox morosely.
"What's that?" asked Chiang Chan, as he flicked the horse pulling the cart
lightly with a buggy whip.
"Dena's curse, the Ox repeated. "Tell him, Dao, you'd tell it better than I
would."
It occurred to Chiang Chan than a Sumatran ape could probably recount a
story as well as the Ox, whose dullness was a match for his size.
"Well, the story goes something like this..." and Dao proceeded to tell the
story as Feng had told it to him. He'd heard it dozens of times, practically
every time, in fact, that the Butcher had had too much to drink, which was
hardly an infrequent occurrence.
Chiang Chan noticed that Dao's manner had changed; he told the story with
the seriousness that Feng had told it to him, without the breezy casualness he
had displayed telling the tale of the lovely Ceylonese sisters.
Dao proceeded to recount the story of Feng and his upbringing, of the
wicked Dargon and his beautiful daughter, Dena. How Feng and his kinsmen had
caught the barbarian princess, stripped her of her clothes, and flog-marched her
naked through the mountains for hours on the way back to their hide-out. When
he got to the part where Feng and his men had bound up Dena's superb breasts in
tit-choking strips of leather, he noticed that beads of saliva were once again
oozing from the corners of the Drooler's mouth. Beads that spilled into a thin
stream when he told of the barbed thorn sticks, the horsewhip, the gnarly bamboo
canes and all of the other instruments of pain that Feng and his stalwart
comrades had applied to the beautiful princess's throbbing, full-nippled
breasts.
Dao went on to describe at some length the savagery with which Feng's men
had assaulted their voluptuous victim, as his audience of three listened
spellbound. "Yes, they got vengeance for their sisters and wives," he
concluded. "But they didn't reckon with Dena's curse."
"Which was?" Chiang asked with interest.
"She invoked her pagan gods to condemn her tormentors to horrible deaths --
and she vowed that one day their bodies would be food for the wolves."
"And sure enough," Dao continued, "after Dena and her companions had been
missing for several days, her father led a war party into the mountains. They
found the heads of Dena's entourage where Feng's men had left them, and then
followed the killers up into the hills. Luckily for Feng he had gone deep into
the forest hunting that morning; when he returned the following afternoon, he
was still a hillside away from the camp, when he thought he detected faint,
animal-like moans of agony coming from that direction."
"When he finally did arrive at the camp, he saw that Dena's malediction
had come to pass: for Dargon's soldiers had strung his kinsmen up naked, each
from his own tree, and smeared their abdomens and groins with the blood and guts
of squirrels and rabbits."
"Then, when Dargon and his men had left and the sun had gone down, the
creatures of the night -- the ravenous black wolves of the mountains --
attracted by the scent of blood, had come out of their lairs to feed on the
bodies of the men who had abducted Princess Dena."
Dao's three listeners shivered. "They never did catch Feng, did they?" Lin
asked in a breathless voice.
"No; with all of his kinsman dead, Feng left the mountains then, and began
the long journey east and joined the Scorpions a couple of years later," Dao
went on. "But he never forgot that curse, and I don't think he ever got a good
night's sleep in all the years since. He slept on the cot next to mine at the
Pit. I don't know how many times he woke up in the night, sweating, his eyes
wild, as if he'd woken from a nightmare just before the wolves' fangs had closed
on his throat.
"Well, at least the wolves never got him," Lin exclaimed.
"But they will," said Dao, through his crenelated teeth. "The wolves of
the sea." His companions shuddered as they looked back over their shoulder in
the direction of the dark harbor, where even then the sharks were feeding on the
body of Feng the Butcher. Dena's curse had finally overtaken its last victim.
