Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Yet in company, it did not accuse him.

  Perhaps it never will, thought Beyash.

  But the bird’s eyes, now one, now another, beadily savored his nervousness. Perhaps, suggested these eyes, on some day, I will.

  Beyash could not eat. He grew lean and his skin hung slack on him, a second yellow robe. Beyash sought solitude very much; when he must be with others, the sweat streamed from his face.

  “Now, Beyash my son,” chided the High Priest gently, “it is not seemly you carry this bird with you before the gods. You must put an end to your foolish behavior.”

  “I cannot, Father,” muttered Beyash. And the High Priest deprived him of his jasper earring for being insolent.

  Ten suns rose and ten suns set, and yet the bird perched on the shoulder of Beyash. And if he was able to thrust it off, it flew back immediately, and pecked him for good measure.

  On the eleventh morning, Beyash, stupid with fright and weakness and sleeplessness, ran suddenly into the Court of the Salamander where many steps led down into a water garden, and Beyash seized a large stone jug that stood on the stair head. Striking at the bird so it momentarily flew upward, Beyash flung the stone jar after it. But the bird dashed aside, the stone jar crashed upon the skull of Beyash, and, in falling down the steps, his neck was broken.

  11

  Zhirem strode south till he came to a wide green river. Men did not live nearby, and there was no bridge nor any other way to cross. He took that as a bitter sign, and turned west along the river’s bank. He had walked two months alone, not looking behind him, nor properly anywhere. The stones had ceased to pelt about him. He barely noted none struck him—maybe they had not been meant to. Later, where they did not know him at all, yet slightly recognized that his garment meant a priesthood of some kind, strangers would now and then give him food or shelter. Zhirem took everything and nothing with equal courteous indifference. This world was mist to him, and through the mist he advanced, searching for a black shadow which would claim him, the shadow of night men called Azhrarn. And even as he searched he did not really believe. And even as he was skeptical, his blood ran cold in case it should be true.

  The bed of the river rose toward its source, and narrowed high among stony uplands. Zhirem climbed with it, and the air became clear as crystal, and yellow eagles swirled in the sky over his head and the land was yellow too, and only the river green.

  In the day’s climbing, Zhirem passed through four villages. People saw him and pointed. Anything was sensational there, for seldom did anything happen. An hour after Zhirem’s passing, the villagers were able to point again, for a girl went by with apricot hair, eating a handful of river grass, setting her feet in the dust where Zhirem’s footprint was still marked.

  Near sunfall, a woman ran to Zhirem out of a lighted door in the fourth village.

  “Go no farther, traveler. Beyond is a wild strange place and no one ventures there after dark.”

  Zhirem stopped. He looked at the woman. Her words seemed to have struck some chord within him. She, moved by his look and his beauty, entreated him to enter her father’s dwelling and eat with them. Like a blind man guided, Zhirem let her take him into the house.

  There was little enough. Stewed fish from the green river, black fruits from the grudging trees. The father was aged and liked to talk, and the woman gazed at Zhirem with her hungry soul in her eyes. They were kind to him for their own selfish reasons.

  Zhirem scarcely ate at all. He listened to the elderly man rambling. Presently Zhirem asked why they feared the ground west of the village.

  “Grim things are said of it,” intoned the ancient, “and grim things go there. The beasts are unnatural. In the time of my father’s father, a child strayed into that place and three men went to find it. Night came and night departed, and only one man returned, and he was an idiot thereafter till the day of his death.”

  “It is a terrain of pitfalls and marshes,” said the woman. “There is a lake, they say, all salt. And the horned horses go to dance there; but that is many miles’ journey on. Besides, there is a wall, and none can scale it, save demons.”

  “Demons,” said Zhirem, so soft only she heard him, for she hung on his words.

  When Zhirem would leave, the woman tried to keep him. In the door of the house, she promised him many things, but he put her aside and went on into the night. As she sobbed against the doorpost, another slipped by, one who had sat in the street all this while, gazing at the lighted window. Simmu who, for two months, had similarly watched, from a distance, Zhirem within the houses of men, or Zhirem when he lay asleep on the ground.

  No track led from the village. Only the thin remnant of the river continued, and this soon reached its terminus, or rather its beginning, which was three slender falls above the rock. The moon had not yet risen, and beyond this spot all was uncertain, a jagged plain which fell away before and away again to a distant sky like black blood.

  Confronting this, without even a moon, Zhirem hesitated. The mist faded from his inner eye; he began to realize how far he had come, and to what end. The lightless country in front of him seemed abruptly like the gate to some hell, to Underearth itself, the domain of the demons.

  And, as he hesitated, Zhirem sensed another near him. He turned and saw, behind him on the higher ground, a shape with a girl’s form and a girl’s hair.

  Zhirem was angered. He assumed the woman had dogged him from the village. He made a rejecting gesture with his hand that said, “Go back and leave me.” But the girl’s shape did not move. Then Zhirem retraced his steps and went up the ridge to tell her to take herself home. In the sluggish darkness, he drew very close before he recognized that the cascade of hair belonged to one he knew better.

  “I trusted myself rid of you,” said Zhirem. “I made no jest when I bade you choose another road than mine. I cannot breathe the air if you are near, all winds that blow become a poison. You are my shame and my defeat. I will not see you. I will offer myself to corruption, but I will not suffer you as my reminder. May the maleficent gods blast you, for they have venom to spare if they exist. If not gods, then carry my everlasting enmity. Shrivel and be damned and get from my sight.”

  All this while, speaking these things with dismal violence, Zhirem saw only what he reckoned to see, which was the enigmatic face of Shell.

  But just then an amber moon began to come up, and Zhirem became aware it was a woman before him, the actual maiden he had lain with among the flowering olives, the maiden of the dream of sin, who was also Shell.

  Zhirem was afraid, afraid since he could not understand. He snarled with his fear, and ran away toward the gate of hell.

  • • •

  There was a wall. It lay three miles into the curious dead-lands beyond the river. The blocks of the wall were dressed stone. A lord had built it in an age past reckoning, and here and there a skull was set in between the stones, for the lord had been of that order of lords who liked such decoration and killed his slaves to obtain it. The unwholesome aspect of the wall had done nothing to lessen the reputation of the area.

  Hundreds or thousands of years ago, a blight had burnt up the landscape till it was black. Black by day, blacker by night. Fogs meandered here, coming and going from the marshes, but farther in, some eight miles westward, a lake of salt lay pink-glittering under the rufous moon. Here grew exotic malformed trees with fruits that shone like brass, and here, on the wide melanotic shore of the lake, unicorns had been known to dance, to fight and to couple. And this night the unicorns came, as if they were the sigils of a man’s terror and craving, aspects only of Zhirem and his febrile surrender to darkness.

  The unicorns were savage, not white as doves, but the colors of scarlet gum and old yellow bone, with twisted horns of tarnished swarthy gold. There were three. They emerged from the gruesome woods where the metallic fruit clinked. A hare started from a thicket and a unicorn tamped
it to the earth with its forefoot, ripped and shredded with the serrated oblongs of its golden teeth, then kicked the carcass aside and stalked on.

  On the lake shore the unicorns ran and circled, their hooves crunching the glittering charcoal sand. One had a silver scar on his flank as if a star had burnt him. He flung about and clashed his single horn against the single horn of another. Lowering their heads these two, pawing the sand, glaring from their eye sockets at an impossible angle, began to duel. The whorled horns came together, smote, screeched, struck sparks, scraped off, returned, like two smoky swords. The third unicorn, partnerless, reared to lash and thrust at the moon.

  Zhirem sat on a rock not a hundred paces away.

  He stared at the unicorns, hypnotized by their intrinsic terribleness.

  The skull wall, crumbling, had been easy to scale after all. Directionless, he considered something had led him here to the unicorns’ dancing floor. After he had come here, they had come. He wondered idly, uninvolved, if they would scent him and gallop to rend him as the leader had rent the hare. Yet he knew also some dark entity kept him for itself. Or thought he knew it.

  The star-burned unicorn had risen now, prizing its battle companion up with it from the earth. They leaned together on the sky, then: blades locked and their eyes rolling. The third unicorn screamed, prancing through the arch their bodies made, swerving to gore, with the awful horn, the side of each. Yet the stabbings were light, caressive almost. In that second, as the black blood ran, a fourth figure appeared on the lake shore.

  Simmu walked there naked save for her hair and the green fleck of fire in the hollow of her throat. She walked like one of the wandering marsh fogs, that pale, seemingly as weightless.

  The unicorns, untangling from each other, poured about to challenge what came. They dug up the black sand, lowering again their heads with the swords held ready to slash and pierce. The smell of their own blood excited them, the vision of the dismembered hare was fresh. But the girl who stepped toward them stepped nearer, and the wind lifted strands of her long hair over the moon, and she raised her arms as if the wind also lifted those, and she danced. Not the dance of unicorns, but of the Eshva. A wondrous dancing.

  Not a sound on the shore now but the wind-strummed grasses. Simmu danced, and the unicorns melted, like red wax and golden wax, into shapes of tranquility. Presently they kneeled and rested their heads in the sand, their cruel mouths slid ajar, their fringed lids shut. Still Simmu danced.

  She danced till the lake and the sky and all the world blurred before her eyes. She danced in the veils of her hair. She had not known this charm, this Eshva dancing, not till this moment. It came from the green gem, it came from her loins and her heart.

  At last she was weary, and could dance no more, yet even now, the dancing lingered within her. She went between the unicorns, but only their eyelids stirred, like leaves. She went to the place where Zhirem sat motionless, on the rock. He did not seem to remember her, yet he looked only where she stood.

  “I have bound you,” she said, “by sorcery. Shall I let you go?”

  Slowly he shook his head.

  “No. Keep me bound.”

  “When you saw me, you hated me,” she said, “but when the unicorns prepared to slay me, you grew pale.”

  “You are a demon,” he said. “I will not deny you any more. Bring your kindred.”

  “I am not of demon-kind,” said Simmu, “but this jewel at my neck may bring some who were with me once. Perhaps. And they are demon-kind.”

  Then she went to him and kissed him.

  On the shore the unicorns were joining, one by one, and their heads rose against the moon, and sank, as they swam across each other’s backs.

  The man and the woman swam deep in the rock’s deep shadow, gazing each into the other’s face as they swam, till each saw how the other was blinded and grew blind in turn.

  Later, the moon fell. And Zhirem’s wide eyes were darkened as the light ran from the sky.

  The holy men of the desert had positively taught him to fear himself and his own joy; the holy priests of the temple had inadvertently taught him to scorn the gods. Humanity instructed him in its faithlessness. Left with nothing, only Simmu had tendered him love. Zhirem could not bring himself to say, in that moment, or to think: Love is not enough.

  To all demons wandering on the earth, the perfume of a spell, the peculiar fragrance of human witchcraft, was compelling. As they could not keep out of mankind’s affairs, so they could not resist this lure. Generally they came to pry, never to participate, rarely to aid; though the Drin—and their lesser cousins, the foolish bestial Drindra—might sometimes join a human magician at some foul work, for sport.

  The Eshva women who had nurtured Simmu for almost two years, they had forgotten this baby, as they had known they would. Short memories had the Eshva. And no other denizen of Underearth had chanced on Simmu afterward, which was strange, for the smell of sorcery went with the boy he had been from the first. Now, however, at large in a lawless country, making Eshva glamour, clad in an Eshva gift, a jewel polished and inscribed by Drin, and in himself physically altered from male to female, Simmu shone like a beacon for demons, which instinctively she knew.

  She had no call on them, not really. It was because of Zhirem she hoped that her adoptive kin would seek her. Like a child which grows up in a pit of snakes, comforted by their skin and inured to their venom, Simmu had no conception of the danger of demon-kind. As intuitively as she enacted the impossible, her own sexual metamorphosis, thus she studied her gem, whispered and dreamed over it, danced on the lake shore, and waited, without fear, hopefully, for strangers.

  It was the second night in that spot. The unicorns had vanished and not come back; even the moon approached in a different form. All day, out of the harsh sun which blistered on the salt lake, Zhirem and Simmu—he knew her true name now—had slept in the wood’s erratic shade. Their night had been unsleeping, a night of sensuality and pain, but this night Zhirem had gone away alone, walking with his head bowed, meditating on his shame and the sweetness of it. He was restless with a wretched pleasure in defilement. When the moon sank a little, he would return to Simmu with eagerness and despair.

  Now, alone, Simmu glanced up from her witching, and found another.

  It was a demon, an Eshva, drawn by Eshva things, and any who had met demons would not have taken Zhirem for one, despite his hair and his handsomeness. The Eshva was masculine. His hair was ebony, his eyes sable and his flesh of a starry pallor. Everything about him exuded subtlety, marvel and a pure unworldly beauty of design.

  A thrill went irresistibly over Simmu, for beings of this tribe had been the delight of her earliest years. Unplanned, she half leaned toward him, but the demon leaned away, playful and malignant. His eyes held this for Simmu to read: You know our customs, some of them, but you are not one of us. You live also in the rude sunlight. Your flesh is clay, it will weaken and crumble. What you do with our spells and charms is well enough for a mortal, but among us it would be counted poor. Your silent footfall is a thunderclap, we are the air.

  Simmu felt the hurt of this, but did not cherish the hurt. Only she was driven to speech, which was a sort of defiance.

  “You come because of this green jewel and its aura. That brings you. What brings the Master of Night, Azhrarn the Beautiful, your Prince, one of the Lords of Darkness?” She used many of his titles from respect and the inchoate, second-hand adoration that had rubbed off on her from the demonesses of her infancy. Still, the Eshva shrank away.

  His eyes said merely: Repent.

  Simmu laughed, aloud.

  “Azhrarn,” she said, “Azhrarn, Prince of Demons. Is there no way to call him?”

  Again the Eshva shrank. A picture sprang from his mind to the receptive mind of Simmu. A silver pipe, fashioned for Azhrarn, might call Azhrarn—sometimes. But if he came, beware. And now the Eshva lau
ghed with his eyes, and terror in the backs of them.

  Simmu felt, perhaps, an instant of pride and that pride’s cheat. Zhirem expected wonders of her, expected her powers to equal those of the lower demons.

  “Listen, beloved,” said Simmu to the Eshva, “seek Azhrarn for me. Tell him one waits kneeling. Beg him.”

  The Eshva smiled. The smile said:

  I am not your slave, mortal.

  Simmu stroked the gem at her throat. She spoke now without words.

  The Drin made this. The Drin will make bargains. I will entice the Drin. The Drin will creep to Azhrarn on their bellies. Conceivably, Azhrarn will chide you that you told him nothing of Zhirem who would kneel to him.

  The Eshva lowered his eyes. He shivered and folded himself into the night without replying.

  When Zhirem came from the same night, Simmu said:

  “It is possible he will be seen here.”

  “Who?” Zhirem asked, but he went white, even his beautiful eyes whitened. All was confusion to him, the unreal mixed with the actual, fire with water. He drew the woman to him, and took refuge in her body, though that also was a thing of miracle and perversity. There was no reason left in the world.

  After the love-dance, they lay together, waiting.

  The night and the night wind moved on the shore. The lake licked its margins. The hard metal fruit of the trees clanked. Nothing more, and the dark began to pass. So they shifted, the lovers, moaned and clung together and drowned themselves briefly, and rose to the surface of that depth, alert, unslackened, waiting yet.

  A second day, a third night. Purple berries hung on a bush; they ate them. The evening was cold; they lit a fire which burned green from the wild wood they fed to it. There was a spring of water; they drank there like thirsty deer. They could not long keep from each other, for lust was new to them, and it was all they had. They began to lose purpose and fear and love and logic; they became two part-starved animals which endlessly coupled, which had been forever on the shore, forever would be, awaiting an advent which they had invented, something which would never occur.