Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Lylas went among the people of the river in the guise of a priestess, and she performed miracles and left them in no doubt she was to be reckoned with. She told them she had come on behalf of a god, but she did not name him. Some aura Uhlume had lent her, however, gave what she said a sinister weight. Child-woman, whore and sorceress, clad in his invisible mantle of power, she gave her directions and they were obeyed.

  The ring of nine mountains was sacred, she said. The valley in its midst was sacred. Most of all, the unimpressive pit of slime was sacred. Therefore, each of these things must be guarded, and the people of the river should count themselves blessed that they had been chosen by the ominous unnamed god to protect what was his. The people murmured uneasily that they did. Then, said the witch, they would not grudge a certain portion of their young men, the strongest and best, to form an elite army to patrol the desert. The people murmured, less easily than before, that of course the god was most welcome. Another item, said the witch. Watch towers must be built to reveal any strangers who approached. They must be challenged and turned away, and slain if they would not turn. Quite so, murmured the people, shifting their feet. But, they added, would such measures be enough? No, said the witch, but they need not be alarmed. She herself would set guardians about the mountains, beings of a non-human nature, which should not inconvenience their mortal comrades but be fatal to any intruder. (The people sweated with fear and politely blamed it on the weather.) Lastly, said the witch, a wall was to be built about the mountain valley, so high no one could get over it, not even the honest sentries outside. And within this wall, the ultimate guardians of the well, were to be put nine virgin girls, each thirteen years of age, and they must not leave the valley until they had served there nine years, after which another nine must replace them—and this regime would continue until time itself stopped. Nine virgin girls? the people asked, surprised. Quite so, said the witch, and indeed, no man must ever enter the valley, and if one attempted to, he must be killed. But how would the girls survive? inquired the people. There was neither food nor wholesome water—begging the god’s pardon, his well was undrinkable—in the valley.

  “No matter,” said the witch, “when I have finished with the valley, it will be more marvelous than any garden of the world. Your daughters will beg to serve there and when the hour of their departure comes, they will weep. In fact, you had better make certain that the nine maidens who are selected are as lovely as nine young moons, for I will not have ugly wenches in my garden, and the god must be honored.”

  She was fourteen, Lylas, and she was extravagant.

  Out of her fourteen-year-old mind burst fourteen-year-old fantasies and she made them real. The nonhuman guardians—what monsters they were. Horned and hoofed and many-fanged, with bundles of snakes for tails and the heads of tigers and sometimes wings. Some breathed fire, some cried aloud in awful voices. They hid in caves in the rocky lower terraces of the mountains, or else they dug holes at the mountains’ feet in the sand, but they would pop out and rage at whosoever went by, so the days and the nights of the desert grew clamorous, pyrotechnic and altogether less sweet than they had been before. Whole tribes of these beings the witch invented, not knowing when enough is enough. They did the river men no harm, it was true, but now and then some traveler strayed among them alone, and they tore him to pieces with their claws of adamant.

  Meantime the people dutifully erected the high wall about the valley. No doubt they had sorcerous aid, for the wall was the height of nine tall men standing on each other’s shoulders, and built in only a month, it was said. A narrow door gave admittance, a door which would open just once a day, at the setting of the sun. And this door, needless to report, possessed a guard more frightful than those previously mentioned. Moreover the wall burned whoever touched it, and lightning shot from the top of it, in case anyone should forget where it was in order to avoid it. Even the elected and elite army of young men who patrolled the desert, manned the watch towers and the mountains’ outer slopes, kept well clear of the wall.

  At last, Lylas went alone into the barren valley with the well in it. She took a stone, one of three Uhlume had given her, and she threw it down. And where she threw the stone, a fountain gushed up from the very depth of the earth, cool and white from some subterranean cave. And presently she threw the second and third stones, and the valley became musical with the sound of waters. Then Lylas, by her own skill which was not inconsiderable, made the promised garden blossom. Some of it was illusion and some was real and some, nourished by the sudden influx of water, came naturally to be in the course of years. But it was an area of unrivalled beauty, and to the people of the desert, who had thought the surly river and its swamps the height of horticultural delight, the garden in the valley was like the dream of a paradise which they had never ever been lucky enough to dream. And for sure, the witch showed it to them. They sighed with yearning and the little girls of eleven or twelve or thirteen made round their eyes, and they began to ask, “May I please go and guard the sacred well of the god?” In this much, Lylas had judged cleverly. However, it was perhaps her mistake, setting maidens within the wall, though she thought all the while it was her masterstroke. She had had sufficient of men and of roving, this witch, and possibly it really was her own dream she had focused in the valley—serenity in a green shade and nine virgins who, for nine years, would not have to put up with the goat games of men—games the witch had over-sampled and grown very weary of. Maybe, too, it was her own lost virginity she sought to contain pristine in the garden, she who had sold herself at an early age for coin and magic lessons. Nevertheless, to herself it seemed that this vanguard of innocent girls would prove the safest defense of all. Like many women who are themselves active, venturesome and crafty and see about them only women who are gentle, passive and home-loving, Lylas supposed herself unique among her sex and that no one was like her. The nine girls in the garden would be content, she believed, as no man could have been. They would play and wander and attend to their female affairs and never think to investigate the well or strive beyond it, while no man (all men being potential heroes), could have kept from doing both.

  Two hundred and one years after, meeting Narasen, the complaisance of Lylas was shaken. But by then she had dissociated herself from the guardianship of the second well, thinking her work there was completed.

  • • •

  The witch had Uhlume’s help to keep herself ever youthful by drinking ground bone, and physically she did not change at all. Mentally there was also little change. At fourteen she had been in some ways remarkably worldly, but really, for two hundred and thirty-two, the age at which Simmu met her, she was rather immature.

  Other than the witch, generally the earth was prone to alteration. And the Land of the Well was no exception. Actually, the static traditions that the witch had introduced there were the very things which brought change about.

  Firstly, the primitive people of the river became rather arrogant. After all, they had been chosen by a god to guard his sanctum. The immediate result of arrogance was courage and a spirit of exploration, which they had never felt before. The desert was uninviting, but now they looked at the river and began to make boats. In a matter of ten years or so, they were sailing down it, and finding other settlements and eventually the sea and a city or two, and it gave them ideas. One thing they noticed, no other settlement had been specially picked out by a god, and though a few claimed to have been, they had no proof. The arrogance begat more arrogance, and the river men became fighters and reavers, and they stole the best from everywhere they could and bore it home to the swamps, howling that it was for the temple of their god. Twice ten more years and they were doing nicely on their plunder, so constructing better ships and weapons to go with them and sailing forth to plunder more thoroughly. Fifty years, and there was a city on both the river banks, a fairly fine city of white walls, hanging trees and gilded steps. And when you came into this city, whose name was Vesh
um, meaning the Blessed One, you would see a statue on the western bank of black obsidian, depicting a grisly black god. Sometime the witch must have let slip a detail or two regarding the appearance of Uhlume, but the statue had neither Uhlume’s beauty nor his remoteness. Rather it resembled the horrors that bounded and squawked about the slopes of the nine mountains, breathing fire and flapping their wings and rending the odd traveler who naively persisted in coming their way.

  Now it is quite probable that no one would ever have troubled to come up river to Veshum as it had been, more probable still that no one would ever have bothered to trek over the arid mountain slopes just to see a slimy hole in a barren valley. But what with all the piracy and the riches the piracy accumulated, what with all the boasting of Veshum about its god, what with all the monsters guarding the mountain slopes and clawing travelers, and the young men patrolling the desert and shut up in the watch towers, and what with the story of nine virgins in an enchanted garden serving the god’s shrine, word got about, and no wonder. Then men began to come to Veshum and worship the black god and lay jewels on his altar. And they beheld, too, the ceremonious choosing of the virgins, how they must be without blemish and radiant, how they were hung with gold, how they were conducted up the mountain and went through a narrow door which magically appeared at sunset in a great wall, from the top of which shot lightning. And when nine new ones had gone in, nine older ones came out, and they came out weeping as the witch predicted, cast from paradise to face a world they had barely known and did not understand how to cope with. A few threw themselves off the mountain side to their death instantly, the rest stamped resentfully to Veshum and took up the posts of priestesses in the obsidian temple with a very bad grace. Some got married—they were sought after, being compulsorily chaste and always beautiful, as had been stipulated. None of them were ever content. They pined for the garden, and sometimes slew their husbands or their subsequent children, and were of course forgiven, being holy. Once in a while, one of these women, heavily veiled and crying copiously, would go back across the desert, up the mountain slopes, between the forests of sentries and monsters, and sit down by the hot high wall. When sunset came, she would rush to the door, be growled at by the guardian, driven aside and burn her hands. Then she would stab herself, or something of the kind.

  “But what is in their charge?” inquired the pilgrims who had come to Veshum.

  “A shrine of gold,” said the rich reavers (who had stopped reaving and now lived quite adequately off the gifts of visitors), “and the golden well beneath.” For the witch, last fantasy, had covered the muddy hole with a delicate temple, apparently of gold and with an apparently golden cupola.

  Then the travelers, or those who had not got too close to the monsters, went home, and said: “The men of Veshum set their bravest sons to protect the honor of their god. His sacred mountains seethe with devils and frights. In a garden too beautiful to speak of, nine virgin daughters of the city, lovelier than nine golden stars, tend a well of gold.”

  So the valley came to be called the Garden of the Golden Daughters, and Veshum became famous in that quarter of the earth. And time, as it always will, passed.

  • • •

  “There is no doubt in my mind,” said the rich man, “that our daughter, Kassafeh, will be chosen.”

  “Indeed yes,” said the rich man’s wife, but she kept her eyes on her embroidery.

  “Our daughter, Kassafeh,” repeated the rich man, smiling with satisfaction. His trade was importing rare silks up river from the cities on the coast, and sometimes his ships brought pilgrims to the altar of the black god and the pilgrims paid well. (The rich man’s grandfather had been a cutthroat pirate, but that was all forgotten now.) “Yes, for sure, Kassafeh will be chosen. She is exquisite. She will be one of the holy nine, and we shall be proud, and how much handier then it will be to get the other four girls wed.”

  “Quite so,” said his wife, not looking at him.

  “Our daughter,” cried the rich man in joyous possessiveness. “Yours and mine.”

  The wife pricked her finger, but she had blushed nearly as red as the blood.

  Kassafeh was beautiful, as the rich man said, and more beautiful than he said. Her skin was pale and water clear, she was slender as the pale new moon, her hair was the pale and pastel gold of a young sunrise. Her eyes—well, it was hard to describe her eyes. Yet, she was beautiful and all the rich man said, all he said but one thing, for she was not exactly his child.

  It had been this way. The rich man’s wife was not a woman of the river people but of the down-river shore folk. While her spouse was rich, she was aristocratic, and born in a fine house she had been, high in the hills that stood above the sea. Now, when she was eleven years old, Kassafeh’s mother had been told by her nurse: “You may go here and you may go there about the hills, provided I or your maidservant are with you. But whatever you do, you must not climb that tallest hill over there, the hill with a summit of bare rock.” “And why must I not?” demanded Kassafeh’s mother. “Because,” said the nurse, “it is sacred to the gods. It is their High Place, and no one must profane it.” Kassafeh’s mother, as can be imagined, concluded immediately that of all the ground in the world she wished to tread, the tallest hilltop was the most urgent. So one morning, evading her attendants, Kassafeh’s mother set out, and being agile and healthy, she raced the sun to the hill’s summit and arrived there first.

  It was a gorgeous spot. Far below spread the static seethe of the soft green hills, while the base of this one was scarlet in a tide of poppies. Far below, the sea was gleaming like a piece of silk, and here was a pinnacle of lovely pearly rock on which rested a wide blue sky. A marble altar stood to the gods at the very peak of the rock, but no one had dared tend it for centuries. Somehow they had got the idea that the gods came down personally from time to time and walked about on the peak, though the gods did not. However, belief is a strange thing, and could, particularly in those days, make other strange things happen.

  Kassafeh’s mother sat on the altar—she was an irreverent, careless girl—and gazed with love at the sky and the earth and the silken sea. It seemed to her after, that the hours slipped by when she was not looking, and the heavy gold of the afternoon sank down on the bare hilltop and she drowsed. Then, when she opened her eyes, Kassafeh’s mother noticed she was not alone.

  An unusual young man was there with her. At least, she took him to be a young man initially, although presently she began to wonder. His hair was a cobwebby gold and his eyes were most peculiar, like prisms which held all colors and none. In his flawless white skin were violet traceries of veins, not ugly as they would have been in another, but quite beautiful. He was naked, save for a sort of bright blue cloak that fluttered from one shoulder—it really did flutter though there was no wind to lift it, and it seemed additionally to grow out of his shoulder rather than being tied around him. Because he was naked, Kassafeh’s mother could see clearly that he had no male genitals; neither, however, did he look necessarily feminine. Indeed he was positively epicene, neuter even, and yet somehow extremely seductive.

  It is a god, thought Kassafeh’s mother. And she courteously got down from the altar and obeised herself. She was not afraid, for she would have found it hard to be afraid of anything so appetizing. She was of that specialized age and temperament which makes men rough and heavy things, fascinating but obnoxious, and here was a compromise.

  The “god” did not move or speak, so Kassafeh’s mother raised her head and next herself. She had the true aristocrat’s lack of reserve, and put one arm about the “god” and kissed him, by way of experiment, on the lips. She felt very little, other than the sensual pleasure of caressing something delightful but unreal, a statue of polished onyx for example. As for the “god,” he gave a kind of vague smile, and his golden lashes shivered.

  Now, he was not a god, this personage, the gods stayed in Upperearth. Yet there were certa
in elementals of that region, or near it, a race of sky creatures or beings of the ether. They wandered among clouds and stars, bathed in the red incense of sunsets, twanged tunes off the elongated silver chords of the rain. They were rarely seen and rarely did they have contact with the men and women of earth, who, to them, were singularly gross. Rather they preferred to haunt the fringes of Upperearth, admiring the gods through cloudy windows. And they resembled the gods somewhat, though not enough really to be confused with them. It is possible that it was these wandering elementals of Upperearth, or more accurately basement-Upperearth, who had visited the hill top, been sighted and taken for deities. Why they visited is not known, nor the reason why this one came when Kassafeh’s mother was sitting there. Perhaps he was curious to spy a human figure on the normally deserted peak.

  But now, after Kassafeh’s mother had kissed him and he had shivered his lashes, the elemental spoke in a faint harp-string voice.

  “Kiss me not again,” he said, “for my kiss may quicken you.”

  “Indeed,” said Kassafeh’s mother, with some skepticism, for she knew the facts of reproduction perfectly.

  “My people can instill new life by a kiss, though, as you are mortal, it would also take the seed of a mortal man to form a child in you.”

  “If you are a god, I should receive honor in bearing your off-spring,” supposed Kassafeh’s mother. And she kissed the elemental once again. The elemental shivered all over on this occasion, and suddenly a delicious taste as of fruit and wine filled the mouth of Kassafeh’s mother. She swallowed, and the elemental shut his violet gold-fringed eyelids.

  “I warned you, but you paid no heed. It will take five children, I believe, before the seed of a man and the life I have implanted in you may commingle. Yes, your sixth child will be mine.” And the elemental paled and giving a sigh of satisfaction, enervation and guilt, he let his impatient cloak haul him upward, and soon he dissolved into the blue sky.