Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Kassafeh’s mother went home after that with a certain perplexity, and told some lies to her nurse as to where she had been. Luckily no perceptible result followed, and by the time that she was married, several years later, to the rich grandson of the pirate, and sent to live in faraway, white-walled Veshum, Kassafeh’s mother had almost erased the incident, which she ascribed to a dream or fantasy of her pubescent youth.

  She bore four daughters and one son to the rich man. All five were comely enough, and the rich man had no complaints. Then one night he lay with his wife, and when he let loose his seed in her, such pangs of rapture overtook the mother of Kassafeh, that she shrieked with pleasure—a thing she was not given to, for she had found men (that is, her husband), after all, rather a disappointment.

  The rich man congratulated himself on his prowess, and when he learned his wife had conceived once more, he congratulated himself on his fertility.

  The child was born after the allotted span with very small difficulty, and from the beginning Kassafeh’s mother watched her daughter with interest and misgiving. And, as Kassafeh grew, so the interest and the misgiving grew. Although decidedly a mortal child, with no uncanny additions or subtractions of the flesh, and with something even of her father’s shrewdness and all her mother’s looks and more, yet there was an essence to Kassafeh none of the other children had. Her hair was such a wild ethereal powdered gold, and her eyes—for the eyes of Kassafeh would change color, not predictably or reasonably, but in the fashion of no mortal eyes. This precocity was studiously overlooked and ignored. It was put down to tricks of light or shade, to the facial expressions of the girl herself. But it was none of these things. It was obviously the inheritance of a part-fathering by something which had eyes like prisms, all colors and none. . . .

  Thus, when the rich man spoke of his parenthood in respect of Kassafeh, Kassafeh’s mother blushed. And he, recalling her solitary shriek of ecstasy, thought she too recalled it and foolishly blushed for that, since she had never cried similarly again.

  Meantime, Kassafeh herself, very much her mother’s daughter if not all her earthly father’s, was listening at the door. And her eyes were shifting like pools from darkest green to palest, maddest gray as she angrily heard mention of the nine virgins and her likelihood of being chosen to become one of them.

  I will not consent, she vowed, to exist walled up in a garden for nine years. Besides, what good has it ever done any of them? They die like flies when they are released. Then she bethought herself of how the nine virgins must be without blemish, and her eyes went to indigo and she to find a sharp disfiguring knife.

  But when she had the knife ready, she glared at its point and at her water-lily skin, and she put the knife away again.

  The great day of the choosing was the very day after that one. And Kassafeh must go, with the other eligible virgin girls of thirteen, to the square before the temple of Veshum. During the early years of this cult, the virgins had been taken from any walk of life, but, as Veshum got more opulent, so the virgins had had to be. Only the daughters of the rich and influential were recently considered for the honor of serving the god.

  They were conducted up the temple stair into a hall, and from thence, singly into a cubicle, where the embittered, garden-exile priestesses examined them with cruel avid eyes. “Not good enough,” shrilled these priestesses. “Note these ugly splay feet, note this vast black mole. No, no, they will not do.” Many of the poor girls ran out sobbing with humiliation. Yet there were always at least nine pretty ones with no blemish, and then the priestesses would probe further. “Now, what is this? Only thirteen and broken into! Pah, for shame, you little harlot.”

  When Kassafeh entered the cubicle, the priestesses turned more wizened than ever, for they could tell at a glance that here was perfection combined with utter chastity. This brat was going to dwell in the heavenly garden which they could never re-enter. How they hated her. But Kassafeh removed her garments and the priestesses smiled at her with love. “Ah,” they congratulated Kassafeh, “what a nasty rash of boils.”

  “Indeed yes,” said Kassafeh, who had made the boils from paste and silk dye the night before. “And I am never free of them. Always I have at least ten or twelve. The physician can do nothing.”

  However, one of the priests was looking through a secret hole in the wall and, quivering with emotion though he was from all the nakedness he had been gloating on, this close he was sharp enough to know a fake boil from a real one. Accordingly he put his mouth to the hole and shouted in a dreadful voice: “The god chooses this maiden and will cure her. Fetch water and wash her body and the boils shall fall from her and she shall be whole.”

  Kassafeh scowled and the priestesses grumbled, but they did as they were told in case the voice might be of divine origin. Sure enough, all the paste boils abandoned Kassafeh in the water, leaving her wholesome and lovely.

  “I will not go,” growled Kassafeh.

  The priestesses scourged her with velvet whips that left no lasting mark, and Kassafeh wept rebelliously. Soon after, the names of the nine virgins were proclaimed, and Kassafeh’s was the ninth.

  She had never reverenced the black image. She thought him vile, for, as a statue, he was surely unaesthetic. The gods, Kassafeh assumed, would be fair. Though she had not been initiated in the truth of her own conception, Kassafeh’s mother had told her many stories of the airy deities of the shore people, and these were the gods Kassafeh was inclined to worship. Now she cursed the idol of Veshum and, as he did not strike her down, she became convinced he was as ineffectual as she had always supposed.

  Kassafeh pondered flight, but it was not to be. She was locked in her chamber by scolding distraught parents, and dragged thence only on the morning when the nine virgins went up the slope of the nine mountain ring.

  The other eight virgins were smirking and joyful. “How favored we are,” they babbled to each other, as the priests hung gold ornaments on them. “How happy we shall be.” “Baaa,” bleated Kassafeh scornfully at them, “baa-baaa!” And when the priest stroked her breast as he set the gold necklace over it, pale-yellow-eyed, Kassafeh bit him.

  Across the desert the procession from Veshum went, chariots with fringed canopies of vermilion, priests and priestesses shaking bells and beating drums and gongs, wild beasts on jeweled leashes for show, and a host of people who had come to stare. All day they journeyed, pausing now and then to drink cool wine and eat fruit and sweetmeats, till they reached the dunescape from which the nine-mountain ring might be seen.

  Here the patrolling army rode up and saluted them, several hundred stalwart young men, and from the watch towers smoke signals rose and horns were sounded.

  The sun was westering, the sky altering to a deep blue-gold.

  From their burrows and caves the monsters were peering and yapping gusts of mild fire at the procession. Some of the virgins, waxing afraid at the monsters, screamed and fainted. Kassafeh was not one of these. She looked at the captain of the patrol army, a handsome youth, with regret. But the captain knew his vocation and did not look at her at all.

  From here, as the light thickened, you could see very clearly the electric flashes dazzling off from the top of the mountains where the hot wall was. The procession started up the mountain side. Bells and cymbals clinked and clattered, and the monsters licked their lips at the foreign travelers, warning them not to fall behind the people of Veshum. Just before sunset, the crowd rolled and scrambled over the last height, and stood before the awful wall.

  It had a shimmering haze on it, the wall, like molten steaming metal. In one part, a thicket of black trees seemed to mask some living presence—the unseen ghastly guardian of the door? Then, as the sky grew brazen, a slit appeared through the thicket in the incandescent brickwork.

  “Come forth, O holy daughters of the golden well!” cried the priests, “Come forth from the garden, your term of service is done.”


  And presently out trooped nine wretched sniveling maidens, rending their garments and their hair. They did not dare to disobey the ritual summons, but their hearts were breaking.

  Kassafeh could not contain herself.

  “Rejoice!” she cried loudly. “Be glad that you are no longer slaves—I would change places with any one of you.”

  But the priests quickly banged their drums and clanged their gongs and drowned her out. Simultaneously, oblivious, some of the nine ex-guardian virgins were, as usual, throwing themselves off the mountain. The others wailed and shed tears. Kassafeh, cobalt-eyed with fury, shut her mouth.

  And, in a tidal surge of musical crashings and chantings, prayers, blessings, and the dim howls of the exiled virgins, Kassafeh and her eight companions went forward. Heat burned on either side like powerful furnaces, and from this heat a nightmarish something grimaced approval at them as they fled by it, which really was the door-guardian for certain. Kassafeh, as she ran, poked out her tongue at it.

  And then the heat was gone, and the door behind them was gone, and all the commonplace world went with them.

  The golden daughters had arrived in paradise.

  2

  On the inside, the wall was quite different, as was everything else. Here it was a lustrous palisade of jade and sea-blue ceramic over which rogue vines and climbing plants had spun a glossy web beaded with tiny fruits and flowers. The doorway opened high above the bowl of the valley; entering, the selected virgins always saw a panorama.

  The inner slopes of the nine mountains were also unlike their outer surfaces. Lawns green as emerald cascaded downward and were lost among a maze of trees, all of a hundred other greens, and nearer to the valley floor this wild green blended into turquoise and far off into a gentle liquid blueness, such as was never seen in the desert or along the dry burnt banks of Veshum’s river. The whole valley was redolent of water, sounded with it, basked in it, and the fresh odor of sweet soil and abundant growing things was a concentrated perfume on the air never before scented by the nine maidens of the river people.

  Now the sun was going out and the valley subtly turned itself from greens and blues, through goldenness, into lucid purples and ambers. Here and there a waterfall shone warm silver in the dusk and luminous stars appeared overhead. A roseate moon lit the garden in an unworldly way.

  Before the entrance, a flight of wide translucent marble steps led down into the valley between the verdant mountain slopes. In the strange and rosy moon-illumination—which seemed all part of the garden’s magic, as indeed it was—the nine virgins espied something approaching up the stair.

  A creamy lioness.

  The nine virgins were stricken with misgiving and some clutched each other, as the nine virgins always did at this point, seeing a predatory animal advance on them through the twilight. But the lioness drew near and displayed not a sign of dislike or hunger. In fact, she rubbed her head against their legs, and she had no smell of the carnivore but rather of flowers. To many a young girl, no dream could be more endearing than this of the savage beast grown tame and fawning on her. All responded swiftly, petted the lioness, received the velvet kiss of her unthreatening, oddly fragrant mouth, and were willing to go after her when she moved to lead them down into the valley.

  Beyond the steps, a mossy carpet unrolled over descending terraces. Through velure woods the nine maidens passed, led by the lioness. And how fearless were the woods to them, even their shadows genial, touched by the rose moonlight. Nightingales sang, and soft dark rabbits darted playfully between the paws of the big cat, who never glanced at them.

  On the other side of the woods lay a small natural lake, fed by the waterfalls. And there was a ship at the lake’s edge on to which the nine virgins, with nervous charmed cries, allowed themselves to be persuaded.

  The ship was not like the serviceable masculine ships of the river people. It was a thing of delicate arching prow and swooping fishtail stern. It glittered and gleamed and from its slender mast transparent spangled sails opened their wings. It sped lightly across the water without help of wind or of oar. And the nine maidens stared about them amazed.

  How many prodigies are necessary to prove you are in a land of prodigies? The pomegranate witch, extravagant fourteen, had put into the garden a wondrous excess of them. Some were toys for the children the nine virgins had lately been, some were mirages to trap the hearts of the women they must become.

  On the far shore of the lake, orchards and groves of fruit trees added the resonance of citron and plum to the air; date palms rising in ribbed columns, fanned the face of the sky. On a hill clad in wine-red roses and inky hyacinth stood a palace of white marble with open doors.

  Miniature birds came flying in a cloud from the palace. They twittered to the nine virgins as if to welcome them.

  In a hall where fountains played, a banquet had been laid for the girls, as it would every evening be laid for them, though they never knew by whom or by what. They sat on cushions of silk and ate rare dishes, things even their father’s tables had not provided them, and they drank wines and sherbets in crystal goblets and the flagons were never empty.

  Above, in the marble dolls’-house palace, were scented baths and beds of silk, from whose canopies pearls hung like water drops, as if it had been raining pearls in every sleeping chamber.

  Something in the wine, or the pale smoke which drifted from the perfumed lamps, had made the nine virgins highly susceptible, as it always did. They sank to sleep on their couches and had visions of their own exhilarated content, and of the sacred golden temple which glinted to the west beyond the palace. They dreamed of the holy well they would guard and of the lions they would sport with and of the marvels as yet undiscovered in this country of marvels.

  Only Kassafeh had a knot in her belly from the rich though quite illusory food, which had really been only roots and bread and similar life-supporting dull stuff, tempered by sorcery. Only Kassafeh turned and twisted angrily on her pearl-dripped hallucination of a bed. She trusted none of what she had seen, for such beauty did not belong with the graceless black god of Veshum. And when she slept, she dreamed of the handsome young patrol captain and she cried to him: “Take me from this place and back to the real world!” But he changed into a rabbit and hopped hurriedly away from her.

  • • •

  It was a garden of delights, the delights of girl children and of girl women. All the worldly pomegranate witch had missed?

  Some of the fountains played delicious drinks, some scent, some had jewels swirling through them which could be plucked out; some fountains changed color like rainbows. There were a myriad rooms in the palace. And in the myriad rooms were a myriad things. Strange fascinating games, magical mirrors which showed other wonderlands, dolls so beautifully painted and dressed they seemed real, and which could be made, by the turning of a key, to move about, sing, dance, and converse. Besides, there were great chests of garments, raiment more lustrous than any gown the nine virgins had seen in the world—or would ever see, for illusion is always superior. And near the fabulous clothes chests were caskets of gems and ornaments. Here and there would be found a musical instrument, which one of the maidens had only to pick up to find she could play it and produce from it scintillating ravishing sounds. In another spot might be located a loom, somehow very easy to master, which could spill off, in response to the haphazard weaving of the maiden, incredible fabrics with glowing pictures in them which appeared almost alive. There were a few exquisite books whose pictures actually did come alive.

  Beyond the palace, roses and other flowers filled the atmosphere with perfume. Fruit hung from vines and boughs, always ripe, always at its most eatable moment. On certain trees sweetmeats clustered, child’s enticement, while in some of the arbors, ivory swings depended. Sit in one of these, and it would rock you as violently or as gently as you asked it to.

  The garden itself had its own
endless variety, for no part of it was ever quite the same, as if it constantly shifted itself a little, changing the shade of a blossoming tree, the angle of a distant slope. It seemed limitless, although its boundaries—the green upsloping inner walls of the mountains—held it safe as a loving hand. And from recesses in the foliage of this safeness came all manner of animals in a curious and soothing harmony. Downy white kids at play with the cubs of a panther, equally ready to include a maiden in the fun; tigresses who would invite a girl on to their backs and carry her, laughing and crazy, with flowers in her hair, for miles, and then lie down and accept her head on the gold-streaked flank which smelled applicably of cinnamon and oranges. Astounding numbers of birds, in plumage of green and scarlet, would lift one lightly by her sleeves and fly her up into a tree and sing to her. Talking monkeys with rope tails and wise solemn eyes would tell stories of an elder world. Lionesses swam in the lake and other pools and streams of the garden, and should the maidens wish to venture there, the lionesses would bear them through the water, or else great blue smiling fish-beasts would rise and offer the handholds of their fanlike fins.

  There were always young things in the garden, mysteriously so, for never did any male animals show themselves. Birds’ eggs like lapis lazuli or green onyx would abruptly arrive in nests and hatch into glamourous birds, or else a new crop of baby tigers would come gambolling over the lawns—but there was no hint of congress or fertilization.

  The sexual stirrings of young women were not encouraged. Blissful ignorance and a preponderance of all things else were intended to stifle them—as in most it did. But a girl grown suddenly disturbed and discontented, without knowing why, would come on a bubbling crystal with a stem and mouth-piece of jade. And being moved to smoke from this, the girl would sink back and in climactic inchoate dreamings her sensuality would be appeased in a form she would never entirely recall. The result of this being that she never afterward quested for a man to assuage her yearning and never missed one, but went instead to find the bubbling crystal.