Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  As for the holy shrine, the golden temple and the sacred well, the duty of the nine virgins was self-imposed but enduring.

  At first they examined the temple with awe. Next, timidly, they stole inside. The walls and roof were gold, the wide window embrasures were gold, even the shadows through the golden fretwork window lattices were gold. In the center of the floor, which was paved with bone, stood a golden basin. Going to the basin, lifting out a stopper of ivory, the nine maidens might gaze downward in stupefied respect at a dim muddy glint, and they might smell the noxious mildewy odor of it. Truly, the sacred well was the only unlovely item in the whole garden.

  Still, since the witch had reasoned that even the most scatter-brained of humanity required some purpose, and she had envisaged the maidens as totally scatter-brained, the well and the temple had a feel to them which instilled in the nine virgins a sense of importance and religious elevation. As a result, each group of nine virgins had always evolved some form of ceremony to do with the well. Generally, it would occur at sunset—associated with their arrival and the opening of the magic door. Generally, it was expressed in some species of dance and a bringing in of fruit and flowers to scatter about the gold basin, and these offerings, without fail, gratifyingly vanished before the next visit. Then the nine virgins would re-affirm their loyalty to the god, perhaps kiss the stopper in the basin, and whisper such words as: “Mighty father, behold your daughter and your slave.” But later, some pride, (or unconscious resentment) always made the virgins re-avow their virginity at the well, in this sort of way: “Behold I am sealed, even as the sacred well is sealed, and by my purity I will keep pure the holy place of the god, and may I perish before I break faith with him.”

  The weight of all this, its significance, for it could not but acquire weight and significance from the force of belief each group of nine virgins wrought continuously in the valley, were by this time very great. How then could rebellious Kassafeh be immune to them? For immune she was.

  The delights of the garden she was suspicious of. She thought them traps, masks hiding the horrible face of the black god. Though she was tempted by comradely panthers, magic books and instruments, dolphins and sweetmeats, she viewed her very temptation with distrust, and denied it everything.

  And somehow, the very marvels of the garden, seeming to grow aware of her denial, came gradually to ignore her. No tigress offered to bear Kassafeh through the groves, no dove flew to sit on her shoulder. Even the fruits of the garden did not taste so sweet to Kassafeh, even the roses were not so red to her eyes. And slowly, as a year went by, Kassafeh noticed other weird changes. For sometimes, walking restlessly about the park, she would, for a second or two, sight an area of barrenness, a blade of rock, a tract of grassless dust. Or she would hear raucous and unmelodic noises from a palace room, and going in find a maiden with one of the instruments, and two or three others sitting near, obviously hearing thrilling music of unqualified virtuosity. Now I see behind the mask, thought Kassafeh vindictively, but she was frightened too. Or maybe he is punishing me. Let me be punished then. As for the rituals at the well, Kassafeh eschewed them. When she went there, she went alone, and lifting out the ivory stopper she sniffed the muddy stink. “That is more like you,” she said to the god.

  Doubtless it was the strain of elemental in her, her part-fathering by the sky-person, himself part-kindred of Upperearth, that made her unsusceptible to this paradise and its snares.

  One year passed and a second year began. It seemed to Kassafeh the other eight virgins had become more sheeplike and silly than ever. Kassafeh wept often and secretly. She dreamed again of the young and handsome captain, and now he bore her away with him on an eagle’s back, but when she woke up, she found a silly sheeplike virgin bleating in her ear.

  “I too have been troubled in this fashion, Kassafeh. But I have smoked dreams from a bubbling crystal, and I was healed of all distress. And look, here is just such a crystal by your couch.”

  Kassafeh looked, and saw a murky glass with some murky fluid restive in it.

  “Come,” urged her fellow virgin, giving her the jade mouthpiece—which to Kassafeh was of dirty chipped enamel. However, disturbed as she was, Kassafeh accepted the drug and lay back with it.

  Presently her head swam. Out of a darkening haze, something pounced on her. It was not a man, rather some caricature of a man, created by a fourteen year old witch-whore who had only contempt for the antics of the men to whom she had sold herself. He was at once comic, ridiculous and terrifying. Kassafeh’s aloofness from the garden had negated the sensual and erotic aspect of the bubbling crystal; all vagueness and pleasure were taken from it, leaving only a crude comment of the witch’s mind upon union with the male.

  A hairy, stenchful, and mannerless giant grappled Kassafeh. His teeth were pylons and his arms were iron chains.

  A phallus, larger than a tower, rushed between her limbs and strove to pierce her. Kassafeh, not surprisingly, screamed.

  When she awoke, bathed in sweat, she tottered to a window and vomited on the patchwork valley, which to her was now half green and half desert.

  In later months, she took to climbing the inner slopes of the mountains. She would ascend to the very wall. She tried to discover the magic door (the stair had, of course, moved itself to another place), but from within you could never, in any case, see an opening, let alone get through it, save on that one day when the term of service was done. For all the illusions in the valley, the safeguards were concrete. Every monster was real, the heated wall, its trick door and the fiend who watched it.

  The second year passed and a third year began.

  By that time for sure, though there were nine virgins in the Garden of the Golden Daughters, only eight of them were guardians. The ninth was an enemy, trapped within the gate.

  3

  Simmu, alone, walked for a year across the earth to reach the land of the Well and its garden. Azhrarn had gifted him with three things, each in its way a pledge: the burning kiss, the token of the Eshva jewel, the location of the source of his goal. But Azhrarn, that conjurer of confusions, had left Simmu to seek the goal unaided, and Simmu—unaided—was to find the road a long one.

  He knew himself, however, from the first, a hero—that is, one with a destiny to fulfil which should shake the world a bit, at its corners. And this knowledge both uplifted and appalled him.

  It was told that he had many adventures on his journey, for heroes then as now were obliged to have adventures. Yet the adventures were of the sort to be expected when traveling through untamed lands abounding in ferocious animals, not all of them natural, where at every bridge and cross-path there might stand some local robber-king demanding toll.

  Simmu, who had come to reckon himself mere human clay, was far from that, and, piece by piece, he began to rediscover it. Confronted by a pack of slavering starving dogs, he froze in alarm, his mortal wits deserted him—and let the Eshva magery seep back in its stead. Before he grasped what he was at, Simmu had commenced working glamour on the dogs. Soon they slumped panting and slit-eyed, and wagged their tails in tranced approbation. Tears ran down the cheeks of Simmu, refinding so definitely what he had thought forever gone from him, his demon upbringing. Necessity had been the key. Later, still half afraid, he had deliberately worked his way down into a gully where lions were basking in the sun. They scented man, and swaggered up snarling, but Simmu felt the Eshva magic rise ready to his hand, and clothed himself in it, and soon his fear and their snarling stopped. These lions did not smell of flowers but of lions, rank uncompromising smell of life, nor were they gentle, but prepared at all other times to rend and kill and eat what currently pleased and enchanted them, and their quiescence was therefore breathtaking.

  Simmu’s sensation of a heroic fate was cemented by these and similar deeds, which occasionally were witnessed, and earned him panic-stricken accolades from the peoples round about. However, he was change
d, for he thought of his powers as a facet of himself rather than himself as a facet of his powers.

  He kept himself also as a man. The impetus for his feminine metamorphosis—Zhirem, afterward, Azhrarn—was gone. And indeed, Simmu the man grew hard and lean as the lions he courted, a bronze-sword blade in himself with the sunburst hair above it like a mane. Bearded, too, he was, a beard trimmed close by use of a knife, and dressed he was in garments which he had, as ever, stolen as he went by, but no longer an amorphous peasant robe which did for either sex, but the masculine dress of a wanderer who needs limbs and hands free for fighting. For of course, he had been fighting also. As with the dogs, faced with the initial fight, Simmu had been unnerved. No one had ever taught him this art. He had never even scrapped with the other children in the temple courts—they had been too in awe of him for that. Thus, meeting brigands at a ford, he wondered what would become of him, and if, after all, he must fall in Death’s net.

  “Ho, stripling,” bawled the brigands, “ho, pretty apricot-plumed youth. Ho, small fawn, tiny amber cat. This ford is our ford, and either you must pay us, or you must fight Ugly Pig, here.”

  And then Ugly Pig came forward.

  Ugly Pig had been suitably named, though no pig, ugly or not, was as ugly as this one.

  “By my missing ear and my seven missing teeth,” compounded Ugly Pig, “I’m ready. By my ten warts I am,” he added.

  Ugly Pig had slain many. He fought with his knife and his strangle-strong fingers and his remaining yellow teeth and his groin-trampling feet. Simmu was of average height, neither short nor tall for a young man, and Ugly Pig was larger, both up and sideways.

  For such an entity, the demons would have experienced vast contempt. The Vazdru and the Eshva, who took care to be beautiful in their human guise, abhorred ugliness more than goodness. And something of this aristocratic loathing influenced Simmu, and he made an involuntary gesture with his hand which showed it plainly. But Ugly Pig presumed Simmu was going for the knife in his belt and rampaged forward.

  And before he knew what he was doing, Simmu had darted aside and Ugly Pig had made lavish connection with a tree.

  What none of them had foreseen was Simmu’s feral swiftness and his senses sharper than a man’s, all of which acted independently of his mortal brain.

  Ugly Pig roared and shook himself, and whirled out his knife and came in again. And Simmu flashed by him and past him, and leaped upon his back as a young leopard would have done. And there he drew his knife and cut the vital neck vein of Ugly Pig. And when his opponent crashed down, Simmu flew aside, landing lightly on the grass, snarling and for a moment entirely bestial, with the unpredictable malice of a beast. It was the first occasion he had killed in person, given a man, as it were, to his enemy Death. But Simmu, fighting for his life, did not care.

  The brigands hesitated. They were not used to such shocks. Then five of them flung themselves on Simmu, and if Simmu had been only the human youth he considered himself, he would have perished that minute.

  But Simmu was Simmu. He spun and swivelled and struck in deadly glancing slashes aimed for the vital points the tiger and the leopard understood so well. And try though they did to fell him and to slaughter him, the brigands could no more have felled and slaughtered a creature one third cat and one third wolf and a final third snake, and sorcerous to boot.

  In the end, four more lay dead and the rest took to their heels, yelling it was a devil sent by the gods to pay them out.

  Simmu also ran from the place, for corpses made him tremble yet. But, leaning on a tree, shaking and wide-eyed, he nevertheless knew he could out-fight the murdering flotsam of the wilderness, not from proficiency but from sheer instinct—the training of his babyhood. And he laughed in his throat and cleaned his knife and went on. And thereafter whoever challenged him got short shrift. And some were not mere brigands but cunning in arms, and still he beat them and slew them, their skills no match for his lightning. Though once or twice they cut him, and a scar rose on his left shoulder like a white half moon, and one like a thunderbolt on his right thigh—like the very lightning he became beneath the blades of others.

  Hence, a reputation ran before him, and often one stab of his lynx eyes was enough to send enemies away, no need for brawling.

  But there was to be another adversary, far worse than beasts or men.

  • • •

  He was halfway to Veshum, halfway along his year-long road, with hero deeds behind him, and the bright mad spark of his heroic goal leading him on. He had already begun to hear garbled reports of the river city, its god and its garden, reports insubstantial as noises carried on the wind.

  It was late afternoon in a country of hills and little villages. Simmu walked with a long effortless stride, his eyes low-lidded against the sun, playing a pipe he had recently fashioned as he journeyed. And in his mind, the dream was of another dusty walk, and one (who had it been?) who had walked with him and afterward gone away, and the pipe made a song of the melancholy of his dream and the birds answered it from the thickets and from the sky.

  And then the birds flew away, and the path along the tawny hill grew peculiarly silent and no breeze moved the thickets. And yet there came a kind of rustling, like a breeze through dust or leaves, at Simmu’s back.

  Simmu stopped playing. He stopped striding. He turned round.

  Sometimes, drawn by the abnormal quality that clung about him, animals might follow Simmu, but there was no animal to be seen. The track was vacant. Yet, turning his back to it again, Simmu hesitated. For it seemed that something followed even so.

  Simmu went on, and the awareness of another behind him went on as well. A man would have doubted himself, but Simmu’s awareness was too fine to mislead him. The track wound round the hill’s crest, and here Simmu paused to wait. But none came, and he moved on, and then, and only then, on came the thing which followed.

  To be pursued is strange, disconcerting, but not inevitably menacing. Simmu knew as much, and thus the overt menace which his pursuer brought with it was the more sinister.

  Simmu had grown to analyze his emotions and to title them—another human failing he had been without in his earliest youth. Now he knew himself afraid, with a unique and specialized fear. However, to turn revealed nothing, and to walk on seemed to invite nothing. He walked, and the sun started to sink and to redden the hills. And then Simmu became conscious of an extra redness in the sky over his shoulder.

  This time, when Simmu turned, he did see—something.

  It was like the after image of some fiery object, as if he had stared at the sun and then away and seen this shadow-printing on the air. It had no form, was not really present. And yet it was.

  Below, off the track from the hill, one of the numerous modest villages squatted. As a rule Simmu did not bother to seek the settlements of men. He preferred the lonely dark which summoned the Eshva memory. But this sunset he felt himself driven by his fear to take refuge in the village.

  He ran down the slope. The sun ran a fraction faster.

  Just as Simmu came into the street of beaten earth, the day winked out into dusk and for the last, he glanced back. The track, the hill, the sky were empty. Yet somehow, superimposed upon the gathering veils of night was a filmy mark, black-red.

  • • •

  A peasant boy-child, eight years old, opened the door and goggled up at the man who stood there: “Come see!” the child cried, overwhelmed at finding a new species.

  Then the whole family came, two agreeable wives (one holding a ladle), a husband, three adolescent sons, and a shy girl of six.

  They gazed at the vision with entertainment, for he was utterly unlike them. Lean tempered bronze, with a silver half moon on his bare broad young shoulder, and a handsome face that seemed to gaze straight back at them from the jungle, tongues of flame for hair and green flames for eyes.

  “Be glad to enter,”
murmured one of the wives, and they all drew him inside.

  By a fire-pit in the overcrowded earthen room, they gave him food and beer and they sat round him and looked at him as though he were a wonderful gem they had brought home from the hills. And when they wanted more than looking, the children approached, the girl to gather handfuls of his hair and the boys to examine the notched murderous knife with its stained handle. The man spoke of journeys and the two women flirted with their eyes in a nice undemanding way.

  Simmu spoke hardly ever, but their company, which was itself like that of a cozy form of animal warren, lulled his nerves. The childish clambering did not trouble him, foxes and cats had clambered all about him and over him in his own childhood. Presently he showed them the wooden pipe, and when they made O’s of their eyes, he played it for them.

  The fire crackled and the watch dog was stretched at the threshold. It seemed nothing unwelcome could get in.

  They lay to sleep together, trustingly, on the piled rugs.

  The fire guttered and slept too.

  The dog did not wake, but Simmu woke. He woke to a red man kneeling on his breast (a man of nothing but redness, a vile red like old blood, hairless, featureless save for eyes like wet blood in the dry-blood countenance), a man, if man he was, who squeezed and squeezed at Simmu’s throat.

  Unable to get breath or to cry aloud, Simmu, being blinded and drowned in a quagmire of this bloodiness, lost his humanity and became that other he was. And the other summoned a resistance from within himself no man could just then have summoned.

  With his left hand he seized the thing’s own throat—which was substantial enough, though clammy and not like flesh. With his right hand Simmu chose his knife from among the fingers of the sleeping sons, and he stabbed up into the neck he had seized which, now sightless, he could not glimpse but only feel.