Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  In the courts of inns, on the terraces of palm trees which descended to the river, Simmu, with hardly any prompting, was taken aside and informed of all he might need to know. Of the nine-year term of the virgins, of the golden shrine that housed the well, of the hot high wall and the patrolling army and its watch towers, of the ferocious monsters who dwelt on the mountain slopes. And one morning, as Simmu was conversing with a stonemason on a terrace, a heavily veiled woman of tragic appearance approached, and the stone mason said: ‘Take notice, stranger, for there passes one of the holy virgins of the Garden. Three years since, her term of service ended. She walked from the garden weeping, as they always do. And now she has stabbed her husband.”

  The woman, who naturally had not been detained for the murder—as the sacrosanct persons of the Daughters of the Garden were never detained for any crime, however heinous—now passed by, and Simmu could observe her closely. She was tall and slender, but bare-footed as one who mourned, and her head and face were thickly muffled in her veiling. Though he could not spy her features, Simmu heard her groans and lamentations, and her tears ran down her veil across her breast.

  “Is she then sorry that she stabbed him?” inquired Simmu innocently.

  “Indeed no,” declared the man with some smugness. “It is a common event for the virgins to assassinate their families. They pine only for the Garden they may never return to and the wondrous presence there of the god. No doubt,” he added in a low and portentous tone, “she will soon attempt to regain admission, which also is common.” And he told Simmu in poetic detail how frequently the veiled and weeping exiled virgins would go out alone across the desert, ascend the mountain slopes, and sit down by the hot wall to await the sunset opening of the narrow door.

  “But do none challenge them?” asked Simmu.

  “Challenge a holy Daughter? Why should they be challenged? They are quite recognizable with their feminine attire, their veils and crying. Only foreigners are turned from the area. Additionally, the monsters on the slopes, set there by the god for the protection of his garden, can easily differentiate between one of the river people and an outlander, and all outlanders they tear in shreds.”

  “And when the virgins reach the door and it opens, what then?”

  “There is a final monster, worse than the rest, which guards the door, and it will let none in save the virgins of thirteen when they first come there in accordance with the god’s decree. It wards off the unfortunate maiden, and presently she slays herself. It is always the same.”

  “Suppose one were to enter the garden?”

  “Impossible!”

  “True, it seems so. But let us say, for argument’s sake—”

  “No, no, I will not blaspheme, even for the sake of argument. None are ever in the garden save the nine fair young girls, chaste as lilies and sweetly ignorant (as all women should be but seldom remain, alas). And the playmates of these naive and lovely creatures are reputedly female beasts, gentle as lambs. For no male of any kind is permitted in the garden. Saving, of course, the suitable masculine penumbra of the god.”

  At this moment, the veiled and doleful figure of the murderess-virgin, having moved up the steps to the city street, slunk into the crowds. Simmu bade the stonemason farewell, and by a circuitous route went after her.

  She was no trouble to keep track of. The crowd parted respectfully to let her through, and she wept and groaned continuously. It shortly became obvious that she was already on her way to seek the nine mountain ring and the door in the wall. Soon she, with Simmu a discreet distance behind, left the city by an unfrequented gate and began her trek across the dunes.

  It was a barren, mostly shadeless region, but the resolute maiden walked on over it until noon blistered the sky. Then, coming to a solitary gaunt rock, over whose ledges the sand blew and the sun poured, she sat down to rest in a drop of shadow at its foot. Simmu, less noisy than the sand itself, approached her.

  Among the demons, it was the Vazdru who sang in the ears of men to wake or to trance them, but the Eshva might have done as much if they had had voices. Simmu crept like the lynx to the woman’s shoulder, and in her ear, demon fashion, he sang. No doubt, to a demon, it would have been a poor copy—what had the Eshva conveyed so scornfully by the lake of salt? Your silent footfall is a thunderclap, we are the air. Nevertheless, this poor copy was mesmeric enough to a mortal.

  Deliriously lulled, the woman’s tears stopped; she sank against the rock and sighed. Simmu lifted her veil. Though her eyes were red and her mouth grown shrewish, yet she was most beautiful. Simmu kissed her face, and her shrewish mouth slackened; smiling somewhat, in the rock’s shadow, she slept her first quiet sleep for three years. Meanwhile Simmu thieved her clothes, leaving her only his cloak to shield her from the desert heat—though this was more than any demon would have left her in a similar case. He still did not make needless presents to Death.

  Then Simmu stripped himself of his own garments, and next of his male gender.

  A year had elapsed. For a year he had been a man, and only that, welded in an incontrovertible mold. And the mold had become rigid, more rigid than it had been that adolescent time among the wild olives, when jealousy, love and fear had refound the change Simmu could effect in himself. Simmu was more a man now than he had been then. Metamorphosis was harder. It was not so much a rending and stretching he felt, but a wrongness. His mind was less elastic even than his unusual body. What had been a satisfying sweet pleasure of pain was now an act of self-denial or hate. He loathed it but he willed it to happen, for he must reach the garden, and this was the way.

  And then, instantaneously it seemed, the struggle melted. He shivered and was no longer hero but heroine.

  There had been greater changes to effect to achieve this reversal of the coin. Simmu the man, broad of shoulder, lean of hip. . . . Simmu the woman was as tall as he, tall for a woman, yet not uncouthly so, for Simmu was no giant; but the bones and muscles of the pelvis, the arms, the legs, the waist, the breast had all subtly disowned their maleness. The woman was slender yet curvaceous, high-breasted, smooth of skin, depilated ambiently of beard and body hair together—beautiful. More beautiful than the maiden who slept in the rock’s shade. And as much a woman now as she had been man before.

  Simmu, without inward comment, put on the stolen clothing, muffled face and tresses in the veil. Her feet, bare and delicate though not necessarily over-small, were unmistakably female. The dress, moistened by tears and dried by the desert’s heat, had taken on the contours of two rounded breasts which once more were undeniably filled.

  The sun had moved one hour nearer to the west when she went on, unaccompanied, the lovely lamenting exiled Daughter, now Simmu, making for the nine-mountain ring.

  Late in the afternoon, they saw her from the watch towers. The sentinels pointed and hushed their voices, somewhat awestruck as they always were at this macabre recurring pilgrimage. Also, let it be said, somewhat irritated, somewhat put out. It was they, or their comrades, who would have to climb through the bedlam of slope-lurking monsters after this girl and inevitably take up and return her self-slain corpse to the city.

  They muttered together, the sentries; down below, various portions of the patrolling army, having spotted the advancing virgin, were muttering in similar vein.

  And then, as the patrols and the sentries stood surveying her in pious, unfriendly resignation, a great activity began on the mountain sides.

  Up from their holes and burrows, their caves and cubbies, surged a few hundred monstrosities, all grunting, roaring, yelping, and howling. Fire snapped from their mouths and the air blackened with smoke. They flapped their wings, those that had wings, so vigorously that brass feathers clattered to the ground. They lashed their tails, and the tails (snakes) hissed. They showed their tiger teeth and pawed the mountain slope and the sand with their hoofs, and their horns rattled loudly as they struck rock and boulder an
d neighboring horns.

  The soldiers of the patrol were astounded. Such a thing had never happened before, at least, not at the arrival of a virgin. Was this some omen? Or had the awful guardian frights of the god finally run amok? Nervously the army regarded its bows and swords, and asked itself how effective they would be, and if it might be blasphemy to resist. Concurrently, the hordes of frights were rushing down the mountain sides and over the sand, resembling an unlikely out-spewing of lava or water. The army and the watch towers were ignored. Straight for the lone figure of the virgin the monsters made. In horrified bewilderment, the army lost view of her in a cloud of wings, horns, scales, tails, dust, fire, and smoke.

  The guardians, naturally, were merely responding as ever to the advent of an unaccompanied alien near the mountain ring. Simmu was not of the river people, therefore she was a foreign trespasser. Therefore they would tear her in pieces. Why every single monster flew out to see to this bit of business is not sure. Possibly they sensed in Simmu less of a simple straggler, more of a true and definite threat—however, Simmu was no slower than they to react.

  Before the cavalcade of guardians had quite reached her, Simmu had cast off her clothing, all but the veil which hid hair and face, and she had begun sinuously to dance.

  Simmu had power, through this magic of dance, this evocative, provocative Eshva spell-weaving, to tame the wildest of earth’s beasts. A touch of the hand was enough, sometimes less, a whisper of thought, Eshva-caressive, to ensorcel serpent, bird, fox or dog—her dancing had bound the savage unicorn, the man-eating cat. But these monsters the witch had left on the mountains, they were not earth beasts, but beasts of sorcery themselves, her beasts, a patchwork which she had invented. Yet, when Simmu danced, their fanged jaws dropped, their terrible horns were lifted meekly aloft, their wings closed, their tails slept. How could this be?

  There was, for one, the demon jewel at Simmu’s throat, the thing which had largely protected him, hero-heroine, in poisoned Merh. And now, perhaps, the jewel heightened the ability of Simmu’s spell. But it would have needed a little more than that.

  One unrecognized event had taken place. Simmu did not know of it, certainly no one in Veshum knew. Even the monster guardians did not. And while the guardians did not know, still the event had cast its dim shadow on them, changing them, weakening them, sucking the marrow from their vicious function.

  The witch, she who had created them two hundred and nineteen years before, was dead.

  Much the witch had done had been of that order of sorcery which was sympathetic or emulative. It was her installing of her own fantasies and cruelties into the enterprise which had ensured the strength of those safeguards of the garden. And though in the forefront of her mind she had set this task aside, in the back rooms of her brain she often recalled it with glee. It had been her masterpiece, her love-gift to Lord Death. And all that had to do with the garden had basked in her far-off subconscious delight in it, had drawn unending fuel therefrom. But now there was no fuel, no source, no distant key to stir the clockwork and get it running smoothly. The remembering brain of the pomegranate witch was trapped in the Innerearth, and few impulses rose from that domain. And thus the guardians rushed to Simmu, apparently eager as ever to prevent and to rend. But, leaderless at last, a dying flame, it took only a reasonably phenomenal magic to swing them from their duty, to harness and erase two hundred and nineteen years of pitiless intent.

  Soon, the monsters fawned on Simmu.

  They rubbed their tigery faces on her sides, and licked her with odd cloven tongues. The Eshva spell was sweet and they enjoyed it. Their lives had been long and mechanical. Even a monster, supposedly, can grow weary of unmitigated rending.

  “Now, what is this?” queried the patrols as they watched the virgin start to move up the nearest mountain slope, escorted by gambolling, slobbering monsters. “Her head is veiled but she is naked,” commented one of the sentries from his high vantage point. The others averted their eyes, not wishing to be irreligiously aroused. “I think,” said one, “she is dancing.” He had caught a glimpse and the spell had partly claimed him. Swimming-eyed, he wandered from his lookout post, an unheard of lapse.

  “Do we follow the maiden?” demanded the men about the slope.

  They had always followed in the past, but now, having received an order to that effect, they kept a gap between themselves and the monsters, who were no longer behaving as Veshum’s famous guardians should. And because of this gap and the monsters themselves, they could no longer see Simmu-the-maiden at all.

  It was now almost sunset. Shadows stained the desert from beneath mountains, watch towers, standing men. The sky was sponged with gold, the western plateau was powdered with red dusts as the caravan of the sun rode toward the brink of the land.

  Concealed, Simmu climbed toward the hot high wall. From its summit the corona of lightning slashed, growing brighter as the sky deepened.

  Simmu reached the place of the door.

  She threw off her last veil as the sinking sun threw off the last veil of the day. Both veils shone and dropped among the rocks. Simmu murmured, from her mouth and from her mind, and the monsters sprawled languidly, lazily wagging their snake-tails, their indolently stirring wings like the sound of many brazen fans rising and falling. Simmu went toward the magic door which just now was forming among the thickets, precisely where the people of Veshum had explained it would. Already the heat of the wall was scorching, already the door was opening.

  And then, between Simmu and the door, out of the thickets, came the last guardian, the sentry at the garden gate.

  It could alter its size, this creature. Among the thickets it was tiny as a snail, its burrow no bigger than the circumference of a girl’s bracelet. But, turning sentinel, it swelled, shot out arms, teeth, boney appendages. It became a snake, armored with lusterless scales, a snake with several muscular human arms, also scaled, furnished with claws of bluish steel. Its face, which was a face of nightmare, was somewhat similar to the head of a man who had lost both hair and wits. It was mad and grinning, composed of a square maw bladed with pointed fangs and two bulging insane eyes in color most unalluring orange (the color of the witch’s toxic pomegranates). The palms of its many hands were also orange, but its tongue, which now and then spilled between its lips and teeth, was black. Horns sprouted from its wrists, its cheeks, its temples.

  Simmu skipped back a pace and considered it. The air was full of the Eshva glamouring, but this final monster clearly did not respond to it. Simmu tried an arrow of thought: Let me by. The guardian of the door bubbled up a gross din, laugh or oath or phlegm, and spat in the air a gob of flaming matter. And then it prepared itself to seize Simmu, a lengthy preparation, full of savoring noises and a sharpening of claws on the ground. While behind it, the narrow door stood fully open on the garden of the secret well, though not for much longer.

  Simmu spun to the monsters who had fawned on her. She extended her arms, she crooned to them and commanded them with her eyes. She thrust violent fancies in their receptive skulls, she stroked their backs until they frisked and rose up, their jaws once more clashing, their tails awake, their wings spread for battle. Simmu used her sorcery in a way she had never done before. Next moment, the hundreds of monsters lost their passivity and aimed themselves in one horrifying, concentrated body—at the guardian of the door.

  Well practiced they, in their one art, that art they had perfected, the art of rending. The guardian had never rent, never had occasion to, for what trespassing stranger ever could have reached so far as the wall? As for the returning virgins, it had only growled at those, and they had fled and killed themselves. It was not ready, this final and worst guardian, not ready for any of what happened. And very quickly, despite its variety of defenses, its tough armor and grasping claws, the monster multitude of teeth and horns and hooves had dismantled it and blood-bathed tiger faces smiled from its vitals and brazen wings flap
ped over its scattered scales.

  And across this gruesome scene dashed Simmu, swifter than the red light which just then left the sky. And Simmu ran straight into the forbidden garden through the impenetrable door a second before it vanished.

  7

  No marble stairway descended from the door on this particular evening. Instead, a silken lawn tumbled there, gracefully down among the groves and woods of the valley, and all was serene in the delicate rose-water afterglow of the garden.

  Simmu remained for some time on the slope, half unbelieving of her feat, yet exhilarated too by half believing in it. She gazed at the garden with a contemplative gaze, for she was wiser now in all modes of mage-craft, and she could smell magic and illusion as strong as the fragrance of the flowers and the scent of the water. Her own female condition she had had to struggle with on first arriving. Even as she cast herself joyfully down on the grass, a masculine pride had beset her, and her physique, held as a man for so great a while, strove to reverse itself. But she resisted her maleness, for the garden was a feminine thing and stocked with females—this fragrance also she could detect. She feared to betray herself—or himself—should she rove about here in a man’s shape.

  After a little, Simmu got to her feet, and she scanned the valley for the golden temple which housed the secret well.

  The rosy garden moon had risen. Simmu’s eyes, aided by the moon and less hampered by illusion than most eyes which had looked about in that valley, quickly caught a glint of gold—or the semblance of gold. Westward, the temple. And Simmu could no more have kept from immediately seeking it than could a thirsty man keep from drinking.

  Simmu ran toward the temple lighter and faster than the illusory deer of the garden—some of which she saw. But they paid no heed to her, being unreal themselves, while her femininity disturbed nothing of the valley’s womanly atmosphere. In fact the whole garden truly had the feel of being a woman or a feminine environment. Everywhere was the softness, the voluptuousness, the feline innocence which eternally had symbolized woman. Nothing decisive, harsh or independent showed itself, or, where it did, illusion glossed it over. Even the trees had fluid, curving postures. Even the hills were round as breasts. And into this, Simmu had thrust, fortunately in woman’s form. It had not yet become a matter of rape.