Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  “No longer does it stink,” said Kassafeh. “The new wine has purified the old.”

  “Gray, leaden water,” Simmu said. “Such a draught I had always believed would be golden.”

  “Oh, I beg you to draw it up. Let us see.”

  Simmu lowered the vessel by its binding down the shaft of the well. In awed fascination they waited rigidly till he raised the vessel again, and then both peered into it with starting eyes.

  Leaden it was, that water. Sluggish, sullen.

  “A small vessel,” Kassafeh breathed, “and the well seems empty. Is this the sum of the draught?”

  “One drop would be enough,” he answered. “One drop, and a man may live forever, spurning Death from his door.”

  “One drop.”

  “Only one.”

  “Then drink, and grow immortal, Simmu.”

  “Be my sister,” said he, “be as my wife, and drink before me.”

  “I? I cannot drink before you, whose hero-deed this is.”

  “I will drink,” he said. “But not quite yet.”

  “Nor I,” said she, “quite yet.”

  Accordingly, on the brink of everlasting life, they hesitated, as if one muttered at their shoulders: “Life is only life. There is also joy.”

  And presently, without either drinking, Simmu stoppered the vessel and roped it to his belt.

  “Thus,” said Simmu, “let us be going.”

  But Kassafeh lowered her eyes, now dark green as myrtle leaves, and she said: “I must remain, for here are my family and my home.”

  “Neither of which you love. Love me and live with me and I will wed you.”

  “Today you say so, but tomorrow it will be different.”

  But she smiled and she went with him.

  • • •

  Now, although the garden was destroyed, although the wall was innocuous and even here and there in rubble, and although the monsters of the mountain slopes had lost all incentive to rend and rip anyone, let alone one who could work Eshva glamour on them and was besides accompanied by a holy maiden of Veshum—despite this, still the patroling army remained. And the army, appalled at the collapse of centuries of tradition, was however in a mood to take captives.

  Firstly, beholding over the broken wall eight frantic girls scrambling about and screaming in the valley, the soldiers had not dared go to their aid, for no one but female virgins were allowed inside. At length, though, common sense prevailed, the soldiers navigated the brickwork and attempted to rescue the screamers. Interesting then to decide who was the more afraid, the eight former virgins of this influx of men, or the men of touching the sacred persons of the virgins. After much debate, awkwardness, confusion (and screaming) the virgins were persuaded to speak.

  And what a story gushed forth.

  A demon man in the valley who had defiled all of them, defiled the god’s shrine, and stole something occult from the divine well.

  Recovered from their religious shock, the soldiers manfully concluded that the demon man was not a demon, for he had been seen in daylight. It was, therefore, some extraordinarily clever and evil magician. Honor demanded that they seek and mutilate him, ignoring his sorcery. The god would protect his army. And the army would protect itself if the god was engaged elsewhere. They were really very straightforward and insensitive men, geared as their days had been from twelve upward to the endless desert camps, cheerless dry vigils and military bravura. So now, having elected vengeance as their main goal, they rampaged through the valley on horseback, dispelling any last vestiges of pastoral femininity or illusion, the ultimate rape. After all, the garden was already despoiled; their god wanted a head on a pike and a phallus on another pike. Their god was not such a mooning fool as everyone supposed.

  Even the monsters dashed from their path—some had got into the garden and were investigating it with interest. Through the waterfalls plunged the riders, past the plaster palace, whooping with blood-lust, over the green places that had been the lawns of a paradise.

  Simmu and Kassafeh heard them. They had been wandering slowly across the garden, unaware of an impending chase. Kassafeh thought they would die—odd reverie with the Immortal draught right next to her in Simmu’s belt. Simmu led her to a tree, and they climbed it and hid themselves in the upper foliage.

  Thereafter began a vast cantering back and forth beneath, much dust and many vows of torture on the defiler-magician. And they were indeed impervious to Simmu’s magic, being so many and so incensed.

  Simmu did not invite Kassafeh to leave him and add her tale of helpless rape to the rest. Nor did Kassafeh suggest such a course. Like two snakes they coiled themselves round the boughs and each other, and clung together in mutual mistrust of the remainder of the world.

  Then came a man alone, riding his horse. And under the tree he paused and squinted up.

  In another second, Simmu had unwound himself from Kassafeh, had sprung and landed upon the mounted soldier, bearing him to the earth. And when Simmu arose, the soldier did not.

  Simmu laid his hand on the startled horse. It quieted to a statue.

  But in a minute Simmu and Kassafeh and the horse, set going as once formerly a horse had been set going by a demon-touch-charm, were speeding from the valley.

  Not toward Veshum, hardly that way. Toward the outer environs of the desert. The unrelenting waterless desert the people of the river avoided. “To take this road is death,” said Kassafeh, “or they say it is.”

  “Death we are done with,” Simmu replied, and they leapt the wall and raced down the mountain side beyond, among the dunes.

  • • •

  None followed. Or, if they followed, not for many miles. The desert, age-old enemy, drove the river men off, and their imaginary god had to go without his piked retribution.

  Simmu and Kassafeh ran on, borne by the ensorcelled horse.

  The desert, like every landscape, had its own persona. It was a situation of white glare by day, white glare glimmering from the sands up into the atmosphere. Beneath, faintly showed the contours of the dunes as if through mist or water. Above, a flat coppery sky rested on the framework of the glare. Sometimes a formation of rock came swimming out of the glare like a great thorn-backed fish; items at a distance were of a tindery brittle blueness unlike the fluid blueness of a watered country.

  The heat of the desert was not like a heat, but like a whittling away. There seemed a sound in the desert, a high-pitched whistling, but there was no sound save the furnace wind raising the sand like smoke from the ridges, as if the dunes actually burned.

  The word of the desert was this: I am made from all the dusts of the bones of men who have perished here, and my rocks are monuments to mountains I have ground away.

  There were no green places, no springs. To this desert, such as these were wounds which it had healed with aridity. What it could not eradicate, it buried.

  By night the sand chilled. Frost scaled its surfaces so it shone with a pure black shining. It was beautiful as only such a spot could be beautiful—because it had warped the natural laws, and here it told you the hideous was fair. And was believed.

  Simmu and Kassafeh entered this domain, and soon any lightness of heart or determination left them, for the desert fed on such emotions. They had not been prepared either with provisions for their bodily needs or provisions of the spirit, for the World-Shattering Deed was accomplished. What must evolve in the deed’s wake was yet uncertain and unformed.

  They would not return to Veshum, nor to any bank of the river, for all its banks, to the very sea, were the dominion of the river people, got in their days of reaving. For the desert itself, none had ever charted it. Only at its extreme borders was it traveled by the caravans of men. “A thousand miles, it is said, without water,” Kassafeh ventured, a prophetess of doom and despondency.

  But, since there was no returni
ng, they went on, the horse plodding now, its feet sinking in the deeper sands, its head hung low, and shortly Simmu dismounted and led it, with Kassafeh alone on its back.

  They struck eastward, so gradually the sun fell behind them.

  They began to yearn for drink with a desperate yearning. The desert became the color of thirst and the wind the voice of thirst. Not only their throats cried out for liquid, but their bodies, their minds. And they began to picture to themselves basins of water and pools of water and fountains and even Veshum’s dull river. But neither spoke of this to the other. And two thirds of the day burned to ash.

  Then the horse dropped to its knees, and in slow sighings, it died. It lay spilled on the desert which would soon cover it and add the dust of it to the dunes. Kassafeh wept, but her tears were very nearly dry.

  Close by, a rock, tall as a tree, offered blue shade, and into this Simmu led Kassafeh, and they sat down there and stared at each other’s faces.

  “We have drink,” said Simmu. “This.” And he unbound the clay vessel from his belt, and set it on the ground between them.

  After that utterance and that gesture, a lengthy silence and immobility. Kassafeh’s gaze, bleached transparent gray in the glare of the dunes, absorbed an opaque tint, almost purple.

  “But will Immortality quench our thirst? Feed us? Protect us from the fury of the sun, the cold of night?”

  “Whatever else, we will not die here.”

  And Simmu took up the vessel, unstoppered it, raised it, and in one continuous motion—drank.

  This done, white-lipped, great-eyed, he sat there as if shackled to the rock itself, while Kassafeh, just as pale and deranged, seemed poised in the attitude of one about to fly from him.

  Again a pause, after which he said:

  “Kassafeh, do not let me go alone on my journey.”

  And suddenly resolute, Kassafeh put back her hair and grasped the clay vessel, and she also drank.

  And now they both were shackled, though their eyes wildly searched the other for some sign.

  An hour or more they were so. And then gradually it was borne in on them that though they were thirsty and hungry, they felt no longer any debilitation, nor any threat of death. Presently they rose as one, and deserted the shade of the rock. And despite the sun, which rained its scalding western light on them, they felt themselves abruptly remade in some original material able to resist such blows. Disconcerted they might be, these two, scourged, burned, robbed of moisture, and of very skin—but not of existence. All the dangers of earth had become to them a field of fronds which lashed at their bodies as they passed, but from which they would emerge now, and always, scathed but intact. And as every man might foretaste his own death, so they tasted life in their mouths.

  And they did not hear the impalpable one who muttered: “Life is only life.” For here too, at this hour, was joy.

  Part Two

  Death’s Enemies

  1

  FOR HOW MANY days—or months—Simmu and Kassafeh, first of the earth’s immortals, wandered in the desert is not remembered. Maybe not so very great a while. Maybe a very great while. The desert was all one, and time in the desert all one with that specific oneness. Certainly, none but immortals could have survived. Though there were certain well-kept secrets of survival in that place, which it would yield only to such as Simmu and Kassafeh, who had outlasted its rigors. The desert no doubt was astounded, finding them still alive on its bosom far in excess of the expected span. Well then, the desert perhaps promised itself, they will be dead tomorrow. But tomorrow they had not died, nor any tomorrow. Eventually, the desert, its arrogance shaken, revealed inadvertently such items as these: some inner regions of the rock stacks where obdurate thorny plants stuck up, whose stems contained a drop or two of moisture, a deeply hidden stream bed in a cave where a trickle of water ran, a fossilizing bush trapped among boulders, branches like broken sticks, but with three brown living shoots.

  So they wandered, subsisting and imperishable, these two children for, despite everything, they were very young, with the sort of youth that has nothing to do either with years or immaturity.

  And they grew thin, beautifully thin, for they were beautiful and thus it must be. And they were rather silent, partly because the desert imposed quiet. Yet Kassafeh was not inclined to chatter. She had been mentally alone three years, and could in any case communicate much by flamboyant gesture and expression, not to mention her chameleon-changing eyes. Simmu she stared at and watched constantly, the way the woman stares at and watches the man she loves, endlessly enthralled by him and her own reaction to him. She had come to love him almost in the moment the lamp shone upon him in the bed, but really she knew nothing of him. He had arrived as a stranger, charmed her as a stranger, taken her away with him as a stranger. And a stranger he remained. He did not speak of his past life, gave it no importance. He did not speak of a future, though clearly there would have to be one of significance. In the present he was a hero, demon-kin, a young leopard, and her lover. That was enough for Kassafeh. As for Simmu himself, he had recaptured something more of his former self, his faunal self, intuitive, speechless, emphatic. And if he loved Kassafeh, and possibly it was not love he felt for her, it was because she too had something of his animalness, and certainly the beauty of an animal. He would return from some foray and find her sleeping in the noon heat, half in shade, half in sun at some rock where he had left her. Tanned, limpid-limbed in slumber, her hair a polish of sunlight raying from her exquisite, not-quite-human face, and he would see in her the gazelle, the lynx, the serpent—his own psychic menagerie. More sister than wife. But he was always eager to couple with her. And indeed the acts of desire were their only recreation in the desert, the rest being the endless search for sustenance and destination.

  All the while, their being together in this way bound them one to another with insuperable ties. Their being together, and the vessel Simmu carried at his belt.

  At last—when should it be? A month, a year later?—they crossed over a high range of dunes, he walking a space ahead, and they saw below an alleviation of the land. Not that it was green or flowering, but it was less of an ochre, less netted in by the gauzy glare of the sun.

  And when they came down on to this plain, they found an abundance of the thorny plants that contained water, and here and there passed a stunted tree, which had usually died for lack of it.

  In the next day or two they discovered and utilized a derelict road which in many spots was lost in blown sand. Near sunfall they would make a halt. (Simmu, who had frequently been a night traveler, now complied with the request of Kassafeh: night was a better time for love.) At the third day’s halt, by the rock which they elected their camp, they beheld a small snake dancing either to the sun or the desert or some dust-devil which had teased it. Simmu drew the snake to him in the old manner, and it wound itself about his arm, sizzling quietly. Kassafeh’s eyes, a dazzling blue, asked plainly: Teach me also to do this. So Simmu began to teach her, and she was fast to comprehend the unhuman lesson and diligent in practice. She would become an adept inferior only to Simmu himself.

  When the cold night gathered, frosting the plain with rimy tufts, they knit themselves together for warmth. Yet here, the night was not so fierce, and they had evolved a fire from the litter of stems and dead wood.

  Kassafeh gazed at the flames, and she said aloud:

  “I see in them a city, and the city is yours.”

  “There was a city, but no longer.”

  “You will be a king,” said Kassafeh, unaware of her own obstinacy in the matter. The yet unproven approach of civilization had reawakened the instinct of a merchant’s daughter; she was only proportionately a child of the ether.

  Simmu glanced at her without understanding, but her physical attraction set his faint irritation aside. In his arms, she was all and only elemental innocence, sky and fire and feline. He had
been fascinated by her cunning, (the lamp under the bed), but best had been what came after.

  Though even a word is sometimes enough. Or two words. City. King.

  2

  Yolsippa the rogue came staggering over the plain in the dawn. He had accidentally unearthed, or rather unsanded, the road an hour previously. Now he ploughed on, going in the wrong direction—yet deeper into the barren area of the desert—instead of away from it. He was of this fashion: in his middle years (which years had taught him little save villainy, and what is more, inefficient villainy), gaudy, gross, a luckless but predacious gambler at the world’s game. In his left ear was a simulated ruby, in his right nostril a ring of debased gold. His clothes were a patchwork of every hue, texture, pattern, and fabric, periodically gemmed with glass jewelry and currently somewhat rent and soiled, as indeed all of him seemed to be. In his belt stuck a ferocious knife, with which perpetually he had tried to rid himself of a diversity of unfriends, creditors and the law. But this knife had never tasted life-blood, due entirely to the clumsiness, unpreparedness, lack of skill and weak stomach of its wielder. Not that he pitied any, save in the most philosophical and nebulous form—he would weep at executions and clap on the shoulder beggars, ignoring their begging bowls—but it took not much to reduce Yolsippa to a wobbling-kneed coward. Bizarre then that this person should have selected the career of pickpocket, cutpurse, thief and, most consistently, charlatan. Not two days and ten miles back, Yolsippa had been practicing this latter art of his at a small town on the desert’s edge. Yolsippa had bottles of green unguent to remove unsightly blemishes, bottles of red unguent to heal sores; amulets to protect against demons, resins to incite lust, powders to incite greater lust, and tinctures to drive lust away. And he had, too, heroic tales told in garish pictures, and tales of an erotic nature of similar ilk. The people in the town were amenable folk, and willing to buy Yolsippa’s crackpot wares more for the interest of something new than out of belief in them. Trade was going well, and then disaster struck.