Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Epilogue

  The Traveling House

  ACROSS THE PLAIN, out of the sunset, came an incredible sight. Men in the fields let go the scythes and stood gaping, women at the wells put down their dippers and pots in surprise. The dogs in the villages barked and the birds sheered up on sun-dyed wings. Such a show had not been glimpsed there for thirty years, not since the king had passed through, and even that passage of splendor paled beside the unlikelihood of this one.

  A team of elephants of huge dimension and coal-black hide walked before. Their trappings were of gold and crimson bedewed with brilliants and bells. On the back of the foremost left-hand beast, in a golden seat, a big man lolled under a sunshade, apparently controlling the animals. Behind the elephants, and attached to them by means of painted shafts and chains of bronze, rolled a kind of movable mansion with walls of carved wood, doors of red lacquer, colored windows, a roof of black porcelain and six tall towers with crystal cupolas. The whole edifice was mounted on a brazen platform equipped with some twenty great gilded wheels. To ensure a total lack of normalcy, the spokes of these wheels were dragons’ heads of brass that puffed out scented smoke at each rumbling revolution.

  The man in charge of the elephants paid no discernible heed to the outcry and gawping on all sides, nor to the yapping dogs and squealing children that here and there ran after the monstrous house on wheels.

  But at one place, where a tavern stood in a grove of green poplars beside the road, some merchants, who had been sitting over their drink, hailed the man on the elephant.

  “Come, take a cup of wine at our expense. You are an interesting apparition. What are you selling?”

  The man on the elephant persuaded his team to halt.

  “I sell nothing,” said he in ringing tones. “I am the protector, and dare I say, the adoptive uncle or father, of the one who has the wares.”

  “More interesting still,” said the merchant who had spoken before. “It sounds like a woman. Is it so?”

  “I perceive your minds are running in a false direction. The lady, my, as it were, niece and daughter, who travels in this unique equipage, is the agent of a mighty lord, his intermediary, and the goods are his.”

  “Does she not then, sell herself?” inquired the merchant.

  “Come,” cried the man on the elephant, “have you ever heard of the House of the Red Doors?”

  At that, an odd silence came down on the merchants, and indeed on the whole tavern yard. The sunset was fading to a dark pink afterglow, and the shadows, which all day had clung to the poplars, now spread their skirts over the ground, for in the provincial inn the lamps were not yet lit. Aloft, the leaves whispered like dry green papers. Yes, yes, the leaves seemed to answer, we have heard of the House of the Red Doors, and who has not? And the merchants looked slantwise and warily through the dusk at the gaudy mansion on wheels, now become mysterious and ghastly.

  “A rumor is a rumor,” said the merchants’ spokesman. “And I do not think I believe it.”

  “As you will,” said the man on the elephant. “But if you should alter your opinion, you may pay my mistress a visit, for we will rest tonight on the adjacent hill. And now,” he added, “I wonder if any hay is to be purchased hereabouts for these elephants? Or if there are any persons of loose morals and crossed eyes?”

  • • •

  An hour the merchants debated together. Their sojourn at this inn, which had threatened tedium, seemed to have grown all too momentous.

  “I do not credit the stories,” said one.

  “But the house travels and has red doors, as in the tales. Moreover, the fat man fits his description—Yolsippa the Rogue, the showman, immortal tricky Yolsippa, whose horse rears at the strabismus.”

  “And who is she in the wagon house?”

  “Well, if the rest is true, then she is Kassafeh, and she is the handmaiden of—”

  “Hush! Hush, and be damned.”

  Meanwhile, the movable mansion lurked on the hill, a quarter of a mile off, its position clearly marked by two flaming torches set in the earth before it. And as the merchants quarrelled and made further noise, one of their number fell quiet. When the rest went in to supper, this one got to his feet, and with a nervous hurrying step, set off for the hill.

  He was of middle years, a solemn man, spare of frame and clad in sober garments. Going uphill through the black night, he came to the elephants first, picketed in a meadow, which beasts trumpeted raucously at his approach. When he reached the torches, Yolsippa—if it were really he—was seated before the red lacquer doors, patiently awaiting him.

  “Now what is it to be?” Yolsippa cried. “Some deceased magician whose bones you would question? Or some rich secret mausoleum you would find and pilfer? Or can it be some lover, newly dead, you would embrace again? Or a deathlike trance you require temporarily to tumble into, one which will fool the wisest physician—maybe in order to escape the tax collector?”

  The sober merchant paled.

  “How can you jest, if truly you serve the master you do?”

  “I serve the lady,” said Yolsippa—it must be he—“and she serves the personage we are talking of, Uhlume, Lord Death.” The merchant staggered. “However,” Yolsippa went on, “you had best be warned. Though my mistress can entreat her lord to oblige you, he may have business elsewhere and prove unavailable, not being, you will understand, at her beck and call. Still, state your business. Is it love, greed or curiosity you desire to solace?”

  “If all this is a fact,” said the merchant with horrified forcefulness, “then I will express my needs only to the witch in the house—Kassafeh.”

  Yolsippa shrugged.

  “I have, in any case,” said he, “an appointment with the pot-boy of the inn, who, though straight-eyed, has assured me he can turn his optics crosswise for three silver pieces.” Then Yolsippa rapped on the doors of red lacquer, which at once flew open. “Now enter,” said Yolsippa, and went off down the hill, leaving the gaping merchant alone.

  A minute elapsed before the merchant gained sufficient courage to go through the doors.

  The interior was quite inviting in itself, for rosy lamps burned up on every hand, revealing various wonders. Most exotic was the central apartment, with columns of carved cedar wood and painted walls and curtainings of lilac hue, while scented flowers spilled from golden vases. On the floor was a fierce tiger skin, with clockwork eyes which followed the merchant, and clockwork jowls which snarled. A loom stood nearby with a rainbow cloth half-finished on it. The merchant cautiously approached the loom, and jumped with a violent agitation when the shuttle shot across it.

  “Fear nothing,” said a voice from behind the loom, “it is just a woman at her work.”

  Nevertheless, the merchant shrank back when she emerged, for now he was face to face with the legendary handmaiden of Death.

  She was not as he dreaded she might be, a hag—or worse. She was young and lovely, her bright hair streaming about her a few degrees paler than her golden dress. Only her eyes were changeable and daunting, and, despite her words, she looked at him haughtily with them, so he thought it advisable to bow three times.

  “And are you,” he mumbled, “Kassafeh?”

  “I am she,” answered the maiden. “Now be seated, and inform me of your hopes.”

  The merchant sat on a couch of embroidered silk.

  “Such magnificence,” he cried. “Can it all be real?”

  “It is quite real,” Kassafeh said stiffly. “Nothing is illusion here.” She seemed touchy on this point, and in order not to displease her the merchant quickly began to give her his reasons for calling.

  “It is on behalf of another I disturb you,” he said. “My aged grandfather, who has lived to a prodigious age, swears that in his youth he made a bargain with—with that master you serve. In honesty, I had always thought this boast of his a mark of his
senility, but I have been forced to feign belief, since his fortune will pass to me at his demise, and I think it right, therefore, to humor him. Now recently, you may suppose, the elderly gentleman has become irked with life, and has been preparing himself to leave it. And quite cheerful was he, assuring me his place was certain at the court of—one you are familiar with. In fact, the old man told me the substance of his bargain. In exchange for enormous riches from an ancient sarcophagus, whose deathly guardians and curses only—ah—such a lord as yours might have means to subdue, my grandfather agreed to pass a thousand years in the Innerearth, in company with—someone of note. Being of a slightly supernatural bent, my grandfather, through dreams and trances, has frequently beheld the doings of the Innerearth, which apparently is a versatile spot capable of any illusory enhancement.”

  Here the merchant paused and mopped his brow. “All this is well, and the tomb in readiness for my grandfather, and his wealth almost in my coffers, when one night the decrepit fellow wakes from a dream yelling he refuses after all to die.”

  It appeared, the merchant went on to say, a new view of the Innerearth had been vouchsafed grandfather. Lord Death had taken a wife—a fright, she was, poison-blue with yellow sparks for eyes, and her right hand was a bone. The denizens of Innerearth cast themselves flat in squeamish homage before this horror, and she, proud over-bearing bitch, trampled on their backs. But there was more. One time, Death had had occasion to be much from home, and on his return he found this pest of a woman had snatched up the reins of his power. She was called Narasen, and had once been a queen. Now she said she had been cheated of her kingdom and would rule jointly with Lord Death over the Innerearth, nor would she vacate the premises after her thousand years were up. And to enforce her statements, she had already had her own palace (twice the size of Death’s) quarried from the black granite of the region, and thereafter robbed the graves of half the kings of the world to ornament it. Peculiar immortal leopards roamed the rooms, biting the uninvited visitors. These beasts, it was related, Death himself had given her, as he had unwisely, in a moment of aberration, given her use of his magic power to open kings’ monuments. Some excused him, saying it was a reward he let her have in response to a warning she had offered him, concerning certain fools who had styled themselves “Death’s Enemies.” Definitely she had abused all her privileges, and had even made oblique bargains of her own with human sorcerers, so now vegetable stuffs were being occultly passed through into Innerearth, from which she meant gardens made and parks laid out. And the slave labor for this enterprise would be supplied by the same unhappy force as had built her palace—the unfortunates that Death had personally claimed for a thousand years.

  “‘And I am too old to toil on such nonsense,’ my grandfather declared, with some cause,” said the merchant. “‘Come,’ postulated I, ‘perhaps the dream is spurious.’ ‘Not so,’ he screamed, laying about with his staff, ‘for the woman who walked at Narasen’s side, forever kissing her wrists and smirking, is the one who was his lordship’s agent when I went bargaining, a hundred and fifty years ago—Lylas of the House of the Blue Dog.’ And so,” concluded the merchant, “my elderly relative has given up all thoughts of passing away, and being a phenomenally stubborn wretch, will probably persist several more decades.”

  “And what use am I to you in this?” said Kassafeh sternly. “I am not Lylas.”

  “If you serve whom you do, probably you might approach my grandfather and reassure him that there is no Narasen.”

  “But there is,” said Kassafeh.

  “Cannot then your lord quell the woman?”

  Kassafeh smiled. Her eyes darkened.

  “Uhlume rules the world, does he not? Why should he trouble that a woman supplants him in his lower kingdom, when all the earth is his?”

  “But in my childhood the priests taught me,” said the merchant uneasily, “that Death is the servant of men, not their tyrant.”

  “But,” said Kassafeh, “all men know him.”

  The merchant shivered.

  “It grows cold,” he said.

  “With good reason,” said Kassafeh. “One comes.”

  The merchant leapt up. He saw how the flames in the lamps were flickering, how the tiger’s clockwork eyes were shut.

  “Honored lady,” he croaked, “I think I will be going.”

  And with that he bolted from the doors and down the hill, where even the elephants refrained from trumpeting.

  • • •

  Years before, Uhlume had found her, found Kassafeh.

  Simmurad was drowned, and the sky elementals who had borne her away, had got tired of the affair, and left her on an upland somewhere, in a dismal rain with hardly a tree to shelter her. Yolsippa they dropped nearby, but from an uncivil height.

  Here the two sat and wept and bemoaned their condition, and were a peculiar consolation to each other from simply being in the self-same plight. Even the tears Kassafeh shed for Simmu died, or were flooded out, by those she shed for herself.

  When the rain ceased, they trudged downhill and through a landscape of woods and rivers. But when they spied a village or farm and pleaded for shelter, the pair were sent off with oaths, stones, dogs. Yolsippa, accustomed previously to these adventures, took up the burden again with complaining fortitude. Kassafeh, who had met them briefly while journeying with Simmu toward Simmurad, collapsed in paroxysms of despair and wrath.

  She and Yolsippa were a disreputable-looking couple through no fault of their own, but while Yolsippa readily forgave her her dishevelment, Kassafeh took exception to his.

  “You hog! You flea-nipped rag!” she reviled him. “Could you not have brought a solitary gem from the city to secure our future?” (Her own had been sloughed during their flight—or stolen by the sky elementals.)

  One dusk, as they dithered by a stream, Yolsippa puffing and blowing over a dingy fire, Kassafeh nagging at him, a cold and ghostly wind blew through the tall grasses, and the hearts of both gave a lurch.

  “Someone walks at the edge of the trees,” gasped Kassafeh.

  “No, no,” blustered Yolsippa, “there is no one. Look away.”

  Then a giant bird seemed to unfold a snow-white wing, and Death stood beside them. Death, magnificent, omnipresent, and awful.

  Kassafeh fainted; at least she dropped to the ground and tried to lose all her awareness, but could not quite do it. Death she saw through a haze of lashes and shadows. In insane terror she saw him, but she saw his beauty too. She evaluated, as in everything else.

  Yolsippa grovelled. He told Death that he admired him, and would do whatever Death thought best.

  Death said: “There are now no human Immortals on the earth, save only you. Did you suppose you could elude me? I am here.”

  “Your arrival is more delightful than the sun to us,” gushed Yolsippa.

  “I cannot end your lives,” said Death, “nor is that my function, though I am no longer quite as I was, for now the sight of death pleases me, renovates me. But you. What am I to do with you, for I cannot rest till the problem is solved.”

  “All mankind palpitates in fear at your footfall, at your very name,” said Yolsippa. “Do we matter?”

  “Yes,” said Uhlume, Lord Death.

  “Then,” Yolsippa suggested, courteously repressing his shudders, “let us be enlisted in your service. No doubt there is some tiny but useful way in which we might aid you. And if our names are linked to yours, men will know we have not escaped your powerful arm, will assume that we exist at your discretion. Indeed, we have no war with you, extraordinary sir. We were simply caught in the machinations of others. I, for example, was tricked into sampling the Elixir of Life—”

  Kassafeh now recovered with rapidity from her faint. She sat up and stared with frightened boldness at Death. “Zhirek the magician was your agent and intermediary. I will be another. Since you have so much traffic with
men on the earth you will need such people. And, since I shall live forever, as you do, my choice is logical. Besides, I served a god before, and Death is, in his fashion, a god. I have experience for the post.”

  She did not know, and how could she, that she was offering to serve the same “god” she had once reviled and fled from, for the black god of Veshum’s garden had been none other than Uhlume.

  Uhlume looked down at Kassafeh. Perhaps he glimpsed Lylas in her place a moment, Lylas, who now went slinking at the heels of the blue woman, Narasen. How things had changed. Uhlume, the expressionless and inexorable, tarnished within by intimations of mortality.

  “You sought,” Uhlume said to Kassafeh, “a hero.”

  “What hero is greater than Lord Death.”

  It was true, and she meant it. It had come to her abruptly that here was the impervious and imperishable name on which to tie her own. Who would throw stones at Kassafeh, the Handmaiden of Death? Already, even as she trembled in doubt of his reply, she planned to ask for a fitting show to attend her, so his person should not be disgraced by her lack of it. None there were who did not understand Death had access to the treasure hoards of tombs.

  Uhlume reached down to her his shapely black hand.

  Kassafeh gazed at it. Then, heart pounding, eyes swimming, she took the hand, and he drew her to her feet. His touch could not slay her, but it could hardly fail to move her. She thrilled to him.

  “I will instruct you,” said Uhlume, “in your duties to me.”

  His smoke white hair brushed her cheek as he leant to her. Suddenly her emotion resolved itself. She gave him that migratory love of hers which had never yet found a home. The veracity of fear she could no longer offer him. Kassafeh—and Yolsippa too—had already lost much of the wooden waxen look of Simmurad, thrust out as they had been to hardship and precariousness. Now, Uhlume tendered purpose, a reason for life, however macabre. Kassafeh, awash with adoration and fulfilment, raised herself and kissed the beautiful mouth of Uhlume, Lord Death, a thing which had never been done in all the long history of men. And Death, who had been levelled by events, in some sort, to the replica of a man, responded to her kiss with an obscure intensity of his eyes.