Mason took three quick steps and got a glimpse past the entrance of his tent. All he saw now was Diane’s satin mules, and her lovely legs, and the trailing skirt of her sea-green robe. Then the lights blinked out; but in spite of the whirring of the wind-driven battery charger, he could hear her murmur, “Everything will be different when we—oh, darling—”
Mason halted, and his clenched fists opened. Since he had the gift of sight, he might as well carry on, and see all that was to be seen. Now that his moment of fury was spent, he sighed and relaxed; somehow, it was a relief to know what he had not permitted himself to suspect. Let them tell him in Baghdad…
He went to the headquarters tent and got Brett’s bottle of brandy; that would give Saoud the needed lift. When he reached the processing tent, the old Arab was sitting up. “Sahib, devils choked me! It was not the heat, it was the blackness that they love.” He rose, and stood steadily enough. “Now I go to help you, it is well with me.”
Mason took a drink himself. He told himself that a prayer to Satan and a daub of clay on the eyelids had had nothing to do with his unexpected need to leave the darkroom; that Saoud, suspicious yet unwilling to be the bearer of evil news, had faked collapse, so that his master could see, and without being humiliated by sharing the knowledge with a servant.
When he left the processing tent, his own was dark. There were now lights at headquarters, and the usual bridge game was on. Diane looked up, fluffed her pale blonde hair, and let the sea-green robe slip well back from shoulder and bosom. Her arms were graceful, and she knew it.
“How did they turn out?” she asked, as usual.
Broad-shouldered Howarth and sandy-haired Brett echoed the question.
“Well enough. But—” He held out some damp enlargements. “Whoever made these shots of the Peacock Shrine ought to have his ears beaten off!”
Howarth’s rugged face darkened wrathfully. “You’re forgetting yourself, Mason. I took them myself. No one was around, and it was a good chance. Folk dances and brats and sheepherders isn’t enough; we need something sensational.”
Mason spat. “You’re likely to get it if Khosru’s tribe finds out! I warned you that I wouldn’t impose on my friendship with him.”
Diane cut in, petulantly: “Oh, do shut up! They didn’t see him.”
Mason was about to answer when, inexplicably, his glance focused on a heap of papers on the top of a filing case. He had not the least idea why his attention had been attracted, why he was no longer interested in explaining to Diane that her logic was far from fool proof. And he ignored Howarth, who said, with sudden amiability, “Better join us and have a drink, Mason; it’s pretty stuffy in that darkroom.”
From the corner of his eye, Mason caught the exchange of glances. His angle of vision seemed wider than before, abnormally wide. He stepped toward the low cabinet and dug into the heap. He found an ancient book which must have been thrust under the papers at the sound of his approach. The sudden tension which followed his move confirmed his suspicion; he had almost caught them with forbidden loot in their hands.
The covers were leather; the pages, vellum inscribed in unfading inks, a Kufic script illuminated in red and gold. He glanced at a column framed in exquisite scroll work, then demanded, “Do you realize that this is Kitab-ul-Aswad, the Black Book of the Yezidis?”
Diane laughed mockingly. “You have the sharpest eyes, haven’t you?”
Howarth’s jaw set. “Certainly. I’d hoped it was. And there are a good many other knicknacks in the shrine. The place is so sacred that the Yezidis visit it only a couple times a year, they won’t miss it for months.”
“You—damn fool!” Mason growled. “I mean all of you.”
Howarth jumped up. “Put that back. Who do you think you are?”
“As long as we are in the field, I am in command.”
But Howarth was used to commanding, and the answer was all the more offensive for having been given in Diane’s presence. He advanced, hand outstretched. “I’ll take that. And if you’re afraid, you can leave.”
Mason set the book down. “Put ’em up!” he commanded.
“What?”
“I said, put ’em up.” He smacked Howarth lightly. “Or suit yourself.”
Then Howarth understood, and cursed furiously. Mason bored in with popping punches. He slashed and battered Howarth’s face, half closed his eyes, cut his mouth: all this instead of knocking him cold. Finally, when Howarth stumbled and clawed the sand, Mason said, “Some people don’t understand any other language. I’m responsible for a fool like you, and I can’t duck the job till we get to Mosul. Diane, go to your tent, and start packing! Brett, have the men break camp, and get the trucks loaded.”
“Where—where—what are you going to do?” Brett stuttered.
Mason picked up the Black Book of Satan’s mysteries. “I am going to return this. Perhaps they have not missed it, in which case we have a very good chance of getting to Mosul without being massacred.”
Howarth was on his feet, bleeding and shaky. “You mean—after all that risk—you’re going to return it—you fool, there’s not a single genuine copy of Kitab-ul-Aswad in the United States—if it’s so dangerous—keeping it won’t slow us down, since we have to leave.”
Mason sighed, shook his head. “You still don’t understand. I can’t have my friends robbed. It’s on my account that they allowed you here.”
“They won’t miss it,” Brett protested, “but if you try to take it back, and someone catches you, then they will have it in for us.”
“That is a risk you made—” His gesture included the two men. “I’ll be careful as I can. Hurry, and you’ll have a start. Don’t wait for me, I’ll overtake you.”
“You don’t need to!” Diane flared. “Stay with your friends, you fool! If it were so deadly, he’d—they’d—never have been able to take it!”
There was no arguing with them, so Mason took the Black Book and went to have Saoud saddle two horses.
As they rode, a few minutes later, Mason passed his hands over his eyes, and shook his head. Try as he would, he could not convince himself that he had actually seen Kitab-ul-Aswad until after he had reached into a heap of papers. “That beggar gave me something,” he repeated to himself. “And he told me it was too late to change the gift of sight. He meant that I’d see unpleasant things…”
The shrine of Malik Tawus was some distance north of Khosru Khan’s hilltop fortress; and Mason hoped, reasonably enough, to be able to replace the sacred book without detection. He scarcely expected Howarth to break camp and start at once for Mosul, and if he succeeded in his attempt, there would be no necessity. But even if not, he was determined to get the expedition out of the Sinjar Hills before Howarth and Brett risked another violation of the terms they had agreed to observe. He owed that much to Khosru Khan.
Presently, he recognized the barren peak, with its stumpy tower, and pressed on up a deeply shadowed ravine. Ahead was a patch of moonlight; and once more, Mason’s vision became strangely acute. In spite of the brilliance reflected from the rocks, he perceived the lurkers in the blackness just beyond. There was a dull gleam of steel; sword or lance was to strike from the side, just as he reached the narrowest point of the cleft.
His first thought was that Khosru’s men, warned of the approach of someone from Howarth’s camp, had come to block the trail, so he called in the Yezidi dialect, “Ana kurdim,” and added, “I am under the khan’s protection.”
The answer was a blaze of pistol fire. The ravine exploded in a sheet of red.
Mason barely felt the impact of bullets, nor the crash against the ragged rocks; his horse fell, killed by a wild shot. And though Mason retained scarcely more than a shred of consciousness, though he did not know whether he was dead or alive, he still was aware of things that happened there in the meeting point of shadow and moonlight, at the foot of Satan
’s hill.
There were triumphant yells, the sharp clatter of horses’ hooves, and another shot. He tried to call to Saoud, but he could not; neither could he turn enough to see what was going on. He was not even sure that he was still one with his body, for he could feel nothing, neither his wounds, nor the sharpness of the rocks. But he could hear the mutter of the men coming from ambush rise to a quavering scream of terror.
His own wits reeled again. When he finally became aware of the moon beating into his face, he was shivering from desert cold; he was drenched with blood, and his body was one vast ache. Saoud was gone, and the horse which remained was dead. Then he saw the silvery shape, and marveled, and forgot his pain.
She was strangely dressed. A tall tiara rose from her hair, and a scarf bound her breast, though the fabric was little more than a silvery mist, like the close-fitting skirt which covered her from hip to a little below her knees. There was a soft tinkling of small bells, pomegranate-shaped, which fringed her skirt; there were gleaming pendants hanging from tiara to her smooth cheeks.
“I am Laylat,” she said, in the dialect of the hills. “One of the hundred thousand daughters of Lilith, who danced before King Solomon, on whom be the Peace!”
Then Mason knew that the blind beggar’s prayer had given him strange sight indeed: this girl who glided through the moonlight was one of the demons who prowl in the wastes. Saoud had often spoken of the lilin, who lure wanderers to madness and to doom in the desert.
Laylat knelt beside him; and now the moon was so bright that her frail garments hid none of her loveliness. Her wide, dark eyes were full of pity, and though he could not understand what she murmured as she touched his wounded head, the sound was soothing as the gentle contact. After what he had left behind him, he was grateful that a night-wandering demon and not any human being had come to see him die.
But Laylat took his hand, saying, “Get up and come with me, Dan Mason.”
He tried to obey that soft-voiced, imperious command, and found that he could. It was unreasonable that he should be able to walk, but he went with her, without stumbling and without any pain. Soon he was entering the forbidden shrine, under the tower, where the Yezidis kept the sacred silver peacock.
The natural grotto had been roughly squared. The wavering flame of two unshaded lamps reached into the deep niche which housed Malik Tawus, the peacock god; and it was reasonable enough that Laylat, a demon of the night, should be at home in the shrine of Satan.
She said, “Dan Mason, you are on the border that divides life and death, and for a little while, you, like any man, can turn either way.”
He was strangely unconcerned, perhaps because the offer was incredible, and because it was made in a smooth, sweet voice that made the present moment more important than the past or the future. Mason asked, calmly as though another person were concerned, “If this is every man’s choice, why do so few take it?”
Laylat smiled, and he forgot that he had ever before seen a woman’s smile. “Most of those who perish surrender to death because of weariness. They think they resist, but that is only blind instinct battling the inner soul’s desire for rest.”
There was no more pain or weakness in him, and he had ceased marveling at that. He looked for a moment into those wide, dark eyes, and touched her bare shoulders. She came toward him as his hands slipped slowly down her smooth back. “Can the dead walk with you across the hills?” he asked; and then, “Or do you only lead the living into the wastes? This is better than living, being with you.”
“There is no promise that you can ever see me on any other night,” Laylat answered. “That is the law of the lilin. Whatever your reasons for living, or not living, this night is ours.”
He remembered the Black Book; it must be back there, with his dead horse. He had to make sure that Khosru Khan would understand.
“How does one live? There are still things I must do.”
“You must pray to Malik Tawus, lord of the world. Since he is the master of evil, only he can turn aside an evil that has found its mark.”
This was what the Yezidis believed: that Allah, contemplating his own perfection, has no thought for the world, and that Malik Tawus is his viceroy, near enough to hear the prayers of mankind. Mason turned toward the peacock shrine and asked, “What does one say?”
Laylat shook her head. “That is merely the image. You must go into the very Presence and demand life.”
A prayer to Satan? The idea no longer seemed blasphemous, nor even shocking. Laylat took his hand, and led him into the darkness beyond the feeble flicker of the silver lamps.
At last she halted, tugged at his arm, and whispered, “Sit here, there is a bench. Before I lead you into the Presence—”
As her whisper trailed into silence, her supple body spoke to him in the blackness; her arms twined about him, and her lips found his mouth. He could no longer believe that his body lay in the ravine beside a dead horse; that he was floating midway between life and death. He had merely stepped in some strange way from the laws of time and space, and he had in his arms not merely a woman, but the very essence of all women, Laylat, one of the daughters of Lilith.
And Lilith, they said in this weird land, had been the first wife of Adam. When at last their lips parted, and she nestled languorously in his arms, he knew why no human woman had ever erased the memory of Lilith from Adam’s mind.
Finally Laylat sighed and said, “Whether you live or die, Dan Mason, you will always remember me. Now let us go into the pit.”
The touch of her hand, the sway of her hip, the fleeting contact of her slender leg guided him down the stairs which spiraled into an incredible depth and darkness. Then, so gradually that he was scarcely aware of the change, an eerie half-light melted the gloom, and Mason stood on the sandy floor of a vault whose crown he could not distinguish.
He glanced about. The curved walls enclosed only emptiness. There was no niche, no sculpture; only ancient rock, the heart of the hill.
Emptiness. A dead and meaningless shaft. He turned to Laylat. Her nails sank into his arm. “Wait,” she whispered. “He is here!”
Then the bluish half-glow began to swirl in a vortex; it became a spindle, glowing and pulsing, stronger as it contracted. Energy radiated from it; fierce waves of power pounded and lashed Mason as though with physical impacts. All the eerie light which had been in the vault was now pulled into that one center, leaving unutterable blackness about him; and he had lost Laylat’s hand. More than that, he had lost her presence, and he was alone. For the first time, Mason was afraid.
A voice spoke, though not to his ear. He felt the thought, and without the medium of words. “You who have come to ask for your life,” the Presence demanded, “what will you do with it if you get it?”
The ferocious impact of the question stunned Mason; it blasted his mind as those bullets from ambush had shocked his body, though now all, instead of part of him, was paralyzed. The vault echoed with soundless laughter and monstrous mockery. “There is vengeance against false friends, and that yellow-haired woman,” the Presence went on. “But what will you pay for the life that can be given? Do you give me their lives?”
The question was logical; but the implication terrified him. What could a man pay as the ransom for his unused span of life? His borrowed vitality left him. That fierce glow which seemed to feed on all the force about, taking and not giving, drained Mason’s strength, and he could not speak; he could not stand. He clawed the floor as though to escape from that elemental fury.
Then Laylat spoke from the blackness: “Lord of the World, Viceroy of Allah, I speak for this man! In exchange for the lives of those who betrayed him, give him his life! He stands between life and death because he tried to spare when he should have struck.”
For a moment, echoes mocked Mason. He tried to rise, to protest; but the Presence spoke: “You have given, and I accept!”
The vault shuddered from the great laughter that followed. Then the force and the radiance vanished. Laylat was kneeling beside him in the darkness, saying, “It is over, it is done, it is granted! And I do not have to leave until the sun rises…”
Dazed, he followed her up the winding stairs.
Back in the shrine, Laylat set aside her tall silver miter, and unbound her long hair. She laughed softly as she caught his hand, and drew him to the dais beside her. “The old magic has not failed, the Lord of the World still listens to the daughters of Lilith.”
She pressed close to him; she made his senses reel and dance from those more than human kisses. But Mason thrust her from him.
“They are fools,” he croaked. “But they are under my protection, and I owe them their one chance.”
He lurched toward the outer shrine; the wavering glow of oil lamps guided him, and then the moon outlined the arch of the grotto.
Soft, bitter laughter followed him as he stumbled over the threshold, and into the cold white glow that flooded the Sinjar Hills. “You live, but you can never forget the daughter of Lilith!” that sweet mocking voice called after him. “You live, and you have paid, for we were one when we faced the Presence. And now you lose me!”
Mason slid, rolled, leaped from one ledge to the next. Each step made him more aware of his wounds and of his weakness. But he reached the floor of the ravine, and found his dead horse.
The Black Book was gone; or else it lay in some dense shadow, and there were too many for him to search. He ran down the rocky cleft. After half a dozen strides, he came upon a scrawny Arab, lying face upward, staring at the moon. It was Saoud, throat sliced from ear to ear.
A ragged furrow seamed Mason’s scalp. There was a wound high in his chest, and his exertions had made it bleed anew. But he had a chance of getting to camp, telling Howarth and the others of their peril.
As he saw it, he had been shot as a raider who had ventured too close to Satan’s shrine. Khosru Khan’s men must have recognized him, after firing that volley. And thus, seeing that they had shot Khosru’s friend by mistake, they would have no scruple about finishing the party that was under his protection. Loot was loot, and now that the strangers had no longer had a friend of Khosru Khan as their protector, they were fair game. But there was still a chance that they had not yet raided the camp.
The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction Page 32
