Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "He has seen the moon-god," the elders agreed.

  The farmer was given three casks of oil for this vision, and though he waited by the banks of the river each night for many years afterward, the god never returned.

  Fish and meal cakes were sacrificed to the moon-god each month by the holy men who climbed to the top of the ziggurat by torchlight. They chanted the moon-god's name and asked for his blessing in the hunt.

  Then came the earthquake, and when the ziggurat lay in ruins in the town square, the elders would whisper that their sacrifices had displeased the moon-god. He did not want fish and meal cakes but the life of the man who had dared to look upon his face. They dragged the farmer out of his home and forced him to climb the rubble of the ziggurat, where they tied him to stakes and cut out his living heart.

  And the earth lay still again.

  "The moon-god is appeased," said the elders.

  No one missed the young slave boy who disappeared during the earthquake. The members of the merchant's household assumed that he had been killed by the flying debris that had fallen during the terrible moments when the ground yawned open and swallowed the massive ziggurat like a honey cake. No one looked for the boy.

  No one saw the small footprints in the mud where the moat had buckled like a ribbon and spewed out its water. No one noticed the small figure running across the land that would be known millennia later as Babylon toward the Zagros Mountains, far to the east of Kish. Even if he had been seen, no one would have thought of going after him. The mountains were the end of the world. Beyond them was nothingness. Everyone knew that because the priests and the elders had decreed it to be so.

  In the Zagros Mountains, the boy shivered with cold and fear. When the earthquake struck, his only thought had been to flee from the house. He had been in the kitchen with the cook and her helper. At the first rumble, the oil-filled pottery jars tumbled off the shelves and crashed to the floor, coating the tile with a thick film that flared up in a blanket of flame when it reached the cooking fire. For a moment, Saladin watched the carpet of flame with terrified fascination as the two cooks shrieked and tried to beat out the flames with rags while the floor shifted crazily beneath them.

  The cook's hair caught on fire. Her hands flew to her burning head, her eyes bulging.

  "Help me!" she screamed.

  Saladin backed away. She looked like a monster. He shook his head. No. No. She lurched toward him, toward the door. He ran from her.

  The next shock caved in the roof. But by then Saladin was already running.

  He stopped only once, at the moat. Until then, he'd had no plan to leave Kish; the sentries at the bridges would have known him for a runaway slave. But there were no bridges now. There was not even a moat. The water had vanished to flood the other side of the city. Here was nothing but a river of mud.

  Tentatively, Saladin took one step into that mud with his small bare foot. Then he threw himself in, digging and clawing until he reached the other side. He would never be a slave again.

  Hunger gnawed at his stomach. He had been running all day, but he would have to wait until morning to eat. His feet were cut badly from the rocks on the barren slope of the mountain he had climbed. As a house slave, he had not been given shoes to wear, but the soles of his feet were still not tough enough to endure a long trek through open countryside. The bloody footprints behind him were black in the moonlight. He could walk no further. He must sleep now, he told himself, here beneath the stars at the end of the world. Saladin put his head down on the dry earth and closed his eyes.

  He did not hear the footsteps approaching. He awoke to a sensation of exquisite pleasure that began at his feet and warmed his whole body. It was a dream, he thought. A lovely dream from a long sleep in a bed of feathers in his family's palace in Elam.

  But Elam was gone. The barbarians of Kish had destroyed it.

  Frowning, he forced his eyes open. At his feet an old man was hunched over him. He was dressed in a tunic of animal skins, and his hair was a tangle of long gray strings, like his beard. When he saw the boy's face, he smiled a toothless grin.

  Saladin gasped. The man's eyes were blue, as blue as the sea. And his skin was white.

  He shook his head and made a clucking sound with his mouth when the boy tried to scramble up, then gestured to an object in his hand. It was a small metal cup of some kind. He was rubbing it over the wounds on Saladin's feet.

  Only there were no more wounds. They had been completely healed.

  Saladin heard a low sound come up from his own throat.

  He had met the moon-god.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  His name was Kanna, and he had lived, as far as Saladin could tell, forever. Kanna himself could not remember much of the time before the Stone, as he called the cup, had fallen to earth.

  He did know that it was before the Semitic peoples had wandered into the valley and begun the civilization known as Sumer, with its weaving and pottery and trade. His people, the people of white skin and blue eyes, had been hunters. Hundreds of generations before Kanna, they had walked to the valley from the high steppes of a land where ice rained from the sky and coated the earth each year with a white blanket that was colder than the river.

  The Stone had crashed into the trees—for there were trees in the valley then, before the sun had grown too warm—near the place where he had built his fire. Kanna had been a holy man, a healer who wandered from tribe to tribe in the valley to tend the sick and sing to the families the stories of their ancestors. But he had been old even then and did not often seek the company of men. Most of his days were spent in the mountains, gathering the herbs and roots to make his medicines. His children had grown and died, as had two wives. He was already a very old man when he found the Stone.

  He had seen the explosion in the night sky, a fireball shooting sparks. When one of the sparks streaked down directly toward Kanna, he had not attempted to move. It was the tongue of the night come to eat him, and he would not object. There was no point in running from death, especially when one had lived as many years as he had.

  But the fireball did not strike him. It slammed instead into a massive cedar growing out of the hillside and severed its trunk like a mighty ax swung by the moon itself. The place where it struck the tree burst instantly into flame.

  Had he been a younger man, Kanna might have fled from the burning tree, yielding to the will of the gods. But he had seen lightning strike before. In his lifetime, he had watched vast tracts of forest burned to ashes by the fire from a single tree. And so instead of running away, Kanna scooped dirt onto the fire with his hands. The hair on his arms singed. His fingers blistered with the heat. An ember burned his face. But he put the fire out.

  In the morning he found the Stone's mother, a pitted, cratered boulder still smoldering with its own heat. It had cracked open when it hit the tree, and its interior lay exposed and gleaming in the sun.

  It was a thing of weird beauty, a mass of concentric circles interspersed with bumps so perfectly round that they might have been eggs growing out of the hot metal. Where there were no bumps, there were depressions of equal perfection. One of these was deeper and wider than the others.

  Then he saw it, lying against a rock: a perfect sphere of a color unlike anything he had ever seen before. He bent to touch it. When he could feel, through his burned hands, that it was not hot, he picked it up.

  He was disappointed. It was not a perfect sphere. Its top had come off and its interior was hollow, as if it had cradled another perfect sphere. He looked for the missing piece. If he found it, he would have not just one, but two spheres nesting together. A moon within a moon. A true gift for the gods. But he did not find the other piece.

  Kanna stared at the Stone in his hand. It would be useful, he decided. He could drink from it, like a gourd. And it was beautiful. And it had come to him straight from the sky.

  Suddenly he noticed his fingers. The blisters were gone. The hair on his arms had grown back. The sore s
pots on his face had healed.

  Then he understood. The gods had given him the Stone to heal the sick. It was time he left the mountain.

  Quickly he gathered up his things and set off toward the valley. He would tell the families there that the gods had smiled and brought them a gift.

  Never did he consider that he would become their god, or that the gift he carried would make him immortal.

  Saladin listened intently to the stories of the Stone. They had taken Kanna years to tell, since the two of them had begun with no common language. By the time Saladin was fifteen, he had learned all the skills the old hunter and healer could teach him and had surpassed Kanna in many ways.

  He began to realize that the hermit was not only an old man, but a completely different type of being. And not a god; not unless the gods knew less than mortals did. For while Kanna could still heal most of the lame and injured creatures of the mountain without the aid of the sacred Stone, he could not fashion a net to catch a fish.

  Saladin had tried to explain the purpose of a net, but the old man had only stared at him, dull-eyed. It was not until he saw what the net his protégé had made could do that he realized the boy had made a tool.

  It was the same with numbers. No matter how many times Saladin demonstrated it, the old man could not grasp the concept of abstract numbers. Two logs, yes; but the difference between "three" and "many" was nonexistent.

  Kanna, the boy decided, was quite stupid.

  He had come from a race of inferior minds, men so limited that for hundreds of years—or perhaps thousands, since Kanna could not discern the difference—not one of them had questioned the improbability that the old man would continue to live while whole generations of valley dwellers aged and passed into dust. Not one of them had dared to take the Stone from him. Even much later, when the climate changed noticeably and the vast plains which had held giraffe and antelope and elephant dried into lifeless deserts, when the limitless expanses of fresh water in which hippopotami had waded dwindled into two muddy rivers, when the hunter-tribes fled the valley or died with sand in their mouths, not one of them had sought to steal Kanna's power.

  When they were gone, the New People came to the valley. They were not hunters, but farmers who lived in the parts of the valley that had once been swampland. They irrigated their fields from the muddy rivers. They built their houses of mud brick and burned animal dung for fuel. They wove their clothing from fibers grown near the rivers. They created art and spoke a language which used a precise grammar, so that it was not necessary to augment it with gestures.

  Into the midst of this advanced society walked Kanna, reeking of the animal skins he wore.

  "Kanna was empty." He clasped his hands over his heart to indicate his loneliness. "Here. Kanna see New People."

  Saladin nearly laughed at the clownish mask of sadness that settled on the old man's features as he remembered their encounter.

  "New People many. One, two, many. Throw spears. Many wounds." He pointed to the places on his ancient, unblemished torso where the weapons of the Sumerians had struck.

  Saladin tried to picture the faces of the civilized men when the old hermit plucked the spears from his body and walked away without a scratch.

  "That's when you became a god to them," Saladin said, maneuvering a thick piece of wood onto the fire that warmed the dank cave where the old man and the boy made their home.

  Kanna looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  "The New People worship you as a god. A white god with sapphires for eyes, who rides on moonbeams." He told the old man the story of the farmer who had seen Kanna fishing at night.

  The hermit laughed, the firelight accentuating the deep folds of his brow. "Kanna run. Kanna think New People man try to kill." When his laughter subsided, his gaze settled into the hypnotic flames of the fire. "Bad to live so long."

  "Not as bad as dying, I imagine," Saladin said dryly.

  The old man smiled. "After New People throw spears, Kanna come to mountain." He patted the rocky earth as if it were a favorite cow. "Kanna stay. Kanna . . . empty." He accompanied the word with the same gesture he had used before.

  Then the corners of his eyes crinkled. "But boy come." He could not pronounce Saladin's name. "Boy come, not empty."

  His hand touched his heart. His eyes welled with tears.

  Saladin sighed and turned away. The old fool's sentimentality bored him. For seven years he had lived with Kanna's apelike stupidity, because there was nowhere else for him to go.

  There still wasn't. He had no future back in the valley. In Kish, he would be executed as a runaway slave if anyone recognized him. Back at Elam—if there still was an Elam—he would be a stranger with no status or property. No, he would not return in disgrace to the land his father had once ruled.

  Two cities, and beyond them the deserts and the mountains and the void of world's end.

  Suddenly he started. He was in the mountains. Since childhood he had heard that the Zagros was the end of all life, and yet he had lived here with Kanna among all manner of living things for seven years. They had roamed the mountains for miles and had not yet approached the abyss.

  He whirled to face the old man. "Kanna," he said, his pupils dilating with excitement, "is there a land beyond the valley?"

  The hermit nodded. "Many lands."

  Saladin thought his heart would burst from his chest. "In which direction?"

  Kanna pointed first to the east, then described a large circle with his arm. "Many lands."

  "But the desert lies to the east."

  "Past the sands," Kanna said. "Along dry river, past a tree of stone. A great valley. Many New People."

  "Past the sands . . ." Saladin's voice was barely audible. The priests had declared that the mountains lay at the end of the world. "But there cannot be . . ."

  Kanna nodded stubbornly.

  For a moment, Saladin allowed himself the luxury of a dream. A new land, filled with people like himself. There, he would not be killed as a slave. And perhaps he would not have to go as a servant. He could trade on his knowledge of healing. Kanna knew every plant and root and rock within a hundred miles and had shown Saladin how to use their medicinal properties to treat wounds and sick animals.

  "How can I go there?" he asked hesitantly. "What route do I take?"

  The old man shook his head. "Boy not go. Boy die in sands." Then he smiled. "Stay. On mountain." He took the boy's hand and placed it over his own chest. "Stay. With Kanna."

  Saladin yanked his hand away. He could not bear the touch of the old man.

  "Do you think I'm going to stay here forever?" he shouted. "Stay here as the pet of an old monkey man?"

  Kanna drew back in alarm, which only fueled Saladin's anger.

  "Don't pretend to be afraid of me! You know I'm going to die here an old man while you go on with your worthless life. You shouldn't have the Stone! It should belong to someone worthy, not—"

  He stopped short, his breath suddenly halted by the magnitude of the idea.

  The Stone.

  With the Stone, he could cross the desert. With the Stone, he could accomplish anything, possess anything, learn anything.

  With the Stone, he could live forever.

  "Give it to me," he said in a low voice.

  Kanna backed away, toward the damp walls of the cave where they slept. "Boy bad."

  "The Stone," Saladin said.

  The old man's lips drew into a tight downward semicircle. He looked like a child about to cry. His eyes flickered down to his waist, where he kept the Stone inside a snakeskin pouch.

  Saladin's young, strong hand reached out to grab the thong suspending the pouch.

  "No!" Kanna howled. Saladin yanked it, oblivious to the old man's efforts to push him away. He forced Kanna against the stone wall. "No!" The hermit's eyes darted wildly around the small cave.

  "You pathetic old bore," Saladin said. He spanned his right hand around Kanna's neck while he continued to pull at the leather th
ong at his waist.

  Then, like an animal forced by desperation to action, Kanna burst through the boy's stranglehold and butted his head against Saladin's.

  The boy reeled backward; the old man's skull was thick as rock. He had barely had time to regain his vision when he saw the firelog coming at his face. Kanna swung it savagely, filling the cave with the ferocious, atavistic cry of the ancient hunter facing a beast.

  The blow sent Saladin sprawling on the packed earth in a fountain of blood. Kanna wept, his shoulders heaving uncontrollably. He took a step forward toward the body, then stopped. If the boy was alive, Kanna knew, he would heal him with the Stone, and it would all begin again.

  Their time together had come to an end.

  Kanna waited. The boy would not live without him.

  Shutting his eyes tightly, the old man stumbled out of the cave into the sunlight. He would go far, far into the desert. He could live there. He could live anywhere. He would live, even though he wanted to die.

  The old man began his descent down the familiar mountain. He said nothing, but as he walked he placed his clasped hand over his heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When Saladin regained consciousness, it was night. He could barely make out the embers of the cooking fire with one eye; the other had no vision at all. The blood on his face had dried into a thick crust. His right shoulder throbbed with a dull ache that grew into a screaming, searing pain when he touched it. His arm hung uselessly, the joint smashed by Kanna's terrible blows.

  Who would have thought the old man would be so strong? Of course, he was a different sort of man. An older species, made for the work of beasts. Saladin spat out blood and broken teeth.

  I shouldn't have forced him to fight me, he thought. He had underestimated the old elephant. All men, even those with no desire to live, possessed the instinct to survive.