by Donald Tyson
“Ride east from the ruins of Babylon into the land of the Persians. Ride until you come upon the river Tigris, where the two courses of the river fork. There you will find a school of philosophers who call themselves the Sons of Sirius.”
“How will this help me reach the Well of the Seraph?”
“Listen, fool, and I will explain. In the library of the school is a book. In the book is a gloss that describes the location of the well. Find the book and you will find the well.”
“Which book? What is the name of it? Who wrote it?”
“These things I know not. I only know what I hear spoken by the heads that are taken by the Beast. They all like to talk, before they go mad. If they know anything of interest, I listen to them. A head told me of this book a century ago.”
This was not the answer I had hoped for. I frowned in thought. It might be no more than a fool’s errand. I remembered the words of the dark man concerning his enemies in the east, and wondered if he had meant this school of philosophers. The Beast flapped its wings and stretched them in the wind.
“Hurry, the Beast is almost ready to fly. Give me the root.”
Extending it in my hand, I held it just away from his extended lips. They writhed in a snarl.
“What does the root do? How do I know it won’t give you the power to slay me?”
“It is a medicine, nothing more. It heals disease, and restores vitality. When eaten once each cycle of the moon, it extends life and confers immortality.”
My interest quickened. I looked at the pale root with greater respect.
“Will it heal mutilations of the face and restore manhood?”
The hairless head laughed his tinkling laugh.
“If its powers were so great, it might grow me a new body to go with my head. No, it cannot restore flesh that has been struck off.”
“Why do you need it?”
Belaka hesitated and averted his glittering eyes. He almost appeared to be embarrassed.
“Those who are slain by the Beast return as its heads exactly as they were at the time of their deaths, with all their infirmities. They do not age, or sicken, but neither do they heal.”
“What are you saying?” I asked with impatience. “Are you afflicted with some sickness?”
Again he hesitated. When he saw that I did not mean to give him the root until I was satisfied, he sighed.
“When I was killed, I suffered from a toothache.”
“A toothache?” I laughed. “Is that all?”
“Foolish child, you do not understand. I have suffered from that same toothache both day and night for over two thousand years.”
I considered this, and nodded. The prospect of ending such ceaseless torment would be attractive. Extending the root, I placed it between his lips, taking care to keep my fingers well back from his teeth, which were blackened at their roots. I realized now the reason for his foul breath. His teeth were rotten. He chewed the tough root.
“Quickly,” he said as he held the root in his mouth. “Take your dagger and cut your arm so that I can suck your blood.”
“This was not part of the bargain.”
“The root requires fresh blood from the veins of another human being before it becomes active. Alone, it is without value. If you mean to keep your word, you must give me your blood.”
Reluctantly, I took out my dagger and made a small cut on the inside of my left wrist. Blood welled forth and trickled down my wrist on to the heel of my hand. The Beast snorted and trembled as it caught the scent of blood, but did not drop its wings, which had expanded to their full size. There was little time to waste. I offered my wrist to the head. Belaka pressed his small mouth over the cut and sucked noisily, his eyes wide. After a few moments, I snatched my arm back.
“Do you mean to suck me dry, vampire?”
He tinkled merrily, his good humor restored by the flavor of my blood, and licked his reddened lips.
“I can feel it working like fire within me. It is healing my teeth.”
He spoke the truth. They were no longer black at their roots, but yellow. In appearance they remained unchanged, but the corruption was gone from them.
“A precious root indeed.”
“With what you have gathered, you can buy a king’s palace, if you sell it to those who know its worth.”
“I should gather more,” I said, looking over my shoulder.
The Beast cried out, and lifted itself on its hind legs for a moment, before dropping back to its forelegs.
“No time. Get on its back, or you will be left behind.”
“Maybe it would be better to remain a day in this place. I can always climb upon the Beast when it returns tomorrow night.”
Belaka laughed, but not unkindly. The ending of his pain made him benevolent.
“I should leave you here. When the Beast returned, you would be nothing but bleached bones. In this place, the hours of daylight pass more slowly. One of our days is here a thousand years.”
This information made me tie up my packet of roots and climb with haste upon the Beast’s back. The prospect of spending a thousand years on this windswept plateau, with nothing to eat but grass and u’mal root, did not appeal to me. No sooner had I stretched out on my belly and gripped the edges of its wings with my hands, then it stood on its hind legs and took three hopping steps toward the edge of the precipice. Without pause, it leaped over into the void, and we fell with a rapidity that made my stomach rise to my throat. I pressed the toes of my boots into the muscular loins of the creature and hoped I would not slide forward.
It leveled its flight and sent itself rushing through the air with the light of dawn behind us, as though fleeing the sun that would soon rise above the broken teeth of the mountains. Below, I saw countless similar peaks, rising like needles with no space between their steep sides. They were barren of life. Hours we flew, yet the light at my back became no stronger, for the beast outraced the sun of that strange land. If anything, it became darker, and the ground below fell under a veil of shadow. When at last this began to lift, I saw that it was the familiar plain beside the river Euphrates.
We raced along the winding length of the river, the stars vanishing overhead one by one until only Venus remained visible, shining with bright beauty in the east, lonely herald of the dawn. I saw the mountain that was the remains of the pyramid of Babylon rise above the horizon, and in moments we were beside it. The Beast circled the ruins of the ancient city and landed near the pillars at the east gate. With relief, I slid my stiffened limbs off its back and moved with care out of the range of its tail.
“Alhazred!” Martala’s voice sounded across the ruins. “Thank the Goddess you have returned.”
She stood beside a low wall at what she believed to be a safe distance, holding the horses by their reins. I cursed her stupidity silently to myself.
“Shut up, you fool,” I shouted, hoping to distract the Beast with my voice.
Hunger gnawed at its vitals. Its heads turned toward the east, and it hesitated, but the lure of fresh food proved too strong. It hopped toward the girl with its wings still half extended from its shoulders. Each gliding hop carried it a dozen paces. I ran after it but knew I could never get there in time.
The horses went mad with terror at the sight of its approach. The mare rolled its eyes and reared up on its hind legs to lash out with its hoofs. The Beast tore open its exposed breast with a single sweep of its talons, and without pause reached for Martala.
As has often been the case, the courage and quick thinking of the girl surprised me. Instead of fleeing on foot, she threw her leg over the back of my gelding and dug her boots into its flanks. The spur was unnecessary. It bolted as if all the demons of hell were at its heels, the Beast following after it with shrieks that split the morning air. I fumbled at the throat of my
tunic for the gold medallion, only to discover that it no longer hung from my neck. Nothing gleamed on the ground behind me. There was no leisure to search for where it had fallen. I ran on, cursing the stiffness of my legs. By the time I reached the girl it would be over.
I found them in a hollow. The gelding lay dead, its belly torn open and its entrails strewn over the dusty ground like a nest of blood-splashed vipers. The girl crouched behind a broken pillar, the Elder Sign made with both hands. As the Beast snapped at her with its beak or struck with its talons, she danced aside, keeping the column of stone between them. Before my aching legs could reach them, the Beast gave a forlorn cry and turned to look full at the east. The first rays of the morning sun blazed above the horizon. The sunlight redden the jagged top of the pillar behind which the girl cowered. With an impotent scream of rage, it turned from her and loped past me as though I were not there, moving in the direction of the east gate.
One of its seven heads gazed back at me across its flanks, and I saw the gleam of gold in its grinning mouth.
“Keep the girl,” the voice of Belaka cried, his words slurred by the pressure of the medallion against his tongue. “She will bring you good fortune.”
“She already has,” I replied.
“One last thing.” His voice grew faint as the distance increased. “When you travel east, avoid the valley of the—”
The rest of his warning, whatever it may have been, was lost on the wind.
Chapter 41
Breathing heavily from my run, I approached the girl and gazed with distaste at the still quivering corpse of my gelding. Already the large black beetles that roamed the ruins in such numbers had found the pool of its blood, and were delicately dipping their mouthparts to drink. Soon would come desert foxes and crows and rats. In a day there would be nothing left but scattered bones, which the ants would pick clean. I took my dagger and cut fresh meat from its haunch. The sleepless night on the mountain plateau had left me nearly as hungry as the Beast.
Martala watched in distaste while I chewed the raw flesh. Knowing her fastidiousness, I did not bother to offer her a piece.
I told her of my experiences while we gathered what possessions we could carry on our backs from the slain horses. She stared in wonder when I opened my small store of u’mal root.
“You should try it, Alhazred. That evil wizard may have lied to you from malice.”
I did not believe Belaka had lied, but there was sense in her words. Better not to place trust in another, when there was no need.
“Very well,” I agreed.
Placing one of the roots in my mouth, I chewed it. The taste was bitter and faintly sour, but not excessively unpleasant. It made the saliva gush from my cheeks. Martala bared her arm by sliding up the cuff of her narrow sleeve and pressed the blade of her little dagger against her skin. Her blood welled like a row of rubies in the golden sunlight. I put my mouth to the place and sucked, tasting its salty and metallic flavor on my tongue.
Fire coursed through my limbs and into my belly. It was like drinking strong spirits of wine. At once the stiffness and fatigue left my legs. My body felt lighter. I reached my hand to my face, and shrugged with regret. There was still a hole where the end of my nose should have been. I felt over my cheeks, my ears, and finally lowered my hand to my groin.
Martala saw my disappointment. Her shoulders sagged.
“Still, it was worth the attempt,” I told her, keeping my voice light to disguise my bitterness of heart.
We made our way on foot southward along the meandering bank of the Euphrates. From the air I had glimpsed a village on the river, not more than half a dozen miles downstream from the ruins. By late morning we reached it. The place was named Hilla, as we learned when I spoke to a man plowing a furrow behind his ox across an elongated field of turned earth. The plowed field, and others like it that stretched along the bend of the river, were kept from turning to dust and blowing away on the wind by means of irrigation ditches that extended on either side from a primary canal. A dam at the end would be opened each evening to allow the water to flood the fields. I had observed similar arrangements of irrigation ditches in the Nile Delta, but the black soil of Egypt was infinitely richer than this poor red clay.
The score or so of mud brick huts scattered amongst the fields boasted no feature of interest. The village elder, a tall and beardless man with a wild mass of curling white hair upon his head, greeted us with hospitality, but was unwilling to sell us anything to ride. Horses he had none, and donkeys he could not spare. When I showed him a handful of dinars, he admitted with reluctance that the village kept a solitary camel left there months ago by a passing group of travelers to recover from sickness. So great was his distress to part with it, the camel might have been one of his own children. We paid separately for the ragged blanket and worn saddle that had been left behind with the elderly and half-blind creature, and bought several small bags of fresh vegetables and dried fruit, then rode our stumbling mount back to the ruins in order to retrieve the remainder of our possessions, apart from the equipage of the horses which we could not carry.
The ruins oppressed my spirit. I was sick of the sight of the crumbled bricks and fallen pillars, and of the countless beetles that wrote their secret verses in the dust with their feet. Without the medallion of the Elder Seal around my neck I mistrusted the Beast. By nightfall it would be insane with hunger. I wished to get as far away as possible from the cursed place before the setting of the sun, but knew it would be irrational to start forth so late in the day. After pondering where to spend the night, I spurred our complaining camel, loaded down with the girl and our saddle bags and sleeping rugs, to the ancient ruin of the pyramid.
It was no easy task inducing the stupid creature to climb the slope of loose rubble that led to the first terrace. I had to drag upon its reins while Martala whipped its buttocks with a length of leather rope. When it smelled the corpse of the priest, it tried to turn and run back down the hill, but with curses we managed to drive it to one side and hold it against the wall of bricks. I left the reins in the girl’s hands and approached the corpse. Carrion birds and rats had gnawed its face, so that little remained. Indeed, its features were somewhat uglier than my own. I grasped it by the ankles and pulled it toward the edge of the terrace. A cloud of angry flies arose from its blackened skin. They followed it over the edge as it tumbled down to the plain.
The camel would be safe from wolves on its own in this elevated place. The Beast hunted only human prey for food, and was unlikely to kill it without provocation. I reasoned that since the mad priest had lived for years in the fissure of the pyramid, so near to the lair of the Beast, yet had not become one of its countless heads, the cleft would probably protect us for the night. With our sleeping rugs in hand, we crawled in as deep as we could penetrate with comfort. In my exhaustion, I fell asleep almost at once and did not awaken until the next morning. If the Beast hunted us, it suffered disappointment, but I thought it possessed insufficient intelligence to remember an injury or sustain a hatred.
We set out in the early morning, riding directly toward the red ball of the rising sun. After sitting on a horse for so many days on the caravan road, the pace of the camel surprised me. I had forgotten how much ground was covered by the long legs of these ungainly animals. Its gait was ideally suited to the low and rolling hills of the dry plain. As long as I took care to guide it around the more troublesome stones, it placed its hoofs without stumbling. A milky cataract covered its left eye, but it had learned to hold its head turned to the left in compensation. Every dozen steps it let out a groan at the stiffness of its limbs. Old age had brought disease to its joints.
“The poor beast,” Martala said behind me after a particularly piteous complaint. “Alhazred, we should get down and walk.”
I laughed so heartily and so long at this notion that she fell into a sullen silence. After a while, h
er arms tightened around my waist.
“Why don’t you give her an u’mal root? Perhaps it would cure her.”
“Are you mad? Each root is worth a hundred pieces of gold. A thousand pieces.”
“If she collapses and dies under us, we will have to walk the rest of the way with packs tied to our backs.”
This was food for thought. The girl had only spoken to get her own way, but her words held truth. I felt no desire to walk where I could ride. I wondered if the root would have effect on a mindless brute.
We stopped and dismounted in the middle of the barren plain, the ripples of heat rising off the rocks around us and making the air shimmer and dance. With care, I removed the smallest root from the blue rag and cut from it a piece as long as the end joint of my thumb before replacing it and returning the bundle to my wallet. Martala held the head of the camel steady by shortening the reins in her fist. I inserted the root between the soft lips of the startled animal. It began to chew. Moving swiftly, I drew the point of my dagger across my bared left forearm, some distance above the cut I had made for Belaka, and pressed the welling blood to the mouth of the camel. It licked my skin and snorted at the taste of blood. Martala had to drag its head down as it tried to dance away.
For several minutes there appeared to be no change, apart from its increased restlessness.
“Hold her head still,” I told the girl.
The milkiness of the cataract covered only half the surface of the left eye, where before it had completely obscured it. As I watched, the white cloud shrank and became less white. In a dozen breaths, it vanished. I reported this change to Martala, who laughed with delight. We made the animal kneel and climbed onto its back to resume our journey. It walked at the same pace it had walked before eating the root, but it ceased to stumble and uttered no more groans.
