“Alas,” said the youngest brother, “I am at a disadvantage, being quite sightless in one eye.”
At this, the girls were abashed. They might have been expected, in the vicinity of the holy city, to have behaved better to a disabled man, and indeed spoken more graciously altogether.
“I will guide you,” the bold girl said quickly. And she hurried to the part-sighted man, and took his hand. “It is this way.”
Leaving the others to their unexpiated discourtesy, the girl led the traveler between the trees and the tents, and soon into that more isolated area of the camping grounds, where the shelters were infrequent and scattered.
The shadows were thickening on the land, though the sky was taking on the lambent sheen of starshine. The disabled traveler paused abruptly, shifting about—as if troubled.
“What is the matter?”
“I had a purse to offer the satchel-maker and just now I felt it fall from my belt.”
“I heard no chink of coins.”
“No surprise in that. My coins are too sparse to make much noise. Please look on the ground, and see if you can find my money, for I can make out little in the darkness.”
So the girl bent to the ground, seeking the purse she had not heard fall. As she did this, the disabled traveler grasped her all at once in a dreadful grip. His hands clamped over her nostrils and her mouth, oblivious to her frantic clawing and struggling, until, from lack of air, she grew insensible.
Lions patrolled the desert. Now one more lion was abroad. It bore the dangling figure of a maiden, not in its jaws, but across its arms. It had, besides, certain aids and tools a lion did not resort to—a length of rope, a length of cloth, another length coiled over and over, the length of a whip.
Out across the night-stained sands, much beyond the fringes of the various campments, their lights, their songs, their religion, and farther still beyond the notice of the gods of Bhelsheved. Here, by a rock, the youngest brother bound the girl with rope and cast her on the earth. Here he stoppered her pretty mouth with the ugly gag. And here he uncoiled and flexed that whip of his, that whip which he had raised against Azhrarn, and which the Prince of Demons had captured in one hand. Cool lightning had poured up the length of the whip, through the handle, into the body of the youngest brother, and become a delirium. He had not ceased remembering it. It had become a sweet torture. Ultimately, a solution insinuated itself.
He raised the whip now, and brought it down. At the impact of its wicked edge on flesh, cutting as a knife, he felt the light—invisible, yet positively experienced in every nerve—begin to come to him along the swinging bull’s hide. At the second stroke it sank up through the handle. At the third stroke, pleasure, like a branch of silver, flowered along his arm, and he groaned.
At the ninth stroke, with a scream, the youngest brother dropped unconscious on the sand.
Later, when the moon was rising, he roused, with a ghastly apprehension, a weight of lead upon limbs and heart. He crawled, as if abject, to regard the object of his affection. He leaned to her bloody shoulder, but she had died at the seventh blow, a vital vein severed, before she woke—in that at least her fate had been kind to her.
As the moon stole up the sky, spying on his deed, the madman buried his victim in the dunes, and smeared her blood from his hands with their powders. Tears of horror bathed his cheeks, he was sickened to his soul. But at the memory of the whip, and the light which had flowed from it, his pulse quickened, and in despair he knew he must kill again and again. Such was the visitation of love he had received, and such the black-haired “god” who had brought it.
As the young man returned through the groves, he saw a lost child, sleeping under a tree. No one was near—the brother uncoiled his whip. The child had no space to scream; its throat was severed at the first blow—again fate was as clement as it could be, having written such a stern sentence. The brother’s own scream he bit back, strangling on delight, tumbling into a temporary death of pangs and whirlings, like great wheels.
This time, when he came to himself, he vomited. Not pausing to effect a burial, he fled the spot, concealing his bloody hands in his cloak.
He could not bear it. He must excuse his irresistible fault. Thus: A god visited me, and ordered me to do these things. Not my will but his. So, weeping and afraid, but under heavenly orders, the young man hid himself in his brothers’ tent.
The venerable philosopher, he who had debated with Azhrarn on the nature of the gods, sat brooding through the hours of darkness.
From somewhere, some compartment of his brain, or of the night itself, a reverie had taken him. For though he did not suppose the gods to be stone, as in the stranger’s malign parable, yet was it not conceivable for the gods to be present in a stone, indeed, in all the stones which littered the landscape?
Now, the old man fancied himself walking across a plain under the moon, and here and there the stones glowed with a supernatural light, but here and there they did not glow, and he turned his foot on them. Then a dreadful fear of sacrilege came over him, and it seemed he heard a voice crying from the stones: Who treads on the gods shall know everlasting misery. After this had occurred more times than he could number, the philosopher, realizing his error, attempted to walk always between the stones of the plain. But try as he would, always some flint or shard came eventually under his foot, and the voice clamored.
At last the philosopher resolved to cease moving altogether, and there he stood, in the midst of the plain, fixed, as he supposed, for eternity.
Waking from this reverie, the philosopher heard a baleful noise and rose, and trod uneasily across the floor of his tent. Outside, the moon hung, a lamp, pendant from the ceiling of the sky. By her illumination, the old philosopher beheld a neighboring stone-grinder sharpening knives out of the hours of his trade from the goodness of his heart. The philosopher, seeing the sparks bursting off the stone, was seized by a terrible rage. He flew at the grinder, beating him about the head.
“How dared you,” cried the philosopher, “abuse this holy object in which the gods are resident!”
The grinder toppled from his stool, and the philosopher strode on, finding next a young woman baking cakes on a flat stone before her fire. The philosopher beat her also, and flung the food into the flames.
“Blasphemer! You must not cook cakes on the breast of heaven.”
And stepping back from her, he turned his heel on a pebble, at which he knelt stiffly, and cupped the pebble in his gnarled old hands, all bruised from striking the faces of men and women, and he entreated the pebble’s forgiveness.
As the moon was declining, a tan-haired girl lay in the back of a tent, her sister sleeping nearby, and she dreamed.
It was her wedding night, and her cousin-bridegroom, whom she had seen no more than three times, brought her inside their chamber, and shut and bolted the door.
A depression settled upon the girl, for though she did not mind the man’s looks, she did not favor them either. And though she loved no other instead, she did not love him.
“Come, dear Zharet,” said he, “let us lie down together.”
So they lay down on the divan among the cushions, and he unknotted Zharet’s girdle clumsily, and fumbled at the embroidery of her bodice, and drew the polished crystal pins from her tan hair.
As he was doing all this, and her vague sensations of aversion and mistrust intensified, her eyes strayed to the narrow window. There, beyond the iron lattice, sat a black velvet cat which gazed at her with eyes like pools of water. In these eyes like pools she read a message, clear as if painted there in symbols. Only take up one of these sharp pins, with which the dolt has just scratched you, and thrust it through his skull. Do this, and you shall have another, better, lover.
And Zharet recalled a dark man passing between the tents in the nights before the people had come to Bhelsheved.
Her bridegroom pinched and plucked at her breast, and lay astride her like a fallen mule, and the girl thought to herself: Imag
ine if that stranger were a god, a dark god from the snow-pale city. And that he had selected me for his bride, but here is an impediment. To be rid of it is only an act of faith and worship.
Just then the bridegroom put his unsubtle fingers to work on another part of her, and with a grimace, the bride snatched the nearest pin and thrust it through his head. He died without a sound, and his body rolled immediately away from her, and she forgot it entirely, for next second the black cat dropped, light as a velvet glove, upon her breast.
A moment only did the creature remain feline. Then it changed into a man, or into the form of a man. Only a glimpse she caught of the face, which was transcendently beautiful, and framed by the long black curlings of its hair, and lit by two black pools of eyes. Even so, she knew it was not the face she had glimpsed among the tents, not the face of that amazing stranger, but another, a little less amazing. Yet he was beautiful enough, this other visitant, beautiful of form and body, and like a pale shadow he covered her, and even his breath was marvelous, drugging her . . . and she tipsily reasoned the god had assumed this mortal aspect in order not to smite her with the energies of the divine one.
Then the demon of Zharet’s dream (demon indeed, one of the Eshva, those that were the servants of the Vazdru princes of Underearth, at whose caress even the locks of doors would melt and open) began to caress her, and all her flesh seemed melting and the locks of her womb pulsed. Her body was altered as he touched it, strands of a fiery weakness coursed down her arms beneath his fingers, her breasts budded, her belly, receiving the impress of the silvery musculature of his, became a stream of lights. When he pierced her, though she was a virgin, she felt no pain, only a shaft of exquisite rightness, as if two portions of a severed whole had come together in wondrous healing. He moved upon her first as slowly as a river, but, like a river, gained momentum. His body was all she knew, his eyes all she could see. The river bore her on toward these eyes, these depthless pools, as if finally she would be dashed into them and drowned there, and how she yearned for her drowning, and herself began to swim toward them, and plead for them and for their waters to close over her head.
Almost in another moment, she felt the land, the very world give way, and cleaved the cleft itself to find the vortex of ecstasy. But this ecstasy was of a specialized kind.
The first moments of the ecstasy were searing green and sapphire, and in them she struggled, blinded and sobbing. But this was the first stage, and after these moments, she broke through into a second ecstasy.
The second ecstasy within the first was the color of wine, and here all her senses became one, and that one shot through her like the spindle of some revolving star, so that all about herself she spun. But this spinning drove her, thrust her, again into a third stage.
The third ecstasy was white, far whiter than any city. And here she was transfixed, and her frantic writhings, her gasps, her cries, even her breathing, stopped. Here on this summit she became a silent shriek. She could neither change further nor return to what she had been. She could not move. Her spasms were one single master spasm, frozen in molten whiteness, without beginning or end.
In this third ecstasy she was suspended for a thousand years.
And then her demon lover let her go, and she fell back through a violet cloud and into her body, or so it seemed, as if her soul had known orgasmic rapture rather than her flesh.
Opening her eyes, Zharet saw the tent in the desert, and that in darkness. She was alone, save for her sister sleeping not far off, and all was quiet, even her own heart beat softly. Then, in the gloom, she savored the fading taste of her dream, trembling. And in her fingers, she turned a quite illusory, and quite murderous, pin.
The people continued to pour into the holy city, to experience sacred joys, to sacrifice, to pray, to confess sin, to come out again, with unfocused eyes.
In the camps all about Bhelsheved, the songs went on, and the feastings began, and the contests with bow and spear, the racing for prizes.
Days passed like flames, and nights like black leopards, running from world’s edge to world’s edge.
Something was not as it should be. What? An uncanny influence lay over the region, a cloud, a smoke. There was dissent. There was quarrelling. There were accusations. . . .
“Someone stole my little singing bird from its wicker cage. Was it you?”
“Someone blighted my rose in its pot. Was it you?”
“Who spilled my wine?”
“Who let out my sheep from their pen?”
“Who spied on me as I bathed?”
“Who told lies about me in my absence?”
“Was it you, or you, or you?”
And at the contests, there was cheating, and when the cheating was brought to light, blows. There was adultery, too, and rape. There was theft.
The storytellers forgot their myths and legends, losing the thread of a tale between one word and the next.
Lamps would not light. Fires lit and exploded, and tents went up like scarlet trees in blossom.
Animals pined and died, as if for some master they had loved.
The corpses from a series of gruesome murders were discovered, the victims both male and female, both adult and child, horribly mutilated by a whip. One was suspected, a kinless carpenter, and he was stoned. A mad old philosopher, about whom a wild mad sect was gathering, screamed curses at the mob, declaring the bloodstained stones were deities.
Girls who were soon to be married were come on, at odd times, playing menacingly with little clay images of their bridegrooms. In some of these images, long pins had been decisively stuck.
All this occurred about Bhelsheved, the holy city. All this which day by day, and—more definitely—night by night, grew stronger and more fearsome, like a contagion, getting a hold, like plague.
Vague reports filtered into the city, into the sacrosanct precincts, were whispered by nervous worshippers, through the filigree screens to the priests or the priestesses, who would bend limpidly and attentively to listen. But if the Servants of Heaven paid any heed, drew any inference, was hard to tell. Seldom, if ever, did these chosen ones speak directly to the people. Hearing of murder, arson, thuggery and upheaval of all sorts, their translucent faces never altered. They made the sign of a blessing or a protection through the screen over whomever had related the events, and then drifted away like gauze scarves.
A new malaise fastened on the people ringed about no less than a hundred paces from the moon city. A malaise of doubt, too faint, too inchoate as yet to overwhelm them, but which, given sufficient space for brooding, would undoubtedly do so. At some juncture they must come to consider that their elected priests ignored, or were incapable of sympathizing with, their trouble. And since these persons were said to resemble the gods, could it be that the gods, also, were indifferent to the plight of mankind—just as a particular stranger had recounted?
No doubt, this fault in the priests was due only to their ordered and protected lives. They had lost, or never even known, a valid conception of human beastliness and despair. Told over to them, it must have sounded like the story of some other world. Perhaps they thought they were being jested with.
CHAPTER 3
Night Works
It was the last night at Bhelsheved. In the shining afternoon, the sublime priests and priestesses had emerged from sanctuary, and moved about the camps, scattering aromatics, sequins and blossoms, blessing the crowds. But the hymns which were sung had a limping quality to them now. Once a man spat, explaining hastily that the sacred names had caused him to choke. Once a girl averted her eyes, tearing the holy flower, which had fallen into her hand, in shreds.
Did the priesthood notice? It seemed not. They floated by in their filmy garments, their filmy hair like sorcerous metal-work of the Drin, those lowest, almost obscene but cunning artisans of the Demon City. . . . But who would dare compare the tresses of heaven’s servants to such stuff? Here and there, a few were doing so.
When the priests retreated bac
k into their fortress, their isolated cold virgin of a shrine, where common men, being gross and vile, were not permitted to live but only humbly to visit, the sun also abandoned the scene.
Day’s golden eye closed its black lid, and it was night.
Presently an awful commotion broke out. News spread like locusts across the campments.
“A band of robbers has stolen the Magic Relic which was to have been awarded to the most worthy among us, the winner having been chosen by popular vote.”
“Sacrilege! In which direction did the devils flee?”
“Eastward. Let us pursue.”
Strange indeed. Each year this wondrous trifle had been awarded. It was nothing less than a gold-encased bone, said to have belonged to the skeleton of Nemdur’s virtuous queen, she who had implored the gods’ pardon and been saved from Baybhelu. Just as the last spilled drop of the sun had been wiped away in the west, two or three shade-like figures had been seen, darting light as air from the vicinity of the Relic-containing pavilion. Reliable witnesses deduced they had perceived the gold bone glintingly passing back and forth between the thieves’ pale slender hands. A curious notion had come to the witnesses—that the robbers laughed at them, even mocked and insulted them, though they made no vocal sound. Whatever else, the fiends had sped eastward, and somehow they left a clear trail on the sands behind them—not of footprints, more like the track of a single huge serpent. Possibly, long cloaks might have formed the marks, as their owners ran.
The pursuit, which began in trickles, mounted into a flood of people pouring from the camps, with lamps and torches in their hands. Something like the joyous arrival at Bhelsheved. Not quite.
And over the twilight sands, all blue from the sky’s deepening blueness, the crowds, thousands upon thousands, hurried, almost all who had come to Bhelsheved, cursing and yelling, toward the east. An unfortunate direction, conceivably, for in the east Nemdur’s Tower had been blasphemously raised, when Sheve had been only a city.