Death's Master

  2

  Dead Narasen stood on a bank of gray shingles, before her a wide unflowing channel of chalky water, reflecting the chalky sky and three distant gray hills of Death’s country, and Narasen herself, as now she was. And Narasen was gaudy in the monochromatic landscape, her skin blue as the hyacinth, the whites of her eyes nearly as blue but yellow in their centers as the topazes that depended from her ears. Her magenta hair, unstirred by the boisterous ineffectual wind of Innerearth, grew longer than it had in life and her nails were also very long, indigo in color. Narasen gazed at her reflection with no compassion. She loathed the world and the un-world alike, the gods, humanity and demons and even Lord Death, and she had not exempted herself from the catalog. But then, raising her eyes, for half a moment she was tempted, tempted to a dream of nostalgia. The farther bank of the river dissolved, became a golden plain, burnt with dark gold shadow, and there, between the pillars of tall trees, a golden leopard flickered. . . .

  But Narasen caught herself, dispelled the dream, and the vision smoked away. She had sworn she would not indulge in reveries of the lost earth, neither to please herself nor to titillate her gloomy master (Death was her master, she could hardly deny it). But Narasen, unlike the other mortal inhabitants of Innerearth, had kept her oath and fantasized not at all. Amidst the splendors and joys of human illusion, she cut her path like a knife. She despised those who abandoned themselves to such hallucinations, and her frown was disliked and avoided. Indeed, Narasen was in some fashion dreaded more greatly than Uhlume, Lord Death. For Death did not frown upon his slaves. He indulged them. He was a sad, ghostly and terrifying father. The mortals who had bargained with him, and now lasted out their thousand years in his domain, vied with each other, actually, to try to warm his melancholy with what their dreamings created. But not Narasen. She had sworn and she had kept her oath. When she entered, the stone palace turned dull and dank, the music faded and the patternings sank in the floor. The human populace of the Innerearth chided her, reviled her, begged her to join them, to be merry and relent. Narasen had no word for them. She ignored them, she brushed them aside. She was yet a queen, and yet a cruel one. When Uhlume, observing the beauty and the song massacred in his halls, set his pale eyes on her, she bowed to him mockingly.

  “I told you you should have pleasure in me,” said Narasen. “Have pleasure then. For your thousand years of Narasen, this is all the pleasure you shall get.”

  But generally, she did not spend her timeless time in the palace of Death among the human slaves, she walked over the ghastly lands of the Innerearth, and grimly and without hope, she searched them for some variety, for a moss that had almost a color between the pebbles, for the intimation of a sun’s rising or a night’s descent or a single star. She found none of these, of course, nor did she believe she would. For this I sold my soul, she thought. For this I whored, and lay with a corpse and bore a child from my unloving womb. For this! And then she would stare about and her hate and her gall were enough to crack the hills, but they did not crack them. Though sometimes, presently she would look up from her anger, and notice the Lord Uhlume standing a small way off, on a hillside or in a valley, watching her. And she would go to him and say: “Do I grate on you, my lord?”

  But the carving of his raven-black face told her nothing, and his bottomless empty eyes told less than nothing.

  However, at this particular hour, Narasen, as she stood by the unlovely river, became aware that Death was away. It was impossible not to know these moments of his absence. A kind of vague lightening of the atmosphere of Innerearth occurred, and simultaneously, and paradoxically, its only interest flagged.

  Now Narasen had recently been planning something for herself.

  In the apartments of the Lord Uhlume there was said to be a certain spyglass. It would show the world and any place in the world that it was required to show. Narasen had heard as much from the chatterings of her fellow slaves, and for years that had been only minutes and for minutes that had really been years, she had toyed with the hot thought of visiting the private rooms of Death and finding out the spyglass and using it—a thing no other of the human population of Innerearth would dare.

  Curious, Narasen’s attitude to Uhlume. She feared him—no longer a mortal fear, but still a fear, for what was he but a sort of Terror made accessible? Even so, she treated with him as carelessly as ever, and more carelessly. Fear, besides, was to Narasen something to be fought with.

  Thus, undaunted by scrutiny, Narasen returned to the dismal palace of Death, sought his apartments, and went in. There was neither lock nor guardian to bar her way. Generally, no one trespassed there.

  The rooms were many and dark, and all of them apparently unfurnished. Maybe the furniture with which Death surrounded himself was so unlikely, so alien to the human eye or reason, that it was present but simply unrecognizable, and Narasen saw but did not assimilate what she saw. Or maybe Death, specter that he was, actually dwelt among nothing, blown out like a lamp when no one was looking at him. Whatever the reason, Narasen discovered not a chair nor a table nor a chest, and she began to suppose the spyglass to be a stupid tale. Yet, in the very instant she supposed this, there the spyglass was in front of her, a crystal mounted in gold, lying in a corner. Which might tempt one to believe the spyglass was like the furniture—either in some other form which the beholder could translate if he wished, or else not there at all until wrenched into being by the determination of Narasen—for Uhlume long ago had told her, souls in unlive bodies were magicians.

  Narasen, needless to say, did not bother with such theory. She took up the spyglass, rubbed off the damp and the dirt, and held it to one eye. At first she discerned only untidy gushings like smoke. Shortly though the glass grew clear and she peered straight out of Innerearth into the world and into Merh. At a carriage of silks and metals and at King Jornadesh in it with a bevy of his women, and the people of Merh tossing flowers in his way.

  She had perhaps often considered things might be as they were in her city, but to have proof boiled and burned in her.

  “Ah!” spat Narasen, flinging down the glass, which of course did not shatter. “If I could curse as Issak cursed me, Jornadesh should be cursed for my murder, and not Jornadesh alone.”

  Just then, the quality of the air became different, more depressive yet more pleasing, which meant Uhlume was coming back.

  Sure enough, not a second later, the door—there was a door, though not consistently—shot open and Uhlume came through it.

  “Behold,” snapped Narasen. “A robber is in your chamber. What shall I steal, my lord? The fabulous gems? The costly carpets?”

  Uhlume said nothing and did nothing. Nothing really surprised him. At least nothing had done so yet.

  “I ask a boon,” said Narasen.

  “Name it,” said Uhlume.

  “I heard you have a spyglass which shows the world. I also heard you will permit your subjects a brief visit to the lands of earth. I hear that they rise aloft in their own dead bodies, and the flesh does not mortify, for you counteract decay with some clever magic. Well then, let me visit the earth. A night and some hours of day are all I ask.”

  “Some who pine to glimpse the world again, I will let go,” said Uhlume. “As a rule, it makes them the more wretched. And there is a price.”

  “Death is a merchant,” said Narasen. “What price?”

  “The price you will not pay,” said Uhlume. “All you see and all you do you must recount to me, must demonstrate to me in illusion, on your return.”

  Narasen smiled.

  “This once I will do it. You shall feast on my adventures, you poor man-formed devil.”

  “No other speaks to me as you,” said Uhlume.

  “Then you are due for it.”

  • • •

  The exit from Death’s kingdom was simple but obscure. Death placed on the third finger of Narasen’s left hand—
the hand from which the top joint was gone—a gold ring containing a bit of sacrum, the sorcerous bone of the pelvis.

  Once this ring was on, Narasen had only to step off from the leaden cliff where Uhlume had taken her, to find herself in a dark void, rushing upward. This passage of dark led into the River of Sleep, that river where dreaming souls strayed and mewed in panic, and it led beyond the river, through a thick smoulder of indecipherable dreams themselves. Narasen had come this way three times before, twice living and once dead. Now she beat on with no interest in the sights, hungry for what waited above, while by concentration of her will, she selected her point of emergence. Her head broke the surface of a sea of smoke, she shot straight upward, and everything was different. She was in the world again.

  That difference. Another would have wept. But Narasen was Narasen. If she felt anything, it was her anger. She had been cheated of this.

  It was the last hour of the afternoon. The sun hung low in a golden sky, and a dusky haze of gold washed over everything. The broad dark river was like beer, the plains were dappled leopard skin. The walls of a city seemed built of biscuit baked in saffron. There came the lazy noises of herds and the dim cries of men, all softened in the honey light. It was Merh and the city was Merh. The very scent of Merh it had, familiar to the native as the scents of her own body when she had lived. Merh, all gold, all sweetness. Merh not missing her, Merh not mourning her, Merh which had belonged to Narasen and which she had saved for this unremembering luscious indifference.

  Narasen looked about her. She stood, as she had meant to, in the felons’ graveyard outside the city wall.

  Issak, the magician, had been cast here after she had killed him. Here, in an unmarked plot his body had decayed, while his curse took hold of Narasen and her kingdom. Vividly, and with good reason, his words had stayed with her throughout her sojourn underground.

  Barren as the womb of Narasen shall Merh become. Merh shall be Narasen. When Narasen ceases to be arid, so shall the land become lubricious. When Narasen is fruitful, then shall the land bear fruit. Merh shall be Narasen.

  Narasen held out her blue hands to the markerless graves. Once before she had found the chink in the curse of Issak. This second chink had taken her years, but she had found it. Patrolling the vile Innerearth, it had come to her, the last sting in the scorpion’s tail, which would make her, rather than Issak, rather than Jornadesh, the scorpion.

  Narasen walked about the lonely piece of soil, testing with some sense new to her what couched there. Sometimes she would pause and stamp. And, from deep in their cavities, old bones seemed to shift, turning over in sleep, bidding her leave them be, it was not they she wanted. At length she sensed a certain area beneath her, and she stopped and considered it. It appeared to her she saw right through the earth into the pit, at a skeleton, with a bit of the haft of a rusty spear yet jammed between its ribs. The skull grimaced up at her. The flesh was all gone, and the soul was gone—free, as her soul was not. But the bones of men in those days were imbued with the deeds and with the memories of the deeds of those who had owned them, as wax takes the imprint of a seal.

  “Issak,” said Narasen, though her voice was not a voice in the world. “The dead speaks to the dead. Recollect your curse on me and on my city.”

  Now when she said this, something moved in the skull, not any part of Issak, but a black worm. The worm came between the jaws of the skull, and first it lifted its head, and next it bowed to her.

  “You acknowledge me then? Good. The curse was this, that Merh should be Narasen. And indeed it was. For when I was barren, Merh was barren, and when I bore fruit so did Merh. But I am dead now, I was poisoned and I died and my skin is blue. Give me back the curse, bones of Issak, for you recall it well. Let Merh still be as Narasen. I paid a high fee to keep what was mine, and did not keep it. Others, who paid nothing, took Merh from me. Let Merh be Narasen still.”

  She was just and she was cruel. As if it accepted as much, the black worm nodded or bowed again. Then it detached itself from the bones of Issak. It pierced up through the grave till it emerged on the earth under the sky, and it wrapped itself three times about the ankle of Narasen. Narasen felt it like a coil of burning wire, and the heat of it rose through her whole body till she was filled and brimming. Then the worm shrivelled to a husk and slipped from her, and Narasen grinned her fine teeth which were now like lapis lazuli, and she looked toward the gates of Merh.

  • • •

  The gold air caught fire and the land flamed up to meet it, until the flame guttered out and night sank into Merh, deep as her deepest stones, and deeper. But in the night a thousand lamp-lit windows had imprisoned the sunset in them, yellow, gold, and red.

  The gates were closing when a shadow came from the twilight road.

  “Look, what is that?” one sentry asked another.

  “Nothing, or nothing’s brother.”

  But the first felt something brush by him, lighter than a cobweb. He put out his hand to seize, and felt a woman’s hair pass through his fingers. Yet very lank the hair was, disenchanting, cold, like weeds in a rank garden. The other sentry, less aware, discerned no touch, though something had actually touched him. A while after, a third man, blundering from the guard house, drunk, discovered a woman’s handprint in the dust of the wall, and inside the outline of the handprint three or four moths alighted and then quivered, one by one, from the stone like burnt papers.

  Two women had come tardily to a well, and were gossiping there. Nearby the child of the elder of them played.

  The child glanced up. Out of the gloom floated a fearsome azure face, two gleaming eyes, a smile that was no smile. A hand drifted lightly over the child’s head. The child, about to shriek, was dumb.

  “Now, my son,” called the elder woman across the darkness, “come here, for we must be going. Who is this,” she added to her companion. “I have not seen such a woman here before.” She could make out only a silhouette, it was true, and the glint of jewels at ears and waist and the shine of metal at throat and wrists. “Someone’s rich maidservant, no doubt. Or some whore out for business.”

  In the dark, laughter that was not quite a laugh. The elder woman, misliking it, bade the other a swift farewell and hastened to gather up her ewer and her child and get home. The younger woman, delayed by the business of filling her jar, uneasily perceived the stranger bend over the well, trail her hand in the pitcher, then let it down into the water below. Then, as the young woman was moving off, a chill hand stroked her neck, and the woman took to her heels—too late.

  Many were to endure that astringent petting.

  Outside a tavern in the red light there, they saw a shape go by they took for a woman. One called and thrust his hand over her shoulder into her dress, but something in the texture of the stony breast his hand encountered drove him off. Another, snoring under a tree, his pot of drink beside him, never noticed a woman take up the crock and sample it and put it back.

  The bakers, working till dawn at the cheerful hell of their ovens, shivered but did not turn. Hours later, mice crept from the vaults of flour and covered the alley with their bodies.

  Some heard ropes creak down into the wells, and no one to be seen. A night bird flew to sip at a wet footprint by one of these wells, and ended its songs.

  A girl, lying in a garden with her lover, started and said: “How cold is your kissing.”

  “No colder than yours.”

  In the yards, the dogs did not bark. They whined, and stifled.

  The whore in the archway said: “This is my place, be off.”

  The beggar, squatting on the temple stair, said: “Give me a coin.”

  A cloth vendor, staggering around a corner with too much wine in him, came face to face with a nightmare, prostrated himself on his belly and swore never to drink again, and, as her icy foot slid over his neck, his oath was made sure.

  On its incline
, the palace of Merh glowed in a perpetual rosy daytime of lights. Before the bronze doors, soldiers with crossed spears were watching, without much alarm or anticipation, to see if they could spot the lingering thing which worried their lord. Ever since the wild man’s prophecy, Jornadesh had cowered in his rooms. So much for wild men and prophecies. So much for wise and majestic King Jornadesh.

  Yet the palace gate stood open, and through the gate one came.

  “No farther!” shouted the soldiers. “State your errand.”

  But this person who approached them did not check. Up the marble steps this person came, and by the glare of the torches the soldiery beheld a woman in a black garment belted with rubies, and gold at her neck and on her arms. But her hair was no color they had seen on a woman’s head before, neither her skin.

  “Now what prank is this? No tricks. We will have an answer.”

  But they received no answer, and the woman came on, and something in the hearts of these men shrank. Presently the youngest flung his spear. It struck the woman in her side, but there was no blood and the woman did not fall, but rather she pulled the spear from her and tossed it down, and her face was frightful with a furious derision. And she called out to them in a voice which was unlike any voice they had ever heard: “Get from my road!”

  And at the sound of this weird cry, all the birds that massed on the palace roof catapulted themselves into the sky with a brazen flash of wings, and flew from the city as if it were on fire.

  The soldiers were finally appalled, and they removed themselves from the path of the woman, all but the youngest who had thrown his spear, and he was too afraid to stir. And the woman pressed her palm to his face as she walked by him, and then walked on into the palace.

  It is to be supposed that Narasen, whose house this had been, knew the byways of the palace well. Silently and mostly unwitnessed, she moved through them, and now and then some article she handled. At the doors of Jornadesh’s apartments—formerly her own—the king’s strong guard of slaves were dicing. But when they set eyes on Narasen, the dice were scattered and the slaves were scattered, and shortly Narasen stood unhindered at the entrance. And in she went, unbidden and undesired, as once Issak the magician had come in, unbidden and undesired by Narasen herself.