Death's Master

  At that, the third virgin flung about and locked her hands around Kassafeh’s ankle.

  “You! Oh, you wicked one! How could you work such an evil upon me in the night!”

  “Not I,” cried Kassafeh.

  “You and none other. I shall never forget your lies to me in that pitch black room, how you laid upon me your body, nor the delicious—dreadful—movements you forced me to embark upon; and how you hurt me and when I screamed for you to continue—that is, I mean, to cease—you laughed in a strange deep voice—oh, Kassafeh, never shall I forgive you for the red ruby I found beneath me. I cannot stop thinking of the delight—or rather, the horror—I suffered at your hands.”

  Kassafeh looked at her ankle in the stone lock of the third virgin.

  “Pray let me free,” said Kassafeh, “and I will lie down beside you and comfort you.”

  “Oh yes, by which, of course, I refuse you,” postulated the third virgin, and let go.

  Kassafeh fled.

  There was an area of the valley where few things flourished and the desert remained. Only Kassafeh saw this place accurately, for by now none of the illusions in the garden could consistently deceive her. To the others, like the rest of their paradise, this was a spot of green lawns, fruit trees, mossy verges. Because of that, they had never observed the tiny square cave into which Kassafeh now edged herself. Nor was she discovered in it when the three fervent girls came wandering by, one after the other, bleating her name. None of the other five passed. Kassafeh concluded they had no reason to.

  Kassafeh lay in her cave all day, angry, cramped, and deep in meditation.

  Though Veshum deliberately kept its daughters unworldly, Kassafeh had learned enough to recognize defloration. And hugely puzzled she was, as well she might be, hearing of three deflorations in one night, supposedly due to her. But of this crime, Kassafeh knew herself perfectly guiltless. Thus, someone—or something—masquerading as herself, had done the deed. And it seemed to her it must be Thing rather than human, for how would a human ever get into the garden. This idea, rather than disturbing her, intrigued Kassafeh, for she was bored and not incapable of bravado.

  Certain elements were consistent in the three stories—the lamp blown out and the chamber darkened so none should see what really came there—some foul devil-shape?—and then a piteous demand for comfort, and then other demands, apparently granted willingly by all three virgins. But there were six further virgins in the valley, and could it be the Thing intended to sample each of them?

  Kassafeh, as was her wont, kept clear of the virgins at their evening feast. In the past two years she had come to prefer the roots and berries and plain water of the valley to illusory banquets. At the feast, five of the virgins chattered on in their normal idiot vogue. Three sat silent, with fever in their eyes and cheeks, and glances of scared jealousy at each other—for each suspected not she alone had had a night caller. They had not danced so well this dusk before the god.

  The virgins repaired to bed. Five fell languidly asleep. Three twisted and wriggled, gasping whenever the night breeze stirred the draperies. But no one entered, and near midnight, all three succumbed to exhausted slumber with a dim notion they had heard someone singing or humming just before they did so.

  But Kassafeh, not quite mortal enough to be influenced by Eshva magic, was alert. Her own lamp she had already extinguished, and she crouched in a corner, eyes and ears wide. About midnight, vigilance was rewarded, for she heard a distant cry, thin as the cry of a night bird, but not a night bird.

  With stealth, Kassafeh crept to the doorway and peered out. A minute after, from another doorway, a figure emerged.

  Three years with her fellow virgins had taught familiarity. Kassafeh perceived at once that this was none of them.

  Yet it was not the shape of a devil or monster. Rather the shape of a tall and slender—no, not a man, for a beam of starlight showed the outline of a high firm breast. . . . Maybe, a demon?

  More adjacent to truth than she realized, Kassafeh prowled lightly after the soundless figure. Soon it stepped aside into another chamber—that of the fifth virgin, and Kassafeh set her eye to an aperture in the curtain.

  Yes! A woman. A woman leant above the lamp, hair the color of apricots hiding the face, skin tawny from the sun, gold-tipped breasts in the lamp’s light, which light was abruptly blown into gloom. And then a woman-shadow at the windows drawing draperies over the stars. Blackness.

  And from the blackness a murmur, and next a question:

  “Who is there?”

  And a second murmur:

  “It is I, Kassafeh.”

  And then the murmur relating its need for comfort, so Kassafeh smiled furiously, entertained despite herself.

  And presently a gasp in the blackness, and a sound like silk sinking to the ground, and, following, a sound like a sure hand traveling over a domed hill, across a plain of vellum, into a valley of warm woods. And maybe Kassafeh did hear as much, for she was attending earnestly.

  Now a sigh, now a breathless breathing, now a broken moan. Now words with no logic, now muffled surgings, twinings. Now the velvet rasp of skin on skin. And now a sharp, though not vociferous, cry, with, as its suffix, a deeper cry. A succession of cries and groans and great laborings for breath, as if a glorious murder were being slowly perpetrated in the bed.

  Kassafeh, with a racing heart, lurked at the curtain, wilting with desire and bewilderment. And then she heard a voice, a voice she had never heard in all her life, say: “My thanks, beloved.” The voice of a man. After which came another aspect of the voice, a kind of new murmuring, song-like, which set Kassafeh retreating, aware of sorcery, her fingers in her ears. But the demon song did not overwhelm her, not half so much as she had been overwhelmed by the voice of a man.

  She ran back to her room, and there she waited, wishing she had a knife to slay him, or a phial of her mother’s scent to entice him—and she was not sure which.

  But the intruder, woman, man or demon, did not enter Kassafeh’s chamber. It was another third virgin he sought that night. Almost as if, deliberately, he was leaving Kassafeh, whose name he used for a concealment, till the very last.

  And possibly he instinctively did as much. For there was a fitness in so leaving her, she the most beautiful, she who had given him his plan.

  There was also another facet and possibly he sensed it or possibly he did not.

  If it had needed an extra focus to associate the supernatural Well of Upperearth with the puny well in the valley, Kassafeh must certainly have provided that focus. She, semi-daughter of a denizen of the sky, an elemental of Upperearth’s lower caste, now a Daughter of the Garden. Thus destiny, or accident, or some obscure, unrecollected, prehistoric whim of the gods had brought each feature together to make the whole. And events ripened.

  In the morning, Kassafeh had decided.

  She had no use for Veshum’s god, and a pact with demons might be preferable. Whatever else, this demon was systematically destroying the purity of the guardians, and thus must be bent on destroying the hated prison of the garden. Kassafeh was his ally in spirit, and much quickened in her flesh.

  When the fourth virgin slunk up to her with urgent squeaks, Kassafeh was canny.

  “We must not speak of it by day,” said Kassafeh. “It shall be our mystery dedicated to the god. Tell no other. It is solely yours and mine.”

  The fourth virgin, pausing only to deliver a loving embrace, went away happily. So did the fifth and sixth virgins, whom Kassafeh harangued in similar vein. However, when the first second and third virgins individually approached—they who had not been visited on the second night—Kassafeh humbly said this:

  “Alas, after our quarrel I feared to come to you, but tonight I will come. Say nothing to the others. I believe what we do is a holy thing, and we are the favored of the god.”

  These lies she delivered,
knowing the demon would quell all who kept awake with his murmuring songs. Only Kassafeh could resist, and she would be ready.

  That night, Kassafeh went to the feast. She put on a fresh robe, one which would look like riches to the virgins, six of whom no longer merited the title. And this night two virgins only chattered inconsequently while the other six gazed adoringly at Kassafeh, and surreptitiously pressed her hand when passing her the wine.

  But when she had gone up to her chamber, Kassafeh sorted what she had put there ready. She bathed in the perfumed bath, which was only a fount of natural water. She put blue flowers in her hair, and crushed their juice to stain her eyelids, and her eyes simulated their romantic blueness. Until she doused the lamp, when her ever-changing eyes turned feral with excitement and unease, and blazed like the cat’s, now amber, now gold, now iridescent pallid red.

  While in the dark she took up and proceeded to hone a piece of sharp flint on a rock, both of which she had searched out in the garden. And even as she struck sparks from this tool of slaughter, she dreamed of love. And even as she dreamed of love, her foot toyed with the rope she had plaited of tough pliant stems, which she might bind him with, if he could at all be bound.

  Additionally, she listened. And once she heard a distant muted cry, and she started. Later, a second cry, and she started somewhat more. For this night, the third cry must be hers.

  9

  The rose moon had sunk, the redder rose of sunrise was an hour away.

  The night pressed itself to the earth in a last black coupling.

  Simmu entered, with a lynx tread, a chamber equally black. No lamp burned; the windows were muffled. Kassafeh, the ninth virgin, slept in tomb-darkness, so it seemed. The way was already prepared.

  As with the others, Simmu insinuated her female shape on to the couch. Unlike the others, the ninth virgin stirred immediately, and announced in a drowsy tone: “I have said before, I will not share my bed with panthers or other beasts.” And she reached out her slim unerring hand and placed it directly on Simmu’s maiden breast. “Now, who is that?” inquired Kassafeh.

  Simmu could hardly reply “I, Kassafeh,” on this occasion. Besides, the neatly placed and now gently exploring feminine hand was already playing havoc with Simmu’s womanhood. So Simmu moved slightly aside from his companion, and let the male urge overtake him.

  “Oh, sister,” whispered Kassafeh, “you do not seem precisely as I remember.”

  “It is a bad dream I have had,” whispered back a coaxing mellifluous voice, no longer quite a girl’s.

  “Poor sister. You must tell me everything,” Kassafeh urged. “Only let me throw off these heavy covers, for the night is hot.”

  And saying it, she did it, and as she did it she grasped the lighted lamp she had muffled under their folds beneath the couch, and with a shout of triumph she sprang to kneel over Simmu, lamp in one hand, the raised honed flint in the other.

  She had not seen a man for three years. Doubtful it was if she had ever seen a man like this man, one so handsome, so leoninely strong and so finely made, like new-minted bronze in her bed, looking up at her with unnerved, unnerving lime-green eyes.

  “Well,” said he, “will you kill me then?”

  Obviously he knew she would not. It was surprise he showed, never alarm.

  “Maybe I will slay myself,” said Kassafeh, “rather than succumb to your lust, which lust is surely plain enough.”

  “Your eyes were molten, but they are now the color of a young night. From this I judge you will be gentle with me.”

  “What do you want in the Garden of Daughters—other than to lie with us, for probably there are women in plenty outside the wall.”

  “No woman like you,” said Simmu. “And now your eyes are dark as hyacinths.”

  Kassafeh smiled and she laid the knife aside, and the lamp on the floor next to it. And, as she did so, he circled her waist with his hands, which almost met since she was slender, and thus he held her, and her lovely hair showered over them both.

  “Are you of demon-kind?” asked Kassafeh.

  “I have walked with some that are,” said Simmu, “and with one who is the Lord of Demons, Night’s Master.”

  “And do you mean to inconvenience Veshum’s doltish god?”

  “All gods, but mostly Death.”

  “Tell me why you are here,” Kassafeh said. “I will lie with you willingly, but tell me first.”

  “Then I will tell you,” said he, “but only one time.”

  And he told her of the two wells and how the breaching of the glass cistern had been mathematically reduced to the breaching of nine maiden-heads, and that Immortality would descend as a result and he should steal it.

  “Why, you are a hero,” said Kassafeh with wonder. And lowered herself into his arms with such amorous hunger that fires seemed kindled between them.

  But Kassafeh yielded her citadel without a cry, or with a cry so soft only Simmu heard it.

  It was the night which shrieked, the night and the violated valley.

  First, a clap of thunder. The land cowered, the stars seemed shaken from their sockets and wheeled about. Then a thunderbolt, a terrible lightning tearing one section of the darkness from another, dismembering the sky, and flinging hither and yon a debris of scorched air. But the bolt struck; within the garden it struck. It smashed the gold dome of the temple, and the dome burst apart like eggshell, gilded pieces erupting far and wide. And down through the aperture the lightning bolt progressed, to uproot with a fearsome concussion the metallic basin with its stopper of bone. And this ultimate stroke laid naked the small round slimy well which had been contained beneath the hallucination of gold and ivory.

  To these upheavals the lovers, knotted about each other in convulsions of pleasure, paid slight heed. The night had resorted to mimicry. Many a house has seemed to quake at such a moment.

  But soon, lying spent, they heard the march of fate across the heaven. And over these onerous drum-beat footfalls, a silence poured. And in the silence came a sound to make the sinews melt and the hair rise and the heart stop: One single glacial crack.

  • • •

  It began to rain in the Garden of the Golden Daughters. To rain only in one place. The rain, a narrow cascade, dropped from some invisible but quite stationary origin, through the broken edifice of the temple, straight down the throat of the second well. The rain had a thick and syrupy appearance. It did not glint or glimmer. It was the color of lead.

  The shower lasted a few seconds, or less. By then, the source of the flow had been sealed up again, or had mended itself. No matter. The water of Immortality had been spilled and was now accessible.

  Overhead, the thunders filed away. But clouds drifted like nets among the shoals of stars, and a cold wind raged through the garden. And when the cold wind had departed, a sense of some strange and altered thing possessed the valley.

  The magic the witch had built there had crumbled, leaving fragments and rags. An illusory tiger, transparent as an orange ghost; a lightning-smitten ruin, no longer gold. The hot wall had lost its heat. Its crackling corona was extinguished. Here and there, stretches had collapsed in powdery rubble. Outside, the monsters mewed aimlessly at the stars, or scratched themselves. Below, the patrols—who had yet been intermittently searching for the suiciding maiden (Simmu)—had dropped on their faces in terror when the lightning struck, and now pointed abjectly at the quiescent nullity of the wall. A bizarre paradox: after two hundred and nineteen years, there really was something to be guarded at last, positive Immortality in the second well, and no proper safeguard remained to keep it.

  In the desert, adding a dismal background, wild dogs howled—why is not to be imagined. It was none of their business.

  10

  Woken by thunder, eight girls, only recently virgins, clustered on the lawn beneath the palace. The palace did not look as marvelous
as it had, an edifice of plaster and posts and hung with sacking. On the slopes, no roses bloomed, no hyacinths. Wild flowers and weeds burgeoned there.

  “It is a sin we have committed!” screamed the un-virgins to the wind. “Kassafeh made us sin.”

  A ghostly deer swirled through the woodland and the un-virgins wailed.

  The wind abandoned the valley, the sun lit its eastern horizons, and unkindly revealed more raw facts. A raven flapped over, cawing scornfully. Yesterday it would have had the guise of a dove.

  Kassafeh ran down the lawn to the gibbering eight un-virgins.

  “Be glad,” said she, harsh as the raven. “There is something truly precious now in the noxious well of the god. Come and see.”

  The eight girls glared at her with hate. If they had been brought up in a rougher clime they would have attacked and savaged her, but now only their glares had weapons, and their tongues.

  “You are vile. You will be damned!”

  “Jackals will eat you!”

  “You have demoniac eyes—jackals will eat those!”

  “The god will turn you into a grasshopper!”

  “Your name will be forever cursed!”

  “Baaa,” said Kassafeh, as once before, “baa-baaa!”

  And then Simmu the young man strode down the slope. He carried a clay vessel (yesterday silver), bound with the rope of stems Kassafeh had woven to bind him.

  The eight un-virgins shrank. Their eyes expanded, their mouths opened wide on huge screechings, and they pelted from the locality. Poor things, they really did not deserve their bad luck, nor the shame which they would insist on experiencing for the rest of their lives.

  Simmu and Kassafeh went toward the wrecked temple, un-speaking, pale and drunken with the magnitude of events.

  Bits of broken tin (gold) and stained and aged bone—the fabulous stopper—rattled under their feet. Cracks bisected the floor; the window lattices had shattered.

  Trembling, Kassafeh and Simmu stared into the minute and slimy well.