Death's Master

  In the half glow beyond the lamp, something tensed and trembled. Muted light licked over a network of small fires. A snake with amber scales, spent, on its belly, head in the shadow—a snake, the cord from the box of wood.

  Narasen made the movement of a river with her palms across the body of the youth. Her red hair, loosened, hung about them, enclosing them with crimson, as the crimson pavilion enclosed them. Her hands slipped into the shallow river-bed, between the fine golden reeds. Her hands traced the course of the river, had a river come there.

  In the half glow beyond the lamp, the amber snake shivered the length of its long shimmering, shivered off the light, though its head remained in shadow.

  Narasen’s fingers clasped the root of the river, its source. She lowered her head to sip from its waters, had there been waters.

  In the half glow, the snake jerked. It rippled. The snake became a river, the river which swelled and sluiced under the river-bed. The snake’s head lashed upon the floor. From the shadow, the head of the snake rose. Straight the snake’s head stood. The snake danced upon its tail.

  Narasen lifted herself. She enclosed the youth in a third pavilion of crimson. The light slid on her back like silver daggers, as it slid on the back of the writhing snake. Narasen stared into the face of a maiden, the phallus of a man within her, and she thought of Merh. And Merh was a leopard and the struggle of the leopard on the spear. And Narasen arched her back with the pleasure of the slaughtering of this leopard, and she felt its death like her own.

  And the snake reared up its head and gasped wide its jaws and hissed forth a rain of fiery needles.

  Part Two

  The Crying Child

  1

  MERH WAS GREEN again with spring, green and gold. Her broad river, like dark jade, wound cool and clear beneath the great trees. The herds of Merh drank at the margins of the water, the long-legged birds waded there. Young grain ripened in the earth, young fruit swelled unseen within the blossoming orchards. Plague had taken her leave and barrenness had fled. There was water in the wells, and milk in the round breasts of the women and in the rich sacs of beasts. Young animals cried from the stalls now, and babies cried from the houses. So many young things were born that spring after the barrenness, they called it later the time of the Crying Child. And for another reason also, it was called that.

  Narasen had come back from the east, across the mountains, into Merh. She had seen the land was altered, already healing, putting on again its sheen of health. Narasen had waited a month and a little longer in the cedar forest. Returning, she knew why Merh was fecund once again, for Merh was Narasen, and the queen of Merh had cancelled the bane of Issak: she was with child.

  The people knelt to her on the country paths. They brought her wild flowers and jars of wine; they brought her baskets of corn seed to bless. She was their fertility goddess, she who had been prince and king here. In the city they lay down in the roadway before her. They poured perfume on the street before her where they did not lie down. In the square below the palace gate, they had taken some men and hanged them for reviling her name in the days of the plague—choosing to forget how they had, everyone, reviled her then. The commander of Narasen’s guard, who had held the palace safe for her in her absence, and a semblance of order in the streets, came swaggering out and bowed and kept his eyes from her belly.

  Narasen endured the pregnancy stubbornly as she had endured all she had undertaken in order to retain Merh. But she was a slave chained to a millstone, and the millstone was in her womb. Nor was the child eager to leave her. It curled in her, asleep, and its soul did not quicken it to be going at the proper season.

  Narasen thought of the child with distaste. It was a sluggard, this dead man’s babe. Perhaps it too was dead. She could not ride or hunt; she had no appetite for food or drink or exercise. She had no love for her women. Fat as a great whale stranded aboard the pitiless land, she must note that all but she were lithesome running deer. “Come, millstone, free me. You have done your work.” She considered she might kill it when it was born. She was a warrior and a man who had been forced to play at motherhood. Yes, she might well kill this child.

  The child seemed to hear her at last. It pierced her with a sword.

  I will not make lamentation for you, thought Narasen. You shall screech, not I.

  And Narasen did not cry out, though the child ripped and rent her like a cloth.

  “She will die,” the physicians murmured dolefully above Narasen. “Even her womb refuses to believe itself a womanly thing, and will not let the child out. Ah, she will die.”

  “I will not,” replied Narasen, through hurt and rage. “But I shall remember each who told me that I should.”

  Two days passed, two nights. The days were molten silver and the nights were hot black blood, both poured upon Narasen. She recollected Issak, how he had spoken of his misguided traffic with the Drin, the dwarf-folk of the demon lands. She came to believe these Drin had taken up their abode within her belly, and hammered there and had their forges going, for they were metalsmiths, but here the red metal they forged was agony and the jewels they set in it were the diamonds of unuttered screams. “Yes,” said the physicians, “she will die.”

  Narasen could no longer speak. She thought: Not I, but all men I will kill tomorrow. All men, who with their lusts cause this.

  The third day came. It rushed on slippers of silk this gentle day, in at the palace door. And just behind the day rushed another, less gentle, and through another door.

  “Bless the gods, lady, for it is a son,” a girl’s voice cried.

  Narasen whispered: “If it is a man, take it and throttle the thing.”

  “Tut,” said the chief physician, “the girl is a dolt, majesty. It is a female child.”

  Narasen recalled herself. She was made of pain, but she lay in the bed beneath the burnished weapons and the painted scenes of war and hunting. She was Narasen of Merh, and she was alive.

  The chief physician and his attendants had drawn aside to hold up an infant before a window in apparent wonder. But a solitary doctor remained at Narasen’s pillow, who bent and put a little cup to her lips. Fluid ran into her mouth. She swallowed. The doctor with his cup unbent and slunk away and out at the door.

  Narasen felt, unlooked for, a spider biting at her heart. She opened her eyes, and saw, between the ripplings of a scarlet veil, a woman in a blue robe grinding something in a pestle. The veil eddied, not gauze but wine, and Narasen floated, a ground bone in that wine, and somewhere a blue dog laughed.

  Am I not strong enough to survive this idiot act of birth? Narasen demanded of herself, of her body and her fate. But she felt a cold tide rising, a cold tide which washed away her stamina and her hope.

  She thought of the cup against her lips, of this one physician who had slunk away and taken the cup with him. She had enemies, many who were covetous of her high place, several who hated her. Vulnerable, rejoicing in her grasp on life, had she let it go in the unguarded moment, drinking without protest that single mouthful? No. Yet the cold tide in her blood, rising, sang like the sea, yes, and yes.

  The physicians chattered at the window. The child they held up shone like a milky glass, and the light of day seemed to pass through its limbs. It kicked but did not cry. You also keep silent, Narasen thought. She was angry. She had reckoned to reign in Merh for sixty years or more, and to secure these sixty years she had undergone whoredom, sorcery, the bondage of her soul, and last, this birth, which she had determined to survive. Now all was taken from her. She would reign a day, or less, the fruit of her struggle was sour. Yet even her anger was faint and sullen. She had no energy left to give her fury. Even wrath was denied her.

  Then she glimpsed a shadow, between the air and the wall of the chamber. Black the shadow was, not Death, but the forecast of Death.

  “So,” said Narasen within herself, “I have been cheated.
”

  “Not so,” the shadow seemed to answer. “Uhlume does not ordain the hour of your death. Your destiny ordains it. Your adversaries or your misfortune claim you. Death is like the night. He comes when he must, but he does not choose the moment of his coming. He is a slave, too.”

  Narasen smiled bitterly.

  “I am too weak to rail,” she said. ‘Tell your master to beware of me when I am with him and strong again, in his wretched country of dusts.”

  “That will be soon.”

  “I know it.”

  • • •

  The physician who had poisoned the queen of Merh scuttled through the by-ways of the palace, entered the barracks of the soldiers, and passed presently into the chamber of the commander of the guard. The commander reclined upon a couch. He was indolent and handsome, and he ate a purple fruit.

  “My lord Jornadesh,” said the physician, “the queen, alas, is very sick.”

  “Alas indeed,” said Jornadesh, the commander, eating his fruit.

  “Such travail,” said the physician, “such loss of blood and strength. Besides, a child conceived by witchcraft, by acts of perversity and necrophilia—we must grieve, for death is inevitable.”

  “And when, to the hour, is this sad, inevitable death to be expected?” inquired Jornadesh.

  “Sunset,” said the physician. “I will respectfully remind your lordship that the draught I have so cleverly procured is of great accuracy and efficiency. I will bring to your lordship’s mind, most courteously, that I have also been very diligent on your behalf in applying this drug. No trace will be discovered, providing the queen is promptly buried.”

  “And the child?” impatiently asked Jornadesh. “Dead too?”

  “Not dead, but reportedly a freak,” said the physician. “Best buried with the mother.”

  “Doubtless so,” said Jornadesh, spitting out the seeds of the fruit.

  He had always abhorred the man-queen of Merh, and marvelled that the throne should be hers. His days as sole lord in the palace when the leopardess was away had moved him to meditation. Now Narasen was stretched on her death-bed and his men waited in readiness to seize Merh. Thereafter Jornadesh would rule by right of his cunning and the favor of the gods. In order not to anger these same gods, he did not mean to kill the newborn infant. There was a stigma, even to a man of blood, in spilling the blood of a child. To bury it alive, however, was another matter. It gave the gods an opportunity to intervene, if so they were minded, which they would not be. Jornadesh was delighted at himself. He had thought of everything. He paid the physician and sent him out, then sent another to pay the physician in different currency—a knife’s end. And then Jornadesh called for a jug of yellow wine and a girl with wine-yellow hair, and thus he waited for good news.

  • • •

  When the sun fell from the sky’s brink, Narasen fell into death. Shadows came and went about her chamber, but in the streets red torches flamed and horses galloped. Three hours before midnight Jornadesh was the king of Merh, and Narasen queen only of a silver bier.

  They took her, by way of the river, in the dark.

  It was a moonless night. The dim lamps dripped dim color in the water, the priests whispered their dirges, the muffled oars folded the current aside like velvet, and the great barge went by the banks like a phantom, wrapped in a pall. Few saw the slow ship pass, for word of Narasen’s demise had travelled as slowly. Some that saw it took it for a supernatural thing. For out of the obscure darkness of it, borne on the tame wind, which blew shoreward the smell of the incense of the rites for the dead, there came a thin crystal crying, white blades of sound, horned to pierce the skin of the night.

  The child had not cried when it was born. It entered the world unafraid, with little to weep at save the loss of its unloving cage. But now freedom turned to threat. The child sobbed and none quieted it. They feared it, either to kill it or preserve its life. They had put it in a round bowl of beaten copper, and here it crawled, trying to get some purchase on the smooth sides, trying to discover the mammalian mound from which it might suck milk. But the bowl was less loving even than Narasen, and more dry. And beyond the bowl, the black rain of night dropped in the child’s eyes, and the river rocked it harshly, ironically.

  A tributary of this river ran northward through Merh. The silken trees swept down about the funeral barge, inky willows, their hair twined with the green jewels of fireflies. And from the black lawns above the river there presently loomed a wall of stone with gates of bronze.

  They went ashore. The priests swung their censers, the soldiers bore the bier of Narasen and the bowl with the baby crawling helplessly in it. They marched through the bronze gates and through the streets of a city where no lights were ever lit, not being needed, and where none looked out or called a greeting: the necropolis of Merh. And beyond an avenue of trees they climbed a marble platform to a mausoleum of red stone, and here the rulers of Merh had been laid for three centuries, and here Narasen was laid on her silver bier.

  The priests hurried to get the rite done. All about, heaps of bones gleamed dully from the lamps, and sometimes a gem glittered; but if the proceeding disturbed them, these denuded kings, their bones gave no sign.

  And still the child cried, as if purposely to disturb them, as if to wring some response from the deaf blind dark. A weasel of hunger gnawed its vitals and between the loud cries, it whimpered. Easily, its noise drowned the muttering of the priests. It stretched its hands and its legs and tried to grip some reassuring thing, but only the chill and the shadow were near, and even the black nurse who had rocked it so harshly had left off her rocking. At length, the vague light, the vague susurration which, till now, had constantly been about it, were also withdrawn. There came the clanging shut of a vast door. And the child conceived through death was alone with death in the place of death.

  And in that moment, Death came.

  The eyes of the baby were unfixed and weak, but in those days of the earth’s flatness, even the newborn could recognize Lord Death. So the child stared and saw and knew him.

  Death bent close. His slender long hand, like a black bird flying, hovered above the child, but Death did not touch. Something in the eyes of the child, which were of a curious bright yellow-green color, like certain stones found deep in the loins of mountains, deterred Death, put him off. Something in the eyes leapt with a pathetic, feeble yet unrelenting urge to live, and Uhlume was then no cutthroat and no robber.

  Shortly, he turned away. He turned and lifted from her silver bed the body of Narasen of Merh. They had dressed her in a black robe belted with a girdle of rubies and on her arms and round her neck they had put gold bands, and earrings of topaz in her ears, because she had been the ruler of Merh and Jornadesh had left her uneasily a portion of state. But her hair had not been dressed and it fell about her like a lank red garden of weeds, and its tint had changed, its red more blue from what she had drunk. And her skin, too, bore the soft blush of this blueness, and even the whites of her golden eyes, which now snapped open at the touch of Uhlume’s hands.

  “I do not resist,” said Narasen in a voice that was no longer a voice at all. “See, I am ready, and may you get much joy of me.” And she put her own hands on the shoulders of Death, and so the child perceived them sink straight through the floor of the tomb, the black man and the blue-skinned woman, and they were gone.

  Then the child began to shriek. Its cries were terrible. From some psychic source it dredged up an ultimate strength to scream, as if it understood these screamings alone remained to mark it out from the dead.

  But who, hearing wild roarings from a graveyard at night, would hurry there to look?

  Below the city of tombs, the other side from the willow banks of the river, there was a wood. On this night of no moon, it was a dancing-ground of black shade, where night flowers bloomed the color of pale yellow papers, and minute glowing insects s
pattered like hail across them. And into this midnight room of trees two demon Eshva had wandered, and were in fact dancing there to music the leaves made in the wind.

  The demon country of Underearth had three classes: the dwarfish Drin, who made things, the princely Vazdru, the elite, and the Eshva who served the Vazdru, and who dreamed of dreaming and lived in a dream and liked to walk the world by night in this dream, unspeaking, beautiful and oblique.

  The two Eshva in the wood were female. In their black hair silver snakes wound languorously, and two black cats, attracted to the Eshva magic, circled about their feet, dancing too.

  Till, clear through the stillness, broke the wild spikes of the child’s screaming.

  The Eshva paused, balanced on air. They had no compassion, but they had great curiosity, a bottomless, limpid well of desire to meddle in human affairs.

  Together, as one, they skimmed between the trees, and the two black cats ran after. They came to the slope above the river, came to the wall of stone. Eshva went where they wished; they flew over the wall and drifted along like a pair of leaves. Among the streets of the dead they drifted, following the cries of the child, which now were growing fainter, guttering out. The Eshva did not fear death. Only sunlight was to be avoided, that, and the displeasure of their Vazdru Lord, Prince of the Princes of Underearth. They reached the platform of marble and floated up it to the door in the mausoleum of red stone.

  One of the Eshva breathed on the door and stroked it with her fingers, and the door groaned softly to itself. The two black cats prowled on the marble stairway and played with a flower-from-the-wood they had brought with them for the purpose. The second demon woman sighed and shut her eyes.

  Then the door opened, unable to resist the caress of its inmost locks.

  The child had screamed and wept itself dumb. It lay in the copper bowl and did not move, not even to try to wriggle aside from the weasel of hunger that bit on its vitals. The Eshva who had opened the door glided up and put her hand on the child to feel its warmth and humanness. And in this way she found the child’s strangeness.