Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) Read online

  She went to her apartments and sat down there. Her head ached, her very mind ached.

  Nemdur would come to her and say: “Our son has disappeared, none can discover him. Do you think the woman who was his nurse killed him?”

  And Jasrin would answer: “Spare her, my lord. She is demented. She is jealous that she has no child of her own, for her own child died. . . .”

  Noon had come, and afternoon, and then the time of redness, the blood-red splashed on the walls, the scarlet aftermath of the sun changing swiftly to magenta and to indigo, and the stars appeared, the lamps of the cities of heaven. Jasrin had heard no outcry and no search through the palace. Nemdur had not come to her.

  And then he came.

  He stepped quickly into the unlit chamber, and for once he did not light the room with his presence, nor did he speak as she had anticipated.

  “Jasrin, my wife,” said Nemdur, “I have heard three stories. The first is that someone thieved the robe of a woman as she slept in the garden shade. The second that this same woman, muffled in her robe against the heat, stole out into the city, but that she never returned. The third story is that Jasrin, the Queen of Sheve, came back from the city unescorted, though none had seen her go there.”

  Jasrin’s aching cloven brain could not deal with this.

  “These are all lies!” she cried. “You should whip such liars.”

  But Nemdur said gently to her: “There is a fourth story. Listen, I will tell it you. Nomads pitched their tents by the walls of Sheve, in order to draw water from the well outside the gate, and to sell produce of theirs in the market. But a woman came and left a child lying among the children of the tents.”

  “It was the nurse,” Jasrin blurted.

  “No,” said Nemdur, “for she was that very hour searching for our child, mine and yours, and she has witnesses to her search.”

  “They are all liars!” cried Jasrin once more.

  “There is only one liar.”

  Immediately Jasrin’s strength went from her like blood from a mortal wound.

  “I confess it,” she said. “The child took away your regard for me. I would send away the child instead. Do not blame me. I could not help myself.”

  “I do not blame you,” said Nemdur. His voice remained quiet, she could not see his face in the dark.

  “And has the child been returned to you?” muttered Jasrin.

  “Returned,” said Nemdur, and then he shouted across the chamber: “Bring in my son.” The doors opened again, and certain servants entered, and one carried a burning torch, and another a bundle. “Set him down,” said the king, “and let this poor madwoman behold the fruit of her planting.”

  So they placed the bundle before the Queen of Sheve and unwrapped it in the torchlight.

  For a while she stared, and then she screamed, and the two parts of her brain shattered in a hundred fragments.

  The people of the tents had known the infant by his gold anklet, and out of respect for Nemdur and out of horror, they had brought home to him, risking his vengeance, what was left of his son. For the dogs had torn the child in pieces. Generally, such dogs would not have harmed a baby, but they were hunting hounds, and they had scented lion the moment the woman approached. When she had dropped the child in the sand, wrapped in the lion skin, the dogs had rushed to it. As Jasrin fled, the dogs had fallen on the skin and coincidentally on the baby inside the skin. Truly, Jasrin was rid of her son, truly she had conquered her enemy.

  Nemdur showed none of his grief or his revulsion, nor did he sentence his wife to any punishment. He put her aside merely, and had her locked in a lavish pavillion adjoining the palace. He went on sending her gifts, costly hangings, succulent meats and ripe fruit, jewels. He was good to her, his tolerance was wondered at. In fact, he would have been less cruel if he had given her instantly to the executioner. Instead, It was a living death he shut her in, worse, far worse, than the scourge, the fire, the clean stroke of a sword.

  In the third month of her imprisonment, the month when the king was to be married again, somehow Jasrin escaped. She was so mad by then that she half believed she was a bride, that this was the water country, and Nemdur, the bridegroom, was about to receive her and unveil her for the first time. The notion had obsessed her, however, that she would be barren, unless she could find a particular magic token, the promise of the gods to her that she should bear a son. This token was none other than the body of her child. So she reached the tombyard and wandered about there, and at length she came upon a gardener. He, knowing her and seeing no help near, took pity and led her to her son’s tomb, and let her go in. Finally, those who pursued her came on the scene, and perceived her sitting in the twilight of the tomb, with the poor body, all gone to bones, in her arms. In her fragmented mind, she believed she had found the key and symbol of her security and future joy. But in some wellspring of herself no doubt she knew it was her frightful guilt she rocked, and her guilt she would not be sundered from. Repeatedly, those who had come after her attempted to prize the dead from her grasp. Eventually she had relinquished everything save one bone, and this they could not get away, try as they would.

  So Jasrin and her bone were removed altogether, to a stone tower in the desert one mile west of the city of Sheve. And here her living death went on, and the routines of her madness never varied, her looking for Nemdur, her speech with the bone, her agony, her fury, her despair, her weeping, on and on. Till all about her grew also a little mad, catching her sickness, and even the tower was steeped in the anguish of her insanity, even the trees, the sands, the stars, the sky.

  There were then five Lords of Darkness. Uhlume, Lord Death, was one, whose citadel stood at the Earth’s core, but who came and went in the world at random. Another was Wickedness, in the person of the Prince of Demons, Azhrarn the Beautiful, whose city of Druhim Vanashta lay also underground, and who came and went in the world only by night, since demonkind abjured the sun (wisely, for it could burn them to smoke or cinders). The earth was flat, and marvelous, and had room then for such beings. But it is not remembered where a certain third Lord of Darkness made his abode, nor perhaps had he much space for private life, for he must be always everywhere.

  His name was Chuz, Prince Chuz, and he was this way. To come on him from his right side, he was a handsome man in the splendor of his youth. His hair was a blond mane couthly combed to silk, his eye, being lowered, had long gilded lashes, his lip was chiseled, his tanned skin burnished. On his hand he wore a glove of fine white leather, and on his foot a shoe of the same, and on his tall and slender body the belted robe was rich and purple-dark. “Beauteous noble young man,” said those that came to his right side. But those who approached him from the left side, shrank and hesitated to speak at all. From the left side, Chuz was a male hag on whom age had scratched his boldest signatures, still peculiarly handsome it was true, but gaunt and terrible, a snarling lip, a hollowed cheek, if anything more foul because he was fair. The skin of this man was corpse gray, and the matted hair the shade of drying blood, and his scaly eyelid, being lowered, had lashes of the same color. The left hand lay naked on the damson robe, which this side was tattered and stained, and the left foot poked naked from under it. When Chuz took a step, you saw the sole of that gray-white foot was black, and when he lifted that gray-white hand, the palm was black, and the nails were long and hooked, and red as if painted from a woman’s lacquer-pot. Then again, if Chuz raised his eyes on either side, you saw the balls of them were black, the irises red, the pupils tarnished, like old brass. And if Chuz laughed, which now and then he did, his teeth were made of bronze.

  Worst of all, was to come on Chuz from the front and see both aspects of him at once, still worse if then he raised his eyes and opened his mouth. (Though it is believed that all men, at one time or another, had glimpsed Chuz from behind.) And who was Chuz? His other name was Madness.

  Like Lord Death, maybe Prince Chuz was simply a personification that had come to be, a fluid concept that
had hardened into a figure. For sure, his appurtenances were as conceptually they should be. Sometimes he carried the jawbones of an ass, and when he cracked them, they gave out the braying crazy noises of the living beast. Or sometimes he carried a brass rattle, and shook it like the sistrum, and from it came a clatter as if a brain were being shaken into bits. But sometimes, he wore an overmantle of black-purple, embroidered with splinters of glass representing malign configurations of the stars. . . .

  Jasrin’s six guards had laid aside their axes. With their six swords in their belts, they crouched at the foot of the stone tower in the cool of evening, throwing dice. The moon had risen, one white fruit on the black-leafed tree of night. By her shine and the flare of a torch sunk in the sand, the guards kept score.

  The first man threw, and the second. Next, the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Next the sixth. And then the seventh.

  The seventh?

  The seventh man’s dice fell; they were yellow and had no markings,

  “Who is this stranger?” demanded the captain of the six men. He clapped his hand on the stranger’s shoulder, snatched the hand back with a curse. The seventh man’s mantle was strewn with bright scintillants that drew blood. “How did you come here and what is your business?” barked the captain.

  The six men peered, and in the torchlight they glimpsed half a face, the other half hidden by the cowl of the mantle. A glamorous young man sat among them, his eyes—or the one visible eye—demurely lowered so the long blond lashes rested on his cheek. With a closed mouth, he smiled. Then suddenly a white-gloved hand appeared and in it an ass’s jawbones that clicked, and let out a raucous braying. And for a second the one eye flashed up, a confused dart of the impossible, before it was lowered again.

  The stranger did not speak, but the ass’s jawbones spoke abruptly between his fingers. They said, “The moon governs the tides of the sea, the tides of the wombs of women, and the tides of the humours of the mind.”

  The six men sprang to their feet. They drew their swords, but also they backed away. Jawbones which spoke were new to their experience, though not unheard of.

  Continuing to smile, his eye meticulously lowered, the stranger rose. Gathering his blank yellow dice, he walked straight through the wall of the tower and was gone. A sound flowed in the air, it might have been a crazy laugh or the screech of a night bird over the desert.

  The captain pushed open the tower door, and led his men in a search of the stair and the lower rooms. Soon Jasrin’s attendants, in alarm, ran down, the old woman and the young girl.

  “Have any passed this way?” demanded the captain.

  “No one,” said the old woman. She started to berate four of the guards, who cowered foolishly like small boys.

  “Your hand is bleeding,” said the young girl shyly to the captain. For a year, the only men she had seen close to had been these six, and this was the year she had become a woman. As she took the man’s hand, she saw he was strong and comely, and he, as she bathed the wounds the stranger’s cloak had made, realized she was gentle, and that the moon shone through her thin garment on her gentle breasts, and all her gentle hair the moon had changed into a cloud of silver.

  Outside, the sixth guard lingered on the sand, amazed, watching the torch which had been knocked into the pool. There beneath the water its flame burned on, as bright as day.

  In the chamber above, Jasrin was in her stage of leaning at the window looking toward Sheve. Dimly discerning the commotion below, she said to the bone: “There are the messengers to say my lord is setting out. In less than an hour he will be here.”

  So she moved about, and so she found a young man seated cross-legged on the carpet, half his face hidden in his mantle, half his body turned from her.

  Jasrin gasped, and held the bone protectively to her.

  Proudly and angrily she said to the stranger: “My lordly husband will soon be with me, and he will slay you for venturing into my apartments.”

  Chuz did not reply, but again he cast his dice. This time they were black as two coals, and where they fell, the carpet smoked.

  Jasrin clutched the bone more tightly.

  “You will not dishonor me before my child,” she said.

  Suddenly the bone began to struggle in her grip. It thrashed and wriggled and ripped itself from her fingers. It tumbled to the ground, and hopped horribly away from her.

  “Dogs ate me!” screamed the bone in a thin high voice. “You gave me to dogs to be eaten.” And it threw itself into the folds of the mantle of Chuz, as if it sought refuge from her.

  Jasrin covered her ears with her hands. The tears burst from her eyes though it was not yet midnight, not yet the season for her tears.

  But a very tender melodious voice began to speak to her. It was the voice of Chuz, one of his voices, for he had many.

  “Jasrin of Sheve is my subject, therefore let her approach me and be comforted.”

  And Jasrin discovered she was creeping to the stranger, and when she was near, he threw off the mantle with the glass splinters strewn on it. So she beheld the entire aspect of his face, one half youthfully bronzed, one half haggardly gray, the rusty hair and the blond, but it seemed to her it was the most natural face she had ever looked on. Chuz drew her into the shelter of his arms and he rocked her softly and he kissed her forehead with his strange, strange mouth. And for the first it seemed to her, as he had told her, she was comforted.

  At length, Chuz, Prince Madness, said to her: “Those who are truly mine may ask a request of me.”

  Jasrin sighed sleepily. “Then grant me my sanity.”

  “That I cannot do, nor would I if I could. And if I did, sane, you could not bear what you had done, and what you have become.”

  “True,” said Jasrin. “It is true.”

  Then Chuz produced the rattle of brass and shook it, and he gave a dreadful laugh, raucous and profane, and Jasrin wildly laughed with him, and she reached for the rattle, but in her hands it altered to the jawbones of the ass. These she commenced to clack and to click, till from them exploded a shout: “If I, Jasrin, must be mad, then make also my husband Nemdur mad. Madder than I. Let his madness destroy him.”

  Jasrin started in distress.

  “I did not say this thing,” she avowed.

  Chuz answered in another of his voices, high and coarse.

  “These were the words your brain would speak.”

  “But in my heart I love Nemdur still.”

  “And in your brain you hate him.”

  “Again,” she said, “it is true. And will you send him mad?”

  “His madness shall become a legend,” said Chuz. He spoke as a murderer would speak in the dark.

  But this time they laughed together delicately and low, like lovers. And presently Chuz vanished.

  There were several doors by which madness might enter any house. One was rage, one jealousy, one fear; there were others. But Chuz, who could walk through a stone wall if he chose to, must select his entry into the human soul with more care. Jasrin’s lunacy had summoned him, or tempted him, or actually evolved him from the shadows. The impetus of her lunacy was like a psychic fuel, a flow of energy along his quite incorporeal nerves. Though fashioned as a kind of man, he did not reason like one. Nor is it necessary to assume that he, the master of madness, was himself positively mad. Therefore he understood—though understood is an inadequate word—that it was not enough for Nemdur to glimpse him from the back alone. Nemdur must meet Chuz face to face, and so encounter destruction. None of this was like a game to Chuz. It was something like a duty, a service which he performed with dedication.

  What then were the chinks he spied out in Nemdur, the crevices whereby madness might enter? It was simple. Nemdur was at the peak of all his life. He was powerful, rich, handsome and secure. He was proud and lustful, and his appetites were large. Nemdur the lover of women, the creator of sons, the King of Sheve. Without vast intellect or imagination, it required a snake beneath the flower to hiss at
him, Now you are vital, now you are mighty. But tomorrow, tomorrow... Nemdur had not really considered that today he was a lion, tomorrow, like his hapless dead first son, he would be bones.

  Chuz did not exactly take other forms. His art was rather in the way he played upon the extraordinary form he had, like variations on a familiar melody.

  Nemdur met him first, leaning in a great door of the palace, his damson overmantle wrapped close. But Chuz did not look particularly like any sort of figure at that moment, more like the shadow of a coming night. “Who are you?” said Nemdur angrily. “One who will outlive you,” said Chuz, and was no more. Later a beggar ran beside the king’s stirrup as he rode out to hunt. The beggar extended a white-gloved hand, and shards of glass, like the quills of a porcupine, glittered along his back. “Give me a coin,” squeaked the beggar. “For when you lie in your tomb what use will your coins be to you?”

  As Nemdur sat idly glancing at a book, leafing through it impatiently to see if it would please his second wife, who was still new and interesting to him, a wind or a hand brushed the pages. And there before Nemdur was the story of the hero Simmu, who had feared Death and elected himself Death’s enemy, and stolen from the gods a draught of Immortality to save himself and mankind from the tyranny of decay and ending.

  “Some say,” murmured a voice at Nemdur’s ear, “that at that era, no longer was Death’s Master the title of the Lord Uhlume, who is the Master of the dead, but that Simmu bore the title Death’s Master, seeing he had mastered Death—”