Delusion's Master (Tales From the Flat Earth) Page 5

  “In all the years I have gone to Bhelsheved there was never anything stolen or any trouble, yet three nights ago my cousin’s black goat vanished from its pen. Only the bones were found—”

  “He has a murderer’s stealth.”

  “He walks like a shadow.”

  And some who were not elegant said: “He is too elegant to be honest.” And some who were not tall said: “He is too tall to be trusted,” and some who were intuitive shuddered, though they were not sure why.

  Other things happened, as the stranger passed. A pet bird pecked through the last bit of wicker on its cage—it had pecked at the wicker very earnestly for three successive nights, each time the stranger had gone by—and flying out of the cage and through the tent opening, it darted after the black-cloaked man, and fluttered round him. Though he did not slacken his pace, the man reached into the air and took the bird in his hand. It was a notable hand, articulate and strong, with long, long fingers. The nails were also rather long, like those of some mighty ruler who need do no work, yet not pointed, but squarely and smoothly tipped, and with each a silver crescent marked on it. The bird trembled in this cool and gentle grip, and stared up into the face which was visible only to itself, for a fold of the man’s cloak otherwise obscured his countenance. A moment later, the tiny bird soared into the deepening sky. It seemed to think itself an eagle, or some great mythical fowl of night. It cast itself toward the vault of heaven with an impassioned inspiration surely too fierce for its fragile wings to sustain.

  (In just such a way, the black goat had eaten an exit from its patched-together pen. It had followed the stranger into the desert, and a lion had crept up on both of them. Seeing the man, the lion had thrown itself down, rolling on its back like an enormous kitten, growling and purring. But when the man had gone, the lion remembered the goat, and turned immediately to kill and devour it. The man had looked over his shoulder once. His eyes, appearing for a second from the midnight of his cloak, gleamed like two black stars, with a cruel pity, an ironic, sympathetic, merciless regret.)

  A skin of wine stood in the sand before a pavilion. The cork leapt from its mouth as the stranger’s shadow slid over it, upsetting the skin, so it toppled. The wine gushed into the sand, like a libation.

  A lean dog howled for no apparent reason, and burrowed under the cushions of its master’s bed.

  A mechanical doll, which for a year had not stirred, suddenly began to march up and down on a child’s knee.

  A rose, in a pot, shed all its petals.

  A dead twig, in a bundle ready for the flames, put forth a bud.

  At one large fire, near the center of the camp, certain philosophers and elders, and men in authority of various kinds, sat about, and nearby there were professional storytellers seated under their scented lamps. Many of the people who had come on the joyous religious pilgrimage to Bhelsheved were gathered here, to listen. As was suitable, the tales were all concerned with the glory and beneficence of the gods.

  At this hour, just before the moon’s ascent, they were telling the antique and relevant history of the foolishness of Nemdur, the king of Sheve. How, seeking to belittle the gods, he had built a blasphemous tower of many tiers, destined to pierce heaven. But the gods, aware that such knowledge and such powers as the Upper Regions might afford men would be damaging to them, had prudently cast down the tower. Only Nemdur’s queen, who had implored the pardon of the gods, they had saved. Thereafter, the area had been sacred. Men would come from far and wide to witness the ruins of the mighty tower, and the ruinous city nearby, forsaken Sheve, and to make sacrifices and offer prayers to the masters of heaven.

  At this point in the story, a child interrupted from the crowd, asking fearfully and loudly if the gods were terrible to behold. The storytellers smiled, and bowed to the philosophers. One of these, a venerable elderly man, spoke gravely to the child. “No, indeed. The gods are beautiful, and just. Those who reverence and obey them need fear nothing from the gods. The gods reward those who adhere to them. Those who stray, they punish. Then they are terrible, terrible in their perfection and magnificence.”

  “But,” said the child anxiously, “what do they look like?”

  The philosopher was done, however, and the storytellers proceeded with their tale. “Hush!” said the child’s nurse sharply.

  “But,” said the child, “if I cannot tell them from their looks, how am I to know them and beware of offending them?”

  Then a voice spoke to the child, a voice which brushed the insides of the child’s ears, wonderfully unexpected, like the sound of the sea inside a shell.

  “The gods are colorless as crystal for they have no blood in their veins. Neither do they possess breasts or genitals. Their eyes are cold as their country where everything is tinted by frost. But you will probably never meet them; they have no liking for the world.”

  “Oh,” said the child, and looked up and saw the pale face of a man bending over it, a face so astonishing it dazzled the eyes of the child like the moon.

  Then the child, dazzled, blinked, and in the little interval of that blink, the man was gone.

  The storytellers were telling now of how some hundreds of years came and went across the desert. Of how divination excelled prophecy, and omen excelled divination, and visions excelled everything. A group of holy men, dwelling in the ruins of Nemdur’s Sheve, began to exhort others that came there to build a second city upon the wreck of the first, a city every stone of which was to be laid in praise of the gods.

  Men will do much in hate. In love they will do more, much more.

  They worked under the lash of love, as the slaves had worked who built the tower of Nemdur’s madness, under the lashes of agony and death. What time had left of Sheve was razed. From the broken stones, like a mirage, the second city bloomed into the air. A strange city, a small city. A rare city, unlike all others. For this was to be no home for commerce or domesticity. Along its colonnades, and beneath its cupolas, the tide of men should pass only at one season of the year, when the people came in to worship, and so lay down the fruits of their year of life elsewhere. A city which was to be kept pure—a temple: Bhelsheved.

  As they worked on it, digging through the crusts of the antique streets of Sheve, they struck water, the desert’s blue gold, a secret lake. And this turquoise eye, gazing back into heaven, was, to the builders, a seal of the gods’ favor upon their enterprise.

  The crowd drifted out a sigh. They began spontaneously to sing, one more song of their journey. How, at this apex of each year, the peoples would turn toward Bhelsheved. From the west, from the north, from the south and from the east, flowing inward like sheep toward their pen, like wine into a bowl, as a tired man into sleep, so naturally did they move toward the sacred city. And we, the people cried, who come from the east into the west, follow every night the sun, which itself flies to Bhelsheved to honor the gods, Bhelsheved, where all sorrow is forgotten, all pain is healed.

  When the song ended, the crowd was happy and boisterous, and someone called for the story of how the gods had saved the world when the Evil One, the Prince of Demons, would have destroyed it.

  The storytellers chuckled, for this tale was well-thumbed in their minds, being ever popular. They took it in turns to relate the legend. Night’s Master, they said, the Black Beast who lurked underground (so hideous to look on that he himself avoided at all times mirrors or any reflective surface) saw the piety and comeliness of humanity, and geared a force of evil sufficiently gigantic that the earth was overwhelmed. Yet, in its death throes, the gods heeded the prayers and pleadings of men. They cast a golden bolt out of the sun itself that scorched the demon so terribly that he was obliged to withdraw, and his disgusting energies with him.

  At the riotous description of this singed monstrosity scrambling underground, the crowd roared with laughter. There was only one in all the throng who did not laugh. At the edge of the inner ring now, the man in the black cloak was standing. The glow from the lamps of the sto
rytellers caught him, and the fold of material had slipped away from his face. He was not merely pale, at last, the stranger, but whiter than chalk, and his mouth whiter yet. His eyes seared with a dry and inextinguishable black fire. He was so still, so silent, that gradually stillness and silence spread from him, through the circles of the crowd, as if his immobility had become one resounding chord struck over and over against the night.

  Even the storytellers came to hear this noiseless chord. They too fell quiet, turning to gaze at him, shading their eyes against their own lamplight. Even the philosophers stared.

  Finally, when the soundlessness had spread all through the congregation, the man spoke.

  “It seems,” he said, and his voice carried, as a wave will run across the sand, “that if the creature you speak of is so vile as you insist, you had better beware of him.”

  The crowd muttered. The philosopher who had addressed the child now addressed the man.

  “Sir, we need not fear the Demon. We are but a day’s journey from Bhelsheved. Here, of all places, the gods will protect us from him.”

  “Will they indeed,” said the stranger. Then, for the first time, he smiled. The eyes of the philosopher briefly faltered, but he was on his way to the holy city, and the appearance and demeanor of a man could not undo him.

  “Should it happen,” said the philosopher, “that the Evil One finds himself able to harm us, then we should understand that we had in some way offended the gods—that we had deserved any evil that thereafter came upon us.”

  “Ah,” said the stranger. He lowered his lids as if he mused. When he looked up again, it was like a dawn, a sunless dawn, but of colossal radiance. “I, too,” said the stranger, “will render you a story.”

  So beautiful he was, and his voice so beautiful, very few in the crowd were able to recognize the extent of such beauty and such marvel. As a man would look at one quarter of the night sky, and wonder at the stars, putting from his mind all those myriads of stars his eyes, at one glance, could not take in, just so they looked at and attended to the stranger, thinking to themselves that he was very handsome, and spoke very well, putting from their minds that in every respect he was beyond them, scalding them, drugging them, stunning them, with his mere presence.

  The man walked straight into the center of the lampglow and the storytellers made way rather nervously for him, envious of their trade. A little night breeze came and went across the desert and the camp, fluttering the soft fires in the lanterns. The stranger’s cloak blew back from his shoulders, as if the wind stirred it, though it was not the wind. That cloak folded itself behind him like two black wings, and the blue light of many distant stars was on his hair. A great pulse seemed to beat through the atmosphere, the very ground. The wind lay down on the sand at his feet like his dog, and he began to tell the story.

  It was this: A prince happened to be walking in the cool of the evening, along the border of the country which abutted on his own estates. There was no law in this country, and so the prince was not greatly amazed when he discovered that all the people in the place were being slain systematically by a fearsome monster which had evolved in their very midst. Now the prince had always been interested in the antics of his neighbors, and seeing their trouble and that they were likely to be annihilated, he took it on himself to seek out the monster and get rid of it.

  Accordingly, he left his own estates, and wandered across the lawless land, through all the ghastly disruption which the monster had caused. At length, he located the creature’s lair, and standing on the barren rock outside, he called it forth. Forth it came, and awful it was, obese and bloated with the blood and distress of men, and swollen with its strength. But the prince did not falter. He drew from its silver sheath the only sword he possessed. He went forward and began to hack and slash at this grisly foe. Lightnings wailed and thunders bellowed. The earth was riven and split. The monster exhaled poisonous fire and rains of steel splinters. The prince was burned and torn, thin needles pierced him; his eyes, which had been most beautiful, were put out. But blinded and in agony, he did not forego the fight. For centuries, or so it seemed to him, in the supremest anguish and horror, he battled, and at last, at last, the loathsome beast lay dead. But, on its carcass, the body of the prince fell down, equally lifeless.

  At this point, the stranger turned slowly about, looking at all the crowd, and into every face it seemed, and into every pair of eyes with his own curious and unfathomable glance. His voice had cast a spell on them. The story seemed quite real. It hurt them to hear him tell it, as it seemed also to hurt him, though they could not reckon how they knew so much, for his tone was harmoniously even, his face clear of all expression.

  It transpired, the storyteller said, the subjects of the prince came to look for him, and eventually they found his corpse. Then, knowing something of sorcery, they went about the task of restoring him. But one ingredient of his restoration was nothing else but tears. This appeared, under the circumstances, an easy element to obtain. The prince’s subjects went instantly to the folk of the neighboring country, for whom he had sacrificed himself, and asked them to weep for him. But these good neighbors averted their faces, and declared: “We know who you mean, and we do not credit you. We shall not shed one tear for the prince of such liars.”

  “And was that not strange?” said the storyteller to the crowd. Some shivered as they heard him. In some there came a bizarre welling of guilt, of shame and fear. . . . “But the strangest portion of the story is to come.”

  The subjects of the prince shed their own tears, and these proved adequate to raise him at last out of the gray limbo in which he had lain all this while imprisoned. But, being restored, as he was traveling back to his kingdom, he chanced to look over into the neighboring land. All was lawless as ever, but now a massive festival was in progress. Moved by curiosity, the prince drew near, and presently he saw and heard these things. His neighbors had erected a formless stone, and were dancing around it to the joyful noise of pipe and drum, and now and then someone would embrace the stone, or pour oil or wine or aromatics over it. Fascinated—for he truly was fascinated—the prince inquired what rites were in progress.

  “We are venerating this incredible and kind god,” the neighbors replied, “who saved us from a fearful monster.”

  The prince observed the stone for some while, but that was all it was—a stone. Rugged, passionless, insensible.

  Presently, he remarked, “Pardon my foolishness, but I had heard it was a lord from over your border, who sought out the monster with a sword, and slew it.”

  At this, the neighbors spat. “We have heard that lie, too,” they said, “but that ugly and misshapen fiend from the next estate is more foul to us than the monster itself. Pray do not mention his name again.”

  For a long while after the stranger had ceased speaking, the crowd sat on in silence. Almost every head was bowed, as if in deep thought—or in humiliation. Yet the crowd did not comprehend what had come over it, this unpleasing doubt in the midst of celebration.

  Then the philosopher spoke primly and loudly to the stranger’s back.

  “A peculiar notion, sir, if I have your drift. It seems you instruct us that the Unspeakable One, the Lord of Shadows, was, at some time, savior of the world.”

  The dark storyteller did not look about. He said: “You have presumed the gods value man so much that they will hurry to his rescue. I think you misjudge the gods.”

  “And you,” declared the philosopher sternly, “suggest that they are merely as stones.”

  “There, I admit, I have maligned them. For if you strike a stone, it may disgorge a stream of water, or a precious jewel. Or you may build a house from it, or scratch words on its surface with a knife. Stones can be serviceable to men.”

  “Your blasphemy is uncouth,” said the philosopher, and the crowd began sulkily to grumble and mutter, taking its cue from him. “You had best remember Baybhelu, and how the tower was shaken down by the gods, to cure mankind of i
ts pride.”

  “Pride?” asked the stranger caressingly. “What have you to be proud of? Your lives, which perish in the blink of an eye? Your memories which are shorter still? Your brains which are so empty of wits that spiders may spin there? Or is it your religion which makes you proud, that sweet and succulent fruit of faith? A fruit may sour. Whatever else, if any Lord of Darkness was unwise enough in the past to have saved you from yourselves, he will not do it ever again.”

  It was only much later that they noted he had spoken of mankind as “you,” and not as “we.”

  When he had finished, an uncanny thing occurred. Although the air was still, a wind came, without sound and hardly any motion, and blew out the lights in each of the lamps, and smothered all the flames round about, so that suddenly the whole area was in blackness, but for the glints of the stars, millions of miles away.

  In the blackness, he was gone. And, relighting their fires, they were glad of his departure, though they did not know him for Azhrarn. Some indeed, weighing their rage above their unease, set out to search for him, for the philosophers vowed such a blasphemer must be scourged.

  It is conceivable that they had already scourged Azhrarn, centuries of this particular scourge, they and their forebears. Although it is unarguably true he had no right to take the attitude with them that he did. No rights at all to his righteous anger, he who had played games with humankind for eons, and before humankind, who knows but that he had not played games with the little creatures that crawled from the seas of chaos aboard the flat, four-cornered earth, the minuscule sparks and atomies with which mortal life had begun. And having played so often with them—like a child who fears to lose its toys—so he had seen the loss of them. He had once sacrificed himself to save the world because without the world to torment and tangle, he knew his own immortality would be dull. Or so they said, the poets, the songs, the stories.

  Certainly, he had known for centuries that his act had been mislaid, set at the wrong door, that of Upperearth. But certainly now, demonstrated so vigorously, their forgetfulness stung him, the shock all the more violent for being delayed, perhaps. If he beheld this frenzied worship of the indifferent gods and was jealous, how much more bitter to find himself unremembered—worse—remembered wrongly. Azhrarn the Beautiful, to be recalled as shambling and hideous. Maybe it was this slight upon his vanity that had the most incensed him.