Death's Master Page 9

Zhirem’s head was bowed. He gazed into his water cup. His dark hair curled round his face like secrets.

  “Well,” said a boy close by, “if you are a king’s son, why are you here? Does he not love you then, your father?”

  “His mother danced with a snake in a cave,” said a second boy. “She held up her skirt and the snake wriggled inside. A month later, she dropped an egg, and there was Zhirem.” The boy giggled. The lay brothers were some distance from him or he would not have cared to invent such a tale out loud.

  “It is worse than that,” said the first boy, “I heard gossiping. Zhirem’s mother sold her body to demons. Zhirem they left behind. The Prince of the Demons had no liking for him either.”

  Zhirem did not raise his head. Somehow, and quite quickly, he had come to comprehend at last the true maleficence of others. He thought vaguely of his mother, whom he supposed still among the tents of the king. He thought of his brothers who had left him as a snack for lions. While he was thinking, one of the boys surreptitiously tried to kick the newcomer, and this boy squealed, kicking instead—he believed—some hot adamance he had not reckoned on being under the table.

  Shell rose. A sort of noisy silence descended at once—the chatter and the activity going on, yet muted, watchful. Even the adults watched, perturbed, pretending otherwise.

  Shell went to the far end of the court. He reached up to the wall which sloped there and scooped something from it. He walked directly as a cat, back to the table, and the boys shuffled aside, one nursing his leg. Shell leaned past Zhirem and placed before him a white bird which had been sleeping on the wall. The bird ruffled its feathers; it whistled a single note, and bent its head to peck the bread on Zhirem’s plate.

  “Shell is a magician,” murmured the boy who had kicked, slyly.

  Shell turned and looked at this boy, looked and looked at him, until the boy’s face curled up, and he stamped and ran away.

  Zhirem looked only at the white bird. Shell dipped his fingers in the water bowl, and with these wet fingers he patted at the face of the other taunting boy. The boy flinched, meant to howl but reconsidered. Shell did not generally make such moves. (Once a bullying child had thrown a stone at him and Shell had found the stone and carried it about with him, and followed the bullying child wherever he went, constantly showing him the stone, saying nothing. In the end the bullying child had grown hysterical, but this was two years before.) Now, the boy with the wet face also ran away, and Shell then returned to his seat by the red ram god.

  Presently the white bird finished Zhirem’s bread and flew off into the deepening sky.

  No one spoke to Zhirem any more, for good or ill.

  Three days were born and three days died in the temple after that. In the Court of Wisdom in the morning the boys bowed before the altar and tended the fires of the images there. (No longer weather gods to hold them in awe, they were for eating under when you were nine or older.) Later they learned from the books of the library or sat under the red-flowering trees to chant the rituals of the temple. They fed the fish in the Sacred Pond and trouped to their noon meal. In the afternoon they walked about the inner lawns with their teachers.

  “Do not let the richness of the temple confound you,” instructed the teachers. “A lily must be beautiful in order that the bee visits her, and the temple must be fair to attract the favor of gods and men alike. Dress in good linen and wear rings, but be humble. Humility is in the heart not on the hand.”

  Two lines carved themselves between the brows of Zhirem, but the teachers did not reckon that children of ten and eleven should debate, and feigned unnotice.

  Shell patrolled the lawn, lynx-like. He ate a flower in a cruel, loving, beautiful way, as if he ate some small animal he had caught. Sometimes he moved by Zhirem and sometimes not. Zhirem glanced at him. The superstition of the desert nudged him. He looked swiftly to see if Shell had a shadow. Shell had. Shell saw, and laughed like a fox laughing.

  Dusk came to the third day and killed it with a blue sword. Always it was the same, and the day, always taken by surprise, never escaped, but bled and swooned and shut its eyes in blackness.

  Zhirem woke because a shape had touched his forehead with two fingers, and said: “Come.”

  “Where?” said Zhirem, who, even in sleep, had somehow anticipated this.

  “Into the night,” said Shell.

  Zhirem considered night. A dull blade grazed his mind: a journey to a garden of sand, a terrible something without name, a journey back in a woman’s arms, and night in all of it, like poison in a cup.

  “No,” said Zhirem.

  And Shell turned without a sound, and went away. And then, before he reasoned, Zhirem was on his feet and going after.

  Shell moved soft, but Zhirem not much less so, for the desert too had taught him lessons.

  Outside, the court was dim, though the moon was rising, a huge late low yellow moon with a single veil of cloud it had thrown back from its face. None kept guard any more. They ignored Shell’s wandering for they could not prevent it.

  Up the wall they slid, the amber cat and the shadow cat, up by way of tiny faults, tiny loops of creeper strong enough to aid a thin agile child, over the top where iron dragons aided them further, and leaped out, winged with hair, into the velvet nothing of dark.

  They dashed onto the black carpet and through the curtaining of leaves.

  “I will show you a fox’s house,” said Shell.

  They roamed the groves and the woods. Only they and the night things were about. To Zhirem it was curious, eventful, but to Shell it was oddly and obviously familiar as the day.

  They sat under a tree and ate its fruit which had a taste of night, a black hidden taste.

  “Night is best,” said Shell, “and better when the moon rises.” He rarely, rarely spoke so much. “But I do not remember why.”

  “I too have a memory I cannot remember,” said Zhirem. “I feel it will be safer to forget.”

  “I should like to remember,” said Shell, “and when I saw your hair, which is dark, I almost did remember.”

  “The priests are liars?” asked Zhirem.

  Shell laughed softly. “Yes.”

  “All men, perhaps.”

  “All.”

  They drank at the stream, and each noticed the other reflected as they drank, each looking at each rather than himself, for the first time truly aware of another human in the world apart from themselves, another human who was as real as they.

  6

  Years, which in childhood and youth seemed the longest, brought in that slow season rapid changes to flesh and heart and brain. Six years to the elderly priests were static yet passed swift as adders. But in those same six years a child could alter to a man.

  The old priests sat in the afternoon court. They ate one meal and dreamed of the next. When it arrived, there was always something amiss; too much red pepper, too little black, the walnuts were improperly stewed and the fowl over-rich. It was a love affair between each man and a full dish. But to the young men, the food was allayed hunger, was fuel, and to some, not even that.

  The old priests squirmed and muttered to themselves as one of the young priests went by, censorious as they always were of the young, but especially censorious of this one.

  The youth was seventeen, straight and lean among the well-fed bodies of his brothers. You could not miss him, for his dark hair hung curling down his back over the yellow garment. Besides, he went barefoot, soles hard from a desert, but disdaining the sandals and slippers of the temple, aping the wretched poor outside. When he turned, his face was like a god’s head on a coin, copper-gold as a coin from the sun, and his eyes were like cool water, a color to quench thirst.

  “They say,” said one of the old priests, “he will accept only three robes, and washes them himself.”

  “They say,” said a second, “the silver torque t
he High Priest presents to all the boys when they are initiated, this ingrate gave to an idiot farmer who had lost his hand and was begging at the gate.”

  “I say,” said a third, “he is immodest with his extravagant ways. He takes it on himself to do heaven’s work.”

  “Just so,” said the first old priest, “and he has been reprimanded. ‘Do not presume to do heaven’s work which will be carried out in due course,’ they tell him. And the upstart answers: ‘If heaven is lazy, I am not.’”

  “Ah!” cried the old priests, and, “Shameful! And there is the other mischief,” they added.

  The other mischief had just come from the Hour of Duty that all young priests of sixteen must offer each day to the gods—burnishing their statues and the statues of their prophets, fair-copying scrolls and books, overseeing the gods’ cooks or gardeners, trimming the sacred thousand candles of the Shrines. The other mischief was also barefoot, also slight and straight of build. The yellow robe and the yellow-red hair made a shining fire elemental of this youth, who truly was brighter than any of the jewels he did not wear.

  The old priests licked their dry old lips watching the two young priests meet and walk on together on their bare hard feet.

  “There is something should be looked into,” grumbled the old priests, brief coals smouldering in the musty chambers of appetite as they haphazardly conjured up for themselves the phallic notions of what went on between Zhirem and Shell, those sinful and prohibited things the temple denied to its sons. Of which, in fact, neither was guilty.

  Strange, perhaps, with two so beautiful and at that age of mutability, shut in a kind of prison with no women, with none, even if there had been women, to be fairer than they. They loved each other, yes. But it was this way with them: they had grown from children to men in constant company with each other. They were at ease with each other and with no one else, and currently asked no more of each other than that. In addition, neither Zhirem nor Shell was quite human.

  For Shell, it was, paradoxically, the wicked innocence of the Eshva still on him and in him that kept him from the temple’s form of sin. To the Eshva everything was sensual, sexual; moonrise was an orgasm of the heart, the eye. A touch was love, was fire. Besides, everything was of interest, part of the dream. They had desire, but did not only live through this. Eshva lusted after the music of a look, and they never questioned nor sought to analyze the sensations that poured over them, only to prolong and enjoy. If flames woke in the vitals of Shell, and probably they did, untroubled and unhurried, he did not seek to quench them or find out their actual source. Time had no proper meaning to the Eshva; Shell had not yet recollected that to men, time was everything.

  And for Zhirem, it was his own beginning that walled him off. The unremembered pain and screaming, the broken spear, the month with the holy men; their counsel. He feared to remember. Someone hunted at his heels, must not catch up. Pleasure of the flesh, any pleasure, daunted him, though he did not completely know this. The opulence of the yellow priesthood he rejected with a contempt born of that concealed fear. He wanted to be angry, to cleanse himself with anger and denial, he wanted also sometimes to be quiet, to drop down like a stone into the dark pools of his own thought and to lie there, drowned and at peace, without the words and customs of men to remind him he too was a man. And both these things, the forum for anger and action, the quiet peace, both Shell gave him. Shell who seldom spoke, but Shell who listened, Shell who could not be constrained but found for them the shades of the nights to be free in and to be silent in. Shell, who gave so much, could not be metamorphosed into the antithesis of Zhirem’s wish—a symbol of the slippy stair into the mouth of hounds where the Master of Night, that Lord of Darkness, the Demon, waited.

  “Tomorrow is the first day of the Festival of the Spring Moon,” said Zhirem as they walked through the colonnades. “I have been elected one of those who are to make the journey to the eastern villages. I think they dared not refuse me. I mean to do some good, and said so. Why should I have had all this mage-training and apothecary training if I am not to use it? What is this place,” he added, “but a house for rich men to wallow in like swine? And do the gods resemble the men?”

  Shell opened his fist and showed the red bead which meant he also had been elected for the eastern journey. His eyes, meeting Zhirem’s, said, with irony: “You and I outside the temple? They have never kept us in.”

  Another strolled by, a fat young man named Beyash, who wore an earring of jasper he had been given for making twenty fair copies of a holy text.

  “Eastward? I too,” he said. “We shall see some women at last, if only the sick ones. But then, you pretty birds have flown out and seen women before. Whom do you meet in the groves at night? That is, when you do not invent tunes for each other.”

  Zhirem stared him down, a glower of steel fathered in him by the holy men of the desert. He said nothing—when not alone with Shell, like Shell, Zhirem seldom talked. His angry tirades were shut within his skull, expressed in cold and level tones if ever spoken. Probably he did not, even now, believe in those about him. He had got the habit, in defense, of blaming them for their alienness to himself, of being angered by them in order to react to their existence.

  But fat young Beyash, lowering his eyes, said: “Pardon me, Zhirem, I only joked with you. But you had better be warned. They tell of a dreadful woman who has come to live in the eastern villages. A woman who sells her loins for money.”

  “Then I pity her,” said Zhirem.

  “Oh, do not. She is an enticer and a blasphemer. She paints her face. And she loves to tempt the young and the fair. Ah, Zhirem, Zhirem—”

  Unnoted, Shell had made a small sound between his lips. A bird passing in the air suddenly opened its bowels over the startled head of the fat young priest. Leaving him squawking, Zhirem and Shell moved on.

  • • •

  “What gives you power over beasts?” Zhirem said. They were walking along the road east in the forenoon, in a cloud of white dust raised by the wagons, and the donkeys the other young priests rode. Here and there a youth was on foot, but only to loosen his stiffness. The two barefoot mad ones alone meant to walk all the way. “But no,” said Zhirem, “I always ask you this, and you do not properly know why or how.”

  Shell smiled, dreaming Eshva smile. He looked at Zhirem with the innocent yet brimming total of love in his eyes. The eyes said: “If I knew, you I would tell.”

  Soon after, the first village came in sight.

  The workers ran from the fields and vineyards and the women and children from the houses. They bowed low to the young priests. They brought them wine with honey in it and white bread baked specially. They had pinched and saved and bought a silver dish for the temple. The priests received everything with lordly grace. They blessed the village desultorily. Were there any sick? No, praise the gods, only the old man with sores. These would heal. They did not expect the young priests to deal with so irksome a chore.

  Zhirem strode like wind-blown smoke through standing corn.

  “Where is this man?” he asked in a voice of iron.

  Nervously, two or three women directed him.

  “Look, the dog, he wants to get among the bitches,” crowed the young priests behind their hands. But the women were no beauties. Hard work and hot summers and cold winterings had seen to that. For the girls, they were kept from the sight of the young priests by order of the temple.

  Zhirem entered the hut where the old man lay, crying in his hurt. Zhirem absorbed this hurt into himself. It moved him. He too had a memory of harm, though harm no longer came to him. He set to work with gentleness and intelligence, exhilarated by reality, determined to be one with it.

  Shell had not followed him. Shell was no healer. Shell sat beneath a tree, playing a wooden pipe he had made, eyes half shut. A new feeling arose in him also, as he gazed through his lashes at the hut. Shell, Eshva-fashion, swam in
the new feeling, basked in its bitter-sweetness. Jealousy.

  The young priests departed, garlanded with the flowers of the first village. Zhirem had not emerged from the hut, so they left him. When he came out, only Shell remained, with the amazed children staring at him from the shrubs as he played the pipe; the men had returned to their work and the women were too awed to speak to the priest alone.

  Zhirem and Shell continued along the road, following the dust cloud in front.

  Zhirem brooded, his eyes luminous. Presently he said, “I consider I must leave the temple. I think I have found what I must do.” Shell watched him attentively. “When I had done what I could for the old man,” said Zhirem, “I felt a shadow fall behind me, a burden leave me. And something passed between us, the sick one and I.”

  “Yes,” said Shell aloud.

  An hour later they reached the second village where the rest of the priests had already been welcomed. A noon meal was being served, fruit and cakes, and more wine going round. A woman had brought her child which had fits, but she had had to wait. Shortly, from being made to sit in fright and the sun, the child had a fit. The priests, displeased, looked away. Zhirem, who had just come up, went straight to the child, and put his forefinger between its teeth so it should bite him in the spasm rather than its own tongue. When the fit passed, Zhirem picked the child up and rocked it. There was a strange tenderness on his face. Not actually feeling for the child, but at something waking in himself. Part astonishment, part laughter, partly pain. He took the mother aside and instructed her in the value of herbs, and then to the wagons where he had the temple servants parcel these commodities up for her. The mother, dry and brown like the other women, started to cry. As if some well-spring in himself filled from her emotion, tears dropped from the eyes of Zhirem.

  The remaining sick of that village were brought to him.

  And at the next three villages, were brought to him.

  The young priests mocked him, but the people ran to him, ran to him before even he talked to them or stepped forward, as if they sensed or beheld some sign on him that he had come for them, and not simply on a journey to get veneration and gifts.