by Tanith Lee
But she did not die, the idiot girl. And none dared kill her, though sometimes they threw pebbles or struck her.
One year, a few months before the harvest, a magus came to dwell in an old mansion on the hill above the village. He announced he had retreated from the cities in order to study his arts in peace, and he was besides a devout and gods-fearing man. The village accepted him as a blessing, just as they accepted the idiot as a curse. However, he had little to do with them, being occupied with his experiments. Now and then a roar would rise from the roof of the mansion, but these sounds were not in themselves apparently injurious. Once or twice, a villager knocked on the brass-bound door which had been affixed to the mansion’s portals, but received no reply. And once only, a shepherd, seeing the magus out walking with his servant on the hillside, hurried up and begged the wiseman to alleviate an ache he had in one of his teeth. But the magus seemed not to hear, and passed on, his long robes, sewn with extraordinary symbols, brushing the grass. The servant, however, turned about, and when the mage was some way off addressed the shepherd.
“Which tooth is that?” inquired the servant.
The shepherd, agog, opened his lips and pointed at the offending canine.
“Oh, I shall see to that for you,” declared the magician’s servant, and swinging up his staff, he knocked the tooth out of the shepherd’s mouth, and two good fellows with it.
Leaving the shepherd howling, the servant, howling also, with uncouth mirth, lolloped after his oblivious master.
Now at this time this servant began to prove himself as much a curse to the village as any other they had had. Repulsive in appearance, and unclean of person, he was kept by the magician for his prodigious strength as a guard, and also out of some perverse wish the intellectual had conceived to observe such a type about his work. His mind being on higher matters and himself protected from the servant’s horridness, the magician failed to notice what went on elsewhere.
Firstly, the servant was given to playing obscure jokes upon the villagers. He would tie the genitals of the billy goats together, for example, and when the goatherd came running at their bawling, the servant pounced on him and tied him up with them too, in a similar manner. On one occasion, the wretch crawled down through a chimney, having previously put out the fire beneath by urinating on it, and fell out into an old woman’s house and terrified her almost into a fit. Next he surprised a woman bathing in a pool. There would have been small doubt as to the outcome of that, save she was the reed-cutter’s wife, and had intended to cut reeds herself, and was therefore able to pull a knife from among her clothes, which item she stuck in the servant’s thigh. At this reception he hobbled away yelling. That night, as the woman cooked her husband’s supper, a tarnished copper bird flew through her window and said sternly to her: “I speak for the magician, and he asks, Why did you stab my servant?” The woman was alarmed, but her man came up and put her behind him, and he said to the bird: “Let your master consider this. When a woman as pretty as mine is able to come close enough to stick a knife in such a part of a man as ugly and noisome as that servant of his, then she must have some reason for her act, and he must have some reason for being so close.” At these words, the bird put its head under its wing as if embarrassed, and the husband added, “Suggest to your master that he keep the oaf in check. Though we are in awe of a magus, the scum that serves him shall have his throat sliced presently.”
As the moon rose that night, the magician set sprites on the servant to lash him, and the fellow ran about wailing. Strong threats were also added, and thereafter no further tricks were played on the villagers.
But the servant was not content. His phallus would trouble him a vast amount, rising up in the hours of the darkness to chide him. Sporadically, the magician might supply him with illusions that had the appearance and fleshliness of delectable and amorous youths and maidens, but only rarely did the mage, himself above such things, remember that his servant was not. A long while in the city, the servant had subsisted quite heartily on a secret diet of rapes and terrorisms—which also fulfilled his appetites. Now, in this parochial spot, his crimes had come swiftly to light, and all his pleasures were forbidden him.
Then one day, spying (it was all he had left) upon two lovers in a meadow, he beheld the idiot girl wander by. And soon the lovers, arising from the grass, beheld her too. From their words the servant found out that they considered her a bane, and longed that she should vanish.
At this news, the servant took to following the girl, and soon enough he learned how the whole village loved her. Shortly a plan occurred to him.
Under the mansion, in whose upper rooms the magus practised his sorceries, was a system of cellars, which in turn led into the stone chamber of an underground stream. Here the servant had frequently wandered, gathering funguses and occult plants at his master’s direction, and also incising lewd graffiti in the walls, and doing harm to the harmless creeping things that lived there.
The resemblance of this subterrain to a prison had not escaped him, either.
Having by now tracked the idiot quite frequently, the servant had some idea of her possible wandering and resting places. Waiting until the night of a full red moon, when the mage was on the mansion’s eastern roof, making lunar calculations, the servant roved about the countryside, until he came on the girl in one of her haunts, which was a ruinous hut without roof or door. Slinking in, the servant eyed her as she crouched beneath her matted hair, and she in turn, poor witless thing, stared vacantly back at him.
Being himself foul, her foul condition did not lessen the servant’s eagerness. Wasting no time, he struck her to the ground, jumped upon her and violently forced her. Fortunately, his excitement was so imperative that she did not have to endure his activities for very long.
For her part, her cries of pain were very nearly abstract, and she did not struggle. She was so used to the casual ill-treatments of men, and of nature itself, she found this new brutalization indistinguishable.
When he was done, the servant shook himself like some large animal emerging from mud, dragged up his skinny haphazard mistress, and loaded her over his shoulder. In this way he conducted her to the magician’s house, and without his master’s knowledge, conveyed her down through the cellars to the rock-cut where the stream ran. Here, he tied her—she had so often been tied, she made no protest even at this—to a handy stalagmite. He then raped her a couple more times, (for, sad fellow, he had been deprived a long while,) after which he serenely repaired aloft, and presented himself to the magician. He was just in time to get to work on the heavy machinery the mage inclined to have operated on the roof. It was an engine of enormous wheels and mechanical pistons, that was driven both by the brawn of the servant and by an uncanny power derived from certain radiations of the stars and other ethereal bodies.
As the servant lugged the levers into position and the engine bellowed, the mage shouted: “In only another one hundred and nine days and nights, as I judge by the aura of the moon and the rhythms of the stars, the comet I am expecting will certainly appear.”
“Yes, master,” shouted back the servant dutifully. His own mind was on lower things, and most happily engaged there.
The mage, however, had reached that peak of pale and shining elevation the intellectual achieves when some long-awaited mental irradiation is in the offing. And so indeed it was. In point of fact, the magician’s whole purpose in coming to this out-of-the-way spot had been to confront the comet. He had learned, from his studies a few months earlier, that the apparition was due to manifest in that portion of sky to which the village was adjacent. He had abandoned therefore all his other projects and hurried to the vicinity. Here, having ordered the servant to construct the strange machine, the magus was now priming it, for he planned by its use to attract and trap a fragment of the comet’s emissions.
The servant, however, had scant care for the mage’s lust, being merry with his own. He pounded the levers of the machine and cranked it. Whe
n his task was done, he stole once more into the underground cavern, where he pushed stale bread and vinegary wine into the idiot’s mouth, before bestriding her again with a master’s pleasure in possession. For he had never owned anything before.
For some ninety days, then, things went on much in this sort. The servant would go down to the cellars and so into the chamber below, and there he would satisfy his desires. Intermittently, he would nourish the idiot girl on remnants of food. For drink, he graciously awarded her the length of the stream, or what part of it she could come at, being permanently tethered as she was.
However, after ninety days, something impinged on the servant’s murky insensibilities. It came to him that a monthly rite, usual to women, was consistently absent in his doxy. At first, he hoped her imbecility had affected her womb, but shortly it seemed to him he could detect the changes about her that attended conception.
The servant fell then into a dreadful distress. Not, to be sure, for the lady’s sake, but for his own. Feeble, half-starved and stupid as she was, she would most certainly not survive the birth of a child, and so he would lose her almost as soon as he had made her his. Accordingly, he debated with himself on various methods, and at length he brought wine and made her drink, and then beat her and kicked her soundly, trusting she might abort the infant, and still live. Alas, alas, the girl only recovered, and she remained filled.
So desperate did the servant become that he contemplated inquiring of the magician a method of curtailment, but by now the one hundred and nine days were almost done, and the mage had withdrawn into his private cell to fast and meditate, purifying himself for the mighty spell he intended to work. He emerged only now and then to examine the engine on the roof, and at such moments was preoccupied.
“Master,” wheedled the servant, “a poor village maiden was at the door yesterday begging that you might remedy an unwanted pregnancy for her mother, already blessed with forty-three children—”
“No, no,” murmured the mage, “your addition is quite wrong. Forty-seven are the number of syllables of the astral mantra I must recite on the comet’s dissolution.”
“Master,” whined the servant, “if I confess to you I allowed a wicked woman, maddened with her desire to enjoy me, to lead me from the path of virtuous abstinence, and that now she threatens me with her father’s wrath if I do not alleviate her condition—”
“What is this nonsense? The mechanism’s condition is perfect. But you must oil this cog.”
Eventually, the servant desisted. He began, instead, to take better food to the girl in the rock-cut, fruit and meat. Even he took her warm rugs to sleep on. Even he sometimes un-tethered her from the stalagmite, and led her up and down to exercise her. If she was aware of his novel kindness, she did not show it. Nor did she seem aware of her pregnancy. When the servant periodically flung her down and rode her frantically, (desperate not to miss an opportunity, since so probably he would soon lose her) she gazed at the ceiling of stone, frowning slightly through her filthy tangled mane.
On the one hundred and eighth day of the magician’s vigil, the first foreshape of the comet emerged from a twilight sky.
Now the comets of the flat earth were of different origins and inclination from those which visit the rounded world. Some evolved in the mass of chaos beyond the corners of the earth as then it was, and passing by error, or through some cosmic or seismic upheaval, into the uplands of the world’s air, were hastily coated by the instinctive elements of that air with protective particles—for pure chaos and the standardized atoms of the world could not coexist without some compromising admixture forming between, to insulate one from the other. These comets came and went, and seldom revisited the sky, for once they regained the outer limits, chaos reclaimed them. A second form of comet was that created solely by tumbling stars, which, each trailing the struck flame of its descent, for some reason failed to hit the earth, and was thereafter carried back and forth—by random currents of the atmosphere, or the exquisite sorceries of sky elementals (who might ride such beacons over the ether). These second sort of comets might recur in appearance at regular or irregular intervals, circling the dome above the earth for centuries, until they were utterly burned out. But there was, too, a third variety, and it was to this group that the magician’s comet belonged.
In those days, the sun, which always remained a precise distance above in its journeys over the earth, moonlike, waxed and waned, thereby creating summer and winter. Every night, also, the sun, having set, was plunged into the hardly explicable limbos which underlay the lower regions of earth—those nether depths that were beyond and below even the Innerearth, Death’s kingdom. This psychic “death” during every period of darkness would mysteriously revitalize the sun’s disc, so that every dawn it was able to hurl itself up in the east again and refresh the world with its light. (The moon underwent a similar process.) However, it would sometimes happen—perhaps once in a thousand years—that, during its waxing stage, the sun would rise clad in more vitality than was necessary, or healthful. This overcharge would then stream off, like steam from boiling water, sometimes visible as clouds, or else quite invisible, to a mortal eye. The solar vapor would presently drift up beyond the apex of the sun’s daily route. Here, in the colder environs of the higher sky, it would alternately ferment and condense, heat and cool, until at length it grew to be a flamingly gaseous sphere.
Once fully formed, the magnetism of the earth would begin to summon this ghostly fireball, and it would commence slowly falling through months, or even years, downwards, its hair spreading out behind it to mark its road through the atmosphere. Without exception, at a point far above the earth’s actual surface, the fiery gas would once more unravel. The radiation, which at these moments would be released, was startling but beneficial. The gases themselves would be absorbed by the earth’s tissue, or else dissipated into nothing.
Such occurrences were rare enough; the magician had believed himself very lucky in mathematically and astrologically chancing on one, for there was small visual forewarning. Only the flung-forward image of the comet might be seen the night before its arrival, an effect similar to that of a lamp reflecting on a wall.
At the sight of its preview, the magician was overjoyed.
Not so, the village. Ignorant of the character of such a phenomenon, they observed the new weird and bulbous star in the sky without celebration. When, as the night progressed, it grew larger, their nervousness increased in proportion. When day dawned, and still the thing was visible, indeed bigger and brighter, and with its diamond-lit tail in evidence behind it, horror filled every heart.
Some rushed to bang on the brass-bound door of the mage’s mansion. There was, as ever, no answer, but after a while the servant appeared coming up the hill. He had been sent to collect special herbs, and was not best pleased to see the crowd barring his way, for he had found crowds were seldom personally auspicious.
Yet the village, in its panic, chose to forget its dislike of him.
“We beg you to beg your master to come out and tell us,” cried the crowd, “what awful fate it is that hangs burning over us in the air.”
The servant yawned with boredom. He knew how the comet would look, and was not afraid of it.
“Oh, that thing. It is nothing but some gob of flatulence belched from the sun. It will be gone by tomorrow, and good riddance.”
The crowd conferred, partly reassured but indecisive. As they did so, the servant sidled by and got to the door, which a seal, given him by the mage, swiftly unlocked.
“But wait,” said a man. “Will you not ask your master to speak to us? Despite your words, some of us are convinced the object is a terrible force and of malign intent. Already, from the shock of beholding it, three women have miscarried.”
The servant, getting in through the doorway, hesitated. His obnoxious countenance convulsed in profound thought.
“Wait one moment,” said the servant to the people, and slammed the door in their faces.
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br /> After three or four hours without any further sign from within, the villagers abandoned the door and rushed home. Here they and their women set about packing their furniture and clothing and getting their herds together. By midafternoon, the village was all but deserted.
To his first inspiration, the servant had now added subtlety.
Once it was dark, the magician would require his servant’s presence at the magic engine, but also, once it was dark, the full majesty of the comet would be revealed. The climax of its dissipation would follow. Now it seemed to the servant that if he could only bring the idiot-girl to the top of the mansion, tying her up, perhaps, on the western roof, well away from the locality of the engine and the mage, she must see the utmost activity of the comet and be duly appalled by it. The noise of the supernatural engine would cover her shrieks. If fortune were with the servant, she, like the other woman, would be delivered of her burden before the night was over. As for the mage, in the aftermath of the spell, he would be as one drugged and drunk, and would totter to his chamber, noticing little if anything of extraneous events.
Night came. The sky was quite black, all its stars blinded. Even the moon, when she floated up in the east, was opaque. But there was light, and to spare. Like a golden medallion on a silver chain, the comet poised above the earth, and radiance unfolded from it like wings, each moment more lucent than the last. All the tintings of the stonework were apparent, and the colors of the flowers on the hillside below, as if caught in the rays of a young morning.
The engine stood in silhouette like a toy some giant child had made itself from bits and pieces of metal, save that here and there a small flickering aurora would eddy up and down its tubes and pipes and wheels. The mage, at his ultimate preparations, had not yet emerged on the roof. The servant came by a back way, out of a trap door, shoveling the idiot-girl before him. Her wrists were tied, and a black cloth had been swathed about her head to keep the sight of the comet a surprise for her.