Death's Master

by Tanith Lee

  Zhirem watched the lions. He was not afraid, yet he could not have said why he was not, for the lions were very terrible to watch, and all he had ever been told of them was to their extreme discredit.

  The male lion ran to him first. It leaped like a bow or an arrow from a bow, and its claws raked him. There was a sound like tearing paper, as if the air itself were torn. Nothing but the air was torn. The lion roared and growled and jumped aside. It altered its shape in defeat and amazement, no longer a leaping active thing but planted like a marble animal, its massive head hanging. It did not try again. But the female cats made several sorties, darting, slashing. Their breath seemed red as it gushed from their red mouths, and had a red stink. At length, they also withdrew, all but one who paused to snuff at Zhirem and to lick his flesh. He felt her rough tongue but not her teeth or her claws. Her eyes seared holes in his body, but she could not. She licked him vigorously, lusting to devour, licking and sucking at him, tasting what she could not eat.

  From a distance, unexplained, this licking seemed to the appalled brothers of Zhirem like an act of homage. They shook with fear. Not only did the lions not obligingly kill Zhirem, they adored him, made love to him.

  The three brothers lay abject on the rocks, observing the lions conclude their worship and crawl back up the hill with their bellies low and their tails trailing. Then they rushed to Zhirem and dragged him on a horse—which sweated and rolled its eyes, for the stink of lions was thick on him—and raced homeward to the tents of their father.

  It was the moment of the sun’s death, and the whole camp bloody with it. In the red glow, the three brothers hastened to find their father the king, and they threw the child smelling of lions before him.

  “In the hills,” the brothers cried, “this Zhirem wandered away, and when we went after him, we found four lions licking him and fawning on him. Surely the demons are friends to him for his dark hair. Surely he is protected by the Master of Night as our wise men have always murmured.”

  The king’s superstitious inclination was to credit this; simultaneously he felt he should not, for he was familiar with jealousy.

  “And what do you say to this?” he shouted at Zhirem. “Do lions not harm you?”

  “It is true,” said Zhirem, “though I do not know why not.”

  These words the king interpreted as insolence. He raised he arm and struck Zhirem in the mouth. Or would have done, but the blow went nowhere, or into some other place, and the king’s hand scorched him as if he had struck fire. That was enough. He needed no more.

  The king called a council among the tents, his warriors, the sages of the nomads and the old ones whose age must be honored. They sat down about the tent of the king, and the king sat on a chair of black wood set on a carpet of red and yellow, and they discussed Zhirem and how he had become. The three brothers came and told of the lions, and they constrained their three friends to speak too, as if they had I witnessed it, which they had not. Then the old men cleaned their rusty knives of malice, and spoke of shadowy hair and ill-luck and the Prince of Demons. Zhirem’s mother they did not call to tell them anything; she was a woman and they forgot her. Nor did they ask Zhirem to speak, only they stood him on the edge of the carpet and one threw a clod of earth at him and it fell aside without touching him, and then one threw a stone, and this too fell aside. And in the end the king took up a spear and cast it at Zhirem, and the spear splintered into a hundred fragments on the air. They all sighed then as if with relief and pleasure. Zhirem alone stared at the shattered spear with horror in his eyes.

  3

  A band of holy men lived in the desert at a watering place. Their house was a ruined fortress which they shared with hawks, owls and lizards.

  The king had put his son Zhirem on a black horse and tied him to the saddle, and he hung bells and amulets on it to restrain the evil spirit which Zhirem contained or had been altered to. Then the king and some of his warriors set off through the early dark for the ruin, driving the black horse before them.

  Zhirem, tied to the horse, had lapsed into a wild silence in which he would say nothing, but in which his eyes screamed. No longer was he merely surrounded by strangers and enemies, he had also become an incomprehensible stranger and enemy to himself. They called him demon, and demon he must be. More than the casting of the spear, he recoiled from its failure to wound him. Even at this hour he did not recall the well of fire. At five years all things are wonders and mysteries, and that only one savage miracle the more. Now, driven before his father’s men, glimpsing their grim hatred, in sympathy with it, it was as if he had glanced idly in a mirror and seen himself changed, with no warning, into a beast.

  They reached the ruin under a moon-bright sky. Owls sat in their white rags on the towers and the holy men sat about below in their brown rags. Pride was a sin, they said, and they wore tattered garments and did not wash themselves, to prove they were not proud, but when they spoke to others they said: “We are the pure children who earn for ourselves eternal life, and whom the gods value. When you are dust, we shall stand in glory.” And if any offered them gold, the ragged men would glower down their noses till the gold withered in the giver’s hand. “We are too humble,” said the ragged men arrogantly, “to take the riches of earth. Build no palace in the world,” they bellowed, trampling through their filthy ruin. “Amass treasure in the land of the gods.” And whenever they fell sick, or knew pain, they declared: “The gods have chosen to test me,” as if the gods thought only of them and were constantly devising methods to be sure of their virtue. But if another, not of their order, was ill, they shouted: “This is the punishment for your abysmal wickedness and you must repent.”

  Yet despite this, or because of it, they claimed to be magicians and had a reputation for duels with demons—or with certain bizarre apparitions which men took to be demons.

  The king went to the steps of the fortress and declared at random, for the holy men had no leader:

  “Here is my son. A devil possesses him, which will not let him be hurt, and makes even lions render him homage.”

  Then the ragged brown owls got up from their perches and advanced on Zhirem without a word. Without a word they cut his bonds and took him down, and without a word, only his eyes calling for help or explanation, Zhirem let them take him.

  “He shall stay with us one month,” said a voice from among the holy men.

  “Come back when next the moon is full,” said another voice.

  The king nodded grimly and rode away with his warriors. Zhirem was borne into the ruin.

  First, they questioned him, and when he would or could not answer, they burned a blue incense which loosened his tongue. Into this answering of his, because of the incense, there filtered some reference to the well of fire. Zhirem, drugged, barely grasped what he had said, neither did his interrogators grasp it, but they thought they smelled demons. For this reason they locked Zhirem in a tiny cell without windows, and left him there for seven days without food and only a crock of scummy water to drink from. “If a common devil inhabits him and the habitation lacks comfort, then it will depart,” they said. But when they dragged Zhirem from the cell on the eighth day, they perceived in his eyes the same madness they had witnessed earlier. So they scourged him to make the possession more uncomfortable, but the scourges frayed and broke in their hands. It was a pernicious devil indeed.

  After this, the holy men practiced cunning. They fed the boy and let him roam where he would about the ruin and the oasis, keeping watch on him to see what he or any demon might do.

  But Zhirem went to the green bank of the pool and sat there, staring blindly in the water. For fourteen or fifteen days Zhirem did simply this. When they called him to eat he came obediently; when they locked him in the cell to sleep, he made no protest. Free, he sat by the pool, and a picture more innocent or more beautiful would be hard to come on.

  The holy men were moved by what they
saw, despite themselves. It dawned on them, as the day dawned on the dark, that there seemed nothing evil in the male child who meditated in the bright day—which day, in any case, demons avoided.

  Finally, some of the holy men went to the boy and set out before him various articles which reputedly had the knack of affrighting the powers of the night. Zhirem showed no fear; he handled the magic items and put them down. Even his eyes were quiet now, the madness and the anguish driven too deep to show. When they spoke to him, he replied gravely.

  “The devil is gone,” said the holy men. “Now, king’s son, you have only to remain true to the gods. Remember, the world is folly, vanity and sin. The way to the gods is up a steep and slippery stair, beset with traps, with stones and naked blades.”

  “Do the gods then,” said Zhirem quietly, “desire men should not reach them, that they litter the way with snares?”

  “It is men themselves who make the snares,” said the holy men. “And one follows with his black and red dogs to devour those that tumble. Beware the Master of Night, the Beguiler. Remember he is ever close and has nearly taken you already.”

  Then a bleak swirling panic rose in the face of Zhirem.

  “There, trust in heaven,” said the holy men, stroking him, unmindful of their own lusts which the weeds of piety had choked but not altogether slaughtered. “Beware of the flesh and its appetites. It is women you must be careful of. Your own mother has brought you into danger, meddling with the dark. Devote yourself, body and spirit, to the gods, and the gods will save you from he that hunts in the night.”

  When the king rode back to the ruin, the holy men told him all they had discovered, and pronounced that the boy should be dedicated to some religious order to ensure his safety.

  “But is he cured of this invulnerability, this thing which sets him apart from humanity?”

  “No,” said the holy men. “He is proof against weapons, perhaps proof against all unnatural forms of death. This is a facet of the spell his mother made which may not be eradicated. Yet he himself does not properly understand how he is. If he lives humbly, he may never learn and so may never seek profit or unwholesome gain from the gift. Leave him among us and we will teach him the path.”

  But the king, to their dejection, would not. Conscious of his royalty among the tents of the desert races, he sent Zhirem instead a year’s journey to the north, to the great temple there. And with him were two horses with coffers of pearls on their backs and gold and other things which the temple liked to receive and the holy men were too humble to accept.

  “If he must be a priest he shall be a fine one, for men may know he is my son,” said the king.

  But Zhirem’s mother, the king’s wife, he cast out into the desert for her part in the spell making. Some say another people took her in, and some that she died there and a tree grew out of her bones in the middle of the empty dunes.

  One day, a merchant and his servants happened to rest under this tree where they had hoped to find water, but there was none.

  “Now how can a green tree grow here and no water within three miles?” the merchant asked of the air.

  He turned pale when the air answered: “I am nourished by my own tears.”

  “Who says this?” demanded the merchant. Looking round, he saw his servants some way off and only the tree was left to have conversed with him. “Now, is it you?” he asked, “and if it is, then you must be a sprite.”

  But the tree whispered in the wind and all it said was:

  “Give me news of my son.”

  “Tell me his name,” said the merchant.

  But either the tree did not recall, or it would not say any more.

  Years after, it was related, another man, finding the tree, dug down to come at its source of moisture and found at last a little water, but it was salt.

  4

  “Pay heed, O adopted of the gods,” cried the fat priest who brought Zhirem into the upper section of the children’s courts. “Here is one, by name Zhirem, formerly a king’s son, now dedicated to the temple, and thus your brother.”

  The children gawped, as children of any race or time or age will do. Thin and dark, the new child stared back at them, with a curious, gleaming, melancholy stare.

  The fat priest was ugly. Like Zhirem, his place here had been bought, so he had not needed to be without blemish as the foundlings did. Now his ugly gaze was attracted from the shadowy child standing by him in the sunlight to a child like a bit of sunlight glinting in the shadow across the court. It was the boy with reddish-yellow hair, the strange boy called Shell, an unblemished foundling.

  The fat priest did not like Shell.

  The glances of Shell were like bright green slivers shot from the eyes of a lynx. Very silent was Shell, hardly a word came from his mouth, only laughter sometimes, sometimes a wordless commanding yell or a melodious whistling. Crying and bawling Shell had been as a baby, when he was found on the steps and taken in. But the folk who had abandoned him had taught him no speech and no desire for speech. Half a year had elapsed, the priests said, before the brat deigned to talk at all, and now, though he read swiftly from a book in his own brain, he would not read aloud—they had beaten him and still he would not—nor pray aloud, and rarely did he answer more than “yes” or “no” or “maybe.” At the same time, the whole entity of this Shell was a sort of speech. His limbs and body spoke in their movements; he ran like a deer, walked like a dancer with a balance and a grace beyond his years. He could leap high enough and snatch quick enough to steal damsons from the twisting tree above the Jade Court, and no child had ever managed that before, but had to be content with the fruit which fell or was shaken down. Even in repose, Shell’s body communicated. Even with just one lynx eye, a twitch of the mouth or nostril, a flicker of the hands, like an animal or an instrument that played by itself. And there were other things. Though the temple gates were bolted and barred by night, yet Shell would get out. Somehow, over the tall sheer walls he went, into the groves beyond. The night seemed to summon him, the night and the moon, and nothing could keep him in. Even two priests acting guard by the dormitory had missed his passing and only found the empty pallet. When Shell remained indoors it was not obedience or because they had out-guessed him, merely that, for this night, he felt no urge to wander.

  And when he wandered, what did he seek?

  A rumor: Shell lay along the bough of a tree and whistled, and nightingales began in the wood. Another rumor: Shell ran with foxes and showed them how to get into the yards of the farms. A fact: a black cobra entered the schoolroom, inspiring terror, but Shell reached out and picked it up, making the while a sizzling noise, and the cobra lay on his shoulder and they rubbed their faces together with affection until the boy carried his pet outside and courteously directed it away among the summer grasses. One creature alone Shell seemed to fear, that was any creature which was dead. The corpse of the lizard and the mouse he fled, but did not seem to know why, and never mentioned the fear aloud. He had never seen a man’s death or a woman’s.

  The priests viewed Shell with sensual unease, anger and disquiet, but since it was beneath them to consider such intensity might be sprung in them by a rootless child, they translated their sensations as indulgence and disapproval.

  To the rest of the boys of the children’s courts, Shell might easily have become victim or hero, one or the other. Yet his obliqueness, his actual unhumanness—which they were able perfectly to sense, as the adult and clouded priests were not—set him too far off to fit a role. Shell was enigma. The children hovered at the edges of his life and his aura, poised to adore or to hate, never quite achieving either, in limbo.

  And now the children beheld another rite of which they could not partake, beheld unerringly as they beheld the oddity of Shell. In truth, the ugly priest noticed too, and did not warm to the vision.

  There was one like a flame, and here was another lik
e a darkened lamp, the lit child and the shadow child. As two opposing poles exert magnetic influence between them, so these two opposites seemed held in a tension of unseen rope which bound one to the other.

  “Now,” said the priest, ordering this and that done. “Attend!” snapped the priest, his weighty orders tossed like bits of paper by a heedless gale. “Behave,” commanded the priest. “Venerate the gods.”

  The face of the shadow child, Zhirem, fixed and closed. He had been reminded of who hunted at his heels.

  5

  It was sunset, the sun a jar of pink bronze oil poured on the temple roofs. The older boys sat at supper in the highest court where the weather gods stood, the blue tiger and the red ram. The babies had been brought up to worship an hour before and hauled away. Now the table was there, and the older boys squealed and jabbered as they fed like a tribe of monkeys, and sometimes a lay brother tweaked their ears to obtain more ruly manners. All this the blue tiger and the red ram observed impassively, and the cool of the evening sank down with the going of the light and there came a scent of trees and incense.

  Shell sat beneath the red ram. It was always now his place and none dared challenge it, though they did not exactly fear Shell. The seat of the red ram was against the wall of the court where there was a broken brick. Looking through you could see the rose sky smoking out in the groves half a mile off, and the lamps lighting in the Sanctuary of Virgins and the Women’s House. The point of which being that maybe, squinting that way, you might catch a forbidden view of a woman, if you had a hawk’s sight. Shell, however, always seemed inclined to watch the night coming and nothing more. He ate fruit and little else at supper, but had been known to eat, on different occasions, grass, leaves, and flowers from the temple ponds. At the low table’s opposite end, eating nothing, sat Zhirem.